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SINCE THE HOLOCAUST, ANTISEMITISM has become a major humanitarian concern across cultures and civilizations.1 The renunciation and prevention of hatred of Jews and of the murderous practices associated with it ranks today as a universal value, symbolic of the effort to combat the dehumanization of any group of people in order to legitimate their annihilation. In this chapter I draw on the work of the Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt and her theory of totalitarianism. Arendt drew a distinction between traditional Judeophobia, which is an evil, and antisemitism, a greater evil that advocates genocide. Antisemitism, she argued in the preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism, “is not merely the hatred of Jews.” Much more than prejudice, it presents the Jews as an “evil” to be eradicated. The distinction between Judeophobia and antisemitism is pertinent to the study of the place of Jews in Islam. In exploring this distinction in this chapter, I also draw heavily on the groundbreaking work of the historian Bernard Lewis, as well as on more recent work by Jeffrey Herf that relates the issue to contemporary Middle East politics.
Antisemitism, Judeophobia, and Expressions of Grievances
In a New York Times review of two books on antisemitism, entitled “A Hatred That Resists Exorcism,” Edward Rothstein begins by asking, “Is there anything left to be said about Antisemitism?”2 He then asks an even more pertinent question: “Aren’t those vulgar hatreds expressed by Muslim protesters … just frustrated expressions of justifiable political grievances?” He thus puts his finger on a key notion employed to deny the existence of a new antisemitism.
Antisemites do not view themselves as racists but instead see themselves as victims of a powerful Jewish conspiracy. As Rothstein puts it, “Antisemitism never sees itself as hatred; it views itself as a revelation. An attack on the Jew is never offensive, it is always defensive. This is precisely how the Nazis portrayed it. It is precisely how Islamist ideology does as well, evident, for example, in the principles and founding documents of Hamas and Hezbollah.… Nazi ideology bears many resemblances to that of contemporary Islamic extremism.”3 This is what sets antisemitism apart from prejudice.
Prejudice, often combined with the demonization of the cultural, religious, or ethnic other, is common in history and hardly restricted to anti-Jewish sentiments. It can be found in all cultures and levels of society. In any culture, prejudice can be expressed to the point of cruelty and can become a threat to its victims. Antisemitism is something else. It does not stop at the evil of prejudice and resentment but has a further agenda. Its victims are denied the right to exist. In an article in the American Scholar, Lewis writes:
It is perfectly legitimate to criticize the action and policies of the state of Israel or the doctrines of Zionism without necessarily being motivated by antisemitism.… It is perfectly possible to hate and even persecute Jews without necessarily being antisemitic.… Antisemitism is something quite different. It is marked by two special features.… [First,] Jews are judged by a standard different from that applied to others.… The other special feature of antisemitism … is the accusation against Jews of cosmic evil.… This accusation of cosmic, satanic evil attributed to Jews … is what has come to be known in modern times as antisemitism.4
The attribution of cosmic evil is what justifies the call for annihilation and legitimates the genocidal agenda ultimately practiced by the Nazis in the Holocaust. Modern European antisemitism is thus far more perilous than any Judeophobia.
Judeophobia is not particular to German or European culture. As Lewis points out, it was present throughout Islamic history. Genocidal antisemitism, on the other hand, is a specifically European, primarily German, disease that never existed in Islam before the twentieth century. Its first appearance in the world of Islam was its adoption, more or less in its German form, by secular Arab nationalists in the 1930s. The more recent Islamization of antisemitism is a different and, I will argue, more dangerous phenomenon. While Islam, as a culture and a faith, is free of such hatred, this antisemitism is a basic feature of contemporary Islamism. Therefore the distinction between Islam and Islamism is—on all levels—pertinent to the relations of the world of Islam to Israel and to the Jews, as well as to the West in general.
In his anthology The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, Andrew Bostom makes the disturbing argument that there exists a “specific Islamic antisemitism”5 that precludes any mutual recognition between Islam and Judaism. The inclusion of “legacy” in Bostom’s title suggests that antisemitism is somehow traditional and essential to Islam. The jacket copy, which Bostom presumably approved, asserts that “Islamic antisemitism is as old as Islam itself,” a contention supported within the book by Bostom’s allegation that it is wrong “to assert that Muslim Jew-hatred is entirely a twentieth century phenomenon.” As well as ignoring Hannah Arendt, this notion of “Islamic antisemitism” also ignores the historical facts presented by Lewis in his Jews of Islam. What Bostom repudiates is exactly what I state as the major premise of this chapter. Without denying or seeking to minimize traditional Islamic Judeophobia, I maintain that the attribution of a general and rampant phobia to all Muslims in their relation to Jews is not correct. There is no such thing as an “Islamic antisemitism.”
I am not merely splitting hairs: the difference is important. The idea of Islamic antisemitism reinforces the artificial fault lines between Muslims and Jews at a time when we need to promote bridging between the groups. Any effort at a Jewish-Muslim dialogue to reach a shared understanding requires proper knowledge of the two distinctions central to this chapter: first, between Islam and Islamism, and second, between Judeophobia and antisemitism. In his address in Cairo on June 4, 2009, President Obama called for the unequivocal condemnation of antisemitism and of the Holocaust as well as Holocaust denial, and for mutual recognition of the right of both Jews and Palestinians to their own states. He described seven “sources of tension” between the peoples of Islamic civilization and the West, one of which is the conflict between Israel and Palestine, and in front of his Islamic audience he courageously deplored the suffering of Jews exposed to antisemitism.
The New Antisemitism
The notion of a “new antisemitism” became popular after Pope Benedict XVI used the phrase in a speech at the Cologne synagogue in August 2005.6 Even though the pope did not specify what he was talking about and made no reference to Islamism, the setting was important: Cologne is among the strongholds of political Islam in Western Europe. Among the several varieties of the new antisemitism, the Islamized version is the most prominent. The phenomenon has five distinguishing features:
1. It is distinctly European and Christian in origin. European antisemitism, in particular its genocidal Nazi variety, was transmitted as an ideology to the Arab world in two stages and took root there. Its first advocates were Christian Arabs, followed by secular Muslims who embraced antisemitism as part of a secular pan-Arab nationalism.
2. The Islamization of this transplanted European antisemitism is a new phenomenon. It is a mistake to think that Islamist antisemitism emerges directly from secular Arab nationalism, and a worse mistake to confuse the two. At the same time, Islamism and secular pan-Arab nationalism, though mutually antagonistic, are related, and they borrow from each other. Political Islam gives antisemitism a religious imprint and aims to make it look like an authentic part of traditional Islam, not an import from the West.
3. The new antisemitism is thus no longer a mere adoption of the old European phenomenon, in either its Nazi or neo-Nazi form. As embraced by political Islam, it is strengthened by the cultural underpinning it acquires. Despite its claims of authenticity, most elements of the ideology of Islamism are based on an invention of tradition, but this invented tradition allows Islamist antisemitism to be articulated in culturally familiar terms. Compared with secular Arab nationalism,7 which was open about borrowing from Europe, at times even from Nazi ideology, religionized Islamist antisemitism is local and claims to be authentic, and is therefore more appealing. Religionized antisemitism is thus more dangerous.
4. The new antisemitism is often camouflaged as a variety of contemporary antiglobalization. This explains its appeal to the European left, which is thereby permitted to overlook the fact that Islamism is a right-wing ideology. Islamist antisemitism would presumably be condemned by the European left if it were not disguised as anti-Zionism, and if Islamist denunciations of Israel and the Jews as “evil” were not combined with anti-Americanism.8 The anti-American component of Islamism is partly based on the conspiracy-driven belief that Jews rule the world9 from New York and Washington, the twin headquarters of capitalist globalization. Antiglobalization thus shields political Islam from criticism by the European left.
5. Anti-Zionism serves as a cover for antisemitism. (This is not, I hasten to add, always true: the late French historian Maxime Rodinson made fair and reasonable criticisms of Zionism.)10 While most in the West distinguish between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, this distinction does not exist in the Islamized variety of antisemitism. In Islamist thinking, Zionism is part of the Jews’ master plan to establish their rule over the entire world. Islamists equate Jews with Zionists and view them as a threat to humanity. The implication is clear: they must be extinguished.
Two themes in Islamist ideology underlie its version of antisemitism. The first is the Islamist idea of “Islam under siege,” and the second is the idea of a competition over the political order of the world. Islamists propagate the idea of a besieged Islam facing a mu’amarah11 (conspiracy) devised by al-yahud wa al-salibiyun (Jews and crusaders), and they tamper with historical facts to present the Jews as the instigators of the Crusades, when in fact Jews were victims of the invaders as much as Muslims were. The second theme relates to the Islamist ideology of creating a new political order throughout the world. Islamists see themselves as competing against the Jews, who they believe are equally poised to shape the world order around Jewish beliefs. These two strains of thought unite to create the vision of “cosmic, satanic evil” that underlies Islamist antisemitism.
The Arab nationalists’ importation of antisemitism ignored a heritage of Jewish-Islamic amity that is well documented in historical records. Bernard Lewis describes the cultural life of Jews in medieval Andalusia, then part of the Islamic world, as a “Jewish-Islamic symbiosis.”12 With the decline of Islamic Spain, these Andalusian Jews were invited to relocate elsewhere in the Ottoman-Islamic Empire under the protection of Muslim sultans. Jews and Muslims defended Jerusalem shoulder to shoulder against the invading crusaders. Jewish historians contributed to discovering Islam and to upgrading it in Western scholarship to a world civilization13—and they did this, moreover, in the face of European prejudice against the civilization of Islam and its people. Today, Islamism is attempting to erase these positive records from our collective memory, and to make the world forget that antisemitism is itself a product of the modern era. In Islamist writing there is no mention of the positive place of Jews in Islamic history that we see in Lewis’s work.
