MEMRI Blog: Columnist Burak Bekdil of Turkish Daily News in his article yesterday, questioned the logic behind statistics. He wrote that according to a nine-country poll conducted by Angus Reid Strategies, two-thirds of adults in Turkey hold an unfavorable opinion about the United States and the percentage of Turks who think the American state is a danger to world peace (66%) was highest among the nine countries surveyed.

The same survey also revealed that only 1% of Turks think Iran is a global security threat, and 4 % see Al-Qaeda as a global menace. Bekdil asks “Do Turks have terribly confused minds? How can they believe the U.S. to be a far bigger threat than a terrorist organization that bombed Istanbul a few years ago, killing over 60 people?”

He continues to wonder, “How can it be that 47% of the people vote for a party that is friendly to the U.S. yet 66% of the same people see that country as biggest security threat? The explanation must be ‘sentimental thinking in reaction to U.S. policies combined with unusual tolerance to the incumbent AKP government’.

Bekdil explains the possible reasons why Iran is not seen as a threat by the fact that as Iran is co-Muslim and that there is admiration in Turkey for anyone who can stand up against America that Turks are so angry with.

From The People's Cube:

Following the misery inflicted on Islam by a toy bear that ended up with calls for the execution of an English woman, more Muslims are stepping forward with stories of long-suppressed emotional trauma imposed on them by so-called reality. This has led to the creation of support groups and social networks that help followers of the Prophet Mohammed cope with the agony of learning about life outside of their immediate environment, offering assistance with technical resources, practical guidance, and strategies for early intervention and punishment of those who offend Islam. ~ "I have always been offended by rubber ducks," says Mahmud Said of Portland, Oregon. "For a long time I felt stigmatized and inadequate, until one day I decided to write about it on an Internet forum. I received hundreds of heart-felt emails - from Morocco to Indonesia. It turns out that thousands of Muslim men between the ages of 18 and 35 have had traumatic experiences with rubber ducks. "We started a support group that has grown to 10,000 members. Not only do we share horrifying rubber duck stories, we also try to increase public awareness by sabotaging the world supply of rubber ducks, setting fire to factories, abducting rubber duck distributors, and intimidating retailers. These are building blocks for our healthy future. With Allah as my witness, our public awareness campaign will soon result in a completely rubber-duck-free world." Abdullah Sharif had just turned 35 when the Mohammed cartoon controversy suddenly broke out. It left him so emotionally scarred that he developed an aversion to representative art in all its forms. He often found himself shrieking while passing comics in a bookstore window, or seeing the funnies in the local newspaper. But while Abdullah had formerly been considered just another oddball, thanks to social networking, he is now a successful leader of an international charitable organization working for the betterment of humankind through imposing of Sharia law on the infidels. His group covers a wide range of activities, from occasional riots, bombings, and beating of newspaper editors to writing threatening letters to the Cartoon Network. "One true believer may be a nutcase, but together we are the fastest growing religion on Earth, making the important cultural shift to a more Islam-dominated society that benefits both the true believers and the lowly kufir," boasts Abdullah. He recently moved to a new home in Malibu and is touring the world on a private Lear Jet. Studies conducted by mental health professionals have shown that Muslim men and women are often offended by the most unexpected items, including baby rattles, hummingbirds, home appliances, or geographical maps with polar ice caps. On the top ten list of the most offensive things are rectal thermometers and the word "allometric," which many consider an underhanded insult to Allah. Every such grievance is being thoroughly documented and acted upon by support groups and mental health providers, such as CAIR, that help victims to overcome their stress and anxiety by filing costly lawsuits against private institutions and government agencies. The typical case involved a visitor from Egypt to Brooklyn, NY, who was offended by the sight of a cumulus cloud over Atlantic Avenue in the shape of the Arabic letter "A." By organizing protests and putting pressure on mass media, a network of Muslim groups and charities succeeded in forcing a Brooklyn judge to award the offended man $150,000 in damages, to be paid by the National Meteorological Agency. The Agency is the government body the Muslim groups deemed most responsible for regulating the proper distribution of water molecules over the New York metropolitan area.

Michael Weiss has a review of Ibn Warraq's Defending The West in The New York Sun:

As of last April, the late Edward Said's "Orientalism," originally published in 1978, was no. 2 on the best-seller list in Cairo. No. 1was a book arguing that Saddam Hussein hadn't really been executed — all cell phone video evidence to the contrary, the writer argued, was a fabrication of the CIA.

Ibn Warraq, a scholar of Islam and the author of the recently released "Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism," pointed out this macabre fact to me over the phone as a sign of what went wrong with postcolonial studies — the academic field more or less founded by Said, which, in an effort to examine the relationship of conqueror to conquered, placed a dime-store psychology of empire at the center of every discussion of "East meets West." Not only did the British and French colonize and expropriate the East, according to Said, their imperial prejudice clouded their understanding of those they conquered. More than that, they "invented" an entire sham epistemology, Said and his followers contend, with which every Western observer has since approached the East and used to his advantage in further colonizing and expropriating it. Said's legacy, however, accomplished exactly what anyone professing sympathy with the Islamic world should have wished to avoid, Mr. Warraq believes. That is, in defending the virtue of traditional cultures, it gave that world a high-minded rationalization for a persisting status quo of medievalism and intellectual poverty throughout the Middle East.

"'Orientalism,'" Mr. Warraq writes, "taught an entire generation of Arabs the art of self-pity … encouraged the Islamic fundamentalist generation of the 1980s, and bludgeoned into silence any criticism of Islam." Though it's Mr. Warraq's plaint that the book "stopped dead the research of eminent Islamologists who felt their findings might offend Muslims' sensibilities," it is not merely an abstract charge, but personally felt. "Ibn Warraq" is an Arabic pseudonym, meaning "son of a stationer, book-seller, paper-seller," which this Indian-born writer assumed after witnessing the critical reception Islamists gave Salman Rushdie, all the while claiming themselves as victims.

Keep reading here.

Paul Sperry interviews Rep. Sue Myrick at Investor's Business Daily:

The diminutive yet feisty Myrick, a former Charlotte mayor and now deputy Republican whip, sat down with IBD to discuss the zeitgeist inside official Washington concerning the war on Islamic terror.

IBD: What persuaded you to start the Anti-Terrorism/Jihad Caucus, and what do you hope to accomplish?

Myrick: I decided to start the caucus out of a deep frustration, because President Bush does not talk to the American people about the long-term threat of radical Islamofascism infiltration in America. Since 9/11, I've tried to get the president and several members of his administration to talk to the American people about the dangerous enemy that we're facing. I took them all the materials I could find about what we did during World War II that were used to unite the American people. Everyone I spoke to said, "We do not want to frighten the American people."

I waited for someone else to start to educate the people, however, it did not seem to be happening. At that point, I sought to become educated on the matter. What I have learned is quite disturbing. I decided that if members of Congress were informed, they would have an opportunity to educate people in their districts. So I started the caucus and brought in three other co-chairs — Bud Cramer (D-Ala.), Kay Granger (R-Texas) and Jane Harman (D-Calif.).

We hope to start a dialogue with America. Until, and unless, we understand what we are fighting, we have no chance. We must inform the people, since it is evident they will have to protect their national sovereignty, because the government is not doing it.

IBD: How many members are in the caucus?

Myrick: We have 118 members — both Democrats and Republicans. The threat we face from radical Islamofascists is not a partisan issue. This is a matter that affects all Americans, regardless of political, social, economic or any other affiliations.

