Muslim Anti-Semitism in Christian Europe: Elemental and Residual Anti-Semitism 2009000220, 9781412810357

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MUSLIM ANTI-SfMITISM IN

CHR'ST'AN EUROPE

MUSLIM ANTI-SfMITISM IN

CHR'ST'AN EURO'E

Elemental and Residual Anti-Semitism RAPHAEL ISRAELI

First published 2009 by Transaction Publishers Published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2009 by Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2009000220 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Israeli, Raphael. Muslim anti-semitism in Christian Europe : elemental and residual anti-semitism / Raphael Israeli. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4128-1035-7 1. Antisemitism--Europe--History--21st century. 2. Muslims--Europe-Attitudes. 3. Muslims--Europe--Political activity. 4. Jews--Public opinion. 5. Zionism--Public opinion. 6. Public opinion--Europe. 7. Islam and politics--Europe. 8. Europe--Ethnic relations. I. Title. DS146.E85I87 2009 305.892’404--dc22 2009000220 ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-1035-7 (hbk)

To Gisele and David Littman “What a couple!!,” it was said of them. In wonder for the golden half-century of their marriage And in recognition of decades of their unflinching friendship. “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments” (Shakespeare, Sonnet 116)

Contents Acknowledgments

ix

Apologia

xi

1

The Anti-Semitic Heritage of the Arab and Muslim World

1

2

The Psycho-Social Heritage of the Immigrant Muslims in Europe

21

3

The Import of the Middle Eastern Dispute into the West

57

4

Major Themes of Muslim Anti-Semitism in the West

77

5

From Words to Deeds

113

6

Anti-Semitism under the Guise of Anti-Zionism and Anti-Israelism

149

7

Social and Political Repercussions for the West

191

8

Battling Anti-Semitism in the West

217

Summary

247

Bibliography

257

Index

267

Acknowledgments The very deep contemporary Arab and Muslim resentment of, anger against, and contempt toward Jews, Zionism, and Israel, has been embedded in the Arab/Muslim psyche for centuries not only as a sequel of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but principally as a result of the almost innate enmity the Prophet of Islam had taught and practiced towards the Jews he encountered as he was climbing the ladder of success in his native Arabian Peninsula. In modern times, as Western colonial powers invaded Muslim lands and subjugated them, they often imparted to their subjects the vast store of anti-Semitic stereotypes and hatred that had been cultivated for almost two millennia in Christendom. Taken together with the constantly worsening fortunes of the Israeli-Arab/Muslim hostile relations in the Middle East, it was only natural that these troubled patterns of communication between the two faiths/ communities, should wander around the world together with the patterns of settlement that the waves of immigrants originating from lands of Islam brought in as part of their cultural luggage. All the more so when the new countries of Muslim settlement in the West, principally Europe, the Americas, and Australia, had already been inhabited for centuries by rather successful Jewish communities. It is not the purpose of this volume to explore the roots or the themes of Muslim anti-Semitism in general, but rather to examine the unique interaction of Muslim immigrants in the West with the host societies, which absorbed them in their midst and afforded them the opportunity to connect with local traditional anti-Semites, be they the adepts of the xenophobic fascist and racist Right, or the adherents of the more recent avowedly anti-Zionist and anti-Israel Left, to form a formidable wall of hatred against the Jewish state and its people. To complicate this picture further, the same Muslim immigrants that sense no compunction about pouring hostility on their fellow Jewish compatriots, who share with them the status of a minority in a Christian-majority society, often also find themselves at odds with the majority host society itself, thus exposing ix

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themselves to criticism and censure on all sides. Engaging simultaneously in battle with both their host society into which they cannot integrate, and their Jewish compatriots who became a model of good integration, they expose their flanks and lose ground in that mammoth confrontation. The right and left fringes of their host societies, which are themselves at odds with their mainstream establishments, remain their staunchest allies, and are at the same time also the flimsiest by their very marginal nature. We shall then lay out the nature and ideology, which make these groups of Muslim immigrants tick and show how in each European country they create their ethnic groups and religious communities, often in competition with each other, with a view of linking their grievances against the host societies, including the Jewish communities therein, which failed to integrate them (residual anti-Semitism) with their imported racial and anti-Semitic sentiments (elemental anti-Semitism). Both perceived “hostile” milieus, which do not allow the immigrants to have their way, are often scapegoated to justify or rationalize the Muslim immigrants’ own failures in the difficult and problematic process of acculturation that they almost invariably undergo. I am indebted to the Harry Truman Research Institute of the Hebrew University for the facilities and the administrative assistance, which afforded me the peace of mind to pursue this research to fruition. But in spite of the generous counsel I received from colleagues, students and friends, I alone remain responsible for any errors of fact or interpretation that may have befallen this text. Jerusalem, Summer, 2008

Apologia On Thursday night, the 6th of March, 2008, a lone Muslim gunman from East Jerusalem, who was employed by Israel and enjoyed the services offered by its city government, surreptitiously made his way into a yeshiva ( Jewish religious school) in the heart of the Jewish neighborhood, and opened gun fire on unsuspecting teenage students who were rehearsing the end of the month portion of the Torah and Talmud that they were routinely studying and debating. Eight of them lost their lives, many others were wounded more or less seriously, until a passing-by reserve soldier, who had incidentally graduated from the same institution a few years earlier, was alerted by the shooting, rushed to the reading hall of the library where the carnage was unfolding and put an end to the massacre. That rampage was not the initiative of a lunatic and lone hatred-filled man, or the idea of a hallucinating misguided fanatic, exactly as the perpetrators of September 11 (2001) in New York and July 7 (2005) in London, even if locally grown, were the satanic messengers of worldwide Muslim organizations bent on murder and destruction. The next day, the well-to-do family of the killed murderer erected a huge tent at the entrance to their house, to accommodate the Muslim well-wishers who began streaming by the hundreds to greet the bereaved family, not to present condolences, for his feat of hitting their enemy at its heart, thereby attaining the hallowed status of shahid (martyr).1 To boot, the mourners hoisted the flags of Hizbullah and Hamas on the tent, all under the open eye of the Israeli forces of order and the liberal attitude of non-interference with the lives of the Arab Muslims in Israel’s capital city. Soon the Hamas took “credit” for that senseless massacre, driving any sensible human being to wonder why a young man of twenty-one, about to wed a wife within three months, would take that harrowing step and destroy his own life and his future. It could not be economic want, personal despair, momentary madness or a family rift. It was simply hatred, inspired by the relentless Muslim “education” in order to despise the “unbelievers,” demonize them, and dehumanize them to the point of making their lives cheap and unworthy of respect. But it must be more xi

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than that, for that horrific act, like the many other acts of terror and killings that we witness in the Muslim world, or emanate from it, day in day out, does not explain in full the intensity, the unbearable ease and the persistence of these unending and revolting manifestations of contempt and abuse of human life. Two weeks later, another Arab from East Jerusalem, who was employed by an Israeli contractor in the west part of the city, seized a bulldozer on his site and went into a rampage in the city shoving people and cars, including a bus full of horrified passengers, until he was gunned down by passers-by and police. Within two weeks that same horrible act was repeated in another street of Jerusalem, by another young Arab of East Jerusalem, also using the same tool of shoving people and cars with the bulldozer he was supposed to operate on his construction site. He too was gunned down by armed citizens and police. This begs the question: why should such a succession of murders of innocent civilians be pursued by young men who were employed and living quite comfortably in the outskirts of the city and were holding Israeli identity cards, which they had sought for their own wellbeing in the first place? What other explanation is there of these senseless murders than hatred of the Jews? Maybe the answer lies in the theory voiced by French philosopher Jean-Claude Milner that today’s anti-Semitism does not originate from old people, but from youth, and thus it is not likely to disappear but rather to become stronger, therefore it is the anti-Semitism of the future.2 Judging from the widespread indoctrination in the media and textbooks for the young of the Arab world, such indoctrination is more likely to be perpetuated there in the future than among the youth of Europe that Milner was talking about. More often than not we are now talking about the same youth who are indoctrinated by the same people who draw from the same sources. In these outbursts of anti-Semitism by Muslim youth there is also an element of contempt and abuse of other faiths, as when in the first case cited above that same Muslim murderer indiscriminately shot and ripped to pieces Torah and Talmud books, which the students were consulting, and which they left stained with their blood when they fell to the bullets of the assassin. And save for a few human and courageous voices of reason in Kuwait, the mood in the Arab/ Muslim world was not one of consternation, sorrow, shame or embarrassment, but when it was manifested, as in Gaza and among other Muslim circles, it was one of jubilation at the sight of the “feat” that their great “hero” had “achieved” in that religious school at the heart of the enemy. It was as if a Jew, or

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a Christian, burst into a madrasa at the heart of the Muslim world and massacred students bent on their study. Can anyone in a civilized country imagine any sign of jubilation at that carnage? The rest of the Muslim world was busy with its own domestic massacres where people in countless thousands are eliminated on a daily basis in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, Iraq, and many other unreported places where human lives do not count. Expectedly, when the killings, intentional or incidental, are committed by non-Muslims, as in Iraq or Israel, they are invariably dubbed as “aggression” or “murder” against Muslims, which in every case reaches the scope of a “massacre” or a “holocaust.” But the many more Muslims who are slaughtered by other Muslims and whose deaths cannot be directly blamed on the West, are simply disregarded and discounted and no grief seems to accompany them or any account taken of them. So, the real massacres by car-bombs and by Islamikaze assassins, of Afghani Muslims by other Muslims, Iraqi Sunnites against Shi’ites, Iranian Shi’ites against Sunnites, or Pakistani Taliban against their own kin, or Hamas adepts in Gaza against their Palestinian brethren from the PLO, go unnoticed and unreported. What imports for Muslim propaganda is not how many Muslims are killed, but who kills them, regardless of the reason or the justification for it. Anti-Semitism is an irrational phenomenon, which has defied definition, let alone explanation or justification in the past two millennia. Yet, the entire field of study of anti-Semitism has attempted for generations to analyze it by rational tools. For example, if we say that murdering Jews is the result of anti-Semitic contempt and hatred, then how to explain the massive physical elimination of other Muslims by their coreligionists: black Muslims by Sudanese-supported Muslim Janjaweed in Darfur, or the widespread cases of mass killings in the Arab and Muslim world, like Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority, the Yemen, Algeria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and all the rest? The inescapable conclusion is that the trigger-happy Muslims who are propped by Jihad, external or internal, and their innate disregard for human life, renders execution, capital punishment, beheading, hanging, mass murder, mutilation, and torture an acceptable norm of conduct. Implementing Shari’a rules in domestic penal law is in itself the best indication of the low value of human life in their eyes. When this worldview is practiced against Jews, it is rationalized as anti-Semitism; against other westerners, as “vengeance,” “selfdefense,” reaction to western “arrogance,” “humiliation,” or “desecration” of Muslim values; and against others by any amount of other trumped

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up justifications. Underlying all those instances is the burning desire by Muslims to impose by force their ideals and rules of conduct, both on their own nationals when they are viewed as apostates, thus deserving death, and certainly on their rivals and enemies, who are often considered as enemies of Islam and Allah, and therefore are equally deserving of annihilation. No debate, negotiation, compromise, or argument is possible with this “will of Allah,” and therefore no perceived offense or deviation from these rules is tolerable or forgivable. It is often claimed that this strict interpretation of Islam with its abuses, including anti-Semitism, is only the lot of “fanatic,” “radical,” “fundamentalist,” or “Islamist” Muslims, usually quantified as some 15 percent of the 1.5 billion world Muslims, as if that were a different faith embracing different principles than those followed by the rank-and-file Muslims. In fact, we are talking about the same one creed, which upholds Shari’a law to various degrees, but those who do not follow it to the letter, as in any other religion, are not adepts of an alternative “moderate Islam,” the one that is sometimes dubbed “religion of peace,” to distinguish from the faith of aggressive “extremists.” The truth of the matter is that no such Islam exists, though there are certainly many truly moderate Muslims, who have broken away from the bloody road of Islamic Shari’a, especially when they conveniently moved to the West, and can from a safe distance criticize the killings in their original countries of those dubbed “apostates,” or “traitors,” or the phenomenon of the Islamikaze3 bombers against Westerners and Israelis, or the culture of death that is cultivated in many Islamic lands, or indeed the unbridled anti-Semitic calumnies that are rife in their own culture. But they have yet to produce an alternative doctrine and worldview that could rival official Islam and posit a creed and a set of rules which can attract Muslims to relinquish the Shari’a and embrace another way. If they did, they would no longer be Muslims in the eyes of established Islam. Moderate Muslims often accuse the radicals, who are in fact the common Muslims who behave in accordance with the accepted rules championed by the Shari’a, of having “hijacked” Islam or “distorted” its “real” meaning, or misinterpreted it, and they in turn are condemned for having abandoned the path of Allah and having been corrupted by western ideologies. But it is the standards of the former that prevail in the Islamic world. One can simply watch the mass demonstrations in the streets of Gaza, Quetta, Casablanca, Durban and Jakarta, or in the Muslim neighborhoods in Paris, London, Marseille, Amsterdam, Sydney,

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and Toronto to realize how much alive, universal and popular are the Muslim slogans and rampages which are performed daily by Muslim masses of men, women, children of all walks of life, and including their lay leaders and clerics, of all ages. Are they all “Islamists”? No, they are simply Muslims, and the common denominator which links them together in their hatred of the West and the Jews is Islam, standard Islam, under the justification of the Shari’a, which is promoted by their Imams. While some moderate and courageous Muslim individuals will fortunately always be there to save the honor of Islam when they raise their lone voices against the abuses perpetrated in the name of their faith, the mainstream in the world of Islam, including westernized and modern professionals and intellectuals, will always be there to glorify in mirth the killings of westerners and Jews, to write or broadcast in exhilaration in favor of the Islamikaze, and distribute in jubilation sweets in the streets to “celebrate” the death of Americans or Israelis. The champions of the spurious distinction between the so-called “Islamist” minority, and the “peaceful” Muslim majority, who become entrapped in their reluctance for a carpet condemnation of Islam lest they be accused of Islamophobia or racism (as if Islam were a race), if they are non-Muslim; and treason if they are, are also enslaved by another distinction of their own making, which has equally no leg to stand on. That is “Judeophobia,” a parallel to Islamophobia, versus anti-Semitism, which is universally condemned in those circles, as it is no longer in vogue, at least not in public. They explain to us, that Islam has never been anti-Semitic, proof of their ignorance of Islamic sources, while the current dislike of Jews is no more than Judeophobia, which has no historical roots and has been a modern, circumstantial, and fleeting phenomenon which does not warrant uncalled for anxiety. If anti-Semitism is reduced to Judeophobia, it would merely become a junior counterpart of Islamophobia, and a lesser evil than anti-Semitism, and therefore less objectionable and more “acceptable,” on par with “Islamophobia,” as a modern phenomenon in Western society. Generally speaking, they would simplistically argue: “how can Muslims, or at least Arabs, themselves Semites, be anti-Semitic?” It is exactly this war of words, which has been engineered to obfuscate substance and increase the currency of Muslim terminology, while at the same time depriving the Jews and their supporters from their traditional arsenal in the battle against anti-Semitism, which we will have to tackle and clarify here. Can anyone explain in what way the Qur’anic

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condemnation of Jews as “descendants of pigs and monkeys,” which is routinely and universally preached to Muslims (not Islamists) by their clerics in both the Islamic world and Europe, is “Judeophobic” and not “anti-Semitic”? Is this hallowed Qur’anic reference, eternal as the Word of Allah, a circumstantial and fleeting pronouncement? To say so would be a blasphemy. It is used by Muslim clerics, as a matter of course, in such “moderate” and “pro-Western” countries as Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, as a continuation of the traditional way of demonizing and dehumanizing the Jews in order to facilitate their annihilation. What more would it take to call this blatant anti-Semitism? Words were created to transmit conventionally agreed upon meanings. If each actor chose to lend to his words a different significance or accuse the others of “distorting” their meaning, then we would no longer be able to call a spade a spade or communicate with others. Anti-Semitism is the millennial irrational hatred of the Jews, and it has been called so since the onset of modern research on this sinister issue in the nineteenth century. No amount of masking, manipulations with words and creation of parallels to dilute that terminology, can succeed, exactly as no coupling of the unique term “Holocaust” with Armenians or Darfurians (incidentally both perpetrated by Muslims), can blunt the poignancy of the Jewish Holocaust or rob it of its uniqueness. No wonder, then, that the most frequent manifestations of anti-Semitism these days, both among Muslims everywhere and their anti-Semitic allies in Europe, has been Holocaust denial, meaning that that devalued term in the eyes of the deniers has acquired a generic usage for all sorts of massacres, but the hated Jews cannot even claim to have acceded to the “honor” of having been one of its victims who, thereby, gained their uniqueness. Notes 1. 2.

3.

For a discussion of martyrs and their motivations, see Raphael Israeli, Islamikaze: Manifestations of Islamic Martyrology (Frank Cass, London, 2003). Claude Meyer, “Interview with Jean-Claude Milner,” the author of The Criminal Inclinations of Democratic Europe, in Actualites Juives Hebdo, No. 823, December 11, 2003. Cited in Manfred Gerstenfeld, “Antisemitism: Integral to European Culture,” Post Holocaust and Anti-Semitism, No. 19, April 1, 2004, p.4, published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Ibid.

1 The Anti-Semitic Heritage of the Arab and Muslim World Muslim migrants to the West and their descendants, who by now number around 30 million in the European Union alone, did not arrive empty-handed. They carried with them the stereotypes and creeds that they had grown up with in their cultural milieus, even if their general educational level did not allow for a more sophisticated learning. After two generations of struggling as temporary “guest-workers” for jobs and basic subsistence, the third generation that was born in that place, acquired the notions of the local culture and regards itself as part of the society of their host country, has also taken on enough self-confidence to establish their own sub-culture, revive their native language, religion, mores, and modes of behavior, and even make demands on their hosts. Among others, the revival of their Islamic faith has been preached by imported Imams from the Islamic mainland (Turks to Germany; North Africans to France and Benelux; Pakistanis and Bangladeshis to Britain). Saudis and other Arab donors to all parts of the West, where they erect mosques and Islamic centers and insist on the propagation of their stringent Wahhabi cult, whose strings are attached to the generous and bulging Saudi purse, have tremendously contributed to the new revivalist Islamic mood among Muslim immigrants. Anti-Semitism in the core Islamic world, which exports its teachings to the new Muslim diasporas in the West, consists of three layers whose combination determines the conduct of Muslims at any given time in any given place. The first is the immense anti-Jewish literature, which is enshrined in Qur’anic verses, in the hadith stories, in accounts of the sirah (the biography of the Prophet) and in treatises of jurisprudence, which have the force of law. The second is the massive Christian antiSemitic literature, which was adopted by Muslims in later centuries as a result of the interaction between the two civilizations. The third is the 1

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wealth of reports and commentaries, which accompany, day after day, the fortunes of the Arab-Israeli dispute, and tends to intensify or quiet down in accordance with the swing of the war-and-peace pendulum which frequently reverses it both ways. All three layers have become indistinguishable and have merged into one major cataract of hatred and calumny, which submerges all the compartments of Judaism, Zionism, and Israel without distinction. The Muslim Component Numerous in volume and overwhelming in content are the Qur’anic passages, which serve as the basis of Muslim elemental anti-Semitism, and which have become the building stones of the massive propaganda that shapes the minds of young Muslims everywhere. What is striking is that at the same time that the foundational texts of Islam affirm their basic contempt and hatred towards Jews (and Christians), they now find it expedient to deny this fact, and this denial has served many non-Muslim apologists of Islam in their attempt to hide, obscure, or otherwise dwarf this innate trait of Islamic history. This at a time when the Qur’an and hadiths (traditions of Muhammad) have numerous passages which proclaim enmity towards the Jews who are declared to be deceivers, conspirers, and killers of Muhammad (by poisoning him). As Mark Durie has written, Islam’s foundational texts express hostility to four religious groupings: Jews, Christians, pagans, and Muslim renegades. Jihad is mandated against all four of these groups, and whereas the rules of war are more merciless against the pagans and Muslim renegades—for only Jews and Christians are being allowed to keep their faith after Islamic conquest—of the two “Peoples of the Book” it is the Jews who attract the most intense expressions of hatred. There is less anti-Christian sentiment in the Qur’an and hadiths than there is anti-Jewish sentiment, and in Muhammad’s biography his dealings with the Jews of Arabia—leading to a genocide of Jewish tribes in Medina, and the bloody conquest of the Jewish oasis of Khaybar—loom much larger and are much more negative than his dealings with Christians.1 Take for example the Islamic daily prayers which include repeated recitations of al-Fatihah, the opening chapter of the Qur’an. In these few verses, every Muslim prays that members of his faith be guided on the straight path of Allah, not like the Christians (“those who have gone astray”) or the Jews (“those who incur Allah’s wrath”). This simple contrast, that whereas Christians have lost their way, Jews have fallen under the anger of Allah, neatly summarizes Islam’s attitude to the Jews.

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The standard commentators, al-Jalalayn ( the Two Jalals), as well as Ibn al-Kathir, whose tafsir (commentary) is popular among English-speaking Muslims, explain in almost the same terms the distinction in their discussion of al-Fatihah: Before these two paths are the paths of the Christians and Jews, a fact that the Believer should beware of so that he avoids them. This signifies that while the Jews abandoned practicing the religion, the Christians lost the true knowledge. This is why “anger” descended upon the Jews, while being described as “led astray” is more appropriate of the Christians. Those who know, but avoid implementing the truth, deserve the anger, unlike those who are ignorant. The Christians want to seek the true knowledge, but are unable to find it because they did not seek it from its proper resources. This is why they were led astray. We should also mention that both the Christians and the Jews have earned the anger and are led astray, but the anger is one of the attributes more particular of the Jews. Allah said about the Jews, “Those (Jews) who incurred the curse of Allah and His wrath” ([Sura] 5:60). The attribute that the Christians deserve most is that of being led astray, just as Allah said about them, “Who went astray before and who misled many, and strayed (themselves) from the right path ([Sura] 5:77).” Here Ibn al-Kathir is explaining that, whereas Christians are merely ignorant, Jews know the truth but deliberately reject it, thus making themselves objects of Allah’s wrath.2

Durie also reminds us that this libel which is repeated in every observant Muslim’s obligatory prayers, several times a day, shows that Islam’s rejection of the Jews is not peripheral or negligible. Many years ago, Mark Durie, an active priest in Melbourne, Australia, was personally surprised to discover hatred of Jews among the Muslims of Indonesia, a country which has had virtually nothing to do with Jews in its history. When Amrozi, the mastermind of the mass murder in Bali, cried out threats against Jews at his sentencing in a Balinese courtroom, this was not because he had ever met a single Jew. His hatred was purely theological. So, in spite of the reality of denial, which is shared by some Jews who could not free themselves of their dhimmitude, Islam’s anti-Semitic legacy is persistent and tenacious. Durie also attests that his friend, Dr. Daniel Shayesteh who was one of the Iranian founders of Hizbullah, became a Christian after he fled from the Ayatollah’s murderous regime. Shayesteh explains in his testimony the hatred of Jews, which he absorbed as part of his Muslim upbringing in Iran, and the intention of the Iranian revolutionaries to destroy Israel. Indeed, the visceral hatred which shaped

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Hizbullah’s dreams of conquest and destruction has not died out, and continues to plague the world.3 Take, for example, the infamous passage from the Book, which is cited in sermons in the mosques throughout the Muslim world, and which depicts Jews as “descendants of pigs and monkeys.” We understand today that Muhammad had pronounced those derogatory words of the Jews when they rose against his authority in Medina at the outset of his political career there. But today, when they are repeated ad nauseam throughout the Muslim world on Friday sermons, out of any context, they serve no other purpose than disparaging the Jews and insulting them. What is that if not anti-Semitism, irrational as it may be? That derogatory reference, which is seconded by many others,4 has had a profound and lasting impact on Muslim thinking, behavior, social norms, and the education of their children, and not necessarily in areas of conflict with Israel or adjacent to it, sometimes even in parts of the world that have never seen a Jew. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the now famous Somalian refugee, who immigrated to the Netherlands and was instantly catapulted to prominence there when she was elected to Parliament, recounted in one of her many press interviews about the religious indoctrination process she underwent in her country in her youth. Her history teacher, Sister Aziza, took the class for an outing to the Iranian embassy and promoted a revolution. Gradually the girls in her class started to physically cover themselves.... She started to wear the hijab and to admire the Muslim Brotherhood. Aziza started to use the “yahud” (Jews) word. One day she said: “You all sit up and listen.” She showed the girls a magazine from Iran with pictures of dead people, piles of bodies and blood, and said: “look what the yahud have done to the Muslims.” The pictures were Iranian propaganda. They were taken from the Iran-Iraq war, showing Iraqi soldiers killing Iranian citizens. This is what the Jews have done, and Saddam was an agent of the Jews, Sister Aziza taught. She instructed the kids how to pray: “You hold your hands together, and you say: ‘Allah please protect us from evil, Allah please keep us healthy, Allah please take care of my mother and my father, Allah please destroy the Jews.’” Hirsi Ali pursued her tale: For me, “yahud” [Jew] was not the same as human. It’s the enemy. It’s Satan. I remember a joke, well, it wasn’t even a joke, from the time I was a very little girl. We were in Riyadh and Jeddah when the oil boom started. They were trying to build an oil pump; the construction project went on forever. At last, when the project was done, they opened the top of the pump, but instead of oil, water came out. And I remember my mom saying: “See, the Jews are at it again.” And I think about the three most horrible insults you could think of in my world. The insults were “yahud”, “shuri”

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and “hanis”. “Shuri” means a communist. “Hanis” means gay. You guys are used to laughing at it, but it’s really not a laughing matter. Because it’s no longer just the Saudis who think like that. These ideas are spreading throughout Islam and all over the world to people who never met Jews, who know nothing about Israelis or what Israel represents. In 1993 I went to Antwerp with a friend. The friend said, “We are now in the Jewish neighborhood” and pointed at an Orthodox Jew. And I lost my breath and said: “Jewish?! Is he Jewish?! Wait, where? Where?” You see, I needed to visualize this huge fantasy of evil that I had in my head. And then he showed me a few people walking around and asked, “What exactly were you expecting?” I looked around and said, “Can you tell me, if a kid has two hands and two legs and he’s walking, are there children who are Jewish as well?” And my friend responded: “Yes, there are Jewish children as well.” At that moment I felt something else inside me, that said it was shameful to voice what I had felt. I had to suppress that. So in 1993 I didn’t talk about it again. It was in 1994, during history class, when I first saw pictures of what happened in the Second World War. I was coming from Somalia, and similar things started to happen in my country, along with Rwanda, Sudan, Liberia, Sierra Leone…. There are many things I learned at that time in history class, but the story of the Holocaust made the biggest impression on me. I went to all the Holocaust museums. I’ve been to Yad Vashem twice. As I understood it, the Holocaust wasn’t just the story of the Jews ... I don’t know if this goes for everyone, but knowledge enlightened me…. As a Muslim, I belong to the universal tribe. Every human individual, regardless of his beliefs, faith, sex, deserves to live and is equal. My criticism is of religion, especially Islam, and not of Muslims. Therefore, my criticism of Islam is not a rejection of Muslims. It is the idea of race that makes us destroy each other. You have to change your mind and learn to accept the other. My case is to convince fellow Muslims. I call myself Muslim not because I believe in Allah any longer, but I come out of that culture, and I want to fight to modify that culture, and create a culture of love and human rights...5

In many respects, Hirsi Ali’ s enlightenment after her move to Holland puts in perspective much of the education to hatred to which innocent children are exposed in the Muslim world, and which bears no necessary relationship to deprivation or poverty (Hirsi was from a well-to do background). Add to that the universality of anti-Semitism in Islam (she heard the same derogation of the Jews in Saudi Arabia and then among European Muslims); the power of stereotypes and cultivated myths (Hirsi had never seen a Jew in either Somalia or, even much less likely in Jeddah); the fallacy of attributing these attitudes to the Arab-Israeli dispute (Somalia never was a party to it); and the lumping together of Jews and Israel as an inseparable entity, Muslim protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, and one begins to comprehend what we are talking about. Hirsi later also understood the systematic Holocaust denial current among Muslims, became a perennial visitor to Israel and to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, and grew to castigate Muslims for the atmosphere of Jew-hatred that they cultivate in their midst. According to the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary

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Anti-Semitism and Racism at Tel Aviv University, racial anti-Jewish attacks in the West have increased 6.6 percent worldwide and the most severe incidents tripled in 2007. That year’s 632 attacks against Jews were reported compared to 593 in 2006. Out of 2007’s attacks, 57 were declared “major attacks,” triple the number in 2006 at 19. The authors of the study pointed out that violence continued to escalate although there was not an “external catalyst” like the 2006 Second Lebanon War6 or the intifadahs of the 1980s and the early 2000s. Much of that escalation in Europe is attributable to the dramatic increase in the numbers and militancy of the Muslim communities in the Old Continent. In his massive The Legacy of Islamic Anti-Semitism,7 an exhaustive collection of sources, Islamic and others, has been undertaken by author Andrew Bostom; the volume testifies to the long and sorry history of anti-Semitism in Islam, the like of which had never been undertaken before on this scale, mainly due to the constrictions of political correctness which had posited that Islam, unlike Christianity, had never entertained a systematic persecution of the Jews as such. This apology for Islam, one of whose prominent champions has been the much-hailed dean of Islamic Studies, Bernard Lewis, has now been shattered by Andy Bostom, who following on the footsteps of another non-professional writer in the field of Islam, Bat Ye’or, has painstakingly but thoughtfully collected and collated this documentation that would have been a large undertaking for any scholar of Islam to pursue, let alone for a professional in medicine whose research in Islam has been merely a sideline. Bostom begins his volume by a well-tailored survey of the theological, historical, and juridical origins of Islamic anti-Semitism, including the Holy Qur’an, the Hadith and the Sirah (the hagiography of the Prophet); he proceeds to an insightful description of the dhimmis in the main lands of Islam, to test the theory of the cited sources against the practice of Muslim rulers, in the entire area spanning the Middle East, North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula (Andalusia), and the Ottoman Empire. The picture one gets from these documents reverses in a dramatic way many of the ill-conceived and misjudged information, which had attempted in the past to ascribe to the lands of Islam a much more benign and idyllic image of their (mis)treatment of the Jews. Inter alia, the coalition between the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem and the Nazis during WWII is conjured up by the author to summarize this introduction. Then, the author delves in considerable detail into the main sources of Islamic jurisprudence—the Qur’an and the Hadith, complemented by the

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Sirah where an abundance of references, usually uncomplimentary but rather derogatory, are made to Jews, collectively known as Israi’liyyat (Israelites’ stories). This is a trove of anti-Jewish stereotypes which have become the shari’a-based uncontested “Truth” about the People of the Book. Those accounts are invariably cited in sermons during Friday prayers, thus assuring their universal diffusion among Muslim constituents and the constant poisoning of the souls of young and adult Muslims alike, something that makes their fundamentally negative attitudes to Jews and Israel unchangeable. This extremely important collection from the holy sources is supplemented by the thinking and judgment of the most authoritative Muslim jurists whose every word has been awaited and avidly digested by Muslim constituencies the world over. The great medieval masters such as Tabari and Jahiz, are reinforced by more recent ones such as the Egyptian Tantawi and Egyptian-in exile Qaradawi who represent the two poles of established Islam and popular Islam in our contemporary Sunni world. Finally, an impressive selection of observations made by prominent Western scholars (Bernard Lewis excepted), and eye-witness reports made by travelers, consular representatives, journalists, and writers about the condition of the Jews in Arab lands, is conjured up to lend their backing to the basic, and well-documented thesis of the author, that the anti-Semitic record of the Islamic world rather leaves much to be desired. All in all, one can hardly exaggerate the vast importance of this volume, which will henceforth become indispensable for any student of Islam, of Judeo-Islamic relations, of anti-Semitism in particular and of hate-literature in general. It also provides the indispensable background to comprehend the underpinnings of the “New Muslim Anti-Semitism,” whose new avenues of hatred have come to be expressed most virulently by Ahmed Ahmadinajad, the President of Iran, who again raises the specter of annihilating the Jews and their state. The paradox implied in the saying that the media achieve immediacy, especially the widespread use (and abuse) of Internet sites to diffuse the venom of radical Islam globally, has extended its applicability to the growing Muslim populations in Europe who have become among the chief proponents of antiSemitism in the West today. The old and stale anti-Jewish stereotypes that appear in classic European anti-Semitism, and have been copiously replicated in Arab and Muslim anti-Semitic writings, have of late affected some new twists, concurrent with the enhanced anti-Semitic mood in the West. The main

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sources of inspiration have not changed dramatically, and they sustain their leaning on Muslim scriptures (like dubbing the Jews the “descendants of apes and swines”, etc.), their borrowings from the Christian themes of Blood Libel, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the world Jewish conspiracy and the idea of “poisoning” in various forms caused by Jews; and their depending on the fortunes of the Arab-Israeli conflict, in the process parading anti-Semitism as anti-Zionism or anti-Israelism. The new twist consists in operationalizing the old stereotypes and the anti-Semitic vocabulary of old into concrete acts to enhance the monstrous image attached to the Jews, and take action to check the “wild” and controllable conduct of the Zionists and the Israelis, to the point of declaring the desirability of their liquidation and preparing the tools of mass-destruction to achieve that goal. The areas where this new operationalization of anti-Semitism works are varied and widespread. Here we can only briefly address several of them, before we reach some tentative conclusions. They are: firstly, using Christians, both in the Middle East and in Europe, many of whom have succumbed to the dhimmi state of mind, to denigrate Jews and Zionism; secondly, to expand the range of Jew-haters and hate-mongers from obscurantist clerics to vast strata of mainstream intellectuals and professionals; thirdly, to encourage anti-Semitism as a legitimate tool to combat Israel; fourthly, to prominently add to the old Christian themes also a pathological Holocaust denial; fifthly, to “perfect” the theme of poisoning to new heights, in line with the world of hallucinations where many Muslims dwell; and finally, to vilify the Jews to such an extent as to fill all crevices of the Muslim soul with a paranoiac contempt and disgust of the Zionists and Israelis, so that the overt Jewish appellation is somehow prudently circumvented. Christians as a Tool In an article published in the establishment al Ahram in Cairo, an enlightened Coptic scholar, Dr. Babawi, lambasted the American Congress for not stopping “Israel’s artillery attacks on the Nativity and the Aqsa Mosque,” and he urged American Muslims and Copts to demonstrate against “crazy Sharon, who began behaving like a madman after he was hit in his sensitive place by a bullet during the 1948 War, which left him with only one testicle, something that has affected him psychologically, and he has become a crazy psychopath, using power to hide his weakness….”8 This broadside, which in Arab tradition demeans the man by

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pointing to his sexual weakness, sought to twist the Nativity event, where Palestinians invaded the Holy Church at gun point, by imputing the moral wrong to Israel who tried to dislodge them from there. But no one could have missed the point: a Copt in Egypt, a member of a persecuted and dispossessed minority in an Islamic country, must be more Arab than his compatriots, to evince his loyalty, and there was evidently no better grounds for that exercise than an anti-Jewish attack. The Bishop of the Assyrian Church in Lebanon followed suit by asserting that though the heads of the Church today are not Jewish, they are “led by Jews, whose faith is inimical to God, to the people and to Christianity.” He cites Jesus as having said to the Jews: “You are the sons of Satan, and you practice the will of Satan your father,” to which they supposedly answered: “No, we are not the sons of Satan, we are the sons of Abraham.” But he insisted: “Had you been the sons of Abraham, you would be acting in accordance with the precepts of Abraham…. You are the sons of Satan.”9 This wholesale discredit of the Jews, to gain favor with the thugs of Hizbullah, defies logic insofar as the dwindling Christian minorities in the Islamic world should have made common cause with the Jews, but it is evident that Muslims exploit the persecuted and intimidated Christians to “prove” the universal disgust that they sense towards Jews. Many of the anti-Jewish stereotypes among the Muslims are imported from Western Christianity while others are Muslim-made, but both parties liberally borrow from each other, through the intermediary of the Eastern Christians in the Muslim world, who master both cultures and traditions, including as regards anti-Semitism, and who have not been reformed by the far-reaching concessions made to Judaism by the Catholic Church. Furthermore, during the al-Aqsa Intifadah, which has pushed the Islamikaze martyrs (shuhada) to the forefront of Palestinian experience, some Christians found them comparable to Christ’s martyrdom even as they invaded the Nativity at the height of their violence: We kneel before the Palestinian people in the Nativity. He starves and thirsts, but he is steadfast…. The one who said “I am hungry” when he was on the Cross was our Lord Jesus himself…. Our Palestinian people in Bethlehem died like a crucified martyr on the rock guarded by Israeli soldiers armed from head to foot, who have no compassion, love, life or tolerance…. The Jew has a principle from which we suffer and which he tries to impose on people, and that is the principle of Gentiles. To him, the Gentile is a slave. They give the Palestinians working in Israel only a piece of bread, and tell them: “this piece of bread that you eat is taken from our children, and we give it to you so you will live as free men in your land, but as a proletariat and a slave in Israel, to serve us…”. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are based on this

10

Muslim Anti-Semitism in Christian Europe principle, and anyone who reads the Protocols feels that we are in this period with the Jews.10

Expanding the Scope of Hatred When one peruses through Arab and Muslim publications and media, one cannot help notice that the scope of anti-Semitism has been expanding beyond obscurantist clerics or fanatically nationalistic elements in those societies, and has come to embrace also supposedly liberal, enlightened and professional mainstream milieus. In that discourse, the interchangeability between Jews, Zionists, and Israelis is unmistakable when all three are alternately threatened of outright extermination. An Egyptian, Dr. Adel Sadeq, a senior psychiatrist by profession, who often bashes President Bush and the West for their ignorance of the Arab psyche, has no qualms about fighting Israel to the finish, more than two decades after his country signed peace with it. He wrote: What is happening now indicates that Israel will not exist for ever. We as Arabs must know that this war will not end…, and anyone who deludes himself that there will be peace must understand that Israel did not come to this region to love the Arabs or to normalize relations with them…. Either the Israelis or the Palestinians, there is no third option…. There are no Israeli civilians, they are all plunderers, for history teaches this. I am completely convinced that the psychological effect [of the Islamikaze] on the Israeli usurper will be his realizing that his existence is temporary…. Remove the Apache [combat helicopters] from the equation, leave them one on one with the Palestinian people with the only weapon being dynamite, then you will see all Israelis leave, because there is not even one Israeli among them willing to don on a belt of explosives…. We will throw Israel into the sea, there is no middle ground. Coexistence is total nonsense…. The real means of dealing with Israel directly is those who blow themselves up. According to what I see in the battle arena, there is no other way but the pure, noble Palestinian bodies. This is the only Arab weapon there is, and anyone who says otherwise is a conspirator.11

If statements of this sort are made by mainstream opinion makers, often graduates of Western universities and bearers of Ph.D. titles, especially in such “moderate” countries as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, how much more so in the Muslim fundamentalist circles where license is given to the most abominable Judeo-phobic rhetoric. At the heart of the Egyptian establishment and consensus, for example, is the weekly October, founded and edited by one of the most virulent anti-Semites in the Arab world—Anis Mansur12—who was a close associate of President Anwar Sadat. This is what a retired general, Hassan Sweilem, had to say in that journal, taken straight from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Hamas platform:

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Along history, since Emperor Justinian and down to Hitler, Europe’s rulers had been trying to rid themselves of the acts of violence, barbarism, corruption, conflict mongering and other deeds that Jews were, and still are, in the custom of doing in European societies…, like, for example, their domination of monetary systems, treasuries, banks and commercial monopolies, which has caused widespread bankruptcy and economic destruction. They also diffuse drugs, prostitution, trade of women as sexual slaves, and alcohol. They have also monopolized the gold and precious stone trade, paid bribes to rulers and extorted them throughout history…. The Jews stood behind wars and internal strife, and that caused European rulers to expel them and kill them. For example, the Crusader armies, passing through the Rhine basin on their way east, massacred them and burned their houses as an act of repentance to their God. When the Crusaders entered Jerusalem, they collected the Jews in a synagogue and burned them live. Their kin in Russia suffered a similar fate…. They were expelled from France, England, Germany, Hungary, Belgium, Slovakia, Austria, Holland, and finally from Spain, after they underwent the Inquisition trials for their conspiracy to penetrate Christian society like a Trojan horse…. The Jewish conspiracy to take over Europe generated civil revolutions, wars and internal strife…. The Cromwell Revolution failed in 1649 England, following the Jewish Conspiracy to drag England into several wars in Europe…. Then the French Revolution broke out, which the Jews had planned, based on the first conference of their rabbis and interest-loaners that had been convened by the first Rothschild in 1773 in order to take over all the world resources…. That conference adopted 24 protocols, including the uprooting of the belief in God from the hearts of the Gentiles, distracting people by distributing among them literature of heresy and impurity, destruction of the family and eradication of all morality…13

This goes on ad nauseam, evincing the primitive, delusive, and bigoted minds of the writers and of those who facilitated those heaps of utter nonsense to gain “respectability” by being published in a truly respectable medium. The Jews were “credited” in that October article with putting Napoleon on the throne and then of causing his demise, of the 1775 war between Britain and the nascent USA, of establishing the Bank of America in 1881 with a view of controlling the wealth of the fledgling U.S., and then of kindling the fire of the American Civil War. He told how the Protocols were written in 1770 by a German rabbi, financed by Rothschild, again in order “to destroy all governments and religions, spread anarchy and revolution, trigger wars, take over the wealth of nations, spread corruption among the youth, and control rulers by implanting in their governments Jewish ministers and advisers.” This mainstream sick mind goes on: the Jews ordered the start of World War I, and got the U.S. to get involved by spreading the rumor that an American ship had been sunken by the Germans. During that war, they prepared the grounds for both Communism and Nazism, as a follow-up to the work done by the Jews Marx and Engels half a century earlier when they circulated the Communist Manifesto in London. Eventually, Communism and Nazism

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Muslim Anti-Semitism in Christian Europe

took over power and came to confront each other, “exactly as the Jews had planned.” The second world war erupted due to the limitations imposed by the Allies on the Germans in Versailles, by order of the Jews, thus pushing the Germans to revolution and to the rise of Hitler. The Jews also brought about the fall of the Ottoman Empire and they were to reap the fruit thereof by concentrating all wealth in their hands.14 Anti-Semitism as a Tool to Combat Israel This repulsive verbiage, which also includes the claim that the Jews caused the Great Depression in order to pave the way to WW II, is not innocently geared to disclose great new historical findings to the world, for educational or didactic purposes, but primarily to discredit the Jews and point to the “dangers” they pose to the world, thereby implying that the Jewish state is as dangerous to world peace and therefore illegitimate. These calumnies, part of which had been concocted for centuries in Europe and were imported to the Middle East and then re-exported to the West, are not believed by Muslims to be a tool of propaganda, because they are so much replicated and repeated that their forgers end up believing them as conventional wisdom and documented history; and because there is almost no decent intellectual, researcher, or scientist in the Muslim world who would dare to contradict them or question their validity, rationale, veracity, and the authenticity of their detail, lest he be considered a “traitor” to the Arab/Islamic cause. And so, forged citations, made-up “facts,” fake sources, trumped up accusations, and all manner of other hoaxes, for which one can be prosecuted in civilized countries and serve prison terms, become widespread currency in Islamic countries, for the most part with impunity (either on the part of peer scholars or by the state). The innocent and misguided masses, who have neither interest in the facts, nor any way to learn them beyond the propaganda they are exposed to, take that nonsense as gospel and as a legitimate way to battle Israel and the Jews. Islamikaze bombings by Palestinians against Israel, have often been rationalized in terms of anti-Zionism and encouraged against the background of the pathologically vilified Jews, who have “earned” the onslaughts against them due to their schemes and the dangers they pose to the world. An Egyptian columnist, for example, preceded and followed by many others, specifically urged the Islamikaze to step up their operations against the Jews, and called upon more Muslim volunteers to join the murderers. His imagination is gruesome in its detail and inhumanity:

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… with every blow struck by al-Aqsa Intifadah, my conviction grows stronger that I, and those like-minded, have been right all along, and I am still right in my belief that the despised racist Jewish entity will be annihilated. Contrary to others, however, I am not ashamed to speak about driving them into the sea, to hell or to the trash heap where they belong… I maintain, and Allah is my witness, that the annihilation and defeat of the Israelis, after which there will be no resurrection, does not require all those things. All that is required is to concentrate on acts of martyrdom, or what is known as the “strategy of the balance of fear”…. Let us do some mathematical calculations: 250 Palestinians have signed up for martyrdom operations, and it is not impossible to raise their number to 1000 throughout the Arab world…i.e, one fida’i out of every 250,000 Arabs. The average harvest of each act of martyrdom is 10 dead and 50 wounded. Thus, 1000 acts of martyrdom would leave the Zionists with at least 10,000 dead and 50,000 wounded. This is double the Israeli casualties in all their wars with the Arabs since 1948 [sic].15 They cannot bear this. There is also the added advantage, not noted by many, of the negative Jewish emigration, which as a result of 1,000 martyrdom operations, will come to at least one million Jews, followed by the return of every Jew to the place whence he came… I am signing myself up as the first martyr from Egypt and declare that I am ready to commit an act of martyrdom at any moment. I will place myself under the command of Hassan Nasrallah, the Hamas, Islamic Jihad and any other Jihad movement…. Never in my life have I asked Allah for money, honor or power. All I have asked, all I ask, all I will ask, is that Allah allow me to become a shahid and grant me the honor of reaping as great a harvest as possible of Israeli lives…16

This rabid anti-Semitism, which unabashedly proclaims its genocidal aims in a mainstream journal, without encountering the least resistance or objection from fellow-writers, the authorities, the media, the public, human rights groups anywhere, and in a country which had signed a peace treaty with Israel more than two decades earlier, naturally did not remain isolated in other Islamic media. In Iran, the hub of Islamic violence and support for terrorism against Israel, reports came out about funds raised to support Palestinian “suicide operations” against Israel, and about promises from Tehran to Islamic Jihadists that their financial sustenance would no longer be channeled through Hizbullah but disbursed directly to them.17 Israel is perceived by them as a danger to the entire region, not only to the Palestinians, and Imam Khumeini was cited as determining that “the goal of this virus [Israel], that was planted in the heart of the Muslim world, is not only to annihilate the Arab nation, therefore the “solution is to annihilate this virus, for there is no other treatment…. The Islamic states and the Muslims should initiate the annihilation of this den of corruption in every possible way. It is permitted to use charity money for that purpose….”18 Similar calls to “annihilate the Jews” have become routine in Muslim mosques as well as in the writings of Saudi and other Muslim writers.19

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Holocaust Denial Even though Holocaust denial is not new in Muslim countries, and sponsoring lecture tours by infamous “revisionist historians” (Faurisson, Garaudy and Irving) has been going on par with prohibiting the projection of Schindler’s List within their boundaries, it seems that recently, especially since the eruption of the al-Aqsa Intifadah (September 2000), this has become one of their favorite pastimes. They do it not out of concern for “historical truth,” but simply to sustain their long-standing accusations against the Jews and turn the blame of terrorism against Jews by blasting them for “using organized terrorism to cultivate that legend [of the Holocaust] and turn it into a fact which ties down the hands of historians.”20 The Jews are also condemned for “forging history,” an accusation of long date since the inception of Islam, aided by the “constant refutation by scientific articles which have proven that never have there been gas chambers, or that the numbers of the dead were significantly lower.”21 Some Muslim media even claimed that, far from being hurt by World War II, Jews on the contrary profited from it, for had Japan and Germany won the war, the Jews “could not have continued to blackmail the Gentiles with their lies.”22 Abu Mazen, the “moderate” successor of Arafat in the Palestinian leadership also joined this cacophony of Holocaust denial in his infamous doctoral thesis, written in Communist Moscow and published as a book in 1984.23 From denying the Holocaust, or diminishing its horrors, to accusing the Jewish victims of Nazism as having conspired with it against their own people, as Abu Mazen did, the road is short to defending Hitler against the “offences” caused him by the Jews and their supporters. Following Western and Israeli protests to the Egyptian government regarding the unbridled sympathy for Hitler that is current in the Egyptian and Arab press in general,24 the government daily Al-Akhbar relented for a while but could not contain its irresistible fascination with Hitler for long and soon reverted to it with vengeance. This time a cleric from al-Azhar, Mahmud Khadr, entitled his contribution “in Defense of Hitler,” and used the occasion to bash not only Israel and the Jews but also the hated West: …Hitler and many of his ministers took their own lives so that they would not have to see the faces of the old ape, Churchill, and the big bear, Stalin, who would sentence them to death with no one to defend them…. Each one of them has a right to his defense…, but Hitler’s executioners took his right away and attributed to him crimes, whether he committed them or not. I do not know what would have happened to Roosevelt, Churchill and de Gaulle, had Hitler won. Perhaps the crimes for which they deserve the death sentence would have been much worse than all that

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Hitler had done…. But all of Hitler’s crimes and infractions were forgotten, except for the crime that was exaggerated and blown completely out of proportion, thanks to the insistence of world Zionism to continue to stoke the fire. The reason for this was the emotional need of the sons of Jacob to extort Germany and to eat away at its resources. It is amazing that Westerners, who are entitled to their own thinking, to confirming or denying anything, including the existence of the Prophets of Allah, cannot address the Jewish question, or more precisely the false Holocaust, whose numbers and scope they have exaggerated, until it has reached the level of the merciless destruction of six million Jews, only because Hitler saw them as an inferior race unworthy of living next to the Germanic race, which must rule the world…. Anyone who knocks on this door is accused of the most horrible things, and is tried in all Western courts for anti-Semitism…, for two reasons: one is due to Zionist control of thinking in the world and the degree of oppression of thought by the Zionist propaganda apparatus in those nations. No one can oppose this oppression for fear of going to prison or having his livelihood or reputation threatened…. The second is the fear that the lies of Zionism would be exposed if the subject of the Holocaust is investigated factually and the logical conclusions are drawn…. The first dubious fact is the number of six million Jews who were burnt in the gas chambers. Did they have children or families who demanded compensation, or did Zionism see itself as their heir? If we assume that everyone had an average of five family members, this would bring the number of the Jews affected to 30 million. It is certain that many Jews escaped before the ship sunk, that many of them survived, despite the so-called extermination and burning. This would mean that the number of Jews in Germany amounted to 60 million, although the total number of Germans has never reached this many…. Even if we cross off one zero from the six million and we are left with a tenth of this number, it would still seem exaggerated and would have to be investigated….25

It is difficult to imagine that the writer did not know the numbers of Germany’s population during the war, or that most of the exterminated Jews were not German but Polish, Baltic, or Soviet, or that since entire Jewish families, often over three generations, were decimated, no heir was left behind to claim damages. All these harrowing manipulations of numbers, of which Abu Mazen was also guilty, and which have no leg to stand on, are pages taken from the books of Sho’ah deniers and have no other purpose than to diminish its dimensions and accuse the Jews of its inflation. A follow up of that line of thought has been to show that Hitler had no reason to exterminate so many Jews, therefore, in fact, he did not. But deniers of the Sho’ah, including Arabs and Muslims, are caught in the contradiction of both diminishing its numbers, in order to relegate the horror to a “footnote in history” as Jean-Marie Le Pen would have it, but at the same time explaining and blowing up the “threat that Jews posed to the Germans,” hence the “imperative” to eliminate them.

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Poisoning as the Ultimate Jewish Conspiracy The repetitive use of the Protocols and the Blood Libel in the Arab media, especially the manufacturing of new popular tele-novellas and other “documentary” series on television during the peak- watching month of Ramadan, create the ambience in which any calumny against the Jews is readily believed and repeated in other media as well, not least in countries such as Jordan and Egypt, which have supposedly made peace with Israel. In this atmosphere the most abominable lies spread about the Jews are picked up and diffused, and the masses are only too eager to absorb them, and further spread them around as “facts,” without investigation or critique. The most virulent kind of hoax of this sort, which easily catches up and propagates, are the stories of poisoning that are attributed to the Jews, and certainly originate from the wellpoisoning calumnies inherent in European anti-Semitism. One could hear Yasser Arafat often attributing to Israel the distribution of poisoned sweets among Palestinian children in order to maim them, or the use of depleted uranium in bullets that quell the Intifadah in order to sexually incapacitate Palestinian fighters and thus contribute to diminishing their numbers. At the height of this campaign, the Palestinian representative in the Human Rights Commission in Geneva, a Doctor Abdallah Ramlawi, accused Israel of injecting the HIV virus into 300 Palestinian children in order to impair their reproduction organs. When Israel sent its experts to Egypt to develop high tech agriculture in its Nile Delta area, with astounding results, reports abounded in the press that the Jews had no other purpose in coming to Egypt, which did not need them and could itself teach them what agriculture was all about, than poisoning the soil of Egypt and destroying its age-old and advanced farming. Papers also recycled ad-nauseam the allegation that Israel distributed, through the Arab world an aphrodisiac, chewing gum geared to raise the sexual desire of Muslim women in order to lead them astray. But perhaps the greatest hoax in this regard, which was constructed by Palestinians, and then built up by other Arabs, Muslims, the UN, the European press, and even the Red Cross, and became cause celebre during the months of March-April 1983, was the story of “poisoning school girls” in the Jenin district, which was then under Israeli rule. Against all available evidence, and in spite of the fact that a number of official investigations were launched by Israel and international bodies, which produced no incriminating findings, the story reverberated across the world, until proven false.26 But even then, no one outside Israel found

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it necessary to castigate the manufacturers of the hoax. The end result was that the Palestinians, and other Arabs and Muslims for that matter, discovered that splashing mud on Israel could go on with impunity, and they pursued their practice wholeheartedly. It is interesting to note that the depleted uranium story and the AIDS injection hoax followed the girls-poisoning episode. After the September 11 (2001) horror and the onset of the Anthrax panic in the U.S., the scientific Egyptian journal al-’ilm, turned the tables on the U.S. and Israel, accusing them of the most hideous war crimes, including the use of non-conventional weapons of mass destruction. With regard to Israel and the Jews, this is what this “scientific” publication had to say: … In the summer of 1949 cholera spread throughout Egypt, following the establishment of Israel in 1948. Egyptian documents indicate that the disease originated from Israel…. The US used germs in Vietnam and against North Korea and China…. Biological weapons research is being conducted by Israeli universities. Prior to the October War (1973) they injected birds with germs and released then above Jordan, Palestine and the Suez Canal…. The US and Israel keep biological weapons at American bases; if they were to be used, they would destroy half the population of the area under attack. Some of this weaponry makes women miscarry…. Also, Jewish tourists infected with AIDS are traveling around Asian and African countries with the aim of spreading the disease…. It is no coincidence that the US is the only member of the UN that has not signed the agreement on punishment for the collective annihilation of people… Israel continues to use germ warfare to destroy the Palestinian people on its occupied land, thus challenging the international community…27

These materials are so repetitive, steady, omnipresent, prevalent, and diffuse in all strata of Arab and Islamic society that they are regarded as a matter of course. Children are “educated” in their “light,” the educated adults read or write about them in the press, clerics preach them in mosques, politicians occasionally refer to them in their public addresses, and the media, written and electronic, abound with them. To the point that they have become part of the infrastructure of education and socialization in those countries. The hierarchies in those societies, including those who have signed peace with Israel, do nothing to criticize the writers, much less to call them to task or to prosecute them. Quite the contrary, the authorities turn a blind eye, some of them blinking in approval, which in turn is interpreted as official backing for these atrocious pronouncements. In turn, these writings, especially those emanating from Egypt, which is considered the cultural hub of the Arab world, are widely read, cited, and appreciated and create a mood of expectation from more writers to produce such vitriolic pieces.

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One has to admit, nevertheless, that the leniency with which Israel deals with these matters, not insisting on their total elimination as prerequisite to any diplomatic exchange, in itself unwillingly contributes to their persistence. It is not enough to demand that an end be put to incitement against Jews in Muslim countries, but that a mechanism for monitoring those abominations and acting upon its findings must be devised, if we can hope that the vitriol might decrease one day to allow for a reconciliation of the hearts to occur between Israel and its neighbors. We remember that when Jorg Haider’s party joined the Austrian coalition, the Israeli government reacted so swiftly that the Ambassador of Israel in Vienna was recalled, even though Haider recanted on his pro-Nazi statements. In the case of the Arab leaders, clerics, intellectuals, and columnists, the anti-Jewish vitriol is much stronger, more threatening, widespread and persistent, but official Israel dares not say or do anything against it. The Holocaust denier, Abu Mazen, has become Israel’s “moderate, peace-loving” partner while the Arab media, even in the countries that signed peace with Israel, pursue their anti-Semitic campaigns unabated, while their rulers who could control them if they wished to, look the other way. How then can they or the rest of the world take Israel’s protests seriously? Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

Mark Durie, “On Islamic Antisemitism,” ICJS Research , Melbourne,. June 23, 2008. Ibid. Ibid. See e.g. Suras 2:61, 4:44-46, 4:160-61, 9:30-31, 5:64, 5:82, and more. Gitit Ginat, “ Freedom fighter,” www.haaretz.com – May 18, 2006.

Press conference by the Head of the Institute, Professor Dina Porath. Widely reported in all Israeli press and broadcasts of April 30, 2008. Andrew Bostom, The Legacy of Islamic Anti-Semitism, Prometheus, NY, 2008. Al Ahram, April 25, 2002. Al-Manar Television, (Lebanon-Hizbullah), April 24, 2002. Al Manar Television, (Lebanon-Hizbullah), April 24, 2002. Iqra’ Television (Saudi Arabia and Egypt) April 24, 2002. See Memri 373, April 30, 2002. For some of his most harrowing condemnations of the Jews, see R. Israeli, Peace is in the Eye of the Beholder, Mouton Publishers, Berlin and New York, 1985, especially the concluding chapter. October, June 17, 2001. Ibid. In fact the amount of Israeli casualties has long surpassed the 20,000 mark, that is, four-fold the author’s estimate. Al-Usbu’ (Egypt) May 28, 2001. Memri 224, June 4, 2001. Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, (London), June 8, 2002. Al-Manar Television (Hizbullah, Lebanon), June 2, 2002.

The Anti-Semitic Heritage of the Arab and Muslim World 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

19

Al-Mustaqbal (Lebanon) March 19, 2002; Al-’Ukadh (Saudi Arabia), November 22, 2001; Al-Riyadh (Saudi Arabia) November 22, 2001. Al-Wafd ((Egypt), February 13, 2000; al-Ahram, April 19, 2000; and the Egyptian Gazette, April 20, 2000. Al-Ahram, December 30, 1999. Al-Hayat, January 31, 2000; Al-Akhbar, January 26, 2000, al-Ahram, April 18 and May 17, 2000; The Egyptian Gazette, April 17, 2000, and more and more. The Secret Ties between the Nazis and the Zionist Movement Leadership (Arabic), Dar Ibn Rushd, Amman, 1984. See R. Israeli, Peace is in the Eye of the Beholder, Mouton, Berlin, 1987, especially pp. 33-4, 231, 326 and more. Al-Akhbar, May 27, 2001. See Memri 231, June 20, 2001. See R. Israeli, Poison: Manifestations of a Blood Libel, Lexington Books, NY and Oxford, 2002. Al-’Ilm (Science) Egypt, November, 2001, Memri 322, December 28, 2001.

2 The Psycho-Social Heritage of the Immigrant Muslims in Europe The Islamic anti-Semitic heritage is not, unfortunately, the only luggage that Muslims bring with them to the West. Their conduct towards Jews, as towards westerners in general, has also been conditioned by patterns of behavior that are cultivated in Arab and Muslim societies and have become part and parcel of the make up of those societies. For example, “honor killings,” which have become a plague in Europe, practiced by Muslim immigrants originating from all continents, or the subjugation of women with the attending veil controversies, or the gang-raping of western women by Muslim immigrants, have all caused difficulties between the host and guest societies in the West, have occasioned friction and violence and correspondingly heightened the rate of criminality among the Muslim populations. The fact that political correctness usually prevents westerners from speaking up and protesting did not, however, remove those problems that continue to loom ever larger as the Muslim immigrant communities grow in size and impact on their environment. This necessarily raises doubts about the Muslims’ ability and will to co-exist with their hosts. Usually, when in its own lands, where it feels weaker, the Islamic world shows respect towards, and at the same time feels humiliated by, the stronger West—technologically, militarily, economically, and culturally. The frustration at the Muslims’ inability to match up to the strong, especially since they were themselves the prevalent culture in the past, creates the elements of confrontation between the two. This is a confrontation because, unlike Western culture which, at least in theory, accepts others for what they are, frustrated Muslims are eager to destroy the bearers of strength rather than try to lift themselves to their level. Frustration generates shame, and aggression is used to displace the shame. Several areas of comparison may be suggested, which point out the differences between the two cultures, 21

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and which are substantiated, inter alia, by the Muslim eruptions of antiSemitism on western soil. The Attitude towards Human Life and Death While Islam does not permit suicide of the faint–hearted individual who runs away from the difficulties of life, and enjoins him to face up to his fate and count on Allah, the Muslim fundamentalist champions have found a way to sanctify death as “martyrdom,” and to idolize it to such an extent as to turn it into a desirable pursuit, sanctioned by Allah, Islam, the precedents of the Prophet and his tabi’un (followers). Gradually, on the footsteps of the medieval fida’iyun, the revived idea of sacrifice and ideal of suffering under the Khumeini Revolution, its application in the IranIraq War and then by Hizbullah in Lebanon, against the U.S. and Israel; and then through the adoption of the idea by extremist Muslim radicals, such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, it developed as a popular, effective, and universal strategy of warfare among other Muslim fighters, especially the Palestinian nationalists of the Tanzim and the Aqsa Brigades in their Intifadah against Israel. Finally, Muslim women and children were brought into the widening circle of Islamikaze, which, though still limited to hundreds, and potentially appealing to thousands, finds wide support among tens of thousands of clerics, columnists, political leaders, and professionals, including some “enlightened” (by their standards) professionals; and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, cannot contain their sympathy and adulation for them and express their sentiment openly in public. For this reason, one can no longer speak exclusively of the war declared by militant Islam against the West and the Jews, but of a growing circle of support in the Muslim public in general for the radicals, especially when they can show positive results to their credit. The most harrowing and callous manifestation of this attitude to human life has been the dragging of teenagers and women, by Palestinians and Hizbullah, into their relentless battles of terrorism against Israel. This attitude toward human life has other dark aspects to it, both internal, within the Muslim community and vis-à-vis the enemy. During the Intifadah of the Palestinians, or the insurgency of the Islamic Groups in Algeria, for example, we have seen massive slashing of throats of other Arabs/Muslims just for belonging to the “other camp,” or for suspicion of “collaboration with the enemy,” be it domestic or external. This was done without any concern for human life, for the families of the murdered or for the destructive impact on the minds of innocent civilians and children

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who grow up to accept, as a matter of course, that massive use of murder and hanging in public squares before their eyes, which blunts their human sentiments. How much more so when the victims are the hated Jews, as the case of Ilan Halimi in France has shown. This is accompanied by a masochistic display of wounds, blood, lynching, abuse of the bodies of the dead, dragging bodies in the streets, and the chants of the onlooking crowds, who look maddened by this orgy of cruelty, violence, and inhumanity. Funerals for their own favorite dead in combat, or as a result of targeted elimination by their enemies, or of the remains of Islamikaze bodies, are also accompanied by shouts, mass-hysteria, shootings in the air, huge processions where the body of the dead is arraigned by the masses out of control and tossed from hand to hand, vows of vengeance for the life of the departed martyr and for his replacement by many others who would volunteer in his footsteps, and the like. Compare that to the funerals of the victims of terrorism, in the U.S. or Israel, which are silent and dignified, intimate and inward-turning, and you have one of the keys to comprehend the difference between the two cultures. If this is the situation with regard to Muslims-to-Muslims, how much more so when foreigners-enemies are concerned! We have seen the chilling scenes of indiscriminate blowing of unsuspecting civilians in restaurants and cafes, the cold-blooded murder of passengers in buses, airplanes, and check-in counters; the shooting of passers-by in streets and of hostages, on a scale and with a frequency unknown in other times and other cultures, save the Nazis. What is more harrowing is the jubilation of the masses of Muslims in support of such massacres, and the “learned” rationalizations that many clerics, intellectuals, and public opinion makers produce to justify them. But that is not all: enemies can be abducted, killed, murdered, tortured, and jailed indefinitely, and no information about them is given to the families, no access to them is allowed to the Red Cross or anyone else, and expensive prices are extorted for just releasing any piece of information about their whereabouts or their putative fate. No other culture in modern memory has behaved so cruelly, so inhumanely, and so obtusely with captured enemies and their loved ones. They know the sensitivity and concern in the West for human life, therefore they exploit them to the maximum, either by keeping silent, thus raising the price of the extortion, or by hiding behind non-governmental organizations such as the Hizbullah in Lebanon or the Hamas in Palestine, or the Islamic Jihad in Syria, or anonymous captors who abducted and executed Daniel Pearl in Pakistan just because he was

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Jewish, in order to escape responsibility. We have also witnessed live on television, the use of bare hands to tear Israeli soldiers to pieces and then the exhibition of the blood-soiled hands to boast before an approving public seized by inhuman frenzy and demanding more cruelty. We have seen Israeli teenagers ambushed by Arabs and their skulls appallingly crushed by rocks or against the rocks, and left laying in the open. The worst part of all this is that when the Arab authorities are confronted with these inhumane situations, they “condemn” acts of “murder of innocent civilians on all sides,” as if there were two sides to this story, and as if these were natural calamities without murderers that could be identified, called to task, and prosecuted to justice. This callousness in the attitudes of Muslims towards their victims is supplemented by the horrendous reenacting of scenes of murder, as if they were sublime human experiences worth replaying and memorizing, and models with which to educate their public and for their young generation to emulate. This, of course, goes a long way to demonstrate how cold-bloodedly these murders are planned, and that they are not the spur-of-the-moment act of “frustration” by some ill-fated or “desperate” Palestinian or al-Qa’ida member. For, when the scene of an Israeli café or a paper-model of an Israeli bus is carefully and meticulously reconstructed in a public place at the heart of an Arab or Muslim city, and flying limbs of Israeli children, dripping with blood are hung around as part of the scene, explosions are replayed and whines of dying victims are amplified for the impact of their despair, and all this to the frenzied cries of joy of the assembled masses, including children, then something is decidedly sick in the psyche of this society. If no amount of explanation or justification can excuse the horrible acts of murder themselves, where the murderers become hallowed martyrs, how much more so the sheer madness of reproducing those acts, once and again, as if a recorded reel is replayed in a slow-motion to satisfy the sadism of its producers. There are reports of Nazi murderers who delighted in projecting on screens to their private audiences their “feats” of mass murders, but even they did not stoop so low as to screen them, let alone replay them in detail, to the wide public. Only now do we understand that those reenactments are the outcome and extension of the terrible ta’zia ceremonies celebrated by the Shi’ites at large during the ‘Ashura day, where the Believers relive the suffering of Imam Hussein in Karbala by inflicting pain and injuries on their bodies. But while the Shi’ites exhibit a masochistic sense of identification with their own kin, out of their own volition and without

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inflicting pain or damage upon others, the Hamas scenes express their hatred towards, and sadistic joy at the suffering of, their enemies especially if they are Jews. A new addition that threatens to descend on the civilized world, is the Muslim radicals’ menace to use non-conventional weapons for mass extermination, as if the mass-killings of satanic proportions, by hand-made mechanical means, were not sufficient to quench their thirst for blood. Palestinians and Hizbullah, al-Qa’ida and Ansar al-Islam, are known to have experimented with gas and poisons contained in the shells and bombs they use against Israeli civilians. The best sign of what is coming is when they begin, in a process of projection, to impute to their enemy what they plan to do. The massacres that they perpetrate or plan against others, which for them are licit and to be expected, become in their minds the “crimes, atrocities and massacres” that the enemy did or will do, and as they were experimenting with gas and poison, they spread the rumors about Israeli use of depleted uranium in the territories, “like NATO in Kosovo,” or of “poisoned sweets” and “HIV positive virus” contamination of Palestinian children. This means that before they use those materials for mass killings, they wish to inject in the minds of the world that they were not first and that they only responded to the “massacres” carried out by Israel and the Jews with American connivance. The eyes of the Arab world were for long hopefully directed to Saddam Hussein until his defeat, to see what kind of arsenal he could deliver against America and Israel. No public voice was heard in the Muslim world, attempting to dissuade him from that folly, for any moral reason, with a view of restricting the loss of human lives, and even not for the practical reason of avoiding a mammoth loss to his people. For if the Twin Towers were a “big success” for them, so much more so the lesson that Saddam was about to teach the West. Hamas and al-Qa’ida, as well as Egyptian Muslim radicals, have actually been adding their voices to those in Iran1 who threaten Israel and the West with poisoning their waters or infecting them with viruses.2 It is only hard to see who will be left to be brought under Muslim dominion, in accordance with the fundamentalists’ dream, if and after the nuclear, chemical, and biological annihilation of the enemy is completed. Intolerance Built into the Culture Bernard Lewis has made the point that, unlike other civilizations which are essentially regional, Islam and Christianity have, by their very pattern of expansion, become universal, and exclusive in the sense

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that not only do they consider themselves the “fortunate recipients of God’s final revelation to mankind, and therefore it is their duty to bring it to the rest of humanity,” but that the clash between them becomes inevitable.3 However, while Western culture has generally forsaken the use of violence to spread its message (unless it feels directly threatened), and pursues it by ways that the Muslims regard as devious (mission, the pop culture of jeans, fast food, music and coca-cola, television, cinema, alcohol, etc.), militant Islam and its supporters do not shun violence, as the Islamikaze phenomenon has been dramatically evincing. In other words, the humanistic idea of tolerance of the other in European culture, which has come to mean that the other is accepted as is, without value-judging him, has become predominant, and has paved the way to the free market of ideas that prevails in the West today. That thinking has not only permitted the renouncing of force, at least in principle, to spread Christianity, democracy, free trade, and other Western ideas, but has also allowed for Islam and other creeds to compete on its turf, without ever suspecting that the competition would ultimately become over the turf itself. Moreover, since the West accepted the idea of separating the Church from the modern secular state, the faith has become the domain of the individual while the public square was made impervious to it. In the Islamic world, practically all the “secular” governments, which for the most part lack legitimacy, must pay lip service to the Islamists, at times by even including them in their governments. Even so, the Islamists appear as the most popular claimants of power, and if allowed to operate as political parties, can often show their mettle and gain access to government. Therefore, no Muslim turf can be made neutral towards other faiths, and the frequent use of violence against them goes a long way to prove that, day in day out. To this day, while Islam can build its houses of prayer anywhere in the world, other faiths are prevented from doing so in some Muslim territory. And while tens of thousands of Europeans have freely converted into Islam, any Muslim who would entertain a thought to convert is considered a heretic or apostate and dealt with accordingly by capital punishment. Furthermore, Muslim radicals regard the defeat of their own illegitimate governments at home as a prelude to their restoration of the universal Caliphate of all Muslims, and therefore treat the Western governments who protect, aid, and sponsor the dictators in place as the direct enemy of the Muslims. From their point of view, then, not only is Western culture despicable in its own “right” and faulty due to its own deficiencies, but

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it invaded their turf in order to subvert it and undermine it from within, until it falls off like a ripe fig. It is the West that came to them, not they to it. This creates a paradox nevertheless, for while Muslim fundamentalists decry the Western cultural invasion, which is “worse” in their eyes than the physical invasions of the medieval Crusades, they and their less militant coreligionists at the same time crowd the queues in front of American, Australian, and European Embassies and Consulates across the world, to gain visas of entry into those bastions of Western values that they love to hate. Some explain their quest as a simple will to study in the West, especially value-free technical professions, which are not “soiled” by Western thinking, ignoring the fact that Western learning and protracted sojourns in the West by necessity will have an impact on them, to the point that they would at the end elect to stay and become Western; others, wish from the start to improve their economic lot by immigrating to the West, but once they get there they congregate around their kin and constitute fertile grounds for Muslim fundamentalist da’wa (Call, Mission); still others, the likes of Sheikhs Bakri and al-Masri in Britain, who have declared their intention to alter the West rather than adapt to it, have migrated to the West as “refugees,” because there was no other place left as a safe haven for them in their countries of origin, and the West was generous enough to accommodate them, ultimately to its own detriment. Paradoxically, it is the adherents of the latter category who place themselves at the forefront of Muslim fundamentalism in the West and who, benefiting from the hospitality and social welfare arrangements in their host-countries, recruit local converts or already naturalized Muslims for training abroad, for indoctrination at home and for activities in the Path of Allah. It is they, who were tolerated by societies against whom they are operating ideologically, who are the least tolerant towards their hosts. Their objective is loud and clear: to Islamize their host societies and let Islam take them over. If until now, under the decisive impact of the integrationists, Muslims wished to assimilate into society, fit into its political, economic and social institutions and become part of it culturally if not religiously, the penetration of Muslim fundamentalism into the West has begun to change these trends around. More and more Muslims “rebel” against their host cultures and demand, as full-fledged citizens, that their original culture be recognized as a component of the national make up; that state symbols (for example the cross in Scandinavian national flags) be altered to become inclusive of them, and that mosques,

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foreign Muslim languages, and Muslim education should be subsidized by the state. In France, this happened following the scandal aroused by Francois Bayrou, the Education Minister in the 1970s when he refused to allow veiled Muslim women into the secular education system of the state ((l’affaire du foulard), and the young French Muslims in France, the sons of immigrants from North Africa, (“beurs” in local parlance) frequently booed the Marseillaise when it was played on football fields prior to international matches involving their countries of origin. All this emanates not only from the absolute conviction of the Muslims that Allah’s message to them, being the most recent is also the most “updated” as it were, but also that their way to Allah is the only valid one. In contrast to Christianity, the other universal monotheistic religion that claims the same, however, the Muslims did not preclude force to enforce their beliefs and to “save the Infidels from themselves,” by their own volition if possible, and by violence if necessary. Therefore, when they speak of “tolerance” they mean some sort of temporary measure of accommodation towards the Infidel, who has clearly embraced an inferior creed, until Islam is strong enough to prevail. The miscalculation of al-Qa’ida on September 11, and before and after that of the Hizbullah, the Hamas, and the Islamic Jihad, was that they thought Western societies, including Israel, were so ripe for their demise that a shocking trauma, or a series of smaller but frequent and consistently growing blows, would in the end overwhelm the enemy. Thus, every time the enemy responds more forcefully, or in more unconventional ways than expected by Muslims, like the Americans in Afghanistan or the Israelis in the West Bank or Lebanon and Gaza, they cry “Foul game!!” This is not how the enemies of Islam are supposed to behave, their very resistance to their subjugation by Islam is regarded as “blasphemous” for its failure to recognize the will of Allah, and their retaliatory strikes against Islam are seen as “signs of distress and despair” which augur their approaching end; hence the stepped-up activities to speed that process up, and bring it to its conclusion, and so on and so forth. That point of view does not recognize the right of the attacked “for the sake of Allah” to self-defense. The Muslims can, and indeed are called upon, to expand, conquer, kill, enslave, dominate and rule, for the entire universe is theirs to be included in Dar-al-Islam, but woe to the one who resists that “noble” process entrenched in the Will of Allah, and if he does, he is decried as “aggressor,” “killer of civilians and children,” “arrogant,” and a perpetrator of “massacres.” Thus, any hideous attack upon Western enemies, even when it involves innocent lives, as in the Twin Tower case, is “inevitable” and “blessed”

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and “well deserved,” and a “great success,” and causes masses to jubilate and writers to sing its praise throughout the Muslim world, while every retaliation is lamented, condemned, and blasted as “unjustified,” “out of proportion,” “cruel,” “wanton massacre,” and “proof,” if proof was needed, of the enemy’s inherent evil. The idea of fair play, of attack and counter-attack, and in consequence of casualties inflicted on both parties to a conflict is misunderstood in Muslim circles. Even the issue of aggressive and defensive warfare is foreign to them, because the Muslim definitions of warfare do not follow the accepted objective norms prevailing in the West, but strictly abide by the subjective rules drawn by Muslim jurists who have formulated Muslim political theory and international relations.4 According to these rules, any attack by nonMuslims on Muslims is inherently illegal and immoral, and therefore it is incumbent upon all Muslims to assist their co-religionists, regardless of what they did to provoke the attack. Conversely, any Muslim attack on the West, for example, since it can be justified as a defensive war against the heretical West, or as an act of self-defense against the spiritual invasion of the West, or as a battle to repulse the enemy from Dar-al-Islam (for example Palestine, Andalusia, Kashmir, and Southern France), is eo ipso a just war that all Muslims are called upon to sustain. In other words, once a war against the enemy had been entitled “Jihad,” and any of the latter examples justifies a Jihad, the arena is wide open for war. Guerilla warfare, or Islamikaze, terrorism and the like, are means of warfare that are hallowed in Islam, with all the attending ideological and doctrinal elaborations attached thereto. The West has no standing in these definitions and what it says or thinks does not matter, because the Islamic position is Allah-inspired and Shari’a-dictated, which means that it is beyond discussion, compromise, debate or concession. Therefore, while external wars in the West are considered quantitative issues (over territories, interests, assets), when they are terminated, then compromise, concessions and negotiations are led until an agreement emerges, and when it does it is binding on the parties who signed the treaty, cease-fire, or convention; in Islam the wars are qualitative (over ideas, doctrines, “justice,” “redress of wrongs”), are never terminated until the victory of Islam and the imposition of its rule is brought about. And when an “agreement” is signed under duress (like after a military defeat), it always derives from the precedent of Hudaybiyya that was established by the Prophet, namely that the agreement is temporary (hudna=armistice), and it is to be violated at the first

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opportunity, when Muslims feel they have regained superiority, or have found new ways of warfare that the enemy is unable to counter (like the Islamikaze). Sulh ( peace-cum-reconciliation) can be concluded only under the terms of a Pax Islamica, when the non-Muslim has accepted the hegemony of Islam and submitted to its rule.5 This is the reason why Muslim authorities in Egypt and Saudi Arabia justified the Camp David Accords of 1977, as well as the Oslo Accords of 1993, in terms of a temporary Hudaybiyya-like truce, which is open-ended and reversible, if and when the circumstances so allow. Like the Prophet’s precedent, these “agreements” were only necessary in order to extort concessions from the enemy, but once they are made and cashed, they no longer necessarily bind. “Islamic interest” is then the key concept in that culture which does not include respect for the Roman law of contract, and the international treaties and conventions which derive from there. This worldview, where rules of war and peace do not apply equally on the belligerents, and clearly benefit the Muslims while they are expected to obligate only the non-Muslims, is the very reason why the Muslims see themselves free to violate their “agreements,” while they constantly accuse their adversaries of “violating all agreements and commitments,” at a time when they themselves faced no reproach because they had never expected to live up to their “commitments” in the first place, while their adversaries who were truly obliged by them were expected to keep them to the letter. Thus, when the Palestinians, for example, committed themselves in Oslo (another Hudaybiyya, in the words of Arafat), without reserve or qualification, to end terrorism and violence in general, not to introduce to their territory any category of un-allowed weapons, to maintain their armed force at agreed levels and under one command, to put an end to incitement against Israel and the Jews, to arrest terrorists and pursue them in justice or extradite them, as a prerequisite to receiving more territory from Israel and advancing into the peace-process, they remembered only the Israeli part of the agreement, and when not fulfilled they heaped all the blame on Israel, while their consistent violations of their main commitments did not matter. They became accustomed by the Rabin Government to the fact that they could break their commitments, but that Israel, for fear of arresting the “peace process,” would swallow all violations and proceed with its one-sided concessions, and so it was. But when a new Israeli government came in, which made further Israeli concessions in accordance with the peace accords contingent upon Palestinian parallel implementation, they cried “Foul game!” once again, and that brought the process to a dead end.

