by Jules Gomes
Islamist Antisemitism Mistaken for Liberation Theology by Leftists, Author Warns
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According to the Jewish Chronicle, an imam at Al Furqan Mosque and Islamic Center in Manchester, England, prayed for protection and victory against the “usurping Jews” in the weeks after the October 7 massacre in Israel. These and other sermons in London and Bradford were cited in a well-documented report about the role Islamism plays in promoting antisemitism in the United Kingdom. (Dexter Van Zile) |
In a historic first, an explosive report has established the pivotal role that Islamist ideology plays in fostering and spreading antisemitism among Muslims in Britain.
Published by the Counter Extremism Group (CEG) in June, the report is a critical response to Sir William Shawcross’s Independent Review (2023) of Prevent, the British government’s counter-terrorism program, which aims to stop individuals from becoming terrorists.
The report collates the “best available evidence” linking antisemitism and Islamism, investigating the rhetoric of Islamist influencers, antisemitic sermons, discourses on jihad, and the history of Muslim-Jewish relations in the Qur’an, to show how antisemitism is infecting British Muslims.
In a bold move, it documents the relationship between Nazism and Islamism warning that “highly influential Islamists” either deny the Holocaust or present it as “unfinished business to be carried to its conclusion by Muslims.”
The 94-page document titled Islamist Antisemitism: A Neglected Hate excoriates policymakers for failing to identify “Islamist antisemitism” as a “distinct phenomenon” and for attempting to rationalize Islamist Jew-hatred as a response to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Political Correctness Blinds Authorities to Islamist Antisemitism
“Institutions tasked with counter extremism have failed to recognise and understand Islamist antisemitism,” notes Daniel Allington, the report’s author, lamenting a “widespread failure to recognise the extensive recent history of antisemitic incidents involving Islamists in the U.K.”
Allington, a senior lecturer at King’s College London, explains how authorities avoid linking Islamism with antisemitism since the issue of “inter-minority prejudice” between Muslims and Jews “is often regarded as too sensitive to address.” Further, “Islamist antisemitism has often been mistaken for a form of liberation theology by non-Muslim westerners on the political left.”
“Yet this reticence coexists with considerable evidence of antisemitism within the Muslim population,” he warns. Polling of British Muslims appears to indicate substantially higher levels of anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli attitudes than are to be observed in the general British population.”
Methodologically, the report presents three studies: a scholarly history of antisemitism and extremism in the Muslim world, a thematic analysis of interviews with expert informants, and an original statistical analysis of survey data.
“All three find strong evidence of a link between antisemitism and extremism in the Muslim world,” Allington concludes.
Antisemitic Prayer and Preaching in Islamist Mosques
Islamists in Britain were celebrating Hamas’ October 7 attack on Jews in “carnivalesque displays” the day after the massacre and much before Israel retaliated against Hamas, thus debunking the view that Islamists were protesting Israel’s retaliatory military action in Gaza.
Demonstrators were filmed dancing, calling for jihad, and shouting Islamic slogans like “Allahu Akbar” as well as “Khaybar, Khaybar, Ya Yahud’ (“Khaybar, Khaybar, O Jews”), which remembers Muhammad’s military defeat of a particular group of Jews, the report noted.
Citing an article in The Jewish Chronicle, the study reports that in mosques in Bradford, London, and Manchester, imams prayed for “Muslims [to] get their victory over the usurping Jews” and for the “purif[ication of] the Al-Aqsa mosque from the filth of the Jews,” while an imam at a Northampton mosque prayed for Allah to “destroy” the Jews, “count them and kill them,” and “make them war booty for the Muslims.”
A mosque in Oldham posted a YouTube video of an imam asking Allah to “give victory to our brothers in Palestine and Gaza” and to “rid us of the Jews,” whom he labelled “brothers of monkeys and apes.” Preachers in mosques promoted the theology that Allah is pleased by the killing of Jews and led prayers for the Mujahideen.
An interviewee cited in the report revealed that such “inflammatory sermons,” which have “all been quite similar,” were delivered at several mosques, both in English and Arabic, since the October 7 massacre. Multiple sermons expounded a hadith, which appears in Hamas’ original founding covenant. The hadith predicts the end times during which Muslims fight and kill all the Jews.
“There are also prayers for the destruction of God’s enemies, and of course, Jews are always mentioned, but polytheists and … non-believers are [also] sometimes mentioned,” he noted.
The report found that antisemitic and
anti-Israel sermons that go unchallenged by mosque leaders and trustees
“create a permissive environment for radicalisation,” especially since
“their sermons typically fail to draw a distinction between Israel and
Jewish communities in the U.K.”
