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ANTISEMITISM
IT DIDN’T JUST START WITH HITLER
THE
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STORY OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE
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Terrorist Attacks Against Jewish Targets |
ANTISEMITISM in the ARAB WORLD and IRAN
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ISLAMIC TERRORISM
Wikipedia
Islamic terrorism, Islamist terrorism or radical Islamic terrorism are terrorist acts against civilians committed by violent Islamists who claim a religious motivation.
………Justifications given for attacks on civilians by Islamic extremist groups come from extreme interpretations of the Quran and Hadith, and sharia law. These include retribution by armed jihad for the perceived injustices of unbelievers against Muslims (especially by Al-Qaeda); the belief that the killing of many self-proclaimed Muslims is required because they have violated Islamic law and actually unbelievers (kafir); the need to restore and purify Islam by establishing sharia law, especially by restoring the Caliphate as a pan-Islamic state (especially ISIS); the glory and heavenly rewards of martyrdom; the supremacy of Islam over all other religions.
Use of the phrase "Islamic terrorism" is disputed. In Western political speech it has variously been called "counter-productive", "highly politicized, intellectually contestable" and "damaging to community relations". Others have condemned the refusal to use the term as an act of "self-deception", "full-blown censorship" and "intellectual dishonesty"
A BRIEF HISTORY OF EXTREMISM
– FROM ANCIENT ROME TO AL QAEDA
History Extra
MODERN EXTREMISM
The 1980s gave rise to modern jihadist extremism: the mobile, transnational movement significantly spearheaded by al Qaeda which raised the issue of violent extremism to a global priority in 2001 on September 11; it was elevated still further by the rise of ISIS in the 2010s. Today, thousands of jihadist extremists take part in violent activities all over the globe, from terrorism to insurgency.
The same period has seen a resurgence of white nationalism and white supremacy in the United States and Europe, many of whom focus on Muslims as their chief enemy, pointing to the depravities of jihadism as part of their justification for their hate. But it’s not only white extremists who are targeting Muslims. In Myanmar, a new breed of Buddhist extremists seeks to exterminate Muslim Rohingya communities. In China, ethnic Uighurs who practice Islam are being incarcerated and ‘re-educated’ in concentration camps, a fact that too rarely features in discussions of extremism.
TERRORIST ATTACKS AGAINST JEWISH TARGETS
IN THE WEST (2012-2019):
THE ATLANTIC DIVIDE BETWEEN
EUROPEAN AND AMERICAN ATTACKERS
Combating Terrorist Center,
Mitchell D Silber, May/June 2019 Volume 12 Issue 5
Conclusion (go to link for full paper)
There is no unified theory to explain the deadly and simultaneously new, transatlantic phenomenon of violent terrorist attacks against Jewish targets in Europe and the United States during 2012-2019, when so few deadly attacks had occurred in the previous decade (2001-2011). There is much that is not known and maybe even more questions than answers.
Nevertheless, there are some common threads that emerge from a comparison of recent case studies. First, the actions of these violent actors are either consciously or unconsciously in line with key philosophical doctrines put forward by movement leaders. Secondly, both jihadis and the extreme right believe they are engaged in a cosmic war for survival and Jews are their enemies, which in their eyes makes killing Jews legitimate. Thirdly, social media has been the medium that has amplified the strikingly similar techniques put forth by both jihadis and right-wing extremists to spread their worldviews, trigger radicalization, and recruit to the cause. Fourthly, for the most part, the attacks have not been directed by formal terrorist organizations, but rather carried out by self-directed, internet-inflamed terrorists who claim to be acting on behalf of causes greater then themselves—both jihadi and right-wing extremist. Finally, in more than a few of the cases, the ‘fame’ that violent extremists gain from their actions can inspire others to copy these actions or commit similar crimes.
