The Sermon Given By The Prophet (s) On The Last Friday Of Sha'ban On The Reception Of The Month of Ramadhan

Edisi Bahasa Indonesia lihat di bawah

"O People !

"Indeed ahead of you is the blessed month of Allah. A month of blessing, mercy and forgiveness. A month which with Allah is the best of months. Its days, the best of days, its nights, the best of nights, and its hours, the best of hours. It is the month which invites you to be the guests of Allah and invites you to be one of those near to Him. Each breath you take glorifies him; your sleep is worship, your deeds are accepted and your supplications are answered. So, ask Allah, your Lord; to give you a sound body and an enlightened heart so you may be able to fast and recite his book, for only he is unhappy who is devoid of Allah's forgiveness during this great month. Remember the hunger and thirst of the day of Qiyamah (Judgement) with your hunger and thirst; give alms to the needy and poor, honor your old, show kindness to the young ones, maintain relations with your blood relations; guard your tongues, close your eyes to that which is not permissible for your sight, close your ears to that which is forbidden to hear, show compassion to the orphans of people so compassion may be shown to your orphans. Repent to Allah for your sins and raise your hands in dua during these times, for they are the best of times and Allah looks towards his creatures with kindness, replying to them during the hours and granting their needs if he is asked...

"O People! Indeed your souls are dependant on your deeds, free it with Istighfar (repentance) lighten its loads by long prostrations; and know that Allah swears by his might: That there is no punishment for the one who prays and prostrates and he shall have no fear of the fire on the day when man stands before the Lord of the worlds.

"O People! One who gives Iftaar to a fasting person during this month will be like one who has freed someone and his past sins will be forgiven.

Some of the people who were there then asked the Prophet (s): "Not all of us are able to invite those who are fasting?"

The Prophet (s) replied: "Allah gives this reward even if the Iftaar (meal) is a drink of water."

"One who has good morals (Akhlaq) during this month will be able to pass the `Siraat'...on the day that feet will slip...

"One who covers the faults of others will benefit in that Allah will curb His anger on the day of Judgement...

"As for one who honors an orphan; Allah will honor him on the day of judgement,

"And for the one who spreads his kindness, Allah will spread His mercy over him on the day of Judgement.

"As for the one who cuts the ties of relation; Allah will cut His mercy from him...

"Who so ever performs a recommended prayer in this month Allah will keep the fire of Hell away from him...

"Whoever performs an obligator prayer Allah will reward him with seventy prayers [worth] in this month.

"And who so ever prays a lot during this month will have his load lightened on the day of measure.

"He who recites one verse of the holy Quran will be given the rewards of reciting the hole Qur'an during other months.

"O People! Indeed during this month the doors of heaven are open, therefore ask Allah not to close them for you; The doors of hell are closed, so ask Allah to keep them closed for you. During this month Shaytan (Satan) is imprisoned so ask your Lord not to let him have power over you."

(I, Ali bin Abi Thalib, who narrated this hadith, stand up and say, "O the Messenger of Allah, what is the best deed (amal) in this month?" He replied, "Ya Abal Hasan, the best deed in this month is that you keep yourself from what Allah has made unlawful (haram).”)


Khutbah Rasulullah: Ramadhan

Wahai manusia, sungguh telah datang pada
kalian bulan Allah dengan membawa berkah
rahmat dan maghfirah. Bulan yang paling
mulia di sisi Allah. Hari-harinya adalah
hari-hari yang paling utama.
Malam-malamnya adalah malam-malam yang
paling utama. Jam demi jamnya adalah
jam-jam yg paling utama.

Inilah bulan ketika kamu diundang
menjadi tetamu Allah dan dimuliakan
oleh-Nya. Di bulan ini nafas-nafasmu
menjadi tasbih, tidurmu ibadah,
amal-amalmu diterima dan doa-doamu
diijabah. Bermohonlah kepada Allah
Rabbmu dengan niat yang tulus dan hati
yang suci agar Allah membimbingmu untuk
melakukan shiyam dan membaca Kitab-Nya.

Celakalah orang yang tidak mendapat
ampunan Allah di bulan yang agung ini.
Kenanglah dengan rasa lapar dan hausmu,
kelaparan dan kehausan di hari kiamat.
Bersedekahlah kepada kaum fuqara dan
masakin. Muliakanlah orang tuamu,
sayangilah yang muda, sambungkanlah tali
persaudaraanmu, jaga lidahmu, tahan
pandanganmu dari apa yang tidak halal
kamu memandangnya dan pendengaranmu dari
apa yang tidak halal kamu mendengarnya.
Kasihilah anak-anak yatim, niscaya
dikasihi manusia anak-anak yatimmu.

Bertaubatlah kepada Allah dari
dosa-dosamu. Angkatlah tangan-tanganmu
untuk berdoa pada waktu solatmu karena
itulah saat-saat yang paling utama
ketika Allah Azza wa Jalla memandang
hamba-hamba-Nya dengan penuh kasih; Dia
menjawab mereka ketika mereka
menyeru-Nya, menyambut mereka ketika
mereka memanggil-Nya dan mengabulkan doa
mereka ketika mereka berdoa kepada-Nya.

Wahai manusia! Sesungguhnya diri-dirimu
tergadai karena amal-amalmu, maka
bebaskanlah dengan istighfar.
Punggung-punggungmu berat karena beban
(dosa)-mu, maka ringankanlah dengan
memperpanjang sujudmu.

Ketahuilah, Allah Ta'ala bersumpah
dengan segala kebesaran-Nya bahwa Dia
tidak akan mengadzab orang-orang yang
solat dan sujud, dan tidak akan
mengancam mereka dengan neraka pada hari
manusia berdiri di hadapan Rabbal-alamin.

Wahai manusia, barangsiapa di antaramu
memberi makanan kepada orang-orang
mukmin yang berpuasa di bulan ini, maka
di sisi Allah nilainya sama dengan
membebaskan seorang budak dan dia diberi
ampunan atas dosa-dosa yang lalu.

(Seorang sahabat bertanya, "Ya
Rasulullah, tidaklah kami semua mampu
berbuat demikian." Rasulullah meneruskan
khotbahnya, "Jagalah dirimu dari api
neraka walau pun hanya dengan sebiji
kurma. Jagalah dirimu dari api neraka
walau pun hanya dengan seteguk air.")

Wahai manusia, siapa yang membaguskan
akhlaknya di bulan ini, ia akan berhasil
melewati Sirathal Mustaqim pada hari
ketika kaki-kaki tergelincir. Siapa yang
meringankan pekerjaan orang-orang yang
dimiliki tangan kanannya (pegawai atau
pembantu) di bulan ini, Allah akan
meringankan pemeriksaan-Nya di hari
kiamat. Barangsiapa menahan kejelekannya
di bulan ini, Allah akan menahan
murka-Nya pada hari ia berjumpa dengan-Nya.

Barangsiapa memuliakan anak yatim di
bulan ini, Allah akan memuliakanya pada
hari ia berjumpa dengan-Nya. Barangsiapa
menyambungkan tali persaudaraan
(silaturahmi) di bulan ini, Allah akan
menghubungkan dia dengan rahmat-Nya pada
hari ia berjumpa dengan-Nya. Barangsiapa
memutuskan kekeluargaan di bulan ini,
Allah akan memutuskan rahmat-Nya pada
hari ia berjumpa dengan-Nya.

Barangsiapa melakukan solat sunat di
bulan ini, Allah akan menuliskan baginya
kebebasan dari api neraka. Barangsiapa
melakukan solat fardu baginya ganjaran
seperti melakukan 70 solat fardu di
bulan lain.

Barangsiapa memperbanyak selawat
kepadaku di bulan ini, Allah akan
memberatkan timbangannya pada hari
ketika timbangan meringan. Barangsiapa
di bulan ini membaca satu ayat Al-Quran,
ganjarannya sama seperti mengkhatam
Al-Quran pada bulan-bulan yang lain.

Wahai manusia! Sesungguhnya pintu-pintu
surga dibukakan bagimu, maka mintalah
kepada Tuhanmu agar tidak pernah
menutupkannya bagimu. Pintu-pintu neraka
tertutup, maka mohonlah kepada Rabbmu
untuk tidak akan pernah dibukakan
bagimu. Syaitan-syaitan terbelenggu,
maka mintalah agar ia tak lagi pernah
menguasaimu."

Aku Ali bin Abi Thalib yang
meriwayatkan hadits ini berdiri dan
berkata, "Ya Rasulullah, apa amal yang
paling utama di bulan ini?" Jawab Nabi,
"Ya Abal Hasan, amal yang paling utama
di bulan ini adalah menjaga diri dari
apa yang diharamkan Allah".)

Ramadan and Fasting Done by Other Faiths

Salaam,

Fasting Month of Ramadan is approaching. In more than 15 days Muslims will observe the same ritual they do every year. In the Holy Qur'an it is mentioned:

"O you who believe! fasting is prescribed for you, as it was prescribed for those before you, so that you may guard (against evil)." (Chapter 2, verse 183)

People would wonder as to who other than Muslim for which Allah has prescribed fasting before. The link above is one of the references in which the examples of people other than Muslim practice, or used to practice, fasting.

Islam is not the only faith where fasting is prescribed for its followers only. God knows what best for humankind.

The complete verses about Ramadan Fasting:

183. O you who believe! fasting is prescribed for you, as it was prescribed for those before you, so that you may guard (against evil).

184. For a certain number of days; but whoever among you is sick or on a journey, then (he shall fast) a (like) number of other days; and those who are not able to do it may effect a redemption by feeding a poor man; so whoever does good spontaneously it is better for him; and that you fast is better for you if you know.

185. The month of Ramadan is that in which the Quran was revealed, a guidance to men and clear proofs of the guidance and the distinction; therefore whoever of you is present in the month, he shall fast therein, and whoever is sick or upon a journey, then (he shall fast) a (like) number of other days; Allah desires ease for you, and He does not desire for you difficulty, and (He desires) that you should complete the number and that you should exalt the greatness of Allah for His having guided you and that you may give thanks.

Ramadan mubarak (soon)!

WAWANCARA "JAFFARY NEWS" TORONTO DENGAN KEL. SOEHERMAN (JAN, 2007)

(For English version see: http://abdisoeherman.blogspot.com/2011/11/interview-with-soehermans.html)

“MATA RANTAI YANG HILANG (MISSING LINK) DALAM TEORI DARWIN ITU SAYA TEMUKAN DALAM SYIAH…”

Oleh Rabiyah Kermali

Abdi dan Dian Soeherman adalah keluarga Indonesia yang dilahirkan dan dibesarkan sebagai Muslim Sunni. Seperti kebanyakan Muslim Indonesia, nenek moyang mereka telah mempraktekkan ajaran Islam sejak lama. Mereka terakhir kali pindah ke Toronto bulan Nopember 2002, setelah tinggal di Inggris dan Brazil. Saya mewawancarai keluarga ini tentang beralihnya mereka kepada Islam Syiah dan latar belakang yang mendasari keputusan mereka.

Sejak kapan anda mempraktekkan ajaran Islam Syiah?

Saya beralih kepada Syiah sejak revolusi Islam Iran. Peralihan ini lebih pada keputusan pribadi karena saya belajar keras untuk mengetahui lebih jauh tentang apa dan siapa yang melatari revolusi besar ini. Antara 1983-84 saya melakukan peralihan ini dengan bantuan guru spiritual saya, Dr. Jalaluddin Rakhmat, di Indonesia yang dia sendiri sebelumnya Sunni dan saat itu sedang belajar banyak tentang Syiah. Dia adalah seorang mubaligh dan pengajar yang memberi informasi kepada orang-orang tentang Islam Syiah sejak revolusi Iran tahun 1979. Banyak orang, khususnya anak-anak muda, yang selanjutnya menjadi Syiah.

Seberapa besar pengaruh Islam Syiah di Indonesia?

Kebanyakan orang Indonesia tidak tahu perbedaan antara Islam Sunni dan Syiah. Hanya setelah revolusi Islam Iran mulailah orang-orang sadar tentang adanya mazhab Sunni dan Syiah. Mereka yang tahu tentang perbedaan ini menjadi Syiah antara lain atas usaha para santri yang telah belajar dari Qum dan kembali ke Indonesia setelah revolusi untuk mengajari orang-orang tentang Ahlul Bait. Diantara pengaruh besar itu adalah dari Dr. Jalaluddin Rakhmat. Ada beberapa habib (sayyid) yang tinggal di Indonesia yang asal mulanya dari Yaman. Mereka mempraktekkan ajaran Sunni Syafi'i dan menyembunyikan kepercayaan Syiahnya dari publik karena mayoritas Muslim adalah Sunni pada waktu itu. Menariknya, setelah revolusi Iran mereka menunjukkan keyakinan Syiahnya terang-terangan kepada orang banyak. Karenanya, makin banyak lagi orang Indonesia yang menjadi Syiah, alhamdulillah.


Apa yang paling membuat anda tertarik kepada Syiah?

Konsep ke-imam-an (Imamiah). Islam Syiah berada pada prinsip bahwa, sebagai konsekuensi dan secara logis, untuk setiap generasi haruslah ada pemimpin yang membimbing umat. Hal ini tidak ada pada Islam Sunni karena mereka tidak menekankan pentingnya pemimpin ruhani yang ditunjuk oleh Allah SWT dan berperan sebagai Khalifah-Nya. Sebelum saya tahu tentang Syiah, saya sering bertanya-tanya: "Rasulullah sangat penting dalam Islam, karena itu secara logis keluarganya mestilah penting juga. Mula-mula, saya tidak menemukan banyak rujukan tentang keluarga Nabi Muhammad SAAW dalam buku-buku hadis Sunni. Menurut saya, Sunni tidak melihat hubungan hubungan yang sangat penting dan fundamental: mengapa Rasulullah tidak memiliki keturunan, khususnya anak laki-laki? Mengapa semua anak laki-lakinya meninggal pada waktu bayi? Saya kemudian berpikir tentang anak perempuannya Siti Fatimah AS dan membuat hubungan itu melalui putri terkasihnya ini. Siti Fatimah AS adalah ibu dari semua Imam, dan inilah keturunan utama yang Sang Nabi tinggalkan melalui kemuliaan putri satu-satunya: Pemuka Kaum Wanita di alam (Sayyidatun Nisa 'il Alamin).

Bagaimana konsep Imam Mahdi AS menurut anda?