In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire found itself increasingly exposed to modernity. In the Arab parts of the empire, Arab Christians, strongly influenced by French culture and ideas, had a more important role in the Arab world than they have today. They were the proponents of Arab liberalism and also of secular nationalism. Neither these Arab Christians nor the Muslim secularists were anti-Western in their attitudes—quite the opposite. Their enthusiasm for the concept of the nation contributed to the dissolution of the Islam-based Ottoman order in 1923 and the abolition of the caliphate in 1924. The Republic of Turkey was not only the first secular state in the world of Islam but also the first Islamic country to recognize the Jewish state of Israel and to establish diplomatic relations with it. This amity has been eroding under the Islamist AKP. Since May 2010 the AKP has used the flotilla incident14 to cool Turkish-Israeli relations. Turkish prime minister Recep Erdoğan has made many statements about both that incident and Israel itself that were seen as antisemitic.
This new antisemitism in the Middle East springs from developments after World War I that fed a transformation of the nationalist mood from liberal to populist. In 1916 France and Great Britain had made promises of independence to the nationalists in order to enlist the Arab support against the Ottoman Empire, but both countries reneged. After the empire was defeated, the French and British designed the Sykes-Picot plan to turn the former Ottoman Middle Eastern provinces into colonies. Thinking themselves victims of a Franco-British conspiracy, the Arab nationalists denounced their former allies, now their colonizers, and found a new ally, Germany. They nurtured a Germanophilia that included the illusion that Arabs were now dealing with a “clean” European state, not a colonial power.15
At first, the shift was primarily ideological and cultural. It later became political through cooperation with the Nazis. Largely Francophile before the First World War, the Arab nationalists turned increasingly Germanophile during the 1920s; and under the Third Reich, this Germanophilia created a susceptibility to antisemitic propaganda.16 The German ideology of Volk had a formative influence on the Arab understanding of nation. Arab nationalists embraced the idea of an ethnic Kulturgemeinschaft in all of its exclusionary German implications. Some of these nationalists circulated the antisemitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion and shared an antisemitic perception of the Dreyfus affair in France.
When Arab nationalists approached the Nazis for help against their French and British colonizers, the Nazis were at first not interested. Lewis notes that they changed their minds “only when it became clear that Britain was an enemy, not a possible ally of the Nazis.… They used Arab nationalists not only against the Jews, but also against the British enemy.”17 In cooperating politically with Nazi Germany, the pan-Arab nationalists adopted its antisemitic ideology. This is how the totalitarian, genocidal form of antisemitism entered the world of Islam. Among the pan-Arab nationalists of that time were Rashid Ali Kailani, the leader of a Nazi-inspired coup in Iraq in 1941, and the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husaini, the man seen as the “founder of national movement” in Palestine.18 He met with Hitler on November 1941 and lived in Berlin from November 1941 until April 1945.
Mufti al-Husaini was a religious authority and, at the same time, an Arab nationalist. This fact confuses some scholars and induces them to identify him with political Islam. Even though he acted as a mufti, his ideas were rooted in Palestinian nationalism, not Islamism. Embracing Nazi ideology and submitting to its political leadership, as Husaini did, are things no modern Islamist would have done. Still, the distinction between pan-Arab secular and Islamist antisemitism is not absolute: it is important to acknowledge continuity next to the breaks, and, on these grounds, perhaps regard al-Husaini as a transitional figure between nationalism and Islamism. In Berlin in late 1937 he made explicitly Islamist arguments about Islam and the Jews, and he was one of the founders of the invented tradition of Islamist antisemitism.
Not only was Pan-Arab nationalism19 a secular ideology, openly influenced by European ideas, it was also restricted to the Arab world. By the very concept of a secular Arab nation, the nationalists implicitly abandoned the idea of a universal umma as a political entity. They did so not for conspiratorial reasons, as the Islamists imagine, but as part of their embrace of the modern age. The pan-Arabists’ vision of uniting all Arab peoples in one state, much like the United States of America, rests on national and ethnic foundations. They do not include non-Arab Muslims in their pan-Arabism because they are secular in their orientation. There is another distinction to be mentioned here, too. Unlike the pan-Arabists, the early pan-Islamists (such as al-Afghani) represented an ideology that aimed at uniting all Muslims in one imperial caliphate, but they did not seek to extend the caliphate beyond the confines of the umma. In this way pan-Islamism resembles pan-Arabism. As I argued in Chapter 2, the Islamist order of a nizam Islami is not the order of the caliphate, as often stated in the West, but something much broader and more modern.
The pan-Arab nationalists learned antisemitism in many ways from the Nazis, as Jeffrey Herf has shown in Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World. In a personal communication Bernard Lewis told me that the Nazis were most active in spreading antisemitic propaganda in the Middle East when Nazi Germany occupied France. He added that the Vichy regime opened such French colonies as Syria to Nazi penetration, giving a great boost to the propagation of Nazi doctrines into the Arab world.
The Islamization of Antisemitism
During this heyday of pan-Arab nationalism, Islamism existed on the fringe of society. Even though the Movement of the Muslim Brotherhood adopted the nationalists’ antisemitic ideology, it rejected most of their other positions—and in fact turned its own antisemitism against the nationalists. In the ideology of Islamism, the introduction of the nation-state is perceived as a Jewish conspiracy to undermine Islam.20 Islamists argue that Jews and Zionists instigated the abolition of the caliphate as the first step toward dividing the Muslim umma into small and weak nations. Nation building is therefore part of a Jewish master plan, carried out in conspiracy with non-Jewish enemies of Islam, to weaken the umma and destroy the Islamic polity. In this context, invented collective memories testify to the imagined alliance between the salibiyyun (crusaders) and the yahud (Jews) acting against Islam, an alliance that must be countered through global jihad. As we shall see, the only exception to the clear distinction between nationalism and Islamism is the case of Palestine.
If secular pan-Arab nationalism is a creation of “world Jewry,” as Islamists contend, then Arab nationalists must be acting as agents of the Jews. In their adoption of the European idea of the nation and their abandonment of the umma, the secularists are helping to fulfill the mukhatat yahudi (Jewish master plan) to destroy Islam.21 The restoration of the universal umma by political Islam is a strategy aimed at derailing this process of nation building. This is a major aspect of contemporary Islamist internationalism. Islamism aims to reverse the separation of religion and politics that has resulted from the conspiracy of “world Jewry” against Islam. The reversal is not only meant for the world of Islam: it includes global desecularization22 in the pursuit of an Islamic world order.
The antisemitism of Islamism is thus distinct from both the old Islamic Judeophobia and modern pan-Arab nationalist antisemitism. The Islamist internationalist agenda, poised to undermine the “master plan of the Jews” who want to rule the world, is the substance of a religionized and powerful ideology. This is not well understood in the study of antisemitism.23 Robert Wistrich, for instance, is a highly respected authority on antisemitism and one of the major sources of this study, but when he speaks of “Arab-Islamic antisemitism,” he deplorably confuses Islamized antisemitism with the secular antisemitic ideas of some Arab nationalists.24
Sayyid Qutb’s Struggle with the Jews
The significance of Qutb to Islamism is comparable to that of Marx to Marxism. He was never marginal, as some Western apologists of Islamist movements contend. No one wishing to study Islamism seriously can ignore Qutb’s writings. His pamphleteering generated dozens of small books, which are translated into almost all the languages of the Islamic world. You can find his books in bookstores in Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and Europe, as well as, of course, throughout the Middle East. Millions of copies are in print. Qutb is also the mastermind of the antisemitism inherent in Islamist ideology. In Ma’rakutna ma’a al-Yahud (Our struggle with the Jews), he laid out all the essential features of the Islamization of antisemitism. Qutb’s antisemitism thus merits some analysis.
Qutb is both the prime mover and the prime example of the sea change that occurred with the rise of political Islam. Egyptian Christian liberals such as Salamah Musah (1887–1958) were not antisemites in the genocidal sense in which I use the term. Others, such as the nineteenth-century Lebanese Christian Najib Azoury (d. 1916), did advocate European-style antisemitism—for instance in his book Le Réveil de la nation arabe, which clearly incited Jew hatred. But because he was essentially translating an ideology imported from elsewhere and had little to add, Azoury did not gain general appeal. His lack of popularity was due not to his being a Christian writing in French rather than Arabic but to the unintelligibility of his thoughts to an Arab and Muslim world whose local cultures were not yet familiar with this pattern of antisemitism.
The intellectual father of the Germanophile direction in pan-Arab nationalism, Sati al-Husri, also bears comparison with Sayyid Qutb. Husri himself never made any antisemitic statement, although his followers’ cooperation with Nazi Germany in Iraq is well documented. The nationalists were willing to ally themselves with the Nazis—which is certainly despicable enough—but even so, antisemitism was never as central to their ideology as it is to that of the Islamists.
The great turning point in the shift from pan-Arab nationalism to Islamism was the shattering Arab military defeat by Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967, which delegitimized the defeated secular regimes. After decades as a fringe ideology, Islamism suddenly became powerful and appealing. Qutb himself did not live to see this. In 1966 he was executed in public, his hanging ordered by the hero of pan-Arabism, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. But he had already laid the foundations for the Islamization of antisemitism.
