By Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine.com | February 17, 2004

To devout Muslims, renouncing the “one true faith” is an act of apostasy warranting a death sentence. By Islamic measures, however, Walid Shoebat has three strikes against him: In 1993, he renounced Islam, converted to Christianity — and, unlike most Middle Eastern Christians tutored in replacement theology, Shoebat adopted ardent Zionism along with his new found faith.

“Christ is a Jewish rabbi,” he insists today. “He was a Zionist.” Shoebat believes that God loves Israel. “How can anyone claim to be Christian and hate Zionism?” he asks, citing Psalm 53. “Christians seek ‘salvation’ and true Christians know that ‘salvation’ comes out of Zion, ‘When God bringeth back the captivity of his people’.”

A Muslim who converts to Christianity takes his life in his hands. Even in the U.S., according to Shoebat, former Muslims are often murdered by their families. In such cases, he adds, news reports seldom cover the Islamic motives. One noted scholar of Islam, the former Muslim Ibn Warraq, writes under a pseudonym to protect his life. In Leaving Islam he collects the accounts of more than two dozen apostates that poignantly demonstrate the need of former Muslims for security precautions.

Yet Walid Shoebat’s journey from Islam to Christianity and Zionism is especially remarkable. A self-described former Palestinian terrorist, Shoebat’s dream in the 1970s was to die as a “shaheed, a martyr.” He spent his youth engaging in riots. He confronted soldiers, hoping to be shot — a virtual impossibility, since the Israelis never targeted the torso “without good reason.” Once, he tossed a fire bomb. Another time, he nearly killed an Israeli solider, who was saved only when Israeli reinforcements arrived. Today, Shoebat seeks forgiveness for his terrible crimes.

Born in 1960 in Beit Sahour near Bethlehem — in so-called West Bank territory that Jordan occupied illegally in 1948 — Shoebat was raised in the jihad doctrine. Under Islam, he reports, Palestinian children are inculcated to hate non-Muslims, and especially to hate Jews and Israel.

“The Arab war against Israel is a jihad,” Shoebat says. “Of course it’s a jihad. It is a religious, holy war. What part of ‘religious, holy war’ can’t the world understand?” Even Christians are indoctrinated in jihad ideology, he notes. Rejection of Jewish rights and history in Israel underlies the foundation of this Islamic jihad doctrine. [1]

In the Middle East, jihad theology has deep historical roots even for some churches. In the mid 19^th century, according to noted Islamic scholar Bat Ye’or, the papacy allied with French imperialists to promote Arab nationalism among Arabized Middle Eastern Christians in the Ottoman provinces. They hoped to defeat Britain and Zionism. These efforts failed, she writes in her seminal Islam and Dhimmitude. But in 1970, the Vatican dispatched an apostolic delegate to Jerusalem to establish a Catholic Justice and Peace Commission. That was when the Latin Catholic, Orthodox and other Palestinian churches began building “an Arab Palestinian identity hostile to Israel and shared by Christians and Muslims.” [2]

Coincidentally, as the seeds of these alliances began to bear their malicious fruit, Walid Shoebat came of age in Beit Sahour. Until fifth grade, he was the sole Muslim in a Christian school. He was taught that Jews were usurpers and thieves, fit only to be “beneficiaries” of virulent, mass-produced hatred — and all that implies. In Islamic school in sixth grade, Shoebat’s jihad indoctrination continued along the same lines. Every song he learned incited blood and murder. “The end product was a terrorist,” he explains.

Not surprisingly, Beit Sahour is also home to Ghasson Andoni and George Rishmawi, are the co-founders of the Rapprochement Center. They also co-founded the International Solidarity Movement with Huwaida Arraf and Adam Shapiro. Both organizations appear to be driven by the malevolent jihad ideology that Walid Shoebat describes. Indeed, at the third annual Palestine Solidarity Conference at Ohio State University in November, ISM featured such radical speakers as Khalid Turaani, executive director of American Muslims for Jerusalem. According to Steven Emerson, AMJ is a radical group that “routinely invokes ‘Zionist’ conspiracies and has featured calls at its conferences for the killing of Jews.” [3] Last May, the ISM held a $40 per plate dinner co-sponsored by an Islamist group, the Muslim Public Affairs Council. Another sponsor: the American Friends Service Committee.