Tidak sulit bagi saya untuk menerima Imam Mahdi AS sesudah beralih menjadi Syiah. Konsep ini merupakan akibat logis dalam meyakini Syiah. Selain itu, banyak Muslim Sunni Indonesia yang percaya tentang Imam Mahdi, termasuk juga mereka yang non-Muslim (kebanyakan orang Jawa). Mereka menyebutnya "Ratu Adil" (Penguasa Adil), meskipun mereka dan orang-orang Sunni percaya bahwa Imam Mahdi belum lahir. Tentu saja tidak mudah untuk memahami konsep gaibnya Imam. Lagi-lagi saya merenung bahwa inilah cara misterius Allah dalam menguji keimanan kita.

Dalam ketiaadaan Imam, orang akan berusaha keras untuk menjadi pengikutnya yang terbaik sehingga mereka dapat membuktikan diri mereka layak masuk dalam barisan Imam. Inilah yang kita sebut sebagai cara aktif dalam menunggu (intizar), yang semestinya menjadi ciri khas semua Syiah.

Dimana anda belajar membaca Quran dan bahasa Arab?

Di Indonesia, kami belajar membaca dan menulis bahasa Arab di madrasah atau di masjid dan di rumah. Banyak cara mudah yang telah disiapkan orang untuk belajar Quran di sana, salah satunya adalah apa yang dikenal sebagai metoda Iqra (membaca).

Bagaimana anda dapat mengetahui tentang pentingnya bulan Muharram dalam hubungannya dengan Imam Husain dan tragedi Karbala?

Ada beberapa desa di Indonesia yang menyelenggarakan peringatan Imam Husain AS bahkan meskipun mereka pengikut Islam Sunni. Syair-syair, kasidah dan puji-pujian dibacakan untuk Lima Orang Suci AS (Muhammad, Fatimah, Ali, Hasan dan Husain). Tradisi seperti ini lebih nampak dalam sejarah Sumatra kami. Dalam sejarah ini, pernah ada kerajaan dimana raja-rajanya diyakini sebagai Syiah.

Buat saya pribadi, peran Imam Husain AS sangatlah penting dalam mengembalikan Islam sejati yang dibawa Nabi Muhammad SAAW. Setelah saya mempelajari Syiah, saya mulai menyadari mengapa Imam Husain harus berkorban begitu banyak demi menyelamatkan ajaran yang kakeknya telah perjuangkan tanpa kenal lelah agar tegak. Saya sekarang mengerti mengapa dia membawa seluruh keluarganya, istri-istrinya, para perempuan dan anak-anak, bersamanya ke Karbala untuk menghadapi tiran dan musuh-musuh Islam. Setelah peralihan saya ke Syiah saya terus mendalami dan mempelajari arti sejati dari Islam Syiah sampai saya benar-benar memahami konsep pengorbanan Imam Husain.

Nyonya Soeherman (Dian) belakangan mempelajari Islam Syiah. Dia baru mengetahui bahwa orang-orang Syiah banyak memuji-muji keluarga Nabi SAAW. "Segala sesuatu berpusat pada Ahlul Bait AS dalam Islam Syiah." Dia pernah bertanya kepada ibunya mengapa orang-orang Sunni tidak berbicara tentang Imam Ali AS dengan gairah dan semangat yang sama. Dia bertanya-tanya tentang penghormatan yang kita berikan kepada umbul-umbul/bendera (alam), keranda (tabut) dan tempat-tempat atau peralatan ziarah (zarih). Di Indonesia, banyak orang Sunni mencium umbul-umbul dan menghormati tempat-tempat yang dianggap suci. Akhirnya dia menyadari bahwa ini bukanlah hal yang baru.

Abdi: Menjadi Syiah buat saya merupakan ide yang baik untuk menjadi jembatan penghubung kedua mazhab. Saya jadi lebih leluasa untuk berkumpul dan mendiskusikan pentingnya keluarga Nabi SAAW dengan yang lain dan untuk mengajari mereka betapa pentingnya berpegang teguh pada Keluarga Suci keturunan Nabi Muhammad SAAW ini. Saya pun berkeinginan untuk membawa Syiah untuk bekerja sama dan bersatu dengan saudara-saudara Sunni bahkan meskipun mereka tidak menjadi Syiah. Ada banyak tema yang dapat dikerjakan oleh kedua mazhab. Terus terang, saya menemukan lebih banyak kesamaan antara keduanya daripada perbedaaannya.

Masih Al-Dajjal, Siapa Dia?

Salaam,

Tulisan ini bermula dari pertanyaan sahabat kami, Dani, lewat Facebook. Saya munculkan di sini semoga tidak membuatnya keberatan karena saya melihat (mungkin) ada manfaatnya buat yang lain.

Pudji Ardani 22 October at 18:52
P. Abdi, maaf mengganggu.....kalau ada waktu bisa gak P. Abdi crita sedikit mengenai Dajjal...kata teman saya, Dajjal bakal keluar di sekitar Iran....dll. makasih sebelumnya.


Saalam Dani,

Saya akan coba jawab sejauh yang saya tahu ya.

Mungkin singkatnya begini. Hampir setiap agama memiliki keyakinan tentang kemunculan "Ratu Adil" atau Messiah. Yaitu keyakinan bahwa Allah akan mengutus hamba pilihan-Nya menjelang akhir zaman untuk menegakkan keadilan setelah dunia dipenuhi dengan penindasan, korupsi, kekacauan, kemaksiatan, dll.

Di kalangan agama-agama Ibrahimiyah (Abrahamic), Yudaisme, Kristen dan Islam, konsep atau keyakinan ini bahkan sangat kental.

Orang-orang Yahudi meyakini dan menunggu-nunggu Messiah mereka sejak kenabian Nabi Musa berakhir. Ketika Nabi Isa turun sebagain mereka mengira beliaulah Messiahnya. Namun pada akhirnya mereka mengingkari bukan saja sebagai Messiah bahkan juga sebagai Nabi. Mereka menganggap beliau sebagai impostor, nabi palsu, dsb. Mereka memutuskan dan meminta Gubernur Romawi pada waktu itu menyalib beliau. Mereka (orang-orang Yahudi dan Kristen) meyakini beliau wafat di tiang salib. Kita Muslim meyakini beliau diangkat Allah ke langit dan seseorang (Yudas?) dibuat-Nya serupa dengan Nabi Isa dan mengalami penyaliban.

Orang-orang Yahudi kemudian menunggu lagi Nabi/Messiah baru begitu rupa sampai mereka sengaja tinggal di Medinah. Para pendeta mereka meramalkan bahwa Nabi baru akan muncul di Arabia. Karena itu dalam sejarah Islam kita mengenal ada tiga kabilah/suku besar: Bani Quraizah, Bani Nadir dan Bani Qaynuqa. Sebelum Nabi Muhammad muncul mereka bahkan sering bersumpah terhadap orang-orang Madinah (Yatsrib) dengan mengatakan: "Demi Nabi yang akan hadir". Namun, seperti halnya yang terjadi pada Nabi Isa mereka pun akhirnya mendustakan alias menolak Nabi Muhammad. Alasannya hanya satu: beliau bukan Yahudi. Setelah ini mereka tidak lagi menanti Nabi baru melainkan Sang Masih (Messiah, Ratu Adil).

Sekarang giliran orang-orang Kristen. Setelah Yesus mereka yakini wafat di tiang salib mereka meyakini beliau bangkit lagi beberapa hari sesudahnya (Paskah). Dan setelah beliau lenyap kembali mereka metakini beliau akan hadir di akhir zaman. Syaratnya: Solomon Temple (Sinagog Nabi Sulaiman) yang sebagian temboknya sekarang jadi dinding ratapan kaum Yahudi di Jerusalem, harus berdiri tegak kembali. Karena itu para Kristen militan Amerika (sebagian mengatakan Bush termasuk di dalamnya) mendukung Zionist dan Israel habis-habisan demi terwujudnya kembali Istana Nabi Sulaiman (Solomon Temple) karena dari situlah Yesus diyakini akan muncul kembali untuk membawa keadilan.

Seperti disebutkan di atas, Islam meyakini Nabi Isa tidak wafat dan diangkat Allah ke haribaan-Nya. Hal ini ditegaskan dalam QS Ali Imran. Karena itu Quran menyebut Sang Nabi Al-Masih artinya Messiah, Ratu Adil yang ditunggu. Hampir seluruh kaum Muslimin meyakini bahwa beliau akan hadir di akhir zaman. Sebagian yang tak meyakini mendasarkan pandangannya pada "logika" dan "kondisi/pandangan modernitas" yang sulit menerima "hal-hal yang gaib". Tapi ini kita bahas terpisah nanti.

Namun demikian, meski Muslimin meyakini Nabi Isa sebagai Al-Masih, Al-Masih sejati adalah Imam Mahdi sebagaimana yang dinubuatkan Baginda Rasul Muhammad SAAW. Nama beliau yang sebenarnya adalah Muhammad. Al-Mahdi adalah gelarannya yang berarti Sang Pemberi Petunjuk.

Ringkasnya kisah, sebelum kemunculan Al-Mahdi ini ada beberapa tanda, besar dan kecil. Antara lain akan muncul seseorang yang dijuluki An-Nafsuz Zakiah (Sang Diri yang Suci) di Mekah dan beliau, sang pembawa kabar akan segera datangnya Al-mahdi, akan terbunuh/syahid di Masjidil Haram.

Selanjutnya Imam Mahdi akan muncul. Beliau akan menghancurkan Pasukan Sufyani (Para Tiran keturunan Abu Sufyan/Mu'awiyyah). Sebelum atau sesudahnya (saya harus cek lagi) Nabi Isa akan turun dan bahu membahu bersama Imam Mahdi menghancurkan kebatilan dan menegakkan keadilan. Nabi Isa akan mempersilakan Imam Mahdi memimpin salat dan bermakmum di belakangnya karena beliau mengatakan periode kenabian beliau telah berakhir setelah kehadiran Nabi dan Imam Mahdi adalah pelanjut agama Nabi Muhammad. Nabi Isa selanjutnya akan menikah dan memiliki keluarga seperti halnya para Nabi dan orang-orang biasa. Beliau akan mendatangi Kaum Nasrani/Kristen dan meluluh-lantakkan keyakinan palsu mereka bahwa beliau bukanlah Anak Tuhan (disimbolkan dengan emnghancurkan salib-salib) dan meluruskan atau melawan mereka yang menolaknya.

Orang-orang Yahudi selanjutnya menemukan orang yang mereka tunggu-tunggu sebagai Al-Masih mereka. Dia dikatakan bermata satu dan memiliki kecerdasan dan kekuatan yang luar biasa. Orang inilah yang dikenal oleh Muslimin sebagai Masihud Dajjal, Dajjal yang ditunggu-tunggu (kaum Yahudi).

Imam Mahdi dan Nabi Isa melawan Dajjal dan akhirnya berhasil membunuhnya.

Darimana Dajjal muncul, kalau saya tidak keliru dia muncul dari satu tempat di Timur Tengah, mungkin di Jerusalem. Tapi bukan di Iran. Saya kira kawan anda yang mengatakan tentang kemunculan di Iran itu keliru dengan seseorang yang berdasrkan hadis Nabi muncul di Khurasan. Sebagian orang percaya yang muncul itu Imam Mahdi, sebagian berkeyakinan pembawa kabar kehadiran Imam Mahdi. Berdasarkan Hadis dan keyakinan yang lebih kuat Imam Mahdi akan muncul di Masjidil Haram, Mekah.

Wallahu a'lam,
Abdi

Doa Bagi Orangtua

Diambil darikutipan bagian terakhir doa Imam Zainal Abidin bagi orangtua kita dalam Sahifah Sajjadiah:

- Ya Allah sampaikan salawat kepada Muhammad,
keluarganya dan keturunannya
Istimewakan kedua orangtuaku dengan yang paling
utama dari apa yang
Kau istimewan pada orangtua
hamba-hamba-Mu kaum Mukminin
Wahai yang Paling Pengasih dari yang pengasih

- Ya Allah jangan biarkan aku lupa untuk menyebut
mereka sesudah salatku
Pada saat-saat malamku
Pada saat-saat siangku

- Ya Allah sampaikan salawat kepada Muhammad dan
keluarganya
Ampunilah aku dengan doaku kepada mereka
Ampunilah mereka dengan kebajikannya terhadapku,
ampunan yang sempurna
Ridailah mereka dengan syafaatku untuk mereka,
keridaan yang paripurna
Sampaikan mereka dengan anugrah-Mu ke
tempat-tempat kesejahteraan

- Ya Allah jika ampunan-Mu datang lebih dahulu
kepada mereka
Izinkan mereka untuk member
syafaat kepadaku
jika ampunan-Mu datang lebih dahulu kepadaku
Izinkan aku untuk member syafaat
kepada mereka
Sehingga dengan kasih sayang-Mu kami berkumpul
Di rumah mulia-Mu
Di tempat ampunan dan kasih-Mu
Sungguh Engkau Pemilik karunia yang besar,
anugrah yang abadi
Engkaulah yang Maha Pengasih dari semua yang
mengasihi

Diterjemahkan oleh Prof. Dr. Jalaluddin Rakhmat

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Dialog Perbedaan dalam Islam

Ole Leho Selamat menunaikan ibadah malam Nisyfu Sya'ba. (Shab-e-Baraat) dan merayakan Hari Kelahiran Imam Agung kini: Imam Mahdi a.f.s. Semoga Allah menetapkan "taqdir" yang terbaik bagi kita di malam ini. Hidupkanlah Malam Agung ini (Rabu di Indonesia, Kamis di Kanada) hingga Fajar dengan zikir, salat dan doa. Sampaikan doa anda kepada Allah swt melalui Ariza Sang Imam. Jangan lupa untuk mendoakan orang lain terlebih dahulu.
05 August at 21:49

Frieda Achmadi-Brotoatmodjo
Ass kang, punteun ari Ariza teh saha? Naha mesti lewat Imam? Atau ini artinya gmn? Nuhun utk info nya
05 August at 22:10

Ole Leho
Ariza teh, buat yang percaya, surat yang kita kirimkan kepada Imam berisi keinginan dan doa kita kepada Allah untuk urusan dunia maupun akhirat.
05 August at 22:52

Taufik Hidayat Dopy
Ass, kang punten maksudnya Imam Agung kini teh imam agung kita saat ini?? nuhun
Thurs at 00:12

Ole Leho
Alaikum Salam,

Iya maksudku Imam Agung itu adalah Imam Mahdi. Menurut sebagian orang beliau belum lahir dan akan lahir di akhir zaman bersama Nabi Isa a.s. Menurut sebagian yang lain beliau sudah lahir pada tanggal 15 Sya'ban sekitar seribu tahun yang lalu bertepatan dengan Nisfu Sya'ban.

