Palestine Chronicle
May 13 2004
An Evening with Bernard Lewis: Terrorists, Tea and Hatred
“The only solution, Lewis concludes, is the Western recolonization of
the Arab world, starting with Iraq ..”
By Sarah Whalen
The Palestine Chronicle
I wonder.
What is a terrorist?
Saudis, Wahhabis, Muslims who follow the shariah, and suicide
bombers, Orientalist Bernard Lewis told a rapt audience of mostly
Jewish Americans in New Orleans last week.
Lewis, a British Jew who studied law but failed to finish, apparently
hates the sharia only slightly less than he hates Saudi Arabia
generally and Wahhabism specifically. “A lunatic fringe in a marginal
country,” he sneers. The West’s present troubles, Lewis avers, arise
from “an unholy combination of two events:” the creation of the
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the discovery of oil there.
The audience titters at the word “unholy.”
Encouraged, Lewis warms to his subject. “Imagine,” he offers, “if the
Ku Klux Klan obtained the oil wells of Texas, and had all that
money…a pale approximation” of what happened with Saudi Arabia.
“Imagine,” Lewis urges, “that the KKK used all this money to
establish a network of well-endowed schools and colleges all over
Christendom, peddling their particular brand of Christianity.”
The audience gasps and shudders at the thought of Christianity being
spread. Or is it a “KKK” brand of Christianity? Or Islam? Lewis is
unclear, but on a roll.
Suicide bombing also has Islamic origins, Lewis insists. He admits
Islam “clearly forbids suicide.” But this doesn’t stop Muslims from
doing it, says Lewis, who shifts to the Assassins, spinning lurid
tales of the dagger-wielding, supposedly hashish-smoking Ismaili
sect’s practices in the 11th and 12th centuries that terrorized
Crusaders and most of “Persia and Palestine.” The Assassins, Lewis
claims, were “eventually suppressed” only to “reappear in the late
19th and early 20th centuries.”
And their heirs, ignoble, modern suicide bombers, Lewis warns, may
soon become a metaphor for the whole Middle East, locked into “a
downward spiral of hate and spite, rage and self-pity, poverty and
oppression.”
The only solution, Lewis concludes, is the Western recolonization of
the Arab world, starting with Iraq.
But why stop there?
An American-Israeli Ottoman empire awaits.
The audience wildly applauds.
Lewis takes questions from lesser beings, all of whom bask in his
genial but insulting answers. Then, the audience storms the table
laden with The Crisis of Islam, and What Went Wrong, manifestos that
made Lewis the Bush Administration’s chief neocon ideologue.
Lewis graciously signs purchases.
I stand in line and wonder: Do these new Lewis fans, many of whom
descend from Holocaust victims and survivors, know that a French
court once fined him for denying the Armenian genocide? Do they know
that today’s date–April 24–marks the Armenian genocide’s 89th
anniversary?
It is my turn: “You claim the Ismaili Assassins are the precursors of
modern Palestinian suicide bombers. I wanted to ask about Masada–”
Lewis jumps, as though poked with a pin. “Masada!” he says
emphatically. “Damn! I meant to say something about that.”
I nod.
“I wonder whether this tradition actually started much earlier in
Palestine with the Jewish tradition of the Sicarii.”
Lewis’s eyes narrow suspiciously. The Sicarii, Lewis knows, were
Jewish Zealot assassins specializing in murder by “sicae,” small
daggers.
During the 66 CE Jewish rebellion, some Sicarii fled to Masada, King
Herod’s fortress, slaughtered the Roman garrison stationed there, and
plundered nearby settlements, including Jewish villages. The Masada
group eventually numbered 960 men, women, and children.
In 72 CE, the Roman governor Silva besieged Masada with the 10th
Legion. Jewish historian Josephus recorded the testimony of two
Jewish women and five Jewish children, the sole survivors of what
happened next, on Passover Eve, 73 CE, when the
Sicarii announced that rather than surrender, the Jewish men would
murder their wives and children, then “cast lots to choose ten men to
dispatch the remainder,” with the lone surviving Jew then running
“his sword entirely through himself.”
This they did.
Lewis glares. “Well,” he says, “Judaism so abhors suicide that there
is not a word about Masada in any Jewish history or rabbinical period
text, only by Josephus.” And he chuckles and remarks that in writing
down the truth, Josephus became a despised Roman collaborator.
I nod. But I ask: “Why do we ignore murder-suicide’s place in ancient
Israeli-Palestinian culture? Modern Israelis made murder-suicide into
a national shrine at Masada. But there’s nothing heroic about
murdering your wives and children and all your male friends, and then
killing yourself, which is what the Sicarii did. So why glorify them,
as Israel does?”
Lewis does not blink.
So I press on.
“Israeli Army recruits take oaths of allegiance at Masada. And since
every Israeli serves some time in the armed forces, they’re all
indoctrinated into this view. Zionist youth groups hike to Masada,
there promising to support the Israeli state unto death. How can you
blame 11th century Ismaili Assassins for inventing suicide bombings,
when the Sicarii predated Islam by hundreds of years?”
“At least,” Lewis snaps, “the Jews only killed themselves at Masada,
and not anyone else.”
But surviving Sicarii groups fled to Alexandria and Thebes. Scholars
say Ismaili fringe traditions originated out of Egypt. And Egypt is
the home of the Muslim Brotherhood. So who taught who how to be a
suicide bomber?
Is recolonizing Israel an option?
Lewis turns away.
I wonder.
From: Baghdasarian