In Our Struggle with the Jews Qutb describes the cosmic war the Muslim people are compelled to fight against the Jews and pays tribute to the youth who joins in that war “not for the sake of any material benefits, but simply to die and sacrifice one’s own life.” According to Qutb, Muslims have no choice but to fight, because the Jews themselves, whom he describes as the major enemy of Islam since the beginning of its history, want this war. They are accused of using their la’ama (wickedness) to destroy Islam. Qutb tells his readers that “this is an enduring war that will never end, because the Jews want no more and no less than to exterminate the religion of Islam.… Since Islam subdued them they are unforgiving and fight furiously through conspiracies, intrigues, and also through proxies who act in the darkness against all that Islam incorporates.”25
This cosmic war against the Jews, Qutb writes, is not a military one, since Jews have no armed forces except in Israel. He argues, “The Jews do not fight in the battlefield with weapons.… They fight in a war of ideas through intrigues, suspicions, defamations, and maneuvering” and with their “wickedness and cunning.”26 Clearly the contemporary notion of a “war of ideas”27 between democracy and global jihad is not solely an invention of Western commentators but an independent Islamist creation.
The claim of authenticity is pivotal. As we will see in Chapter 7, it constitutes one of Islamism’s basic features. Nonetheless, Qutb does acknowledge a European source for his war of ideas when he quotes The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to support his allegations about the “evil” of the Jews. But he reads this antisemitism into Islamic history and gives it an Islamic shape. This is the Islamization of antisemitism. According to Qutb, the war of ideas begins with early Islam in 622 and continues unabated throughout all of Islamic history, from Medina to the present. Unlike the Arab Christians and the Muslim secular pan-Arabists, Qutb goes far beyond simply copying European antisemitic beliefs: he adds the original element of an invented history of Islamic antisemitism.
The Qur’an distinguishes between ahl-al-kitab (people of the book—that is, Jews and Christians), who are acknowledged as believers, and the kuffar (unbeliever). As an educated Muslim, Qutb was familiar with this distinction, yet he creates a new category of al-kuffar al-yahud (the Jewish unbeliever). He legitimates this deviation from the religious doctrine with the allegation that the Jews, “who were originally in fact included in the community, forfeited this right from the very beginning.… They committed unbelief and became herewith the worst enemies of believers.” This enmity dates “from the very first moment, when an Islamic state was established at Medina, as it was opposed by the Jews, who acted against Muslims on the first day when those united themselves in one umma.”28 Qutb misrepresents the foundation of the polity of Medina when he speaks of a dawla (state). This term was never used in any of the Islamic sources in that time.
The war with the Jews continues throughout Islamic history. Qutb sums it up in a rhetorically memorable, thoroughly inaccurate, passage:
Who tried to undermine the nascent Islamic state in Medina and who incited Quraish in Mecca, as well as other tribes against its foundation? It was a Jew. Who stood behind the fitna-war and the slaying of the third caliph Othman and all that followed hereafter as tragedies? It was a Jew. And who inflamed national divides against the last caliph and who stood behind the turmoil that ended with the abolition of shari’a? It was Ataturk, a Jew. The Jews always stood and continue to stand behind the war waged against Islam. Today, this war persists against the Islamic revival in all places on earth.29
In addition to inventing a history of Jews and of the interaction of Jews with Islam, Qutb also describes simat al-yahud (the basic traits of the Jews), which he articulates in unequivocally antisemitic jargon. Here we find the attribution of “cosmic, satanic evil” that Lewis identifies as an essential feature of antisemitism. The passage quoted above continues with a list of antisemitic tales, constructed in religious terms that serve to underpin the view that there can be no settlement, no reconciliation, and no compromise with Jews, ever. Qutb believed that the Jews “use all weapons and instruments and employ all their ingenious Jewish cunning”30 in the pursuit of their malicious conspiracy. It is the Jews, he insists, not the Muslims, who in their evil wage this unending cosmic war.
One is inclined to ask Qutb why the Jews commit all these “assaults” against Islam. The answer is always “the Jewish character.” Qutb believes that “the Jews” have never been other than “evil” and “wicked.” He does not call for their annihilation, as the Nazis did, but the Holocaust is clearly implied in his writings. Qutb charges that the Jews “killed and massacred and even sawed the bodies of a number of their own prophets.… So what do you expect from people who do this to their prophets other than to be blood-letting and to target all of humanity?”31 He adds a call to “free humanity” from this “evil.” This is more than Judeophobia, it is a murderous ideology supported by the imagery of “the Jew” as a “wicked, bloodthirsty, inhuman” monster who is and does evil to all humanity and therefore should be exterminated. What makes this antisemitism more dangerous than its predecessors in the Arab world is that it is presented in specifically Islamized terms, as an expression of religionized politics.
This religionized antisemitism is then extended to a strategy to fight the alleged “Jewish-Christian” agenda that targets the entire Islamic umma. Christians act as salibiyyun (crusaders) in their capacity as proxies for the Jews, who are “the real instigators.” Qutb maintains that “there is a crusader-Zionist harban salibiyya-sahyuniyya (war) against the roots of the religion of Islam.” The interchangeability of “Zionist” for “Jewish” and “world Zionism” for “world Jewry” leads to the conclusion that for Qutb world Jewry and world Zionism are the same. He does not look at Zionism as a modern phenomenon but extends it back to the Crusades: “The Jews were the instigator from the very first moment. The Crusaders followed next.”32 The deep political implications of this equation are widely accepted by Islamists. Qutb’s reading of history provides an orientation with far-reaching consequences.
Today’s Islamist anti-Americanism continues in the tradition of Qutb, who accused the United States of crusaderism. Historically, the crusaders were Europeans, but Islamists relocate them to America. The Islamist book by Salah A. al-Khalidi entitled America Viewed from the Inside through the Lenses of Sayyid Qutb33 explicitly extends Qutb’s antisemitism to implicate the United States. It describes the Jews as virtually ruling the world through their domination of the United States. Seen in this light, the perception of “Islam under siege” manages to unite anti-Americanism with the Islamization of antisemitism. The United States, as the major proxy of Zionists, becomes a key part of the zero-sum game Qutb has established. This connection between antisemitism and anti-Americanism is essential in the political thought of Islamism.
It is not only young Muslims who are susceptible to such indoctrination. The ideology also appeals to the European left, which celebrates Qutb’s thought as a liberation theology. The danger for the European left in sympathizing with Islamist anti-Americanism is that antisemitism and anti-Americanism intermingle and at times become fused. Both ideologies indulge the perception that Jews steer American foreign policy through their lobby in Washington. The Jews are believed also to rule the United States indirectly from their strongholds on New York’s Wall Street. This perception did not change with the election of an African-American as president of the United States.
Qutb’s correlation of Islamist antisemitism with anti-Westernism underlies the anti-Zionism of Hamas as well as that of al-Qaeda. Hamas declares the Jews “an entity” inimical to Islam. In this thinking, local conflicts such as the one between Palestine and Israel become religionized and thus intractable. Islamists believe that peace with the Jews contradicts shari’a, which is nonnegotiable. When al-Qaeda was established 1998, it adopted a mission to “fight Jews and crusaders.” Its founding statements make little distinction between Jews and sahyuniyyun (Zionists). Christians are called salibiyyun (crusaders). This again defies Islamic tradition, which qualifies Jews and Christians honorably as dhimmi (protected monotheist minorities). These are entitled not to equality but to protection. Self-congratulatory Muslims praise this as tolerance. I do not defend this ranking of faiths but nonetheless maintain that the classification is not, like the ideology of al-Qaeda, antisemitic. It is worth noting that after Barack Obama was elected president, al-Qaeda released a video in which Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama Bin Laden’s deputy, addressed Obama directly. Zawahiri said to him: “You were born to a Muslim father but chose to stand in the ranks of the enemies of the Muslims and pray the prayers of the Jews, although you claim to be Christian in order to climb the rungs of leadership in America.”34
Obama’s response was not only conciliatory to Muslims but perhaps frustratingly disarming to al-Qaeda. During his first state visit to a Muslim country, in April 2009, he said in front of the Turkish parliament, “The United States is not and will never be at war with Islam.”35 Neither in Ankara that April nor in Cairo two months later did Obama draw a distinction between Islam and Islamism, but he took a clear stand against antisemitism. Nonetheless, he demonstrated no awareness of the Islamization of antisemitism.
Zawahiri claims to speak in the name of Islam when he spreads his message of genocidal antisemitism. To understand that this message is alien to Islam, one needs to understand the distinction between Islam and Islamism.
As an import from Europe, Qutb’s Islamized antisemitism must be understood in light of the historical fact noted by Walter Laqueur: “Traditionally Europe was the continent in which antisemitism has its strongest roots and most extreme manifestations.” When this European antisemitism was transplanted to the world of Islam, new themes were introduced that are now returning to Europe. Laqueur tells us that today, “the revival of antisemitism in Europe is predominantly Muslim in character.”36 This new antisemitism is now spreading throughout the diasporic Islamic enclaves existing in most countries of the European Union. Muslim immigrants are mostly poor people who come to Europe because of its prosperity. Once there, they form an ethnic-religious underclass and often live in parallel societies separated from the mainstream by ethnic, cultural, language, and economic barriers. In their isolation in a process of self-ethnicization, many of these immigrants become susceptible to Islamist antisemitism. Qutb’s Our Struggle with the Jews is read aloud in some mosques. Laqueur argues that “Islamist antisemites have collaborated with European antisemites of the left and with the fascist antisemites.… The main contribution of Islamism has been in the field of conspiracy theory.”37 In Europe, Qutb’s worldview may spread beyond Islamists and propagate its obsession with a “Jewish conspiracy” outside the Muslim enclaves. Too often I had to listen to Muslim immigrants in Berlin as they told me that their troubles in the diaspora stemmed from the “fact” that the Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland (the Central Council of Jews in Germany) is the nation’s real government. When I asked about the source of this knowledge, it was always Qutb and the Protocols.
