In case you think the first part of that title is a joke, it is; unfortunately, Nonie Darwish doesn’t realise just how funny she is. There is a well attested saying that converts are the worst bigots, and Nonie is a convert of sorts - to American-style democracy and über-Zionism – but it isn’t what she is for that is so terrifying, rather what she is against. Ever heard the word Islamophobia? Of course you have; it’s the Islamic version of anti-Semitism, and is intended to imply that Moslems are always hated for irrational reasons. Sadly, that is not the case. We all have our so-called prejudices, and although they may not seem quite rational to other people, they are to us.
Let’s take a neutral example, you are a woman travelling alone at night, and the only other person waiting for the late train is me. I get in the empty carriage, you get in same and walk down to the next one. Should I take offence? I didn’t when something like that happened to me a few years ago.
All women know that not all men are potential rapists, but just in case...Similarly, people who have had a bad experience or two with Moslems, Jews, Christians, Englishmen, plumbers...okay, so it’s irrational to hate plumbers, just because one ripped you off and the other bodged a simple repair job, but there is nothing irrational about it from where you stand.
This begs the question, what did the Arabs do to Nonie Darwish? Nonie was well over fifty when she published her first book, in 2006, but she’s been a busy girl since.
Now They Call Me Infidel: Why I Rejected The Jihad For America, Israel, And The War On Terror is her autobiography, one that positively drips over with hatred for all things Egyptian, all things Arab, all things Islamic. Yup, Nonie wants not just the white picket fence and Mom’s apple pie, but wonderful Israel and the war on terror. Admittedly she doesn’t say anything in her book about waterboarding, detention without trial or any of the other doubtful benefits of tearing up the US Constitution, but it is clear she believe those contemptible people of the Middle East deserve everything they get.
According to her book, Nonie had a fairly privileged upbringing, though after the death of her father, things weren’t quite so rosy. Although a Moslem, she was sent to a Catholic school that was run by nuns, who were wonderful, apparently. Quite unlike many of the nuns we’ve heard about teaching here in the West. That was just as well, because Nonie didn’t think much of Egyptian schools.
Gamel Abdel Nasser was the first Arab leader to stand up to the Western powers; right or wrong, he was and remains a hero to his countrymen, the first Egyptian to rule Egypt since Cleopatra. A hero to them, but never to Nonie, who even blames him for the Suez Crisis. Perhaps she doesn’t realise there was fierce resistance to this debacle in Britain, which was still recovering from the Second World War and the Korean War. Suez led to adulation for Nasser; for Prime Minister of England Anthony Eden, it led to humiliation and resignation.
Nonie makes it clear that she has never had anytime for bigotry; it must have been that Western education she had from those nice Catholic nuns before going on to the American University, thus on page 39 she tells us: “Few Westerners can comprehend the degree to which hatred of Jews permeates every aspect of Arab culture”.
No, not of “the Jews”. It is often said of genuine Western anti-Semites that when they talk about Zionists, they really mean Jews. With Moslems, especially Arabs, the converse appears to be the case, these people may talk about Jews, but what they really mean is Zionist Jews. How else is one to explain the fact that fairly large Jewish minorities lived and continue to live unmolested in many Arab countries? Jews are not even persecuted in Iran, as Rabbi Ahron Cohen makes clear, among others.
If she has no time for racial bigotry – real or imagined – Nonie finds sexism equally abhorrent. Here she is on page 68: “Under Islamic law, men have the freedom and many choices to actually cheat on their wives, while wives are unable to get a divorce or have a relationship, even when their husband has left them.” – her grammar
Hmm, that might just depend on the husband. And on the wife, of course.
On page 96, she has some strong words about Arab unity, and says “The oil-rich Arab nations are quite obsessed with maintaining ‘ethnic purity.’.;”
They can’t have been too impressed with her second husband then, of which more anon. Overall, she has an incredibly starry-eyed vision of America in particular and the West in general. If a Westerner had written about the differences in cultures like this, racist is the most polite epithet that would have been used against him. In this case, that is all it is, a cultural difference, and only a fool would argue that Western norms are superior to Islamic ones, especially in this department.
Nonie married a Coptic who converted to Islam, then moved with him to the Promised Land, where in time they divorced, and she married...“Howard”. Undoubtedly Howard’s family were just as thrilled he was marrying an Arab as her ethnic purity obsessed Arab cousins were with her marrying a white man, but that’s racial prejudice for ya. Or is it something else?
