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