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THINK-ISRAEL |
Eliyahu Tal, the compiler and editor of "Israel in Medialand"[1], in his introduction, provides a convenient setting for this article. In his words,
"While repetition, is an innocuous educational term, brainwashing has to do with propaganda. Messages repeated day upon day, month after month, are bound to register in people's minds and subconscious. The globalization of news transmissions simply lends that process more impetus. Once, predominantly only reporters of news, the media have assumed the role of shapers of news, to a degree that arouses concern. One of the elder statesmen of American journalism, Eric Severeid, even went so far as to write: 'Our rigid formulae of so-called objectivity—our flat, one-dimensional handling of news, have given the lie the same prominence and impact that truth is given; they have elevated the the influence of fools to that of wise men; the ignorant to the level of the learned; the evil to the level of the good.'"
Ever since the Israeli Declaration of Statehood there has been a constant assertion that it was this singular act which resulted in Arab/Muslim hatred and anti-Semitism. It is frequently alluded to by Muslim leaders and, indeed, the media. Critics of Islam argue that the presence of Israel, a Jewish state and democracy, in the heart of the Islamic world is very difficult for Muslims to accept. It is very hard for Muslims to reconcile Israel's existence and its regional military supremacy with the prevalent Muslim views that, as recipients of Allah's final revelation, no Muslims should be subject to the political supremacy of a Jewish state. Further, regardless of the small size of Israel and the vastly larger land mass of the surrounding Arab lands, from the Muslim perspective, Israel's presence is a cancer in the heart of the Islamic world.
What we learn from this is that the establishment of the State of Israel is a political bone of contention. In other words, the Arab-Israeli Wars, which are primarily a political confrontation, put Jews (who consider the State of Israel to be part of their ethnic identity) and Arab Nationalism (considered by most Moslems to be a political extension of Arab ethnic identity) against each other.
In summary, the message that is projected on a regular basis is that the State of Israel is responsible for Islamic anti-Semitism i.e. the root of the conflict, whereas reference to "Allah" does not appear in every day usage. English standup comedian, Pat Condell,[2] has recognized this stating as he does that "Arabs don't hate Jews because of Israel: they hate Israel because of the Jews".
TO UNDERSTAND WHAT THIS MEANS FOR PEACE EFFORTS with the Arabs one need read no further than the Shmuel Katz 1982 pamphlet: "No Solution to the Arab-Palestinian Problem."[3] Shmuel understood full well the religious nature of the Arab-Israel conflict. In this pamphlet he wrote:
"Of all the statements about Israel made under Islamic religious inspiration, perhaps the most significant is the one uttered by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in a sermon he delivered in Cairo's Al-Hussein mosque on April 25, 1972 on the occasion of the birthday anniversary of the Prophet Muhammad:"The Jews were the neighbors of the Prophet in Medina ... and he negotiated with them. But in the end they proved that they were men of deceit. The most splendid thing that the Prophet Muhammad did was to drive them out of the whole of the Arabian Peninsula. ... They are a nation of liars and traitors, contrivers of plots, a people born for deeds of treachery. ... I promise you ... the defeat of Israeli arrogance and rampaging so that they shall return and be as the Quran said of them 'condemned to humiliation and misery'. ... We shall send them back to their former status."
Shmuel continues: "The eradication of the State of Israel means the restoration of Islam to its potency, to its rightful dimensions: in Israel's end lies the confirmation."
Shmuel never shied away from the truth. He noted in "The Existential Fact"[4]
Indeed, one of the most critical tasks of the Jewish people is to ensure that at least its friends should absorb the fact — bleak, uncomfortable but existential — that the Islamic world, if it were prepared to accept Israel's collective existence at all, would only tolerate it as a subject community under Moslem sovereignty.
PROFESSOR ROBERT S. WISTRICH, A WORLD RENOWNED EXPERT ON HOLOCAUST STUDIES, has more recently focused on Islamic anti-Semitism. His 2002 book entitled Muslim anti-Semitism, a Clear and Present Danger,[5] while exhaustive, has a common theme. By way of an introduction, he makes the point that the warning signs of a terrorist attack on the centers and symbols of American security were evident long before 9/11, both in the rhetoric of the Al-Qaeda movement and in smaller-scale attacks. He states further, "a virulent strain of anti-Semitism has taken root in the body politic of Islam to an unprecedented degree".
