From anti-Zionist to Zionist, A Pakistani View

This is part of an interview with Noor Dahri about his journey from being anti-Zionist to Zionist. The full interview can be read at http://tinyurl.com/z8hhmzn

Why did you join the Zionist Movement?

I was born and raised as a Muslim in Pakistan. We were taught to hate Jews and Israel and I had frequently participated in anti-Israel and anti-Zionism demonstrations, especially in Al-Quds day. I never knew that Jews were humans as we are.  In fact, I considered Jews worse than animals and the enemy of humanity, particularly those against the Muslims and Islam. I accepted only some Jews, however, only those who stood with Palestinians and never with the Zionists. For me, the Zionist was a devil worshiper and was against Allah/HaShem. For this reason, being a religious Muslim, my dislike and hate against Zionists was natural.

As I told you before, I was taught to hate Jews. They manipulated many religious texts in efforts to spread hatred towards other religions. I must mention the name of a kind lady, who was not only my colleague but my first Jewish friend in my life.

Additionally, she helped me in my debate and conversation with other Jews on social media. I monitored every conversation with Jews on social media in detail, particularly paying attention to every statement they used. Sometimes there existed bad people and extremes in the Jewish community. What inspired me the most, was that those bad individuals on social media from the Jewish community were a tiny minority and also were strongly condemned by their own Jewish community.

It took me nearly 2 years to fully understand what the truth was and what the reality of Israel is. It was not only through social media or engaging in a one sided story but I studied many books, articles, videos, testimonies and many other things in research to judge and evaluate what the fact is. No doubt, there are so many conflicts between both communities and there are many political and religious extreme elements that do not want them to get to together. Overall, I felt that the Jewish community rushes to accept peace at any cost which helped me change my mind. This is the primary reason I chose to join Zionism

The world always blames Israel and what is a Zionist, what do you think about it?

Since I studied about Jewish society and the movement of Zionism, I found that there were so many lies spread against Israel and Zionists around the world, particularly in international media. As you know, the media is a psychological tool used to manipulate peoples’ minds towards whatever it wanted.  It has the ability to divert attention, and Israel and Zionists are the easiest target of blame. There are many lies against Israel in the world, especially whenever Israel strikes in Gaza.  Millions of fallacies are created in the media to spread hatred against Israelis.

We as Muslims have been ordered by Allah in Qur’an to find the truth, even if the truth goes against us (or against my community), and this is what I do to spread G-d’s mission.

Without knowing Zionism, we cannot understand Zionists. Imagine! I am a very strong religious Muslim who spent most of life spreading the message of my religion, Islam. Now I turned into a Zionist and proudly announce it publicly, even though it is a risk to my life. The world needs to understand the main objectives of Zionism.

People ask me if the Islamic ideology isn’t enough to educate the world about peace. No doubt, Islam is a religion of peace but unfortunately Islamic political and religious leaders changed the religious shape of Islam into that of a political one.  This political shape is not worthy of peace, but only hate and killing those who do not adopt to the Political Islamic ideology. For me, this is what a Zionist is.  It is not only understanding about a political form of Zionism but to fully adapt it as an ideology.

Are there other Muslim movements?

There are many people in Pakistan who not only support Israel but show their solidarity to the Zionist Federation. I had no idea prior, but after my joining ZF-UK, so many people from Pakistan, India and particularly Arab countries, contacted me to show their support for me. I would like to say here, people are ready to accept the truth, and they know what the fact about the Israel-Pal issue is, but they are afraid to speak up due to their life being threatened living in Islamic countries. I even cannot disclose their identities.

People in Pakistan are in a rush to support Israel but because of the fear of a religious and a political persecution, they cannot raise their voice up. I hope one day, I will be successful to make a platform where I would gather all my people who support Israel and the ZF movement from these communities. It will bring a new change.

What does the Pakistani community think about supporting Israel?

The Pakistani community is not like an Arab community whom follows one sided information through tunnel vision. They are very intelligent and educated people. They are well researched and know what’s going on around the world. They know the threat and danger, but unfortunately are not wise enough to sense the great threat and danger within, which is a Mullah Mafia or a Mullahcracy (Religious Imam Mafia). Mullahcracy hijacked the Pakistani nation and government. Slain PM Benazir Bhutto and current PM Nawaz Sharif tried hard to create good relations with Israel, they did not achieve the goal. Specifically, the Pakistani community is controlled by three monsters- political, religious and Arab leaders and local and international media. 

