Originally posted at PJ Media, as “How Mainstream Islam Threatens Jewish Existence”
Whether one considers the masses of Muslims flowing into Europe as (primarily economic) refugees, proud hijra colonists “quietly” Islamizing the continent, or both, these newly arrived votaries of Islam express an unabashed Islamic Jew-hatred. Germany’s failed attempt to mollify this Muslim immigrant animus toward Jews by “sensitivity” visits to Nazi-era concentration camp memorials, demonstrates its deep-seated intractability.
The spectacle of brutality on display at Sachsenhausen did not awe [Syrian Muslim] Jamo, a former photographer who had known daily violence in Syria. No matter the direct perpetrator of the violence Jamo had witnessed, the greatest cause of conflict in the region, he said, was Israel…“The Arabs think what Hitler did was a good thing, because he freed them from the Jews.”
As I will elucidate under three subheadings [(I) Canonical Islam is Rife with Jew-Hatred, and Mainstream Islam’s Most Authoritative Theologians and Institutions Actively Promote This Bigotry; (II) Mainstream Islam’s Inculcation of Canonical Islamic Jew-Hatred is Mirrored by the Pandemic of Global Muslim Jew-Hatred; (III) Non-Muslim Religious and Political Leaders—Including Jews—Remain in Abject Denial About the Direct Causal Link Between the Mainstream Inculcation of Canonical Islamic Jew-Hatred, and the Pandemic of Global Muslim Jew-Hatred], the evidence is overwhelming, and irrefragable, that contemporary mainstream Islam foments the global scourge of annihilationist Islamic Jew-hatred in a simple, powerful manner: invoking Islam’s most important canonical sources, and their most authoritative interpretations.
But who best represents “mainstream Islam”? By Islamic consensus, The Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre [RISSC], Amman, Jordan has defined, and further epitomizes, the phenomenon. The major aims of this mainstream Islamic organization, which each year puts out the “The Muslim 500—The World’s 500 Most Influential Muslims“, per its 2007 Charter, are:
- “to protect, preserve and propagate traditional, orthodox, ‘moderate’ Islam as defined by the international Islamic Consensus on the ‘Three Points of the Amman Message’ arrived at over the years 2005-2006.”
- “to spread knowledge of the ‘Amman Message’ of November 2004 and the principles it contains in so far as these best represent traditional, orthodox, ‘moderate’ Islam.”
- “to establish, propagate and publicize the religious and legal positions of traditional, orthodox, ‘moderate’ Islam on key issues relevant to life in the modern world.”
The RISSC’s 2017 iteration of “The Muslim 500” maintains that traditional Muslims (96%) and “fundamentalists” (3%) comprise 99% of the world’s Muslims, while modernists represent ≤1%. The biting dismissal of the ≤1% “modernists” and their “scant knowledge of traditional Islam,” explodes a comforting fiction about “reform,” and “reformists”, long propounded by delusive Western apologists, across the political spectrum:
Islamic modernism is a reform movement started by politically-minded urbanites with scant knowledge of traditional Islam. These people had witnessed and studied Western technology and socio-political ideas, and realized that the Islamic world was being left behind technologically by the West and had become too weak to stand up to it. They blamed this weakness on what they saw as ‘traditional Islam,’ which they thought held them back and was not ‘progressive’ enough. They thus called for a complete overhaul of Islam, including—or rather in particular—Islamic law (sharia) and doctrine (aqida). Islamic modernism remains popularly an object of derision and ridicule, and is scorned by traditional Muslims and fundamentalists alike.
Sharia supremacism—and its intrinsic bigotry—represent the mainstream in Islam, as affirmed once again in 2017 by the RISSC.
(I) Canonical Islam is Rife with Jew-Hatred, and Mainstream Islam’s Most Authoritative Theologians and Institutions Actively Promote This Bigotry
Grand Imam of Al-Azhar University, Ahmed al-Tayeb, is the number 1 ranked Muslim figure for 2017 in “The Muslim 500”. His “The Muslim 500” profile states,
Influence: Highest scholarly authority for the majority of Sunni Muslims, runs the foremost and largest Sunni Islamic university.
