The Jew is Not My Enemy (5 page)

Neither the Mumbai terrorists nor the Haitian and African Americans were Arab or had been affected by the Israel-Palestine dispute. Chances are they had little or even no interaction with Jews in their day-to-day lives. So what motivated them to harbour so much hate in their hearts that they would give their lives for a chance to massacre Jews? Could it be that the religious education they received in the New
York prison system or in the madrassahs of Pakistan turned them into vessels brimming with hateful bigotry?

The seeds of such hate are planted in the minds of Muslims at an early age. The first time we attend Friday prayers at our neighbourhood mosques, as boys accompanying our fathers (most Muslim women never attend Friday congregations), the sermon we hear ends with the clarion call, “O Allah, defeat the kuffar” – Jews and other non-Muslims. We grow up having this prayer drilled into us week after week, though in time most of us ignore it as nothing more than the rhetoric of the screaming cleric. Nevertheless, this repeated prayer does leave a lingering suspicion about the Jew that stays with most Muslims for our entire lives, even if we never meet one.

Not only has the prayer asking God to defeat the Jews and Christians become a regular feature at most Friday congregations, it has gone unchallenged. In Muslim countries, no one seems to find it at all objectionable, while in the West there is a fear of upsetting Muslim clerics and community leaders. Many Westerners feel this hate is protected under provisions for minority religious rights. Some imams in the West have become so emboldened by the cowardice of the multiculturalists that they have placed their call for the defeat of Jews and Christians on their websites, ensuring that the large majority of Muslims who do not regularly attend mosque will not miss the message.

At a Toronto mosque in October 2009, a cleric ended one Friday sermon with this prayer: “O Allah, give victory to Muslims and Islam … O Allah, give defeat to the kuffar and mushrikeen” – non-believers. “Allah, destroy them from within themselves, and do not allow them to raise their heads in destroying Islam.” When asked to explain his use of the pulpit to spread such hate, Imam Said Rageah, who was schooled in Saudi Arabia, told the
National Post
that he did not intend to insult non-Muslims. Moreover, he said, his use of the word
destroy
did not mean
he wanted to destroy anyone, “but rather to confound or weaken those that would infringe on their [Muslim] rights.”
²

He did not deny that the word
kuffar
meant non-Muslims, including Jews, but Islamists across Canada came to his aid, claiming that the word was not at all a label for Jews or other non-Muslims. This despite the fact that scholar after scholar in all of Islamic history and to the present day, in the Middle East as well as North America, has referred to Jews and other non-Muslims as the kuffar.

Among them is Sheikh Muhammad al-Shinqati, director of the Islamic Center of South Plains, in Lubbock, Texas, and a resident scholar on the Islam Online website that gives fatwas on various issues raised by Muslims from around the world. In 2005, Sheikh al-Shinqati was asked on that forum whether Muslims are “allowed to call a Christian person kafir? Who is, exactly, a kafir?” He answered: “Christians and Jews are kuffar because they rejected the Prophethood of Muhammad.” The good sheikh added: “Kafir is now a derogatory term, and that is why I would encourage Muslims to use the term ‘non-Muslims’ when referring to people of different faiths.”
³

The good news is that some clerics have begun to question the inclusion in Friday prayers of this call to defeat Jews. Senior Saudi cleric Sheikh Salman al-Awdah, director of the website Islam Today, has said that Muslims should avoid prayers that call for the destruction of non-Muslims. “Praying for the ruin and the destruction of all infidels is not permitted because it goes against God’s law to call upon them … to take the righteous path.”
⁴

If an imam in Canada, with all its laws restricting hate speech, fears no consequences of his anti-Semitic prayer, imagine what is happening in the Arab world and Pakistan, where Muslims form the overwhelming majority of the population, and where asking Allah to “crush the Jews” has been the norm, not the exception, for centuries.

