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Jewish World Review March 27, 2009 / 21 Adar 5769 How and why Muslims riot in liberal democracies By Caroline B. Glick
Tuesday's demonstration, which was led by former followers of the late Rabbi
Meir Kahane MK Michael Ben-Ari, Baruch Marzel and Itamar Ben Gvir was
supposed to take place last December after the Supreme Court upheld the
activists' legal right to march through the city. But the police blocked the
it, claiming they could not guarantee the marchers' security. Only after
again being ordered by the Supreme Court to the let demonstration to go
forward did the police relent. But they limited the march to the outskirts
of the city.
In accordance with the police guidelines, Tuesday the marchers were
transported to the outskirts of the town in bullet-proof buses. 2,500
policemen deployed along Wadi Ara highway, and throughout the town to
protect them. They were allowed to march holding flags and singing folksongs
for a half an hour and then returned to their bullet proof buses. In the
meantime, thousands of local residents standing on rooftops and crowding
into the streets began rioting. They threw volley after volley of rocks at
the Jewish marchers and the police protecting them. They cursed them. They
cursed the police. In the end, some 15 policemen were wounded by the
projectiles - including Inspector General Shahar Ayalon, the Deputy
Superintendent of the National Police.
As far as the media were concerned, the fact that thousands of Arabs
attacked the police and the lawful demonstrators was a non-story. The fact
that these Israeli Arab citizens claimed to be personally insulted and
injured because the demonstration "forced" them to set their eyes on their
national flag was seemingly understandable. The fact that these Israeli
citizens rejected Israel's flag while waving Palestinian and Islamic flags
was neither newsworthy nor controversial. No one in the media asked the Arab
rioters whom they felt threatened by. No one asked them why seeing Jews
marching with the flag of Israel should provoke them to attack.
To the extent the media found a culprit, it was the Israeli demonstrators.
They were "provocateurs" who forced taxpayers to spend millions of shekels
to deploy 2,500 policemen armed with riot gear to the city. It never
occurred to the media that Ben Ari, Marzel and Ben Gvir were not the cause
of the enormous police presence. They were a danger to no one. The reason
the police were forced to deploy so massively was because they believed that
the Arabs would violently attack the Jewish demonstrators. It was the Arabs,
not the Jews whom the police feared would break the law. And as it works
out, they were right.
The media's coverage of the Umm el Fahm riot fits into an ongoing patter.
Over the years, the local media have developed a code for reporting on Arabs
- whether Palestinian or Israeli or foreign. And it is a bigoted code.
As far as Israel's media are concerned, Arabs cannot be expected to act like
responsible citizens. They cannot be required to abide by the law like the
rest of the country's citizens. As far as Israel's media and the rest of the
political Left are concerned, Arabs are either victims or objects. They
cannot be culprits or independent actors. Their will -- to the extent they
have one -- is collective. No individual can be held accountable for his or
her actions. And their will is reactive. All Arab actions are but
reactions
to Jewish provocations.
Many in the US and Europe have expressed surprise and indeed mystification
about Avigdor Lieberman and his Yisrael Beitenu party's strong third place
showing in last month's elections. And there is good reason for their
confusion. Lieberman is not an easy candidate to swallow for either
rightists or leftists. Right wingers find his plan to make the Galilee and
parts of the Negev part of a future Palestinian state absurd and wrong.
Leftists find his call for all Israelis, including Arab Israelis -- to
declare their loyalty to the state as a condition for keeping their
citizenship absurd and wrong. And yet, due to the 15 Knesset seats he won
from both right and left wing voters, Lieberman will serve as the foreign
minister in the incoming Netanyahu government.
The Israel Left has demonized Lieberman as a racist for his positions on the
Arabs. The anti-Israel lobby in Washington is already using their attacks to
discredit the incoming government. But the fact is that fundamentally,
Lieberman is little different from the Left which demonizes him.
Lieberman is a populist. He owes his popularity to the fact that he properly
identified the political radicalization and increasing lawlessness among
Israel's Arab citizens as the major domestic issue of our times. Lieberman
is unique among politicians from both the Left and the Right in that he is
the only one who is willing to confront the issue head on. And it is due to
his readiness to discuss this issue that the public rewarded him with
fifteen Knesset seats.
Like most populists, Lieberman is not a deep thinker. As a consequence, he
adopted the bigoted framework of the Left for contending with the challenge
posed today by Israel's Arabs. His idea of removing the Galilee from
sovereign Israel and attaching it to a Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria
and Gaza is based on the Left's bigoted assumption that Israeli Arabs cannot
be expected to be loyal to the country or act as law abiding citizens.
