Through the Looking Glass

The British Muslim Fuad Nahdi argues that the British suicide bombers who attacked a cafe in Tel Aviv were fundamentally motivated by outrage over Palestine. In an article in the Guardian, Nahdi says that, despite the restraint of Islam, "young people speak only of Palestine. It is the great religious transformation of our age. And if you talk to these new zealots, you will find that anger over Palestine has been the catalyst which radicalised them."

What is needed now, he says, is a "decent settlement for the Palestinians, with the restoration of the Muslim holy places to Muslim control". Otherwise, "we should brace ourselves for the forthcoming intifada in the streets of Birmingham and Detroit."

One hundred years ago, the shoe was exactly on the other foot. What Europe feared most was the International Jewish Conspiracy. They had invented that abomination, Marxism: they were behind anarchism. They were everywhere. 

In order to appreciate just how commonly held this belief was, one need look no further than John Buchan's 39 Steps. Written in the days before the Great War, and a perennial best-seller to this day, the doomed journalist Scudder confides his fatal secret to Richard Hannay. War was coming he said, so that:

The capitalists would rake in the shekels, and make fortunes by buying up wreckage. Capital, he said, had no conscience and no fatherland. Besides, the Jew was behind it, and the Jew hated Russia worse than hell.

'Do you wonder?' he cried. 'For three hundred years they have been persecuted, and this is the return match for the pogroms. The Jew is everywhere, but you have to go far down the backstairs to find him. Take any big Teutonic business concern. If you have dealings with it the first man you meet is Prince von und Zu Something, an elegant young man who talks Eton-and-Harrow English. But he cuts no ice. If your business is big, you get behind him and find a prognathous Westphalian with a retreating brow and the manners of a hog. He is the German business man that gives your English papers the shakes. But if you're on the biggest kind of job and are bound to get to the real boss, ten to one you are brought up against a little white-faced Jew in a bath-chair with an eye like a rattlesnake. Yes, Sir, he is the man who is ruling the world just now, and he has his knife in the Empire of the Tzar, because his aunt was outraged and his father flogged in some one-horse location on the Volga.'

In what must be the cruelest joke in history, the British laid the foundations for the State of Israel because they feared that the International Jewish Conspiracy was going to turn the Ottoman Empire against them. Yes, you read that right: the British Foreign Office determined that the Jews were going to unleash the Moslems on them. Seriously. Sir Gerald Lowther, who was the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, was convinced that the Young Turk movement, which had just seized the reins of power in 1908, was a creation of the Jews. In David Fromkin's A Peace to End All Peace, Lowther and his linguist FitzMaurice concluded that the Young Turks had met in:

"... Salonika, about half of whose 130,000 inhabitants were either Jews or Dunmehs (members of a Jewish sect that had converted to Islam in the seventeenth century). Salonika was also a city in which there were Freemason lodges ... (where) ... a Jewish lawyer ... allowed the (Young Turks) to meet."

And since "the Oriental Jew is adept at manipulating occult forces ..." it had taken control of the Ottoman Empire. A few years later, the British Foreign Office had come to the conclusion that victory in the First World War would be greatly assisted by buying off the Jews by assisting in the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, which it did in 1917. Thus was Israel born.

And now Nadhi wants Britain to buy off the International Muslim Conspiracy by supporting the establishment of a Palestinian state in the Jewish homeland which was used to buy off the International Jewish Conspiracy which was threatening to control the Ottoman Empire. Otherwise, there will be an intifada  in the streets of Birmingham or Detroit. The French should have saying: the more things stay the same the more they are different.