Prisoners of Islamic Jew Hatred

Dereliction of Duty: Riverdale Rabbi Avi Weiss did in effect resign when he made his feckless comments quoted by the N.Y. Daily News

Prisoners of Islamic Jew Hatred

“These were people who were eager to bring death to the Jews and the Jewish community.” Assistant US Attorney Eric Snyder provided this apt characterization of the four converts to Islam whose mass murdering plans to bomb two Bronx synagogues were thwarted.

Richard Williams, uncle of the arrested plotter Onta “Hamza” Williams, lamented that his nephew, a Baptist who converted to Islam, “…wasn’t raised this way. All this happened when he became a Muslim in prison.” Indeed, Warith Deen Umar, a Muslim chaplain who worked for 25 years in the NY State prisons, and was considered a highly influential cleric, reportedly boasted that this vast incarceration system was, “…the perfect recruitment and training ground for radicalism and the Islamic religion.” During his chaplaincy, Umar also repeatedly gave sermons fomenting Jew hatred, witnessed by prison staff.

But the obvious question persists—although dutifully avoided by our learned religious, media, and political elites in this sorry age of Islamic correctness: What Islamic teachings might these American Muslim converts have learned, whether in prison, or elsewhere, which caused them to target their American Jewish neighbors, specifically, for mass killing? Simply put, it is impossible to comprehend this ugly phenomenon without understanding the core, mainstream Islamic theology—still unreformed and unrepentant—which has inspired Muslim Jew hatred, since the advent of Islam.

For over a thousand years, Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt, has served as the academic shrine—much as Mecca is the religious shrine—of the global Muslim community.  Al Azhar University and its mosque represent the pinnacle of Islamic religious education.

A front page New York Times story published Saturday January 10, 2009, included extracts from the Friday sermon (the day before) at Al Azhar mosque pronounced by Egyptian-government appointed cleric Sheik Eid Abdel Hamid Youssef. Referencing well-established Antisemitic motifs from the Koran (citations provided, below), Sheikh Youssef intoned,

Muslim brothers, God has inflicted the Muslim nation with a people whom God has become angry at [Koran 1:7] and whom he cursed [Koran 5:78] so he made monkeys and pigs [Koran 5:60] out of them. They killed prophets and messengers [Koran 2:61 / 3:112] and sowed corruption on Earth. [Koran 5:33 / 5:64] They are the most evil on Earth. [5:62  /63]

In authoritative classical and modern Koranic interpretations, the Koran’s central Antisemitic theme—their eternal curse for “prophet killing,” and violating Allah’s commands—is coupled to Koranic verses 5:60, and 5:78, which describe the Jews transformation into apes and swine (5:60), or simply apes, (i.e. verses 2:65 and 7:166), having been “…cursed by the tongue of David, and Jesus, Mary’s son” (5:78). The Muslim prophet Muhammad himself repeats this Koranic curse in a canonical hadith (sacred collections of Muhammad’s words and deeds). Moreover, just before subduing the Medinan Jewish tribe Banu Qurayza and orchestrating the mass execution of their adult males, Muhammad invoked  Koran 2:65/7:166, addressing these Jews, with hateful disparagement, as “You brothers of apes.” Finally, Islamic end of times theology teaches that the dawning of the messianic era cannot begin until the Jews are violently exterminated en masse, sparing none. Both Shi’ites and Sunni Muslims invoke the infamous hadith attributed to Muhammad: “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’…” And each Friday this genocidal hadith is quoted in sermons across the Islamic world, including among US Muslim communities.

Last February 2008, Franco Frattini, the European Union (EU) official responsible “for combating racism and Antisemitism in Europe,” revealed  that Muslims—who comprise 4%  of the European population—were responsible for fully half (50%) of the documented Antisemitic incidents in continental Europe. Thus, on a population percentage basis, Muslims in Western Europe already accounted for roughly 25 times the number of Antisemitic incidents as their non-Muslim European counterparts. When the late 23 year-old Parisian Jew Ilan Halimi was being tortured to death in February 2006, his Muslim captors, “…phoned the family on several occasions and made them listen to the recitation of verses from the Koran, while Ilan’s tortured screams could be heard in the background.” In the heart of Western Europe, Ilan Halimi’s torturers-murderers did not invoke any non-Islamic sources of anti-Jewish hate, only the Koran.

All these events highlight the abject failure to confront the menace of theologically-motivated Islamic Jew hatred. Despite continuous interfaith “dialogue” sessions, Jewish leaders in both Europe and America never demand a mea culpa from their Muslim interlocutors for the living legacy of doctrinal Islamic Jew hatred whose ugly sequelae are evident on a daily basis. Their dereliction of duty is shameful.