The Imagery of “Islam under Siege”
Everything is subject to change, and political Islam is no exception. Antisemitism is mutable as well; Laqueur rightly speaks of its “changing face.” What changes could occur in Islamism and Islamized antisemitism? To identify the potential for change, one needs to consider three realms of analysis, not always consonant with one another: European (diaspora), Arabic (Middle East), and Islamic (Islamic civilization).
Globalization brings together people who not only do not share the same norms and values but also have different worldviews. Islamism turns this circumstance into the cultural perception of an imagined enemy, the West led by the conspiring Jew. Long before the expression “war of ideas”38 was used in the West to describe the conflict between secular democracy and jihadism, Islamists and Salafists spoke of harb al-afkar against alleged victimization of the Muslim umma in a world-political circumstance of “Islam under siege.”39 The framework of this war is provided by the idea of ghazu fikri (intellectual invasion of the world of Islam), allegedly instigated by the Jews. One can find this perception in the work of the Islamists Ali Jarisha and Mohammed Zaibaq, two Saudi professors currently teaching at the Islamic University in Medina, who argue in their influential book Asalib al-ghazu al-fikri lil alam al-Islami that earlier patterns of “wars with weapons” have been mostly replaced by hurub al-afkar, wars of ideas. This new variety of war, they maintain, is more perilous to the Muslim umma.
Islamist antisemitism, with its imagery of “the Jew” designing a conspiracy against Islam, resorts to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to support the perception of a Jewish master plan. The Protocols are, of course, a major source for modern antisemitism and the obsession with “Jewish conspiracies.” Beyond remarking that no traditional Islamic document exists to serve this need, we should note how Islamism extends this conspiracy to include the West generally. Jarisha and Zaibaq continue Qutb’s “reasoning” in this manner: “The West waves the flag of secularism … invades with its new values the society of Islam to replace the Islamic values by its own.… We shall talk about Zionism, or world Jewry, in order to address the related master plan pursued by the related secret societies for the destruction of the world.”40 Jarisha and Zaibaq thus endorse Qutb’s allegations that Jews are evil and cowardly. According to Qutb, the Jews do not fight with “the sword and arrow in the battlefield, but rather with the diffusion of suspicions, defamations and through maneuvering.”41 This is a textbook example of antisemitism as a mindset that attributes to the Jews a universal conspiracy to destroy the world. The explicit Islamist equation of sahyuniyya (Zionism) with al-yahudiyya al-’alamiyya (world Jewry) belies the common Western misperception that “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism.” Those who advance this argument help legitimate antisemitism by camouflaging it as political opposition to Zionism. Jarisha and Zaibaq make the equation even more explicit: “Zionism is an obnoxious evil,… but it is not a new one. It only became conspicuous under the name of world Jewry in the nineteenth century. In fact, Zionism is an old dogma that dominates the Jewish mind, and it exists since the early age of Judaism, transmitted by one generation to the other.”42 Such frankness is rare when Islamists address Western audiences. In these venues, anti-Zionism is presented strictly as a response to the grievances of the Israeli-Palestinian situation.
According to Jarisha and Zaibaq, the “perfidious plan” practiced by Jews has existed “since the Crusades.” One may be confused to learn from these Saudi Islamists that the Jews were behind the Crusades. For the sake of clarification I should mention that not only did the Crusades predate Zionism and the conflict over Palestine by many centuries, they also were violently anti-Jewish. Nonetheless, undeterred by history, Jarisha and Zaibaq provide a nonsensical rationale for Jewish-Crusader conspiracy.
Here we have the invention not only of tradition but of history. Historical records support a distinction between Christian Europe and the secular West. The latter emerged along with humanism during the Renaissance.43 This distinction is ignored in the Islamist invention of history. In the view of Jarisha and Zaibaq, secularity, “the idea of separating religion from the state, is a Jewish accomplishment as much as are the crusades and the two world wars. All are based on the work of Jews.”44 In real history, Jews fought side by side with Muslims to protect Jerusalem against the crusaders45 and were punished heavily for it after the crusaders’ victory: many were burned alive by Christians while hiding in their synagogue. Yet Jarisha and Zaibaq, in defiance of history, repeat throughout their book that “the Jews were the instigators of the crusades.” The same antisemitic distortion can be found in dozens of other Islamist publications that invent history in order to demonize the Jews. Jarisha and Zaibaq and their nonsensical account are worth mentioning only because the narrative is so common.
As part of their war of ideas against Islam, the Jews are alleged to employ Islamic and Oriental studies, al-istishraq, to implement their “wicked master plan.” Jarisha and Zaibaq believe that “Zionism entered Orientalism to use it for preventing Muslims from forming one united block that could powerfully resist world Jewry.… The Jewish Orientalist scholars were most active in this domain.”46 Again, the reality is different. European Jewish Orientalists contributed to a romanticization of Islam, in particular of Islamic rule in Spain. The distinguished political philosopher Shlomo Avineri told me, and has often said in public, that Jewish-European scholars presented “a beautiful Islam” in reaction to discrimination against Jews in Christian and secular Europe. As Bernard Lewis points out, Islamic Spain was for them the better model. Underlying this romanticization is what Martin Kramer identifies as the “Jewish discovery of Islam.” This is a kind of an acknowledgment of the “Jewish-Islamic symbiosis” that thrived in Islamic Spain. Kramer cites the Jewish contribution to the study of Islam incorporated in Western scholarship.47
Islamists and Salafists, unfortunately joined by American followers of Edward Said, indict “Orientalism” as a major source of “distortion of Islam.” One finds this accusation not only in Islamist books but also in many American works of Islamic studies. Western students of Islam who engage in the polemics of “Orientalism” seem not to know that the term is merely a translation of the Arabic al-istishraq. Today, the accusation of Orientalism can damage a young scholar’s career, so many avoid speaking truths or offering candid opinions that have the potential to offend. This intimidation and self-censorship are practiced not by a totalitarian regime but by people who view themselves as scholars acting in an open society committed to academic freedom.
Long before Said published his famous book Orientalism, the Sheikh of al-Azhar, Muhammed al-Bahi,48 published a huge volume dealing with the alleged war of ideas fought against Islam by “the Orientalists.” The book contains a list of “orientalists” that includes mostly Jewish names. I cannot prove that Said adopted the term “Orientalism” from Bahi, but clearly the critique of Orientalism is not original to him. Still, unlike Bahi, Said must be acquitted of any profiling of Jews in his “Orientalism.”
Let me say something positive about Said: despite the great disagreement that ultimately ended our friendship, I do not wish to vilify either his work or the man himself. Edward Said was an enlightened humanist, neither pro-Islamist nor an antisemite, who had a valid complaint against Eurocentrism in the study of Islam. But his critique of Orientalism became a cudgel in the hands of his followers, who today act as a kind of academic police force forbidding any criticism of political Islam.
Thus there is little complaint in the West when Jarisha and Zaibaq attempt to dismantle the secular idea of separation of church and state by writing that “secularity is the work of the Jews.… Fanaticist crusaderism and hateful Jewry introduced this idea of secularism which is alien to Islamic fiqh.… On these grounds, the hidden hand managed to destroy the Caliphate and it also was guided in this pursuit of the venture of the separation between religion and politics introduced by secular nationalism.”49 Even the work of Kemal Atatürk, the founder of secular Turkey who abolished the caliphate, is described as “inner Orientalism.” There are also some Western scholars who believe this.
The alliance of Jews and Western crusaders is often extended to Marx and Lenin, both of whom are identified as Jews embedded in the “master plan.” Jarisha and Zaibaq present a more original interpretation. They concede the Jewish origins of Marxism but contend that the Jews engage in a superficial “Jewish propaganda war” against bolshevism in order “to scare non-Jews about communism” and thus deflect attention away from their own, far more insidious plans. This tale is meant to illustrate “how wicked” is the genius of the “Jewish conspiracy,” which has created competing capitalism and communism and steered them both in a drive to rule the world by establishing a “world state dominated by the Jews.”50
Beyond this spasm of creative paranoia, it makes no sense to delve further into the alleged Jewish conspiracy. Past this point Jarisha and Zaibaq mostly rephrase elements of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, targeting all Muslims who do not share their views. Claiming to be more prudent and balanced than others, they do not rank all “Islamic reformers as agents of a Jewish conspiracy.” Instead, they see in the work of liberal Muslim thinkers like Rifa’a Rafi’ Tahtawi and Mohammed Abduh, who attempted to build bridges between Islam and the “Jewish dominated” West, mere ignorance and naïveté. “Reformist and rational Muslims,” they write, fail to understand what they are “naïvely” doing. In the view of Jarisha and Zaibaq the business of bridging between civilizations is misguided because “the bridging between Islam, Christianity, and Judaism could only take place at the expense of Islam. Islam is the only true religion and any putting of Islam and other religions on an equal footing would only be detrimental to Islam.”51
The dismissal of dialogue with other religions is driven by the Islamic claim of superiority in an Islamist ideology of supremacism. The dialogue is unveiled as an effort orchestrated by Freemasonry to undermine this claim. Here again one is confronted with “the hidden hand of the conspiring Jew,” existing and acting everywhere. The Jews are supposed to rule the world with the assistance of their “secret societies,” among which Freemasonry is believed to be the most prominent. The Freemasons are described by Jarisha and Zaibaq as “one of the oldest Jewish organizations. A reference to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion suffices to provide an evidence for the existing close ties between freemasonry and Judaism. These protocols are the Zionist constitution.… Freemasonry emanates from Jewish religion.”52
A few pages later they identify Freemasonry as a tool “in the pursuit of the Jewish agenda.” Muslims are expected not only to reject any dialogue but to fight “jihad against the Jews” and their allies “the crusaders” in order to thwart the “wicked plans” of Freemasonry.53
The imagery of the conspiring Jew unmasks the supposed distinction in Islamism between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. The discourse of political Islam is dominated by a perception of an overall conspiracy that targets Islam and its people. Islamic civilization is regarded as being under siege, encircled by an imaginary Jewish evildoer who pulls the strings in all wrongs to which Islam has been exposed since its history began in 622. Hence the Islamist belief in a cosmic war between “Islam and world Jewry.” It follows that Islamist antisemitism does not emanate from the Middle East conflict and will not subside after resolution of that conflict.
