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Death to the Infidels
Radical Islam's War Against the Jews
By Mitchell Bard Palgrave Macmillan
Copyright © 2014 Mitchell Bard
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-137-47458-2
CHAPTER 1
ISLAM AND THE JEWS
"The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has several dimensions — national, political, territorial, cultural and religious," Israeli journalist Yossi Melman observed. "In the worst case scenarios drawn by Israeli analysts, the most feared and dangerous one is that the religious aspect will take over and dominate the conflict, thus turning it into a religious war, which might draw the billions of Muslims around the globe against Israel."
This is the scenario we now find ourselves in.
Conventional wisdom, as well as the misguided notions of many Muslims, commentators, journalists, and U.S. government Arabists, is that territory, politics, and the Palestinian issue are the root cause of the modern conflict in the Middle East. The easiest way to disprove this belief is to go back to the origins of Islam and trace its development over the centuries with regard to attitudes toward Jews. Though politics later became more important to the dispute between Jews and their neighbors in the Holy Land, the religious dimension has always been the most important factor.
At the outset, a distinction needs to be made between Muslims and Arabs as these terms are not synonymous. Not all Muslims are Arabs and vice versa. Arabs are people who originated in Arabia and now live throughout the Middle East. The overwhelming majority (approximately 90 percent) is Muslim, but others are Christian or members of offshoots of Islam such as Druze and Alawite. Some Arab Christians also have a problem with Jews either because of the assimilation of anti-Semitic Christian teachings, experience with Jews in the holy land or anger toward the Israeli government, while others make a distinction between Jews and Israeli policies. Most Muslims (80 percent) live outside the Middle East in places such as Indonesia, Nigeria, and India or in non-Arab states in the region such as Turkey and Iran.
The word Islamophobia was invented to shield Muslims from scrutiny in this era of political correctness. However, no single word can cover the breadth and diversity of the Muslim faith. It is necessary to point out that Muslims have a variety of interpretations of their faith and practices, and not all subscribe to the anti-Semitic or fanatical views that are expressed in the Koran, by their spiritual leaders, or by others claiming to speak for Islam. Islam originated more than 14 centuries ago and has more than 1.5 billion adherents with an assortment of viewpoints and practices. Some of these beliefs are benign, such as those of the Sufis, while others, such as those of jihadis, are dangerous.
Jew hatred among Muslims can be traced to Islam's Holy Scriptures and some of their interpreters — or, some would argue, misinterpreters. Though most Muslims grow up with tolerant religious traditions, a small number of extremists have twisted and misconstrued Islam's Holy Scriptures. Furthermore, radicals often are selective in their interpretation of Islamic sources and pick and choose passages and explanations to fit their needs to motivate, recruit, and brainwash followers.
The good news is that only a fraction of the Muslim world believes the pejorative interpretations. The bad news is that it doesn't require a very high percentage of the world's 1.5 billion Muslims to adopt radical views to pose a threat to Jews, Israel, and the international community.
The interaction between Jews and Muslims is, in historical terms, a relatively recent phenomenon, as Jews trace their history back more than 1,500 years before the birth of Muhammad. Before there were Muslims — or Christians — the Jewish people had a thriving civilization. Jews trace their connection to the Land of Israel to the time of Joshua, more than 3,000 years ago. In fact, for more than 400 years, it was the Jews who had a powerful nation that controlled what the Romans later named Palaestina (the southern portion of what is now called the West Bank) and parts of what is today Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.
Despite the invasion of various empires over the centuries, Jews have lived in their homeland uninterrupted for more than 2,000 years, maintaining a small presence even after most were killed or expelled by the Romans and their successors. Estimates of their population range from a high of 7 million in the first century of the Common Era to approximately 7,000 living under Ottoman domination at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The majority of Jews were deported or provoked to go into exile, what became known as the Diaspora.
Once dispersed, Jews became minorities in the lands in which they lived and adapted their lifestyles, culture, and politics to survive in alien societies.
The story of Jewish-Muslim relations does not begin in the Jews' Holy Land, but in what would later become the Muslims' holiest cities — Mecca and Medina. Jews fleeing persecution from Christians during the centuries after the Roman conquest scattered around the world, and a few tribes settled in the desert wastelands of what is now Saudi Arabia. These Jews, who probably had first been expelled from Palestine by the Romans, settled in Yathrib, which later became known as Medina to commemorate Muhammad's association with the city. Early on, Muhammad respected the Jews and adopted some of their customs (e.g., facing Jerusalem for prayers), but he was angered by the Jews' failure to recognize him as a prophet and their criticism of his distortions of the Old Testament. He subsequently rejected Jewish beliefs and the customs he had adopted (e.g., he changed the direction of prayers to Mecca) and claimed that Abraham was the patriarch of Islam, not Judaism.
"The embittered Muhammad began to cast the Jews in his revelations as a devious and treacherous people, who had persecuted past prophets and falsified the Holy Scriptures," notes historian Ephraim Karsh. "This disengagement was completed on Muhammad's deathbed in the form of an injunction ordering the expulsion of Jews (and Christians) from the [Arabian] peninsula: 'Two faiths will not live together in the land of the Arabs.'"
Before his death, the tensions between Muhammad and the Jewish tribes escalated, and Muhammad and his followers expelled two of the tribes and murdered all the men from the third, selling the women and children into slavery. Jews in other areas were also besieged but were ultimately allowed to stay on their land in return for an annual tribute of half of their produce.
Muslims believe that God (Allah) spoke to the prophet Muhammad through the angel Gabriel. The revelations to Muhammad were transmitted orally until after the Prophet's death. They were subsequently written down in what became the Koran, a book that followers believe is literally the word of God. The people who were willing to submit to the word and will of God became known as Muslims (i.e., "one who submits").
The enmity of Muslims toward Jews was codified in the Koran, which makes numerous references to Jews that can be interpreted as disparaging. For example: Jews try to introduce corruption (5:64); have always been disobedient (5:78); are cursed and treacherous (5:13); are enemies of Allah, the Prophet, and the angels (2:97–98); "shall have disgrace in this world" and "a grievous chastisement in the hereafter" (5:41); and were "consigned to humiliation and wretchedness" (2:61). Muslims are also instructed "not take the Jews and the Christians for friends" (5:51).
These anti-Jewish views are reinforced in Muslim commentaries. For example, a Hadith (a tradition of the Prophet Muhammad) contains one of the most frequently quoted statements calling for genocide: "On the Day of Judgment, the trees will say, 'Oh Muslim, Oh servant of God, here is a Jew hiding behind me. Come here and kill him.'"
Princeton University professor Bernard Lewis, the doyen of Middle East scholars, explains that one reason for the disproportionate number of critical passages regarding Jews was that Muhammad had more contact with Jews than Christians. He also defeated Jews in battle, creating the image of Jews as weak and unthreatening. Consequently, Muslims worried less about the Jews than the Christians, who were viewed as their rivals in a battle to bring enlightenment to the world.
Islam also has profound theological differences from Judaism that have led to animosity. For example, Muslims believe that the Hebrew Scriptures, though written thousands of years earlier, are falsifications of the Koran. This explains the discrepancy between the two traditions, as in the story of the sacrifice by Abraham of his son. The Torah says Abraham sacrificed Isaac on Mount Moriah in Jerusalem, but Muslims believe Abraham sacrificed Ishmael on Mount Mina near Mecca.
One bizarre and enduring calumny against the Jews is the Islamic belief that ancient Jews were turned into animals for transgressing the word of God. Jews, of course, have been called many disparaging names over the years associated with their looks or wealth, but why the comparison to animals? Islamists find their inspiration in the Koran and the Hadiths. The divine punishment of Jews is mentioned in three Koranic verses: "They are those whom Allah has cast aside and on whom His wrath has fallen and of whom He has made some as apes and swine" (5:60); "You have surely known the end of those from amongst you who transgressed in the matter of the Sabbath, in consequence of which we condemned them: Be ye like apes, despised" (2:65); and "when, instead of amending, they became more persistent in the pursuit of that which they were forbidden, we condemned them: Be ye as apes, despised" (7:166).
Even today, references to Jews (and sometimes "Zionists," used as a synonym) as "the descendants of apes and pigs" are common in mosques and the media in Muslim countries. Here are a handful of examples:
• In a weekly sermon in April 2002, Al-Azhar Sheikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, the highest-ranking cleric in the Sunni Muslim world, called the Jews "the enemies of Allah, descendants of apes and pigs."
• In one of his sermons, Saudi sheikh Abdul Rahman Al-Sudais, imam and preacher at the al-Masjid al-Haram Mosque — the most important mosque in Mecca — beseeched Allah to annihilate the Jews. He also urged the Arabs to give up peace initiatives with them because they are "the scum of the human race, the rats of the world, the violators of pacts and agreements, the murderers of the prophets, and the offspring of apes and pigs."
• In an August 2001 sermon, Sheikh Ibrahim Madhi, a Palestinian Authority official and imam of the Sheikh Ijlin mosque, Gaza City's main mosque, called on the Palestinian people to forget their internal disagreements and turn all weapons against Jews: "lances must be directed at the Jews, the enemies of Allah, the nation accursed in Allah's book. Allah described [them] as apes and pigs, calf-worshippers, idol-worshippers."
• Referring to Israel's fiftieth anniversary, Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah said the nation was established by "the grandsons of apes and pigs — the Zionist Jews — on the land of Palestine and Jerusalem." He concluded his speech with the slogan "Death to America" and "to the murderers of the prophets, the grandsons of apes and pigs, we say: ... 'Death to Israel.'"
Christians are also targets of radical Muslims, so it is not surprising that Koranic commentary links transformation into apes and pigs with Christians as well.
Some Muslims do argue these references to apes and pigs should not be taken literally, but as a "metaphor for supposedly believing persons (either Jews or Muslims) who had deliberately and willfully chosen to ignore commandments from God." Nevertheless, these references are primarily directed toward Jews and the impact is dehumanizing. "One could laugh off such rhapsodies of nonsense as the misguided musings of benighted souls," journalist Tibor Krausz notes, "but pervasive Islamic Jew-hatred has real-life consequences. By relentlessly dehumanizing Jews, Islamists seek to legitimize their murder as justified owing to Jews' inherently atavistic and animalist nature. Thus, killing Jews becomes both a religious duty and moral imperative."
The teachings in the Koran should be considered in historical context. For example, some Muslims argue that derogatory references apply only to Jews living at the time of Muhammad, that is, the seventh century. Still, like apologists for terror who try to erase the violent implications of jihad, even as some Muslims use the term to instigate holy war, present-day radical Muslims take Koranic deprecation of Jews literally. "One could reasonably argue," social psychologist Neil Kressel says, "that none of the negative references to Jews require that a contemporary Muslim believer possess hostility to Jews. Moreover, anti-Jewish references in the sacred sources do not explain why hostility to Jews is far more intense today than in many past eras of Islamic history." Kressel adds that "contemporary Christianity possesses at least as strong a religious foundation for Jew-hatred as Islam — in truth, much stronger — yet in the present day much of its potential for bigotry and hatred has been muted."
The disparaging religious teachings have conditioned many Muslims to believe almost any lie about Jews, which helps explain why Hitler's Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian book fabricating a global Jewish conspiracy to control the world, are bestsellers in the Middle East. These books reinforce the libels of the past. The first popular Arabic edition of the Protocols was published in 1951 by Muhammad Khalifa at-Tunisi, who said he translated the book to warn mankind of the danger posed by the Jews. "Even if they were expelled from our countries to any spot of land," he said, "wherever they were, they were enemies of mankind."
The theme of the Protocols has been incorporated into a variety of modern forms, including television shows and movies. For example, Egypt produced a 41-part television series, Knight Without a Horse, which tells the story of Jews trying to conceal the existence of the Protocols out of fear it would reveal their conspiracy to dominate the world. Not to be outdone, Syria produced its own $5 million, 29-part drama, Al-Shatat, which depicts Jews engaging in a conspiracy to rule the world and repeats traditional blood libels against Jews.
In addition to the indoctrination of Jew-hatred found in Islamic texts, Muslims are also conditioned by modern media to accept anti-Semitic tropes imported from the Christian world in the early twentieth century. Long before the publication of the Protocols and Hitler's manifesto, Jews were accused of a variety of heinous activities, such as poisoning wells and using the blood of Christians to make matzos for Passover. Though many of these calumnies date back centuries, modern Muslim leaders have repeated them. King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, for example, said that Jews "have a certain day on which they mix the blood of non-Jews into their bread and eat it. It happened that two years ago, while I was in Paris on a visit, the police discovered five murdered children. Their blood had been drained, and it turned out that some Jews had murdered them in order to take their blood and mix it with the bread that they eat on this day." On December 5, 1984, Saudi Arabian UN delegate Marouf al-Dawalibi told the UN Human Rights Commission conference on religious tolerance, "The Talmud says that if a Jew does not drink every year the blood of a non-Jewish man, he will be damned for eternity." More recently, Saudi cleric Salman Al-Odeh said he read about a doctor living with a Jewish family who was asked to bring them human blood. The doctor refused, but discovered that "they were making matzos with human blood."
The Elders of Zion is not the only conspiracy theory circulated in the Muslim world; others include the charge that Jews/Israel/Mossad were responsible for 9/11. For example, Prince Nayef of Saudi Arabia, then interior minister, told a Kuwaiti newspaper that Jews were behind the heinous attacks because they knew they would benefit from subsequent criticism of Islam and Arabs. In 2012, an Egyptian cleric claimed the "elders of Zion" were corrupting Muslims by flooding the Internet with porn and that alcohol and prostitutes would drown Muslim youth in "urges and desires." The Palestinians are masters of the "Big Lie" (the notion that if you tell a lie that's big enough, and you tell it often enough, people will believe you are telling the truth) and have claimed Israelis have done everything from dropping poison candy from planes to kill children in Gaza to injecting Palestinians with HIV.
Anti-Semitic stereotypes are also reinforced in the media in Muslim countries. Jews are often portrayed as Nazis or in Nazi-like cartoons, with hook noses, carrying daggers dripping with the blood of dead children, and with other images meant to dehumanize and humiliate them.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Death to the Infidels by Mitchell Bard. Copyright © 2014 Mitchell Bard. Excerpted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
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