He wanted the world to know that these were anomalies.
“Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ,” Mr. Obama said. “In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”
Not surprisingly there has been a backlash to his comparison of the atrocities of the Islamic State to the bloodshed committed in the name of Christianity in centuries past. A backlash to a moral equivalency, one might suggest.
The President stated “From a school in Pakistan to the streets of Paris, we have seen violence and terror perpetrated by those who profess to stand up for faith — their faith — professed to stand up for Islam, but, in fact are betraying it,” he said, describing the Islamic State as “a brutal, vicious death cult that, in the name of religion, carries out unspeakable acts of barbarism.”
Are these people in ISIS betraying Islam? Are these behaviours new; unheard of before the 21st century?
Muslims began attacking Jews and Christians from the time Mohammed brought Islam to the people. Attacks against Jews began in Morocco in the 7th century. Jews had been living in Morocco since 586 BCE; more than 1000 years before the Prophet had come to the land.
Jews were forced to live in separate
communities. Muslims in Morocco called them
mellahs. Today we call them ghettos. By the 12th century almost all Christians had fled Morocco because of the massacres and forced conversions by the Muslim population. So the restrictions on and intolerance toward the Jews increased.
The Jews were the
dhimmi. The only
dhimmi left. Jews were forced to pay a head tax, were slapped in the face, bullied and insulted. Their women raped, stores and homes looted, synagogues burned, Holy Books destroyed.
Sound familiar to events today?
Today ISIS is killing Christians, Muslims, Yazidis, (the Jews are long gone) and burning their homes, places of worship, raping their women, murdering their men and children, often in most barbaric ways.
Six-thousand Jews were murdered in
Fez in 1032. Women were taken, property confiscated. The Almohads slaughtered Jews in the tens of thousands. And the very few Christians who had not left were finally wiped out. “Jews were not the only victims of Almohad cruelty; the Muslim maliki school of Sunni Islam was banned in Almohad North Africa and its leading works were burned in the public squares.”
Jews who had been forced to convert (or die) were not treated as Muslims. They were rarely trusted to be true converts. Their children were taken away to be raised by
real Muslims.
Throughout the following centuries Jews trying to leave had nowhere to go.
Sound familiar?
Anti-Jewish propaganda was everywhere in Morocco especially Fez. A death of a Muslim by anyone would lead to murder of the Jews. Vengeance and blood lust were in the DNA.
More recently, in the 19th century, the Jewish population was subjected to “such repression, restrictions and humiliation as to exceed anything in Europe.” Jews were enslaved for life to Muslims and passed down as an inheritance. Like the slavery to which President Obama referred in his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast.
Jewish children were kidnapped and sold into slavery. This behaviour is repeated today in the
Sudan where Christians are kidnapped and taken as slaves by Muslims.
In the 19th century whole neighbourhoods of Jews in their
mellahs were expelled and their women raped. In 1864, Muslim mobs murdered 500 Jews in Marrakesh and Fez and repeated their actions 20 years later. In 1912 Muslim attacks left 10,000 Jews homeless.
Under French rule which came into effect in 1921 the Jews continued to be treated as
dhimmi and massacres still took place in Fez by Muslims.
With the establishment of the State of Israel, the French tried to keep the peace in Morocco. But in June 1948 the mobs were at it again and dozens of Jews were murdered. And the exodus began. Thirty thousand to Israel. In 1956 when Morocco was declared an Arab state, emigration was declared illegal, but life was so intolerable that 70,000 Jews managed to escape to Israel. In 1959 Zionism was declared a crime. Despite some attempts by the Arab leadership to make the Jews feel welcome, when emigration was made legal, 100,000 more Jews fled.
This intolerance, Mr. President, not only to Jews but the Christians and Muslims in the Muslim world remains endemic. It is in the DNA because it has been taught for more than 1500 years. Longer than racism in America; still present 500 years after it was brought to your shores with the assistance of
Muslims already all too familiar with the enslavement of human beings.
While Christianity fought against its inner evil, removing it from its soul, Islam has not. To compare the two, especially after the brutal ( brutal; that word does injustice to the horror perpetrated by these followers of Islam) conflagration of the Jordanian pilot, is to excuse the inexcusable, to bear witness to unspeakable acts and stay willfully blind. Dangerous in a world that is so interconnected-where evil spreads in the blink of an eye, the click of a mouse.
Change requires that leaders stand up and preach it. If that does not work, then true leaders make laws that change such behaviour until the sick DNA is dissolved.
The history of Morocco comes from the book “From Time Immemorial” by the late Joan Peters.