IBD: Should Americans be concerned about recently declassified documents detailing a secret plot by Islamist groups in this country, tied to the dangerous Muslim Brotherhood, to take over America from within, to Islamize our society?

Myrick: Americans must be concerned — alarmed. That is what I am referring to when I say that the administration has not explained who we are fighting and (where we are fighting them). "We're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here" is not the whole story. It is amazing that we actually have the enemy's playbook, yet for some reason we don't want to seriously confront the threat we are facing.

The radical Islamofascists have told us how they intend to infiltrate all areas of our society and use the freedoms that are guaranteed under our Constitution to eventually Islamize our country, eliminate our Constitution and enact Shariah law. I know that it sounds a bit fanatical, but it's true.

In 1998, Osama bin Laden declared war on the U.S. What did we do? Nothing. Then he attacked again and again around the world before finally striking inside the U.S. Yet, rather than confront the threat head on and declare war on radical Islamofascists, we seek to placate the threat at home by saying radicals have hijacked Islam...

Kanchan Gupta writes in The Pioneer:

Those acquainted with contemporary Bengali literature would agree that dissident Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen is not a talented writer. But there are few who would disagree that she is an extremely courageous woman who has struck out at Islamic fanatics and mullahs whose sole passion in life is to come up with the most perverse interpretations of the Quran so that they can live out their dark fantasies born of obscurantism and twisted notions of patriarchy. Ms Nasreen gave up her profession as a qualified physician to take on radical Islamists who had begun to gather strength under the tutelage of Bangladesh Nationalist Party, led by Dhaka cantonment queen Begum Khaleda Zia, as well as Awami League, headed by a fork-tongued Sheikh Hasina Wajed. Her newspaper columns were hugely popular, especially among Bangladeshi women, although the Jamaat-e-Islami was none too pleased that someone should dare question the mullahs' diktats.

Ms Nasreen became a celebrity of sorts in Kolkata after the publication of Nirbachito Column, a collection of her newspaper columns, which won her a prestigious literary award. Back in Dhaka, her success raised the hackles of those discomfited by the fact that rather than disappear behind a burqa and meekly accept the oppressive ways of the clergy, a Bangladeshi woman had begun to inspire others to emulate her defiance. They began to sharpen their knives for the kill; in the meanwhile, they turned on Bangladesh's minuscule and disinherited, disempowered Hindu community, committing horrendous atrocities. After the demolition of the disputed Babri structure in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992, they let loose a reign of terror, killing Hindu men, raping Hindu women and destroying Hindu temples. Lest all this be denied by Islamic fanatics on both sides of Padma -- including those who fly the banners of Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, All-India Milli Council and assorted organisations like All-India Minority Forum that make up the Brotherhood in Green -- and their 'secular' patrons, the most casual scan of newspapers of those days will reveal the extent of the crimes committed against Hindus in Bangladesh in the guise of protesting the demolition of the disputed Babri structure.

It is a tribute to Ms Nasreen's courage that rather than silently watch the persecution of Bangladeshi Hindus, she recorded those crimes in a slim volume, Lajja. Within days of the publication of the novel -- it was 'fiction' based on incontrovertible facts -- it was slammed by the Government of Bangladesh, which had clearly colluded with the fanatics by allowing them a free run, and the mullahs who, typically, were outraged that a Muslim (although Ms Nasreen says she is a 'humanist') should have dared put their misdeeds on record. The book was banned and a mullah issued a fatwa, calling for her execution as she had committed 'blasphemy'! During Friday prayers in mosques across Bangladesh, believers were urged to murder Ms Nasreen if the Government failed to carry out the death sentence. Another mullah offered a reward of $2,000, which was really more a reflection of his cash flow problems than his desire to see her head brought to him on an aluminium platter borrowed from his kitchen....

If Ms Nasreen is forced to leave India, make no mistake that a time will come when anybody who doesn't subscribe to the twisted worldview of Islamic fanatics will be similarly hounded in this wondrous secular democracy of ours.

Moshe Sharon writes at Mideast Outpost:

...Who can forget Neville Chamberlain returning from Munich after succumbing to Hitler’s demands, waving a piece of paper and announcing “peace in our time”? This was the introduction to the most horrible war in human annals. Similarly, one can hardly forget the pictures of Rabin, Peres and Arafat first at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in 1994 and then in front of the White House in 1995 (“Oslo 2”)—all smiles and handshakes, announcing the end of the conflict. These “peace” prizes and promises led to the most terrible terror war Israel has experienced, resulting in the death of over 1500 men women and children, the injury of over 5000 and the creation of a permanent terror entity in its midst...

The deadly words “peace” and “negotiations” should have long been obliterated from Israeli and Western lexicons. These are seductive words; they addle the brain and lead one to do stupid things. As long as they are not replaced by that one wonderful word victory, Israel and Western civilization are in mortal danger. Islam thrives on the ethos of Jihad and therefore does not know any concept save “victory.” From its inception, Islam has been guided by the principles of war against non-Muslims: triumph and conquest. These have always been regarded as signs of divine approval and support. If Israel and the West wish to live, the Islamic triumphal drive must be confronted on the battleground with the same principle of victory and triumph backed by the moral superiority of life-cherishing civilizations and the scientific superiority of modern weaponry.

James R. Russell of Harvard University writes in the Columbia Current:

Is this Columbia University? A professor of anthropology calls for a million Mogadishus, a professor of Arabic and Islamic Science tells a girl she isn't a Semite because her eyes are green, and a professor of Persian hails the destruction of the World Trade Center as the castrating of a double phallus. The most recent tenured addition to this rogues' gallery is to be an anthropologist, the principal thrust of whose magnum opus is the suggestion that archaeology in Israel is a sort of con game meant to persuade the unwary that Jews lived there in antiquity.

I could refute the claims that Nadia Abu El-Haj makes in her book, but respected specialists have done so already in Isis, the Journal of Near Eastern Studies, and elsewhere. Facts on the Ground fits firmly into the postmodern academic genre, in which facts and evidence are subordinate to, and mediated by, a "discourse." There is no right or wrong answer, just competitive discourses. It does not come as news that people employ the data of archaeology to prove points of interest to them—information in any discipline used by human beings does not exist in a vacuum. But, as reviewers noted, Facts on the Ground expands upon this insight, quite unremarkable in itself, to propose that Israeli archaeologists use altered or falsified data and do so to a single ideological end. That purpose is to demonstrate a previous Jewish sovereignty and long historical presence that did not in fact exist, thereby to cloak the "colonial" essence of Zionism. This aspect of the book is malign fantasy.

Though alumnae of Barnard have declared they will stop giving money to Alma Mater if El-Haj is tenured, it is unlikely their protests will have any effect. She is fully supported by other ideologues in positions of power at Columbia and by outspokenly anti-Israel academics around the globe. Most of the good lack all conviction, as usual.

Keep reading here.

Melanie Phillips attended what she termed a “riveting” debate between the much ballyhooed former Hizbut Tahrir enthusiast Ed Husain and the Somali secularist and former Dutch Parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Two years ago I discussed at some length Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s lucid argumentation and moral and physical courage. She remains the same noble, eloquent, and committed person.

