Friday, December 21, 2012

Gatestone Update :: Soeren Kern: Muslims Angry Over Spanish Citizenship for Jews, and more



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Muslims Angry Over Spanish Citizenship for Jews

by Soeren Kern
December 21, 2012 at 5:00 am
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Muslims are now demanding reciprocity, demanding that the Spanish government grant automatic citizenship to millions of descendants of Muslims who were also expelled from Spain in the Middle Ages.
The Spanish government has announced that it will grant automatic citizenship to Jews of Sephardic descent, whose ancestors were expelled from Spain in 1492.
The measure has been welcomed by Jewish groups, who say the move is long overdue and that it rights a historic wrong.
But Muslim groups are now clamoring for reciprocity, and are demanding that the Spanish government grant instant citizenship to millions of descendants of Muslims who were also expelled from Spain during the Middle Ages.
The so-called Right of Return for Sephardic Jews (Sepharad means Spain in Hebrew) was announced in Madrid on November 22 by the Spanish Justice Minister, Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, and the Foreign Minister, José Manuel García-Margallo.
Under existing Spanish law, Sephardic Jews already benefit from a preferential naturalization procedure that allows them to claim Spanish citizenship after having lived in Spain for only two years, a privilege that is also available to citizens of Spain's former colonies in Latin America and elsewhere.
The change means that Sephardic Jews -- wherever they live in the diaspora -- will have to present an accreditation from the Spanish Federation of Jewish Communities (FCJE), a Jewish umbrella group, confirming their ancestry to claim a Spanish passport.
Spain's offer applies only to those who identify themselves as Jewish. It does not apply to Sephardic Anousim (anousim in Hebrew means "coerced"), the descendants of Jews who were compelled by the Spanish Inquisition to convert to Roman Catholicism (they are sometimes also called crypto-Jews or Marranos). Secular anousim must seek religious training from the FCJE and undergo formal conversion to Judaism before they can obtain Spanish citizenship.
The Spanish government has not said how many Jews it expects will apply for citizenship (a total of 698 Sephardic Jews obtained Spanish citizenship during the period 2006-2010). There are an estimated three million Sephardic Jews around the world today. Most live in Israel, the United States, Belgium, Greece, France and Turkey, but there are also sizeable communities in Latin America, especially in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Venezuela.
No more than 45,000 Jews currently live in Spain -- out of a total Spanish population of 47 million -- which is only a fraction of the number of Jews who lived in the country before 1492, when Jews were forced to convert to Roman Catholicism or go into exile.
The Edict of Expulsion, issued on March 31, 1492 by the Catholic Monarchs of Spain (Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon), and also known as the Alhambra Decree, ordered Jews to leave the Kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, and their territories and possessions, by July 31 of that same year.
Up to 800,000 Jews are believed to have left Spain as a result of the decree. Another 50,000 chose to avoid expulsion by converting to Roman Catholicism.
Spain first began granting citizenship to Sephardic Jews -- on an individual basis, not en masse -- in 1988, when the government of Felipe González modified the Spanish Civil Code. The concessions were halted in 2009 by the Socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, but the procedure has now been revived and amended by the conservative government of Mariano Rajoy.
Reacting to the Rajoy government's pledge to expedite the naturalization process for Sephardic Jews, Isaac Querub, the president of the FCJE, declared that November 22, 2012 would "pass into history as a day of clear blue sky and intense luminosity."
For his part, Foreign Minister García-Margallo emphasized the historic links of the Jewish people with Spain. At a ceremony at the Centro Sefarad-Israel in Madrid, he said: "Our relations have never been forgotten and have intensified the more tolerant and democratic Spain has become."
But Spanish political commentators have been speculating about both the reason and the timing behind the government's move.
Just one week after announcing the Right of Return for Sephardic Jews, Spain voted in favor of upgrading the status of the Palestinian Authority at the United Nations. The November 29 vote was a major blow to Israel; some commentators have speculated that Spanish government announced the citizenship measure as a "gesture" to minimize the impact on bilateral relations.