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Intolerance based on a concept of superiority, whereby the superior does not have to conform like the inferior, is apparent also in the daily conduct in the Muslim world towards other religions. Rampant are the instances where Christian churches are burned down in Egypt and Indonesia, and synagogues are attacked and destroyed by Palestinians (notably the Joseph Tomb in Nablus and the Jewish Synagogue in Jericho during the Intifadah), and by Muslims throughout the Western world since the outbreak of the Palestinian insurgency in late 2000, but rare are the occasions where Muslim mosques are attacked by anyone anywhere. The Muslims do not take this, and the fact that they can build their mosques anywhere in the West, as an indication of Western tolerance and acceptance of the other, but as a sure sign that no one dares to resist Islamic expansion while they, in their countries of origin, can curtail or totally prevent the construction of any Christian, let alone Jewish, houses of prayer. Muslims can be the inhabitants of any country in the world, including the Christian world and Israel on whose doors they knock for immigration or “right of return,” but they would not, by law, allow any Jew into Saudi Arabia or Jordan. What is more, they still dub the countries to which they wish to immigrate as “racist” for not completely surrendering to their will, while Jews and Christians are severely restricted in various areas of the Muslim world. That suggests to them, once again, that while the whole universe is their domain as of right, other faiths are not, by their very nature, entitled to the same rights in the lands of Islam. No country in the West witnesses its citizens following the shameful scenes, current in the Muslim world, where American and Israeli flags, and the effigies of their leaders, are burned ritually as a matter of routine, save when Muslim communities in the West practice the same ritual. But no sustained burning of Arab or Muslim flags or effigies is known as a phenomenon in the West or in Israel. Once again, the inability of the Muslim world to accept as their equals the national symbols of others is striking, at a time when the West respects theirs as a matter of course, and when it does not Muslim violence ensues as it happened with the Cartoon affair of early 2006. This, far from awakening the consciousness of the Muslims to their own intolerance, in contrast with the publicly advertised and exhibited Western tolerance towards them, on the contrary has confirmed them in their belief in the hegemony of their faith and symbols that no one dares to challenge, at a time when they openly defy, with impunity, other creeds and symbols. This has encouraged the Muslim communities

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in the West and in Israel to demand the right to construct their mosques, or to perform their Friday rituals, in places known as holy sites to other faiths. On Temple Mount in Jerusalem they built their mosques on a site that they knew was the holiest for the Jewish creed, they transformed many churches and synagogues into mosques during their conquests and expansion, and turned every occupied land into a waqf (Holy Endowment) that cannot revert to non-Muslims.6 But woe to anyone who dares to turn a mosque into another house of prayer, or to occupy land that is or was Muslim, for that is intolerable. More recently, new challenges rose when Muslims began to illegally construct their mosque on the grounds and in defiance of, the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth, to squat for the Friday prayers near the main cathedral of Florence, and to deny any historical rights to the Jews over Temple Mount, thereby declaring to Christianity and to Judaism, in Lewis’ memorable words: “Your time has passed. Now we are here. Move over.”7 This is not exactly tolerance. Incidentally, and significantly, the verse from the Qur’an that Bernard Lewis mentioned in connection with the inscription in the Dome of the Rock, to wit: “He is God, He is One. He does not beget, He is not begotten,” which was meant to reject the basic dogma of Christianity about God and His Son, when the Muslims took over Jerusalem in the seventh Century, was also inscribed on the temporary tent-mosque in front of the Annunciation that awaited the building of the permanent mosque, obviously with the same intention and meaning. Coupled with the denial of Jewish rights on Temple Mount, this signifies, in the eyes of the Muslims, that they intend to indeed supersede both Judaism and Christianity, as Islam had taught them of old; hence, the hatred of the Muslims to the construct “Judeo-Christian tradition,” which they regard as a passing episode in history, once the Seal of the Prophets, Muhammad, had dispensed to humanity the latest divine message that is Islam. “Your time has passed. Now we are here” is not only the statement of a factual chronological sequence, but also a declaration of mastery, dominance, hegemony, and exclusivity, backed by the will and the power to make it happen in the real world. For a creed that was designed by Allah to replace all others and to bring all humanity under its aegis cannot be expected to tolerate other faiths, let alone competitors for the same world constituency on the same sites. The Eternal Victims In stark contradiction to the dreams of world dominion that they entertain, Muslims tend at the same time to regard themselves as eternal

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victims of the West that they hate and want to displace, but whose help they need and implore, and they rationalize this contradiction by the plots and conspiracies constantly woven around and against them, as if the West had no other concerns than them, or could not do very well without their lachrymose complaints. First and foremost for them is the need to explain to themselves and to the world why and how they, who had pioneered civilization and sciences in medieval times, and had caused Europe to tremble and fear their successive mighty empires, found themselves, without preparation, warning, or transition at the bottom of the civilizatory heap and of the hierarchy of world powers when the modern era dawned. For a shame society like theirs, it is difficult, nay impossible, to take responsibility for their deeds and to devise a policy of adaptation that could help them pull out of the quagmire, for that would amount to admitting the deficiencies of their culture, the stifling restrictions of their faith, the pipe-dreams of their leaders, and the insufficiencies of their social systems. Thus, rather than admit their inabilities and seek succor elsewhere, it is easier to project their own ill-will on others, masquerade their jealousies and bigotry as “revivalism” and accuse the all-powerful West, the colonizer and imperialist of yesteryear, of all their ills, including their demise, suffering, backwardness, population explosion, dictatorial rule, corruption, and what not. They do not want to recall that when they were the powerful, the conquerors, the colonizers and the imperialists, they did not stop one moment to ask themselves what they were doing to their conquered peoples and civilizations that they gradually decimated. Arabs and Muslims have resources, human and mineral, a great tradition of learning and a vast ambition to restore themselves to where they were before they began slipping in the modern era. But their self-inflicted deficiencies in government, economics, and antiquated social structures do not permit them to take off. Perhaps most stifling of all is the array of dictatorships of all sorts, monarchical and republican, one-party and military juntas, rulers who were never elected and self-imposed Presidentsfor-life. Illegitimate rule spawns corruption, helplessness, and hopelessness, and the near non-existence of civil society and non-governmental organizations and voluntary associations with the necessary clout to fill in when the government is deficient, make change difficult and nearly impossible. Uncontrollable poverty and population explosion are hardly the requisite processes to arrest these trends. When allowed to operate, Islamists often step in to fill the gap, but they are closely monitored or

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harnessed to the regime’s goals, and therefore their operations are often circumscribed and cause them to become part of the problem instead of the solution. In this state of affairs, where the Western world, and Israel at their doorstep, advance and increase the gulf between themselves and the poor Muslim world, an eye-poking gap is observed on television screens and in neighboring Israel daily, which prompts people to find refuge in self-victimization: it is not their fault, it is the fault of others. This state of mind is aided in those societies by the dependence of the commoner on his corrupt government for food subsidies, for employment, for education and social services, for development, and for the individual’s well-being. But the governments are incompetent, illegitimate, bent on staying in power and lacking in a blueprint for resolving the ever-aggravating problems of their countries and societies. The stronger the regimes, by virtue of the modern weaponry, which affords them a superior power of enforcement, the more disaffected are the populations who sense that their government’s interests are not theirs; all the more so, since the maintenance of the rulers in place is often made possible by their Western “allies” who provide the money, the economic aid, the weapons, and the food that keep this explosive situation from getting worse and from blowing up in the West’s and the regimes’ faces. Another paradox develops: because when they are dispossessed, unemployed, and hopelessly classified as have-nots, the masses in those countries not only are victims of their rulers and their Western “allies,” and, therefore, feel “entitled” to demand that both provide for their needs, but the more they receive to sustain themselves and ascertain their survival, the more humiliated they become for that dependence, the more enraged they are by it, and the more violent-prone they grow as the only way to air their frustration that only keeps increasing. In other words, the West and the local governments, who are held jointly responsible for the poverty and frustration of which the masses are the victims, not only are expected to alleviate the burden of the impoverished and the disadvantaged, but when they do so are all the more resented and likely to become the targets of the frustration. This is a no-win situation which inter alia causes massive departures of immigrants to seek their livelihood or the implementation of their revolutionary dreams elsewhere, notably in the West. Bin Laden, for example, is no less enraged against his own Saudi government, which is sustained by its alliance with the U.S., than against America and Israel. If it is so with a Saudi system, which is not needy, and a Bin Laden who is not impoverished, how much more so with other Arabs and Muslims where both government and people are in dire poverty!!

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The eternal victims also believe not only that everyone owes them everything, and they themselves are exempted from any self-strengthening effort, but also that they can use violence to redress the wrong done to them. So, for example, Palestinians who have been living on UNRWA’s handouts and sacks of flour for the past sixty years, and where their population in the squalid refugee camps has quadrupled since then, believe it is the duty of the world to continue to feed them indefinitely. They make children and the West has to take care of them. They have resisted all attempts at resettlement in their host countries, which are also Arab and Muslim, but prefer to leave the refugee problem seething, and to continue to depend on the world’s goodwill for survival, rather than force the refugees to take up a constructive life and end their refugee status. They maintain the illusion of the “right of return” in their refugee standing, which is the ultimate victimhood, and they are not about to relinquish it. What is more, the U.S., and other Western countries that shoulder the brunt of the UNRWA budget, are also the most hated and threatened by the Muslim fundamentalists who feed from their hands. If they had learned, if they had been willing to learn, from Western nations and Israel how to absorb refugees in their own territory and put them on a productive track, rather than to implant in them the mentality of the eternal victims, much of the bitterness and frustration that engender violence and terrorism could have been spared. And this is not only a matter of money or of development (Bin Laden and Saudi Arabia being the ultimate example), but a matter of culture. If one is educated to not accept any handouts, to rise on his feet and help himself, to shed the feeling of victim and be proud of a self- made and self-sustaining livelihood, then one’s dignity is restored, the humiliation effaced or diminished, and the paralyzing jealousy and stifling apathy replaced by aspiration, ambition, and striving. No wonder then that among Palestinians a high ratio was found to support terrorism, which is for them, to be sure, the “right” of the eternal victim to both avenge his situation and to have it redressed. How exactly this will happen, they do not say, unless they think, as part of their world of delusions that we shall address below, that they can bring the West to submission or destroy Israel and replace it. There is also no wonder that al-Qa’ida, the Hamas, Hizbullah, and the rest rationalize their wild terrorism as “retaliation” for their humiliation and victimhood by the strong, the arrogant, and the powerful who had rendered them victims. Therefore, while their terrorism is to be “understood” in their eyes, and

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justified as the cry of the desperate victim, as Mrs. Blair or Secretary Straw have themselves intimated, any Western counterattack or defensive act, must be construed as “aggression” against and “massacre” of the eternal victim. For every one of their orgies of killing one must seek the “roots” and comprehend the “reasons,” and address the “causes,” exactly as for every burning of a church or a synagogue; however, if a mosque is hit, or Muslim children are injured, even incidentally, that is intentional “murder,” “desecration,” and “blasphemy.” For that reason, they do not recognize the difference between intentional damage and collateral casualties. It is the result that counts, no matter what the intention of the enemy planners may have been. America and Israel are always “children killers,” “heretics,” aggressors, arrogant, and perpetrators of massacres. Americans “kill” Iraqi children by “preventing food and medicaments from reaching them,” even if it was Saddam who preferred to purchase weapons or compensate the families of the Palestinian Islamikaze, rather than import food and drugs for the sick. The dead corpses of the Iraqi children are there for display, for if they are clearly the victims, then the Americans must be their killers. Thus, a reversal of roles is effected, whereby the West and Israel become the “terrorists” and the Muslims the victims thereof; it is the West who terrorizes the Muslim world and is arrogant and condescending towards it, and the Muslims merely act in self-defense. Hence the failure of Muslim countries, including in their Kuala Lumpur Islamic Conference of June 2002, let alone in international gatherings, to accede to the Western definition of terrorism, which is, in essence “the use of violence against innocent civilians to attain political goals.” They refuse to relinquish the mantle of victimhood to others, therefore terrorism is what is done to them, not what they do to others. They struggle at all international forums to show that the Palestinians and Hizbullah cannot be considered terrorists, no matter what they do, because they fight for “liberation” from “occupation”; many of them also rationalize the Twin Tower horror as “liberation” from the choking American tutelage, or a “message” to the “real terrorist,” which is America (or Israel for that matter), or a “lesson” to the arrogant, or a new “mode of warfare” against the threatening and aggressive West; or the “desire for death” of the audacious Islamikaze martyrs, matching up to the “desire for life and comfort” of the cowardly and decadent West. That is also the reason why they remind America of its own “terrorist attacks” against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, proof that what matters is not what is done, to whom and under what

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circumstances, but who does it. “Victims of the world, Unite!!!,” if, of course, America or Israel is the reason of your misery. Other victims, such as the Americans murdered on September 11, or Indians obliterated in Kashmir, or the Israelis who are blown apart in pizza parlors, or in the bus on their way there, are not victims in the eyes of the Muslim fundamentalists, and more and more in the eyes of plain Muslims in general, even when Muslims are the recognized and avowed perpetrators of the terror in all those cases. They do not deserve compassion, because they “had brought that upon themselves,” or better, “have concocted it themselves” in conjunction with the CIA or the Jews, or the Mossad. The wide acceptance of those theories of conspiracy, including among intellectuals and opinion makers, adds to the universal sense of victimhood that is rampant in the Islamic world. Another important corollary of this attitude is that, while in the Judeo-Christian tradition martyrs are usually the victims of external aggression inflicted on them in the pursuit of their faith, in Islam it is the perpetrator of the aggression, who also immolates himself in the process, who becomes the Islamikaze martyr. In other words, it is not he who suffers death or torture or misery on his way to martyrdom, since he had chosen that course avidly and advisedly, but he who must kill in order to gain his place in the hierarchy of martyrdom. This dramatic shift, from those who were killed in battle or by accident and thereby became martyrs in classical Islam, to the Islamikaze intentional mass-killing of others in order to go to Paradise and enjoy the seventy-two virgins promised by the Qur’an, is the mind-boggling thought that baffles the West today. Self-Delusion, Fantasy and the Real World The proverbial Arab enamoring with words, to the point of ecstasy, has been studied by scholars, such as Gibb and Patai, and found to be related to the strength of the Arabic idiom, as exemplified in the Qur’an, in the ancient Arabic poetry of the time of the Jahiliyya, and in the subsequent Arab and Muslim literature. The ability of the word to move people and to incite them to action, a key element in the training of the Islamikaze, is supplemented by a rich world of fantasy, which defies rational analysis, and in which wishful thinking replaces facts, and mantra-like slogans supersede policy (“Jerusalem will be liberated by one million shahids”; “if the Israelis do not like it, they can drink the waters of the Gaza Sea/the Dead Sea”), and the unpleasant is denied as if it did not exist (No Muslims have committed the Twin Tower murder; the Israelis/

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Jews did). For that reason, commitments are ignored, as if they had never been undertaken (Oslo, smuggling in weapons by Palestinians, arresting terrorists), promises are forgotten the moment they are made (to stop incitement and terrorism), slogans are coined and repeated (Israelis inject HIV positive to Palestinians; Oslo is like Hudaybiyya), propaganda and incitement thrive (the Karine A and Suntorini weapons smuggling never took place; Israelis and Americans are children killers), boasting one’s exploits (Egyptian democracy is more authentic than Israel’s) and denigrating the enemy are rife ( the Jews are cowardly, the descendants of monkeys and pigs), lies are made up to cover up deficiencies (Palestinians’ economic suffering is due to Israel’s policies, not to terrorist activities by the Palestinians), and denial is exercised when one is faced with facts(No Karine A, no blowing up of the Twin Towers). History is invented (Palestinians are the descendants of Cana’anites), false analogies are made (Palestinian leaders are comparable to the founding fathers of America), facts are denied (the Holocaust, or involvement in terrorism), and self-embellishment and self-aggrandizement are sought (The future belongs to Islam, the West’s demise is imminent) for consolation. Palestinian and other Arab and Muslim textbooks for children tell the entire story with such eloquence that not much needs to be added.8 But enough examples will be cited, especially in connection with Islamic terrorism, incitement to it, and its praise after the acts of murder, to illustrate the main assumptions of this chapter. Each of the fantasies undergoes several stages: first the fabrication of a web of lies that has no relation to facts, and which Muslims think that if repeated often enough, it becomes a reality, in which they begin to believe themselves, even when they cannot prove it. Because no rules of evidence apply to them, and what matters is the manufacturing of “facts” and the diffusion of such in their midst and across the world, which swallows the stories, unsuspecting that hoaxes of that dimension can be invented, and out of belief that even if the Israelis or the Americans did not “do it,” it is likely that they would, because it is in their nature. A classic case in point is the blood libel against the Jews, which we saw repeated by the Minister of Defense in Syria (Mustafa Tlas), and reiterated by nearly all Muslim media, without criticism. In the same vein, the Palestinian delegate at the Commission of Human Rights in Geneva, of all places, can stand up and accuse the Israelis of injecting the AIDS virus into Palestinian children, or Arafat can lambast the Israelis for spreading poisoned sweets to kill Palestinians, or the Saudis and Egyptians can

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claim that Israel had distributed an aphrodisiac among Muslims which increased the sexual appetite of women in order to corrupt their morals, or that the Israeli armed forces used depleted uranium bullets to harm the Palestinians. During the battles of Jenin in April-May, 2002, for example, a Palestinian father was produced on television cameras, crying and weeping for his nine children who had “perished” before his eyes and whom he “had seen with his own eyes” under the rubble. A very horrible and heart-tearing experience indeed, except that all nine children were fortunately found safe and sound. Perhaps the most chilling hoax that was fabricated by the Palestinians, actively supported by all Arabs and Muslims, and passively accepted by much of the European press, was the “Poison Affair” of 1983, when the Israelis were blasted for “poisoning Palestinian schoolgirls in Jenin,” and then in other areas of the West Bank, with a view to “sterilizing them before their age of reproductive activity” and thus “battle against Palestinian demography.” These condemnations were made throughout the press of the world, and even when it was proved that the “poisoning” was a case of mass hysteria, what professional medicine recognizes as “hyper-ventilation,” the accusations did not recede.9 Any condemnation goes, and when the accuser is not held responsible for providing evidence, accusations and libel become cheap and risk-free and everyone can indulge in them at will. Self-delusion operates on other levels as well. Convinced in the righteousness and exclusivity of their Islamic universal message, the Islamists cannot understand why the West and Israel pursue them, do not let them act with impunity in the Path of Allah, or wage war against them. For the message of Allah is clear and unambiguous, it declares the Jews monkeys, it forbids Muslims to befriend Jews and Christians,10 enjoins the Muslims to “kill Unbelievers wherever we find them,”11 to “murder them and treat them harshly,”12 “fight and slay the Pagans, seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem”13; so, then, what do the Infidels complain about? That word of Allah was intended against them, and they cannot deny or resist it, because Allah himself said it, and that is written, word for word, in His Divine Message—the Holy Book which applies to all humanity. They also believe that Allah and His Messenger had announced that it was acceptable for Muslims to go back on their promises and obligations with Pagans and make war on them whenever Muslims find themselves strong enough to do so14; or that Allah had taken away the freedom of belief from all humanity and relegates those who disbelieve in Islam to Hell,15 calls them “untouch-

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able and impure,”16 and orders His followers to fight the Unbelievers until no other religion except Islam is left,17 and more and more. Then, why should they spare non-Muslims, make any agreement with them, or honor any of their commitments to them? The hard-core Islamists are therefore shocked that the West battles them and resists them, instead of submitting to them and recognizing that Islam is their only salvation. We have seen appeals to President Bush to convert to Islam and astonishment at his procrastination to do so. They cannot comprehend how and why Westerners are failing to see the light and do not hurry into the fold of Islam. In their world of delusion, they already see “thousands of Americans” repenting for their previous obdurate misunderstanding of Islam, and their “coming to tears when they listen to the Words of the Qur’an recited to them.” Their worldview, which cannot accept a plurality of creeds, cannot also understand why they, the disseminators of the good of Allah and His message, should be held in low esteem, feared and persecuted by the West. All they did on September 11 was the fulfillment of the Word of Allah: “For them [the Unbelievers], garments of fire shall be cut and there shall be poured over their heads boiling water, whereby whatever is in their bowels and skin shall be dissolved and they will be punished with hooked iron rods,”18 and that they will not only have to live in “disgrace in this life, but in the Day of Judgment He shall make them taste the penalty of burning.”19 To have precipitated the Day of Judgment upon the victims of that massacre, was therefore nothing anomalous, just the early fulfillment of the Word of Allah. Then, the stage of denial sets in, as Muslims realize the outrage they caused and the havoc that their delusions have impelled them to commit. Be they acts of terror against Israel, the Karine A weapon smuggling, or the September 11 horror, the Muslims first of all denied they ever did, intended, knew, or participated in those acts, paradoxically while at the same time evincing unrestrained jubilation about them. In their stage of denial, they wish both to dissociate themselves from the atrocities they had committed and to “enjoy” their results at the same time. The first major terrorist act against Israel, committed at the height of the Oslo euphoria in mid-1994, for example, when twenty-one young Israeli soldiers perished, was immediately denied by Arafat, who “had no knowledge” of it, and as “proof” of his innocence, denounced the “act.” In an interview to Israeli media, he speculated that it must have been the “deed of the Israeli security services” who “were interested to wreck the Oslo agree-

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ments.” Why wreck them, when the Rabin government who signed them was in power, full of goodwill and leniency towards Palestinian violations, and eager to show to his suspecting constituency in Israel that they “worked,” Arafat did not explain. His conspiracy theory and instinctive sense of denial was stronger than any rational consideration he might have invoked. When the Achille Lauro was hijacked by Palestinians in the Mediterranean in 1986, and an American citizen was murdered on board and callously tossed into the sea, the sea-jackers retired to Port Said where they were arraigned, but President Mubarak denied that he had any knowledge of the mastermind of that terrorist act, at the same time that he gave him shelter in his country. The affair of the ship Karine A, which in early 2002 was seized by the Israeli Navy in the Red Sea, illicitly carrying weapons to the Palestinians, under the command of one of Arafat’s associates, was totally denied by Arafat and the Palestinian Authority as an “Israeli plot.” Then when presented by the facts and when the shipment of weapons was exposed to world media, Arafat said that he “had no knowledge of it personally,” and only when he was confronted with the documents he had personally signed, did he have no choice but apologize to President Bush. In the aftermath of September 11, similar patterns of behavior were detected in the Muslim world. In spite of their joy that they could not contain, Muslims from Pakistan to America, from Egypt to Afghanistan, denied that any Muslim could “commit such horror,” because it was patently against “the compassion and tolerance of Islam,” and verses were cited in support of that contention, such as that Islam “was opposed to compulsion in faith,” or to the execution of “innocent civilians,” unless they challenged Islam or “humiliated it.” They also contended that an act of terror of such proportions could not possibly have been planned, let alone executed, by any Muslim state or organization, thus exonerating themselves in advance, even if that implied their admitting their incompetence in carrying out operations of such a scale. Even as the evidence was being gathered and divulged of the Qai’da involvement, and demands were mounting for its indictment, they continued to insist that “unless America provided decisive and undisputed evidence for Muslim involvement,” it was wrong on the part of the West to “smear the entire Muslim world,” (which was “opposed to terrorism” in any case), on account of the “yet unproven” deeds of the few. And so, the roles were again reversed: the Muslims, who needed no evidence for their delusions, and never stop to reflect on the irrationality of their accusa-

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tions against the West and Israel, suddenly find themselves scrupulous about “evidence,” when the accusations are laid at their door. And so they found themselves pledging that should any evidence emerge of Muslim involvement, the culprits ought to be pursued to “Muslim justice,” and dealt with according to Muslim legal procedures, which meant in effect exonerating Muslims altogether. But the facts kept pressing at the door, and when the Muslim claims of “innocence” became ludicrous in the eyes of world opinion, the stage of projection and laying the blame on others began. As in the cases where Israelis were accused by Palestinians of “provocations” in mounting terrorism against their own citizens in order to blame the “innocent and peace-loving Palestinians,” or of concocting the Karine A arm smuggling in order to smear the Palestinian “impeccable reputation” of “law-abiding” and “respect for its commitment,” the Muslim world orchestrated a campaign of projection on others of the evils of September 11. First, it was claimed by Muslims in Egypt and Pakistan, America and Saudi Arabia, that the Jews, the CIA or the Israeli Mossad “did it,” with countless “indications” indicting, successively or simultaneously, either or all of them. Again, becoming suddenly meticulous about “data gathering” and the provision of “conclusive evidence,” they began to fabricate piecemeal fantastic stories about Israelis or Jews who “had been pre-warned and evacuated the premises of the Twin Towers prior to the blast,” or the takeover of control towers by “suspect elements,” also presumably Jewish, who “collaborated with the hijackers,” or other hoaxes that never cease to raise our admiration for the boundless imagination of their inventers. Indeed, even though the reality of Muslim daydreaming is not itself limited by imagination, it proves to us to be more fantastic than their fantasies. From the concept of imagination we often use the positive derivative of the “imaginative,” but they are bent on the “imaginary,” which seems to fill their world and satisfy their emotions. In this Kafkaesque world of the unreal, only non-Muslims are supposed to sin, and therefore anything projected on them is either true, or could be true even if it is not proven. This is the foundation of the vicious and sustained campaigns of denigration and diminishment of the West and the Jews in Muslim circles, countries, and societies, that we commonly call incitement and that is the prerequisite for terrorism against them. Incitement often means delegitimization of the enemy, making them look corrupt, decadent, an inherent enemy of Islam and Allah, and therefore deserving of annihilation through terror. To that end, any means is justi-

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fied, even inventing lies, making up false quotations from nonexistent sources, like the “citations” by Palestinians in their text books of passages that never were, which “prove” the Jewish conspiracy, its “evil,” and its ill-intentions against Islam and the rest of humanity; or the ritual repetition of the blood libel as a fact of history, or liberal quotations from the forged Protocols of the Sages of Zion as true documents, etc. It seems amazing to us that they care little not only for the truth as long as it serves their goals of libeling Israel and the West, but even less about educating their children on falsehoods and training them to consider imaginary texts as “citations.”20 In May 2002, when the Israeli armed forces launched their Defensive Shield Operation against terrorist bases in Jenin, which was led extremely carefully and sparingly with regard to civilians, the Palestinians immediately shouted: “Foul Game!” They had conducted a series of murderous attacks against Israeli civilians, and blown up one hundred of them within one week, including during the Passover Seder where entire families were wiped out (29 killed in all), and that passed in the Palestinian public as a matter of routine; but when Israel decided to root out the bases of terror in the West Bank, immediate accusations of “massacres” began, echoed by the Arab and Muslim press, (and also by the European press, and the numbers of “massacred” people kept increasing, reaching the peak of 3,000 according to Saeb Arekat, the Chief Palestinian negotiator. Then it turned out that “only” 50 Palestinians were killed in that center of terror, and for the most part amid very heavy fighting where 22 Israeli fighters lost their lives. There was no massacre, in short. Similarly, when the Americans opened their counterattack against the Taliban, and thoughtfully attempted not to harm civilians, to the extent possible, in the process, and even dropped significant quantities of food to sustain them during the fighting, it was the stories of “massacres” of “innocent civilians,” “poisoning of the dropped food parcels,” the “intentional bombing of schools and food depots,” the “cruel arrest of Taliban POW’s” and their transport to Guantanamo where they were treated “inhumanly” like “the Nazis would,” that dominated the Arab and Muslim reporting of the operation, not the intentional atrocities committed by the Taliban themselves and their supporters. For the Arab and Muslim audiences in both cases, the story was not about reporting a balanced truth, where the evils, intentional or incidental, and motivations of both parties were recounted, and where the cause and effect sequence had to be explained, of horrendous terrorist attacks against civilians which

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had to be recompensed and rooted out, but only about the “callous and senseless American and Israeli aggressive attacks against civilians,” without reason or cause, just to satisfy the evil instincts of Bush and Sharon. For them, vilifying, debasing, calumniating, and libeling their enemies was the only way to delegitimize them as inhuman predators, so as to pave the way for future additional terrorist attacks against them. Projecting on the enemy, by heaping lies and pipe-dreams against him, in the way of pure and primitively simple incitement, however, does not only permit his delegitimization and encourages more attacks against him, but also, more significantly, belies and exposes the hidden dreams of what the Muslims would do to the Americans and the Israelis, if they could. Projection-cum-incitement, therefore, reveal to the West what fate is awaiting him, should the Muslim world win this confrontation. Wasn’t it the Secretary General of the Arab League, ‘Azzam Pasha, who declared on the day the Arab armies invaded nascent Israel in 1948 in order to eliminate it, that a “massacre would ensue that the world had never seen since the Mongols”? He meant a massacre of the Jews, exactly as the Muslim terrorists mean and implement today, but instead of piecemeal—in one big stroke. Thus, while Americans and Israelis, in their reprisals in self-defense, have espoused the strategy of saving civilian lives to the extent possible, and would rather fight surgically, at the risk of their own casualties, to minimize the enemy’s civilian losses, rather than blanket-bomb entire cities or population centers, Muslim terrorists act differently. Their stated aim is to maximize civilian casualties in the enemy’s ranks, as evidenced in the Twin Towers and in the massive explosions in crowded civilian places in Israel, where nails and bolts are added to the bombs for maximal effect, and sometimes poisonous substances are tucked on to the bombs for added damage. In other words, while the West operates with a considerable restraint of its forces, for fear of their devastating impact, terrorists act with the maximum unleashing of their power, something that leads to the fear in the West that they would not hesitate to use unconventional weapons if they laid their hands on them. That is exactly the soft-belly of the West, which ties in with its concern for human life, for due process of law and restraint in using power, which the Muslim terrorists who are not shackled by those limitations seek to exploit and strike at. To make that happen, roles are once again reversed: “We are not the terrorists!!!, You are!!!,” they shout at the West. For, what Muslim martyrs do in terms of wanton killing, is not only justified, because it is in the Path of

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Allah, but by delegitimizing the West as terrorist itself, the fight against it is called for, and to be fought by all means available to the Muslims, precisely those that the West has restrained itself from using. Pathological Anti-Semitism Perhaps since Nazi Germany no amount of vitriol was poured on the Jews as such, not only Israelis and Zionists, as has been the case in the past few years by Arabs and Muslims, beyond what emanates from Islamic sources that were surveyed above. We have seen nauseating citations of anti-Semitic attacks in the high echelons of Arab politics, not only in intractable Syria, but even in the Egyptian mainstream press, which shamelessly recounts its lies and fabrications as “history,” and avidly “quotes” from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion that never were, and retells with a sadistic delight that can only match its joy at the carnage in the Twin Towers, the Blood Libels of which Jews have been accused. Not one voice is there to stand up to the calumniators and intercede for ceasing that orgy of hatred even in Egypt decades after its “peace” with Israel. All one has to do is to rummage through the hundreds of hate sites that are fed by Muslims and Arabs across the world, to realize the width and depth of anti-Semitic sentiment in the Muslim world as described in the previous chapter. There has also never been any society since the Nazis which so boasted of its hatred towards the Jews as Muslim society today. Its preachers denigrate and humiliate them, incite against them, justify massacres against them, and associate them with America and the evil West. Reasons for this new outburst of hatred, which has been manifest also throughout the democratic West where Jewish and Muslim communities live side by side, emanate perhaps from the reality in which Jews represent the successful middle-class that has made the West prosperous. For the Muslims it is painful to admit that Jews succeeded where they have failed, and the jealousy in this regard cannot be contained or suppressed. They compensate themselves by their prophecies about the “cowardly” Jews who in the end of days will run away and hide from the Muslims who will seek their destruction. There is no need, as some counsel, for Israel (and the West for that matter) to go into any soul-searching and to dig up the “reasons” (there must be reasons, right?) for this hatred, anymore than there was one when the Jews were made the scapegoats of the Nazis, and were murdered for what they were, with the burden of the “guilt” accruing to them. If

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anything needs to be investigated, it is the sick minds of the anti-Semites, today and of old, but this does not seem to be the moment, beyond the enumeration of some traits of character of the Muslims, which make them so prone to accuse others in general. For if the Muslims and Arabs are so fond of Hitler and of citing him, and they miss no opportunity to analyze “scientifically” the “reasons” for his victimization of the Jews, and they naturally find the Jews themselves guilty, then words like “reason” and “cause” have been depleted of their meanings, and one is dragged to the realm of the incomprehensible and the irrational. But then, side by side with that, the Holocaust that the Jews were accused of having brought upon themselves, is vehemently, and again “scientifically,” denied, and the Jews are relegated to the role of the Nazis themselves in their dealings with the Palestinians. Such a web of lies, presumptions, pretenses, denials and contradictions, only the modern Arab and Muslim mind could create. In any case, the delegitimization of the Jews, of Israel their state, and Zionism—their movement of national liberation, is so thorough, total, and irreversible, as to turn them into the target of the coming Islamikaze massacres, a fate which they deserve a-priori. By turning their hatred of Jews into a pathological phenomenon, as we have already implied in the previous chapter, inseparable from their own being, they immunize themselves against any human compassion. Otherwise, it is hard to understand how crowds would jump for joy in Palestinian and Egyptian streets, at the sight of Jewish children blown to pieces, or entire families wiped out in one stroke of madness. They have turned so obtuse and cruel when Jewish victims are concerned, that it is necessary to remind them, from time to time, that they are evil to pursue civilians and murder them in streets, restaurants, and buses; even more evil are those who rejoice with them, and they must be excluded from the human race. If they call their massacres Jihad, and their murderers martyrs, that does not mitigate their crime; on the contrary, it discredits the faith that motivates them and the God in whose name they act. But the Muslim fundamentalists’ judgment is blunted by hatred, to the point that they can no longer differentiate between good an evil, human or inhuman. They profess the evil of indiscriminate killing that is dictated by their blind hatred, even if they should themselves be consummated by its fire in the process. They have no use for facts (for example the Holocaust), nor respect to values (the mass-murders they commit without a hitch), nor concern for the victims. Because only they, the fighters of Jihad, who are awaited in Paradise, count, and anyone in their way should be eliminated.

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They turn their own plight onto the Jews and accuse them of their own backwardness, oppression, and poverty; and they impute to Zionism the “oppression of freedom” of which they themselves suffer. Only a twisted mind beyond repair can accuse the Jews of the Twin Tower massacre, begin to believe it itself, and then come to the conclusion that because of the “Jewish failure” to achieve their goals, the “future of Muslims in America looks bright.”21 Dialoguing with Others Some naïve minds in the West have come to believe that dialogue and negotiations with Muslim radicals can and will alter those attitudes and lead to coexistence between Muslims and their rivals. The problem is that dialogue has been treated in the West as if it were a real policy, whereas it is in fact a non-policy, designed only to fill an awkward vacuum and to make royalties like Prince Charles and legislators feel virtuous for “doing something.” But while Europeans have regularly entered a “dialogue” with Muslims in good faith, fully intending to find common ground with their often unruly Muslim interlocutors—for the Muslims, “dialogue” means something else entirely. For them, it signifies the submission of a lesser culture and religion to their own superior one. Muslims hope to inspire in the Westerners and Israelis conversion to an Islamic view of the world. Anything short of that is regarded by them as an abject “failure of dialogue,” and a signal to resort to threats of violence or acts of terrorism. They are well practiced at both, while the Westerners have literally become pushovers at this stage in their history. Except for the U.S., they hardly believe that anything is worth fighting over. Nor do they have a stomach for a fight of unlimited duration. They would rather capitulate than investigate in depth the meaning of tolerance, understanding, dialogue, and peace to the Islamists. The problem today lies in the juxtaposition of a resurgent Islam on the one hand, and a self-deprecating West on the other, unsure of itself, its values, or even what it stands for. Its people have made a virtue of instant self-gratification, and therefore they invest next to nothing in the future—hence they have stopped having children. Their preferred way of life amounts to a “credit card culture.” They want everything, and they want it instantly. Never mind that their governments no longer raise sufficient funds from taxation to cover exorbitant welfare entitlements, or that a bleak financial future awaits tomorrow’s pensioners. In short, the West has become a disgrace to its own heritage in sharp reversal of its fortunes when at the

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turn of the twentieth century the Muslim Ottoman Empire was considered the “sick man of Europe,” and was therefore no match for a confident West. U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was onto something apart from the obvious when he distinguished between “old” and “new” Europe—except that in their eagerness to grab some (necessarily shortterm) economic benefits after emerging from Soviet control, the headlong rush of “new” Europe to join the EU will inevitably contaminate them with the prevalent Western disease. There is another drawback to this constant resort to “dialogue.” It lulls the Western populations into believing that their governments are doing something constructive to avert violence or threats of violence in the future. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth, for this non-policy simply serves to embolden and concomitantly empower those Muslims whom Western governments have chosen to act as intermediaries with the wider Muslim community. Invariably, Western governments have elected these Muslims largely because they are the activists and therefore are prominent in the community, while the governments comfort themselves with the injudicious belief that these figures represent “moderate” Islam. However, these Muslims have been living in Europe long enough to have learned to tailor their vocabulary precisely according to whom they are facing across the table. They speak the language of peace, reconciliation, and goodwill to Westerners, and reserve their true thoughts and beliefs for fellow Muslims. In other words, they have learned to “work the system,” admirably so. In effect, these “moderate” Muslim leaders gradually extract one concession after another from Western policymakers, rendering “dialogue” a one-way street. They enter each session with the full intention of testing the limits of the concessions they can extract, and it is a rare government minister who would risk disappointing them—or else the headlines in the papers the following day would be sure to inflame the Muslim community. Herein lies the value of the worldwide Muslim penchant for overreacting to every perceived slight, real or imagined, by demonstrating their “rage” loudly and violently. Temperament comes into play here too, for unlike other peoples who experience anger or humiliation, many Muslims are either unable or unwilling to contain those sentiments. One has only to recall the Arafat-orchestrated “days of rage” in the early days of the Intifadah against Israel to understand that, in sharp contrast to Westerners, Muslims make a fetish of celebrating their anger. Such an uncontrolled behavior is unthinkable in the West, but not because of lack of provocation, particularly since September 11.

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Funerals too are manipulated to vent wrath and fury, emotion, general mayhem, and impromptu rifle-shooting. The total and shameless lack of dignity, even at what should be a somber occasion, is jarring to western eyes. Bodies are held aloft and bounced along the route, in a manner that would be regarded as disrespectful to the deceased in other cultures. Bodies have been known to fall off the stretcher amid the melee, and other processions turning chaotic as was recorded for posterity in the case of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini’s funeral. Iran’s ambassador to Copenhagen, Ahmad Danialy, making his first public appearance in Denmark since being recalled by the Iranian Foreign Ministry in January 2006, following the Cartoon affair, addressed a public gathering and noted that the crisis had “hurt the feelings of the Muslim world and caused a great deal of concern. Now after the lapse of this period of unpleasant and bitter experience, I am very pleased to witness a beautiful and jovial gathering of the erudite and learned here in Copenhagen…. The conference is a step in the right direction for improving relations. The truth of the matter is that the world needs to direct new attention to one fundamental principle and that is: Respect for the sanctity of religions in all places and at all political, cultural and social levels….”22 And this happened when the Ambassador was aware of how his President speaks about Jews and Israel and how his clerics deprecate Christianity and other faiths, and how the Iranian regime supports the burning down of Jewish synagogues in the West Bank and in European cities. But if the purpose of the conference was “to introduce the Prophet (the Muslim one, not all the rest), the proper way,” then why should we expect any care or concern for any faith except the Islamic one? The following conference in the United Arab Emirates, organized by the Tabah Foundation, brought sixty young people from Denmark and the Arab world together under the banner “The Search for Mutual Understanding,” namely that the Danes should learn to respect Islam, never mind their own beliefs and culture. The delegates discussed a range of issues that the Cartoon crisis revealed as sore points between religious Muslims and secular Western culture, such as freedom of expression and the role the media can play in hindering or facilitating global understanding. The four-day conference held in Abu Dhabi “exceeded the expectations of Jeppe Bruus Christensen,” chairman of the Danish Youth Council, who naively and prematurely declared: “I don’t think we should underestimate how important this is in the Arab world. It has gathered a great deal of attention.” What he did not realize was that his statements were interpreted

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throughout the Arab world as a desperate attempt by Denmark to apologize for its “horrible” deed, as a capitulation to Muslim demands. It did not earn Denmark any credit, but only scorn and contempt. Christensen felt the two groups managed to “understand” each other and “accepted” mutual criticism, but he failed to comprehend that the Muslim goal was to assert its victory, not compromise, because its system cannot recognize that it can be at fault, unlike other (lesser) faiths. Thus, his feeling that the whole exercise “has been very constructive and positive” and that “we have been able to agree upon common values, such as having the right to criticize each other,” would have been in vain had he read the Arab reports of the conference. Other participants from Denmark and the Middle East were more sober and realistic when they merely agreed that the conference “underscored the need for bridging the gaps that the conflict had revealed,” and that “We have to accept that there are areas where we remain distant from each other.” Moreover, to illustrate the depth of that gap, some Muslims continued to consider Denmark, one of the most open, tolerant, and hospitable countries of the world, to be “a racist and closed country.”23 Much closer to the reality was the evaluation by some Danish participants who heard their country being deprecated, albeit that it could be the model of tolerance for the entire Islamic world, when they said that “we have to acknowledge that that’s the way it’s going to be for some time.” The conference also gave young Muslims the chance to meet their Danish counterparts and test the images presented by the media in their countries. “It’s been very important for me to obtain the human aspect. To meet people and hear their opinion instead of seeing it in the media,” said a nineteen-year-old Egyptian who admitted that preconceived notions, such as “the Danes hate us,” were difficult to reject, but the conference’s people-to-people approach helped. Another Arab youth, from Saudi Arabia, where Danish goods were initially boycotted, said that he was surprised in a positive way about the Danish young people, for “They were much more open and understanding about our culture than I had expected.” But was he about theirs in the same way? He acknowledged that while dialogue and respect had been established at the conference, transferring the experience to his home country could prove difficult. He explained: “We’ll be challenged when we come back to our countries, because some people have different attitudes. They use a different approach than dialogue, but we still need to work to spread the message that it is possible to live in this world together.”24 One wishes he were right.

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The Danish Queen, Margrethe, more reflective than the British Royal House, stated that Islam poses a challenge both globally and locally, and the challenge should be taken seriously. In her published biography, based on interviews between the Queen and the book’s author, journalist Annelise Bistrup, the Queen affirmed that “There is something impressive about people, whose existence is immersed in religion from dawn to dusk, from the cradle to the grave…, but it is a challenge, which we need to take seriously. We have admittedly ignored it for too long. Because we are tolerant and a little lazy, I don’t find it easy at all. Nor especially pleasant.” Unlike other royals and politicians who make gratuitous declarations just to please their Muslim citizens or to placate their wrath, Queen Margrethe has studied Islam through her archaeological pursuits, and says that she does not feel entirely unprepared to enter the debate. “There is something fascinating about people who go to such lengths to surrender themselves to a religion. But there is also something frightening about the all-encompassing side of Islam,” she said, and then courageously added, “The challenge must be met, at the risk of getting some less flattering labels attached, for there are some things we should not meet with tolerance. When we are tolerant, we should be careful to note whether it stems from convenience or conviction.” Queen Margrethe explained that her nation and the West stand at a crossroads, but it needs to be recognized that crossroads often only reveal themselves when they are crossed. She warned that “one doesn’t always turn out to have taken the right road. But we have at least realized that we cannot let ourselves be shooed off by things that frighten us. We cannot compromise our notions of justice and legitimacy.” Queen Margrethe pointed out that her interviews with her biographer Bistrup brought up forgotten memories that could be worthwhile for others, especially young people, to hear.25 She was most certainly referring to the seeming nonchalance with which the worriless young generation looked upon the multi-cultural states that exacted an increasing price from present-day European societies. Loyalty, Statecraft, Law, and Order Part of the friction between the Muslim minorities in Europe today and their host societies in general, and their neighboring Jewish communities in particular, arises from the Muslim attitudes toward the state and the rule of law, and from the social and family ties and loyalties that they import with them. On the most fundamental level, they experience a great difficulty in interacting with democratic state institutions that are remote

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and impersonal, sanctify the individual and the secular, and discount the religious and the affective links of the clans and the families. For them, custom and tradition, social conventions and a culture of shame, which are governed by personal relationships and the rule of the notables, take precedence over state law and cold unnegotiated rules of conduct imposed on them by the alien culture that surrounds them. Hence the very different Muslim notions of right and wrong, just and coercive, legitimate and unlawful, which make for the failed states they originally came from, and the ensuing clashes between them and their host societies, including the Jews who have embraced, for the most part, the local norms of conduct and are counted among their staunchest defenders. While the democratic principle was posited by Giuselmo Ferrero as a prerequisite for legitimacy of rule, Muslim regimes cannot by definition subscribe to it, hence their difficulty to adapt to it in the Democratic countries where they have immigrated but try at the same time to impose on them Shari’ah Law. In classical Islam the acceptance of the ruler was performed through the bai’a (the oath of allegiance) in the public square, which was then ruthlessly translated into popular legitimacy, and any insurgence challenging it was deemed rebellion against the legitimacy of the ruler. But it was evident that the genuine legitimacy of the ruler (Caliph or Sultan) remained based on the capacity of the autocrat to enforce the Shari’ah Law and protect it. Today, Muslim rulers use the terms of “democracy,” “human rights,” “elections” and such, but they profoundly misunderstand them. It is not that they understand and manipulate them, in line with Ferrero’s typology of “fraudulent democracy” typical of fascist regimes, they only seem so to Western minds who cannot imagine that others fail to comprehend what is obvious to us. There is a link between legitimacy and succession. Mubarak or Qaddafi have “succeeded” themselves many times and they regard themselves as legitimate, though no rival would dare or be allowed to run against them. They cannot be opposed during an “election,” genuinely believing that opposition and competition, the trademarks of Western democracy, are signs of division and controversy which are inimical to the rule of “unity.” They sense that since they were overwhelmingly “chosen,” unopposed, by 95 percent of the masses, that is their base of legitimacy. We speak in the West of the people as the sovereign and the source of legitimacy. Islam hails Allah as the only sovereign of the universe and brands any attempt to impute sovereignty to humans as shirk namely imparting divine qualities to anyone other than the Almighty. As this is

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seen as blasphemy deserving of capital punishment, Muslim radicals do not recognize most governments in the Islamic world, and are particularly incensed by monarchs who dub themselves “sovereign,” for the only form of government acceptable to them is the Caliphate where the Caliph was the Vicar of the Prophet, not a sovereign in his own right. In their view, Allah, the sovereign has already dispensed to humanity the most perfect of legal codes—the Qur’an and the Shari’a, and for any human to pretend that it can be ameliorated via parliamentary legislation, would also amount to blasphemy. In the West consensus is the fruit of political bargaining based upon a give-and-take process between political, ethnic, religious, linguistic, and cultural groups, or lobbies of particular interests, which recognize the relativity of the truth and need to balance the various interests in order to arrive at a social pact which governs the state and social institutions, like the maintenance of law and order and enforcement thereof. Muslims, however, especially the radicals among them, have enormous difficulties in compromising or striking deals because for them the Truth is one and eternal, an either-or-affair, anchored in a demand for everything now. Since most governments are regarded as anti-Islamic, often violence is encouraged against them, be they in Islamic countries proper, and much more so in Western countries, which do not recognize Islam yet as part of their legitimate system. This problematic Muslim view of Western democracies as not totally legitimate due to their ignorance of the Divine Law decreed by Allah, is precisely what has prompted many a Muslim leader in the West to declare that his purpose is to introduce Shari’a Law into the country’s system. The capitulation of some government, judicial and clerical officials in this regard in Britain, Germany and France, has given incentive to European Muslims to further raise their voices against the existing western order and clamor for more Muslim legislation. Open statements by some of their spiritual leaders that they have come to change Europe, not to submit to its rule, not only make the existing order dispensable in their eyes, but they endeavor by demonstrations, use of violence and acts of terror, to hasten its demise and substitute for it the Pax Islamica of their dreams. Hence the frequent clashes between Muslim communities in Europe and the forces of order, of which Jews are often the victims. The problem is not only the illegitimacy of non-Muslim government, but the tribal and family loyalties in Muslim society which make for their social atomization and for the shift of their political loyalty from their country (original in the East and present in the West) to their religion,

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community, family, clan, tribe, country of origin, persona of the tribal or religious leader. The immigrants from the failed states in the Islamic world, which know more strife, tension, violence, fear, and disaffection, than serenity, order, predictability and freedom, precisely due to the inability of the state to command the loyalty of the individual citizens who lament the illegitimacy of its rule, cannot do better than import with them to their host societies their age-old customs and ways of conduct. To the point that they threaten to turn their shelter countries into ungovernable as their original own. The old Bedouin adage: “I am against my brother; my brother and I are against our cousins; our family is against the rest of the clan; I and my clan are against the rest of world,” which has been a societal constant of the Islamic world, seems to have crossed the oceans and transplanted itself into Western society. The states of which the Muslim immigrants have become the supplicant citizens, do not provide the glue to link their new citizenry to them, hence the constant unrest among Muslim communities who have failed to become part and parcel of their new countries of asylum. The high percentage of crime among Muslim immigrants, way out of proportion to their rate in the population, especially the ideological crimes such as terrorism, are more indicative of this turn of events than the petty crimes against property which can be attributed to economic disadvantage. Once it is established that the Western destinations of immigration are no substitutes for capturing their uprooted political and social loyalties, it is also understandable why acting in contravention to the public order, which is not theirs, and opposing violently the countries which have aided them and given them refuge, do not appear to them as violating any legal or moral rule. Their yardsticks of justice, order, right, fairness, and rightful conduct are the Muslim ones which are nonnegotiable and absolute. For example, it would not occur to them that in any conflict involving Muslims and non-Muslims, the latter, including in their own country or residence, may also be right. If Britain battles against terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan, it deserves counterattacks against it by its own Muslims, who are the natural allies of all other Muslims. Muslims and Arabs everywhere clamor for “justice,” as if justice were absolute and not in the eye of its beholder. Justice (‘adalah in Arabic) is for the Arabs linked to the traditional notion of balance between the two saddlebags on the camel back, short of which the camel cannot march at length to cross the desert. Justice is also linked to honor, and the maintenance of honor hinges on the ability to protect one’s property, including one’s women,

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and his proven capacity to retrieve and avenge them if they are taken or violated. Otherwise his reputation is irretrievably compromised. Thus, one’s honor is constantly on the line and it is tested by one’s daring in the service of one’s honor. An Arab/ Muslim will not rest until the wrong done to him is redressed and what he believes is his property is retrieved. Then, justice is done, and one can go back to functioning normally. There are no objective criteria to examine the feeling of right and wrong, or when and where an encroachment on one’s honor has been committed. They hinge on the subjective sense of the wronged individual. So, when the Muslims demand justice, they mean their Muslim justice, i.e. the return to them of what they claim is theirs, regardless of whether, what and how others might advance as a disclaimer in historical, legal, logical or human terms, for all these are irrelevant. First, Muslims must get full satisfaction, in accordance with their own sentiments and convictions, their rights must be recognized and stated, and only then they might show generosity and give back out of their own volition, not as a result of coercion or force. Thus, the whole notion of compromise does not come into play, because if something is yours, you must obtain it first. Take, for instance, the troubling question of “honor killing” among Muslims in Europe, or of forced marriage on under-age women, as an extension of the imported custom from Muslim lands. It is “their” women who are in question, therefore what right does the Western state have to interfere in their “private” affairs? The subordinate status of the Jews as dhimmis has been sanctioned by the Shari’a, and they have been treated accordingly by Muslim communities in Europe. What right have European states to interfere in this purely Muslim matter, which concords with Islamic Law? When they demonstrate against Jews and attack peaceful Jewish communities and individuals and burn their synagogues and desecrate their cemeteries, that is a matter of course, in view of the contempt in which they hold Jews and their faith. So, why should European authorities interfere? Muslims have paid America and Britain their due in the September 11 and July 7 attacks, why is there such an over-reaction to those acts of “self-defense” on the part of the wronged Muslims? And so on and so forth. It is only “natural” that Muslims of Britain, France, and the U.S. should send their “volunteers” to train in Afghanistan and Pakistan and fight against the West anywhere necessary.

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Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

Former President Rafsanjani spoke of using a nuclear bomb against Israel. See Iran News(English), Kayhan (Farsi), and Al-Wifaq (Arabic), December 15, 2001. Memri 325, January 3, 2002. See also Al-Sha’b (Egypt), September 23, 2001. Al-Qa’ida Spokesman, Suleiman Abu Gheith, in an article titled “In the Shadow of the Lances”, and also Ayman al-Zawahiri’s article in al-Mujahidin. For both, see Memri, June 12, 2002. Bernard Lewis, “How did the Infidels Win?,” National Post, June 1, 2002. For the most comprehensive and authoritative study to date, see Majid Khadduri, War and Peace in Islam. See Moshe Sharon, “Hudna and Sulh in Islam” (Hebrew), Nativ, Summer 2002. See repeated references to this in the Charter of the Hamas, referred to above. Bernard Lewis, see ftn.1 above. e.g., Raphael Israeli “Identity and State-building: Educating Palestinian Children after Oslo,” Journal of Terrorism and Political Violence, Spring 2002. See R. Israeli, Poison: Modern Manifestations of a Blood Libel, Lexington Books, Lanham and NY, 2002. Qur’an, Sura 5:51. 2:191. 9:123. 9:5. 9:3. 5:10. 9:28. 2:193. 22: 19-22. 22:9. For examples see R. Israeli, ftn. 6 above. See for examples, Itamar Marcus, “Islam’s Mandatory War Against Jews and Israel in Palestinian Authority Religious Teaching,” Studies on Palestinian Culture and Society, Study No 4, 2 July, 2001. By Palestinian Media Watch, Jerusalem; and James Cox, USA Today, September 28, 2001. “The clash of civilizations is currently on hold,” Copenhagen Post Online, April 20, 2006, http://www.cphpost.dk/get/95174.html. Ibid. Ibid. “In a new biography, Denmark’s Queen Margrethe II says Islam should be challenged,” Copenhagen Post Online, April 14, 2005, http://www.cphpost.dk/get/87253.html.

3 The Import of the Middle Eastern Dispute into the West The massive influx of Muslim populations into Europe since the 1950s and the establishment of large, self-confident, and permanent Muslim communities amounting to millions there, has also caused Muslim culture, traditions, customs, and politics to take root there. Triggered at first by Arabs from North Africa, who brought in their wake their ill-disposition towards Israel and the Jews in the Middle Eastern conflict into their adopted lands, they were joined by Muslims of other origins—from the Sub-Continent in Britain and Turks in Germany, and later reinforced by Muslim refugees from the entire troubled Muslim world (Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, Kurdistan, parts of Africa), to embrace an antiIsrael and anti-Semitic discourse. Paradoxically, that negative discourse, which was often expressed violently against Israeli legations in the West, in Western university campuses, and/or against the local Jewish communities, has been customarily accompanied by demonstrations against the very Western countries that gave the Muslims asylum and allowed those public manifestations of displeasure. In the Islamic world itself the anti-Western outbursts, typically directed against the United States of America as the arch-representative of Western civilization, have become the norm in practically all non-Western, which are also non-democratic, authoritarian, often economically backward, for the most part religious, traditional and lacking in freedom and human rights societies. Western civilization is evoked by them not only to explain their own failures but to hurl accusations against the “Imperialist-colonialist” and “oppressive and exploitative” West who has caused their misfortune. Paradoxically, at the same time that they claim to champion western values such as freedom, democracy, secularism, economic prosperity, and peace-loving, they also give them a twist of their own, making them their own and interpreting them their own way. 57

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For example, democracy for Islamic countries, (and many developing nations for that matter), may also mean a continued authoritarianism, which derives from and suits best the native traditional systems of those societies. In that regard, the successful regimes of the West, which are feared and admired at the same time, and on whose doors long lines of visa-applicants keep knocking, are also hated, despised, shunned, defamed, and outright blamed for aggression, terrorism, corruption, materialism, degeneration, and impending decay. That very mixture of awe and hatred, envy and contempt, is imported to the West with the new immigrants, who also come to regard the successful Jewish communities, who had totally acculturated and are often at the forefront of professions, intellectual life, art, commerce and politics, as the quintessential representative of the Western culture that they despise because they fail to integrate into it. As those Jewish communities usually lend their support to Israel, though in civilized and non-violent ways, the Muslim immigrants find themselves squeezed between their envy of the Jews’ success and the latter’s politics. So we see Muslim immigrants associating with native European anti-Semites from the Right who hate the Jews for their success and with European leftists who detest Israel’s politics or its very existence, but they dub their alliance in the politically correct jargon: anti-Zionism. The ubiquity, simultaneity and uniformity of these anti-Jewish outbursts since the outbreak of the Intifadah in September 2000, throughout the Western world, gives reason to believe in a centrally coordinated scheme aimed at delegitimizing the State of Israel by demonizing it and its people and heaping on the Zionist national ideology all the blames and condemnations, which have been traditionally imputed to the Jews. This is how anti-Semitism merges with anti-Zionism and anti-Israelism, the latter being more acceptable and politically correct than the former. The newly established Muslim communities in the West are becoming a permanent component of the local societies due to their exponential demographic growth, which assures them that their numbers, hence their political influence, can only increase in the future in view of both the negative growth in Western societies on the one hand, and the rapid development of the Muslim communities on the other hand, where the high birthrate and the continued stream of new immigrants (legal and illegal) constantly feed that trend. Moreover, unlike the older first generation of immigrants, which was busy searching for livelihood and job opportunities, the new generation of Muslims, more educated and

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attuned to the local scene, will have less difficulty and more propensity to express itself on affairs of its concern, notably domestic and foreign policy. Thus, politicians of all convictions, particularly in areas of large concentrations of immigrants, who realize their growing dependence on the votes of the newcomers, will by necessity be more and more attentive to the needs and demands of the Muslim communities, not least with regard to the relations between the countries of asylum and the Arab and Islamic world, including the Arab-Israeli dispute in the Middle East. In the past decade these trends have been accelerated and already have made some long term impact: 1. 2.

3.

4.

5.

The established Arab-Muslim populations have learned to make use of their numbers and to hinge their political support to candidates for public office on the satisfaction of their demands; Paradoxically, those new immigrants who had been deprived of free expression in their authoritarian countries of origin, can now use their newly acquired democratic rights to exert pressure on their adoptive countries to lend support to the countries of origin they had left behind; On the national scene, the new immigrants who enjoy equality and tap the resources of their adoptive countries to facilitate their own absorption, end up imposing the ideas and positions they imported with them from the Middle East on their countries of refuge; As they grow in numbers and influence, and no longer content to make their voices heard in local politics, the Muslim newcomers attempt to marginalize the much more affluent but much less numerous local Jewish communities, either out of jealousy or a sense of competition. Antagonism between the two communities aggravates as a result, in spite of the many sincere, but vain, efforts by the Jewish communities to engage in dialogue with their Muslim compatriots; So, the tensions between the two communities are not merely socio-economic, emanating from the vast gulf that yawns between them, but also political in view of their diverging politics in support of the respective rivals in the Middle East. Add to that the traditional contempt for Jews that every Muslim customarily carries with him as part of his religious, mental, and cultural luggage, and you have the recipe for a potential rift between the two, on Middle Eastern terms and in Levantine style, on European soil.