Karena itu dalam pertengahan Sya'ban kita melakukan dua hal: memperingati Hari Kelahiran beliau plus memperingati dan menjalankan amal Nisfu Sya'ban. Malam Nisfu Sya'ban adalah malam terbesar kedua setelah Laylatul Qadar dimana Allah mencatatkan "taqdir" kita untuk setahun ke depan. Karena itu kita dianjurkan melakukan banyak ibadah dengan menghidupkan malamnya hingga pagi hari.

Mudah2an jelas. Kalau tidak silakan tanya lagi. Trims.

Wassalaam,
Abdi
Thurs at 17:27

Fahmi Alkaff
Dengarlah dan perhatikan apa yang di sampaikan........ karena SAATNYA sudah dekaaaaaaaaaaat....!!
Thurs at 23:30

Muhammad Amin
Janganlah memberitakan hal-hal yang masih menjadi perbedaan pendapat di sebagian besar ummat.
Fri at 14:52

Ole Leho
Terima kasih atas saran anda Amin. Seperti anda lihat saya menyebutkan kedua pendapat di atas, mereka yang meyakini Imam Mahdi belum lahir dan akan hadir sebagaimana diramalkan Rasulullah di akhir zaman. Sebagian yang lain meyakini Imam telah lahir pada 15 Sya'ban 10 abad yang lalu dan gaib. Anda boleh juga tidak percaya pada keduanya.

Anda berhak memberi komentar namun tidak berhak melarang orang menyampaikan pandangannya. Jika anda mau silakan sampaikan pandangan anda sehingga tercipta dialog yang sehat.

Larang-melarang adalah kebiasan para tiran mulai Soeharto hingga Sadam yang takut pada terungkapnya kebenaran.

Wassalaam,
Abdi
Fri at 18:48

Muhammad Amin
Perbedaan pendapat tentang hal ini, telah berlangsung berabad-abad, dan tidak akan ada ahirnya. Tidak akan cukup disampaikan di Forum ini. Saya hanya menyampaikan cara saya berbicara mengenai agama kepada awam, mengindari hal-hal yang bisa menjadi pertentangan di ummat. Karena banyak sekali hal lain yang lebih penting untuk terciptanya ukhuwah di ummat islam.
P.Abdi menyebutkan "kita" dalam menyampaikannya. Jadi seolah-olah kita semua percaya pada apa yang dibicarakan P.Abdi. Atau mungkin P.Abdi hanya bicara didalam komunitas P.Abdi sendiri. Demikian mohon maaf kalau ada kata-kata yang dianggap tidak pantas.
Yesterday at 02:11

Ole Leho
Salaam Amin, terima kasih atas penjelasan anda. Tak ada yang perlu dimaafkan karena anda tidak menyakiti atau menyinggung saya. Saya malah senang dapat tanggapan dari anda, itu tanda permulaan yang baik dalam dialog, ketimbang dipendam di dalam hati padahal kita tidak sepakat.

Izinkan saya menjawab. Perbedaan tidak selalu berkonotasi negatif. Dalam Quran Allah justru menunjukkan perbedaan itu, kurang lebih, sebagai hikmah:

"Wahai umat manusia! Sesungguhnya Kami telah menciptakan kamu dari lelaki dan perempuan dan Kami telah menjadikan kamu berbagai bangsa dan bersuku puak, supaya kamu berkenal-kenalan (dan beramah mesra antara satu dengan yang lain). Sesungguhnya semulia-mulia kamu di sisi Allah ialah orang yang lebih takwanya di antara kamu, (bukan yang lebih keturunan atau bangsanya). Sesungguhnya Allah Maha Mengetahui, lagi Maha Mendalam PengetahuanNya (akan keadaan dan amalan kamu)." (QS Al Hujurat 49:13)

Allah membuat kita berbeda-beda agar kita saling mengenal satu sama lain. Bukan untuk membuat yang satu merasa lebih superior dari yang lain karena Allah tidak akan melihat dari warna kulit atau bahasa melainkan "Sesungguhnya semulia-mulia kamu di sisi Allah ialah orang yang lebih takwanya di antara kamu."

Karena itu tidak ada yang salah pada adanya perbedaan bahkan meskipun telah berlangsung berabad-abad. Yang salah adalah bila kita mengeksploitasi perbedaan itu untuk memecah belah yang biasanya hanya dilakukan oleh orang yang ingin menguasai: devide et impera (divide and conquer).

Kedua, forum ini wahana publik. Kita bebas melemparkan gagasan apapun selama kita menjaga norma dan batas susila diantara kita. Menyerang dan menyakiti bukanlah sikap mulia dan karenanya tidak bisa kita tolerate. Alhamdulillah kita tidak sedang melakukan itu.

Karena ini forum publik saya tidak harus hanya membatasi pada komunitas saya seperti yang anda sebutkan. Siapa saja yang tertarik mengakses profil saya tidak perlu dilarang membaca pikiran dan pandangan saya. Kita percaya masing-masing kita di forum ini sudah dewasa dan dapat memilih apa yang baik baginya. Bukanlah ciri saya untuk menganggap orang lain awam. Terus terang sayalah yang awam dan terus berusaha belajar dari hikmah yang muncul dari perbedaan.

Ketiga, ukhuwah tidak berarti semua sama, semua seragam. Saya tetap menjadi kawan baik anda sekalipun saya percaya kepada Imam Mahdi dan anda (mungkin) tidak. Anda tetap kawan Muslim saya yang pernah bekerja bersama di IPTN dan Brazil. Perbedaan pandangan kita tidak akan dengan sendirinya memutuskan ukhuwah kita.

Keempat, perbedaan yang telah berlangsung bertahun-tahun dan tak kunjung berhenti seperti anda katakan tidak dengan sendirinya sia-sia. Siapa yang tahu bahwa justru dari perbedaan itu seorang sadar bahwa apa yang dipahaminya selama ini keliru. Siapa yang mengira dari perbedaan itu muncul sesuatu yang justru menyelamatkannya di Hari Akhir.

Rasulullah bersabda dalam sebuah hadis sahih: "Barangsiapa yang mati tanpa mengenal imam zamannya ia mati Jahiliah." Apakah ada perbedaan pendapat mengenai hadis ini? Silakan beritahu kami.

Bagaimana dengan hadis dalam Sahih Bukhari dan Muslim dimana Rasul mengatakan khalifah/amir/pemimpin/imam sesudah beliau ada 12 orang, semuanya dari Quraisy. Dalam riwayat lain semuanya dari Bani Hasyim.

Akhirnya marilah kita selalu membuka diri terhadap setiap informasi yang datang. Jangan khawatir daya nalar kita cukup baik dalam menerima atau menolak sesuatu yang tidak cocok buat kita... bahkan sekalipun itu sebuah kebenaran.

Semoga komentar panjang lebar saya ini berguna. Sekiranya tidak just delete or forget it. Don't waste your time, just move on.

Wallahu a'lam dan wassalaam,
Abdi
Yesterday at 17:42

Muhammad Amin
Assalaamu"alaikum.
Saya setuju, dan saya faham dengan surat Alhujraat:13, perbedaan adalah merupakan sunatullah. Yang saya khawatirkan adalah perbedaan dalam memahami agama, perbedaan dalam aqidah akan mengakibatkan kita berbantah-bantahan, akan menyebabkan kita bertengkar dan akan memecah belah ummat. Itulah yang telah terjadi pada ummat Islam. Bagi kita yang punya cukup nalar mungkin tidak akan terjadi pertengkaran, permusuhan sehingga melemahkan Islam sendiri.

Dalam Alquran Allah telah berfirman" ...dan janganlah kamu berbantah-bantahan, nanti kamu jadi lemah dan hilang kekuatanmu..." Al.Anfal:46)
"Jikalau tuhanmu menghendaki, tentu Dia menjadikan manusa ummat yang satu, tetapi mereka senantiasa berselisih pendapat, kecuali orang-orang yang diberi rahmat oleh tuhanmu......" Q.S.Hud:118-119. dan ada bebreapa ayat lagi dalam Alquran yang melarang berpecah belah.
Jadi menurut saya berselisih itu dilarang oleh Allah, dan yang berselisih tidak diberi rahmat oleh Allah.

Kebenaran itu hanya satu, dan Aqidah itu hanya satu.
Yang saya maksud dengan awam itu adalah publik atau umum, dan saya tidak menganggap bahwa saya lebih faham dari publik. yang saya khawatirkan adalah terjadinya perselisihan dan pertengkaran diantara ummat. Dan itulah yang sudah menjadi kenyataan terjadi di ummat Islam.

P.Abdi saya mungkin termasuk orang yang sangat sedih dan menyesali kenapa didalam ummat islam terjdi perpecahan sehingga ada sunni ada syiah. dll. Kita sebagai manusia yang hidup jauh setelah Rosululloh, tiba-tiba saja mendapatkan ummat yang sudah bercerai berai. Saya bermimpi seandainya saya punya kemampuan saya ingin mengembalikan ummat islam ini bersatu, ingin mengembalikan seperti zaman rosululloh saw.
Oleh karena itu saya selalu menghindari hal-hal yang bisa memecah belah ummat. Dan saya tidak mau ikut-ikutan seperti orang-orang sebelum kita, yang telah membuat ummat islam seperti sekarang ini.

Hal-hal yang memulai kita bicara sekarang ini, kemudian P.Abdi menambahkan 2 hadist. Ini adalah bukan lagi suatu ikhtilaf atau hilafiah, tapi sudah merupakan perbedaan aqidah. Dan saya tidak akan mengomentarinya, karena sudah banyak orang baik yang sebelum kita, maupun sekarang telah berbantah-bantahan mengenai ini. Saya tidak mau ikut-ikutan membuang buang waktu. Masih banyak hal-hal yang lebih bermanfaat buat saya. Saya lebih baik memperbaiki akhlak saya yang masih sangat compang-camping. Saya Insyallah akan terus berusaha memahami Islam ini lebih baik. dan saya akan terus mencari kebenaran yang satu itu. Dan terahir tentu saja kita akan menjadi sahabat terus, Mudah-mudahan P. Abdi juga menemukan kebenaran yang sejati.
4 hours ago

Ole Leho
Alaikum Salaam,
Setuju 100% dengan anda tentang perpecahan (firaq); karena itu saya lebih memfokuskan pada perbedaan (ikhtilaf). Saya bahkan menyebutkan bahwa perpecahan itu sebagai alat penguasa atau kolonialis untuk menguasai (devide et impera, divide and conquer).

Tentu saja kita pantas bersedih dalam melihat perpecahan. Namun kita bisa melihat... Read more pebedaan dalam perspektif lain. Allah menciptakan manusia berbeda-beda untuk mengenal satu sama lain. Meski dalam sejarah perbedaan ini dieksploitasi sebagai alasan orang putuh memperbudak orang hitam karena alasan superiority, yang oleh Allah sudah diantisipasi dengan menyebutkan sebaik-baik kalian adalah yang paling taqwa, bukan yang putih, bukanyang Arab, dst.

Dengan terjadinya diskriminasi dan perbudakan apakah dengan begitu kita bisa menyalahkan perbedaan warna kulit? Tentu saja tidak karena bukan itu yang menjadi masalah, melainkan sikap diskriminasi, superior, takabur yang berujung pada eksploitasi satu bangsa terhadap bangsa lain.

Hal serupa dengan perpecahan yang timbul dari adanya perpecahan. Bahkan Rasulullah sendiri tidak melarang adanya perbedaan pendapat seperti dalam riwayat yang mungkin anda tahu. Yaitu ketika para sahabat melakukan perjalanan dan pada waktu salat mereka tidak menemukan air. Lalu mereka bertayamum dan salat dan meneruskan perjalanan. Tak lama kemudian mereka menemukan air dan waktu salat masih ada. Mereka berbeda pendapat, sebagian melakukan salat lagi sebagian lain tidak karena merasa telah melakukannya.

Saat mereka bertemu dengan Sang Rasul beliau bersabda bahwa yang salat kembali mendapat dua pahala, sementara yang tidak teguh dalam pendiriannya. Beliau tidak menyalahkan satu pihak pun apalagi menyalahkan perbedaan karena beliau tahu perbedaan adalah sesuatu yang alamiah selama manusia tidak memanfaatkannya buat keburukan.

Saya setuju,berbantah-bantahan seperti disebut dalam Quran betul-betul melemahkan kita, juga membuang waktu dan enerji dan sudah sepantasnya ditinggalkan.

Namun mengakui adanya perbedaan dan menjadikannya pilihan bagi setiap orang adalah sebuah cara dan sikap yang tepat. Karena itu fatwa Rektor Al-Azhar Dr. Mahmud Syaltut tahun 1959 yang mengakui Jafari sebagai mazhab kelima dalam Islam di samping Hanafi, Maliki, Syafii dan Hambali dan orang diberi keleluasaan untuk memilih merupakan terobosan yang besar. Sikap mulia dalam mengatasi perbedaan dan menghindarkan perpecahan. Dengan cara itu insya Allah perpecahan dapat dihindarkan

Salut dan sangat setuju dengan kecenderungan anda untuk lebih mengutamakan perbaikan akhlak kita; sesuatu yang menjadi prinsip utama saya dalam menilai seseorang. Dahulukan akhlak dari fikih.

Tentang awam, publik atau umum itu kita tidak berbeda. Saya tidak mengatakan bahwa anda bersikap lebih paham tapi saya menegaskan bahwa publik tidak dengan semestinya less knowledgeable dari kita. Karena itu tidak ada yang harus dikhawatirkan dengan diskusi publik. Mereka yang tertarik akan mengikuti, yang tidak akan pergi dan berkata who cares!

Saya kurang paham dengan komentar anda tentang kedua hadis tersebut. Apakah Bukhari dan Muslim berbeda aqidah dari kita? Saya tidak menambah2kan, saya mengutip hadis itu dalam hubungannya dengan komentar anda untuk tidak "... memberitakan hal-hal yang masih menjadi perbedaan pendapat...". Namun saya hargai sikap anda untuk tidak mengomentari.

Tentang aqidah, mungkin kita perlu meluruskan kesalah-kaprahan dalam penggunaannya. Aqidah adalah ushuluddin, pokok agama yang seseorang tidak dianggap Muslim bila tidak meyakininya:
1. Tauhid (keesaan Allah)
2. Nubuwah (keyakinan pada para Nabi dan Rasul dan bahwa Baginda Muhammad adalah Nabi Penutup)
3. Ma'ad (Hari Kiamat).

