Comments on: Muslim Anti-Semitism, Israel, and the Dynamics of Self-Destructive Scapegoating

By: mirelgoldenberg

mirelgoldenberg — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 18:10:38 +0000

The author said :” If I am wrong, and Palestinian hatred is merely a result of the “occupation”, then concessions from the Israelis should lead to a lessening of Palestinian hatred, and the road to peace. This is the prevailing paradigm that currently dominates thinking about the Arab-Israeli conflict. It projects a kind of positive-sum rationality on Arab political culture, and assumes that if something’s wrong, it is the fault of the stronger party unwilling to compromise (Israel)…If I’m right, then every time Israel makes concessions, it encourages further aggressions. Thus, despite what the politically correct paradigm, based on projecting our own liberal mentality on others, anticipated, every time Israel engages in anti-imperialist activities – withdrawing from most of the West Bank (1994-2000), southern Lebanon (2000) and Gaza (2005) – the result was more aggression.”
All this is very true and sad; this destroyed the Israeli Left Peace Now movement and the Israeli trust in Palestinians intentions and today, due to the new political configuration of Israel, we can’t expect any peace agreement in the next years.
However I want to point to a psychology of Force of the Middle East: the Western concept of clemency and compromise is perceived as sign of WEAKNESS and this clemency increase violence and antagonism. To better explain I will go to a movie, “apocalypse now” where the half-mad colonel Kurz explain this:Kurtz: I’ve seen horrors… horrors that you’ve seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that… but you have no right to judge me. It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror… Horror has a face… and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies! I remember when I was with Special Forces… seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember… I… I… I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out; I didn’t know what I wanted to do! And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it… I never want to forget. And then I realized… like I was shot… like I was shot with a diamond… a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, my God… the genius of that! The genius! The will to do that! Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we, because they could stand that these were not monsters, these were men… trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love… but they had the strength… the strength… to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men, our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral… and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling… without passion… without judgment… without judgment! Because it’s judgment that defeats us. “

By: mirelgoldenberg

mirelgoldenberg — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 18:08:04 +0000

The article is exhaustive and very interesting, but it has a false premise.
IF Israel would be a German Christian state, the Muslim hate would be anti-German.
Of course that the actual hate against Jews is using the Islamic and mostly the European antisemitic images as “the Elders of Zion”. Of course that the Islamic antisemitism exists. However the key is in the creation of non-Muslim state in Palestine. If Turkey would keep Palestine as a micro Turkish Muslim state, The Arab countries would accept this gladly.
The Arab nations of the Middle East don’t accept that a non-Islamic nation conquered a Muslim land and this “stranger”is victorious in wars, proving military, economical and technical superiority. Here is about a concept very Middle East Arab called “Arab Honor”, present in the social, political and family life.

By: Diane

Diane — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 19:45:14 +0000

Bashy,

Here’s what Dr. Isma’il ‘Ali Muhammad, head of the Department of Islamic Preaching and Culture at Al-Azhar University, thinks of the Jewish people:t\

http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/6086.htm

Read it and then tell me again that Islam respects the Jewish faith.

By: Alex Bensky

Alex Bensky — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 23:24:41 +0000

1. Bashy, you might want to do a little easy research on the term “anti-Semitism.” It was coined in the late nineteenth century by a German politician, Wilhelm Marr (who was all in favor of it). It means “anti-Jewish,” he simply picked “Semitic” as a weasel word. Anti-Semitism isn’t “hared of Semites,” it’s “hatred of Jews.”

2. Islam declares Jews to be People of the Book, which means that it’s OK to keep them as dhimmis and not kill them outright if they refuse to become Muslims. However, the prophets of the Hebrew Bible are, shall we ay, viewed different in the Koran; the Abraham of Genesis is unrecognizable as the Ibrahim of the Koran.

3. So Mohammed didn’t make his Jewish wife convert to Islam even as he killed lots of other Jews. OK.

4. The idea of Jews living happily with Muslims in Muslim lands is a pretty myth but doesn’t bear much relationship to the truth. In places like Spain there were some periods of comparative prosperity but at no point in any Muslim land did Jews…or Christians…live as equal citizens in the sense that Muslim live in America as citizens. Most Jews most of the time faced oppression and discrimination and were always second-class citizens. Nice to think otherwise but alas, not true.

