THE ROOT OF EVIL, OCTOBER 2001

When I was 10 years old, I asked myself: Why don't the Arabs like the Jews?

At the age of 10, I was walking in the souks of Rabat and Casablanca in Morocco. I would see people, often mothers with their small children, walking through the alleys.
If one of them didn't keep up or disobeyed, his mother would say to him: "Come here, you little Jew.
It was almost the equivalent of what you would hear in New York in the 1920's, « You Irish »

I heard this remark more than once when it came to scolding a child, to admonishing him, in other words to insulting him for his behavior. I didn't understand why she called him a little Jew.

At home, I asked my father.
He explained to me.
-When you call someone a Jew, you are insulting him, reducing him to less than what he is, degrading him.
To which I replied
-But Daddy, if that's the way it is, the little Arab boy will grow up thinking that Jews are despicable people, that he won't be able to love them. And yet we are not bad.
-I know, son, but we have no choice but to live with it. But some Arabs are nice. Look at our friend, Mr. Jilali, he loves us and his family too, and we love him, he's a good friend. So you have to be careful, and don't be surprised if someone treats you badly.

My father's answer did not satisfy me, he explained what was going on but did not tell me why.
So I decided to find the answer.
Two words, today seem to dominate any conversation.
Islam and terrorism. And rightly or wrongly, they are associated.
Because it seems that the majority of terrorists come from Islam.

A word that would piss off a generation of moderates for whom Islam is a religion of peace and moderation, which condemns terrorist acts, began to surface in my mind and I refused to admit it.

20 years later, when he was 5 or 6 years old, my son who had just started school, came to see me.
Why, Dad," he asked me, "do people not like Jews?

In this case it was not a question of Arabs/Muslims, since there were hardly any in the schools in Canada at that time, but of some Christians.
How can I answer a child on a subject that is more than a thousand years old, one of the most delicate and difficult, and that he understands without boring him too much with a discussion that would be almost philosophical. History repeats itself: twenty years ago, I asked the same question to my father.

I took him to my room/office at home, took a book from a shelf and put it in his hands:
I turned the pages and stopped in front of a picture, I said to him, you see this gentleman is a Jew, I turned the page and said this one is also a Jew and so on.
I had explained to him beforehand what the Nobel Prize was.
He stopped me and said:
-I know why they don't like Jews, Dad.
-Why did I ask  him?
-Because they are jealous.

I stopped our little exercise by telling him, you will grow up my son and you will understand a little better.

While searching for the answer, I learned that when Mohammed started his new religion, Islam, he approached the Jews around him (one of his fathers-in-law was one) and invited them to convert to Islam.
The Jews, being a people very much anchored in their religion and beliefs, refused to convert.

This refusal came as a shock to Muhammad who had just received the message from the angel Gabriel and therefore believed that he possessed the truth. Why can't the Jews admit that my faith is the right faith? Is it because they believe that theirs is superior to mine?

In the face of this humiliation, Muhammad resented them and declared war on the Jews. A new feeling arose towards the Jews who, although they believed in a God like the Arabs, did not accept Muhammad as their leader. Just as they did not believe in Jesus six hundred years earlier.

Interestingly enough , and not everyone makes the analogy. In the  XVth Century, Martin Luther befriended Jews, then came to them asking to join his new religion. Here again Jews nicely refused being happy with their religion.
Luther became so upset that he came up with several ordinances making life hard fir Jews.

History repeats itself and the Jews paid dearly for their obstinacy.
And that's how it started.

From the seventh century, waves of Arabs, originating from Arabia, poured eastwards, over North Africa towards Spain and France. Other waves of Arabs, heading west, reached the borders of India and Indonesia.

Their goal was to convert to Islam all those pagans who had no beliefs (the Jews and Christians had one). After Mohammed there was a schism as to the lineage of Mohammed's descendants. In fact, two groups were distinguished:
The Shiites, descendants of Ali, Muhammad's son-in-law, as the legitimate heir of Muhammad and who opposed the the Sunnis, descendants of the first four Caliphs, heirs of Muhammad and insisting on the observance of the Sunna as the basis of law. The Koran remains the common denominator.

Now here is a current example:
A team of French journalists managed to get into an Islamic training camp to see what was going on there. They entered a classroom with a group of 5 to 6 year olds, and their teacher was there to teach them the alphabet.
The first three letters of the Arabic alphabet that these children were learning were: J, H, D to form the word JIHAD. The concept of Jihad has been overused to justify violence.

What about this?
Jihad means struggle, combat. The prophet said that the greatest jihad is the struggle of a man against his own influences to evil. But what has been done with it? A justification for hunting down infidels?

