About the Jihad Against Israel - New English Review

by Anjuli Pandavar (December 2019)

The Palestinian Delusion:
The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process

Robert Spencer, 2019,

Bombardier Books, New York

The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process packs a huge punch, arguably even bigger than that of Robert Spencer’s previous book, The History of Jihad from Muhammad to ISIS. Not since Bat Ye’or’s 2013 Understanding Dhimmitude, has a book so critical to the survival of Israel, and by extension, civilisation, appeared, at least not in English.

“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”[1] This slogan serves as the opening line of Robert Spencer’s new book, a line that could just as well have been, “This is the book about which there is no delusion.” As the book unfolds, it becomes clear that, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” is not just a delusion, but a delusion that contains within itself, Russian-doll fashion, multiple delusions. This appalling slogan is the culminating metaphor for all that has been “The Israeli-Palestinian peace process,” and a well-chosen scene setter.

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The manifestations of these many delusions are expertly woven into the historical sequence of developments in and around the 28,000 square kilometres of mostly resource-starved scrubland on the Eastern Mediterranean coast, from which the Romans had banished the indigenous people, the Jews, less than two thousand years ago. In the chapter ‘How Israel came to be,’ Spencer describes how the exiled Jews, having had enough of oppression, persecution and pogroms in their scattered existence, took to the idea of returning to their desolate scrubland. The only problem was that while they were away, that desolate scrubland had been overrun by Muslims on jihad, and somewhere in the small print of jihad, it says that once Muslims rule a land, it can never ever be ruled by anyone else again, never mind that they seized it in the first place, as in this case, they did to the land of Israel in 634 AD, when the Byzantine Empire still held it.

Robert Spencer’s expertise on the Qur’an, strong enough to deter Muslims and Islamic apologists from challenging him, is on full display in Chapter Two: ‘The Roots of the Hatred of Israel,’ under the subheading, ‘Qur’anic Anti-semitism.’ The main fountainhead of jihad is the Qur’an, of which the book dissects no fewer than sixty-nine verses for their role in the extreme Muslim Jew hatred. Of the hadith, the sayings and doings of Muhammad, whose example Muslims must emulate, the notorious genocide hadith runs:

[2]

No Muslim will repudiate this hadith—think about that when you next dream of how wonderful it would be if Jews and Muslims could co-exist in peace. Spencer explains, “Muslims are taught in their holiest books not just to despise and mistrust Jews, but that Muslims are doing a good and virtuous deed if they kill them, a deed that will bring about the consummation of all things and the dawning of eternal justice for mankind.”[3]

Israel is not the first place where Muslim rule has been pushed back. Before the re-establishment of Israel, civilisation was restored in various places throughout the 1400 years of jihad conquest: Tartary, the Balkans, the Iberian Peninsula, the Mediterranean islands, southern Italy, southern France, India, East Timor and, of course, Israel.[4] Each of these reconquests is a deep affront to Muslims, for centuries the most galling having been the Iberian Peninsula, in particular, Al-Andalus (Spain), about which myths of Muslim multicultural magnanimity abound. The re-establishment of Israel eclipsed all other jihad losses. It shook Muslim supremacism to its core, coming as it did just when Islamic revivalism was getting underway in the aftermath of the demise of the Ottoman caliphate. Not only is Jerusalem the setting of a great Islamic fantasy (a mosque that never was, from which Muhammad rode a beast that never existed, on a journey that never took place[5]), but Muslim rule was replaced with rule by Jews, and the Palestinian Delusion lays out, meticulously, how Islam makes it impossible for Muslims to countenance Jewish rule over Muslims and over lands once ruled by Muslims. “Drive them out from where they dove you out”, says the Qur’an (2:191).

The Palestinian Delusion will still, despite its scholarly integrity, meet with incredulity from most. The desire so desperately to believe something not to be true, when confronted with irrefutable evidence to the contrary, can prove an intensely distressing experience. So deeply and successfully have the twin ideological onslaughts of political correctness and multiculturalism wormed their way into the Western psyche, that otherwise rational people become quite irrational when it comes to Islam and Muslims.

