Twitter/X can be such a cesspit of hate and threats that when I saw "No Jews" trending, I assumed the worst. Images from Nazi Germany immediately came to mind, like the one from the German Federal Archives above. In English, it reads, "Germans, defend yourself, don't buy from Jews." That's from when the Nazis were just getting started — before Kristallnacht, before the concentration camps, before the deportations, before the death camps.
But I clicked on "No Jews" anyway because it goes with the job, and what I found was not at all what I was expecting.
While the Israeli-Hamas war garners all the attention — and I'll get back to the reason for that momentarily — "No Jews" shows that, even with a brutal war raging, Gaza doesn't even top the list of how bad Arabs have it...
...at the hands of their fellow Arabs. For much of the Islamic world, Israel serves as both a convenient distraction and a convenient excuse from just how badly most of the so-called "house of peace" (Dar al-Islam) runs its affairs.
For every leftie complaining about Israeli's treatment of Gaza Palestinians, there is exactly zero taking public notice of how they're being treated in Syria.
1/ Here you can see hundreds of Palestinians queuing for food, but they're not in Gaza. They're in Yarmouk, Syria. pic.twitter.com/U5b0l7pQZ7
— Claire Lehmann (@clairlemon) October 27, 2023
Lehmann adds that a UN report indicates "only 20% of the food needs are met for Yarmouk's population. Yet, there's silence from the pro-Palestinian movement in the West." Hell, there's silence in the Middle East, too — because everything bad must be Israel's fault. That's the convenient distraction.
Recommended: Hamas Official: We Will Repeat the October 7 Atrocities Again and Again
"No Jews, no news."
Arab/Islamic world yawns. No Jews, no news. pic.twitter.com/mHG3YxFayK
— David Bernstein (@ProfDBernstein) October 25, 2023
Meanwhile, in Pakistan, something like 1.7 million Afghan refugees are being expelled. That's roughly equal to the two million residents of the Gaza Strip. Can you imagine the global outrage if Israel were to expel them to Egypt in a desperate move to buy itself, at last, a little peace? The response would be so severe that the best Israel could hope from us is that we'd merely cut them off. But you can almost imagine an administration like Joe Biden's threatening Israel with military action.
Pakistan is expelling 1.7 million refugees and just bulldozed migrant shelters.
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) November 1, 2023
Hundreds of thousands of Afghans are now fleeing to the border. Many have lived in Pakistan for decades.
Thousands of these Afghan refugees will be resettled in the United Kingdom and other Western… pic.twitter.com/Ci0FTGM4PT
Our own country, like every other, has a sad history of legal and cultural discrimination against minorities. And yet what is the most dangerous thing in the world to be, perhaps now and always? Being a Muslim in a Muslim country where the majority of Muslims are slightly different from your minority Muslim group.
This last tweet sums up what I mean by that.
“400,000 have died in Yemen, 500,000 in Syria, 150,000 in Lebanon. You hear little about these, as there are no Jews to launch jihad against.” https://t.co/5I9xu7UyOo
— Small Fringe Shoshi 🚚🚛🚜💨 (@shoshido) November 1, 2023
Muslim-on-Muslim violence is a terrible thing already — and no Jews are required.
If author and former Army intelligence officer Ralph Peters is correct, the violence would only grow worse if Hamas or Iran were to succeed in wiping Israel from the map. "The destruction of Israel," he wrote in the afterword to "The War in 2020," would be "less likely to trigger Islamic unity than to utterly dissolve it. Unable to direct their frustrations at the Zionist devil, the Islamic nations of the Eurasian landmass would quickly rediscover the holy and delectable mission of slaughtering each other over trivia."
If you disagree with Peters' assessment, just look at Yemen, where precisely that has been going on for almost a decade. Yemen serves as both a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, but also as a springboard for Iran's state-sponsored international terrorism. Closer to Israel, the same could be said about Syria.
My job is to provide context, and I feel like I've let you down on this one. The danger of a regional war — or wider — spawning in the Middle East is real and growing. To understand why, and to understand why accommodating anti-Israel groups merely exacerbates the danger, requires context. I'll try to provide more of that going forward.
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