Islamist Theology Contests Israel’s Right to Exist
Interviewees also revealed how Islamists explained Israel’s existence as incompatible with Islamist theology. “For Islamists, the presence of a Jewish state in the Middle East is an intolerable challenge to the divinely-ordained political order,” the report noted.
Three interviewees noted how “Israel’s location within the Muslim world, where Jews were historically permitted to reside as subjects, but not to enjoy political sovereignty,” triggered a sense of dissonance.
The Islamist justification for fighting Israel is based not merely on “a justice perspective, but from Islamic scripture,” making sure that people are encouraged to fight a “defensive jihad” for what is theirs and to defend themselves, one interviewee said.
“[A]s far as they’re concerned, any Jewish state on Muslim land is a problem … they’ll [say] … ‘No, Jews can live among us as people of dhimma who have no political sovereignty, and they can live among us as protected citizens — or as protected subjects, to be more precise,’” he said.
Such propaganda also involved a romanticized “Golden Age” of the Caliphate. Summarizing the Islamist view, interviewees reported that under the caliphs, Muslims looked after Jews in Islamic lands and allowed Jews to live under Islam, “as long as they were dhimmi.”
Continuing Influence of Nazi Jew-hatred on Islamism
The report traces historic links between Nazi and Islamist ideology beginning with the post-World War I period when “antisemitism became an ideological rallying point for many Islamists and proto-Islamists in the Middle East.”
Alliances between Nazi and Islamist leaders played “a major role in the genesis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” and “led to cultural exchanges which embedded Nazi-style conspiracy theories in Islamist thought and propaganda.” This continued post-Holocaust, writes Allington.
Islamists developed a hybrid form of antisemitism, borrowing antisemitic Christian “conspiracy theories about Jews and Zionists, together with genocidal ambitions previously unknown in the Muslim world.” This form of antisemitism is adopted by both Shia and Sunni Islamists.
The report names the Nazi collaborator who served as Mufti of Jerusalem from 1922 to 1937, explaining how Islamists used the hybrid antisemitic ideology to stop Zionism from facilitating an independent status for the Jews in their homeland.
Antisemitism Rooted in Muhammad’s Relations with Jews
The report explores how Islamists decontextualize conflicts between Muhammad and Jewish tribes of his day “to create the impression of an ancient religious war between Muslims and Jews.” This was compounded by the Jews’ refusal to accept him as a prophet and Islam’s self-understanding as superseding Judaism.
Muhammad’s flight from Mecca to Medina brought him and his followers into conflict with the three local Jewish tribes. He killed and enslaved one tribe and presented the others with a choice between conversion to Islam and exile. The subsequent subjugation of the exiled tribe led to the system of dhimmitude, non-Muslims living as second-class citizens under a Muslim ruler.
“Indeed, much of the traditional biography of Muhammad is shaped by conflict with Jews,” the report acknowledges. Islamists use verses from the Qur’an and the hadiths “to prove that the Jews have been the most bitter foes of Islam and are still trying to destroy it.”
It explains how, while a dhimmi status may have offered relative protection to Jews for centuries in Muslim lands, such a model combined with an aspiration for a Caliphate is now used to support Jew-hatred. The Muslim Council of Britain has not responded to an FWI query about the report.
Experts Commend Report on Islamist Antisemitism
“Western scholars of Islamic history and theology have long noted a strand of antisemitism throughout much of Islamic history,” Martin Parsons, independent consultant on Freedom of religion, radical Islam, and Christianity, told Focus on Western Islamism (FWI).
Parsons elaborated:
Although this report fails to fully acknowledge this, what it does helpfully provide is two things: first, it provides a social science analysis which demonstrates that there is a strong statistical correlation between Islamism and antisemitism in the UK. Secondly, it draws attention to the failure of police, educational institutions—including universities, and Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion professionals to grasp that link.
“The result of that failure has been what the UK’s Commissioner for Counter-Extremism, a year ago, called ‘the normalisation of extremism’ on the streets of Britain,” he added.
A spokesperson for Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) told FWI that the report “is a wake-up call for Britain’s anti-extremism apparatus, which has hit ‘snooze’ too many times.”
“This is a critical report that forcefully tackles several taboos. It underscores the futility of attempting to rationalise Islamist antisemitism as a response to the Arab-Israeli conflict, highlights the enduring relationship between Islamist and Nazi ideology, and finds a highly statistically significant positive association between antisemitism and several measures of extremism,” the spokesperson emphasized.
“The country we knew is vanishing before our eyes. The authorities need to acknowledge and grapple with this major problem before it’s too late,” CAA added.
Jules Gomes is a biblical scholar and journalist based in Rome.
Source: https://www.meforum.org/fwi/fwi-news/report-highlights-u-k-s-failure-to-confront-islamist-antisemitism
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