Yet credit for conjuring the fantasy nation of “the Palestinians” does not go to Muslims, but to the godless Soviets. One is reminded of the eagerness with which Muslims petitioned the South African Apartheid Government to ban Salman Rushdie from entering the country. No association is too shameful, if it serves jihad. The Palestinian Delusion shows that “Palestinian nation” that so many the world over get so angry and passionate about, is nothing but a squalid KGB Cold War side-project.[6] They even repurposed an Egyptian born in Cairo as the “Palestinian” Yasser Arafat they needed. According to Spencer, Yasser Arafat himself denied the existence of Palestine and Palestinians:

The question of borders doesn’t interest us . . . From the Arab standpoint, we mustn’t talk about borders. Palestine is nothing but a drop in an enormous ocean. Our nation is the Arabic nation that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea and beyond it . . . The PLO. is fighting Israel in the name of Pan-Arabism. What you call ‘Jordan’ is nothing more than Palestine.[7]

King Hussein of Jordan concurred, “The truth is that Jordan is Palestine and Palestine is Jordan.”[8]

So who, exactly, are the people who want to be “The Palestinians”? We read that the Syrians insist that they’re Syrians[9] and the Jordanians say they’re Jordanians. In reality, nothing distinguishes them from the Muslim Arabs around them: not songs, not national dress, not cuisine, not even cultural quirks like an unshakeable hatred of Jews. Nothing they have is uniquely theirs. Even the “Palestinian” flag, we learn, is a repurposed cast-off salvaged from the defunct Arab Federation of Iraq and Jordan that existed for all of 138 days in 1958.

While it is absolutely correct that the Jews should retake their land, it stands as one of the great ironies of history that they should have been so unprepared for the ferocity with which the surrounding Muslim Arabs would meet them on their return. They had, after all, been dhimmis under Muslim rule all over the Middle East and North Africa for almost one-and-half millennia.[10] It was (and quite patently remains) inconceivable that Muslims, “the very best of people” according to their Allah, would ever countenance “the descendants of apes and pigs” ruling over them. Why the Jews, the Zionists, had such a blind spot for their own 1400-year experience at the hands of Muslims is one of the gaps in The Palestinian Delusion.

The farce that was the “peace process,” Spencer shows, was little more than a monumental scam on the part of “Palestinian” Arabs to dupe Western leaders (they wanted to be duped) and to play the Western liberal intelligentsia (they wanted to be played), with the purpose of getting the leaders to pressure Israel into making concessions to the Arabs and of turning the Western populations against Israel and the Jews in general. It worked. They even managed to bring Israelis to within a whisker of committing national suicide, having convinced so many of them that they could buy peace with land. Not only did the Jewish nation almost tear itself part when it withdrew from Gaza, the strip promptly turned into a nightmare right on their doorstep for which Israel’s southern communities have suffered intolerable insecurity in their own country ever since.

The Palestinian Delusion reads particularly strongly on the Sadat-Carter-Begin-Rabin fiasco, revealing, perhaps to the surprise of many, just what a sly, duplicitous and dangerous character Sadat was. When reading this, one cannot help but notice that Jimmy Carter was to Anwar Sadat as Nancy Pelosi is to Ilhan Omar. These are lethal combinations for both the United States and Israel. Carter’s naïvety and pathos, and Nancy Pelosi’s sycophancy might induce embarrassment in some Americans and deep concern in others, but that would not come close to the shameful conduct of the British in the whole sorry business of Mandate Palestine. Their duplicity, double-dealing and treachery encouraged the Muslim Arabs in all their basest Islamic impulses, even after Israel had declared independence. Britain was possibly the only country to recognise Jordan’s annexation of Judea and Samaria, and the bestowing of Jordanian citizenship on the affected Muslim Arab population, despite opposition from the Arab League—a hint of sins to come. The Palestinian Delusion has nothing good to say about either the Brits or the Muslim Arabs because there is nothing good to say about them.

The United Nations and its agencies come in for a well-deserved pummelling in The Palestinian Delusion, for they are shown to be little more than instruments of jihad, right down to the inculcation of Jew-hatred in the Arab children in UN schools, and those children’s early indoctrination into aspiring to be jihad mass murderers. A child in a UN school shares his endearing aspirations: “Stabbing and running over Jews brings dignity to the Palestinians. I’m going to run them over and stab them with knives.”[11] If The Palestinian Delusion has one loud and clear message, it is Get real!