On March 9, 2009, a young Arab boy appeared on Egypt’s Al-Rahma
Television. This is what he had to say under the watchful eyes of his Islamic teacher:

Such a prayer may shock the non-Muslim listener, but to Muslims around the globe, such prayers and injunctions, if not always so explicit, are perfectly common. But although the clerics and imams of today may be the instruments of such fanatic hate, we need to look elsewhere for the roots of this rancour.

In Karachi on a warm spring day in 2006
, as I walked through the city’s posh Clifton district, a banner hung across a street caught my eye. It read, “Bird Flu is a Jewish conspiracy.”

I was dumbstruck. At first I thought that perhaps this was some dark Pakistani humour I had failed to appreciate returning to my birthplace after a gap of seventeen years. However, when I asked around, I found that this view was widespread: Israel, I was told, was to blame for the bird flu because it wanted to destroy the poultry industry of Indonesia, a Muslim nation. When I found a similar banner adorning the entrance of a grocery store, I asked the owner to explain to me the link between Jews and bird flu. He handed me a copy of
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
. “Here, take this book gratis – but read it,” he commanded. With an air of supreme confidence he explained that it was not just the bird flu that the “Yahoodis” had used to attack an Islamic country. The tsunami of December 2004 too was a result of a joint effort by the United States and Israel to drown and destroy Muslim nations. I was flabbergasted, and had to be pulled away by a buddy who had the foresight to see the consequences of what might happen if I started arguing with the store owner.

The city and country I had first left in 1978 had changed dramatically. Karachi was both wealthier and poorer. Opulence was reflected
in its buildings and SUVs, but its intellectual and artistic heritage had been bankrupted.

While the city’s religious working-class neighbourhoods teemed with people eager to move to the West to embrace the American dream, its upper-class secular elites peppered their talk with anti-imperialist rhetoric and an infatuation with Islamism. Among them were families who, after having secured U.S. or Canadian passports, had come back to Islamdom to enjoy privileges they missed in the West.

At a gathering one evening, whisky-drinking admirers of Osama bin Laden lectured me about the five thousand Jews that never reported to work at the Twin Towers on 9/11, while their peroxide-blond wives looked on lovingly through blue contact lenses, rearranging coffee-table books on ice hockey, and the strains of Shania Twain – appropriately singing, “You don’t impress me much” – wafted from their children’s bedroom. The city that had once launched popular uprisings, going back to the great Royal Indian Navy mutiny of 1946; that had toppled military dictatorships; that had been home to Pakistan’s best and brightest writers, dancers, singers, architects, and atheists; and that once had a healthy Jewish population and synagogues was now a hotbed of Jew-hatred and pseudo anti-Americanism that defied the most elementary logic. Almost every anti-American millionaire who had not yet acquired a Western passport would spout his share of hatred towards the United States – and then moments later ask me how he could send his son to the States so he could secure a green card and then sponsor the rest of the family.

The hatred of Jews was not restricted to the Karachi Press Club or the charity balls held by the Pakistani upper crust. It was aired on television talk shows as well. At quaint tea parties hosted by blue-eyed, blond begum-sahibs in the clubs that have become the hub of the proletariatmimicking Islamist bourgeoisie of Pakistan, expressing hatred of the Jew, it seemed, is the easiest way to establish one’s intellectual credentials.

Later I leafed through my copy of
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Protocols
is a collection of articles concocted in 1895 by the Russian Czar’s secret police in order to depict the growing strength of Marxists as a Jewish conspiracy. It was first published in Russia in the early 1900s, and claimed to expose a plan by the Jewish people to achieve global domination. It was published again after the 1905 Russian Revolution, when the ruling monarchy, stung by the mass uprising, used it to blame the Jews for instigating the workers’ strikes, peasant uprisings, and military mutinies. The monarchy had also invoked
The Protocols
when it blamed the Jews for Russia’s defeat at the hands of Japan in 1904. By the time the Czar was overthrown in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, anti-communist Russian exiles made
The Protocols
an instrument for blaming Jews for that upheaval, too. They depicted the Bolsheviks as overwhelmingly Jewish and allegedly executing the plan embodied in
The Protocols
.