Lieberman's adoption of the Left's prejudiced perspective on Israeli Arabs
has engendered a dismal situation where while the debate has now been joined
on the issue of how to contend with Israeli Arab disloyalty and crime, the
debate that has developed is nothing more than a dialogue of the deaf.
No one talks about the need to inculcate Israeli values of liberal democracy
among our Arab citizens. No one talks about blunting the power of radical
leaders like Sheikh Ra'ad Salah, who heads the Islamic Movement's Northern
Branch or Arab parliamentarians who openly treat with Hizbullah and Hamas
and side with Israel's enemies in time of war. No one talks about empowering
Israeli Arabs who are loyal to Israel. That is, no one talks about adopting
policies that could actually improve the situation.
And this is a tragedy because the situation is truly grave. Early this week
a Hizbullah-controlled Israeli Arab terror group which calls itself the Free
People of the Galilee claimed responsibility for the attempted car bombing
at Haifa's largest shopping mall Saturday night. That bomb, planted in a car
trunk outside the mall, was large enough to have toppled the three story
mall and kill hundreds of people. Mercifully, it was discovered before it
was detonated.
Since 2001, the same group has claimed responsibility for a string of
murderous attacks - mainly centered in Jerusalem. It claimed responsibility
for the massacre of eight students at Mercaz Harav Yeshiva last year. It
claimed responsibility for the first bulldozer attack in Jerusalem last year
in which three people were murdered. And it claimed responsibility for the
murder of several individual Jews around the Old City in Jerusalem since
August 2001.
Also this week, the Jerusalem District Attorney's office announced that four
Israeli Arabs have been indicted for the attempted murder of an American
Hebrew University student last month. The four attacked the student as he
walked through the Jerusalem Forest on the way to his dormitory. They beat
him, stabbed him in the cheek, and tried to slash his throat before fleeing
the scene.
And earlier this month, the police announced the arrest last month of
another Israeli Arab on charges of spying for Hizbullah. The arrest of
27-year-old Ismail Sulaiman from a village in the Jezreel Valley is the
latest in a string of arrests of Israeli Arabs on charges of spying for
Hizbullah. Last September IDF Sgt. Maj. Louai Balut from the Western
Galilee, who served as a tracker along the Lebanese border was sentenced to
11 years in prison for spying for Hizbullah. And of course, former MK and
Balad Party leader Azmi Bishara remains on the lam after he fled the country
just before being charged with spying for Hizbullah during the 2006 war.
Israel of course is not alone in contending with this challenge. Throughout
Europe governments are forced to contend with the fact that increasingly,
the greatest threat to the security of their general citizenry comes from
their Muslim and Arab citizens. The only difference is that Israel alone is
castigated as a racist state simply for suffering from the problem of Muslim
extremism.
On Sunday Phillip Johnston published a column in the *Sunday
Telegraph*critiquing the British government's new strategy for
defending against
Islamic terror. Johnston bemoaned the fact that the new plan pays no
attention to the fact that most of the terrorists sitting in British jails
as well as the perpetrators of the July7, 2005 bombings are British. Whereas
the new strategy concentrates on the need to fight terrorists in places like
Afghanistan, as Johnston put it, "There was not a single mention of the
undeniable truth that the extremists who will actually carry out atrocities
live among us and need to be confronted here and now."
Johnston argued that rather than ignore the problem of increased extremism
among Britain's Muslims "in the interests of 'community harmony'," the
British government should actively engage in "an unequivocal and
enthusiastic espousal of British values of tolerance and liberal democracy."
That is, to contend with the growing radicalization of British Muslims, the
government in London should end its current policy of appeasement of radical
Muslim groups which is based on the bigoted assumption that Muslims cannot
be expected to either abide by the laws or to integrate into wider society.
Britain should instead embrace its own identity as a liberal democracy and
require its citizens to abide by liberal democratic norms.
In Britain as in Israel and indeed throughout the free world, those norms
are based on the understanding that the ability of a society to remain a
free society is contingent on its citizenry's recognition that there can be
no civil rights without civic duties. The Umm el Fahm riots serve as yet
another warning of this fundamental truth.
Here in Israel we face the same choice. Either we encourage our Arab
citizens to fully accept both the rights and duties of citizenship or we
continue - through either populism of cowardice - to facilitate their
rejection of our society. If we embark on the first path, we will safeguard
our national identity as a Jewish liberal democracy. If we remain on the
second path, we will imperil our lives, our way of life and our national
existence.
JWR contributor Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post. Comment by clicking here.
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