Unlike pan-Arab nationalist antisemitism, Islamist antisemitism claims to be authentic. It contributes to a religionization of tensions that lead to conflict.54 One can point in particular to the Islamization of Palestinian politics,55 in which the secular PLO, though still in place, is challenged most successfully by Hamas, in Gaza.
In his booklet “Why We Reject Peace with the Jews,” written on behalf of the Islamic Association of Palestinian Students in Kuwait, the Palestinian Islamist Muhsen Antabawi directly echoes Qutb’s contention that “there can be no peace between Muslims and Jews.” Unlike the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has taken pains to camouflage his antisemitism as anti-Zionism, al-Antawabi makes no distinction between al-yahud (the Jews) and al-sahyuniyyun (the Zionists). He characterizes all Jews indiscriminately as “an anti-Islamic Zionist entity” permanently “conspiring” in a cosmic war against Islam. Therefore, he concludes, “the solution for Palestine can only be brought by a generation mobilized against the Jews on the grounds of a combination of the Qur’an with the gun.”56 This is not far from a call for annihilation.
As we have seen, Qutb was the Islamist thinker who laid the major foundations of this variety of antisemitism. It is a version that goes well beyond both European and pan-Arab nationalist antisemitism in religionizing a political ideology based on cultural and historical perceptions. It has to be repeated: Qutb was at no point marginal. His views live on today in the charter of Hamas.
From Qutb to Hamas
Islamist antisemitism is not a frustrated expression of grievances. The efforts by some Europeans to reduce this cosmic war to political outrage expressed as anti-Zionism unwittingly help camouflage an incipient crime against humanity. By viewing Hamas as a liberation movement, Europeans turn a blind eye to Islamist antisemitism. Humanist scholars like Matthias Küntzel, who break taboos by studying Islamist antisemitism, pay dearly for it even in Germany. Küntzel writes about the Hamas charter: “In every respect, Hamas’ new document put the 1968 PLO charter in the shade.… The Hamas charter probably ranks as one of contemporary Islamism’s most important programmatic documents and its significance goes far beyond the Palestine conflict.”57 Hamas also revives the earlier conflation of nationalism and Islamism in Palestine. Its charter deserves scrutiny because it brings Islamized antisemitism into action.
The charter was issued in April 1988, but the movement was established on December 14, 1987.58 The charter underlines Küntzel’s point that its significance extends beyond the Palestine conflict. Article 2 identifies Hamas as an extension of the Movement of the Muslim Brotherhood, which represents the very origin of the Sunni version of Islamism and is today one of the major networks of internationalist Islamism. Article 32 identifies as Hamas’s enemy not Israel but “world Zionism.” Hamas perceives itself as a ra’s hurbah (spearhead) in the war against world Zionism, specifically, as “the combatant arm of the Muslim Brotherhood for launching of a continuing jihad.”59
According to the charter, the “Zionist master plan” knows no boundaries; “today Palestine, tomorrow more expansion.” The charter outlaws on religious grounds—that is, in the name of shari’a—all efforts by Muslims toward peaceful resolution of the conflict with Israel. This includes the Camp David Accord and all related efforts. Muslims who engage in peacemaking are accused of khiyana uzma (great treason). A comparison of the charter with Qutb’s pamphlet against the Jews reveals much borrowing of both ideas and rhetoric. Like other Islamist documents, the charter makes no distinction between Jews and Zionists; they are together the enemy. Article 22 views Jews as the source of all evil. Compare the following quotation with the one from Qutb’s pamphlet quoted above:
They stood behind the French and the communist revolutions … in the pursuit of the interests of Zionism.… They were behind the First World War that led to the abolition of the caliphate … to get the Balfour Declaration.… Then they established the League of Nations to rule the world through it, and hereafter they pulled the strings for the Second World War … to establish the state of Israel and to replace the League of Nations with the U.N. and its Security Council. They rule the world.… There is no single war that took place without the hidden hand of the Jews steering from behind.60
If this is not an expression of apocalyptic antisemitism, what is?
A few other questions come to mind. What is the distinction between Hamas’s antisemitism and that of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? Why is this more than an expression of Judeophobia? And foremost: what is authentically Islamic about Hamas?
Hamas is careful to identify itself as a religious organization and thus distinct from the secular PLO. Article 15 of the charter states that it is “imperative to relate the issue of Palestine … to its religious character and to deal with it on these grounds.” Article 27 goes farther: “Secular thought fully contradicts the religious idea.… We refuse the belittling of the place of religion in the Arab-Israel conflict and insist instead on the Islamiyyat (Islamicity) of Palestine. We cannot replace these claims with secular thoughts. The Islamicity of Palestine is part and parcel of our religion.” This statement leaves no space for any conflict resolution based on compromise. It is God, not any secular power or worldly moral argument, who demands the destruction of Israel. This political goal is thus not negotiable. How could one ask God to compromise?
The charter of Hamas refers at its outset to the Qur’anic verse from Al Umran that qualifies Muslims as khair umma (chosen people), which it follows with a quotation from Hasan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood: “Israel stands and shall continue to stand until Islam eradicates it, as it did unto earlier similar entities.” Article 6 states that Hamas’s goal is to “wave the flag of Allah over every inch in Palestine.” The next article quotes a highly disputed hadith, or saying of Muhammad, that is alleged to have been transmitted from the Prophet by Buchari. This hadith refers to the day of resurrection that comes with a fight against the Jews. The battle ends with al-yahudi (the Jew) hiding behind a tree and a stone. The stone shouts: “Oh Muslim, oh server of Allah, a Jew is hidden behind me, come and kill him.” But “the gharqad (tree) does not betray the hiding Jew, because it is Jewish.” This hadith prescribes the “killing of the Jew” as “a religious obligation” and thus includes the most extreme implication of the religionization of antisemitism. Applied to Israel, it implies eradication. Again, the authenticity of this hadith is doubtful. Plenty of fake hadiths were posthumously attributed to the Prophet. But its quotation in the charter of Hamas is significant in itself.
Lest there be any doubt over the negotiability of the conflict with Israel, article 11 declares Palestine waqf Islami, that is, an nonnegotiable divinity. While acknowledging that Jerusalem was not an Islamic space before the Islamic futuhat wars, the charter claims that “the shari’a rules that every land conquered by Muslims is their property until the day of qiyama (resurrection).” Article 13 then adds: “Peaceful solutions contradict the commitment of Hamas to Islam. The abandonment of any piece of Palestine is an abandonment of the religion itself.… There is no real solution to the conflict over Palestine other than jihad.… Anything else is a waste of time.”
Hamas resolves not only to fight Jews and crusaders with weapons but also to neutralize their intellectual impact. Article 35 asserts, “The lesson to learn is that the contemporary Zionist ghazu (invasion) was preceded by the crusaders of the West.… As Muslims defeated the earlier invasion they shall also manage with the new one.… Muslims learn from the past, and purify themselves from any ghazu fikri (intellectual invasion).” This theme of purification is not unique to Hamas but is central to the political thought of Islamism. It challenges not only Jews and Westerners but all other non-Muslims, for instance, in Southeast Asia.
There are two lessons to learn from the Hamas charter. First, by embracing religionized war, it makes killing a sacrament. Second, the rejection of Western ideas as an “intellectual invasion” is a rejection of the humanist agenda of the twenty-first century. One of that agenda’s most fundamental elements is that the European Holocaust was an evil that must never be repeated. By abandoning the very core of the credibility and legitimacy of humanism, Hamas and other Islamists permit the return of genocidal thinking.
Let me reiterate that the “cosmic enmity” constructed by Hamas (following Qutb) between Jews and Muslims has no foundation in the history of Islam. It is not found in serious histories, only in the invented histories constructed by Islamists to justify their antisemitism.
That said, I remind the reader that everything changes, including Islamism. Has Hamas changed to the extent that we may count its anti-Western resistance as an expression of liberation? Many European leftists and liberals believe so. One of the journalists who make this argument, Paul McGough, met with the Hamas leader Khalid Mishal and asked for his views on an adjustment of the charter; McGough reports: “On the critical question of rewriting the charter, which calls for the destruction of Israel,… [Mishal] was unbending: ‘not a chance.’ ”61
In the West most of those who approve of Hamas have never read its charter or thought very critically about the Islamist movement in general. Some of these people defend Hamas against criticism by arguing that the critics are defaming Islam—an argument that overlooks the crucial distinction between Islamism and Islam. Among the deplorable confusions, for instance, is the listing of the Egyptian Muslim Brother Yusuf al-Qaradawi as a “liberal” in Charles Kurzman’s Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook. Qaradawi is the intellectual heir of Qutb and a source of Hamas’s rejection of any borrowing as hulul mustawrada (imported solutions) from the gharb salibi (crusader West). Democracy is considered to be among these imports. In his highly popular trilogy al-hall al-Islami62 (the Islamic solution), Qaradawi calls for a cosmic war of ideas against al-gharb al-salibi. He seems to apply this formula to all adoptions from the West except antisemitism. Laqueur quotes Qaradawi as saying on his weekly al-Jazeera program: “There is no dialogue between us and the Jews except the sword and the rifle.”63 This declaration of war recalls Qutb’s Struggle against the Jews and justifies asking in what sense Qaradawi qualifies as a “liberal Muslim.”