Surely she has heard this Arab saying: “I and my brother against my cousin, I and my cousin against our neighbor, I and my neighbor against the world.”
Apparently not, but in America (page 185): “I discovered that, contrary to what I learned in college, all cultures are not equal”.
This is indeed true, and it is a lunatic notion indeed to suggest – as do socialists and the people who run Survival International – that a tribe that lives in mud huts, that never aspired to invent even the wheel, has a culture that is on a par with that developed by Western Man. Let us though leave the white supremacy to the likes of Harold Covington, and try to be thoroughly objective. What have Moslems, the Arabs or the Egyptians given to the world? How about the pyramids to start with? The two planes that brought down the Twin Towers on that fateful September day would not have made a dent in the Great Pyramid.
The Arab contribution to civilisation is phenomenal in many fields ancient and not so ancient including astronomy, literature, medicine, and mathematics; most significantly in this latter, it was the Arabs who originated the concept of zero.
Shortly before the day that changed the world, Nonie flew with her new American family to Egypt. While “Howard” returned early, she left the country – presumably for the last time ever ndash; with her kids only on September 10, 2001. (Egypt’s gain is America’s loss).
The atrocities of September 11, 2001 appear to have been the final straw for this woman who from her early quasi-Catholic education had nothing but contempt for her own culture, and she launched her own jihad.
Now it is a fact that saying nice things about Jews has never done anyone any harm – even if a lot of what is said is not strictly true, or even a tissue of lies. That being said, Nonie went right over the top, and on page 196 we are told: "I will never forget that day—the first time I spoke before a Jewish group. As I was speaking, deep inside I felt a profound sadness about the tragedy of anti-Semitism in the Muslim world. I was thinking how the small State of Israel daily lives with the terror of suicide bombers, how at any moment they know their children can be blown up on a bus on the way to school, or when they stop for a pizza in a café. I looked into the eyes of those gracious and wonderful women who had dedicated their lives to serving their community, not just the Jewish community, but also the community as a whole. I felt deep respect."
She omitted that bit about Sabra and Shatilla, two intifadas, and a great deal more, but she makes it clear in her book that the suffering of the Palestinians is entirely the fault of those wicked A-rabs, who have quite cynically exploited these wretched people as a political pawn in their joustings with the Jewish State.
On page 234, she tells us that in November 2004, she spoke at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. Irony of ironies, what a place to lecture Jews about the evils of terrorism. On July 22, 1946, Zionist terrorists planted a massive bomb in its basement. This resulted in 91 deaths (including of a number of Jews) and 46 injured.
Nonie has not only lectured and written about the evils of Islam far and wide, she and her dog have set up a website called Arabs For Israel. Like Nick Griffin, with whom she has nothing else in common, she has concluded that Islam is the root of all evil. To her the Jew has never and can never do any wrong; America is truly the Promised Land, and if us Westerners have any faults at all, it is that we are totally ignorant of the enemy we face, an enemy who wants only to murder us in our beds. If only!
This picture is of course ludicrous. America is certainly the Promised Land. For some. It is also a land of poverty, of repression, a land where a police officer can administer a vicious beating to an innocent, defenceless woman, and walk away with total impunity.
In America and indeed in Britain under certain circumstances, an innocent person can be shot dead by the police with total impunity. America is not only the land of the free and the home of the brave, it is also the home of tent cities and the medically uninsured. In Britain, America and other Western countries, alcohol abuse is a serious problem, not so under sharia.
We are all of us shaped to a large extent by our personal experiences, obviously she has had, or feels she has had, some bad if not terrible experiences. At the current time, the Middle East is in turmoil, Syria is tearing itself apart, but we in Europe have had our civil wars. We have also seen religious persecution, of Protestants by Catholics, of Catholics by Protestants, and of non-believers by both. The Egyptians and the Arabs generally may be behind us socially in many ways, but in time they will catch up. And in some ways they are ahead of us. One of the greatest causes of delinquency if not of social unrest is the nuclear family or indeed households without fathers. Islamic families are traditionally extended, and families in the true sense of the word.
Nonie Darwish makes a few valid points but her autobiography, her other writings, indeed her entire life is a polemic against Islam, foolishly or disingenuously failing to distinguish between the world’s third great religion and the political, quasi-fascist ideology that has stolen its name, Islamism. The Arabs for Israel line is even more ridiculous at a time when in spite of decades of brainwashing and smears by the likes of the ADL, many Western Jews have woken up to the true nature of Zionism.
[The above blog was first published July 30, 2012.]
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