This Tuesday, January 24, 2012, 7:00 P.M., I will be giving a presentation at the Luxe Hotel, in Los Angeles, sponsored by the Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, and entitled, “Understanding the Islam in Muslim Jew-Hatred”
Below is how the event is advertised:
Dr. Andrew Bostom will demonstrate, Antisemitism in the Muslim world—from the 7th century advent of Islam, through the contemporary era—is rooted in the foundational texts of Islam itself.
Lawrence Wright, in his Pulitzer Prize winning book The Looming Tower, claimed that “Until the end of World War II…Jews lived safely -although submissively-under Muslim rule for 1,200 years, enjoying full religious freedom; but in the 1930s, Nazi propaganda on Arabic-language short-wave radio, coupled with slanders by Christian missionaries in the region, infected the area with this ancient Western prejudice (antisemitism).” Matthias Kuntzel has stated that it was “(d)uring the Thirties and Forties (that) Islamist anti-modernism was poisoned by the Nazi antisemitic mind-set.”
These erroneous if widely prevalent conceptions of Islam’s doctrinal and historical treatment of Jews rest on two false pillars popularized by the poorly researched, if emphatically asserted claims of a major scholar of Islam … (I) “In Islamic society hostility to the Jew is non-theological. It is not related to any specific Islamic doctrine, nor to any specific circumstance in Islamic history. For Muslims it is not part of the birth-pangs of their religion, as it is for Christians.” (II) “…‘dhimmi’-tude subservience and persecution and ill treatment of Jews… is a myth.”) (…) This sham castle of glib affirmations must be swept away if the enduring phenomenon of Islamic Antisemitism is to be properly understood.
Those false conceptions are the heart of the problem. They are usually affirmed without substantive proofs being given. The actual data, provides a negative proof. It reminds me of a scene in Woody Allen’s film Sleeper. Allen portrays Miles Monroe, the owner of a health food store in Greenwich Village who is cryogenically frozen and he wakes up 20 years in the future. In one scene he is confronted by two doctors, one of whom is very authoritative and claims to be possessed “of what we know to be true.” He offers Miles a cigarette saying “Here, smoke this, and be sure you get the smoke deep down into your lungs. Its tobacco, one of the healthiest things for your body.”
There are incontrovertible and overwhelming hard data – pathological and epidemiological – which demonstrate a major causative role for smoking in both the predominant form of lung cancer (i.e., adenocarcinoma), and premature coronary heart disease. Dr. Bostom believes smoking is to these diseases as the Islam in Islamic Antisemitism is to this scourge of Jew-hatred, past and present. It is as destructive to our social and moral health to deny this reality, as it is to human public health disease prevention efforts to deny the causative link between cigarette smoking and adenocarcinoma of the lung, or premature coronary heart disease. That is what Dr. Bostom came to conclude from doing his own research for The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism.
$15 per person Cash or check at the door
Register here or by email at RSVP@cjhsla.org
For more information call (818)704-0523
— Andrew Bostom is the author of The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims (2005/2008),The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History (2008) and the forthcoming Sharia versus Freedom, the latter with a foreword by Andrew C. McCarthy.