Hamas is listed by the United States as “terrorist organization,” but it is courted not only by Turkey’s Islamist AKP but also by the European left, which grants legitimacy to the increasing anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism in the world of Islam. In its indiscriminate “third-worldism,” the left appears to view Islamism as an ally against capitalism.64 Thus we get a marriage of convenience. The right-wing orientation of Islamism seems not to disturb European leftists, who share with Islamists the combination of anti-Americanism and antisemitism,65 even if they do not want these sentiments clearly spelled out. Andrei Markovits does not buy into the left’s denial of any such combination; in his book Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America, he argues that antisemitism in Europe “has consistently been … an integral part of anti-Americanism.”66 This mindset unites the antisemites of the European old right and those of the new left in an alliance with some leaders of Europe’s Muslim immigrants, under the dual camouflage of anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism. Things become awkward, however, when the Islamists are not so careful to deny their antisemitism—when, for example, they deny the Holocaust. It is the peak of hypocrisy for antisemitic Islamists to present themselves as “the new Jews” and speak of a new Holocaust against Islam even while they assert that the actual Holocaust never happened.
Are Muslims in Europe “the New Jews”?
The process of ethnicization of the Islam diaspora in Europe67 is only partly related to the discrimination and Islamophobic resentment Muslim immigrants encounter. These immigrants are unfortunately represented mostly by Islamist leaders, who do not have any right to declare themselves “the new Jews of Europe.”68 These leaders do not believe in an integration of Muslims into European citizenry but prefer to claim freedom of faith in order to establish an Islamic counterculture within European societies. If Islamists in Europe hate the Jews in this pursuit, why do they also steal the Holocaust and identify themselves with the Jews? Why do Europeans who discriminate against Muslims suddenly, on hearing them characterized as “the new Jews,” become receptive to Islamist concerns? And finally: how does the distinction between Islamism and Islam apply to the Islamic diaspora in Europe? Markovits superbly helps us decipher the issue: “While these immigrants awakened first and foremost a nasty strain of xenophobia in all European countries against themselves, they also have triggered a massive, twofold reemergence of antisemitism: first, on the part of those who hate these newcomers and wish them ill,… second, on the part of those who are the targets of this hatred who happen to be from cultures where antisemitism has attained a major presence mainly—though not exclusively—by dint of the Arab-Israeli conflict.” It is outrageous that European leftists, who were mostly silent when Serbian fascist groups massacred Bosnian Muslims in the Balkans, suddenly changed their attitudes and “raised their voices in the Bosnian war once the United States intervened.”69 Their opposition to the intervention was driven by anti-Americanism and not, apparently, by any humanistic opposition to war or the slaughter of innocents.
The concern of this chapter is not so much anti-Americanism per se but rather the antisemitism promoted by Islamism, for which anti-Zionism70 and anti-Americanism provide a convenient camouflage. The Swiss daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung carried an article by a British Muslim democrat, Hanif Kureishi, who described his visits to several mosques in Great Britain: “The mosques which I visited were dominated by ardent and inflammatory preachers, one after the other agitating in an endless torrent. They were inciting against the West and the Jews.… This happens not only in mosques but also in most religious institutions, including the faith schools in which these ideas are disseminated.”71
It’s worth noting that multicultural Britain is quite different from France. Until the jihadist assaults of July 2005, the United Kingdom was open to Islamists and allowed them to operate openly in ways denied them elsewhere in Europe.72 Some multiculturalists approved of this tolerant attitude, while others saw it as a cause of cultural fragmentation and a disuniting of Europe. This is a delicate area, and I hasten to add that I value cultural diversity and have no patience for European racism. My point is that even within the open atmosphere of London, the self-appointed spokesmen of the Islamic diaspora—most of whom hate the Jews—engage in cynical doublespeak. In their propaganda they condemn the Holocaust while also denying that it ever occurred, maintaining that the Muslims of Europe are as oppressed today as the Jews were under the (nonexistent) Holocaust.73
The spread of antisemitism among Muslims in Europe is a phenomenon to which Europeans turn a blind eye even as they are deaf to Islamist propaganda. This happens also in the United States. Some American commentators belittle the radicalization of Muslim youth in Western Europe. In a book on Islam in France, published by the Brookings Institution in 2006, one may find a chapter in which Jonathan Lawrence scandalously attempts to play down antisemitism by arguing that “in the overwhelming majority of cases antisemitic acts are not elaborate affairs.”74 This book carries a foreword by Olivier Roy, the French scholar who speaks of post-Islamism and dismisses the entire Islamist movement as “takfiri pockets of lost youngsters.”
The issue here is not “pockets” but the return of antisemitism to its original home. The Jews are scapegoats for the failed integration of Muslim immigrants in European societies. Seyran Ateş, a Turkish lawyer who acts on behalf of Muslim women in Germany, has frequently criticized antisemitism in the Muslim diaspora. Ateş accuses multiculturalists of bigotry because they refuse to acknowledge Islamist antisemitism. In Berlin in 2007 she was fired upon, but she survived the assault and blamed antisemitic Turks in Berlin.75
At a symposium conducted at the Vidal Sassoon Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University in 2006, the interaction between Islamic fundamentalism and Western multiculturalism was one of the issues under debate. When multiculturalists romanticize non-European cultures, including Islam, they establish taboos against any criticism of these cultures as practiced by immigrants in Europe. The result is that Jew hatred in the diaspora of Islam in Europe is granted a degree of respectability as a form of outrage of the despised directed against oppressors. It does not matter that while Muslims in Europe are viewed as oppressed, the oppressors are not Jews in particular but rather Europeans at large. On a different occasion, Jeffrey Herf noted, “The unambiguous expressions of Jew-hatred from the Islamists have not aroused the same degree of moral revulsion that would be the case if the source was neo-Nazism in Europe.”76
As I have argued throughout this chapter, antisemitism is a European disease that in the past generated the deadly racism that resulted in the Holocaust. Germans have laudably committed themselves to the idea that this crime must never be permitted again. They have established this as a basic element of their political culture. It is thus most perplexing to watch the same people remain silent about antisemitic Islamism or describe it as a legitimate response of the “oppressed.” In a lecture on antisemitism delivered at Yale in March 2007 I felt I had more freedom to say this than at any time in Europe.
There is no denying the social marginalization of diaspora Muslims in Europe. Muslim immigrants exist as a poor ethnic underclass in European societies in a kind of segregation, partly imposed, partly self-chosen. When they express their resentment they do it through Islamist identity politics. It is unfortunate that these people turn their anger, which is largely justified, against the Jews. I do not like Islamist blame games, but I cannot refrain from ascribing their misery partly to Europeans. Even those Muslims in Europe who are privileged to be among the middle class feel the brunt of the ugly European exclusionary culture. Multiculturalism and cultural relativism exist side by side with this exclusionary racism and are not free of it. The majority of Muslims who make up the ethnic underclass in Europe are not educated and may not have even heard of multiculturalism, but they hear Europeans talk about tolerance of non-Western cultures while practicing exclusion. In Germany, for instance, the major application of affirmative action policies is to ensure the employment of (German) women, not to redress discrimination against Muslims. Jews pay for this European practice. In the agitprop of “Islam under siege,” in which Islam is believed to be encircled by Jews and crusaders, Islamists project onto Jews the role of instigators.
Multiculturalism, meanwhile, presents itself as a postcolonial worldview poised to abandon the West’s “mission civilisatrice” and its ugly Eurocentrism. This positive aspect seldom goes beyond rhetoric. Instead we get, in the name of cultural relativism, a new ideology that dismisses the universality of the values of humanism. Even the new antisemitism seems to be admissible as a view of the cultural other, granted respectability under the guise of anti-Zionism. Matthias Küntzel reports that after he wrote about his work on Islamist antisemitism, he was “excluded” by his peers. Jew hatred among Muslims in Europe is a taboo subject. The European left’s view of Islamists as anti-imperialists and of their totalitarian movement as an antiglobalization effort legitimates the suppression of any critique of Islamism. Instead of Islamist antisemitism, one is encouraged to talk about Islamophobia.
This attitude explains situations in which the perpetrators of Jew hatred are tolerated when they are non-Western (for example, Islamic, especially Palestinian) immigrants. In the name of diversity, multiculturalism honors cultural difference indiscriminately. Recognition, elevated to a basic right, requires an unchecked toleration of the cultural views of others without any limitation. Thus as Herf rightly notes, antisemitism is condemned only when expressed by local Europeans. When it originates from other cultures, excuses are brought forward: it signifies the “outrage of an oppressed people” against Zionist atrocities in Palestine and the world.
For example, in the German cities of Essen and Düsseldorf some synagogues were desecrated in October 2000. Everyone assumed that the perpetrators were neo-Nazis. The chancellor at the time, Gerhard Schröder, responded with outrage, calling on all Germans to engage in an Aufstand der Anständigen (uprising of the decent people) against the new rise of antisemitism. Upon investigation, the German police found that the perpetrators were not German neo-Nazis but Arab Muslim immigrants. The outrage promptly subsided. It was transformed overnight into a multicultural understanding of the “oppressed” Palestinians. The desecration was no longer a disgrace but an expression of outrage over “the way Jews treat Arabs” in Palestine. The Jews were no longer victims but perpetrators, for some even “the new Nazis,” and the vandals’ hatred was no longer abhorrent antisemitism but laudable anti-Zionism. It is not known, of course, whether any of the congregants in these synagogues had ever mistreated a single Arab—and not relevant, for they too had been transformed, from individual Jews into “the Jews.”
