Beliefs having little basis in fact

Muslims and were allowed to practice their own religion.

Except for the Crusades interlude (10991191), Muslim conquest and expansion continued across North Africa and up the Iberian Peninsula. In Spain under Muslim rule Jewish settlers were welcomed because of their industriousness and the economic prosperity they engendered. They were allowed to own businesses and practice their professions and their religion. But political authority was limited to Muslims. After the Spaniards expelled the Muslims in 1492, they gave the Jews the choice of conversion to Christianity or exile. Most of them left.

Some Jews, called Ashkenazi, migrated to Europe and mainly settled in Poland, Russia and Germany. Sephardic Jews, settled in North Africa and the Middle East. A few even migrated to Palestine, now under Ottoman Turkish rule. These Jews were generally accepted and treated much better than the Ashkenazi were in Europe. Iran already had a large and prosperous Jewish population dating from the First Diaspora of Old Testament times.

Up until the beginning of the Zionist movement less than 10 percent of the population of Palestine was Jewish, and they were centered mostly in Jerusalem. It was the Zionists and their plans for a Jewish homeland in Palestine that changed the Muslim Arabs’ feelings toward the Jews. In 1892 a Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland proposed a Jewish Homeland in Palestine but made no mention of the 360,000 Muslim Arabs already living there. This, no doubt, disturbed both the ruling Ottoman Turks and the Palestinians. Today’s Muslim-Jewish conflict had its beginnings with this event. They have not been “hating and fighting each other since the beginnings of history” as some infer.

The Muslims have no franchise on terrorism either. When the British tried to slow Jewish immigration to Palestine toward the end of World War II, Zionist terrorists assassinated British Minister of State Lord Moyne on November 6, 1944 and bombed British trains, stations and officers clubs. On July 22, 1946 they blew up the British headquarters at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 people and engaged in other kidnappings and murders of British personnel.

There are no clean hands today in the Muslim-Israeli conflict. But hostilities go back no further than the late nineteenth century.

George B. Reed Jr., who lives in Rossville, can be reached by email at reed1600@bellsouth.net.