Some Israeli governmental agencies publish annually a report on antiSemitic outbursts worldwide. The report focuses on Europe, the U.S. and other Christian territories where anti-Semitic tradition has for long allowed Judeo-phobic manifestations of hatred and anti-Jewish propaganda, and details a sinister statistic of threats towards Jewish communities,

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attacks against Jewish institutions and individuals, desecrations of Jewish sites like synagogues and cemeteries, and sometimes outright arsons of synagogues. This is reminiscent of the old times when the states of Europe themselves, led by the Church and its Inquisition, rampaged Jewish communities and produced untold numbers of pogroms, burnings of homes and houses of prayer, and often caused the Jewish population either to convert, to suffer martyrdom, or to leave. Nowadays, some of these attacks are launched by skinheads and some Nazi or Neo-Nazi groups as part of their general xenophobia, or are specifically focused on Jews, citing the Jewish Conspiracy, the double loyalty and subversion of Jews, or denying the Holocaust and demonizing the Jews instead. Recently, this hatred has been inspired and activated by an innumerable amount of hate sites on the Internet which inflame the tempers, and invent any number of stories to rationalize the systematic demonization of the Jews. Parts of these reports are regularly dedicated to legislation adopted by those countries to battle anti-Semitism, to legal suits triggered by Jews under those laws and to the educational efforts made to mitigate the virulence of those anti-Semitic pursuits.1 These past two decades, the reports have become routine, much like the annual report of the ADL in the U.S., but as one advances into the twenty-first century, one is stunned by the increase of these occurrences in Christendom, concurrently with the increasing attacks on Israel and Zionism, which have become part of the politically correct discourse in much of the West. For it seems that to the traditional anti-Semitic waves that Europe has known throughout its history, a novel salience has been gradually lent to these same events which are concocted, planned, launched, and diffused by the Muslim communities or by the Muslim websites in the West. So, much of these enhanced statistics has to be attributable to the added activity of the new Muslim population. For example, besides the old Holocaust deniers of the Front National, like Le Pen himself and the “academic” Robert Faurisson and Roger Garaudy, both Holocaust deniers, who are always given a hero welcome in the Muslim world and in the Muslim communities in Europe; the trial of David Irving in England at the turn of the century and millennium, and the recognition of the Sho’a by the UN and many Western governments, have provoked a backlash among Muslim communities who refused to participate in state-run memorial services for the murdered. These reports are worrying even if we do not take into consideration the daily flow of vitriol that is carried by the Arab and Muslim press across the world, even in countries

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like Egypt and Jordan which have supposedly made peace with Israel, but where not only the press but also “educational” textbooks in school continue to foment Jew-hatred as before and cultivate the next generation of anti-Semites. Except that there, there are almost no Jews left, therefore the anti-Semitic discourse is clearly directed to foreign scenes where Jews dwell, namely either Israel or Western countries, where it is translated into a brutal anti-Zionist and anti-Israel rhetoric. The Intifadah, which broke out in September 2000 in Jerusalem and soon inflamed the entire length and width of Israeli and Palestinian territories, has mobilized in surprising ways not only the masses in the lands of Islam, who submit to daily anti-Semitic incitement by their media, clerics, and leaders, but also the Arab and Muslim immigrant populations around the world, from Canada to Australia and from Western Europe to South America. The outbreak of violence against Jewish targets around the globe coincided with the season of the Jewish High Holidays and heightened the furor that Muslims poured on their Jewish neighbors in Israel, the Palestinian territories and then in Islamdom where there are no longer Jews and Christendom where Muslim immigrant populations have taken root. What seemed as spontaneous worldwide scenes of violence against Jewish symbols and sites, came against the background of the repeated Muslim pleas with the rest of the world to relent on violence and conflict against Muslims during their holidays, notably in Ramadan. For example, Muslim authorities demanded that America cease its bombings of Afghanistan on that holiday, that Palestinian convicted terrorists be released by Israel or that European authorities consider amnesty for Muslim convicts in their prisons. At the same time, however, they launched the Intifadah during the holiest days in the Jewish Calendar, a repeat of the launching of the 1973 War on Yom Kippur (never mind that it also coincided with their own Ramadan), and at the height of the Intifadah, they burnt the Jewish synagogue in Jericho and the Joseph Tomb in Nablus, which they specifically undertook to protect under the Oslo terms which necessitated Israeli withdrawals from those locations. A mindset has been prevalent among Muslims that their faith reigns supreme and obligates all to respect it, while they have no similar obligations towards others. They demand their right to build mosques everywhere in the world where there are Muslim communities, but Christians and Jews and members of other faiths are banned from building their houses of prayers in many a Muslim territory. And if they are permitted to build, or happen to maintain their own religious sites, they are continually exposed

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to harassment, destruction, and attack, like the Bamyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan, the Coptic churches in Egypt, the Christian churches in Nigeria and Indonesia, and the many churches and synagogues which were burnt, assaulted, or converted into mosques in Muslim lands. Expectedly, the acts of violence, which spread in the following months of the Intifadah to the entire world, were most pronounced in places where Muslim communities were largest, and evolved from demonstrations for the Palestinians in streets and campuses into vicious anti-Israeli onslaughts and violence against Jewish targets, all in one. In the many instances where local native demonstrators joined the Muslims in the sloganeering and attacks, anti-Zionist slogans made the headlines, though blatant anti-Semitic calls and threats could also be heard and read. Behind them stood inveterate anti-Semites like Lewis Farrakhan in the U.S., Holocaust deniers, nationalists and xenophobes (whose hatred is also, paradoxically, often directed towards Muslim immigrants), racists of all walks (who often do not hide their hatred towards Arabs and other Muslim groups as well), and they all put their networks of communications, money, expertise, experience, and inner knowledge of their societies at the disposal of the Muslim organizations. However, local circumstances, such as the election of Joe Lieberman to the presidential ticket (as Vice-President to Al Gore) in America in 2000, or the pro-Israeli declarations by PM John Howard in Australia, or occasional words of sympathy to Jews by European leaders after Jewish sites were desecrated in their respective countries, have contributed to inflaming and feeding anti-Semitic moods in those parts of the world. According to the reports of August 2000, namely one month prior to the Intifadah, the synagogue Beth Aharon was burnt in Brooklyn, New York on August 31, following a series of stone pelting, glass shattering, and bomb throwing during the preceding month. On September 30, one day after it broke out, a rabbi was attacked on his way home from the synagogue in Brooklyn and he was sprayed by tear gas and beaten, while the assailants were shouting: “This is for the Palestinians.” The same day, a Hassidic Jew was attacked by a dagger in New York, and his assailant shouted :”I am a Palestinian, get out of here!” So, a Hassidic Jew who probably had never been to Israel, and is more likely than not a non-Zionist or even anti-Zionist, is attacked for being a Jew, by a Palestinian who wished to avenge his people in the West Bank who had risen in Intifadah against Israel. Therefore, to claim to differentiate in the many repetitive cases like this between Jew, Zionist, and Israeli is only

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absurd. During the same months of August-September 2000, a wave of anti-Semitic attacks washed the shores of Europe, raising the suspicion that as the second Camp David Conference was ending in failure, preparations were being orchestrated by Arafat and his gang not only in the Middle East for the outburst of riots, but also by his representatives and aides across the world for parallel demonstrations of support. Violence indeed erupted in a tidal wave against Jews and their synagogues and cemeteries in Sweden (September 12), Russia (September 17 and 27), Italy (September 18), France (September 24), Britain (August 6, 7 and 12 and September 29), and two cases of desecration in Lithuania, one case in Germany, one in Russia, one in the Ukraine, one in Norway, and one in Ireland. These acts of desecration were often accompanied by antiSemitic inscriptions in public places, on the Internet and in circulated tracts and leaflets. Similar cases were reported in Belgium and Bolivia. However, while most of these incidents in this first wave unfolded before the Intifadah, in some cases, notably in Brussels, the Muezzins in the mosques called their followers already on September 29 to “take revenge on the Jews as a reprisal for Israel’s actions in the Palestinian territories.” No further evidence is needed to demonstrate that the failure of Camp David and the preparations for the worldwide uprising against Israel had been anticipated to run concurrently with the outbreak of the Intifadah on September 28, the Eve of the Jewish High Holidays. The governments of Sweden, the Czech Republic, the U.S., Germany, and Russia took some steps to avert escalation, but the worst was yet to come. In October, 2000, the wave grew into a tsunami, as anti-Semitic desecrations, attacks, arsons, Holocaust denials, and the like became routine, and were led under the collaboration of Muslims communities with local xenophobes and racists of all sorts. Incitement to violence against Israel and Jews attained new levels of virulence, unknown in modern peace-time Europe. On the morrow of the outbreak of the Intifadah the windows of the Kehillat Yaacov and of the Grand Synagogue of the Fieldgate Street in London were shattered. On October 1, an Arab driver attempted to overrun Jewish worshippers on their way to the Aubervilliers synagogue in Paris, followed immediately by an Arab youth who pelted water bottles on the walls of this same institution. On the same day, Arab youth pelted chestnuts at Jewish worshippers near the Ohaleikha Yaacov Synagogue in Paris, at the height of the Jewish High Holidays, and only the nearby presence of police prevented the escalation of those events into something more serious. The same day, other Arab youth, of whom

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there seem to be a plentiful supply in France, again pelted stones and insults against Jewish worshippers in Creteil near Paris and in a Lyon neighborhood (otherwise famous for its basketball team)—Villeurbanne. On the occasion of the Jewish New Year, the Arabs of Antwerp, aided by local skinheads, showered passing-by Jewish worshippers with insults and a Nazi salute before they were stopped by police. This sudden explosion of anti-Semitic activities during the Jewish high holidays attained its peak in the following days, concomitantly with the escalation of violence in the Middle East. No one aware of the holiness of those days of New Year and then Atonement in the Jewish Calendar, could escape noticing the intentional purpose of the rioters to hurt Jews where it hurt them most, while their leaders across the world were selling, with incomprehensible success, their thesis about “peaceful Islam,” the very word of Islam deriving from “salam” (peace), an argument that has no leg to stand on, if only judging from the conduct of Muslims towards the Jews in the Middle East and across the world, which had forced the one million Jewish minority out of the lands of Islam and from “peace” in the last half century. As the Intifadah completed its first week of violence by further escalation, so did the anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli demonstrations by Muslims in Europe. In the center of Lille in northern France, walls were full of graffiti celebrating the equation of the Nazi swastika with the Star of David. On October 2, a number of grave attacks were registered: in the Paris 19th Arrondissement Synagogue, a Molotov cocktail was projected, followed by telephonic threats during the prayer services of the next day. That same day, a fatwa was proclaimed in Britain by a Muslim cleric who called for Jihad against Israel and Israeli interests. The blind Sheikh abdul-Rahman, who had masterminded the first attempt against the Twin Towers in New York in 1993 and was incarcerated ever since, was cited by his disciples as having issued a call for Jihad against Jews wherever they could be found. The same night, three Molotov cocktails were launched against the synagogue and Jewish community center in Dusseldorf, Germany, while a phone call to the base of fire fighters in Nice, France, warned of a ticking bomb, which was supposedly placed at a local synagogue. Such warnings and alarms, some false some real, were listed on the same night, in Malmo, Sweden; in Brussels, Belgium; and in Schwerin, East Germany, where a couple of elderly Jews were attacked and the wife seriously injured. That same night, the Jewish cemetery in Schwaebisch Halle, Germany, was seriously desecrated while Nazi swastikas were painted on the memorial wall of the Buchenwald concentration camp

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near Munich and on the memorial wall of the ancient synagogue in Halle, also in Germany. No sign of respite appeared in the coming days. On October 3, in the Paris suburb of Villepinte, three Molotov cocktails almost totally burned a synagogue. In Campinas, a suburb of Sao Paolo in Brazil, rioters threatened to kill a policeman who stood on guard near a synagogue. In Thessaloniki, Greece, one of the most Jewish cities of the Balkans in history, be it under the Ottomans or in modern Greece, an immense hostile demonstration was held in front of the dying Jewish Community Center. In Florence and Venice, threats were made on the phone against Jews and Israel. Again in Malmo, Sweden, where a large and growing Arab population has taken root, the Jewish cemetery was desecrated on the night between October 3 and 4. The next day, a large demonstration of the Italian fascist Forza Nuova, unfolded in the center of Rome; the Jewish cemetery of Potsdam, Germany was vandalized and Jewish symbols trampled upon and destroyed; and the leaders of the German Jewish community received booby-trapped letters and threats of death, while a Jewish school in Paris was also showered with anti-Semitic insults and death menaces. Radio 786, a Muslim radio station of the Cape area in South Africa, launched a broadside against Israel and urged Muslims to “liberate Jerusalem from the Zionists,” an echo of a similar call made by Yasser Arafat after the Oslo Accords to the Muslims of Johannesburg on the occasion of his visit for the inauguration of President Nelson Mandela. No wonder that in that atmosphere of hatred that extended from Johannesburg to the Cape, the Durban conference convened by the UN in 2001 to combat racism and anti-Semitism, turned into an anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish festival of hatred and racism, which compelled the U.S. and Israel to abandon the conference. On October 5, which closed the first week of the Intifadah, a Jewish boy was assaulted by Arab youth near the Jewish school of Or-Yossef again, and the next night the glass of the Jewish synagogue of Kreutzberg in Berlin was shattered, followed by the vandalizing of the synagogues Bar-Yohai and Or-Aviv in Marseille, where graffiti were left on the walls calling for “Death to the Jews,” and blaming the Jews at the same time as “murderers.” In those same days similar attacks were launched against Jewish synagogues in Toronto and London, Ontario, and also Montreal in Quebec, Canada. Lest the reader gets fatigued by the repetitiveness of the same message, and bored by the uniformity of the vandalism against Jewish targets, a few explanations are due, before we pursue the description of these

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horrors mainly (but not only) by Muslims in western democracies at the opening of the twenty-first Century and third Millennium. First, one must remember once again that evil is made possible when, according to the old adage, people of goodwill remain silent. The political correctness in the Western democracies, which did not permit a clear voice to rise against violence and injustices committed by Muslims against Jews, would be one of the main reasons why those same Muslims would turn against their host societies in general and generate the horrors of Madrid, London with unfortunately more to come. Secondly, it is the general atmosphere of anti-Semitism, under the guise of anti-Zionism and anti-Israelism, which is cultivated by the media, by some interested politicians and by blind intellectual circles, which are either bribed by Muslims or scared of them, which numbs free thinking and good-willed people and prevents them from acting in good time to stand up against this vicious anti-Semitism. Thirdly, multitudes of Muslims in the West are accustomed to watch the Arab and Muslim universal networks, like al-Jazeera, al-Arabiya, or al-Manar, who usually do not differentiate between fact and propaganda and feed those masses, which depend on them for information with one-sided and unchecked stories which recount and amplify the horror stories allegedly perpetrated by Israel, while the Palestinians remain for ever the innocent and saintly victims. Those networks also carry series in the peak-viewing evenings of Ramadan when all Muslim families are glued to the television after they break the fast, on some horrible themes as the Blood libel or the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, whose teaching is invariably demonization of the Jews and condemnation of their Jewish state. Having no other source of information, they rely on the skewed and unbalanced news reports and “documentaries” they absorb day in day out in their living rooms, then go to the streets to pour their rage on Jews they encounter. The thugs who repeat these anti-Semitic acts of barbarism do not get tired for they are driven by evil. Only the people of good will who keep silent get tired, because they do not wish to be bothered by their conscience into action. They become aware of the down-spiraling of the situation, and that is called consciousness, but their conscience wishes they did not. So, events continued to unfold relentless and unabated: the second week of the Intifadah was as violent. On October 6, the students exiting from their Jewish School Tenoudji at St. Ouen north of Paris, were pelted with rocks. Across the Atlantic, the Jewish journal of Sao Paolo received calls of insults and an explicit document threatening to

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blow up the buildings of the Jewish Federation, the Israeli Consulate in town, and the Israeli Embassy in Brasilia. The threats were signed by Osama Bin Laden and Hizbullah. The Jewish institutions in the city received an entire stream of insulting emails comparing Jews to Hitler and menacing to blow up the Jewish museum in Rio de Janeiro. In Panama, the Arab community issued a communiqué condemning Israel and Jews for their part in the Palestinian riots, bluntly announcing that Jews are the “murderers of all those who oppose their takeover of the world.” A Latin American Internet site, Ciudad de Libre Opinion (the city of free opinion), posted a call to “expel the genocidal Zionists and support the Palestinian cause.” Since October 7 that site was garnered by a picture of a young Palestinian waving a red flag with a swastika at its center and a caption stating that “the forces of occupation have murdered 47 Palestinians and killed 12 children,” citing the spiritual head of Iran who summoned Muslims to a Jihad against Israel. On October 7, the frenzy continued, in all its harrowing detail. Only detail depicts the picture in all its cruelty and forces it to transcend mere statistics of body counts and terrorized humans. Jihad against Israel was the prevalent call during a large demonstration in Geneva opposite the UN Headquarters. Another bomb was launched at the Aubervilliers synagogue once again, and Arabs threatened the rabbi that they would blow up the building on the approaching Yom Kippur. Molotov cocktails were hurled at a Jewish restaurant in the 19th Arrondissement of Paris and shattered its windows. Later that day, other Arabs tried to force their way into other Jewish restaurants, hurling all the while threats and insults. In a neighborhood of Lyon, the Synagogue of La Duchere was attacked and the worshippers had to be evacuated in police cars. All that in the country of individual liberty and religious freedom. Other threats abounded, announcing the burning down of other synagogues on Yom Kippur. On the same day, the windows of the Reform Temple of Edgeware in London were broken, and at the Borehamwood and Elstree synagogue, the Holy Ark containing the Torah scrolls was smashed and some of the holy texts consumed by fire. On the same night, Molotov cocktails were launched at the windows of the Upper Berkeley Street, and the Seymour Place synagogues in London. A coordinated pogrom on this scale and of such intensity had never been seen before after the horrors of World War Two. In the following days dozens of Jewish sites were similarly targeted: stone throwing, arsons, insults, and attacks. In Marseille on October 7 and

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8, in Lyon on October 8, in Leicester also on October 8, in Birmingham on October 8, in London and the Bronx in New York and purposely in profanation of the day, on the eve of Yom Kippur, where three young Muslims were arrested. In Ottawa, slogans appeared declaring “glory to Islam,” in Montreal demonstrators shouted “death to the Jews,” with five similar assaults occurring in Toronto and its suburbs during the first week of October. On the Day of Kippur, its holy significance made no impression on the thugs. It was October 9, and the synagogue in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania was set afire. Ironically, it is named Ohev Shalom (Lover of Peace). On the same holy day, the synagogue at Clichy-sous-bois in the Paris outskirts was also set aflame and the worshippers sent home and deprived of their holy day prayer. The same applied to five other cases in Paris, one in Lyon and one in Strasbourg. At Aix-en-Provence too an attempt was made to burn the synagogue, and Nazi fliers invoking Hitler were left behind. In remote Tashkent in Central Asia a synagogue was reduced to ashes, together with its Scrolls of the Torah. In two cities of Muslim Daghestan, which is part of the Russian Federation in the same region, Jews were warned to leave their house of prayer lest they are blown up in them. All this happened during the Jewish High Holiday in countries which like to call themselves “civilized” and boast of exemplary judicial systems, and where grandiose constitutions guarantee freedom for all and the liberty of worship to all; all, except the Jews, like in the dark Middle Ages. Further onslaughts targeted Jewish sites in London, Toronto, and Montreal, in the latter Arabs attacking Jewish children on their way to school and vandalizing the Jewish cemetery. Between October 10 and 11, another eight attacks of this sort were registered in Toronto and Montreal, Canada, and in Bradford and Leeds, England. The Jewish community in the Bronx was also targeted as well as the Riverdale Synagogue which was set afire on the 12th. On the same day, more attacks and threats were reported in Toulouse, Geneva, Montpellier, Moscow, Cardiff, Newcastle, and London, and some locations in Norway. In the following three days (October 13-15), more than thirty attacks were reported in Moscow, Geneva, Strasbourg, Meknes (morocco), Durban, Venezuela, Brasil, Rome, Minneapolis, Chicago, London, Manchester, Sydney, Lyon, Paris, Brussels, Milwaukee (Wisconsin), Sanford (Minnesota), Toronto, Leeds, and western Britain. They were followed by acts of vandalism in Sao Paulo, London, Toulon (France) again Sydney, and Toulouse. On October 16, eleven violent eruptions shook the Jew-

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ish communities of Manchester, Birmingham, Toronto, Washington, DC (where insults were hurled at Jews during a Lewis Farrakhan assembly), but also in Quebec, Morocco, and London once again. In some cases, the Jews were compared to the Nazis and calls were heard to Jihad against them. Some of those menaces were signed by Hizbullah and Hamas and called to kill the Jews, addressing specifically Israelis in London. At the end of October, other arsons, insults, attacks, and desecrations took place in Edmonton (Canada), Miami, Hannover (Germany), London, Buenos Aires, and localities in Brasil, France, Germany, New Zealand, The Hague, Sao Paolo and Sydney, Toronto, Melbourne, Catalonia (Spain), Ottawa, Montreal, and in Queensland (Australia). In October, the level of anti-Semitic activity in Canada approached that of France, with Britain, the U.S., and Germany closely following. Thus, among the G-8, supposedly the most “advanced” nations of the world, only Japan, which has no Jewish community and Italy, where the Jewish community has always been curiously small (tens of thousands instead of the hundreds of thousands in the other big European nations and millions in the U.S.), remained outside this shameful circle. Only in part of these many cases the assailants were identified as Arabs or Palestinians, in other cases the attacks were apparently committed by other Muslims in combination with local racists, anti-Semites, and Neo-Nazis or criminal elements. Some of the attacks were directed at the Israeli legations in the large cities or against individual Jews in the public square. In some mass demonstrations, “death to the Jews” was the slogan, or Jewish passers-by were spat at and the Israeli flags were ceremonially burned, often accompanied by effigies of Israeli (and American) leaders. In Canada alone, 25 cases of this sort were reported for the month of October, and hundreds across the world. October 2000 was the worst month of this outburst, when scribbling hate-slogans graffiti on the walls of synagogues reached its climax. Apart from the open acts of vandalism and personal attacks on Jews, insults were hurled at Jews from passing cars, or via telephone calls, false bomb-scares, and raw anti-Semitic propaganda which also targeted Israel, Zionism, and Jews, often calling upon the public to murder Jews. Of all the 180 occurrences of October 2000, 61 were reported in France, 29 in Canada, 22 in the USA and 20 in Britain, precisely where the old and well established Jewish communities have been outnumbered (except for the USA) by the new Muslim immigrants, notably Arabs, who have imported with them into their lands of refuge their ancient anti-Semitic sentiment and their cur-

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rent anti-Israel bias. Five of these incidents involved fire arms or knives, and in two cases Jews were wounded, not to speak of the great material damage caused to the vandalized synagogues and cemeteries. Thirty-one cases of physical attacks on Jews were registered, 6 of which necessitated medical help, and in 37 cases Molotov cocktails were pelted with the intention to hurt or cause damage, most of them in France (25). Of the 22 cases of arson, 9 happened in France. In two cases of bomb explosions, which destroyed two synagogues, one took place in Paris, the other in Syracuse, New York.Sixty-five cases of throwing rocks were counted, most of which were in France and Britain, and 17 acts of desecration of synagogues, monuments, and tabernacles during the holidays. One hears the old argument advanced during the darkest days of antiSemitic horrors in Europe, that the victims thereof are to blame, for it is inconceivable that all Europeans are wrong and only the Jews are right. In the Middle Ages the Inquisition and the Church in general used these arguments to both justify their persecution of the Jews and stress their own righteousness in doing so. The Nazis developed the race theories where the superior Aryans were duty-bound to enslave and exterminate the inferior “vermin” of the Jews and others. Now, in the most established western democracies, where these rules no longer hold water, Jews are only obliquely accused in view of their putative association with Zionism, the national movement of liberation of the Jews, and with Israel, their state. But as seen above, in the attacks against Jews, who often have nothing to do with Zionism or Israel, they are directly assailed and submitted to humiliation and violence for being Jews who go to the synagogue to pray or send their children to Jewish schools, or wear Jewish symbols, or respect Jewish holidays, or simply dare to be or to identify themselves with Jewry. In any case, in November 2000 it is the thugs who got tired after a month of full-steam anti-Semitic activity, resulting in a dramatic drop in the statistics of incidents. These acts of violence which were banalized by their repetition and routinization, no longer attracted the attention of the media, especially that in some places the authorities have finally taken some firm, if belated, steps to secure the order and help preserve the safety of Jewish sites throughout Europe. But security measures were undertaken by the Jewish communities themselves, who hired guards or mobilized their own young people to maintain a stricter than usual screening process for the visitors of Jewish sites. Never were mosques or churches in Europe in need of such security arrangements, but synagogues are. One wonders why.

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The anti-Semitic attacks did not totally die out nevertheless. In Australia, notably Sydney, five such onslaughts were reported in November against Jewish individuals or targets, while in France, Canada, and Britain, where the October violence focused, a respite was noted. Conversely, new eruptions of violence against Jews were reported in Hungary, Macedonia, Bosnia, and South Africa. But gross anti-Semitic propaganda was still in evidence in France, Australia, Belarus, Russia, Estonia, Romania, and Mexico. In Australia, 13 cases of hate propaganda, threats, and desecrations of Jewish sites were cited. However, valiant efforts must be pointed out that were made by the French, the Finns, the Germans, and the Austrians to uproot this phenomenon by way of public apologies for infractions of the law and for the harm done to Jews in the past and at present, of mass demonstrations protesting the rise of violence against Jews, and of public sympathy shown by the authorities to Jewish communities who suffered such attacks. In December, two months after the outbreak of the Intifadah, anti-Semitic outbursts were not yet totally pulverized. Arabs and other anti-Semites attacked Jewish sites in Romania and France, Germany, Spain, Belarus, the U.S. (3 cases), and Britain (5 cases). But now Russia became a new focal point, where 6 cases were documented of hostile political gatherings, remarks, and commentaries in the media, mass demonstrations, and circulated tracts. By comparison, only one case was noted in Canada, 2 in Australia, three in the U.S., 4 in Britain, 1 in France, and 1 in South Africa. But this time the authorities moved quickly and firmly and offered public apologies in Russia, in the Czech Republic, in Lithuania, Germany, Lichtenstein, the U.S., Britain, New Zealand, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Japan, Norway, Italy, and Australia. Unknown since Kristallnacht in 1938 and the Sho’a, these frequent, and ubiquitous anti-Jewish riots, which recurred in democratic countries such as Britain and France, no longer bore similarity to the classic pogroms of Eastern Europe which had triggered the massive exodus of Jews to the new Continent at the turn of the twentieth century. This time, there has been a state of Israel to take up their case to the world and to offer shelter to the destitute. Hence the diminished trauma compared to past pogroms, but in terms of the rot, which has been eroding the moral fiber of those civilized societies, apparently not much has changed, for the anti-Semitic discourse has become current and accepted in the highest strata of British society long after Jews received equal rights and the ladder of social success was made accessible to them. In Germany, the

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Sho’a happened long after the Jews were emancipated and integrated to the point that they considered themselves Germans of the Mosaic faith. But in all appearances, the current waves of anti-Semitic eruptions in the Western world owe a great part of their impetus, as we shall see, to the presence and militant activity of the Muslim communities which have come to influence, in some places to dominate, the public debate on many social and political issues. That explains, at least partly, why great democracies like France or Britain, and for that matter Canada and Australia, which have been committed to human rights and to public peace and order, found themselves paralyzed at the outset of this antiSemitic wave, knowing that in part at least, this has been generated by Muslim immigrants, who are sensitive to government remonstrations, and therefore no firm step was taken against them at the outset. They would have moved much swifter had mosques or churches been vandalized on the same scale and with the same frequency as synagogues. To summarize what seems to be an anachronistic state of affairs, where pogrom-style onslaughts against the Jews recur in western democracies, including in the most civilized of them, maybe the following remarks are called for: 1.

2.

3.

Although manifestations of anti-Semitism were quite current in the Western world prior to the Intifadah, the intensity of the current wave, which was triggered by the Palestinian uprising and its rapid spread remind us of the existence of an infrastructure of hatred towards Jews which has always been there and was not erased by the Dreyfus Affair or the horrors of the War and the Holocaust. The only innovation was the use, manipulation, and spin that the Muslim rioters gave to that infrastructure for their own purposes. The scale and intensity of violence against Jewish targets could not have developed independently, because no Western country, even not Russia or the Ukraine, would have dared to revive the discredited style of open anti-Semitism in this post-War era where awareness of the Holocaust has been mounting. However, leaning on the Muslim communities in the West, and in anti-Israel and anti-Zionism disguise, it exploits the anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian sentiment in the Western democracies to turn against the Jews without incurring the remonstration of the authorities. Once de-facto legitimacy is accorded to these abuses in Western Europe, the anti-Semites of North America, South America, Australia, and Eastern Europe are only happy to jump on the bandwagon and join the “party” without incurring any backlash for something they did not start.

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5.

6.

7.

8.

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The most affected countries by these eruptions of anti-Semitism are those where the local inveterate anti-Semites encounter the groups of Muslim and Arab immigrants who import their anti-Semitism in their wake. France, Britain, and Germany (but also Benelux and Spain) are indeed the countries of Europe where this encounter of Arabs, Pakistanis, and Turks with veteran European anti-Semites takes place the most intensely. In the long run, similar demographic developments will drag into this circle more countries like Canada, Australia, and the U.S., and the Nordic countries of Europe, which give shelter to Muslim political refugees like Iranians, Iraqis, Somalis, Afghanis and Kurds, to cite only a few examples. This means that as these refugees settle down and begin manifesting their political grievances, they will probably also raise their political concerns imported from their countries of origin, namely anti-Israeli and pro-Islamic positions which are bound to increase anti-Semitism. The result will be that as the Muslim communities grow larger in numbers and political impact; the role of the older but considerably smaller, Jewish communities will shrink, and their ability to withstand and resist the anti-Semitic wave will be correspondingly diminished. As a consequence, the intimidation and violence against the Jews will reduce their numbers through emigration from the Islamizing societies of Europe, and the remaining Jews will feel isolated and shunned by their compatriots. The attacks against Israel that were launched during the Intifadah were calculated to make life intolerable in Israel and drive Israelis to despair, in the hope of making them abandon the freedom and prosperity that they have achieved at a price. In the same fashion, Arab and Muslim opinion in the world, which regards Diaspora Jewry as the mainstay of support for Israel, has sought confrontation with the Jewish communities in the West, attacking their cultural and religious centers in order to render their life impossible and force them to depart. In effect, in Sydney, Paris, London, the Cape, Ukraine, and Panama, all those hundreds of acts of aggression, attacks, arson, vandalism, anti-Semitic slogans, Internet sites, and tracts, while calling upon Muslims to launch Jihad against Israel and the Jews in order to liberate Jerusalem from Zionist hands, constitute the two sides of the same project. They target the cities of Israel as well as the Jewish neighborhoods in Western cities. Globalization of information has generated universalization of Arab and Muslim links and solidarity. In each Muslim country the local media raise the consciousness of their publics to the Palestinians’ problems, which become theirs and relevant to their purview, thus paradoxically escaping the usual restrictions of censorship imposed by the rulers. Consequently, Muslim public opinion is taken hostage by groups of Muslim radicals who operate in the name of Islam, and transmit instantly their interpretations of world affairs and their modes of action to

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tackle them. Those messages include demonization of Jews insofar as they pose a mortal danger to Islam as a whole, followed by fundraisers and incitement to violence, thus generating worldwide demonstrations of Muslims, and instructing their coreligionists across the globe where and how to demonstrate, how to join terrorist cells, or how to concoct explosives and other lethal tools of combat. What happens on the terrain in Nablus and Gaza is immediately relayed by satellite dishes and cable TV to the streets of Melbourne, London, Kuala Lumpur, and Sao Paolo, not to mention the Arab streets of Rabat or Baghdad, or the Muslim streets of Jakarta and Teheran. The feeble reaction of Western authorities to the anti-Semitic outbursts in their countries, creates the impression in Muslim radical milieus that for fear of contradicting their large Muslim populations and raising their anger, governments would not dare to act firmly to enforce the law, as it is indeed very often the case. For in many instances due to economic interests with the lands of Islam, European governments look the other way after each explosion of hostility and violence against their Jewish communities, something which has seriously shaken the self-confidence of those Jewish minorities who had thought that their safe existence was secure in post-War Europe. It is otherwise hard to explain how those dozens of repetitive aggressions against Jews go unpunished or acted upon, in spite of the commitment of the western democracies to human rights and to legal procedures to maintain peace. One remembers that when in the 1980s daily acts of terror happened against the general citizenry in Paris, public indignation forced the authorities to take draconian measures of security. Their low profile now, in the face of these successive waves of anti-Semitism, raises eyebrows and concern about the future of democratic values in Western Europe. The end result is that the Jewish communities of Europe, which have always boasted of their guaranteed individual and communal safety, are now fearing for their lives, and afraid for the future of their children whom they send to study abroad or encourage to immigrate to Israel. The very presence of police in Jewish “dangerous” areas is sufficient to point to the malaise. In consequence, Jews move out of risky neighborhoods, hide Jewish symbols like the Kippa head cover, or the mezuzah at their doorstep, or the Star of David which they tuck under the clothes, or seek asylum in other lands.

Jewish communities in the West know that the infrastructure of antiSemitism has been solidly rooted in European soil and is only likely to expand due to the supplement of the transplanted Muslim anti-Semitism into the West. This prediction rests on the fact that close links have been forged in recent years between Muslim radicals in Europe and local anti-Semites on the Right and the Left, and on recent experience whereby these anti-Semitic alliances are accumulating expertise in their

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activities on the one hand, while the authorities are turning a blind eye on the other. This is bound to encourage more anti-Semitic rampage in years to come. In view of the less than promising prospects of resolving the Arab-Israeli dispute in the foreseeable future, Jewish communities in Europe will face very difficult choices. Note 1.

Much of the data cited below are based on the reports of the Jewish Agency and the Israeli government, as summarized in Raphael Israeli, “Le Conflit du Moyen Orient s’exporte vers les democraties occidentales,” Observatoire du Monde Juif, November, 2001, pp. 10-17.

4 Major Themes of Muslim Anti-Semitism in the West There is no denying that anti-Semitism has not only proven its vitality and affected a spectacular comeback after the Holocaust, but that it has also become the wave of the future inasmuch as youth are waving its banners in the open, and talk about it is no longer discredited and the European Union has been ambivalent about the need to battle against it at the risk of alienating its Leftist, Rightist, and Muslim populations. Muslim youth, who arrived in Europe with a heritage of anti-Semitic sentiment, are in their element when they discharge their rage on the adjoining Jewish communities in conjunction with, or independently of, the native anti-Semites. So, when Muslims in Europe act against Jews, they do not seem as totally alien to their environment nor are they dissuaded by the general mood to desist from those acts which are mentioned and discussed as a basic social datum that one has to live with. Popular and respected Rabbi Sacks of the U.K. put it in simple and straightforward words: Let me state the point as simply as I can: Anti-Semitism is alive, active and virulent in the year 2002, after more than half a century of Holocaust education, interfaith dialogue, UN declarations, dozens of museums and memorials, hundreds of films, thousands of courses, and tens of thousands of books dedicated to exposing its evils; after the Stockholm Conference, after the creation of a National Holocaust Memorial Day, after 2000 religious leaders came together in the UN in August 2000 to commit themselves to fight hatred and engender mutual respect…. What more could have been done and can we do to fight anti-Semitism?1

It goes without saying that a major source of anti-Semitism among Muslims of the world, notably those dwelling in Europe, has been the Palestinian Authority, not only due to its perennial, direct, and immediate engagement with the Israelis, but principally because the Palestinian cause around which all Arabs and many Muslims rally, has become the standard-setting source from which the Israeli and Jewish evil-doing is 77

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widely cited as the first-hand and most authoritative reference. This is so because since its inception in 1994, as it moved into the West Bank and Gaza by agreement with Israel, the PA has set onto a course of delegitimizing its partner to the Oslo agreement, thereby proving to the mindless and naïve Israelis who had signed it that they had in fact signed their own death-writ by inviting into the Territories the very Trojan horse, which was to destroy them from within. For, as Marcus and Crook have aptly demonstrated,2 one of the primary objectives of the PA was to delegitimize Israel in order to facilitate its subversion, then destruction and takeover. This Palestinian strategy, which has been pursued by the mainstream leadership under Arafat and then Abu Mazen, is implemented through the various channels of the Authority-controlled media, school textbooks, sermons in the mosques, political speeches where incitement takes central place and various “cultural” activities which smack of blunt indoctrination more than of bequeathed civilizational values. That indoctrination encompasses denial of the right to existence of the Jewish state, many libels and hate messages and accusations that Israel intentionally “massacres” Palestinians through shooting, and even Nazi-style “oven burning.” These libels are so massive, pervasive, and repetitive that there is no point in refuting or arguing against them systematically.3 To achieve these goals, through virulent anti-Semitic campaigns, the PA has mobilized its academic community, which more often than not regards itself committed to the service of their emerging state rather than to academic inquiry and truth. For example, textbooks in the PA can cite a non-existent “Talmudic passage,” without caring the least about intellectual honesty or about the credibility of their future scholars, which they educate to lie. Examples abound. For one, the history of the Middle East has been totally revised and re-written, with a view to erasing all records of Jewish presence in Palestine, archeological sites and authoritative histories notwithstanding. The Authority probably believes that by delegitimizing Israel in academic trappings, it can achieve a “respectable” and irrefutable denial of the historical link between Jews and Palestine. So, they first create the infra-structure of “evil Jews,” who are bent on “treacherous conduct,” followed by forgeries and fictional inventions to “prove” that Judaism is “racism.” These traits are presented as the unchangeable character of the Jews by the mobilized academics for the “educational” programs of the Palestinian Authority, both in textbooks and in the media. In 1998, PA “historians” held a conference where historical revisionism

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was devised, not as an individual endeavor by historians who were inspired by their learning or the archival sources they discovered, but by the policy directives of the PA. Dr. Yussuf Alzamili, Head of the History Deparment at the Khan Yunis Government Educational College, presented the approach of the developing PA educational system, whose goal would not be to teach the historical truth but rather to convey a political history aimed at denying Israel’s right to exist in the Land of Israel/Palestine. He called on all universities and colleges to be active in writing the history of Palestine and not to enable the “defiled and the enemies to distort it … or to enable legitimacy for the existence of Jews on this land.”4 Little wonder then why this sort of scholarship has never permitted Palestinian universities to count among the top ones. Moreover, after all the accords and the agreements between Israel and the “moderate” Palestinians, they still resist any recognition of a Jewish state or any standing for the Jewish people on Temple Mount, or indeed any link between historical Jews and Palestine.5 When it became too much for even manufacturers of history to strip the Jews completely from their history, due to the compelling evidence that has been engraved on the ground for millennia, Palestinian academics simply adopted the strategy of borrowing the identity of the ancient Hebrews as their own, claiming that those ancient tribes were both Arab and Muslim (more than two millennia before there was Islam), thus denying today’s Jewish identity. One of those “historians” who was hand-picked by Arafat as his adviser and chief librarian, Jirar al-Qidwa, has been the main champion of this “replacement theology,” which he assiduously diffuses via the PA TV broadcasts. He unabashedly converted biblical Jews into Arabs, two millennia before Arabs invaded Palestine after the onset of Islam. He wrote: Regarding the Israelites, they were Arab tribes and among the purest…. And believe me, by Allah’s name, that my blood has more of the Israelites’ blood and the blood of ancient Hebrews than has the blood of Netanyahu and Sharon.6

To strengthen this point, the Jerusalem daily, al Quds, carried for weeks on end in July and August 1996 a daily page of chronicles of the history of the “Palestinian-Cana’anite people.” In these chronicles, academics of the West Bank universities explained how Israeli archaeological finds bolster the claims of the Palestinian-Cana’anites to age-old rootedness in the land. All this led to the celebration of the summer festival of Sebastya, staged by the Palestinian Ministry of Culture, in August 1996, where Arab youths dressed in robes bearing ancient Cana’anite figures

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brandished torches as they danced about the town square packed with PLO and PA administration officials. Others arrived atop horse-drawn chariots modeled on drawings found at the Israeli archaeological excavations at Meggido. On the same stage in the middle of the square, a dramatic passion was acted out with the Ba’al, God of the Heavens and Fertility in the Pantheon of the ancient Cana’anites struggling against Mut, God of the Underworld. Ultimately, Ba’al emerged victorious and the narrator took the opportunity to heap praise on the loyal PalestinianCana’anite nations: the Emorites, Girgasites, Jebusites, and Perizites, which had fought the Hebrew invaders across the Jordan.7 How was it possible for the Palestinians to claim that they are the ancient Hebrews and then call them “invaders” who had to be fought by the Cana’anites who were also Palestinian? Historical precision did not seem to be their concern. In addition, it seems rather odd that the numerous references to the Qur’an about Allah’s Covenant with the Jews and His promise that they would inherit the Land of Cana’an, should be completely ignored in this revisionist history. Even odder is the modern use of Ba’al, a pagan God, in a society where Islam is a serious contender for Palestinian nationalism.8 Delegitimation of the Jews and their link to Israel also found expression on the Islamic level, though this is not a specifically anti-Jewish step, which Islam customarily takes with regard to the other revealed religions. Though Islam came to the world two millennia after Judaism and more than half a millennium after Christianity, it claims a fresh renewal of the ancient divine notions, which had been deposited with the Jews and the Christians and then betrayed by their believers until Allah sent Muhammed to humanity to revive that message, in one stroke turning its other two monotheistic predecessors into distortion of the faith. In so doing, Islam accuses its predecessors with forgery and distortion when it presents the biblical figures of the Patriarchs and others, including Moses and Jesus, as Muslim “Prophets.” So, Jirar al-Qidwa, the mercenary-scholar of the PA, stated: Judaism is not a religion in the full sense of the word, and is not a nation at all…. Where does this religion come from? The source of Judaism is Mosaic Law … which is the continuation of Islam of our Master Abraham…. Several researchers [who are they?] have found in the Bible, when translated correctly [namely by Muslims] texts that prove that it is the continuation of Islam.9

This systematic stripping of the Jews from their heritage, which also goes hand in hand with denying their link to the Holy Land, Jerusalem, and Temple Mount, posits the Israelis, the Jews, and the Zionists as

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“liars” and “usurpers” of a right they do not possess. Thus, the Jews, by dispossessing the Palestinians from their rights, in fact created sympathy for them across the world in general and among Muslim communities in particular. These scholar-mercenaries seem to truly believe that by accusing Jews as usurpers they would have ipso facto amended the facts of history of the past and the books of history that they busy themselves to indoctrinate their children with, regardless of the cost to their intellectual honesty.10 And this was not done by an obscure and negligible margin of the Palestinians, but by their “moderate” leadership whom some mindless Israeli leaders brought to the country from exile and handed to them the delicate and responsible task of teaching children and educating them, watching them instead distort young and innocent minds and cultivate hatred in their hearts so as to perpetuate the conflict, not to heal it. The fact that successive Israeli governments had let that happen was taken by other Muslims as confirmation of that “truth” and has facilitated the further dissemination of those misguided, mischievous, vicious, and poisonous ideas to the Muslims of Europe. Native anti-Semites in Europe who associated with Muslims, found it only too expedient and too easy to add those rationalizations of their own hatred to Jews to their long list of grievances against the Zionists and the Israelis, which assuredly help them to demonize the Jews and delegitimize their state. Demonization of the Jews, which is transmitted by Palestinian media, at the same time that they declare their readiness to negotiate peace with Israel, reaches all parts of the Muslim world, including the Muslim immigrants in Europe and not only provides the ideological and propaganda underpinnings of their arguments, condemnations, accusations, and other attacks against Jews, Zionism, and Israel, but often lends to them a divine sanction, which would appeal to any Muslim anywhere. For example, Dr. Muhammed Mustafa Najem, a lecturer in Qur’anic interpretation at Gaza’s al-Azhar university, taught in a televised PA sermon that Allah has described the Jews as “characterized by conceit, pride, arrogance, savagery, disloyalty, treachery, deceit and cunning.”11 Some time later, the same “academic” appeared on the official PA TV station, saying: “The Jews are Jews, and we are forbidden to forget their character traits even for a moment, even for a blink of an eye.”12 Nothing extraordinary, or innovative, or original in these anti-Semitic statements. But the fact that they are cited by a cleric, and an “academic” to boot, from holy scriptures, before huge audiences live, and then repeatedly broadcast by the media and reproduced en masse, for public consumption, and

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for immediate exportation to other Muslim communities, lends them an authoritative and immutable nature whose impact is deep and wide. Another “academic,” a psychologist this time, teaches what in all civilized societies would be considered hateful, racist, and poisonous: “From the moment the Jewish child is born, he nurses hatred against others, nurses seclusion, nurses superiority….”13 Any reader or listener or watcher of this verbiage realizes the scope of racist hatred of the Jews it is trying to propagate even as it is accusing its Jewish objects of racism. Or take Muslim anti-Semites’ fascination with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the flagship hoax of European anti-Semitism since the turn of the twentieth century. It made its way from Czarist Russia to Western Europe, to the Americas and the Muslim world, and now, after having somewhat faded in Europe and been discredited in the West in general after it was brought up in courts and dismissed as a hoax, it is coming back in the wake of Muslim immigrants who get daily confirmation of its “veracity” from the Palestinians. The PA, as part of its delineation of “Jewish evil,” presents the fictitious libels of the Protocols as authentic documents, viewed as the “Jewish plan for world domination.” Dr. Riad al-Astal, a lecturer in history at the Gaza al-Azhar University, brought up the Protocols when discussing the rise of political Zionism in Europe. He asserted that: What is known as the Zionist Renaissance grew and the seeds of what is called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion appeared at the end of the 18th Century [sic]. They are the protocols that were presented in Basel [at the first Zionist Congress in 1897].14

This worship of nonsense was backed in writing by “a chapter about a research paper titled The Jewish Danger: the Protocols of the Elders of Zion” published in the official organ of the PA.15 Furthermore, a new textbook authored by Palestinian “scholars,” undertook without compunction to poison the minds of innocent children with those spurious Protocols, insisting on their “authenticity” by describing them as “a group of confidential resolutions adopted by the [First Zionist] Congress and known by the name The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the goal of which was world domination.16 The intention to use their “first hand expertise” of things Zionist, Jewish, and Israeli to inject that cheap propaganda into the minds of kids, which could only increase hatred and perpetuate the conflict, was thwarted in this instance, when a worldwide protest caused this passage to be excised from an amended edition. The thermometer was thus broken, but the fever was not healed. Sheikh Atiyeh Sahar, Head of the Department of Islamic Research at the Gaza al-Azhar University,

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then still under PA control, added from his fertile imagination to the discussion of this topic on official PA TV: It must be known that this nation [the Jews] are willing to alter their religion in order to attain their demands … in order to achieve their goals, they are willing to turn away from their God and his uniqueness which was introduced to the world by their Prophets. We also know that they changed the Bible and replaced it, because it does not serve their purposes, and they drafted the Talmud, as it is known, and came up, finally with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.17

In view of the sustained anti-Jewish campaign of mud-splashing by the Palestinians around the world, some of the dirt sticks, then it is recycled and augmented and independently thrown once again at European Jewry. There we hear that the outbursts of anti-Semitism are in fact reactions of the nations that protect themselves from the threat posed by the Jews, or take revenge for the damage done to them. Psychologist Khader Abas expounded on this point on PA TV: The Israelis [Jews are meant here] brought it on themselves … the disasters and massacres in every society where they lived. First, they concentrated money in their hands, denying it to others. Second, they spied against the nations where they lived. And the third important and basic aspect: they were condescending…. Thus, the people of the societies they were in took revenge against them, or tried to punish them.18

To avoid the libel of anti-Semitism, the PA, in its media and textbooks, like in other Arab and Muslim entities, charge the Jews of the responsibility for the anti-Jewish sentiment that they cultivate around themselves, just like the Nazis who blamed the Jews for their misfortunes. Here is what the organ of the New Life had to say: Corruption is the nature of the Jews all over the world, to the point where only rarely do you find corruption that Jews are not behind…. If we take a look at history, we discover to what degree the Jews were exposed to loss and expulsion all over the world as a result of their ugly deeds and their wickedness. This is after their actions were discovered and their responsibility for the destruction of the land and its people caused the [local] people to launch a war of annihilation against them.19

Palestinian academics, in the service of their political leaders, have not only distinguished themselves in harsh anti-Semitic language, but also promoted the use of violence against Jews, a pattern that we see systematically cited and emulated by the Muslim diasporas in the West. When an academic like Dr. Abu Halabiyah, Rector of Advanced Studies at the Islamic University in the PA, prescribes the killing of Jews as a panacea to his society’s ills, we are past the stage of propaganda into the real battlefield:

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Muslim Anti-Semitism in Christian Europe The Jews are the Jews…. They do not have any moderates or any advocates of peace. They are all liars. They must be butchered and must be killed…. The Jews are like a spring—as long as you step on it with your foot it doesn’t move. But if you lift your foot from the spring, it hurts you and punishes you…. It is forbidden to have mercy in your hearts for the Jews in any place and in any land. Make war on them any place you find yourself. Any place that you meet them, kill them…20

While anti-Semitism in Europe may or may not necessarily correspond to developments in the Middle East as some claim and others deny,21 it will be the contention of this volume that Muslim anti-Semitism in Europe today, though it is deeply rooted in the imported Muslim anti-Semitism of old, its waves tend to follow the fortunes of the Arab-Israeli dispute, as exemplified by the high peaks of the 2000 Intifadah and other events in the Middle East, notwithstanding the fact that the Oslo Accords and the following “peace process” in the Middle East did not significantly lower the level of Muslim violence towards European Jews. This seeming contradiction became possible because nowhere within that process was there a full lull and state of bliss and tranquility between the people of the Middle East, but it was accompanied by continuous terrorism, military entanglements, killings, and bad blood between the parties, which allowed Muslims in Europe to identify with their coreligionists in the Middle East and pour their rage on their Jewish compatriots at home. Naturally the widespread distribution of anti-Semitic propaganda on the Internet and the media gives it more resonance at a higher speed than ever before, in spite of the paradox that media create immediacy. Examples abound: during the month of Ramadan, when Muslims fast during daytime and feast at night, they become avid watchers of TV series from Arab counties, which are usually anti-Semitic in tone and context. The Syrians ran a few years ago a series about the blood libel, which showed the Jews cutting the throat of a child to use his drained blood for matzah, in the footsteps of the infamous former Chief of Staff of the Syrian army, Mustafa Tlas, who wrote his “doctorate” on this very theme.22 The Egyptians, more than fifteen years after their peace accord with Israel, run their own series on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which became popular throughout the Arab and Islamic world and was viewed by many European Muslims as well. These episodes have had a great impact on TV watchers and contributed their part to the increase of anti-Semitism among Muslims in Europe. Demonization of the Jews, and in consequence of Israel and Zionism, has also been a common ground of European anti-Semites and their Muslim compatriots, and no more attractive theme for demonization

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of Israel could be found than the Palestinian one where their inherently underdog position automatically attracts to them all sympathies and elevates their adulation to a level of worship that is essentialized in what has come to be known as Palestinism (see next chapter on anti-Semitism parading as anti-Zionism). One example is the French weekly, Le Nouvel Observateur, which blamed in 2001, at the height of the Intifadah, Israeli soldiers for raping Palestinian women at checkpoints, so as to cause their families to kill them for “defiling family honor.”23 It was an open case of libel, which Palestinians and Muslims in Europe seized upon to demonize Israel, Zionism, and the Jews. Unlike other places in a similar situation of war, not one case of rape has ever been recorded in Israeli-Palestinian interactions. Sociological work has been done in Israel about that rather surprising phenomenon, and the researchers were charged due to their suspicion that the reluctance of Israeli soldiers to rape Palestinian women emanated, among other factors, from their “racist” contempt for Palestinians. At any rate, the author of that defamatory article, which had no leg to stand on, turned out to be the daughter of the Chief Editor of that prestigious journal, Jean Daniel, and after representations and protests, the journal admitted that the allegation was untrue. But the damage to the image of Israeli soldiers was done, and it served the propaganda of the Palestinians. Stories of this sort, which are not anchored in reality but provide a punishing anti-Israeli message by European and Muslim anti-Semites, like the recent trial in France, which proved that the Muhammed al-Dura sensation condemning Israel was staged by the French reporter with Palestinian aid, recur not only in France, but also in the selection of reported events by the BBC and their interpretations with heavy anti-Israeli bias. Muslim leaders in the West, both those dubbed “moderate” who are connected to their countries’ establishment, and more so the restive radicals who are often at odds with the authorities, have recourse to the same known themes of anti-Semitism which are either imported with them from their original lands of Islam or are acquired locally in their interaction with the native anti-Semites of old. There is a local twist, however, which develops in every Western country according to the composition of its Muslim population, the level of local anti-Semitism that existed prior to the coming of the Muslim immigrants and continues after their arrival, the fortunes of the Middle Eastern dispute, and the special circumstances of each country or group of countries (e.g. Scandinavia, the Balkans, Benelux, etc). Demonization of Jews in general and of Zionism and Israel

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as a corollary, seem to head the list of Muslim anti-Semitic speeches and deeds, closely followed by Holocaust denial and the conspiracies that the Jews are accused of weaving around the world. Demonization of Jews, Zionism, and Israel Salafi Muslims in France often attack both their country of refuge and its Jews, and the Jews in general whom they confound, as has been their wont, with Zionism and Israel. By citing the inherent evil of the Jews, who are now their compatriots, they not only point out to their evil modern qualities that are subsumed in western civilization in general, but they also inescapably single out the Jewish state and its Zionist ideology as particularly corrupt due to the character of the Jews who authored them. One of those imams was cited as proclaiming that France was “an impious state which wishes the principles of Islam to dissipate gradually, and that “western liberalism is the origin of all perversions.” Like the proponents of al-Takfir wal-hijra (declaring the others as unbelievers and migrating from their midst) in radical Islam, some of those Muslim preachers in Europe hint at the possibility of migrating from the corrupt and unjust societies where they live, and failing that, at the very least cutting themselves off from their sinful environment into Muslim enclaves where they can apply their laws and customs, clear from the infections of western society, to which they have to resort only when it is absolutely necessary. In other words, while they migrated from their countries of origin, which had persecuted them due to their radicalism, in order to find freedom of worship and of political activity in the West, now that they realize that the West is not to their liking either, due to its “corruption,” “injustice,” and “perversion,” where can they go? Since there are no signs that they wish to return en masse to their home countries, one can surmise that they would rather attempt to alter their lands of asylum to fit their convictions. In September 2005, just after the London underground bombings, one of those radical imams was heard to enjoin his followers to confine their social contacts to “good relationships with people who fear Allah.” In the previous February another Imam of that tendency called upon his congregation to “avoid contacts with Unbelievers (kuffar), be they Muslims who misbehave or non-Muslims, and to shy from visiting them even in hospital.” That was the only way for him to avoid the impurities of French and Western societies in general. Hassan Iquioussen, a popular preacher who presents himself as the alter-ego of celebrated intellectual Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss grandson of the founder

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of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt, Hassan al-Banna, had also attacked the Jews as “misers and interest-loaners” and added that Zionism had plotted together with Hitler, a contention often heard in Muslim circles, including “moderate” President of the Palestinian Authority Mahmud Abbas, who won a doctorate in the Soviet Union on that “merit.”24 Demonizing the Jews for both their innate qualities, and for contributing to western perversion and for associating with the Nazis, not only pulls the carpet from underneath their claim of being their victims, but also places them at the focus of the Muslim struggle against their host countries, something which articulates and rationalizes the anti-Semitic sentiment they air day in day out. In Saudi Arabia, whose text books are exported to the Muslim communities, which it finances in the West, there was talk of reform following American pressures in the wake of September 11. In May 2006 the Saudi Education Minister held a joint press conference with American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and gave public assurances to the effect that the reforms go “into teacher training and the messages that are given to children in the formative years.” When asked about offensive language against other faiths in the textbooks, he said: “this is taken out.” But according to researcher Miss Shea who wrote a report on this sensitive issue, Teaching methods that ask kindergarten children to give examples of “false religions”, like Judaism and Christianity, add up to an ideology that runs throughout. It is not hate speech here and there. It adds up to an argument, an ideology of us versus them.25

When confronted with the same questions in Riyadh, Minister of Education Abdallah al-Obeid, admitted that “some things needed to be changed,” and that the accusations were being investigated, but he also insisted that there was “some misunderstanding of some of the texts. But Westerners should understand that there are things that cannot be altered without challenging the basic tenets of Islam.” These were exactly the things raised by the American Department of state in view of the negative stereotypes of Jews and Christians which are cited from the Qur’an and other Muslim writings. But the Wahhabi version of Islam is the least inclined to changes of this sort, for unlike Christianity, which claims continuity with Judaism (hence the Judeo-Christian tradition), Islam asserts that it was the origin, the preceding Old and New Testaments notwithstanding, and that Judaism and Christianity are but aberrations of the original divine message of Islam, of which Adam and Abraham were the early adepts. And since all this is incrusted in the Word of Allah, that is the Qur’an, and in Islam, which is His Religion, no amount of

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debate could make the Muslims change their mind, because if they did they would be betraying their faith. So, if they cannot change, they deny the allegations against them and accuse the allegators of “Islamophobia.” Thus, according to Tanya Hsu, a political analyst in Riyadh with close ties to the education ministry, there is anger behind the scenes at what they regard as a propaganda campaign designed to make the government look bad. She says: “the charges are absolutely not true. We are really just looking at a few sentences and a few words. I do not know of any country in the world that does not have a few mis-chosen words in textbooks.” The report about Saudi education came precisely as the Royal House has been walking a fine line between external pressure to reform and internal conservatives who could shake its grip on power if it failed to conform. That is understood, but does not justify lack of action if indeed change is to be introduced.26 That it is only “a few phrases and words” that need to be excised, is no excuse not to touch the text, exactly as it takes very little to excise in order to turn a normal man into a eunuch. A few examples of what we are talking about are needed to illustrate these abuses, which encourage bigotry, contempt, and hatred of other faiths. The Saudi school system itself is said to total 25,000 schools, educating about 5 million students. But in addition, Saudi Arabia runs Islamic academies in some 19 world capitals, notably in the West, including one outside Washington in Fairfax County, which use some of these same religious textbooks. Saudi Arabia, although providing a negative example of tolerance by prohibiting any other faith but Islam in her territory, assumes the unilateral liberty to take advantage of others’ tolerance and distribute its textbooks and propaganda in the schools and madrasas in others’ lands with the design of undermining their regimes, societies, and public order. Undeterred by Wahhabism’s historically fringe status among the four schools of law in Sunnite Islam, Saudi Arabia has been trying to assert itself as the world’s authoritative voice of Islam—a sort of Islamic Vatican, as some Saudi officials have themselves said, and these textbooks are integral to this missionary effort. As mentioned in the report of the American Congress commission investigating the September 11 attacks, which were committed mostly by Saudis, “even in affluent countries, Saudi-funded Wahhabi schools are often the only Islamic schools available.” Education is at the core of the debate in the Islamic world. Osama Bin Laden understands this well; in a recent audiotape he railed against those who would “interfere with school curricula.” Other Muslim scholars and educators have come to regard the

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western onslaught on Muslim youth, through film, music, and popular culture (Mc Donald, jeans, sneakers, pop music, Coca Cola, drugs and the like) as a western scheme to penetrate Islamic culture and undermine it from within. They named that pernicious process “Westoxication” and their educational systems are geared to refute it at its base. The 74-page review of the curriculum reform, which is proudly distributed by the Saudi Embassy in Washington, reveals that the next generation of Saudis will not only match their elders in intolerance and bigotry, but that what they call reform and propagate as such around the world, is more likely to deepen hatred and intolerance towards other cultures. A sample from that report will illustrate the idea: 1.

2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

From First Grade Textbooks—“Every religion other than Islam is false’, and “Fill in the blanks with the appropriate words (Islam, hellfire): Every religion other than------------- is false. Whoever dies outside of Islam enters-------------From Fourth Grade—“True belief means … that you hate polytheists and Infidels, but do not treat them unjustly”. It is hard to see how one can treat “justly” someone one is encouraged to hate. Fifth Grade—“Whoever obeys the Prophet and accepts the oneness of Allah cannot maintain a loyal friendship with those who oppose Allah and His Prophet, even if they are his closest relatives”. So, all those who consider themselves “friends of the Saudis” should beware. “It is forbidden for a Muslim to be a loyal friend to someone who does not believe in Allah and His Prophet, or someone who fights the religion of Islam”. So, all the members of the Coalition who are fighting Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, and certainly Israelis who fight Hamas and Hizbullah in the Middle East, should forget about their Muslim “friends”. “A Muslim, even if he lives far away, is your brother in religion. Someone who opposes Allah, even if he is your brother by family tie, is your enemy in religion”. Anyone who believes in another God but Allah is considered as “opposing Allah” and therefore is an enemy by definition. Sixth Grade—“just as Muslims were successful in the past when they came together in a sincere endeavor to evict the Christian Crusaders from Palestine, so will the Arabs and Muslims emerge victorious, Allah willing, against the Jews and their allies, if they stand together and fight a true jihad for Allah, for this is within Allah’s power”. No wonder then that Israelis and westerners are dubbed “new Crusaders” and fought against accordingly. The American and French Presidents who have declared that they would stand with Israel, should take cognizance of that direct threat against them. Eighth Grade—“As cited in Ibn Abbas: the apes are Jews, the People of the Sabbath; while the swine are the Christians, the Infidels of the Communion of Jesus”.

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8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

“Allah told His Prophet, Muhammed, about the Jews who learned from parts of Allah’s Book [the Qur’an ] that Allah alone is worthy of worship. Despite this, they espouse falsehood through idol-worship, soothsaying and sorcery. In doing so, they obey the Devil. They prefer the people of falsehood to the people of the Truth , out of envy and hostility. This earns them condemnation and is a warning to us not to do as they did”. “They are the Jews whom Allah has cursed and with whom He is so angry that He will never again be satisfied [with them]. Some of the people of the Sabbath were punished by being turned into apes and swines. Some of them were made to worship the Devil, and not Allah, through consecration, sacrifice, prayer, appeals for help, and other types of worship. Some of the Jews worship the Devil. Likewise, some members of this nation worship the Devil and not Allah. “Activity: the student writes a composition on the danger of imitating the Infidels”. All these latter citations from the Qur’an are the patrimony of all observant Muslims, therefore one does not have to be a “radical” or “fundamentalist”, or Wahhabi, to be imbued with this hateful stuff during his educational process. Any madrasa thoughout the Islamic world, from Morocco to Pakistan, imparts these notions to its students. Ninth Grade—“The clash between this [Muslim] community (Ummah) and the Jews and Christians has endured and it will continue as long as Allah wills it”. “it is part of Allah’s wisdom that the struggle between the Muslims and the Jews should continue until the Hour [of judgment]”. Thus, what loyal Muslim would agree to make peace with Israel, under any circumstances, unless the eschatological Day of Judgment reverses that? That is the reason why Islamic movements, like the Wahhabis, the Shi’ites, the Muslim Brothers, the Hamas and Hizbullah, refuse to recognize Israel or negotiate with it. “Muslims will triumph because they are right. He who is right is always victorious, even if most people are against him”. Ask any Muslim and he will tell you that his faith is “tolerant”. But if they want no compromise or negotiation, only victory, how can there be understanding? Tenth Grade—This grade’s text on jurisprudence teaches that life of non-Muslims (as well as women and, by implication slaves) is worth a fraction of that of a free Muslim male. In consequence, blood money, that is to say the retribution paid to the victim or his heirs for his murder or injury, means: “Blood money for a free Infidel is half the blood money for a Male Muslim, whether or not he is a Scriptuary (Christian or Jew), or not (pagan, Zoroastrian etc)”. Similarly, “Blood money for a woman: half of the blood money for a man in accordance with his religion. The blood money for a Muslim woman is half that for a male Muslim, and the blood money for an infidel woman is half that of a male infidel”. In this regard, Muslim women and in-

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19.

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fidel women are equally treated as half the worth of their respective males. Eleventh Grade—“The Greeting ‘Peace be Upon You’ (as-salam ‘alaykum used by Muslims to greet each other) is specifically for Believers. It cannot be said to others”. “If one comes to a place where there is a mixture of Muslims and Infidels, one should offer a greeting intended for the Muslims”. If young adolescents are educated in this vein, then what happened to the famous courtesy and hospitality of the Arabs? “Do not yield to them [Christians and Jews] on a narrow road, out of honor and respect”. This counsel means that it is better for a Muslim to fight for passage rather than yield some to accommodate non- Muslims, even if they are old, sick or otherwise deserving of attention. To tell the difference, Jews and Christians within Islamdom were required to wear certain items and colors of dress to tell them apart from Muslims. Twelfth Grade—“Jihad in the Path of Allah—which consists of battling against unbelief, oppression, injustice and those who perpetrate them—is the summit of Islam. This religion arose through Jihad and through Jihad its banner was raised high. It is one of the noblest acts which bring one closer to Allah, and one of the most magnificent acts of obedience to Allah”. But since it is always given exclusively to Muslim rulers and clerics to determine when injustice or oppression occurred (not of Muslims among themselves or against non-Muslims, only of others towards Muslims), then all wars against the West and Israel, including those triggered by Muslims on September 11 and July 7, are considered to be waged against “unbelief, oppression and injustice”.27

These generally vilifying terms referring to Jews and Christians in Muslim text books (after they were “amended” under the new “reform”), are current not only in Saudi Arabia itself and produced the murderers of September 11, but are also widespread in the Wahhabi educational system, which is present in practically most Islamic centers which are financed by the Saudis. If the attitude towards Jews (and Christians) is so condescending at best, inciting to discrimination, contempt, and violence at worst, then one should not be surprised by the mounting waves of hatred against Jews in Europe. These attitudes are not only rationalized in historical, political, or social terms, which can be given to debate and dissent, but are couched in absolute, divine, and unchallengeable terms, which make them as immutable as the religion itself. This rhetoric is not only resorted to by clerics who may be deemed “obscurantist” and incorrigible, but also by mainstream leaders of the Muslim community, who may utter on the one hand voices of reconciliation and moderation when they address the host society in which both they and the Jews are

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minorities, but on the other hand defend the most fanatic and despicable anti-Semitic views when they address their own constituencies. In August, 2005, merely one month after the London bombings, John Ware moderated a program on the BBC where he remarked, inter alia, that the East London Mosque had received $ 1 million from the Saudis towards its new center, and reminded his interviewees that the Mosque’s links to Saudi Arabia went back many years, and that its honored guest for the opening ceremony was Saudi Sheikh Sudais who had repeatedly vilified other faiths. Dr. abdul Bari, the Chairman of the Mosque and a leader of the MCB (Muslim Council of Britain), responded: “Well, of course, if it was proved that he exactly said this thing, then why invite people like this?” John Ware pursued his point: “Let me say what else he is reported to have said: that there should be ‘no peace with the rats of the world.’” This vilifying reference to the Jews had been emphatically repeated in Goebbels’s propaganda against the Jews under the Nazi regime, and it has a particularly insulting and painful connotation for them. Ware continued: “Again, he refers to Jews as the scum of the human race and to Christians as worshippers of the cross. You don’t see Christians in those terms?” Abdul Bari: “I don’t see Christians in those terms.” Ware: “you don’t see Christians in those terms?” Bari: “No … the Trinity may be one of them [of the worshipped idols]. And it all depends how you use the word and explain the word.” Ware: “Sure, but this is harsh … I accept all that, but this is different, isn’t it. This is very harsh language. This in effect denounces other faiths, Hindus, Christians and Jews.” Bari: “Well, denouncing any faith is not acceptable in Islam, that is not the Prophetic teaching. We need to know the source of this and this is a very dangerous thing, that character assassination of Muslim scholars and leaders is getting very widespread.”28 So, this respectable leader of the Muslim community in Britain is more worried about the “character assassination” of Muslim scholars than about what they say. His claim that those harsh words are not “according to the Prophetic teachings” only means that either he did not read or understand the above quotations, which every Saudi boy is brought up upon or that he adopted the tactic of denial when facing Western audiences. John Ware responded: “I am not trying to assassinate his character, I am simply trying to deal with the facts. That’s what I am trying to do.” Bari: “No, I know … you are saying facts, but we have a question whether these are facts.” Ware: “The facts are easily checkable, we found a selection of the Sheikh’s sermons on a Saudi website covering mosques in the holy

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cities of Medina and Mecca, with English translation.” Sheikh Sudais in effect said: “Monkeys and pigs and worshippers of false Gods who are the Jews and the Zionists.” This debate live on television amounted in fact to a dialogue of the deaf, because Ware was reasoning by facts, logic, and citations while Bari who has a totally different cast of mind, is impervious to logic and citations, given that references to the word of Allah and of His divine Law, which have been incarnated in the Qur’an and Islamic teachings, are in themselves incontrovertible “proof” of any Muslim argument. No Muslim can deny or contradict, let alone argue with, citations from the Book. Ware’s courageous attempt to confront his Muslim interlocutor with facts and citations simply fell on deaf ears. Ware also rightly claimed that the Saudis invested billions to propagate translations of the Qur’an which back the intolerant approach of Islam towards other faiths, at a time when more open and tolerant versions exist which accept others. For example, he produced the translation of a verse into English, which says: “Those who follow the Jewish [scriptures] … and the Christians, any who believe in Allah and work righteousness, can go to Paradise,”29 while the Saudi version puts the verb in the past tense, meaning that Jews and Christians may have been entitled to Paradise in the past, but they are no longer. One of the leading British experts on the Qur’an, Professor Neal Robinson from the University of Louvain, Belgium, confirmed that while this difference in translation may seem subtle, it casts non-Muslims in a completely different light, and gives the impression that only Jews and Christians before the rise of Islam could be admitted to Paradise, not Jews and Christians today who believe in God, look to the coming Day of Judgment, and do good works. But one ought to mention here that there is no “Saudi version” of the Arabic Qur’an, the Word of Allah being universal as are its universally accepted commentaries like Jalalayn and Tabari who do not mince their words when they speak disparagingly about other faiths. To the extent that various translations from the original Arabic exist, which mitigate this bigotry in western eyes and ears, it is only intended for the naïve, uninformed, and uninitiated “liberals” and politically correct souls, who would cling to any benevolent interpretations to justify their dhimmitude towards Islam. Palestinians, Jordanians, and Egyptians who are arguably “mainstream” moderates, repeat the Saudi interpretation as a matter of course, because for them there is only one version, in the original Arabic, that Allah had decreed for all humanity. Professor Robinson himself responded to Ware’s challenge:

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Muslim Anti-Semitism in Christian Europe I think this is a regrettable narrowing. They have not changed the interpretation of the Qur’an, this was the prevalent view in the Middle Ages; just as medieval Christians believed that outside the Church there is no salvation. Today, missionaries have reinforced the injunction that a Muslim cannot be a genuine friend of non-Muslims. Their whole ideology is one of Arab and Muslim supremacy and they have little room for other more liberal Arab interpretations of Islam and no room at all for the West. The West is just dismissed as decadent and secular. They have no understanding of the way in which modern secular societies have carefully separated the domains of religion and state and kept certain areas of public life free of religious influence.30

Once again, while there are liberal and moderate Muslim individuals who would wish to introduce new interpretations, they can hardly represent their personal views in public; but they have failed, at any rate, to produce a modern, moderate, and liberal doctrine of Islam that has followers and challenges the prevailing one. It is the traditional exegesis of the Qur’an and other Islamic writings, which dominate the scene, nothing else, even in the eyes of Sir Iqbal Sacranie, the head of MBC for many years, who was cultivated by the British government as the paradigm of moderation and modernity, to the point of elevating him to knighthood. In another interview, in that same BBC program, John Ware questioned Dr. Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, of the Muslim Institute, who was considered a “moderate” Sufi, who said: “Our children will not mix, meet, play with other children because they are kuffar (Unbelievers).” Ware brought up the Holocaust Memorial Day that was organized by the government to mark the 60th anniversary of the “most shameful event in modern European history,” which was attended by some Muslims, but he castigated the MBC, which chose to stay away. Sir Iqbal again denied: “not the boycott, we did not boycott, a boycott has a … a boycott has a total … different connotations. It denies the…. We do not deny the fact that…”31 It was pitiful to see Sacranie at a loss with words to justify the fact that his MBC was the only faith organization demonstratively absent from that state ceremony. Sacranie “explained”: “Indeed, a very principled position we have taken. Of course we share the pain and the grief of our Jewish friends when they … when they suffered the pain through the Holocaust, but the point is that it has to be taken all of them.” MBC had indeed written to the Home Office, saying that his group would attend the ceremony if the event included all “the sufferings of the people” and in particular what he called ”other ongoing genocide and human rights abuses around the world, notably in “the occupied Palestinian territories, Chechnya, Kashmir etc.” Sacranie just forgot to mention that in all those cases, including Bosnia, Kosovo, and Darfour, it was Muslims who trig-

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gered terrorism, and none of those who acted against them had initiated any unprovoked genocide against any of them, as it was the case with Jews during the Holocaust. Fortunately for Sacranie and the Muslim community, Sheikh Admani who took part in the debate, admonished Muslims not to politicize the Holocaust and to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Jews in their suffering.32 Ware then moved the scene of his interviews to the Leeds Grand Mosque, where Sacranie chooses to pray when he visits, and the only mosque in town which follows a radical version of Islam. Its imam, Sheikh Muhammed Taher, looks beyond Leeds to the global fraternity of Islam as incarnated in the Ummah, and regularly speaks about the familiar themes of the supremacy of Islam and his conviction that Christians and Jews plot to undermine it. His rationale: “The treatment of Muslim prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Zionist prisons in Palestine. All this is the result of a poisoned culture and is deliberate … We know the reason behind the US attack on the Muslim world…. Today we are watching a vicious Zionist-Crusader attack, godless and full of hatred against the Ummah.” When Ware intervened to ask whether that sort of phrase was a healthy message to give to Muslims in Britain today, Sacranie once again jumped in, asserting that the message to be given out in Britain today [following the London bombings], must pass the reality of the world we are living in. So if there are issues of injustice they must be brought forward so that people become aware of them, and that voices which rise against injustices cannot be silenced. It transpired from his words that he meant the injustices that were perpetrated against Muslims, according to Muslim complaints or Arab propaganda, not any others, even if the veracity and validity of the former remained questionable. In other words, the war on terror, Israel’s defensive wars, the attempts to reform the Muslim world and pull it out of its lethargy and backwardness, are all perceived by both Sacranie and his Sheikh as wars against Islam in the worse tradition of conspiracy theories which have bewitched the Muslim world, including knighted gentlemen like Sacranie.33 John Ware then remarked that the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) organizers of anti-Zionist demonstrations saw themselves as the conscience of the MCB of which they were affiliates. Indeed, the MAB rallies young Muslims to the “cause of their brothers and sisters in Palestine and Iraq.” Their placards equated Zionism with Nazism and they displayed them regularly on their websites and in their organized rallies. A Palestinian, Dr. Azzam Tamimi, often acts as a senior spokesman for

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the MAB, and he has avowedly promoted Islam as a political ideology. When he was interrogated about his activities, Tamimi confirmed that since “they were fighting a war against the world of Islam,” and though he had condemned the London bombings, he supported “suicide bombings” in Israel and the “armed resistance” in Iraq, thereby approving of the importation of the Middle East conflict into the streets of Britain. Tamimi emphasized: “Nobody who wages war against Allah can win. Nobody. They are going to lose. They are going to lose, Allah Akbar!, Allah Akbar! Allah Akbar! (Allah is the greatest!—the war cry of the Jihadists). Another interviewee in the program, Mehboob Kantharia, reacted more sensibly: I was abhorred by this statement, I mean I could not believe that here was a man who was leading a so-called credible organization known as the Muslim Association of Britain, sending out a clear message to not just the young Muslims of this country, but every other young person who has some radical ideas, that it was OK to become a “suicide bomber”, to correct an injustice somewhere else in the world…. I mean, just to use your body … as a bomb as a bomb to go and kill your fellow human beings.34

Ware remarked that following the London bombings, and in order to stop more young British Muslims being drawn into terrorism, the government said it would prosecute anyone who glorified terrorism, wherever it happened. But Tamimi did not repent. He retorted: “I don’t glorify killing anybody. I just explain, my job is to explain. I explain why people resort to certain tactics in certain contexts.” Ware insisted that when Tamimi said that for Muslims martyrdom was not the end of things but the beginning of the most wonderful of things, that was more than an explanation, that was glorification. Tamimi responded that “martyrdom was an Islamic concept and one could not rule it out of Islam. If people abused it or used it in the wrong place, or killed innocent people and called it martyrdom, that is something else. But as an Islamic concept, martyrdom had to be glorified if it served the defense of a homeland or the Muslim community.” Jews and Israel certainly do not enter those definitions, therefore they remain within the permitted martyrdom that should be glorified. Ware pushed his point: when Tamimi dubs martyrdom in Israel a “divine bliss,” that is also glorifying, that is glorifying the tactics in another country, irrespective of the rights or wrongs of the Israeli government, that is glorifying the same tactic that was used in London, in contravention of the proposed law against the glorification of terrorism. Thereupon Tamimi was resigned to be called an “apologist for terrorism,” saying: “if you want to consider me so, that is up to you.”

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But Ware did not let up on that rare occasion of tough face-to-face courageous and demanding confrontation where his interviewees had nowhere to hide. He argued that after the London bombings, the MCB convened a special meeting at the London central mosque, where 40 of Britain’s most prominent Muslim scholars and clerics gathered. The MCB had hoped that a joint declaration by the participants would remove any doubt or ambiguity about where everyone stood over “suicide bombings.”35 Moulana Mohammed Shahid Raza, the President of the World Islamic Mission of Europe, assured that “In the name of Allah, we regard these acts as utterly criminal, totally reprehensible and absolutely unIslamic,” but Ware pressed the point: “was that condemnation valid for London only or did it apply also to British Muslims carrying out those bombings in Israel and Kashmir?” Again, Iqbal Sacranie came to the rescue: “My understanding is that for any British Muslim anywhere outside the country, to commit ‘suicide,’ would that be acceptable in Islam? No, that’s my position…. I don’t think any scholars….” Neither Sacranie nor anyone else who shared the platform, uttered a straight condemnation of those acts, the epithet of “unacceptable” was satisfactory for them, because they were “un-Islamic,” not because it is abhorrent to murder people for any reason. The fact was disregarded that they were done in the name of Islam, which means that they were ideological deeds involving supernatural and irrational rewards, not “criminal acts,” which are usually committed for material gain. At any rate, not a word of apology or sympathy for the families of the murdered, which implied that when other Muslims, not British, committed such horrors, as on September 11, no condemnation was to be expected from the leadership of British Islam. It was not the murder of innocent people by Muslims, anywhere, which deserved condemnation by any civilized person, but only when the murder was perpetrated in London, in order to safeguard the reputation of the British Muslim community. Imam Raza, who was introduced to the program as Britain’s foremost Muslim scholar, was unequivocal for a change: “The declaration applied not just to British “suicide bombers,” but to every suicide bomber everywhere.” But Shahid Raza was compelled to correct himself and scrambled to sound “politically correct under the circumstances.” any Muslim youth, any Muslim man or woman, going anywhere on the globe targeting civilians anywhere by suicide bombing, is haram (prohibited by Islamic Law). It is interesting what he would have said if he were confronted with the fatwas of venerated Sheikh Qaradawi, or Sheikh

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Tantawi, the Mufti of Egypt, or Sheikh Sabri of the Palestinian Authority who explicitly allowed Islamikaze operations against Israel and even encouraged them. When Ware made the point that the spokesman of the MAB had not used the term haram when denouncing the London bombings, Tamimi jumped in defense of his fellow Muslim: “That is a political statement produced under duress, under pressure. I do not agree that all human bombs anywhere in the world are the same. I would love to see no more of this weapon used anywhere, but there are certainly differences, and whoever claims that there are no differences and all are the same, is simply confusing the issue.” What transpired from this “interview” turned into a cross examination, which seldom any Western journalist would dare to expose Muslim officials to, was that the British Muslim leadership had their sympathies for Muslim terrorism when it was directed against their perceived enemies, but at the same time they were cautious to preserve the reputation of their community in the eyes of the host country. It was obviously a difficult balancing act. Azzam Tamimi confirmed this thesis by claiming that most Muslims around the world, not only in Britain, share the opinion that martyrdom operations are permissible against Israel.36 John Ware continued to press: “Where exactly does the MCB stand on Islamic groups that use suicide bombers against civilians wherever they are?” Last year, Sir Iqbal Sacranie paid his respects to the ideological chief of Hamas, the group responsible for dozens of suicide bombings targeted directly at Israeli civilians. An Israeli missile strike on Sheikh Yassin killed him in the street, with his son, his bodyguards, and five civilians. After his funeral in Gaza, the Central Mosque in London held a memorial service for him. Sir Iqbal chose to attend and the MCB hailed Sheikh Yassin as “the renowned Islamic scholar.” It is one thing supporting the Palestinians and it is another, isn’t it, supporting the theological justification that Sheikh Yassin gave to the murder of civilians. He was the spiritual leader and the ideological leader of a terrorist movement. Again Iqbal was in a quandary, from which he attempted, rather clumsily, to extricate himself: He may have given that…. In your terms, if it means that fighting occupation is a terrorist movement, that is not a view that is being shared by many people. Those who fight oppression, those who fight occupation, cannot be termed terrorists, they are freedom fighters, in the same way as Nelson Mandela fought against apartheid, in the same way as Gandhi and many others fought the British rule in India. There are people in different parts of the world who today, in terms of the historical side of it, those who fought oppression are now the real leaders of the world.