Phillips somehow found Husain’s arguments more “persuasive.” But in essence he simply repeats the same ahistorical, apologetic prattle about rediscovering factitious golden eras of Islam’s “own religious traditions of peaceful co-existence”—ignoring that this false construction is merely a euphemism for jihad-imposed dhimmitude, or for those societies not vanquished by jihad, what the great Belgian scholar of Islam Armand Arbel described as follows:

…perpetual war should be their lot, waged in the course of the winter and summer ghazu. [razzias] If the sovereign of the country thus attacked desired peace, it was possible for him, just like for any other tributary or community, to pay the tribute for himself and for his subjects.  Thus the [Byzantine] Empress Irene [d. 803] “purchased peace at the price of her humiliation”, according to the formula stated in the dhimma contract itself, by paying 70,000 pounds in gold annually to the Caliph of Baghdad. Many other princes agreed in this way to become tributaries – often after long struggles – and to see their dominions pass from the status of dar al Harb to that of dar al Sulh. 

We get some hint at Phillips curious reasoning, or rather reductio ad absurdum argumentation, with this comment which ostensibly demonstrates how she “understands” Islam’s own depredations: “…not to mention the violence and oppression it [Islam] practised towards other faiths (although not as bad as Christian upon Jew) [emphasis added].” Not only is this  tu quoque “reasoning” (which trivializes the historical treatment of Jews in Muslim societies—chronic oppression, punctuated by outbursts of mass anti-Jewish violence, forced conversion to Islam, or expulsion—while ignoring the fact that there are no Jewish communities left in the Arab world, other than persecuted vestigial remnants of cemetery watchers, while here in a 90% rather devoutly Christian America we Jews do quite well, and haven’t ever experienced a pogrom in 250 years of inhabiting this blessed country), it is a reductio ad absurdum that negates the hundreds of millions of non-Jews (estimated here) slaughtered and enslaved and mutilated by jihad—Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, Animists—through the present era.

Phillips’ “conclusion” is lamentable (and shallow) enough. Worse still, she blithely ignores Husain’s malicious, immoral equivalence between Zionism and jihadism, most notably the modern incarnations of this permanent, and genocidal Islamic institution. The “brave reformer” she champions, Husain made these nauseating proclamations in his June 2007 diatribe:

Zionism and Islamism are both political perversions of ancient Abrahamic faiths of Judaism and Islam…. Disregard for the sanctity of human life is a hallmark of both Zionism and Islamism…Just as Israel is an expansionist state which remains in occupation of the Golan Heights, Islamists plan for a state that would have an occupying army to support ever-expanding borders Just as Zionists claim territory based on notions of "Jewish land" and God-given rights, Islamists wish to reconquer India and Spain as "Muslim land", once ruled by Muslim monarchs…Zionists have achieved their state; Islamists are busy trying out every conceivable option to bring their dream Zion to fruition. For centuries, Jewish people said "Next year in Jerusalem", and for decades for now, Islamists have been repeating "Caliphate by next Ramadan.”Behind every single world event, from the Holocaust to 9/11, Arab Islamists blamed a global Zionist conspiracy. Similarly, in Jewish circles, Zionists from Binyamin Netanyahu to Daniel Pipes have made careers out of lambasting Islamists. But are Islamists and Zionists really all that different, despite their blatant enmity? I think not

Both the rather uninformed Ms. Phillips, and the unreformed Antisemitic Muslim bigot Ed Husain would do well to heed the words of Bat Ye’or—our greatest living scholar of dhimmitude, herself victimized by this oppressive, living Islamic institution—on Zionism:

The word “Zion”, which designates the land of Israel and its capital Jerusalem, exists in texts dating back almost three millennia.  It was the Emperor Hadrian who called this country Palestine in 135 C.E.   In this Palestine, Arabic was not the spoken language, the Bible and not the Koran was taught, and the population was mainly Jewish. Palestine was colonized five centuries later by the Arab armies of the Islamic jihad.  Many Jews were massacred at that time, others deported to Arabia as slaves, the whole population expropriated and reduced to the condition of dhimmis, as were all indigenous Jews and Christians in the south Mediterranean countries conquered by jihad, as well as those in many European countries.  Are these countries conquered by Islam - Portugal, Spain, Sardinia, Sicily, Crete, and the southern regions of France and Italy, for example - Arab lands? 

If the liberation movement of the Jews in their ancestral homeland is interpreted as racism, then all the movements of liberation from expropriation and servitude imposed by jihad are racist.  Such a stance reinstates the imperialism of the Islamic jihad, which has claimed millions of victims in three continents over more than a millennium, deported an incalculable number of slaves, annihilated entire peoples, destroying their history, their monuments and their culture. 

…the conference against racism in Durban [August 2001} did not condemn this culture of hate;  they rehabilitated it.  When some of their propositions condemn Zionism, this conference is encouraging jihad, the culture of the war against infidels, it is scourging the principles of freedom and human rights.  It is demonstrating negationist racism. 

Ed Husain has merely exchanged his turban for the more acceptable Islamic Antisemitism/Anti-Zionism expressed at Durban. And Ms. Phillips just as desperately needs to become far better informed, shed her Spiritual Turban, and realize that she too, “…cannot stop the inquiring mind at the gates of any religion—let alone Islam.” Phillips must begin to realize the perversity of her willful ignorance about the contents of books such as Why I am Not a Muslim. In the words of that book’s author, Ibn Warraq, “How do they [those like Phillips] think reformation will come about if not with [such] criticism?”

MEMRI: Two conferences took place last week in Turkey. The first, a summit held November 13, 2007 in Ankara, was dedicated to advancing the peace process, with the participation of Turkish President Abdullah Gul, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and Israeli President Shimon Peres.

The second, held November 15-17 in Istanbul and titled The Al-Quds International Forum Meeting, was dedicated to support for jihadist organizations' quest for Jerusalem, and was hosted by Turkey's Waqf for Volunteering Organizations (TGTV), whose leaders include AKP officials, current and former MPs, and government ministers and which has been linked in international intelligence reports to other Islamist organizations suspected of transferring funds to Al-Qaeda.

Full story here.

Fawaz Damra, the former Imam of the Islamic Center of Cleveland, was touted as a promoter of  interfaith dialogue even after evidence of his participation in fundraising events for the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), was produced, along with a videotape of the Imam telling a crowd of Muslim supporters in 1991 that they should aim “…a rifle at the first and last enemy of the Islamic nation, and that is the sons of monkeys and pigs, the Jews.” Convicted in 2004 for lying to immigration officials about his links to the PIJ, Damra, who was born in Nablus in 1961, was subsequently deported back to the West Bank in January 2007.

And just this past October 30, 2007 it was announced that Imam Ahmed Alzaree—the first permanent successor to Damra—resigned as the new “spiritual leader” of the Islamic Center of Cleveland three days prior to officially beginning the job. Alzaree, who at one stage of the vetting process expressed the unusual reservation that “he would not come to Cleveland because a reporter was inquiring about his background,” ostensibly accepted the position as noted on October 26, 2007, then pre-emptively resigned a few days later, after the contents of “khutbahs” (sermons) he had delivered on March 7, 2003, were revealed.  