The jihad against the Jewish people in the holy land dates back centuries. But in March 1920, Yasser Arafat’s idol and relation, Jerusalem Mufti Hajj Amin el-Husseini, reignited the Islamic reign of terror, says Shoebat. El-Husseini sent for muhajideen from Syria to stage bloody riots. Soon afterwards, he led violent agitations to win the coveted role of Jerusalem Mufti over another candidate who apparently did not espouse jihad. [4]  

As a child, Shoebat heard tales of jihad incitements from Beit Sahour elders like Dheib Abd Rabbo: “Hajj Amin el-Husseini said, ‘Do not have pity on them. Take your gun and your sword, and murder the Jews and rape their women.’ At that point, Rabbo decided he would not do this. He would not rape. So he took his gun and his sword and he went home.”

Plenty of others participated, however. “In Hebron and in our village, even before World War II, jihad was genocide,” Shoebat notes. In 1920, Arabs murdered nine Jews in Halsa and Bnei Yehuda. On August 26, 1929, they killed 133 Jews in Hebron, Safed, Motza, Tel Aviv and elsewhere and wounded 339. In 1936, they murdered at least another 70 Jewish civilians, wounded hundreds more, and destroyed Jewish farms, homes, villages, crops and cattle. [5] El-Husseini influenced Hitler, saluted the Nazi Arab legion, helped create the Muslim S.S. unit that committed genocide in Bosnia and, in 1944, broadcast another call to jihad from Berlin:

“Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion. This saves your honour. God is with you.” [6]

Michael Sabbah, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, taught Islamology and Arab philology for decades. According to Shoebat, he hews to Islamic jihad dogma as well. The church doctrine of Jew-hatred rests on an Islamic foundation well-laid by Sabbah’s predecessors, Bat Ye’or confirms. In the 1970s, the Greek Melkite Archbishop Hilarion Capucci was convicted of gun-running for the Palestine Liberation Organization and deported to Brazil. Shoebat, who joined the PLO in the 1970s, once started a major riot in Beit Sahour at Capucci’s command.

Islamic thinking motivated one high-ranking official to recommend that European churches subordinate to Islam through an Eastern “wisdom of sufferance.” Thus Kenneth Cragg, assistant and honorary Latin Bishop of Jerusalem from 1970 to 1985, ignored frequent historical collaboration of church leadership with Islam for personal gain. He also minimized Islamic destruction of holy land churches, abductions, assassinations and forced conversions of pilgrims — Muslim practices ongoing in Israel today — and the Turkish jihad that decimated 1.5 million Christian Armenians. To avoid blaming the real enemy of Eastern Christians, Cragg usurped the false, inverted characterizations first used by Arnold Toynbee, who maliciously cast Jewish victims of Islamic genocide as Nazis who “crucified” Palestine. [7] “Christians should be appalled by this rendering,” says Shoebat.

Jerusalem Patriarch Sabbah also promotes Islamic loathing of Jews in Palestinian churches. Following a theological map created in 1983 by the al-Liqa Catholic center and a CJPC pamphlet, “Moslems and Christians on the Road Together,” Sabbah supports the Sabeel “Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center,” whose very name suggests a Christian brand of jihad. [8] In language “stuffed with expressions of compassion, justice, and peace toward and evil Israel,” Sabeel director Naim Ateek refined his perverse jihad ideology, [9] which Palestinian churches now export to the U.S. at every opportunity.

Palestinian Christians behave much like medieval serfs, and function as subservient little dhimmis. But their acceptance of jihad dogma is a futile enterprise, Malik stresses. Even “removing Israel from the equation and satisfying the Palestinians beyond their wildest dreams would not eliminate the violence against non-Muslims inherent in political Islam.” [10]

Other Middle Eastern Christian churches better deflected Islam’s corrupting jihad ideology. Rooted in indigenous pre-Islamic cultures, languages and faiths, the Armenian, Assyrian, Serbian, Coptic and Lebanese Maronite churches maintained some religious autonomy before Islam’s timeless advance, according to Bat Ye’or. However they also “react as hostages struck dumb with fear,� she observes. [11] 

Only in 1998 did the Middle East Council of Churches at last awaken to its peril. That year, the council expanded its agenda from a “hitherto exclusive fixation on the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Palestinian problem,” observes Maronite Lebanese scholar Habib Malik. Now they now also address the welfare of native, mainly Christian non-Muslim minorities, Christian unity and human and women’s rights. [12]

No one better understands the dangers that Islam presents to Middle Eastern Christianity than former Islamic terrorist Walid Shoebat. “The slogan known to all Palestinians is, ‘Saturday people first and Sunday people next’,” he reports. “It means if Israel and the Jewish people were ever defeated, Christians will be next.” From recent events, that should be obvious. By fighting Israel, Christian leaders like Hanan Ashrawi and George Habash abet their own people’s demise, Shoebat says.