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In other words, when one strips the niceties from Sacranie and his colleagues’ cautious formulations, one finds out that for him, as for other Muslim publics and governments, terrorism is not what Islam does, but what others do to Islam. Unlike in the West where terrorism against civilians is considered as an uncivilized means of combat under any circumstances and whatever the reasons, for Muslims it is exonerated, or even permitted if it serves a worthy purpose like liberation from occupation. Never mind that Gandhi and Mandela did not use terrorism against innocent civilians to attain their goal, because they understood that not all means are justified to attain one’s goals, noble as they may be. Sacranie could not grasp this distinction between his genuinely outrageous statements and his pathetically vain attempts to appear politically correct and humane. “Hold on,” he added, “whether it is Hamas, whether it is Israel, whether it is anybody else, we have no distinction. Why are you making it such a difficult question? In simple answer to it, loss of innocent civilian life, we make no distinction between the life of a Palestinian or a Jew. They are all part of the human race and life is sacred.” To further pressure by Ware that he should settle his own non-sequiturs, Sacranie had nothing more to add, referring to his previous answers, which were exactly confused and contradictory. Then John Ware took his inquiries to young British Muslims, to gauge their views on the same matters. Abu Muntasir, a Muslim youth leader said: “This happened in Britain to our people, and worst of all in the name of Islam. And that has jolted us, it is like saying”: well, we always knew it was wrong, never had the guts to come and say so,”but it has been happening for so long in Iraq and Palestine, and people still justify it, and I would…, we can’t….” When Ware inquired about the loyalty of Muslims to the worldwide nation of Islam, the Ummah, Ehsan Masood of the Gateway Trust, said: “We are all part of one global Muslim family but I would argue that you can also look at it another way: if someone in my family screws up, you know, I’ll give them a good bollocking, in the nicest possible way. But that responsibility is not something that we are always prepared to own up to.” Shahedah Vawda of the City Circle, added: “I mean just coming back, the question took me totally off guard, but just to say that I think maybe that we are lacking, where we are lacking, if we haven’t effectively channeled that anger or that fear, or that outpouring of rage, the pain that you feel when you see fellow Muslims being massacred.” Ehsan Massood, once again: “All our community organizations have very deep roots in very different Islamic movements abroad, whether it was in Pakistan or Bangladesh or

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in the Arab world or in South East Asia…. A lot of that residue is still here, a lot of our organizations, and it is clear to me now that we have moved on from there, and there has been quite a big shift in thinking. But it may take another generation to completely go.” To Ware’s remark that one visiting speaker has already begun that journey, and that once a hardliner, he has softened his ideological stand, Abu Muntasir responded: “if my death could restore the life of those victims, I would gladly die, I would die, I would have myself executed, not because I feel much scared that non-Muslims would hurt me, I am hurt because innocent people have died, and that is because I am a Muslim.” John Ware concluded that the battle for Muslim minds in Britain is well under way. It is a battle of ideas—between those for whom Islam is personal, and those who also wish to pursue Islam as a political ideology, fueled by the rages and injustices of much of the Islamic world. The outcome of this battle will help shape British society in the twenty-first century.37 But one ought for the sake of comparison, turn to the favelas in the outskirts of Caracas, Sao Paolo, Buenos Aires, where human misery is no less acute than in the Muslim world and where social and economic deprivation and injustice are even more infuriating than in Iraq, Palestine, and Kashmir. Nevertheless, no one has heard of those impoverished and exploited Latinos blowing up buses and pizza parlors, crashing the skulls of children, chopping live on TV the heads of their hostages, mutilating the dead bodies of their enemies or cruelly and indiscriminately massacring their own people. Ware’s incomparable interviews in this program were never equaled in the depth of their inquiry, the forcefulness of their statement, the implacability of their analysis, and particularly the objectivity and the fearlessness of their exposure to the public. The long and detailed citations taken from that program may seem or sound tedious at time, but this is exactly their strength, whereas they penetrate all the crevices and hidden corners of every question so as to leave no stone unturned in making sure that no one could avoid a question or hide behind excuses and platitudes. Rarely have Western media produced such a firm, forceful, honest, and conscientious moderator, who had the ability and the audacity to confront the issues and the personalities involved in them. Holocaust Denial Holocaust denial by Muslim anti-Semites has been almost universal. Some flatly deny that there ever was a Sho’ah, finding support among

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the Irvings, the Faurissons, and the Garaudy’s who lend a “scholarly” guise to the denial; others, while finding it hard to refute altogether, due to the growing recognition of Europe in the need to commemorate those horrors, diminish its scope and consequences; still others, while half-heartedly recognizing the plight of the Jews, simply object to participating in any memorial service for the victims of those dark days, claiming that since Israelis are today’s new Nazis, and the Palestinians their victims, it would amount to sheer hypocrisy to commemorate the one and ignore the other. More liberal minds among Muslims find it counterproductive and harming to Muslim interests to align themselves with Holocaust deniers, thus placing themselves among the worst bigots and racists of the world and potentially becoming the next victims of the same racists. This panoply of reasons must of course come under criticism, not only because Holocaust deniers have repeatedly lost their case before courts of law in civilized countries, which have made Holocaust denial a major crime, but on its own terms due to the false comparisons, the distortions of fact, the lack of scientific interest in the Holocaust as an unprecedented political, psychological, and social phenomenon, and the general reluctance of the Muslim world to embrace any argument, which robs them of the cloak of victimhood that they have appropriated and refuse to relinquish the monopoly over it. Additionally, concurring to the narrative of the Holocaust, they fear, might enhance the international legitimization of Israel and pull the carpet underneath the contrary claims of Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims Sheikh Umar Bakri, for example, who for years built up the radical Muslim trend among British Muslims until he was indicted and fled to Beirut after the London bombings of July 2005,38 and became perhaps the most virulent and dangerous western-based spokesman of the world war that radical Islam has declared against the West, made no effort to hide his program. Not only did he side openly with Bin Laden, and recruit and indoctrinate would-be Islamikaze in the heart of the West and in Islamic countries further afield, but he did not relent from his open campaign of hatred against Jews, and then the West in general, when the latter did not react decisively to this threat. He had posters “Kill the Jews!” plastered on walls around him, and to escape punishment he claimed that those were the words of the “Holy Scriptures,” not his own.39 He accused Jews of exploiting the Holocaust to achieve “hegemony over Muslims” and insisted that far worse war crimes had been perpetrated by others against Muslims in Chechnya, Kashmir, and Palestine than those Muslims were

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accused of in other parts of the globe.40 He also said that he had no problems with Jewish communities as such, only against Israel, which was a “cancer in the heart of the Islamic world,” and therefore it had to be “eradicated and removed.” He told his demonstrating audiences in front of the Regent’s Park Mosque, upon the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifadah, that “all Israeli targets are legitimate for you. All Israelis must be destroyed.”41 His campaign of incitement also included the playwright Terrence McNally for portraying Jesus Christ as a homosexual in his play Corpus Christi. Later, he suggested that all homosexuals ought to throw themselves down from the Big Ben.42 Despite the virulence of the argument, this is not a strictly speaking Sho’ah denial, because Bakri was only accusing the Jews of exploiting that event to promote other goals. Of course, an emphatic denial of the Holocaust during the years of the Irving trial in England, would have dragged Bakri himself to another legal confrontation that he would have lost. This soft way of denial, coupled with the Muslim boycott worldwide of Schindler’s List, which attests to the veracity of the Jewish genocide by the Nazis, was one of the ways of avoiding flat denial and its consequences while at the same time accusing the Jews of distorting its aftermath. But the representative body of British Muslims—the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), which is supposed to be the umbrella organization of all Muslims, and has been influenced since its inception by its radical leadership, has now shrunk to only part of the multitude of mosques and groups which it used to represent (probably one third of all 1,500 mosques in Britain). The MCB has been opposed to Holocaust education in Britain. Only in 2007 did they agree for the first time to attend the Holocaust Memorial Day, though the Bolton local council diluted the event by replacing it by the Genocide Day, which permits them to claim that the Palestinian “genocide” is included under that heading. Holocaust Memorial has been held by every municipality separately, with those with larger Jewish populations doing more than others. Some years ago, the Department of Education undertook a study on the teaching of sensitive issues, which included the Crusades, the world wars, and the Holocaust, and found that the latter was well taught in British schools. However, one school had considered abandoning its courses for “fear of offending Muslim parents in school.” Offending for what? To teach the plight of Jews is, or can be, offending to anyone, unless one is adamant on denying history? What was the fear based on, except for simple disregard of a major historical event? Whom does that hurt? At any rate, since that consideration was misreported by the press,

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it caused the spread of a computer virus, under the claim that Britain had abandoned its Holocaust education in schools. In France, even though no decision was taken to eliminate Holocaust studies, the mere fact that in schools and lycees turmoil breaks loose every time Jews, Israel, or the Holocaust are mentioned, has compelled many a teacher to conceal or diminish the prominence of Holocaust studies in school curricula. That is perhaps the reason why attitudes towards the Holocaust have emerged as one of the criteria by which Europeans test their Muslim immigrants. Lately, one after another, European countries have decided to control immigration by putting more obstacles in its way, for example entrance tests for the applicants. The French have elected the entrapment of the naïve immigrants, by suggesting a choice of multiple and “attractive” options for response to questions, while the Germans who require straightforward positive knowledge by the immigrants, from basic data on their new country (geography, history political system) to the requisite conditions for becoming a citizen, sprinkle tricky questions for Muslims. For example the significance of the Holocaust is “denied” in their presence, and then they are asked about the right of Israel to exist. Or, as the immigrants want to become part of the German economic miracle, for example, they are required to show some knowledge of post-war Germany, the circumstances of its partition and then reunification and the new constitutional arrangements that have emerged, including civil liberties, democracy, and equality before the law. But the Muslim immigrants are also confronted with the necessity to distance themselves from limitations on the freedom of movement of their women and from other traditional mores incompatible with free and democratic countries. Then the mechanics of a working democracy are tested, including the significance of the freedom of creed (which is not a matter of course in Islamic lands), tolerance of others’ thoughts and expressions even when one’s feelings are offended (perhaps a lesson from the Cartoon Affair), and the obligation to enroll one’s children in the public school system for the sake of civic education to absorb those values. Implied in these tests is the assumption that the parents have no absolute right to discipline their children by any means they deem fit, and that they cannot force them to marry against their will. If these mechanisms indeed promote more tolerance and less anti-Semitism, only the long term will tell. Holocaust denial among European Muslims is not only part of the luggage they bring with them to their countries of refuge, but it is constantly fed and encouraged by the native European deniers and also by

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the constant flow of denial from the Palestinians who wish to demean Israel’s claim to nationhood which competes with theirs, and notably by the Iranians. President Ahmadinejad has drawn most media attention by his insults to the Jewish people, his blunt denial of any wrong-doing of the Nazis to the Jews and even his outrageous offer to mount an international competition of cartoons on the Holocaust in Tehran. His insensitivity towards the plight of other people, at a time when he and other Muslims were crying foul over the Prophet’s caricatures in Denmark, is particularly striking. But it turns out that Ahmadinejad has not been an isolated case of an extremist Muslim fanatic, but that his rival in the 2005 elections that he won, Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, himself a former president of the country who was portrayed in the Western media as a “moderate,” also denied the Holocaust. He had delivered in 1998 a public speech at the rally to mark Jerusalem Day where he claimed that “only” two hundred thousand Jews perished during the war.43 An indication of the collaboration between Muslim and European deniers can be found in the fact that when Swiss denier Jurgen Graf was convicted to fifteen months in prison in 2000, he absconded to Iran for refuge. That same year, the Iranian Embassy in Vienna gave shelter to an Austrian denier, Wolfgang Frohlich.44 Western Holocaust deniers appear in the Iranian media, where they are treated as foreign experts who can support the outrageous theses of the regime on both the Holocaust and other issues of interest to Tehran. What remains specific to Ahmadinejad, however, unlike in the case of Abu-Mazen, the “moderate” head of the Palestinian Authority who had completed his “doctorate” in Moscow where he linked between Zionism and the Holocaust, is that the Iranian president has promoted Holocaust denial as the centerpiece of his policy towards Israel. He often repeats his view that the Holocaust is a myth and that western governments “are in the grip of the claws of Zionism,” before proposing that Israeli Jews be deported to the U.S. and Canada. The high point of his strategy was the hosting in Tehran of the International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust in December 2006, attended by notorious Holocaust deniers from around the world. The conference was organized by the “respected” Institute for political and International studies, which is linked to the Iranian Foreign Ministry, and the cost was covered by the Iranian government. The program included discussing whether the Holocaust happened and sessions on anti-Semitism, Nazi-Zionist collaboration, and the “Holocaust Industry.” The most significant outcome

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of that conference was the establishment of the World Foundation for Holocaust Studies, headed by a five-person committee of notorious Holocaust deniers from all continents. An impressive host of “researchers” indeed for the study of a phenomenon, which did not exist in the first place. As the secretary general of the organization was appointed Mohammed Ali Ramin, the Iranian who not only denies the Holocaust but also claims that AIDS, SARS, and bird flu are interrelated with the Holocaust story. The foundation’s plans have been to hold another conference, the production and distribution of denial propaganda, and other activities to be funded by the Iranian government, and advance its agenda.45 This is how Western and Islamic anti-Semitism reach the peak of their open and public collaboration, setting not only the grounds for the revival or Holocaust denial in Europe, which was in a moribund shape after David Irving lost his case, becoming also a model for emulation to the Muslim immigrants in the Western world. Holocaust denial directly serves the purpose of delegitimizing Israel, both by Muslims the world over and Western Leftists. While official Britain formalized Holocaust remembrance since 2001 around the Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD), which is marked not only centrally in London by the government, but also locally by city and town councils, Muslim organizations as well as the Left attack it because they regard it as support for Israel. When in 2007 the local government of Bolton, a town in Northwest England, canceled the HMD event and replaced it by a more general Genocide Memorial Day, which every interested party could interpret and apply at will, like the MCB which demanded it in the first place, it was done in protest against Israeli policies during the Lebanon War of 2006 even though it was triggered by Hizbullah, not Israel. If more local governments adopt this negative stance in the face of the central government, which stands firm on the national memorial, this will have been an indication of the growing influence of the anti-Israeli Left and of the anti-Semitic Muslims, each expressing its hostility to the Jewish entity and memory from its own standpoint. In fact in January 2007, during the Holocaust Memorial Week (HMW), the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign (SPSC) organized a series of public readings, which charged that Zionism collaborated with the Nazis in implementing the Holocaust, a charge that is current in the Arab world, not least in the “doctoral” dissertation of Abu Mazen, now the Head of the “moderate” PLO and the powerless President of the Palestinian Authority. It is noteworthy that this dissertation was written in Moscow, under the Soviet

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regime, which made up this story in order to discredit the Jewish people and delegitimize Israel, just as their Czarist predecessors had done when they made up the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which are still widely in circulation in both the Muslim world and Russia.46 The British Left’s coalition with the Muslims in demeaning and discrediting Israel in the form of public readings, or running Jim Allen’s play, Perdition, or when Sho’ah deniers like Lenni Brenner are invited to expand on Zionist collaboration with the Nazis, is backed by the Iranian campaign of Holocaust denial and the growing support of the British Left for the Hizbullah and Iran, hence their strident anti-Israeli, under the cloak of anti-Zionist, attitudes. They understand very well that by denying the Holocaust, casting the Zionists as collaborators of the Nazis, and challenging the mainstream Holocaust memorials, they undermine the very legitimacy of Israel, the more favorable position of their central government notwithstanding. Moreover, as Dave Rich has shown, since this last taboo of Holocaust denial has been broken by the Left, the Muslim Public Affairs Committee of Great Britain (MPACUK) has suffered no damage in the anti-Zionist world by supporting financially David Irving during the trial he lost in London against Deborah Lipstadt. So, when it comes to visceral anti-Semitism, the Left, which is usually the staunchest supporter of the rule of law, sets aside its principles in order to stand by the loser in that famous trial and to disparage the verdict of the court of law, which vindicated the Jewish defendant. A Socialist Workers Party activist indeed admitted that: My qualms about the staging of Perdition during the Holocaust Memorial Week are tactical. The Zionists have certainly controlled the discourse about Holocaust remembrance for many years, and have aggressively quashed the truth about Zionist collaboration with the Nazis.

The Chair of the SWP, Mick Napier, who had no use for tactics of that sort, revealed the strategic long term goal of his party by arguing: The Holocaust commemoration was used to justify the mass murder and expropriation of the Palestinians…. An accurate understanding of the Nazi Holocaust is essential to grasp modern Israeli savagery towards the Palestinian people. The political link between Palestine and the Nazi mass murder of the Jews in 1942-5 is not the prerogative of the SPSC.47

If avoiding participation in Holocaust memorials in Europe obliges the Muslims there to provide convoluted excuses to justify their conduct, when it comes to denial of the Holocaust itself, lock, stock, and barrel, the Palestinians play a determining role, since they are held as first hand

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“experts” in Israeli and Jewish affairs and because at stake is their own identity and monopoly of the land to the extent that they succeed in showing the false posture of the Jews, including the Holocaust justification of their statehood. Professor I. Sissalem, one of the mercenary “academics” who often “stars” on the PA TV, stated on one of his broadcasts: Lies surfaced about Jews being murdered here and there and the Holocaust. And of course these are all unfounded claims. There was no Dachau, no Auschwitz! [They] were cleansing sites…. They began to publicize in their propaganda media that they were persecuted, murdered and exterminated…. Committees acted here and there to establish this entity [Israel], implanted as a cancer in our country…. They always portrayed themselves as victims, and they made a center for Heroism and Holocaust [Yad Vashem]. Whose heroism? What Holocaust? It is our nation that is heroic, the holocaust was against our people…. We were the victims. We will not stay victims for ever.48

World Conspiracies Even though some of the provocative and inflammatory rhetoric was toned down among Muslims in Europe after September 11, out of their desire to lower their profile pending the passing of the storm, some radical movements and leaders like the Turkish Kaplangi Imam, who was expelled from France for his racist diatribes in 2005, keep repeating themselves and some of them are also deported. But those who escape expulsion continue to propagate their horrific ideology. One of them declared on April 1, 2005 that “Jews are at the root of all problems of the Muslims,” and that “all media are controlled by Jews.” On the following May 27, he entreated his followers to “be patient, for ultimately Allah, Islam and Muslims will emerge victorious.” When such public pronouncements are monitored or reported, the Paris Criminal Police (Brigade Criminelle), who is tipped by the Intelligence Services, invites the inciters to “remind” them of the stringencies of the law. But these measures cannot prevent the incendiary discourse from spreading via the Internet or private meetings of small groups of radicals. For example the salafi movement in France, which aspires to return Islam to the pristine days of the Prophet, and counts about 5,000 among its active membership according to the General Intelligence, also controls some 40 mosques throughout the country. A French sociologist of Iranian descent, Farhad Kosrokhavar, who prepared a report for the General Intelligence on that group, did come to the conclusion that those young Muslims who cultivate “social rancor” in their midst, are “preparing to cross sabers with the Republic.” For them, the large Muslim organizations who had

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negotiated with CFCM, the state-sponsored umbrella organization for all Muslims of France initiated by then Minister of the Interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, had “sold out” to the French as did the tablighis (another radical movement) and even the fiery Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss grandchild of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt. One of the most salient anti-Semitic organizations among European Islam is the Milli Gorus, which was imported with the Turkish immigration. Naturally, since most Turks of Europe dwell in Germany (some 3 million of them), one has to focus in this regard on the direct indoctrination and its effect on German Muslim children and its ramifications with regard to anti-Semitism. A Turkish flash interview with former Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan (1996-7), who is the founder and leader of the Milli Gorus, was aired in July 2007. Erbakan is the spiritual mentor of the now ruling AKP, including its present chiefs—Abdullah Gul, the President of Turkey and Tayyip Erdogan, the Prime Minister, who were his disciples and filled mayoral, ministerial, and parliamentary posts during his own prime ministership. Erbakan’s parties, under various names, were all banned by Turkish courts, but in his campaign to promote his “Islamic Happiness” party during the elections of 2007, Erbakan expanded on his anti-Semitic views. Some of the colorful opinions he spelled out in detail during the interview, include the following: “All Infidel nations are one Zionist entity; Jews want to rule from Morocco to Indonesia; the Zionists worked for 5,767 years to build a world order on which all power and money depend on Jews; the US dollar is Zionist money; The Jewish ‘bacteria’ must be diagnosed for a cure to be found; Zionists initiated the Crusades; Jews founded Protestantism and the Capitalist order; and Bush attacked Iraq to build Greater Israel, so Jesus can return.”49 This is a mixture of traditional anti-Semitism in Europe with themes picked up by Hamas and other Muslim radicals and propagandized in their platforms and tracts. Some European Muslims, in conjunction with their anti-Semitic compatriots, view the Jewish conspiracy of world conquest via the bias of anti-Americanism, which is rampant among the intellectual Left, the media, the Muslims, and the French government of the pre-Sarkozy era, which began in 2007. It is another question why the French who should be deeply indebted to the U.S., which rescued them from German slavery in the two world wars have been on the contrary resentful of it until Sarkozy came about and is trying to reverse that trend. The connection between America and Israel in the minds of both Europeans and Muslims has in

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fact become a major theme in the world conspiracy, which anti-Semites impute to Jews. Because according to this convoluted logic, the Jewish ambition to rule the world is being implemented by American conquest of various parts of the world.50 Alvin Rosenfeld made the point that there are indeed some similarities between anti-Americanism and antiSemitism, since both are convenient diversions of public opinion from external discontents or domestic internal weaknesses and frustrations. He cites, for example, a German philosopher who said in a 2002 interview that America and Israel struck him as the only two countries today that were “rogue states.” The theory that Europe derives its identity from anti-American sentiment was confirmed by two leading contemporary European thinkers, Derrida and Habermas who wrote that the anti-Iraqi war demonstrations in Europe in 2003 might go down in history as the onset of Pan-European awareness. Others point out that anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism are the only icons around which a Greek and a Swede, a Rightist and a Leftist in Europe, who otherwise do not have much to share, have in common.51 Much of the scenario of the plotted Jewish-Zionist takeover of the world is shared by Muslims (see for example the platforms of the Hamas in Palestine and Europe, and the Milli Gorus in Turkey and Germany) and by Leftist and Rightist anti-Semites in Europe, providing a vast ground for collaboration opportunities between them, which they never miss exploiting. Indeed Holocaust deniers in the West, by using their thesis that there was no Sho’ah to combat the Jewish state, have found much support in the Arab and Muslim worlds in general, and in the Muslim communities of Europe in particular. Ernst Zundel’s open letter to the Muslim world, for example, laid out the entire scope of the “world Jewish conspiracy,” by including in it the concepts of “International Zionists,” the “international secret societies” founded and funded by Jews, “international bankers,” which use Jewish money to control the world and “International communism,” and, paradoxically “international capitalism,” the exact terminology that is current in Muslim use throughout the world.52 Zundel resorted to the same not only to express his hatred to the Jews but also to extort money from Arab/Muslim donors, who have long ago superseded the Jews with their petro-dollar fortunes. His appeal reads, inter alia: The Islamic world has the financial means to publish, broadcast or otherwise disseminate the historical, factual data leading to the truth…. There are at this moment already in existence organizations which, if properly funded, could become the nucleus of an independent, worldwide information network capable of countering the now virtually

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unopposed Zionist disinformation and hate propaganda networks. One such example is the Zundelsite, a US-based website that has exposed the so-called “Holocaust” as an extortion tool … that yields Israel the money, power and excuse to occupy the Palestinians and to intimidate its neighbors as Syria, Lebanon, Iran and other Arab nations…. Take the Holocaust away, and you will have severed the financial water well that feeds an evil oligarchy and repressive system.53

Notes 1.

2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

Jonathan Sacks, “The New Anti-Semitism,” Haaretz, September 8, 2002. Cited by Manfred Gerstenfeld, “Anti-Semitism: Integral to European Culture,” PostHolocaust and Anti-Semitism Series, No 19, April 1, 2004, p. 2. Published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook, “Anti-Semitism among Palestinian Authority Academics”, Post-Holocaust and anti-Semitism, No 69, 1 June 2008, by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. The terminology of “Trojan Horse” was used by no less a figure than “moderate” Faisal al-Husseini, the PLO official in charge of Jerusalem, who made this remark after the onset of the 2000 Intifadah. The following discussion is based on the Marcus-Crook report. Palestinian Television, 25 March, 2004. Ibid, p. 2. See e.g., Simon Epstein, “Cyclical Patterns in Anti-Semitism: The Dynamics of Anti-Jewish Violence in Western Countries since the 1950’s,” Analysis of Current Trends in Anti-Semitism, No 2, 1993, Hebrew University, Jerusalem. PA TV, June 5, 1997. Cited by Marcus and Crook, op. cit. p. 2. Yoram Hazoni, “Editorial,” Azure, 2, 1997, pp. 3-5. For details, see R. Israeli, “Education, Identity, State Building and the Peace Process: Educating Palestinian Children in the Post-Oslo Era,” Terrorism and Political Violence, pp. 79-94. See R. Israeli, Palestinians Between Nationalism and Islam, Vallentine Mitchell, London, 2008. See also I. Sissalem, PA TV, October 8, 2001. In PA TV, November 3, 1998. Cited by Marcus and Crook, op. cit. pp. 4-5. Hassan Khader, PA TV, October 13, 2006; Al-Ayyam, December 4, 1998; and I. Sissalem, Jerusalem Through the Generations, PA TV, November 21, 2004 and December 21, 2004. All cited by Marcus and Crook, op. cit. pp. 4-5. M. Majem, Friday Sermon, PA TV, November 1, 2002. M. Majem, Ibid. December 6, 2002. Both references are cited by Marcus and Crook, op. cit. p. 4. K. Abas, Media and Issue, PA TV, April 14, 2002. Ibid. R. al-Astal, People’s Journey, PA TV, December 28, 2003. Al-Hayat al-Jadida (The New Life), December 1, 2003. History of the Modern and Contemporary World, Grade 10, published in 2000 by the Palestinian Authority, pp. 60-61. PA TV, September 10, 2000. This, the previous and the following references to PA TV are all based on Marcus-Crook, op. cit. pp 3-4. PA TV, April 14, 2002. Al-Hayat al-Jadidah, July 11, 1998. Sheikh Halabiya, Friday Sermon, live on PA TV, February 11, 2002. See e.g. Simon Epstein, “Cyclical Patterns in Anti-Semitism:The Dynamics of Anti-Jewish Violence in Western Countries since the 1950’s,” Analysis of Current Trends in Anti-Semitism, No 2, 1993, Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

Major Themes of Muslim Anti-Semitism in the West 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46.

47.

111

Raphael Israeli, Islamikaze: Manifestations of Islamic Martyrology, Frank Cass, London, 2003, pp. 303-5. Le Nouvel Observateur, November 8, 2001 Citations collected by Christophe Deloire, “La France, Terre de Jihad,” Le Point, (Paris), 1727 October 20, 2005, p. 37. Harry de Queteville, “Christians still ‘swine’ and Jews ‘apes’ in Saudi Schools,” Sunday Telegraph, June 25, 2006. Ibid. Nina Shea, “This is a Saudi textbook. (After the intolerance was removed.)”, Washington Post, May 21, 2006. Shea is is director of the Center for Religious Freedom at Freedom House. ”A question of Leadership,” BBC Programme Panorama, moderated by John Ware, broadcast August 21, 2005, 22:20 on BBC One. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/ programmes/panorama/4171950.stm#. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. This author has suggested “Islamikaze,” combining Islam and Kamikaze, to characterize those so-called “suicide bombers” who have nothing suicidal about their murderous missions. They are always intent on killing others but are prepared to sacrifice themselves in the process. See Raphael Israeli, Islamikaze: Manifestations of Islamic Martyrology, Frank Cass, London, 2003. Ibid. Ibid For the entire story, see Raphael Israeli, Islamikaze: Manifestations of Islamic Martyrology, Frank Cass, London, 2003 pp. 192-204. http://artsweb.bham.ac.uk/bmms/sampleissuejanuary2001.asp. Ibid. BBC News, October 14, 2000. For those fiery speeches and the reactions to them by unsuspecting Britons, see The Times, September 9, 1996; and The Guardian, September 9, 1996. “Rafsanjani Supports French Muslim Author, Condemns Zionist Propaganda,” BBC Monitoring, January 26, 1998. Both this and the previous footnote are cited by Dave Rich, “Holocaust Denial and anti-Zionist and anti-Imperialist Tool for the European Far-Left,” in PostHolocaust and anti-Semitism, No 65, February 1, 2008, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Dave Rich, op. cit. p. 2. Amanda Smith, “Town Marks Genocide Memorial Day,” Bolton News, July 15, 2007; Rachel Fletcher, “Sacks Told Blair: We do not Need Holocaust Day,” Jewish Chronichle, February 2, 2007; Robert WIstrich, “The New War Against the Jews,” Commentary, May, 1985. All cited by Dave Rich, op. cit. p. 3. The above passage is based on: Jamie Doward, “Muslim Leader Sends Funds to Irving,” The Observer, November 19, 2006; Mick Napier, “Raising the Issues over Holocaust Memorial Day,” Socialist Worker, January 27, 2007; All cited by Dave Rich, op. cit. pp. 3-4.

112 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

Muslim Anti-Semitism in Christian Europe I. Sissalem, PA TV 29 November 2000. Cited by Marcus-Crook, op. cit. p.4. “Anti-Semitism and the Turkish Islamist Milli Gorus Movement,” MEMRI, Special Dispatch Series, 1699, August 29, 2007. Yair Sheleg, “Enemies, a Post-National Story,” Haaretz, March 7, 2003. Cited by M. Gerstenfeld, op. cit., p. 5. See e.g. R. Israeli, “The Charter of Allah: the Platform of the Islamic Resistance Movement,” in R. Israeli, Muslim Fundamentalism and Israel, The University Press of America, 1993. Ernst Zundel, The West, War and Islam, 1980 (updated 2005), November 29, 2007. Cited by Dave Rich, op. cit. p. 4. Incidentally November 29 (1947) was the 60th Anniversary of the UN Assembly decision to establish a Jewish State by partitioning Palestine.

5 From Words to Deeds One would have thought that Muslim intellectuals in the West would have subtracted themselves from the primitive and openly paranoid counts about the world Jewish conspiracy, the Jewish dominance of the world media and centers of finances and the like. We shall find, nonetheless, that Muslim leaders have often succumbed to the temptation of explaining their own misfortunes or world events by involving Jews, the Mossad, or world Zionism in them. For example, they would insist that world leaders who support Israel, like Reagan and Bush were Jewish, that the UN, of all places, is the mastermind of the Jews who use it as a tool of world dominion, and that the major violent events that shook the world, like revolutions, world wars and September 11 are all the fruit of Jewish imagination, planning, and execution. Muslim minds, including those in the West, are so permeated with these non-sensible theories that they become impervious to logical, rational debate that is open to argument and to proof based on hard evidence. Therefore the difficulty of dealing with those people consists not only of removing the mountains of nonsense which block their sight, obfuscate, and choke their free thinking, but also of persuading them that the very attempt to counterargue those futilities is not necessarily part of the world conspiracy, which they perceive as being woven around them. It is possible to explain their imaginary picture of the world by their need to project on their enemies the analytical shortcomings, which bewitch them, but it is impossible to move them out of the illusory scenarios, which they have constructed around themselves and then they cling to them with a tenacity which defies and contradicts Western standards of thinking and conduct. The result is that even when Muslims initiate an act of violence, in response to their perception of events, they accuse their enemies of it and dub it, or what led to it, as an act of aggression of which they are the victims and which calls for their reprisal. 113

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This reversal characterizes the behavior of Muslim terrorists who sought refuge in the West, which they detest and wish to undermine, or are for the most part on the run from their home regimes that they tried unsuccessfully to topple. Since they are persuaded that they fight for the path of Allah, they certainly do not regard themselves as terrorists, and when they are arrested for terrorist activities within their host countries, which had generously, naively, and self-defeatingly given them shelter and provided for their needs, they accuse their benefactors and condemn their “barbaric” behavior. This mechanism of denial, which posits Western democracy as just a milking cow that owes them sustenance while they owe it nothing, allows them to deny the good and protection they get and to even mount subversive cells that operate in the heart of their countries of refuge as of right. They can cause havoc, death, destruction, and terror upon the nations that took them in, in spite of their repeated commitment that they would refrain from political or subversive activity as a condition for being accorded the status of refugees.1 Political denial has been adopted in Western chanceries as well, under the belief that if they mean well for the Muslim refugees, they would encounter exemplary behavior on their part in return. Even the al-Qa’ida entrenchment in the U.S. and Europe and their illicit activities done under various covers, was not enough to stir suspicions and to instigate the slumbering Western governments to take measures of self-defense, until the Muslim radicals struck, first in America and then in Europe. These Muslim terrorists have put on the West the blame for resisting the wave of terror they have inflicted on their countries of shelter, and therefore the host countries, which have tried to fight terrorism after they woke up a little too late, are being accused of “racism” and “Islamophobia,” “inhumanity,” and the like, as if migration of Muslims to the West had worsened their personal fortunes, not the other way round. The democratic countries of refuge that have absorbed these streams of “refugees” who arrived uninvited, were now depicted as the “oppressors” of the poor and peaceful Muslims, the likes of the oppressive countries of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and all the rest, or worse.2 So much so that many Western societies, instead of countering proudly those claims that have no leg to stand on and insist that their values be internalized by their Muslim immigrants, tend to ply before the onslaughts of their intruders and they begin preaching for incorporating Islamic values into their European societies or evincing more forgiving attitudes towards the use of violence by Muslim groups. Against this

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background of Western capitulation to the Muslims and the rampant, and spreading, disposition to Islamize European societies rather than demand westernization of their guest immigrants, Jewish minorities who observe with horror these processes, appear to be more concerned than others about the survival of Westernism, Europeanism, modernism, and separation of religion from state, which are the prerequisites for their own liberty. This does not make them likable in the eyes of the Muslims who strongly despise them in any case. In England the Home Office announced a plan of “deradicalisation” that would persuade converts to violent causes to alter their views. Namely, the new plan means that people who fall under the influence of violent organizations will not automatically face prosecution, and instead would undergo therapy and counseling from their community, not criminal charges, assuming that those who are drawn into extremism have suffered personal trauma or crisis that make them vulnerable to exploitation by others. Thus, instead of being shunned as criminals, the perpetrators are going to gain sympathy for their exposure and “exploitation,” as if they were marionettes devoid of their own will, desire, criminal intent, or ability to harm others, to the point of escaping criminal responsibility. The plan includes a suggestion that local councils should map their areas’ religions, survey and record the faiths and denominations of local residents, with a view of removing funding and denying access to public facilities if a group is found promoting violence.3 This plan, which has presumably copied Saudi Arabia’s attempt to “buy” the loyalty of its Muslim radicals by rewarding them for their “repentance,” in fact proclaims that the Muslim troublemakers in England can shed their responsibility by persuading the authorities that they are proxies, “exploited” tools of the violence of others, not free and independent agents of trouble and terror. Would those Muslims in Britain who engage in anti-Semitic attacks also be absolved of responsibility if they claim to have been brainwashed by other antiSemites? Where will be the dividing line to separate those who will be classified as instigators and those who will be considered mere dupes who can be “deradicalized”? It is precisely the polarity between Jews and Muslims in Britain, the former pushing towards preservation of the modern state and its institutions, which alone guarantee the rights and protection of minorities, the latter towards its demise via Islamization, which has necessitated a dialogue between them. Aliph-Aleph UK, founded by Dr. Richard Stone, who is also the head of a commission on Islamophobia, is such

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a trialogue organization, which includes the three Abrahamic faiths. A center for the study of Jewish-Muslim relations was recently established at Cambridge University, founded by Dr. Ed Kessler, and the Joseph Interfaith, initiated by a former director of the Maimonides Foundation, was also set up. Such a proliferation of institutions of dialogue does not only attest to the dire need for them and yearning for them, but also to the failure of government to address the mounting social issues emanating from Muslim anti-Semitism and to the seeming futility of breathing life into a dialogue that only the Jews are interested in while Muslims are reluctantly dragged into it and stay in it only as long as they can be “understood,” exonerated from accusations, courted and surrounded by sycophancy. In any case, it is usually Jews who initiate these groups and Muslims sometimes respond positively; Jews do not usually manifest Islamophobic sentiment towards Muslims even when they entertain one in the secret of their hearts, while Muslims often evince anti-Semitic attitudes; and it is Muslim demonstrations, including violent ones against Jewish holy sites and Jewish persons, which mar Judeo-Muslim relations, almost never the other way round. After ten years of activity or more, how can these interfaith groups justify their activities and existence, in view of the high level of anti-Semitism? The erroneous attempt of British Jews, as of the British government, to differentiate between “Islamists” who are labeled “anti-Semites” and the other Muslims, is the reason for some of their optimistic reports about the “progress” achieved in those dialogues.4 There are many moderate, modern, and law abiding Muslims, in Britain and elsewhere, to be sure. But they are yet to produce and enforce a “moderate” formula of Islam, which challenges the basic notions of Jihad, the deprecation of the dhimmis, and the universal hatred towards Jews among Muslims in general. Those principles, which lay at the base of Muslim anti-Semitism, are part and parcel of Islam, not of “Islamism,” and the main sources of Islam, from the classic beginnings to our days, are imbued with them. Muslims, not “Islamists” are those who pursue their violent attacks on the Jews in Britain, and the rest of Europe for that matter. And those attacks seem to increase. The Community Security Trust (CST), which provides security and defense services for the Jewish community has recorded in 2007 hundreds of attacks on Jews, in 129 of which the perpetrators were white British, 15 East European, 27 Blacks, 52 Asian, and 14 of Arab appearance.5 These latter 93 (Black, Asian, and Arab) identified perpetrators were most probably Muslim as were many of the

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unidentified attackers, something that drives the rate of active Muslim anti-Semites to more than a third of the total, or tenfold their proportion in the general population. Verifiably, a sharp increase in the attacks follows the fluctuation of the fortunes of the Arab-Israeli conflict as explained above. An independent academic criminologist, Paul Iganski from Lancaster University, also found that between 2001 and 2004, 50 percent of identifiable perpetrators of hate crimes against Jews were non-whites, presumably Muslims or various extractions.6 This sorry situation does not only point to the impotence of the Met Police and of the British Government to provide protection for its law-abiding Jewish citizenry, against the British anti-Semites and the Muslim thugs who are not arrested preventively or after the fact for fear of triggering new disturbances by Muslims. Now, the British authorities, after identifying and arresting the perpetrators, would probably send them for observation and then for “deradicalization” in view of their being mere “tools” in the hands of others (also, incidentally, Muslims). In this fashion, not only does law enforcement in Britain admit its gradual devolution, but as it accepts delinquency and crime as “exploitation” of the innocent, impunity will henceforth go in tandem with crime, and semi-private militias, like the Jewish CST (which is still unarmed for now), will have to rise to defend their membership. Lebanon today and Bosnia in the “heyday” of the civil war of the 1990s, might become the model to follow. Two contradictory trends are discernible in the British treatment of the Muslim problem and its corollaries such as anti-Semitism. On the one hand, the unbridled permissiveness, which had been instituted during the days of Jack Straw as the Home Secretary, had allowed England to become the international hub of world terrorism, with the British naively believing that giving free rein to abominable terrorists like sheikhs Omar Bakri and Abu Hamza; and pursuing a policy of multi-culturalism, which lent equal value to British education of school children and to Muslim values, which were liberally imparted to the young immigrants, would shield Britain off the major terrorist attacks which shook the U.S. and Israel. But it was not to be: the British were also targeted; the Muslim radicals, who were propagating the terrorist poison in Britain and shipping hundreds of young Britons for training in Afghanistan and Pakistan, warned that it was coming, but only Straw and his underlings refused to see the light. When they struck in July 2005, the British government was dumbfounded since it could not comprehend how its liberalism was rewarded by misdeed and terror. Only then did the government wake up to

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its responsibility, when it saw that not outside terrorists but home-grown Britons were the authors of those horrors, with more to come. Many hundreds of Muslims were arrested, the laws were toughened with regard to detention and immigration, security controls were tightened, the much pampered Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) fell out of favor, the Home Minister was replaced and a new ministry for interacting with ethnic communities (CLG) was spun off the Home Office. But, paradoxically, while these tough protective measures are being put in place, those strange attempts are being made to tackle radical groups by “deradicalization” of the culprits in a naïve attempt to turn them away from terrorism, once the perpetrators are considered “victims” of those who manipulated them into crime and terror, and not criminals responsible for their deeds and deserving to bear their punishment. But the new Secretary, Ruth Kelly, also understood that working with the radicals might alienate the moderates, and though the MCB is still invited to attend government meetings, the National Security Strategy, which has been pursued since March 2008, is stating in a direct way that the task of the government is to promote an integrated strategy to undermine radicalization and promote cohesion and the voices of moderation.7 Though in matters of burial, circumcision, and slaughter of livestock the Jews may have shared interests with their Muslim compatriots, it is the large umbrella of the British state, which alone can shield them from the overwhelming numbers and the militant tone of their Muslim compatriots. So, when the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, made a statement in early 2008 that in the future Britain should accommodate shari’a law, not only Britons in general, but particularly the Jews and other minorities, shuddered when reflecting on what awaited them if that should come to pass. On the Muslims of Britain and the rest of Europe this will have an even more lasting impact: knowing that their hour will come, as Europe is gradually plying to their design, they have no reason to follow the moderate line of integration into the system that Ruth Kelly envisages for them, and every reason to press their demands that their mores, customs, and religious precepts should become part and parcel of the British cultural and social scene. Williams has set a precedent by suggesting that the Jewish rabbinical courts in Britain and elsewhere, could be a model if the Muslim expectations for shari’a should be met. However, he missed the whole essence of the difference between the two: while Muslims intend to replace the British law and courts by the Muslim ones, first for their own sake only and then gradually converting the law

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of the land and its jurisdiction into theirs, Jews maintain the superiority of the British system, law, and courts, and the Jewish course of action as a supplemental way of mediating legal cases without conflicting with, or eclipsing British law. Though the Archbishop retracted some of his remarks, the impression remains valid that the British have been leaning backward to please and accommodate the vocal Muslim community. As the vigilant guards, lest this state of mind might gnaw into the British social and legal fiber, the Jews are perhaps more alert than others and are bound, in consequence, to draw anger and condemnations from their Muslim compatriots. The fact that the Board of Governors of the Jewish community has become a model for other ethnic and faith organizations, including the MCB, to emulate, does not diminish one iota from the Muslim wrath which the Jews will incur as they become the defenders of Britishness in the face of the many Britons who have renounced it in favor of Islam. Yussuf al-Qaradawi is a Muslim radical sheikh in exile from his native Egypt and now living in Qatar. He regularly appears on al-Jazeera network to expound his ideas and deliver fatwas that have become law in Muslim radical circles worldwide. He is also the President of the European Fatwa Council, namely the recognized authority of all European Muslims, whether they are categorized as “Islamists” or not, to deliberate on their problems, religious and otherwise, and to deliver verdicts that are seen by many as authoritative and enforceable. His friendship with the former Lord Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, who has repeatedly hosted him in the British capital during his tenure of office, against the protests of many Britons, naturally lent legitimacy and prominence to both his fiery theories and verdicts of iron and blood which are widely diffused, respected, and heeded. A French investigative report cites one of those “pearls” from his mouth: “You must continue to battle the Jews. They will try to defend themselves, but you will get them ultimately. For the Jews will hide behind trees and rocks, who will announce out loud: ‘a Jew is hiding behind me, come and kill him’, this will be a prerequisite for the coming of the Resurrection.”8 This phrase is an oft-repeated tradition of the Prophet of Islam, which recurs ad nauseam in Muslim writings and cited in full in the charter of the Hamas, without anyone asking how come that the followers of the Prophet of Islam, a faith that claims to be a “religion of peace and tolerance,” who feel acutely insulted every step of the way for whatever disrespectful statement is said of him, are not incensed by his appeal to wanton murder of the follow-

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ers of another faith? No wonder then, that when Muslims in France or elsewhere in Europe cannot indulge in full scale and wholesale pogrom against Jews as of old when the latter were defenseless, they should at least manifest their hatred by attacking individual Jews on their way to the synagogue, Jewish children on their way to school, or set fire to Jewish places of worship and cemeteries, and burn Israeli flags or effigies of Israeli leaders. In this culture of hatred and vengeance, fantasy is very prolific and the spoken recrimination or symbolic act is equated in their eyes to the real thing, which they are incapable of doing in democratic countries where Jews are no longer defenseless. Indeed the Jews in Arab and Muslim lands have all left for they could no longer bear the “peace and tolerance” which surrounded them. Muslim terrorism can be directed by Jihadists against nations of Unbelievers, or against Muslim countries presently headed by “renegade” Muslims who have “sold out” to the West, individual Infidels who are considered legitimate targets if they are members of anti-Islamic or unIslamic entities, or identified as enemies of Islam, or Muslim individuals who are regarded as heretic (kafir) or apostate (murtadd). Moreover, when Sheikh Yussuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim radical who supports inflammatory discourse against all those categories of non-conformists and encourages acts of terrorism against them, was embraced by the former Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, who could not see “anything wrong” with this radical Muslim who does not shun violence, this came to be viewed by Muslims as a capitulation of the West to the new demands of radical Islam. During the first week of July, 2003, the European Council for Fatwa, headed by Qaradawi, held its 11th conference in Stockholm to discuss questions regarding the Muslim communities in Europe. The key issue of the definition of terrorism was put on the agenda, after the previous Dublin Conference had come to a deadlock. The main Speaker, al-Qaradawi, whose opinion is much heeded in Sunni radical circles worldwide, in fact differentiated between colonialist and international political terror on the one hand, and terrorism that is permitted by Islamic Law (Shari’a), such as martyrdom (Islamikaze) operations, popularly known in the West as “suicide bombings.” He recommended the latter, as reported in a major Arabic medium in Europe: 1.

The martyrdom operations against Zionists are not included in the category of prohibited terrorism, even if its victims are civilians, thus once again submitting the definition of terrorism not to its disgraceful means of mass murder of innocent civilians, but to its goal, eo ipso

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justifying the act, regardless of whether the victims are in Tel Aviv or London, as long as they are identified as Zionists, that is enemies of Islam. European Jews who consider themselves Zionists are explicitly included in this authoritative fatwa. Israeli society was dubbed in his eyes as a “colonialist, racist and occupying power”. It is an invading society whose members had come from the outside to occupy and settle Palestinian lands. This means that any Muslim place that can be identified as “invaded” or “militarized”, like Afghanistan or Iraq under the US and Britain, Palestine under Israel or Kashmir under India, Chechnya and Daghestan under Russia, must act in self-defense and attack relentlessly and indiscriminately their enemies, be they military or civilians. This is called a Jihad of necessity binding on every Muslim individual (Fard ‘Ayn), not one of choice (Fard Kifaya). Whenever the battle is waged for the domination of Islam, any act against Muslims, even in self-defense, is tantamount to “aggression” in Muslim eyes, for Islam, which is the Path of Allah, cannot be resisted, and those who resist it are legitimate targets for annihilation. In other words, suffice it for Muslim clerics to declare Jihad against any European territory which resists its takeover by Islam, to justify any act of terror against it. Muslims have implemented that in Bosnia, partly in Macedonia, now in Kosovo, courtesy of NATO, and in the future in the Sanjak province of Serbia, or the Andalusian territory in Spain, or the Americans and Europeans who are themselves targeted, therefore persistence in the pursuit of that goal is bound to bear fruits. Even when the enemies hide behind innocent Muslims (Muslims are, by definition, always innocent) as human shield, it is permissible to kill the innocent Muslims for the sake of the overall Muslim good when that serves Muslim goals and protects the universal ummah of Islam. The significance is harrowingly simple: if civilians, like the office workers or government officials are perceived as shielding “enemies” of any sort, they are legitimate targets, like in the New York, London and Madrid massacres. In fact, he emphasized, that since every modern war is total one, and the domestic front, including laborers, industrialists and farmers stand behind their armed forces, then all of them are liable to annihilation. Islamikaze martyrdom is the most valuable weapon of Muslims, which even America’s billions cannot buy, that Allah has placed in the hands of the Believers as the weapon of the weak and the wretched in the face of world powers. Therefore, those who oppose this mode of fighting are mistaken. The martyr does not value his life when it is sacrificed for the sake of the Muslim community and is assured of Paradise in return. Unlike the usual suicidal type who commits his act as a retreat from life, the martyr dies in attack and advance forward out of his desire to attain his goals and please Allah.9

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The Hamas organization, which follows masters like Qaradawi, and implements the most ferocious strategy agaisnt Jews, Zionism, and Israel (all three used interchangeably), has often been out-Hamased by European Islamists in spite of the fact that the issues regarding the ArabIsraeli dispute are certainly not directly theirs. Some radical Muslims in Britain, for example, have blasted Hamas for failing to carry out a “real Islamic holy war” and have called for a jihad against Israel following the escalation of Israeli-Palestinian clashes in July, 2006 along the Gaza strip. A number of British Muslim organizations have urged their followers to wage war on Israel: “What the Jews are doing in Palestine today will no doubt disturb any true Muslim,” a statement authored by ‘abdul Aziz alDimashqi, said on the website of the Saved Sect group in Britain. Never mind the unprovoked rocket attacks on Israeli civilians along the Strip, or the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier from inside the Israeli territory. Dimashqi is also aware that launching a Jihad against Jews could apply to Jews in general, including his Jewish compatriots. He continued: “What hurts us equally as much is to see the Muslims in Palestine calling for an independent Palestinian state … with man-made laws, democracy, freedom and so on. Hamas has no intention to impose shari’a law, and is only concerned with its national state.” The website also warned that: “The Messenger of Allah had promised humiliation and disgrace for those who abandon Jihad and become busy with worldly life and the pursuit of wealth.” The group thought that there were too few “real mujahideen” in Palestine at the moment, therefore it urged all the Muslims of the world to answer the call for Jihad. The web message concluded: “if a terrorist is a person who resists occupation, calls for the implementation of Islam and fights for his rights, then we are all terrorists.”10 In an earlier statement, the same group said that “Israel is a cancer, Islam is the answer.” During protests in London against the Danish cartoons of Muhammed, members of the organization held similar signs declaring that “Europe is the cancer.” The British police, who finally woke up to the universal danger that these fanatics posed, have since made a number of arrests of those suspected of organizing the demonstrations. In another placard of the Saved Sect, referring to the boycott of Danish products in the Arab world, one could read: “Fight, do not boycott!”, or “ The only solution and divine method to liberate Muslim land is Jihad. Jihad in the Shari’a, means fighting, not boycotting Coca Cola or Fanta, and definitely not voting for man-made laws as suggested by many hypocrites.” The Sect also stated that that Jihad was a means to precipitate its

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long-term vision of a vast Islamic state extending over the entire Middle East. In their words: “the Caliphate is undoubtedly the permanent solution for the Muslim Ummah.” In other pro-Jihad forums used by British Muslims, anti-Israeli hatred peppered discussions: “I am so fed up with these dirty, filthy Israeli dogs. May Allah curse them and destroy them all, and may they face the same fate as Banu Qurayza,” wrote one user of the Muntada (club/forum, the short form for Muntada Ansar al-Islam) Islamic forum. Banu Qurayza was the name of a seventh-century Jewish tribe living in the Arabian Peninsula, whose members were massacred by the early Muslims, with their Prophet participating and approving.11 Since the Prophet is held as a model for all Muslims, murder of Jews anywhere could be considered as a laudatory enterprise, as in the case of the American-Jewish journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan. So much for the much trumpeted Muslim “tolerance” of other faiths. In the face of these words of incitement and these widely hailed models of murderous conduct, which are repeatedly uttered on European soil and supported by multitudes of Muslims in the West, small wonder that home-grown terrorists all over the continent are preparing themselves to die for their cause, or just kill Unbelievers, preferably Jews. In March 2006 France and much of the Jewish world were shaken by the brutal torture and murder of Ilan Halimi, a young Parisian Jew, by a Muslim group of assassins who were following the example of their coreligionists in Karachi. But this terrorist battle can be pursued in other ways too. Western intelligence services have been trying to lay their hands for years on a young Internet hacker, significantly nicknamed Irhabi 007, the symbolically deadly combination of the Qur’anic Irhab (terror) and the legendary James Bond, also known as Agent 007. He hacked into American universities’ computers, propagandized for Mus’ab Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qa’ida in Iraq, and taught other online Jihadists to wield their computers to the cause. But in the autumn of 2005 he disappeared from the message boards after the Scotland Yard arrested a young Londoner, Younis Tsouli, for plotting to pose a bomb. He was duly charged with eight different criminal offenses, from mounting a plot to detonate a bomb to possessing equipment for terrorist operations and weaving a conspiracy to obtain money by deception. During the interrogation it turned out that he was the Irhabi 007 in question. This is only the tip of the iceberg, because according to a Washington Post report, seconded by other Western media, countless Internet sites and password-protected forums have sprung out recently to serve Jihadists around the globe. The

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British investigators found in Tsouli’s house stolen credit card information, some of which was used to pay Internet providers on whose servers he had posted his propaganda messages. He and others also disseminated manuals of weaponry, videos, or insurgents in Iraq featuring beheadings of hostages and other inflammatory materials. One of those sites is Muntada Ansar al-Islam which frequently indulges in anti-Semitic hate-messages.12 Tiny Belgium, with its 40,000 Jews and 10 times as many Muslims (the same proportion as in France), has also been witnessing endless attacks on its Jewish population. The scenario taking place in Belgium exactly mirrors that of France. The far-right Neo-Nazi fringe of the population had formerly perpetrated anti-Semitic acts, but in the past few years these can be almost exclusively attributed to local Muslims. For example, in just one week in 2004, six very violent anti-Semitic attacks were reported in Antwerp, where a vibrant Jewish community lives. One of the attacks involved the stabbing of a 16-year old Jewish youth; then, three other young Jews were shot at; another one was beaten and left unconscious on the pavement; and so on. One should note that Antwerp is the city where the Arab European League was founded by Abu Jajah, a Lebanese who happened to have been involved with the Hizbullah terrorist organization. Abu Jajah stated on one occasion: “Antwerp is the European pillar of Zionism and that is why it has to become the Mecca of pro-Palestinian actions.” His movement has also threatened Belgian Jews to stop supporting Israel or violence would fall upon them. With such a menacing message, it is not surprising that young Muslims are feeling compelled to physically attack Jews in the streets of the Kingdom, even if the official figure of the anti-Semitic attacks is Belgium, which was put around 120 annually in the past few years, does not seem to reflect reality. In fact, lots of complaints are never filed with police because the victims are scared to report the violence inflicted on them. Or people just give up on going to the police. For instance, Rabbi Laskar has just ceased reporting all the assaults he is victim to anymore, because they have unfortunately become routine. In October 2001 he was attacked 3 times in the space of 24 hours: once when he was walking with his wife and children and got spat at by a dozen young Muslims; then, the next day a group of about 50 Muslims pelted them with stones and hit his young daughter in the back; and finally, that same day, 4 young Muslims attacked and attempted to choke him. More than the constant violence, there is also a growing malaise among Belgian Jews who are afraid to live their Judaism fully

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and openly. Kids attending Jewish schools are frequently harassed and need to be protected by police. The Member of Parliament and Mayor of Forest (a town in suburban Brussels), Corinne de Permentier, was appalled that two Jewish organizations had to leave her town because of constant threats. She remarked: “It is crazy that a community needs to be permanently protected by the police in a democratic country.” Other politicians are complaining that the Belgian government is not doing enough in terms of protection because in most cases no arrests have been made. Obviously, in such an environment, this is not a good time to be a Jew in Europe. That is surely why, when Elie Wiesel was in Berlin in 2004 for a conference on anti-Semitism, he was asked by close Jewish European friends a revealing question. For the first time ever, it was not: “should we leave Europe?,” but “when should we leave?”13 Jewish leaders have accused the European Union of covering up the true scale of anti-Semitic violence carried out by Muslim youth in the continent, reigniting a controversy over Europe’s failure to confront Islamic extremism at home. A study released by the EU’s Racism and Xenophobia Monitoring Center, astounded experts when it concluded that the wave of anti-Semitic persecution over the past two years (2002-4) stemmed from neo-Nazi or other racist groups. “The largest group of the perpetrators of anti-Semitic activities appears to be the young, disaffected white Europeans,” said a summary released to the European Parliament. “A further source of anti-Semitism in some countries was young Muslims of North African or Asian extraction…. Traditionally, anti-Semitic groups on the extreme Right played a part in stirring opinion,” it added. The headline findings contradict the body of the report, which says that most of the 193 violent attacks on synagogues, Jewish schools, kosher shops, cemeteries, and rabbis in France in 2002 (up from 32 in 2001) “were ascribed to youth from neighborhoods sensitive to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, principally of North African descent, while the part attributable to the extreme Right was only 9% in 2002,” it said.14 This wording is problematic in many respects. Firstly, it avoids the A and M words (Arabs and Muslims), for fearing to “insult” those large populations, but had no compunction about identifying their Jewish victims. What are they afraid of? Beyond the fact that everyone knows who are those “disaffected youths,” and who is “sensitive to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” did the report authors believe that by avoiding their direct identification they were obscuring the facts or letting the perpetrators off the hook? If anything, this wording only underlined the dismay of its authors when

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facing a reality that they lacked the courage to face head on. In addition, is their constricting the problem to the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” a fair or true reading of the situation? Are the threats of genocide voiced by Iran against Israel part of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Do the Muslim fanatics who want a Caliphate in the Middle East as in Britain care about that conflict? Iran is not even a party to the Arab-Israeli dispute, it has no common boundary with Israel, and its only concern with Israel, as is that of the Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, is its existence in the midst of the Islamic world and has nothing to do with Palestinians. If anything, Iran has been at odds with the Arab world, especially the Palestinian Authority for its “betrayal” of the Islamic tenets of negotiating with Israel. What interests it, and other Muslims, are the Hamas and the Hizbullah who also oppose, on Islamic grounds, any peace process between Arabs and Israelis. A responsible report about anti-Semitism in Europe would defeat its purpose if it is exclusively linked to the Palestinism, which has blinded Europe for too long as a universal rationalization for all the antiSemitic sentiment which has been metamorphosed into “anti-Zionism” throughout the continent (see Chapter 6). In the same vein the report on Belgium repeated the same nonsense that “most of the fire-bomb and machine-gun attacks on Jewish targets were the result of a “spill-over” from the Palestinian Intifadah. In consequence, the European Jewish Congress accused the EU watchdog of twisting data for the then 15 member-states to suit its own ideological bias, describing the report as a “catalogue of enormous contradictions, errors and omissions.” “We cannot let it be said that the majority of anti-Semitic incidents come from young, disaffected young men. This is in complete contradiction with the facts recorded by the police,” insisted the Jewish Congress reaction. The EU had suppressed a report in 2003 by German academics, which concluded that Arab gangs were largely responsible for a sudden surge in the anti-Jewish violence, allegedly because the findings were politically unpalatable. Victor Weitzel, who wrote a large section of a far more detailed study, told the Daily Telegraph that the latest findings had been “consistently massaged” by the EU watchdog to play down the role of North African (that is Arab and Muslim) youth. This could only mean that the “EU seems incapable of facing up to the truth on this,” he added, and emphasized that “everything is being tilted to ensure nice soft conclusions.” He also remarked that “when I told them that we need to monitor the inflammatory language being used by the Arabic press in Europe, this was changed into ‘minority press’. Honestly, it’s incredible!”

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Weitzel’s 48 page section, compiled with a Polish academic, Magdalena Sroda, is the fruit of months of interviews with Jewish leaders across Europe. While far right and traditional Christian forms of anti-Semitism still exist, the report hones in on the new form of “anti- Zionist” left which demonizes Israel and subtly leaks into prejudice against the Jews. The study describes Belgium as a country where anti-Semitism has become almost fashionable among the left-wing intelligentsia, a process that has since expanded into Britain and much of the rest of Western Europe. At any rate, the report focuses on Jew-baiting by Muslim youth in Europe, and it paints an alarming picture of France’s 600,000 Jews, the EU’s biggest Jewish community. There, Jewish children are routinely beaten with impunity, and teachers dare not talk about the Holocaust for fear of “provoking” Muslim students. Britain, which saw a 75 percent rise in incidents against Jews in 2003, was also gently rebuked in that report for hesitating to take “politically awkward” measures against Islamic radicals, because of the government’s reluctance to upset the much larger and restive Muslim community.15 More independent reports by journalists and scholars confirm once and again that the rise in anti-Semitic acts in Europe goes hand in hand with the widening grip of radical Islam there. Molenbeek, one of Brussel’s poorest communes, for example, which became one of the breeding grounds for radical Muslims, was investigated by an undercover FlemishMoroccan freelance journalist, Hind Fraihi. She claims to have spoken to dozens of young Muslims who had been offered weapon training in Afghanistan to join Islamic Jihadist ranks. The Flemish newspapers—Het Nieuwsblat and Het Volk published the first part of her investigation based on her observations and conversations in mosques, cultural centers, and on the streets of Molenbeek-Saint Jean. Gunther Vanpraet, the managing editor of the two newspapers, said that Fraihi had wanted to see “if the rumors about the increase of the numbers or Muslim extremists were true.” He said that hundreds of young Muslim adults there had been studying Islam for years. “They are the future Muslim leaders,” he observed, and added that “alongside them there is a significant group of young people who have very little hope of a normal future in our country, because of their lack of training and because of the job market. This is a breeding ground for thousands of Jihad candidates who are ready to commit terrorist attacks and to lead the religious war against the Infidels.” Vanpraet also said that these fanatics were using Belgium as a base for planning terrorism, rather than as a target. Fraihi found extremist Jihad writings

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in several Molenbeek libraries and said such documents were also in frequent circulation in the commune. “The majority of the mosques which circulate these dangerous documents operate in the greatest secrecy and are difficult for the security services to infiltrate,” she wrote. She mentioned that fanatic recruiters approach Muslim residents in the streets or in mosques. Molenbeek Mayor, Philippe Moureaux, and the police played down the findings, saying that the number of Muslim terrorists was small and that many were already known to the authorities and were under surveillance.16 It is not difficult to connect between these hot houses of thuggery and terrorism and the growth in the rampant anti-Semitic eruptions throughout the country and the continent. In Australia, in addition to the violent anti-Israeli riots, which were perpetrated at the outbreak of the Intifadah in 2000, using the same anti-Semitic themes as their European coreligionists, they also engage in active peddling of hatred against the Jews, while inciting violence and glorifying terrorism. When the government reformed sedition laws in 2005 in order to stop direct incitement to terrorist violence, some of the media and academics raised hysterical claims that the laws went too far and would stifle legitimate political reporting and debate. But it soon became clear that in some respects these laws did not go far enough. The government committed itself to review the laws with a view of addressing the existing loopholes, which under the present situation allow free circulation of literature which incites to hatred, violence, and terror. Those activities are led by Jihadists who oppose democracy and are committed to overthrow it and undermine it, therefore the initiators of the new laws thought that they ought to protect it from them rather than them from it. Unlike Europe where the Muslim immigrants fail to dilute themselves in their host societies, and therefore create a state of friction with their shelter countries, Australia remains committed to multi-culturalism, like Canada and the U.S. to some extent, due to its make up since its inception by an immigrant society, which is constantly in the making. But multi-culturalism does not mean freedom to propagate hatred. At a Muslim bookstore in Sydney, which prides itself on being the largest in the country, one of the children’s books offered for sale is The Emergence of Dajjal, The Jewish King, authored by Muhamad Yasin Owadally. This Malaysian publication argues that every Jew is part of a plot to take “control of the whole world, from east to west, under the leadership of Dajjal,” the Muslim equivalent of the Christian anti-Christ. Any peace process in the Middle East, the text argues, is the result of superpowers preparing

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the path for the Jews. This signifies in Muslim parlance that every Jew is the existential opponent of Islam, and Muslims should be opposed to such a demarche at every turn. The idea of every world problem being the result of Jewish conspiracy, goes back to that infamous and spurious text of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which remains popular among Arabs and Muslims, and anti-Semites around the globe. The introduction to that book, which is available at a give-away price, says, inter alia: “The Christian world has already been snared, and it lies and prostrates at the mercy of the ruthless inhuman cabal.” Another Muslim store sold a new stock of Henry Ford’s The New International Jew, which includes the text of the Protocols, prefaced by anti-Semitic invective, printed in Johannesburg of all places. When one adds to that the injunction of Sheikh Abdallah Humaid: “When you meet those who disbelieve, smite at their necks till you have killed and wounded many of them and taken the rest captive”; and you have a harrowing framework for the operation of this industry of hatred in the heart of a free democratic nation.17 After the al-Aqsa Intifadah broke out in 2000, a sustained campaign by the Muslims of France, in apparent coordination with other Muslims throughout the world, was launched simultaneously against Israel and the Jews, where not only Israeli symbols and interests were harmed, but also the institutions of their Jewish compatriots. Synagogues and cemeteries, Jewish day schools and Jewish schoolchildren, Jewish worshippers and their private homes, were attacked, burned, threatened, intimidated, and ridiculed in public, causing death in some cases. In no instance did any public or clerical figure in the Arab and Muslim worlds so much as raise their voice against this disrespectful and violent conduct, as they would do with vengeance when an innocent blasphemy against their tenets, which hurt no one and threatened no one, which would unfold in Denmark five years later. In 2001, a small collective booklet was put together, edited and published in France, under the title of the Lost Grounds of the Republic (Les Territoires Perdus de la Republique), by a group of high school (Lycee) teachers throughout France, Jews and non-Jews, who could no longer bear the rule of terror introduced into the public school system by Muslim youth. Chapter after chapter, writer after writer, the teachers who were audacious enough to publish their accounts, told of their experiences in their respective schools, where every time the word “Jew” was uttered, the Arabs would hurl anti-Semitic swearing words at them and express their regrets that Hitler did not finish them off; and whenever the word “Holocaust” was mentioned, a noisy choir of deniers

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would shout “Lie!, there was no Holocaust!” The frightened teachers, who were often threatened and sometimes assaulted physically, left the classes, afraid for their own safety, and turned to their school principals, who were as intimidated as they were and were reluctant to react. This inaction was replicated all the way up the echelons of “education” in France, even including the Minister of Education himself, who proved just as inept and helpless. In despair, the teachers decided to publicize that book of protest against the Republic, whose values of liberty, equality, and fraternity they tried to impart to their students but were prevented from doing so.18 So, while during the 5 years which preceded the outbreak of the Intifadah in 2000, 16 anti-Semitic acts were recorded in France, in the subsequent 5 years, there were 672. The French Interior Ministry found that a Jew’s chances of becoming the victim of an attack were 44 times greater than those of a Muslim or a black.19 A case in point was what became a cause celebre in France, of a pretty seventeen-year old girl, anonymously referred to as yalda (a girl, in Hebrew), who served as a bait for the kidnappers, torturers, and killers of Ilan Halimi, a young Jewish telephone salesman, whose body was later found in a wasteland in Paris. She later realized what she had done only when she heard the Muslim thugs, those “youth of the suburbs,” dragging their shrieking prey to his death. She was “remunerated” when the captors paid for a hotel room where she and her boyfriend spent the night. Testimony of this grim event made the French internalize the threat of the “barbarians at the gate” of their beloved capital, except that in the modern era the barbarians were within the city walls and trampling upon the disintegrating European civilization. Those same gangs of hooded thugs also assailed and robbed students who attended anti-government demonstrations in the heart of Paris, thus making good on French fears that the hordes of the suburbs were intent on invading their affluent and self-content heartland. Indeed, the gang that the yalda worked for was known as Les Barbares, which included blacks, Arabs, and whites from Portugal and France. The shocking cruelty they inflicted on Halimi seemed to have little to do with their efforts to extract money from his family, and evoked the sadistic universe of Clockwork Orange, the famous novel of Anthony Burgess, with a massive dose of anti-Semitism appended to it. After his abduction he was tortured with acid and cigarette burns for more than 3 weeks. More than 30 neighbors in that dreadful residential block where he was kept, were aware of what was happening, but divulged to the

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police nothing of the crime, which was only part of an overall wave of attacks against Jews in France. The French public was shocked not only by the inhumanity of the kidnappers towards Jews in this case, but more so from the realization that the barbarians will attack them next, following the sinister maxim that “those who steal for you will end up stealing from you.” Besides yalda, other women were arrested for their botched attempts to entrap Jews. One admitted that the head of the gang, Yussuf the Barbarian, said expressly that “he wanted a Jew” because “Jews are rich, and since they stick together they are willing to pay.” That Jews, or any other human group would pay because they hold life to be precious, did not occur to Yussuf. One of the female witnesses attracted two victims, one of whom was rejected because he was not Jewish. A member of the family of a girl-victim who was ruthlessly torched, said: “I want barbarism rejected. We are not in a war. I refuse to live in a country that cannot defend its citizens.” Such criminal attacks specifically against Jews, by gangs of rapists and robbers, for the most part Muslims, strikes a particularly shameful ring among the French who know of the history of anti-Semitism of their country and of the French collaboration with the Germans in sending the Jews to be annihilated in Nazi crematoria. Some specialists acknowledged the rise in anti-Semitism and attributed it equally to the Intifadah of 2000 and to the internal politics connected with Dieudonne (see previous chapter) episode. But the murder of Halimi was not the first inflicted on French Jewry since the start of the Intifadah of 2000. On November 19, 2003, Sebastian Sellam, 23, a Jewish disk jockey, left his apartment in a modest building of Paris’ 10th arrondissement, heading to work as usual. In the underground parking lot, a Muslim neighbor slit Sellam’s throat twice, and completely mutilated his face with a fork. Even his eyes were gouged out. Sellam’s mother said the killer then mounted the stairs, his hands still bloody, and announced his deed. “I have killed my Jews! I will go to Heaven,” he shouted in ecstasy. Such a conviction was no doubt inspired by the oft-cited hadith from Mishkat al-Masabih: “When judgment day arrives, Allah will give every Muslim a Jew or a Christian to kill so that the Muslim will not enter into hell fire.” Another gruesome murder was committed by a Muslim that evening when Muhammed Ghrib, 37, stabbed Chantal Piekolek, 53, 27 times in her neck and chest while she worked in her Avenue de Clichy shoe store.20 Both incidents were barely reported at the time, and certainly their anti-Semitic motivation was ignored or downplayed.