Alzaree’s March, 2003 sermons are in fact far worse than has been portrayed by the Cleveland media. One assumes that either they have not been read at all, or at best only perused, and those reading these sermons, by and large, have no idea about the virulently Antisemitic motifs in the Koran and hadith (i.e., the words, deeds, and even physical gestures of Muhammad as recorded by pious Muslim transmitters). Moreover, these sermons were also virulently Christianophobic, invoking combined anti-Christian/Jew-hating motifs from the Koran (for example, Koran 4:157-159), as well as anti-Christian eschatology (linked explicitly to Jew-hating eschatology) from the hadith, particularly with regard to “Jesus,” or to be precise, the Muslim simulacrum of Jesus, “Isa,” as characterized in Islam’s foundational texts. Alzaree simply recounts Islamic doctrine (as per the Koran and hadith) regarding “Isa”—the Muslim Jesus—which emphasizes the Jews overall perfidy, especially their gloating (but unknowingly “false”) claim to have killed Isa.  According to this sacralized Islamic narrative, Isa is merely a Muslim prophet whose ultimate “job description” includes the destruction of Christianity.  Thus Alzaree’s sermon invokes the canonical hadith that this Muslim Jesus—who was never crucified—the perfidious Jews prodding the Roman’s to kill Isa’s “body double”—will return as a full-throated Muslim to break the cross, kill the pig, and end the payment of the deliberately humiliating Koranic (9:29) poll-tax demanded of Christians (i.e., the jizya). This hadith states, “He [Isa] will fight the people for the cause of Islam. He will break the cross, kill swine, and abolish jizya”—because Christians will be converted to Islam (and thus exempt from the jizya), or eliminated—“Allah will perish all religions except Islam.” Alzaree concluded the second sermon with an apocalyptic canonical hadith—repeated in the 1988 Hamas Charter (in article 7)—stating if a Jew seeks refuge under a tree or a stone, these objects will be able to speak to tell a Muslim: “There is a Jew behind me; come and kill him!”

As a central anti-Jewish motif, the Koran decrees an eternal curse upon the Jews (Koran 2:61/ 3:112) for slaying the prophets and transgressing against the will of Allah. This motif is coupled to Koranic verses 5:60 and 5:78 which describe the Jews transformation into apes and swine (5:60), having been “…cursed by the tongue of David, and Jesus, Mary’s son” (5:78). The Koranic curse (verses 2:61/3:112) upon the Jews for (primarily) rejecting, even slaying Allah’s prophets, is updated with perfect archetypal logic in the canonical hadith: following the Muslims’ initial conquest of the Jewish farming oasis of Khaybar, one of the vanquished Jewesses reportedly served Muhammad poisoned mutton (or goat), which resulted, ultimately, in his protracted, agonizing death. The Jews’ ultimate sins and punishments are made clear in the Koran: they are the devil’s minions (4:60) cursed by Allah, their faces will be obliterated (4:47), and if they do not accept the true faith of Islam—the Jews who understand their faith become Muslims (3:113)—they will be made into apes (2:65/ 7:166), or apes and swine (5:60), and burn in the Hellfires (4:55, 5:29, 98:6, and 58:14-19).

References (such as Imam Damra’s) to the Jews transformation into apes, or apes and swine—perhaps the most striking Koranic motifs for the Jews debasement—have been exploited in polemical incitement against Jews, or odes celebrating their having been disgraced and slaughtered. The sacralized prototype is clear: right before subduing the Medinan Jewish tribe Banu Qurayza and orchestrating the mass execution of their adult males, Muhammad addressed these Jews with hateful disparagement, as “You brothers of monkeys.” Some 4000 Jews were massacred in the 1066 Granada pogrom, inspired in part by an anti-Jewish ode containing the line, “Many a pious Muslim is in awe of the vilest infidel ape,” referring to the Jewish communal leader, the vizier Joseph b. Samuel Naghrela. More Jews were killed in this one pogrom than in the Crusaders’ much more infamous ravages through the Rhineland 30 years later. Anti-Jewish riots and massacres by Muslims accompanied the 1291 death of Jewish physician-vizier Sa’d ad-Daula in Baghdad—the plundering and killing of Jews, which extended throughout Iraq (and likely into Persia)—were celebrated in a verse by the Muslim preacher Zaynu’d-Din ‘Ali b. Said, which begins with this debasing reference to the Jews as apes: “His name we praise who rules the firmament./These apish Jews are done away and shent [ruined].” Referring to the Jews as “brothers of apes,” who repeatedly blasphemed the prophet Muhammad, and whose overall conduct reflected their hatred of Muslims, the Moroccan cleric Al-Maghili (d. 1505) fomented, and then personally lead, a Muslim pogrom (in ~ 1490) against the Jews of the southern Moroccan  oasis of Touat, plundering and killing Jews en masse, and destroying their synagogue in neighboring Tamantit. Each of these massacres was incited and/or celebrated by depictions of Jews as apes in verses by popular clerics—in the case of Touat, the “composer” of such a verse al-Maghili (d. 1505), an important Muslim theologian whose writings influenced Moroccan religious attitudes towards Jews into the 20^th century—led the pogrom himself. Maghili also declared in verse, “Love of the Prophet, requires hatred of the Jews.”

Currently the invocation of Koranic references to the Jews as apes and pigs pervades Muslim (especially Arab Muslim) religious and political discourse in print, audio, video, and internet venues. Young children are targeted with these messages, and even encouraged to repeat them by approving adults during additional media coverage. Menachem Milson recently warned that repeated invocation of these motifs cannot be “dismissed as mere vulgar invective”, or “primitive magical thinking”. Rather, these recurring expressions need to be understood as a form of dehumanization serving as a pretext for the destruction of Jews. Given the murderous historical legacy of Muslim societies that invoked these Koranic motifs (i.e., in Granada, Baghdad, and Touat, Morocco) his concern is not alarmist.  

Georges Vajda’s seminal analyses of Muslim eschatology, as depicted in the hadith, highlights the Jews’ supreme hostility to Islam. Jews are described as adherents of the Dajjâl—the Muslim equivalent of the Anti-Christ—or according to another tradition, the Dajjâl is himself Jewish. At his appearance, other traditions maintain that the Dajjâl will be accompanied by 70,000 Jews from Isfahan wrapped in their robes, and armed with polished sabers, their heads covered with a sort of veil. When the Dajjâl is defeated, his Jewish companions will be slaughtered— everything will deliver them up except for the so-called gharkad tree, as per the canonical hadith invoked by Imam Alzaree. Another hadith variant, which takes place in Jerusalem, has Isa (the Muslim Jesus) leading the Arabs in a rout of the Dajjâl and his company of 70,000 armed Jews. And the notion of jihad “ransom” extends even into Islamic eschatology—on the day of resurrection the vanquished Jews will be consigned to Hellfire, and this will expiate Muslims who have sinned, sparing them from this fate.

Stubborn malevolence, as Vajda further notes, is the Jews defining worldly characteristic: rejecting Muhammad and refusing to convert to Islam out of jealousy, envy and even selfish personal interest, lead them to acts of treachery, in keeping with their inveterate nature: “...sorcery, poisoning, assassination held no scruples for them.” These archetypes sanction Muslim hatred towards the Jews, and the admonition to at best, “subject [the Jews] to Muslim domination,” as dhimmis, treated “with contempt,” under certain “humiliating arrangements.”

Thus the blatant Jew-hatred expressed by Damra and reiterated (in tandem with anti-Christian motifs) by Alzaree—this erstwhile “Imamate of Cleveland”—was fully sanctioned by—indeed they were merely quoting directly from—the core religious texts of Islam, i.e. the Koran, hadith, and early Muslim biographies of Muhammad.

More than four decades ago (in 1964), Moshe Perlmann the pre-eminent scholar of Islam’s ancient anti-Jewish polemical literature, observed,

The Koran, of course became a mine of anti-Jewish passages. The hadith did not lag behind. Popular preachers used and embellished such material.

