The Everlasting Hatred (20 page)

Mohammad's first four successors, or
Khaliphs
, are known collectively as the “rashidun,” or “the Divinely Guided Ones.” They each knew “the Prophet” personally and worked with him to build and spread Islam. Thus their credentials were as unique as their thirty years of rule (A.D. 632–662). Their accomplishments were nothing short of extraordinary by anyone's measure.

After some controversy, Abu Bakr Sedeik (A.D. 632–634) became the first to possess the title of Khaliph Rasul Allah. This title represented the temporal authority of the Prophet and the holder's responsibility as defender of the faithful. Since Mohammad was “the last, or Seal, of the Prophets,” the Khaliph was not the spiritual head of the House of Islam but rather the secular “commander of the faithful.”

Bakr's khaliphate magnified, if it did not create, a schism that endures to this day via the geo-religio-political division of the Shi'ite and Sunni sects.

When the Shi'ites' choice, Ali, was not chosen as Khaliph, a violent struggle erupted that continues until this present day. Ali ibn Talib was not only Mohammad's first cousin and adopted son, but he was also married to Mohammad's only surviving child— his daughter Fatima. If you think this is irrelevant ancient history, just remember that Sunni Iraq fought a bloody war with Shi'ite Iran over this issue during the entire decade of the 1980s.

In the Muslim Middle East, events that happened centuries
ago are still as relevant as those that happened yesterday. A grudge based on an event that occurred a thousand years ago can erupt today into a savage war against the “descendants of the offender.”

Only two issues in history have really united the Sunnis and the Shi'ites. The first was the long war against the Christian crusaders in the Middle Ages—the second is the mutual hatred of Jews and the desire to destroy the state of Israel. It's truly amazing, but after Iraq and Iran inflicted over a million casualties on each other, they “kissed and made up” because of the mutually perceived threat of the U.S. led invasion of Iraq.

Bakr's short two-year khaliphate was spent reuniting the tribes of Arabia, most of which immediately revolted after Mohammad's death. He had the help of an amazing military leader named Khalid ibn-Walid, who became known as “the Sword of Allah.”
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Omar ibn al-Khattab, by prearrangement, succeeded Bakr and reigned from A.D. 634–644. He is very important to understand, because he devastated the Christian world with a vengeance.

Historian George Grant offers these descriptions of Omar:

A stern giant of a man with a long dark beard and a full, brooding countenance. He wore coarse, frayed garments and always carried a whip in his right fist in order to enforce righteous humility among his men. He had little appreciation for the accomplishments of Byzantium and was single-minded in his desire to bring the empire to its knees.

According to the Shah Nemeh, a contemporary chronicle of caliphs and kings, Umar (Omar) despised the Christian infidels for their “half-faith” and yearned to force their confessions, creeds, and liturgies into extinction.
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Omar was driven as one empowered by a “supernatural spirit,” which probably explains his amazing career. Under his “inspired leadership” the united tribes of Arabia exploded from the peninsula. They charged in every direction, conquering and occupying all they encountered.

The exploits of Walid, “the Sword of Allah,” are particularly important to this book. In A.D. 635, Walid crossed the border of Persia and subdued the village of Hira. He then made an incredible forced march across the Syrian desert to join forces with another Muslim army that was near Jerusalem. In short order, although out-numbered two to one, Walid led his forces in a series of brilliant cavalry charges that cut the Byzantine defenders to pieces.

Walid quickly conquered the territory generally known as Palestine. By the fall of A.D. 635, Walid reached the very gates of Damascus, having decimated the opposition along the way. After a six-month siege, the Muslims captured the ancient city of Damascus.

In the fateful month of August, A.D. 635, the Muslim armies captured Jerusalem.