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In some Paris suburbs, where Muslim immigrants abound, the word “Jew” appears in graffiti on walls and on the tongues of Muslim youth in playgrounds and in the streets, as a degrading epithet, with blacks and Arabs coalescing against Jews and intimidating them. Following the Halimi murder in February 2006, anti-Semitic pronouncements have become yet more widespread among the unemployed and alienated Muslim youth, particularly in the state school system. Even school inspectors, like Jean Pierre Obin, who had written a report in 2004 where he asserted that anti-Semitism was “ubiquitous,” have no compunction about criticizing their own Minister of Education, who is accused of “having done nothing to redress this pitiful situation,” resulting in the sad fact that Jewish children can no longer go to just any school. One teacher was stunned on the morrow of September 11 to see in the stairwell of his school a spray-painted airplane crashing into the Twin Towers, with the caption reading: “Death to the US and the Jews!” Even years thereafter, Muslims in his classes still believed that the devastation was caused by the Jews. He said that when he mentioned that Hitler had killed millions of Jews, one of his Muslim students blurted out that “he would have been a good Muslim.” A student who inscribed “dirty Jew” in one of his class notebooks was punished by two hours of detention. Some say that North African Arabs who immigrated to France brought with them an anti-Jewish sentiment and passed over their prejudices to the second and third generations, at a time when French sense of guilt for their colonial era in North Africa left them disinclined to discipline the Arab immigrants, unlike the firm stance they took against the French Right when it showed signs of anti-Semitism. Meanwhile, Imams refused the call of Rabbis to tour together problematic neighborhoods because they feared they would be seen as “collaborators” by their coreligionists. A stop-gap measure taken by the Ministry of the Interior was to increase security around Jewish institutions. All this has generated an exodus of Jews, some of them for the second time after their parents had left North Africa for the safety of France and now find themselves obliged to move on to Israel or the U.S. Some have chosen the inconvenience of settling their families in Israel and commuting every weekend to visit them, while they kept their jobs or businesses in France. Those who stay avoid exhibiting in public Jewish symbols, after knives were put to their throats on more than one occasion in the streets of France.21

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Certainly, continuously labeling Islam as a “religion of peace” by Europeans, notably Prime Minster Blair in Britain, makes Muslims complacent, while offending them and lashing out at their behavior pushes them to soul-searching. A case in point was David Cameron, the head of the opposition Tories in Parliament, who compared Muslims who seek to live under Shari’a to BNP supporters.22 Cameron and other leaders were encouraging Muslims to monitor and tone down their religious sermons in mosques, which engendered much incitement against non-Muslims. An indication of the potency of the incitement, Hamas itself was cited as having banned open-air Friday prayers organized by the Fatah rival faction in Gaza, claiming that their rivals were using outdoor worship on Fridays to sow chaos and sedition, because they knew how those sermons could be exploited, something that took Europeans decades to appreciate.23 To British Muslims, who know that Israel has very little room to maneuver with the Muslims at her door step, it is becoming increasingly clear that the conflict in the Middle East is about religion, not about land. The Israel Intelligence Heritage and Commemoration Center (IICC) in Herzliya, Israel, has issued a scathing report, which accuses Britain of being a “major source of publishing and distribution of Hamas incitement.” The report notes that, even today (Aug, 2007), Britain “does not stop the distribution of hateful propaganda against Israel and the West, and publications glorifying ‘suicide bombings’, while the Hamas media empire is guided from Damascus and assisted by Arab countries.” It also has a branch operating in Britain and uses it for printing and distribution of Hamas publications. Prominent among these publications is the monthly Filastin al-Muslima (Muslim Palestine). The monthly is what can one expect from a publication whose editorial line is directed by the Hamas leadership in Damascus. From Britain, it is responsible for planning and initiating “suicide attacks.” The online bi-weekly Al-Fateh, combines articles and illustrations for children whom Hamas considers a significant target audience. Al Fateh is designed to inculcate in children support for radical Islam, violence, and terrorism.24 These radical and hate-filled materials are not only intended against Israel, but also serve as indoctrinating stuff for Muslim youth in Britain, who read them and are often tempted to act upon them, as in the 2005 London bombings. Indeed, British security has been alerted by a wide assortment of potential and actual terrorists of every hue. A Pakistani-born British national, Iaz Ali, was arrested by the Israeli Shin Bet (Internal Security Agency), and he admitted that he had served as a representative

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of Islamic Relief Worldwide (IRW), a Birmingham-based organization established in 1984 and suspected of funding Hamas activity. Ali told his Israeli interrogators that he had served as the IRW representative in the Gaza Strip since December 2005 and mainly worked on money transfers from abroad and to Hamas institutions, which had been outlawed in Israel. On his computer, Shin Bet found incriminating documents allegedly proving IRW’s relationship with illegally-run Hamas charities in Nablus, Saudi Arabia, and Britain. IRW representatives in Israel sometimes operated out of Hamas offices and served as an integral part of the Palestinian terror network, security officials said. Following negotiations with Ali’s lawyer, Israel agreed to deport him to the U.K. without the option of returning to Israel.25 Soon thereafter The Times revealed that the conflict of the Middle East had led to a surge of anti-Semitism in Britain, and an All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Anti-Semitism reported that a sinister symbiotic relationship had developed between far-Right groups and Islamic extremists who are united in their hatred of all things Jewish. The inquiry, chaired by former Minister for Europe Denis MacShane, uncovered calls for the killing of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or extremist religion and the demonization of Jews through conspiracy myths and Holocaust denial. It found that Arabic translations of Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were stocked in Arabic bookstores in London. Of particular concern to the inquiry was anti-Semitism on campuses, with literature being distributed that called for the killing of Jews and the destruction of Israel. Criticism of Israel is being used as a pretext for fomenting hatred against the Jews in general and Britain in particular. There was a tendency to compare Israeli policies to those of the Nazis and to hold Jews collectively responsible for the actions of Israel. The Committee was sent material broadcast on Arab and Iranian television in which children are incited to wage Jihad against Jews. Figures from the Community Security Trust showed 455 anti-Semitic “accidents” in 2005, the second highest figure since records began in 1984. It said that Britain’s 300,000 Jews are “more anxious and more vulnerable to abuse and attack than at any other time for a generation and longer.” The report criticized police forces for failing adequately to monitor anti-Jewish accidents and called on the Crown Prosecution Service to investigate why fewer than 1 in 10 reported incidents led to prosecution. It referred to anti-Semitic discourse, defined as “a widespread change in mood and tone when Jews were discussed, whether in print or broadcast,

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at universities or in public or in social settings.” It recommended that an interdepartmental task force be set up to combat anti-Semitism and involve local government. It called for more research into the correlation between attacks on Jews in Britain and events in the Middle East, adding that all police forces should be required to record anti-Semitic incidents. The conclusions drawn by the 14-member panel of 14 MPs support the findings of a study published by two Yale University professors, which report that anti-Israel sentiments were a predictor of anti-Semitism.26 Figures compiled by the police illustrate that Jewish people are 4 times more likely to be attacked because of their religion as Muslims. One in 400 Jews compared to one in 1,700 Muslims are likely to be victims of “Faith hate” attacks every year. The figure is based on data collected over 3 months in 2006 in police areas accounting for half the Muslim and Jewish populations of England and Wales. The crimes range from assaults and verbal abuse to criminal damage at places of worship. Police forces started recording the religion of faith-hate victims only in 2006. They did so on the instruction of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), which wanted a clear picture of alleged community tensions around the country, following reports of Muslims being attacked after September 11 and the July 7 London bombings. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said that the large rise expected in after July 7 had not materialized. The CPS report revealed that not a single person accused of an anti-Semitic crime had been prosecuted on a charge of religiously aggravated offense. A report by MPs in September said British Jews were more vulnerable to attack and abuse now than for a generation. Ian Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader, who sat on the all-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into anti-Semitism in September, said it was “perverse” that not all police forces recorded anti-Semitic accidents. The ACPO directive was ignored by most forces, whose systems are not designed to record religion, though they routinely record ethnicity. ACPO said large organizations take time to adjust to new systems. Information on faith-hate crimes obtained by the Sunday Telegraph, showed that in London and Manchester, where Muslims outnumber Jews by four to one, anti-Semitic offenses exceeded anti-Muslim offenses.27 Much of the antagonism to Jews in the West is manifested in universities, where Israeli, Jewish, or pro-Israeli speakers are harassed and often prevented from addressing their audiences, precisely at the bastions that should be championing free speech and expressions of ideas of all sorts. This is done by Arab and Muslim students, in concert with other local

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anti-Semites and anti-Israeli activists who cannot be controlled by their institutions and are often incited from the outside by fake students who are there only to stir trouble and foment anti-Semitism. The speakers, like the universities’ authorities, vary from standing firm on the principle of free speech for all and confronting the hagglers, to capitulating to them under pretexts of “security,” “safety,” or the desire to avoid controversy and violence. One of those brave fighters has been Brigitte Gabriel who insists that universities are “the battlegrounds where we must fight to win back the opinion and allegiance of American students, even though this is made harder when Islamists in both the colleges and local communities try to intimidate us and deny our free speech on campuses.” What applies to the U.S. is certainly relevant to European campuses. Gabriel, a Christian refugee from Lebanon who has shrapnel in her body(dating from the time when she and her family were targeted by Muslims during the Lebanese civil war), has grown accustomed to negative attitudes on the major West and East Coast elites in the U.S. as well as in Europe where she travels for lecture tours. There, campuses harbor radical professors, anarchist students, and militant Muslim activists. Yet she was stunned to find in the heartland of America, as she would have in all parts of Europe, campuses like the University of Memphis, where the Muslim community launched a full scale campaign to stop the lectures, which she was invited to present for the Judaic Studies program. They demanded the cancellation of her lectures in emails, which flooded the administrators from Muslim students on campus and Muslims in the community and in mosques. There is no equivalent of militant Jews or Christians who demanded the same limitations of Muslim preachers even when they call for violence and unrest. Even in the case of Columbia University in the Fall of 2007, when Ahmadinajad’s controversial visit on campus was challenged due to his incitement and genocidal designs on Jews and Israel, his public debate was allowed to run. In Memphis, as in other places in the West, the demands to exclude Jewish events use the most strange of pretexts: People like Brigitte are plenty in the world, they are the true enemies of Islam. And despite their rubbish talks, the truth about Islam is spreading like a wildfire across America and around the globe. All Praise to Allah! Dr Patterson [the Dean of the School], hosting this lady is in its order of magnitude worse than hosting of the Imperial Wizard of the KU Klux Klan. Do you honestly think the scheduled lecture will serve any useful purpose other than inflaming the Muslims, insulting them and spilling poison in the community?28

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Gabriel wrote that “if they would put the same energy into condemning the radical element within Islam and join us in saying that slaughtering people in the name of Allah is murder, not Jihad, maybe we won’t question their loyalty as American citizens.” Dr. Patterson, who invited Gabriel, refused to bow to their intimidation and introduced her by telling the audience what an eye opener had this lecture become because of the reaction to it. He stated that he never realized that in Memphis a speaker’s safety could be threatened, necessitating a police response. This state of affairs, when speakers need police officers to protect their freedom of speech, has been duplicated in Europe too. America is the country where free speech is protected under the Constitution, and so it is Europe. But when police ignore it for the sake of “public safety,” it presents the crack that Muslim activists are seeking to start the process of disintegration and chaos that would facilitate their takeover of the campus. At the end of Gabriel’s lecture the Muslims swarmed in front of her, questioning and intimidating her. Police officers quickly moved in and took her to the police cars as the enraged Muslims started shouting.29 Such behavior has turned university campuses in the West into testing grounds where this battle will be waged in years to come. As in the cartoon affair, the issue is not an insult to the Prophet or disregard of Muslim values, but whether the very concept of freedom will win in the face of coercion that the Islamists are trying to enforce. A British university was accused of selling out academic freedom of speech by scrapping a talk on links between Nazis and Islamic antiSemitism after allegedly receiving emails from Muslims protesting the event. Matthias Kuntzel, a German author and political scientist who specializes in the threat of Muslim fundamentalism, was told by the University of Leeds that his talk and workshop on Hitler’s Legacy: Islamic anti-Semitism in the Middle East, had been cancelled because of “security fears.” Two academics in the Leeds’ German Department, which had organized the event, claimed the university had “bowed” to Muslim protests.” Kuntzel said he had given similar addresses around the world and there had been no problems. He added: “I was told it was for security reasons—that they cannot shelter my person. But I do not feel in any way threatened. My impression was that they wanted to avoid the issue in order to keep the situation calm. My feeling is that this is a kind of censorship.” He said that the contents of the emails described to him did not overtly threaten violence, but they were “very, very strongly worded.” The university denied censorship, saying the organizers had

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not given it enough notices to arrange for stewards to be on duty at what was bound to be a controversial event. One of the protest emails, from a student who describes himself as “of both Middle Eastern and Islamic background,” complained that the title of the event was profoundly “offensive,” suggesting that the same argument advanced for the Cartoon Affair was going to turn into a precedent and that henceforth, only items cleared by Muslims could be cleared in public. That student explained: “to suggest that there is any link between Islam and anti-Semitism is not only a sweeping generalization but also an erroneous statement that holds no essence of truth.”30 Not only events and lectures are being censored, but also the veracity of historical writing must be verified and approved by Muslims before it is aired, according to Muslims, lest it be “offensive” or “erroneous,” two anathemas Islam cannot bear. Kuntzel later accused Britain of being the worst country for stifling debate on Muslim extremism. The cancellation of his lecture came two weeks after students at Oxford University launched a petition demanding the sacking of David Coleman, a professor of demography, over his links to Migrationwatch, the immigration think tank. Kuntzel said: “It is a worrying trend. If I say something which is not positive about a particular brand of Islam, the imposition is that I am inciting hatred of every Muslim. I am very concerned about this—it is an attack on academic freedom.” He added: “There is nothing wrong with holding beliefs but you must be able to challenge and question them. Academic integrity is all about the exchange of positions and the search for truth—I think this is in danger in the UK.”31 His lecture finally went ahead in October, 2007. But the EU, cowering to these threats, has drawn up guidelines advising government spokesmen to refrain from linking Islam and terrorism in their statements. Brussels officials have confirmed the existence of a classified handbook, which offers “non-offensive” phrases to use when announcing anti-Terrorist operations or dealing with terrorist attacks. Banned terms are said to include: Jihad, Islamic, or fundamentalist. One suggested alternative is for the term Islamic terrorism to be replaced by terrorists who abusively invoke Islam. An EU official said that the guidebook, or “common lexicon” is aimed at preventing the distortion of the Muslim faith and the alienation of Muslims in Europe. Details of the contents of the lexicon remain secret, but British officials stressed that it is there as a helpful aid “providing context” for civil servants making speeches or giving press conferences.32 A lexicon to frame the debate on radicalization has been a project of long standing. The previous year, an

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EU official said: “The basic idea behind it is to avoid the use of improper words that would cause frustration among Muslims and increase the risk of radicalization,” adding that “Jihad means something for you and me; it means something else for a Muslim. Jihad is a perfectly positive concept of trying to fight evil within oneself.”33 One wishes he were right, or at the very least he knew what the term means for Muslims like the Hamas and the Hizbullah or the Muslim Brothers or the Hizbut-Tahrir, which have branches in Europe. At the same time that imaginary “offenses” against Islam are actively suppressed, there seems to be no one in the EU able, willing, or courageous enough to take to task Muslims in Europe who daily, perpetually, and repeatedly offend other faiths, including those of their host countries. The training of imams in Europe, for example, which is supposedly conducted in place in order to avoid the import of fiery radical imams from Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, turns out not to lag behind the forbidden import, giving the impression that Europe is sleepwalking into its demise or simply entertaining an unfathomable death wish, in the process also encouraging anti-Semitism in its midst. Muslim students training to be imams at a British college with strong Iranian links, complained that they were being taught fundamentalist doctrines, which describe non-Muslims as “filth.” The Times of London obtained extracts from medieval texts taught to students in which unbelievers are likened to pigs and dogs. The texts are taught at the Hawza Ilmiya in London, a religious school, which has a sister institution, the Islamic College for Advanced Studies (ICAS), which in turn offers a degree validated by Middlesex University. The students study their religious courses alongside the university-backed BA in Islamic studies. They spend two days a week as religious students and three days on their university courses. The Hawza Ilmiya and the ICAS are in the same building at Willesden High Road, North London, and share many of their teaching staff. They have a single fund-raising arm, the Irshad (Guidance) Trust, one of the managing trustees of which is Abolhossein Moezi, an Iranian cleric and a personal representative of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme religious leader. Moezi is also the director of the Islamic Center of England (ICEL) in Maida Vale, a large mosque and community center that is a registered charity. Its memorandum of association, lodged with the Charity Commission, states: “At all times, at least one of the trustees shall be a representative of the supreme spiritual leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” Both the Irshad Trust and ICEL were established in 1996.34

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In their first annual accounts, lodged with the Charity Commission in 1997, the “charities” in question revealed substantial donations. The Irshad received over a million pounds and ICEL accepted an “exceptional item” of over another million. Around that time, ICEL bought a former cinema theater in Maida Vale without a mortgage- an indication of its fluidity. Since then it has received over one million pounds every year in donations, which, it says, come from British and foreign donors, but it declines to specify whether any of its money comes from Iran. Since 2000 its accountants have recorded in their auditors’ report on the charity accounts that they have limited evidence about the source of donations, though the links between those two charities and Iran are strong. The final three years of the eight-year Hawza Ilmiya course are spent studying in colleges in Qom, the Iranian holy city and power base of Iranian top clerics. It is hard to imagine that a regime, which openly hates Jews, calls for their genocide, and denies the Holocaust, should resist the temptation to impart those same beliefs to the students it supports. In fact, the text that has upset some students is the core work in their “Introduction to Islamic Law” class, written by Muhaqqiq al-Hilli,35 a thirteenth-century Shi’ite scholar. The Hawza Ilmiya website states that “the module aims to familiarize the student with the basic rules of Islamic Law as structured by al-Hilli.” Besides likening Unbelievers to filth, the text includes a chapter on Jihad, setting down the conditions under which Muslims are supposed to fight Jews and Christians. The text is one of a number of books that some students said they found “disturbing and very worrying.”36 Middlesex University, which accredits the ICAS courses but not the Hawza Ilmiya, said: “The BA in Islamic studies offered by the Islamic College of Advanced Studies is validated by Middlesex University.” It is, then, the university’s responsibility to ensure that the academic standards of this particular program are appropriate, and also to inquire into the contents of what is taught in all courses. However, the doctrinal details of the curriculum are no less harrowing than the overall program. They teach that : “The water left over in the container after any type of animal has drunk from it is considered clean and pure apart from the left over of a dog, a pig and an Unbeliever”; “there are ten types of filth and impurities: urine, faeces, semen, carrion, blood of carrion, dogs, pigs, Unbelievers. When a dog, a pig, an Unbeliever touches or comes in contact with the clothes or body [of a Muslim] while he [ the Unbeliever] is wet, it becomes obligatory upon him [the Muslim] to wash and clean that part which came in contact with the Unbeliever.”37 “Unbeliever” here

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refers to Christians and Jews, vividly demonstrating that Muslim ill-will towards Jews pre-dated the Arab-Israeli conflict by at least six centuries. The oft-cited territorial (and resolvable) conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has therefore never been more than a smokescreen for the intractable religious one. A nation composed of people who are despised and considered “filth” would never be recognized by pious Muslims. Similarly, the Christian society of Europe, to which Muslims have immigrated of their own choice, and yet teach their children to hate and despise it, must wonder about the ultimate goals of these immigrants. For their attitude often demonstrates that they are in Europe in order to undermine it, not to adapt to it. A documentary film was broadcast on television of anti-Semitic incitement in a Birmingham mosque. It showed Saudi-trained imams teaching radical hate messages against Jews and Israel. This, and the following murderous attacks in London of July 7 helped focus police and other security apparatuses throughout Europe on violent acts by Muslims, be they specifically anti-Semitic or terroristic generally. But the huge numbers of mosques and other Muslim centers render the task daunting for most national police forces in the EU. Incitement of European Muslims to action is also directly influenced by satellite television channels from the Middle East, like the Hizbullah’s al-Manar, and the more respectable Qatar-based al-Jazeerah, which in many instances has been proven to serve the PR needs of al-Qa’ida and other Muslim radicals who are bracing for action. It is no coincidence that there is a marked increase of anti-Semitic activities in the major European countries in 2007-8, in comparison with the previous years. According to a BBC broadcast, there was a 9 percent rise in anti-Semitic incidents in the U.K. in the first half of 2008 compared with the same period the year before. There were 266 incidents up to June, compared with 244 the previous year, according to the Community Security Trust (CST) of Britain. Some 166 were incidents of abusive behavior, including verbal abuse, hate mail, and anti-Semitic graffiti. CST emphasized that improved contact with smaller Jewish communities “goes some way to explaining the overall rise.” Incidents involving Jewish students or academics and at colleges rose 88 percent, from 26 to 49. There were also 29 incidents involving Jewish schools and schoolchildren. Violent assaults were down, from 54 in the first 6 months of 2007, to 42. In smaller communities, outside the biggest Jewish communities in London and Manchester, CST recorded 98 incidents in 38 different areas. This included 21 incidents in Leeds,

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up from 13 a year before, and a rise from 6 to 10 in Liverpool. In the first half of 2007, CST had recorded 70 incidents in 25 locations outside London and Manchester. “This is partly explained by efforts made by CST to improve contact with smaller Jewish communities beyond the main urban centres, and goes some way to explaining the overall rise in incidents,” the charity said. John Mann MP, chair of the parliamentary group against anti-Semitism, said the report showed improved reporting of incidents involving students and smaller communities. “By knowing the scale of the problem we can deploy strategies to combat anti-Semitism from our streets and our campuses,” he said, “Every anti-Semitic attack is a blight on society.”38 In a report-cum-analysis of an American reporter living in Paris, Nidra Poller described a series of anti-Jewish violent eruptions, which deepen the anxiety of the local Jewish communities as to the future, in the face of the great hopes that were appended to the Sarkozy term as President. The brutal mob beating of a Jewish teenager in full view of witnesses at the end of a summer afternoon in 2008, marks in her eyes an “ominous development in the hate crimes that have plagued France since the fall of 2000.” Previously, Paris’s worst anti-Semitic crimes were committed behind closed doors: In 2003, Sébastien Selam was murdered and mutilated by a Muslim neighbor in the underground parking lot of their building. In 2005, Ilan Halimi was tortured to death by Youssouf Fofana and his “Gang of Barbarians” in a housing project in the banlieue. As if to camouflage the horror of a brazen aggression, French media framed 17-year-old Rudy Haddad’s beating in an incongruous narrative of turf battles between Jewish gangs and African and Maghrebi gangs. Confused accounts of the June 21 fights that ended with the attack against Rudy—portrayed as a tough guy with a police record—curiously recall the “cycle of violence” treatment of the Arab-Israeli conflict, where Palestinian terror attacks and Israeli efforts to prevent them are judged as morally equivalent. In Rudy’s case, officials and reporters contravened the customary self-imposed gag rule and immediately pinned an ethnoreligious label on the “youths” who, according to witnesses, bashed Rudy’s skull, broke his ribs, jumped up and down on his inert body with all their might shouting “dirty Jew,” and left him in a coma. But every account ended with a line about “intercommunitarian strife” that placed half the blame on the victim. The exact nature of these Jewish gangs was left in the dark; no one would imagine they were stealing motor scooters, beating up Muslims and taunting imams.39

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President Nicolas Sarkozy, who had just arrived in Israel when the story broke, did not hedge: He promised that the perpetrators of this heinous crime would be severely punished. Judicial and police authorities, following suit, launched an investigation for attempted murder with aggravating circumstances of anti-Semitism and mob violence. Five minors were held briefly and then released as material witnesses. Until a thorough investigation clearly establishes what happened on June 21, we are left with conflicting versions of a series of fights—or one-sided attacks—around the City Hall in Paris’s 19th arrondissement. The fighting apparently began on the grassy knolls of the vast Buttes Chaumont park, where many Jews traditionally gather on the Sabbath—and where Muslim bullies systematically come to harass them. Later, a group of 15 or 20 of the usual suspects ganged up on a lone young Jewish man walking from a metro station to the park. When he returned with some friends to look for his Jewish star necklace that had been ripped off, they were attacked again; one of his friends had his arm gashed with a machete. A woman witnessed another violent fight near the City Hall in the mid-afternoon. Fearing someone would get killed—the (African and Maghrebi) assailants were beating their victims with iron bars—she asked the policemen on duty to intervene. One of them shrugged and said, “They should all go home.” No one has reported seeing gangs of Jews beating up defenseless Muslims that day, emphasizes Poller. But Mourad Afira, himself an Arab, who owns a bar across from the housing project, claims he saw 20 Jewish guys on a “punitive expedition” run up the street at about 6:30 p.m. Seeing they were outnumbered, he says, they made a hasty retreat, leaving Rudy behind. At that point, Mr. Afira says he closed the shutters. There has been no reliable confirmation of Mr. Afira’s version of the story, which Paris prosecutor Jean-Claude Marin implicitly contradicted in suggesting that Rudy might have been “visualized as belonging to the gang if only because he was wearing a kippa.” Rudy, who is recovering slowly, says the last thing he remembers is that he was on the way to the synagogue. To reaffirm the good reputation of his district, Socialist Mayor Roger Madec organized a “fraternal gathering” in front of the City Hall on July 3. Reporters were greeted by a press attaché who hastened to inform them that this was not a “purely” anti-Semitic attack—“the Jewish gangs, you know,” emphasizes Poller sarcastically.40 With the exception of Richard Prasquier, the president of the Jewish umbrella organization CRIF who asked what is being done about the

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hatred that fired the unspeakable violence against a 17-year-old simply because he is Jewish, the other speakers sang the praises of good neighborly diversity and warned the media not to pin anti-this and anti-that labels on the “regrettable incident.” None of these other speakers thought to address Mr. Prasquier’s question. According to Poller’s own inquiry, a quick look at the neighborhood demographics puts a serious crimp into the “Jewish gang” story. The 19th district, where Paris’s largest Jewish population is nonetheless heavily outnumbered by Muslims, has the city’s highest rate of reported anti-Semitic incidents—many more are believed to go unreported because of fear of reprisals—and worst overall crime rate. An Islamist cell, the “19th Arrondissement Iraq Connection,” was spawned on the fringes of the neighborhood’s infamous extremist mosque; its members used to work out in the Buttes Chaumont park. The cell’s members were recently sentenced to long prison terms for recruiting jihadis to fight in Iraq. Jewish teenagers Poller met in the neighborhood said they are constantly harassed by Muslim bullies, particularly on the Sabbath. This fits the pattern of a wave of violence against Jews that began in the fall of 2000 and persists, with ups and downs, to this day. Synagogue burning is now out, but deep-seated hatred of Jews remains endemic in large sectors of the Muslim community. Many families send their children to Jewish day school to avoid harassment. Yahoud (Arabic for Jew), Juif, and the slang word feuj are commonplace insults. Many Sephardic Jews—like Rudy Haddad’s grandparents—had to flee their native North African countries. Then they fled the banlieue when Muslims made life there unbearable. Many are emigrating to Israel, Canada or the U.S. But Jews are not the only targets of a new brutality that stumps French law enforcement. Hatred and resentment against the “dirty French” (“souchiens” or “dirty dogs,” from a play on the French word for indigenous) has led to endless episodes of violence since a three-week, country-wide rampage in November 2005. School teachers are stabbed, schools are burned, cars are torched, train conductors are beaten up, prisons are overcrowded, while left-wing judges fight every law-and-order measure promoted by Justice Minister Rachida Dati.41 During the July 13-14 French independence holiday some 600 cars were burned and over 200 people were arrested, the vast majority of them in the Parisian banlieue. The thugs attacked the police with baseball bats, firebombs, and firecrackers; one policeman lost an eye. The Champs de Mars at the foot of the Eiffel Tower has become a contemporary battlefield. Students celebrating there after they finished the baccalauréat exam were

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assaulted by a mob of 300 so-called “youths” who attacked the graduates and the police with equal rage. In France, where racial, religious, national, or ethnic breakdown of population statistics is forbidden, and where applying such labels to criminals is taboo, the term “youth” is used to hide the identity of thugs, even when their identity is visible in TV footage. The taboo was exceptionally lifted in Rudy’s case to sustain the narrative of intercommunitarian strife. The fortuitous discovery—or invention—of Jewish gangs imposed a corresponding African and Maghrebi label. Since tough laws and improved police work have not put a stop to the harassment of Jews, some young Jewish men are trying to defend themselves. Much was made of Rudy’s “police record.” In fact, his “record” consisted of an attempt to defend a friend who’d been knocked to the ground by a group of Muslims who came to break up a Hanukkah candlelighting ceremony in honor of kidnapped Israeli soldiers. Rudy fought them off with his motorcycle helmet, which became in legal terms an “arm by destination.” No one denies the possible existence of Jewish delinquents, but it is dishonest to put a “West Side Story” twist onto the 19th-arrondissement strife, as if Jews were muscling into Muslim territory, harassing peaceful citizens, chasing them out of schools, breaking the windows of halal butcher shops, dealing drugs, and attacking police. There is a qualitative difference between Muslims seething with Jew hatred who gang up to stomp, bash, and slash Jews, and young Jewish men trying to defend themselves. The Rudy Haddad story leaped back onto the front pages on July 10 with the arrest of seven “youths” who turned out to be in their mid- to late twenties. Two have been arraigned and jailed: an African, identified as Sekou M., and a North African, Foued O. The latter, who is a career air force corporal, is accused of bashing Rudy’s head with a crutch. Another African, Boubacar C., suspected of involvement in the machete attack, has been charged and released while awaiting trial. The implication of husky, mature men in the attacks that raged that day and culminated in the savage beating of a Jewish teen further undermines the narrative of mere squabbles among youngsters. Details about the motivation, background, and ideology of these men will, one hopes, emerge in the course of the investigation. Mayor Madec was applauded when he said at his grand fraternal gathering that the residents of the 19th arrondissement, whatever their origin, want to live side by side in peace and security, Yes, most of them do. The problem is, some don’t. And they can spoil it for everyone.42

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Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

Executive Intelligence Review, September 4, 1998. Al-Ahram Weekly, October 1, 2001. James Kirkup, The Daily Telegraph, June 3, 2008. See “Muslim-Jewish Interactions in Great Britain,” Interview with Michael Whine, Changing Jewish Communities, No 33, May 15, 2008, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. “Anti-semitic Incidents Report 2007,” Community Security Trust, London, February, 2007, p. 12. Cited ibid. p. 4. P. Iganski, V. KIelinger, and S. Patterson, Hate Crimes against London Jews: an Analysis of Incidents Recorded by the Metropolitan Police Service, 2001-4, Institute for Jewish Policy Research and the Metropolitan Police Service, London 2005. Cited ibid. p. 4. See “Muslim-Jewish Interactions in Great Britain,” Interview with Michael Whine, Changing Jewish Communities, No 33, May 15, 2008, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, p. 8. Le Point, 1727, October 20, 2005, p. 37. Al-Sharq al-Awsat, (London), July 19, 2003. Yaakov Lappin, “UK Islamists: Make Jihad on Israel: British Jihad Group Declares: ‘Israel is a Cancer, Islam is the Answer’ and calls upon followers to carry out holy war,” Ynetnews.com July 2, 2006. Ibid. Rita Kats and Michael Kern, “Terrorist 007 Exposed,” Washington Post, 26 March 26, 2006. Olivia Guitta, “For Jews, Belgium is no better than France,” The American Thinker, July 6, 2004. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, “EU Covered Up Attacks on Jews by young Muslims,” Daily Telegraph, April 1, 2004. Ibid. “Brussels Commune Fundamentalist Recruiting Ground, says Journalist,” Expatica, March 14, 2005. Australia-Israel Review (AIR) Vol 31, No 6, June 2006, pp. 4, 40. Emmanuel Brenner, Les Territoires Perdus de la Republique (Paris: Mille et Une Nuit), 2001. Nathalie Segaumes, Le Parisien, June 15, 2004. Alyssa Lappen, “Ritual Murders of Jews in Paris,” FrontPageMagazine.com, December 4, 2003. Ibid. Steve Bird and Russel Jenkins, “WE are vilified like Jews by the Nazis. Says Muslim leader,” The Times, February 3, 2007. “Hamas Bans Fatah Friday Prayers in Gaza,” Reuters, September 4, 2007. David Badein, “The UK: Hamas Sanctuary,” FrontPageMagazine, August 30, 2007. Yaakov Katz, “UK Hamas Funder to be Deported,” Jerusalem Post, May 30, 2006. Ruth Gledhill, “Police Accused of Inaction as anti-Jewish Alliance Emerges,” The Times, September 7, 2006; and George Conger, “UK MP’s find Leap in anti-Semitism”, Jerusalem Post, September 5, 2006. Tom Harper and Ben Leapman, “Jews Far More Likely to Be Victims of FaithHatred Than Muslims,” Sunday Telegraph, December 17, 2006.

From Words to Deeds 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

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Brigitte Gabriel, “Muslims Muzzling Memphis,” AmericanThinker.com, April 10, 2006. Ibid. John Steele, “Freedom of Speech Row as Talk on Islamic Extremists is Banned,” The Daily Telegraph, March 15, 2007; and Graeme Patton, “Academic: Extremism Debate is Being Stifled,” Daily Telegraph, March 17, 2007. Ibid. Bruno Waterfield, “Don’t Confuse Terrorism with Islam, Says EU,” The Daily Telegraph, March 30, 2007. David REnnie, “Islamic Terrorism is Too Emotive a Phrase, says EU,” The Daily Telegraph, April 12, 2007. Sean O’Neill, “Muslim Students Being Taught to Despise Unbelievers as Filth,” The Times, April 20, 2006. Najm al-Din Ja’far bin Muhammed, nicknamed al-Muhaqqiq (1205-1277), famous for his book Shara’i’ al-Islam (The Laws of Islam). For excerpts of the texts, see Andrew Bostom (ed), The Legacy of Jihad, (Amherst, MA: Prometheus Books, 2005), esp Chap. 20, pp. 205-12. O’Neill, “Muslim Students etc…” op cit. BBC, July 31, 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7534243.stm. N i d r a P o l l e r, Wa l l S t r e e t J o u r n a l E u ro p e , J u l y 3 1 , 2 0 0 8 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121745263179998311.html?mod=opinion_main_ commentaries. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

6 Anti-Semitism under the Guise of Anti-Zionism and Anti-Israelism It has become a recurrent truism that matters regarding Jews, Israel, and Zionism acquire a worldwide resonance that is out of proportion to their intrinsic news value. For anything which relates to Israel, the sole Jewish state in existence, in contrast with the multitude of Christian, Muslim, Arab, and Buddhist entities, is placed under the magnifying glass and held to the highest standards of scrutiny. But why is it so? Is it because the “Jewish question,” as Maxime Rodinson1 has elected to call it, “persists”, that the Jewish state attracts upon itself the old stereotypes, suspicions, and accusations that were always imputed to the Jews? In short, has Israel become the Jew of the Nations? The epithet “Jewish state” is in fact gratuitously appended to it by the Western media, while the Arab and Muslim countries prefer what is for them the derogatory attribute of “Zionist.” While it is not fashionable and acceptable in liberal democracies to blame an ethnic or religious group or instigate against a minority, in a world that purports to be democratic and human-rights conscious, it is acceptable and fashionable to criticize, even calumniate, a state because that is always construed as a political debate, hence its legitimacy. So, essentially, while Arabs or Muslims or other adepts of dictatorial and totalitarian regimes have no compunctions of being openly anti-Semitic, and they use interchangeably Jews, Zionists, and Israelis, the hidden anti-Semites in the West adopt their language to the jargon which condemns Israel, drawing exactly on the same arguments as the avowed anti-Semites, but couching them in political terms. To do that, both groups need to link Jews with Israel, by either calling the latter the “Jewish state” (as in the West), implying that it carries with it the innate nature of the Jews, or by blaming directly the Jews, usually dubbing them “Zionists,” or the “Zionist entity,” not simply the Jews nor the “Jewish state,” which would have compelled them to recognize that state. 149

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We have already seen that by attacking the Jews and imputing the bad qualities inherent in the Jews to anything they produce, including their movement of national liberation—Zionism, and their state- Israel—antiSemites thereby delegitimize Israel. But how do Westerners refer to that link, and how do they use politics, not the ancient anti-Jewish religious and ethnic stereotypes to bash Israel? Moreover, if as some anti-Semites now claim, the ancient pernicious essence of the Jews, which used to be transmitted genetically, has now lost some of those characteristics due to their new existence in the state of Israel,2 how can a Westerner, unlike an Arab, continue to uphold anti-Semitic stereotypes with regard to Israel? Hatred to the Jews in the Christian world had been either based on religion or on social hostility towards those who were perceived as usurers, or on a quasi-ethnic suspicion towards those whose way of life set them apart from the majorities within which they lived. But in the contemporary world, where Jews have been officially absolved by recent popes from their religion’s blame, and where their role in society and their life styles have become undistinguishable from those of the majority, what grounds can still exist to pursue anti-Semitism? Another question relates to the unbearable ease with which anyone, under one pretext or another, appoints oneself to pontificate and judge where the Jews allegedly went wrong, and suggest what they should do to amend for their faults, or what concessions they should do to redress the wrong; as if the Jews, and in consequence Israel, had become the yardstick to measure morality, and as if their conduct is anyone’s business. Take the Kurds in comparison, who are also Muslims. They are a proud nation of 25 million, all living under oppression under the Turks, the Iraqis, the Iranians, and the Syrians, all battling and sacrificing for centuries, but they never got the attention that is given to Palestinians who are 25 percent the size, and of much more recent separate identity compared to the Kurds. Why? Because Israel is not directly involved with the Kurds, but holds the cards of the Palestinian fate. Therefore, the Palestinians are everyone’s concern, everyone feels entitled to intervene on their behalf, bringing one of their leaders to admit that their cause won prominence only because their adversaries are Israelis and Jews. At the same time, few have attempted to castigate the oppressors of the Kurds, still fewer have promoted their independence, and those who do do so in a much more subdued and less judgmental fashion. Seldom has the question of the Kurds made such headlines or caused so many wars, or preoccupied the world powers or organizations the way Palestinians do. There are no Jews or Israelis to beat around there.

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Since every anti-Semite who harshly criticizes Israel to the point of turning the Jewish state into the Jew among states, claims his right to criticism, it is often difficult to draw the line between one and the other. The renown Canadian Human Right Law Professor, Irwin Cotler, a former Minister of Justice in Ottawa and presently a member of Parliament there, has suggested guidelines, which mark the transition from criticism of Israel, which is legitimate, to plain and coarse anti-Semitism and which is not. Critics become anti-Semites, he claims, when: a.

b.

c. d. e. f. g. h.

i.

They publicly call for the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people. This is the case with the platforms of the PLO and the Hamas, some militant Islamic rulings as well as the Iranian threat to annihilate Israel, which we can call “genocidal anti-Semitism”; They deny the Jewish people’s right to self-determination, delegitimize Israel as a state and attribute to Israel all the world’s evil; we can call this “political anti-Semitism”, inasmuch as other peoples’ natural and historical rights are recognized, save the Jewish people; They “Nazify “Israel (“ideological” anti-Semitism) and demonize it in a most insulting way by comparing it wrongly with its most horrifying butchers in history; Israel is characterized, again wrongly, as the “perfidious enemy of Islam” (“theological” anti-Semitism); Israel is attributed a mix of evil qualities by some intellectuals and elites (“cultural” anti-Semitism); They call for boycotts or other economic restrictions on Israel (“economic” anti-Semitism); They deny the Holocaust and re-write history as a way to deny Jews the sympathy they rightly received from the western world after, and as result of, the Holocaust; They terrorize Israel by racist attacks and heaping false accusations against it (Like the Blood Libel, the Protocols, the Poison Affair,3 world conspiracy, poisoning of other people’s soil and people, war crimes, massacres and the like), or casting it as “racist” itself like in Durban, in Arab League conferences, the Human Rights Commission and the media); They single out Israel for discriminatory treatment in the international arena through denial of equality before the law.4

Arab and Muslim propaganda, at large and in Europe, and the antiSemitic writers in the West, usually qualify for their questionable title as they easily pass these nine tests. One of the most abject twists in their attitude towards Israel as the Jewish state, and the emotion-laden story of the relationship between Christians and Jews, has been the surrogate use of the Arabs and Muslims made by Western writers to castigate the Jews.

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There is something perverse in this twist inasmuch as both Christians and Jews, had dwelt as tolerated and under a far from egalitarian status of dhimmis under Islam. But now those writers go to the defense of Arabs and Muslims as a means to whip Jews and Israel, and in so doing they find themselves in concert on the attitude to Jews with their current Muslim compatriots whom they treat with much farther equality than Christians are treated in Muslim lands. Let us listen to what Rodinson says: Contrary to what has been said and written in Arab and Muslim circles, the condition of the Jews in the world of Islam was not idyllic. It is quite true that the negative aspects of the Jewish situation in Muslim countries has been exaggerated by Zionist propaganda…. It is quite true that the situation of Jews in Muslim countries over fifteen centuries has been better than in Christian countries…. But this does not alter the fact that the status of dhimmi applied to Jews and Christians was inegalitarian and that if Judaism and Christianity were tolerated religions … their believers were nonetheless considered enemies of the true faith. Appreciations of them were disparaging, suspicious and scornful. In the case of the Jews these attitudes found support in many passages from the Qur’an dating from the time when the Jewish tribes of Medina constituted Muhammed’s main adversary, passages that can readily obliterate the favorable attitudes towards Jews and Christians reflected in other, earlier passages… Many instances of disparagement and suspicion of the Jews, and of slander against them therefore exist in the Muslim tradition. Especially at the popular level. Many proverbs testify to this…. The accusation of ritual murder, for instance, may be found in the Thousand and One Nights…, and the origin of Muslim sects which the Orthodox majorities consider as undermining Islam from within, is often ascribed to converted Jews. Extremist Shi’ism in the early years of Islam and and Fatimid Isma’ilism later, are two examples. In various Muslim countries public signs of contempt are attached to Jews, and the most difficult and repugnant jobs are reserved for them…5

This sounds like a sober and balanced analysis of the situation until the need to attack Zionism and Israel suddenly draws from that historical survey some rather surprising and unrelated conclusions and interpretations: There is no reason to portray [those attitudes towards the Jews] as crimes with which to stigmatize Islam, the Arabs or both—as the Zionists and their friends often do…. But there is no reason to deny these facts either, as Arab and Muslim ideologues often do…. When they paint an unreasonably idealized portrait of Islamic society in the Middle Ages in which justice, benevolence and harmony alone prevailed—against the testimony of millions of Arab sources—they merely arouse the incredulity of nonMuslims and lead them to suspect that the reality was worse than it actually was… It was actually Zionism that stoked these smoldering embers. It could not have been otherwise when a group of Jews claiming to be the sole true representatives of the Jewish world laid claim to an indisputably Arab land, declaring that they intended to wrench it from the Arab world and turn it into a foreign state. It could only have been aggravated when this group of Jews realized its designs by force and with the aid of

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the powers of the Christian world…. The Arab anti-Zionist struggle, like all ideological struggles, uses all the weapons it can find. It is wonderful that this ideological struggle has so often forsaken the weapons of racial and religious hatred, and that its attacks have so often targeted only those directly responsible for the alienation of Arab Palestine, namely the followers of the Zionist movement.6

The total denial of the right of the Jewish people for statehood and the claim that it came to usurp a land that was “indisputably Arab” not only disparages the historical tie between the Jews and their country, but fails to explain how dispute emerges from an “indisputable” situation. In order to make his thesis about the evil inherent in Israel and Zionism stick, he lends to them acts of injustice and arbitrariness (“they wrenched the land by force”), though he is conscious of the tremendous Zionist efforts to purchase the land from local Arabs and of the submission of the Zionists (and the local Arabs for that matter) to the rulers of the land, first the Ottomans and then the British Mandate, which far from being at the mercy of the Zionist predator on the contrary acted, often ruthlessly, to oppress them. What is particularly stunning in this analysis is that after his long, well-documented litany of negative Arab/Muslim attitudes towards the Jews dating from the Middle Ages, the author concludes that it was modern Zionism, which lay at the basis of all those attitudes today, and that the Jews are to blame, due to their predatory practices, for the cumulative sentiment against them on the part of the Arabs. In fact, he justifies Arab anti-Semitism by legitimizing “all weapons” available in the anti-Zionist struggle in which he posits himself as an active participant. But disregarding the UN decision to partition Palestine, which Israel accepted and the Arabs rejected, and by claiming that the Arabs, who had never had a state in Palestine, were entitled to it and not the Jews who had been exiled from there, he is in fact singling out the Jewish people as the only one who has no right to statehood. That is bland anti-Semitism and that is the sort of argument that Muslims in Europe are seeking and using. But the peak of Rodinson’s mischief against the Jews, under the guise of anti-Zionism, is when he lends advice to the Arabs how to disguise their anti-Semitism in order to make it more palatable to the world as anti-Zionism, and in his capacity as one of the most prominent European Orientalists of his generation he knew he had not only the ear of Muslims in general, and especially that of his Muslim compatriots, but that his popularity would skyrocket in the Arab and Muslim world whose propaganda work he was championing. He wrote:

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It was inevitable that in the ardor of the ideological struggle against Zionism, those Arabs most influenced by Muslim religious orientation would seize upon the old religious and popular prejudices against the Jews in general. It was inevitable that certain fundamentalist Muslim organizations would link Zionism to the supposed general pernicious character of the Jews and Judaism. It was inevitable that the Muslim popular masses, once mobilized against Zionism, would call to mind popular traditions about the Jews and associate them with this combat. I recall all this as a warning. Zionist propaganda does its work by arguing that all anti-Zionist efforts of the Arabs and others are motivated by anti-Semitic propensities, by hatred of the Jews in general. The Zionist propagandists know very well that, for the time being at least, anti-Semitism arouses great revulsion among the majority of European and American public opinion. To denounce an action or assertion as antiSemitic is thus to rally public opinion against it. The Arabs and some of their friends ought to understand that they are in effect aiding Zionist and Arabophobic propaganda whenever they denounce a Zionist act or thesis while explaining it, or appearing to explain it, by the eternal maleficence of the Jewish people, while accordingly seeking analogies to it in Jewish history, or while suggesting that the persecution of Jews was deserved, or did not actually take place, or was minimal. It does not help to conclude or preface such arguments with the proclamation: “we are not anti-Semites, the Arabs have never been anti-Semites” … How many people have I seen who have made at first such proclamations, only later to hear critical, mocking, hostile, malevolent, disparaging ,or slanderous remarks against the Jews in general in Arab circles? They have concluded that they have been deceived by Arab propaganda and that the Zionists were right after all … when they claimed that this propaganda was motivated at the bottom by anti-Semitism. They have then decided that the Zionist offices that organize bulk mailings or sales of translations of anti-Jewish pamphlets that circulate in the Arab countries were revealing the truth of the matter after all. Every time an Arab government … prints or distributes the Protocols of the Elders of Zion…, every time Arab publicists adopt such fabrications, they proffer effective aid to Zionist propaganda, which makes no mistake when it gives maximum publicity to all these acts. The question is whether the Arabs want to continue to accord Zionism such valuable assistance.7

The author, who is representative of the leftist anti-Semites in Europe, whose resonance among European Muslims is considerable, is caught here in a pathetic attempt to hide his own virulent anti-Semitism by diverting it to anti-Zionist channels, but he himself implies that they amount to the same: if the Jews, of all peoples, are denied their right to statehood and therefore they are condemned to remain dispersed and persecuted among nations, what is that if not anti-Semitism? In no place does the author condemn the Arab anti-Semitic proclamations because they are wrong morally and humanly or may cause incitement and social disruption, or close the doors to an Israel-Arab settlement politically. He just counsels the Arabs to desist from that anti-Semitic rhetoric because it is counterproductive and can hurt their cause. And despite the statements of

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some of them, openly and without compunctions, that they are anti-Jewish, that is anti-Semitic, the author tries to convince them (and himself) that they indeed are not. Because if they were, he cannot use them as his surrogate weapon to attack the Jews: you cannot use anti-Semites to lash out at Jews and then to claim that you meant Zionism. Equally pathetic is Rodinson’s attempt to wean Arabs and Muslims from their crude anti-Semitism by telling them that the anti-Semitic material they are circulating (the Protocols) is fabricated. But what if they believe that it is not and that it is authentic, his insistence on the contrary notwithstanding? Why would they be different from the Europeans who fabricated it and continue to swear by it, to propagate it and have even ended up believing in it themselves? And so, by concentrating on his Zionist subterfuge, he simply belies his own argument about the deep-rooted anti-Jewish sentiment in Arab and Muslim tradition, prior to and independently of Zionism, and exposes himself to the counterargument that what is important to him is not the anti-Semitic discourse, but the need to show, at any price, that Zionism, that is the movement of national liberation of the Jews, has no leg to stand on, should not and will not succeed. Only thus, would the Jews be beaten historically, by being denied a political rehabilitation in a land that is not theirs, even if they should make some gains temporarily by scoring sympathies when their Jewishness comes under attack. For Rodinson, then, as for Arabs and Muslims, the point is to raise doubts about the legitimacy of Israel by anti-Zionist allegations when possible, and by straight anti-Semitic broadsides when necessary. The persistence of anti-Jewish abominations in the Islamic world, and by extension among Muslims in Europe, which at times are backed by Western writers like Rodinson, who target Israel and Zionism, has produced a self-serving spiraling exaggeration of the anti-Jewish biases and stereotypes in both, thus attesting, Rodinson notwithstanding, to the common sources used by both, and to the cross-nurturing of those two trends in the delegitimation of Israel. For the more the Jews, and in consequence Zionism and Israel, are demonized beyond measure, the more likely their image be tarnished, their reputation dimmed, and their legitimacy questioned. So, while the old anti-Semitic accusations had some kernel of truth to them (the rejection of Christ, living apart from others, sticking to their own calendar, embracing and perpetuating different ways of language, dress and life, money-lending, and the like), as these things began to evolve after the troubled Christians, who saw

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their stereotypes and beliefs threatened, escalated their anti-Jewish biases into the domain of irrational fantasies. Indeed, according to Gavin Langmuir, the accusations regarding the ritual crucifixion of young Christian children, the attending ritual cannibalism, and the attempts to destroy Christianity by poisoning wells and triggering the Black Death, were all later developments.8 Says Langmuir: The falsity of those accusations seems glaringly obvious now, but that was not the case before Hitler. Of course, historians have long known that those accusations were made and that thousands of Jews were killed because of them. But not until the late 19th and the first half of the 20th century was there a serious attempt by some Jewish and non-Jewish historians to disprove them. They had a hard time convincing others, however, because of the way they went about it. Strangely enough, or perhaps all too understandably before Hitler and Freud, they did not focus on the accusations themselves; they focused on the Jews and tried to prove that Jews had never done such things. That defensive posture considered the Jews guilty until proven innocent, and it set the historians an almost impossible task, for it was and is impossible to prove conclusively that no Jews ever engaged in such physically possible conduct in secret. In a period of widespread hostility to Jews, however, the approach had the advantage for Jewish historians that they could try to exculpate Jews without criticizing Christianity directly—a feature that made the approach attractive to Christian historians as well. Its weakness was that it ignored the obvious. If the evidence to support the truth of the accusations was highly suspect, as it was, it was nonetheless certain that people had made those accusations and used them to justify the killing of thousands of Jews. The first question for objective historians should therefore have been, not whether Jews could have done something like that, but what had Christians in fact done? How did those accusations arise? Who made them and why? How did they “know” that Jews had done such things.”9

These questions, which seem to have never bothered Muslim writers, are perhaps the crux of the matter, because this means tackling the issue of negative proof. The Jews had been accused in the Christian world since the 12th Century and then, by extension in the Muslim world since the 19th Century, of blood libel and poisoning; those calumniations were taken as a matter of course, and the burden of providing the evidence of their innocence was squarely thrown on the Jews. How can one prove something that never existed? Positive evidence is part of the laws and ways of nations and civilizations, and it was always incumbent upon the accuser to substantiate his case. But to provide negative evidence, under the threat of otherwise being held as the culprit? Only Jews were submitted to that travesty. And as Langmuir has demonstrated, the Jews themselves, who were too meek to counter-accuse the Christians for those abominable and groundless calumniations, had elected instead to focus on their own innocence by trying to “prove” what cannot be

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proved. The Arabs and Muslims too have learned the same technique of accusation against the Jews, and it is no coincidence that the blood libel persists there. But the Arabs and Muslims in the 20th Century as well as post-Hitler Christians can persist in their blood libel accusations only because they can mobilize positive evidence on their side, if not direct then circumstantial, taken from the Qur’an and the Hadith, about the inherently evil nature of the Jews, and hence their liability to do anything, including blood ritual. Rodinson by himself has provided us with enough massive information on the disparaging nature of traditional Islamic literature, in addition to the evidence we have adduced, with regard to the Jews and the resulting inferior status of dhimmitude to which they were relegated and that they had to share with Christians under Islam. But he said nothing of the submission of the Jews to that status and its acceptance as if it were an inexorable force. Much the same spirit had prompted the Jews under Christendom to apologize constantly and to prove their innocence when they were accused of blood libel, poisoning, and other unlikely abominations, rather than turn the tables on their calumniators and reproach them their unfounded libel. What we miss here is the toll that was levied on the Jewish psyche for generations, in both places, which made him feel and behave like the eternal culprit, thus encouraging the spiral of anti-Semitism. Admittedly, under the circumstances of discrimination, oppression, fear, and threat of extermination, exile and forced conversion, there was perhaps little the Jews could do to behave differently; and if they wanted to survive in the oppressive environment while carrying their freedom in their minds, they had no option but to stoop, resign, accept, adapt to the present, and dream of redemption in the future.10 The dhimmi condition was not only a legal, economic, religious, and politically subordinate status, but also, as Bat Ye’or has admirably shown,11 a state of mind, which conditions the subject to submit to his fate, and continues to dominate his mind long after he has disengaged from that humiliating status. In a dramatic reversal of their erstwhile status of dhimmis under Islam, Christians have developed another aspect of dhimmitude (the term was coined by Bat Ye’or) and that is the tendency to exercise, as if it is right, a condescending and suspicious attitude towards the Jews. Nowadays, Jews can no longer be put in ghettoes or be made to wear the yellow patch, but they can be castigated, supervised, taken to task, and expected to behave by standards set by others. These are the common grounds on which Europeans and Muslims can collaborate. The

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Arabs and Muslims are still incredulous at the sudden upsurge of the Jews, who broke away from their allotted dhimmi status and spectacularly made it to the forefront of the modern world; some Westerners who still entertain their old anti-Semitic stereotypes towards the Jews but cannot articulate them openly as of old, turn against Zionism and Israel as an oblique way to compensate for the fashionable restraint from whipping the Jews in the public square. Moreover, with a view of freeing themselves from the sense of guilt occasioned by the Holocaust, many of those Christians, either following the Arabs or serving as models for them, have reversed the roles: the Jews are now compared to the Nazis and the Palestinians to their Jewish victims. Christians within the Arab world go even further at the same time that they are still dhimmis under Islam but also virulently anti-Jewish and anti-Israel in order to endear themselves to their Arab society. They act thus because they must show to their seething Islamic environment that they are no less anti-Zionist than the general populace, in the process exposing their own sense of insecurity and vulnerability in having to play the Islamic game, on Islamic terms, in order to survive. So does the Vatican in licking the boots of some of those worst regimes in an attempt to save the dwindling Christian communities from extinction. It is evident at any rate that the continuous state of dhimmitude tends to corrupt the character and corrode the sense of liberty of the dwindling and frightened Christian minorities within the Muslim world, and these in turn feed their frustrations and fears back to their coreligionists in the West who seize upon them to reinforce and vindicate their own anti-Semitism.12 As Langmuir points out, and as we know from many other aspects of anti-Semitism in general, the blood accusation, ritual cannibalism, well poisoning, ritual crucifixion, and profanation hurled at the Jews have one thing in common: irrationality,13 though we are paradoxically attempting to categorize them in rational fashion. The people who created them and those who used them to incite massacres of Jews, never said that they themselves had actually observed Jews doing any of those things. The explanation of this irrational hatred of the Jews, according to Langmuir, was (and is): … many Christians are plagued by a new kind of doubts, by conflicts between what they could and would know if they used their ability to think rationally and empirically, and what they wanted to believe…. Many people were able to face their religious doubts more or less directly or set them unthinkingly aside, and many were not fearful of the presence of the Jews [in their midst]. But many others could not or would not confront their doubts. Instead of examining what was really bothering them, they defended their beliefs by imagining that contemporary Jews were acting

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in ways that demonstrated empirically the truth of the Christian beliefs. To repress their doubts, they suppressed their capacity to think rationally and empirically, and instead imagined Jews according to their threatened beliefs. But doubts still plagued them, whether consciously or subconsciously. Their projections could not remove the real source of their anxiety, for it was buried deep within them, and their projections only drove the real problem farther underground. And since they could not recognize what was disturbing them, that only heightened their sense of a menace and their hatred of it and drove them to seek an outlet for their emotions. Revealingly, the surrogate on which they vented their hate was the Jews, the supreme symbol of disbelief.14

This same mechanism of irrationality may very well have applied to Muslim hatred towards Jews in the Middle East, which was imported into Europe by Muslim immigrants as explained above. In the Middle East, against all likelihood, and much more intensely so due to the ongoing intensity of the Arab-Israeli dispute, the same accusations have become part of the litany of complaints, for the most part having no leg to stand on, which have been poisoning systematically the minds of media readers, listeners and watchers, school textbooks, Friday prayer sermons, and political statements of Arab leaders and opinion makers. But unlike Langmuir’s claim to the effect that the weight of irrationality has been decreasing after Hitler, who had brought it to its mad apex, there did not occur any corresponding decrease in the virulent anti-Semitism of Muslims in the world or among the migrants to the West. So, while in Western democracies there are less manifest expressions of anti-Semitism, inter alia because they are punished by law, there remain grey areas of silence in the face of open Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism, which also serve the purpose of venting the persistent undercurrents of traditional European Jew-hatred. For when the Muslims in Europe deny the Sho’ah or the Palestinian delegate in the Commission of Human Rights in Geneva accuses the Israelis of injecting HIV positive to 300 Palestinian children in order to harm their reproductive organs, almost none of the Western delegates rose to protest, nor did the chanceries of Europe who should have been horrified by this new manifestation of the blood libel.15 Some Western media even actively aided the Palestinians in propagating the calumny in April 1983 blaming Israel for poisoning Palestinian school girls in the West Bank, and none of them showed the decency of apologizing for this horrible libel when the entire story proved a hoax.16 This European assistance to Muslim libel against the Jews, whether intentional or through omission to protest, and probably geared to let Israel be unjustly bashed with impunity, has been taken in itself as an

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acquiescence in the Muslim accusations. This in turn signifies: one, that passive anti-Semitism is permitted, or at least not harshly prosecuted, as long as the countries of Europe can wash their hands clean of any active Judeo-phobia within their boundaries; and two, this signals to the Muslims, in their lands and in Europe, that they can pursue their libel and their threats to destroy Israel and eliminate Israelis, because no one, least of all the UN and its “Human Rights Commission,” would dare raise his voice against it. For no one is impressed by the UN Secretary and Western leaders, who dub Iranian President genocidal threats against the Jews and politicidal menaces against Israel as “unacceptable,” but do nothing to oust Iran from the UN until it repents. Worse, they continue their business deals with it and pursue their preparations for another outburst of UN-sponsored anti-Semitism in Duban II. So many Europeans let the Muslims in Europe, the Middle East and the UN do the dirty job of anti-Semitism for them while they watch with delight their surrogates express similar sentiments to theirs, and note with self-righteousness that anti-Semitism in Christian Europe “has been in decline.” “Hatred of the Jews is found as a common denominator among people of otherwise irreconcilable beliefs and attitudes,” lamented a student of Soviet anti-Semitism.17 There is perhaps no other explanation for the convergence of the tacit anti-Semitism of the West, especially France, and the explicit one, articulated by Arabs and Muslims, including those who migrated to Europe. In the latter, however, as previously in the Soviet Union, anti-Semitism was adopted and expressed by official and semi-official state organs, or by Muslim groups such as al-Qa’ida, al-Muhajirun, Hizbu’l Tahrir, and various brands of the Muslim Brotherhood, where it became an instrument of mobilization, incitement, propaganda and even policy. And the more it remains unchallenged by the rest of the world, the more it is likely to expand and deepen its roots, to assert itself, and to acquire permanence. On October 14, 1965, both the Soviet Union and Poland opposed at the UN a proposal that the Charter of Human Rights should contain a clause banning anti-Semitism. Instead, they pressed for an amendment—which others refused to adopt—advocating that Zionism, Nazism, and Neo-Nazism (in that order) be classified a “racial crimes.”18 Ten years later, the General Assembly did adopt the proposition that Zionism equaled racism, thus bringing to full circle the legitimation of anti-Semitism in the guise of anti-Zionism. No one could dare to attack the Jews openly, so their collective creations, like their movement of national liberation (Zionism) and their state (Israel) were put beyond the pale, signaling that from all the nations of the world, the Jews alone

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had no right to be liberated or to have a state of their own. That amounted to anti-Semitism pure and simple. The transposition of the Jewish problem onto Israel and the resulting shift of anti-Semitism into anti-Zionism, seems to provide the key for the combined rage of the Arabs and Muslims and some Europeans in their common attitude towards contemporary Israel and Zionism. It was a great European, George Clemenceau, who while pointing to the great power and influence he was imputing to the Jews, also accused them of proving themselves “incapable of creating their own homeland.”19 This patronizing attitude has never extricated itself from the built-in contradiction among anti-Semites of recognizing Palestine, on the one hand, as the natural abode of the Jews, but on the other hand refusing to accept that the Zionist dream has precisely realized itself there. And after the establishment of the state of Israel, they will always hold it to a different standard of conduct than all countries, seeking as it were the seeds of its demise in its very existence and perennially raising questions about its legitimacy. For this reason, Israel is not viewed like any other state. Fiji, Barbados, or Guinea, or any other God-forsaken place, which has not marked the world by any cultural, economic, scientific or religious traits, and which has emerged from nowhere into independence, are taken as a matter of course, but their legitimacy is unshakable, and their statehood, self-determination, and territorial integrity are inviolable. Only Israel remains somehow different in spite of being one of the oldest and most persistent civilizations, and stands today at the forefront of the most advanced nations in the world. Since the 1980s several high level European politicians have made radical anti-Semitic declarations which accorded with Arab and Muslim positions. In a public statement in 1982, Greek Socialist Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou compared Israelis to Nazis.20 But no mainstream European leader went as far as Christian Democrat Giulio Andreotti, many times the Prime Minister and then the President of Italy, who declared in Geneva, during an inter-parliamentary conference in 1984, his support for a Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi motion, which equated Zionism with racism, supported the boycotting of Israel, and defended the right of the “armed struggle for the liberation of Palestine [that is terrorism]. Italy was then the only Western country to vote with the Soviet Bloc for this motion.21 Later, such occurrences have become even more frequent. In April 2002, Franco Cavalli spoke at a demonstration of the Swiss-Palestinian Society in Bern. He was then the parliamentary leader of the Social Democratic Party (SP), which is part of the Swiss govern-

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ment coalition. He claimed that Israel, “very purposefully massacres an entire people” and undertakes the “systematic extermination of the Palestinians.”22 Was he ignorant of the comparatively higher number of Palestinians massacred by the Syrians, Lebanese, Jordanians, and their own infighting, or his anti-Semitism drove him to ignore the numbers? Or he could not explain why the Israelis were so inadequate and impotent at “annihilating” the Palestinians, if they are stronger and more numerous than ever before. Senior members of the Greek Socialist Party routinely used Holocaust rhetoric to describe Israeli military actions against Arabs, even when they are defensive in nature. In March, Parliamentary Speaker in Athens, Apostolos Kaklamanis, referred to the “genocide” of the Palestinians, forgetting that no one people can undergo so many genocides and still survive. Jenny Tonge, a Liberal Democrat MP in the U.K. declared at a meeting of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in 2004 that she might consider becoming a “suicide bomber” if she lived in the Palestinian territories. But in contrast to the other cases, which remained unrefuted, her party distanced itself from her statement, explaining that it did not condone terrorism.23 Raising the very question of Israel’s legitimacy, or even “recognizing its right to exist,” in itself carries a connotation of suspicion, uncertainty, hesitation, temporariness, and remonstration, as if it were under probation, like a criminal on parole, who has to prove constantly that he deserves his freedom. If Israel concedes, withdraws, shrinks back to its “natural size” (as the Egyptians would have it), obeys, effaces itself, admits “guilt” or plies to demands from it, or submits to calumniations against it, in short behaves like a dhimmi of old, then it is considered by the nations of the world as peaceful, reasonable, moderate, and conciliatory. But when she stands up to her enemies, demands that her rights, territory, heritage, security, people, way of life, and sovereignty be safeguarded and respected, then the world is amazed at its arrogance, self-assertion, aggression, selfishness, spirit of rebellion, fanaticism, extremism, and disregard of others. When diplomats and world leaders admit Israel’s right exist (thank you), this is often taken as a special favor done to it and some Jews are happy at the daily confirmation of that favor, which they were never accustomed to take as a matter or natural right. The dhimmi spirit that they perpetuate dictates to them a grateful mode of behavior towards anyone who condescends to affirm what otherwise would have been considered a matter of course. That is the reason why sixty years after independence Jews continue to express in their national anthem

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the “hope” of attaining freedom in their land. They cannot believe they did already. Consider this: a world leader or a minor one tells Israel that she has the right to exist, but she ought to evacuate territory, allow Palestinian refugees to go back to their previous homes, give up a certain amount of her defenses, and depend on international guarantees. This means that her right to exist is conditional on her meeting certain expectations even if they run contrary to her interests or to her very chances of survival in her hostile environment. Thus, not only is Israel, of all nations, required to take steps towards her own demise, as a prerequisite to her conditional recognition by others, but this also implies that if she does not comply, her admission into the family of nations may be rescinded. Can anyone dare telling the British that they would be recognized provided they return the Falklands to their owners, or the Americans, the Canadians, and the Australians that they can be recognized only if they restored rights to the dispossessed natives that they had conquered, or that the Japanese, Syrians, Iraqis, and Sudanese will be accepted only when they recognize their minorities and stop persecuting them, or Iran, China, and Egypt—only if they accepted democracy or stopped threatening their neighbors? Unthinkable? Not in the case of Israel, even though it cannot be reproached for any of those violations or improprieties. Take for example the question of Jerusalem, the capital of Israel and the Jewish people for the past 3,000 years. In December, 1995, the General Assembly of the UN adopted a resolution, with an overwhelming majority, as in previous years, denying the validity of the Israeli laws, which confirmed united Jerusalem as the capital of modern Israel once again. That resolution also condemned the “Judaization” of Jerusalem as if someone blamed the Chinese for the Sinification of Beijing or the French for the Francisation of Paris, or Saudi Arabia for the Islamization of Mecca. When the Arabs dominated East Jerusalem, which they never made their capital, not only did they effect a full Arabization of the city, but they did that at the detriment of Jewish sites such as Temple Mount, the Mount of Olives, the Jewish Quarter, and no one complained ( that is except for the Israelis, but those are not counted). But as soon as the Jews restored their sites to their sovereignty, without as much as touching the Aqsa compound, which the Muslims had knowingly constructed upon the holiest site of the Jews, then outcries about “Judaization” began, which was heralded as “threatening world peace.” So, when the UN declares that the Israeli measures were “null and void,” one wonders whether the restored Jewish Quarter, which had been destroyed by the Arabs, should

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have remained in ruins, or demolished again after it was repaired, or that the reparations of the cemetery of the Mount of Olives, which had been demolished by the Jordanians and its tombstones used to pave a road, should revert to its state of profanation in order to qualify for the terms of that resolution. In October 1996 the European community demanded that Israel should rescind all those measures of restoration and construction and return things to their “original state.” Original since when? If the splendor of Jerusalem is returned to its Davidic and Solomonic original, then al-Aqsa Mosque should have been removed to allow for the original Temple to re-emerge. Or perhaps they meant that the latrines that the Jordanians had constructed on the sites of the synagogues that they destroyed in the Old Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem should be reinstituted on the ruins of those now reconstructed sites? The occasion for those European demands was the reopening of an ancient tunnel, dating back 2,400 years in history, to the times of the Jewish Hasmonean Dynasty, before there was any idea of Europe, of Christianity, Islam, Arabs, or Palestinians. And because the Muslim Palestinians who had usurped the holy Jewish Temple Mount, now claim that the tunnel endangered their holy sites, themselves built on the ruins of the ancient Jewish Temple, the Europeans moved to make Israel close it again. And all that, under the Palestinian threat of violence if Israel would not conform. Which one of those new European nations would have acquiesced in a situation where its right to relate to its past heritage was called into question? Jerusalem is but an example. At stake is the self-imputed right of Western countries to determine the standards of behavior to which Israel is held and their presumption to act as self-appointed supreme arbiters of that conduct. Exactly like the Jews in their midst, who were suspicious and accused until proven innocent, so is the Jewish state. It is in this sense that the Jewish state has become the Jew among states.24 For decades, most nations took the right to call Israel “the Jewish State,” or the “Tel Aviv Government,” lending to it the same legitimacy as the “Vichy Government” had; they made their representations and sent their representatives to that non-existing address; the international media also dispatched their reports from Tel Aviv, while the pictures they showed often originated from Jerusalem, the seat of the government of Israel. All that in order to avoid recognition of Jerusalem, the ancient capital of Israel, which had predated their own respective capitals, as the reconstituted center of modern Israel. So widespread has been that fiction that many people ended up believing that it was Tel Aviv, not Jerusalem, that

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was the capital of Israel. What other country in the world would have been submitted to such a treatment, or accepted the systematic negation of its legitimacy of which the choice of a capital city is part? This inordinately critical view of the Jews in history has somehow carried over and rubbed off on Israel as well, and directly aided the Arabs and Muslims in their rejection of Israel, lock, stock, and barrel. The intense scrutiny and obsessive coverage of Israel’s every fault and detail sends to Tel Aviv (but more to Jerusalem) regiments of reporters and correspondents, more than to any other world capital save Washington, DC. And all those journalists have to justify their presence in Jerusalem (under Tel Aviv disguise) and hunger for news to feed their avid media. Thus, the most absurd of gossip can become reported news, and the most insignificant events can become “history.” In reports about the Intifadah, for example, articles were written about the special wood used to manufacture police truncheons to maintain order, and the workshops where they were made. Similarly, we have seen that the tedious and repetitive detail that is of no interest elsewhere finds its way to international media. The nature of the “Jewish” truncheon, which caused suffering to the Palestinians and also tarnished Jewish reputation, was only a symptom. No one has ever checked the truncheons used by the British police in Northern Ireland or by the French police in quelling street riots in the Parisian slums. But a Jewish truncheon deserves a special scrutiny. Palestinian children and adolescents can throw Molotov cocktails at Israeli police, occasionally killing, wounding, or maiming them, but those are “only kids” standing up courageously against their oppressors; to be repressed by police wielding those redoubtable Jewish truncheons, that is quite another matter, for Jews have to submit to special standards of conduct, unlike all others. A Palestinian spokesman made the remark: “We are so lucky that our enemies are the Israelis. If they were Singhalese, who would care to mention us?” Father Marcel Dubois, Head of the Dominican Order in Jerusalem, made a similar comment: “Had the occupied territories been under Margaret Thatcher’s responsibility, the Intifadah would have lasted three days only and no one would have talked about it any more.”25 Both statements were corroborated by a member of the foreign press corps in Jerusalem Thomas Friedman, of the New York Times who repeated the same observation in almost the same words: “the great luck of the Palestinians is that they are in a state of conflict with Israeli Jews.”26 This is the reason why the demonization of Israel in both Europe and the Muslim world is directly connected to the emergence of the Palestin-

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ian cause, which can be subsumed under the headline of Palestinism. This trend has been particularly salient in France, not coincidentally also the home of the largest Muslim community on the continent (6 million out of a population of 60). During the election campaign of 2004 in France, the Europalestine list of candidates—founded and headed by a notorious Muslim anti-Semite actor, Dieudonne—made a relatively strong showing in some constituencies and totaled more than 50,000 votes, probably most of them Muslims, judging from their election stickers. Under huge advertisements in the streets of La Courneuve and other heavily Muslimpopulated areas of Paris, which announced the link between “peace in Europe and justice in the Middle East,” more elaborated statements of faith, hatred, racism and bigotry could not be ignored: “The Martyrdom of the Palestinians people has lasted too long”; “The Palestinian issue has been shamefully marginalized in the corridors of power, in spite of its strong presence in the minds of thousands of citizens”; “Jerusalem to the Arabs”; “Death to the Jews”; “Allah Akbar!”; “Bush and Sharon got Saddam, but I pray that Bin Laden should escape them.”27 As long as Muslim terrorism had been directed against Israel only, the European media usually put the blame on the Israelis, but only when it started to strike western territory, did the Israeli position begin to encounter more understanding in Europe, where leader after leader showed sympathy for her. But for the diehard anti-Semites as well as the Muslims of Europe, there has been no let up. Muslims continue their blunt anti-Semitic statements while non-Muslims continue to deftly channel their hatred to anti-Zionism. It is no coincidence that the question of Israel’s posture and reputation in the world is perceived by Muslims as pertinent to its legitimacy. They understand that a weak, disarmed, and bullied Israel can bring it more easily and more quickly to its demise, because no one wants to sustain a temporary or fleeting entity. A strong and internationally robust Israel, on the other hand, which can boast a sound economy, world acclaim for its military, scientific, and technological prowess and its dizzying pace of development against all odds, would be that much more difficult to delegitimize, to eliminate, or to calumniate. Hence Arab economic boycotts against Israel to hurt its economy; the military and political siege around it to isolate it; terrorist attacks to discourage the flow of foreign tourists and investors, and new immigrants into it; its constant harassment with threats of war and violence to deflect its creative attention and sap its energies; and its libel via demonization in an effort to undermine its standing and tarnish its soaring reputation as a strong high achiever

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and successful contributor to the world community. The Muslim dismal failure to attain any of those goals over the past half century has only galvanized their determination to redouble their efforts and try to achieve via “peace” what they could not accomplish by war. And when Israel refuses to surrender, Muslims in their European diasporas join the effort by prevailing upon the local systems to partake of the vilification of the Zionist state. The pathetic British Teachers Union, who on occasions decided to boycott Israel academically; or the Norwegian consumers who tried a boycott of Israeli products, only showed them that the Zionist state can survive and flourish without them, their undeclared anti-Semitic sentiment notwithstanding. The self-image of Israel as a Zionist state, namely one who claims a national home to the Jews in the land surrounding Zion (Jerusalem), has been the target of Muslim propaganda (both in Muslim lands and in the West) to delegitimize the Jewish state. The concerted effort at the UN in 1975, by all Muslims and anti-Semites to delegitimize Israel by ostracizing Zionism, was only the most spectacular manifestation of that trend. And although that abomination of outlawing one of the most successful movements of national liberation of the 20th century was redressed in 1991 when the General Assembly abolished its previous resolution equating Zionism with racism, Durban 2001 which was supposed to combat racism, ended up as an ugly demonstration of anti-Semites and Muslims against Jews, Zionism, and Israel which prompted Israel and the U.S. to leave the conference. The Muslim world celebrated in spite of the fact that in the meantime both Egypt and Jordan signed peace treaties with the Zionist state. Less salient to public opinion is the persisting total and uncompromising negation of Zionism by Muslims, including those who made peace with Israel, and their ongoing commitment to eradicate it. This is evident in the daily and repetitive broadsides against Zionism in their media and other publications and in their favorite reference to Israel and the “Zionist entity” and the substitution of the epithet “Zionist” for anything relating to Israel, like “Zionists” for Israelis, “Zionist policy” for Israeli policy, etc. Even the basic document of the Palestinians—their National Charter—vows to destroy of manifestations of “Zionism” in Palestine in its armed struggle against it. Fifteen years after Oslo, fifteen out of the thirty-three articles of that Charter, which was never amended, continue to state that purpose. That goal seems to them to be more palatable to Westerners who would oppose the explicit politicide of Israel, as bluntly declared by Iran’s President, but would accept the elimination of Zionism though both would amount to the same. Those are the wide

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grounds on which Muslim and European anti-Semitism can find their common expression. Muslims in general, including those in Europe, have no compunction about interchanging Jews, Israelis, and Zionists, despite their protestations to the contrary, and they have the advantage of taking the liberty to substitute them for each other without fearing the political incorrectness, which may derive from using the improper words. The French Le Point, for example, reported that the General Intelligence Directorate (DCRGDirection Centrale des Renseignements Generaux) has been collecting extracts from the Friday sermons in radical mosques, and that acting on this intelligence, nineteen activists of this sort have been expelled from France in 2005 alone, including one imam and one preacher. The others were “ideological operators” who led groups whose potential for subversion was detected by the authorities and whose rhetoric against Jews (and Americans) was among their chief targets. One of those expelled imams was protesting incessantly against the “West which is ruled under the boot of Zionists and their mercenaries” and vowed that “the land must burn from New York to Jerusalem.” He preached that “Jihad must be waged everywhere on Allah’s land,” so that the “Holy Places should be cleansed from Jews, Christians and heretic Muslims.” Europe in general, and the French Republic in particular, also come under this all-encompassing definition of the enemies of Islam, for Jihad ought to be launched against the “great Americano-Zionist Satan and its undistinguishable petty allies of all sorts.” The rationale is chillingly simple: “secularism is a diabolical concept, a Zionist invention, and Islam cannot accept democracy because “democracy means the rule by the people while in Islam it is exclusively the domain of Allah.” One of those radical Muslim imams, who follows the Turkish Kaplan school of thought, has called on his adepts to “never submit to French demands,” and dubbed in 1994 the then French Minister of the Interior, Charles Pasqua, a “poisonous snake who aspires to the death of Islam so that he can enslave the Muslims.” In 1997 he attacked France for its “corrupt politicians and decadent society, who have to be brought back to reason one of these days.” He also voiced his opposition to the “catholic idolaters” and to the “criminal and perfidious French language,” which amounted to a refusal to “acculturate into any society that is not Islamic.” He also castigated the Believers who let their wives dress like “those loose western women,” and specifically attacked a young Muslim Turkish woman who married in 2005 a French man, thereby “infecting the blood of the True Faith.”28

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So deep has become the identification of Zionism with evil in Muslim circles, that after a wide-ranging program on BBC’s Panorama, following the London bombings in 2005, which caused turmoil among the Muslim community in Britain, due to its “Islamophobia” and attacks on Muslim leaders in the country (see Chapter 4 the Demonization of Jews), a group of young Muslim professionals convened in London to discuss the issue. Martin Bright, a journalist from The Observer, who reported that the debate was intense and the tempers flared, was the sole defender of the program on the panel, and was expectedly dubbed a Muslim hater and a propagandist. Bright attested that when he was interviewed a week earlier on Muslim Cable TV, he was asked to declare his links to “the Zionist media lobby,” just because the central claims of the Observer and Panorama remained unchallenged: that the moderate credentials of Britain’s most powerful Muslim lobby—the MCB (Muslim Council of Britain) were open to question; that the MCB grew out of sectarian Islamic politics of South Asia; and that it failed to control its extremist affiliates. Bright felt that to articulate those ideas did not amount to an attack on Islam or on British Muslims, but rather to call to account a powerful organization which had the ear of ministers and influence across Whitehall. Perversely, the program had the short term effect of rallying many who had been critical of the MCB in the past to its cause now that it was under siege. But Bright wrote that it would be catastrophic if this continued to be the case, since the organization was not capable of representing the broad diversity of the Muslim communities in Britain. On the set of a Pakistani TV station, the host accused Bright of being “a great admirer of Salman Rushdie,” while a representative of the MCB bullied an imam who dared to suggest that he had been ashamed of Sacranie’s boycott of the Holocaust Memorial.29 Tariq Ramadan, the prominent Muslim intellectual who resides in Geneva and is the grandchild of al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brothers, has been roaming all Europe and posing as a modernizer of Islam. So much so that in spite of the ban imposed against him to take up a professorship in the U.S., he has been adopted by the British government as a counselor on Muslim affairs, he has been lecturing throughout Britain and explaining on British TV his views on Ijtihad (intellectual striving to re-interpret the scriptures in their new and modern context). In one of those interviews he is very cautious not to appear as anti-Semitic by adopting the very acceptable anti-Zionist spin, so current in Europe. As he made clear, the Cartoon Crisis was not just intended to

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provoke Muslims, but was part of the Western pro-Zionist conspiracy. He seamlessly linked between the violent Intifadah caused by Muslim mobs around the world who rose against the “insult” to their Prophet and the Palestinian grievances against Israel, as if they were part of an ideological feedback loop: the West is always to blame for its racism and religious bigotry and Muslims are never responsible for their acts of violence. Also telling is his pretended rejection of “suicide bombing,” for while claiming to be “against those acts of terror,” he immediately qualified by arguing the “reasonableness of those who advocate terrorism against Israel.” This position is taken directly from the American leftist textbook: “I am personally opposed to suicide bombings, but I would never prevent someone from exercising their right to conduct one against the Zionist oppressors.” Ramadan identifies Western policies as the cause of the rise of extremist Islamic political groups and the source of the “us and them” worldview of the “four young” (again no word about Muslim) 7/7 London bombers.30 Admittedly some of Ramadan’s declarations in his program seem moderate, for example the stunning revelation that “European Muslims do not see the world as their ancestors did, divided into the medieval Dar al-Islam (the House of Islam or Pax Islamica) and the rest as the hostile Dar al-Harb (House of war). Maybe Ramadan has been personally persuaded to relinquish that anachronistic view of the world, which does not accord any more with modern reality, and that is to his credit, but who has allowed him to speak in the name of European Islam in this regard? This would be a major advance in Muslim-Western relations if it were proved true, but does this statement jibe with the state of affairs he presents during his program? Especially in his discussion of the recent French car-burning Intifadah, and the Danish cartoon protests, didn’t he claim that young Muslims in Europe felt alienated from the Western cultures they inhabit? Doesn’t his justification of violence by Muslims, in reaction to this alleged alienation and in response to the West’s “proZionist policies” assume the Manichean dichotomy that he claims that European Muslims have now rejected? And does he not identify a vision of “us and them” resulting, ironically, from western “pro-Zionist” policies, at a time when Zionism is under attack in Europe, which has increased “extreme Islamic political groups” and provoked the 7/7 bombings? His rosy assessment of the shift in belief among European Muslims about their role in Muslim society is belied by the very arguments he presents throughout the program. To his credit, however, in Ramadan’s closing remarks he did not hesitate to direct some criticism at the Muslim

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community in Europe and at the Muslim world: “As I come to the end of my journey, I am convinced that Muslims in Europe have to find a path between the secular West and the traditional East. Islam in the Muslim majority countries is trapped by undemocratic regimes and reactionary clerics.” So far so good, but he immediately qualifies his position with this reversal: “Resistance to change is reinforced by resentment at what Muslims see as double standards of western policies towards the Muslim world.” Yet again, Tariq Ramadan contends that the problems of Muslims living in the West and the cultural adaptations they need to make to integrate into their host societies, are not really in their own hands, but the hands of non-Muslim westerners. The West is responsible for the alleged policies and double standards that fuel their resentment. Ramadan provides justification for Muslims in the West in their refusal to integrate socially until Western culture reverses its internal and foreign policies to their liking and abandons the very Judeo-Christian values that have made the West a bastion or personal and political freedoms that many of the Muslim immigrants in Europe could not find in their own Muslim lands.31 In short, the Muslims’ pressure on Europe to trade its Judeo-Christian values, which they interpret as “pro-Zionist,” for Shari’a-inspired values which they wish to impose on their host countries, will persist as long as Europe does not capitulate. Anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism have been used even as a vehicle of internal debate in Europe regarding anti-American and anti-Islamic attitudes. During the autumn of 2005 a major argument erupted in France after its Parliament adopted a law requiring school textbooks to recognize the positive aspects of colonialism, but due to the strong objections of “memory activists” and historians, the law was finally revoked. The French textbooks remain, therefore, ambivalent on the issue, recognizing both the positive and the negative aspects of colonialism. But the debate shifted to terrorism, because many feared that as French teachers are free to choose their books in the market place, which is usually anti-American, students may grow to justify Muslim terrorism as a reaction to American imperialism, thereby also taking sides in the internal debate on European Islam. For in some textbooks Islamic terrorism was dealt with as just the top tier of public protests, which begin with mass rallies, continue via “citizens’ action” like that of Jose Bove who visited Arafat and accused the Mossad of organizing anti-Semitic eruptions in France, and end up with violence, when one of those texts claimed that the destruction of a McDonald restaurant in Millau had earned Bove international fame due to his opposition to globalization. According to this view, Islamic terror-

