On the New Muslim Antisemitism

Raphael Israeli

The old and stale anti-Jewish stereotypes that appear in classic  European anti-Semitism, and have been copiously replicated in Arab and Muslim anti-Semitic writings, have of late effected some new twists, concurrent with the enhanced anti-Semitic mood in the West. The main strata of inspiration have not changed dramatically, and they sustain their drawing from Muslim sources (like dubbing the Jews the "descendants of apes and swines"), their borrowings from the Christian themes of Blood Libel, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the world Jewish conspiracy and the idea of "poisoning" in various forms; and their depending on the fortunes of the Arab-Israeli conflict, thus parading anti-Semitism as anti-Zionism or anti-Israelism. The new twist consists in operationalizing the old stereotypes and the anti-Semitic vocabulary of old into concrete acts to counter the monstrous image attached to the Jews, and take action to check the "wild" and controllable conduct of the Zionists and the Israelis. The areas where this new operationalization of anti-Semitism works are varied and widespread. Here we shall briefly address some five or six of them, before we reach some tentative conclusions. They are: firstly, using Christians, both in the Middle East and in Europe, both of whom have succumbed to the dhimmi state of mind,  to denigrate Jews and Zionism; secondly, to expand the range of Jew-haters and hate-mongers from obscurantist clerics to vast strata of mainstream intellectuals and professionals; thirdly, to encourage anti-semitism as a legitimate tool to combat Israel; fourthly, to  prominently add to the old Christian themes also a pathological Holocaust denial; fifthly, to "perfect" the theme of poisoning to new heights, in line with the world of hallucinations  where many Muslims dwell; and finally, vilification of the Jews to such an extent as to fill all crevices of the Muslim souls with  a paranoiac  contempt and disgust of the  Zionists and Israelis, when the overt Jewish appellation is somehow  prudently circumvented.

*Raphael Israeli – Born in Fes, Morocco , currently teaching Islamic, Chinese and Middle Eastern History at Hebrew University and as a guest Professor at Haifa University. Graduate of Hebrew University in History and Arabic Literature, PhD in Chinese and Islamic History from the University of California, Berkeley in 1974. Since 1974 Lecturer and then Professor of Islamic and Chinese History at Hebrew University, with sabbatical periods spent at York University in Toronto, the University of Pittsburg’s Semester at Sea program, Harvard University, Boston University, Australian National University in Canberra, Melbourne University and Naruto University in Japan. Author of 25 books and some 100 scholarly articles in the fields of Islamic radicalism, Islamic terrorism, the Modern Middle East, Islam in China and Asia and the Opening of China by the French.