Unfortunately Palestinian Christian leaders stand neck deep in corruption. They take extensive profits from dealings with Islamic terrorists, according to Shoebat. “For American churches, their packaged message is ostensibly peace and justice,” he says, explaining a policy of blatant duplicity. “Do you really think Capucci reformed? He’s a terrorist. They facilitate terrorists. Their message at home is very different from the one they deliver here.”

Occasionally, the politically correct facade maintained for U.S. churches cracks open. Emil Salayta, who heads the Latin Patriarchate schools in Jerusalem, once spoke on “peace” at the Presbyterian Church in Walnut Creek, California. Shoebat attended and challenged Salayta. Could peace be achieved by bombing Israeli buses, he asked. “I have him on tape. ‘Israel must be eliminated, by whatever means,’ he replied.” No one else seemed concerned.

Shoebat cautions U.S. churches and universities to be more wary. “These people back terrorists,” he warns. “Michael Sabbah, Niam Ateek, Elias Chacour, Riah Abu el-Assal and Emil Salayta are evil.” In 1993, at age 33, Shoebat read the Bible for the first time. Only then did he learn — contrary to everything he had been taught — that it was written in Hebrew, and repeatedly invokes peace and praises Israel. He was shocked.

The Palestinian Authority condemns the supposed Israeli theocracy. Yet in December 1920, Musa Kazem el-Husseini, of the Mufti’s clan, demanded restoration of Islamic theocracy in Palestine in a letter to British High Commissioner Herbert Samuel. [13]. The PA Constitution, moreover, formally adopted the rigid, anti-democratic Islamic sharia. Lest there be any doubt of its meaning, Islamic law carefully spells out the institutional inferiority that has been forced on non-Muslims by majority Muslim societies since the time of Mohammed. As Sheik Muhammad Ibrahim al-Mahdi explained on official Palestinian Authority TV in 2001, Muslims

“of Palestine want to meet Allah and we are the soldiers of the Caliphate, that was announced by the Prophet… Therefore, the Caliphate will be in accordance with the prophecy, in Al-Aqsa, in Jerusalem, and in its surroundings…

“We welcome, as we did in the past, any Jew who wants to live in this land as a Dhimmi, just as the Jews have lived in our countries, as Dhimmis, and have earned appreciation, and some of them have even reached the positions of counselor or minister here and there. We welcome the Jews to live as Dhimmis, but the rule in this land and in all the Muslim countries must be the rule of Allah… Those from amongst the Jews and from amongst those who are not Jews who came to this land as plunderers, must return humiliated and disrespected to their countries.” [14]

Shoebat relates historical and current incitements in Israel to the Armenian genocide, which was also religious war. Armenian Christians were poor and weak, he says, but Muslims were told, “Do not have pity on them. It is your duty to cleanse the land of these people.”

In late 1914, pamphlets throughout the Muslim world called for jihad, Peter Balakian reports in The Burning Tigris. The Ikdam Turkish paper underscored the call to jihad. “The deeds of our enemies have brought down the wrath of God. A gleam of hope has appeared. All Mohammedans, young and old, men, women and children must fulfill their duty…. If we do it, deliverance of the subjected Mohammedan kingdoms is assured.” [15]

A 31-page Universal Proclamation to all the People of Islam circulated widely in 1915 urged Muslims to complete “the deliverances of all the Islamic kingdoms from the hands of the infidels.” Muslims everywhere must, it continued,

“rise up and as the rising up of one man, in the one of his hands the word and in the other the gun, and in his pocket balls of fire and annihilating missiles and in his heart the light of the Faith, and that we lift our voices to the utmost, saying—-India for the Muslim Indians, Java for the Muslim Javanese, Algeria for the Algerians among the Muslims, Morocco for the Moroccans, Tunis for the Muslim Tunisians, Egypt for the Muslim Egyptians, Iran for Muslim Iranians, Turan for the Muslim Tureks, Bokhera for the Bokharians, Caucasus for the Caucasians and the Ottoman kingdoms for the Muslim Turks and Arabs.” [16]

Often, Islamic clerics called directly for the extermination of Armenian Christians.