In an earlier study (published 1948) of 11^th century Muslim Spain—idealized, falsely, as the paragon of Islam’s ecumenism—Perlmann had described how such polemical tracts and sermons incited the mass violence which destroyed the Jewish community of Granada during the catastrophic 1066 pogrom, with its death toll of some 4000 Jews.

The modern pronouncements of Cleveland’s clerical “Imamate”—Damra and Alzaree—reflect an ancient, but continuous tradition of anti-Jewish incitement by Islam’s “popular preachers,” very much alive today. And the historical treatment of Jews in Muslim societies—chronic oppression, punctuated by outbursts of mass anti-Jewish violence, forced conversion to Islam, or expulsion—has been consistent with such sacralized religious bigotry. Promoters of modern jihad genocide  have consistently invoked Islam’s Jew-exterminating eschatology. Hajj Amin el-Husseini,  ex-Mufti of Jerusalem, and Muslim jihadist, who became, additionally, a full-fledged Nazi collaborator and ideologue in his endeavors to abort a Jewish homeland, and destroy world Jewry, composed a 1943 recruitment pamphlet for Balkan Muslims entitled, “Islam and the Jews.” This incendiary document was rife with antisemitic verses from the Koran, as well as Jew hating motifs from the hadith, and concluded with the apocalyptic canonical hadith describing the Jews annihilation. Forty-five years later the same hadith was incorporated into the 1988 Hamas Charter, making clear its own aspirations for Jew annihilation. Sheer ignorance of this history and theology are pathognomonic of much larger and more dangerous phenomena: the often willful, craven failure to examine and understand the living legacy of Islam’s foundational anti-Jewish animus, or acknowledge the depth of Jew hatred that pervades contemporary Islam’s clerical leadership, including within major Muslim communities of the United States.

More evidence of Western Europe’s moral and intellectual decay, and capitulation to the Ur Fascism of the Islamic Jihad emerged on Wednesday November 7, 2007, with this announcement:

Tariq Ramadan is to hold the Sultan of Oman chair of Islamology at the University of Leiden. Education and Culture Minister Ronald Plasterk said yesterday in the Lower House that he does not object to Ramadan's appointment.

The appointment was a sickening reminder of its diametric opposite: the principled stand taken at Leiden by Huizinga in 1933 as described in “Huizinga before the Abyss: The von Leers Incident at the University of Leiden, April 1933,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 1997, 27:385-44.  Johan Huizinga, the great Dutch historian, then serving as rector of Leiden University, withdrew university hospitality to the Nazi scholar, Johannes von Leers, who was attending an international student conference at the university. Huizinga acted on the grounds that von Leers had published an anti-Semitic election pamphlet in which he knowingly presented the blood libel of Jewish ritual murder as a historical fact, and contemporary threat. Despite subsequently winning public approval, Huizinga stood in courageous isolation when he took this action, suffering both personal criticism and significant problems in his dealings with German and Swiss publishing houses in the aftermath of the affair. (Ultimately, he died in Nazi detention, during 1945.) Thus in sharp contrast to his modern heirs at Leiden University, Huizinga had a very definite sense that a university had to judge its behavior according to concepts of intellectual honor and dignity which von Leers’ actions infringed upon.

One year ago, on October 10, 2006 an Islamic website alerted Muslims to yet another of the seemingly endless litany of “insults to Islam.” The message claimed a cube-shaped building under construction in New York City, on Fifth Avenue between 58^th  and 59^th  Streets in midtown Manhattan, bore a deliberate resemblance to the sacred Meccan “Kabaa”, and as such was meant to provoke Muslims.  After taking liberties to contrive a resemblance between Apple’s (as in Macintosh computers) “Mecca,” and the actual Meccan Kabaa (see here), the Islamic website maintained the New York structure intended to be open 24 hours a day (alas, like the Kabaa), and moreover, contained bars selling alcoholic beverages—both blatant “insults to Islam.” The message further urged Muslims to disseminate this “alarming” information, in the hope that “Muslims will be able to stop the project.” As Robert Spencer observed aptly, at the time, “The only problem is that the project is finished, and the actual building doesn't look like the Kabaa at all, unless all cube-shaped structures are forbidden to infidels.”

Fast forward almost exactly one year, and a strangely delayed outpouring of “Kabaa outrage” was expressed on October 6, 2007—in Kashmir! As reported by the Iranian (Islamic Republic) News Agency, hundreds of Muslim college students in the Northern Kashmir city of Baramulla took to the streets in demonstrations, “to decry a bar built in the shape of the holy Kaaba in New York.” Proclaiming anti-American and pro-Islamic slogans, the students insisted that the putative construction of a wine-shop or a bar like the Kaaba was tantamount to the desecration of the holy sites of Islam. “Muslims all over the world should protest at this,” they stated. They also demanded that the “bar” be closed down immediately, accompanied by a “US apology” to the Muslim world for creating the Kaaba replica.

Ignoring the final constructed appearance of Apple’s New York City cube, and the fact that alcohol was never served there,  what is the Kabaa, and why might any perceived insult to this Meccan structure arouse the ire, once again, of pious votaries of Islam?

The Kabaa is a black-gray, cube-like building located in the center of the mosque at Mecca which contains the black stone (the Hajaru ’l-Aswad). The bizarre and fantastic Muslim narrative—a melding of traditions from the core Islamic texts (including the Koran), and the inventiveness of Muslim writers—maintains that the Kabaa was originally constructed in heaven some 2000 years before the world’s creation (indeed, this heavenly model of it persists eternally, named the Baitu’l-Ma‘mūr). Adam purportedly erected the earthly Kabaa directly below the location its perfect model occupies in heaven. Although 10,000 angels were assigned to guard the Kabaa, as the Orientalist Johann Ludwig Burckhardt observed, more often than not, they appear to have been remiss in their duty. Destroyed during the great flood, Abraham, assisted by his son Ishmael (who was then in Mecca with his mother Hagar) is said to have been instructed by Allah to rebuild the Kabaa. During this reconstruction, Ishmael, seeking a stone to mark the corner of the rebuilt structure, was given the famous black stone by the angel Gabriel. Following Ishmael’s death, the Kabaa passed into the possession of successive Arabian tribes, becoming a Pantheon for idols, even including figures of the Virgin Mary and infant Jesus sculpted upon one of its six pillars nearest the entrance. At the outset of Muhammad’s prophetic career, the initial direction for prayer was Jerusalem, implying he was disinclined to the Kabaa as an ancient “superstitious” idol temple. Had the Jews not rejected Muhammad’s claim to teach the true monotheism of Abraham, abrogating that of Moses, Jerusalem, not the Meccan Kabaa would have been the object of Muslim reverence. When Muhammad finally vanquished the idolatrous Quraysh of Mecca, occupying the city by force of arms (in 630), the idols in the Kabaa were destroyed (excepting an icon of Jesus and Mary), and the “divine” rites of Islam enacted.