(Untuk lebih lengkapnya silakan merujuk pada: http://abdisoeherman.blogspot.com/2008/12/iman-dan-ilmu-pengetahuan.html#links)

Adakah perbedaan antara anda dan saya atau anda dengan Bukhari Muslim dalam hal ini? Saya yakin tidak.

Wallahu a'lam dan wassalaam,
Abdi
20 minutes ago

MahdiUnite : Message: Why candid camera was banned in Russia!!

MahdiUnite : Message: Why candid camera was banned in Russia!!

IMAN DAN ILMU PENGETAHUAN

Salaam,

Sekadar berbagi info, iman berbeda dari pengertian “percaya” yang biasa kita gunakan sehari-hari. Dalam Islam, Iman merupakan ushuluddin: pokok/dasar/fundamental agama; mencakup tiga hal utama yaitu:
- Tauhid (Keesaan Ilahi)
- Nubuah (Kenabian)
- Akhirah (Hari Akhir)

Dalam Islam Sunni, rukun Iman yang enam tercakup dalam ketiga tonggak Iman di atas:
- Iman kepada Allah (tonggak pertama)
- Iman kepada para Malaikat (pertama)
- Iman kepada para Nabi, termasuk dan khususnya Nabi Besar Muhammad Saaw (tonggak kedua)
- Iman kepada Kitab-kitab (Suci) yang diturunkan Allah kepada para Nabi (kedua)
- Iman kepada Hari Kiamat (tonggak ketiga)
- Iman kepada Qadha dan Qadar atau Takdir (pertama)

Dalam Islam Syiah, rukun Iman yang lima juga tercakup dalam ketiga pokok Iman di atas:
- Tauhid atau keesaan Allah, lawan dari syirik (tonggak pertama)
- Keadilan Ilahi, yakni keyakinan bahwa Allah itu Maha Adil (pertama)
- Nubuah (tonggak kedua)
- Imamah, keyakinan bahwa Rasulullah Saaw menunjuk para Imam sesudah wafat Beliau (kedua)
- Ma’ad atau Hari Kebangkitan atau Kiamat (tonggak ketiga)

Untuk Ushuluddin di atas seorang Muslim WAJIB beriman (100%) tanpa harus bertanya atau tanpa perantara. Untuk itu setiap orang akan dimintai pertanggung-jawabannya di Hari Akhir kelak. Dalam hal ini tidak ada kompromi, tidak ada 50%, 75% atau kurang dari 100%. Semua harus 100%. Karena itu saya yakin semua Muslim dalam milis ini memiliki 100% keimanan dalam Ushuluddin atau Rukun Iman.

Kepercayaan atau dalam hal ini keimanan kepada hal-hal yang ghaib di atas, dalam Al Quran Surat Al-Baqarah 2, ayat 3, dijadikan indikasi/pertanda orang yang bertaqwa (muttaqin), yaitu orang yang senantiasa menghadirkan Allah setiap saat, dalam kesehariannya, baik di Masjid atau di luar Masjid. Yang tidak akan melakukan perbuatan-perbuatan tercela karena menyadari Allah selalu melihat perbuatannya.

Keimanan adalah tahap yang lebih tinggi (advanced) dibandingkan keislaman. Untuk menjadi Muslim relatif “mudah”, anda cukup menyatakan “La Ilaha illa ‘llah, Muhammadar ‘Rasulullah”, Tiada tuhan selain Allah dan Muhammad Saaw adalah Rasul Allah. Dalam salah satu ayatnya Al-Quran menunjukkan hal ini:
[QS Al-Hujurat 49:14] Orang-orang Arab Badui itu berkata: "Kami telah beriman". Katakanlah (kepada mereka): "Kamu belum beriman, tetapi katakanlah: "Kami telah tunduk (ber-Islam)", karena iman itu belum masuk ke dalam hatimu dan jika kamu taat kepada Allah dan Rasul-Nya, Dia tiada akan mengurangi sedikit pun (pahala) amalanmu; sesungguhnya Allah Maha Pengampun lagi Maha Penyayang".

Keimanan itu bertingkat-tingkat sebagaimana ditunjukkan dalam tahapan berikut ini:
1. ‘ilmul yaqin (percaya/iman berdasarkan ilmu/pengetahuan)
2. ‘Aynul yaqin (percaya/iman berdasarkan penglihatan: seeing is believing)
3. ‘Haqqul yaqin (percaya/iman yang sejati)

Contoh sederhana: ada orang berkata bahwa rumah di seberang kali terbakar. Orang yang mendengarnya sebagian percaya (ilmul yaqin). Beberapa orang kemudian mendatanginya dan melihat sendiri bahwa rumah itu benar-benar terbakar (aynul yaqin). Pemilik rumah itu sempat terbakar dan merasakan panasnya api (haqqul yaqin). Namun seperti saya katakan di atas iman atau yaqin hanya relevant dengan ushuluddin. Jadi contoh yang tepat adalah tentang keberadaan Allah. Seorang seperti kebanyakan diantara kita beriman kepadanya karena informasi yang diberikan oleh agama, buku-buku, para ustad, dsb. (ilmul yaqin). Para ilmuwan, astronom atau dokter lebih yaqin lagi atas keberadaan Allah karena mereka melihat sendiri bagaimana embrio berkembang seperti dijelaskan dalam Quran, bagaimana bintang dan galaksi dan alam semesta berkembang atau seperti Maurice Bucaille yang membuktikan sendiri bahwa mumi yang ditelitinya adalah Firaun yang tenggelam setelah Nabi Musa berhasil menyeberang berdasarkan ayat Al-Quran (aynul yaqin). Sementara Rasulullah selalu bersama Jibril atau pernah berada di Sidratul Muntaha dalam Mi’rajnya (haqqul yaqin).

Karena itu haqqul yaqin biasanya dimiliki oleh para Rasul dan para Imam saja. Sayyidina Ali pernah berkata, “Sekiranya pintu surga atau neraka diperlihatkan kepadaku imanku tak akan bertambah lagi”. Ini menunjukkan bahwa beliau sudah berada dalam posisi keimanan tertinggi. Sementara Khalifah Kedua Umar berkata saat mencium Hajar Aswad, “Sekiranya aku tidak melihat Rasul menciumnya aku tidak akan melakukannya” (aynul yaqin).

Sekarang mengenai Rasulullah melakukan bekam apakah merupakan bagian dari keimanan yang meyakininya harus tanpa reserve, tanpa tedeng aling-aling, tanpa harus bertanya atau meneliti lebih lanjut?

Mula-mula, kepercayaan kepada Rasulullah Saaw adalah bagian dari Iman (tonggak kedua) dan mengikuti seluruh perkataan dan tingkah lakunya (sunnah) adalah konsekuensi dari keimanan itu dan karenanya menjadi kewajiban bagi seluruh Muslim.

Namun demikian, berbeda dengan Al-Quran secara umum hadis (tradisi yang dikaitkan dengan perkataan dan perbuatan Nabi Saaw) mengandung kebenaran yang tidak mutlaq (absolute) atau 100% otentik, tetapi muqayyad, atau relative. Hadis harus melalui proses studi kritis yang menyeluruh dan mendalam yang dengan itu diperoleh beberapa kualifikasi. Tingkatan kebenaran hadis yang paling tinggi disebut sahih. Di bawah sahih adalah hasan, sementara hadis yang ditolak disebut maudhu (palsu). Namun demikian bahkan hadis sahih pun tidak sama dengan kebenaran mutlaq Al-Quran, tetapi hanya mendekati. Betapapun mendalam dan menyeluruhnya kajian hadis kebenaran yang dapat dicapainya hanya relative sesuai dengan sifat manusia, sementara kebenaran Allah absolute, sebagaimana Allah bersabda “Al-haqqu mir Rabbika fala takunanna minal mumtarin” ([QS 2:147] Kebenaran itu adalah dari Tuhanmu, sebab itu jangan sekali-kali kamu termasuk orang-orang yang ragu). Ada beberapa hadis dalam Sahih Bukhari yang kebenarannya bahkan dapat dipertanyakan. Saya dapat memberi contoh di lain waktu.

Selanjutnya, mengenai bekam yang dilakukan Rasulullah ada dua hal yang harus kita lakukan. Pertama membuktikan bahwa hadis tentang Rasul berbekam itu sahih. Kedua, mencari, menemukan, mengkaji, menganalisa dan membuktikan bahwa metoda bekam, yang sekarang popular di Indonesia sebagai metoda alternative, BENAR-BENAR 100% sama dengan yang dilakukan Rasulullah.

Untuk yang pertama kawan-kawan dalam forum ini mungkin dapat menunjukkan kepada saya bahwa hadis tentang Rasul berbekam itu sahih atau ada dalam Kitab Sahih Bukhari atau Muslim. Saya sendiri pernah menemukannya, kalau tidak salah ingat, dalam Riadus Shalihin. Namun saya lupa apakah hadis itu mutafaq alaih atau sahih atau berasal dari Sahihain (Dua Kitab Sahih: Bukhari dan Muslim).

Untuk yang kedua, sekiranya premis pertama di atas benar, adalah penting bagi Muslim, dan ini tantangan buat para ilmuwan Muslim kiwari (contemporary), untuk membuktikan otentisitas metoda ini dalam hubungannya dengan apa yang dilakukan Nabi. Untuk itu kita tidak boleh HANYA percaya. Kita harus melakukan pengujian, penelitian dan analisa sebagaimana yang dilakukan para ilmuwan Muslim jaman dahulu seperti Ibnu Sina, Al-khawarizmi, Al-Biruni, Ibnu Rusyd, dll. Inilah yang membuat ilmu pengetahuan berkembang dalam dunia Islam. Sekiranya kita dan para ilmuwan itu tidak melakukan penelitian dan pengujian pastilah agama kita tidak berbeda dengan yang lain yang mempercayai bahwa bumi itu datar dan yang menentang seperti Galileo harus dihukum.

Al-Quran mengatakan “Fas’alu ahlaz Zikri, inkuntum la ta’lamun” ([QS 21:7 dan 16:43] …; maka bertanyalah kepada orang yang mempunyai pengetahuan jika kamu tidak mengetahui). Ini menunjukkan bahwa dalam Islam bertanya dan mencari pengetahuan sangatlah dianjurkan. Bertanya adalah jembatan menuju pengetahuan.

Kesimpulan: untuk ilmu pengetahuan kita mesti bertanya, mempertanyakan dan menguji hingga memperoleh kebenaran. Islam melarang kita mempercayai sesuatu secara membuta. Islam memerintahkan kita untuk mengetahui dan mendalami pengetahuan lebih jauh. Quran berkata “Iqra”, bacalah! Dan Rasul menyuruh kita mencari ilmu sejak buaian hingga liang lahat atau hingga ke negeri Cina.

Untuk Ayi dan kawan-kawan, terus lakukan pengkajian dan pengujian dan tidak perlu khawatir bertanya atau mempertanyakan karena hal itu tidak akan mengurangi keimanan. Insya Allah usaha anda semua memperoleh ganjaran berlipat dari Allah SWT apalagi bila akhirnya dapat diterapkan dan memang mendatangkan manfaat.

Wallahu a’lam.

The Israel Lobby

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt

For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread ‘democracy’ throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries was based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, but neither explanation can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the US provides.

Instead, the thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby’. Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country – in this case, Israel – are essentially identical.

Since the October War in 1973, Washington has provided Israel with a level of support dwarfing that given to any other state. It has been the largest annual recipient of direct economic and military assistance since 1976, and is the largest recipient in total since World War Two, to the tune of well over $140 billion (in 2004 dollars). Israel receives about $3 billion in direct assistance each year, roughly one-fifth of the foreign aid budget, and worth about $500 a year for every Israeli. This largesse is especially striking since Israel is now a wealthy industrial state with a per capita income roughly equal to that of South Korea or Spain.

Other recipients get their money in quarterly installments, but Israel receives its entire appropriation at the beginning of each fiscal year and can thus earn interest on it. Most recipients of aid given for military purposes are required to spend all of it in the US, but Israel is allowed to use roughly 25 per cent of its allocation to subsidise its own defence industry. It is the only recipient that does not have to account for how the aid is spent, which makes it virtually impossible to prevent the money from being used for purposes the US opposes, such as building settlements on the West Bank. Moreover, the US has provided Israel with nearly $3 billion to develop weapons systems, and given it access to such top-drawer weaponry as Blackhawk helicopters and F-16 jets. Finally, the US gives Israel access to intelligence it denies to its Nato allies and has turned a blind eye to Israel’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.

Washington also provides Israel with consistent diplomatic support. Since 1982, the US has vetoed 32 Security Council resolutions critical of Israel, more than the total number of vetoes cast by all the other Security Council members. It blocks the efforts of Arab states to put Israel’s nuclear arsenal on the IAEA’s agenda. The US comes to the rescue in wartime and takes Israel’s side when negotiating peace. The Nixon administration protected it from the threat of Soviet intervention and resupplied it during the October War. Washington was deeply involved in the negotiations that ended that war, as well as in the lengthy ‘step-by-step’ process that followed, just as it played a key role in the negotiations that preceded and followed the 1993 Oslo Accords. In each case there was occasional friction between US and Israeli officials, but the US consistently supported the Israeli position. One American participant at Camp David in 2000 later said: ‘Far too often, we functioned . . . as Israel’s lawyer.’ Finally, the Bush administration’s ambition to transform the Middle East is at least partly aimed at improving Israel’s strategic situation.

This extraordinary generosity might be understandable if Israel were a vital strategic asset or if there were a compelling moral case for US backing. But neither explanation is convincing. One might argue that Israel was an asset during the Cold War. By serving as America’s proxy after 1967, it helped contain Soviet expansion in the region and inflicted humiliating defeats on Soviet clients like Egypt and Syria. It occasionally helped protect other US allies (like King Hussein of Jordan) and its military prowess forced Moscow to spend more on backing its own client states. It also provided useful intelligence about Soviet capabilities.

Backing Israel was not cheap, however, and it complicated America’s relations with the Arab world. For example, the decision to give $2.2 billion in emergency military aid during the October War triggered an Opec oil embargo that inflicted considerable damage on Western economies. For all that, Israel’s armed forces were not in a position to protect US interests in the region. The US could not, for example, rely on Israel when the Iranian Revolution in 1979 raised concerns about the security of oil supplies, and had to create its own Rapid Deployment Force instead.