The blatant, relentless and ritualistic discrimination against and legal abuse of Israel at the United Nations are also thoroughly treated, not least the outrageous “inadmissibility of acquisition of territory by war,” contrived especially for Israel after it drove Jordanian troops back out of Judea and Samaria, Egyptian troops back out of Gaza (and all the way across the Suez Canal) and Syrian troops off the Golan Heights, after those countries’ aggressive war of 1967, intent on wiping out Israel. It has been a basic practise ever since men made war, that if an aggressor loses a war, that aggressor loses such territory as the victim had managed to conquer from it. The book makes clear that it is the first time ever that it is demanded of a country attacked that it returns territory won in self-defence. Of course, should Israel accept this blatantly ridiculous principle, any of its many hostile neighbours will have every incentive to try again next year in the full knowledge that they will never lose territory, and the old pattern of annual jihad war will be restored. The Palestinian Delusion strengthens the view that the United Nations has outlived its original purpose. That is putting it mildly.

Having comprehensively debunked the so-called “two-state solution,” Spencer describes all “one-state solutions” on offer as “grim scenarios.” Grim they certainly are. ‘What is to be done?’ asks Chapter Ten in its title. Indeed, what is to be done? The jihad imperative is absolutely fundamental to Islam. It is never going to go away and will never be repudiated. Spencer is forceful throughout, but in addressing the question of what is to be done, a great deal more forcefulness would be justified.

“There is no solution that will establish a permanent peace,” says Spencer, “but the problem can be managed. Islamic jihadis respect nothing about those whom they regard as infidels except strength… The key to Israel’s survival, therefore, is not negotiations or more concessions of land for a chimerical peace, but strength: military, cultural, and societal strength.”[12]

The Muslim Arabs in Gaza, Judea and Samaria have proved themselves devoid of all good faith, time after time after time. Knowledge of the Qur’an and the life of Muhammad would teach non-Muslims that treaties and agreements mean nothing to Muslims, except as reprieves from their enemies’ attacks until they are able to strike again. They would know that the Qur’an and Muhammad set the standards for all Muslims in all matters. They would be familiar with Muhammad’s conduct in the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, and expect Muslims to conduct themselves in exactly the same way. Negotiations with such a people are a nonstarter, always and forever. The Palestinian Delusion could not be clearer about how directly and intimately, Muslims emulate Muhammad.

By invoking Hudaybiyya to justify Oslo, Arafat was saying that despite appearances, he had actually conceded nothing. Muhammad had undertaken the treaty of Hudaybiyya . . . so that the Muslims could recover their strength after a series of costly battles with the Quraysh. When the Muslims were strong enough to fight again and defeat the Quraysh, he broke the treaty. Arafat was telling Muslim audiences, who would have been familiar with the Treaty of Hudaybiyya, that he had entered into the treaty with Israel not as a retreat from the Palestinian jihad against the Jewish state, but as a tactical move to further the aims of that jihad. And when the Palestinians were strong enough not to need the treaty anymore, he would, like Muhammad, break it.[13]

No inch of the Jewish part of Mandate Palestine can ever be sacrificed for a project as suicidal as a Palestinian state. “[Israel] should not pretend that the establishment of this state has solved or will solve anything.”[14] It might be safe to say that the Gaza nightmare has removed any danger of such pretence. Judea and Samaria fill Israel’s abdominal cavity. The Jewish state should offer neither apology nor explanation for dealing exactly as it sees fit with those who will destroy it. The Palestinian Delusion can afford to be much more forceful in its conclusions, especially as countries that could have stopped Hitler but did not, are in no position to lecture Israel on what it can and cannot do to prevent the next Holocaust.