However, what may be the most striking findings from this case study analysis are that, first, Europe has become the focal point of the jihadi terror threat to Jews in the West and second, the United States has become a new, emerging. focal point of the extreme right-wing terror threat to Jews in the West. To be clear, these findings do not mean there is not a jihadi threat to Jews in the United States. Yet, it is plausible that since the U.S. intelligence community and law enforcement have been so seized by the jihadi threat since 9/11, it has been more effectively suppressed than the extreme-right threat, which has not received similar resources. In terms of Europe, the volume of the jihadi threat, evidenced by the close to 5,000 Islamic State-linked European foreign fighters,112 has made it more difficult to suppress, resulting in more successful jihadi attacks in Europe and more deadly attacks on Jews. Similarly, in Europe, it would be incorrect to conclude that there is no threat from the extreme-right to Jews. But, it is possible that the European variant of “white genocide” theory, the Great Replacement, which views Jews as fellow victims, rather than enablers of white extinction, has moderated it. Mitchell D. Silber is the former Director of Intelligence Analysis at the New York City Police Department and is currently an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s graduate School for Public and International Affairs. He is currently involved in a two-year research project analyzing anti-Semitic violence in Europe. Follow @MitchSilber
WHY MIDDLE EAST MUSLIMS ARE TAUGHT TO HATE JEWS
For far too long the pervasive Middle Eastern qualification of Jews as murderers and bloodsuckers was dismissed in the West
as an extreme view of radical fringe groups.
But it is not.
It is time for the region's secular movements
to start a counter-education in tolerance.
The Christian Science Monitor, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, January 24, 2013
CAMBRIDGE, MASS. — Egypt’s newly elected president, Mohamed Morsi, was caught on tape about three years ago urging his followers to “nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred” for Jews and Zionists. Not long after, the then-leader of the Muslim Brotherhood described Zionists as “bloodsuckers who attack the Palestinians,” “warmongers,” and “descendants of apes and pigs.”
These remarks are disgusting, but they are neither shocking nor new. As a child growing up in a Muslim family, I constantly heard my mother, other relatives, and neighbors wish for the death of Jews, who were considered our darkest enemy. Our religious tutors and the preachers in our mosques set aside extra time to pray for the destruction of Jews.
For far too long the pervasive Middle Eastern qualification of Jews as murderers and bloodsuckers was dismissed in the West as an extreme view expressed by radical fringe groups. But it is not.
All over the Middle East, hatred for Jews and Zionists can be found in textbooks for children as young as 3, complete with illustrations of Jews with monster-like qualities. Mainstream educational television programs are consistently anti-Semitic. In songs, books, newspaper articles, and blogs, Jews are variously compared to pigs, donkeys, rats, and cockroaches, and also to vampires and a host of other imaginary creatures.
Consider this infamous dialogue between a 3-year-old and a television presenter, eight years before Mr. Morsi’s remarks.
Presenter: “Do you like Jews?”
3-year-old: “No.”
“Why don’t you like them?”
“Jews are apes and pigs.”
“Who said this?”
“Our God.”
“Where did he say this?”
“In the Koran.”
The presenter responds approvingly: “No [parents] could wish for Allah to give them a more believing girl than she ... May Allah bless her, her father, and mother.”
This conversation was not caught on hidden camera or taped by propagandists. It was featured on a prominent program called “Muslim Woman Magazine” and broadcast by Iqraa, the popular Saudi-owned satellite channel.
It is a major step forward for a sitting US administration and leading American newspapers to unequivocally condemn Morsi’s words. But condemnation is just the first move.
Here is an opportunity to acknowledge the breadth and depth of the attitude toward Jews in the Middle East, and how that affects the much desired but elusive peace process between Israel and the Palestinians.
So many explanations have been offered for the failure of successive US administrations to achieve that peace, but the answer is in Morsi’s words. Why would one make peace with bloodsuckers and descendants of apes and monkeys?
