Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube/Diller distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. His bi-weekly column appears regularly in newspapers around the globe. His website, DanielPipes.org, is one of the most accessed internet sources of specialized information on the Middle East and Islam.
Mon Oct 27, 2003 2:06 pm Deadly Denial [of Muslim Anti-Semitism]
Deadly Denial [of Muslim Anti-Semitism]
By Daniel Pipes
The New York Post
October 26, 2003
THE prime minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamad, informed the world this month, among other things, that "Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them." Condoleezza Rice, the U.S. national security adviser, described Mahathir's comments as "hateful, they are outrageous."
But she then added, "I don't think they are emblematic of the Muslim world." If only she were right about that.
In fact, Mahathir's views are precisely emblematic of current Muslim discourse about Jews - symbolized by the standing ovation his speech received from an all-Muslim audience of leaders representing 57 states. Then, a Saudi newspaper reports, when Western leaders criticized Mahathir, "Muslim leaders closed ranks" around him with words of praise ("very correct," "a very, very wise assessment").
Although anti-Jewish sentiments among Muslims go back centuries, today's hostility results from two main developments: Jewish success in modern times and the establishment of Israel. Until about 1970, however, Muslim resentment remained relatively quiet.
But in the 1970s, political radicalization combined with an oil boom gave states like Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Libya the will and the means to sponsor anti-Jewish ideas worldwide. With barely a Muslim voice to counter ever-more-outlandish theories, these multiplied and deepened. For the first time, the Muslim world became the main locus of anti-Jewish theories.
By now, notes Morton Klein of the Zionist Organization of America, "Hatred of Jews is widespread throughout the Muslim world. It is taught in the schools and preached in the mosques. Cartoons in Muslim newspapers routinely portray Jews in blatantly anti-Semitic terms."
Indeed, Mahathir is hardly the only Muslim ruler to make anti-Jewish statements. President Bashar al-Assad of Syria said in 2001 that Israelis try "to kill the principles of all religions with the same mentality in which they betrayed Jesus Christ." The Iranian ayatollahs and Saudi princes have a rich history of anti-Jewish venom, as of course do Egyptian television and Palestinian textbooks.
Of the myriad examples, one stands out for me: a June 2002 interview on Saudi TV with a 3-year-old girl named Basmallah, made available by the Middle East Media and Research Institute:
Anchor: Basmallah, are you familiar with the Jews?
Basmallah: Yes.
Anchor: Do you like them?
Basmallah: No.
Anchor: Why don't you like them?
Basmallah: Because . . .
Anchor: Because they are what?
Basmallah: They're apes and pigs.
Anchor: Because they are apes and pigs. Who said they are so?
Basmallah: Our God.
Anchor: Where did he say this?
Basmallah: In the Koran.
The little girl is wrong about the Koran, but her words show that, contrary to Rice's analysis, Muslim anti-Semitism extends even to the youngest children. That Mahathir himself is no Islamist but (in the words of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman) "about as forward-looking a Muslim leader as we're likely to find" also points to the pervasiveness of anti-Jewish bias.
In its attitudes toward Jews, the Muslim world today resembles Germany of the 1930s - a time when state-sponsored insults, caricatures, conspiracy theories and sporadic violence prepared Germans for the mass murder that followed.
The same might be happening today. Wild accusatory comments like Mahathir's have become banal. Against Israelis, violence has already reached a rate approaching one death per day over the past three years. Outside Israel, violence against Jews is also persistent: a Jewish building blown up in Argentina, Daniel Pearl's murder in Pakistan, stabbings in France, the Brooklyn Bridge and LAX killings in the United States.
These episodes, plus calling Jews "apes and pigs," could serve as the psychological preparation that one day leads to assaulting Israel with weapons of mass destruction. Armaments chemical, biological and nuclear would be the successors of Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Dachau. Millions of Jews would perish in another Holocaust.
As in the 1930s, the world at large - including the U.S. government - again seems not to note the deadliness of processes now underway. Anti-Jewish rhetoric and violence are decried, to be sure, but with little sense of urgency and even less of their cumulative impact.
Condoleezza Rice and other top-ranking officials need to recognize the power and reach of the anti-Jewish ideology inculcated among Muslims, then develop active ways to fight it. This evil has already taken innocent lives; unless combated it could take many more.
Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum.
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It so happens that, relative to its population, Israel has the:
- largest number of university degrees in the world;
- produces more scientific papers than any other nation;
- has the largest number of start-up companies;
- largest number of biotech start-ups among them;
- has the largest percentage of households with personal computers;
- absorbs more immigrants than any other country.
At the same time, in absolute figures, Israel:
- has more start-up companies than any other country except the United States;
- is the second only to the United States in the size of its venture capital funds;
- despite the almost total lack of natural resources, has an economy that exceeds in size the economies of all its immediate neighbors combined;
- is the only country in the world that entered the new century with a net gain in its number of trees
There are more facts pointing in the same direction, but you probably get the picture by now.
Add to it the leading role that Diaspora Jews are playing around the world in all areas of human endeavor (check the Nobel Prize statistics, for instance), and one will inevitably agree with the conclusion so succinctly stated by you in your speech at the Organization of the Islamic Conference in Putrajaya, Malaysia: Jews rule the world. And Muslims, as we both know, don't, no matter how badly they want to.
In your speech, you have correctly identified religion as the underlying reason for the abysmal backwardness of the Islamic world: "We need guns and rockets, bombs and warplanes, tanks and warships for our defense. But because we are discouraged from learning of science and mathematics as giving us no merit for the afterlife, today we have no capacity to produce our own weapons for our defense. We have to buy our weapons from our detractors and enemies."
I am sure you realize that since your "detractors and enemies" sell you those weapons, they do not consider you a serious adversary.
Obviously, they are not afraid of you, and in your world, the absence of fear is tantamount to disrespect, which prompts you to state, "Today we, the whole Muslim ummah [community], is treated with contempt and dishonor." In my world - the world ruled by Jews - the absence of fear is tantamount to freedom, and our respect towards each other is never based on one person's readiness to harm another. In fact, your inability to manufacture weapons is the least of your losses due to the supremacy of death over life in your culture. Frankly, you have no idea how much you are really missing in your vain pursuit of the mythical virgins: you are missing life itself. This is exactly why, according to you, "There is a feeling of hopelessness among the Muslim countries and their people." What else can you expect from people whose lives have been taken away from them and sacrificed to a false, cruel, senseless deity?
That closes the vicious circle to which your religion condemns its followers: "Our only reaction is to become more and more angry. Angry people cannot think properly. And so we find some of our people acting irrationally. They launch their own attacks, killing just about everybody, including fellow Muslims, to vent their anger and frustration."
I am afraid you are bending the truth here. No suicide bombing has ever been done by a disgruntled person acting alone. There is a powerful organization behind each of the mass murders perpetrated by Muslims, and I suspect you, as a good Muslim in a position of power, have contributed to a few of them.
However this perfectly transparent lie is not as important as the truth you have brought out into the open. You spoke before a room full of Islamic leaders from all over the world. You talked about the extermination of Jews as the only way to avoid the extermination of Muslims. You brought up the Holocaust as an example that should be followed. You were so politically incorrect that even President Bush had to think for three long days before finally deciding how to react on your speech. Your audience however experienced no doubts. Your call for genocide was met with a standing ovation. Every branch of Islam was represented at the conference: Sunnis and Shiites, openly hateful "extremists" and cautiously hateful "moderates", true enemies and false allies, Iranians and Afghans, Saudis and Turks. And none of them found anything objectionable in your speech. Not a single one.
And that makes me sincerely grateful to you. Grateful, because no enemy of Islam, no outsider, no scholar could have debunked the myth of "moderate Islam" as conclusively as you have done in your speech. Now we've heard straight from the horse's mouth that "the religion of peace and love" exists only in the imagination of lying politicians. And for that I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
Sincerely,
Yashiko Sagamori
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Perhaps more respect for Jews would be achieved by walking softly and carrying a larger stick. In other words, a 100 fold response in kind might be appropriate for any violence commited against Jews.
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