Others say the Spanish government is seeking to attract Jews as a way help remedy the country's severe economic problems. Just days before welcoming Sephardic Jews back to Spain, the government announced on November 19 that it would offer residency permits (the equivalent of a US green card) to foreigners who buy houses priced at more than 160,000 euros ($200,000) as part of its efforts to revive a collapsed real estate market and divest itself of hundreds of thousands of unsold homes.
Meanwhile, Muslims are now demanding that the Spanish government grant automatic citizenship to millions of descendants of Muslims who were expelled from Spain in the seventeenth century.
Much of the Iberian Peninsula was occupied by Muslim conquerors known as the Moors from 711 until 1492, when the Moorish Kingdom of Granada surrendered to Ferdinand and Isabella. But the final Muslim expulsion from Granada, known in Arabic as Al-Andalus, did not take place until over a century later, beginning in 1609, when King Philip III decreed the Expulsion of the Moriscos.
The Moriscos were the descendants of the Muslim population that converted to Roman Catholicism under threat of exile from Ferdinand and Isabella in 1502. From 1609 through 1614, the Spanish government systematically forced an estimated 350,000 Moriscos to leave Spain for Muslim North Africa.
Today there are an estimated 5 million descendants of the Moriscos living in Morocco alone; there are millions more living in Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Mauritania, Tunisia and Turkey.
In a December 3 essay published by the Morocco-based newspaper Correo Diplomático, the Moroccan journalist Ahmed Bensalh Es-salhi wrote that the "decision to grant Spanish citizenship to the grandchildren of the Hebrews in Spain in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, while ignoring the Moriscos, the grandsons of the Muslims, is without doubt, flagrant segregation and unquestionable discrimination, as both communities suffered equally in Spain at that time. The decision could also be considered by the international community to be an historic act of absolute immorality and injustice…This decision is absolutely disgraceful and dishonorable."
Bensalh then went on to threaten Spain: "Is Spain aware of what might be assumed when it makes peace with some and not with others? Is Spain aware of what this decision could cost? Has Spain considered that it could jeopardize the massive investments that Muslims have made on its territory? Does Spain have alternatives to the foreign investment from Muslims if they ever decide to move that capital to other destinations due to the discrimination against Muslims?"
Bensalh's article is the latest salvo in an escalating battle being waged by Muslim historians and academics who are demanding that Spain treat Moriscos the same way it treats Sephardic Jews.
Jamal Bin Ammar al-Ahmar, an "Andalus-Algerian" university professor at the Ferhat Abbas University in Sétif in northeastern Algeria, has been engaged in a four-year campaign to persuade Spanish King Juan Carlos to identify and condemn those who expelled the Muslims from Al-Andalus in the fifteenth century. Al-Ahmar is also demanding that millions of Moriscos expelled from Spain be allowed to return there.
In a letter addressed to Juan Carlos, Al-Ahmar calls for a "full legal and historical investigation of the war crimes that were perpetrated on the Muslim population of Andalusia by the French, English, European and papal crusaders, whose victims were our poor miserable people, after the collapse of Islamic rule in Andalusia."
The letter speaks of "the injustice inflicted on the Muslim population of Andalusia who are still suffering in the diaspora in exile since 1492."
Al-Ahmar wants the Spanish monarch to apologize "on behalf of his ancestors" and to assume "responsibility for the consequences" that this would entail. He says it is necessary "to identify criminals, to convict retroactively, while at the same time to identify and compensate victims for their calamities and restore their titles." This process would culminate with "a decree that allows immigrants to return to their homes in Andalusia, and grant them full citizenship rights and restoration of all their properties."
Soeren Kern is a Senior Fellow at the New York-based Gatestone Institute. He is also Senior Fellow for European Politics at the Madrid-based Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group. Follow him on Facebook.
Related Topics:  Spain  |  Soeren Kern

