A Monopoly on Suffering [Archives:2000/13/Focus]

Common Sense
By: Hassan Al-Haifi

No one in his right mind should ever be in a position to forgive Adolf Hitler for his distasteful disregard for human life, Jewish or otherwise and surely the German people are probably the last ones to want to forgive him for staining their phenomenal civilized and cultural achievements. In addition the German people will be the first ones to say that Hitler was also to be damned for leaving them an enduring headache, as he made them prisoners of systematic reparation payments for many generations to come as “compensation” for the barbarity the lunatic dictator inflicted on Jews over his 10 year field trip as the Fuhrer of the Third Reich (Mind you, the Jews were not the only victims of such racial and ethnic madness). 

Moreover the well-organized Zionist lobby has never failed to take advantage of the misdeeds (to Jews mainly) of Hitler to continuously impose upon the German post-Hitler governments a strong guilty stigma that continues to influence German policy, particularly towards the Middle East. One German once told this observer: “We Germans probably hate Hitler more than anyone else. He has forced upon us so many restrictions and restraints, because whatever we do, we have to be conscious that it does not irritate Jewish interest groups. If we wish to give the Palestinians US $ 1 Million, we must give Israel US $ 10 Million or else face severe attacks from Jewish organizations, especially from the United States”.

If one goes through history rather quickly, one will find that there are probably no people who have been free from any suffering, which in many cases has approached genocide. Even today we are still confronted by cases of genocide and mass annihilation of people, such as what occurred in Bosnia or what happened in Rwanda or a little while back in Cambodia. Yet, the Catholic Church, or any other international body, is not being hammered not speaking against the senseless barbarity in any of those places. In fact, it would be unfair to expect that the Vatican would have been able to do anything to prevent or cease these and other barbarities. Yet the poor Pope, on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, has now been added to the growing list of those the Zionists lobby feels they can squeeze a dollar or two for the Vatican’s “silence” more than half a century ago on what Hitler unleashed in Europe. I think this kind of embezzlement must not be continuously tolerated forever, for entails a serious handicap on those who practice it, as though the blood of all those helpless victims is cheap enough to be used by Zionist solicitors of funds for their spongy experiment in the Holy Land. Surely there must be some courtesy and respect accorded to a well regarded leader of a sizable chunk of the world community, even if he is from another religion. It goes without saying that Moslems have been victims of Catholic inquisitions of greater severity than that practiced against Jews throughout their history. It would not be a mistake today that if it was not for Catholic persecutions of Moslems in Spain and Portugal and in many of the Far Eastern Dominions of the Iberian States (including East Timor and the Philippines, the majority of these states would be Moslems today! But alas Moslems are very tolerant and smut surely understand that all that occurred against other Moslems is because of their own weakness, first of all, and not because their enemies just were too vicious.
On the other hand, Moslems suffered under the Crusades, who were unleashed against the “heathen” Moslems in the early years of the last Millennium by Pope Urban II, and chroniclers report that when the Crusades were able to enter Jerusalem, 90,000 skulls of the Moslem residents of the city were piled all over the city as decorations for the celebration of the victory.
One can go on and on in recalling the many cases of ethnic cleansing that went on Southern Italy and Sicily where all the Moslems were either forced to convert to Christianity or face death, often by burning so as to give them a “taste of the inferno”, as was the case in Spain and Portugal later [The Moslems or Saracens, as many Western orientalists like to call them, ruled Southern Italy and Sicily for 400 years and a sizable chunk of the Iberian Peninsula for 800 centuries). There are also cases of ethnic cleansing in Eastern Europe and Russia, which still continues to this day. In Greece, towards the last century, thousands of people, if not millions, were forced to convert or die. In Rhodes today, Moslems are not allowed to use their mosques “except on Fridays” and no Moslem schools or organized activities are permitted whatsoever. In Serbia, chroniclers reported that Belgrade once had 300 minarets, which indicates a sizable Moslem community once thriving there alongside with all the other ethnic composition of the city. Not so surprising, though Islam was called the “religion of the Sword”, non Moslem constituencies still exist today without recalling any real mass genocide or “ethnic cleansing” inflicted on any of the domains that made up the Moslem Empire in its various forms. The Mongols also let loose their terror in the Moslem world, as they did against everyone else that their fast cavalries literally whisked through. The Library of Baghdad was burned with 3 million volumes of accumulated scholarly treasure and God knows how many people burned with it. The heirs of the Genghis Khan adopted Islam and it became the state religion of many of the principalities governed by Mongol khans including the Moghul dynasty that ruled India for hundreds of years until the British took over India.
On the other hand other genocide of history were inflicted by the European settlers of North and South America, where the indigenous populations there were almost wiped out, along with a vast wealth of cultural heritage. The Spaniards and Portuguese found it difficult to fully annihilate the “Red Indian populations under them, so they just forcefully converted them to Christianity as an extension of the Inquisition they carried out in the Iberian Peninsula for hundreds of years against the Moslem populations there. Perhaps the lessons of tolerance, at least from a racial standpoint learned from the Moslems may have softened the Iberian conquistadors of and mainly carried out their genocide on economic (plunder) and religious grounds.

Yet the Popes of all these periods were also silent, if they in fact did not sanction many of the genocide. The Pope, at the time that Ferdinand and Isabella threw out the Moslems from Granada was so grateful to the Iberian twin states for driving the Moslems out of Western Europe that he divided all the “New World” between Spain and Portugal for their great loyalty to the Church. That is why Brazil is more Portuguese today than it is “Latin American Spanish, because Brazil came out to be on the side of the longitude line set by the Pope (I think his name was Clemens, but not sure now) as the dividing line accordingly.
Yet, history will be history and surely, if people continued to seek apologies for all the atrocities that have been inflicted upon so many peoples, the whole population of the world would be busy working to meet “reparation” payments and writing letters of apologies for not stepping in to stop the carnage that has been repeated in just about every corner of the Earth over the millenniums that have crossed human history since Cain slew his brother Abel. Perhaps it was that precedent that encouraged the Israelis to unleash their barbarity against their helpless Semite brethren (Moslem and Christians) in order that the Jews can have their “Promised Land” and take over the Holy lands of the three monotheistic faiths that produced the cultural heritage, from which the roots of modern civilization stem. Surely, this would be considered an act of justice, where the Lord Al-Mighty would not be Himself, if he would sanction the State of Zion at the expense of thousands of innocent lives and millions of homeless refugees, both Christians and Moslem Arab, who must pay the price for the atrocities that Hitler and many others committed against the Jews over the ages. Ironically, it was in the Arab and Moslem domains that Jewish communities continued to live and thrive for centuries, until the Jewish state came into being to bring uncalled for animosities to the region that delivered the message of Peace (one of the Lord’s names), just so some arrogant embezzlers can find a home that will disregard the spirit and letter of the message that still has a long way to go before human suffering and intolerance are over with and people remember that suffering should not be an excuse for inflicting suffering and disrespecting the revered positions of masters of other faiths. But then, Israel will always be Israel. Peace, Shalom and Salam. It is not enough just to say it; one must imbue it with tolerance and forgiveness. That is what the Message is really all about; is it not?
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