Bill O'Reilly's Vacuum-Packed 'Truth' About Muslims

by Craig White

"How many times over the last year have we heard various pundits and agenda-driven bigmouths say the following: The United States is partly to blame for world terrorism because it has abused and exploited the Muslim world. This is an enormous lie and one that should be stopped dead in its tracks. The real reason that many Muslims hate America is that it supports and defends Israel. That is the truth, and all these other canards are charades."

In his September 26 Worldnetdaily column, "The truth be told" (opening lines quoted above) Bill O'Reilly said a number of things that are flat-out wrong. Even worse is his overall logic, which addresses the Muslim world in an ahistorical vacuum. I am not out to attack Bill, nor am I an apologist for Islam. I would really like to convince him and perhaps a few of those who think like him that their incomplete knowledge of the Middle East, combined with faulty logic they may not have noticed, has led them to a distorted picture. Why should anyone listen to me? Well, I've lived in the Middle East for over a decade, I speak Arabic, I've read the whole Quran, I've read the whole Old Testament, and I've had some Israeli friends, so frankly I know something about the subject. But also, we should all listen carefully to those who disagree with what we say, and appeal to our reason. We're all human, our knowledge is incomplete, we may even learn something new. So please listen, and don't take my honesty for hostility.

Bill's first error: In a discussion of his wanderings in Morocco, he says everywhere he went, little children asked him for handouts, asked if he was Jewish (when they found he was American), and then told him Jews were bad. "If you travel anywhere in the Muslim world, I guarantee you that the vast majority of children will behave the same way," he goes on. As I say, I've lived in the Muslim world for well over a decade, in two Arab countries and another 98 percent Muslim one; I've visited another five Arab countries, and not once did one child ask if I was Jewish. (Although a Jewish guy in Jerusalem once did, I think intending to offer me Shabat hospitality. Nice of him.) So, Bill, we all make mistakes, but I think your broken guarantee is a small sign that you may be able to learn more about the Middle East – if you want to.

Second error: "This [hatred for the Jews] has been going on for thousands of years, and it's all about land. The Muslims feel the ancient land of Palestine is their territory. But the Jews have chosen this place to make their stand." Actually, Muslim-Jewish relations hit a very rocky spot early on in the preaching life of Mohammed, but it was certainly not about the land of Palestine then, in the early 7th century, it was about revelation and the politics of Mecca and Yathrib, later called Medina. Some Jews still lived in Palestine at that point, but except for very brief periods (under Simon bar Kochba, for example) Jews had not controlled the land since the days of the Maccabees in the early first century B.C. Soon after Mohammed's death, Muslim armies swept into Palestine, then part of the Byzantine Empire, and conquered it. From the beginning of Islam, already long centuries after the catastrophic Jewish defeats of 70 AD and 133 AD, until at least the end of the 19th century when the Zionist movement began to plan the Jewish return to Palestine, almost no non-Jew expected Jews to control Palestine. That only became imaginable in the first half of the twentieth century, when Jewish groups began to emigrate in large numbers to a land then full of Arabs, with the announced intention of becoming a majority in part of it and forming a Jewish state. The unhappiness Arabs in the planned Jewish state felt about this idea was based on their hope of becoming independent, rather than moving from Ottoman to British to Jewish domination. At that point it became possible for Muslims (and some Christian Arabs) to "hate Jews" over land, as some then did. Thus, Muslims could not possibly have hated Jews over land "for thousands of years." This is not nit-picking, it's about fundamental facts of the Middle East, a place where history is all-important to ordinary people on all sides. Bill, if you're going to rebuke "pundits and bigmouths," you need to get the most basic facts straight!

From serious errors let us move to an unprovable assertion: "…without America's help, the Arabs would slaughter the Jews much like the Nazis did. There is no question about this. Hamas, Hezbollah and the other insane terrorists will tell you flat out: The Jews deserve to die. If the United States ever stopped supplying money and weapons to Israel, there would be a second holocaust." Among various problems with this assertion is the "quotation." Who said "The Jews deserve to die," and in what context? Serious pundits ought to provide sources for quotations, and put them in context.