It's Official: Muslim Population of Britain Doubles

by Douglas Murray
December 21, 2012 at 4:30 am
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The strange thing about this "multicultural" society is that it can celebrate every imaginable culture except the one that allows all these cultures to co-exist alongside each other -- and all the time with enthusiasm from pundits and politicians, busy trying to pretend that this is all the most wonderful result imaginable.
The national census for England and Wales has come out, and, as usual, this once-a-decade event has had all of its most significant points overlooked.
By any measure, what it reveals is a country undergoing seismic change. Over the course of a decade up to four million more people have entered the country to live. In the capital, London, people identifying themselves as "white British" have for the first time become a minority. Perhaps most strikingly, the national Muslim population has doubled.
This last fact is perhaps one of the least considered of the census so far. Doubled? Surely not. This has to be the claim of Mark Steyn or some other demographics-obsessed nut. Well no, it isn't, and it is now official: between 2001 and 2011 the Muslim population of the UK rose from 1.5 million to 2.7 million. Otherwise put, that is an increase from 3 percent to 4.8 percent of the overall population.
If in 2001 the British Prime Minister had said to the British public that over the next decade he intended to double the number of Muslims in the country, he would most likely never have been returned to office. But of course he did not say that, any more than any of his successors or predecessors did.
For the last decade, every major politician has lied about this issue. While talking tough, about putting a cap on immigrant numbers, pushing people to assimilate and much else besides, they have done nearly nothing. For instance, ten years ago Home Secretary David Blunkett talked as tough as he thought he could, saying that migrants ought to learn English. His successor, Jacqui Smith, said the same thing five years later. As did immigration minister Phil Woolas a couple of years after that. Throughout the last decade the Labour government managed to do exactly what the Conservative and coalition governments before and after them have also managed to do: go as far as they thought they could in rhetoric while going wholly against what they said -- and the wishes of the country -- in actions.
Now we can see the fruits of their labors. The census reveals that three million people are now living in households where no adult speaks English as their primary language. As Labour's Sadiq Khan has admitted, local councils have spent their money on translation services rather than language classes, thus actually dissuading people from learning the language. The result is communities with inter-generational language barriers. There are parts of London where a quarter of the people are in the same situation. They have created a society where many people can speak about each other but many cannot actually speak to each other. And all the while politicians and pundits are busy trying to pretend that this is all the most wonderful result imaginable.
The London Evening Standard welcomed the news that white British-born people had become a minority in their own city, and ran a lead opinion piece accusing anybody unhappy about the doubling of the number of Muslims of being "Islamophobes." Since then, the comments have barely gotten more enlightened. The author Will Self declared on the BBC's leading talk show Question Time that people unhappy about the direction Britain is going on are "racists."
On the BBC's Newsnight I sat alongside two very nice, wealthy, successful immigrants who explained how positive the census results were for Britain, showing a "diverse" and "multicultural" society. I was the only one of the four panelists to point out that this wave of immigration might have any negative effects. And the only one to point out that the strange thing about a "multicultural" society of this kind is that it can celebrate every imaginable culture other than the one which allows all these cultures to co-exist alongside each other. In other words, it is the center which is the only thing not being celebrated, and the center that is being consciously eroded. Worst of all is that this happened in defiance of the repeatedly expressed views – as tested time and again in nationwide polls – of the general public.
Of course much of this simply confirms what the last Labour government appears to have intended. Three years ago, in the same Evening Standard, Andrew Neather, a former adviser to the Blair government, said that the huge upsurge in immigration over the last decade was in part due to a politically motivated attempt by Labour ministers radically to alter the country and "rub the Right's nose in diversity.'"
He went on to say that Labour's relaxation of immigration controls was a deliberate plan to "open up the UK to mass migration," but that ministers were nervous about discussing this move publicly because they feared that it would alienate their "core working class vote."
Well, they have certainly managed to do what they wanted. The Labour government, like the Conservative governments before them, and the coalition government since, did everything it could to ignore the real concerns expressed by the majority of the public. But with no decent mainstream party to vote for, the public kept voting for the same parties as usual. Fooled by the occasional speech saying that there was going to be some"'tough" new approach, the country got stuck in a debate that has been played on repeat. Yet all the time that debate-loop was going, the ground beneath us was changing unrecognizably.
Now, true to tradition, a couple of days after the census Labour Party leader Ed Miliband has come out to declare that immigrants to Britain should learn to speak English. It is exactly what all of his recent predecessors have also said, and it is exactly what none of them -- any more than he -- have done anything concrete about. Britain has been changed, and more change is on the way. Some of those changes might be good, and others are likely to be not as good. There are those who wanted this change to happen, and there are those who did not. The former now occasionally notice that their plan has caused troubles of which they were barely aware when they set out. The latter are reviled as backwards, racist, bigoted and out-of-touch with their new country. In reality they are simply people who once had a country and have seen it changed irrevocably, and simply hold on to a feeling of sadness that nobody thought about where this would take us, or whether we the people should ever be listened to in the little matter of our own future.
Related Topics:  United Kingdom  |  Douglas Murray