School of Thought: Traditional Sunni
During an interview with Al-Tayeb, which aired on Channel 1, Egyptian TV, October 25, 2013, he gave a brief explanation of the ongoing relevance of the Koranic verse 5:82 which has been invoked—“successfully”—to inspire violent Muslim hatred of Jews since the advent of Islam:
A verse in the Koran explains the Muslims’ relations with the Jews…This is an historical perspective, which has not changed to this day. See how we suffer today from global Zionism and Judaism…Since the inception of Islam 1,400 years ago, we have been suffering from Jewish and Zionist interference in Muslim affairs. This is a cause of great distress for the Muslims. The Koran said it and history has proven it: “You shall find the strongest among men in enmity to the believers to be the Jews…”
Less than a year later—consistent with his belief in (and promulgation of) Islam’s “sacralized,” conspiratorial Jew-hating canon (see Koran 5:32–33 and 5:64; Muhammad’s poisoning to death by Jews in the “traditions”)—Grand Imam al-Tayeb insisted that the scourge of jihad terrorism, ravaging the Middle East, epitomized by IS/IL, is due to the machinations of “Global Zionism,” i.e., Jews. During a televised statement which aired on Channel 1 Egyptian TV, September 8, 2014, al-Tayeb intoned:
All the [fundamentalist terrorist groups] are the new products of imperialism, in the service of global Zionism in its new version, and its plot to destroy the [Middle] East and tear region apart.
Since its founding in 973 C.E., Al Azhar University (and its mosque) have represented a pinnacle of Islamic religious education, which evolved into the de facto Vatican of Sunni Islam. Unfortunately, over that same millennium, through the present era, Al Azhar and its leading clerics have represented and espoused the unreformed, unrepentant jihad bellicosity and Jew-hatred at the core of mainstream, institutional Islam. Islam’s canonical texts—the Koran itself (see here), and the “traditions” of Islam’s prophet Muhammad (the hadith, and sira; see here)—are redolent with Islamic Jew-hatred. This hateful material was catalogued—and extolled—by Ahmed al-Tayeb’s immediate predecessor as Sunni Muslim Papal equivalent, the late Sheikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, who served as the Grand Imam of Sunni Islam’s Vatican, for 14 years, from 1996, till his death in March, 2010. Voice of America’s report on his sudden demise from a fatal heart attack, noted that he “was the head of Sunni Islam’s most prominent seminary, the Cairo-based Al-Azhar institute,” and further declared “Tantawi led a moderate branch of Sunni Islam.” Tantawi’s “academic” magnum opus, a 700 page treatise entitled, “Jews in the Koran and the Traditions”, includes this summary Koranic rationalization for Muslim Jew-hatred:
[The] Koran describes the Jews with their own particular degenerate characteristics, i.e. killing the prophets of Allah [see Koran 2:61/ 3:112 ], [and see al-Azhar Sheikh Saqr’s contemporary Koranic citations, “Jews’ 20 Bad Traits As Described in the Qur’an”] corrupting His words by putting them in the wrong places, consuming the people’s wealth frivolously, refusal to distance themselves from the evil they do, and other ugly characteristics caused by their deep-rooted lasciviousness…only a minority of the Jews keep their word…[A]ll Jews are not the same. The good ones become Muslims [Koran 3:113 ], the bad ones do not.
More ominously, Tantawi’s exhaustive modern analysis of Islam’s defining, canonical sources concluded by sanctioning these bigoted—even violent—Muslim behaviors towards Jews:
[T]he Jews always remain maleficent deniers….they should desist from their negative denial…some Jews went way overboard in their denying hostility, so gentle persuasion can do no good with them, so use force with them and treat them in the way you see as effective in ridding them of their evil. One may go so far as to ban their religion, their persons, their wealth, and their villages.
As Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Tantawi’s public statements on “dialogue” (January 1998) with Jews, the Jews as “enemies of Allah, descendants of apes and pigs” (April 2002; from Koran 5:60), and the legitimacy of homicide bombing of Jews (April 2002), made his personal Muslim Jew-hatred eminently clear. Tantawi’s comments on dialogue, which were issued shortly after he met with Israel’s Chief Rabbi, Israel Meir Lau, in Cairo, on December 15, 1997, provided him another opportunity to re-affirm his ongoing commitment to the views expressed about Jews in “Jews in the Koran and the Traditions”, (his published Ph.D. thesis):
…anyone who avoids meeting with the enemies in order to counter their dubious claims and stick fingers into their eyes, is a coward. My stance stems from Allah’s book [the Koran], more than one-third of which deals with the Jews…[I] wrote a dissertation dealing with them [the Jews], all their false claims and their punishment by Allah. I still believe in everything written in that dissertation. [i.e., Jews in the Koran and the Traditions, cited above]
Mainstream Shiite Islam—the “Twelver” Shiites being the largest branch of this Muslim minority, representing some ~10% of the world’s Muslims—expresses concordant “understandings” of Jews. Muhammad Husayn Tabatabai’s, “The measure of balance/justly held scales in the interpretation of the Quran,” is regarded as the most important 20th century Shiite Koranic commentary. Indeed the Islamic Studies academy—both Western and Iranian—has designated Tabatabai (d. 1981) the leading modern Shiite religious scholar and philosopher, dubbing him a “theosopher.” Allameh [Allamah] Tabatabaei [Tabatabai] University, named in honor of this celebrated Shiite authority and “theosopher,” is the largest specialized state social sciences university in Iran and the Middle East, with 17,000 students and 500 full-time faculty members. Affirming his continued lofty stature, and relevance, an Iranian national conference was held on May 3, 2012, in Qom, dedicated to “recognizing the interpretative methods and principles used by Allameh [Allamah] Tabatabaee [Tabatabai] in [his Koranic] exegesis.”
Allamah Tabatabai, modern doyen of Shiite Koranic exegesis, and “theosopher,” provides this gloss on Koran 5:82—as current Sunni Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Ahmed al-Tayeb averred in 2013, the central Koranic verse defining Islam’s eternal attitudes towards Jews, and Judaism:
[T]he Jews, although they had the same alternatives as the Christians, and they could retain their religion with payment of the jizyah [humiliating Koranic poll tax, per verse 9:29], yet they continued in their haughtiness, became harder in their bigotry, and turned to double dealing and deception. They broke their covenants, eagerly awaited calamities to befall the Muslims and dealt to them the bitterest deal…[T]he enmity of the Jews…toward the divine religion [Islam] and their sustained arrogance and bigotry, have continued exactly in the same manner even after the Prophet… These unchanged characteristics…confirm what the Mighty Book [the Koran] had indicated.
Tabatabai’s authoritative modern Shiite gloss further reiterates—and validates—the notion established by a millennium of Sunni exegeses that Koran 17:4–7 refers to Allah’s brutally just punishment of the “corrupting” Jews (specifically, the destruction of the two ancient, historical Jewish temples by the Babylonians and Romans). His exegesis also recapitulates Shiite traditions claiming the “corrupting” Jews conspiratorial responsibility for the murder of Shiism’s most lauded “martyrs”—the fourth Caliph Ali, and his son Husayn. Perhaps more striking is Tabatabai’s approving affirmation of these (“and other”) traditions, that the two corruptions mentioned in the Koran were the murdering of Ali and Ḥusayn. Such traditions are currently cited as a Shiite rationale for Israel’s destruction, whereas elsewhere, Tabatabai ultimately invoked Muhammad himself as a final validation for this viewpoint,
presented to reflect all the things that go on within this nation and what comes forth from it, from the Israelites, truthfully reflecting what the prophet [Muhammad] (may Allah honor him and grant him peace) repeatedly reported, namely that this nation will commit exactly what the Israelites committed [before] in completely the same way. They would even take possession of a lizard’s hole [in retaliation] for [that lizard] disturbing them.
Tabatabai’s mainstream Shiite Islamic Jew-hatred embodies all that better known Shiite clerical leaders have espoused, whether deemed “radical,” such as Ayatollah Khomeini (d. 1989), and his living successor, current Iranian Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei (#4, and the highest ranked Shiite, in the 2017 The Muslim 500), or “reformist,” like the late Ayatollah Montazeri (d. 2009), “spiritual godfather” of the (Soylent) “Green Movement”, and lionized by uninformed neo-conservative “Iran experts.” Consider these Jew-annihilationist utterances of the “moderate, reformist” Montazeri, who also championed Iran’s nuclear aspirations.
