The Islamisation of European anti-Semitism

From here, part of an article by Andrew Bostom:

The clear excess virulence of the Antisemitism in Europe’s Muslim versus Christian populations, combined with the evidence that globally, Muslims in Islamic countries exhibit even more fanatical Jew hatred than their European co-religionists, defies the “conventional wisdom” regarding the ultimate origins of Muslim Jew hatred in Western Europe, and beyond. This very flawed construct—that Muslim Jew hatred is merely a loose amalgam of re-cycled medieval Christian Judeophobic motifs, calumnies from the Czarist Russia "Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, and standard Nazi propaganda—ignores both empirical contemporary observations, and primary, uniquely Islamic components of Jew hatred, both past and present. When the late 23 year-old Parisian Jew Ilan Halimi was being tortured to death, his Muslim torturers, as Nidra Poller wrote in the Wall Street Journal “…phoned the family on several occasions and made them listen to the recitation of verses from the Koran, while Ilan's tortured screams could be heard in the background.” Ilan Halimi’s torturers/murderers did not invoke any non-Islamic sources of anti-Jewish hate, only the Koran.

For the Muslim masses, basic Islamic education in the Koran, hadith (the putative words and deeds of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, as recorded by pious transmitters), and sira (earliest Muslim biographies of Muhammad) may create an immutable superstructure of Jew hatred on to which non-Muslim sources of Jew hatred are easily grafted. Examples of this archetypal Jew hatred from the sacred Islamic texts, sira, and main early Sunni historiographical accounts, include: Koranic verses labeling Jews as malevolent enemies of Islam (5:82), and disobedient slayers of their own prophets who suffered justifiable abasement (2:61), including, for some, transformation into apes and swine (5:60); or the more profoundly hateful narratives (in the hadith, sira, and early histories, for example by Tabari) which maintain that the perfidious Jews fomented sectarian strife in early Islam by promoting heresies—including Shi’ism itself—that threatened the unity of the Muslim community (umma), and the canonical hadith (Sahih Muslim Book 026, Number 5431) that the Jews caused Muhammad’s protracted, excruciating death from poisoning. As the scholar Georges Vajda observed, these archetypes, in turn justify Muslim animus towards the Jews, and the admonition to at best, “subject [the Jews] to Muslim domination”, as dhimmis, treated “with contempt”, under “humiliating arrangements”.These hateful motifs remain vibrant and normative in the Muslim community.

Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, since 1996, Grand Imam of Al-Azhar University (the most prestigious center of Muslim learning in Sunni Islam) wrote these words in his 700 page dissertation rationalizing Muslim Jew hatred, Banu Isra’il fi al-Qur’an wa al-Sunna [Jews in the Koran and the Traditions], originally published in the 1970s, and then re-issued in 1986:

[The] Koran describes the Jews with their own particular degenerate characteristics, i.e. killing the prophets of Allah, corrupting His words by putting them in the wrong places, consuming the people’s wealth frivolously, refusal to distance themselves from the evil they do, and other ugly characteristics caused by their deep-rooted lasciviousness…only a minority of the Jews keep their word….[A]ll Jews are not the same. The good ones become Muslims, the bad ones do not.

These are the expressed, “carefully researched” views on Jews held by the nearest Muslim equivalent to a Pope, who represents 90% of the world’s Muslims. And Sheikh Tantawi has not mollified such hatemongering beliefs since becoming the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar as his statements on the Jews as “enemies of Allah, descendants of apes and pigs”, the legitimacy of homicide bombing of Jews, or “dialogue” with Jews (just below), make clear.

…anyone who avoids meeting with the enemies in order to counter their dubious claims and stick fingers into their eyes, is a coward. My stance stems from Allah’s book [the Koran], more than one-third of which deals with the Jews…[I] wrote a dissertation dealing with them [the Jews], all their false claims and their punishment by Allah. I still believe in everything written in that dissertation.

The release of the [UK] All-Party Parliamentary Enquiry into Antisemitism serves as a clarion call to confront this ugly, burgeoning problem which threatens the very fabric of British, and Western European society. Given the primacy of Muslim Jew hatred within this overall phenomenon—motivated by uniquely Islamic religious archetypes of Jews—Muslims must begin the formal process of examining and reforming the anti-Jewish dogmas contained in their own foundational texts.

Professor Phillip Cunningham (in, “Education for Shalom: Religion Textbooks and the Enhancement of the Catholic-Jewish Relationship,” 1995, p. 39) summarized the principal features of the Second Vatican Council's “Declaration of the Relationship of The Church to Non-Christian Religions” (Nostre Aetate):

Nostre Aetate rejected key elements of the ancient anti-Jewish tradition. ‘The Jews’ were not guilty of the crucifixion, had not been renounced by God, were not under a wandering curse, and their covenantal bond with God endured.

These pronouncements and teachings of the Roman Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council issued in 1965, provide a modern paradigm which the Muslim clerical hierarchy—Sunni, from Mecca and Cairo, Shi’ite, from Qom and Najaf—must embrace, if the scourge of Islamic Jew hatred is to be eradicated, within Europe, and across the globe.