Probably no point in reminding you that if the Arabs had accepted the UN’s 1947 partition the sum total of Arabs displaced by Israel would have been: none. The “injustice” was not refugees, it was the mere fact of Israel.

By: Eliyahu

Eliyahu — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 12:34:42 +0000

If Bashy is really a Quraishy, then that is interesting. The Quraish was Muhammad’s tribe. He killed some of his own tribal brethren, so he wouldn’t shrink at killing Jews. Which is what he did in the town of Medina [Yathrib]. Three Jewish tribes inhabited Medina before Muhammad got there. None were left when he got done with them. Maybe Bashy can quote from sources in the Hadith and tell us just how many Jews in Medina were sold into slavery, how many were killed by cutting their throats [by the Muslims], how many were killed in other ways, and how many were allowed to survive by abandoning Medina and leaving everything behind.

By: Daniel Bielak

Daniel Bielak — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 01:05:03 +0000

Off-topic: Must Watch Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) rips Obama administration for opposing Iran sanctions http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G46Fnc_gVx4

By: Daniel Bielak

Daniel Bielak — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 01:04:22 +0000

Excellent article.

Clear, effective, beneficial.

By: Bashy Quraishy

Bashy Quraishy — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 23:30:55 +0000

Muslim Anti-Semitism, Israel, and the Dynamics of Self-Destructive Scapegoating
DECEMBER 02, 2011 by RICHARD LANDES is a compilation of all that is wrong with one-way historical narratives.
I am not a Palestinian, so I cannot bring their side of the story, but taking individual acts or events and present these without a context as Islamic anti-Semitism is not only historically wrong but also smacks of ignorance of the history.
No matter, how Mr. Landes turns and twists the stories, the fact remain that:
1. Islam is not anti-Semitic and Arabs are themselves Semitic people
2. Quran declares Jews as People of the book and Jewish prophets are revered by Muslims as much if not less as by Jews.
3. Prophet Mohammed’s one wife Safia, daughter of Haye bin Akhtab was from the Jewish tribe of Banu Nazir and he never asked her to be Muslim
4. Throughout history – from Jerusalem to Spain to Ottoman Empire and in most Arab countries, Jews lived happily and were protected by the Muslim states. Only when the Israeli/Palestinian issue came up in the twentieth century, the relationship took a wrong turn. Muslims saw the plight of Palestinians as a cruel injustice and reacted in an un-Islamic manner
So my request to people like Landes and other intellectuals is to do criticise those who express anti-Semitic opinions but please separate it from the justified criticism of Israel. I have visited Israel many times and I do appreciate that there are many progressive and just Jewish people in Israel and in the world who do not see Islam as an enemy and do not call individual act of anti-Semitism among some Muslims as Islamic. As a journalist and human rights activist, I shall never call the actions of some anti-Islam Jewish intellectuals in USA and Europe as Islamophobic Jews. Religion should not be mixed with politics if we have any hope of peace.
Kind regards

Bahsy Quarishy

By: oldschooltwentysix

oldschooltwentysix — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 18:51:15 +0000

This is a very good article. The lack of wider knowledge beyond the narrative constantly thrown at us, by lazy and corrupt media and the so-called intelligentsia, has made things even worse than might have been otherwise. Of course, I need not tell you!

I think someone should make a film about the Mufti for popular release. It seems that nothing gets through unless it’s in the form of entertainment.

By: John P.

John P. — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 15:29:43 +0000

This is a very insightful piece and an engaging read.

How can one possibly inaugurate, foster, and sustain a democratic culture of freedom, one that, the in words of Isaiah Berlin, considers it “shameful not to grant to others the freedom one wants to exercise oneself,” without an ability to self-criticize?

That pretty much sums up the problem.

I can’t understand either why Arab anti-semitism is so downplayed in the western media.

Mubarak was really no friend of Israel or the Jews, and he probably harboured a great deal of anti-semitism.

Yet when the Arab Spring began in Cairo protesters began painting stars of david on posters of him to imply he was a zionist spy and a tool of the israelis.

Likewise with Gadaffi. For years the libyan dictator called for the destruction of Israel, and yet when libyans began rebelling against his regime, they too held up posters of the guy with stars of david painted on them to again imply he was a zionist stooge.

Arab anti-semitism is both systemic and pathological; it is the glue holding these ‘societies’ together, and I’ve no idea what can be done to attenuate it.