Editor’s note: Ever since Hamas’ Oct 7th savage terror attack against Israel, we have observed – in horror – how the Left has risen up in rabid support of the terror group and engaged in ferocious hatred of Jewish people in general – and of the state of Israel in particular. The examples have been unending: Harvard student organizations rallied around Hamas, Black Lives Matter endorsed Hamas’ murder of Israeli babies, and leftist groups and individuals everywhere have vociferously supported the Hamas massacres.
And just recently, the Left has even engaged in denouncing Israel for rescuing its hostages.
This is all nothing new, of course. Frontpage Editor Jamie Glazov has documented the Left’s long traditional dance with Islamic jihad and Jew-Hate in his critically-acclaimed and best-selling book, United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror. Now, because of the Left’s current passionate alliance with Hamas, our editors have deemed it vital to run a chapter from Jamie’s book, titled “To Hate a Jew.” The chapter explores how and why anti-Semitism serves as one of the core bonds between the Left and Islam in the Unholy Alliance.
Make sure to read the eye-opening chapter below and to order United in Hate, which reveals the shocking truth of what really lies behind the Left’s dark love affair with Hamas’ bloodthirsty jihad against Israelis.
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Chapter 13: To Hate a Jew
“Behind the doctrine of atheistic materialism was a Jew; behind the doctrine of animalistic sexuality was a Jew; and behind the destruction of the family and the shattering of sacred relationships in society…was a Jew.”
—Sayyid Qutb
The hatred of Jews serves as a central underpinning to the Islamist death cult—as it does to most death cults. Like its ideological cousins, fascism and communism, Islamism wages war against Jews in its effort to secure its own survival. Totalist ideologies detest modernity, individual freedom, and any value placed on individual human life—notions with which Jews are strongly identified. Jews also personify the enduring struggle to survive, rather than the impulse to destroy and perish. For Islamists—as for leftist believers, as delineated in the believer’s diagnosis and documented throughout Part II—such a disposition is tantamount to a declaration of war.
In Islamists’ eyes, not only are Jews guilty because, as a people, they are synonymous with liberty and the veneration of life on earth; they are also guilty for being the creators and inhabitants of the state of Israel—the very existence of which is an affront to Islam’s quest for dominion over all the lands of the Middle East and, ultimately, the world. The fact that Israel is an ally of the United States only magnifies the “crimes” of the Jews. Consequently, the Jewish state serves as a nearby stand‐in for the West in general, and for America in particular. As Kenneth Timmerman notes, “much of today’s anti‐Semitism, while aimed at Jews, stems from a belief system that equally rejects America and indeed Western civilization as a whole.”[i]
As will be demonstrated in this chapter, Islamist Jew hatred is, first and foremost, rooted in Islamic theology and culture. At the same time, it is important to stress that, as shown in chapter nine, since Islamism is partly an outgrowth of the European ideological virus that spawned communism and fascism, so too is its Jew hatred an outgrowth of those two death cults.
Many Muslim Arabs adored Hitler and were enchanted with his Final Solution. As mentioned in chapter nine, the Muslim Brotherhood’s founder, Hassan al‐Banna, was a devout admirer, and the Nazis helped create the organization as a weapon against the British in the Middle East.[ii] By the end of World War II, the Muslim Brotherhood had a half million Arab Nazis as members.[iii] The grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al‐Husseini, met with Hitler on November 28, 1941, to request German assistance in engendering a Middle Eastern Final Solution, and he offered to form an Arab army to help carry it out.[iv] Al‐Husseini became the Arabic voice of Nazi Germany in all of its broadcasts to the Arab world, exhorting Muslims to murder Jews.[v] Hitler’s Palestinian disciple understood, however, that direct assistance could be provided only after the Führer had finished the job in Europe— an objective the Nazi dictator never achieved. Yasser Arafat was one of al‐Husseini’s most admiring disciples, even claiming that he was his nephew.[vi]
Sayyid Qutb, meanwhile, helped frame the Jew hatred of the Islamic world in the modern era. For Qutb, the Jews represented the “eternal enemy” of Islam. Behind every evil, in Qutb’s view, were the Jews: “Behind the doctrine of atheistic materialism was a Jew; behind the doctrine of animalistic sexuality was a Jew; and behind the destruction of the family and the shattering of sacred relationships in society…was a Jew.”[vii]