They unfortunately rely on everything from these monsters identified, and follow blindly whatever is asked of them or shown to them. Very few people use their minds and do research to find out the truth.

If someone shows them the historical, political and religious facts, I believe my nation will accept the truth.

I hope, one day people around the world, particularly the Pakistani community, will embrace the truth. I see, the day is very close.

A confession of a left-wing Zionist

For full article go to :-

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/A-confession-of-a-left-wing-Zionist-457122

SIMON KOVAR 06/18/2016 

There was a time when being a “Leftist Zionist” was no contradiction.

In 1944, the British Labour Party resolved not only to support Jewish settlement of Palestine but, “on human grounds and to promote a stable settlement,” the transfer of the Arab population. “The Arabs have many wide territories of their own,” it resolved; “they must not claim to exclude the Jews from this small area of Palestine [excluding Transjordan], less than the size of Wales.” Theodor Herzl was far from being a right-wing ethnic nationalist. He dreamed of a Jewish state where Arabs would live as equals and no army would be necessary.

In short, there was a time when you could be a liberal or Socialist and still be a hard-nosed realist on questions of power. Today’s Left prefers its heroes to be powerless. Israel commits the sin of being able and willing to defend itself. The Palestinians are absolved by dint of being less powerful.

When I entered university in the 1990s, the Left-inclined student’s default position was anti-Zionism. I was one of them. From 2000-2005, I worked for Britain’s Center-Left Liberal Democrats. In 2014, according to insider accounts, the party nearly blew up its coalition with the Conservatives over Gaza. Not tuition fees, healthcare, Europe, or trade with China and Saudi Arabia. Gaza.

There came a point where I had to ask whether some of my “comrades,” when speaking about Israel, were talking about the same thing I was. They slipped easily from humanitarianism into dark fantasies of hidden “Zionist” forces pulling the strings, medieval blood libels and rationalizations of terrorism

I visited Israel for the first time shortly after I left the party. Needless to say, it conformed to none of my leftist preconceptions. More than this, I no longer felt ashamed.

I understood that my anti-Zionism was composed largely of embarrassment and apology, impulses that were suddenly missing in Israel. “I am Jewish but not a Zionist” was like saying “I am Jewish but not one of them.” Why should there ever be a “but” after a statement of one’s identity? Another part of my anti-Zionism turned out to be based on a highly ideological brand of leftist historiography  which I began to pick apart and question as a postgraduate.

Here are some of my questions.

- Why is Jewish nationalism considered an “invention,” a “project,” an “ideology,” an “enterprise,” a “Western” imposition? Not to understand it, but to delegitimize it.

- Palestinian nationalism is treated as a fact of nature but was itself invented out of a whole compost of ingredients, including European Nazism and Fascism.

- Why is 1948 labeled a Zionist war to ethnically cleanse Palestine. The secretary general of the Arab League promised “a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.”

- If Palestinian leaders are true nationalists, then surely they are primarily concerned with securing a state? Apparently not.

Zionism was concerned with Jewish immigration above all. This was because it was fundamentally an ideology of rescue, not religion or land. So much so that in 1946 it offered to forgo statehood and give up its claim to Jerusalem in return for open immigration.

Palestinian “nationalism” was never intrinsically defined by a claim to statehood. It was quite happy to be part of Greater Syria or Jordan. Instead, it was defined by opposition to any Jewish immigration. That is why it said “no” even to the tiny Jewish state proposed by the Peel Commission in 1937, opposed the British White Paper in 1939 and bargained with Adolf Hitler to prevent Jewish refugees from reaching Palestine.

Put another way, the Palestinian leadership was quite happy to be part of a Pan-Arab empire or monarchy, even a Nazi-dominated world empire, provided it could get the one thing that mattered the most to them: a Judenfrei Middle East.

Why is Palestinian refugee status perpetual and saintly but Jewish refugees thought interlopers and a thing of the past? My grandparents were refugees from the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, but I do not go around calling myself a refugee. I have heard Norman Finkelstein repeatedly claim that 80 percent of Gazans are refugees. This is true only if you claim the label in perpetuity from generation to generation. On the same basis, Israel is close to 100% refugee, but nobody on the Left seems to think this grants the country any moral license or sanctity.

Those who claim that Palestine was “ethnically cleansed” are not really bothered by refugees at all. They are bothered by Israel existing. Otherwise, Pakistan would be a far more obvious target of concern. 14 million people were “transferred” in that partition, which happened only the year before the pivotal year in Israel’s independence struggle. Unlike in Palestine, hundreds of thousands were butchered. No one says Pakistan – which engaged in two subsequent brutal and bloody occupations, in Kashmir and what became Bangladesh – has no right to exist.