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ism occupies the top of that scale of protest inasmuch as it purports to put an end to American domination of the world. In this light (or rather obscurity), one textbook explains Muslim terrorism as the rejection of Western civilization, of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians, and of the presence of American troops in the Middle East. In another textbook, students are told that terrorism is the weapon of the weak, who are unable to confront major powers and therefore attempt to destabilize them by attacking their symbols. In sum, Bove and Bin Laden are described as being engaged in the same battle, only differing by the means used, while the entire ideology of Jihad, of which they ignore the import, leaves the authors unmoved.32 The two authors of this textbook attack the trend of thought, which implies that France was becoming the ally of Muslim radicals by emphasizing its multi-culturalism and its constant call for dialogue, thus manifesting its impotence in applying independent foreign policies. The authors claim that these trends, which supported the Muslim radicals in France did not describe the world as it is but as they fantasize it, because given that the hated U.S. is the sole superpower that dominates the world, France is still the only one to stand up bravely to it, speaking for the “silent majority” and promoting Islamic terrorism as a “proud reaction of humiliated Muslims.” But the authors show that contrary to that image of France, the latter has been engaged in fighting terrorism on its terrain as an ally of the U.S. and under its command in Afghanistan where the Taliban and al-Qa’ida are still entrenched. Even the Chief of Staff of the French army has been on record as fearing that Paris, just like London, may be threatened by terrorism due to its support for the U.S. The authors specify that the textbooks in France, which have been sobered by the waves of anti-Semitic eruptions that were generated by their violent anti-Israeli sentiment, are now treating Israel more fairly and more objectively. For example, Israel is no longer described as the product of the Sho’ah, and Zionism is now presented as a political means of Jewish emancipation. Nevertheless, a new obsession with “balance” has become the order of the day, under which every time Palestinian corruption is mentioned, it is ritually described as “less painful than occupation.” Whenever the Holocaust is referred to, the Arab nakbah (disaster) goes hand in hand with it. And whenever Palestinian terrorism is condemned, so is Israeli “colonization” of the territories as claimed by the Palestinians. The authors reveal that when their book came out in 2005, they were told by many parents that they were shocked to discover what their children were learning. They apparently had not seen Brenner’s book, which had

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appeared several years earlier and gave a detailed account of the virulent anti-Jewish, anti-Israel, and pro-Islamic learning materials that were forced on school curricula by the Muslims.33 When outspoken American critic of Islam, Wafa Sultan, (see the Summary below) visited Australia, in 2007, she warned that all Muslims needed to be closely monitored and insisted that Australia and the U.S. (and one could add Europe too) were duped into believing that there was a difference between the moderate and radical interpretations of Islam. In an interview for The Australian, Sultan said that Muslims were brainwashed from an early age to believe that Western values were evil and that the world would one day come under the control of Shari’a law. She warned that Muslims would continue to exploit the freedom of speech in the West to spread their hate and attack their adopted countries until the Western mind grasped the magnitude of the Islamic threat.34 Capitalizing on European disarray and mood of self-flagellation, Muslims lured their hosts to delegitimize Jews as a national minority and deny their right to statehood, according to French sociologist Trigano. This fit seamlessly with the fact that Jews had become the symbol for the Europeans to avoid confronting as long as possible the problems posed to them by Arab and Muslim immigration, since the Middle East dispute had become a means to mediate the complex relationships between Europe and the immigrant population. Condemning Israel was a way for Europe to keep civil peace at home based on the record of European disregard for Muslim attacks against Jewish targets in Europe, it indeed appears that instead of confronting the Muslim aggressors, Europeans elected to turn the Jews into scapegoats while the Jewish victims were helpless and powerless to face these accusations and, ill-disposed to react to them aggressively and violently, had to accept them passively. Shmuel Trigano further claims that since Europeans adored Jews provided they were dead, they recognized Jewish peoplehood only in the context of their suffering and elimination in Europe—hence the “excessively sacral” fashion in which the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz took place.35 The contemporary European hostility against Israel and the Jewish communities in the continent, suited exactly the vituperative sentiment being cultivated by Muslims and Arabs for years. For Europeans, identifying with the Sho’ah was a way to redeem themselves from the Nazi culpabilities and their own collaboration with them, in the process turning the Jewish victim into the executioner by the very fact that he dared to take up weapons and revolt against the state of victimhood that was assigned to him. The convergence between the

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European feelings of guilt and the inveterate Muslim hatred of the Jews was somewhat disrupted by the Cartoon Affair, which vilified the Danes and other Europeans together with the Jews. That process had begun after the Van Gogh murder in Holland and prior to the cartoons and the London underground explosions, when a Danish daily surprisingly declared: “Today we are all Israelis.” A Danish retired general declared in a panel debate in Copenhagen he shared with this author in October 2005, that “Europe cannot sustain another Holocaust. If Israel goes down, Europe will go down with it.” The Cartoon Crisis put the Europeans and Jews/Israelis squarely on one side and the Muslims on the other, once again pitting Muslim civilization against its JudeoChristian counterpart. The demonization of Denmark in the Muslim world during the Cartoon Crisis not only signaled to the Europeans that it was not always the evil attributed to Israel which caused trouble in the Middle East, but that radical Islam and its aggressive attitudes towards the non-Muslims was at the root of these tensions. Denmark, one of the most liberal, open, and tolerant societies in Europe, finds itself, as a result, resented and boycotted for a sin it did not commit. But that turn of events did not stop there. A famous Egyptian actor and singer, Sha’ban abd al-Rahim, echoing the widespread sentiment in the Muslim world against Danes and Jews, soon joined the fray, adding a popular (in both senses of the word—folkloric and loved by the populace) twist to that unfortunate affair. He had behind him a rich record of hatred when he recorded a hit in 2000 entitled “I hate Israel, I love Amr Musa.” That expression of hatred, which the authorities would not stop, though they would in other circumstances, came twenty-one years after his “moderate” country signed a peace treaty with Israel. Amr Musa, a former Foreign Minister of Egypt and now the Secretary General of the Arab League, is a notorious anti-Semite and anti-Zionist. He followed that album up after September 11 with a disk featuring the song: “Hey people, it was only a tower, and I swear by Allah that they [the US] are the ones who pulled it down.” One wonders how an avowed Muslim could swear by Allah in vain in front of his supposedly pious crowds whose government was nominally siding with the U.S. fight against terror. In any case, in view of the Cartoon Affair he persuaded his producer to record two new songs: one sending Denmark to Hell (the other about the outbreak of the Avian flu), for he was convinced that “we must wake Islam up and write a new song right now.” His interview, which was broadcast throughout the Arab world, is most instructive about his and his vast audiences’ state of mind, which

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ought to be comprehended and heeded by the West. These are excerpts from that interview-cum-performance: I had begun with the song “I hate Israel”…Then, I started to sing and when the song became a hit and there was such a big fuss, I decided to follow these things so that I could pick up things that people like, and which help angry people to let off steam…. One morning … when I finished work, and turned on the TV and heard about those bad cartoons…. I got really mad and called my producer and insisted that we must write s song now… We are completely fed up (2) But there are no solutions Humiliation has reached even the religion and the Prophet (2) The religion and the Prophet Allah’s Messenger, Muhammed the Imam of Prophets They want to disturb his image—those despicable fools (2) Those despicable fools No Religion can be held responsible for the man who humiliated the Prophet These are crazy people and their top guy is an idiot (2) Their top guy is an idiot Denmark? They are nothing but pagans Who are they to say anything about the Prophet? (2) About the Prophet Our Islam is innocent of them, and what they say is all lies Our Islam is a religion of love, not of injustice and terrorism(2) Not of injustice and terrorism When you all meet in Hell, the flames will burn your faces The flames will burn your faces They will burn your faces. They will speak and won’t be silent, and others will say along with me: We want a total boycott, and even that is not enough Why shouldn’t we curse them just like they curse us?...36

Other Muslims, more cynical, ignorant, fanatical, and outrageous, even tried to outdo their popular singer by taking their revenge for their humiliation on the Jews. Arab and Muslim media, which routinely carry hideous anti-Semitic caricatures, noticeably multiplied their output during the Cartoon Crisis, as if this satisfied their need to channel their hatred where it was least likely to backfire on them. Hamshari, a leading Iranian newspaper, announced, as its way of “retaliating” (for what?) against Jews, a Holocaust Cartoon contest. What do victims of the Holocaust, which the Iranian president denies having ever happened, have to do with Muslim outrage over the Danish cartoons? The Arab-European League, a self-proclaimed “moderate” Belgian-Muslim organization, published

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in “retaliation” to the cartoons, a caricature showing Anne Frank in bed with Hitler, with the Nazi chief saying: Write this one in your diary, Anne.”37 Setting aside this coarse, insensitive, inhuman “sense of humor,” it is evident that in this outburst of hatred, Israel and Europe have been lumped together as the enemy of Islam and been thrust into the status of Satan who deserves curses and boycott. Daniel Goldhagen, a noted writer on the Sho’ah, has also diagnosed the Cartoon Affair, not simply as a detached and independent event, but a link in a chain of phenomena, which express the march of political Islam and its muscle flexing in the streets, in the halls of power and battlefields, to the extent that a Sunni cleric in Beirut who led an anti-cartoon demonstration declared that the war with the West had already started. Goldhagen claims that the cartoons did not provoke a storm until Iran was about to be referred to the Security Council for its threatening nuclear program. He found it revealing that Gaza, the hotbed of Hamas, was one of the spots where “philo-Palestinian Danes and other Europeans” were attacked, even though its residents receive more European economic aid per capita than anyone else in the world. However, European largesse will not buy Palestinian goodwill, since they have come to regard any foreign aid as an “entitlement to which they have a right.” The same attacks were duplicated in Syria, Lebanon, and Iran—other epicenters of Islamic turmoil. Even in London, Muslim demonstrators held banners proclaiming: “ Massacre those who insult Islam”; “butcher those who mock Islam”; “Britain you will pay, 7/7 is on its way”; and “Europe—your 9/11 will come.” In Gaza demands were made to amputate the hands of the cartoonists, together with death threats against the publishers. European, especially Danish, goods were boycotted, embassies torched and a bounty of a million dollars was offered for the murder of the cartoonists.38 Maybe even the events that led in July 2006 to the Second Lebanon war, were triggered by Iran and Syria, via their surrogates in Gaza first, and then in Lebanon, as a sort of revenge for the cartoons. As the proponents of violence against the West found themselves unable militarily to wage a full-fledged war against the West, they resolved, in a displaced reaction against what they thought was weaker and more vulnerable Israel, to channel their fury against it. That they reaped in the process the diversion of world attention from the Iranian nuclear program, and ultimately obtained the release of their prisoners by kidnapping Israeli hostages, was an added bonus. This is far beyond what could be expected as a proportionate (let alone civilized) reaction according to Western standards. For Goldhagen, the meek European response of apologies and

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self-flagellation lent legitimacy and set a precedent to that intifadah-like eruption of violence whenever Muslims felt injured. While the fury over the cartoons spread throughout the Muslim world, Danish, Norwegian, British, and even French and Austrian embassies, consulates, and humanitarian aid agencies were burned down and Christians attacked and robbed, bringing the number of those directly killed by these murderous protests to 200 (the equivalent of the Bali Massacre in 2002). It was evident that the demonstrations were staged and manipulated, not spontaneous. Israel was drawn in when Palestinian Muslims attacked western interests in the West Bank and Gaza, stomped on Danish flags, kidnapped westerners and sent the rest fleeing to Israel for safety. For Muslims, those who provide shelter for escapees of Muslim violence are by definition “anti-Muslim” forces, which must be assaulted and condemned. On February 8, 2006, 60 international observers from the Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH), including 20 Danes and Norwegians, were forced to flee their Headquarters, after being attacked by Palestinians. Since the PA Police were unable to defend them from the demonstrators, the Israeli army had to be summoned for the job. The irony of the situation escaped no one: It was the Palestinians who asked for international forces to “protect” them from Israel, and now the TIPH soldiers were asking Israel to protect them from the Palestinian onslaught.39 Thus, not only was Israel lumped together with Europe in times of crisis, but the Muslim anti-Western fury, which is directed at both, and is usually and routinely poured on Israel, Zionism, and the Jews, has become a universal alarm call for the entire Western civilization. An American columnist wrote: As long as Muslim demonstrators only shouted “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!”, Europe and the rest of the world’s Left found reasons either to ignore the Nazi-style evil inherent in those chants, and the homicidal actions that flowed from them; or to blame America and Israel for the hatred…. But like the early Nazis, our generation’s fascists hate anything good, not merely Jews and Americans. And now, the Damascus’ Embassy in Norway, a leading anti-Israel “peace-at-any-price” country, has been torched. And more and more Norwegians, Brits, French, Dutch, Swedes, and the rest of the European appeasers who blamed America for September 11, and Israel for Palestinian suicide bombings, are beginning to wonder whether there just might be something morally troubling with the Islamic world”40

Apart from the fact that such notorious anti-Semites, as Ahmadinajad of Iran, blame Israel for the conflict which evolved between Islam and Christianity, Israel’s name was somehow invoked in most Muslim demonstrations against the cartoons. When Danish flags were burned down throughout the Islamic world, they were ritually accompanied by

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the Israeli Star of David and the American Stars and Stripes, while in the background shouts of “Destroy” or “Death to ” Denmark, Israel, the U.S., or slogans that Bush or Angela Merkel, or the American Neo-cons were ”stupid Zionists” were heard. Since threats of “Death to Israel,” Zionism or Jews have become the delenda est Carthago of radical Muslims, the cartoon crisis was just another occasion for them to express their hate to anything Jewish or pro-Jewish or pro-Zionist or evoking Jewish statehood. So blatant were these manifestations of flagrant anti-Semitism, that European countries who have been usually oblivious to them in other contexts, suddenly woke up to the reality of anti-Semitic cartoons in the Muslim media, and of Muslim insults to other religions, at a time when Muslims were violently protesting against an artistic “insult” to their prophet, and overlooking what their coreligionists were doing to churches, synagogues, and Christian and Jewish symbols worldwide. Moreover, Western media came to realize that while the Cartoon Affair was an isolated one, even though it caused death and turmoil, the Muslim deprecation of others is permanent, repetitive, recurring, self-sustaining, and independent of any particular “provocation.” So overwhelming is this attitude among Muslim masses that even such a prominently civilized and moderate Nobel Prize laureate for literarture, Naguib Mahfuz of Egypt, was cited as having joined the crowds of the boycotters of Denmark.41 This prompted a scathing comment by American columnist Charles Krauthammer: What passes for moderation in the Islamic community—“I share your rage but do not torch that embassy”, is nothing of the sort. It is simply a cynical way to endorse the goals of the mob without endorsing its means. It is fraudulent because, while pretending to uphold the principle of religious sensitivity, it is only interested in this instance in religious insensitivity…. Have any of these “moderates” ever protested the grotesque caricatures of Christians and, most especially Jews, that are broadcast throughout the Middle East on a daily basis? The sermons on Palestinian TV that refer to Jews as the “sons of pigs and monkeys”? The Syrian prime time TV series that shows rabbis slaughtering a gentle boy in order to ritually consume his blood? The 41-part series on Egyptian TV based on that anti-Semitic Czarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, showing the Jews to be engaged in a century-old conspiracy to control the world?... Those who don’t are not moderates, they are simply hypocrites, opportunists and agents for the rioters, using merely different means to advance the same goal: to impose upon the West, with its traditions of freedom of speech, a set of taboos that is exclusive to the Islamic faith. These are not defenders of religion, but Muslim supremacists trying to force their diktats upon the liberal West.42

Israel was enmeshed in the Cartoon Affair in yet another fashion. Israel had suffered from a total Arab boycott for many decades and therefore understood the meaning of the boycott of Denmark’s goods by the Muslim

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world. Back in 2002 the Labor Union of Denmark was among the first to call for boycott of Israeli goods due to the Palestinian Intifadah. It was rather strange for the eruption of Palestinian violence against Israel to be rewarded by punishment of its victim. But when the boycott of Denmark was announced by the Muslim world, its own partial boycott of Israel backfired on it, as many refused to join the “buy Danish” counter-measure movement. Since many Muslim countries withdrew their ambassadors from Copenhagen, and the Danes had to apologize repeatedly for the “wrong” they did not do, the Muslims felt vindicated while the “pro-Zionists” were defeated in their eyes. It was claimed that the boycott was lifted after the Arla group, which exported dairy products to the Arab world, made worldwide apologies and pledged to “disseminate awareness about Islam and make donations to Muslim charities.” The consequence might be that in its eagerness to promote trade with the Muslim world, Denmark might grow even more circumspect in its dealings with Israel, even though the Danes understand that they received the same treatment they had unjustly meted out to Israel.43 This can only increase the degree of European servility to the Muslim world, and speed up the rate of importation to the continent of the Middle Eastern dispute which for Arabs and Muslims remains the yardstick to gauge European conformity to their pressing demands. Perhaps no other country in Europe has done more to hide its antiSemitism under the cloak of anti-Israelism, and to bring its public conduct toward Israel to the peak of hypocrisy than Sweden under the Social Democrats, until recently personified by Prime Minister Goran Persson. A former Israeli Ambassador to Stockholm (2002-4), Zvi Mazel, who was a keen observer and gained fame when he pulled the plug on a horrific “artistic” exhibit, which glorified terrorism against Israel, says that while Sweden considered itself a super-democracy, an example of openness and enlightenment, its citizens have been incredibly and unilaterally educated by its shallow press, which had abandoned any similitude of investigative reporting and wholly relied on biased communiqués and briefings, which evinced an inexplicably hostile attitude towards another democracy like Israel, and chose to throw its lot with the authoritarian and dictatorial regimes of the Arab world and their attending rabid anti-Semitism. He imputes that attitude partly to the lack of serious and persistent public debates in the press and partly to the self-righteousness and the pontificating arrogance of the ruling elites. Since a disproportionately large number of journalists belong to, or are supporters of, the Green

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and Left parties and the then-ruling Social Democrats, they tend to toe the line without asking questions or criticizing the conventional wisdom. For example, Jan Guillou, a man who praised Saddam Hussein in his articles and held extreme anti-Israeli views, was elected chairman of the Journalists Association, a body that rarely takes the government to task. Mazel recalls that in one of the briefings of the state media, where most ambassadors showed up, they were told that only three topics were of interest and worthy of coverage: The Arab-Israeli conflict, the situation in Iraq due to American involvement, and relations with neighboring Scandinavian countries. The Ambassador found that attitude narrowminded and unbecoming of a democracy. He also found it outrageous that all ambassadors were told on that occasion, that while the media had the freedom to write what they wished against of for any country, the latter had no right to respond.44 Mazel observes that of all major Swedish papers, Aftonbladet has been the most anti-Israeli, which can explained by the fact that its editor, Helle Klein is a descendent of a famous rabbi, who cannot find anything right with Israel (otherwise why would she remain outside of it?), to the point that even at the height of the Intifadah, when Israel was inundated by a murderous wave of Islamikaze, she found it necessary to accuse the victims of being “colonialists and oppressive” and had no reproach to voice towards the Palestinian terrorists who blew up buses, restaurants, and markets in order to maximize the numbers of Jewish victims. Dagens Nyheter, the more intellectually inclined, is not only consistently antiIsraeli, but has no compunction about linking his political positions to anti-Semitism, which are one and the same for it. It explicitly and shamelessly came out with an article entitled: “It is Permitted to Hate Jews,” by a Jan Samuelson, who presented himself as an “Islam expert,” and claimed that as long as Israel “occupied territories,” the Muslim hatred against the Jews was justified, as if before 1967 there was no genocidal Muslim anti-Semitism, and disregarding the fact that though Israel did not occupy Swedish territory, hatred towards it was encouraged by his paper. Never mind that the occupation of Skane by the Swedes did not necessarily arouse Danish hatred towards them. A slightly improved and fairer criticism of Israel is offered by Svenska Dagbladet and Expressen though the latter allowed an Imam from the Stockholm Great Mosque to publish a weekly column on its pages. When one recalls that Hamas hate materials are routinely distributed in that mosque and that Sheikh Qaradawi, the master hater of Jews, spoke there in 2004, one can imagine the import and tone of that column. But anyone who wishes to reply is

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banned from doing so under the guidelines of the government, so even the exposed hate sermons of Qaradawi received no serious coverage.45 On the positive side of the balance, Persson personally had partly redeemed himself by organizing a conference on Holocaust education in 2000, but that also allowed him, his party, and his supporters to point to that big and positive event to refute any accusation of anti-Semitism. He also established a research institute to research the Holocaust, and the proceeds were published as a book that was translated to many languages and which took upon itself to collaborate with Yad Vashem in Israel in Sho’ah education. Thereafter, Persson attended the annual Holocaust memorial in the Great Synagogue of Stockholm, but his speeches became less and less sympathetic to the Jewish victims and more and more “balanced” in order not to upset the Muslims on whom he increasingly depended until he lost the 2005 elections. One theory suggests that Persson, who was aware of Swedish leanings towards Hitler during the war, and of the subsequent growth of Neo-Nazi groups in the country, who ideologically pose a challenge to him as a social democrat, decided to act against them by raising the Holocaust education issue. So, though he was probably the least sworn anti-Israeli in his government, he tolerated in its midst Foreign Minister Anna Lindh who pathologically hated Israel and never made any attempt to hide it. Under her term of office until she was assassinated in 2003, her Ministry issued the greatest number of anti-Israeli condemnations of any EU country. The occasion usually came when an act of terrorism caused victims in Israel and the Israeli army retaliated, generating a “balanced” statement of Lindh, which condemned both the terrorists and their victims. When as the head of the Swedish Young Social Democrats an Iranian immigrant was elected, he demanded a more pronounced anti-Israeli policy, something which anchored Sweden as the most anti-Israel and pro-Muslim country in the Union.46 But Sweden could not yet claim the questionable title of the most anti-Jewish country, which France can still take to its “credit,” however reluctantly and contrary to its official policy. It is very instructive and edifying to explore in this regard both the field report of a senior Israeli journalist who spent time at the very end of 2003 in the cites around Paris where proximity between Jews and Muslims produced scenes of blunt Muslim anti-Semitism, and the rebuttal of an American journalist who lives in Paris but had another take on the same events.47 Journalist Ben Simon anchors his story in the Seine-Saint-Denis neighborhood in northern Paris, which became notorious for its festering crime after having undergone a demographic and architectural upheaval by the masses of

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Maghrebi Muslim immigrants in recent decades, and to a lesser extent by Jewish immigrants who have replaced the old native French inhabitants in that suburb. All these newcomers have been accommodated in hundreds of long and dreary apartment buildings, hastily built to receive them. Muslims and Jews from the Maghreb found themselves perpetuating their previous way of life, which they transplanted with them to French soil. That Maghrebi-speaking population has been augmented by new immigrants from China, India, Pakistan, Turkey, Poland, Romania, and elsewhere in that international tour of Babel for the poor and the disaffected. The reporter could observe the crumbling harmony between Arabs and Jews, though they shared the same North African origin, and imputes it to the imported Israeli-Palestinian dispute into the French heartland. At any rate, he stresses that the routine of the Jewish residents in that neighborhood has been violated once and again by attempts on the part of their Muslim neighbors to harm them. In Sarcelles, one of the localities of that neighborhood, a Jewish owner of a pastry shop, exclaimed: “this is not true France, you understand, there are people here from all countries, but there are no French people. They have all fled away and left us alone with the Arabs.” In his perception those Arabs had changed in the previous three years from cordial neighbors and good customers to people he became totally fed up with.48 According to that report, the cause for the change lies in the outbreak of the Palestinian Intifadah in 2000, which pitted the Sarcelles Arabs against their Jewish neighbors, causing them to spit on Jewish passers-by in the street, scrawl graffiti on the walls of their shared apartment buildings, harass Jewish children wearing skullcaps, calling them “sales juifs!” (dirty Jews ), and even try to burn down the neighborhood synagogue. Jews in that area began mulling over the need to leave, as they could no longer deal with the situation. Shortly thereafter, at the conclusion of Friday night prayers, the rabbi in the synagogue asked the worshippers not to leave just yet. After bolting the doors, those present discussed ways to restore security to the Jews of Sarcelles. Some people said in a panic that it was impossible to go on living like this, others suggested moving to a different neighborhood “where there are no Arabs”; others argued that there is no choice but immigrate to the Land of Israel because that is the safest place for Jews. Everyone agreed that they would abide by whatever the rabbi decided. The Jews said to the reporter that some of them will move to Canada, but most would go to Israel. There were in this story all the components of fear of the present Muslim anti-Semitism,

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uncertainty of the future due to the perceived inability of the authorities to protect them, clustering around the spiritual leadership and the entire congregation to seek safety and solace, the instinctive desire for survival by moving on, and the ultimate trust in the Rock of Israel as the permanent solution. As one of the congregants put it, “something has happened to the Jews of France, people do not feel it is their home any longer.”49 The previous year, Muslim youngsters of North African origin in the suburb of Garges les Gonesse not far from Sarcelles, ran amok outside the gate of the synagogue and threw rocks at the worshippers. Immediately afterwards a firebomb was thrown at the synagogue. No one was hurt, but following that incident, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy ordered guards to be posted at the synagogue. An iron wall was built around the entire structure, and closed-circuit security cameras monitor the movement of passers-by round the clock. This means, that for Jews who stay, they have to adapt to so many security measures that they have to re-adopt the fortress mentality that they thought they had relinquished when they left the medieval ghettoes in North Africa and stepped into the freedoms of modern democracy. In 2004, 600 Jewish families still lived in that suburb, alongside thousands of Muslim families, who have very markedly returned to religion, with women and young girls covered with their veils or shawls, and the shop owners adding an Arabic name to their previous French one. Unemployment there is very steep, 2.5 times the national average, and the economic distress underlines the heightened religious practice, to such an extent that it outstrips the pace of those who distance themselves from it. The scars of this trauma were not helped when sometime later Parisian Jews were awakened to the TV broadcasts of the smoky remains of a Jewish school in the Gagny suburb of the same region, which had been razed to the ground. Again, Sarkozy visited the grounds and acknowledged that the attack bore “a clear racist and anti-Semitic context.” Two days later, President Chirac convened Jewish leaders at the Elysee and assured them that “every attack on Jews is the same as an attack on France.” Nice words apart, Jews in France sensed that anti-Jewish acts were taking the semblance of routine and part of the standard expected of Muslim behavior, with the government quite incapable of quelling the phenomenon. A decade earlier, during the presidency of Mitterand, when the Jewish cemetery in Carpentras, southern France, was desecrated, 300,000 French people from all walks of life, including intellectuals, Muslims, Leftists, and government officials, led by the President himself, marched in protest, expressing their deep and genuine jolt at the events. Now things had changed, that envelope

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of protection and solidarity had gone, and the President was receiving the Jews in his Palace, not running to them in sympathy.50 During the first year of the Intifadah,(2000-1) Ben Simon tells us, the municipality lost no time in sending workers to erase anti-Jewish slogans that were scrawled on the walls across the country. Thereafter, the pace has slowed down, either because of the banality of the repetitive routine, or because the French have grown weary of the outcries of the Jews. This is how fatigue and indifference take over values of justice and order. The terrorists never get tired. Philippe Elyakim, the editor of an economic journal in Paris, whose parents had immigrated from Thessaloniki in the 1940s, and who always considered himself a Frenchman who never encountered any sign of anti-Semitism, was shaken when his 13-year old son returned from school very upset, because one of his classmates hurled “sale juif!” at him. When he reported the incident to the school principal in the prestigious Monmartre neighborhood, the culprit was suspended for three days. This time it is unclear whether the girl in question was Muslim or otherwise. But it is clear that in this atmosphere of resignation, where anti-Semitic jibes are current, and the mainstream no longer protests, demonstrates, or writes articles to raise hell, Muslims feel free to act, because acting against Jews no longer raises eyebrows. So, Jews once again feel unsafe and threatened, often explaining this away as “Muslim racism generated by the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians,” though the amount of Jewish individuals who were injured or otherwise physically assaulted was not high, in the judgment of Ben Simon, which will be challenged below. But the few that were hurt, like the case of Rabbi Gabriel Farhi who was stabbed, were a few too many in the eyes of the Jewish community. Some circles have advanced the thesis that Rabbi Farhi had “staged” his own stabbing in order to “sate his relentless desire for publicity.” In any case, exasperation and fear are mounting in the midst of the French Jewish community to the point that Jean-Jacques Wahl, the director of the Alliance school network, who considered himself the consummate Frenchman, began to doubt his long-held assumptions, although he still believed that official France was not anti-Semitic.51 Nonetheless, the students of the Jewish High School in one of the Paris suburbs feel that they are directly threatened and that the state is failing to protect them from Muslim anti-Semitism. Their school has acquired the look of a prison due to the ugly wall that has been built around it and the cameras that seek out hostile interlopers. It is not by chance that the school is guarded as though it were a military site. The largest

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concentration of militant Muslims in France lives around that school in poor and disadvantaged conditions and depending on welfare handouts. Every morning the 650 Jewish students are transported to the school. Since Muslim students make their way to their schools along the same routes, the trips are fraught with tension for their permanent potential of friction between the two groups. Until the Intifadah of 2000, the Jewish students used to flaunt their Jewishness, wearing a Star of David around their necks , and the boys wearing kippa head-covers. Now they keep them in their pockets and put them on only after they are on the school grounds, removing them again on their way back home. This would be equivalent to Muslim girls being forced to remove their veils or shawls in public, and donning them on only in the privacy of their homes or Muslim institutions. One can imagine what outrage that would have caused throughout the country of liberties and civil rights. The school principal, Rachel Cohen, explained that since these days it is enough to look like a Jew to be attacked, the students got permission to hide any sign that exposed their Jewishness. What escapes her and many other Jews who are ready to absorb this humiliation and remain silent, is that Jews can be and are usually identified by Muslims and attacked no matter how they hide. So, in their quest to secure their safety by sacrificing their honor, they end up losing both. In fact, the principal attests to the fact that all the students in her school have encountered anti-Semitic incidents, curses, imprecations, threats, intimidations, insults, and all.52 Worse yet, tenth-grade students in that school reported to feel like “settlers in an occupied territory.” Significantly, only five out of the forty students polled by Ben Simon in that class, said that they saw their future in France. In response to another question nearly all of them said they saw their future in Israel. Rachel Cohen, the Principal, organized transportation in common for the students, to reduce the potential of friction with Muslim kids on the way. But she could not help feeling for the Muslim kids because she was Grieved by the hatred they have implanted in them and by the anti-Jewish brainwashing they are subjected to. What kind of life will they have after they grow up? My feeling is that the clerics who have poisoned these young people are criminals, because they destroy the common fabric of life of Jews and Muslims.53

There is hardly anything more appropriate to conclude this chapter than the harsh words of Nidra Poller , the American journalist who has lived in Paris most of her life, for whom the gloomy picture Ben Simon drew of Muslim anti-Semitism in France seemed too soft and unreflecting of the gravity of the situation:

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… this is real life testimony from Jewish residents of Sarcelles exposed to every sort of harassment, assault, threat and insult from their Muslim neighbors. You wouldn’t want to live one single day this way. You can’t believe that Jews in a supposedly modern democratic country can be expected to put up with such mistreatment. And I know even worse stories coming from that same lawless territory … Ben Simon does indeed ask: “What are French Jews undergoing today?”. And then, instead of searching for answers to this heartbreaking question which inhabits our days and nights, he throws us a whopper: “In the past three years, which were studded with anti-Semitic attacks and incidents, not one Jew has been hospitalized, not one Jew has been injured or has required medical treatment of any kind against this background”. What a slap in the face of the embattled banlieue Jews! And it happens to be totally false … On 22 March, 2003, Muslims participating in an anti-war demonstration attacked six members of a Jewish [youth movement]. All six require medical attention. One of the youth, Yoni M. was beaten over the head with iron bars and almost lost an eye. The attack was captured on video and can be viewed. [Interior Minister] Sarkozy visited the place one week later and promised to bring the assailants to justice…. Three months later the case was closed. Ignoring the fully publicized peace march incidents and dozens of others of equal violence, Ben Simon was wrong again [when referring to the stabbing of Rabbi Farhi]. The allegations that the minor abdominal wound was self-inflicted … is one of many such cases where incidents have been reported, denied, confirmed, discredited. Where do you go for the truth when the entire Jewish community is accused of self-inflicting anti-Semitism because of its support for Israel? How do you establish the truth when anyone who denounces an anti-Semitic act or crime is dismissed as an extremist, a fabulator, a Holocaust profiteer? What is really happening to the Jews in France? Sebastien Sellam was not hospitalized. No medical attention could have brought him back to life. His throat was slit. His face was gouged. I save you the details54 [He was a disc jockey at a hot Parisian night club called Queen. At about 11:45 p.m. on Wednesday November 19, the young man known as DJ Lam C (a reverse play on his surname) left the apartment he shared with his parents in a modest building in of Paris’ 10th arrondissement near la Place Colonel Fabien, heading to work as usual. In the underground parking lot, a Muslim neighbor slit Sellam’s throat twice. His face was completely mutilated with a fork. Even his eyes were gouged out in the garage of his low rent apartment building]. Obviously, the wounds were not self-inflicted. The murderer was whisked into a mental hospital and no one knows if he will ever be brought to trial. So, is this an anti-Semitic crime, or just one puzzling incident? An 11-year old boy was systematically persecuted by two Muslim schoolmates from September to December (2003). Twice his injuries required treatment in the hospital emergency room. The affair was handled with the same mixture of secrecy and confusion that has prevailed over the past three years [since the outbreak of the Intifadah in 2000]. But it happens that a journalist’s daughter was in the same class as the persecuted Jewish boy. So the story came out. In Le Monde, no less. This is not a Sarcelles anecdote, it is not a case of friction between immigrant Jews and immigrant Arabs in the scary banlieues. It happened at the prestigious Lycee Montaigne in the 6th arrondissement of Paris. The bullies confessed, then retracted, then confessed, but one of the boys, sincerely baffled, said he did not understand what all the fuss was about … this kind of thing [beating up Jews] is common practice today. A 31-year old Jewish woman was assaulted, raped and injured on the 30th of November, 2003 near her home in the Bellefontaine neighborhood of Toulouse. The assailant

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scribbled an anti-Semitic message on her chest with a ball-point.55 How can a journalist write about what is happening to the Jews of France and avoid scrupulously reporting these incidents?... and hundreds more? [Instead], Ben Simon interviewed a few well integrated French Jews living in good neighborhoods who confirm the troubling rise of anti-Semitism. But he undercuts each example with a disclaimer and tops it off with an extravagant compliment for France. As we say in French, je connais la musique. France is not anti-Semitic, French Jews are elected to high office, President Chirac is not anti-Semitic, he officially confessed to France’s Sho’ah guilt. Another lurid example from the horrible banlieue: a Jewish lycee. You could cry! All of the students have been insulted, threatened with death and extermination, attacked, mocked, spat upon. They have to hide their kippot and Stars of David, but they can’t hide their Jewish souls. It’s happening one half hour by commuter train from the center of Paris. No one can stop it. These kids are on their way out: they see no future for themselves in France. But Ben Simon, in magnificent intellectual tradition, far from the bruised bodies and hearts, wonders if they are dealing with “real or imagined anti-Semitism”. Philosopher Alain Finkielkraut has been [accused by Ben Simon] to be driven to “the verge of hysteria, as he has been relentlessly spreading fear and anxiety”. Well, my friends, if you want to see some real hysteria I recommend a walk on the wild side, chez les jihadistes. Take a look at their abovementioned video-taped attack on the [members of Jewish youth movement], Israeli flags covered with swastikas, Zionism=racism, Sharon=Hitler, and hordes of modestly hijabed women screaming unveiled virulent hatred.… Is French anti-Semitism really French? Because the hoodlums who attack Jews are Muslim. Yes, but they are in most cases French Muslims. Citizens. With voting rights. And they can’t be kicked out. You can quote discerning thinkers who express serious concerns about the pervasive anti-Semitism in French society and then cancel them out with meaningless disclaimers. You can, based on nothing but vague supposition, entrenched ideology, or wishful thinking, claim that this brief upsurge of anti-Semitism is directly related to the Arab-Israeli conflict, and seems to be waning. So what if it flares up again tomorrow? As it did last month? And what if it is enflamed next time by some other conflict or some other aspect of the conflict?56

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Maxime Rodinson, Cult, Ghetto and State: The Persistence of the Jewish Question, al-Saqi Books, London. Ibid, p. 173. See Raphael Israeli, Poison: Manifestations of the Blood Libel, Lexington, 2000. www.jafi.org.il/agenda/2001/english/vk3-22/6asp. Cited by Gerstenfeld, April 1, 2004. Ibid, pp. 184-6. Ibid. pp. 186-7. Ibid, pp. 187-8 Gavin Langmuir, Towards the Definition of anti-Semitism, UC Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990, pp. 11-12. Ibid, p. 12. This aspect has been analyzed by Bat Ye’or in Juifs et Chretiens sous l”islam : les Dhimmis face au Defi Integriste , Pris, Berg International, 1994, pp. 107-113.

188 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

Muslim Anti-Semitism in Christian Europe For the study of the system of Dhimmitude, see Bat Yeo’rs Les Chretientes d’Orient entre Jihad et Dhimmitude, Paris, Cerf 1991, and its Hebrew and English versions, which have had wide resonance and contributed enormously to the understanding of the status of the Scriptuaries under Islam. Bat Ye’or, Juifs et Chretiens etc., pp. 263-90. Op. cit., p. 13. Ibid, pp. 13-14. See Raphael Israeli, Poison: Manifestations of a Blood Libel, Lexington Books, 2002, pp.14-15, 18-22, 45-6, 90-3, 214-17, 228-30, 231-33. See op. cit. Emanuel Litvinoff (ed.). Soviet anti-Semitism: the Paris Trial, Widwood House, London, 1974, p. 1. Ibid, p. 4. Cited in Walter Zenner, Minorities in the Middle East: A Cross-Cultural Analysis, SUNY, Albany, 1991, p. 65. Daniel Pedurant, “Anti-Semitism in Contemporary Greek Society,” Analysis of Current Trends in Anti-Semitism, No 7, 1995, p. 10, Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Cited by Gerstenfeld, April 1, 2004. Maurizio Molinari, La Sinistra E Gli Ebrei inn Italia: 1967-1993, Milan, 1995, p. 115. Cited by Gerstenfeld, April 1, 2004, p. 16. “Israeli Kritik oder antisemitismus?,” Neue Zurcher Zeitung, April 26, 2002. See citations in Gerstenfeld, April 1, 2004, op. cit. p. 16. See Paul Giniewski, “Israel: Etat Juif ou Juif des Etats,” Politique Internationale, No 74, Winter 1996-7, pp. 1-20. Marcel Dubois, “Judaisme, Christianisme et Philosophie,” Le Soir, Paris, March 31, 1988. Cited by David Makovsky in his “Media Report,” The Jerusalem Post, August 25, 1989. Didier Hassoux, in Liberation, June 15, 2004. Citations collected by Christophe Deloire, “La France, Terre de Jihad,” Le Point, 1727, October 20, 2005, p. 37. Martin Bright, “Let us Shed More Light on Islam,” The Observer, August 28, 2005. Patrick Poole, “Britain’s Tariq TV,” FrontPageMagazine.com, May 25, 2006. Ibid. Eve Bonnivard (AFP, Paris) and Barbara Lefebvre (a history teacher), who wrote jointly: Eleves sous Influence (Students under Influence), Paris: Audibert, 2005. The extract from their book was excerpted by Haaretz, March 29, 2006. Ibid. Richard Kerbaj, “Warning to West on Evil of Islam,” The Australian, August 21, 2007. Shmuel Trigano, in Post Holocaust and Anti-Semitism, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, No 42, 1 March, 2000. Dream 2 TV, March 1, 2006. Translated and reported by MEMRI 1116, March 17, 2006. Many of the insights referred to here are based on Manfred Gerstenfeld, “The Muhammed Cartoon Controversy, Israel and the Jews: A Case Study.” Post-Holocaust and Anti-Semitism Series, No 43, April 2, 2006, The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Daniel Goldhagen, “The New Threat,” The New Republic, March 13, 2006.

Anti-Semitism under the Guise of Anti-Zionism and Anti-Israelism 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

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Richard Ostermann, “Drawing Conclusions,” The Jerusalem Post, June 15, 2006. Dennis Prager, World Net Daily, February 7, 2006. Cited by Gerstenfeld, op. cit. p. 6. Cited by Gerstenfeld, op. cit. p. 7. Charles Krauthammer, “Save us from Moderates,” Seattle Times, February 13, 2006. Arab News (Saudi Arabia) April 4, 2006. Interview with Ambassador Zvi Mazel, “Anti-Israelism and Anti-Semitism in Sweden,” in the Series European-Israeli Relations: Between Confusion and Change, The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Spring 2006. Ibid. Ibid. Daniel Ben-Simon published in Haaretz, December 26, 2003; Nidra Poller refuted some of his observations and comments on Jerry Gordon’s website. His email is: [email protected], December 31, 2003. Ben Simon, ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. See Alyssa Lappen, “Ritual anti-Semitic Murders in Paris,” FrontPageMagazine, December 4, 2003. This item is based on an article in La Depeche du Midi, December 2, 2003. Poller, op. cit.

7 Social and Political Repercussions for the West European societies find themselves enriched on many levels by the presence in their midst of Muslim communities. However, this enrichment is not always necessarily positive inasmuch as hatred vocabulary is introduced into the daily language, notably when it concerns Jews. People use words for communication and words have meanings that are sometimes culture-bound and can be comprehended differently from what one means. For example, mentioning the Holocaust means, for the Jews, the remembrance of a disaster; for Gentiles, an event of history and perhaps a warning against what might happen when otherwise decent people keep silent; for Muslims and Arabs, it is an alarm appeal against the injustices meted out to them today, and all three would respond differently in consequence. Words that we consider abrasive or subversive may be regarded as matter-of-fact by Muslims, and vice-versa: what we see as a casual or even perfunctory reference to the Prophet of Islam would be viewed by his followers as insulting and justifying, therefore, a violent response. However, there are words, phrases and slogans that are not ambiguous, for killing is killing, be it to punish a criminal, to eliminate an innocent person, or to carry out a fatwa pronounced by a Muslim cleric. For example, if one battles Muslims or insults or humiliates them or their Scriptures, one becomes “permissible” (in Muslim jargon) for punishment by their standards. And Muslims alone hold the yardstick to measure who, when, how, and where one is deemed to have humiliated whom, and the punishment he or she must incur as a result. Abrasive rhetoric does not always have to be verbal, but can also be expressed by body image or scenes of massive massacres, which, far from evoking human sympathy for the victims, on the contrary arouse a mad thirst for more blood by the perpetrators, not only among the killers but also amidst the Muslim masses who watch them. For example, when 191

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bodies of Western or Israeli troops or civilians are mutilated in public, or decapitated live on television, or lynched in a mad orgy of murder, Muslim crowds in general would play and replay those horrors to remind their constituencies of the “heroism” of their killers or incite the masses to demonstrate their jubilation at the sight of their enemy’s suffering. This in itself creates not only an ambiance of tolerance for such acts of bloodlust, but “educates” the young generation to emulate them amidst a blatant demonstration of obtuseness, cruelty, and inhumanity. This brutalization of life under puritanical Islam, whose vocabulary has been gradually seeping into similar groups amidst Muslims in the West, has in turn contributed to the vulgarization of speech and to rhetorical excesses, which justify the harsh physical punishments envisaged in shari’a law, the Islamikaze bombings against western and Israeli targets, and other manifestations of disregard for human life and for human suffering. Moreover, this state of mind has also generated a banalization of life in general, even among Muslims themselves, as they watch hundreds murdered daily in Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza, in acts of killing, many perpetrated by Muslims against Muslims, which seem to have no rationale and no justification. Given the most gruesome state-sanctioned punishments, known to be carried out in Iran, in Taliban Afghanistan, in Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere, where human life is debased and fellow Muslims are treated like animals, it is not surprising that blowing up buildings or commuter trains, restaurants and schools, or beheading enemies and mutilating their bodies, seem to come naturally.1 Muslim hatred groups within Western societies, though they are not totally out of place in view of the many extreme right and left parties that infest those countries, add nevertheless a novel dimension of social disturbance in the heart of the West. Neo-Nazis, skinheads, Lepenists, and nationalists of all walks, who cultivate xenophobia and anti-Semitism are found in practically all countries of Europe, and their fortunes accord with the socio-economic conditions of each location. Paradoxically, their ideological marginality pushes them into political prominence-like Le Pen at one point or the National Party in Belgium or Denmark—or shrinks into insignificance like the Neo-Nazis in Germany or in Sweden. But Muslim hatred of the Jews has been linked to the permanent and sustained growth of the mainstream Muslim community. Yes, in practically every European country, every effort is made to cast off the minority of the “Islamists,” those few percentage points, which supposedly cause trouble, drive anti-Semitism to the extreme and rebel against the prevailing social

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system, and against the majority of “peace-loving” Muslims who seek a quiet and normal life. However, either because most Muslims in Europe abide by their customs, remain loyal to their judicial norms and regard themselves as discriminated against by their host societies, or are drawn by family alliances and religious contacts to confront the host society, they are more likely than not to raise the suspicions of their neighbors, or to embark on a course of collision with the host society. If the Muslim populations in Europe, who continue to cluster together in ghettoes and suburbs and thus differentiate themselves from the majority, also pursue their demographic growth both by immigration (legal and illegal) and by birthrate, the question of friction between the two populations can only aggravate as the Muslim minority becomes larger and more vocal. It is not likely that the masses of Muslims who have made Europe their home (over 30 million out of a general population of close to half a billion in the EU of 27 in 2008) would relinquish their links with their home countries and families, nor with their Imams and therefore with the religious establishment, which had appointed them to their jobs. Nor can anyone expect the Muslim immigrants to forego their economic, cultural, and political links and the inclinations to the Islamic world they left behind. In consequence, and in view of the low prospects of settling the Middle Eastern dispute any time soon, it is to be feared that the feuds, which today oppose Muslims and Jews on the Continent as a reflection of that conflict, could only increase and deepen. Of course, this would be obviated if well-established Jews, who are reluctant to see their cultures Islamize and their advantageous status in society altered, would elect to move elsewhere, as has always been their wont when earth started to shake under their feet like in France, Belgium, and somewhat in Britain too. The perception is not true, unfortunately, that most “Muslims reject Islamism and its propaganda” and only “one percent are members of Islamist organizations whose political objectives include anti-Semitism.”2 It may be true that most Muslims do not actively participate in daily agitation against the Jews of Europe. But if one is to judge from the recurring anti-Semitic slurs in schools and the general Judeo-phobic tenor of the Wahhabi Imams who direct the Muslim centers in Europe, one could be reasonably confident of the usually contained hatred towards the Jews and of its potential to burst out at any time. It is evident that the collapse of socialist and generally secular orientations in Europe has encouraged the rise of mobilizing ideologies, which purport to fill the vacuum left

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by the demise of non-ideologies. The new trends do not hesitate to use Western pop-culture icons to achieve that goal. For example, the Hamas unscrupulously resorted to a Hollywood cartoon to recruit children to its cause. Clothing, music, and other devices are used to achieve the same appeal. Hamas markets T-shirts online, which transmit Muslim messages that endear the Prophet, Islam, Mecca, or Muslim icons to the young. All these “innocent” media are used to also clarify and instill Jihad, violence, intifadah, demonization of Jews, hatred, and coarse anti-Semitism. One of those pop heroes, who won a European prize on RTL TV in February 2008, introduced himself as: “I am a Taliban…. I am the terrorist these young people believe in…. I am King Bushido and my second name is Muhammed. And I have set your city on fire…” In a rap video placed on the Internet, a Lebanese man living in Berlin chants: “Kill every Jewish pig, the Yahudis (Jews) are unclean. They should all die and they are not worth our tears.” Most comments that these atrocious words triggered were enthusiastic.3 In view of the widespread distribution of this poison, how could one sink in the illusion that only a few percentage points of Muslim youth are likely to follow these hatred “teachings”? As in France and other parts of Europe, the Muslim upsurge in Sweden’s large cities is directly related to anti-Semitic attacks. Anders Carlberg, the President of the Jewish community in Goteborg (Gothenburg), the second largest city in the country, told an interviewer that “the fear of being attacked is the primary concern of Jews in Sweden today,” after his son and friends were assaulted by a gang of Muslim youth in Malmo and rescued by the police.4 Once upon a time one identified humanly with this dire cry for safety when Jews were safe almost nowhere, and were rejected by all countries, which saw themselves as “humane and civilized” when they escaped the horrors of persecution, pogroms, hatred, and genocide, which had culminated in the Sho’ah, and had nowhere to go that would accept them without quotas, favors, supplications, and interference of the righteous. But after 1948, when a Jewish state declared its gates open at all times, under any circumstances, to any Jew who wished to seek refuge there, or just remake his life in a Jewish atmosphere, it has become a matter of personal choice for each Jew to decide where he or she wishes to dwell in safety. Indeed, the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe today, which is also related to the increasing presence of Muslims there, has, once again, made the Israeli option worth considering. Some have chosen it, but to those who have elected to stay where they are, despite

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the humiliation of persecution, abuse, and fear which they suffer, one feels less sympathy than in the pre-state of Israel period when they could go nowhere else. Israel was established as a country of persecuted refugees and survivors of pogroms, save for a small minority of idealist revivers of Jewish sovereignty who either counted among the handful of the pioneering founders, or have been trickling from prosperous and free diasporas over the years. So, massive immigration to Israel of the remaining half of the Jewish exile, will always depend, unfortunately, on new outbursts of anti-Semitism. During the large anti-Israel demonstrations in Malmo in 2000, triggered in this third-largest city of Sweden by Al-Aqsa Intifadah in Israel, Jewish store owners were threatened by Muslims. In Malmo 25 percent of the population is Muslim, out of a foreign-born 40 percent of residents whose children make up more than 50 percent of the children of the city which boasts that its inhabitants come from 164 countries and speak more than 100 languages. For most immigrants who wish to integrate and become Swedish, the environment is admirably conducive to rapid assimilation. But how about those who refuse to abide by the laws of the land and elect to drag Malmo and its environment into chaos and terror? Middle East restaurants and supermarkets, and the weekend open market at the center of town, all add flavor and variety to the local urban ambience; and business in these specialized shops is brisk due to the large number of consumers, mainly Muslim but also a growing number of Swedes. But many Swedes, including local Jews fear, though many Muslims hope, that Malmo may be the prototype of how Sweden might look in the future. When interviewed about this state of affairs, Swedish officials and community leaders—doctors, police chiefs and teachers— are extremely tame and cautious when first polled about their growing Muslim population. But when they open up, they admit that their city cannot handle such a large immigration and that it failed to absorb and integrate the newcomers. If nurses and doctors are scared to go to work because they might be mugged or threatened or abused or attacked for not delivering a quick enough treatment to their Muslim patients, then the dissolution of the “Swedish way,” which most Swedes are proud of and accustomed to, might simply speed the rate of Swedish emigration from their beloved city. Swedes, like other Scandinavians, are extremely wary of mentioning the ethnic/religious origin of the violators of their normative system of conduct, lest they be accused, or even suspected of racism. In grave cases of gang rape or blatant robbery, oblique reference may be

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made to “dark-haired,” “North African origin,” or “speaking Swedish (or Danish) with an accent,” “immigrant population” and “ghetto residents,” with the words “Arab,” “Muslim,” “Iranian,” “Afghani” rarely heard. But everyone understands the sub-texts and the latent meanings. Paradoxically though, this PC conduct, which is calculated to circumvent prejudice and bias, has had a reverse effect because, when one does not hear the facts stated officially and clearly, guesses and assumptions then abound, which can only increase prejudices and fears, not diminish them.5 At any rate, the Muslim organizations in Scandinavia engage in blunt anti-Semitic activities, sometimes under the cover of anti-Zionism, even more overtly than the Scandinavians themselves, since it is no longer taboo to talk of these topics in common discourse, and there is not even any attempt to disguise it. As someone wrote in another context: “It has become the only hatred that dares to speak its name.” Anti-Semitism in Sweden, for example, has become directly subversive against a small Jewish minority that has lived fully integrated in the Swedish culture for the past 250 years, and openly favorable to a larger Muslim minority of new immigrants and political refugees, which has generally segregated itself from mainstream Swedes for the past 30 years or so. Here is a case—one of many—in which Hitler’s racist supremacy descendants are expressing the very same anti-Jewish sentiments, albeit in a slightly different language, which is countered, once again, by a politically correct shrug of indifference by officials. Hitler had called, in the name of his Nazi ideology, upon his supporters to kill all Jews everywhere for what he claimed was the “general social good.” In the Stockholm Grand Mosque, Muslim Believers are also incited to murder all Jews everywhere in the name of their faith. The parallel and similarity in intent are terrifying, as are the similarity and parallel in the silence from those whose job it is to know better the adage that “Men of evil can pursue their sins only because men of virtue keep silent.” The international media, which might have put a question or two on this subject to the Swedish Chancellor of Justice, Goran Lambertz, also kept silent. The Swedish Radio News (SRN) in fact reported that a Stockholm mosque was selling cassettes calling for a genocidal holy war against the Jews. According to SRN, the cover of one of the cassettes shows a picture of the Statue of Liberty draped in a burning American flag, but it sold. Sales of cassettes promoting genocide are illegal in Sweden, but a spokesman of the mosque who was questioned blamed “volunteers of stocking the mosque bookstore with the cassettes.”6 Even more omi-

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nously, as part of what Swedish Jews saw as “an open season” on them, probably in connection with the approaching elections of 2006, the Swedish Chancellor of justice was cited as saying that Muslim calls for death to Jews are just “part of the debate in the Middle East.” Earlier in 2006, the Chancellor had decided to discontinue his department’s pre-trial investigation into the Grand Mosque where those audio cassettes with their inflammatory anti-Semitic contents were being sold. But after the program Dagens Eko unveiled the contents of the cassettes in November 2005, a charge of racial incitement was filed with the police against the mosque. The Swedish Chancellor of Justice responded by closing the pre-trial investigation on the grounds that “the lecture did admittedly feature statements that are highly degrading to Jews (among other things, the Jews are consistently referred to as “brothers of apes and pigs”), but pointed out that such statements “should be judged differently—and therefore be regarded as permissible—because they were used by one side in an ongoing and far-reaching conflict where calls to arms and insults are part of the everyday climate in the rhetoric that surrounds the conflict.”7 This means that the Swedish Minister considered the Muslims of Sweden as a legitimate extension of the Muslims in the Middle East, and its Jews as the extension of Israel, hence providing legitimacy for the importation of the conflict into the boundaries of his country, whose system of justice he was supposed to enforce. A press release by the Jewish community wondered at this state of affairs and asked whether this was an act of political correctness, of elections tactics, or fear of radical Islam’s reaction if legal steps are taken against it. But apart from that, there are several issues to be raised regarding the Chancellor’s dismaying statement. The first is that it is important to remember that in that election year of 2006, the Muslim community of half a million (out of about 10 in total) is manifold larger than the tiny Jewish community (around 20,000), therefore the gap in electoral weight between the two is considerable, regardless of the qualitative input and the degree of assimilation of each. Secondly, in the mosque in question a curse was pronounced on all Jews, everywhere, and the audience of worshippers was encouraged to partake of Jihad (Holy War) against Jews in general; thus they highlighted Islamikaze “suicide bombing” as an effective weapon and praising its perpetrators as “martyrs,” without singling out either the Jews of the Middle East or the Mujahideen who lived there, something that amounts to a clear case of general racial incitement against the Jews and genocidal threats against them. Yet, the

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Chancellor of Justice opined that “owing to the Middle East conflict, such expressions, despite their content, cannot be regarded as racial incitement according to Swedish law.” One might indeed wonder how the phrase “kill the Jews” needs to be expressed in order to come to be regarded by the Chancellor as inflammatory enough and as plain incitement to kill the Jews. Notwithstanding those shaky excuses, Mr. Lambertz chose to ignore the legal precedent of 1989 when the District Court of Stockholm and then the Court of Appeal (in 1990) decided against Radio Islam’s responsible publisher, Ahmed Rami, and convicted him. Legal proceedings had been initiated then by the Chancellor of Justice for precisely racial incitement in similar circumstances, and Rami was convicted on seventeen counts, imprisoned and his station closed down. In that case too, many Swedish apologists tried to mitigate Rami’s culpapility by claiming that his statements should simply be regarded as “robustly expressed comments on the situation in the Middle East,” but they failed and he went to jail. In the case of the Stockholm cassettes of 2006, one recurring theme must be underlined and that is the hadith (tradition of the Prophet), which claimed in essence that there will be no peace in the world until the last Jew has been killed. As narrated by Abu Huraira: “Allah’s Apostle said: the Hour [of Judgment] will not come until you fight the Jews, and the stones and trees behind which the Jews will be hiding, will say: ‘Oh Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.’”8 Had the honorable but ignorant Swedish Chancellor of Justice done his homework, he would have learned that this hadith prescribing the killing of all Jews, had been pronounced and sanctioned as authentic by its inclusion in the most authoritative collection of the Prophet’s sayings some thirteen centuries prior to the conflict in the Middle East. The Chancellor might conceivably have also come to that same conclusion were he not facing an election year and had he not needed Muslim votes in the election that his party was to lose. To explain his misdeed clumsily in terms of the current politics in the Middle East, when neither the wording of the threats nor their dates fit in, amounting to more than political correctness gone mad, it was a direct and subversive blow against a Jewish minority, which lives peacefully, abides by the law, and contributes to society in all domains out of proportion to its numbers. It is never acceptable to cry “Wolf!” when it is a false alarm. But had Europeans cried out their warnings against Hitler seventy years earlier when he rose to power, and taken at face value his anti-Semitic and genocidal

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declarations, the world would have been a very different place today. Not only for European Jewry but also for the many millions of Russians, Americans, Europeans, Canadians, and Australians who would have been spared the horrors of war and loss, which were fueled by racist zeal and stoked by genocidal ideology. At any rate, it is also fair to present the Chancellor’s letter, which he circulated in public, as an explanation of his puzzling stand: Dear everyone who wrote to me about the hate speech. I understand your reaction, but you were cheated, because the press release you must have read was seriously misrepresented. My decision was a purely legal one, interpreting Swedish law on hate speech. And it is quite safe to say that the law does not make it a crime to sing battle songs or utter war cries related to the conflict in the Middle East. This is true even if suicide bombers are called heroes and abusive speech is used about Jews. Insults can sometimes be regarded as hate speech but not in a context like the one that was under my judgment. It is also quite safe to say that the law in this country does not make it a crime to quote and to analyze a so-called hadith, which is a centuries old part of Islamic law, even if it is utterly offensive—as this one was—to the Jews. If, however, the author or the speaker makes statements which must be regarded as supportive of a hadith like the one in question, then this is definitely a crime. But this was not the case. The basis of my judgment was Swedish law on freedom of speech. This is protected by the Constitution, and the freedom goes very deep. The law on hate speech is one of the few exceptions to this very important human right. It is explicitly stated that expressions must be clearly in conflict with freedom of speech to be a crime. I found some of the expressions under my judgment utterly provoking and quite unacceptable. My judgment is supported not only by national law in this country. Freedom of speech is also protected by the European Convention of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. I am convinced that it would have been in conflict with the Convention to declare the statements in question a crime. My decision is final and cannot be tried by any court or another organ here in Sweden. There is furthermore no reason for me to review my decision as long as such re-examination would concern the same material. But if new material is put before me, I am, of course, ready to make an assessment of that. I will just mention one item from the totally off the point press release. The author of it implies that it would be politically correct in Sweden to refuse prosecuting hate speech against Jews, and that my decision had something to do with the upcoming elections in Sweden. Nothing could be more false. The author also accuses me of not daring to prosecute. This is highly insulting. I certainly dare. I am not going to pass any judgment on any of you. But I have never before in my life been awarded so many ugly names or received so many indirect threats. And let me thank all of you who were good enough to make reservations concerning the correctness of the press release, or who were otherwise respectful enough to be friendly. Kind regards, Goran Lambertz, Chancellor of Justice of Sweden

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If this were a mere academic argument, it would have been left there, although, unlike academic situations, which are in perpetual flux, the Chancellor informed everyone that his decision could be appealed. But in the real world, there are two glaring faults in his argument. The quotations of the hadith were not made by Muslims for the sake of debate or to promote knowledge among the uninitiated, but as an instruction to Muslims, who knew its contents, to act likewise, just as the Rami case of twenty years ago dealt with citations from the Bible that the court in Stockholm found offensive enough to be deserving of punishment. If the Chancellor could not judge the local context in Sweden relevant, then at least, he should have heeded the general background of the conflict between Jews and Muslims in Palestine, and the coming to power of the Hamas, which upholds the same genocidal attitudes towards the Jews, for on that basis the Americans, Europeans, Israelis, and other civilized nations have founded their refusal to deal with that organization, precisely because they realized the operational import of those threats and abusive words. If that public statement by the minister was calculated to distance him from the suspicions of an election year, it is interesting to know what he would have done with the news about huge expenditures by the Swedish government for Muslim religious facilities, which in fact rewarded Muslims at the same time that he refused to prosecute them for incitement. Indeed, the Islamic Center in Malmo was to receive 3 million Kronor (ca $600,000) in government funding for building and repairing damage “caused in the latest attack on the mosque.”9 The government said that the donation was based on the fact that the Islamic Center was important and contributed to “creating the image of Islam in Sweden, but did not specify whether this was the positive image or the negative one, as in the case of the cassettes of the Grand Mosque of Stockholm which clearly projected very negatively on that image. The government, by the mouth of the Minister for religious affairs, Lena Hallengren, added that the Islamic Center was a significant player in integration work, and its activities in the religious, social, and cultural domains reached many people in Southern Sweden. But she added nothing about the incitement, anti-Jewish and otherwise, that emanates from that center, like from the Stockholm Grand Mosque. The Swedish government also undertook to send three young Swedish Muslims to Egypt, and Jordan, with the aim of countering the image of Sweden as anti-Islamic, but where they are also sure to learn more antiJewish hatred—which runs routinely in the media—promulgated by the

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clerics and the elites of those countries even decades after they signed peace treaties with Israel.10 It was not immediately known whether the government was also planning to send a parallel delegation of Swedish Jews to Israel to help amend the anti-Semitic image of Sweden there. But this too had apparently nothing to do with the light electoral weight of the Jews compared with that of their Muslim compatriots. In fact, the depth of the ridicule the Persson government brought upon itself while trying to placate the Muslim vote ahead of the elections of 2006, is exemplified by these excerpts from a press editorial: Sweden claims that its decision to pull out of a NATO air force exercise had nothing to do with the participation of the Israeli Air Force in the event. But as [an Israeli] Foreign Ministry spokesman put it, both Sweden’s decision and its strange denial of the obvious are “insulting and unacceptable.” The Swedes, indeed, did not mention Israel by name in announcing their withdrawal from the exercise. Swedish Foreign Minister, Leni Bjorklund, however, said that her country was withdrawing because the “Swedish Armed Forces were notified at a late stage that a state not belonging to the Partnership for Peace, and with which Sweden did not previously have bilateral military cooperation and which does not take part in international peacekeeping missions, was to take part in the air exercise”. That country has a name, it is Israel. In case any confusion remained regarding which country Sweden intended to snub, Swedish Prime Minister, Goran Persson, told reporters in Stockholm that Sweden withdrew from the Volcanex 2006 exercise in Italy because “We are careful about joining exercises with countries that we won’t cooperate with in international missions under the UN or EU mandates. That is our principle, that is our history. The Israelis have another, warlike history, which I find regrettable for that matter.”11

Israeli spokesmen might have responded that, come to think of it, their country does have a “more warlike” history, and it is indeed regrettable. Israel regrets that in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973 it was compelled to face invading or threatening Arab armies, which vowed to wipe it off the map. It regrets today that Iranian leaders, with their Hamas and Hizbullah underlings, continue to fund terrorism and to renew their vow to destroy a member of the UN and a country with whom Sweden maintains diplomatic relations. Israel also regrets that immediately after it offered in 2000 to withdraw from 95 percent of the territories claimed by the Palestinians, they launched a wave of Islamikaze bombings that took over 1,000 Israeli lives, mostly innocent and peaceful citizens. Moreover, in the wake of the Hamas election victory, terrorist attacks, shellings, and bombings are on the rise again, justified by Hamas heads as “natural and understandable.” This sequence of events, where Israel can wholeheartedly agree with her Swedish “friends,” is indeed both warlike and regrettable. But by what logic should it lead Stockholm to boycott Israel and to welcome Hamas officials to Sweden? Its Foreign Minister, Jan Eliasson, said: “There is

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no reason to dramatize this. It has nothing to do with our relationship with Israel that we want to protect and promote. It is a purely practical judgment based on the exercise needs we have.” It remains unclear why the judgment and the exercise needs of France, the U.K., Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Spain—all members of the European Air Group that organized Volcanex 2000—seem so different from those of Sweden. Even more mysterious is the kind of relationship that Eliasson sought to “protect and promote.” He should have noticed that Israel is a peace-seeking democracy under attack and permanent threats. The Israeli Spokesman who reacted to those remarks, indeed remarked: “We do not appreciate it when countries boycott us and welcome our attackers, as Sweden has done cancelling her participation and granting visas to the Hamas delegation, contrary to EU policy. If a country believes that Israel is not good enough to participate in peacekeeping maneuvers, Israel will be entitled to think that that country is not qualified to play a role in the Middle East peace process.” It is unfortunate, emphasized the lead article, that Sweden has shown such a gross inability to understand Israel’s position that—in the name of promoting peace, of all things—it has removed itself from any constructive role in such a quest. Far from advancing peace, Sweden’s positions, however inadvertently, encourage terrorism against Israel, resulting in the death of more Israelis and Palestinians.12 The Hamas delegation invited from Gaza to attend the International Conference on the Rights of Palestinians to Return to a Free Palestine, was headed by Atef Adwan, the Minister of Refugees in the Hamas Government in Gaza, which is shunned by the EU of which Sweden is part. Never mind that Free Palestine means, according to Hamas interpretation, free from Jews and Israel, namely the end of Israel or that their chaotic rule over Gaza hardly carries any indication of freedom. According to a Swedish paper, Sydsvenskan, Adwan made the following statement: “By allowing me to travel here, the Swedish government is sending a clear message to our people that somebody is on our side.” Perhaps he was right, for if a senior representative of the Hamas terrorist organization began his European tour by visiting Sweden, and he was given a visa to do so, that says something about the soft stand of European socialism towards Muslim terrorism. Sweden in particular, under the Persson government, was a case in point. Two members of the Swedish Parliament tried to invite a leader of the Hamas, Muhammed al-Bardawil, to their august institution. As the September 2006 elections drew closer,

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it seemed that the Swedish Left was openly embracing radical Islamic groups, thus responding to the wishes of their Muslim constituents and ignoring the protests of the Swedish Jews. Public television indeed revealed in those days that the leading Social Democratic Party had started fishing for votes domestically with the help of radical Muslim clerics. For several years, the Christian wing of the Social Democratic Party, called The Brotherhood, had been working with the influential Muslim leader Mahmud Adebe, president of Sweden’s Muslim Association, though he can hardly be dubbed a “democrat.” Already in 1999, Adebe went on radio proposing that Shari’ah (Islamic law) be introduced in Sweden. In addition, in a letter to the Swedish Minister of Justice in 2003, Adebe got involved in a heated debate regarding an incident of “honor-related” killing when a Kurdish girl was shot several times in the head, murdered by her two uncles. Adebe did not condemn the murderers—rather he forcefully defended them, because he saw the entire debate as an attack against the Muslim religion, and claimed that public debate regarding these acts of murder risked to “encourage immigrant girls to revolt against the tradition of the families and their religious values.”13 Muslim anti-Semitism in Europe is only one manifestation of the Jihadi spirit, certainly not the most pressing for the countries who still prefer to look the other way while Muslims are rampaging their old, established, peace-loving, and law-abiding Jewish communities. But even that aspect of the Muslim battle for recognition in Europe has been costing those societies an incalculable price. Hugh Fitzgerald has tried at least to ask the right questions, even though he could not always provide the answers: What is the actual expense caused by the large scale presence of Muslims within Western societies? What would be the cost of guarding every subway, every airport and railway station, every department store, every theater, every government and public building, and patrolling the roads and streets leading there? What is the cost of protecting outspoken critics of Muslims like Hirsi Ali and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands or Carl Hagen in Norway? It certainly is a large public expenditure to protect each of those politicians and provide for them a protected dwelling. How much does it cost to provide bodyguards to foreign diplomats like the Israelis and the Americans and others who are primarily threatened by the Muslims of Europe? What is the cost of protecting pipelines, water and electricity facilities, sewer treatment installations, forests and woods susceptible for arson, and nuclear plants? Attacks against Jewish schools, cemeteries, synagogues, and public institutions have also necessitated ex-

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tra expense by local and national governments to provide that protection. What is the cost of seeking and monitoring terrorist suspects, for the most part of Muslim conviction, whose support for terrorism may range from active participation and planning, to partaking of underground networks, intelligence gathering, and the hiding of weapons caches? What does it cost to monitor the texts of incitement in mosques, in distributed tracts and in imported and local made audio- and video tapes?; or to detect those who make propaganda, fundraise, recruit, and dispatch trainees to Afghanistan and Pakistan or provide refuge to illegal immigrants or violators of the law? What does it cost to investigate, pay networks of informers, arrest, pursue in justice and jail the convicted culprits? Does this amount to billions or tens of billions, simply because the countries of shelter in Europe naively believed that if they meant well, so would those who knocked on their doors in search of refuge? It would cost much less to develop and enforce saner immigration policies whereby those who seek to impose Shari’a laws would simply not be welcomed.14 Those who seek to impose Shari’a are many, even if some are adopting a moderate modus operandi in order to mitigate the suspicions and resentment of the host population. These trends and expressions of future plans, sometimes espoused bluntly by extremist organizations, at other times dipped in milk and honey to become more palatable and acceptable, have already reaped considerable fruit as tens of thousands of Britons, Frenchmen, Germans, and others are converting to Islam, and the Archbishop of Canterbury has called for the examination of the possibility to adopt piecemeal, in Britain, elements of the Shar’ia. The aggregate of all this might produce profound changes in European society. The Muslim Council of Britain, which is the umbrella organization for all Muslims sponsored by the government and pampered by it, to the point of elevating its head, Iqbal Sacranie to Knighthood, was also the organization that boycotted the official Holocaust memorial ceremony to which the government invited all heads of denominations. But it represents only a third of the 1,500 mosques in the country, something that puts doubts on its representative quality as the umbrella for all Muslims. Nevertheless, the British Muslim Forum, which represents the Pakistani community, has also been identified as running in the MCB orbit. More worrying is the other umbrella organization, the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), which also claims an affiliation of 500 mosques, but has a clear Muslim Brotherhood agenda, and in which some of its members identified as active Hamas members. This is something that certainly

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contributes to the radicalization and anti-Zionist stance adopted by British organizations such as the Teachers Union, which has repeatedly voted to boycott Israel due to its treatment of Palestinians, who are themselves ruled by Hamas.15 For every Muslim organization set up in Europe, there are many others who embrace more extremist views, as an expression of dissatisfaction with the “moderation” of its competitors. This has an immediate and profound impact on the conduct of these groups in violent anti-Israeli demonstrations, in their outspoken anti-Zionism—which is supported by local traditional anti-Semites—and in their persecution and assaults against the Jewish communities they encounter daily. For example, not content with the pro-Brotherhood MAB, the British Muslim Initiative has established its own pro-Hamas group, which is bound to be more aggressive than others. The MAB is also associated with the Center for the Study of Terrorism, making believe that since they study terrorism, namely Muslim terrorism, they distance themselves from it thereby attaining respectability; with the Muslim Welfare House, which, until monitored and investigated, cannot assure one whether it is not a front charity organization, like those used by Hamas, Hizbullah and Hizbu-tTahrir to raise their funds; and with the Federation of Student Islamic Societies (FOSIS). Other affiliates are organizations of mosques, mainly from the Pakistani communities, the Islamic Foundation, the UK Islamic Mission and the Islamic Society of Britain, which represents the ideology of the Jamaat-e-Islami, the radical organization of Pakistan. Shi’ites are also present in Britain, with their Islamic Center of England in central London, which is a religious and cultural body, and the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC), which reflects Iran’s ideology and appoints the imams of the Islamic center. One can only imagine what sort of antiSemitic and anti-Israeli stuff is distributed by that center.16 Add to that both the infamous Hizbu-t-Tahrir, which does not hide its ambition to establish a universal Caliphate, which would encompass Europe, and aggressively militates for that cause, though it suspiciously hides its address and can be accessed only via a poste restante, and the equally infamous proponents of Islamikaze bombings—Hamas and Hizbullah—who raise money through front charities and preach the elimination of Israel, and you have quite an impressive and frightening array of Muslim organizations, which did not come to Europe in order to live in it and to improve their standard of living or their civil rights, but like Abu Hamza and Omar Bakri of Britain and Abu Laban in Scan-

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dinavia, wish to transform it to their tune. These extremist organizations are also the most notoriously anti-Semitic. In addition, there are student organizations, of which the Federation of Student Islamic Societies, the main umbrella body, is the most visible and aggressive. Another is the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS), which takes the lead of blatant and hateful anti-Israel and anti-Zionist activity on all campuses, making them virtual battlefields of anti-Israel propaganda throughout Europe. However, such fanatic groups as Al-Muhajirun (AM) who were banned in Britain on the grounds that they glorified terrorism, and Hizbu-t-Tahrir (HUT) have been banned by the British National Union of Students (NUS) due to their blunt anti-Semitism about which NUS is reluctant to see its image tarnished.17 At the same time, however, new networks of relationships have been in the making, which, if successful, might alter the interaction between communities in places like Britain and generate, in the long run, a lessening of the present intercommunal tensions and rifts. The case in point are the dialogues and trialogues, usually initiated by the Church or the Jewish communities, where attempts are made to bridge the disagreements and enmities by joint programs of action. Aliph-Aleph (the respective ways the letter A is pronounced in Arabic and Hebrew), founded by Dr. Richard Stone, is such an association promoting dialogue, whatever that may mean. Another one is the Three-Faiths Forum, co-founded by Sir Sigmund Sterberg and the late Zaki Badawi, which aims to bring the three Abrahamic religions together for “peaceful dialogue,” as if a violent dialogue were also possible. This organization maintains a substantial school program, organizes some high-level meetings and has set up a small network of branches. Recently, a Center for the Study of MuslimJewish relations was established at Cambridge University. It remains to be seen whether only the mythical Golden Era would be highlighted in those studies, in order to brush aside the long periods of persecution and annihilation of Jewish communities in Muslim lands, or a serious, varied, and courageous study would bring up the complexities of the dhimmi status of the Jews (and Christians) and make the Muslims face up to their unpleasant past and repent for it. This program, which was founded by Dr. Ed Kessler (Muslim organizations have rarely founded and funded such joint institutions), was later joined by Amineh Hoteh and Shannaz Butt. A similar organization, the Joseph Interfaith Foundation, has also launched an academic study program and that was founded by Mehri Niknam, a former Director of the Maimonides Foundation, the first U.K.