Might contemporary “Kabaa rage,”—directed, curiously, at a New York structure—be related to the Muslim world’s obsession with Jewish conspiracies against Islam, which date back to Islam’s foundational texts, and history? Koran 5:64, for example (“They [the Jews] hasten about the earth, to do corruption there”) reads like an ancient antecedent to “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” and was cited in this context during a January 2007 speech by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Furthermore, after Muhammad’s conquest of the Jewish farming oasis at Khaybar, the hadith and sira (early pious Muslim biographies of Muhammad) refer to an event  which updates with impeccable logic the Koranic curse upon the Jews (2:61 /3:112) for having wrongfully slain Allah’s earlier prophets—a Khaybar Jewess is accused of serving the Muslim prophet poisoned mutton (or goat), leading ultimately to his protracted and painful death. And Ibn Sa‘d’s sira (Kitab Al-Tabaqat Al-Kabir) focuses on the Jewish conspiracy behind this alleged poisoning of Islam’s prophet. An additional profoundly anti-Jewish motif occurring after the events recorded in the hadith and sira,  put forth in early Muslim historiography (for example, by Tabari), is the story of Abd Allah b. Saba. An alleged renegade Yemenite Jew, and founder of the heterodox Shi’ite sect, he is held responsible—identified as a Jew—for promoting the Shi’ite heresy and fomenting the rebellion and internal strife associated with this primary breach in Islam’s “political innocence,” culminating in the assassination of the third Rightly Guided Caliph Uthman, and the bitter, lasting legacy of Sunni-Shi’ite sectarian strife.

Not surprisingly then, conspiratorial accusations against Jews  in late 13^th century Baghdad included plans to attack Mecca itself and convert the Kabaa to a heathen temple! The brief rise and calamitous fall of Sa‘d ad-Daula—which mirrored the experience of his Jewish co-religionists—took place during this Mongol epoch. Sa‘d ad-Daula was a Jewish physician, who successfully reformed the Mongol revenue and taxation system for Iraq. In recognition of these services, he was appointed by the Mongol emperor Arghun (who reigned from 1284-1291) to the position of administrative Vizier (in 1289) over Arghun’s Empire. Despite being a successful and responsible administrator (which even the Muslim sources confirm), the appointment of a Jew as the Vizier of a heathen ruler over a predominantly Muslim region, aroused the wrath, predictably, of the Muslim masses. According to modern historian Walter Fischel, this reaction was expressed, through and exacerbated by “…all kinds of [Muslim] diatribes, satirical poems, and libels”. Ibn al-Fuwati (d. 1323), a contemporary Muslim historian from Baghdad, recorded this particularly revealing example which emphasized traditional anti-Jewish motifs from the Qur’an:

In the year 689/1291 a document was prepared which contained libels against Sa‘d ad-Daula, together with verses from the Qur’an and the history of the prophets, that stated the Jews to be a people whom Allah hath debased…

Another contemporary 13^th century Muslim source, notes Fischel, the chronicler and poet Wassaf, “…empties the vials of hatred on the Jew Sa‘d ad-Daula and brings the most implausible accusations against him.” These accusations included the claims that Sa‘d had advised Arghun to cut down trees in Baghdad (dating from the days of the conquered Muslim Abbasid dynasty), and build a fleet to attack Mecca and convert the cuboidal Kabaa  to a heathen temple. Wassaf’s account also quotes satirical verses to demonstrate the extent of public dissatisfaction with what he terms “Jewish Domination.”

Drummer and lyricist for The Clash Joe Strummer composed a 1982 lyric protesting Ayatollah’s Khomeini’s ban on rock music. Updating Strummer’s words (“Sharif don't like it [he thinks it's not kosher]”), in reference to the Kabaa rage manufactured by today’s Islamic “Sharifs” (i.e., protectors of the Muslim super-tribe, and tribal assets),  “Sharifs don't like it.” Given the living legacy of conspiratorial anti-Jewish animus in Islam’s foundational texts, and early history, these Sharifs of 2006/2007 may think Apple’s New York City “Kabaa” is all too “kosher!”

Raymond Ibrahim translates key Al Qaeda documents, some previously unavailable in English, that provide a window into the thinking of radical Islam's leadership. "The Al Qaeda Reader," divided into theology and propaganda focuses on the writings of Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden. Raymond Abrahim is interviewed by Lawrence Wright, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in general non-fiction for his book "The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11."

Upcoming Schedule EST:

	Sunday, September 16, at 6:00 PM
	Sunday, September 16, at 9:00 PM
	Monday, September 17, at 12:00 AM

Washington Times: BAGHDAD — Many U.S. soldiers on the ground in Baghdad caution that improved security in the capital city will last only as long as the surge. If American troops were to leave, they say, the insurgents could be back within hours...

One soldier, who has taken part in the distribution of hundred-thousand-dollar contracts in the Sunni area south of Baghdad, once known as the Triangle of Death, said he was basically buying a cease-fire.

"I can't believe we are paying these people not to blow us up," he said, asking that his name not be used...

"My job is infantry; it is to target, kill or arrest insurgents. But the way we go about doing it is police-department policy. And I am not a cop — that is not my job," said one U.S. soldier, who asked that his comments remain anonymous...

From “In a Tunisian Oasis” (1936)

Talking to an Islamically educated Arab is like talking to a pious European of the fourteenth century. Every phenomenon is referred by them to its final cause—to God. About the immediate causes of things—precisely how they happen—they seem to feel not the slightest interest. Indeed, it is not even admitted that there are such things as immediate causes: God is directly responsible for everything. “Do you think it will rain?” you ask pointing to menacing clouds overhead. “If God wills,” is the answer. You pass the native hospital. “Are the doctors good?” “In our country,” the Arab gravely replies, in the tone of Solomon, “we say that doctors are of no avail. If Allah wills that a man die, he will die. If not, he will recover.” All of which is profoundly true, so true, indeed, that is not worth saying. To the Arab, however, it seems the last word in human wisdom. For him, God is the perfectly adequate explanation of everything; he leaves fate to do things unassisted, in its own way—that is to say, from the human point of view, the worst way.

It is difficult for us to realize nowadays that our fathers once thought much as the Arabs do now. As late as the seventeenth century, the chemist Boyle found it necessary to protest against what  I may call this Arabian view of things. “For to explicate a phenomenon,” he wrote, “it is not enough to ascribe it to one general efficient, but we must intelligibly show the particular manner, how that general cause produces the proposed effect. He must be a very dull inquirer who, demanding an account of the phenomena of a watch, shall rest satisfied with being told that it is an engine made by a watchmaker; thought nothing be declared thereby of the structure and coaptation of the spring, wheels, balance, etc., and the manner how they act on one another so as to make the needle point out the true time of the day.”

The Arabs were once the continuators of the Greek tradition; they produced men of science. They have relapsed—all except those who are educated according to Western methods—into pre-scientific fatalism, with its attendant incuriosity and apathy. They are the “dull inquirers who, demanding an account of the phenomena of a watch, shall rest satisfied with being told that it is an engine made by a watchmaker.” The result of their satisfaction with this extremely unsatisfactory answer is that their villages look like the ruins of villages, that the blow-flies sit undisturbedly feeding on the eyelids of those whom Allah has predestined to blindness,  that half their babies die…

From Religion and Temperament (1948)

Mohammedanism…in its primitive form…is hard, militant, and puritanical; it encourages the spirit of martyrdom, is eager to make proselytes, and has no qualms about levying “holy wars” and conducting persecutions. Some centuries after the prophet’s death it developed the Sufi school of mysticism—a school whose strict Islamic orthodoxy its theologians have always had some difficulty in defending.