In the 1920s, the London
Times
exposed
The Protocols
as a forgery. The newspaper revealed that much of the material was plagiarized from earlier works of political satire having nothing to do with Jews.

Today, the primary consumer of this forgery is the Muslim world, where
The Protocols
is cited as an authentic document validating the widespread belief that Jews control the world. Over time,
The Protocols
has been used to blame the Jews for both the horrors of communism and the excesses of capitalism, though this irony appears to have escaped the attention of its readers.

Pick up a newspaper in any part of the Arab world and you’re likely to see Hitler’s swastika superimposed on the Israeli flag. Such anti-Semitic imagery was once unheard of, but today caricatures of Jews – with fangs and exaggerated hook noses, for example – are common. Arab intellectuals and political leaders often insist that such images reflect
a dislike for Israelis and Zionism, yes, but not necessarily of Jews and Judaism. However, a look at school textbooks shows otherwise. In one government-approved textbook for Jordanian high school students, Jews are described as innately deceitful and corrupt. “Up to the present,” it states, “they are the masters of usury and leaders of sexual exhibitionism and prostitution.”
¹
It is not uncommon to hear Islamist televangelists and Saudi clerics in their sermons refer to Jews as descendants of apes and monkeys.

In Pakistan too, textbooks continue to depict Jews in a bad light. Conservative officials regularly block attempts by the government to delete anti-Jewish material from textbooks. In one instance, the textbook board agreed, under pressure from the World Bank and other funding agencies, to remove a section from ninth- and tenth-grade textbooks that urged pupils to “fight against those who believe not in Allah” and that asked for “Allah’s curse” on Jews and Christians. However, after removing the offensive text from books for grades nine and ten, board officials sneaked it into the books for grades eleven and twelve.
²

There is also evidence that Muslims are picking up anti-Semitism that is rooted in Christian dogma, which for centuries had little traction in the Muslim world. When Pope John Paul
II
visited Damascus in 2001, President Bashar al-Assad greeted him with a speech in which he suggested it was Jews who had killed Jesus. When Assad’s crude attempt to curry favour with the pope drew no response, his minister of religious affairs, Muhammad Ziyadah, went a step further. In a separate speech made before the pontiff, Ziyadah said: “We must be fully aware of what the enemies of God and malicious Zionism conspire to commit against Christianity and Islam.”

There is some truth to the claim that Judeophobia among Muslims is partly a consequence of the creation of the state of Israel and its continued occupation of the West Bank. However, there is clear evidence that contemporary anti-Semitism predates Israel and Zionism by
decades, and that it seeped into the Arab world from Europe as part and parcel of nineteenth-century colonization.

Few Jewish scholars would deny that notwithstanding the dhimmi, or second-class, status of Jews under all caliphates, life for Jews under Islam in the Arab world and North Africa was far better than in Christian Europe. At a time when Maimonides, the pre-eminent medieval Jewish philosopher and one of the greatest Torah scholars of the Middle Ages, served Saladin as his physician in twelfth-century Cairo, such a relationship would have been impossible to imagine in the domain of the Catholic pope or the Orthodox patriarch. Imagine Maimonides gracing the court of Louis vii of France.

For centuries, a virulent form of anti-Semitism afflicted Europe. That disease has now, unfortunately, become endemic in the Islamic world. Even while Jews were an integral part of Islamic life – as in eighth-century Baghdad, tenth-century Spain, twelfth-century Cairo, and sixteenth-century Turkey – the Christian world remained hostile towards them: they were the killers of Christ, and some Christians believed they re-enacted this ultimate evil by drinking Christian blood every Passover.

Although the Quran has positive as well as numerous harsh verses about Jews, the caliphs – except for the odd aberration – were enlightened secularists for their time. For them, the bottom line was that as long as Jews accepted Islamic political authority and the social and political limitations this imposed upon them, they were fully protected under Islamic law.