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Muslim-Jewish dialogue organization. The voice of these “dialoguing” set-ups was not heard when, for example, the MCB boycotted the Holocaust memorial marked by the British government, generating outrage among the Brits at large.18 Other organizations that may offer a ray of hope are Faith Matters, a Muslim foundation that campaigns against anti-Semitism. Very untypically, its leaders visited Israel and they have even planned to take mixed Jewish-Muslim groups to Auschwitz and Srebrenica. Now, this is somewhat tricky and can turn counterproductive. Not only can nothing match or compare to the Jewish Holocaust, which in concept, execution, and scale has been a unique phenomenon, but acknowledging Srebrenica as a Muslim parallel would automatically justify the Muslim boycott of the Holocaust memorial in London as long as Muslim “holocausts” are not recognized and commemorated. Besides, the horror of Srebrenica, in which the Dutch UN forces did not interfere though they were in the neighborhood and knew of it, was not one link in a long and systematic chain of acts of annihilation against Muslims, but a single case that has to be pursued and its perpetrators punished, but ideally in conjunction with the recognition, investigation, and punishment of Muslim atrocities against the Armenians, the Kurds, the Greeks, Christians, other Muslims [like in Iraq and Darfour], Croats and Serbs, and the Jews, in which apologies and compensations are offered for them. Muslims, of all creeds and nations, should not be allowed to escape scrutiny and chastisement for their mass killings and only accuse others of committing them. Other such organizations include City Circle, which brings together Muslim professionals in London who seek a British-Muslim identity and in conjunction with Faith Matters has organized an interaction with the Jewish community. Unlike the official boycott by MCB of the Holocaust Commemoration, these two groups have organized commemorations of their own and joint tours of speakers from both faiths to address select interfaith activities. There have also been conferences of rabbis and imams sponsored by EU governments, which established an ongoing basis for exchange at the clerical leadership level. These activities are supplemented by local dialogues between the congregations of mosques and synagogues in certain neighborhoods and towns. In Stamford Hill in North London, for example, the Muslim-Jewish Forum functions between the strictly Orthodox Jewish community and Muslims. Similar groups exist in Manchester and Leeds. The Muslim-Jewish Women’s Dialogue has existed for a decade, convened by An-Nisa’ (women), and

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it held joint conferences under government sponsorship. In 2007, Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks played host to several important groups of British and international Muslim religious leaders. The Leo Baeck Institute, which trains liberal and reform rabbis in England, convenes its students together with trainee imams from the Muslim College to discuss and study in concert. This is inspired and aided by the Martin Buber House Trialogue in Bendorf, Germany, which brings together Jews, Christians, and Muslims to study commonalities of faith for two or three weeks every summer. Other attempts were made to channel the energies of Muslim and Jewish boys into soccer games, which lasted for a few years and then were interrupted, or to inspire mixed groups of Jews and Muslims to interact in various ways. Jewish communities in England have been attempting to interact with what they perceive as moderate groups of Muslims and at the same time work against the influence of “Islamists” who are anti-Semitic at their core. The problem is how to tell them apart, due to the oft-repeated anti-Jewish stance that the official establishment of Muslims, like the MCB, adopts in public. At the same time that efforts are made for interaction and understanding, violent attacks on Jews in England have been on the rise, something that puts a question mark on the entire project of rapprochement between the two communities. Is this the result of the general increasing of youth violence in British and other European societies, or does this signal that the entire painstaking endeavor of the Jews to woo and coax the much larger Muslim community, as a way to shore up their own existence in Britain and elsewhere, has been backfiring and proving counterproductive? It is a fact that of all ethno-religious communities in Europe the Jews are probably the only ones compelled to provide for their own security, which local police forces are unable or unwilling to ensure. The sight of every Jewish school, synagogue, and institution guarded by security personnel, which one does not see at the entrance to mosques or churches, is suggesting to the European public in general that its respective governments are unable to protect their Jews, or unwilling to antagonize their restive Muslim populations by doing so. The Community Security Trust (CST), which oversees defensive services for the Jewish community in Britain is in itself a puzzling phenomenon for a democratic country where Jews have lived in relative safety since their return from their outrageous eviction by Cromwell. It is an admission by the British authorities of their own impotence, or at the very least of their unwillingness to face the issue head-on as a national project that

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is crying for a solution. Similar Jewish self-defense institutions in other parts of Europe are indicative of the same malaise. It is evident that not all violence against the Jews originates from Muslims, there are other anti-Semites as well. Since the CST monitors and records the figures, it turned out that of the breakdown of 243 out of 547 physical attacks on Jews in Britain in 2007, half of them (129) were perpetrated by whites (probably British), 15 by East European immigrants, 27 by blacks, 52 by Asians (in all appearances from the Indian Sub-Continent), and 14 by Arabs. The last three categories were evidently, for the most part, Muslims, and made up the other half of the recorded assaults; taken together with the balance of 300 cases, which were not identified and only assumed to have been mostly committed by Muslims, one can say with certainty that the majority of attacks against British Jews (and other European Jews for that matter) are perpetrated by Muslim immigrants.19 While outbursts of violence against Jews in Europe are not isolated and are probably part of the general ambience of increased violence that is due to social, economic, and political problems, it is disturbing to observe that the rate of anti-Semitic violence by Muslims in Europe is far higher than their proportion in the population, for if they account for only between 3-4 percent (in Britain and Germany) and 10 percent (in France), they have been responsible for at least half of the total antiSemitic assaults there. Violent events in the Middle East are usually followed by a correspondingly high incidence of Muslim anti-Semitic attacks in Europe, and in France, more than elsewhere, due to the highest rate of Muslim immigrants there. So, while a certain peak was attained in the Autumn of 2000 when the Palestinian Al-Aqsa Intifadah broke out, it has since consistently dropped. This is changing the climate of public safety in Europe, since the Muslim attacks against Jews have become more widespread and account for a great part of the criminal acts that are routinely committed in city streets. It is quite another issue that Muslim crime in Europe has ended up increasing the numbers of Muslim inmates in prisons to alarming proportions, but since anti-Semitism is not usually part of this general criminal record, it is sometimes hard to tell which is what. Regular crime is usually performed for personal gain to its perpetrator (theft, robbery). In anti-Semitic assaults it is ideology that motivates the perpetrators to attack a woman who displays a star of David on her necklace or an orthodox Jew who wears a kippa headgear, or Jewish children going to schools, or a Jewish synagogue, in spite of the personal risk involved. This is the reason why this sort of illegal ac-

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tivity cannot be categorized as a crime, just as the 7/7 London bombers were not regular criminals since they had nothing to gain, and everything to lose. The more this sort of ideological act spreads out, the more the European landscape will change as the authorities will become less and less inclined to antagonize their growing Muslim population and resigned to abandon their dwindling Jewish communities. An illustration of the odd partnerships that bring native European and Muslim anti-Semites together in their common hatred of Jews and Israel, has been the alliance of the British Trotskyites, who are now organized under the aegis of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), which is ideologically close to the Muslim Brotherhood. One can hardly imagine anything stranger than this, because the former are Marxist and revolutionary, while the latter are radical and puritanical Muslims, who would be worthy of the epithet of “reactionary,” and for whom communism has been anathema since its inception. The Trotskyites have infiltrated the Labor Party and the trade unions and still hold the old Soviet views of Zionism as an underling of global capitalism and American imperialism. In recent decades they have gained new audiences, have engaged in boycotts of Israel and have transmitted their bitter anti-Zionist rhetoric to the new generations of Jew-haters. In the February 2003 anti-war demonstrations in London, the main organizers were the MAB and the SWP, that is the incredible alliance of Marxists and radical Muslims (the Red-Green Axis, according to Robert Wistrich) who shared opposition to the war in Iraq and the Palestinian issue as a unifying factor. According to noted expert R. Wistrich, himself a native of Britain and versed in its political scene, During the demonstration there were anti-Semitic insinuations and intonations in the slogans and catchwords used. The protest came at a time when the “cabal” theory that the Jews had seized control of American and British foreign policy was being widely advanced. It was crudely asserted in Britain, Europe, the Middle East—and to a lesser degree in the US—that Bush’s war in Iraq was being fought on Israel’s behalf. This echoes the anti-Semitic notions of the late 1930’s about “warmongering Jews” pushing the West into an unnecessary conflict with Nazism.20

Not very far from that tendency is the “Respect Party” of MP George Galloway from Scotland, who dubs himself an Islamist-Marxist movement, much like the combination of Trotskyites and their axis with the Muslim Brothers of Britain. He split off from the Labor due to the latter’s extreme Left positions, which should have put him at odds with the reactionary and Nazi-like Ba’ath Party of Saddam Hussein, but he defended the Iraqi tyrant on British television and from whom he did not hesitate

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to receive aid. He also distinguished himself as a militant anti-Zionist, anti-globalist, and anti-American, and constantly vilifies Jews and Israel. Because he sees a revolutionary potential in the Muslims of Britain, he pretends, in concert with them, to revive international socialism. His common grounds with the Islamists, in opposing Israel and America, allow both of them, as in the case of the Trotskyites’ coalition with the Muslim Association of Britain, to act together on the public square, though in matters of feminism, homosexuals, and secularism they remain far apart. So, independently as well as in conjunction with far-left British parties, the Muslims’ weight in anti-Semitic activity keeps escalating. There is evidence that at least half of the British Muslims, like other Muslims world wide, believe in the Jewish conspiracy which dominates the U.K. media and politics. It is also evident that the percentage of Muslim perpetrators of violent anti-Semitic acts is ten times greater than is their rate in the population. When Daniel Pearl was captured, and executed in Karachi, the mastermind of his arrest and beheading, just for being Jewish, was an English-born Pakistani who got his “education” in the London School of Economics. Another infamous case involved another Muslim, Abduallah al-Faisal, who was indicted for the incitement to murder “filthy Jews” (and Hindus) in a London court of law in 2003. He was also accused of encouraging British Muslims to carry out bombings in Israel. At the other end of the spectrum, British fascists, who would prefer to see Britain without Muslims, link up nevertheless with Muslim militants in hating the Jews and Israel and show great reverence to Bin Laden .21 Previously, modern European anti-Semitism, though pernicious and vicious, was not spread by governments, state organs, school systems, and mainstream media. Nowadays, the diffusion of Muslim communities throughout the continent and their integration into the respective national entities of Europe, has not only rendered those societies more fertile grounds for anti-Semitism, but Judeo-phobia has become a more acceptable form of social discourse among elites. Obsession with the Palestinian problem as a tool to bash Israel, Zionism, and the Jews has cemented the cohesion between Muslims and some elites on the Right and the Left on the common grounds of anti-Semitism. Therefore, instead of the crude hatred and bigotry that one could hear in the old days mainly on the popular level, it has now become diversified and more sophisticated, backed by highly skilled writers and artists in rhetoric. Jewish communities in Europe have become the targets of surveillance and of hate mail via the Internet. Some perpetrators say they are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, but many of them carry straightforward

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messages of Jew-hatred. Thus, the marvels of the Internet, which were calculated to facilitate better and faster communications between peoples and cultures, have grown into channels of hatred, bigotry, threats, and as a result also a very hostile place for Jews who are usually at the receiving end of this hate-literature, which has been expanded to include blogs, chats, open forums, email, spam, and what have you. The Internet is no longer only a means of communication but also of instruction, guidance, incitement, and coordination of action; one can learn there both how to prepare bombs and explosives; and when, where, and against whom to use them; and how to organize mass demonstrations; in short how to disrupt the existing order and create a new agenda to one’s liking. Societies are being transformed. The web abounds with Islamic, Nazi, extreme Left and Right organizations, the website of The Guardian, for example, all supposedly supervised by the Internet Watch Foundation, which is sponsored by the Internet providers and accepts complaints about racism and other crimes, which they pass to the police. Muslim anti-Semitic hatred, which emanates from mosques, Muslim organizations, madrasas, bookshops, university campuses, and cultural centers, is often boosted by generous grants from wealthy donors from countries like Saudi Arabia, whose thousands of rich princes and businessmen gain a foothold in European countries and surreptitiously assist their networks of Muslims who are loyal to the spread of their anti-Jewish propaganda. For example, a documentary film of incitement was broadcast on television in a Birmingham mosque that is under Saudi influence. It showed Saudi-trained imams teaching radical hate messages against Jews and Israel. Some of these Imams were arrested and convicted as a result of prompt police action. Sheikh Abduallah al-Faisal was convicted of incitement of racial hatred and soliciting to murder in 2003 and sentenced to seven years imprisonment and deportation thereafter. Zaheen Muhammed was convicted in 2005 for distributing leaflets that bore the hadith “The hour will come when Muslims will fight the Jews and kill them etc….” Abu Hamza was finally jailed in 2006 after many years of racial hatred and incitement, soliciting to murder and other charges, and has since been the subject of a U.S. extradition request in connection to terrorism.22 The scope of monitoring these sources of incitement has been expanding to the point of coming close to metamorphosing traditionally free, open, and liberal societies into those that are police-controlled, full of fear and suspicion. All this has been happening more and more after Sep-

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tember 11 (2001) in the U.S. and especially subsequent to July 7 (2005) in London. Limitations on traffic have been imposed, unsuspecting civilians are asked for a screening at the entrance of public places, ID cards are asked for inspection in the streets of Europe, and airports and public transportation facilities are closely watched. Police everywhere in Europe would love to be able to know what goes on inside mosques, Muslim youth clubs, Muslim schools and Muslim cultural centers, but they are either constricted by law from encroaching on privacy or are woefully short of manpower in view of the increasing Muslim population and its growing radicalization. This puts a heavy burden on the public purse, at a time when the public realizes that this is not a fairly and equally shared expenditure by the national treasury to respond to a general need of all inhabitants, but a superfluous yoke, which if European society were left to its own devices, as of old, it could have spared. They now understand that the anti-Semitic and other criminal breaches of the law by Muslim radicals has not only caused the dramatic increase of Muslim inmates in the European jail system, but has also forced all Europeans to endorse a regime of self-imposed restrictions in self-defense. Terrorism, including anti-Semitic terror, has indeed dragged all Western societies not only into fear and limited freedoms, but also to collective punishments of the entire public because of a few perpetrators. To top all that, they have to double or quadruple their petrol bills to the oil-producers, like Iran and Saudi Arabia, who finance terror and train the cadres of imams who spread hatred and anti-Semitic incitement throughout the West. Strife, intolerance, insecurity, and threats to freedom of expression in the Muslim world have caused charitable institutions, businesses, and media associated with Islam to move to Europe and to change the public square in many European capitals. For example, Arab language newspapers had their offices moved to London after the Lebanese civil war of 1975-90. Part of that Arabic press, which reflects extremist points of view, for example support for Saddam when he ruled Iraq, or proponents of Hamas and Hizbullah and other terrorist organizations, found a warm and secure haven in the laissez-faire atmosphere of liberal Britain and have greatly impacted public discourse ever since. For instance, the Hamas organ Filastin al-Muslima, or Al-Quds al-Arabi edited by Abdul Bari Atwan, one of the most vicious anti-Semites and anti-Zionists one can find in Europe, and who sits on panels in many electronic media in Europe, have had considerable influence on what is said and thought, and on the acceptability of anti-Semitism among the elites and in the

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salons of Europe. One of the most visible manifestations of that insidious influence on European societies is the ambience in university campuses, which have become inhospitable to Jews, certainly to Israelis. While in the past Jews flourished in academic environments, when learning was prevalent and learned discourse was at its prime, now Jewish students have lowered their profile, sometimes hiding their identifying Jewish trappings to avoid conflict, and often living under the threat of vocal radical Islam under whose wings European Muslims, reinforced by overseas Muslim students, often set the tone and terrorize the rest. They promote boycotts of Israel, distribute anti-Israel and anti-Semitic tracts, and strive to get Zionism on the racist list. At Manchester and Sussex universities in England, for example, student unions have attempted to ban visiting Israeli speakers from addressing Jewish students’ events, something never seen before in the famously free and open British institutions of higher learning.23 In other words, the Muslim students who were taken in as refugees from persecution from their own countries, now enforce bans and boycotts on native Jewish students and their European supporters, thus imposing new standards of freedom, which democratic Europe had not experienced in centuries. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

The intrepid Canadian journalist, Jane Kokan, obtained a video filmed under cover of the surgical removal of eyes as a punishment by the state for viewing pornographic literature. The film was shown on the British Channel 4. Matthias Kuentzel, “Anti-Semitic Hate-speech in the Name of Islam,” www.matthiaskuentzel.de/contents/anti-semitic-hate-speech-in-the-name-of-islam, May 29, 2008. Ibid. Dhimmi Watch, October 28, 2004. Ibid. Gothenburg, Sweden www.upprop.net/pressrelease.php?. Ibid. Hadith Collection of Sahih al-Bukhari, Vol 4, Book 52, Number 177, also cited in the Hamas Charter. See Raphael Israeli, “The Charter of Allah: the Platform of the Islamic Resistance Movement,” in R. Israeli, Fundamentalist Islam and Israel, The University Press of America, Lanham and New York, 1993. This and the following passages are based on a selection of stories, all from The Local in English in Sweden, and on the government’s announcement about the funding of the repair of the Malmo Islamic Center. www.thelocal.se/article. php?ID=3392&date=20060327, March 27, 2006. This and the following passages are based on a selection of stories, all from The Local in English in Sweden, and on the government’s announcement about the funding of the repair of the Malmo Islamic Center. www.thelocal.se/article. php?ID=3392&date=20060327, March 27, 2006. “Sweden’s Anti-Peace Policy,” Lead Article, Jerusalem Post, April 30, 2006.

Social and Political Repercussions for the West 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

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Ibid. Nina Sanandaji, “Sweden’s Unholy Alliance,” FrontPageMagazine, May 19, 2006. Hugh Fitzgerald, “What is the Cost?,” Jihad Watch, May 26, 2006. Michael Whine, interviewed on “Muslim-Jewish Interactions in Great Britain,” Changing Jewish Communities, No 32, May 15, 2008, p.2. Published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Ibid. Ibid. Michael Whine, interviewed on “Muslim-Jewish Interactions in Great Britain,” Changing Jewish Communities, No 32, May 15, 2008, p.2. Published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. “Anti-Semitic Incidents Report, 2007,” Community Security Trust, London, February, 2008, p. 12. Interview by Manfred Gerstenfeld with Robert Wistrich, “Anti-Semitism Embedded in British Culture,” Post-Holocaust and Anti-Semitism, No 70, July 1, 2008. Published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Ibid. pp. 6-7. “Undercover Mosque,” Dispatches, Channel 4 in the UK, January 16, 2007. Cited from Michael Whine, op. cit. pp.4-8. Ibid.

8 Battling Anti-Semitism in the West Several strategies have been tried over the centuries to battle the plight of anti-Semitism: from denial to emigration, to dialogues with the antiSemites—be they members of the host majority or other minorities—in a vain attempt to mend their ways. Such strategies also include monitoring and complaining to the authorities, publishing reports that are supposed to put the anti-Semites to shame, resorting to international bodies that police human rights, petitioning the courts in countries where they are effective, educating for tolerance of children and adults, self-defense in extreme cases, and what not. But none of those counter-measures is nearly as demeaning and humiliating to the Jewish victims themselves as is embracing the indictments of their enemies and detractors. During most of the centuries of the Jewish Diaspora, one could still understand that in a situation of no choice, where the persecuted Jews had nowhere else to go, embracing the enemy’s arguments was a way to preempt indictment by the environment. In this post-exilic era, however, i.e., after the state of Israel was reestablished, and the opportunity has become practical to move there as an escape from persecutions, it is much more difficult to comprehend those Jews. It has been suggested that “Jews embracing as truth the indictments of their enemies has been a fixture of Jewish life throughout the history of the Diaspora,”1 but that does not account for Jews pursuing that very course when they are offered the choice to break the siege around themselves and find shelter in less anti-Semitic surroundings. In fact, as an integral part of battling anti-Semitism, many Jewish leaders in the modern West have encouraged their co-religionists to cast off some of their “reprehensible” endeavors and modes of behavior (trades, dress, speech, conduct, and mores) as a way to please their persecutors and placate them, in the hope of blunting anti-Semitic sentiment. This approach to thwarting off anti-Semitic attacks has persisted in Western countries after the found217

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ing of the state of Israel, when one is no longer constrained to swallow humiliation for the sake of survival. Worse, after Israel was founded, some Israeli intellectuals and “bleeding hearts” who ache the pains of the entire panoply of the peoples of the world except their own, have curiously adopted the same strategy of taking to heart the indictments of their enemies who besiege them; the latter seek their destruction, as a way of self-justification, apology, exoneration of their own sins, acceptance in the company of their detractors, or setting themselves apart from the indicted lot. It all sounds like the cases of abused children or kidnapped hostages, who by force of intimate contact and friction with their tormentors and captors end up embracing their arguments and identifying with them. In turn, this creates yawning cleavages within Jewish and Israeli society, between the sensible majority who responds to its instincts of self-preservation and survival and takes firm stands against its enemies, and the self-deprecating and self-flagellating minority who would only find fault with itself and exonerate its most dangerous and genocidal enemies from any blame. Consider, for example, the question on Temple Mount in Jerusalem, one of the most sensitive issues, which touches upon the very soul of the Jewish people, the focus of its identity and the core of its conflict with the Arabs and Muslims. Taken to its polar extremes, the Jews claim the most antiquated foothold on that emplacement of the Jewish Temples, while the Muslims, citing the presence of the Aqsa Mosque there for the past millennium and more, can claim that the present state of affairs, which has acquired sanctity, cannot be altered. Without going into all the hair-splitting theological niceties in both religions, one can reasonably claim that despite the exclusive nature of monotheistic religions, a pragmatic and tolerant approach of goodwill could serve both parties’ purposes without totally excluding the other. Muslims have traditionally taken the rapport of force as the yardstick for treating this matter: Since the Muslims had occupied Jerusalem in the seventh century, they forbade access to Temple Mount to all, except Muslims, and that prohibition was enforced for many centuries except during the interlude of the Crusaders when Muslims also were excluded. When Israel took Jerusalem in 1967, the Muslims expected it to proceed similarly, out of conviction that the balance of power had shifted. But the Israelis did not, since they realized that the claim of Muslims had in the intervening centuries taken hold and could not be removed. They left then the entire compound in the hands of the Muslims, much to the astonishment of the Arabs and many Jews as well. Conversely, in the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron,

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where similar exclusionary procedures had been applied for centuries of Muslim rule against the Jews, Israel decreed that it belonged to both Jews and Muslims and divided the week in half, with the structure serving as a mosque half the week and as a synagogue the other half. Muslims did not relish that arrangement but they plied to it for want of a better option or of might to enforce it. Had the very same logical and fair arrangement been immediately applied on Temple Mount, perhaps today there would be no major focus of conflagration there. But it was not applied, mainly due to the Jewish and Israeli “moralists” who saw fit to lend credence to the exclusive rights of the Muslims in that most holy of places and to negate the feasibility of the Jewish claim to that place. And so, those who excluded others, that is the Muslim authorities, which insisted that Jews had never been there and that all their records, creeds, and even archaeological vestiges were “fake,” took exclusive possession of the place, under the supervising eye of the Israelis; this was done while the latter who recognized Muslim rights and were prepared to share the rituals, as in Hebron, with the Muslims on the basis of a practical arrangement, remained excommunicated and excluded. The extraordinary issue here is that not only is this not recognized as a magnanimous step on behalf of Israel, at its own detriment, either by Muslims locally and throughout the world, but that the generous (and naive ) Israelis are accused of advancing false claims on Temple Mount and are taken to task in consequence. When the cacophony of Israeli critics is joined by Jews and Israelis in this respect, then Jews are back embracing the indictments of their enemy. Had the Jews and Israelis who act so enjoyed esteem from their Muslim detractors for their self-indicting position, they could at least have bathed in that momentary glory. But all they get (and deserve) is contempt and repeated “confirmations” from the Muslim side that “even the Jews admit” to the superiority of the Muslim records and claims. The result is that much more humiliation is heaped on the Jews and the Israelis, much to their dismay and incomprehension. Some Jews and Israelis who would rather struggle for the enemy than for their own people, are pressing their case, on “moral grounds,” not realizing how immoral is their stand when they aid the sworn enemy of their persecuted people and besieged country. Muslims are certainly happy to adopt those “moral” considerations, which serve their purposes and defeat the counterarguments of their Jewish enemies. Muslims in the West advance much the same “moral” arguments for their anti-Semitism as their coreligionists in the Middle East, and some Jews find themselves

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sharing the same complexes and patterns of behavior. The most salient of these “moral” debates refers to the very establishment of Israel “on the ruins” of the Palestinians, hence the Nakbah to counter the claimed independence of Israel. The fact that the Jews had accepted the partition plan, which like partition of the Temple Mount, loomed as the fairest and the least hurting for either party, and the Arabs had rejected it and moved to undo it by force, seems to be of no consequence for either the Muslims or their Jewish supporters. Harking back to the sentimentality of intellectuals and the left towards human rights, Muslims have learned to drive these Jews deep into a sense of guilt, to the point of making them question the moral worth of their own statehood. No parallel counterarguments of this sort are known to have grown among Arabs or Muslims with regard to the historical links of the Jews to Palestine, the Sho’ah, the progressive regime, economy, technology and society the Jews have built in the Jewish state, and the like. Thus, when Arabs and Muslims dub Israel as “racist,” discriminatory, and “immoral,” to the point of negating its right to exist, some of those tortured Jewish souls echo those misgivings and lend them validity. Hence there is post-Zionism to counter the Zionist enterprise, historical revisionism to undo historical events, subjective “narratives” to replace objective developments, and self-flagellating accounts to compete for their place in national history. These very themes, which depict the Jews/Israelis as the oppressive predators and their Muslim opponents as the perennial victims, are encountered by practically all Jewish communities, not the least on campuses where these accusations are rehearsed, multiplied, amplified, and transmitted to the next generation of youth for safekeeping and elaboration. These are often aided by Jewish intellectuals who seem to delight in abandoning the front lines of their people, and submit to the Arab and Muslim onslaught, which is often launched in tandem with the traditional anti-Semites in each locality who cannot be thankful enough for this Allah-sent reinforcement. Concurrently, Jews in Israel and abroad who incline to self-indictment would indulge in social welfare for the community at large, in order to prove that, contrary to stereotype, Jews are interested in the well-being of the entire community and are among its chief donors and philanthropists, sometimes to the detriment of their own Jewish community. Thus one can find Western and Israeli Jews who fund cultural, economic, and educational endeavors specifically for the Arab citizens of Israel or for other ethno-cultural minorities in their countries of residence, so as to demonstrate their moral concern for the welfare of the weak and the needy in general and their avoidance of

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parochial philanthropy.2 The same propensity for occasional outbursts of universal caring are manifested by Jewish organizations and Israel following natural calamities, like floods, hunger, and earthquakes, when food, money, medicine, rescue teams, and material assistance are dispatched in quantities out of proportion to the size of the country and its means. And it is not only government effort that is listed, something that could be explained by diplomatic eagerness to please the world and to spread some propaganda and goodwill, but mainly individual contributions by both the wealthy and the modest, which add up to considerable amounts. These trends, which thrive typically in leftist circles in Israel, also drive the Jews of the Diaspora to ally with socialist and liberal parties (Democrats in the U.S., Laborites in the U.K., Socialists in France ). For those parties allowed them to be subsumed within universal-humanistic endeavors, which avoided narrow parochial and particularistic courses of action. The Jews also believe that being part of a wider liberal cause, like civil rights in America, equal rights in politics, and equal opportunity in economics, would in itself guarantee them their place in the societal game. Some of them, for that reason, have pushed the same logic to its ultimate, transcended the liberal line, and found themselves leading or militating in more extremist groups such as communists, revolutionaries, radicals, and any other margin that could distance them from the stigma of the bourgeois class that had stuck to them. That was not only an attempt to assuage anti-Semites but to deny their own identity. It was not until the watershed year of 1977, when for the first time a nonLabor government was formed in Israel, that clamoring for civil rights for Arabs came from the opposition, and Jews in the Diaspora began to override this “right-wing” Jewish government in their plans of assistance to Arab villages, which they thought were being discriminated against. But when the Rabin Labor government returned to power, a preferential plan favorably discriminating Arabs in education, employment, and development was adopted which made the generous Jews’ private enterprise among Israeli Arabs redundant. But the Israeli left did not relent, and the extreme among them continue to demonstrate, often violently, and in concert with Palestinians, against the construction of the Israeli defensive wall in the West Bank, knowing full well that without it they could not be dwelling in tranquility in their towns and villages of Israel Proper. Leftist views die hard. This puts Jews in the Diaspora in a bind. For as much as most of them support Israel most of the time, they dare not always voice their leanings in public, especially since their traditional allies in the liberal

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left often abandon them in their confrontations with the Muslims whom the left rallies in their common anti-Israel and anti-Zionist cause. Some of them, who have crossed the lines into enemy territory, have no compunction about joining the left, which also often means the Muslims, in its hatred of Israel and the Jews, and in its action against them. But Muslims are also often found collaborating with the extreme right, or drawing inspiration directly from Muslim radicals in the Middle East. In late 2004 France banned the broadcasting of Lebanese Hizbullah al-Manar through the European Eutelsat satellite system, citing the station’s anti-Semitic content, which it knows has a direct impact on the violent conduct of the Muslims in its suburbs. Nevertheless, messages of hate were still being broadcast into the living rooms of Muslims in Germany via satellites controlled by Saudi Arabia and Egypt—Arabsat and Nilesat. The consequences were not long to come. Rabbi Zalman Gurevich was wearing a traditional black robe when he left his synagogue in Frankfurt’s Westend on Sabbath, September 7, 2007. According to the police report, he encountered a twenty-two-year old German of Afghan descent. It was early evening, and the young man shouted: “I am going to kill you, you shit Jew” and plunged a dagger into the rabbi’s abdomen. The latter was hospitalized and taken care of, but there was no mistake that he was attacked for being a Jew, like in Germany of the 1930s. It was clear that the hatred imported from Beirut and Gaza was resurfacing in the streets, sports clubs, schools, and subways of Europe. That young Muslim and many like him learn that “you Jew!” is a derogatory appellation in kindergartens, schools, and playgrounds. Schoolchildren berate their teachers, calling them “Jew dogs!” for not offering shari’a-compatible instruction, and Jewish children are attacked and feel compelled to switch to Berlin’s Jewish High School and/or to hide the Jewish insignia of their faith when in public.3 The Extreme Right in Europe usually means Neo-Nazis and their likes. Indeed, while the number of anti-Semitic offenses committed by Muslims in Germany in 2006 jumped from thirty-three to eighty-eight, Neo-Nazi sentiment was shown to be behind most of the anti-Semitic incidents reported during that year. In 2007 the German Interior Ministry published a study on the worldviews of Muslims in the country, where it is emphasized that “anti-Semitic attitudes were found among young Muslims far more often than among non-Muslim immigrants or domestic Germans.” It was pointed out that this anti-Semitism could not be dismissed as the product of an underdog attitude within marginalized social groups, but that it represents an ideological way of thinking. It specified

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that “the pervasiveness of sweeping anti-Semitic prejudices among Muslim students was also noticeable.” It added that such prejudices that were expressed by about one third of the students and in an extreme form, by about 10 percent, were significantly more common than anti-Christian sentiments. Matthias Kuentzel, a foremost specialist of anti-Semitism in contemporary Germany, finds that the Middle Eastern conflict is often cited as the reason, all right, but that the root must refer back to the inception of Islam as in the infamous hadith cited in the Charter of the Hamas, and repeatedly quoted above,4 when rocks and trees will cry out: “Oh Muslim, a Jew is hiding behind me, come and kill him!” With the tradition of the Prophet leaving not much for imagination, what are young Muslims educated on that tradition supposed to think or to do? Teachers in the German Capital today, reports Kuentzel, are sometimes confronted with Muslim students who expressly use the Holocaust to justify their sympathies to the Nazis and to Hitler, on account of their persecution and genocide of the Jews, and who refuse to take part in day trips to concentration camps or in memorials for the dead. During one excursion to the German Historical Museum, a group of Muslim youth gathered in front of a replica of a gas chamber in Auschwitz, and applauded.5 France as well as Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Romania, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, and Poland, have all made Holocaust denial illegal, according to the Anti Defamation League (ADL). But they allow actual attacks on Jews by Muslims to continue. Elsewhere in Europe, “When a Dutch family comes back to Holland after eight years of living in Israel, people tend to assume its members are Jewish,” so says Leon Meijer, who completed his doctorate at the Technion in Haifa and then returned to his home country. Thereupon, his eleven-year old daughter was told by a classmate soon after her return: “It’s a pity Hitler didn’t finish the job.” That was quite a statement by a child of that age, which could not have been made had the child not been indoctrinated by someone. Meijer was shocked not only by that comment but by the discovery that the Netherlands had no laws clearly outlawing Holocaust denial. Six years later (in 2006), he drafted legislation that would do just that. Under his proposal individuals who deny or glorify genocide with the intent to hurt others could be fined or sentenced to up to a year in jail. That law would be added to current legislation prohibiting discrimination on the grounds of race and religion. Meijer, who serves as an adviser to the Christian Unity Party, which is sponsoring the legislation, described the measure as more urgent than before now that echoes of Iranian Presi-

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dent Ahmadinajad’s denials of the Holocaust and threats to annihilate Israel are also heard in the Netherlands. He also said that people copy and repeat these kinds of remarks, especially since the number of the survivors who can personally testify has been dwindling.6 Though the Christian Union holds only three seats in the 150-member parliament, Meijer says that his bill enjoys a great deal of support. Even so, it took a few months to approve, any possible pitfalls, including fears that the law would impede free speech, were cited to explain why Holland, unlike its neighbors, had not banned Holocaust denial before. Dutch Jewish Community leader, Ronny Naftaniel, said that the proposed law could not encounter political obstacles, since it is not limited to the Holocaust but includes all genocides as defined by the International Criminal Court; but other objections could arise, based on other conflicts, such as the current crisis in Darfour, or the past experience of the Armenians in Turkey. Although Naftaniel, who doubles as the Director of the Center for Information and Documentation on Israel, feared the new law might encounter political difficulties, he was confident that it was a bold step forward. He noted that there had been prosecution of Holocaust denial under the existing Dutch anti-discrimination laws on the basis that negation of the Holocaust insults survivors and their children, but he said that any move to codify the offense would be welcome. “There are fewer and fewer survivors and even their children are not numerous anymore, and we think it’s important to keep the memory of the Holocaust complete and without debate. It should not be dependent on the survivors and their children” he insisted. However, the general atmosphere towards the Jews worsened in Europe since the Intifadah of 2000, marked by increased instances of spitting, name calling, and other forms of abuse, according to Naftaniel. But he also says that the attacks—none of which were violent in the Netherlands—have leveled off in the past few years. Still, ADL associate national director, Kenneth Jacobson, remarked that “any kind of effort for a Holocaust denial law is a way of dealing with the trend that is developing, and to stop it in its tracks.” He noted, however, that “all the polls indicate that the vast majority of Europeans are aware that the Holocaust happened.”7 As we have noticed, most of the Holocaust denial pronouncements originate from Muslims, who are occasionally aided by their European allies. Unthinkable before September 11 (2001), and especially before the Madrid bombings (2004), for a Spaniard and a European to take the defense of Jews in Europe, a courageous journalist, Sebastian Vilar Rodriguez, published on the Internet an article of repentance in late 2005,

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which is worthwhile to reproduce in detail due to its important addition to the effort to battle anti-Semitism in Europe. He wrote: I walked in the streets of Barcelona, and suddenly discovered a terrible truth: Europe died in Auschwitz. We killed 6 million Jews and replaced them with 20 [now 30] million Muslims. In Auschwitz we burned a culture, thought, creativity, talent. We destroyed the chosen people, truly chosen because they produced great and wonderful people who changed the world. The contribution of these people is felt in all areas of life: science, art, international trade, and above all, as the conscience of the world. These are the people we burned. And under the pretense of tolerance, and because we wanted to prove to ourselves that we were cured of the disease of racism, we opened our gates to 20 million Muslims who brought us stupidity and ignorance, religious extremism and lack of tolerance, crime and poverty, due to an unwillingness to work and support their families with pride. They have turned our beautiful Spanish cities into the Third World, drowning in filth and crime. Shut up in the apartments they receive free from the government, they plan the murder and destruction of their naïve hosts. And thus, in our misery, we have exchanged culture for fanatical hatred, creative skill for destructive skill, intelligence for backwardness and superstition. We have exchanged the pursuit of peace of the Jews of Europe and their talent for hoping for a better future to their children, their determined clinging to life because life is holy, for those who pursue death, for people consumed by the desire for death for themselves and for others, for our children and theirs. What a terrible mistake was made by miserable Europe!8

This is no simple or easy admission by the citizen of a country that had forced mass conversions of Jews into Christianity and burned or expelled those who were not ready to abandon their faith. The admission is not made easier either by the shameful submission of the Spanish public to Muslim terrorism, after PM Jose Aznar who supported President Bush in his war on terrorism was voted out of office following the massive terrorist attack on Madrid in 2004 or by his replacement by the socialist Zapatero who pledged the withdrawal of his troops from Iraq. The Spaniards remain cautious in their dealings with Muslims, for they continue to walk the tight rope between their continued colonization of the Ceuta and Melilla enclaves in northern Morocco, and their declared support for Muslim and other Third World countries’ independence. But nothing threw them out of balance and exposed their vulnerability more than the trial that began in April 2006 in Madrid, where the details of the Muslim plot against them and its worldwide context were revealed to their stupefied public. A Spanish judge indicted 29 people for their roles in the deadly train explosions, and concluded that the attack was carried out by a local radical Islamic cell that was inspired, though not directly commanded, by al-Qa’ida. After a two-year investigation, judge del Olmo handed down an almost 1,500-page report with the first indictments, charging six people with 191 counts of terrorist murders

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and 1,755 attempted murders, to accord with the numbers of the killed and wounded passengers, respectively. The other 23 were charged with collaborating in the plot and aiding its execution. Explosive-filled backpacks were detonated by cell phones on the morning of March 11, 2004 ripping apart four rush-hour commuter trains. That was Europe’s second worst attack by terrorists after the 1988 downing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.9 In the midst of that state of mind, the Spaniards hosted in Seville in March 2006, a conference of rabbis and imams to discuss the “deepening crisis between the two faiths” and the obstacles to settling the Middle East dispute. The conference was convened by the French organization Hommes de Parole (Men of their Word), which promotes dialogue between conflicting groups, and it brought up the questions of terrorism, the Israeli settlements and the centrality of Jerusalem in both creeds. There were displays of conviviality between the parties, though no fundamental issue was resolved; however, it was easy to make general and unbinding statements denouncing the use of religion to justify violence and urging “respect for religious symbols,” which was an apparent reference to the Cartoon Affair. That meant that the organizers of the conference and the chosen venue for its deliberations used the Arab-Israeli dispute as a parable for the mounting confrontation in Europe between the Christian host societies and the Muslim guest immigrants, one that politically correct Europe does not dare to raise directly. From the Muslim point of view, whenever they go to a dialogue, they usually mean that their views should be listened to and heeded, not that they should reciprocate in kind. Therefore, nothing productive has ever emerged from these encounters, and no solution was ever proclaimed by conferences of clerics who state ideals as described in the scriptures but have no power to implement them even if they are all peaceful, humane and well-meaning. So, while the final declaration condemned any “incitement against a faith or a people, let alone call for its elimination,” supposedly referring to Iran’s President’s denials of the Holocaust and threats to eliminate Israel, any Muslim could also interpret that statement as condemning the cartoons against the Prophet.10 While the intent of the organizers may have been to alleviate the Muslim-Jewish tensions in Europe and elsewhere, perhaps thereby to contribute to the battle against anti-Semitism there, the asymmetry between the two parties was dramatically illustrated. Firstly, at a time when hundreds of Jewish synagogues, cemeteries and Jewish schools were desecrated or burned, and many Jews were attacked in the streets

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and in some cased murdered, no similar onslaughts by Jews on Muslims in Europe were registered. Secondly, While Israel was represented at the conference by its established Chief Rabbi, it was Muslim imams from Gaza, a territory ruled by Hamas, who attended, admitting that they would have been shot had they walked the streets of their city with Jewish rabbis. Thirdly, there are no terrorist attacks or systematic incitement against any Muslims from Israeli territory, while a consistent anti-Semitic campaign is run from practically all Muslim countries against Jews and Israel. So, getting imams who represent no one and are afraid to pronounce aloud conciliatory words towards Jews in order to sign a joint declaration is the paradigm of inefficacy and vanity. Conferences of that sort were held in Alexandria, Egypt, in recent years, that were attended by even the Chief Mufti of Egypt, Sheikh Tantawi. But beyond the smooth and politically correct declarations, which were usually reversed by the same imams who attended, when they sanctioned Islamikaze bombings against Israel during their sermons in their communities, nothing practical came out of them. Both parties were acutely aware that the influence of clerics on toning down the conflict was insignificant, because only politicians, not the people or their clerics could make any decisions. But for the Europeans who convened that Seville Conference, which had also taken place in Brussels a year earlier, the Middle Eastern conflict was only a test case for the much larger Arab-European tensions, suspicions, and fears. If in the Middle East the effort to dialogue proved futile politically, despite the conviviality between clerics in the intimacy of a hotel in a foreign country, so much more so when it came to the bigger problem of Islam in Europe, which was the top priority in the minds of the conveners of those gatherings. Sometimes, a country like Germany, which is committed to fight anti-Semitism, Islamic and otherwise, is dragged into perpetuating it by anti-Semites or other ill-willed people. The German government has admitted it was deeply involved in funding the June 2008 conference on the Middle East in Berlin, and suggested inviting former Iranian deputy foreign minister Muhammad Javad Ardashir Larijani to speak at the gathering, where he called for the destruction of Israel. This was supposed to be the Third Transatlantic Conference—whose stated purpose was to address “common solutions” in the Middle East—where Larijani said the “Zionist project” should be “canceled” and argued that Israel “has failed miserably and has only caused terrible damage to the region.” Jens Plötner, a spokesman for German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, told The Jerusalem Post11 that the Foreign, Economics and Research

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ministries and Chancellor Angela Merkel’s office transferred funds to the Hesse Foundation for Peace and Conflict Research, which he said had proposed inviting Larijani. The grant was made from a fund for “civil society projects.” The foundation made the suggestion to invite Larijani “four months before the event” at an inter-agency meeting involving the four government bodies, Plotner said. However, a Financial Times Germany article titled “Publicly funded anti-Semitism” reported on June 27 that the Hesse Foundation claimed it was the Foreign Ministry that suggested Larijani as a speaker. A representative of the German Foreign Ministry’s Iran Desk told the Post on June 26, “The Foreign Ministry did not support the event financially. The Foreign Ministry knows of Mr. Larijani’s statements from media reports.” A ministry spokeswoman had told the Post repeatedly that the Foreign Ministry did not fund the conference. After being told of the contradictory statements, the spokeswoman confirmed that “the HSFK [Hesse Foundation] Peace Institute received a grant” for the event as a result of the inter-agency meeting, but she did not address the ministry’s earlier denials. A spokesman for the German government told the Post that federal agencies involved in planning the conference received funds from the European Recovery Program. Bernd W. Kubbig of the Hesse Foundation, the principal organizer of the conference, refused to provide the Post with a transcript of the event in which Larijani said, “Denial of the Holocaust in the Muslim world has nothing to with antiSemitism. And President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has never denied the Holocaust.” However, Ahmadinejad has consistently questioned the authenticity of the Holocaust, and he invited well-known Holocaust deniers to the “World without Zionism” conference held in Tehran in 2005. Critics charge Kubbig with placating a regime that wishes to destroy Israel. “The idea that today the Iranian regime would like to complete the Nazis’ job is bad enough; even worse, however, is German cooperation with this,” said Nasrin Amirsedghi, an Iranian intellectual who fled the Islamic Republic and now lives in Mainz, Rhineland Palatinate. “The German government is currying favor with the mullah-regime,” said an angry Stephan Kramer, general secretary of the Central Council of Jews in Germany. The incident has become a foreign relations debacle for the German government. According to critics, it appears to be the first government-funded event in Germany since WWII in which the government sponsored a speaker who advocated a second Holocaust against Jews. The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Europe demanded Steinmeier’s “public condemnation” of Larijani’s statements and an “investigation

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and disciplining of those responsible for the invitations and funding of this scandalous encounter.” The Wiesenthal Center also called for Steinmeier’s support for the Justice Ministry to commence “criminal proceedings against Larijani for his violation of German law against offending the memory of the Holocaust.”12 Plötner said the Wiesenthal Center would receive a reply within two weeks. When asked whether the German government plans to repudiate the Larijani’s statements, a spokesman deferred the matter to the Foreign Ministry. Non-Jewish organizations also issued strongly worded statements seeking action from the government. The Mideast Freedom Forum Berlin wrote that the invitation of Larijani “is a slap in the face to the Iranian opposition” and cited Larijani, who as chairman of the Human Rights Staff of Iranian Justice in 2007 defended the practice of stoning Iranians who violated religious law. A joint statement from the Coordinating Council of German Non-governmental Organizations against anti-Semitism and the German chapter of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, an organization devoted to countering academic discourse that “demonizes Israel and Zionism,” said that “a representative of the Hesse Foundation for Peace and Conflict Research (HSFK) voiced regrets that ‘the feelings of some Israeli participants were hurt’ at the Berlin conference. It is up to German politicians to make clear that what ‘were hurt’ were not only the ‘feelings of some Israeli participants,’ but elementary principles of peaceful coexistence and human rights.” Both organizations demanded “a tightening of economic sanctions against the nuclear armament plans of the anti-Semitic Islamic Republic of Iran.... German exports to Iran have not decreased in recent months, but have increased considerably.” A weeklong investigation by the Post indicates that the German government has been intensifying its business and political relations with Iran in 2008. With the exception of 2007, Germany has remained Iran’s No. 1 European Union trade partner over the years. Economists attributed the decline in 2007 to private-sector complications in Iran, and not to German political policy. In the first quarter of 2008, Iranian-German business mushroomed to €1.35 billion, an 18 percent increase when compared with the first four months of 2007. Germany supplies a technology-starved Iran with sophisticated equipment for its energy sector and growing infrastructure. Total German export trade to Iran has consistently hovered around 4 billion each year. Merkel has talked about tightening the economic screws on Iran, but her informal policy to discourage trade has not curtailed the strong economic ties between the countries. Siemens, the electrical giant, for example, maintains

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a robust yearly trade of between $500 million and $1 billion with Iran. The German company Wirth, according to Emanuele Ottolenghi, director of the Transatlantic Institute in Brussels, “sold tunnel-boring equipment to Iran for its Ghomroud water project.” While such heavy earth-moving machines can be used to build underground nuclear weapons facilities, the German government approved the deal for the machines, which critics consider to be a telling example of “dual-use” equipment. Germany’s regulatory agency BAFA is required to block deals involving certain “dual-use” goods, which can be used for military and civilian purposes. According to terrorism and regulatory experts, Germany has failed to clamp down on the sale of “dual-use” goods to Iran.13 On other instances, Western governments who undertake to battle antiSemitism can thereby cause damage to the Jews, due to their reluctance to appear discriminatory towards Muslims. Thus, in France, part of the government’s dealing with the Affair of the Veil consisted in banning in public religious symbols of the other religious communities too (the kippa headgear for Jews, large crosses for Christians). But the Jews also discreetly removed their head-covers in public and instead wore baseball caps, but felt compelled to remove the mezuzah on their door steps after the doors to several Jewish homes were burned, and hide their Star of David pendants under their garbs for fear of being assaulted in the streets. In Canada, following a public debate about the rejection of the Muslims’ demand for enforcement of faith-based arbitration, a Montreal rabbi noted sadly that “the Ontario government felt compelled to throw the baby with the bathwater.” The issue was, according to Daniel Pipes, that Orthodox Jews (and others) felt they might lose out points to an emerging pattern whereby efforts to integrate Muslims into the West in fact upset the existing benign status quo. He cited other recent examples, whereby French nuns for the first time must take off their headgear for identity card or passport pictures, because of anti-Hijab legislation. Larger populations than ever before—British underground riders, American airport passengers, Russian theater goers—must undergo extensive security checks, as a result of fears from Muslim terrorists. Ironically, Muslims who consistently complain about collective punishments inflicted on them, choose to ignore the fact that they have been the basic cause for all the collective punishments imposed upon us as our privacy has been encroached upon and humiliation and embarrassment have become our lot, when we travel, enter theaters or undergrounds, or board airplanes. Danes marrying foreigners face extensive restrictions in bringing their spouses to Denmark because of immigration abuses involving Muslims.

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Santas, Nativity plays, Christmas carols, and Bibles are banned in public in some Western countries so as not to offend Muslims. Unremarked by most Westerners, Islam’s presence has started to change their ways of life. In a recent survey it was found that 63 percent of Canadians oppose giving any religious community the right to use self-based arbitration to settle divorce, custody, inheritance, and other family disputes. Asked specifically whether the Muslim community should be permitted to use faith-based arbitration, to settle family issues, the same percentage of Canadians gave a nay answer. The findings suggest that anti-Muslim sentiment was not behind the loud opposition in Ontario to allow Shari’a courts to arbitrate family law. “It was not singling out a particular community. We found that people were generally opposed to do it for any community. So, that kind of explains the opposition to granting the Muslim community that right.”14 A charismatic British imam who has been accused of publicly vilifying Hindus, Jews, and liberal Muslims made a return visit to Toronto in June 2006 at the invitation of a Scarborough (Canada) mosque. Sheikh Riyadh ul Haq was slated to be a keynote speaker at a youth conference—a visit already protested by at least one group and by individuals who accused him of lifting passages from the Qur’an and altering them to suit his often controversial conclusions. Federal Immigration Minister Monte Solberg was urged to deny him entry. Ul Haq, a prominent cleric in England, had passed mostly unnoticed during at least four previous appearances in Canada. The arrests of 17 Greater Toronto Area residents on terrorism-related charges, in the Summer of 2006, however, provoked questions about just who is preaching to Canada’s Muslim youth—and led to concerns about ul Haq’s presence at the Youth Tarbiyah (Culture) conference. In Toronto, he was to address an audience of 2,000 on current issues facing Muslim youth, according to Mohammad Alam, president of the Islamic Foundation of Toronto, the event organizer. “Whoever is objecting should make their own judgment and come hear him speak. He is a very learned scholar in Europe, or at least that’s my understanding,” said Alam. But some Muslim scholars say ul Haq often quotes the Qur’an out of context, and also refers to events out of historical context. For instance, in a speech posted on an Islamic website he quotes a Qur’an passage that states, “Of the whole of mankind, you shall find the most intense in their hatred and enmity towards the Believers, al-Yahood (Jews) and the mushrikeen (the idolators.).” Then he paraphrases, saying that the ones who are bitterest in their enmity towards Muslims, the most unrelenting, unforgiving, are the Jews and the mushrikeen (idolators) in

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all their forms. To avoid accusations of anti-Semitism, he added: “Allah, the creator of the Semites, says that, the chief idolators today are the Hindus.”15 In fact, says Muslim scholar Shabir Ally, the passage refers only to the coalition of the Jews and the pagan Arabs who together were attacking the Muslims in Mohammed’s time, in the seventh century. Thus, ul-Haq ignored the historical context in which it was mentioned. If the verse says “Jews,” he takes it to be all Jews for all times and all places, says Ally, president of the Islamic Information and Da’wah Centre International in Toronto. He points out that ul Haq omitted the Qur’anic verse that states—again in Mohammed’s era—that a Christian is a Muslim’s friend. He just focused on the part he needed because he wanted to show that the world is against Muslims, says Ally. Earlier, reacting to the terrorism-related arrests, Munir El-Kassem sermonized, “We should be more careful in controlling the youth in the public domain—not everybody should be allowed to talk or lead the youth. They are the most vulnerable.” He was also to speak at the Toronto conference. El-Kassem had heard ul Haq speak twice: “It is purely religious and there is nothing I could call controversial…. He is a powerful speaker; his style is both compelling and motivational.” Ul Haq had spoken to an audience of 15,000 at the Reviving the Islamic Spirit Conference at the Rogers Centre in late 2005, alongside controversial Americans such as Imam Zaid Shakir and Sheikh Hamza Yusuf. He also frequently travels to the United States as a speaker. But Tarek Fatah, of the secular Muslim Canadian Congress, said that “those who invite ul Haq here should take ownership of hate…. We don’t want this man to come to Canada unless he is willing to debate us in public,” says Fatah. Born in 1971 in Gujarat, India, ul Haq, also known as Shaykh Abu Yusuf Riyadh, moved to the United Kingdom at age three to join his father, an imam at a Leicester mosque. At thirteen, he enrolled in an Islamic seminary in Bury, U.K., called Darul Uloom al Arabiyyah al Islamiyyah (The Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies), where he met Sheikh Husain Patel, currently imam at the Islamic Foundation. “He is honest, he has integrity and he is a very good speaker. He is well liked by the Muslim youth,” says Patel. “He sometimes is critical of certain segments of the society and people. He has been critical of the British government and the British Prime Minister and their participation and invasion of Iraq and the Gulf War, and very rightly so.”16 Ul Haq is the author of two books and was an imam at the Birmingham Central Mosque until 2003, the year he was arrested but not charged in a drive-by shooting incident that left two men critically injured. British

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police later said the shooting involved two groups targeting each other. Ul Haq now runs the Al Kawthar (Abundance, also a river in Paradise) Academy, a website packed with his lectures and excerpts from his books. There are people who are taking his quotes out of context and just recycle them, says Patel. Basically ul Haq has hundreds and hundreds of tapes; that’s what he does. He gives lectures and speeches all around the world. In a sermon on his own website, ul Haq says of Europeans that they have made it clear that they will not tolerate a Muslim force or power in Europe: “If it means massacring Muslims, if it means genocide, if it means a holocaust in Europe again, so be it, but this time the target is Muslims.” He also accuses the West of being people with hearts of stone concerned only about stones, during the furor over the Taliban’s destruction of the famed Buddhist statues at Bamiyan in 2001—which he deemed as idols, an abhorrence to Islam, and therefore an affront to the concept of Tawhid (Unity of Allah). And he castigates moderate Muslims who in their weakness say: “Well, Muslims should be careful, we shouldn’t rebel, we shouldn’t stand up against these powers.” “Where in his speeches are the good things that are happening to Muslims? Of Muslims who live in his own neighborhood?” wonders Shabir Ally, of the information center. “He is piecing together, by his interpretation, motivation for people to reach certain conclusions. It is not good for youthful minds.” Alia Hogben, president of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women, is also concerned about how ul Haq might influence young Muslim minds in Canada. The issue is the fine line between allowing someone to have freedom of speech and the danger of inflaming others to hate and anger, says Hogben. “If his comments as in this speech are repeated—they are racist, intolerant, with an unreasonable vilification of the West—then his entry needs to be assessed carefully, especially in light of the recent events, or close watch needs to be maintained when he does speak here.” A federal immigration ministry spokesperson said that although U.K. citizens may enter Canada without a visa, those who incite hatred might well be prosecuted. The Canadian Coalition for Democracies, an Ottawa-based lobby group, is calling on the authorities to refuse entry on security grounds. “He has preached hatred of Hindus and Jews while glorifying martyrdom and jihad,” said coalition director David Ouellette. Ul Haq was also scheduled to speak at a Montreal conference in July, 2006 while a seminar at McMaster University, based on his book Causes of Disunity, was cancelled—officially because of a time-table conflict.17 Coverage of manifestations of anti-Semitism, usually parading as anti-Zionism, gradually found expression in non-Jewish French media

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which previously would have glossed over the phenomenon and looked the other way. The major French daily Le Monde, unexpectedly came out ferociously against anti-Semitism and racism on the Internet and pledged to combat them, following a meeting on the topic in Paris of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). An article in this prestigious medium, authored by Renaud Muselier, the French Foreign Secretary, singled out the accusation of the Blood Libel and the fairy tales of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as the targets of his forthcoming campaign against those websites that were created, nourished, expanded, and distributed by Muslims in Europe. To maintain the sacred “balance,” however, Muslims and blacks were also mentioned in that article as victims of this xenophobic hatred, but it escaped no one’s notice that the target, for the most part, was Jews. The author advocated vigorous steps against the perpetrators of this incitement in spite of the limitations they might place on freedom of speech and human rights, simply in view of the high stakes involved, no less than has been the case in the campaigns against terrorism and pedophilia.18 Other media sent special correspondents to examine the sources of Muslim wrath as a result of Daniel Pearl’s murder in Pakistan, which was highlighted as a case of blunt anti-Semitism by Bernard-Henri Levy in his book and lectures. Le Point, for example, eager to report to its readers the underlying reasons for the murderous outbreak of Jew-hatred in remote Pakistan, which had no direct link to the Palestinians whose misfortune is usually cited as the root of all anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli hatred, dispatched its reporters to investigate this matter. There they learned that Muslims were convinced that it was the West who waged war against them, not due to their terrorist attacks against it, but in order to humiliate and subjugate Islam in this clash of civilizations. Only then did Europeans begin to realize the asymmetry of their war against Islam and the intensity of the indoctrination and anti-Semitic hatred that their Muslims absorb during their tour of “education” in the Pakistani madrasas. Asymmetry, because when Muslims strike at European targets, they aspire to cause maximum damage to innocent civilians, while when the West, or Israel, strike back, they calculate their measures to cause as little loss of life and damage to innocent people as possible. While the former haphazardly attack passengers, diners, passers-by, and any target that might maximize loss of life and damage, civilized countries pinpoint centers of terrorist fighters and launch surgical strikes to minimize lateral damage. Perversely, the terrorists welcome the damage done to their population in order to justify their own acts of terror and mobilize

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their populace around them, while Westerners on the contrary wish to shelter their population from terrorists, because they are accountable to it and its safety.19 In the face of the customary European submission to Muslim behavior, it is sometimes Jews who suffer the pains of their countries and take their defense. In a presentation to MPs of the All Party Group on Race and Community, Abdul Bari, the President of MCB, accused British ministers of stigmatizing the British Muslim community and of fuelling xenophobia. He criticized the government for “unfairly targeting” Muslims and said that it was undermining their status as equal citizens, going so far as to ask: “What is the degree of xenophobia that tipped Germany in the 1930’s towards a murderous ethnic and cultural racism?” His comments attracted remarks from Jewish leaders, angry at the crass comparison. Jon Benjamin, Chief Executive of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said: “To try to recast modern Britain as equivalent to Nazi Germany is equally offensive and disingenuous.” Bari acknowledged that “very real progress has taken place for British Muslims under the Labor government,” but said it should not be invoked to merely paper over the cracks. “For if genuine change is to be achieved, the government needs to address key domestic and foreign policy concerns. These include poverty and social exclusion, Islamophobia and discrimination, and the misuse of counter-terrorism powers.” Abdul Bari rejected Blair’s call for Muslims to do more to fight terrorism, shifting the onus to the government. He also defended the Council’s controversial decision to boycott Holocaust Memorial Day, in the wake of Home Secretary Ruth Kelly’s threat to withhold the Council’s funding of about 50,000 pounds a year if it did not back down.20 Similarly, when a Muslim leader, Naseem, claimed that Britain was turning into a “police state,” and accused the government of “picking on the Muslim community to pursue a political goal,” he again invoked the comparison with Nazi Germany, when he said: “The German people were told the Jews were a threat. The same thing is happening here.” But this rhetorical escalation via comparison with Nazism was not called for, because anyone who uncritically resorts to it implies that he ran out of arguments. The comparison is especially insensitive because German Jews never inflicted terrorist attacks on Germany. Iqbal Sacranie, the former head of MCB, and rather more sophisticated than Nassem, commented: “I would not have used the Nazi reference, but I know from the number of calls that we are getting that people are really disturbed by the onslaught on the Muslim community.”21

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Denis MacShane, former British Minister to Europe, who led an investigation on anti-Semitism for the British Parliament, gave a presentation at a special conference on anti-Semitism in Berlin in November 2006, where he said “a witches brew of Islamic fundamentalists, Left-wing intellectuals and Neo-Nazis is helping spread anti-Semitism in Europe.” According to this analysis, there is an unorthodox alliance between several distinct groups: an organized ideological Islamism across Europe, which is openly anti-Semitic and subscribes to the appalling statements by the President of Iran that Israel should be wiped off the map; the “soft” anti-Semitism of Muslim intellectuals who are often religious and include the Muslim Brothers, who claim there is Zionist or Jewish control over media and politics (the 1930s vocabulary of the “Jewish conspiracy,” has been replaced today by the “Jewish Lobby”); the traditional right-wing anti-Semitism; and finally the Left, encompassing the far left and the legitimate Left’s hatred of Israel—a distorted association of Israel and America as the twin demons who have caused all of the world’s problems. MacShane claimed that the solution was for Europeans to demonstrate a robust defense of Israel’s right to exist. An insistence on the separation of faith from politics, so fundamentalists who claimed their actions were part of God’s will were instantly discredited. He concluded: “Fighting anti-Semitism is part of a common struggle against intolerance and demagoguery. It is a noble political cause to fight.”22 The government also introduced guidelines to tackle anti-Semitism in British universities. Campus authorities should record all complaints of anti-Semitism made by students, including statements or speeches. University vice-chancellors are warned not to tolerate academics whose critical views of Israel “cross the line” from personal interest or activism to abuse of power. There is a particular concern about so-called “Islamic anti-Semitism” with radical Muslim clerics, or their followers, being allowed to preach anti-Jewish hatred in universities. Phil Woolas, the Communities Minister, said: “We are very worried about Islamic antiSemitism on campuses. In this country we tend to see it as something of the past. It is not.” Although the government did not announce legislation, Woolas said it had not been ruled out. Police forces must now keep records of anti-Semitic attacks, the Foreign Office will be required to raise the issue with Arab countries such as Egypt and Jordan, which produce some of the most extreme anti-Semitic material, and a task force will be set up to combat anti-Semitism. Denis MacShane also declared “During our evidence sessions we heard of Jewish students having anti-Semitic graffiti scrawled on their doors, and of extremist Muslim groups being

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invited to speak on campuses. There are also attempts to ban people from putting forward Israel’s case in debates on the Middle East.” His report found that Jewish students felt “isolated and unsupported,” and that pro-Palestine debates were being used as a “vehicle for anti-Jewish language.”23 The British government also announced that the Crown Prosecution Service is to investigate why fewer than one in ten anti-Semitic accidents results in prosecution. The review follows criticism by MPs that the judicial system is failing Jews, who are more vulnerable to attacks and abuse than at any time in a generation, despite their being, as a group, one of the most law abiding components of society. Police forces are also overhauling their procedures for recording such incidents after MPs complained that many were “complacent.” Ministers are to urge police to use the Public Order Act of 1996, which outlaws the spread of racial hatred, where there is enough evidence to bring prosecution against extremist Muslims for speeches on campuses. According to the figures from Jewish groups, there were 594 anti-Semitic accidents in 2006, up 31 percent from 2005. More than a fifth of the incidents, which included 112 assaults and 70 attacks on properties, took place during the 34-day war between Israel and Hizbullah in Lebanon in July/August 2006.24 British police were also to record anti-Semitic crimes as racist attacks, beginning in 2008. The government also pledged additional funds to monitor anti-Semitic incidents in the country. “Anti-Semitism has not been taken as seriously as other forms of hatred in some parts of our society,” said Ian Wright, the parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, during a discussion of the All-Party Inquiry into Anti-Semitism in July, 2007. Wright also reiterated the government’s opposition to an academic boycott on Israel which repeatedly rears its head in Britain, calling it “anti-Jewish in principle.” This finally shows that, after much criticism and much hesitation, the British government had the decency to link between bland anti-Semitism and its anti-Zionist and anti-Israel manifestations. In France, where the Muslim minority attained the high proportion of 10 percent, roughly double the European average, the problem of Muslim anti-Semitism is perhaps the hardest to combat. The waves of millions of new immigrants who arrived mainly as foreign workers, then settled down, gained French citizenship, produced second and third generations of embittered youth, and caused a near crisis situation in a country where they constitute a high percentage of the population. During Chirac’s two terms of office it was Nicolas Sarkozy, twice his Interior Minister,

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who attempted courageously to face up to the Muslim rage and to tame the crowds of violence-prone demonstrators who repeatedly disrupted the local order in Paris and other cities. Following the Napoleonic age institutionalization of the Jewish community of France, which did not prevent either the Dreyfus Affair at the turn of the 20th century nor the delivery of French Jews to the Gestapo at Drancy, Sarkozy made a valiant attempt to bring French Muslims under one umbrella, similar to the CRIF and the Consistoire of French Jewry. He thought that by creating a seminary to train French imams, he could exclude Muslim clerics from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, or North Africa, who only added fuel to the flame by inciting their followers to embrace radical Islam of the Muslim Brotherhood type. He also hoped that creating an officially recognized Muslim leadership would suffice to push it towards moderation and recognition of its minority status, which would in turn oblige it to defer to the rules of the Republic. But his measures, which were rightly hailed as courageous and far-reaching, produced catastrophic results, for, far from reining in the fanatics, they won the majority of seats during the elections and confined their President, the hand-picked moderate Dalil Boubakeur, the Rector of the Great Mosque in Paris, to the margins. One of the consequences has been the extreme anti-Semitic conduct of the Muslims of France, especially in Paris and its suburbs, and Sarkozy’s consistent measures to contain it. But his policy was restrained by the current political correctness in the West, which took to task the three countries that dared to fight terrorism (the U.S., Britain, and Israel) and elected to appease terrorists rather than fight them. Sarkozy’s election as President in May 2007 may augur a shift in European policy to confront terrorism and its attending anti-Semitism. If this indeed is to come to pass, one may interpret in retrospect the sporadic words of decency that have been voiced by various public figures in Europe over the past few years and have climaxed in the warm attitudes towards Jews and Israel by the new Mayor of Rome, Gianni Alemanno, which contrast sharply with the anti-Semitic broadsides of the former Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone. Alemanno said in his interview that it’s time for the Eternal City to adopt a “zero tolerance” approach to Muslim terrorism. Like Sarkozy, Alemanno is pro-American and pro-Israel. But it is precisely here that his political discourse becomes radical for a British and generally European ear. He has made “zero tolerance” his slogan and says the former New York mayor, Rudy Giuliani, is a role model for Rome. He also says that the fight against fundamentalism and the defense of the rights of the individual are key

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for Italy, even though it has few Muslims. “We need a Right based on both tolerance and the protection of identity—national identity.” He even chairs a body called Kadima (forward) World Italia, a friendship association for the political party created by Israel’s former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and bearing the same name as the ruling party in Israel. “Are you a neoconservative, then?,” he was asked by the British interviewer, and he replied that American categories cannot be applied to European politics. But he has multiplied his overtures towards Israel and the Jewish community in Rome and says, “To defend Israel is to defend the values of the West.”25 Preceding Alemanno, there was in 2003 an editorial in Le Monde, which found that the Eurobarometer poll, which designated Israel as more dangerous than any other country in the eyes of Europeans, “revealed something extremely dangerous about the Old Continent.” To find fault with Europe rather than with Israel was quite novel and quite untypical for the press of the liberal left there.26 No less impressive was Julie Burchill’s farewell article from her readers of The Guardian, as she moved to The Times, and on that occasion confessed that though she liked her previous position as columnist, she recently felt less loyal to her paper due to its strong anti-Israel bias, specifically with regard to its position on the Eurobarometer. She wrote: If you take into account the theory that the Jews are responsible for everything nasty in the history of the world, and also the recent EU survey that found 60% of Europeans believe Israel is the biggest threat in the world today (hmm, I must have missed all those rabbis telling their flocks to go out with bombs strapped to their bodies and blow up the nearest mosque), it is a short jump to reckoning that it was obviously a bloody good thing that the Nazis got rid of 6 million of the buggers. Perhaps this is why sales of Mein Kampf are so bouyant, from the Middle Eastern bazaars into the Edgware Road [prophetically, the location where the London bombings of 2005 were to occur], and why the Protocols of the Elders of Zion could be found for sale at the recent antiracism Congress in Durban.27

Similarly, Ilka Schroeder, a German member of the European Parliament, took the EU to task for channeling hundreds of millions to the Palestinian Authority, which was waging a terrorist war against Israel. He complained that instead of preventing the use of European money to kill Israeli citizens, most of the political establishment of Europe was dreaming about an international peace forced on Israel.28 Shimon Samuels, Director for International Liaison of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, put it in blunt terms:

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Kalshnikov bullets, explosive belts and al-Qassam missiles, purchased out of EU’s annual subsidy [to the Palestinian Authority], have killed over 900 Israelis and maimed thousands—this is anti-Semitism. EU-financed media facilities—through satellite television and Internet hate-sites—impact on Muslim communities in Europe to attack their Jewish neighbors. This is anti-Semitism.29

In view of the failure of individual European governments to combat anti-Semitism—for example when Jews have to hide their identity in public in order to escape harm—the Union as a whole decided to harness itself to a new collective endeavor to that end, though its frequent and one-sided condemnations of Israel militate against that goal. It appears that real estate has become more important in the eyes of the Europeans than does human life, if one judges from the Europeans’ repeated representations to Israel following construction by Israel in the territories or destruction of terrorists’ houses on the one hand, and their reticence in the face of daily bombings and shelling of Israeli civilians in Israeli territory which have caused hundreds of killed and wounded. Nonetheless, when anti-Semitic acts burst out, which are provoked by European condemnations of Israel, European governments rush to placate their Jewish communities by quenching the flames of anti-Semitism. A typical example of this contradictory behavior can be found in Sweden, which, on the one hand sponsored, with others, the condemnation of Israel at the UN Commission of Human Rights, which practically supported Palestinian terrorism and accused Israel of perpetrating “mass killings” in the territories under dispute; but on the other hand, it was the same Sweden, which initiated the Stockholm program of Holocaust education.30 In addition, a recent study on Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism in Sweden concluded that this variety of anti-Semitism is actively hushed up, excused, or even denied in the media and by the political, academic, and intellectual establishment.31 Some European leaders, after realizing that their countries’ subsidies went to the hate-filled Palestinian textbooks, which negated the Europe-supported Oslo Accords, began to go out of their way to mend the situation by showing a more positive attitude to Jews and Israelis. In Austrian papers a photograph was shown of the Israeli Chief Rabbi placing his hand in blessing on the inclined head of President Thomas Klestil, at a meeting of rabbis in Vienna. The European Commission President, Romano Prodi, also flew in from Brussels to participate in the dedication of the first Jewish teachers’ academy in Vienna after the Holocaust.32 Similarly, after years of anti-Semitism denial, the then French President Chirac, who did not hesitate to invite to the Elysee an

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Arab who had vowed to kill Jews, turned around and declared that his country was going to combat it, in spite of his continued catering up to the Palestinians and brandishing his pro-Arab policy, and his staunch refusal to label the Hamas as terrorists. Only after the arson against a Jewish school in Paris, the like of which had happened often but was explained away as “hooliganism,” did Chirac’s attitude turn around. He announced extra measures of security in places of worship, severe punishment of anti-Semitic perpetrators, and reinforced civic courses in French schools. French Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, admitted the plight of anti-Semitism long before his President and has taken firm security measures. He said that no Jews should hide their identity in France, long before he was elected President in 2007.33 Most importantly, recommendations for combating anti-Semitism were outlined in the major study that was published in 2002 by the Center for Research on Anti-Semitism for the European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC), which had concluded that: France, Belgium, the Netherlands and the UK witnessed rather serious anti-Semitic incidents such as numerous physical attacks and insults directed against Jews and the vandalism of Jewish institutions (synagogues, shops, cemeteries). Fewer anti-Semitic attacks were reported from Denmark and Sweden.34

The fact that Europe founded this institution, whatever it’s worth, is indicative of the growing realization that the Old Continent became reminiscent of the 1930s when the anti-Semitic atmosphere, which allowed the surge of Nazism also permitted Kristallnacht and the Sho’ah, as many Jews are asking whether this is not the time to leave before things get worse. The conclusions of that study recommend many activities, such as the development of a data base about anti-Semitic phenomena by cultivating state institutions in each EU country to monitor anti-Semitism, and encourage dialogues within the civil society to facilitate understanding. The media were prodded to report about ethnic and cultural groups in a “responsible” way, in conjunction with legislative and educational measures. Hate crimes were to be severely punished and measures to be taken against school students who block Holocaust studies at schools. All these steps became imperative as the hitherto monitoring, reporting, and protesting by the Jewish organizations proved insufficient, for it became evident that half a century after the Holocaust and its surrounding circumstances, which ruined Europe, this continent could not afford another one. Just like anti-Semitism itself, which constantly sheds old forms and takes on new ones, the combat against it must alter its ways and means

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due to new breath-taking technological developments which may facilitate both its spread and its containment. We are talking about the Web 2.0, which was created in 2004 and has since been revolutionizing both the diffusion of Muslim anti-Semitism in the West and its antidote. The new name of the game is sharing, inasmuch as the web users themselves, not their editors or publishers, create its contents, define its limits and determine the very definition of what is anti-Semitism. A breakdown of anti-Semitism into “social,” “cultural,” “political,” or “economic” categories, in itself might not only widen its acceptability and spread its applications, but by encouraging its analysis and bringing in growing circles of discussants, many of whom are a-priori hostile to Jews, might cause one to end up boosting it instead of eliminating it or reducing its negative impact. For one thing, the web allows for a variety of ways to spread the debate about it and to whet the appetite of prospective participants, each according to his or her taste: videos, photos, cartoons, stories, opinions, films, current news, and favorite bookmarks. When one allows everyone to be a partner in the publishing process, the definitions become stretched to the limit, people use the same words but mean different things, and subjective and self-serving narratives take the place of one researched, documented, and immutable historical truth. In other words, democratic debate and consensus will replace strict historical investigation and the victim will be history, just like with the democratic institution of jury trials, which replaced professional judges, justice is often the victim. Social and psychological pressure to conform to the majority gut feeling will by necessity push many amateurs to toe the line and leave the tough investigation and unpopular conclusions to that shrinking rarity of history-searching and truth-seeking professionals.35 The first victim of this innovation would be the definition of antiSemitism, which by necessity would also influence the combat against it. For example, if partners in the web come to the conclusion that racism does not necessarily include anti-Semitism, they can end up being both anti-racists and anti-Semites, as during the orgy of anti-Jewish hatred of Durban in 2001, which was supposed to combat racism, with the result that anti-Semitism would lose its top priority as a form of racism and be confined to a milder and more manageable form of hatred. Anti-Semitism 2.0 will allow its participants to share demonization of the Jews, conspiracy theories, Holocaust denial, and classical anti-Jewish motifs, both traditional Christian or latter-day Muslim, as legitimate subjects of discussion, given to reinterpretation every step of the way. Then Israel would be more easily and more widely compared to Apartheid South

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Africa or Nazi Germany, and made to personify evil, corruption, and illegitimacy to the point of justifying its elimination. When that trend is aided by misinformation and disinformation, and when the anti-Semite can turn himself into the victim as he labels the accusations against him as libel, then we have the field wide open for not only the spread of anti-Semitism, but also the growing difficulty to defend against it. This is in accordance with what David Hirsh has dubbed the “Livingstone formulation,” referring to the former Lord Mayor of London who effectively claimed that his was a legitimate criticism of Israel, not anti-Semitism.36 This fascinating study by Oboler, which provides in detail the two examples of “Israel is not a state” in the Facebook Group, and of “Creating Palestine in Google Earth,” dramatically illustrates how sophisticated and less sophisticated members of those groups, which already have a large membership, can demonize and delegitimize the Jews and Israel and co-opt in their stead Palestinians and Palestine in what has been termed “replacement geography.” For Muslim anti-Semites in Europe, whether or not they contributed to the growth of this website, this is an Allah-sent bonanza, which will vastly amplify the resonance of their propaganda and lend to it respectability and popularity. For example, if Palestine replaces Israel, who should care about the history of the Solomonic Temple Mount or the illegal digging, removal, and dumping of ancient Jewish artifacts, which prove the contrary? In this context, the Zionist ideal of returning Jews to the land and to manual labor is described as “racism,” the policy of settlement of the land as “ethnic cleansing,” and the fact that Arabs have chosen to lead their lifestyle in their villages as “apartheid.” Naturally, those assumptions, which are taken as irrefutable Gospel, lead to the statement as a matter of course of pro-Palestinian points of view. A search for “apartheid” in the web, for example, would yield an overwhelmingly anti-Israeli crop of references, which make the user forget about the original use of that term in South Africa, and ignore the fact that any comparison between that atrocious regime and Israeli policies towards the Arabs would yield more discrepancies than similarities. As these and other references to the web become widespread among the youth of the West, and Muslims in Europe encourage their use, they will lend by necessity currency to anti-Israeli sentiment, which will become harder to battle.37 Notes 1.