Millions of Muslims have been conditioned to regard Jews not only as the enemies of Palestine but as the enemies of all Muslims, of God, and of all humanity. Arab leaders far more prominent and influential than Morsi have been tireless in “educating” or “nursing” generations to believe that Jews are “the scum of the human race, the rats of the world, the violators of pacts and agreements, the murderers of the prophets, and the offspring of apes and pigs.” (These are the words of the Saudi sheik Abdul Rahman al-Sudais, imam at the Masjid al-Haram mosque in Mecca.)
In 2011, a Pew survey found that in Turkey, just 4 percent of those surveyed held a “very favorable” or “somewhat favorable” view of Jews; in Indonesia, 10 percent; in Pakistan, 2 percent. In addition, 95 percent of Jordanians, 94 percent of Egyptians, and 95 percent of Lebanese hold a “very unfavorable” view of Jews.
In recent decades Israeli and American administrations negotiated with unelected Arab despots, who played a double game. They honored the formal peace treaties by not conducting military attacks against Israel. But they condoned the Islamists’ dissemination of hatred against Israel, Zionism, and Jews.
As the Islamists spread their influence through civil institutions, young people were nursed on hatred.
In the wake of the Arab Spring, as the people take a chance on democracy, they and their new leadership want to see their ideals turned into policy.
For too many of those who fought for their own liberation, one of those ideals is the end of peace with Israel. The United States must make clear to Morsi that this is not an option.
This is also a crucial opportunity for the region’s secular movements, which must speak out against the clergy’s incitement of young minds to hatred. It is time for these secular movements to start a counter-education in tolerance.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a fellow at the Belfer Center’s Future of Diplomacy Project at the Harvard Kennedy School, and author of the books “Infidel” and “Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations.”
© 2013 Global Viewpoint Network/Tribune Media Services. Hosted online by The Christian Science Monitor.
EYE ON ANTISEMITISM.
THE 1300 YEAR OLD MUSLIM ORIGINS OF HATE
Islam's hate does not stop with Jews,
but Jew-hatred is one of its malignancies.
Arutz Sheva Victor Sharpe, 12/06/16
Islamists hate Jews, gays, Christians - and the world ignores this at its peril.
This resistant and malignant infection of hate is able to evolve and poison human beings generation after generation.
One of its most virulent infestations of Islamic Jew-hatred today takes the form of the so-called Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) scourge, which targets the only true and vibrant democracy - Israel - in the hellish Muslim dominated Middle East.
The areas of the world, which are perpetrating hideous crimes against humanity, are ignored by the myrmidons who support the anti-Jewish bigotry and prejudice of BDS.
For the indoctrinated supporters of BDS, there is no apparent interest whatsoever in the horrors taking place daily in N. Korea, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Mali, Guinea-Bissau or in so many of the countries that make up the 197 members of the United Nations.
For the BDS rabble only the Jewish state is the target. Proof, if ever it was needed, that BDS is primarily and demonically anti-Jewish.
Ask the BDS supporters about the continuing illegal occupation and ethnic cleansing of the native Greek population of northern Cyprus by Turkey, or the decades of illegal occupation of Tibet by Communist China,and they remain ignorant of or deathly silent about those crimes against humanity, thus exposing their deplorable hypocrisy.
Any fair-minded person must contemplate why the BDS movement is focused solely on the Jewish state, while massacres of Christians, Yazidis, Kurds and others by ISIS continues all over the Middle East and are almost completely ignored. Eugene Ionesco’s Theater of the Absurd pales in comparison to BDS lunacy!
The BDS movement goes far beyond legitimate criticism of beleaguered Israel; it’s one and only target nation. In essence these haters call for the dismantling of the Jewish state and expulsion of its native Jewish population.
Here then is the naked and hate filled desire by the BDS thugs to commit ethnic cleansing and force a real apartheid upon the Jewish citizens of Israel. This then is the crime against humanity that is spewed by BDS within colleges, liberal churches, mainstream media outlets, the arts and sciences.