Wistrich recognizes the centrality of the Koran in the dissemination of "some notably harsh passages" which are "far from harmless" in its description of Jews as "corrupters of Scripture", "falsehood" , "distortion", stubbornly and willfully rejecting Allah's truth and their rejection of Muhammad who branded them as enemies of Islam, depicting them as possessing a malevolent, rebellious spirit. According to Wistrich, the jihad against Israel is seen by the Islamists in particular, not only as a military — political battle for the inalienable "sacred Muslim soil" [Waaf] of Palestine, but also as a struggle against a much larger force — whether it be America or the occult power of the Jews.
Quoting from Professor Wistrich:
"Shortly after the disaster of June1967, the more conservative fundamentalists exacerbated and sharpened the traditional image of Zionism and the Jews into something so utterly vile and perverse that it could only merit total eradication. In point, of fact, Muslim Arab anti-Semitism of the late 1960s was already genocidal in its implications. Virtually all the Arab theologians assembled in Cairo in 1968 denoted Jews as "enemies of God" and "enemies of humanity"; as a criminal riffraff rather than as a people; their state was seen as the illegitimate culmination of allegedly immutable and permanently depraved characteristics. President Sadat of Egypt on April 25, 1972, referred to the Jews as 'a nation of liars and traitors, contrivers of plots, a people born for deeds of treachery,' who would soon be 'condemned to humiliation and misery,' as prophesied in the Koran."
Perhaps the most revealing observation provided by Wistrich in his excellent opinion piece is expressed in the following statement. "The Western media, as is its custom, has been extremely reluctant to relate the current terrorist war against Israel and the West to its ideological roots in Islam or to the sources and meaning of Jihad.
ANDREW G. BOSTOM [MD, MS] IS AN AN AMERICAN AUTHOR and Professor of Medicine at Brown University Medical School and well known for his writings on Islam. American Thinker published his "Misunderstanding Islamic Anti-Semitism" on May 11, 2008 and what follows is extracted there from. It is framed around his positing two questions based upon his research and distributed to a cadre of academics, independent scholars, theologians, journalists, and activists who have addressed Anti-Semitism within the Muslim world. His questions were whether this quote exemplifies racial or at least ethnic Anti-Semitism, and where or when it was written.
"Our people [the Muslims] observing thus occupations of the Jews and the Christians concluded that the religion of the Jews must compare unfavorably as do their professions, and that their unbelief must be foulest of all, since they are the filthiest of all nations. Why the Christians, ugly as they are, are physically less repulsive than the Jews may be explained by the fact that the Jews, by not intermarrying, have intensified the offensiveness of their features. Exotic elements have not mingled with them, neither have males of alien races had intercourse with their women, nor have their men cohabited with females of foreign stock. The Jewish race therefore has been denied high mental qualities, sound physique, and superior lactation. The same results obtain when horses, camels, donkeys, and pigeons are inbred."
The responses to Bostom were unsurprising representing conventional academic [and journalistic] generally accepted beliefs. In other words, the assertion that Muslim Jew hatred is of recent origin, commencing in the late 19th or early 20th centuries, a byproduct of the advent of Zionism and the consequent Arab-Israel conflict over the land area defined in the 192 Mandate for historical Palestine. As to the latter question, the correspondents replied as follows:
The quote dates back to an essay by an Arab writer named al-Jahiz [d. 869], and clearly illustrates the anti-Jewish attitudes prevalent within an important early Islamic society. At this point, Bostom provides numerous examples of Anti-Semitic statements from Muslim authors throughout the ages using demeaning quotes from the Koran and other religious texts. He brings to mind a specific quote from Bat Y'eor's 1974 foresighted analysis of the Islamic Anti-Semitism and resurgent jihadism in her native Egypt:
"The pejorative characteristics of Jews as they are described in Muslim religious texts are applied to modern Jews. Anti-Judaism and anti-Zionism are equivalent — due to the inferior status of Jews in Islam, and because divine will dooms Jews to wondering and misery, the Jewish state appears to Muslims as an unbearable affront and a sin against Allah. Therefore it must be destroyed by Jihad."
Julien Benda, in his classic 1928 La Trahison de Clercs [The Treason of the Intellectuals], decried with prophetic accuracy how the abandonment of objective truth, abetted totalitarian ideologies, which lead to the cataclysmic destruction of World War II. This classic remains the nearly complete failure of Western intellectuals to study, understand, and acknowledge the heinous consequences of the living institution of jihad war and Jew hatred. The intimately related doctrine of Islamic Anti-Semitism, Professor Bostom concludes this article as follows. "And the jihad against the Jews is but one aspect, albeit primal, of the jihad to establish global Islamic hegemony.