Khaliph Omar came into the city on a February day in A.D. 638 and personally proclaimed the Temple Mount one of Islam's holiest sites. He built a wooden mosque over the great rock on the Temple Mount. However, Muslims believe a story that differs from the history recorded in the Biblical record. They believe the Temple Mount is the site where Abraham built an altar on which to sacrifice
Ishmael
. The Bible clearly states the altar was built to sacrifice Isaac, not Ishmael. God's choice of Isaac over Ishmael is an essential part of the entire Biblical revelation concerning His plan for mankind's redemption. It is also the basis for the centuries-old feud between the two races that sprang from Ishmael and Isaac.

Muslims developed the legend that this rock is the very
foundation stone from which Allah created the earth and the place where Adam made atonement after his fall. Most importantly, the Muslims believe Mohammad ascended to heaven from here on his horse named Barak that miraculously sprouted wings. This is the Muslim basis for designating the Temple area the third holiest site of Islam.

Chuck Missler quotes Steve Runciman concerning Omar's triumphant entry to Jerusalem:

On a February day in the year A.D. 638 the Khaliph Omar entered Jerusalem, riding upon a white camel. He was dressed in worn filthy robes, and the army that followed him was rough and unkempt; but its discipline was perfect… . Omar rode straight to the sight of the Temple of Solomon… . Omar was shocked at the filth and rubble that lay strewn about the Temple Mount. Because the holy sight had been neglected he made the Christian Patriarch (Sophronius) grovel in the muck. Afterward Omar set about clearing the sight. He then built a wooden mosque on the temple mount.”
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During the short nine years of Omar's khaliphate, the Muslims went from a regional kingdom on the Arabian Peninsula to become an Islamic world-empire. Grant comments on this amazing fete:

Before his death in A.D. 644 [Omar] had spread the dominion of Islam from the Euphrates across the North African Littoral. He had conquered all of Iraq, brought the Persians to the brink of collapse, controlled the southern Mediterranean coastline, and put Christendom on the defensive at every turn. In addition, he left his successors a tumultuous momentum that gave them expansive new conquests in Spain, Sicily, Crete, and Italy.
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Most important to our focus, Omar's conquests brought under his brutal control Jewish communities that had lived for hundreds of years in the areas he conquered. Those who were not killed received the status of something only slightly less terrible— they became “dhimmis,” which I mentioned before.

Most of the Christian Byzantine civilization was also conquered, and the survivors suffered a fate similar to that of the Jews. Historic churches were converted to mosques. Priceless Christian art was obliterated. Everything Christian was destroyed. Everything that referred to Jesus as the Son of God was removed. In its place, the Muslims posted ornate signs that read, “All praise be to Allah who never had a son.”

It was under Khaliph Omar that the laws regarding non-believers were firmly established by Muslims. As dhimmis, Jews were forbidden to touch the Koran. They were forced to wear distinctive clothes and a yellow badge (Christians had to wear blue). They were not permitted to perform religious practices in public, not allowed to own or ride a horse, and were required to bury their dead without any public expression of grief.

As an expression of gratitude for being allowed to live among Muslims, dhimmis were expected to pay special confiscatory taxes prescribed by the Koran—usually at least 50 percent of all earnings. (Tax-wise, it sounds much like America's current taxes.)

Here is an example of “Islamic justice” for the Jewish dhimmis. “Islamic religious law decreed that, although the murder of one Muslim by another Muslim was punishable by death, a Muslim who murdered a non-Muslim was not given the death penalty, but only the obligation to pay ‘blood money' to the family of the slain infidel,” writes author Joan Peters. “Even this punishment was unlikely, however, because the law held the testimony
of a Jew or a Christian invalid against a Muslim, and the penalty could only be exacted under improbable conditions—when two Muslims were willing to testify against a brother Muslim for the sake of an infidel.”
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This kind of blatantly ruthless double standard in Islam has continued through the centuries—enforced to varying degrees of cruelty depending on the character of the Muslim ruler and the country. Under the best of circumstances, life was intolerable and filled with indignities.
In the worst of circumstances, Jews and Christians lived every moment of every day in fear for their very lives
.