His Excellency [the sixth Shi‘ite Imam Ja’far] al-Sadiq affirmed thrice that those who will ultimately exterminate the Jews will be the clerics of [the Iranian Shiite shrine city of] Qom. (cited approvingly in a public forum, and reiterated in Montazeri’s Memoirs)
Very soon through a billion strong march by all the Muslims of the world, we can liberate beloved Jerusalem, destroy usurping Israel, and place the destiny of Islam and the Muslims in their own hands…
[T]his Islamic movement, which will be the one to save the Palestinian [Muslim] people and Jerusalem, should be strongly supported [including by] all the military and political moves we feel Islamic governments should make to extirpate Israel as a cancer.
On October 16, 2003, in Putrajaya, Malaysia, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, then a renowned “moderate” Prime Minister of “moderate” Muslim Malaysia, and a respected Muslim intellectual, delivered the convocation speech at the 10th Islamic Summit of the (then) Organization of the Islamic Conference (now Organization of Islamic Cooperation), mainstream Islam’s most important religio-political organization, representing the entire global Muslim umma (community), and its 56 nation states (plus the Palestinian Authority). Invoking Koranic “guidance”, and the jihadist precedent of Islam’s prophet Muhammad, and his original pious Muslim followers, Mahathir Mohamad declared, with open bellicosity,
To begin with, the governments of all the Muslim countries can close ranks and have a common stand…on Palestine…We need guns and rockets, bombs and warplanes, tanks and warships…We may want to re-create the first century of the Hijrah, the way of life in those times, in order to practice what we think to be the true Islamic way of life. 1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews. There must be a way. And we can only find a way if we stop to think, to assess our weaknesses and our strength, to plan, to strategize and then to counter-attack. As Muslims, we must seek guidance from the Al-Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet. Surely the 23 years’ struggle of the Prophet can provide us with some guidance as to what we can and should do
Even Western editorialists from bastions of the Left were uncomfortable with the approving audience reception Mahathir Mohamad’s speech received. Richard Cohen of the Washington Post opined,
They gave the Malaysian a standing ovation. Asked afterward what they thought of the speech, the luminaries in attendance—including some of our most cherished allies—thought they had heard nothing untoward. Mahathir’s claque included Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Abdullah, Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf, our guy in Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai…
A Le Monde editorialist added an important observation about the “common currency” of such ideas, albeit in what was arbitrarily delimited to the “Arab Islamic world”:
…[T]he audience approved. Because such words are common currency in the Arab Islamic world where they pass for evident truth and are regularly uttered by government, the press – and teachers
But these Western editorialists remained oblivious to the canonical Islamic context Mahathir Mohamad’s Muslim audience instantly recognized, and validated, as sources of inspiration for their jihad against the Jews, most notably, the Jew-hating, jihadist example of Muhammad.
As an apposite conclusion to this section, I will summarize the eternal “guidance,” vis-à-vis Jews, Islam’s prophet hardwired into the Muslim creed.
September 622 C.E. marks a defining event in Islam—the hijra. Muhammad and a coterie of followers persecuted by fellow Banu Quraysh tribesmen, fled from Mecca to Yathrib, later known as Medina. The Muslim sources described Yathrib as having been a Jewish city founded by a Palestinian diaspora population which had survived the revolt against the Romans. The Jews of the north Arabian peninsula were highly productive oasis farmers. These Jews were eventually joined by itinerant Arab tribes from southern Arabia who settled adjacent to them and transitioned to a sedentary existence. Following Muhammad’s arrival, he re-ordered Medinan society. The Jewish tribes were isolated, some were then expelled, and the remainder attacked and exterminated. Muhammad distributed among his followers as “booty” the vanquished Jews property—plantations, fields, and houses—using this “booty” to establish a well-equipped jihadist cavalry corps. For example, within a year after the massacre (in 627) of the Jewish tribe the Banu Qurayzah, Muhammad, according to a summary of sacralized Muslim sources, waited for some act of aggression on the part of the Jews of Khaybar, whose fertile lands and villages he had destined for his followers, to furnish an excuse for an attack. But, no such opportunity offering, he resolved in the autumn of that year [i.e., 628], on a sudden and unprovoked invasion of their territory. Ali (later, the fourth “Rightly Guided Caliph”, and especially revered by Shiite Muslims) asked Muhammad why the Jews of Khaybar were being attacked, since they were peaceful farmers, tending their oasis, and was told by Muhammad he must compel them to submit to Islamic Law. The early 20th century scholar of Islam, David Margoliouth, observed aptly:
Now the fact that a community was idolatrous, or Jewish, or anything but Mohammedan, warranted a murderous attack upon it.