The first Gulf War revealed the extent to which Israel was becoming a strategic burden. The US could not use Israeli bases without rupturing the anti-Iraq coalition, and had to divert resources (e.g. Patriot missile batteries) to prevent Tel Aviv doing anything that might harm the alliance against Saddam Hussein. History repeated itself in 2003: although Israel was eager for the US to attack Iraq, Bush could not ask it to help without triggering Arab opposition. So Israel stayed on the sidelines once again.

Beginning in the 1990s, and even more after 9/11, US support has been justified by the claim that both states are threatened by terrorist groups originating in the Arab and Muslim world, and by ‘rogue states’ that back these groups and seek weapons of mass destruction. This is taken to mean not only that Washington should give Israel a free hand in dealing with the Palestinians and not press it to make concessions until all Palestinian terrorists are imprisoned or dead, but that the US should go after countries like Iran and Syria. Israel is thus seen as a crucial ally in the war on terror, because its enemies are America’s enemies. In fact, Israel is a liability in the war on terror and the broader effort to deal with rogue states.

‘Terrorism’ is not a single adversary, but a tactic employed by a wide array of political groups. The terrorist organisations that threaten Israel do not threaten the United States, except when it intervenes against them (as in Lebanon in 1982). Moreover, Palestinian terrorism is not random violence directed against Israel or ‘the West’; it is largely a response to Israel’s prolonged campaign to colonise the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

More important, saying that Israel and the US are united by a shared terrorist threat has the causal relationship backwards: the US has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around. Support for Israel is not the only source of anti-American terrorism, but it is an important one, and it makes winning the war on terror more difficult. There is no question that many al-Qaida leaders, including Osama bin Laden, are motivated by Israel’s presence in Jerusalem and the plight of the Palestinians. Unconditional support for Israel makes it easier for extremists to rally popular support and to attract recruits.

As for so-called rogue states in the Middle East, they are not a dire threat to vital US interests, except inasmuch as they are a threat to Israel. Even if these states acquire nuclear weapons – which is obviously undesirable – neither America nor Israel could be blackmailed, because the blackmailer could not carry out the threat without suffering overwhelming retaliation. The danger of a nuclear handover to terrorists is equally remote, because a rogue state could not be sure the transfer would go undetected or that it would not be blamed and punished afterwards. The relationship with Israel actually makes it harder for the US to deal with these states. Israel’s nuclear arsenal is one reason some of its neighbours want nuclear weapons, and threatening them with regime change merely increases that desire.

A final reason to question Israel’s strategic value is that it does not behave like a loyal ally. Israeli officials frequently ignore US requests and renege on promises (including pledges to stop building settlements and to refrain from ‘targeted assassinations’ of Palestinian leaders). Israel has provided sensitive military technology to potential rivals like China, in what the State Department inspector-general called ‘a systematic and growing pattern of unauthorised transfers’. According to the General Accounting Office, Israel also ‘conducts the most aggressive espionage operations against the US of any ally’. In addition to the case of Jonathan Pollard, who gave Israel large quantities of classified material in the early 1980s (which it reportedly passed on to the Soviet Union in return for more exit visas for Soviet Jews), a new controversy erupted in 2004 when it was revealed that a key Pentagon official called Larry Franklin had passed classified information to an Israeli diplomat. Israel is hardly the only country that spies on the US, but its willingness to spy on its principal patron casts further doubt on its strategic value.

Israel’s strategic value isn’t the only issue. Its backers also argue that it deserves unqualified support because it is weak and surrounded by enemies; it is a democracy; the Jewish people have suffered from past crimes and therefore deserve special treatment; and Israel’s conduct has been morally superior to that of its adversaries. On close inspection, none of these arguments is persuasive. There is a strong moral case for supporting Israel’s existence, but that is not in jeopardy. Viewed objectively, its past and present conduct offers no moral basis for privileging it over the Palestinians.

Israel is often portrayed as David confronted by Goliath, but the converse is closer to the truth. Contrary to popular belief, the Zionists had larger, better equipped and better led forces during the 1947-49 War of Independence, and the Israel Defence Forces won quick and easy victories against Egypt in 1956 and against Egypt, Jordan and Syria in 1967 – all of this before large-scale US aid began flowing. Today, Israel is the strongest military power in the Middle East. Its conventional forces are far superior to those of its neighbours and it is the only state in the region with nuclear weapons. Egypt and Jordan have signed peace treaties with it, and Saudi Arabia has offered to do so. Syria has lost its Soviet patron, Iraq has been devastated by three disastrous wars and Iran is hundreds of miles away. The Palestinians barely have an effective police force, let alone an army that could pose a threat to Israel. According to a 2005 assessment by Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies, ‘the strategic balance decidedly favours Israel, which has continued to widen the qualitative gap between its own military capability and deterrence powers and those of its neighbours.’ If backing the underdog were a compelling motive, the United States would be supporting Israel’s opponents.

That Israel is a fellow democracy surrounded by hostile dictatorships cannot account for the current level of aid: there are many democracies around the world, but none receives the same lavish support. The US has overthrown democratic governments in the past and supported dictators when this was thought to advance its interests – it has good relations with a number of dictatorships today.

Some aspects of Israeli democracy are at odds with core American values. Unlike the US, where people are supposed to enjoy equal rights irrespective of race, religion or ethnicity, Israel was explicitly founded as a Jewish state and citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship. Given this, it is not surprising that its 1.3 million Arabs are treated as second-class citizens, or that a recent Israeli government commission found that Israel behaves in a ‘neglectful and discriminatory’ manner towards them. Its democratic status is also undermined by its refusal to grant the Palestinians a viable state of their own or full political rights.

A third justification is the history of Jewish suffering in the Christian West, especially during the Holocaust. Because Jews were persecuted for centuries and could feel safe only in a Jewish homeland, many people now believe that Israel deserves special treatment from the United States. The country’s creation was undoubtedly an appropriate response to the long record of crimes against Jews, but it also brought about fresh crimes against a largely innocent third party: the Palestinians.

This was well understood by Israel’s early leaders. David Ben-Gurion told Nahum Goldmann, the president of the World Jewish Congress:

If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country . . . We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?

Since then, Israeli leaders have repeatedly sought to deny the Palestinians’ national ambitions. When she was prime minister, Golda Meir famously remarked that ‘there is no such thing as a Palestinian.’ Pressure from extremist violence and Palestinian population growth has forced subsequent Israeli leaders to disengage from the Gaza Strip and consider other territorial compromises, but not even Yitzhak Rabin was willing to offer the Palestinians a viable state. Ehud Barak’s purportedly generous offer at Camp David would have given them only a disarmed set of Bantustans under de facto Israeli control. The tragic history of the Jewish people does not obligate the US to help Israel today no matter what it does.

Israel’s backers also portray it as a country that has sought peace at every turn and shown great restraint even when provoked. The Arabs, by contrast, are said to have acted with great wickedness. Yet on the ground, Israel’s record is not distinguishable from that of its opponents. Ben-Gurion acknowledged that the early Zionists were far from benevolent towards the Palestinian Arabs, who resisted their encroachments – which is hardly surprising, given that the Zionists were trying to create their own state on Arab land. In the same way, the creation of Israel in 1947-48 involved acts of ethnic cleansing, including executions, massacres and rapes by Jews, and Israel’s subsequent conduct has often been brutal, belying any claim to moral superiority. Between 1949 and 1956, for example, Israeli security forces killed between 2700 and 5000 Arab infiltrators, the overwhelming majority of them unarmed. The IDF murdered hundreds of Egyptian prisoners of war in both the 1956 and 1967 wars, while in 1967, it expelled between 100,000 and 260,000 Palestinians from the newly conquered West Bank, and drove 80,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights.

During the first intifada, the IDF distributed truncheons to its troops and encouraged them to break the bones of Palestinian protesters. The Swedish branch of Save the Children estimated that ‘23,600 to 29,900 children required medical treatment for their beating injuries in the first two years of the intifada.’ Nearly a third of them were aged ten or under. The response to the second intifada has been even more violent, leading Ha’aretz to declare that ‘the IDF . . . is turning into a killing machine whose efficiency is awe-inspiring, yet shocking.’ The IDF fired one million bullets in the first days of the uprising. Since then, for every Israeli lost, Israel has killed 3.4 Palestinians, the majority of whom have been innocent bystanders; the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli children killed is even higher (5.7:1). It is also worth bearing in mind that the Zionists relied on terrorist bombs to drive the British from Palestine, and that Yitzhak Shamir, once a terrorist and later prime minister, declared that ‘neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat.’

The Palestinian resort to terrorism is wrong but it isn’t surprising. The Palestinians believe they have no other way to force Israeli concessions. As Ehud Barak once admitted, had he been born a Palestinian, he ‘would have joined a terrorist organisation’.

So if neither strategic nor moral arguments can account for America’s support for Israel, how are we to explain it?

The explanation is the unmatched power of the Israel Lobby. We use ‘the Lobby’ as shorthand for the loose coalition of individuals and organisations who actively work to steer US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. This is not meant to suggest that ‘the Lobby’ is a unified movement with a central leadership, or that individuals within it do not disagree on certain issues. Not all Jewish Americans are part of the Lobby, because Israel is not a salient issue for many of them. In a 2004 survey, for example, roughly 36 per cent of American Jews said they were either ‘not very’ or ‘not at all’ emotionally attached to Israel.

Jewish Americans also differ on specific Israeli policies. Many of the key organisations in the Lobby, such as the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organisations, are run by hardliners who generally support the Likud Party’s expansionist policies, including its hostility to the Oslo peace process. The bulk of US Jewry, meanwhile, is more inclined to make concessions to the Palestinians, and a few groups – such as Jewish Voice for Peace – strongly advocate such steps. Despite these differences, moderates and hardliners both favour giving steadfast support to Israel.

Not surprisingly, American Jewish leaders often consult Israeli officials, to make sure that their actions advance Israeli goals. As one activist from a major Jewish organisation wrote, ‘it is routine for us to say: “This is our policy on a certain issue, but we must check what the Israelis think.” We as a community do it all the time.’ There is a strong prejudice against criticising Israeli policy, and putting pressure on Israel is considered out of order. Edgar Bronfman Sr, the president of the World Jewish Congress, was accused of ‘perfidy’ when he wrote a letter to President Bush in mid-2003 urging him to persuade Israel to curb construction of its controversial ‘security fence’. His critics said that ‘it would be obscene at any time for the president of the World Jewish Congress to lobby the president of the United States to resist policies being promoted by the government of Israel.’

Similarly, when the president of the Israel Policy Forum, Seymour Reich, advised Condoleezza Rice in November 2005 to ask Israel to reopen a critical border crossing in the Gaza Strip, his action was denounced as ‘irresponsible’: ‘There is,’ his critics said, ‘absolutely no room in the Jewish mainstream for actively canvassing against the security-related policies . . . of Israel.’ Recoiling from these attacks, Reich announced that ‘the word “pressure” is not in my vocabulary when it comes to Israel.’

Jewish Americans have set up an impressive array of organisations to influence American foreign policy, of which AIPAC is the most powerful and best known. In 1997, Fortune magazine asked members of Congress and their staffs to list the most powerful lobbies in Washington. AIPAC was ranked second behind the American Association of Retired People, but ahead of the AFL-CIO and the National Rifle Association. A National Journal study in March 2005 reached a similar conclusion, placing AIPAC in second place (tied with AARP) in the Washington ‘muscle rankings’.

The Lobby also includes prominent Christian evangelicals like Gary Bauer, Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson, as well as Dick Armey and Tom DeLay, former majority leaders in the House of Representatives, all of whom believe Israel’s rebirth is the fulfilment of biblical prophecy and support its expansionist agenda; to do otherwise, they believe, would be contrary to God’s will. Neo-conservative gentiles such as John Bolton; Robert Bartley, the former Wall Street Journal editor; William Bennett, the former secretary of education; Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former UN ambassador; and the influential columnist George Will are also steadfast supporters.

The US form of government offers activists many ways of influencing the policy process. Interest groups can lobby elected representatives and members of the executive branch, make campaign contributions, vote in elections, try to mould public opinion etc. They enjoy a disproportionate amount of influence when they are committed to an issue to which the bulk of the population is indifferent. Policymakers will tend to accommodate those who care about the issue, even if their numbers are small, confident that the rest of the population will not penalise them for doing so.

In its basic operations, the Israel Lobby is no different from the farm lobby, steel or textile workers’ unions, or other ethnic lobbies. There is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway US policy: the Lobby’s activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For the most part, the individuals and groups that comprise it are only doing what other special interest groups do, but doing it very much better. By contrast, pro-Arab interest groups, in so far as they exist at all, are weak, which makes the Israel Lobby’s task even easier.

The Lobby pursues two broad strategies. First, it wields its significant influence in Washington, pressuring both Congress and the executive branch. Whatever an individual lawmaker or policymaker’s own views may be, the Lobby tries to make supporting Israel the ‘smart’ choice. Second, it strives to ensure that public discourse portrays Israel in a positive light, by repeating myths about its founding and by promoting its point of view in policy debates. The goal is to prevent critical comments from getting a fair hearing in the political arena. Controlling the debate is essential to guaranteeing US support, because a candid discussion of US-Israeli relations might lead Americans to favour a different policy.

A key pillar of the Lobby’s effectiveness is its influence in Congress, where Israel is virtually immune from criticism. This in itself is remarkable, because Congress rarely shies away from contentious issues. Where Israel is concerned, however, potential critics fall silent. One reason is that some key members are Christian Zionists like Dick Armey, who said in September 2002: ‘My No. 1 priority in foreign policy is to protect Israel.’ One might think that the No. 1 priority for any congressman would be to protect America. There are also Jewish senators and congressmen who work to ensure that US foreign policy supports Israel’s interests.

Another source of the Lobby’s power is its use of pro-Israel congressional staffers. As Morris Amitay, a former head of AIPAC, once admitted, ‘there are a lot of guys at the working level up here’ – on Capitol Hill – ‘who happen to be Jewish, who are willing . . . to look at certain issues in terms of their Jewishness . . . These are all guys who are in a position to make the decision in these areas for those senators . . . You can get an awful lot done just at the staff level.’