Professor Bostom's extraordinary work, The Legacy of Islamic Anti-Semitism: From sacred Texts to Solemn History[6] was published 2 months after this small book. It is undoubtedly a scholarly work which positively destroys major myths surrounding the given subject, and relatively current, having been published in 2008. A distinguishing feature of this major work by Bostom lies in how he demonstrates the extent of Jewish suffering at the hands of Islam, By way of an introduction, he differs sharply with Professor Bernard Lewis, generally regarded as the world authority on the history of Islam. Consider the following quote from Lewis:
"On the whole, in contrast to Christian anti-Semitism, the Moslem attitude toward non-Moslems [including Jews] is not one of hate or fear or envy but simply contempt."
One can readily appreciate the disagreement with the above when reading Bostom's book. His writing includes considerably more detail of the ant-Jewish elements in Islamic's religion, culture and history. This is achieved by making use of reference to the works of Jews who lived under the Muslims; Islam's holy books, the Koran, the hadith and the sira, all of which have sharply negative things to say about Jews. They have been emphasized and reinforced by Muslim thinkers, jurists and preachers throughout the history of Islam, and Bostom shows how the attitudes and ideas engendered by them have directly influenced the actions of Muslim rulers, clergy and mobs both in their oppression of Jews as dhimmis, and their aggressive excesses against Jews including pogroms, forced conversion, pillage and expulsion. The Muslim God refers to Jews as monkey and pigs.
Bostom effectively debunks oft-repeated Islam-apologist myths: the alleged Islamic Golden Age where Muslims learned their anti-Semitism from Christians or the West, and that anti-Semitism arose in the Muslim world only after the recognition of the state of Israel.
From the days of Mohammed, non-Muslims under Muslim rule were subject to taxation, humiliation, oppression, exile, and murder. Bostom proves this through historical analysis.
The Koran is believed to be the perfect, unchanging, eternal word of God. This leaves Islam no room for reform, especially when it comes to hostility to non-Muslims, especially Jews.
Footnotes
[1] Israel in Medialand: A Study of the International media's coverage of the uprising (intifada) in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, compiled and edited by Eliyahu Tal, 1988.
[2] "The Great Palestinian Lie", October 6, 2011, http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2011/10/arabs-dont-hate-jews-because-of-israel.html
[3] www.shmuelkatz.com/Articles/NoSolutionToArabPal.pdf
[4] shmuelkatz.com/Articles/BattletruthLW.pdf in The Jerusalem Post, Jan. 23, 1981.
[5] Published by American Jewish Committee (2002).
ASIN: B007HFIUKS.
http://www.archive.org/details/MuslimAnti-semitismAClearAndPresentDanger
[6] To provide insight into the scope and depth of Bostom's book, this is the Table of Contents:
Part 1: Islamic Anti-Semitism — Jew Hatred in Islam: A Survey of Its Theological-Juridical Origins and Historical Manifestations
- Introduction [pp. 25-29]
- Antisemitism in the Qur'an [pp. 29-63]
- Antisemitism in the Hadith and Early Muslim Biographies of Muhammad [pp. 63-91]
- Regional Case Studies of the Dhimmi Condition for Jews: Historical Palestine, Muslim Spain, Ottoman and Republican Turkey, and Shi'ite Iran [pp. 91-197]
- From Jihad to Dhimmitude: Historical Palestine as "Prototype" [pp. 91-122]
- Jihad conquests and Early Muslim rule in Syro-Palestine
- Palestinian Jewry Under The Mamluks and Ottomans
- World War I
- From the British Mandate to the Present Era
- Mythical Andalusia: From Jihad to Dhimmitude in Muslim Spain [pp. 122-133]
- From Andalusia to the Ottoman Empire [pp. 133-134]
- Ottoman "Tolerance": Jews Under Ottoman Rule-From Jihad, to Sürgün, to Dhimmitude [pp. 134-152]
