Posted: 22 Jan 2015 07:55 AM PST
Even articles about
Muslim Anti-Semitism rarely want to talk about Muslim Anti-Semitism. In the
aftermath of the Kosher supermarket massacre in France, articles about the
Muslim persecution of Jews in Europe nervously hover around the subject
before swerving away to discuss the European far-right.
An
article about Muslim anti-Semitism in France inevitably becomes an article
about the National Front, which is not actually shooting Jews in
supermarkets. Broader European pieces obsessively focus on the Jobbik party
in Hungary which for all its vileness has not actually killed any Jews.
(The endless articles about Jobbik characterize it as a far-right European
Christian party, but in fact it’s a pan-Turkic organization whose chairman
had told a Turkish audience, “Islam is the last hope for humanity.” Its
actual identity is based on a broad front of ethnic solidarity by identifying
Hungarians as a Turkic people. Its anti-Semitism is anti-Zionist. Jobbik
hates Jews because it identifies with Muslims.)
The usual treatment of Muslim anti-Semitism is cursory. History books
acknowledge its existence while asserting that European anti-Semitism was
worse. Modern media coverage takes the same approach by finding a useful
distraction in the European far-right.
Muslim anti-Semitism needs to be addressed on its own if for no other reason
than that it’s the dominant form of violence against Jews in Europe. And it
has been that way for some time now.
Articles that gloss over Muslim Anti-Semitism to flit on to the National
Front, which in this current crisis has shown itself to be less anti-Semitic
than the BBC whose reporter Tim Wilcox accused a daughter of Holocaust
survivors in France of oppressing Palestinians, are very deliberately
ignoring the issue. The politics of the media led it to class together
anti-immigration with violent bigotry. But the violent bigotry isn’t coming
from the sort of people that the media thinks it ought to.
It’s not UKIP supporters that are hunting down and killing Jews and so the
media avoids the subject until some violent atrocity forces its hand and then
it blames Muslim anti-Semitism on a failure to integrate. Ahmed can’t get a
job because of UKIP or Wilders and so he shoots up a synagogue. The Jews are
just collateral damage in Muslim blowback to their persecution by European
opponents of immigration.
Throw in a little something about Israel and Muslim anti-Semitism is
transformed into a misunderstood phenomenon that really isn’t what it appears
to be. Muslims don’t hate Jews. They’re just confused.
But Muslim anti-Semitism predates the difficulties of integrating Algerians
and Pakistanis into Europe by over a thousand years. In Islam, Jews represent
both a subject race and a primal enemy. Israel infuriates Muslims so much not
because they care a great deal about the Palestinian Arabs who have been
expelled in huge numbers from Muslim countries within the last generation,
but because Jews no longer know their place. Islam is supremacist. Allahu
Akbar asserts Islamic supremacy over all other religions. As an historical
subject race, Jews are a natural target for violence by Muslim immigrants
with strong supremacist leanings. The disenfranchised Muslim isn’t looking
for equality. He’s seeking supremacy. That is what the Islamic State and the
Koran give him. He picks the same Jewish targets as Mohammed did because the
Jews are a vulnerable minority. That is as true in Europe today as it was in
Arabia then.
Unlike the Christian world, which was never fully subjugated by
Islam, both the Jewish homeland and much of the Jewish diaspora population
existed under Muslim rule long enough that non-submissive Jews became a
particularly galling reminder of the fall of the Caliphate.
Muslims had taken Jewish submission for granted making the existence of
non-submissive Jews, whether in Jerusalem or in Paris, that much more
outrageous. The Algerian Muslim can more readily accept taking a back seat to
a French Christian than to an Algerian Jew, whom he knows would have been
considered inferior to him if they were both back in Algeria.
The left has become so mired in a post-colonial worldview that it refuses to
understand that the struggle is not between Western European colonialism and
a post-colonial Third World, but between different eras of colonialism. Arab
Islamic domination is not post-colonial; it’s a colonialism that predates it.
When Western leftists make common cause with Arab and Islamic nationalists,
they aren’t being post-colonial, they’re advocating an earlier form of
colonialism that led and is once again leading to ethnic cleansing, genocide,
mass slavery and the destruction of indigenous cultures; including that of
the Jews.
Middle Eastern Jews, like other non-Muslim and non-Arab minorities, welcomed
European colonialism as relief from Islamic and Arab colonialism. France is
filled with Jews from North Africa because they received their rights for the
first time under French rule. As French citizens, they could shed their
mandatory black clothes and no longer fear being killed because of Islamic
law, like Batto Sfez, a Tunisian Jew who was executed for blasphemy in an atrocity
that triggered French intervention.
Yoav Hattab, one of the Jews murdered in the Kosher supermarket attack in
Paris, was the son of the Chief Rabbi of Tunisia. While the Chief Rabbi was,
in the unfortunate Dhimmi fashion of those who live under Islamic rule,
forced to praise how well Tunisia treats Jews, his son was buried in Israel.
Israel was also the place where most Tunisian Jews moved to escape Arab
Muslim persecution.
The Western left can’t talk about Muslim anti-Semitism because it would also have
to talk about Muslim colonialism. And then the entire basis of its approach
to the Arab and Muslim world would collapse. If post-colonialism in the
Middle East is just the replacement of one colonialism with another, then the
left would have to admit that it has once again disgraced itself by
supporting a totalitarian system.
Just as it replaced the czar with the commissar, it is replacing the
protectorate with the caliphate.
Modern histories of the Middle East excuse the historical Muslim persecution
of Jews for the same reason the media excuses modern Muslim attacks on Jews.
This historical revisionism justifies Islamic colonialism in the service of
post-colonialism with the myth of a golden age of benevolent tyranny.
The
post-colonial narrative obligates academics and journalists to favorably
contrast the Muslim treatment of Jews, then or now, with the European
treatment of Jews. This obstructionism has endangered European Jews even more
than Jihadist videos advocating violence because it makes it impossible to
discuss an urgent violent threat for fear of violating the left’s
post-colonial narrative.
Muslim anti-Semitism must be discussed. And it must be contextualized within
the history of Muslim-Jewish relations, not European ones like the National
Front or Jobbik. It must not be dismissed as some transient phenomenon caused
by poverty or the latest Hamas clashes, but viewed within the context of
Islamic colonialism and the treatment of non-Muslims in the Muslim world. The
treatment of Yazidis in Iraq and Christians in Syria must also be placed
within that same context.
Historical revisionism for Muslim anti-Semitism is as unacceptable as Holocaust
denial or any other attempt to stick a smiley face on the oppression of Jews.
And what is at stake here is not merely history, but the root cause that
drives Muslim men and women born in Europe to attack and kill Jews.
The post-colonial authorities of the left may not be interested in discussing
Muslim anti-Semitism, but Muslim Supremacist anti-Semitism remains interested
in persecuting and killing Jews.
Daniel Greenfield is a New York City based writer and blogger
and a Shillman Journalism Fellow of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
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