Islam and the Jews

In March 1944 the then leader of the Palestinian national movement said to his people: “Kill the Jews wherever you can find them. This will please God, history and religion.” The fact that the speech was broadcast by Radio Berlin was no coincidence. The Palestinian leader Haj Amin al-Husseini spent the greater part of the Second World War as Adolf Hitler’s guest in the German capital. He praised German-Arab friendship and referred to an ideological fellowship with National Socialism, based on the cult of authority, anti-communism, Anglophobia – and hatred of the Jews. One year earlier, when the Holocaust was reaching its climax, Amin al-Husseini expressed his admiration for the way in which the Germans “had definitively solved the Jewish problem”. Al-Husseini was a religious man, who usually began his speeches with quotations from the Qur’an.

There is good reason to ask the question whether something as fundamental has changed in the Arab and Muslim world since Haj Amin al-Husseini’s times. Robert Wistrich, Professor of History and head of the International Centre for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University, replies (“The Old-New Antisemitism”, The National Interest No. 72, 2003) that Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hizbollah and al-Qaida’s global jihadis are today driven by the same violently anti-western and anti-Jewish religious fanaticism as al-Husseini in his time. “There are also clear parallels here to other totalitarian ideologies which have afflicted humankind during the last century: Communism and Nazism”, writes Wistrich. He is not alone in this view. The American left-wing intellectual debater and writer Paul Berman shows in his book Terror and Liberalism that radical Islam today praises martyrdom in the struggle against “the enemies of Islam”, in the same way as Nazism praised self-sacrifice and dying for Hitler’s Germany. Yehuda Bauer, one of the world’s most prominent researchers into the Holocaust and the history of anti-Semitism, has also criticised this “death cult”. He too sees clear parallels between Communism, Nazism and contemporary radical Islam.

Even in the 1980s the Islamic specialist Bernard Lewis wrote in his book Semites and Anti-Semites. An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice: “Today traditional anti-Semitism is a vital part of Arab intellectual life – almost to the same extent as it was in Nazi Germany.”

The development since then has merely accelerated with coarser anti-Jewish hate propaganda in the mass media, schools and mosques of the Arab world and the Muslim world – from Morocco and Egypt in North Africa to Palestine, Saudi Arabia and Iran in the Middle East. In a country like Pakistan, where there are no Jews, hatred of the Jews is one of the most common messages among the country’s many militant Islamists. Even in the suburbs of Europe’s cities, where a failed integration policy has created a fertile soil for extremism, this poison is being spread.

There are also direct challenges to the genocide against the Jews. And close at hand. At a “Rally for Islam” in central London the extreme Islamist group Al-Muhajiroun’s leader Omar Bakri preached that Muhammad openly encouraged Muslims to kill Jews. In the Stockholm mosque in the summer of 2003 a meeting was held in the European Council for Fatwa and Research at which the influential fundamentalist theologian Yousef al-Qaradhawi described suicide bombings (against civilians in Israel) as “the most powerful of weapons, because it is a unique weapon which Allah has given all his believers. It constitutes a form of divine justice on Earth”. In Denmark the extreme group Hizb-ut-Tahrir agitates on its homepage and through leaflets for the murder of Jews.

It is from Christian Europe that Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism found inspiration for its myths of ritual murder and conspiracy theories. Bernard Lewis explains the difference between classical European anti-Semitism and the hatred of the Jews in the Muslim/Arab world: for the Christian Jew-haters, “Jew” represented the dark, deadly power – a notion which underlies many conspiracy theories and myths about Jewish control over banking and the mass media. In the Muslim world, on the other hand, Jews have been regarded as, admittedly crafty and sly but also ridiculous and weak beings.”

Only in the 19th century did hatred of the Jews of the European type spread to the Muslim world. Accusations of Jewish ritual murder and conspiracies began to appear in Arab countries. This development accelerated after Arab defeats in all their wars against Israel – humiliation could not be explained with the aid of old European conspiracy theories about “Jewish world domination”.

The hatred of Israel – “anti-Zionism” – after 1948 has increasingly often been given a classic anti-Semitic expression. The existence of the Jewish state is described as a symptom of a sickness at the heart of the Muslim world. In Palestinian school books the recurrent message is that Israel is an objectionable colonialist project, doomed to disappear, and that the Jews, who are only ascribed negative qualities, are the principle enemies of Islam.

