Wednesday, May 20, 2009
'Blood Libel' is becoming a fairly overused term lately, a sort of catch-all for any anti-Jewish libel. I think what we have here is some biased Duranty-esque reporting of the mouthings of dhimmis taken at face value, convenient for a publication with NatGeo's slant -- OK, not as catchy I admit. Anyway, Phyllis Chesler is all over it: The Blood Libels at National Geographic Magazine: The Planet-Friendly Purveyor of Anti-Christian, Anti-American, and Anti-Israeli Biases.
...Here's what the article does: It essentially blames the Christian Crusaders, American Christians, and Israel (!) for the persecution and disappearance of Arab Christians from the Middle East. I could not make this up. The lies, omissions, biases, both subtle and overt are mind-boggling. For example, the article, written by Don Belt, does not explain why the Crusades ever took place--namely, to protect the Christian Arabs from being slaughtered and forcibly converted by Muslims. In any event, Belt writes that "ironically, it was during the Crusades (1095-1291) that Arab Christians, slaughtered along with Muslims by the crusaders and caught in the cross fire between Islam and the Christian West, began a long, steady retreat into the minority."
Just a minute. How has Belt managed to bypass the Arab Muslim conquest of the Christian and Jewish Middle East? For example, according to the pre-eminent scholar, Bat Ye'or, (and cited in Andrew Bostom's excellent The Legacy of Jihad),
"Abu Bakr organized the invasion of Syria (Syro-Palestine) which Mohammed had already envisioned...the whole Gaza region up to Casarea was sacked and devastated in the campaign of 634. Four thousand Jewish, Christian, and Samaritan peasants who defended their land were massacred. The villages of the Negev were pillaged by Amr b. al As...in his sermon on Christmas day, 634, the patriarch of Jerusalem, Sophronius, lamented over the impossibility of going on pilgrimage to Bethelehem...Sophronius, in his sermon on the day of Epiphany 636, bewailed the destruction of the churches and monasteries, the sacked towns, the fields laid waste...thousands of people perished in 639, victims of the famine that resulted from these destructions. According to the Muslim chronicler Baladhuri (d.892 C.E.), 40,000 Jews lived in Caesarea alone at the Arab conquest, after which all trace of them is lost."
Based on scholarly sources, Bostom carefully and comprehensively chronicles the systematic Arab Muslim pillaging of the entire Middle East which included their enslavement and murder of Christians and Jews. What Don Belt fails to note, even in passing, is that more than four centuries of such Arab Muslim persecution of Christians is precisely what led to the Christian Crusades...
http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2009/05/to-push-or-to-squeeze_18.html#readfurther
Very interesting
I haven't read the NG article. I've read, from another source, about the impact of unintended consequences from US Christian missionaries where a number of established Arab Christian churches immigrated en masse to the US.
The implication of the NG article seems to conflate killing in crusades to the US offering a safe haven from Islamic persecution, which is rather disingenuous. It would be analogous to blaming the US for the current reduced European Jewish population, since a number of Jewish people left Europe & moved to America.