Muhammad also used the epithets “apes/monkeys” and/or “pigs” (per Koran 5:60) to characterize Jewish victims of his jihadist campaigns, notably the Qurayza tribe, whose males Muhammad subsequently beheaded. Just prior to orchestrating the en masse execution of the adult males from the besieged Medinan Jewish tribe the Banu Qurayzah (and distributing their women, children, and possessions as slave “booty” for the Muslims), Muhammad, according to his earliest, reverent Muslim biographer, Ibn Ishaq (d. 767-770), addressed these Jews with menacing, hateful derision: “You brothers of monkeys, has God disgraced you and brought His vengeance upon you?” (Another early Muslim biographer of Muhammad, Ibn Sa‘d [d. 845], reports that Muhammad stated, “brothers of monkeys and pigs, fear me, fear me!”). Following his later campaign against the Jews of the Khaybar oasis, Muhammad told those surviving his slaughter, and rapine, “As for you, I hate you more than monkeys and pigs.”
Here is the description by Ibn Ishaq, of Muhammad’s mass beheading of the Banu Qurayzah males:
Then they [the men, including post-pubescent boys, of the Jewish tribe Banu Qurayzah] surrendered, and the apostle [i.e., Muhammad] confined them in Medina.. Then the apostle went out to the market of Medina (which is still its market today) and dug trenches in it. Then he sent for them and struck off their heads in those trenches as they were brought out to him in batches…There were 600 or 700 in all, though some put the figure as high as 800 or 900….This went on until the apostle made an end of them.
Lastly, as a central tenet of Muslim eschatology (end of times theology), Muhammad proclaimed (Sahih Muslim Book 041, Hadith Number 6985) that Islam’s final triumph over mankind, ushering in a messianic age, would only occur with the complete annihilation of the Jews.
Abu Huraira reported Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: ‘Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him’
This canonical tradition of Islam’s prophet was incorporated into the theology of the Palestinian Muslim jihadist movement by Hajj Amin el-Husseini in 1937, and the Hamas Covenant of 1988, and it remains a staple of Islam’s major teaching institutions, Sunni (including Al-Azhar) and Shiite alike. Moreover, as the distinguished historian of Islam Moshe Sharon observed, ruefully, in July, 2008:
Not one Friday passes without this hadith being quoted in sermons from one side of the Islamic world to the other.
These are the specific “sacralized” manifestations of Muhammad’s legacy of annihilationist Jew-hatred Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad deliberately invoked as “guidance” to rapturous approval from his mainstream Muslim leadership audience, representing the entire global Muslim “umma”.
