The Cold War rages on for Christie Davies (“Islam and Breivik’s Bombs,” News, October). He even referenced the “evil” Russian/communist in drawing a bead on the “evil” Muslim.
And what evils are the Muslims of Europe guilty of? Davies is upset that women are expected to wear headscarves (read: act modestly) in Muslim neighborhoods, a challenge to the self-indulgent, freewheeling whore mentality that’s grown up all over the West. As a believing Jew, I approve of this localist desire for modesty. Why shouldn’t Christians like it?
The sharia zones also take a firm line against gambling, usury, etc. Does Professor Davies think these vices are good things and/or shouldn’t be talked about? He complains about Muslims encroaching on free speech, but he’s the one that wants the sharia signs torn down.
Davies goes on to complain about the “blinkered ideological mind-set of the Norwegian left-wing elite” but shows himself to be blinkered and out of date with his Cold War rhetoric. His reference to the Israel/Palestine situation demonstrates moral obtuseness that all but says Palestinians have no title to live in a land that has been their home for many generations. If Davies knew the history of the Zionist movement and wasn’t still fighting the Cold War, he wouldn’t make such shallow statements.
Davies notes that Anders Behring Breivik didn’t kill any Muslims. Interesting, no? My guess is that Breivik didn’t want to end up like Israeli mass murderer Baruch Goldstein (beaten to death by Muslims after his gun jammed). My second guess is that although Breivik saw the Muslims as adversaries he recognized that they have families, morality, and culture, and that they’re willing to fight for them. The Norwegian Labor Party has no culture, nothing worth believing in, and its welfarism has destroyed the family—thus, they deserve death.
Yet Breivik should have had mercy on his countrymen. The great Rabbi Chaim Volozhin writes in Ruach Chaim, “It is not good for a righteous man to be involved in the punishment of sinners. It is better to pray that they repent.” If Davies reckons Muslims to be acting badly, then he should pray that they repent. In the meantime, I’ll be praying for Davies.
—James Mosher
Ledyard, CT
Professor Davies Replies:
James Mosher is wrong on every point in his attack on my article about Breivik.
I made only one very indirect reference to the Cold War and the Russian-controlled communists, when I mentioned in passing that the Czechoslovak government had provided weapons and explosives for terrorists. The Iranian and Libyan Muslims did the same. In London our biggest loss of life to terror has been from a Muslim bomb in a subway. The bomb attacks I did specifically mention in the text were by a 19th-century Spanish anarchist and by two groups of freelance oddball Marxists. Hardly Cold War stuff.
Mr. Mosher praises the Muslims’ morality. Yet there are in Britain proportionately far more Muslims in jail for ordinary nonterrorist (but serious) criminal offenses than there are indigenous people. Many Muslims are there for the organized rape of underage girls and for forcing them into prostitution. Muslims make up a high proportion of the rapists in Scandinavia. This you call sexual morality? In many cases the crimes are racially aggravated. Others have been convicted of killing a daughter who wished to have a degree of independence. This, too, shows their contempt for women, and what makes it worse is that they can quote the Koran in defense of their actions. In my town Muslims run the drug trade. Muslims cannot be held up as moral exemplars. There are very few Hindus, Sikhs, or Parsis in jail. This shows that the Muslims are not discriminated against by the police, who cannot tell these groups apart by appearance; the Muslims simply commit more crime. Non-Muslim South Asians are exemplary citizens, as are Britain’s Jews. The Muslims are not.
The Palestinians could have kept their individual land ownership even in the Jewish state and in the international city of Jerusalem, if they had accepted the U.N. partition plan. The Muslims chose instead to attack. The Palestinians lost out in the same sense as the Germans of Silesia and East Prussia. We may feel sorry for the refugees, as we did for the Germans, but revanche is not an option. Before that, Arab landlords had sold land to the Jews over the heads of the peasants, as is allowed by Turkish land law (from the time of the caliphate).
The welfare state has brought problems to Scandinavia, as it has to Britain, but the biggest welfare scroungers may well be the Muslims. They have a low level of activity in the labor market. My taxes help to subsidize their uselessness.
I have never in my life drunk alcohol and have never gambled, but I have an absolute right to do these things in a Muslim area in London and, indeed, to get a license to open a bar, a betting place, or pawn shop in their district. Others live there, too. They can do what they like in their own homes and can post notices urging compliance with sharia in their windows, much as I forbid tobacco in my house and have an aesthetically pleasing woodcarving of a pig in my window alongside a bronze figure of Hodja Nasreddin on his donkey. But they cannot put up posters on lampposts owned by the state to intimidate others. They are violently antisemitic and quite capable of posting a notice saying that their area is Judenfrei. In Europe Muslims already seem to use Nazi graffiti in German. I do not want a law prohibiting Muslim shops from selling the Protocols, but their behavior disgusts me. If the Muslims do become powerful, they will go first for the Jews.
I am pleased that an Orthodox Jew will pray for me, much as I would be if a Christian did. The G-d of the Jews also called the Christians into existence. I repudiate any Muslim prayers for me much as I would deny those of the priests of Baal, since I find their religion false. But I will continue to exchange acts of kindness with individual Muslims. Christians should pray not just for the repentance of Muslims but for their conversion.
Leave a Reply