“Despite a previous decision concerning the elimination of the Armenia Race, as the necessities of time did not allow the fulfillment of this holy intent, and now, after we eliminated all obstacles, and seeing that the time has come to redeem our nation from the dangerous race. We have in-trusted you, and we insist, that you do not surrender yourselves to the feelings of pity, as you face their miserable situation. For the cause of putting an end to their existence, you need to work with all your strength, to completely destroy the Armenian name in Turkey, once and for all.” [17]

Jihad pogroms began exterminating countless Armenian Christians in the late 19^th century, according to Balakian. But calls to jihad reached a crescendo in 1914 and 1915. This led Turkish Muslims to butcher 1.5 million Armenian Christian men, women and children. They openly sought to destroy Christianity in the Islamic Ottoman Empire, says Shoebat.

The current jihad in Israel, he says, is of precisely the same nature. “Thomas Friedman wrote that terrorism is an issue of education and an issue of jobs,” says Shoebat. “Excuse me. It isn’t. My own family is very well off.”

Shoebat’s family is better off since his conversion to Christianity: They stole his property in Beit Sahour, he says, and Islamic law prohibits his reclaiming it. An attorney he knows called to warn him: “If you ever go back to Beit Sahour, you will lose a lot more than property. Your children will be taken, and your wife will not be yours.” Islam allows no rights whatever to born Muslims who leave the faith — formally, murtadd fitri — including the right to life.

Frequently, extra-judicial executions of former Muslims and non-Muslims are conducted by slitting the victim’s throat. Former Muslims must therefore sometimes live under police protection. This is the sad case for Sabatina James, who immigrated to Austria with her family from Pakistan. As a former Muslim convert to Christianity, the young woman requires constant protection from family threats.

“I was a terrorist,” says Shoebat today. After coming to the U.S. in 1978 as a student, he participated for years in Arab Muslim “activism,” attended political events, and called, like most Palestinian Americans, for Israel’s destruction. In 1993, he married a Christian woman and now has Christian children. 

Shoebat also rescued his American mother from Beit Sahour, where he says she was effectively held prisoner by Islam for 40 years. He was never told that she was herself a Christian. He remembers that once, his mother took him and his brother to run away. But the neighbors spying from their balconies reported her departure. When they arrived at the station, Muslim relations were waiting to take them back. Shoebat’s father cracked his mother’s skull with a hammer. After that, he watched her closely.

Now, Shoebat is surprised by reporters’ facile acceptance of Palestinian political goals. He worries that too many U.S. churches and universities promote Palestinian “peace” emissaries so unquestioningly. Their apparent messages of “justice,” in reality, are thinly-veiled calls to jihad and genocide, he says. “They have no shame for killing. If a Jew ever walks in the streets of the West Bank, he’s dead.”

Despite all this, Shoebat says he loves his fellow Palestinian Arabs as much as he loves the Jewish people and Israel. How so? “Terrorists are also victims. They suffer an occupation of the mind.”

NOTES:

1 Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide (2002), pp. 279-286.

2 Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude, p. 280.

3 Steven Emerson, American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us (2002), p. 203.

4 Zvi Elpeleg, The Grand Mufti: Haj Amin al-Hussaini Founder of the Palestinian National Movement (1993), pp. 10-15; Samuel Katz, Battlegroud, pp. 63, 68.

5 Martin Gilbert, Routledge Atlas of the Arab Israeli Conflict (2003), pp. 10-13,

6 Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude, p. 283.

7 Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude, p. 284-285.

8 Bat Ye’or, email correspondence, Aug. 5, 2003.

9 Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude, p. 281.

10 Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude, pp. 289-291.

11 Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude, p. 289-290.

12 Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude, p. 290.

13 Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude, p. 153.

14 “A Friday Sermon on PA TV: We Must Educate our Children on the Love of Jihad,” special dispatch # 240, Memri.org, Jul. 11, 2001.

15 Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response (2003), pp. 169-170.

16 A Universal Proclamation to all the People of Islam, National Society of Defense, Seat of the Caliphate, 1333 (Muthba’atâ’el Haireyet, 1915) p. 21.