Jews dwelling in Muslim-ruled lands all lived under the terrible law of the dhimmi. As Islam spread, Jewish communities were swept into the storm. Those who weren't killed lived lives of humiliation and terror.

What Moses predicted centuries before about the Israelites became a terrifying reality:

Moreover, the Lord will scatter you among all peoples, from one end of the earth to the other end of the earth… . Among those nations you shall find no rest, and there shall be no resting place for the sole of your foot; but there the Lord will give you a trembling heart, failing of eyes, and despair of soul. So your life shall hang in doubt before you; and you shall be in dread night and day, and shall have no assurance of your life.
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It is true that Jews were persecuted in other cultures as well, but the Muslims raised it to the level of a religious sacrament.

The practices that started then continue to this present day. Here are a few examples of some of the ancient Jewish communities, and how they have continued to our present era.

Life for Jews has always been particularly demeaning. In Yemen, for example, Jews were treated like subhuman slaves, forced to clean the public latrines and clear the streets of animal carcasses without pay on the Sabbath day.
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A particularly horrible Yemenite law decreed that fatherless Jewish children under thirteen be taken from their mothers and raised as Muslims. “Children were torn away from their mothers,” according to historian S. D. Goitein. “To my mind this law, which was enforced with new vigor about 50 years ago, more than anything else impelled the Yemenite Jews to quit that country to which they were very much attached. The result was that many families arrived in Israel with one or more of their children lost to them … some widows were bereaved in this way of all their offspring.”
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Persecution in Yemen was consistent and extreme over the years. Stoning Jews continued as an age-old custom right up until most Yemenite Jews left for Israel in 1948. They had lived there for twenty-five hundred years.

Jews had a long history of residence in Babylon until the Muslim conquest in the year A.D. 634. Later, the heavy taxes were imposed, synagogues were razed, and, ultimately, entire communities were slaughtered.

In the modern era, after Israel became a state, Iraq came down on Iraqi Jews with a pent-up fury. There was a long history of persecution in this region, but this was horrific. More than 123,000 Iraqi Jews fled to Israel in terror between 1949 and 1952 alone. Many were killed in riots. Those who fled left with nothing but the clothes on their backs—thankful they escaped with their lives. They left behind wealth and property that their
families had accumulated over some twenty-five hundred years. Most of these families could trace their origins in Iraq back to the Babylonian captivity in the days of Daniel the prophet.

Prior to 1948, the Jewish community in Egypt lived in relative peace and harmony compared to the plight of Jews in the neighboring Muslim nations. Even so, their lives were filled with constant uncertainty. Humiliations, property confiscations, and physical atrocities happened daily at the whim of the Muslim neighbors.

Beginning in 1940, spurred by Nazi propaganda and the growth of the Zionist movement, many Jews were killed in anti-Jewish riots. Egypt even passed laws that all but prohibited Jews from being employed. The government confiscated property, and after the 1947 vote to partition Palestine, Jewish homes were looted and synagogues destroyed.

In one ten-day period in 1948, 150 Jews were murdered or seriously wounded in Egyptian bloodletting. As soon as a ban on Jews leaving the country was lifted in 1949, some twenty thousand fled Egypt, mostly for Israel, with only the clothes on their backs.

Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser openly declared in 1964, “Our sympathy was with the Germans. The president of our Parliament, for instance, Anwar Sadat, was imprisoned for his sympathy with the Germans.”
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In the 1970s, a prominent Egyptian writer was, once more, helping to stir up the old blood libels against Jews. Anis Mansour assured his readers that the medieval lie that Jews sacrificed children and drank their blood was historically true and that “the Jews confessed.” Because of this, he said it was perfectly appropriate to
persecute “the wild beasts.” Another time he wrote: “People all over the world have come to realize that Hitler was right, since Jews … are bloodsuckers … interested in destroying the whole world which has … expelled them and despised them for centuries … and burnt them in Hitler's crematoria … one million … six million—I would that he had finished it!”
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