Since 1948, the reconstituted Jewish state - born again in its ancestral and biblical homeland - has endured a boycott imposed upon it by the Arab League but until 1973 the Arab trade boycott was ineffective until the price of oil increased five-fold.
Oil then became the wonder weapon the Arab world could now exert against the energy hungry West. It gave Islam a new impetus to win the world for Allah.
But now that pernicious boycott has been strengthened and emboldened by even vaster sums of money from the oil companies pouring into the coffers of assorted oil rich Arab kingdoms, tyrannies and sheikhdoms.
Much of the endless flow of misplaced Arab and Muslim wealth increasingly goes into U.S., European and British universities in order to finance the demonization of Israel among unwitting and pliable students.
The virulent campaign of deception and outright lies has been helped by many leftist, often tenured, professors who maintain an unholy alliance with Islamists and help oil the wheels of hatred against embattled Israel.
The BDS boycott exceeds all divisions between left and right. It is launched against all Israelis and all Jews - regardless of their political affiliation or opinion.
With respect to this current manifestation of Arab and Islamic hate, aided and abetted by their willing and mindless executioners in the West, it would be instructive to realize that there is nothing new under the sun.
The origins of this evil anti-Jewish discrimination took clear shape in Islam as long ago as between the years 717 and 720, when Caliph Omar ordered that all non-Muslims who fell under the yoke of Islam - the dhimmis - should wear distinctive dress and be boycotted and sanctioned in every way. This led to hapless Jews - and Christians - by the twelfth century forced to wear yellow patches on their clothes.
This abomination aimed at identifying and singling out Jews for persecution was often copied in Europe and England by both the Church and temporal powers throughout the long dark centuries of enforced Jewish statelessness.
It raged during the medieval inferno and beyond and was diabolically imposed upon the Jews who fell under the German Nazi juggernaut of death during the Holocaust.
Life for Jews under Islamic rule was a veritable vale of tears, as it was under much of Christendom. The odious forced incarceration of Jews in European ghettos was in fact an invention of the Muslim world.
The ghetto, or mellah in Arabic, was first created in a particular quarter of Cairo, Egypt, during the eleventh century, followed by the first walled-in mellah in Fez, Morocco.
After Mohammed destroyed the Jewish tribes of the Hedjaz (present day Saudi-Arabia) in 624-628, relentless and horrific persecution of Jews by Muslims broke out in every subsequent century.
This persecution took many lives and left the Jewish survivors facing boycotts and sanctions: fast forward to the present day Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) hatred. See! There is nothing new under the sun when it comes to hatred of the Jews.
Here then we have the 8th century Muslim origin of the current manifestation of anti-Jewish bigotry and discrimination we know today as BDS.
Arguably, of course, anti-Jewish boycotts and sanctions began even earlier within Christendom, but the BDS supporters of today are engaged in aiding and abetting an Arab and Muslim onslaught against the Jewish state.
We can trace much of the original anti-Jewish discrimination back to the time of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian who passed imperial edicts during the 5th century, which gravely interfered with Jewish religious and secular life.
Jews were even forbidden to pronounce aloud their fundamental prayer, the Shema, (Deuteronomy 6:4) affirming the Divine Unity of G-d’s unalterable Oneness. This is the primal confession of Faith within Judaism for every other Jewish belief turns upon it; all goes back to it; all flows from it.
“Hear O Israel, the Lord is our G-d, the Lord is One.”
The Jews under Justinian’s cruel edicts had to pray under their breath, just like the deplorable situation that exists today at the world’s holiest Jewish religious site, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
On the sacred Temple Mount, Jews are today forbidden by the impudent Muslim occupiers, the so-called Waqf, to pray or be seen to even move their lips in prayer.
The UN partitioning of the geographical territory, sometimes known as Palestine (a state that has never existed in all of recorded history and does not exist today), failed to inaugurate a new era of Jewish-Arab relations, it merely capped centuries of Arab and Islamic oppression and persecution of Jewish minorities.