Kenneth Levin, “Diaspora Jews Embracing the Indictments of their Enemies”, Post-Holocaust and Anti-Semitism, No 53, 1 February, 2008, The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

244 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

Muslim Anti-Semitism in Christian Europe Compare to the situation described by Levin, op. cit. p. 3. Matthias Kuentzel, “Anti-Semitic Hate-speech in the Name of Islam,” www.matthiaskuentzel.de/contents/anti-semitic-hate-speech-in-the-name-of-islam thiaskuentzel.de/contents/anti-semitic-hate-speech-in-the-name-of-isla m, May 29, 2008. See R. Israeli, “The Charter of Allah,” in R. Israeli, Islamic Fundamentalism and Israel, The University Press of America, 1993. Kuentzel, op. cit. p. 3. Hilary Leila Kriege, “Holland Moves to Ban Holocaust Denial,” Jerusalem Post, June 10, 2006. Ibid. Sebastian Vilar Rodriguez, a circulated article on the Internet, end of 2005 and beginning of 2006. Pamela Rolfe, “29 Indicted for Roles in Madrid Bombings: Judge Says al-Qa’ida Inspired local Cells,” The Washington Post, April 12, 2006. Renwick McLean, “Imams in Spain say Muslims and Jews Must Confront Extremism,” The New York Times, March 26, 2006. Jerusalem Post, July 6, 2008. Ibid. Ibid. Daniel Pipes, “Enforce Islamic Law in Canada?,” New York Sun, September 27, 2005. Surya Bhattacharya, Heba Aly and Graham Fraser, “Imam’s visit raises concerns,” Toronto Star, June 24, 2006. Ibid. Ibid. Renaud Muselier, “No, to a Racist and anti-Semitic Internet,” Le Monde, June 14, 2004. Christophe Deloire, “La France, Terre de Djihad,” Le Point, 1727, October 20, 2005. Tom Harper, “Ministers Compared to Nazis over Islam Stigma,” Sunday Telegraph, December 17, 2006. Steve Bird and Russel Jenkins, “We are vilified like Jews by the Nazis, says Muslim leader,” The Times, February 3, 2007. David Byers, “British MP Warns Europe of New Anti-Semitism,” Jerusalem Post, November 22, 2006. Isabel Oakshott and Chris Gourlay, “Anti-Semitism Rules Come in at Universities,” The Sunday Times, March 25, 2007. Jonathan Petre, “Judicial System is Failing Jews,” Daily Telegraph, March 29, 2007. John Laughland, “Meet Italy’s answer to Boris,” Spectator, July 23, 2008. http:// www.spectator.co.uk/print/the-magazine/features/852321/meet-italys-answer-toboris.thtmll. boris.thtm Editorial, “l’Europe et Israel,” Le Monde, November 5, 2003. Julie Burchill, “Good, Bad and Ugly,” The Guardian, November 29, 2003. Both this and the preceding cited by Gerstenfeld, op. cit p. 7. Ilka Schroeder, “Europe’s Crocodile Tears,” The Jerusalem Post, 19 February 19, 2004. “Against Anti-Semitism, for a Union of Diversity,” Press Information of the Wiesenthal Center, February 19, 2004. “SWC Protests anti-Israel Vote by France, Sweden etc….at UN Commission on Human Rights,” Simon Wisenthal Center, Press Release, April 16, 2002.

Battling Anti-Semitism in the West 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

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Mikael Tossavainen, “The Denied Hatred: Anti-Semitism Among Arabs and Muslims in Sweden,” published by the Swedish Committee Against Anti-Semitism, 2003. Ruth Ellen Gruber, “Vienna Meetings Show Another War for Community to Approach the State,” JTA, February 8, 2004. This and the previous footnote are cited from M. Gerstenfeld, op. cit. p 9. Jerusalem Post, February 22, 2004. Cited by M. Gerstenfeld, op. cit. pp. 6-10. For details see Andre Oboler, “Online anti-Semitism: Social anti-Semitism on the Social Web,” Post Holocaust and anti-Semitism, No 67, April 1, 2008, The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, pp, 1-2. David Hirsh, “Anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism:Cosmopolitain Reflections”, Working Papers Series, Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of anti-Semitism, December 13, 2007. Cited by Oboler, p. 3. Ibid.

Summary In our complicated and global era where everything is connected to everything else, it is easy to realize how the seemingly “marginal” issue of Muslim anti-Semitism in Europe can unexpectedly affect many aspects of our lives. For example, the Cartoon Affair which began by an innocent display of drawings of Muhammed in an obscure paper in a backwater town of Denmark, itself not the most important country in the world, has caused not only turmoil in the entire world and prompted the death of many innocent people, but also a row between Islam and Christianity, which the Pope is still trying, unsuccessfully, to mend. In an attempt to shore up its crisis with the Arab world and rescue its business interests in the Arab world, which has decided to boycott its dairy products ever since, Denmark has been holding vain “dialogues” with the Arab world, which the latter has taken as a capitulation of the West since it’s recognized its error. And since the cartoons were initiated by a “Zionist plot” according to some Muslims, you have here a maze of international events intertwined into each other and prone to create more, not less, anti-Semitism in Muslim Europe. Or take the March 2006 event in the U.S., when a Muslim chaplain, Umar abdul Jalil of the New York City Department of Corrections, was reported to have said in a speech that the “greatest terrorists of the world occupy the White House,” that Jews control the media, and that Muslims were being tortured in Manhattan jails. The Mayor of New York, his boss, who also happened to be Jewish, should have felt offended by this Wahhabi Muslim, whose teachings are deemed the most virulently anti-Semitic. Nevertheless, he showed restraint and refused to dismiss him on the grounds of free speech. What a world of inconsistencies and surprises! If that were not enough, another American imam, Marwan alHindi, a Jordanian born Muslim who served as a chaplain in the Toledo Correctional Institution, was charged with recruiting terrorists to fight in Iraq. Saudi Wahhabi organizations recognized that the growth of their brand of Islam in America offered an extraordinary opportunity for the infiltration of radical ideology. So, imams were imported from suppos247

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edly “friendly” Saudi Arabia, who claimed that there is only one Islam and that is Wahhabism. The fact that it is itself targeted by al-Qa’ida, just like America, made it conveniently appear as siding with the U.S., which had neither the educational nor the legal expertise to recognize the danger of letting radical Islam infiltrate its institutions and society. The penetration of European jails by the same radicals, poses similar problems, inasmuch as the veterans of the correctional system emerge not only more radical but also more anti-Semitic. When released from incarceration, these radicals, for the most part, get more hardened and more emboldened than before, confirmed in their beliefs, by their stay in prison and ready to take on more hardships for their cause. Because, as Efraim Karsh has shown,1 Islamic history has not been reactive, as some claim, but aggressive with imperialistic designs since its inception. He believes that if the West, especially America, is reviled today in the Muslim world, it is because that is the last obstacle to block the way for the fulfillment of the Muslim universal Imperialistic dream, which is often pictured by Muslim radicals as the revival of the Caliphate, the historical tool of Muslim revival, conquest, and world dominion. Thus, the various factions of Muslim radicalism in Europe, from the Muslim Brotherhoods to Hizbu-t-Tahrir, hold that design as a central tenet of their ideological struggle via Jihad. In that scheme, Jews and Christian shall return to their traditional role as dhimmis. In the imagination of many of these radicals, Bin Laden, the modern-age hero who defied the Americans, like Saddam before him, is comparable to medieval Saladin who ousted the Crusaders from the holy Muslim territories. Moreover, if Saladin’s role was reactive to the Crusaders’ invasions of Muslim territory, the Muslims who are implanted in Europe today have the potential to claim that territory for Islam, through a process of quiet invasion, penetration, missionary work, and immigration (legal or illegal), which will climax in taking over the rule there and pushing its non-Muslim populations into conformity or servitude. The process will be hastened when Turkey joins the EU, which will treble the present Muslim population from ca 30 million (some 6 percent) to over 100 million (more than 20 percent of the total). Not only are Muslims worldwide concerned about correcting the historical “injustice” that was done when Islam was ousted from Spain and Sicily, which they had controlled for centuries, but they have been preparing to recuperate their losses by increasing their numbers via added immigration; by the work of da’wa, which has already resulted in tens of thousands of converts in Germany, France, England, and other

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countries; by pushing vocally for “family reunions,” which will allow in larger quotas of Muslim immigrants; and by the sheer population growth which the large Muslim families of Europe can sustain in contrast with their non-Muslim compatriots who grow negatively as their families keep shrinking below the minimum maintenance rate of 2.1 percent. Many of them are convinced that since Islam is a universal faith with a universal message, and they, as its adepts, are under the obligation to serve its imperialistic ambitions, the day will come when Europe, indeed the whole world, will become Muslim domain. When the British Muslim radical Sheikh Bakri made his prediction to a European paper about Islam conquering the world after it had been seated in Downing Street 10 and the Elysee Palace,2 he stated not only his imperial ambitions but also unmistakable anti-Zionism and implied anti-Semitism inasmuch as he aspires, under a cataract of rosy language, to return the Jews (and Christians) to their “protected” status: With thanks to Allah, we bring peace to all, and we help the world realize that Islam is the only way of life…. Terrorism is defined in the West as “the systematic use of violence to achieve political or religious ends…. We define it as “the attack without divine authority”…. Clinton is a target of Jihad…. He is responsible and he will pay…. The existence of Israel is a crime and must be removed…. Our duty is to work to establish a Muslim state anywhere in the world, even in Britain. Life is protected under us. There will be no minorities and no majorities as in America. Anti-Semitism in America is disgraceful. Synagogues and churches will flourish in the Islamic Caliphate, as long as they adopt Islamic law…. We restored life for the Jews after the Crusades, and we plan to do so again…. What President Clinton and Prime Minister Barak are doing [that is negotiating peace at Camp David], is putting themselves in the position of Allah, therefore they put themselves directly at war with the people who believe in Allah.3

Responding to an article published a few days earlier by Henryk M. Broder in Welt am Sonntag, entitled “Europe—your family name is appeasement,” Matthias Dopfner, who seconded it, lashed out furiously at the emerging attitudes of Europeans who were prepared to sacrifice their culture and their Jews in order to appease their Muslims: Appeasement cost millions of Jews and non-Jews their lives as England and France, allies at the time, negotiated and hesitated too long before they noticed that Hitler had to be fought, not bound to agreements. Appeasement stabilized Communism in the Soviet Union and East Germany in that part of Europe where inhuman, suppressive governments were glorified as the ideologically correct alternative to all other possibilities. Appeasement crippled Europe when genocide ran rampant in Kosovo and we Europeans debated and debated until the Americans came in and did our work

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for us. Rather than protecting democracy in the Middle East, European appeasement, camouflaged behind the fuzzy word “equidistance,” now countenances suicide bombings in Israel by fundamentalist Palestinians. Appeasement generates a mentality that allows Europe to ignore 300,000 victims of Saddam’s torture and murder machinery and, motivated by the self-righteousness of the peace-movement, to issue bad grades to George Bush. A particularly grotesque form of appeasement is reacting to the escalating violence by Islamic fundamentalists in Holland and elsewhere by suggesting that we should really have a Muslim holiday in Germany. What else has to happen before the European public and its political leadership get it? There is a sort of crusade underway, an especially perfidious crusade consisting of systematic attacks by fanatic Muslims, focused on civilians and directed against our free, open Western societies. It is a conflict that will most likely last longer than the great military conflicts of the last century—a conflict conducted by an enemy that cannot be tamed by tolerance and accommodation but only spurred on by such gestures, which will be mistaken for signs of weakness. Two recent American presidents had the courage needed for anti-appeasement: Reagan and Bush. Reagan ended the Cold War and Bush, supported only by the social democrat Blair acting on moral conviction, recognized the danger in the Islamic fight against democracy. His place in history will have to be evaluated after a number of years have passed. In the meantime, Europe sits back with charismatic self-confidence in the multicultural corner instead of defending liberal society’s values and being an attractive center of power on the same playing field as the true great powers, America and China. On the contrary—we Europeans present ourselves, in contrast to the intolerant, as world champions in tolerance, which even (Germany’s Interior Minister) Otto Schily justifiably criticizes. Why? Because we’re so moral? I fear it’s more because we’re so materialistic. For his policies, Bush risks the fall of the dollar, huge amounts of additional national debt and a massive and persistent burden on the American economy—because everything is at stake. While the alleged capitalistic robber barons in America know their priorities, we timidly defend our social welfare systems. Stay out of it! It could get expensive. We’d rather discuss the 35-hour workweek or our dental health plan coverage. Or listen to TV pastors preach about “reaching out to murderers.” These days, Europe reminds me of an elderly aunt who hides her last pieces of jewelry with shaking hands when she notices a robber has broken into a neighbor’s house. Europe, thy name is cowardice. “All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to do nothing”(Edmund Burke).4

In this somber reality, which holds no promise for a brighter future, there are some rays of hope which appear to be a breakthrough towards an awakening in Europe and a growing realization that submitting to the Islamic onslaught means not only capitulating to a rabid anti-Semitism but even endangering the moral and cultural basis of Western society at large. For example, following Bat Ye’or’s seminal Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, on which she drew heavily, Oriana Fallaci warned Europe lest it became colonized by the Arabs, as a result of their deliberate and gradual scheme. According to her analysis, the present Euro-Arab dialogues, cultural and economic cooperation, have resulted in Europe’s accepting Arab oil and manpower, disseminating Arab propaganda about the glory of Islamic civilization, and providing weapons and turning against Israel

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and the UN. She cited, as an example, the Venice Conference of 1977, attended by 10 Arab and 8 European nations, which ended with a resolution calling for the diffusion of Arabic and affirming the “superiority of Arab culture.” The Arabs demanded that the Europeans respect the religious, political, and human rights of the Arabs in the West, without European request for reciprocity in the Arab and Muslim world. Nor did the Europeans require that Muslims learn about European history, civilizations and values, or allow freedom of worship for Christians in their countries, or promote civil rights and eliminate anti-Semitic incitement in their media and educational systems. A combination of socialist leaders in Europe, who were impressed by Khomeini in 1979, and then by Saddam and Bin Laden, coalesced to sell out a substantial portion of Europe’s political and cultural independence to the Arabs. Even though Fallaci embellished her narrative with sweeping and biting generalizations, she had long been sounding the alarm over the neglected issue of Muslim immigration and the negative ideas they were importing with them to European lands, including inflammatory anti-Semitism. Fallaci cited Boumedienne, a former President of Algeria, warning the General Assembly of the UN in 1974, that “one day, millions of men will leave the southern hemisphere of this planet to burst into the northern one. But not as friends. Because they will burst in to conquer, and they will conquer by populating it with their children. Victory will come to us from the wombs of our women.”5 When these ominous words were said, little attention was paid to them, but the fact that they were dug up from oblivion in the context of the future of Europe today, may be one of the indications of this brutal awakening of Europe. Connected to this is the new way a reconsideration is given to the conflict in the Middle East and the attending rise of anti-Semitism on the Continent. At the time of the Venice declaration, which could not be replicated today under the conservative regimes of Sarkozy, Merkel, and Berlusconi, the Islamic threat and pressure had prompted the pro-Arab tilt in European policies. But in the meantime, not only have the socialists lowered their profile, but the new members of the EU, whose roots are in the former Soviet Union, like Poland, the Baltics, and the Czech Republic, whose guilt toward and commitment to Israel is stronger than that of the founding members of the Union, and whose Muslim population is tiny, are heavily contributing to the attenuation of the anti-Israeli sentiment and in consequence to a mounting awareness of the need to fight anti-Semitism in European lands. As a result, the profile of Palestinism has also been diminished and Israel has

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been less demonized and more understood. More and more Europeans are questioning themselves about the artificial distinctions they had made between “moderate Islam” and “Islamism,” just to console themselves that it was not all bad. Consider these excerpts from a column of the London Times of Summer 2008, unthinkable a few years back: Who says that Islamists can’t learn a trick or two from the West when they have to? Take a glance at the glossy brochure of Islam Expo—billed as Europe’s “biggest Islamic cultural festival”—which ended at Olympia yesterday. You could be forgiven for thinking that you were looking at the catalogue for the forthcoming Boden sale that comes to the venerable London exhibition centre in a few weeks’ time. Visitors to Islam Expo would have witnessed such innocent activities as an Islamic arts and crafts workshop for under 12s, live Islamic storytelling performances and lute-playing and poetry recitals in the pomegranate and date gardens. The old Comintern would have instantly recognised the first rate tradecraft involved in organizing all this. Just as Moscow and its allies knew how to organize a “popular front” to draw non-communist progressives and liberals into their orbit of influence, so some Islamists have honed a keen sense of how to present a non-threatening face to the West and to the many hundreds of decent, apolitical Muslims who turned up for a family day out. But behind the cultural soft power of Islam Expo, there is political hard power, and some of it comes in quite raw, unpalatable forms. The organizers gave floor space in the exhibition section to the genocidal regime in Sudan (festooned with pictures of happy-looking black Africans) and to the “Cultural Section” of the Iranian Embassy (representing an aspirant genocidal regime) and the Algerian junta (no spring picnic on human rights). This perhaps becomes less surprising when one examines some of the directors of Islam Expo. All oppose al-Qa’ida violence, but they are anything but moderate Muslims. They include Azzam Tamimi, a supporter of Hamas suicide bombings in Israel and an admirer of Ayatollah Khomeini; and Ismail Adam Patel, who believes that women in the West who are raped share responsibility with their attackers. Consider also the views of one of the expo’s speakers: Professor Zaghloul al Naggar, professor of geology and director of the London-based Markfield Institute of Higher Education, has rightly told IslamOnline that “many Westerners—some of them homosexual—convert to Islam in order to appeal to Islamic communities and spread sinful behavior among Muslims, thus shaking their belief,” according to the allaahuakbar. net website. No wonder Hazel Blears, the feisty Secretary of State for Communities, decided last week that this was not a place where any minister should be seen. Most of her Muslim colleagues in the Labour Party backed her, including the MPs Sadiq Khan and Khalid Mahmood. But another minister, Shahid Malik, MP for Dewsbury, had other ideas and sought to attend in a personal capacity. He was persuaded not to attend Islam Expo only with the greatest difficulty—after heavy pressure from his departmental chief at International Development, Douglas Alexander, the Chief Whip and the Cabinet Secretary, who invoked Cabinet Office guidelines on engagement with Islamic groups. Ms Blears is probably the member of the Cabinet readiest to uphold a strict interpretation of those criteria. She has also dealt vigorously with senior officials whom she believes have been naive in their approach to Islamist-friendly groups. But policing the boundaries of respectable discourse is hard work. While ministers were forbidden to go, the Foreign Office-funded British Satellite News was publicizing an entirely positive

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image of Islam Expo for overseas consumption. This time the Government has had a narrow escape from the political Islamists of Islam Expo. Its relief must be compounded by what has happened over the past 48 hours to Alex Salmond. Scotland’s First Minister has landed himself in serious trouble over a grant of £215,000 given to the Scottish Islamic Foundation, which is headed by one of his advisers, Osama Saeed. Other Muslim groups in Scotland are upset by what they see as favoritism to the best-known political Islamist in the Scottish National Party. Mr Saeed, an SNP parliamentary candidate and also a speaker at Islam Expo, has described Hamas suicide attacks as “martyrdom operations” and has supported the creation of a modern caliphate, or pan-Islamic state. The row could cost the SNP victory in the Glasgow East by-election next week. The fashionable take on deradicalising angry young Muslim men is that only political Islamists, such as Mr Saeed, have the credibility to stop them going over the deep end. This reasoning is doubtful. The opposition of political Islamists to al-Qa’ida violence in the West does not mean that they are actually friends of the West. Rather, they know that there is more than one way to skin a cat. The boundaries between violent and non-violent Islamists deserve greater exploration. Are non-violent political Islamists part of the solution or, as figures such as Hazel Blears and David Cameron increasingly suspect, part of the problem?6

Surveys conducted among opinion elites in Europe indeed show that support for the Palestinians has fallen precipitously, according to leading international pollster Stan Greenberg. There has not necessarily been a “rush to Israel,” but there is a crash in backing the Palestinians blindly. Greenberg singled out France as the country where attitudes had changed most dramatically. In 2003, 60 percent of those French who responded said they took a side in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, and among them four out of five sided with the Palestinians. Today, in contrast, 60 percent did not take any side in the conflict, and support for the Palestinians has dropped by half among those who did express a preference. At the root of the change, says Greenberg, was a fundamental remaking in Europe of the “framework” through which that conflict is viewed, while it was formerly viewed in a “post-colonial” context, meaning that Europe could cancel out its own colonial history by taking “the right side,” namely the Palestinian side. Moreover, the support that Israel enjoys from the U.S., which was conceived as a global power, instinctively designated the Palestinians as victims. France, with the largest Arab-Muslim population in Europe, with its experience in Algeria and outspoken anti-Americanism, naturally fits this mindset. Today, by contrast, the Europeans are focused on the impact that Islamic radicalism has been having on them, and therefore, they ask themselves: “who is the moderate and who is the extremist in this game?” It occurs to them that it is perhaps the previously saintly Palestinians who may be the extremists, since it is they who are allied with the extremists who wish to destroy European societies and culture

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from within.7 One can see the immediate repercussions this development can have not only on the current demonization of Zionism, Israel and the Jews, and on the resulting anti-Semitism, but also on the positive relationship with Israel, which Tony Blair and Angela Merkel have begun and Sarkozy is pursuing, with the staunch support of the leaders of Poland and the Czech Republic. This trend has also been boosted since former Prime Minister Sharon, who was held as an uncompromising ideologue, had surprised Europe with his unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, followed by the take over by the Hamas, an ideological absolutist, of that same territory. Another reason for optimism, in spite of the European Commissioner for Justice, Franco Frattini’s revelation that Muslims are responsible for one half of the documented anti-Semitic incidents in the EU,8 is the backlash Muslims in Europe are beginning to receive from their own Westernized coreligionists who have decided to relinquish the old stereotypes and enmesh into Western culture, inter alia by recognizing Jewish contribution to it and castigating their kin for their wanton antiSemitism. Wafa Sultan, an Arab-American psychologist, did not mince her words in her interview with Al-Jazeera, which had an earth-shattering effect in the Muslim world in general and among Muslim minorities in the West in particular: The Muslims are the ones who began using this expression [of clash of civilizations]. The Muslims are the ones who began the clash of civilizations. The Prophet of Islam said “I was ordered to fight the people until they believe in Allah and His Messenger”. When the Muslims divided the people into Muslims and non-Muslims, and called to fight the others until they believe in what they themselves believe, they started this clash and began this war. In order to stop this war, they have to re-examine their Islamic books and curricula, which are full of calls for takfir (labeling others heretics or Infidels to justify waging war against them) and fighting the Unbelievers. [Some Muslims say] that they never offend other people’s beliefs. What civilization on the face of this earth allows them to call other people by names that they did not choose for themselves? Once they call them Ahl-al-Dhimma (Protected people under Islamic rule); another time—the People of the Book; and yet another time they compare them to apes and pigs, or they call the Christians “those who incurred the wrath of Allah” [in the opening Sura of the Qur’an, which in this verse refers to Jews, not to Christians]. Who told you that they are people of the Book? They are people of many books. All the useful scientific books that you have today are theirs, the fruit of their free and creative thinking. What gives you the right to call them “those who incur Allah’s wrath?”, or “those who have gone astray”? [reference to the Christians in the same Sura], and then claim that your religion commands you to refrain from offending the beliefs of others? You are free to worship whoever you want, but other people’s beliefs are not your concern…. Let people have their beliefs….

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The Jews have come from their tragedy (the Holocaust) and forced the world to respect them with their knowledge, not with terror; with their work, not with crying and yelling. Humanity owes most of the discoveries of the 19th and 20th centuries to Jewish scientists. 15 million people, scattered around the world, united and won their rights through work and knowledge. We have not a single Jew blow up in a German restaurant; we have not a single Jew destroy a church; we have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people. The Muslims turned three Buddha statues into rubble. We have not seen a Buddhist burn down a mosque, kill a Muslim or burn down an embassy. Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people and destroying embassies. This path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for mankind, before they ask that human kind respect them.9

Sultan’s words, which were circulated worldwide, brought her instant fame. In another interview she gave to the American press,10 she said that in this battle between barbarism and modernity, reactionary Islam is destined to lose. In response, clerics throughout the Muslim world condemned and threatened her. But Muslim reformers praised her for saying out loud, in Arabic and in the most widely viewed channel in the Muslim world, what few Muslims dare to say even in private, namely that they have become hostages to their beliefs and teachings, and that only knowledge can free them from that backwards thinking. Shortly after that broadcast, clerics in Syria where she had originated from, expectedly denounced her as an Infidel. One of them said that she had done more damage to Islam than the Danish cartoons, which mocked Muhammed. She said that she was working on a book, tentatively titled The Escaped Prisoner: When God is a Monster, which would turn the Islamic world upside down when it is published, because she was questioning every single teaching of the Holy Book.11 The problem is that no alternative moderate doctrine of Islam exists, which commands any following to speak of. It is then, unfortunately, more likely that her courageous book and outspoken interviews will win her the fate of Ibn Warraq, whose confession Why I am not a Muslim forced him to change his public name to avoid persecution, or of Salman Rushdie, who was compelled to flee the United Kingdom as long as the fatwa condemning him to death was not cancelled, or of Hirsi Ali, who could no longer bear her confinement in the Netherlands and had to immigrate to the U.S. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

E. Karsh, Islamic Imperialism: A History, Yale, 2005. Le Monde, September 9, 1998. The Jerusalem Post, May 30, 2000. Matthias Dopfner, “Europe—Thy Name Is Cowardice,” January 7, 2005. This article was originally posted in German in DIE WELT and was translated from

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5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Muslim Anti-Semitism in Christian Europe German by H. Lau. Dopfner is Chief Executive of German publisher Axel Springer AG. Brendan, Bernhard, “Oriana Fallaci asks: Is Muslim Immigration to Europe a Conspiracy?,” Los Angeles Weekly, March 15, 2006. Dean Godson (a research director of the Policy Exchange think tank), “The hidden face of political Islamism: It is increasingly hard to draw a line between the agendas of the violent and non-violent,” The Times, July 15, 2008. David Horowitz, “Exclusive: European Support for Palestinians Crashes,” The Jerusalem Post, June 3, 2006. The Jerusalem Post, February 2, 2008. Wafa Sultan, Al-Jazeera, February 21, 2006. See also MEMRI 1107, March 7, 2006. Los Angeles Times, March 10, 2006. Ibid.

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Index Abbas, Khadr, 83 Abdul-Rahman, Sheikh, 64 Abraham, the Patriarch, 9, 80, 87 Abrahamic Faiths, 116, 206 Abu Dhabi, 49 Abu Halabiyah, Dr., 83 Abu Jaja, 124 Abu Laban, Sheikh, 205 Abu Mazen (Mahmud Abbas), 14, 15, 18, 78, 87, 104, 105 Abu Muntasir, 99-100 Achille Lauro, 41 Adam, 87 Adebe, Mahmud,203 ADL (Anti-Defamation League), 60, 223-4 Admani, Sheokh, 95 Adwan, Atef, 202 Afghanistan, xiii, 28, 41, 54-5, 57, 61-2, 73, 89, 95, 117, 121, 127, 172, 192, 196, 204, 222 Africa, 17, 57, 142-3, 145, 252 North, (Maghrib), 6, 28, 57, 125-6, 132, 142-5, 182-3, 195, 238 South, 65, 71, 242-3 Aftonbladet, 180 Ahmadinejad, President Ahmed, 7, 104, 136, 177, 124, 228 (Al)-Ahram, 8 AIDS,16-17, 25, 38, 105, 159 Aix-en-Provence, 68 (Al) Akhbar, 14 Alemanno, Mayor Gianni, 238-9 Algeria, xiii, 252-3 Boumedienne, President, 251 Islamic Armed Groups (GIA), 22 Ali, Iaz, 133-4 Aliph-Aleph, 206 Allah/God, xiv, xvi, 2, 4-5, 9, 11, 13, 15, 21, 26, 28-9, 40, 42, 46, 52-3, 79-81, 83, 86, 89-91, 93, 96, 107, 121, 123, 131,

136-7, 168, 174, 232, 254 Path of, 27, 39, 44-5, 114, 121 Tawhid of, 233 Allen, Juni, 106 Allies, 12 America (see also U.S.), ix, 41-2, 55, 82, 136, 163, 221, 250 Anti-Americanism, 108-9 North, 72 South / Latin, 61 67 72 Amrozi, Sheikh, 3 Amsterdam, xiv Andalusia, 6, 29, 121 Ansar al-Islam, 25 Antwerp, 5, 64, 124 Apartheid, 98, Apostasy, xiv, 26, 120 Andreotti, President Giulio, 161 Al-Aqsa, 8, 163-4, 218 —Brigades, 22 —Intifadah, 9, 13-14 Arab, ix, 69, 116, 196, 209 Arabic (language), 37 —European League, 124, 175 —Forces, 44 —Israeli Conflict, ix, 5, 8, 59, 74, 117, 122, 126, 142, 159, 17980, 187, 226 —League, 44, 151, 174 Arabia, 2 —n Peninsula, ix, 123 (Al) Arabiya, 66 Arafat, Yasser, 14, 16, 30, 38, 40-1, 48, 63, 65, 78-9, 171 Arekat, Saeb, 43 Armenian, xvi, 207, 224 Aryans, 70 Ashura, 24 Asia,17, 116, 125, Central—68 South—169

267

268

Muslim Anti-Semitism in Christian Europe

South-East—100 Assyrian Bishop, 9 (Al) Astal, Dr. Riad, 82 Athens, 162 Atlantic, 66 Trans—Conference, 227-8 Atwan, Abdul Bari, 213 Auschwitz, 107, 207, 223, 225 Liberation of—173 Australia, ix, 3, 27, 61-2, 69, 71-3, 128-9, 163, 173, 199 (The) Australian, 173 Austria, 11, 18, 71, 104, 177, 223, 240 President Klestil of—240 Ayatullah, 3 (Al) Azhar, 14 —in Gaza, 81-2 Aziza, Sister, 4 Aznar, PM Jose Maria, 225 Azzam, Pasha, 44 Ba’ath, Party, 210 Babawi, Dr., 8 Baghdad, 74 Bakri, Sheikh Omar, 27, 101-2, 117, 125, 249 Bali, 3, 177 Balkans, 65, 85 Baltics, 15, 251 Bamyan, Buddha Statues, 62, 233, 255 Bangla-Desh, 1, 99, 126 Banna, Hassan al, 87, 108, 169 Banu Quraiza, 123 (Les) Barbares, 130-1, 142 Yussuf le Barbare, 131, 142 Barak, PM Ehud, 249 Barcelona, 225 Bardawil, Muhammed, 202 Bari, Dr. Abdul, 92-3, 235 Basel, 82 Basilica of Annunciation, 32 Bat Ye’or, 6, 157, 250 Bayrou, Francois, 28 BBC, 85, 92ff, 141 Pamorama, 169 Beijing, 163 Beirut, 101, 176, 222 Belarus, 71 Belgium, 11, 63-4, 93, 124-7, 175, 193, 202, 223, 241 —National Party, 192 Ben-Simon, Danny, 181ff

BENELUX, 1, 73, 85 Benjamin, Jon, 235 Berlin, 65, 125, 194, 222-3, 236 —Freedom Forum, 229 —Middle East Conference, 227, 229 Bethlehem, 9 Bin Laden, Obama, 34-5, 67, 88, 101, 166, 172, 211, 248, 251 Birmingham, 68-9, 131 —Mosque, 141, 212, 232 Bistrup, Annelise, 51 Bjorklung, Leni, 201 Black Death, 156 Blacks, xiii, 116, 130, 132, 209, 234, 252 Blair, PM Tony, 133 235 250 254 Mrs.—36 Blasphemy, xv, 28, 52, 129 Blears, Hazel, 252-3 Blood Libel, 8, 16, 38, 43, 45, 66, 84, 1512, 156-9, 234 Bolivia, 63 Bolton, 105 Bosnia, 71, 94, 117, 121 Bostom, Andrew, 6 Boubaker, Dalil, 238 Bove, Jose, 171-2 Bradford, 68 Brasilia, 67 Brazil, 65, 68-9 Brenner, Leni, 106, 172 Bright, Martin, 169 Britain / England / UK, 1, 11, 27, 53-5, 57, 60, 63, 68-73, 77, 92, 94-6, 99, 101, 105, 115, 121-2, 127, 133-4, 137-8, 163, 165, 177, 193, 202, 204, 209, 221, 230-2, 241, 248-9, 255 Aliph-Aleph,115 All Party Group on Race and Community, 235, 237 Board of Deputies, 179, 235 British National Party (BNP), 133 —’s Charity Commission, 139-40 Communities Secretary, 236-7, 252 Community Security Trust (CST), 116-7, 134, 141-2, 208-9 —’s Crown Prosecution Service, 134-5, 237 Dar al Uloom al Arabiya al-Islamiya (in Bury), 232 Department of Education of—102 Downing St. 10, 249 —’s Foreign Office, 235, 252

Index Government of —117, 232, 235, 237 (The) Guardian, 239 —’s Home Office, 94, 115, 117-8, 235 Islamic Foundation, 232 Joseph Interfaith, 116 —’s Left, 106 Maimonides Foundation, 116 —Mandate in Palestine, 153 Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPACUK), 106 Parliament of —133-5, 142, 162, 235-7, 252 —’s Police and Scotland Yard,122-3, 134-5, 236-7 Royal House of—51 —’s Socialist Workers Party,106, 210 —’s Universities,236-7 West—68 Brussels, 63, 64, 68, 125, 127, 138, 227, 240 —’s Transatlantic Institute, 230 Buchenwald, 64 Buddhism, 233 Buenos Aires, 69, 100 Burchill, Julie, 239 Burgess, Anthony, 130 Bush, President George, 10, 40-1, 44, 108, 113, 166, 178, 210, 225, 250 Cairo, 8 Caliphate, 26, 52-3, 123, 126, 205, 2489, 253 Cambridge University, 116, 206 Center for the Study of Muslim-Jewish Relations at—206 Cameron, David, 133, 253 Camp David, 249 —Accords, 30 —Accords II, 63 Cana’an, 38, 79-80 Canada, 61, 65, 68-9, 71, 72-3, 104, 128, 144, 151, 163, 182, 199, 230-1 Alia Hogben, 233 Council of Muslim Woen of—233 Immigration Minister of —231, 233 Mc Master University, 233 Minister of Justice of—151 Muslim Canadian Congress, 232 Parliament of —151 Canterbury, Archbishop of, 119-20, 204

269

(The) Cape, 65, 73 Capitalism, 108, 210 International—109 Caracas, 100 Cardiff, 68 Carlberg, Anders, 194 Carpentras, 183 Cartoon Affair, 31, 45, 103, 122, 137-8, 169-70, 174, 175-8, 226, 255 Casablanca, xiv Catalonia, 69 Cavalli, Franco, 161 Ceuta and Melilla, 225 Charles, Prince, 47 Chechnya, 9 4, 101, 121 Chicago, 68 China, 17, 163, 182, 250 Chirac, President Jacques, 183, 187, 237, 240 Christ, Jesus, 9, 80, 89, 102, 108, 155 Anti—128 Christensen, Jeppe Bruns, 49-50 Christianity, 8-9, 25-6, 28, 32, 39, 49, 61, 80, 87, 89, 92, 127, 129, 136, 149, 1513, 156-8, 164, 168, 177-8, 203, 207, 225-6, 247, 249, 251, 254 Anti—223 Catholic—9, 168 Christendom, 60 Eastern—9 Protestant—108 Church, 26, 31-2, 36, 59, 62, 70, 72, 178, 206, 208, 249, 255 Churchill, Winston, 14 CIA, 37, 42 Clemenceau, George, 161 Clerics, 18, 23, 207, 226 Christian—9, 53 Muslim—(see also Imam), 8, 10, 14, 17, 22, 49, 61, 81, 91, 97, 121, 129, 140, 171, 176, 185, 191, 201, 203, 231, 236, 238, 255 Clinton, President Bill, 249 Coleman, David, 138 Communism, 11, 14, 210, 221, 249, 252 International—109 —t Manifesto, 11 Copenhagen, 49, 174, 179 Copts, 8-9, 62 Cotler, Irwin, 151 CRIF, 143

270

Muslim Anti-Semitism in Christian Europe

Croats, 207 Cromwell, 11, 208 Crusades, 11, 27, 89, 102, 108, 218, 248-50 New Crusaders, 89 Czech Republic, 63, 71, 223, 251, 254 Dachau, 107 Dagens Nyheter, 180 Daghestan, 68, 121 Daily Telegraph, 126 Damascus, 133, 177 Danialy, Ahmed, 49 Daniel, Jean, 85 Dar-al-Harb, 170 Dar al-Islam (Pax Islamica), 28, 30, 53, 170 Darfur, xiii, xvi, 94, 207, 224 Dati, Rachida, 144 Da’wa, 27, 232, 248 Day of Judgment / Resurrection, 40, 119 De Gaulle, President Charles, 14 Dead Sea, 37 “Defensive Shield Operation”, 43 Denmark, 48-51, 104, 122, 129, 170, 1748, 180, 230, 241, 247, 255 Danish (language), 196 Labor Union of—179 National Party of—192 Youth Council of—49 Derrida, Jean, 109 Dhimmi, 3, 6, 8, 55, 93, 116, 152, 137-8, 162, 206, 248, 254 Dieudonne, 131, 166 Dimashqi, abdul Aziz, 122 Dome of the Rock, 32 Drancy, 238 Dreyfus Affair, 72, 238 Dublin Conference, 120 Dubois, Father Marcel, 165 Dura, Muhammed, 85 Durban, xiv, 68 —Conference, 65, 151, 160, 167, 239, 242 Durie, Mark, 2-3 Dusseldorf, 64 Edmonton, 69 Egypt, xvi, 9-10, 12-14, 16-17, 25, 30-1, 38, 41-2, 45-6, 50, 60, 62, 84, 87, 93, 97, 108, 114, 119, 162-3, 167, 174, 178, 200, 222, 236, 238

Alexandria, 227 Nilesat, 222 Eliasson, F.M. Jan, 201-2 Elyakim, Philippe, 184 Erbakan, PM Necmettin, 108 Erdogan, PM Tayyip, 108 Estonia, 71 Europe, 8, 12, 27, 202 —an Center for Research of antiSemitism, 241 —an Commission, 240 —Commissioner for Justice, 254 —an Convention on Human Rights, 199 Eastern—71-2, 116, 209 Eurabia, 250 Eurobarometer, 239 Europalestine, 166 Eutelsat, 222 —an Jewish Congress, 126 —an Federation of Student Islamic Societies, 206 General Union of Palestinian Students in—206 Old and New—48 Organization for Security and Cooperation in—(OSCE), 234 —Parliament, 125, 239 —Peace Mission, 201 —Racism and Xenophobia Monitoring Center, 125, 241 —Recovery Program, 228 —an Union, 1, 48, 77, 125-6, 138-9, 141, 181, 193, 207, 239-40, 248, 251, 254 Falklands, 163 Fallaci, Oriana, 250-1 Farhi, Rabbi Gabriel, 184-186 Farrakhan, Lewis, 62, 69 Fascism, ix, 52, 65, 177 (Al) Fateh, 133 (Al) Fatihah, 2-3 Fatwa, 64, 97, 119ff, 191, 255 European—Council, 119, 120-1 Faurisson, Robert, 14, 60, 101 Ferrero, Giuselmo, 52 Festivals— Jewish—43, 135 —High Holidays,61, 63-4, 68 Muslim—(see also Ramadan),61 Filastin al-Muslima, 133, 213

Index

271

Finkielkraut, Alain, 187 Finland, 71 Fitzgerald, Hugh, 203 Flemish, 127 —newspapers (Het Nieuwsblat, Het Volk),127 Florence, 32, 65 Ford, Henry, 129 Fraihi, Hind, 127 France, xii, 1, 11, 23, 28, 53, 55, 63-4, 6973, 85-6, 103, 107-8, 110-20, 123-5, 127, 129-31, 142, 144, 160, 163, 165-6, 170-2, 177, 181, 193-4, 202, 204, 209, 221-3, 230, 234, 237, 241, 248, 253 —’s Army,172 CFCM (Umbrella Organization for French Muslims), 108 Consistoire and CRIF in—238 French Revolution, 11 —’s Intelligence Services, 107, 168 —’s Ministry of Education, 130, 132 —’s Ministry of the Interior, 108, 130, 132, 168, 237-8, 241 —’s Ministry of Justice, 144 —’s Parliament, 171 —’s President (see also Chirac and Sarkozy), 89 Elysee Palace,183-4, 240, 249 Southern—29 Vichy Government of—164 Frank, Anne, 176 Frankfurt, 222 Frattini, Franco, 254 Freud, Sigmund, 156 Friedman, Thomas, 165 Frohlich, Wolfgang, 104 Front National, 60

Genocide, 13, 67, 94-5, 102, 126, 136, 140, 151, 160, 162, 180, 194, 196-200, 2234, 233, 249, 252 —Day,102, 105 Gentiles, 9, 11, 14, 191 Germany, 1, 11, 12, 14-15, 53, 57, 63-5, 69, 71-3, 103, 108-9, 126, 131, 137, 192, 202, 204, 222-3, 227, 229-30, 235, 239, 242, 248, 250, 255 BAFA, 230 Central Council of Jews in—228 East—64, 249 Financial Times in—228 Foreign Minister of—(Steinmeier), 227 Hesse Foundation for Peace in—2289 Historical Museum in—223 Interior Ministry of—22, 250 Martin Buber House, 208 Ministry of Justice of—229 Gibb, Hamilton, 37 Glasgow, 253 Goebbels, Josef, 92 Goldhagen, Daniel, 176-7 Gore, VP Al, 62 Goteborg, 194 Graf, Jurgen, 104 Great Depression, 12 Greece, 65, 109, 161, 207 —Socialist Party,162 Guantanamo, 43, 95 (The) Guardian, 212 Guillou, Jan, 180 Gul, President Abdallah, 108 Gulf War, 232 Gurevich, Rabbi Zalman, 222

G- 8, 69 Gabriel, Brigitte, 136-7 Galloway, George, 210 Respect Party, 210 Gandhi, Mahatma, 98-97 Garaudi, Roger, 60, 101 Gast Arbeiter, 1 Gaza, xii, xiii, xiv, 28, 74, 77, 98, 133, 176-7, 192, 202, 222, 227, 254 —’s Al-Azhar, 81-2 —Sea, 37 —Strip, 122, 134 Geneva, 16, 38, 67, 68, 159, 161, 169

Habermas, Jorgen, 109 Haddad, Rudy, 142-5 Hadith,1-2, 6, 131, 157, 198-9, 200, 212, 223 Hagen, Carl, 203 Haider, Jorg, 18 Haifa, 223 Technion in—223 Halimi, Ilan, 23, 123, 130-2, 142 Halle, 64-5 Hallengren, Lena, 200 Hamas, xi, xiii, 13, 22-3, 25, 28, 35, 69, 89-90, 98-9, 108-9, 122, 126, 133-4,

272

Muslim Anti-Semitism in Christian Europe

139, 151, 180, 194, 200-2, 204-5, 213, 223, 227, 240, 252-4 —Charter /Platform, 19, 119, 223 —Media, 133 —Minister of Refugees,202 Pro—205 Hamshari, 175 Hannover, 69 (Ul) Haq, Sheikh Riyadh, 41, 153, 2312, 233 Al-Kawthar (Website), 233 Harrisburg, PA, 68 Hawza ‘Ilmiya, 139-40 Hebrews / Israelites, 79-80 Hebron, 177, 218-9 Tombs of the Patriarchs, 218 Hell, 39, 89, 131, 174-5 Heresy, 11, 26, 28, 36, 120, 168, 254 Hijab / Veil, 4, 21, 28, 183, 185, 187 The Affair of the Veil, 230 Hilli, Muhaqqiq, 140 Hindu, 92, 211, 231-2, 233 Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 36 Hirsi Ali, Ayaan, 4-5, 203, 255 Hitler, Adolph, 11-2, 14-5, 45, 67-8, 87, 129, 132, 137, 156-7, 159, 176, 181, 187, 196, 198, 223, 249 Mein Kampf, 134, 239 Hizbullah, xi, 4, 9, 21, 23, 25, 28, 35-6, 67, 69, 89-90, 105-6, 124, 126, 139, 141, 201, 205, 213, 222, 237 Hizb-ut-Tahrir, 139, 160, 205, 248 Hollywood, 194 Holocaust / Sho’ah, xvi, 5, 46, 60, 63, 712, 77, 95, 127, 129-30, 140, 158, 162, 172-4, 176, 181, 186-7, 191, 194, 207, 220, 223, 226, 240-1, 255 —Cartoons, 175 —Denial, xvi, 5, 8, 14ff, 18, 38, 46, 60, 62, 85, 100ff, 109, 134, 151, 159, 175, 223-4, 228, 242 —Education and Research,181 240-1 —Memorial, 5, 77, 94, 101-2, 105-6, 169, 204, 207, 235 Muslim “—”, xiii World Foundation for Holocaust Studies, 105 Holy Land / Land of Israel, 79-80 Holy sites, 116, 168, 219 Honor killings, 21, 85, 203 Howard, PM John, 62

Hudaibiyya, 29-30, 38 Hudna, 29 Humaid, Sheikh Abdallah, 129 Humiliation, 21, 34-5, 41, 48, 70, 122, 157, 172, 175, 185, 191, 195, 217, 219, 230, 234 Hungary, 11, 71 Hussein, Imam, 24 Iberia, 6 Ibn al-Kathir, 3 Ibn Warraq, 255 Igansky, Paul, 117 (Al) ‘Ilm, 17 Imam (see also Clerics), xv, 1, 86, 95, 107, 132, 141-2, 168-9, 180, 193, 205, 207, 212, 226-7, 231-2, 238, 247 Training of—139, 141 India, 37, 98, 121, 182, 209, 232 —n Sub-continent, 57 Indonesia, 3, 31, 62, 108 Inquisition, 11, 59, 70 Internet, 7, 60, 63, 67, 73, 84, 107, 110, 122-4, 140, 194, 211-2, 225, 233-4, 240, 242 —Watch Foundation, 212 Web 2.0, 242-4 Intifadah, 6, 16, 22, 31, 48, 58, 61-2, 64, 67, 72-3, 126, 128, 165, 170, 179-80, 194 —al Aqsa, 9, 13-14, 65, 71, 845, 102, 129-31, 182, 184-6, 195, 209, 224 Iquioussen, Hassan, 86-7 Iran, xiii, 3-4, 7, 13, 25, 48, 57, 67, 73, 104-7, 110, 126, 134, 139-40, 150-1, 163, 175-7, 181, 192, 196, 201, 205, 213, 223, 227, 229-30, 252 —Foreign Ministry,104 Deputy Foreign Minister(Larijani), 227-9 Institute for Political and International Studies in—104 —, Iraq War,4, 21 President of (see also Ahmadinejad), 49, 160, 167, 175, 220, 236 Iraq, xiii, 36, 54, 57, 73, 89, 95-6, 99-100, 108, 121, 123-4, 150, 161, 163, 180, 192, 207, 225, 232, 247 —War,109, 210 Ireland, 63 Northern—165

Index Irhabi 007,123-4 Irshad Trust, 139-40 Irving, David, 14, 60, 101, 105-6 Islamdom,61 Islamic Center of England (ICEL), 13940 Islamic College for Advanced Studies (ICAS), 139-40 Islamic Conference, 36 Islamic Jihad, 13, 22, 23, 28 Islamic Relief Worldwide (IRW), 134 Islamikaze / Martyrdom, xiii, xiv, xv, 9-10, 12-3, 21-3, 26, 29-30, 36-7, 46, 96-8, 101, 120-1, 133, 162, 170, 177, 180, 192, 197, 199, 201, 205, 227, 233, 250, 252-3 Islamophobia, xv, 88, 114-6, 169, 235 Isma’ilism / Fatimism, 152 Israel, ix, xiii, 2, 5, 7, 9-10, 25, 28, 34, 36, 121, 144, 182 Anti—3, 8, 16, 22, 49, 57-8, 61, 69, 90, 102, 123, 128, 149ff, 167, 236 —Chief Rabbi,227, 240 —Defensive Wall,221 —’s forces,xi, 9, 41, 43, 201 Greater—108 Intelligence Heritage and Communications Center in—133 Kadima Party, 239 —, Palestinian,182, 184, 253 Shin Bet, 133-4 Watershed of 1977, 221 Israi’liyyat, 7 Italy, 63, 65, 69, 71, 201, 239 Berlusconi, PM, 251 —’s Christian Democrats, 161 Forza Nuova, 65 Kadima World Italia, 239 Jacob (the Patriarch)— Sons of—15 Jacobson, Kenneth, 224 Jahiliyya, 37 Jahiz, Abu ‘Uthman, 7 Jakarta,xiv, 74 (al) Jalalayn, 3, 93 Janjaweed, xiii Japan, 14, 69, 71, 163 (al) Jazeera, 66, 119, 141, 254 Jeddah, 4, 5 Jenin, 16, 39, 43

273

Jericho, 31, 61 Jerusalem, xi, 5, 11, 32, 37, 61, 65, 73, 79-80, 163-8, 218, 226 David and Solomonic—164 —Day, 104 East—xi, xii, 163 Jewish Quarter of—163-4 Mount of Olives, 163-4 Mufti of—6 Jerusalem Post, 227-8 Jihad, xiii, 2, 29, 46, 64, 67, 69, 73, 89, 91, 116, 120, 121-3, 128, 134, 137-40, 144, 168, 172, 187, 194, 197, 203, 248-9 —Movement, 13, 127 Mujahideen, 197 Johannesburg, 65, 129 Jordan, xvi, 16-17, 31, 60, 93, 162, 164, 167, 200, 236, 247 —River, 80 Joseph Interfaith Foundation, 206 Joseph Tomb, 31, 61 Judaism, 32, 87 Anti—92, 149ff, 231, 233 Diaspora—73 Hasmonean Dynasty, 164 Hassidism, 62 Judaic Studies, 136 Judaization, 163 Judeo-Christian, 32, 37, 87, 171, 174 Orthodox—5, 20, 7, 230 Reform in—208 Sephardic—144 Judeophobia, xv, xvi, 10, 59, 160, 193, 211 Justinian, Emperor, 11 Kaklamanis, PM Apostolos, 162 Kantharia, Mehboob, 96 Karachi, 123, 211 Karbala, 24 Karine A (ship), 38, 40-2 Karsh, Efraim, 248 Kashmir, 29, 37, 94, 97, 100, 101, 121 Kelly Ruth, 116, 235 Kessler, Dr. Gol, 116, 206 Khadre, Mahmud, 14-15 Khamenei, Ayatullah Ali, 139 Khan Yunis— —Educational College, 79 Khaybar, 2 Khomeini, Ayatollah, 13, 48, 251-2

274

Muslim Anti-Semitism in Christian Europe

—Revolution, 22 Korea (North), 17 Kosovo, 25, 94, 121, 249 Kosrokhavar, Farhad, 107 Kramer, Stephen, 228 Kristallnacht, 71, 241 Ku Klux Klan, 136 Kuala Lumpur, 36, 74 Kuntzel, Matthias, 137-8, 223 Kurds, 57, 73, 203, 207 Kuwait, xii Labor Party, 210, 221, 252 —government,235 Trade Unions, 210 Lambertz, Goran, 196, 197-8, 199 Lancaster University, 117 Langmuir, Gavin, 156-9 Laskar, Rabbi, 124 (Le) Monde, 186, 234, 239 Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 15, 60, 192 (Le) Point, 168, 234-6 Lebanon, xiii, 9, 22-3, 28, 110, 117, 124, 136, 162, 176, 194, 222 —Civil War, 136, 213 Second—War, 6, 105, 176, 237 Leeds,68, 141, 207 —Grand Mosque, 95 University of—137 Left, ix, x, 58, 74, 77, 105, 108-9, 127, 144, 154, 170, 177, 180, 183, 192, 203, 210-2, 220-2, 236 British—106 Leicester, 68 —Mosque,232 Leo Baeck Institute, 208 Levant, 59 Levy, Bernard-Henri, 234 Lewis, Bernard, 6-7, 25-6, 32, 56 Liberia, 5 Lichtenstein, 71 Lieberman, Joe, 62 Lille, 64 Lindh, Anna, 181 Lipstadt, Deborah, 106 Lithuania, 63, 71, 223 Liverpool, 142 Livingstone, Mayor Ken, 119-20, 239 —formulation, 242 London, xi, xiv, 11, 63, 67-9, 73-4, 105, 119, 121-2, 134-5, 141-2, 172, 176, 213, 252

—Bombings, xi, 55, 66, 86, 91-2, 957, 101, 121, 133, 135, 141, 169, 170, 174, 210, 213, 239 —Central Mosque, 98 City Circle, 207 East—Mosque, 92 —Mayor of, 119-20, 239 —Metropolitan Police,117 —(Ontario), 65 Louvain (Belgium) University of—93 Lyon, 64, 67-8 Macedonia, 71, 121 Mac Shane , Denis, 134, 236 Madrasa, xiii, 88, 90, 212, 234 Madrid, 66 121 —Bombings, 224-5 Mahfuz, Naguib, 178 Maida Vale, 139-40 Mainz, Rhineland, 228 Majem, Dr. Mustafa, 81 Malaysia, 128 Malmo, 64-5, 194-5, 200 —Islamic Center, 200 (al) Manar, 66, 141, 222 Manchester, 68-9, 135, 141-2, 207, 214 Mandela, Nelson, 65, 98-9 Mann, John, 142 Mansur, Anis, 10 Marcus and Crook, 78, 110 Margrethe, Queen, 51-2 Marin, Jean-Claude, 143 Marseille, xiv, 65, 67 Marseillaise, 28 Marx and Engels, 11, 210-11 Masood, Ehsan, 99 Masri, Sheikh Abu-Hamza, 27, 117, 205, 212 Mazel, Zvi, 179-80 Mc Nally, Terrence, 102 Mecca, 93, 163, 194 Media, 7, 49, 66, 70, 107-8, 151 Arab—xii, 10-11, 13-14, 16-17, 50, 60, 120, 167, 175, 251 Arabic (in Europe), 126 Australian, 128 Egyptian, 45 European—16, 39, 43, 166, 194, 211, 213, 234, 241 French, 142, 144 Iranian, 104

Index Islamic—13-14, 38, 60-1, 65, 73, 169, 175, 178, 194, 213 Israeli—40 Palestinian, 78-9, 81 Western—100, 104, 123, 149, 178 World, 39, 41, 164-5, 196 Medina, 2, 4, 93, 152 Mediterranean, 41 Meggido, 80 Meknes, 68 Melbourne, 3, 69, 74 Memphis University of—136, 137 Merkel, PM Angela, 178, 228-9, 251, 254 Mexico, 71 Miami, 69 Middle Ages, 68, 70, 94, 139, 152-3 Middle East, ix, 6, 8, 12, 50, 57ff, 78, 845, 96, 122, 126, 128, 133-5, 138, 141, 159-60, 166, 172-4, 178-9, 193, 195-6, 198-9, 202, 209-10, 219, 222-3, 227, 229, 236, 239, 250 —Conflict (see also Arab-Israeli),223, 226-7, 251 Middlesex University, 139-40 Milli Gorus, 108-9 Milner, Jean-Claude, xii Milwaukee, 68 Minneapolis, 68 Minnesota, 68 Mitterand, President Francois, 183 Moezi, Abolhossein, 139 Molenbeek, 127-8 Mayor of—93 Mongol, 44 Montpellier, 68 Montreal, 65, 68, 230, 233 Morocco, 68-9, 90, 108, 127, 225 Moscow, 14, 68, 104, 105, 252 Moses, 80 Mosaic Faith, 72 Mosaic Law, 80 Mosque, 1, 4, 13, 17, 26-7, 31-2, 61-2, 70, 72, 78, 92-3, 95, 102, 107, 127-8, 133, 136, 139, 141, 144, 168, 204-5, 207-8, 212-3, 219, 231-2, 238-9, 255 East London—92 London Central—97-8 Malmo—200 Paris—238

275

Regent’s Park—102 Stockholm—180, 196-7 Mossad, 37, 42, 113, 171 Moureaux, Philippe, 128 Mubarak, President Hosni, 41, 52 Muezzin, 63 Mufti, 6 Muhajirun, 160, 206 Muhammad (see also Prophet of Islam), 2, 4, 32, 80, 122, 152, 175, 194, 232, 247, 255 Mujahideen (see also Jihad), 122, 197 Multi-culturalism, 51, 117, 128, 172 Munich, 65 Muntada (Ansar an-Islam), 123-4 Musa, ‘Amr, 174 Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), 95-6, 98, 204-5, 210-1 British Muslim Initiative, 205 Center for the Study of Terrorism, 205 Federation of Student Islamic Societies, 205 Islamic Foundation, 205 Islamic Society of Britain, 205 Muslim Welfare House, 205 U.K. Islamic Mission, 205 Muslim Brothers, 4, 86-7, 90, 108, 139, 160, 169, 204-5, 210, 236, 238, 246 Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), 92, 94-5, 97-8, 102, 105, 117, 119, 169, 204, 207-8, 235 Nablus, 13, 61, 74, 134 Naftaliel, Ronny, 224 Nakbah, 172, 220 Napier, Mick, 106 Napoleon, 11, 238 Nasrallah, Hassan, 13 Nativity Church, 8-9 NATO, 25, 121, 201 European Air Group, 202 Volcanex 2006, 201, 202 Nazareth, 32 Basilica of Annunciation,see entry Nazis, 6, 11, 14, 23, 24, 43, 45, 50, 64, 68-70, 78, 83, 87, 92, 95, 101-2, 1046, 131, 134, 137, 151, 158, 160-1, 173, 176-7, 196, 210, 212, 222, 228, 235-6, 239, 241-2 Gestapo, 238

276

Muslim Anti-Semitism in Christian Europe

Neo—60, 69, 124-5, 160, 181, 192, 222 Pro—18, 223 Swastika, 64, 67 Netanyahu, PM Benjamin, 79 Netherlands / Holland, 4-5, 11, 174, 177, 202-3, 207, 223-4, 241, 250, 255, —’s Christian Unity Party,223-4 —’s Parliament, 4, 223-4 New York, xi, 64, 121, 168, 247 Bronx, 68 Brooklyn, 62 Columbia University in—136 —’s Mayor Giuliani, 238 New York Times, 165 New Zealand, 69, 71 Newcastle, 68 Nice, 64 Nigeria, 62 Nile River, 16 Nobel Prize, 178 Norway, 63, 68, 167, 177, 203 (Le) Nouvel Observateur,85 Obeid, Abdallah, 87 Obin, Jean-Pierre, 132 (The) Observer, 169 October, 10-11 Ontario, 65, 230-1 Oslo, 38, 40, 167 —Accords,30, 40-1, 61, 65, 78, 84, 240 Ottawa, 68, 151 Canadian Coalition for Democracies in —233 David Ouelette, 233 Ottomans, 6, 12, 48, 65, 153 Owadally, Muhammed Yasin, 128 Oxford University, 138 Pakistan, xiii, 1, 23, 41-2, 55, 73, 90, 99, 117, 123, 126, 133, 139, 169, 182, 2045, 211, 234, 238 Jamaat-e-Islami, 205 Palestinians, xiii, 9-10, 12-4, 16-7, 23-5, 28, 30-1, 35-6, 38, 41, 43, 46, 61-2, 69, 72-3, 81, 93-5, 99-101, 104, 106, 110, 121, 142, 150, 158-9, 210-11, 220 —Authority (PA), xiii, 11, 77-80, 87, 98, 126, 177, 239-40 —Charter, 167 —Education, 79

—Israeli, 125-6, 141 —Ministry of Culture, 79 —Mufti, 6 PLO, xiii, 80, 105-6, 133, 155 Philo— / Palestinism,85, 126, 166, 176 Pro—124 —Solidarity Campaign, 162 —Tanzim, 22 Panama, 67, 73 Papandreou, PM Andreas, 161 Paradise / Heaven, 37, 46, 93, 121, 131, 133 Paris, xiv, 63-8, 70, 73-4, 123, 130-2, 142, 144, 163, 165-6, 172, 181, 234, 238, 241 —Criminal Police, 107 —Eiffel Tower, 144 —Prosecutor, 143 Pasqua, Charles, 168 Patai, Raphael, 37 Patel, Isma’il Adam, 252 Patel, Sheikh Hussein, 232-3 Patriarchs, 8, 218 Tombs of—218 Patterson, Dr., 136-7 Peace, 10, 12, 16, 30, 48, 81, 90 —Process, 84, 126, 128, 202 —Treaty, 13, 17, 45, 61, 84, 167, 174, 201 Pearl, Daniel, 23, 123, 211, 234 Pennsylvania, 68 People of the Book, 2, 7 Permentier, Corinne de, 125 Persson, PM Goran, 179, 181, 201 Pickolek, Chantal, 131 Pipes, Daniel, 230 Poison, 8, 16ff, 39, 43-4, 151, 156-7, 158-9, 194 Poland, 15, 71, 127, 160, 182, 223, 251, 254 Poller, Nidra, 142-4, 185-7 Port Said, 41 Portugal, 130 Potsdam, 65 Prasquier, Richard, 143-4 Prodi, Romano, 240 Prophet— —of Allah,15, 122, 175 —of Islam, ix, 1, 6, 21, 29-30, 39, 49, 53, 193, 198, 223, 226, 254 —of Jews, 83

Index Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 8-11, 16, 43, 45, 66, 82-3, 106, 129, 134, 151, 154-5, 178, 234, 239 Qaddafi, Mu’ammar, 52 (al)Qa’ida, 24-5, 28, 35, 41, 113, 123, 141, 160, 172, 225, 248, 252-3 Qaradawi, Sheikh Yussuf, 7, 91, 119-20, 122, 180-1 Qatar, 119, 141 Qidwa, Jirar, 79 Qom, 140 Quebec, 65, 69 Queensland, 69 Quetta, xiv (al)Quds, 79 Qur’an, xv, 1-4, 6, 32, 37, 39-40, 53, 801, 87, 90, 93-4, 123, 152, 157, 191, 231, 254-5 Rabat, 74 Rabbi, 11, 62, 67, 125, 132, 178, 180, 182, 207, 226, 230, 239 Chief—of Israel, 227, 240 Rabbinical Court, 119 Rabin, PM Yitzhak, 30, 41, 221 Racism, ix, xv, 5-6, 13, 15, 31, 50, 62, 65, 69-70, 78, 82, 85, 101, 107, 114, 121, 125, 151, 153, 160-1, 166-7, 170, 1834, 187, 195-7, 199, 212, 214, 220, 223, 225, 233-5, 237, 239, 242-3 Rafsanjani, President Akbar Hashemi, 56, 104 Ramadan (festival), 16, 61, 66, 84 Ramadan, Tariq, 86-7, 108, 169-71 Rami, Ahmed, 198, 200 Radio Islam, 198 Ramin, Muhammed Ali, 105 Ramlawi, Dr. Abdallah, 16 Raza, Muhammed Shahid, 97-8 Reagan, President Ronald, 113, 250 Red Cross, 16, 23 Red Sea, 41 Rhine Basin, 11 Rice, Secretary Condoleezza, 87 Right, ix, x, 58, 74, 77, 109, 125, 127, 132, 134, 192, 211-2, 222, 236, 239 Right of Return, 31, 35 Rio de Janeiro, 67 Riyadh, 4, 87, 88 Robinson, Professor Neal, 93-4

277

Rodinson, Maxime, 149ff Rodriguez, Sebastian, 224-5 Romania, 71, 182, 223 Rome, 65, 68, 239 Mayor of —239 Roman Law, 30 Roosevelt, President Franklin, 14 Roth, Stephen Institute (Tel Aviv University), 5-6 Rothschild, 121 Rumsfeld, Secretary Ronald, 48 Rushdie, Salman, 169, 255 Russia, 11, 63, 71-2, 106, 121, 199, 230 Rwanda, 5 Sabri, Sheikh Ikrama, 97 Sacks, Rabbi Jonathan, 77, 208 Sacranie, Sir Iqbal, 94-5, 97-99, 169, 204, 235 Sadat, President Anwar, 10 Saddam, Hussein, 25, 36, 161, 180, 210, 213, 248, 250-1 Sadeq, Dr. Adel, 10 Sahar, Sheikh Atiyeh, 82 Saladin, 248 Salafi, 86, 107 Sao Paulo, 65-6, 68, 74, 100 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 108, 142-3, 183, 186, 237-8, 241, 251, 254 SARS/ Avian flu, 105, 174 Satan / Devil / Dajjal, 5, 9, 25, 90, 128, 168, 176 Saudi Arabia, xvi, 1, 5, 10, 13, 30-1, 34-5, 38, 42, 50, 87-9, 91-3, 114-5, 134, 139, 141, 163, 192, 212-3, 222, 238, 247-8 —Minister of Education, 87ff —Royal House, 88 Saved Sect, 122 Scandinavian / Nordic, 27, 73, 85, 180, 195-6, 205-6 Schindler’s List, 14, 102 Schwerin, 64 Scotland, 210, 253 —s First Minister, 253 —’s Islamic Foundation, 253 Lockerbie/ PANAM 103, 226 —’s National Party, 253 Scottish-Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, 105 Sebastya, 79 Sellam, Sebastian, 131, 142, 186

278

Muslim Anti-Semitism in Christian Europe

Serbia, 121, 207 Sanjak Province, 121 Seville, 226 —Conference,227 Sha’ban, al-Rahim, 174 Shahid / martyr / fida’i, xi, 13, 21, 23-4, 36-7, 44, 46, 96, 121, 197 Shari’a Law, xiii, xiv, xv, 7, 29, 52-3, 55, 97, 119, 120, 122, 133, 140, 171, 173, 192, 203-4, 222, 231 Sharon, PM Ariel, 8, 44, 79, 166, 187, 239, 254 Shayesteh, Daniel, 3 Shi’ite, xiii, 24, 90, 140, 152, 205 Islamic Center of England, 205 Islamic Human Rights Commission, 205 Ta’zia, 24 Shirk, 52 Sicily, 248 Siddiqui, Dr. Ghayasuddin, 94 Sierra Leone, 5 Simon Wiesenthal Center, 229, 239 Sirah,1, 6-7 Sissalerm, Professor I., 107 Slovakia, 11, 71, 223 Smith, Ian Duncan, 135 Somalia, 4-5, 57, 73 Soviet, 15, 48, 87, 105, 160-1, 210, 249, 251 Comintern, 252 Spain, 11, 69, 71, 73, 121, 202, 224, 226, 248 Srebrenica, 207 Sroda, Magdalena, 127 Stalin, Josef, 14 Star of David, 64, 74, 178, 185, 187, 209, 230 Steinmeier, FM, 227-9 Stockholm, 179, 201, 240 —Conference, 77, 120 —District Court, 198, 200 —Great Mosque, 180, 196-7, 200 —Great Synagogue, 181 Stone, Dr. Richard, 115, 206 Strasbourg,68 Straw, Secretary Jack, 36, 117 Sudais, Sheikh, 92-3 Sudan, xiii, 5, 163, 252 Suez Canal, 17 Sufi, 94

Sulh, 30 Sultan, Wafa, 173, 254-5 Sunday Telegraph, 135 Sunnite, xiii, 7, 88, 120, 176 Suntorini (ship), 38 Sussex University, 214 Sweden, 63-5, 109, 177, 180, 194-5, 198, 200-1, 240-1 Armed Forces of—201 Chancellor of Justice of—196-200, 203 Expressen, 180 Green Party of —179-80 Journalist Association of—180 Law of—199 Muslim Association of—203 Parliament of—202 Radio—96-7 Skane, 180 Social Democrats of—179-81, 203 Young—181 Svenska Dagbladet, 180 Swedish (Language), 196 Sweilem, Hassan, 10-11 Switzerland, 86-7, 104, 108, 161, 223 Social Democratic Party of—161 Sydney, xiv, 68, 71, 73, 128 Synagogue, 11, 31-2, 36, 49, 55, 59, 61ff, 120, 125, 129, 143-4, 164, 178, 182-3, 203, 207-9, 219, 222, 226, 241, 249 —in Stockholm, 181 Syracuse (NY), 70 Syria, xiii, 23, 45, 84, 110, 150, 162-3, 176, 178, 255 —’s Minister of Defense, 38, 84 Syudsvenskan, 202 Tabah Foundation, 49 Tabari, Muhammed, 7, 93 Tablighi, 108 Taghkent, 68 Taher, Sheikh Muhammed, 95 Takfir wal-Hijra, 86 Taliban,xiii, 43, 172, 192, 194, 233 —POW’s, 43 Talmud, xi, xii, 78, 83 Tamimi, Dr. Azzam, 95-6, 98, 252 Tantawi, Sheikh Muhammed, 7, 97-8, 227 Tehran, 13, 74, 104, 228 Tel Aviv, 121, 164, 165

Index —University, 6 Temple Mount, 32, 79-80, 163-4, 218-9, 220, 243 Terrorism, 13-4, 22-3, 29-30, 35-6, 38, 4044, 47, 53-4, 58, 61, 84, 94, 96, 98-9, 114, 117-8, 120, 122, 124, 127, 133, 138, 141, 162, 166, 170-2, 181, 201-2, 204, 212, 225, 234, 238, 240-1 Textbooks, 88, 91, 171 Arab—xii, 61, 159 French—171 Palestinian—78, 83-4, 240 Saudi—87ff Thatcher, PM Margaret, 165 The Hague, 69 Thessaloniki, 65, 184 Three-Faiths Forum, 206 (The) Times, 134, 139, 234, 252 TIPH(Temporary International Peace in Hebron), 177 Tias, Mustafa, 38, 84 Tonge, Jenny, 162 Torah / Bible, xi, xii, 67-8, 80, 83, 200, 231 Old and New Testament, 87 Toronto, xv, 65, 68-9, 231 —Islamic Foundation, 231 Muhammed Alam, 231 —Islamic Information and da’wa Center, 232 Shabir Ally, President, 232-3 Tory Party, 133, 135 Toulouse, 68, 186 Trigano, Shmuel, 173 Trojan Horse, 11, 78, 110 Turks / Turkey, 1, 57, 73, 108-9, 150, 168, 182, 224, 248 AKP, 108 —courts, 108 Kaplangi, 107, 168 Milli Gorus, 108 Twin Towers, 25, 28, 36-8, 42, 44-5, 47, 64, 132 UAE, 49 Ukraine, 63, 72-3 Ummah, 90, 95, 99, 121, 123 Unbelievers / Infidels / Pagans / mushrikun, xi, 28, 39-40, 86, 89-91, 94, 108, 120, 123, 127, 139-40, 231, 254-5 United Nations, 16-17, 60, 65, 77, 113, 160, 167, 251

279

Decisions, 153, 163 —General Assembly, 160, 163, 167, 251 HQ of—67 Human Rights Commission, 16, 38, 151, 159-60, 240 International Criminal Court, 224 —Peace Missions, 201, 207 —Secretary General, 160 —Security Council, 176 UNRWA, 35 United States, 11, 27-8, 36, 55, 71, 73, 121, 128, 136, 144, 178, 230, 247, 255 Anti—57, 172, 253 Bank of America, 11 —Civil War, 11 —Congress, 8, 88 —Constitution, 137 —Defense Secretary, 48 —Dept. of State, 87 —Muslims, 8 —Neo-cons, 178 —President, 89, 255 —Statue of Liberty, 196 Terror against—17 Van Gogh, 174 Vatican, 158 Vawda, Shahedah, 99 Venezuela, 68 Venice, 65 —Conference,251 Versailles, 12 Vietnam, 17 Vienna, 18, 104, 240 Wahhabi, 1, 87-8, 90-1, 193, 247-8 Wahk, Jean-Jacques, 184 Wales, 135 Waqf, 32 War, 11, 29-30, 91, 102, 108, 113 1948—8, 44, 201 1956—201 1967, 201, 218 October 1973,17, 61, 201 Gulf —232 Cold—250 Lebanon II—6, 105, 176 —on terror, 95 World—I,11 World—II,5-6, 12, 14, 67, 72, 104, 181, 228

280

Muslim Anti-Semitism in Christian Europe

Ware, John, 92ff Washington, DC, 69, 88-9, 165 Washington Post, 123 Weitzel, Victor, 126-7 Welt am Sonntag, 249 West Bank, 28, 39, 43, 49, 62, 77, 79, 159, 177, 221 Whitehall, 169 Wiesel, Elie, 125 Wilders, Geert, 203 Williams, Archbishop Rowan, 119 Wisconsin, 68 Wistrich, Robert, 210 World Islamic Mission in Europe, 97 Woolas, Phil, 236 Yaf Vashem, 5, 107, 181 Yahudi (Jew), 4-5, 194, 231 Yale University, 135 Yassin, Seikh Ahmed, 98

Yemen, xiii Yeshiva, xi Yom Kippur, 61, 67-8 (Al)Zamili, Dr. Yussuf, 79 Zarqawi, Mus’ab, 123 Zawahiri, Ayman, 56 Zionism, ix, 2, 10, 13, 15, 47, 61-2, 67, 80, 95, 105-6, 113, 124, 227, 233, 243, 247 Anti-—ix, 8, 12, 45, 58, 62, 65, 70, 86ff, 93, 104, 108-110, 120-1, 1267, 149ff, 152, 167, 210, 222, 229, 237, 249, 254 —Congress, 82 International —109 Post—220 Zoroastrian, 90 Zundel, Ernst, 109 Zundelsite, 110