[media-dakwah] The new reality

Tue, 25 Apr 2006 22:48:32 -0700


http://musliminsuffer.blogspot.com/

bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful


=== News Update ===

The new reality



Faisal Bodi
April 24, 2006

Since the beginning of April Israeli troops have killed more than 30
Palestinians, six of them children.

The scale of the Israeli slaughter is three times the toll exacted by last
week's Islamic Jihad bombing of a restaurant in Tel Aviv.

That's not to seek a moral justification for the killing of civilians in
some league table of suffering. Rather it is to highlight the double
standard in international calls for the new Hamas-led government to
renounce violence while Israel continues its killings. Viewed against this
backdrop, history will no doubt record the EU's attempt to blackmail Hamas
as a missed opportunity, and another stride towards the brewing clash of
civilisations.

Western rejection is already forcing Hamas to look to its natural Muslim
hinterland for support. Last week I heard its big guns blazing at a
conference in support of al-Quds (Jerusalem) and Palestinian rights. While
commentators in the west speculated over a Hamas shift in stance towards
recognising Israel, the message from the podium couldn't have been more
explicit.

No recognition of Israel, no return to negotiations with Israel under the
current status quo, and no laying down of arms. They were the words of
Ahmed Bahar, the deputy speaker of the Palestinian parliament in a
presentation which even stirred the normally timid delegates from Qatar
into vigorous applause. And there was little love lost for Europe. Hamas'
political bureau chief Khalid Meshal saw the EU's suspension of aid to the
new Palestinian government as evidence that the "West wants to crush the
will of the Palestinian people".

"Islamic nations know their responsibilities", he told the conference in a
thinly-veiled appeal for funds that was met with a US$50 million pledge by
Tehran, and followed by a similar announcement from Doha. Next to Mishal
sat Ramadan Shalla, the leader of Palestine's other Islamic movement,
Islamic Jihad. He was no less equivocal. "Even if we are taken to the altar
and beheaded we cannot recognise these people (the Zionists)". And his
reasoning? "Recognising Israel means the victim giving in to the aggressor
and usurper and saying that Palestine is not our land, it is not an Arab or
Islamic country."

The sentiments were by no means confined to the radicals. The speaker of
the Malaysian senate, Abdul Hamid Pawanteh, saw the western reaction to
Hamas' win as a gauntlet to the Muslim world and called on it to "recognise
and support the elected Palestinian government.

Judging from the tone of the conference, patience for western policy
towards Palestine is wearing thin in the Muslim world. Since the Oslo
Accords were signed in 1993, the main issues at the heart of the Palestine
conflict - refugees, Jerusalem, borders and settlements - have remained in
diplomatic deep-freeze.

However, the Israeli bulldozers and builders have been somewhat more
active, enhancing Israel's position on all these issues to the point that
its acting premier can talk about unilateral decisions. More fundamentally,
Israel has demonstrated that it can count on active western backing and
acquiescence in its campaign.

But that is forgetting a new reality. Hamas' ascendancy has changed the
rules of the game. Its position, which is that justice requires the
reversing of Israeli gains, is in tune with the prevailing global Muslim
opinion. Hamas, and Tehran for that matter, will not recognise Israel
because they believe that to do so would be to relinquish the right of
return of five million Palestinian refugees (this non-recognition is not
the same as violent destruction of Israel, nor does it equate to any mass
ethnic cleansing of Jews). If that seems like a hard-line position, it is
no more hard-line than Israel's rejection of the right of return, or its
unilateral claim to Jerusalem as its eternal capital.

Being in Tehran confirmed the huge gulf between the west's attitude to
conflict resolution, which is based on recognising the fruits of Israeli
aggression, and the Arab/Muslim stance, spelt out in the conference's final
declaration, which is to deny all legitimacy to the "Zionist regime" as a
usurper on the soil of Palestine.

Some will condemn this return to the bottom line of justice as naive
idealism. They will say that circumstances demand an imperfect peace over
an unachievable justice. Some of them are genuine but they sit uneasily
alongside others who use the argument as a fig leaf for Israeli injustices.
They are the ones who dismiss as unrealistic any attempt to roll back
Israel's illegitimate gains, whilst simultaneously celebrating the
realisation of the Jews' dream of returning to the "promised land" after
winding back a 2000-year exile.

Europe has now located itself squarely in the Zionist camp. In accepting
that Israel cannot be pressured into a just settlement it has rejected the
chance to explore new points of departure for a Palestinian-Israeli
dialogue. Its failure to recognise the new rules of the game can only
hinder the quest for peace and drive the world closer to a clash of
civilisations pitting Muslims against the west.

source:
<http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/faisal_bodi/2006/04/post_49.html>http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/faisal_bodi/2006/04/post_49.html

===


-muslim voice-
______________________________________
BECAUSE YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO KNOW 

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