The explanation for this type of hate propaganda should not be sought in Israel’s policy, but in the very existence of the Jewish state. According to Muslim tradition, the loss of every piece of land which has ever been part of the Muslim world, dar al-islam, like the fact that Jews govern the country’s Muslim citizens, comprises a difficult theological problem.

Despite the fact that developments in the Arab world and in the Muslim world today can be compared to the anti-Jewish persecutions in 1930s Germany, the religious rhetoric means that politicians and intellectuals in the Western world avoid taking a stand. They do not want to be accused of Islamophobia. At the same time moderate Muslim leaders keep silent in order not to be accused of collaborating with “the Zionists”. The result is that Muslim extremists’ interpretation of the relationship of Islam to Judaism gains an ever stronger foothold within Muslim and Arab opinion.

Demonising the Jews and declaring them to be inhuman are important steps on the path to the Nazi “final solution”. Today we see the same development in the Arab and Muslim worlds. It is a question of an explosive development of conspiracy theories, claiming that “the Jews” are behind all the misery that has afflicted Muslims. “The Jews” are accused of consciously spreading AIDS in the Arab world, of having caused the tsunami catastrophe in Asia, and of being the principle enemies of the Prophet. Judaism is explained as being the underlying power behind all the expressions of modernity – secularism, feminism, capitalism, liberalism, etc which are regarded as threats to Islam.

This type of message reoccurs in popular culture – an Egyptian TV series in 41 episodes, Rider without a Horse, deals with a Jewish plot aiming to enslave the world. And it is even more explicit in politics. In Hamas’ official programme one can read the following (in paragraph 22): With their money they (the Jews) are taking control of all the world’s media, news agencies, publishing houses, radio stations and others. /…/ They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist Revolution and all the other revolutions of which we have heard. They formed secret societies such as the Masons, Rotary clubs and the Lions with the aim of promoting the interests of Zionism /…/ They were behind the First World War, in order to destroy the Islamic caliphate /…/ They founded the League of Nations, through which they could govern the world. They were behind the Second World War, by means of which they made huge financial gains /…/ They are the people who ensured that the League of Nations was replaced by the UN and the Security Council, in this way to dominate the world.”

Sometimes this conspiracy thinking can attain downright comic portions: according to Professor Hasan Bolkhari, a member of the Iran Film Institute and a cultural adviser at the country’s Ministry of Education, the American TV cartoon series Tom and Jerry is part of  “ a conscious Jewish strategy aiming to change the picture of mice and create sympathies for the Jews [they have traditionally been associated with mice] on the part of European children”. (See Bolkhari’s speech at a film seminar on February on www.memritv.org/clip/en/1049.htm).

Another common theme, with its roots in Christian mediaeval Europe, is “Jewish ritual murder”. This is how a modern version of this myth sounds: “AIDS is being spread in Europe by beautiful HIV-positive Jewish girls who have come from Israel to sell themselves to Egyptian youths /…/ the Egyptian authorities have exposed Zionist presents for children, in the form of chewing gum which has been proved to cause sterility. For university students (the Jews) have developed a chewing gum which increases sexual lust.” (Al-Usbu’ Al-Adabi, the state-controlled mouthpiece of the Syrian Writers’ Association, January 1, 2000)

In association with Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting, three years ago Arabic speaking TV viewers worldwide could watch the Syrian drama series Al-Shahat (“Diaspora”) shown on Lebanese Hizbollah’s satellite channel Al Manar. The film is full of bloody scenes in which rabbis and religious Jews are represented as cannibals. (Anyone wishing to view a sample of how these themes are presented can find video clips from Al Shahat and similar Arab TV productions at www.memritv.org/subject/en/113.htm.)

One of the great bestsellers in the Arab world has for years now been the book Matzah of Zion. The author, General Mustafa Tlass, Syria’s long-term Defence Minister with literary ambitions, writes for example: “A Jew can kill you and take your blood to bake his Zionist bread. “During the 1980s the book was a bestseller throughout the Arab world and in 1990 it was dramatised on Syrian radio and could be heard across the Middle East. Its success was clearly so great that General Tlass and others in the Syrian machinery of power considered it appropriate to export the book beyond the Arabic-speaking world. At a meeting at the UN Commission for Human Rights on February 8, 1991 the Syrian representative, Nabila Chaalan, encouraged the members of the commission to “read this important book.”

