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During an interview on the Turkey-based MB-affiliated Channel 9 TV, Libyan researcher Dr. Ali Al-Siba’i said that the Jihad that terrifies the world today was sanctioned by shari’a law in order to establish justice, and that humanity was relieved of oppression, exploitation, and plundering when Islam “spread its wings throughout the world.” He said that the Europeans and the Americans inherited their imperialist-colonialist mentality from the Romans, and that they can only be stopped by Muslims through the use of offensive Jihad. He also said: “Look who [Allah] has sent to rule over us – the Jews, whom the Quran called ‘most despicable creatures of Allah.’ The descendants of apes and pigs rule over us and inflict upon us all kinds of torment.” The interview aired on October 27, 2018.

“Justice, fairness, impartiality, honesty”? The violent Jihad that has lasted for 1,400 years, conducted now in this part of the world and now in that, had little to do with justice, fairness, impartiality, honesty. The Shari’a promoted the Muslim impulse to conquer as many non-Muslim lands and subjugate as many non-Muslim peoples as possible, plundering their riches, seizing women to be used as sex slaves, and reducing those who survived — men, women, and children — to the status of dhimmis, subject to a host of onerous conditions, including the required payment of the Jizyah, a tax that guaranteed they would not be attacked by Muslims themselves. The impulse to “establish justice, fairness, impartiality, and honesty among people” had nothing to do with their conquests, except insofar as they believed that only with the imposition of the Sharia, the Islamic law, could ”justice, fairness, impartiality, and honesty” — as Muslims understand those words — be guaranteed. How could there be “fairness” if non-Muslims had the same rights as Muslims? Or how could “justice” be achieved if the testimony of non-Muslim witnesses was given the same evidentiary value as that of a non-Muslim? Impossible! To be “impartial” — to measure Muslim and non-Muslim by the same standard, according them the same rights — would be to ignore the most basic division of humanity, between the Muslims who are the ”best of peoples” (3:110) and the non-Muslims (98:6) who are the “most vile of creatures,” both judgements found in the immutable Qur’an.

Humanity was relieved of oppression and exploitation, and of the plundering of resources and the denial of rights only when Islam spread its wings throughout the world. Before that – what did the Romans do in Egypt? What did they do in Libya? What did they do in Syria and in Palestine? What did they do throughout the world? The imperialist-colonialist mentality of the Romans was inherited by Europe in the Middle Ages, as well as today. I’m talking about Europe in general, about Europe and America. Today, it is [America] that spreads its influence. America wants to oppress and grab each and every region. This mentality can only be smashed by Jihad – not defensive Jihad, but offensive Jihad.

The author fails to recognize that the most successful imperialism and colonialism in history has been that of the Muslim Arabs themselves, who not only conquered vast regions and moved in great numbers into non-Arab and non-Muslim lands (as in North Africa, which originally was Christian and pagan in religion, and ethnically Berber, before large numbers of Muslim Arabs moved in), but managed to convince those they conquered not to reject being arabized, but to participate in it, by converting to Islam and then giving themselves Arab names and lineages. In some cases, they even called themselves “Sayyid” to suggest a factitious lineage back to the Al-Quraysh tribe of Muhammad himself.

The Indians did not come to our country and colonize us, and neither did the South Americans. Only the Europeans did, because they inherited this from the Romans. Nobody will stop them except for the Muslims.

The Europeans did very little colonizing of Arab and Muslim lands. The British left the entire Arabian peninsula alone, save for a single entrepôt in Aden, where ships going to or from India could stop for supplies. The British never entered the Arabian interior itself. On the high seas, the Royal Navy did seek to interdict, and succeeded in shutting down, the Arab trade in African slaves. The British did enter Egypt under Lord Cromer in 1882, but not as colonists. They came with a limited mission — to make the Egyptian civil service more efficient and less corrupt — and having achieved that, they left in1922. The real imperial power in the Middle East for hundred of years was Ottoman Turkey, and it was the British who drove out the Turks during World War I, freeing the Muslim Arabs from the Turkish masters who had ruled them for centuries.