And Islam will never accept any non-Muslim nation within its midst where once the Muslim foot trod triumphal. Forever that land is considered within the Dar-al Harb (the House of War) and Muslims are enjoined to wage endless war against it until it returns to the Dar al-Islam (the House of Islam). So much for Peace Now!
The increasing anti-Semitism that corrodes the Arab and Muslim world has made it today the active nexus for a loathsome international anti-Semitic revival, barely 70 years since the Holocaust destroyed one third of the world’s Jewish population; reducing it from 18 million to barely 12 million.
It is this war of economic coercion, extortion and blackmail that the BDS is waging today against the Jewish state with the active support of the useful idiots who act as BDS storm-troopers and who, in the main, are ignorant of the fundamental issues that drive the conflict with those Arabs who call themselves Palestinians.
Victor Sharpe is a prolific freelance writer with several published books including the trilogy, Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.
ANTISEMITISM IN THE ARAB WORLD - 1
Guided History: History Research Guides by Boston University Students,
Joshua A. Dalva
INTRODUCTION
Jews and Muslims have lived amongst each other since the very beginning of Islam. Throughout history, Jews have lived in the Arab world under Muslim rule and their interaction has been defined as one of second-class subjects living in foreign lands. In today’s world, Jews and Muslims are seemingly convergent and engaged in constant conflict and struggle. The dominance of Antisemitism in the Arab World has shown historical trends of rampant Anti-Jewish violence, hate speech, conspiracy theories, and general disdain of one peoples towards another. One such conspiracy theory, the 1850 Damascus affair became a catalyst for propagating the Blood Libel throughout the Arab world and popular literature. While the events in the 19th century and turn to the 20th century reflect a more intensified Antisemitic brand in the Arab world, it is not entirely obvious if the Damascus Affair can be pinned as the sole or even most influential catalyst. Thus, the discussion of Antisemitism and its appearance as a dominant force in Islamic society has created conversation of where it came from and what it’s based on. Today, the question arrises if Antisemitism in the Arab world is connected to the State of Israel or not and if any connection exists. As in any topic, in the discussion of Antisemitism in the Arab World, there are myths to be dispelled and truths to be exposed. Is Antisemitism the same as Anti-Zionism? How related are they and did one exist before the other? Are Arabs fundamentally Antisemitic? Is this a religious, political, or deeply engrained societal phenomenon? What does
history tell us about this issue?
The purpose of this guide is to explore the issue of Antisemitism in the Arab World. Using religious, historical, narrative, and political sources, the topic can be explored and conclusions can be drawn. Central to the theme of Antisemitism in the Arab world is the discussion of Anti-Zionism and if it can be combined in the discussion of Antisemitism or if it is separate. Ultimately this guide and subsequent research will seek uncover the origins, reasons, and future of Antisemitism in the Arab world.
Go to site to read review of references
ANTISEMITISM IN THE ARAB WORLD - 2
Wikipedia. Click to go to full article
Antisemitism in the Arab world refers to discrimination against Jews in Arab countries. While Arabs are also a Semitic people, the meaning of the English term "antisemitism" refers to discrimination against Jews (see antisemitism: Etymology and usage).
Arab antisemitism is believed to have expanded since the 19th century. Jews, like other minority groups within the Muslim world, were subject to various restrictions long before that (see Dhimmi). However, despite its restrictive nature, dhimmi status also afforded the "People of the Book", provided they did not contest the inferior social and legal status imposed on them, relative security against persecution and welfare most of the time—a protection that was missing for non-Christians in most of Europe until the institutionalization of equality under a secular idea of citizenship after the French Revolution—and allowed them to enjoy their respective religious laws and ways of life.