If . . . Israel . . . assumes full political control over what are at present considered to be the Palestinian territories . . . [it] would require a sea change in international politics ever to be even seriously considered . . . [15]

Some Israeli leaders insist that Israel must be able to defend itself by itself. While this insistence is generally understood to mean that Israel should be military capable of fending off all potential attackers without recourse to its allies, there might be more to this dictum: the Jewish state does not require international political approval for defending itself. If defending itself means establishing full political control over Gaza, Judea and Samaria, then it must do so without regard to international politics. It is hardly possible for Israel to be more isolated than it was in the immediate aftermath of its founding, when it was no more than the “desolate wasteland” left behind by centuries of Muslim rule. The country, a confident high-tech miracle that within seventy years, without oil, has managed to lead the world in medical innovation, greened the desert and sent a craft to the Moon. It can hack its way into its enemies’ computers, while its soft power is present on every continent. Israel is a very different proposition today to what it was a few decades ago.

“It is time for a new approach”, says Spencer. “The response of Israel, and of the free world in general, should not be fear or hatred, but a sober realism and a determination to remain resolute against the jihad.”[16]

There can be more to this new approach. A few days after the publication of The Palestinian Delusion, news broke of a bill making its way through the Indian Parliament, according to which Indian citizenship would be offered to all persons in neighbouring countries suffering Muslim persecution. Israel has set itself up as a country that rescues Jews from wherever they may be persecuted and provides them with a safe home. While Israel, quite reasonably, focuses on one group of victims regardless of the perpetrators, India, even more reasonably, given the jihad campaigns to exterminate Hindus, focuses on all the victims of one group of perpetrators, Muslims, and wants to offer those victims a safe home. India’s liberation of Muslim women from the extremely unfair and humiliating (for the woman) Islamic divorce laws, its recent frustration of Pakistan’s jihad designs on Kashmir and the country’s growing affinity towards the Jewish state, suggest that the new approach Spencer proposes for Israel would be on firmer ground not with “The free world in general” (the major components of which are already ideologically paralysed), but with hand-picked partners who show no “fear or hatred, but a sober realism and a determination to remain resolute against the jihad.” Apart from the United States, India and Japan are two such partners (not China!—this is the latest Israeli delusion). Taiwan and the four Visegrád countries could be, too, as could Rwanda, Ethiopia, Kenya, Ukraine, Croatia and Myanmar. Israel, already helping to clear out Hezbollah from South America, is looking at the world with fresh eyes. It does not have to play the game by obsolete Cold War rules.

What about the Muslim Arabs in Gaza, Judea and Samaria? Are they not tired of the rampant corruption and nepotism, and of the appalling governance? Is there any glimmer of hope from that quarter of a sensible, civilised and lasting way forward? Whereas The Palestinian Delusion suggests a possible glimmer of hope here, the present reviewer sees none. It is true that everyone who is not on the make in “the Palestinian Territories” is bearing the yoke of an oppressive regime, be it the Palestinian Authority (PA) or Hamas, but it is not the Palestinian population as a whole that will rise up against their corrupt and abusive leaders, especially not when the “enemy” is the Jews. Muslims are taught that no matter how bad a leader is, if the leader is a Muslim, then you obey that leader, except when that leader commands you to act against Allah.

These are authoritarian societies structured on dependent subordination with an entire ideological infrastructure, Islam, to keep that mediaeval system in place. To the general population in such a society, the leaders are entitled to what they help themselves to. The Palestinian Delusion tells us exactly how much these leaders have been helping themselves to. The way Arabs see the world, the inherent good of nepotism is self-evident. In Arab society, no one is entitled to anything, except the leader of the land and the husband of the house, who dispense favours and hand-outs to their dependent subordinates. There is neither professionalism, nor service. There are no rights, only the dispensing and denial of favours. A problem only arises when the leader fails to dispense sufficient hand-outs. The role of hand-outs in the political economy of the PA is part of the explanation for its contemptuous rejection of the $50 billion aid package that the Trump Administration had put together to improve the lives of the Palestinians: they would be upstaged.

Arab societies operate on deference and adulation, behaviour by which dependent subordinates secure favours and hand-outs. This is where ‘pay-for-slay’ comes in. It is not just that the PA is a corrupt, Jew-hating, terrorist outfit that pays its people to kill Jews, with pay-for-slay, the PA manages to kill two birds with one stone: keep up jihad and keep the hand-outs flowing (more on this below). Only those people who have broken the ideological and psychological bonds of dependent subordination and become autonomous individuals — the kind of people who characterise free societies — have a problem with corruption, and they are firmly under the boot of the PA security apparatus and Hamas terror. Yet only with such people lies hope, and not nearly enough for Israel to build a policy on.