- The Initial Incorporation of the Jews into the Ottoman Empire: From Jihad to Sürgün
- Ottoman Dhimmitude: The Jewish Experience
- Jews in Modern (Republican) Turkey [pp. 152-168]
- The Dhimmi Condition for Iranian Jewry Under Shi'ite Rule, 16th Century to the Present [pp. 169-197]
- Nazism, the World War II Era, the Creation of Israel, and the Modern Exodus of Jews from Muslim Lands [pp. 197-217]
- Summary and Conclusions [pp. 217-227]
- Notes for this section [pp. 227-275]2. Anti-Jewish Motifs in the Qur'an and Its Exegesis [pp. 276-300]
- Qur'anic Verses [pp. 276-294]
- Haggai Ben Shammai (essay): "Jew-Hatred in the Islamic Tradition and the Koranic Exegesis" [pp. 294-300]3. Anti-Jewish Motifs in the Hadith [pp. 301-344]
- Excerpts from the Canonical Hadith Collections [pp. 301-309]
- Georges Vajda (essay): "Juifs et Musulmans Selon le Hadit" [Jews and Muslims According to the Hadith] [pp. 309-344]4. Anti-Jewish Motifs in the Sira (Early Muslim Biographies of Muhammad) [pp. 345-403]
- Excerpts from the Sira [pp. 345-385]
o Ibn Ishaq/Ibn Hisham [pp. 345-366]
o Ibn Sa'd [pp. 366-384]
o Tabari [pp. 384-385]
-Hartwig Hirschfeld (essay): "Essai Sur L'Histoire Des Juifs De Medine" ["Essay on the History of Jews of Medina"] [pp. 385-403]5. Muslim Jurists, Theologians, and Scholars on the Jews: Classical and Pre-modern Era [pp. 404-436]
- "The First Jews Oath in Islam" [pp. 404-405]
- Al-Jahiz: "Why the Muslims Prefer the Christians to the Jews" [pp. 405-407]
-Al-Tabari: "A Renegade Jew as the Source of the Shi'ite "Heresy" and the "Conspiracy" to Destroy the Early Islamic Caliphate" [p. 407]
-Al-Jaubari: "To Disclose the Fraudulence of the Jewish Men of Learning" [pp. 407-408]
- Al-Wansharisi: "A Collection of Legal Opinions Demonstrating the Attitudes of Muslim Jurists and Citizens Towards the Jews of Muslim Spain and North Africa, Ninth-Fifteenth Centuries" [pp. 408-411]
-Ghazi al-Wasiti: "Anti-Jewish Anecdotes from an Anti-Dhimmi Treatise [pp. 411-412]
-Sirhindi-"On Killing a Jew" [p. 412]
-Al-Majlisi: "Lightning Bolts Against the Jews" [pp. 412-415]
-Moshe Perlmann (essay): "Eleventh Century Andalusian Authors on the Jews of Granada" [pp. 416-428]]
-Georges Vajda (essay): " 'Adversos Judaeos': A Treatise from Maghrib-"Ahkam ahl al-Dhimma" by Sayh Muhammad b. 'Abd al-Karim al-Maghili" [pp. 428-436]6. Muslim Jurists, Theologians, and Scholars on the Jews: Modern Era [pp. 437-577]
-Sayyid Qutb (essay) "Our Struggle Against The Jews" [pp. 437-449]
-Abdul Sattar El Sayed (essay) "The Jews in the Qur'an", Fourth Conference of the Academy of Islamic Research, Cairo, 1968 [pp. 450-456]
- Abdul-Hamid 'Attiyah al-Dibani "The Jewish Attitude Towards Islam and Muslims in the Early Islam" Fourth Conference of the Academy of Islamic Research, Cairo, 1968 [pp. 457-471]
-"D.F. Green"-David Littman and Yehoshafat Harkabi: "Arab Theologians on Jews and Israel" Extracts from the Fourth Conference of the Academy of Islamic Research, Cairo, 1968 [pp. 472-484]
- Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi (extracts from): "Banu Isra'il fi al-Qur'an wa al-Sunna [Jews in the Koran and the Traditions]" [pp. 485-500]
-Afif Abd al-Fattah Tabbara (extracts from): "al-Yahud fi al-Qur'an" ["Jews in the Qur'an"] [pp. 500-537]
-Salah al-Khalidi (extracts from): "Haqa'iq Qur'aniyya al Qadiyya al-Filastinniya" ["Qur'anic Facts Regarding the Palestinian Issue"] [pp. 537-572]
-Yusuf Qaradawi: "Our War with the Jews Is in the Name of Islam"; "The Jews of Today Bear Responsibility for Their Forefathers' Crime against Jesus" [pp. 572-574]
-Sheikh 'Atiyyah Saqr: "The Jews' 20 Bad Traits As Described in the Qur'an" [pp. 575-577]7. The Jews of Arab Muslim Lands: Historical Maps (12 Maps Compiled by Sir Martin Gilbert) [pp. 578-590]
8. The Dhimmi Condition for Jews, and Muslim Jew Hatred: Early Islam Through the Modern Era [pp. 591-800]