From a Letter to Norman Douglas, June 26, 1925

One winter I shall certainly go and spend some [more] months there [in Tunisia], about the time of the date harvest—tho’ I have no doubt that the site of the Arabs picking and packing the dates would be enough to make one’s gorge turn every time one set eyes on that fruit for the rest of one’s life. How tremendously European one feels when one has seen these devils in their native muck! And to think that we are busily teaching them all the mechanical arts of peace and war which gave us, in the past, our superiority over their numbers! In fifty years time, it seems to me, Europe can’t fail to be wiped out by these monsters. Intanto…

MEMRI Blog: Turkish Columnist: Mini - Mosques Pop Up In Restaurants, Metro, Cafes, Street Corners, Everywhere

Columnist Yalcin Dogan of the mainstream, top-selling Turkish daily Hurriyet complains in his column about the changing life-style in Turkey. He says that small mosques are popping up everywhere – even at public places where it disturbs the flow of the people, such as underground train stations. The owner of a famous kabab restaurant in Ankara who planned to serve alcohol on the second floor of his restaurant, had to give up the idea and turned the second floor into a small mosque due to the demands of his AKP clientele - who now pray there before ordering their food.

Dogan writes that on a major shopping street in Ankara, there is a new mescit (small mosque) now and people have to walk over praying people overflowing from the prayer house – when there already is a large mosque nearby. He writes that there are new mescits in growing numbers of restaurants, cafes, terminals, hospitals, shopping centers, post offices, airports and other public places.

“What is happening”, the columnist says, “is that the daily lives of Turks are being changed by the imposition of Islamist symbols everywhere.”

Source: Hurriyet, Turkey, September 1, 2007

MEMRI Blog: OIC Secretary General: The Muhammed Cartoonists Lower Than Dogs

Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the Turkish Secretary General of Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) lashed at the Swedish daily that published the controversial cartoon depicting prophet Muhammed as a dog. Ihsanoglu who is visiting Tehran said to journalists: “Freedom without boundaries becomes audacity. What the Swedish newspaper did is inhuman and uncivilized. It is provocation. Those who are responsible for the cartoon of our beloved prophet are much lower than the dog that they depicted”.

Source: Furkan Haber, Turkey, September 4, 2007

MEMRI blog: Protests in Turkey Against Muhammed Cartoons in Sweden

Hundreds of Turks recited prayers for the prophet as they marched in Istanbul to protest the Muhammed cartoons published in a Swedish newspaper. The angry crowd arrived at the Consulate General of Sweden but could not burn the Swedish flags that they brought with them due to the intervention of security forces.

Source: Furkan Haber, Turkey, September 3, 2007

MEMRI Blog: Mainstream Turkish Daily Milliyet, Islamist Milli Gazete: The U.S. Foreign Policy Shaped By Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion

Columnist Yaman Toruner of the mainstream Turkish daily Milliyet wrote a two part article in which he recommends that everybody, especially the Turkish Foreign Minister, urgently read the controversial new book ‘The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy’ authored by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. He says that this ‘must read’ book sheds light to the activities of the influential ‘Israeli Lobby’, and demonstrates the fact that the U.S. foreign policy is shaped by the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion”.

The Islamist Turkish daily Milli Gazete re-published Toruner’s article, with “Protocols” reference as its title.

The article also claims that Israeli lobby is the most influential lobby; that it raises the most amount of money – in U.S. history; that it is a taboo in the U.S. to criticize the Israeli lobby; that Christian Zionists are allied with the Israeli lobby; that there would be peace in the world if it weren’t for the Israeli lobby; that conflicts with Iraq, Iran, Syria were direct results of the Israeli lobby’s incitement; and that 9/11 attacks were done because of the U.S. policies of support for Israel.

Toruner says that AIPAC is the main organization in the Israeli lobby along with a long list of American organizations, such as WINEP, ADL, CUFI, IPF, AJC, and JINSA - and over 80 other organizations found in the American Jewish Yearbook.

What Toruner defines as a “must-read" book may fast become a new bestseller in Turkey, after last year's ‘Mein Kampf’.

Source: Milliyet, September 3-4, 2007, Milli Gazete, September 4, 2007

Some clarification in light of Hugh's comments on my use of ‘Antisemitism.’ Robert Wistrich, has emphasized the problematic nature of the term ‘antisemitism’, derived from a group of cognate ‘Semitic’ (i.e., stemming from the Biblical Shem, one of Noah’s three sons) languages—Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Babylonian, Assyrian, and Ethiopic—and applied, inappropriately, to a pseudo-scientific racial designation by the German journalist Wilhelm Marr, in the 1870s. Regardless, for the past century, as Wistrich notes,

…the illogical term ‘antisemitism’…[w]hich never really meant hatred of ‘Semites’ (for example, Arabs [emphasis added]) at all, but rather hatred of Jews, has come to be accepted in general usage as denoting all forms of hostility towards Jews and Judaism throughout history. [emphasis added]

Moreover, in the specific context of the Arab Muslim world during the high Middle Ages (circa 950-1250 C.E.), S.D. Goitein’ s seminal analyses of the Geniza documentary record employed the term antisemitism,

…in order to differentiate animosity against Jews from the discrimination practiced by Islam against non-Muslims in general. Our scrutiny of the Geniza material has proved the existence of ‘antisemitism’ in the time and the area considered here…

Goitein cites as concrete proof of his assertion that a unique strain of Islamic Jew hatred was extant at this time (i.e., up to a millennium ago)—exploding the common assumption of its absence—the fact that letters from the Cairo Geniza  material,

…have a special word for it and, most significantly, one not found in the Bible or in Talmudic literature (nor registered in any Hebrew dictionary), but one much used and obviously coined in the Geniza period. It is sin’ūth, “hatred”, a Jew-baiter being called sōnē, “a hater”.

Incidents of such Muslim Jew hatred documented by Goitein in the Geniza come from northern Syria (Salamiyya and al-Mar‘arra), Morocco (Fez), and Egypt (Alexandria), with references to the latter being particularly frequent.

Also your claim about the powerlessness of the Jews did not in any way spare them from theologically-inspired Jew hatred by the Muslim masses. A remarkable essay by the polymath Arabic writer al-Jahiz (d. 869), composed in the mid-9^th century illustrates the anti-Jewish attitudes prevalent within an important early Islamic society. Al-Jahiz’s essay—an anti-Christian polemic believed to have been commissioned by the Abbasid Caliph al-Mutawakkil (d. 861), who inaugurated a literary campaign against the Christians—explores the reasons why the Muslim masses prefer the Christians to the Jews. This empirical preference (although decried by the author) is acknowledged by al-Jahiz from the outset:

I shall begin to enumerate the causes which made the Christians more liked by the masses than the Magians [Zoroastrians], and made men consider them more sincere than the Jews, more endeared, less treacherous, less unbelieving, and less deserving of punishment. For all this there are manifold and evident causes.

Al-Jahiz offers two primary explanations for this abiding hostility of the Muslim rank and file towards the Jews. First was the “rancorous” relationship between the early Muslim community, exiles from Mecca, relocated among Jewish neighbors in Medina.

When the [Muslim] Emigrants [from Mecca] became the neighbors of the Jews [in Medina]…the Jews began to envy the Muslims the blessings of their new faith, ⁶³ and the union which resulted after dissension. They proceeded to undermine the belief of our [i.e., the Muslim] masses, and to lead them astray. They aided our enemies and those envious of us. From mere misleading speech and stinging words they plunged into an open declaration of enmity, so that the Muslims mobilized their forces, exerting themselves morally and materially to banish the Jews and destroy them. Their strife became long-drawn and widespread, so that it worked itself up into a rage, and created yet greater animosity and more intensified rancor. The Christians, however, because of their remoteness from Mecca and Medina, did not have to put up with religious controversies, and did not have occasion to stir up trouble, and be involved in war. That was the first cause of our dislike of the Jews, and our partiality toward the Christians.