The Palestinian Delusion describes Hamas’ exhorting and offering to pay Gazans for getting themselves or their family members killed at the border fence with Israel, so as to make propaganda capital out of their deaths. Spencer quotes Mahmoud al-Habbash, PA President Mahmoud Abbas’ adviser on Islamic affairs and Sharia top-judge, denouncing this Hamas practise and belittling the propaganda value of these deaths, essentially accusing Hamas of ‘bigging it up’.

When you hear them [Hamas’ heroic slogans], you think that the people saying them are inside the al-Aqsa Mosque after they liberated it. And afterwards you discover that they’re only selling illusions, trading in suffering and blood, trading in victims, [saying]: ‘You Palestinians, our people, go and die so that we’ll go to the TV and media with strong declarations.’ These [Hamas] acts of ‘heroism’ don’t fool anyone anymore. The Palestinian people…sides with the PLO.[17]

Spencer sees in this PA spat with Hamas the two sides jockeying for popular support. But the judge’s outburst is more sinister than that. Qur’an 9:111 teaches Muslims that: “Indeed, Allah has purchased from the believers their lives and their properties, for that they will have Paradise. They fight in the cause of Allah, so they slay and are slain”, (emph. AP).

Hamas, being an even more primitive outfit than the PA, lacks the administrative infrastructure, proximity to Jews and vast revenues to run its own pay-for-slay programme, let alone eclipse that of the PA. Whereas the PA offers pay-for-slay, Hamas can only manage pay-for-be slain. It is quick and dirty and has the potential to rapidly mushroom and draw the envy of Palestinians in Judea and Samaria, who have had their opportunities for martyrdom severely curtailed since the erection of the security barrier and the growing presence of armed Jewish communities in their midst. The PA is anxious for its own pay-for-slay policy not to be upstaged by any Hamas imitation, and is ready to fight to protect the pre-eminence of its generous policy in the eyes of the Palestinian population. Every time Israel withholds PA taxes to match the pay-for-slay hand-outs, it compounds the Palestinian population’s perception of Israel as oppressing them, and the PA wastes no time in making the most if that perception. Fear of facilitating a Hamas take-over of Judea and Samaria stays the Israelis’ hand in their dealings with the PA. Israel is fighting the jihadis with one hand untied behind its back.

The start of The Palestinian Delusion excellently contextualises the jihad facing Israel, setting it within the doctrines of Islam. Surprisingly, there is no matching contextualisation at the end of the book, missing the opportunity for a more political, rather than doctrinal, contextualisation. If Islam is the problem, as the book clearly and rightly shows it to be, then even if the Palestinian question were soluble, it is but a single manifestation of a much greater problem: the orchestration of global jihad by the Organisation for Islamic Cooperation (OIC), Allah’s diplomats. This organisation’s stranglehold over the European Union and the United Nations allows it to direct nations against Israel as instruments of the Qur’anic jihad imperative. There is no telling which country will bend to its will next. But it is facing growing frustration on a number of fronts, not least on account of Visegrád (Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary) refusal to bow to EU bullying, Brexit’s implications for the jihad in Britain, India upsetting all the regional jihad schemes by going on the offensive, and President Trump’s moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem and defunding the UNRWA, the significance of latter two is well highlighted in The Palestinian Delusion.

What of Israel’s Muslim Members of Knesset (MKs)? They may claim to ride in the name of Israel, but in whose name do they ride? They are Muslims, adherents of the scripture that commands them to, “Drive them out from where they drove you out”, and followers of a prophet who stressed to his followers that,

[18]

When those Muslim MKs were sworn in to high office in the Jewish state, were they asked to renounce Qur’an 2:191 and Muhammad’s notorious genocide hadith narrated at Sahih Muslim 6985? If Israel does not make the Muslim MKs publicly renounce these expectations of their faith, it might learn their allegiance under circumstances it would not wish to contemplate. Publicly renouncing the Islamic doctrines demanding the destruction of Israel (the specific Arabic wording of the text), rather than swearing allegiance to Israel as a Jewish state (about which Islam, in any case, would require them to lie), would be the real acid test of those MKs’ allegiance to Israel in its character as the Jewish national home.