17 Na’aeem Bek, Armenian Atrocities, p. 43.
Continue reading “The Ravages of the Jihad-Occupied Mind” →

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By Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine.com | December 30, 2003

This is the first in a series of articles FrontPage Magazine will present on the misdeeds of the Ford Foundation. A recent, disturbing editorial in the Wall Street Journal has scratched the surface of this heavily funded, tax-exempt, politically leftist organization. We hope to continue to expose Ford’s sponsorship of far-Left causes in the days to come. — The Editors.

To most Americans, it may seem unlikely that the U.S. Constitution could — or should — ever be revised to conform to strict Islamic law. But an educational program funded by the Ford Foundation has explored that very possibility, challenging our right to unfettered freedom of speech. The program, administered by the woefully misnamed Constitutional Rights Foundation, asks students to ponder how the Constitution could be amended or otherwise interpreted to prohibit blasphemy against Allah.

Just how piddling are the offenses in question? Ask a group of young party-goers in Seattle. They printed a flyer advertising a “rave” and unknowingly decorated it with a verse from the Koran. Ali-Salaam Mahmoud, head of the Sea Tac, Washington Majid As Salaam mosque demanded the rave promoters recall and destroy their 50,000 brochures. The rave promoters did not comply, but 400 Seattle Muslims organized a taxi work stoppage in protest. Several Jewish and Christian leaders supported the offended Muslims.

To take another example: In 1997, Nike recalled 38,000 pairs of sneakers after CAIR and other Muslim groups instigated an international Nike boycott; the word–designed on the sneaks resembled Arabic script for “Allah.” Nike even cut a $50,000 check for the northern Virginia Dar-Al-Hijrah Islamic Center and made educational videos and CDs about Islam. Continue reading “Ford Has a Better Idea: One Nation Under Allah” →

All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
All Rights Reserved.
Printing is allowed for personal use only | Commercial usage (For Profit) is a copyright violation and written permission must be granted first.

by Jerry Gordon and Alyssa A. Lappen
Jewish Internet Association
December 14, 2003

An anti-American geyser erupted December 5 at a daylong Columbia University conference, entitled “US Imperialism in the 21st Century.” The university’s Center for Comparative Literature and Society co-sponsored the event with its controversial Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures program to honor MEALC founder, the late polemicist Edward Said. It filled the Teatro at Casa Italiana to capacity, apparently through email notices sent “entre nous” to like-minded students and faculty.The event—chaired by newly tenured MEALC professor and former Palestine National Committee negotiator Rashid Khalidi—capped a period specially marking the university’s intellectual decline. Fresh from the University of Chicago, Khalidi filled the $4 million, anonymously endowed Edward Said chair to advance Palestinian and Arab causes at Columbia, and appear frequently on PBS and NPR.Neither Columbia nor the taxpayer-funded TV and radio networks publicize Khalidi’s reverence for the memory of mass murderers like Black September terrorist Abu Iyad [1] or his support for violence: Palestinian society “comes through during these uprisings,” he said in October 2000. “It is civil society that carried the first uprising.” [2]

On December 5, MEALC’s targets were U.S. global imperialism and Israel’s Second Intifada–what London University Middle East analyst Ephraim Karsh more aptly calls “Arafat’s War.” The U.S. global war on terror seeks to defeat the state and Islamic terror sponsors that perpetrated and facilitated the September 11th attacks. Israel seeks to defeat a terrorist infrastructure that over the last three years is responsible for more than 20,000 suicide and other attacks that maimed or killed nearly 7,000 Israeli civilians. Continue reading “Peeling Columbia’s Middle East Mask” →

All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
All Rights Reserved.
Printing is allowed for personal use only | Commercial usage (For Profit) is a copyright violation and written permission must be granted first.

By Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine.com | December 4, 2003

After a European Union poll found that nearly 60% of Europeans consider Israel the greatest threat to world peace, the British Broadcasting Corp. on November 26, asked if anti-Semitism is really increasing. “There was outrage and shock over the recent EU poll,” observed Robert Wistrich, director of Jerusalem’s Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of anti-Semitism. Many Israelis consider mainstream labeling of “Israel as a Nazi state” a sort of anti-Semitism.

But the BBC gave the final word to Vienna’s Edward Serotta. The increasingly “shrill” debate often “paints the entire European continent as a cesspool of hatred for Jews,” griped the Central Europe Center for Research and Documentation director. “One prominent Jewish leader recently said the climate was just like 1933 – this is absolutely absurd.”