Religious rhetoric aimed at the Jews and Judaism also characterises the message on Arab and Muslim media, in sermons and school books: Khaled Al-Qudha, Jordanian Professor of Religious Lesgislation, says in a TV feature: “The Prophet said: Doomsday will come only when Muslims fight Jews and kill them, until the Jew hides behind trees and rocks and the trees and the rocks say: ‘O, Muslim, O, servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me. Come and kill him.’” (Al-Majd TV, September 11, 2005).

In an interview on Syrian TV on July 21, 2006 the country’s deputy Minister of Religious Affairs, Muhammad Abd al-Sattar referring to the Qur’an said that “Jews are descended from apes and pigs”.

During a Friday service broadcast on Palestinian TV in May 2005, Imam Ibrahim Mudeiris, said that “Jews are a virus like AIDS.”

The old millennium ended with a modern caricature in the Palestinian daily paper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida (December 28, 1999). In this we can see an old man, who symbolises the 20th century, and a young man, who represents the coming century. Between them stands “the Jew” – according to an aesthetic familiar from Der Stürmer, with the Star of David on his chest and his skull cap on his head. The old man is pointing to “the Jew” and saying “the sickness of the century”.
(There is reason here to compare Muslim reactions to some Muhammad drawings in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten or Lars Vilk’s “roundabout dog” – a fairly rare phenomenon in European newspapers – with the tidal wave, continuing for decades, of coarsely anti-Jewish caricatures in state-controlled daily newspapers across a large part of the Muslim world. In Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Iran and the Palestinian areas it is customary – and not an exception – to portray Jews as animals, the devil incarnate and ritual murderers. See topical Jewish caricatures from the Arab press on
www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=subjects&Area=antisemitism&ID=IA36807)

If anyone wishes to make excuses for this coarsely anti-Semitic propaganda by referring to the failure of the Palestinian-Israeli peace process, the latest intifada or the so-called wall on the West Bank, I recommend the previously-mentioned book by Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites, which depicts the anti-Jewish hate propaganda which for decades has spread through the Muslim world. Or Judith Vogt’s Billedet som politisk våpen (“The image as a political weapon”), where some of the coarsest Jewish caricatures from Arabic newspapers – before 1967 – are reproduced.

Nowhere else in the world is denial of Nazi crimes as widespread and as generally accepted today as in the Muslim and Arab world. Revisionist myths, which see western historiography about the Holocaust as a “Zionist lie” with the intention of “creating sympathy for the Jews”, are presented as fact. In, for example, the Palestinian administration’s largest official daily paper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida (July 2, 1998) one could read: “They (the Jews) began to circulate terrible pictures showing mass executions and fabricating horrible stories about the gas chambers in which, according to them, Hitler had burned them. /…/ And they derived advantage from all of this in order to create sympathy, whilst at the same time they demanded financial compensation and support from the whole world.”

On December 7, 1999 the Jordanian Muslim weekly paper Al-Sabil wrote: “Hitler took revenge on the Jews because he knew that they were profiteers, extortionists and traitors. He got rid of them /…/ and realised his dream and restored his stolen rights. Is a person like that not worthy of admiration? Hitler succeeded where the Arabs have failed. He purged his country from the Jews in his own way and the Jewish historians have lied when they depicted this as a Holocaust.”

In his introduction to an Arabic translation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, the translator Luis Al-Haj writes: “The soldier Hitler left behind not merely a tragically sullied legend, the tragedy of a state whose dreams had been crushed, a regime whose support was being undermined, and a political party that had been struck down. Hitler was an ideologue who left behind an ideological heritage which must not perish.” The book, which has been distributed in east Jerusalem and areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority, has in recent years been high on the Palestinian bestseller list.

It is, therefore, not so strange that such falsifiers of history and Holocaust-deniers as Robert Faurison, David Irving and Roger Garaudy are honoured as heroes in the Arab world. On a visit to Egypt, Garaudy was given a prize by the country’s Society of Authors and an honorary membership. In Syria he was officially received by the country’s Vice President, and the Mufti, Sheikh Ahmad Kaftharo, said in a statement that “Garaudy has in a radical way exposed […] the Zionist fraud”. The Culture and Education Minister of Lebanon, Michel Adah, held a joint press conference during which Garaudy repeated classic anti-Semitic myths about Jews “who control the international media and in this way succeed in falsifying history”. All of this at the same time that Garaudy had in his home country been found guilty by a court of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.

A few Arabic intellectuals have reacted. The Palestinian American writer Edward Said wrote in the London newspaper Al-Hayat on the reception Garaudy had been given in the Arab world: “If we wish to influence what is happening, we have to acknowledge the Jews’ suffering just as we require them not to deny what we have been through. It is sick to deny the Holocaust or to compare the murder of millions of people with the expulsion or oppression of the Palestinians.”