No Muslim will ever renounce anything in the Qur’an, or anything Muhammad had said or done, yet these Muslim MKs assumed office in Israel. How many Jews know the story of Khaybar? Every Muslim does. Too many Jews believe they need to bend over a little more in their niceness to Muslim Arabs and everything will be alright. Such Jews are proud of “their” Arabs, of how the latter have even embraced democracy. Diversity smugness is at dangerous levels, as the very conviction that inspired the murder of doctors and nurses on their way to Hadassah Hospital, also has a voice in the Knesset. As soon as those Muslim MKs gain the slightest leverage over state actions, they will break cover. Muslims know this, but unfortunately, Jews do not—at least, not yet. The Palestinian Delusion covers an enormous canvas. It would be unfair to expect it to have addressed the jihad against Israel from every conceivable angle. It is, after all, a pioneering work.

Many who should have listened to Bat Ye’or did not, and the delusions rolled on. Perhaps they will now listen to Robert Spencer. His natural audience and focus is the United States, its government, its security establishment and its people. The Palestinian Delusion, however, is far more immediately critical to the survival of Israel than it is to the US, and one would hope for a Hebrew translation soon.

So back to the question: What is to be done? The only party to this mess even remotely interested in peace is Israel. The only way peace will be arrived at is if Israel were to impose it. Imposing peace, of course, means by military force, but that does not necessarily mean oppression. To attain and maintain peace means keeping the Muslim Arab propensities for jihad in check, and having a severe deterrent at the ready for any who would be inspired to obey 2:191, or to emulate Muhammad at the expense of the Jews, or to call for the same, including by enjoining obedience to many anti-Semitic verses in the Qur’an.

Jihad will further be kept in check by saturating Gaza, Judea and Samaria with Jewish communities, armed, of course, and militarily protected. In Gaza this would have to be preceded by enforcing cordons sanitaires, ever-widening towards the Egyptian border and the coast, based on a calculus of rockets, mortars and incendiary kites launched into Israel. To think that surgically taking out a terrorist leader asleep in his bed is going to stop rocket attacks, while entire rocket squads are mass-produced in the schools each day, is another delusion. Muslims commit jihad not because the mastermind orders it, but because Allah commands it and Muhammad did it.

The general lesson from The Palestinian Delusion is: whoever you are, and especially if you are the Israeli Government and security establishment, whatever assumptions you are making about Muslim Arabs, think again. Are you projecting your own rationale onto the minds of Muslim Arabs? Are you projecting your own value-system onto the ethics of Muslim Arabs? Are you projecting your own aspirations onto the hearts of Muslim Arabs? Delusion upon delusion upon delusion characterised the so-called “peace process.” This edifice of fantasies must be dismantled, rather than endlessly searching for a “partner for peace” that does not exist, that cannot exist.

And what about the numbers game? Firstly, the so-called “right of return,” as Spencer’s book shows, is irrelevant. They were never expelled, leave aside the fact that most who did depart Israel in 1948 have since departed this world altogether—there is no need for Israel to pay any attention to the “hereditary refugee status” conjured especially for “Palestinians.” No one else inherits their parents’ refugee status.

Secondly, natural increase is easily dealt with. A people that calls for the extermination of another people is, by definition, the worst of all peoples. The Jews have nothing to prove when it comes to “being better than that”—they are not calling for the harming, let alone extermination, of anyone. Jews being themselves the object of Muslim extermination calls, have a great deal of latitude before they even remotely begin to approach the Palestinians’ moral depravity.

With that preamble, Israeli could do a lot worse than deporting to the Arab part of Mandate Palestine east of the Jordan anyone who calls for the extermination of Jews, including reading out loud or approvingly quoting any Qur’an verse or hadith that does so. The Jewish state cannot afford the luxury of balking at the idea of expelling people who would see Jews exterminated, especially when it has itself expelled Jews from Gaza (part of Mandate Palestine designated for the Jewish National Home), for the benefit of those who have never hidden their intention to annihilate the Jewish state, and have only intensified their efforts to that end since taking over Jewish territory—land for peace, indeed.