These days, the Muslim world is trying to convince us that the word Jihad is not a holy war but rather a struggle for the achievement of good, to keep away from temptations and evil. I looked up the word in more than one dictionary, including the Arabic-French and French-Arabic dictionaries. For Jihad, it says: holy war. The Arabs have indeed known some holy wars.

I would like to, but this is not the place to expand on these holy wars to discover so much blood spilled in the name of Islam. No matter how much one says that terrorism is contrary to the Koran, it remains that it is a religion marked by violence. History is full of it.

Whether in Egypt, against the Copts or conflicts have caused hundreds of deaths. In Saudi Arabia, where Shiite minorities in the southern and eastern regions have been massacred. In Syria, where the oppressive Alawite regime of Assad oppressed the Sunni majority and massacred nearly 38,000 civilians in 1982 in Hama. In Tripoli, Lebanon, in a conflict between the PLO and the pro-Syrian Saiqa, hundreds of Palestinians and Lebanese civilians were killed.

Another proof, closer to us this time, this photo of a Taliban unloading his rifle on the head of a woman whose crime, if there was one, I am convinced, did not deserve such a death. Was it not the prophet Mohammed who said "...Do not kill women, children or non-combatants, do not kill the elderly or religious people..." this same hadith continues:

"...Do not poison the wells of your enemies..."
And to think that today everyone is afraid of a chemical or bacteriological war.
History has shown us a series of fratricidal wars between Muslims.
In Yemen, fighting between the South and the North has often taken place.
King Hussein of Jordan killed nearly twenty thousand Palestinians in less than a month in September 1970.

Didn't Iran and Iraq use young children to blow up the mines during their war where more than sixty thousand of their own people lost their lives?
Saddam Hussein did it with the Kurds, everyone knows it.
As soon as there is a demonstration against the government in place, they shoot.

Pakistan does it.
Indonesia did it.
How far does this violence go?
Is this a people guided by a peaceful Koran?
A Koran, which on almost every page invites to prayer, to arms, to the enemy and to infidels.

When at a very young age, the Palestinian child is taught that the Jew is the enemy of our race, that he has no place on the planet, that he must be exterminated, that he must be thrown into the water, as the Palestinian motto prescribes, and that Israel does not exist in the geography books of the Palestinian schools.

At 5 years old, as soon as he is able to walk and run, he is taught to throw stones. At 15, with little or no education, he vegetates, like his parents before him. At the age of 18, he learns to use weapons and prepares himself for his war. He lets himself be trained, ends up in a camp and to the great pleasure of his family, he is made a future martyr.

It is him, who in the name of this (and here I drop the word) hatred in him,
hatred repressed but oh how much aggrandized, raised to the sense that it is of its duty to remedy it of the simplest way, this new expression: a man-bomb.
Curiously, suicide as well as murder are defended by Islam.

How can we explain that a future man-bomb is encouraged to give his life in order to inherit paradise where ten virgins are waiting for him to commit murder. His family on the other hand will benefit from the kindness of the authorities, a brainwashing that continues to work and that seems to find takers in a population that is so downcast.

We hear it daily on the radio, on TV, we read it in the newspapers. What about this? Hate is a violent feeling that pushes one to desire the misfortune of someone, to hurt him or her. With time, hate is nourished and becomes a violent aversion, a deep disgust that one feels towards someone or something.
What does the Qur'an say about hatred? "...Do not let hatred for a people prevent you from being righteous..."

We have seen Palestinians rejoicing over the destruction of New York and yet the Qur'an has quoted a Jewish passage that says, "At the fall of your enemy you shall not rejoice. Islam forbids rejoicing over the calamities of its enemies.

And yet, do Muslims respect their own bible?
How can a people live with hatred in their hearts, a hatred that is omnipresent as long as there are people around them who do not share their beliefs and convictions? Is this the answer we are looking for? For if this is the answer, how will we solve it? We have to face the evidence: We have in our hands a severe case of anomie.

Let me explain. When a society experiences the collapse of its own norms and values, when there is a total disintegration of its social norms, when the law is not respected and despair takes hold of a whole population, we give in to the rage, which can take the form of terrorist acts. We then fall into an age where ignorance justifies the means.

When will people, Muslims or others, finally wake up and understand that hatred leads to nothing but the destruction of others and of oneself?
Who will stand up and preach an attitude that will make us better human beings?
Why do we, humans, have such a strong innate hatred that it leads us to kill "others"?
Where will we find the strength to face a multitude that opposes our point of view?
How can we make a population, a people, a generation understand that they are living in a lie?

What can we do?

If not, as best we can, each in our own little corner, convince one or two people around us who, if they understood, would convince other

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