Following that incident I made an effort to launch a public debate about anti-Zionism and antisemitism. It was difficult to find an outlet for the article I wrote. At that time I was still a regular newspaper columnist, but my own publishers, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Der Spiegel, would not print the piece, nor would any other German newspaper. In the end, the daily Die Welt ran it, but only after another assault: a Berlin Rabbi named Rothschild was beaten by an Arab-Islamist gang and had to be hospitalized.77 What tolerance! What lessons learned from the Holocaust! Having lived in Germany from 1962 to 2009, I believe the Germans have in fact learned very little.
In the synagogue vandals’ court trial, jurors were urged to understand their deeds as expressions of “legitimate outrage” against injustice in Palestine. The public’s favorable attitude toward the perpetrators was reflected in the exceptionally light sentence they received. Had they been German, the sentence would have been much tougher and civil society would have been unanimously unforgiving.
In France assaults against Jews have become a daily business. The French police advise Jews to abandon all outward displays of their Jewishness as the best way to avoid assaults by young Muslims allegedly protesting Zionism or contesting their marginalization. The same happens in Scandinavia. Sweden hosts the antisemitic Radio Islam. Many European Jews living there describe a level of harassment sufficient to make them consider leaving, but which Scandinavians tolerate as “frustrated expressions of justifiable political grievances.” Multiculturalism thus has become a cover for the return of antisemitism to Europe via Arab-Islamic migration. Among the so-called repentant Europeans, recognition of the right to cultural difference has been extended to enforced tolerance of Arab-Muslim antisemitism. Those who criticize this Islamist antisemitism are accused not only of Islamophobia—even if, like me, they are themselves Muslims—but also of creating tensions by offending Muslim immigrants.
Every analysis of diasporic cultures needs to deal with the invention and construction of cultural identity. This is especially relevant when the environment is perceived as hostile (such as Europe, seen as dar al-kuffar). Under Islamist influence, the underclass of the Islamic diaspora is constructing its cultural identity around an ideology of antisemitism. The Berlin newspaper Tagesspiegel reported that in some schools in predominantly Arab-Muslim districts (such as Neukölln), students underlined their Muslim identity in terms of antisemitic slogans such as Hier kommt kein Jude rein (no Jews are allowed to enter). Multiculturalism presently tolerates this variety of identity politics even as it decries identity politics of local people as “right-wing radicalism” and “anti-immigration.” The equally radical right-wing Islamists are given a free pass.
The indiscriminate tolerance granted by European cultural relativists to Islamists takes identity politics to absurd levels. As a result of the Islamist indoctrination they receive in diaspora institutions—the scenes reported by Hanif Kureishi are hardly limited to London—young Muslims throughout Europe are radicalized from early childhood. The new antisemitism is part and parcel of this indoctrination. In this pursuit, Islamists make full use of civil rights. Invoking freedom of religion, they teach in faith schools an exclusive identity that denies the identity rights of non-Muslims and undermines efforts at integration of Muslims as citizens. While no balanced observer can overlook the way Muslims are treated in Europe, it is not only Europeans who are responsible for the failure of Muslims to integrate into European society. Muslims themselves are also to blame. Islamist leaders in Europe support not Europeanizing Islam but rather the Islamization of Europe.78
There is a proverb in German: Angriff ist die beste Verteidigung (attack is the best defense). If you accuse Islamists of spreading antisemitism, they call you an Islamophobe. Then they equate anti-Islamism with antisemitism and speak of a new Holocaust against Muslims. By this logic, those who advocate hatred are innocent, but those who object to hatred are promoting genocide. Tariq Ramadan defends himself against the accusation of doublespeak79 by turning the tables in precisely this way. In an interview with Der Spiegel he declared, “I am a Muslim Jew.” In view of his troubles with such French Jews as Alain Finkielkraut, this claim is little more than propaganda. Ramadan is mistrusted by Jewish intellectuals in France because they believe he profiles them in an antisemitic manner. In contrast, he has been celebrated in Oxford and in some circles in America as the voice of Islam in Europe.80 I find nothing European in his Islamist thinking. In contrast there are truly European Muslims who take a clear stand against Tariq Ramadan.81
In an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung titled “Die falsche Parallele” (The false parallel), I disputed the equation of Muslim immigrants with Jews. As a Muslim immigrant, I can say from personal experience that Muslims in Europe today are discriminated against and socially marginalized. But we are not “the new Jews.” We live in a democratic Europe and are by no means subjected to a Holocaust. Nowhere in the world of Islam do Islamists enjoy the degree of civil rights and freedom they have in Europe.82
One needs to deal honestly with the false comparison of antisemitism and anti-Islamism. In Europe one often hears Islamists speak of a new Holocaust that targets Muslims. As a Muslim humanist I fail to grasp how people who in fact despise Jews can take advantage of the very real suffering of the Holocaust to advance their political goals. Despite some wrongs done to Muslims, Europe is a democratic place. It grants Islamists political asylum and welfare payments when they flee persecution in the world of Islam. Any Muslim is much safer in Europe than in any Muslim country. The Islamists themselves are the foremost beneficiaries of the strict legal standards for civil rights in Europe. If there is a real Holocaust that targets Muslims in Europe, why do Islamists pour into Europe and continue to seek asylum there? Between 1950 and 2010 the Muslim diaspora in Western Europe grew from about 1 million to 23 million people.
The return of antisemitism to Europe via Islamic migrations happens in the context of the activities of diaspora Islamists who are at pains to hijack the Muslim diaspora in Europe and abuse it for their own purposes. They undermine integration and avert any criticism by hurling the stone of Islamophobia. The events in Essen in 2000 display the downgrading of the vice of antisemitism (which is real), and the upgrading of the allegation of Islamophobia (which is also real, but nonetheless highly exaggerated). In Islamist propaganda the two are equated. It bears repeating: Islamists enjoy more freedom and civil rights in Europe than in any place in the world of Islam except the countries where they are in charge. The ideologically biased environment of multiculturalism in Europe enforces a silence that benefits Islamists, who find in Europe a sanctuary from which to wage their war of ideas.
The multicultural tolerance extended to the Islamists of the diaspora creates a problem not only for European Jews but also for liberal Muslims, who flee Islamism at home only to find themselves exposed to it in Europe. Among the elements in the European ideology of antisemitism is the doctrine, much prized by the Nazis, of Volk. There is no similar concept in the original Islamic idea of umma. In its classical understanding the umma is fully inclusive: everyone can join by converting. In Chapter 1 I demonstrated that Islamism invents Islamic tradition by turning the Muslim umma into something like the Nazis’ Volk: pure and exclusivist. Its foremost enemies are the Jews. Earlier I referred to the notion “ethnicity of fear” I coined to describe the process of mutual ethnicization now occurring between Muslims and Europeans. The constructed ethnicity of the restrictive Islamist umma reinforces the increasingly restrictive ethnicity of Europe. This is a fearful development by which European Jews are affected. The toleration of this trend serves to hide Europe’s own antisemitism. Antisemitism is anathema to humanism. In its legacy Islam has a tradition of humanism83 that includes a “Jewish-Islamic symbiosis.”
