Faithfulness at work

Are some world powers the main supporters of invading armies and occupation regimes? Or rather our own weaknesses undermining our cause? In Islam, the Greater Jihad is the Inner Jihad. Why do we then focus so much more on external campaigns that our lack of discipline boycotts?

When a senior strategist and director of the Tel-Aviv University Moshe Dayan Center like Asher Susser speaks frankly to an audience of supporters and says, «Secular Palestinian nationalism is on the way out -- That is the problem (for the occupation regime)» he gives away the only real fear threatening the tyranny he serves:

To no one's surprise, it is not about a boycott campaign. It is not about people strapping bombs around their bodies. It is about faithfulness to religion, and adherence to its cohesive fundamentals. The antithesis of secular nationalisms. Cheap chauvinisms which were easily defeated by Israel in the 1970s, and which current versions - labeled 'moderate Islam' - perform like a clockwork in the academicist and conceptual warfare of imperialists.

What is the problem when a new Western clothing store sets to open several branches in the occupied territories? They will only bring more consumerism and degradation to Israel. Wouldn't we, due to that, protest or feel attacked if they opened in a Muslim country instead?

Israel is not South Africa

Boycotting wont do the job. Israel is not the South Africa of the apartheid times, an analogy often drawn. Israel's racism is not the racism of the white man over the black man: It is even more inherently the racism of self-centeredness over God.

Israel's apartheid is not just against a group of people who are different, but against spirituality too. And that changes everything, starting from the nature of the combat. That brings the battlefield to the doorstep of our inner Jihads.

Look and see what mere boycotts and secular campaigns have accomplished for the Palestinians: Even less territories and more humiliation. Do we see Israeli strategists today complicated in any way about this issue? How could they possibly be, when their entire regime is subsidized from abroad in the first place? It kills Palestinians with impunity in the year 2014 as it did in 2009, and sanctions did nothing to impede it in any way.

The conspiracy of us against ourselves

Yet if we turn to what a few well fought inner Jihads (as those of  Tabatabaei, Khomeini and Beheshti) brought for the oppressors, we stumble with a stunning view. We realize these have delivered the tyrants their most feared threat. An Islamic Revolution which resists desecration, and does so to the point that the challenges it has presented to the materialistic ideology in all levels and fields have been interpreted in the oppressors' minds as an existential threat.

It is an existential threat because the oppression lives well beyond Israel's imposed borders. Not only does it rest on staunch lobby groups deployed worldwide or in their allies' political systems but, far more importantly, it rests on each and every one of us.

Our corruptions of behavior, our laziness to access to a better understanding of our world with the intellectual faculties that God deposited on us, are the first ones undermining our good intentions. Correcting our ways, moving towards wisdom and purity, and challenging the civilization of materialism are all in all that existential threat to the Tel-Aviv apartheid regime.

What is the point of declining eating a McDonalds burger only to then reaffirm lifestyles which promote the suffocation of spirituality? What consistency is there in declining taking certain biased media as source, to then borrow our understandings of reality from third people who - like Prophets - claim to be waking us up while not even belonging to the wise men?

Not in vain Tabatabaei advised us,

Before all else, members of a society should be able to gain a true vision of the world and of men based on the real nature of things. Only then could they know and perform their duties as human beings - in which lay their real welfare. (Shia in Islam)