All madrassas and all mosques are places of exhortation to exterminate the Jews by virtue of the simple fact that the Qur’an and the hadith are taught and propagated within, as they are in the UN schools, where, “every child is indoctrinated that they should kill the Jews.” Expelling all present at such gatherings (and their families) to the Arab part of Mandate Palestine might go some way to keeping the Muslim Arab population growth within Gaza, Judea and Samaria in check. As a humanitarian gesture, compare a $100,000 send-off in each family’s bags as they cross the Jordan into their Palestine, to rockets landing on family homes in Israel. Thus can Israel save itself and yet preserve its humanity, the only humanity in a sea of hatred and spite. The threat from within its borders neutralised, the Palestinian delusion finally be laid to rest. That, for a change, would be Israel killing two birds with one stone.

Some might despair at the thought of scrapping decades of hard peace work. The Palestinian Delusion shows those were decades of failure. Israel must draw a line under it regardless of what anyone says. Its very existence depends on it. Can the toxic harvest of Gush Katif, where Israel did more damage to itself than it has ever done to the Muslims who wish to destroy it, ever be redeemed?

The Palestinian Delusion is a formidable addition to Robert Spencer’s already considerable oeuvre. Even if academic Islam scholarship were not in craven, sycophantic prostration before Islamic intimidation, Spencer’s brave and honest work on exposing Islam and the dangers it poses for the world would still tower above them all. Posterity will recognise Spencer as one of the most important scholars in his field. Should civilisation survive the current onslaught of Islamic barbarism, Robert Spencer’s work, not least The Palestinian Delusion reviewed here, will be amongst those to have enabled that survival. Not all the beneficiaries will have the grace to acknowledge their debt.

[1] Loc. 74.

[2] Sahih Muslim 6985, quoted at loc. 797.

[3] Loc. 801.

[4] For the definitive work on the history of jihad, see Robert Spencer, 2018, The History of Jihad from Muhammad to ISIS, Bombardier Books, New York.

[5] According to the Islamic story of the Night Journey, Muhammad was one night in 621 transported from his bed in Mecca on a flying equine beast, a buraq, to “the furthest mosque,” which was in Jerusalem. There he stopped to prey before proceeding to Heaven on said buraq and returning to his bed that same night. Problem: there was no Muslim and no mosque anywhere near Jerusalem in 621. This is the sole basis of the Muslim claim to Jerusalem as the “Third holiest site in Islam.” The adventures of Sinbad the Sailor have greater historical credence. But never mind that. Palestinians proudly and gleefully sacrifice their children for “Al-Quds”.

[6] Loc. 1711.

[7] Quoted at loc. 1817.

[8] Quoted at loc. 1815.

[9] Locs. 1653-76.

[10] Bat Ye’or, 2013, Understanding Dhimmitude, RVP PRESS, New York.

[11] Quoted at loc. 3706.

[12] Loc. 4108.

[13] Loc. 2858. Note that Yasser Arafat had trouble justifying to the Palestinian population his signing of the Oslo Accords. When Western commentators charge that the Palestinian people cannot hold their leaders to account because they do not have elections, this is a Western projection. Those leaders are very much held to account, not against a popular vote, but against the commands of the Qur’an, the utterances and actions of Muhammad, and Shari’a. Only when Arafat assured them that he had no intention of making peace with Israel did they give him a break. Meanwhile, in Western capitals, they popped champagne.

[14] Loc. 4115.

[15] Loc. 4116.

[16] Loc. 4117.

[17] Quoted at loc. 3993.

[18] Loc. 797.

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Anjuli Pandavar is a British assistant professor at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic, where she teaches English. She is an ex-Muslim and a fierce critic of Islam and of the creeping dhimmitude in the West. Anjuli fights against jihad by encouraging Muslims to leave Islam and by supporting Israel in every way she can. Some of her work can be read at www.jihadwatch.org.

Follow NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast