May 17, 2002

"Islamic Anti-Semitism- In Bed With New Hitlers"

Europe has become an anti-Semitic inferno.  The fires of Jew hatred are ablaze from France to Germany and have spread across the Channel to Great Britain.  Fifty-seven years since the murder of six million Jews and the Christian rooted malignancy has metastasized once again.  Why?

The pathology of anti-Semitism is inherent in the doctrines of Christianity and the blood stained pages of its new bible.  Makes no mistake: anti-Semitism is an invention of Christianity.  Most especially after the tenth century when John Christendom, a prelate of the church demonized Jews and was probably the first to wage extermination.

Hatred for Jews is indigenous to Islam as well but by no means is it as intensive or doctrinaire as in Christianity. Mohammed was enamored of Judaism.  In Mecca, he learned much from Jews and was introduced to monotheism by Jews as well.

The Islamic prophet was expelled from Mecca but was embraced by three Jewish tribes who brought him to Medina and listened to his preaching.  In Medina, he learned much more about Judaism but was wounded when the Jews rejected him as a prophet, which turned his affectionate respect for Jews to animosity.  The Caliphate emerged after Mohammed's death.  His four disciples set about the world foisting his teaching with the edge of their swords.  Many Jews were forcibly converted to Islam but many more Christians were proselytized against their will.  Life for Jews in the Islamic world was at all times bereft of acceptance but fluctuated between moments of toleration and outright violence.

Islamic treatment of Jews never reached the levels of European Christian animosity.  Christians consistently subjected Jews to blood libels, pogroms, mass slaughters and the unimaginable holocaust.  Pogroms were also known in the Islamic world but they were few and not doctrinaire.  To the Moslem, Jews and Christians were infidels, but Buddhists and Hindus were much worse.  The current wars in Kashmir and recent actions by the Taliban in Afghanistan are examples of classical Islamic hatred for those religions.  Both Christianity and Judaism were banished more than nine hundred years ago from the Arabian Peninsula and in modern Saudi Arabia today, the worship or belief in religions other than Islam is forbidden.  Suddenly, Moslems took a page from the ugliest pages of Christian history and brought them to fore.

The crazed Protocols of the Elders of Zion are frequently referred to as proven fact, and the Passover blood libels emerged from the pens of ostensible scholars.  Bashar Asad, the son of Hafez and now dictator of Syria openly called upon the Pope to align himself with the Arabs in ridding the world of the killers of "Christ."

Strange as it may seem, Arab propagation of anti-Semitism, though always latent became a persistent and nagging voice on the very day the Oslo accords were signed.  While Jewish hopes for peace began to rise, the voices of hate were resonating in Islam and do you know who ignited these new fires?  Let me tell you who exploited animosities that were dormant for one thousand years and introduced the Christian myths and demonic portraits of Jews.  You guessed right- Yasir Arafat.

In the entire Arab media, in school texts and from pulpits Friday after Friday readers and congregations and pupils were being told, "Kill Jews."  In Israel, government after government continued to negotiate although each of Israel's Prime Ministers knew well what was happening in the Islamic world.

Rabin contended, "You make peace with an enemy."  He was right.  But, once you have made peace, the enemy should have now become a friend.  Israel's Arab adversaries chose instead to become worse enemies.  New alliances were created between Moslems and the Christian militias in America's northwest.  The Ku Klux Klan became a partner to Hamas.  European anti-Semitism is not the result of compassion for Palestinians.

It is the product of a whole new phenomenon.  There is a worldwide consensus among liberal and leftist thinkers.  The Palestinians are the underdogs and the Israelis, the oppressors. The left has been entrapped by the Palestinian propaganda machine and has now become part willingly or otherwise of the world's newest form of age-old Christian Jewish hatred.  To my dear Jewish friends on the left, I say, watch out.  You may be getting into bed with Hitler's successors.

Shabbat Shalom