AIPAC itself, however, forms the core of the Lobby’s influence in Congress. Its success is due to its ability to reward legislators and congressional candidates who support its agenda, and to punish those who challenge it. Money is critical to US elections (as the scandal over the lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s shady dealings reminds us), and AIPAC makes sure that its friends get strong financial support from the many pro-Israel political action committees. Anyone who is seen as hostile to Israel can be sure that AIPAC will direct campaign contributions to his or her political opponents. AIPAC also organises letter-writing campaigns and encourages newspaper editors to endorse pro-Israel candidates.

There is no doubt about the efficacy of these tactics. Here is one example: in the 1984 elections, AIPAC helped defeat Senator Charles Percy from Illinois, who, according to a prominent Lobby figure, had ‘displayed insensitivity and even hostility to our concerns’. Thomas Dine, the head of AIPAC at the time, explained what happened: ‘All the Jews in America, from coast to coast, gathered to oust Percy. And the American politicians – those who hold public positions now, and those who aspire – got the message.’

AIPAC’s influence on Capitol Hill goes even further. According to Douglas Bloomfield, a former AIPAC staff member, ‘it is common for members of Congress and their staffs to turn to AIPAC first when they need information, before calling the Library of Congress, the Congressional Research Service, committee staff or administration experts.’ More important, he notes that AIPAC is ‘often called on to draft speeches, work on legislation, advise on tactics, perform research, collect co-sponsors and marshal votes’.

The bottom line is that AIPAC, a de facto agent for a foreign government, has a stranglehold on Congress, with the result that US policy towards Israel is not debated there, even though that policy has important consequences for the entire world. In other words, one of the three main branches of the government is firmly committed to supporting Israel. As one former Democratic senator, Ernest Hollings, noted on leaving office, ‘you can’t have an Israeli policy other than what AIPAC gives you around here.’ Or as Ariel Sharon once told an American audience, ‘when people ask me how they can help Israel, I tell them: “Help AIPAC.”’

Thanks in part to the influence Jewish voters have on presidential elections, the Lobby also has significant leverage over the executive branch. Although they make up fewer than 3 per cent of the population, they make large campaign donations to candidates from both parties. The Washington Post once estimated that Democratic presidential candidates ‘depend on Jewish supporters to supply as much as 60 per cent of the money’. And because Jewish voters have high turn-out rates and are concentrated in key states like California, Florida, Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania, presidential candidates go to great lengths not to antagonise them.

Key organisations in the Lobby make it their business to ensure that critics of Israel do not get important foreign policy jobs. Jimmy Carter wanted to make George Ball his first secretary of state, but knew that Ball was seen as critical of Israel and that the Lobby would oppose the appointment. In this way any aspiring policymaker is encouraged to become an overt supporter of Israel, which is why public critics of Israeli policy have become an endangered species in the foreign policy establishment.

When Howard Dean called for the United States to take a more ‘even-handed role’ in the Arab-Israeli conflict, Senator Joseph Lieberman accused him of selling Israel down the river and said his statement was ‘irresponsible’. Virtually all the top Democrats in the House signed a letter criticising Dean’s remarks, and the Chicago Jewish Star reported that ‘anonymous attackers . . . are clogging the email inboxes of Jewish leaders around the country, warning – without much evidence – that Dean would somehow be bad for Israel.’

This worry was absurd; Dean is in fact quite hawkish on Israel: his campaign co-chair was a former AIPAC president, and Dean said his own views on the Middle East more closely reflected those of AIPAC than those of the more moderate Americans for Peace Now. He had merely suggested that to ‘bring the sides together’, Washington should act as an honest broker. This is hardly a radical idea, but the Lobby doesn’t tolerate even-handedness.

During the Clinton administration, Middle Eastern policy was largely shaped by officials with close ties to Israel or to prominent pro-Israel organisations; among them, Martin Indyk, the former deputy director of research at AIPAC and co-founder of the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP); Dennis Ross, who joined WINEP after leaving government in 2001; and Aaron Miller, who has lived in Israel and often visits the country. These men were among Clinton’s closest advisers at the Camp David summit in July 2000. Although all three supported the Oslo peace process and favoured the creation of a Palestinian state, they did so only within the limits of what would be acceptable to Israel. The American delegation took its cues from Ehud Barak, co-ordinated its negotiating positions with Israel in advance, and did not offer independent proposals. Not surprisingly, Palestinian negotiators complained that they were ‘negotiating with two Israeli teams – one displaying an Israeli flag, and one an American flag’.

The situation is even more pronounced in the Bush administration, whose ranks have included such fervent advocates of the Israeli cause as Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, I. Lewis (‘Scooter’) Libby, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and David Wurmser. As we shall see, these officials have consistently pushed for policies favoured by Israel and backed by organisations in the Lobby.

The Lobby doesn’t want an open debate, of course, because that might lead Americans to question the level of support they provide. Accordingly, pro-Israel organisations work hard to influence the institutions that do most to shape popular opinion.

The Lobby’s perspective prevails in the mainstream media: the debate among Middle East pundits, the journalist Eric Alterman writes, is ‘dominated by people who cannot imagine criticising Israel’. He lists 61 ‘columnists and commentators who can be counted on to support Israel reflexively and without qualification’. Conversely, he found just five pundits who consistently criticise Israeli actions or endorse Arab positions. Newspapers occasionally publish guest op-eds challenging Israeli policy, but the balance of opinion clearly favours the other side. It is hard to imagine any mainstream media outlet in the United States publishing a piece like this one.

‘Shamir, Sharon, Bibi – whatever those guys want is pretty much fine by me,’ Robert Bartley once remarked. Not surprisingly, his newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, along with other prominent papers like the Chicago Sun-Times and the Washington Times, regularly runs editorials that strongly support Israel. Magazines like Commentary, the New Republic and the Weekly Standard defend Israel at every turn.

Editorial bias is also found in papers like the New York Times, which occasionally criticises Israeli policies and sometimes concedes that the Palestinians have legitimate grievances, but is not even-handed. In his memoirs the paper’s former executive editor Max Frankel acknowledges the impact his own attitude had on his editorial decisions: ‘I was much more deeply devoted to Israel than I dared to assert . . . Fortified by my knowledge of Israel and my friendships there, I myself wrote most of our Middle East commentaries. As more Arab than Jewish readers recognised, I wrote them from a pro-Israel perspective.’

News reports are more even-handed, in part because reporters strive to be objective, but also because it is difficult to cover events in the Occupied Territories without acknowledging Israel’s actions on the ground. To discourage unfavourable reporting, the Lobby organises letter-writing campaigns, demonstrations and boycotts of news outlets whose content it considers anti-Israel. One CNN executive has said that he sometimes gets 6000 email messages in a single day complaining about a story. In May 2003, the pro-Israel Committee for Accurate Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) organised demonstrations outside National Public Radio stations in 33 cities; it also tried to persuade contributors to withhold support from NPR until its Middle East coverage becomes more sympathetic to Israel. Boston’s NPR station, WBUR, reportedly lost more than $1 million in contributions as a result of these efforts. Further pressure on NPR has come from Israel’s friends in Congress, who have asked for an internal audit of its Middle East coverage as well as more oversight.

The Israeli side also dominates the think tanks which play an important role in shaping public debate as well as actual policy. The Lobby created its own think tank in 1985, when Martin Indyk helped to found WINEP. Although WINEP plays down its links to Israel, claiming instead to provide a ‘balanced and realistic’ perspective on Middle East issues, it is funded and run by individuals deeply committed to advancing Israel’s agenda.

The Lobby’s influence extends well beyond WINEP, however. Over the past 25 years, pro-Israel forces have established a commanding presence at the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, the Center for Security Policy, the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute, the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). These think tanks employ few, if any, critics of US support for Israel.

Take the Brookings Institution. For many years, its senior expert on the Middle East was William Quandt, a former NSC official with a well-deserved reputation for even-handedness. Today, Brookings’s coverage is conducted through the Saban Center for Middle East Studies, which is financed by Haim Saban, an Israeli-American businessman and ardent Zionist. The centre’s director is the ubiquitous Martin Indyk. What was once a non-partisan policy institute is now part of the pro-Israel chorus.

Where the Lobby has had the most difficulty is in stifling debate on university campuses. In the 1990s, when the Oslo peace process was underway, there was only mild criticism of Israel, but it grew stronger with Oslo’s collapse and Sharon’s access to power, becoming quite vociferous when the IDF reoccupied the West Bank in spring 2002 and employed massive force to subdue the second intifada.

The Lobby moved immediately to ‘take back the campuses’. New groups sprang up, like the Caravan for Democracy, which brought Israeli speakers to US colleges. Established groups like the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and Hillel joined in, and a new group, the Israel on Campus Coalition, was formed to co-ordinate the many bodies that now sought to put Israel’s case. Finally, AIPAC more than tripled its spending on programmes to monitor university activities and to train young advocates, in order to ‘vastly expand the number of students involved on campus . . . in the national pro-Israel effort’.

The Lobby also monitors what professors write and teach. In September 2002, Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, two passionately pro-Israel neo-conservatives, established a website (Campus Watch) that posted dossiers on suspect academics and encouraged students to report remarks or behaviour that might be considered hostile to Israel. This transparent attempt to blacklist and intimidate scholars provoked a harsh reaction and Pipes and Kramer later removed the dossiers, but the website still invites students to report ‘anti-Israel’ activity.

Groups within the Lobby put pressure on particular academics and universities. Columbia has been a frequent target, no doubt because of the presence of the late Edward Said on its faculty. ‘One can be sure that any public statement in support of the Palestinian people by the pre-eminent literary critic Edward Said will elicit hundreds of emails, letters and journalistic accounts that call on us to denounce Said and to either sanction or fire him,’ Jonathan Cole, its former provost, reported. When Columbia recruited the historian Rashid Khalidi from Chicago, the same thing happened. It was a problem Princeton also faced a few years later when it considered wooing Khalidi away from Columbia.

A classic illustration of the effort to police academia occurred towards the end of 2004, when the David Project produced a film alleging that faculty members of Columbia’s Middle East Studies programme were anti-semitic and were intimidating Jewish students who stood up for Israel. Columbia was hauled over the coals, but a faculty committee which was assigned to investigate the charges found no evidence of anti-semitism and the only incident possibly worth noting was that one professor had ‘responded heatedly’ to a student’s question. The committee also discovered that the academics in question had themselves been the target of an overt campaign of intimidation.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of all this is the efforts Jewish groups have made to push Congress into establishing mechanisms to monitor what professors say. If they manage to get this passed, universities judged to have an anti-Israel bias would be denied federal funding. Their efforts have not yet succeeded, but they are an indication of the importance placed on controlling debate.

A number of Jewish philanthropists have recently established Israel Studies programmes (in addition to the roughly 130 Jewish Studies programmes already in existence) so as to increase the number of Israel-friendly scholars on campus. In May 2003, NYU announced the establishment of the Taub Center for Israel Studies; similar programmes have been set up at Berkeley, Brandeis and Emory. Academic administrators emphasise their pedagogical value, but the truth is that they are intended in large part to promote Israel’s image. Fred Laffer, the head of the Taub Foundation, makes it clear that his foundation funded the NYU centre to help counter the ‘Arabic [sic] point of view’ that he thinks is prevalent in NYU’s Middle East programmes.

No discussion of the Lobby would be complete without an examination of one of its most powerful weapons: the charge of anti-semitism. Anyone who criticises Israel’s actions or argues that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over US Middle Eastern policy – an influence AIPAC celebrates – stands a good chance of being labelled an anti-semite. Indeed, anyone who merely claims that there is an Israel Lobby runs the risk of being charged with anti-semitism, even though the Israeli media refer to America’s ‘Jewish Lobby’. In other words, the Lobby first boasts of its influence and then attacks anyone who calls attention to it. It’s a very effective tactic: anti-semitism is something no one wants to be accused of.

Europeans have been more willing than Americans to criticise Israeli policy, which some people attribute to a resurgence of anti-semitism in Europe. We are ‘getting to a point’, the US ambassador to the EU said in early 2004, ‘where it is as bad as it was in the 1930s’. Measuring anti-semitism is a complicated matter, but the weight of evidence points in the opposite direction. In the spring of 2004, when accusations of European anti-semitism filled the air in America, separate surveys of European public opinion conducted by the US-based Anti-Defamation League and the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that it was in fact declining. In the 1930s, by contrast, anti-semitism was not only widespread among Europeans of all classes but considered quite acceptable.

The Lobby and its friends often portray France as the most anti-semitic country in Europe. But in 2003, the head of the French Jewish community said that ‘France is not more anti-semitic than America.’ According to a recent article in Ha’aretz, the French police have reported that anti-semitic incidents declined by almost 50 per cent in 2005; and this even though France has the largest Muslim population of any European country. Finally, when a French Jew was murdered in Paris last month by a Muslim gang, tens of thousands of demonstrators poured into the streets to condemn anti-semitism. Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin both attended the victim’s memorial service to show their solidarity.

No one would deny that there is anti-semitism among European Muslims, some of it provoked by Israel’s conduct towards the Palestinians and some of it straightforwardly racist. But this is a separate matter with little bearing on whether or not Europe today is like Europe in the 1930s. Nor would anyone deny that there are still some virulent autochthonous anti-semites in Europe (as there are in the United States) but their numbers are small and their views are rejected by the vast majority of Europeans.

Israel’s advocates, when pressed to go beyond mere assertion, claim that there is a ‘new anti-semitism’, which they equate with criticism of Israel. In other words, criticise Israeli policy and you are by definition an anti-semite. When the synod of the Church of England recently voted to divest from Caterpillar Inc on the grounds that it manufactures the bulldozers used by the Israelis to demolish Palestinian homes, the Chief Rabbi complained that this would ‘have the most adverse repercussions on . . . Jewish-Christian relations in Britain’, while Rabbi Tony Bayfield, the head of the Reform movement, said: ‘There is a clear problem of anti-Zionist – verging on anti-semitic – attitudes emerging in the grass-roots, and even in the middle ranks of the Church.’ But the Church was guilty merely of protesting against Israeli government policy.

Critics are also accused of holding Israel to an unfair standard or questioning its right to exist. But these are bogus charges too. Western critics of Israel hardly ever question its right to exist: they question its behaviour towards the Palestinians, as do Israelis themselves. Nor is Israel being judged unfairly. Israeli treatment of the Palestinians elicits criticism because it is contrary to widely accepted notions of human rights, to international law and to the principle of national self-determination. And it is hardly the only state that has faced sharp criticism on these grounds.