(II) Mainstream Islam’s Inculcation of Canonical Islamic Jew-Hatred is Mirrored by the Pandemic of Global Muslim Jew-Hatred
Such traditional, institutionalized Islamic Jew-hatred is ultimately manifest in the global pandemic of strongly bigoted Muslim attitudes towards Jews as documented by unprecedented Anti-Defamation League (ADL) surveys conducted in 2014, and updated in 2015. “Scaling” conspiratorial Jew-hatred, based upon an index of eleven antisemitic stereotypes, 50% of the world’s Muslims harbored the most intense animus (affirming ≥ 6/11 stereotypes), a rate 2 to 3-fold higher than among any other major faith (i.e., Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism), or those professing no religion. Fully 75% of Middle East and North Africa Muslims, overall, expressed this level of Jew-hating intensity, ranging between 92%-93% in Gaza/ Judea-Samaria (“the West Bank”) and Iraq, to 74%-75% in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, respectively. Predictably, when queried, canonical Islamic Jew-hatred emerges as a critical etiologic factor in shaping such Muslim attitudes. Thus, in July, 2011, American pollster Stanley Greenberg reported the results from what was described as an “intensive, face-to-face survey in Arabic of 1,010 Palestinian adults in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.” There were two salient, pathognomonic findings. One was that 73% of the Palestinian Muslims surveyed “agreed with a quote from the [Hamas] charter, [article 7] and a hadith, or tradition ascribed to the prophet Muhammad, about the need to kill Jews hiding behind stones and trees,” i.e., the dictates of Muhammad’s canonical hadith of Jew-annihilation (Sahih Muslim Book 041, Hadith Number 6985), presently ubiquitous in Islamdom. Eighty percent (80%) further agreed with “a quote from the Hamas Charter about the need for battalions from the Arab and Islamic world to defeat the Jews,”i.e., article 15 of the Hamas charter calling for the jihad destruction of the State of Israel by the world’s Muslims, [per the charter, this “jihad becomes a personal duty of every Muslim…[I]t is necessary to raise the banner of jihad. This requires the propagation of Islamic consciousness among the masses, locally (in Palestine), in the Arab world and in the Islamic world”], the same public admonition Mahathir Mohamad gave to the heads of all the nation states of the global Muslim umma at the 2003 OIC meeting in Putrajaya.
Follow-up 2015 ADL data from Western European Muslims (an oversample of the Belgian, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and UK Muslim populations) revealed that 55% shared this level of Jew-hatred. These Western European ADL findings are consistent with prior analyses of the indoctrination of Muslim European youth and adults with textual Islamic Jew-hatred, and European Union data that acts of overt antisemitic violence are at least ~25-fold more likely to be committed by Muslims, relative to non-Muslims. European reports on violent Jew-hatred published in 2015 and 2017 highlighted the ongoing “disproportionate” culpability of Muslims in committing such acts. The 2015 and 2017 reports were also concordant in identifying the central role of Islam in fomenting European Muslim Jew-hatred, observing [in 2015] “the level of antisemitism rises with the level of [Islamic] religiosity,” and with so-called, “fundamentalist interpretations of Islam,” and [in 2017], “Muslim respondents’ high level of religiosity was therefore a key factor in explaining the high level of antisemitism among Muslims.”
The documented promulgation of canonical Islamic Jew-hatred in U.S. mosques (here; here) and Muslim primary and secondary schools (here; here), may have already contributed to sporadic violent acts (or attempted acts) by Muslims against American Jews (here; here; here), and if unchecked, could eventually spawn levels of Muslim antisemitic violence on par with those now occurring in Europe.
(III) Non-Muslim Religious and Political Leaders—Including Jews—Remain in Abject Denial About the Direct Causal Link Between the Mainstream Inculcation of Canonical Islamic Jew-Hatred, and the Pandemic of Global Muslim Jew-Hatred
Two men possessed of striking intellectual courage—Dutch politician Geert Wilders, and Stoughton, MA Rabbi Jon Hausman—are living examples of how the rarest exceptions prove the rule regarding denial of Islam’s canonical Jew-hatred, and its repercussions, by all other politicians and religious leaders.
Geert Wilders’ December 2013 “Open letter to his Holiness Pope Francis boldly ventured where no Western political leader had tread before—or since. Starkly contrasting Papal ecumenism, with the virulent Jew-hatred publicly spewed by Sunni Islam’s Vatican and its Papal equivalents [discussed in section (I)], Wilders wrote,
In your recent exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (Paragraphs 247-248) you draw the world’s attention to the indebtedness of Christianity to the Jews and their faith. The exhortation also contains a sharp condemnation of the terrible persecutions which the Jews have endured from Christians in the past. Your words are words which might inspire many. Unfortunately, they are in sharp contrast to the expressions of hatred which were voiced last October by the spiritual leader of Sunni Islam, Ahmad Al-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of the Al-Azhar Institute in Cairo. During an interview, aired on Egyptian television on October 25, Grand Imam Ahmad Al-Tayeb reaffirmed the relevance of Koranic verse 5:82, which states the Jews are strongest in enmity towards…the Muslims. This verse has inspired centuries of Islamic hatred of Jews. Al-Tayeb’s invocation of Koranic Jew-hatred is in line with fourteen centuries of Islamic teaching. Grand Imam Al-Tayeb’s predecessor at Al-Azhar, Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, even wrote a book, entitled “The Children of Israel [Jews] in the Koran and the Sunna,” in defense of Jew-hatred based on Koranic teachings.