Look who [Allah] has sent to rule over us – the Jews, whom the Quran called “the most despicable creatures of Allah.” The descendants of apes and pigs rule over us, and inflict upon us all kinds of torment.

Classic Islamic antisemitism preached hatred and contempt for the Jews, but never saw the despised Jews as “ruling over us.” That comes from the narrative in European antisemitism, where Jews are regarded as possessing great financial and other, almost occult, powers, with rich and powerful Jews gathering in meetings where they decide the fate of the rest of humanity, always to the advantage of themselves and their fellow Jews. This Libyan researcher combines the antisemitism found in the Qur’an — where Jews are shown as guilty of a multitude of sins, including being “the strongest in opposition to Muhammad,” but never depicted as secret rulers of the world, as they were in European antisemitism, that endowed them with great and sinister powers. Thus he laments that “the descendants of apes and pigs [the Jews] rule over us, and inflict upon us all kinds of torment.” After all, how can Arabs and Muslims explain the ability of the Jews of Israel to repeatedly throw back the Arab invaders, except through a narrative that endows the Jews with malign and almost supernatural powers, like those that European antisemitism attributes to them?

They are then, these Jews, in modern Islamic antisemitism, both despised, for being the descendants of apes and pigs, for being liars, untrustworthy, disobedient, grasping, strongest in opposition to Muhammad, and much more, while at the same time they are also feared, as in European antisemitism, for their seeming powers to control so many others behind the scenes. Logically, of course, the Israeli Jews should not be despised, for their ability to defend themselves against overwhelming odds, is impressive. Nor should they be seen as possessing unusual powers over others. After all, if they did have such power over many countries, wouldn’t they have been able to win more votes at the U.N., where Israel is repeatedly denounced, voted against, always by a gigantically lopsided margin, for its attempts to defend itself in Gaza, or to fight preemptively against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, or even to expand those Jewish villages in the West Bank that it has a perfect right to do, according to U.N. Resolution 242, but that so many call, quite inaccurately, “settlements” in “occupied Arab land.”

Dr. Ali Al-Siba’i claims that the Jews are those whom the Qur’an called the “most despicable creatures of Allah. The descendants of apes and pigs rule over us and inflict upon us all kinds of torment.” In the same breath, he claims that Allah “has sent the Jews” to “rule over us.” So I have one question: Why? Why would Allah, the merciful, give the Jews the power to “rule over Muslims”? Wouldn’t it make better sense to have the Jews permanently subject to Muslim rule and forced to endure life as dhimmis? It is clear that because the Jews are not now in thrall to Muslims, and certainly not behaving like dhimmis, that the other antisemitic narrative, the one with its roots in Europe, where all-powerful Jews plot to control the world — see, e.g., the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” — has to be brought into service. Now any Israeli victory in war can be explained as due not to Israeli bravery, but rather to the malign forces of international Jewry working behind the scenes. For the Arabs, it is both face-saving and comforting to think that it is not the superior soldiership of the IDF, nor the courage of the recruits, nor the superiority of Israel’s strategists, nor the country’s advanced weaponry, including some, such as Iron Dome, that have been developed and manufactured by Israel itself. The Arabs need only point to all the help (carefully unspecified) given to Israel by “international Jewry” — the “malefactors of great wealth” who must explain Israel’s ability to withstand its enemies.

But this leaves the original question still unanswered. Why would Allah set the despised Jews to “rule over” Muslims? Perhaps He means this as a test of Muslim fortitude, the ability to endure such an unjust situation, having to be ruled by the descendants of apes and pigs. And if the Muslim Arabs continue to lose battles, that can be attributed not to their insufficiencies, but to Allah’s desire to test their faith still further. Inshallah-fatalism can explain their losses — Allah willed it — and then, once they have given sufficient proof of their ability not to lose heart, but to keep their faith in Allah, He will at long last reward them by giving them a great victory over the Jews, who will, of course, then be slaughtered or reduced to hopeless dhimmitude. And Allah Knows Best.