In the autumn of 2001, and especially in the spring of 2002, the Bush administration tried to reduce anti-American sentiment in the Arab world and undermine support for terrorist groups like al-Qaida by halting Israel’s expansionist policies in the Occupied Territories and advocating the creation of a Palestinian state. Bush had very significant means of persuasion at his disposal. He could have threatened to reduce economic and diplomatic support for Israel, and the American people would almost certainly have supported him. A May 2003 poll reported that more than 60 per cent of Americans were willing to withhold aid if Israel resisted US pressure to settle the conflict, and that number rose to 70 per cent among the ‘politically active’. Indeed, 73 per cent said that the United States should not favour either side.

Yet the administration failed to change Israeli policy, and Washington ended up backing it. Over time, the administration also adopted Israel’s own justifications of its position, so that US rhetoric began to mimic Israeli rhetoric. By February 2003, a Washington Post headline summarised the situation: ‘Bush and Sharon Nearly Identical on Mideast Policy.’ The main reason for this switch was the Lobby.

The story begins in late September 2001, when Bush began urging Sharon to show restraint in the Occupied Territories. He also pressed him to allow Israel’s foreign minister, Shimon Peres, to meet with Yasser Arafat, even though he (Bush) was highly critical of Arafat’s leadership. Bush even said publicly that he supported the creation of a Palestinian state. Alarmed, Sharon accused him of trying ‘to appease the Arabs at our expense’, warning that Israel ‘will not be Czechoslovakia’.

Bush was reportedly furious at being compared to Chamberlain, and the White House press secretary called Sharon’s remarks ‘unacceptable’. Sharon offered a pro forma apology, but quickly joined forces with the Lobby to persuade the administration and the American people that the United States and Israel faced a common threat from terrorism. Israeli officials and Lobby representatives insisted that there was no real difference between Arafat and Osama bin Laden: the United States and Israel, they said, should isolate the Palestinians’ elected leader and have nothing to do with him.

The Lobby also went to work in Congress. On 16 November, 89 senators sent Bush a letter praising him for refusing to meet with Arafat, but also demanding that the US not restrain Israel from retaliating against the Palestinians; the administration, they wrote, must state publicly that it stood behind Israel. According to the New York Times, the letter ‘stemmed’ from a meeting two weeks before between ‘leaders of the American Jewish community and key senators’, adding that AIPAC was ‘particularly active in providing advice on the letter’.

By late November, relations between Tel Aviv and Washington had improved considerably. This was thanks in part to the Lobby’s efforts, but also to America’s initial victory in Afghanistan, which reduced the perceived need for Arab support in dealing with al-Qaida. Sharon visited the White House in early December and had a friendly meeting with Bush.

In April 2002 trouble erupted again, after the IDF launched Operation Defensive Shield and resumed control of virtually all the major Palestinian areas on the West Bank. Bush knew that Israel’s actions would damage America’s image in the Islamic world and undermine the war on terrorism, so he demanded that Sharon ‘halt the incursions and begin withdrawal’. He underscored this message two days later, saying he wanted Israel to ‘withdraw without delay’. On 7 April, Condoleezza Rice, then Bush’s national security adviser, told reporters: ‘“Without delay” means without delay. It means now.’ That same day Colin Powell set out for the Middle East to persuade all sides to stop fighting and start negotiating.

Israel and the Lobby swung into action. Pro-Israel officials in the vice-president’s office and the Pentagon, as well as neo-conservative pundits like Robert Kagan and William Kristol, put the heat on Powell. They even accused him of having ‘virtually obliterated the distinction between terrorists and those fighting terrorists’. Bush himself was being pressed by Jewish leaders and Christian evangelicals. Tom DeLay and Dick Armey were especially outspoken about the need to support Israel, and DeLay and the Senate minority leader, Trent Lott, visited the White House and warned Bush to back off.

The first sign that Bush was caving in came on 11 April – a week after he told Sharon to withdraw his forces – when the White House press secretary said that the president believed Sharon was ‘a man of peace’. Bush repeated this statement publicly on Powell’s return from his abortive mission, and told reporters that Sharon had responded satisfactorily to his call for a full and immediate withdrawal. Sharon had done no such thing, but Bush was no longer willing to make an issue of it.

Meanwhile, Congress was also moving to back Sharon. On 2 May, it overrode the administration’s objections and passed two resolutions reaffirming support for Israel. (The Senate vote was 94 to 2; the House of Representatives version passed 352 to 21.) Both resolutions held that the United States ‘stands in solidarity with Israel’ and that the two countries were, to quote the House resolution, ‘now engaged in a common struggle against terrorism’. The House version also condemned ‘the ongoing support and co-ordination of terror by Yasser Arafat’, who was portrayed as a central part of the terrorism problem. Both resolutions were drawn up with the help of the Lobby. A few days later, a bipartisan congressional delegation on a fact-finding mission to Israel stated that Sharon should resist US pressure to negotiate with Arafat. On 9 May, a House appropriations subcommittee met to consider giving Israel an extra $200 million to fight terrorism. Powell opposed the package, but the Lobby backed it and Powell lost.

In short, Sharon and the Lobby took on the president of the United States and triumphed. Hemi Shalev, a journalist on the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv, reported that Sharon’s aides ‘could not hide their satisfaction in view of Powell’s failure. Sharon saw the whites of President Bush’s eyes, they bragged, and the president blinked first.’ But it was Israel’s champions in the United States, not Sharon or Israel, that played the key role in defeating Bush.

The situation has changed little since then. The Bush administration refused ever again to have dealings with Arafat. After his death, it embraced the new Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, but has done little to help him. Sharon continued to develop his plan to impose a unilateral settlement on the Palestinians, based on ‘disengagement’ from Gaza coupled with continued expansion on the West Bank. By refusing to negotiate with Abbas and making it impossible for him to deliver tangible benefits to the Palestinian people, Sharon’s strategy contributed directly to Hamas’s electoral victory. With Hamas in power, however, Israel has another excuse not to negotiate. The US administration has supported Sharon’s actions (and those of his successor, Ehud Olmert). Bush has even endorsed unilateral Israeli annexations in the Occupied Territories, reversing the stated policy of every president since Lyndon Johnson.

US officials have offered mild criticisms of a few Israeli actions, but have done little to help create a viable Palestinian state. Sharon has Bush ‘wrapped around his little finger’, the former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft said in October 2004. If Bush tries to distance the US from Israel, or even criticises Israeli actions in the Occupied Territories, he is certain to face the wrath of the Lobby and its supporters in Congress. Democratic presidential candidates understand that these are facts of life, which is the reason John Kerry went to great lengths to display unalloyed support for Israel in 2004, and why Hillary Clinton is doing the same thing today.

Maintaining US support for Israel’s policies against the Palestinians is essential as far as the Lobby is concerned, but its ambitions do not stop there. It also wants America to help Israel remain the dominant regional power. The Israeli government and pro-Israel groups in the United States have worked together to shape the administration’s policy towards Iraq, Syria and Iran, as well as its grand scheme for reordering the Middle East.

Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical. Some Americans believe that this was a war for oil, but there is hardly any direct evidence to support this claim. Instead, the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure. According to Philip Zelikow, a former member of the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and now a counsellor to Condoleezza Rice, the ‘real threat’ from Iraq was not a threat to the United States. The ‘unstated threat’ was the ‘threat against Israel’, Zelikow told an audience at the University of Virginia in September 2002. ‘The American government,’ he added, ‘doesn’t want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.’

On 16 August 2002, 11 days before Dick Cheney kicked off the campaign for war with a hardline speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Washington Post reported that ‘Israel is urging US officials not to delay a military strike against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.’ By this point, according to Sharon, strategic co-ordination between Israel and the US had reached ‘unprecedented dimensions’, and Israeli intelligence officials had given Washington a variety of alarming reports about Iraq’s WMD programmes. As one retired Israeli general later put it, ‘Israeli intelligence was a full partner to the picture presented by American and British intelligence regarding Iraq’s non-conventional capabilities.’

Israeli leaders were deeply distressed when Bush decided to seek Security Council authorisation for war, and even more worried when Saddam agreed to let UN inspectors back in. ‘The campaign against Saddam Hussein is a must,’ Shimon Peres told reporters in September 2002. ‘Inspections and inspectors are good for decent people, but dishonest people can overcome easily inspections and inspectors.’

At the same time, Ehud Barak wrote a New York Times op-ed warning that ‘the greatest risk now lies in inaction.’ His predecessor as prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, published a similar piece in the Wall Street Journal, entitled: ‘The Case for Toppling Saddam’. ‘Today nothing less than dismantling his regime will do,’ he declared. ‘I believe I speak for the overwhelming majority of Israelis in supporting a pre-emptive strike against Saddam’s regime.’ Or as Ha’aretz reported in February 2003, ‘the military and political leadership yearns for war in Iraq.’

As Netanyahu suggested, however, the desire for war was not confined to Israel’s leaders. Apart from Kuwait, which Saddam invaded in 1990, Israel was the only country in the world where both politicians and public favoured war. As the journalist Gideon Levy observed at the time, ‘Israel is the only country in the West whose leaders support the war unreservedly and where no alternative opinion is voiced.’ In fact, Israelis were so gung-ho that their allies in America told them to damp down their rhetoric, or it would look as if the war would be fought on Israel’s behalf.

Within the US, the main driving force behind the war was a small band of neo-conservatives, many with ties to Likud. But leaders of the Lobby’s major organisations lent their voices to the campaign. ‘As President Bush attempted to sell the . . . war in Iraq,’ the Forward reported, ‘America’s most important Jewish organisations rallied as one to his defence. In statement after statement community leaders stressed the need to rid the world of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction.’ The editorial goes on to say that ‘concern for Israel’s safety rightfully factored into the deliberations of the main Jewish groups.’

Although neo-conservatives and other Lobby leaders were eager to invade Iraq, the broader American Jewish community was not. Just after the war started, Samuel Freedman reported that ‘a compilation of nationwide opinion polls by the Pew Research Center shows that Jews are less supportive of the Iraq war than the population at large, 52 per cent to 62 per cent.’ Clearly, it would be wrong to blame the war in Iraq on ‘Jewish influence’. Rather, it was due in large part to the Lobby’s influence, especially that of the neo-conservatives within it.

The neo-conservatives had been determined to topple Saddam even before Bush became president. They caused a stir early in 1998 by publishing two open letters to Clinton, calling for Saddam’s removal from power. The signatories, many of whom had close ties to pro-Israel groups like JINSA or WINEP, and who included Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, Bernard Lewis, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, had little trouble persuading the Clinton administration to adopt the general goal of ousting Saddam. But they were unable to sell a war to achieve that objective. They were no more able to generate enthusiasm for invading Iraq in the early months of the Bush administration. They needed help to achieve their aim. That help arrived with 9/11. Specifically, the events of that day led Bush and Cheney to reverse course and become strong proponents of a preventive war.

At a key meeting with Bush at Camp David on 15 September, Wolfowitz advocated attacking Iraq before Afghanistan, even though there was no evidence that Saddam was involved in the attacks on the US and bin Laden was known to be in Afghanistan. Bush rejected his advice and chose to go after Afghanistan instead, but war with Iraq was now regarded as a serious possibility and on 21 November the president charged military planners with developing concrete plans for an invasion.

Other neo-conservatives were meanwhile at work in the corridors of power. We don’t have the full story yet, but scholars like Bernard Lewis of Princeton and Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins reportedly played important roles in persuading Cheney that war was the best option, though neo-conservatives on his staff – Eric Edelman, John Hannah and Scooter Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff and one of the most powerful individuals in the administration – also played their part. By early 2002 Cheney had persuaded Bush; and with Bush and Cheney on board, war was inevitable.

Outside the administration, neo-conservative pundits lost no time in making the case that invading Iraq was essential to winning the war on terrorism. Their efforts were designed partly to keep up the pressure on Bush, and partly to overcome opposition to the war inside and outside the government. On 20 September, a group of prominent neo-conservatives and their allies published another open letter: ‘Even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack,’ it read, ‘any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.’ The letter also reminded Bush that ‘Israel has been and remains America’s staunchest ally against international terrorism.’ In the 1 October issue of the Weekly Standard, Robert Kagan and William Kristol called for regime change in Iraq as soon as the Taliban was defeated. That same day, Charles Krauthammer argued in the Washington Post that after the US was done with Afghanistan, Syria should be next, followed by Iran and Iraq: ‘The war on terrorism will conclude in Baghdad,’ when we finish off ‘the most dangerous terrorist regime in the world’.

This was the beginning of an unrelenting public relations campaign to win support for an invasion of Iraq, a crucial part of which was the manipulation of intelligence in such a way as to make it seem as if Saddam posed an imminent threat. For example, Libby pressured CIA analysts to find evidence supporting the case for war and helped prepare Colin Powell’s now discredited briefing to the UN Security Council. Within the Pentagon, the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group was charged with finding links between al-Qaida and Iraq that the intelligence community had supposedly missed. Its two key members were David Wurmser, a hard-core neo-conservative, and Michael Maloof, a Lebanese-American with close ties to Perle. Another Pentagon group, the so-called Office of Special Plans, was given the task of uncovering evidence that could be used to sell the war. It was headed by Abram Shulsky, a neo-conservative with long-standing ties to Wolfowitz, and its ranks included recruits from pro-Israel think tanks. Both these organisations were created after 9/11 and reported directly to Douglas Feith.

Like virtually all the neo-conservatives, Feith is deeply committed to Israel; he also has long-term ties to Likud. He wrote articles in the 1990s supporting the settlements and arguing that Israel should retain the Occupied Territories. More important, along with Perle and Wurmser, he wrote the famous ‘Clean Break’ report in June 1996 for Netanyahu, who had just become prime minister. Among other things, it recommended that Netanyahu ‘focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq – an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right’. It also called for Israel to take steps to reorder the entire Middle East. Netanyahu did not follow their advice, but Feith, Perle and Wurmser were soon urging the Bush administration to pursue those same goals. The Ha’aretz columnist Akiva Eldar warned that Feith and Perle ‘are walking a fine line between their loyalty to American governments . . . and Israeli interests’.

Wolfowitz is equally committed to Israel. The Forward once described him as ‘the most hawkishly pro-Israel voice in the administration’, and selected him in 2002 as first among 50 notables who ‘have consciously pursued Jewish activism’. At about the same time, JINSA gave Wolfowitz its Henry M. Jackson Distinguished Service Award for promoting a strong partnership between Israel and the United States; and the Jerusalem Post, describing him as ‘devoutly pro-Israel’, named him ‘Man of the Year’ in 2003.

