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Islamic anti-Semitism, although not restricted to the Islamist movements, is a key factor in the Islamists’ war against the modern world.
It lies behind Tehran’s desire to destroy the “cancerous tumor” of Israel and motivated the recent Iranian attack on Israel by an armed drone. It inspires Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s threat that Israelis won’t be able “to find a tree to hide behind”, a clear allusion to a hadith that demands the killing of Jews.[1] It causes Mahmoud Abbas to deny any connection between Jerusalem and the Jews2 and transforms the political conflict between Israel and the Arabs into a religious struggle between right and wrong.
Islamic antisemitism mobilizes the terrorists of the Islamic State to murder Jews in Europe and it ensures that not only in Amman, but also in Berlin and Malmo Arabs threaten Jews with this particular war cry: Khaybar, Khaybar, O Jews; the army of Muhammad will return. Khaybar is the name of an oasis inhabited by Jews that Mohammed conquered in blood in 628. It is also the name of an assault rifle made in Iran and a type of rocket used by Hezbollah to fire at Israeli cities in 2006.
WHAT DOES THE TERM “ISLAMIC ANTISEMITISM” MEAN?
This term is neither a general attack on Islam, whose texts also include Jew-friendly passages, nor a general accusation against Muslims, quite a few of whom are against antisemitism. Instead, it refers to a specific kind of antisemitism based on a fusion of two sources: The anti-Judaism of early Islam and the modern antisemitism of Europe.
European antisemitism, as manifested in the phantasm of the Jewish world conspiracy, was alien to the original image of the Jews in Islam. Only in the Christian tradition do Jews appear as a deadly and powerful force capable of killing even God’s only son. They were able to bring death and ruin on humanity – being held responsible for outbreaks of the plague. The Nazis believed in the phantasm of the Jews as the rulers of the world, who were thus also responsible for all its misfortunes. There was, according to their phantasm, only one way to the redemption of the world: the systematic annihilation of the Jews.
Not so in Islam. Here, it was not the Jews who murdered the Prophet, but the Prophet who murdered Jews: In the years 623 to 627, Mohammed had all the Jewish tribes in Medina enslaved, expelled or killed. Therefore, some typical features of Christian antisemitism did not appear in the Muslim world: “There were no fears of Jewish conspiracy and domination, no charges of diabolic evil. Jews were not accused of poisoning wells or spreading the plague.“[3]
Instead, Muslims used to treat the Jews with contempt or condescending toleration. The hatred of Jews fostered in the Qur’an and in the Sunnah pursued the goal of keeping them down as dhimmis: hostility was accompanied by devaluation.
ISLAM AND JEWRY AND THE BLUDAN CONFERENCE
Islamic antisemitism did not develop spontaneously but was invented and used as a means to an end. This process began about 80 years ago in the context of Arab attempts to stop the Zionist immigration to Palestine which considerably increased in the 1930s.
The first text that propagated sheer Jew-hatred in an Islamic context by mixing selected anti-Jewish episodes of Mohammed’s life with the so-called wickedness of Jews in the 20th century was a 31-page brochure in the Arabic language with the title Islam and Jewry, published on August 18, 1937 in Cairo.
The publisher of the first Arabic edition of Islam and Jewry was Mohamad Ali al-Taher, Director of the “Palestinian-Arab Bureau of Information” in Egypt. Al-Taher was a well-known journalist from Palestine who had lived in Cairo for many years.
He was, according to the Norwegian professor of Middle East Studies, Brynjar Lia, one of Amin el-Husseini’s “Palestinian contacts in Cairo” and is said to have contributed to the transfer of German Nazi money to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
THE ESCHATOLOGICAL “FINAL SOLUTION”
“Anyone who looks for Islamic anti-Jewish pronouncements can even find a tradition according to which the Resurrection will be preceded by a massacre of the Jews by the Muslims – an eschatological ‘final solution’”, wrote Yehoshafat Harkabi in his seminal study of 1972, Arab attitudes to Israel.[39] As proof, he quoted the following hadith from the 1937 pamphlet Islam and Jewry:
“Said the Prophet, on whom be peace: the hour of the Resurrection will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and the Muslims kill them, until the Jews hide behind the stones and trees, and then the trees and stones will say: Oh Muslim! Oh Abdallah! Here is a Jew behind me, come and kill him! Apart from the gharqad, for it is one of the Jews’ trees. Said the Imam al-Tabari: The gharqad is a well-known tree, with thorns, which is to be found in Jerusalem, where the killing of the Dajjal and the Jews will take place.”
This is a particularly cruel hadith. It not only makes the killing of the Jews essential to the Muslims’ final salvation but also makes even the tree – symbol of living nature – and the stone – symbol of dead nature – demand that the Jews be killed, as if the whole universe were condemning them to death. It is a sadistic hadith because it shows the Jew not as a dangerous, but as a frightened and trembling figure who tries to hide but is nevertheless dragged out of his concealment and relentlessly killed.
http://www.matthiaskuentzel.de/contents/islamic-antisemitism-how-it-originated-and-spreadIRAN’S “FINAL SOLUTION” FOR PALESTINE
Iran’s rulers clearly consider the ambition to destroy Israel to be part of a religious war.
Already in 1963, at the beginning of his career, Ruhollah Khomeini concentrated his antisemitic attacks on “the enemies of the Qur’an”, reports his biographer Amir Taheri. Khomeini advised his followers to “recall and explain the catastrophes inflicted upon Islam by the Jews and the Baha’is.” He claimed that the Israeli government had printed millions of copies of “a falsified Qur’an” in a bid to “destroy our glorious faith.”[49]
Pretty interesting read in my honest opinion, especially the comparison to antisemitism in Christian Europe.