The Jew is Not My Enemy

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR
THE JEW IS NOT MY ENEMY

Morality is doing what is right
,
regardless of what we are told;
Religious dogma is doing what we are told
,
no matter what is right
.

–E
LKA
R
UTH
E
NOLA

Just after the end of the Second World War, an English scholar and cleric, James Parkes, wrote a succinct little book on anti-Semitism called
An Enemy of the People
. With the discovery of the Nazi death camps came an ever wider recognition of the end game of two thousand years of Jew-hatred: Hitler’s plan to eliminate the Jewish people from the face of the earth.

Many scholars since that time have documented the Holocaust and traced its origins in Christian theology, medieval torture and expulsions, Tsarist pogroms, and racial theories given new life by bowdlerizing Darwin. We now understand that what seemed a catastrophic illness in Hitler’s Germany and occupied Europe is in fact a chronic disease that has erupted in quite disastrous ways from time to time. Any idle exploration of the Internet, any scratching of the underbelly of politics today, would remind us that the eruptions of this terrible chronic condition continue.

Tarek Fatah opens our eyes to a world with which we are less familiar, but whose importance is critical for the times in which we live. Never one to pull his punches, he wades into debates about Islamic theology and politics and reminds us of the ugliness of Jew-hatred within parts of the Muslim tradition. It is, he argues, both alarmingly widespread and a deep offence to Islam’s humanistic traditions.

No doubt the book will arouse debate and controversy. To those of us who have known Tarek for a long time, that comes as no surprise. But it is a debate that needs to happen, because if Jefferson was right when he said that democracy is an infectious idea, so too is hatred. And no hatred has been more widespread and pernicious than hatred of the Jews.

What Tarek Fatah’s critics will miss is that he speaks as a Muslim who refuses to allow his religion to become an exercise in propaganda. He points out the moments in human history when enlightened Muslim leaders welcomed Jews in their midst and encouraged scholars to understand the depth of what is common to great religious traditions. The golden age of Maimonides in “al Andalus” can come again.

There are passages in the Torah, the Bible, and the Quran that speak of death to infidels and the necessary slaughter of others for the survival of people chosen by God. Those who seek theological support for the narrowest of hatreds can, and have, found it in sacred texts.

But what Tarek Fatah points out is how toxic this has become in today’s world, and that a demonization of the Jews, and Israel, is a particular feature of extremism that needs to be exposed.

The book combines history, theology, and politics. It shows that far from being anti-Semitic in its early years, Islam stressed its common heritage with the people of The Book, and that it is a return to this deeper understanding that could be a basis for hope.

No doubt Fatah’s exposure of the futility of singling out Israel for all the troubles in the Middle East will earn him much predictable criticism, but readers should also recognize that Israeli settlement policy also comes in for criticism as he points out that a two-state policy requires a viable Palestine. He is nobody’s patsy and calls it as he sees it. It is his independence of spirit and his willingness to engage in debate and discussion that have always marked his life. He criticizes freely and accepts the rules of the arena in return.

This book should be read and debated widely. Osama bin Laden is not alone, and his popularity on the streets of Khartoum and Baghdad has to be understood. Nor should anyone believe that a resolution of the conflict in the Middle East between Israel and its neighbours, as necessary and desirable as that is, will put these issues to rest. Life is more complicated than that.

Tarek Fatah is now coming into his own. He has written a book of weight and substance, and attention must be paid to what he says. Let us also realize what he is not saying. He is not saying that “Islam is anti-Semitic.” He is not saying “The war between Islam and the West is inevitable.” He worries rightly about Islamophobia and tells his readers that Islam is a great religion to which attention and respect must be paid. He is also saying that through a curious twist of politics and ideology too much hatred is now working its way into some preaching, and the wider world needs to understand the nature of this threat.

As he rightly points out, the victims of this pernicious theology are not just Jews: they are all those who take issue with extremism. What is happening is a battle for the soul of Islam, and all of us have a critical stake in the outcome.

The words were as pungent as could be
, the message seething with unmistakable hate. Jews, he said, were “diseased and filthy.” Salman Hossain’s article, published in March 2010 on the website Filthy Jewish Terrorists, did not end there. Hossain went on to describe Jews as “the scum of the earth,” labelling them “psychotic” and “mass murderers.”
¹
Elsewhere, Hossain called for “a genocide” that “should be perpetrated against the Jewish populations of North America and Europe.”
²

Had Salman Hossain been spouting his anti-Semitism from an Al-Shabab hideout in Somalia or an al Qaeda cave in Yemen, one could have simply shrugged off the hatred as just another clichéd rant from a frustrated jihadi. However, Hossain’s hatred had originated in one of Canada’s leading educational institutions – Toronto’s York University, where he was a student. It was not as if he came from a dispossessed Palestinian family or had lost his loved ones in an Israeli attack. No, this young man’s roots were in Bangladesh, where the only genocide ever committed on his people was by fellow Muslim Pakistanis, in 1971. Yet this Bangladeshi Canadian reserved his odious hatred for the Jew, not the Pakistani army that had massacred a million of his parents’ generation. The only Pakistani he did vent his wrath at was me, calling me a traitor. My crime? Despite my solidarity with the Palestinian cause, I denounce anti-Semitism and refuse to hate either Israel or the Jewish people.

Salman Hossain is not an isolated case of a Western Muslim youth imbued with anti-Semitism. Websites and social-networking forums such as Facebook are littered with posts by young Muslims in Canada, the United States, and Europe who openly espouse hatred for Jews. Take, for example, the British Muslim who posted a comment on my Facebook page, saying, “Muslims who drink [alcohol] are Jews in reality.” This single sentence spoke volumes about how the word
Jew
is used as a slur by so many Muslims. This man’s comment came during a vigorous debate on Facebook in December 2009, when a well-known British Islamist, Inayat Bunglawala, slammed the group British Muslims for Secular Democracy because their head, the author, columnist, and BBC commentator Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, was a connoisseur of fine wines. It was not sufficient to attack her as an apostate who had committed the ultimate sin of developing a taste for Turkey Flat Shiraz; the added slur of her being a “Jew” was needed to complete the insult.