“From Muhammad, via the Koran, across space and time, as promulgated today by Sunni Islam’s 1000-year old leading teaching institution, Al-Azhar, and ISIS, alike, Jews as apes/pigs is a “sacralized” theme repeated to incite their slaughter en masse, or as individuals, such as Pamela Geller. Would that Fox News’s morally and factually bereft “pundits” understood this hideous reality.”
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Yesterday (5/5/15) I blogged about how both CNN and Fox News (excepting Sean Hannity, entirely, and to some extent, Megyn Kelly) have chastised journalist/writer, and activist Pamela Geller for “provoking” the Garland, Texas jihadist attack on a free speech gathering, which featured cartoonist depictions of Islam’s prophet Muhammad. Last evening, Bill O’Reilly at Fox News, with popular conservative radio talk show host Laura Ingraham witlessly chirping in her agreement, doubled down on that despicable and ignorant immoral equivalence.
Here is a re-statement from my 5/5/15 blog of the pathological willful blindness underlying the ugly reactions by Fox News talking heads such as O’Reilly and Ingraham:
Over 13-years after the murderous jihad cataclysm of 9/11/2001, these news intermediaries evidence a woefully deficient understanding of the living Islamic doctrinal and historical basis for behaviors such as the thwarted Garland, TX attack. They are equally oblivious to hard contemporary data on both global, and U.S. Muslim attitudes toward such critically relevant matters as “blasphemy,” as well as what a preeminent, mainstream North American Muslim jurists association opines about “punishment” for criticism of Islam’s prophet. This professional knowledge deficit—a dereliction of journalistic duty—is manifest in their coverage of the free speech event, and/or their interactions with Ms. Geller.
The central defining feature of this deliberately self-bowdlerized conservative media “mindset”—epitomized by O’Reilly and Ingraham—is denial of Islam’s prophet Muhammad’s prototype behaviors which sanction violent jihadism, non-Muslim, especially Jew-hatred, misogyny, and lethal attacks on his—and Islam’s—critics.
Tuesday (5/5/15), ISIS released a direct threat to Pamela Geller—invoking a reference to the Koranic epithet for Jews invoked by Muhammad. Issued from the twitter account of U.S.-born jihadist Abu Ibrahim al-Ameriki, the statement included these words, referring to the failed Garland attack, and an open-ended threat:
Our aim was the khanzeer [pig] Pamela Geller and to show her that we don’t care what land she hides in or what sky shields her; we will send all our Lions to achieve her slaughter.
Muhammad 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. Tafsir al-Jalalayn, which remains one of the most popular, as well as the most authoritative Koranic commentaries provides this gloss on 5:60:
[5:60] ..those whom Allah has cursed and put far away from His mercy and with whom he is angry—turning some of them into monkeys and into pigs by transmogrification—and who worshipped false gods. These are the Jews…“False gods” refers to Shayṭān [Satan]. They [the Jews] worship him by obeying him. Such people are in a worse situation—because they will be in the Fire—and further from the right way (the Path of the Truth) [i.e., Islam]
Just prior to orchestrating the en masse execution of the adult males from the besieged Medinan Jewish tribe the Banu Qurayza (and distributing their women, children, and possessions as slave “booty” for the Muslims), Muhammad, according to his earliest 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!” A third account, Al-Waqidi’s (d. 822), The Life of Muhammad, reports that as Muhammad approached the Qurayza’s fortress, he proclaimed they were “brothers of monkeys and pigs and worshippers of evil.” Following a 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 Ibn Ishaq’s description of Muhammad’s mass beheading of the Banu Qurayza males:
Then they [the men, including post-pubescent boys, of the Jewish tribe Banu Qurayza] surrendered, and the apostle [i.e., Muhammad] confined them in Medina in the quarter of d. al-Harith, a woman of B. Al-Najjar. 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. Among them was the enemy of Allah Huyayy b. Akhtab and Ka’b b. Asad their chief. There were 600 or 700 in all, though some put the figure as high as 800 or 900. As they were being taken out in batches to the apostle they asked Ka’b what he thought would be done with them. He replied, “Will you never understand? Don’t you see that the summoner never stops and those who are taken away do not return? By Allah it is death!” This went on until the apostle made an end of them.
The historical treatment of Jews in Muslim societies since the advent of Islam—chronic oppression, punctuated by outbursts of mass anti-Jewish violence, forced conversion to Islam, or expulsion—has been consistent with such sacralized religious bigotry. Thus the dehumanizing Koranic references to Jews as apes (or apes and pigs) were used explicitly for polemical incitement to large scale, annihilationist pogroms against dhimmi Jewish communities in Granada (within mythically “tolerant” Muslim Spain) during 1066, Baghdad and its environs, proliferating into Iran, at the end of the 13th century, and southern Morocco at the close of the 15th century.
At present, there is continual, monotonous invocation by leading Muslim clerics for example from Sunni Islam’s Vatican equivalent, Al-Azhar University, of this Jew-hating motif from the Koran (and other foundational Muslim texts). Thus the late (d. 2010) Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Sheikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi declared that the Jews were “enemies of Allah, descendants of apes and pigs.”
From Muhammad, via the Koran, across space and time, as promulgated today by Sunni Islam’s 1000-year old leading teaching institution, Al-Azhar, and ISIS, alike, Jews as apes/pigs is a “sacralized” theme repeated to incite their slaughter en masse, or as individuals, such as Pamela Geller. Would that Fox News’s morally and factually bereft “pundits” understood this hideous reality.