However, al-Jahiz then identifies as “the most potent cause” of this particular animus towards the Jews, Qur’an 5:82, and its interpretation by the contemporary (i.e., mid-9^th century) Muslim masses. It is also worth noting that al-Jahiz (described as a “skeptic”, who harbored “indifferent views toward religion in general”) included these sociological observations which reveal the interface between Islamic religious and indigenous ethnic/racial discriminatory attitudes towards Jews expressed a millennium before any secular Western European antisemitic ideologies would be exported to the Muslim Near East:

Our people [the Muslims] observing thus the occupations of the Jews and the Christians concluded that the religion of the Jews must compare unfavorably as do their professions, and that their unbelief must be the foulest of all, since they are the filthiest of all nations. Why the Christians, ugly as they are, are physically less repulsive than the Jews may be explained by the fact that the Jews, by not intermarrying, have intensified the offensiveness of their features. Exotic elements have not mingled with them; neither have males of alien races had intercourse with their women, nor have their men cohabited with females of a foreign stock. The Jewish race therefore has been denied high mental qualities, sound physique, and superior lactation. The same results obtain when horses, camels, donkeys, and pigeons are inbred.           

Al-Jahiz’s contention that the Muslims harbored greater enmity towards the Jews than the Christians is supported by the independent observations of another Arab author active during the beginning of the 9^th century in Iraq, the Sufi theologian al-Harith al-Muhasibi (d. 857). He maintained that because the Jews stubbornly denied Muhammad’s truth, they were “…in the eyes of the Muslims worse than the Christians.”

One thousand years later, E.W. Lane’s testimony on the difference between the attitude of Egyptian Muslims toward the Jews and the Christians again highlights the influence of Qur’an 5:82:

They [the Jews] are held in the utmost contempt and abhorrence by the Muslims in general, and they are said to bear a more inveterate hatred than any other people to the Muslims and the Muslim religion. It is said, in the Koran [quoting 5:82] “Thou shalt surely find the most violent all men to those who have believed to be the Jews…”

Lane further notes,

It is a common saying among the Muslims in this country, “Such one hates me with the hate of the Jews.” We cannot wonder, then, that the Jews are detested far more than are the Christians. Not long ago, they used often to be jostled in the streets of Cairo, and sometimes beaten for merely passing on the right hand of a Muslim. At present, they are less oppressed: but still they scarcely ever dare to utter a word of abuse when reviled or beaten unjustly by the meanest Arab or Turk; for many a Jew has been put to death upon a false and malicious accusation of uttering disrespectful words against the Koran or the Prophet. It is common to hear an Arab abuse his jaded ass, and, after applying to him various opprobrious epithets, end by calling the beast a Jew.

The essay on contemporary Turkish Antisemitism also includes this important discussion from a pioneering study published by Bat Ye’or (in Hebrew only, and translated for my forthcoming “The Legacy of Jihad”):

Bat Ye'or published a remarkably foresighted 1973 analysis (first translated into English here) of the Islamic Antisemitism resurgent in her native Egypt, and being packaged for dissemination throughout the Muslim world. The primary, core Antisemitic motifs were Islamic, derived from Islam's foundational texts, on to which European, especially Nazi elements were grafted.

The pejorative characteristics of Jews as they are described in Muslim religious texts are applied to modern Jews.  Anti-Judaism and anti-Zionism are equivalent-due to the inferior status of Jews in Islam, and because divine will dooms Jews to wandering and misery, the Jewish state appears to Muslims as an unbearable affront and a sin against Allah. Therefore it must be destroyed by Jihad. Here the Pan-Arab and anti-Western theses that consider Israel as an advanced instrument of the West in the Islamic world, come to reinforce religious anti-Judaism. The religious and political fuse in a purely Islamic context onto which are grafted foreign elements. If, on the doctrinal level, Nazi influence is secondary to the Islamic base, the technique with which the Antisemitic material has been reworked, and the political purposes being pursued, present striking similarities with Hitler's Germany. [emphasis added]

That anti-Jewish opinions have been widely spread in Arab nationalist circles since the 1930s is not in doubt. But their confirmation at [Al] Azhar [University] by the most important authorities of Islam enabled them to be definitively imposed, with the cachet of infallible authenticity, upon illiterate masses that were strongly attached to religious traditions. [emphasis added]

[Former Turkish Prime Minister] Erbakan's recent statements are vivid evidence of the fulminant Antisemitism his popular movement has imbued, including amongst Turkey's current ruling elites, who never criticize such pronouncements by their mentor. This bigoted discourse resonates among the masses, illustrating graphically the same phenomenon described so presciently 34 years ago by Bat Ye'or in Egypt: sequentially grafting on to a learned foundation of Antisemitic motifs from Islam's core texts, modern secular Western European elements, especially those associated with Nazism. 

According to rumors in Turkey, the Islamist leader Fethullah Gulen (aka Hocaefendi) was seen last night boarding a Turkish Airlines plane in New York, on his way back to Turkey. The news was not confirmed.

Gulen has been living in the U.S. for many years – since his 1999 indictment in Turkey for organizing unlawful Islamist activities against the republic. Recently, charges against him were dropped and his trial was cancelled due to the changes made to relevant laws.

It has been speculated many times in the Turkish media that Gulen had been waiting for the Islamist AKP, that he and his community strongly supported, to be re-elected before he returned. Now that Turkey has an Islamist president as well as an Islamist government the time may have come for Gulen to come back.

Hugh has some comments on Gulen here.

Dr. Mark Durie writes at Answering Islam:

‘Isa the destroyer of Christianity

The prophet ‘Isa will have an important role in the end times, establishing Islam and making war until he destroys all religions save Islam. He shall kill the Evil One (Dajjal), an apocalyptic anti-Christ figure.

In one tradition of Muhammad we read that no further prophets will come to earth until ‘Isa returns as ‘a man of medium height, or reddish complexion, wearing two light garments, looking as if drops were falling down from his head although it will not be wet. He will fight for the cause of Islam. He will break the cross, kill pigs, and abolish the poll-tax. Allah will destroy all religions except Islam. He (‘Isa) will destroy the Evil One and will live on the earth for forty years and then he will die’. (Sunan Abu Dawud, 37:4310) The Sahih Muslim has a variant of this tradition: ‘The son of Mary ... will soon descend among you as a just judge. He will ... abolish the poll-tax, and the wealth will pour forth to such an extent that no one will accept charitable gifts.’ (Sahih Muslim 287)

What do these sayings mean? The cross is a symbol of Christianity. Breaking crosses means abolishing Christianity. Pigs are associated with Christians. Killing them is another way of speaking of the destruction of Christianity. Under Islamic law the poll-tax buys the protection of the lives and property of conquered ‘people of the Book’. (At-Taubah 9:29) The abolition of the poll-tax means jihad is restarted against Christians (and Jews) living under Islam, who should convert to Islam, or else be killed or enslaved. The abundance of wealth refers to booty flowing to the Muslims from this conquest. This is what the Muslim ‘Isa will do when he returns in the last days.

Muslim jurists confirm these interpretations: consider, for example, the ruling of Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri (d. 1368).

"... the time and the place for [the poll tax] is before the final descent of Jesus (upon whom be peace). After his final coming, nothing but Islam will be accepted from them, for taking the poll tax is only effective until Jesus' descent (upon him and our Prophet be peace) ..." (The Reliance of the Traveller. Trans. Nuh Ha Mim Keller, p. 603).

Ibn Naqib goes on to state that when Jesus returns, he will rule ‘as a follower’ of Muhammad.