He also reminded Pope Francis about the widespread Koran-inspired persecution of Christians across Islamdom in 2013:
The current suffering of Christians from Islamic persecution in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Sudan, Nigeria, Pakistan, Indonesia, and so many other countries, clearly indicates what Christians have to endure from the followers of the Koran.
Wilders then politely chastised Pope Francis for his claim (Evangelii Gaudium [paragraphs 252-253]), “authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence.” The Dutch politician stated in reply: “Reality does not confirm this statement.” Wilders concluded the letter with an appeal to Francis to actually read the Koran, citing a brief litany of the Muslim holy book’s many warlike and bigoted verses, before exhorting The Pope to “face reality,” in defense of Western, Judeo-Christian civilization, against the existential threat of Islam:
The Koran is full of bellicose and hate-mongering verses against non-Muslims. Your Holiness will be able to find them if he reads the Koran, but I will name just a few: [i.e., these specific citations were provided—2:191–193; 4:89; 8:60; 9:5; 9:29; 9:30; 9:123; 47:4]… I hope that the Holy Father will help us defend the West’s Judeo-Christian and humanistic civilization, to which even atheists and agnostics owe their freedom and democracy. Nothing will be gained by a refusal to face reality. We must speak the truth about Islam — the largest threat to mankind in this present age.
Rabbi Jon Hausman—fluent in written and oral Arabic—is the sole U.S. rabbi willing to openly discuss the living legacy of Islamic antisemitism, and its rootedness, as he has noted, “in Islam’s sacralized texts dealing with Jews.” Contra Rabbi Hausman’s intrepid public discourse, not a single major Jewish anti-discrimination or Jewish advocacy organization from A[DL], through S[WC], to Z[OA], has ever similarly identified—let alone challenged—mainstream Islam’s relentless propagation of canonical Islamic Jew-hatred. Worse still, in June, 2006, despite then Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan’s (and his coterie’s) already well-established public record of visceral Islamic Jew-hatred, the Anti-Defamation League awarded, and Erdogan personally accepted, the ADL’s “Courage to Care Award.” Such craven, willfully blind silence by these organizations has contributed to Rabbi Hausman’s (like Geert Wilders’), vilification, and being made a pariah—including by his fellow rabbis—none of whom share Hausman’s scholarly understandings of Islam, or his valor.
Some 850 years ago (in 1172 C.E.), elaborating on the depth of Muslim hatred for the Jews in his era, Maimonides made this profound observation regarding the Jewish predilection for denial, a feature that he insists will hasten their destruction.
We have acquiesced, both old and young, to inure ourselves to humiliation…All this notwithstanding, we do not escape this continued maltreatment [by Muslims] which well nigh crushes us. No matter how much we suffer and elect to remain at peace with them, they stir up strife and sedition.
The Jews and their communal leaders like Maimonides victims of the Sharia’s jurisdictions in the Middle Ages—vanquished by jihad, isolated, and well-nigh defenseless under the repressive system of dhimmitude—can be excused for their submissive denial. There is no excuse in our era, given the existence of the U.S. and a thriving Western Jewish diaspora—living under the blanket of hard, U.S.-won protections for their religious freedom, physical security, and dignity—and an autonomous Jewish State of Israel.
Together as Jews, all other non-Muslims, and Muslim “apostate” conscientious objectors to Islam, we must no longer accept Maimonides’ 12th century expectations of Muslims, otherwise they will oblige us. Continued denial of Islam’s mainstream, canonical Jew-hatred, and the global Muslim attitudes it fosters, will facilitate the jihad annihilation of Jews. But the jihad destruction won’t end with their elimination, alone.
