Antisemitism -- Levantine tree with some European roots

Matthias Küntzel is an author and a political scientist and holds a tenured part-time position as a teacher of political science at a vocational school in Hamburg/Germany.

In 2003, he delivered the Keynote Address at the Conference on “Gencide and Terrorism – Probing the Mind of the Perpetrator” at Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA.

In 2004, his essay Islamic Antisemitism and Its Nazi Roots was published in Antisemitism International, The Annual Research Journal of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, in Jerusalem, Israel.

In 2005, he joined the American association “Scholars for Peace in the Middle East” (SPME). http://www.spme.net/

***********

***********

This paper was presented over a year ago.

.

Recent remarks by the president of Iran give it new relevance.

Islamic antisemitism is a key challenge of our time. It is not only expressed through Al Qaida’s suicide terror attacks against synagogues or through attacks against Jewish institutions perpetrated by European Muslims, but is propagated day by day throughout the Arabic-Islamic world....[Three examples]

.

1.) “The Resurrection will not take place until the Muslims fight the Jews, and the Muslims kill them. The Muslims will kill the Jews, rejoice [in it], rejoice in Allah’s Victory.… The Prophet said: the Jews will hide behind the rock and the tree, and the rock and the tree will say: oh servant of Allah, oh Muslim this is a Jew behind me, come and kill him!… Everything wants vengeance on the Jews, on these pigs on the face of the earth.”

.

2.) ...the Jews instigated the French Revolution and October Revolution; that they provoked the First and Second World Wars; that they control the world’s media and economy; that they endeavour to destroy morality and religion and run brothels worldwide. Tantawi, the highest Sunni Muslim theologian, quotes Adolf Hitler’s words in Mein Kampf that “in resisting the Jew, I am doing the work of the Lord”

.

3.) Egyptian state television and many other TV stations have broadcast this incitement repeatedly during Ramadan. Anyone acquainted with Nazi films like “Jud Süss” [The Jew Süss] knows what incredible suggestive power the antisemitic film exerts. For example, at one point in the Arab film version of the Protocols, Jews haul a frightened youngster into a room. Then the camera zooms in on the child for a close-up shot of the Jews slitting his throat and collecting his blood in a basin. Here we have the blood libel, according to which Jews consume the blood of infidels during the Passover, being drummed into the minds of millions of Muslims at peak viewing time. It will take generations to get rid of this poison.

.

Many either react as if hating Jews was a feature of the Oriental world, like hookahs or mosques. Or antisemitism among Muslims is glossed over as a kind of “anti-imperialism of fools” and rationalised as an alleged response to the Middle East conflict. The quintessence of both modes of thinking is the belief that Muslim antisemitism is totally different from European antisemitism.
.

This view, however, won’t stand up to close examination. In Islamic tradition, the Jews were viewed as being inferior. As a result, the fear of “eternal” Jewish hostility or even a “Jewish conspiracy” was unknown in the Muslim world for centuries. An antisemitism based on the notion of a conspiracy of World Jewry is not rooted in Islamic tradition, but is based rather on European ideological models. The decisive transfer of this ideology took place between 1937 and 1945 under the impact of Nazi propaganda.

.

...those who consider the Jews to be a global force of Evil, and wish to annihilate them, cannot sincerely criticise Hitler's so-called Final Solution. Instead, to the outside world they deny that the Holocaust took place, while in secret it serves as a source of inspiration to them and as a precedent which proves that one can in fact murder millions of Jews.
.

This antisemitism has nothing to do with ethnic characteristics or cultural peculiarities deserving protection from criticism on grounds of "political correctness". In fact, we are witnessing the revival of Nazi ideology in a new garb. Giving support to all those Muslims who oppose this development is of the utmost importance. Let me therefore conclude with an appeal by a Muslim, a scholar of Islam, Bassam Tibi, who said: "only when the public takes the appropriate stand against the antisemitic dimension of Islamism will it be possible to say that they have truly understood the lessons of the Holocaust."

.

......Students of history take note.

.

............Political observers pay attention.

.

......................Those who claim to be Christian be aware.