Oh really? Serotta made this bizarre claim precisely a week after two Paris Jews were brutally murdered and disfigured–because they were Jewish. A minor tabloid, Le Parisien, reported the grisly events. But not a single major French newspaper Le Monde, Figaro or Libération covered the stories, according to an interview with a victim’s mother, distributed by Rosenpress in Revue-Politique.com. In one case, the police advised the family not to call the crime anti-Semitic. [1]

Sebastian Sellam, 23, was a popular disc jockey at a hot Parisian night club called Queen. At about 11:45 p.m. on Wednesday November 19, the young man known as DJ Lam C (a reverse play on his surname) left the apartment he shared with his parents in a modest building in of Paris’ 10^th arrondissement near la Place Colonel Fabien, heading to work as usual. In the underground parking lot, a Muslim neighbor slit Sellam’s throat twice, according to the Rosenpress interview. His face was completely mutilated with a fork. Even his eyes were gouged out.Following the crime, Rosenpress correspondent Alain Azria reported, Sellam’s mother said the Muslim perpetrator mounted the stairs, his hands still bloody, and announced his crime. “I have killed my Jew. I will go to heaven,” he reportedly said. The alleged murderer’s family was well known for rabid anti-Semitism, Mrs. Sellam reportedly told Rosenpress, a point confirmed by the victim’s brother. Within the previous year, Sellam’s mother reportedly said, the family found a dead rooster outside their apartment door with its throat slit, and their Mezuzah was ripped from their door post. Leaving dead roosters is reportedly a traditional warning of impending murder.

The homicide especially traumatized the Paris Jewish community: According to Rosenpress, another gruesome murder, also allegedly committed by a Muslim, occurred earlier that evening. Chantal Piekolek, 53, was working in her Avenue de Clichy shoe store when Mohamed Ghrib, 37, stabbed her 27 times in the neck and chest.

Piekolek’s 10-year-old daughter hid in the storeroom behind the shop with a girlfriend and heard the entire crime. There was no evidence of sexual assault, according to Rosenpress. Paris reporters believe the cash remained in the shop’s register, but this detail remained unconfirmed at press time.

A report apparently based on Le Parisien  appeared in France’s biggest Jewish newspaper, Actualité Juive, but added little. The report strangely named the DJ’s alleged murderer only by his first name. No surname was given. A reliable Paris journalist says the story is correct.  

Initial reports in small news outlets naturally terrified and confused the French Jewish community. Intense anti-Semitism has been building for more than a decade, according to Nidra Poller, an American expatriate in Paris for several decades. Anti-Semitic crimes frequently go unreported in the major press, she said, suppressed by French authorities, victims fearing retribution–and news agencies. Jewish community members thus usually learn of attacks as they did during previous centuries in North African and Eastern European ghettos–by word of mouth.

In 2001, a rabbi in Poller’s neighborhood was kidnapped and held hostage in a car for two hours. Another religious Jew was kidnapped in similar fashion, Poller reported. A Jewish woman and her husband, whom she had just picked up at a local hospital, were abused and threatened with murder for several hours by their Muslim taxi driver, she said.

The charged, anti-Semitic atmosphere in France engenders panic each time a Jewish community member suffers an attack. Crimes typically include harassment, kidnapping, assault, rock-throwing, arson and other abuse, Poller said. Victims usually report the incidents to officials, families and friends. Stories thus spread like wildfire, terrifying people, she noted. Just as frequently, authorities refuse to investigate. Reports are then followed by official and other denials–stoking the community’s fear. People don’t know what to believe, Poller said. Desperate for verifiable data, they attempt to trace reports through sources back to the victims. But those seeking information are generally told to back off. “They are left wondering whether their sources are correcting wild rumors or covering up dastardly anti-Semitism,” said Poller.

French Jews live in constant fear, Poller said. Everyday activities, such as taking a taxi, going to synagogue or shopping can bring attacks. The entire community is traumatized. This pattern was effectively repeated with the November murders in Paris after initial reports indicated that both cases were anti-Semitic crimes.

Then the respected Guysen Israel News clarified essential details. It seemed, the news service claimed, that Piekolek was not Jewish, although her husband was. In a subsequent editorial, Guysen opined that while Sellam’s murderer was a known anti-Semite, he was also mad and jealous of the successful DJ he had known since boyhood. The news agency insists that it would label the crimes anti-Semitic if they really were. But other reporters and agencies disagree, and label the murders anti-Semitic.

