The God Blog

December 15, 2008 | 8:53 pm

Shoe-hurling in the Arab world

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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When I was in Israel in August 2007, I traveled with a group of journalists to an Arab Israeli town in the upper Galilee. The purpose was to see how money from the United Jewish Communities was improving life in poor Arab towns. When I slipped out of the community center, I didn’t exactly discover the secret to coexistence.

I wandered the neighborhood before stopping to watch young boy and two young girls playing outside their house. When they noticed me, they shouted words I didn’t understand and took a few steps toward me. One of the kids was waving at me, holding some paper in their hand. This, I thought, was my invitation to go talk with these kids about their feelings about Jews. Not sure how I was going to accomplish that in Arabic, but I walked their way nonetheless.

The paper, it turned out, was money. I guess they thought that, based on my curly hair, I would drawn to a few bucks like a mouse to cheese. I tried to brush this affront off in the most embarrassing way—by engaging the children in some dialogue—at which point the little boy, maybe 8 years old, took off his sandal and held it up like he was going to swat me.

As you can imagine, I quickly turned tail. I wasn’t afraid of being attacked. I knew what the boy meant when he lifted his sandal at me. Among Arabs, showing someone the sole of your shoe is an absolutely vile curse.

“Hitting someone with a shoe is a deep insult in the Arab world, signifying that the person being struck is as low as the dirt underneath the sole of a shoe.”

The New York Times offered that explanation today after an Iraqi journalist became an Arab folk hero for throwing his shoe at President Bush and shouting “This is a gift from the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you dog!”

Well, Mr. President, I haven’t been a fan of your administration or the war in Iraq. But at least I can offer you my shared sympathy on this one.

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The word dog is very important to Arabs as well. For some reason they are considered to be filthy creatures, and in the hadiths dogs, women and Jews often appear in proximity.

Walid Shoebat, the Arab PLO terrorist turned Zionist recounts that in kindergarten the kids are taught to repeat a popular song - “Arabs are beloved and Jews are our dogs”. So when an Arab calls you a dog, it’s only one step better than calling you a Jew.

Comment by Ben Plonie on 12/16/08 at 12:32 am

Hi Ben,
Would you be able to provide evidence about your comment:
“In the hadiths dogs, women and Jews often appear in proximity”
thanks
Best regards
Abdel

Comment by abdel on 12/16/08 at 2:42 am

I was actually quoting from a second party reference, but at this time of night I found one here

Sunan Abu-Dawud, Book 2: Number 0704:
Narrated Abdullah ibn Abbas:

Ikrimah reported on the authority of Ibn Abbas, saying: I think the Apostle of Allah (peace_be_upon_him) said: When one of you prays without a sutrah, a dog, an ass, a pig, a Jew, a Magian, and a woman cut off his prayer, but it will suffice if they pass in front of him at a distance of over a stone’s throw.

Similarly

Sahih Bukhari Volume 1, Book 9, Number 493:
Narrated ‘Aisha:

The things which annual prayer were mentioned before me (and those were): a dog, a donkey and a woman. I said, “You have compared us (women) to donkeys and dogs.

My major point has to do with dogs in the Arab culture, which is the context for the shout to President Bush. We can go on all night demonstrating the cultural disgust by Arabs and Muslims of dogs.

Comment by Ben Plonie on 12/16/08 at 3:17 am

Some dislike dogs, others believe that they are superior to every other nation, and that the “goyim” are inferior, even subhuman.

Yes, it would be nice to have a dialogue with a palestinian, and you are bothered with the “shoe- display” but what do you expect? All those children see is violence, they associate ISraelis only with bombs, hanger, death and humiliation. Violence creates violence. Try to go to Carol City in Miami or some parts of Harlem, and we will see if you get some LUV! How about some areas in LA? ha? Those youngsters in projects grow up in a world ov violence and abuse, and they are agressive because of their living conditions.

