An Evening with Bernard Lewis: Terrorists, Tea and

[Phrygian]

An Evening with Bernard Lewis: Terrorists, Tea and Hatred

May 13, 2004

"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.

http://www.palestinechronicle.com/story.ph...040513103628345

[Howitzer]

Massada is cherished in Israel as a symbol of jewish people that died and didn't become slaves of the roman invaders. Suicide is forbidden in jewish tradition, and as you should know sicariies were margin minority of jewish political fractions in Judea at those times. They were fanatical organisation, condemned by jewish spiritual leaders, and they asassinated other jews which were suspected in convertion to Hellinism. When in 1948 Israeli state reborned it needed desperately symbols of "Fighting Jews", especially after holocaust. Massada was one of the symbols picked in those times(less than 1000 jews in heroic resistance to whole roman legion), alongside with people like J. Trumpeldor which said on his last breath, dying in 1920 from arab "pogromshik"'s bullet "It is good to die for our country". I am sure that in the dawn of the independent Armenian state you tried to find symbolic events and people like that in armenian history too.