Parisian Jews are frightened and confused, Poller said. If Sellam’s murderer was mad, why wasn’t he previously committed to psychiatric confinement? Were initial Rosenpress and Revue-Politique reports on Piekolek correct? Was her murder verifiably not an anti-Semitic crime? Or are subsequent denials based on terrified rejection of facts? (Her husband was Jewish, so it was not “anti-Semitic.”) Are Paris Muslims really starting to slaughter Jews?

“In Paris, a lot of Jews already had to leave countries in North Africa,” Poller said. “Now, they are told not to talk about anti-Semitism. And they are going to have to flee again?”

Alas, it is easy to believe the worst. A few days earlier, an anti-Semitic arson attack hit the Jewish Merkatz Hatorah boys’ school on the outskirts of Paris. Prime-Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin later said he hoped to identify “those who carried out this shameful attack.”

Given intense and worsening anti-Semitism in France and Europe, there seems little hope that the government will actually investigate the arson, much less prosecute the perpetrator if it finds one. After all, EU officials deny the severity of the problem. Last week, they shelved an EU report on the subject for fear of antagonizing Muslims, who were behind many of the incidents examined.

Two Muslim students at Paris’ well-regarded Lycée Montaigne recently beat an 11-year-old Jewish classmate while reportedly yelling at him, “We’ll finish Hitler’s job.” Headmaster Jean-Marie Renault sued the accused aggressors and plans “a debate on the dangers of xenophobia” next term. Complaints rarely produce criminal sanctions, however. Many anti-Semitic crimes are never even reported, Poller said–especially in the housing project cités that ring Paris, where residents are one third North African Muslims. “La Zone is foreign country,” writes Theodore Dalrymple.

But is it? Poller left France for a U.S. speaking tour in November with one week’s news publications to read on her flight–two weekly magazines and three major newspapers. All of them, she said, were “reeking with hatred [for Jews].” They also sympathized extensively with terrorists. News reports are not factual. “They are sermons,” Poller said. A profile of philosopher Gilles Deleuze in the weekly Nouvel Observateur, for example, praised his defense of the Palestinians, citing an article he wrote on “le grandeur de Arafat,” despite his personal responsibility for more than 1,000 civilian murders.

EU officials may not want to admit it. But attacks on Jews have been mounting since the terrorist war on Israel began in September 2000. In the last year, however, anti-Semitic attacks in France have grown increasingly bold. In January, Paris Rabbi Gabriel Farhi was attacked several times. In April 2002 alone, the French Interior Ministry recorded nearly 360 anti-Semitic crimes against Jews and Jewish institutions, according to Washington Times reporter Al Webb. [2] In May 2002, a mysterious fire erupted at the Israeli embassy in Paris.

“Yes, a synagogue was burned,” Frenchmen routinely admit, according to Poller. “But how do we know this was anti-Semitic?” Sellam’s murder was handled in much the same way, she said, although 2,000 mourners attended the popular young disc jockey’s funeral. Le Parisien, according to Poller the only print newspaper to report the crime, noted that Sellam was Jewish and his alleged murderer Muslim, but explained the crime as an outburst of jealousy by a lifelong friend. “Sebastian was successful and his murderer was unsuccessful and jealous.”

Something considerably darker than professional jealousy must be at work, however, when a murderer completely mutilates his victim’s face with a fork and gouges out his eyes or stabs a 53-year-old mother 27 times in the chest and neck.

Indeed, in Sura 8, verse 12, the Qur’an instructs Muslims, “Remember thy Lord inspired the angels (with the message): ‘I am with you: give firmness to the Believers: I will instil terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers: smite ye above their necks and smite all their finger-tips off them’.”

Evidently, some Muslims take this literally. The theme repeats in Sura 47, verse 4: “Therefore, when ye meet the Unbelievers (in fight), smite at their necks.“Citing this verse, Shafi’i jurist al-Mawardi (d. 1058) prescribes exactly such behavior. When Allah gives Muslims victory over mushrikun in “The Amirate of Jihad”–the non-Muslim region of war, or Dar al-Harb–he advises, “their women and children are taken prisoner, and their wealth is taken as booty, and those who are not taken captive are put to death.” [3]

Meanwhile, in Germany, neo-Nazis were arrested in September for planning an arson attack on a Munich synagogue to commemorate Hitler’s November 9 Kristallnacht of 1938, in which thousands of Jewish homes and shops were destroyed, hundreds murdered and thousands arrested and sent to concentration camps.