-S.D. Goitein (essay): "Evidence on the Muslim Poll Tax from Non-Muslim Sources" [pp. 591-601]
-Georges Vajda (essay): "À Propos de la Situation des Juifs et des Chrétiens à Séville au Début du XIIe Siècle" [Concerning the Situation of Jews and Christians in Seville at the Beginning of the 12th Century] [pp. 601-602]
-Edmond Fagnan (essay): "Le Sign Distinctif Des Juifs Au Maghreb" ["The Distinctive Sign of the Jews in Maghreb"] [pp. 602-606]
-Alexander Scheiber (essay): "The Origins of Obadayah the Norman Proselyte-Obadayah's Experiences in Baghdad, Early 12th Century" [pp. 606-610]
-Jacob Mann (essay): "Moses b. Samuel, A Jewish Katib in Damascus, and His Pilgrimage to Medinah and Mekkah" [pp. 610-618]
-H.Z. Hirschberg (chapters): "The Destruction of Kairouan, and the Almoravid and Almohad Persecutions" [pp. 619-637]
-Jane Gerber (essay): "The Pact of Umar in North Africa: A Reappraisal of Muslim-Jewish Relations" [pp. 637-644]
-Eliezer Bashan (essay): "New Documents on Attacks on Jewish Religious Life in Morocco in the Last Third of the 19th Century" [pp. 644-658]
-David Littman (essay): "Jews Under Muslim Rule, II: Morocco 1903-1912" [pp. 658-677]
-Norman Stillman (essay): "The Moroccan Jewish Experience: A Revisionist View" [pp. 677-686]
-Jacques Chalom (chapters 7, 9, and 13) from, "The Israelites of Tunisia: Their Civil and Political Condition" [pp. 686-693]
-Laurence Loeb (chapters): " 'Outcaste': Shi'a Intolerance"; and "The Safavids" and "The Qajars" [pp. 694-707]
-Yehuda Ratzaby (essay): "Expulsion to the Desert-The Most Decisive Event in the History of the Jews of Yemen" [pp. 707-712]
-Yosef Tobi (essay): "Conversion to Islam Among Yemenite Jews Under Zaidi Rule" [pp. 713-730]
-Moritz Levy (chapter, from "Die Sephardim in Bosnien"): [The Sephardim in Bosnia: a Contribution to the History of the Jews in the Balkans] [pp. 731-733] -A.R. Malachi (essay) "[Palestine] Under the Rule Ibrahim Pasha" [pp. 733-744]
-Bat Ye'or (essay): "The Dhimmi Factor in the Exodus of Jews from Arab Countries" [pp. 745-758] -Andrew Bostom (essay): "Endowing Denial " [pp. 758-761]
-Bat Ye'or (chapter): "Modern Egyptian Jew Hatred: Indigenous Elements and Foreign Influences" [pp. 761-769]
-Emmanuel Sivan (essay) "Islamic Fundamentalism, Antisemitism, and Anti-Zionism" [pp. 770-776] -Aluma Solnick (essay): "Based on Koranic Verses, Interpretations, and Traditions, Muslim Clerics State: The Jews Are the Descendants of Apes, Pigs, And Other Animals" [pp. 777-788]
-Andrew Bostom (essay): "Jews as Christ-Killers in Islam" [pp. 788-790]
-Hans Peter Raddatz (essay): "Antisemitismus im (Gegenwarts) Islam " ["Antisemitism in Contemporary Islam"] [pp. 791-800]9. Documents and Eyewitness Accounts [pp. 791-843]
-Decrees of Dhimmitude, 850-1905 [pp. 801-803]
-Jews as Dhimmis and Muslim Chattel, 1790-1949 [pp. 804-816]
- Two Anti-Jewish Pogroms in the Modern Era Before the Creation of Israel: Baghdad (1941) and Tripolitania (1945) [pp. 817-824]
- Light Skinned Egyptian Muslim Repeatedly Beaten by His Co-Religionists for "Looking Jewish" (1948) [p. 825]
- "Jews in Grave Danger in All Moslem Lands" The New York Times, May 16, 1948 [pp. 826-828]
- New York Times Reports on the Exodus of Jews from the Arab Muslim Middle East, 1955-1962 [pp. 829-830]
- An Eyewitness Account of the Anti-Jewish Riots in Tunis at the Outbreak of the Six-Day War (1967) [pp. 830-832]
- A Libyan Jew Breaks Her Silence 36-Years After Surviving the 1967 Tripolitan Pogrom [p. 833]
-The Modern Rhetoric of Genocidal Muslim Antisemitism [pp. 834-843]
Appendix A: Major Contributors [pp. 844-850]
Appendix B: Muslim Jurists, Theologians, and Historians [pp. 850-855]
Alex Rose is an engineering consultant. He was formerly on the Executive of Americans for a Safe Israel and a founding member of CAMERA, New York. He made Aliyah in 2003 and now resides in Ashkelon, Israel. This essay was submitted November 25, 2012.