In short, Zionism injected controversy into Middle Eastern politics not because there were competing nationalist claims for the same land, or because it entailed the creation of a Palestinian refugee issue. Rather, the issue was any significant Jewish presence in Palestine and the question of Jewish refugees.

I like to see myself as the sort of leftist you read about in textbooks. A democrat, an egalitarian, an anti-Fascist, a feminist and a peacenik. How can I be these things and not support Israel? How can I be these things and have any time for Israel’s enemies? How?

To SJP*, a Letter From an Angry Black Woman

‘You do not have the right to invoke my people’s struggle for your shoddy purposes’

(*SJP – Students for Justice in Palestine)

By Chloe Valdary| July 28, 2014

http://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/180382/students-justice-palestine

The student organization Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is prominent on many college campuses, preaching a mantra of “Freeing Palestine.” It masquerades as though it were a civil rights group when it is not. Indeed, as an African-American, I am highly insulted that my people’s legacy is being pilfered for such a repugnant agenda. It is thus high time to expose its agenda and lay bare some of the fallacies they peddle.

• If you seek to promulgate the legacy of early Islamic colonialists who raped and pillaged the Middle East, subjugated the indigenous peoples living in the region, and foisted upon them a life of persecution and degradation—you do not get to claim the title of “Freedom Fighter.”

• If you support a racist doctrine of Arab supremacism and wish (as a corollary of that doctrine) to destroy the Jewish state, you do not get to claim that the prejudices you peddle are forms of legitimate “resistance.”

• If your heroes are clerics who sit in Gaza plotting the genocide of a people; who place their children on rooftops in the hopes they will get blown to bits; who heap praises upon their fellow gang members when they succeed in murdering Jewish school boys and bombing places of activity where Jews congregate—you do not get to claim that you are some Apollonian advocate of human virtue. You are not.

• If your activities include grieving over the woefully incompetent performance by Hamas rocketeers and the subsequent millions of Jewish souls who are still alive—whose children were not murdered by their rockets; whose limbs were not torn from them; and whose disembowelment did not come into fruition—you do not get to claim that you stand for justice. You profess to be irreproachable. You are categorically not.

• If your idea of a righteous cause entails targeting and intimidating Jewish students on campus, arrogating their history of exile-and-return and fashioning it in your own likeness you do not get to claim that you do so in the name of civil liberty and freedom of expression.

• You do not get to champion regimes that murder, torture, and persecute their own people, deliberately keep them impoverished, and embezzle billions of dollar from them—and claim you are “pro-Arab.” You are not.

• You do not get to champion a system wherein Jews are barred from purchasing land, traveling in certain areas, and living out such an existence merely because they are Jews—and claim that you are promoting equality for all. You do not get to enable that system by pushing a boycott of Jewish owned businesses, shops, and entities—and then claim that you are “against apartheid.” That is evil.

• You do not get to justify the calculated and deliberate bombings, beatings, and lynchings of Jewish men, women, and children by referring to such heinous occurrences as part of a noble “uprising” of the oppressed—that is racism. It is evil.

Coretta Scott King, A. Phillip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Count Basie and Dr. Martin Luther King Sr. were all Zionists.

Indeed, they and many more men and women signed a letter in 1975 that stated: “We condemn the anti-Jewish blacklist. We have fought too long and too hard to root out discrimination from our land to sit idly while foreign interests import bigotry to America. Having suffered so greatly from such prejudice, we consider most repugnant the efforts by Arab states to use the economic power of their newly-acquired oil wealth to boycott business firms that deal with Israel or that have Jewish owners, directors, or executives, and to impose anti-Jewish preconditions for investments in this country.”

You see, my people have always been Zionists because my people have always stood for the freedom of the oppressed. So, you most certainly do not get to culturally appropriate mypeople’s history for your own. You do not have the right to invoke my people’s struggle for your shoddy purposes and you do not get to feign victimhood in our name. You do not have the right to slander my people’s good name and link your cause to that of Dr. King’s. Our two causes are diametrically opposed to each other.

Your cause is the antithesis of freedom. It has cost hundreds of thousands of lives of both Arabs and Jews. It has separated these peoples, and has fomented animosity between them. It has led to heartache, torment, death and destruction.

It is of course your prerogative to continue to utilize platitudes for your cause. You are entirely within your rights to chant words like “equality” “justice” and “freedom fighter.”

You can keep using those words for as long as you like. But I do not think you know what they mean.