Right. And two grisly ritual murders last week in Paris, France were not anti-Semitic.

Notes

[1] Digital video film interview by © Alain Azria / Avi Rosen / Rosenpress Agency

For further information:

[2] Al Webb, “Synagogues Burn as Europe Rages,” Washington Times, Apr. 23, 2002

[3] Abu’l Hasan al-Mawardi, al-Ahkam as-Sultaniyyah: The Laws of Islamic Governance (Ta-Ha, 1996), p. 76. Continue reading “Ritual Murders of Jews in Paris” →

All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
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By Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine.com | October 17, 2003

Escape from Slavery: The true story of my ten years in captivity–and my journey to freedom in America,
Francis Bok with Edward Tivnan, St Martins Press 2003, 285 pages, $24.29.

The cruelty that Francis Bok experienced at age seven defies civilized human conception. One day in 1986, his mother Marial sent him to Nyamlell’s market from their Southern Sudan Dinka village of Gourion to sell eggs and peanuts. His father Pial Bol Buk had recently called Francis “Muycharko” — “like twelve men.” He would be successful and achieve something important. Eventually, his father’s hope proved prophetic. But in 1986 Francis could count to no more than ten and still played alweth and Madallah — Dinka hide-and-seek and cricket. His mother sent older friends to supervise his first independent market trip.

That day, the Catholic boy nicknamed Piol, for rain, lost his childhood and world to the murahaliin. After torching the nearby villages and slaying their inhabitants, 20 light-skinned Juur horsemen charged into Nyamlell. They severed the heads of all Dinka men with single sword strokes, left them rolling in the blood-soaked market dust and stole off Piol’s older friends Abuk, Kwol and Nyabol in different directions. A rifleman permanently silenced a crying girl with a bullet to her head. A swordsman more “mercifully” sliced off her sister’s leg at the thigh like the branch of a small tree. Francis tried to flee. Terror squelched his cries. He was halted at gunpoint, grabbed and slung astride a small saddle, crafted specifically to carry abducted children, and ridden far north.

After President George W. Bush signed the tough Sudan Peace Act on October 18, 2002 — improving on earlier measures — many Americans became increasingly aware of ongoing Islamist Sudan’s government support for mass enslavement and genocide of Southern Sudanese Christians and animists. Following the heroic efforts of Boston philanthropist Charles Jacobs to denounce black bondage in sub-Saharan Africa and abolish slavery globally in his lifetime, John Eibner’s Christian Solidarity International began his revolutionary work to purchase and liberate Southern Sudanese slaves from Arab Muslim bondage. Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff also covered the genocide in a series of ongoing exposes.

But few have noted that the experience of Francis Bok–and the ongoing Arab Muslim oppression and genocide against Southern Sudan’s Dinka–is merely the modern manifestation of Islamic Jihad tradition established by the Prophet Mohammed and pursued aggressively ever since by Islamic jurists and rulers–from the Caliphs to the Ottomans, to current-day Islamic tyrants like Sudan’s Hasan at-Turabi and Gen. ‘Umar al-Bashir. “Jihad,” wrote Rashad Ali in Khilafah Magazine in December 2001, “is the removal of obstacles, by force if necessary, that stand between people and Islam. It is the practical method of spreading Islam. The call to Islam is compulsory on Muslims.” Moreover, “Jihad is continuous and will always be so.”

Even victims like Bok are seldom aware of the history. During 10 long years of enslavement by Giemma Abdullah in Kerio, Francis Bok had no idea why he was victimized. He learned soon enough that the Arabic word abeed carried three meanings–“slave,” “black” and “filth.” Half his lifetime among Muslims taught him that they considered themselves better than Southern Sudanese infidels. But this hardly informed him of the history of the jihad institution to which his 20^th century captors and masters subjected him. He could not recognize himself as an inferior, non-Muslim dhimmi. Continue reading “Jihad Slavery: An Ugly Living Legacy” →

All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
All Rights Reserved.
Printing is allowed for personal use only | Commercial usage (For Profit) is a copyright violation and written permission must be granted first.