Antisemitism in the Arab world has increased greatly in modern times, for many reasons: the breakdown of the Ottoman Empire and traditional Islamic society; European influence, brought about by Western imperialism and Christian Arabs; Nazi propaganda; resentment over Jewish nationalism (see Zionism); and the rise of Arab nationalism. The rise of political Islam during the 1980’s and afterwards provided a new mutation of Islamic antisemitism, which gave the hatred of Jews a religious component.
For most of the past fourteen hundred years, according to Bernard Lewis, Arabs have not been anti-semitic as the word is used in the West. In his view this is because, for the most part, Arabs are not Christians brought up on stories of Jewish deicide. In Islam, such stories are rejected by the Qur'an as a blasphemous absurdity. Since Muslims do not consider themselves as the "true Israel", they do not feel threatened by the survival of Jews. Because Islam did not retain the Old Testament, no clash of interpretations between the two faiths can therefore arise. There is, says Lewis, no Muslim theological dispute between their religious institutions and the Jews.
While there were anti-semitic incidents in the early twentieth century, antisemitism increased dramatically as a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict. After the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the Palestinian exodus, the creation of the state of Israel, and Israeli victories during the wars of 1956 and 1967 were a severe humiliation to Israel's opponents - primarily Egypt, Syria and Iraq. However, by the mid 1970s the vast majority of Jews had left Arab and Muslim countries, moving primarily to Israel, France and the United States. The reasons for the exodus are varied and disputed (see Expulsions).
By the 1980’s, according to Bernard Lewis, the volume of anti-semitic literature published in the Arab world, and the authority of its sponsors, seemed to suggest that classical antisemitism had become an essential part of Arab intellectual life, considerably more than in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France, and to a degree that has been compared to Nazi Germany.
In their 2008 report on contemporary Arab-Muslim antisemitism, the Israeli Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center dates the beginning of this phenomenon to the spread of classic European Christian antisemitism into the Arab world starting in the late 19th century.
Examples of information given to Arabs about Jews are:
In the year 2003, Israeli-Arab Raed Salah, the leader of the northern branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel published the following poem in the Islamic Movement's periodical:
You Jews are criminal bombers of mosques,
Slaughterers of pregnant women and babies.
Robbers and germs in all times,
The Creator sentenced you to be loser monkeys,
Victory belongs to Muslims, from the Nile to the Euphrates.
During a speech in 2007, Salah accused Jews of using children's blood to bake bread.
"We have never allowed ourselves to knead [the dough for] the bread that breaks the fast in the holy month of Ramadan with children's blood," he said. "Whoever wants a more thorough explanation, let him ask what used to happen to some children in Europe, whose blood was mixed in with the dough of the [Jewish] holy bread."
Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed Mahdi Akef has denounced what he called "the myth of the Holocaust" in defending (the then) Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's denial of it.
Wikipedia has summarised Islamic terrorism as comprising terrorist acts by groups or individuals who use Islamic and Islamist motivations or goals for their actions. Islamic terrorists have relied on interpretations of the tenets of the Quran and the Hadith. Such groups have cited Quranic verses and Hadith to justify violence and killing. Recently, there have been incidents on a global scale, where certain hardline Islamic groups have started advocating beheading and enslaving in the name of religion and caliphate against other sects of Muslims and non-Muslims (kuffar). This has been met with armed resistance from these oppressed Muslim groups and moderate Muslims have taken a strong stance against such ideology. Go to article for more detail
IRAN’S ANTISEMITISM CAN’T BE REASONED WITH
Time,
Rabbi David Wolpe the Max Webb Senior Rabbi, Sinai Temple,
Los Angeles, March 30, 2015
One might as easily ask the tiger to be a vegan
As Passover approaches, the Jewish world has yet to fully turn its attention from the earlier holiday of Purim. Purim recalls the efforts of a Persian anti-Semite to kill the Jews. Sound familiar?
This is a time to remind ourselves of the power of irrationality. Perhaps many Americans, as exemplified by the Barack Obama administration, do not understand a certain darkness in the soul. Let me explain.
