Why the Palestinians Refuse to Civilize, 11/8/2023
On my fourth trip to Israel I led a church tour group from Riverside, California – a two week tour timed to coincide with 10 Days of Awe, which starts with Yom Teruah (the Feast of Trumpets) on the bibical calendar of Leviticus 23, and ends with Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement). Most of our daily excursions took us to places on the standard tourist list but on Yom Kippur I arranged an “off the grid” tour of the Kidron Valley with a Messianic Jewish guide with special expertise in Jerusalem history.
Even though the Kidron Valley runs directly between the Temple Mount and the Mount of Olives – almost literally a stones throw from each other – it is a place almost completely wild compared to the carefully maintained tourist areas. The eastern hillside on the northern end of the valley has many ancient burial chambers just abandoned and neglected, with trees growing out through their openings, and on the valley floor was the half-eaten rotting carcass of a dead sheep and the older remains of other animals. An abandoned building that looked like it had once attempted to serve as a tourist attraction was the home of a pack of wild mongrel dogs, which were thankfully still only puppies.
But in the middle stretch of the hillside as we hiked south was a different pack of “predator puppies” – a group of pre-pubescent Palestinian boys who immediately began throwing stones at us from up the hill. Thankfully, they seemed more interested in impressing each other with their daring than in hurting us so their aim was poor and the force they used to lob their missiles rather weak. Still, our small group included several women, and there was no Israeli police presence virtually anywhere because it was a high holy day, so we just picked up our pace and prayed for God’s protection. When we reached the southern end of the valley, at the base of the City of David where Hezekiah’s water tunnel ends (a tourist attraction), we felt saver, even though the boys had followed us there on bicycles.
I put on a charm offensive with the obvious leader of the group, who spoke reasonably good English, and won him over. The group then accompanied us back up the valley on our return trip – mostly friendly (with a blustery edge) and overflowing with curious boy questions.
Muslims consider themselves People of the Book (the Bible) along with Jews and Christians, even though they follow the Quran and “The Life of Mohammed” as their religious guides – linking themselves to the Bible through Abraham’s son Ishmael, whom they portray as the favored son and heir rather than Isaac. That’s a major doctrinal chasm coloring virtually every aspect of civilization arising after Genesis 17. We three groups (to the extent we actually follow the Bible) have very strong agreement on Creation, the natural family, the special status of the Abramic bloodlines and other foundational values, but on a great many issues covered by Genesis 18-Revelation 22 there is variance and tension.
This is a problem because in Genesis 16: 12, the Angel of the Lord warned Abraham that soon to be born Ishmael “will be a wild donkey of a man, and his hand will be against everyone, and everyone’s hand against him; he will live in hostility toward all his brothers.” Islam is the religious embodiment of the seed of Ishmael, birthed from the lifetime of military conquest of its prophet Mohammed as chronicled in his biography which in some ways carries more weight than the Quran – the book of doctrines – itself.
During its first century, Islam was actually considered a sect of Christianity, but that soon morphed into the hostile rivalry that has ever since characterized it. The history of the world since then is a chronicle, first of the wars of conquest waged westward against Christendom by the Muslims, then of the eastward multi-century Christian military counter-campaign, and then, roughly since the rise of the British Empire, the attempted containment of Islam in the lands of the east.
Throughout it all the most contested territory has always been Israel which has repeatedly changed hands among “the People of the Book” like the most coveted toy of three fighting brothers. Most of the time it has been held by the militarily stronger brothers, Islam and Christianity, but during the peak of its global power, when also the crypto-doctrine of British Israelism dominated its elites, the British Empire decided to give the Holy Land back to the Jews who had formed a nationalist Jewish movement which coopted the name Zionism in 1897 to facilitate their repatriation there. (For the prior four centuries Zionism had been a joint Christian Jewish movement centered on the shared doctrine of Millennialism, but after 1897 it was exclusively associated with Jewish nationalism in a restored Israel.)
In 1917, at the end of WWI, the Jews finally got hands-on control of Israel including West Jerusalem. At the end of WWII they formally established the secular State of Israel. In 1967 they got de-facto control of East Jerusalem and much of the covenant territory outlined in the Bible.
The Islamic people of the religion of military conquest have never accepted Jewish ownership of the Land God covenanted to them, but they have not had the strength to take it back because of the combined military might of the nationalist Jews and of the (still nominally) Christian Anglo-American alliance. So instead they have engaged in asymmetrical warfare in various forms including “intifadas” while at the same time waging much more consequential CULTURAL warfare, exploiting the weaknesses of the west against us – most especially those related to the disease of Marxism, and most particularly the powerhouse Marxist doctrine of “oppression.”
Under the doctrine of oppression the greatest evildoers are “oppressors” and the greatest good is “liberation of the oppressed from their oppressors.” The doctrine is so incredibly powerful in the Christian west because it appeals to the essential Christian virtue of protection of the weak, and thus it has allowed cynical western Marxists to usurp power, even to the point of now politically controlling both the US and UK, as well as the EU. It is also the perfect counter to traditional Jewish influence in the west, which has relied in large part on reminding Christians about their “oppression” of Jews over the centuries.
The key to cultural victory in the western world today is defining oneself as a victim and one’s opponent as a victimizer. And that in turn depends upon how good your propaganda is compared to your opponent. The Palestinians refuse to civilize, despite billions of dollars of assistance, because Muslim military strategist have cultivated them since the 1940s to become the world’s ultimate victim class in the eyes of the west – even to the point that they could get away with justifying their October 7th massacre as “pushback against oppression” – just like the Black Lives Matter terrorists of 2020 – and be fully backed in that irrational contention by huge numbers of Americans (especially youths), even at Jewish-funded Harvard University.
Unfortunately, because they have (with few exceptions – please excuse the profanity) refused to distance themselves from actual oppressors like the many fake Jews backing such atrocities as the LGBT campaigns to enslave our children, the pro-Israel lobby throughout the west has lost its edge on the scale of “oppressor/oppressed” and at the same time alienated an increasing number of Christians who are being sucked into what I call the Cult of Anti-Zionism. I’ll address that phenomenon and how I think all this will play out in my next article.