In a British daily paper I read about an imam in Brighton, Abduljalil Sajid, and a rabbi, Hershel Gluck. They tell of an occasion when a Jewish representative and an imam were each to make a public speech – one about anti-Semitism, the other about Islamophobia. They decided at the last minute to exchange roles: the Jewish man talked about hatred of Muslims, the imam about hatred of the Jews. There is an encouraging symbolism in this image. Not just because Judaism and Islam have a great deal in common, and that Jews and Arabs have a long history of productive coexistence, but also because the best way to counteract extremism – which only has hatred and violence to offer its supporters – is to create the prerequisite for meetings with “the other”.

On Jews in the Qur’an

Like all religious writings, the Qur’an is a complex and multifaceted work, in which moderate individuals can find life-giving messages of peace and communion, whilst extremists find arguments for their notions of violence.
Ahl al-kitab, which is usually translated as “the People of the Book”, is the term the Qur’an uses to denote both Jews and Christians. The Qur’an is, in one sense, the most pluralist of all the monotheist religious writings with its oft-repeated doctrine that all previous prophetic revelations are valid, and that those who faithfully follow them are pleasing to God. The diversity of the revelations is seen as part of God’s plan, intended to stimulate people into a friendly competition in goodness:

“To each among you
Have we prescribed a Law
And an Open Way.
If God had so willed,
He would have made you
A single People, but (His
Plan is) to test you in what
He hath given you; so strive
As in a race in all virtues.
The goal of you all is to God;
It is He that will show you
The truth of the matters
In which ye dispute.”
(5:51(b) The Holy Quran, A. Yusuf Ali 1983 Amana Corp.)

Despite these positive references, the Qur’an’s predominant message is that individual Jews may be loyal and pious (3:110-115), but that most are sinners, who have betrayed the high ideals they should stand for. Most common is the accusation that the Jews (like the Christians) have falsified the teachings that God has revealed to them (2:75-79, 3:78, 4:46). In the Qur’an the Jews are called apes and swine, because they did not obey God. They are arrogant; they refuse to acknowledge all revelations which are not given to them directly, however precisely these may coincide with their experiences (2:87-92).
Muslim commentators have different views on this accusation – something that should be interpreted such that the Jews have consciously changed the actual wording in Scripture; others that they consciously misinterpret biblical evidence. But the conclusion remains: if Jews and Christians were merely to read their own writings with honest intent, they would be forced to acknowledge the validity of the Qur’an and the claim of Muhammad to the status of prophet.

During his stay in Mecca a close relationship seems to have existed between Muhammad and the Jews. These friendly relations were later given a political basis in the Constitution of Medina, which lays down that Jewish and Arab tribes in the area, just like Muhammad’s followers, together form a single ummah, that is to say a religious-political community whose members are equals as regards rights and duties. This attitude started to change, however, with the Arabs’ attacks on Muslims in Medina in the years 624-627, when the different Jewish tribes seem to have reneged on their pact with the Muslims. This changed Muhammad’s attitude to the Jews, who were then accused of hypocrisy and deception against their monotheist fellow-believers. In one of the most hostile verses of the Qur’an, Muslims are exhorted thus:

“O ye who believe!
Take not the Jews
And the Christians
For your friends and protectors:
They are but friends and protectors
To each other. And He
Amongst you that turns to them
(For friendship) is of them.
Verily God guideth not
A people unjust.”
(5:54 The Holy Quran, A. Yusuf Ali 1983 Amana Corp.)

It is all too obvious how easily such verses can be torn from their context – the attempts by the early Muslim community to establish itself – and can be applied by today’s fundamentalists to the political conflicts of our time.
Despite the rancour that is expressed in these verses in the Qur’an, the situation of the Jews was often much better under Islamic rule than in Christian countries right down to modern times. At times of tolerance Muslim scholars could point to the Qur’an’s reconciliatory verses:

“And dispute ye not
With the People of the Book,
Except with means better
(Than mere disputation), unless
It be with those of them
Who inflict wrong (and injury):
But say, ‘We believe
In the Revelation which has
Come down to us and in that
Which came down to you;
Our God and your God
Is One; and it is to Him
We bow (in Islam).’”
(29:46 The Holy Quran, A. Yusuf Ali 1983 Amana Corp.)

Jackie Jakubowski