By Sha’i ben-Tekoa
Why do Arabs chop off hands? The short answer to the question is that they suffer from a chronic plague of theft, a perennial social disease in their culture. The hand-chopping is an effort to limit the behavior. Not only is there no conscience in the culture to suppress the urge to steal, but there is even admiration for the thief who gets away with his crime. That admiration goes to the very roots of Islam.
In 1939, a year judged by cineasts to be Hollywood’s greatest year ever, one film was The Thief of Baghdad with its state-of-the-art special effects and a story drawn from A Thousand and One Nights, whose title character is a winsome little street thief played by the Indian actor Sabu. Folklorists are familiar with such folk tales, in many cultures, of the rascal, the trickster.
But no less normative in Araby is the despot stealing the wealth of the people he dominates. Commonly, when his people have had enough of his abuse and rise up, as we recently saw when Syria’s Bashar al-Assad fled Damascus, he takes all the wealth that he had looted. In 2011’s Arab Spring, Tunisia’s President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was reported to have fled the country with truckloads of gold bullion. And after Israel assassinated Hamas kingpin Isma’il Haniyeh, last year, we learned that he had become a billionaire.
Thousands of years ago, the Sages of the Jewish people read in their Torah that even before his birth, Abraham’s first-born son Ishmael, whom he sired with his wife’s Hamitic handmaiden, had been prophesied to be a “wild ass of a man.” As a sixteen-year-old, Abraham, acting at his wife’s behest, expelled Ishmael because Sarah had watched Ishmael fulfill the prophecy as he grew. She had a premonition that, when her aged husband passed, Ishmael would be capable of murdering her son, Isaac, to steal all of Abraham’s wealth, material and spiritual. In the Midrashic literature of the Sages, Ishmael’s essential character is described as that of a thief.
In 11th-century France, Rashi, the greatest of Biblical exegetes, commented on Ishmael’s expulsion, and on the fact that he did not accompany his mother back to her native, superpower country, Egypt. He preferred the life of an outlaw and went off into the Desert of Paran armed with a bow and arrow, becoming an armed robber.
By Rashi’s century, the age of the Crusades, it was common knowledge that the Middle East was rife with nomadic bands of Arabs who preyed upon innocent travelers crossing their deserts, besides raiding other tribes. Armed robbery was a way of life for the Arabs for thousands of years. Gertrude Bell, the amateur English Arab expert, who drafted the boundaries of the modern state of Iraq, wrote of these raids, which she enjoyed watching like a spectator at a tennis match.
In the 6th century, Ishmael’s descendant, Muhammed, was born. Some scholars believe Muhammed had the brains to see the difference between his idolatrous, illiterate tribesmen and the Jews, who worshipped an invisible God, were literate, and who lived according to written laws in a book. Therefore, he tried to learn Judaism.
It’s a reasonable hypothesis given that there is so much Jewish material—both from the Torah and the Talmud—plagiarized in the pages of the Koran. Some scholars believe he entered a yeshiva in Mecca, but he was such a problematic personality and character that the rabbis expelled him as Abraham expelled Ishmael.
The result? A Koran replete with dozens of Torah characters and narratives, with significant alterations. When Muslims are asked to explain the discrepancies between the different versions of the same episodes, they’ll say the Jews stole the stories from Islam and changed them. And when confronted with the fact that the Biblical canon was closed roughly a thousand years before Muhammad was born, they’ll offer a fairy tale explanation fit for inclusion in A Thousand and One Nights.
In the 7th century, when the Arabs invaded the Biblical Promised Land, they sealed the conquest by overrunning the Jews’ Temple Mount. There, they built a “war memorial” in the spirit of the Arch of Titus in Rome for the emperor’s victory over the Jews. The golden Dome of the Rock, still there, sits on the very site of the Jews’ First Temple that had stood for 410 years, and the Second Temple for 418 years. The Dome of the Rock symbolizes Islam’s conquest, not just of the Jews, but of Judaism itself, with their corrupt version triumphing over the original.
Islamic law also requires Believers in the One True Faith to visit Mecca and circumnavigate the spot where Ibrahim (the mispronunciation of the Biblical Abraham) bound his son Isma’il (the erasure of the Biblical Isaac) for a sacrifice. That version implicitly concretizes the basic Islamic belief that the Jews stole this story and changed it, replacing Ishmael with Isaac. Moreover, they argue that this world-famous religious episode did not take place, as the lying Jews claim, in Jerusalem, but in Mecca.
No less, in 1963, the Oscar for Best Picture went to David Lean’s cinematic (if not historical) masterpiece Lawrence of Arabia. In a pivotal scene, Lawrence finally gets the illiterate, tribal Arabs to attack a Turkish troop train, which they blow off the tracks, wrecking it completely. They then loot it, with each one finding some object that he fancies and wandering off with it.
Lawrence is shocked. He calls them to return for another operation. He thought he had recruited them for the noble cause of freedom from Turkish rule, but now understood they attacked just for the booty.
Lastly, the latest iteration of the Arab predilection for theft is their 20th-century invention of the verbal hologram of “Palestinians.” They use this stolen word (which always applied to the Jews who remained in Israel after Judea’s fall to Rome) to claim that they are the ancient, authentic, indigenous people of Palestine, dispossessed by the thieving Jews. This nonsense is what festers in the cracked brains of the ignorant, Jew-hating morons these days in their mobs chanting “Free, Free Palestine!”
This is Islam, a religion of theft that preaches that Believers have the right to overrun all the world’s peoples and destroy their religions.
Islam is a predatory culture afflicted with the uncontrollable appetite to steal what belongs to others, an urge it disguises as a divine command. It is a religion of theft.
And so, since they have a problem with thievery, it makes sense they are the only society in the world that lops off hands as punishment for theft—it is that serious a problem—a punishment prescribed by a legal system fit for a Stone Age people.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/04/why_do_arabs_chop_off_hands.html