Here is a real quotation you can look up, from the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, August 11, 2000, concerning a well-known Israeli politician, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the founder of the Shas party: "In the same sermon, Yosef, once known as a political dove, denounced Barak for u2018running after' the Palestinians. u2018Why are you bringing them close to us?' he asked. u2018You bring snakes next to us. How can you make peace with a snake?' Dismissing the Arabs as u2018Ishmaelites,' he added for bad measure: u2018They are all accursed, wicked ones. They are all haters of Israel. It says in the Gemara that the Holy One, Blessed be He, is sorry he created these Ishmaelites.'” Here is another quotation, from the Jerusalem Post, July 29, 2001: "On Friday, Lau, Israel’s chief rabbi gave his seal of approval to the government’s controversial practice of carrying out targeted killings of Palestinian u2018terrorists.' The same day, [Rabbi] Yosef said they were reproducing like insects and were destined to end up in hell. u2018In the old city of Jerusalem they’re swarming like ants. They should go to hell – and the Messiah will speed them on their way,' the founder of the Shas party said in a sermon."

Do these quotations prove that "the Jews" hate Arabs? Of course not! If I were to ignore all the Israeli calls for peace with the Arabs, and an independent Palestinian state, and cite Rabbi Yosef to prove that all Israelis hate and despise all Arabs, I would be creating propaganda in its nastiest form (not because it would abuse Jews, but truth!). To ignore the statements of Yasser Arafat, Crown Prince Abdullah, and almost every other Arab leader calling for a secure Israel within its pre-June 1967 boundaries (over 75 percent of "the land of Palestine"), is equally reprehensible in Bill's case: unless he just doesn't know about them. If he knows about them and believes they are lies, he is entitled to say that and explain why, but to pretend they don't exist while knowing they do would be to indulge in propaganda, not journalism. I don't know, either in Bill's case or in so much other pro-Israel commentary in America that appears to know only one side, whether propaganda is being indulged in or ignorance displayed.

Bill is then guilty of gross inconsistency when he says, later in his article: "Of all the people on earth, the Germans are the ones who should be doing everything possible to help the Jews. They have not repaid the Hitler debt…" Let's see, all Germans are guilty because the leaders of their ancestors … wait, that sounds like what anti-Semites say about the Jews! Closer to home, Bill, I assume you're in favor of white reparations for slavery in the U.S., based on this comment? Please. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and that means Jews and non-Jews too. If there's no inherited group guilt for Jews, or white Americans, how can it exist for Germans?

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, one of my heroes, warned that the line between good and evil runs not between nations or classes or groups of any kind, but through every human heart. I think once we divide the world into good and bad groups, we are then able to quench any feelings of human sympathy we might have with victims in "bad" nations. Are Americans worth more than Palestinians? Our American creed compels us to say no. An Israeli helicopter pilot launched a missile into a crowd of Palestinians in Gaza early this month, killing a dozen people standing on the street and wounding over a hundred, the latest in a string of similar "preventive executions" from the sky (usually with at least a few bystander deaths). If we find this defensible, that means that if the American government killed American bystanders that way while attacking persons believed to be terrorists in the U.S., that would be sad but necessary. I don't think you, Bill, would agree! A U.S. administration that "unavoidably" killed American bystanders as it blew up rather than arrested accused terrorists on a regular basis would be quickly out of office, I believe, whatever the difficulties of making the arrest.

When the Israeli military does this sort of thing, as has frequently happened over the last two years, the perpetrators are rarely punished, and then certainly not with long prison terms. An Israeli gunner in the safety of his tank fired a shell into a crowd of Palestinians shopping in the market at mid-day, this past summer on the West Bank, killing some and wounding others. Nothing, I believe, happened to the gunner, who was apparently enforcing a mid-day curfew. When Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza beat up or shoot Palestinians trying to harvest their own olives from their own olive trees, the settlers are rarely arrested and tried. When severely wounded Palestinians or women giving birth are stopped for hours at check points, and die as a result, as has happened quite a number of times in the last two years, those responsible are rarely if ever charged with criminal negligence leading to homicide. (All of these stories can be checked, and you can find U.S. and Israeli sources if you don't trust the Arab ones.) Honestly: try to imagine it was your wife killed or your little girl crippled by one of those missiles or tank shells, or your brother shot while trying to harvest his own crop.

I haven't yet addressed suicide bombing. In my view, it's a mind-boggling evil, and inexcusable. When some of my Arab friends tell me they support it, I am horrified, and I let them know it. Similarly, I would be only too happy to see everyone in Al Qaida arrested and the leadership and all others involved in the September 11 attacks tried and executed. I believe, however, that most Americans see far more stories and pictures of Arab crimes against Israelis than of the kinds of Israeli actions described above, and that may distort their view of the conflict. If we are going to understand the Middle East, a place with a complex past and present, we need to hear much more than sweeping generalizations that make one side pure evil and the other pure good – if "the truth be told."

Craig White (send him mail) has lived and worked abroad for much of his adult life, in various organizations. All the opinions expressed above are his own, entirely personal views.