Converging toward Hamas

by Shoshana Bryen
December 21, 2012 at 3:30 am
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All the years, all the dollars, all the military training and assistance, all the political acceptance -- including an "embassy" in Washington and diplomatic status -- could not buy the United States one iota of political clout where it counted. It is an enormous American failure of understanding to think those things would trump the natural morphing of Palestinian leadership toward the convergence of politics, religion and "national origin" against the "foreign." The enemy of my enemy is not my friend…. Rather than face their lack of insight, the default position of the US Administration and the Europeans is to blame Israel.
There are many points of disagreement between Fatah and Hamas; so many that they fought an ugly civil war in 2007, leaving Hamas in control of Gaza and Fatah in control of the West Bank. It is a mistake, however, to conclude from their often violent enmity, that Fatah, the so-called "moderate" faction, is or can be a partner to Israel in "peacemaking" or in finding the "two state solution" so beloved of Western politicians.
It is also a mistake for the U.S. and the West to push Israel toward concessions to Mahmoud Abbas in the hope of strengthening Fatah against Hamas.
The enemy of my enemy is not my friend. It is entirely possible for two parties to hate each other, but to agree they hate you more. And so it is in this case. Hamas and Fatah are not opposite ends of some mythical Palestinian political spectrum – they are merely different approaches to the same end.
Hamas is a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, rooted in Sunni expansionism but aligned with Iran for purposes of money, training and weapons.
This is another instance in which two parties (Sunnis and Shiites) can be at war at one level, but agree to make war together on a third party (Israel). Fatah is open to a (very temporary) political settlement with Israel as long as it brings millions of Arabs into Israel over whom Israel would exercise no functional control.
For both Fatah and Hamas, the bottom line is that the establishment of Israel in 1948, with the blessing of the United Nations, was a mistake by the international community that needs to be corrected.
It was a Western delusion to believe that the parameters of the deal the U.S. and Israel were pursuing was also the goal the Palestinians were pursuing.
President Obama, in one of his first speeches on the subject (2009) as president, said:
Let me be clear: The United States strongly supports the goal of two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security. That is a goal shared by Palestinians, Israelis, and people of goodwill around the world… That is a goal that I will actively pursue as President of the United States.
The President was asserting that the Palestinians agreed that their national aspirations could be satisfied with a split, rump state wedged between a hostile Israel and an even more hostile Jordan.
The Palestinians never agreed to original division of the British Mandate into Jordan under a Hashemite King (77%) and west-of-the-Jordan (23%) for the Jews. The Palestinians also never agreed that west-of-the-Jordan could be further subdivided to give the Jews a permanent, legitimate, sovereign piece of land . Obama was mistaken. Palestinian leadership has yet to be bribed or forced to agree that Israel is a legitimate, permanent player in the region.
Israel seeks recognition of Israel as a Jewish State and Mr. Obama appears to agree, having said only a few months ago, "The road is hard but the destination is clear – a secure, Jewish State of Israel and an independent, prosperous Palestine."
Abbas demurs. "I do not accept it. [Israel as a "Jewish state"] It is not my job to give a description of the state. Name yourself the Hebrew Socialist Republic – it's none of my business." Later he said, "Israel can call itself…the Jewish-Zionist Empire." Last year he said, "Let me make something clear about the story of the 'Jewish state'… I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I will never recognize the Jewishness of the state, or a 'Jewish state.'"
This is not a semantic problem. If the United States is wrong about the outline of a future deal, it also wrong about Palestinian internal politics. Hamas and Fatah are seeking "unity;" where they converge is in agreeing that political advances for the Palestinians put Israel at a disadvantage (the Fatah position), and that military advances for the Palestinians also put Israel at a disadvantage (the Hamas position).
So, in an uneasy alliance, Fatah pursues one and Hamas the other.
Unity, however, should not be confused with shared power. Only one faction will ultimately speak for the Palestinians, and Hamas is presently on course to swallow Fatah despite the loss of patronage from Syria.
Fatah's political advances, including UN General Assembly recognition of "Palestine" as a "non-member state," attracted little visible enthusiasm from the public, and Abbas's PA is mired economic disarray compounded by corruption.
Hamas, on the other hand, is basking in local glory for its attacks on Israel and its breakout from diplomatic isolation.
Abbas and company understand that Hamas may ultimately succeed in taking control of the Palestinian Authority. For example, Hamas rallies were permitted on the West Bank for the first time since the civil war. Abbas is discussing a possible future confederation with Jordan. Fatah has been curtailing security cooperation with the IDF and there are those who believe a third "intifada" has already begun. [Leaving an odd problem for Israel – would the IDF try to save Abbas and his corrupt administration in the face of popular enthusiasm for Hamas?] Even partial success in allowing Hamas to accede to power with minimal internecine killing might allow Fatah officials to escape to a safe haven -- their money having probably already escaped.
Abbas has flown in the face of each request by President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton for movement toward an agreement with Israel. It was inevitable because they -- and Israel -- were asking for something he does not wish to deliver: not a "two state solution," but a Fatah-Israel alliance against Hamas.
All the years, all the dollars, all the military training and assistance including stewardship by three American generals, all the political acceptance -- including an "embassy" in Washington and diplomatic status -- could not buy the United States one iota of political clout where it counted. It is an enormous American failure of understanding to think those things would trump the natural morphing of Palestinian leadership toward the convergence of politics, religion and "national origin" against the "foreign." Rather than face their lack of insight and the concomitant failure of their vision, the default position of the Administration and its European allies is to blame Israel – for a lack of "empathy" and "generosity," and for "provocation" of Palestinian irritation.
If the Palestinian leadership continues to unify under Hamas, the question will be whether the U.S. and Israel will finally be able to admit the inherent limitations of the "peace process," or whether the West will continue to push for a "two state solution" at Israel's expense.
Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of The Jewish Policy Center.
Related Topics:  Shoshana Bryen

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