The other day I gave a lecture on antisemitism and was asked for the thousandth time, “Why?” What is the source of this hatred? It has its origins in “otherness” — people who are different arouse our suspicion and often our enmity. For much of Western history, the Jew was the symbol of the person who is unlike the majority. But that is not a sufficient explanation. Nor is any historical or sociological circumstance enough to explain why less than 1% of the world’s population arouses more than 50% of its crazy hatreds. antisemitism is not about Jews; it is about anti-Semites.
When the leader of Iran tweets about wiping Israel off the map, our instant reaction is that he isn’t serious, and that the message was just for domestic consumption. Rationality has a hard time comprehending unreasoning hatred. The sober man won’t believe the drunk can’t simply control himself.
The deception lies with the idea that one who is mad in one thing must be mad in all things. Many anti-Semites are supremely sensible about things other than antisemitism. So you can sit across the negotiating table and hear them speak quite rationally about scientific data and power relations and believe, “This person is essentially like me.” That is a natural assumption and a deep delusion.
That same person will also believe, in the face of all evidence, that Jews control the banks, or that the Mossad brought down the towers on 9/11, or that the Holocaust was a fraud, or that every depredation and misfortune that that person, or their people, has suffered is somehow the fault of the Jews. And if only the world would be rid of Israel, then the Sunni and Shiite would lie together as the biblical lion and lamb.
So is it surprising when a defector from the Iran nuclear-deal negotiations claims that Iran is getting just what it wants? Of course the negotiators will not demand that Iran recognize Israel or cease its encouragement of terror; one might as easily ask the tiger to be a vegan. You cannot expect nations or individuals to abandon part of their raison d’être.
Now we have the news that Iran, which had promised to ship its stockpile of uranium to Russia, has reneged on that portion of the deal. This is a negotiating tactic with which we should be familiar: As the deal gets close, and the sides have a greater investment in it being consummated, the Iranians will take pieces off the table. Not enough to blow up the deal (there are “other ways” to deal with the material, according to the New York Times), but enough to make it less effective, less comprehensive, and more manageable when finally signed. To the conspiratorial mind, every concession is not an advance to a solution but a tactical triumph.
As I have written before, an Iranian bomb combines the two great taboos of the 20th century, Auschwitz and Hiroshima. It is a nuclear bomb in service of destroying the Jewish people. The drive to acquire one will not be derailed by appeals to Iranian self-interest. We all recall the military vehicles diverted to concentration camps despite the desperate need for them at the German front, because the urgent task of killing Jews could brook no interruption. That entire nations could hate Jews to their detriment is no surprise to Israel’s prime minister: After all, his father wrote a noted history of the Spanish Inquisition.
The dark, relentless, and unsparing hatred that swirls about is evident every single day in broadcasts, tweets, and speeches from clerics and political leaders all across the Middle East. We are accustomed to saying that it is our values, our way of life, our history, or something else that others hate. When it comes to antisemitism though, it is not about Jews, it is about anti-Semites. It is a derangement not susceptible to rational analysis or rational deterrence. We are about to strike a deal with people who harbor an implacable hatred. Iran may seek leverage for all sorts of regional, hegemonic goals as well. As long as the current regime holds power, however, there is one unwavering, non-negotiable goal. And unlike the sunshine of reason, deep hatreds are patient. Read next: Lincoln and the Jews
The Tom Lantos Archives on Anti-Semitism and Holocaust Denial
Can the Arab world leave anti-Semitism behind? Washington Post, Richard Cohen, 28.2.2011
Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim countries Wikiwand
Antisemitism in the Arab world Wikipedia
Global Anti-Semitism: Select Incidents in 2019 ADL
The Centrality of Anti-Semitism in the Islamic State’s Ideology and Its Connection to Anti-Shiism MDPI
1 Concordia Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies, Montreal, QC H3G 1M8, Canada
2 Canadian Institute for Jewish Research, Montreal, QC H3G 2K7, Canada