Florida Governor, and GOP POTUS candidate, Ron Desantis, did not mince words during a 10/15/21 Face The Nation interview: “We cannot accept people from Gaza into this country as refugees.” But it was Desantis’ clarification as to why that has elicited near universal scorn: “not all of them are Hamas, but they are all antisemitic.” His interviewer, Margaret Brennan, immediately shot back, “I’m sure you know, all Arabs are Semites. But how can you paint with such a broad brush to say 2.3 million people are antisemitic?”
What is the validity of Ms. Brennan’s clear implication that Palestinian Arabs as “Semites,” are axiomatically incapable of antisemitism? Moreover, did Desantis “paint with such a broad brush,” in his assessment that 100% of the Palestinian Muslim populace hated Jews?
Brennan chose to regurgitate a common, disingenuous misrepresentation that seeks to deny Arab Muslim Jew-hatred altogether. Semites in fact speak a group of cognate Semitic languages, mainly Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic. Antisemitism, without being hyphenated, means Jew-hatred, of any ilk. Period.
Desantis’ contention comports, sadly, with voluminous data compiled by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) over the past decade from validated surveys of “Extreme Antisemitism,” defined by ADL as agreement with at least six of eleven Antisemitic stereotypes. Employing this definition, there is a pandemic of Muslim Antisemitism—a 2 to 3-fold excess occurrence of extreme Muslim Antisemitism, globally, by religious affiliation relative to Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, or no religious affiliation. This excess is also found among Muslim diaspora populations in Western Europe (reflected, again, in a 2022 update for Belgium and France), and the United States.
However, ADL’s global survey reported in 2014 revealed Muslim Jew-hatred is at its most intense in the Muslim Middle East, and North Africa, reaching an “apogee” in Gaza/Judea-Samaria (the West Bank). The world’s 16 most Antisemitic countries are all in this region, where 74% to 93% of the overwhelmingly Muslim denizens of these nations exhibit extreme Antisemitism—Judea-Samaria/Gaza 93%; Iraq 92%; Yemen 88%; Algeria 87%; Libya 87%; Tunisia 86%; Kuwait 82%; Bahrain 81%; Jordan 81%; Morocco 80%; Qatar 80%; United Arab Emirates 80%; Lebanon 78%; Oman 76%; Egypt 75%; Saudi Arabia 74%.
A 2011 face-to-face survey in Arabic including over 1000 Palestinians in Gaza and Judea-Samaria conducted by U.S. Democratic party pollster Stanley Greenberg, unearthed even more disturbing antisemitic tendencies. The survey exposed violent sentiments clearly motivated by themes of Jew-hatred elucidated at great length in my tome The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, specifically, the canonical traditions of Islam’s prophet Muhammad, as well as Koranic verses espousing both Jew-hatred, and jihad war against Jews. Hamas’ founding 1988 Covenant merely reproduces these motifs with accurate citation of both the Koran and the traditions. Greenberg’s unique survey queried, directly, how Palestinian Muslims processed a Jew-annihilating tradition in the Covenant (article 7), along with a modern call for the annihilation of Israel as a political entity, by jihad (in article 15). Not surprisingly, given over 13 centuries of such canonical Islamic religious incitement of Jew-hatred and jihad, 73% of Palestinians abided the dictates of the Jew-annihilating hadith, while 80% agreed with the goal of destroying Israel as a state, via jihad.
Perhaps most tragic is the irrefragable fact that the conjoined Jew-hatred and jihadism of Hamas’ Covenant mirrors what is still being inculcated by the most esteemed mainstream religious teaching institutions of both Sunni and Shiite Islam (see pp. ix-xi). Consider Sunni Islam’s Vatican, Al-Azhar University, and its current (since 2010) Grand Imam Papal equivalent, Ahmed al-Tayeb as a salient example. In 2002, then Grand Mufti of Egypt, al-Tayeb supported homicide bombing “martyrdom” operations against Israeli civilians. During an interview which aired on Channel 1, Egyptian TV, October 25, 2013, Al-Tayeb, as Al-Azhar Grand Imam, gave a brief explanation of the ongoing relevance of the Koranic verse 5:82 which has been invoked—“successfully”—to inspire 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’…”
Finally, Palestinian polling data obtained from face-to-face interviews of 1270 adults, just 4-months ago (June 7th to11th, 2023), confirmed the public preference for Hamas over Fatah: Hamas polled 10% higher than Fatah on the question of “deserving to represent the people,” while Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was preferred by 23% more Palestinians than Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas, to be President.
Viewed in this depressing overall context of rampant Muslim Jew-hatred, Ron Desantis is guilty, at worst, of a small rounding error.