Those Palestinian kids probably hear from their parents, that three quarters of their people were forced out of their homes, and the rest were denied basic human rights for the last 50 years: “Beyond Chutzbah” by Norman Finkelstein, a real eye opener on the reasons why Arabs have so much contempt toward Israel.

When the people are constantly stepped on, humiliated, violated and denied justice, they will explode. In this context your gesture of “friendship” does not seem honest. Palestinians do not need your “dialogue” they need equal human rights, like here in America, we all have equal rights, without regard to the ethnic origin or religion, and the Civil rights movements, including ADL faught hard to advance those rights here. But what about Israel? Why the same rules do not apply there? Palestinians do not believe that it was fair for them to pay for Hitler’s crimes, and they do not believe that they deserve being treated like subhumans for the last 50 years.

I do remember reading that it was the Arabs who took in the Jewish refugies in the middle ages after they were expelled from England, France and Spain. Jews lived all over the muslim world for centuries,in those “uncivilized” countries, in Turkey and Iraq, in Tunesia and Marocco, Afghanistan and even Iran. Yet, the civilazed Europe had not a ingle jew left in the middle ages, who was not forced to become a refugy, to convert or to be killed by the Inquisition. So it is hard for me to believe that Arabs are evil, as you are triying to portray. I can see that that they are very pissed off, but wouldnt anybody be in the same situation? Palestinians have been f…ked and in addition they are being told it is all their fault, and they have no rights to anyuthing but to die of starvation, and you are upset at a little “shoe gesture? How pathetic!

Comment by David on 12/18/08 at 6:31 pm

David, you have packed very many points in your post; I address them since you obviously know less than nothing. ‘Nothing’ would be an improvement.

* The only people who believe that Goyim are inferior are those Goyim who try to cover up their feelings of inferiority with antisemitism. The only people who believe Goyim are subhuman are those Goyim who prove it by acting subhuman, references on request.

* Arab kids living in an “Arab Israeli town in the upper Galilee” see no violence, ‘hanger’, death or humiliation, except that inflicted on Jewish Israelis by Arabs. They obviously weren’t forced from their homes either, although their foreign butts probably arrived in ‘Palestine’ five minutes before the music stopped in 1948.

* And the real reason why the Arabs have contempt for Israel is because of contemptible ‘Jews by Chance, Antisemites by Choice’ like Norman Finkelstein. Sure they hear stuff from creeps like him, because neither entity minds lying. Israel was never legitimately an Arab or Muslim or Christian country, and that was just as true in the long gloomy ‘Palestine’ phase foreign occupation during which the indigenous Jews suffered terribly. The false indoctrination that they get in the schools that Israel mistakenly lets them run only make matters worse.

* Arabs in Israel not only have equal rights, they have superior rights. They are taxed less and enforced even less than that; they cost the State a hundred times as much and get a hundred times more social assistance than Jews, they are exempt from both military and national service based only on their ethnicity. If they wished to relocate to what you would call a free society including under the PA or Hamas we would buy them first-class tickets to anywhere. For some reason they consistently poll as wanting to remain Israeli. And the Arabs are ferociously grabbing Jewish land and building illegal settlements that they call ‘villages’ so the foreign press (and traitorous domestic press come to think of it) can overlook them and call Jewish villages ‘settlements’.

* A word to the wise; poor conditions do not lead to terrorism, terrorism leads to poor conditions.

* Just so you know, the Arabs did not take in Jewish refugees. Jews took in Jewish refugees. The Arabs and Muslims of Turkey and Iraq, Tunesia and Marocco, Afghanistan and Iran were mostly first-class a-holes who oppressed and abused and humiliated their Jewish populations for centuries until finally torturing and expelling them penniless into Israel.

I would take that little brat’s shoes and pitch them over the fence into Gaza, and his sorry ass after them.

Comment by Ben Plonie on 12/18/08 at 8:38 pm

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