c. 1998 Religion News Service
(Ibrahim Hooper is national communications director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Washington-based Islamic advocacy group.)
UNDATED _ In the Koran, Islam’s revealed text, God states:”O ye who believe! Stand out firmly for justice, as witnesses to God, even as against yourselves, or your parents, or your kin, and whether it be (against) rich or poor.” As the United States”celebrates”Israel’s 50th anniversary with a nationally televised Hollywood gala and countless other special events, the nation’s estimated 6 million Muslims feel like lone witnesses to the truth _ one largely unreported to the American public and unacknowledged by policy-makers.
In Israel itself, the celebrations are quite controversial. Organizers are deeply split along religious, ethnic and political lines. Four senior officials of the celebrations association resigned in protest.
But American media has not focused on the organizers’ infighting and criticism. This despite the fact that American taxpayer contributions to Israel of grants and loans totaling some $6 billion tax dollars undoubtedly paid for part of the multimillion-dollar celebration. As one network news feature states:”It’s your money.” The myth of Israel’s birth has noble scholar-warriors”making a once-barren desert bloom,”as President Bill Clinton recently said. Party-line propaganda also had Palestinians leaving their homes to make way for invading armies. Israeli and American policies have been built on these myths and are sustained by the new mythology of”Islamic fundamentalism.” The reality is quite different.
For Israel to be born, another nation and culture had to be decimated.
More than 400 Palestinian Muslim and Christian towns and villages were systematically destroyed. The inhabitants of these once-thriving centers of culture and faith were either killed, as at Deir Yassin, or expelled at the point of a bayonet as in Lydda and Ramle, where some 75,000 people were given 48 hours to flee across the Jordan River.
More than 700,000 Palestinians suffered a similar fate.
Israel is the only nation on earth in which torture of political prisoners is legal and the only outwardly democratic country, since the demise of apartheid in South Africa, permitting ethnic and religious segregation of housing and government services.
Israel is also one of a handful of countries that allows indefinite detention of security suspects without trial or charge. Some of these detainees have been kidnapped and transported across international borders to serve as hostages in negotiations with opposition groups and neighboring countries.
The”peace process”is not working because Israelis and their American supporters in Congress have not recognized Palestinian rights as a sovereign nation with borders, currency, passports and freedom of movement. They seem to prefer putting the original owners of the land into fragmented and unsustainable”ghettos,”surrounded by Israeli soldiers, secret police and settlers.
Official American support for the continuation of these policies sours relations with much of the world’s population. When American M-16s arm Israeli soldiers, American F-15s and F-16s bomb refugee camps and American vetoes relieve Israel of its responsibility to carry out U.N. resolutions, America is seen as one with the occupier.
This linkage with the occupation harms America’s long-term interests in the region.
Celebrations in this country all stress links between the American Jewish community and that sliver of land so far away. Is the area between the Jordan River and the sea sacred only to one of this nation’s religious minorities?
American Muslims must remind people of other faiths that Jerusalem, a central issue for Muslims through history, is mentioned in the Koran and in Islamic traditions. One of these traditions states that prayers in Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem are multiplied 500 times.
The Koran states:”Glorified be He (God) who took his servant for a journey by night from al-Masjid al-Haram to al-Masjid al-Aqsa, whose precincts we have blessed …” The night journey referred to in this verse is that of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Jerusalem, and from the rock now located in Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock mosque to heaven. This event is marked each year by more than 1 billion Muslims worldwide. Jerusalem was also Islam’s first”Qibla,”or direction to which Muslims turn in prayer. The current walls of the Old City were built by Ottoman Turk Muslims.
Today, Israel routinely bars Muslim and Christian Palestinians from religious sites in Jerusalem. The Christian population of the city drops daily. Ironically, it was the coming of Islam to the area that permitted Jews to again reside in Jerusalem after having been expelled and massacred by Romans, Byzantines and Crusaders.
These are the truths that American Muslims must offer as they”stand out firmly for justice.” Perhaps an unidentified Palestinian student said it best during a recent CBS News report on the anniversary. The student remarked:”I just hope they (the Israelis) are happy living on someone else’s grave … if they call that 50 years of independence.”
DEA END HOOPER
