Why We Need to Talk About Muslim Anti-Semitism - Daniel Greenfield

by Daniel Greenfield

Muslim anti-Semitism predates the difficulties of integrating Algerians and Pakistanis into Europe by over a thousand years. In Islam, Jews represent both a subject race and a primal enemy. Israel infuriates Muslims so much not because they care a great deal about the Palestinian Arabs who have been expelled in huge numbers from Muslim countries within the last generation, but because Jews no longer know their place. Islam is supremacist. Allahu Akbar asserts Islamic supremacy over all other religions.

Even articles about Muslim Anti-Semitism rarely want to talk about Muslim Anti-Semitism. In the aftermath of the Kosher supermarket massacre in France, articles about the Muslim persecution of Jews in Europe nervously hover around the subject before swerving away to discuss the European far-right.

An article about Muslim anti-Semitism in France inevitably becomes an article about the National Front, which is not actually shooting Jews in supermarkets. Broader European pieces obsessively focus on the Jobbik party in Hungary which for all its vileness has not actually killed any Jews.

(The endless articles about Jobbik characterize it as a far-right European Christian party, but in fact it’s a pan-Turkic organization whose chairman had told a Turkish audience, “Islam is the last hope for humanity.” Its actual identity is based on a broad front of ethnic solidarity by identifying Hungarians as a Turkic people. Its anti-Semitism is anti-Zionist. Jobbik hates Jews because it identifies with Muslims.)

The usual treatment of Muslim anti-Semitism is cursory. History books acknowledge its existence while asserting that European anti-Semitism was worse. Modern media coverage takes the same approach by finding a useful distraction in the European far-right.

Muslim anti-Semitism needs to be addressed on its own if for no other reason than that it’s the dominant form of violence against Jews in Europe. And it has been that way for some time now.

Articles that gloss over Muslim Anti-Semitism to flit on to the National Front, which in this current crisis has shown itself to be less anti-Semitic than the BBC whose reporter Tim Wilcox accused a daughter of Holocaust survivors in France of oppressing Palestinians, are very deliberately ignoring the issue. The politics of the media led it to class together anti-immigration with violent bigotry. But the violent bigotry isn’t coming from the sort of people that the media thinks it ought to.

It’s not UKIP supporters that are hunting down and killing Jews and so the media avoids the subject until some violent atrocity forces its hand and then it blames Muslim anti-Semitism on a failure to integrate. Ahmed can’t get a job because of UKIP or Wilders and so he shoots up a synagogue. The Jews are just collateral damage in Muslim blowback to their persecution by European opponents of immigration.

Throw in a little something about Israel and Muslim anti-Semitism is transformed into a misunderstood phenomenon that really isn’t what it appears to be. Muslims don’t hate Jews. They’re just confused.

But Muslim anti-Semitism predates the difficulties of integrating Algerians and Pakistanis into Europe by over a thousand years. In Islam, Jews represent both a subject race and a primal enemy. Israel infuriates Muslims so much not because they care a great deal about the Palestinian Arabs who have been expelled in huge numbers from Muslim countries within the last generation, but because Jews no longer know their place. Islam is supremacist. Allahu Akbar asserts Islamic supremacy over all other religions.

As an historical subject race, Jews are a natural target for violence by Muslim immigrants with strong supremacist leanings. The disenfranchised Muslim isn’t looking for equality. He’s seeking supremacy. That is what the Islamic State and the Koran give him. He picks the same Jewish targets as Mohammed did because the Jews are a vulnerable minority. That is as true in Europe today as it was in Arabia then.

Unlike the Christian world, which was never fully subjugated by Islam, both the Jewish homeland and much of the Jewish diaspora population existed under Muslim rule long enough that non-submissive Jews became a particularly galling reminder of the fall of the Caliphate.

Muslims had taken Jewish submission for granted making the existence of non-submissive Jews, whether in Jerusalem or in Paris, that much more outrageous. The Algerian Muslim can more readily accept taking a back seat to a French Christian than to an Algerian Jew, whom he knows would have been considered inferior to him if they were both back in Algeria.

The left has become so mired in a post-colonial worldview that it refuses to understand that the struggle is not between Western European colonialism and a post-colonial Third World, but between different eras of colonialism. Arab Islamic domination is not post-colonial; it’s a colonialism that predates it.

When Western leftists make common cause with Arab and Islamic nationalists, they aren’t being post-colonial, they’re advocating an earlier form of colonialism that led and is once again leading to ethnic cleansing, genocide, mass slavery and the destruction of indigenous cultures; including that of the Jews.

Middle Eastern Jews, like other non-Muslim and non-Arab minorities, welcomed European colonialism as relief from Islamic and Arab colonialism. France is filled with Jews from North Africa because they received their rights for the first time under French rule. As French citizens, they could shed their mandatory black clothes and no longer fear being killed because of Islamic law, like Batto Sfez, a Tunisian Jew who was executed for blasphemy in an atrocity that triggered French intervention.

Yoav Hattab, one of the Jews murdered in the Kosher supermarket attack in Paris, was the son of the Chief Rabbi of Tunisia. While the Chief Rabbi was, in the unfortunate Dhimmi fashion of those who live under Islamic rule, forced to praise how well Tunisia treats Jews, his son was buried in Israel. Israel was also the place where most Tunisian Jews moved to escape Arab Muslim persecution.

The Western left can’t talk about Muslim anti-Semitism because it would also have to talk about Muslim colonialism. And then the entire basis of its approach to the Arab and Muslim world would collapse. If post-colonialism in the Middle East is just the replacement of one colonialism with another, then the left would have to admit that it has once again disgraced itself by supporting a totalitarian system.

Just as it replaced the czar with the commissar, it is replacing the protectorate with the caliphate.

Modern histories of the Middle East excuse the historical Muslim persecution of Jews for the same reason the media excuses modern Muslim attacks on Jews. This historical revisionism justifies Islamic colonialism in the service of post-colonialism with the myth of a golden age of benevolent tyranny.

The post-colonial narrative obligates academics and journalists to favorably contrast the Muslim treatment of Jews, then or now, with the European treatment of Jews. This obstructionism has endangered European Jews even more than Jihadist videos advocating violence because it makes it impossible to discuss an urgent violent threat for fear of violating the left’s post-colonial narrative.

Muslim anti-Semitism must be discussed. And it must be contextualized within the history of Muslim-Jewish relations, not European ones like the National Front or Jobbik. It must not be dismissed as some transient phenomenon caused by poverty or the latest Hamas clashes, but viewed within the context of Islamic colonialism and the treatment of non-Muslims in the Muslim world.

The treatment of Yazidis in Iraq and Christians in Syria must also be placed within that same context.

Historical revisionism for Muslim anti-Semitism is as unacceptable as Holocaust denial or any other attempt to stick a smiley face on the oppression of Jews. And what is at stake here is not merely history, but the root cause that drives Muslim men and women born in Europe to attack and kill Jews.

The post-colonial authorities of the left may not be interested in discussing Muslim anti-Semitism, but Muslim Supremacist anti-Semitism remains interested in persecuting and killing Jews.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. He is completing a book on the international challenges America faces in the 21st century.

Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/dgreenfield/why-we-need-to-talk-about-muslim-anti-semitism/

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