An Exceptional Case: Islamism and “Nazi Palestine”
To the list of major distinctions I make in this book—between Islam and Islamism, for instance, and between the Judeophobia of traditional Islam and the modern form of genocidal antisemitism adopted from Europe—I add a smaller distinction between the antisemitism imported by secular pan-Arab nationalists and the religionized antisemitism later unfolded by Islamism. The historians Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers, in their recent book Nazi Palestine,84 and Jeffrey Herf, in his book Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World,85 compel us to see an exception in Palestine. Though first established in 1928 with the foundation of the Movement of Muslim Brotherhood by Hasan al-Banna, Islamism thrived in most of the Middle East only after the Arab nationalists’ defeat in the 1967 war with Israel. But it was successful in Palestine much earlier than elsewhere. There Islamist ideas entered the political theater during the 1930s and 1940s under the influence of Nazi Germany. Here was a conflation between nationalism (Palestinian nationalism was then still a part of secular pan-Arab nationalism) and Islamism. The ideas of Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, borrowed from those of al-Banna. It is among Herf’s more significant findings that the two not only knew each other but were close, and shared an admiration of Hitler, approving his crimes against the Jews.86
Al-Husseini, it should be noted, was not an Islamist in the sense in which I use the term. Though a cleric and a religious authority, he was, rather, a Palestinian nationalist. He admired Hitler and invoked The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to support his obsession with a “Jewish conspiracy,” which he believed also targeted Palestine. The Mufti enjoyed the support of the Muslim Brotherhood. Herf produces archival evidence of al-Banna’s pro-Nazi orientation and shows that he “had made a careful study of the Nazi and Fascist organizations. Using them as a model, he had formed organizations of specially trained and trusted men.” The Muslim Brotherhood was active not only in Egypt but also in Palestine, where Islamists “opened branches … in Nablus and Jaffa.” Herf adds that “in the aftermath of World War II … Amin al-Husseini and Hasan al-Banna could point to Israel’s emergence as a confirmation of Nazism’s wartime predictions.… The Muslim Brotherhood, Hasan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb … indicated continuity with the conspiracy theories that came daily from Radio Berlin extended beyond the Islamist fringe.”87
Al-Husseini spent much of the war in Berlin in the service of Hitler; afterward he tried to flee but was arrested in France on suspicion of involvement in war crimes. The Muslim Brotherhood was one of the leading Arab-Muslim pressure groups that helped get him released. After al-Husseini’s release, al-Banna issued this statement: “Al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin … declares that the Mufti is welcome to stay in any Arab country.… The lion is at last free.… Oh, Amin, what a great, stubborn terrific wonderful man you are.… Hitler and Mussolini’s defeat did not frighten you … a hero who … fought Zionism.”88 Herf comments: “A plausible reading of al-Banna’s statement would be that Husseini was continuing the same struggle that Hitler and Germany—and Husseini himself—had been waging during the war.… Having sided with Germany and Hitler … brought admiration for Husseini’s wartime activities.”89
Second and more horrible is the finding by Mallmann and Cüppers that there existed a plan to orchestrate a Holocaust against the Jews in Palestine. This was to be a cooperative effort between the Nazis and their Arab-Muslim allies. It was already well known that Husseini had created a Muslim extension of the Waffen SS in the Balkans. But Mallmann and Cüppers have discovered a plan to implement the Eastern European Nazi experience of the Einsatzkommando in Palestine. In Eastern Europe, non-German collaborators had killed Jews on behalf of German Nazi troops. “The example of the Einsatzgruppen in Eastern Europe,” the authors write, “shows that the mass murders initiated by the Germans … were supported by local collaborators and were smoothly implemented with only minimal guidance.” This example served as the model for what was to happen in Palestine. “A vast number of Arabs, in some cases already well-organized, were ready to serve as willing accomplices of the Germans in the Middle East.… The central task of Rauff’s Einsatzkommando was the implementation of the Holocaust in Palestine … with the help of those collaborators.” This collaboration for the annihilation of the Jews would have proceeded smoothly had there been no “friction”—to borrow a term from Carl von Clausewitz. The plan for a Holocaust in Palestine, with Islamist collaboration, had to be deferred after the German defeat at El Alamein and other losses on the Eastern Front. Eventually, all that “Hitler had planned in 1941 against the British positions in the Arab world … had to be definitely abandoned.”90
Other German mainstream scholars, by contrast, are sympathetic even to Jihadist Islamists in Palestine—for instance, the anti-Zionist terrorist Izz al-Din al-Qassam, who worked closely with al-Husseini. Mallmann and Cüppers express wonder “that such a terrorist, even after September 11, 2001, could still be labeled in Western scholarly literature as martyr who bore witness to his faith and the Palestinian cause.” This remark refers to the misrepresentation of al-Qassam in the work of Gudrun Krämer, who teaches Islamic studies at the Free University of Berlin. It is worth noting that Hamas names the missiles it fires at the civil Israeli population Qassam Missiles. Mallmann and Cüppers do not accuse mainstream scholars of antisemitism, but they take issue with those who limit critical scholarship about other cultures in the name of respect. To do this “amounts to a form of censorship against any kind of thinking,” and they remind readers of the need for “the acceptance of the universal values of all human beings beyond the limits of religion, economic growth, or gender.… It is precisely because of the universality of the human condition that no one can be released from such responsibility.”91
The authors detect in Western third-worldism “a mixture of blindness and infatuation.” Scholars like Krämer defend “prejudiced-based ideologies, such as … anti-Zionism and Antisemitism” as frustrated expressions of grievance. Mallmann and Cüppers deplore the loss of “the difference between enlightened thinking and the alternative road to barbarism.” They conclude, “The full awareness of crimes against humanity resides precisely in this ability to differentiate, which should be defended at all costs.”92
The Pillars of Islamist Antisemitism
The reality of a politically motivated but religionized antisemitism spreading throughout the world of Islam should remind us that antisemitism in Europe led to the ugliest crimes in the history of humanity. The study of antisemitism in Islam is thus a project for prevention of future crimes.
This is why it is important that modern Islamist antisemitism be distinguished from traditional Judeophobia. Although Islam honors Jews as believers and classifies them as ahl-al-kitab, people of the book, prejudice against Jews has long existed in the Islamic world.93 While conceding the traditional Islamic tolerance that in medieval times allowed subject Jews to practice their religion—and while acknowledging that this tolerance was laudable compared with the butchering of Jews by medieval Christians—we must also note the obvious fact that this standard of “tolerance” no longer suffices.94 No Jew today would agree to be ranked as dhimmi, part of a protected minority of second-class believers.95 By modern standards this is simply discrimination. Therefore it is understandable that Israeli Jews reject the idea, promoted by some so-called moderate members of Hamas, of providing Jews peace within the framework of dhimmi status in an Islamic shari’a state in Palestine that would replace Israel. This proposal contradicts all standards of civil society.96
When Islamists accuse secular Arab and Turkish nationalists of acting as proxies for the Jews in a conspiracy to undermine the Islamic order, they ignore the fact that secular nationalists also engage in antisemitism. But unlike the secular nationalists, the Islamists give this ideology a religious garb. The Islamization of antisemitism, the foundations of which were laid by Sayyid Qutb and which continues today in the doctrines of organizations like Hamas, invokes a false tradition of unending, intrinsic hatred between Jews and Islam. The pillars of Islamized antisemitism can be summed up by a series of allegations:
• that a Jewish conspiracy against Islam has existed since 622;
• that Jews want to rule the world and thus deprive Islam of its own claim to rule the world;
• that Jews employ a variety of “secret” forces (such as Freemasonry) to further their goal of world domination, the chief of these being Zionism;
• that since the Crusades, Jews have used Christians as their proxies; and
• that America is today ruled by Jews.
These beliefs make Islamist antisemitism inseparable from Islamist anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism. Those in the West who argue that Jew hatred in the world of Islam is not antisemitism but rather is based in anti-Zionism or opposition to Israel’s policies must contend with the Islamists’ own statements to the contrary.97
Let me conclude with three observations:
1. Belief in the “cosmic, satanic evil” of Jews is tantamount to approval of a new Holocaust. Creatures of such evil could not be human, and their extermination would be not only logical but necessary. To state it thus, of course, makes the absurdity of the belief immediately obvious. This kind of thinking never existed in Islam until the emergence of Islamism.
2. The Islamization of antisemitism by Sayyid Qutb and the Muslim Brothers (who are seen by some policymakers as “moderate Islamists”) is a new development. The new religionized antisemitism is significantly different from “racial” Arab national antisemitism.
3. This Islamized, religionized antisemitism is more dangerous than racial antisemitism because it claims asalah (authenticity) as something native to Islam and is in this way more appealing to Islamic people.
How, then, can the West face this new form of the antisemitic disease without alienating itself from the world of Islam? The best way to counter Islamized antisemitism is on its own terms: to delegitimate it as foreign to Islamic thought and tradition and to deny it authenticity. Liberal Muslims who are aware of the cordial Jewish-Muslim relations in Muslim Spain and of the Muslim Ibn Rushd’s congeniality with the Jewish philosopher Maimonides must enlighten their fellow Muslims about this history. The historical relationship between Muslims and Jews is far from ideal, but it is very far from a state of constant (let alone cosmic) war. The better side of this tradition should be revived in modern Jewish-Islamic cooperation against the Islamist agenda. It is important for the world to understand that antisemitism lies at the core of the ideology of Islamism. The alternative to Islamism is a revival of the buried tradition of Islamic humanism that unites prominent Jewish and Muslim philosophers like Maimonides and Ibn Rushd in a cultural symbiosis abhorrent to Islamism.
This positive tradition is still alive in Morocco, the only Arab-Islamic country I know that outlaws Jew hatred. In July 2009 I was in the Moroccan city of Fez attending a Congrès Mondial sur Multiculturalisme et Pluralisme and was pleased to hear local politicians and scholars publicly exchanging their views in a context of pluralism and diversity. “The Jewish sources of Morrocan culture” were openly acknowledged. In an interview with Moroccan National Radio I voiced my admiration for the nation’s culture of civil Islam and called it a model for other Arabs and Muslims. Such an interview would be unthinkable in Egypt, Syria, or anywhere else in the Middle East. Antisemitism in those countries is so strong that objecting to it is a subversive act. Unlike the earlier variety of pan-Arab antisemitism, which was restricted to the elites, the new Islamist antisemitism is represented by popular mass movements. It has gained roots and has been elevated to a public choice. It is in no way an expression of Islamophobia to outlaw this new Islamist antisemitism. On the contrary, this outlawing is in line with the mindset of the tradition of “Jewish-Islamic Symbiosis” that flourished in medieval Islamic humanism.
I conclude this chapter by asking: Is the Arab Spring of 2011 inspired by this Islamic humanism? The downfall of authoritarian regimes and the subsequent emergence of new freedoms in the course of the Arab Spring did not unleash only positive sentiments. Some of the demonstrating masses in Tahrir Square in Cairo in mid-September 2011 found their way to the Israeli embassy to translate antisemitic sentiments into assault and destruction. This happened a week after AKP-Islamist Turkey expelled the Israeli ambassador. Then the Islamist Turkish prime minister came to Cairo to let himself be celebrated as the leader of the Muslims against the Jews. He did not engage in antisemitic slogans, but he exploited the anti-Israel card. Michael Borgstede, the German Middle East correspondent of the German daily Die Welt, wrote: “Since the fall of Mubarak Egyptian people speak out freely what is on their mind. A part of this freedom of expression is a tremendous amount of antisemitism and Jew-hatred.”98 If one accepts Hannah Arendt’s view as articulated in this chapter—namely, that any antisemitism is totalitarian—then the likelihood of the Arab Spring serving to elevate Islamists neither promises democracy nor reflects a mindset of Islamic humanism.