Finally, a brief word is in order about the neo-conservatives’ prewar support of Ahmed Chalabi, the unscrupulous Iraqi exile who headed the Iraqi National Congress. They backed Chalabi because he had established close ties with Jewish-American groups and had pledged to foster good relations with Israel once he gained power. This was precisely what pro-Israel proponents of regime change wanted to hear. Matthew Berger laid out the essence of the bargain in the Jewish Journal: ‘The INC saw improved relations as a way to tap Jewish influence in Washington and Jerusalem and to drum up increased support for its cause. For their part, the Jewish groups saw an opportunity to pave the way for better relations between Israel and Iraq, if and when the INC is involved in replacing Saddam Hussein’s regime.’

Given the neo-conservatives’ devotion to Israel, their obsession with Iraq, and their influence in the Bush administration, it isn’t surprising that many Americans suspected that the war was designed to further Israeli interests. Last March, Barry Jacobs of the American Jewish Committee acknowledged that the belief that Israel and the neo-conservatives had conspired to get the US into a war in Iraq was ‘pervasive’ in the intelligence community. Yet few people would say so publicly, and most of those who did – including Senator Ernest Hollings and Representative James Moran – were condemned for raising the issue. Michael Kinsley wrote in late 2002 that ‘the lack of public discussion about the role of Israel . . . is the proverbial elephant in the room.’ The reason for the reluctance to talk about it, he observed, was fear of being labelled an anti-semite. There is little doubt that Israel and the Lobby were key factors in the decision to go to war. It’s a decision the US would have been far less likely to take without their efforts. And the war itself was intended to be only the first step. A front-page headline in the Wall Street Journal shortly after the war began says it all: ‘President’s Dream: Changing Not Just Regime but a Region: A Pro-US, Democratic Area Is a Goal that Has Israeli and Neo-Conservative Roots.’

Pro-Israel forces have long been interested in getting the US military more directly involved in the Middle East. But they had limited success during the Cold War, because America acted as an ‘off-shore balancer’ in the region. Most forces designated for the Middle East, like the Rapid Deployment Force, were kept ‘over the horizon’ and out of harm’s way. The idea was to play local powers off against each other – which is why the Reagan administration supported Saddam against revolutionary Iran during the Iran-Iraq War – in order to maintain a balance favourable to the US.

This policy changed after the first Gulf War, when the Clinton administration adopted a strategy of ‘dual containment’. Substantial US forces would be stationed in the region in order to contain both Iran and Iraq, instead of one being used to check the other. The father of dual containment was none other than Martin Indyk, who first outlined the strategy in May 1993 at WINEP and then implemented it as director for Near East and South Asian Affairs at the National Security Council.

By the mid-1990s there was considerable dissatisfaction with dual containment, because it made the United States the mortal enemy of two countries that hated each other, and forced Washington to bear the burden of containing both. But it was a strategy the Lobby favoured and worked actively in Congress to preserve. Pressed by AIPAC and other pro-Israel forces, Clinton toughened up the policy in the spring of 1995 by imposing an economic embargo on Iran. But AIPAC and the others wanted more. The result was the 1996 Iran and Libya Sanctions Act, which imposed sanctions on any foreign companies investing more than $40 million to develop petroleum resources in Iran or Libya. As Ze’ev Schiff, the military correspondent of Ha’aretz, noted at the time, ‘Israel is but a tiny element in the big scheme, but one should not conclude that it cannot influence those within the Beltway.’

By the late 1990s, however, the neo-conservatives were arguing that dual containment was not enough and that regime change in Iraq was essential. By toppling Saddam and turning Iraq into a vibrant democracy, they argued, the US would trigger a far-reaching process of change throughout the Middle East. The same line of thinking was evident in the ‘Clean Break’ study the neo-conservatives wrote for Netanyahu. By 2002, when an invasion of Iraq was on the front-burner, regional transformation was an article of faith in neo-conservative circles.

Charles Krauthammer describes this grand scheme as the brainchild of Natan Sharansky, but Israelis across the political spectrum believed that toppling Saddam would alter the Middle East to Israel’s advantage. Aluf Benn reported in Ha’aretz (17 February 2003):

Senior IDF officers and those close to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, such as National Security Adviser Ephraim Halevy, paint a rosy picture of the wonderful future Israel can expect after the war. They envision a domino effect, with the fall of Saddam Hussein followed by that of Israel’s other enemies . . . Along with these leaders will disappear terror and weapons of mass destruction.

Once Baghdad fell in mid-April 2003, Sharon and his lieutenants began urging Washington to target Damascus. On 16 April, Sharon, interviewed in Yedioth Ahronoth, called for the United States to put ‘very heavy’ pressure on Syria, while Shaul Mofaz, his defence minister, interviewed in Ma’ariv, said: ‘We have a long list of issues that we are thinking of demanding of the Syrians and it is appropriate that it should be done through the Americans.’ Ephraim Halevy told a WINEP audience that it was now important for the US to get rough with Syria, and the Washington Post reported that Israel was ‘fuelling the campaign’ against Syria by feeding the US intelligence reports about the actions of Bashar Assad, the Syrian president.

Prominent members of the Lobby made the same arguments. Wolfowitz declared that ‘there has got to be regime change in Syria,’ and Richard Perle told a journalist that ‘a short message, a two-worded message’ could be delivered to other hostile regimes in the Middle East: ‘You’re next.’ In early April, WINEP released a bipartisan report stating that Syria ‘should not miss the message that countries that pursue Saddam’s reckless, irresponsible and defiant behaviour could end up sharing his fate’. On 15 April, Yossi Klein Halevi wrote a piece in the Los Angeles Times entitled ‘Next, Turn the Screws on Syria’, while the following day Zev Chafets wrote an article for the New York Daily News entitled ‘Terror-Friendly Syria Needs a Change, Too’. Not to be outdone, Lawrence Kaplan wrote in the New Republic on 21 April that Assad was a serious threat to America.

Back on Capitol Hill, Congressman Eliot Engel had reintroduced the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act. It threatened sanctions against Syria if it did not withdraw from Lebanon, give up its WMD and stop supporting terrorism, and it also called for Syria and Lebanon to take concrete steps to make peace with Israel. This legislation was strongly endorsed by the Lobby – by AIPAC especially – and ‘framed’, according to the Jewish Telegraph Agency, ‘by some of Israel’s best friends in Congress’. The Bush administration had little enthusiasm for it, but the anti-Syrian act passed overwhelmingly (398 to 4 in the House; 89 to 4 in the Senate), and Bush signed it into law on 12 December 2003.

The administration itself was still divided about the wisdom of targeting Syria. Although the neo-conservatives were eager to pick a fight with Damascus, the CIA and the State Department were opposed to the idea. And even after Bush signed the new law, he emphasised that he would go slowly in implementing it. His ambivalence is understandable. First, the Syrian government had not only been providing important intelligence about al-Qaida since 9/11: it had also warned Washington about a planned terrorist attack in the Gulf and given CIA interrogators access to Mohammed Zammar, the alleged recruiter of some of the 9/11 hijackers. Targeting the Assad regime would jeopardise these valuable connections, and thereby undermine the larger war on terrorism.

Second, Syria had not been on bad terms with Washington before the Iraq war (it had even voted for UN Resolution 1441), and was itself no threat to the United States. Playing hardball with it would make the US look like a bully with an insatiable appetite for beating up Arab states. Third, putting Syria on the hit list would give Damascus a powerful incentive to cause trouble in Iraq. Even if one wanted to bring pressure to bear, it made good sense to finish the job in Iraq first. Yet Congress insisted on putting the screws on Damascus, largely in response to pressure from Israeli officials and groups like AIPAC. If there were no Lobby, there would have been no Syria Accountability Act, and US policy towards Damascus would have been more in line with the national interest.

Israelis tend to describe every threat in the starkest terms, but Iran is widely seen as their most dangerous enemy because it is the most likely to acquire nuclear weapons. Virtually all Israelis regard an Islamic country in the Middle East with nuclear weapons as a threat to their existence. ‘Iraq is a problem . . . But you should understand, if you ask me, today Iran is more dangerous than Iraq,’ the defence minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, remarked a month before the Iraq war.

Sharon began pushing the US to confront Iran in November 2002, in an interview in the Times. Describing Iran as the ‘centre of world terror’, and bent on acquiring nuclear weapons, he declared that the Bush administration should put the strong arm on Iran ‘the day after’ it conquered Iraq. In late April 2003, Ha’aretz reported that the Israeli ambassador in Washington was calling for regime change in Iran. The overthrow of Saddam, he noted, was ‘not enough’. In his words, America ‘has to follow through. We still have great threats of that magnitude coming from Syria, coming from Iran.’

The neo-conservatives, too, lost no time in making the case for regime change in Tehran. On 6 May, the AEI co-sponsored an all-day conference on Iran with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the Hudson Institute, both champions of Israel. The speakers were all strongly pro-Israel, and many called for the US to replace the Iranian regime with a democracy. As usual, a bevy of articles by prominent neo-conservatives made the case for going after Iran. ‘The liberation of Iraq was the first great battle for the future of the Middle East . . . But the next great battle – not, we hope, a military battle – will be for Iran,’ William Kristol wrote in the Weekly Standard on 12 May.

The administration has responded to the Lobby’s pressure by working overtime to shut down Iran’s nuclear programme. But Washington has had little success, and Iran seems determined to create a nuclear arsenal. As a result, the Lobby has intensified its pressure. Op-eds and other articles now warn of imminent dangers from a nuclear Iran, caution against any appeasement of a ‘terrorist’ regime, and hint darkly of preventive action should diplomacy fail. The Lobby is pushing Congress to approve the Iran Freedom Support Act, which would expand existing sanctions. Israeli officials also warn they may take pre-emptive action should Iran continue down the nuclear road, threats partly intended to keep Washington’s attention on the issue.

One might argue that Israel and the Lobby have not had much influence on policy towards Iran, because the US has its own reasons for keeping Iran from going nuclear. There is some truth in this, but Iran’s nuclear ambitions do not pose a direct threat to the US. If Washington could live with a nuclear Soviet Union, a nuclear China or even a nuclear North Korea, it can live with a nuclear Iran. And that is why the Lobby must keep up constant pressure on politicians to confront Tehran. Iran and the US would hardly be allies if the Lobby did not exist, but US policy would be more temperate and preventive war would not be a serious option.

It is not surprising that Israel and its American supporters want the US to deal with any and all threats to Israel’s security. If their efforts to shape US policy succeed, Israel’s enemies will be weakened or overthrown, Israel will get a free hand with the Palestinians, and the US will do most of the fighting, dying, rebuilding and paying. But even if the US fails to transform the Middle East and finds itself in conflict with an increasingly radicalised Arab and Islamic world, Israel will end up protected by the world’s only superpower. This is not a perfect outcome from the Lobby’s point of view, but it is obviously preferable to Washington distancing itself, or using its leverage to force Israel to make peace with the Palestinians.

Can the Lobby’s power be curtailed? One would like to think so, given the Iraq debacle, the obvious need to rebuild America’s image in the Arab and Islamic world, and the recent revelations about AIPAC officials passing US government secrets to Israel. One might also think that Arafat’s death and the election of the more moderate Mahmoud Abbas would cause Washington to press vigorously and even-handedly for a peace agreement. In short, there are ample grounds for leaders to distance themselves from the Lobby and adopt a Middle East policy more consistent with broader US interests. In particular, using American power to achieve a just peace between Israel and the Palestinians would help advance the cause of democracy in the region.

But that is not going to happen – not soon anyway. AIPAC and its allies (including Christian Zionists) have no serious opponents in the lobbying world. They know it has become more difficult to make Israel’s case today, and they are responding by taking on staff and expanding their activities. Besides, American politicians remain acutely sensitive to campaign contributions and other forms of political pressure, and major media outlets are likely to remain sympathetic to Israel no matter what it does.

The Lobby’s influence causes trouble on several fronts. It increases the terrorist danger that all states face – including America’s European allies. It has made it impossible to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a situation that gives extremists a powerful recruiting tool, increases the pool of potential terrorists and sympathisers, and contributes to Islamic radicalism in Europe and Asia.

Equally worrying, the Lobby’s campaign for regime change in Iran and Syria could lead the US to attack those countries, with potentially disastrous effects. We don’t need another Iraq. At a minimum, the Lobby’s hostility towards Syria and Iran makes it almost impossible for Washington to enlist them in the struggle against al-Qaida and the Iraqi insurgency, where their help is badly needed.

There is a moral dimension here as well. Thanks to the Lobby, the United States has become the de facto enabler of Israeli expansion in the Occupied Territories, making it complicit in the crimes perpetrated against the Palestinians. This situation undercuts Washington’s efforts to promote democracy abroad and makes it look hypocritical when it presses other states to respect human rights. US efforts to limit nuclear proliferation appear equally hypocritical given its willingness to accept Israel’s nuclear arsenal, which only encourages Iran and others to seek a similar capability.

Besides, the Lobby’s campaign to quash debate about Israel is unhealthy for democracy. Silencing sceptics by organising blacklists and boycotts – or by suggesting that critics are anti-semites – violates the principle of open debate on which democracy depends. The inability of Congress to conduct a genuine debate on these important issues paralyses the entire process of democratic deliberation. Israel’s backers should be free to make their case and to challenge those who disagree with them, but efforts to stifle debate by intimidation must be roundly condemned.

Finally, the Lobby’s influence has been bad for Israel. Its ability to persuade Washington to support an expansionist agenda has discouraged Israel from seizing opportunities – including a peace treaty with Syria and a prompt and full implementation of the Oslo Accords – that would have saved Israeli lives and shrunk the ranks of Palestinian extremists. Denying the Palestinians their legitimate political rights certainly has not made Israel more secure, and the long campaign to kill or marginalise a generation of Palestinian leaders has empowered extremist groups like Hamas, and reduced the number of Palestinian leaders who would be willing to accept a fair settlement and able to make it work. Israel itself would probably be better off if the Lobby were less powerful and US policy more even-handed.

There is a ray of hope, however. Although the Lobby remains a powerful force, the adverse effects of its influence are increasingly difficult to hide. Powerful states can maintain flawed policies for quite some time, but reality cannot be ignored for ever. What is needed is a candid discussion of the Lobby’s influence and a more open debate about US interests in this vital region. Israel’s well-being is one of those interests, but its continued occupation of the West Bank and its broader regional agenda are not. Open debate will expose the limits of the strategic and moral case for one-sided US support and could move the US to a position more consistent with its own national interest, with the interests of the other states in the region, and with Israel’s long-term interests as well.

10 March