Al‐Qaeda and all other Islamist terrorist organizations have emerged, clearly, from traditional political Islam. But they also have evolved from the Nazi‐Arab World War II generation, through the connection with the Muslim Brotherhood, which remains the backbone of al‐Qaeda and the parent of nearly every other Arab terrorist group.[viii] As Timmerman has noted, “If today’s Muslim anti‐Semitism is like a tree with many branches, its roots feed directly off of Hitler’s Third Reich.”[ix] Mein Kampf was and still is circulated widely in the Muslim world. It is, for instance, a bestseller among Palestinians and it has also recently been on the bestseller lists in Turkey.[x]
Just as it has Nazi‐Fascist roots, so too the Islamist death cult has communist origins, as we saw in chapter nine, and the communist death cult was also rife with Jew hatred. The Soviet regime viciously persecuted its Jews, and newly discovered evidence indicates that Stalin was planning a second Great Terror, his own version of the Holocaust, to rid the Soviet Union of its remaining Jews.[xi] Shortly before his death he authorized the construction of four large death camps for this purpose in Kazakhstan, Siberia, and the Arctic north.[xii]
The Soviet regime consistently used its power and influence to channel Islamism’s Jew hatred into a ferocious anti‐Americanism.[xiii] Former Romanian intelligence general Mihai Pacepa has revealed how the Soviet‐bloc espionage community’s main objective was to transform Yasser Arafat’s war against Israel and its main supporter, the United States, into a central doctrine throughout the whole Islamic world. Pacepa writes:
According to KGB theorists, the Islamic world was a petri dish in which we could nurture a virulent strain of America‐hate. Islamic cultures had a taste for nationalism, jingoism, and victimology. Their illiterate, oppressed mobs could be whipped up to a fever pitch. Terrorism and violence against America would flow naturally from their religious fervor. We had only to keep repeating, over and over, that the United States was a “Zionist country” bankrolled by rich Jews. Islam was obsessed with preventing the infidel’s occupation of its territory, and it would be highly receptive to our dogma that American imperialism wanted to transform the rest of the world into a Jewish fiefdom.[xiv]
This explains why the Soviet bloc flooded the Islamic world with Arabic translations of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, along with other “documentary” materials, “proving” that Jewish money governed the Zionist United States, whose aim was to extend its domination over the rest of the world.[xv]
Soviet communism, therefore, fueled the energy and hate with which Islamism, its ideological cousin, would fight modern liberalism and freedom. The totalitarian virus was simply transported into a new theater. As Pacepa powerfully observes, “the hijacked airplane was launched into the world of contemporary terrorism by the KGB and its puppet Yasser Arafat, and it is significant that this became the weapon of choice for September 11, 2001.”[xvi]
Islamism’s Jew hatred also has numerous other sources. One significant ingredient is the humiliation phenomenon delineated in chapter eleven. Muslim Arabs experienced excruciating shame in losing three wars to the Israelis (1948, 1967, 1973) and in observing the success and prosperity of the Jewish civilization right in their midst. For generation after generation, Arabs in the Middle East have known nothing but backwardness, poverty, dictatorship, and cultural impotence. Yet they have had to witness a comparatively small number of European and American Jews migrate to a tiny stretch of desert a half century ago, to join the Jews already living there and, within a single generation, build the most powerful economic and industrial nation in the entire Middle East. This is an agonizing dose of reality for many Arabs, causing them to try to destroy the reminder of their own impotence—i.e., the Jews—rather than to acknowledge the flaws of their own civilization and admit that they might profit by learning something from the hated “infidels.” In the Arab world, Israel’s creation is Nakba—the Catastrophe.
But despite the Nazi and communist reinforcement, Islamist Jew hatred is primarily founded in Islamic sources, which will always take precedence for Muslims. And one of the key problems is that Muslims do not see Jews as merely their enemies; they see them as the enemies of God. The Koran attributes many negative characteristics to Jews, especially falsehood and distortion,[xvii] and it teaches that Allah, as well as David and Jesus, has cursed the Jews.[xviii] In fact, Allah was so disgusted with Jews that he transformed them into apes and pigs.[xix] The hadiths also contain many anti‐Jewish teachings. A hadith collected in Mishkat Al‐ Messabih, for instance, says, “When judgment day arrives, Allah will give every Muslim a Jew or Christian to kill so that the Muslim will not enter into hell fire.”[xx]
It is important to point out, of course, that there are some Islamic leaders, such as Sheikh Abdul Hadi Palazzi, director of the Cultural Institute of the Italian Islamic community, who seek to abolish Jew hatred within Islam.[xxi] But they have a great struggle ahead of them.
The Prophet Muhammad taught Jew hatred explicitly by example. He commanded his followers: “Kill any Jew that falls into your power.”[xxii] In his later years, Muhammad himself persecuted Jews and sanctioned the killing of the males of large Jewish tribes, notably in the brutal massacre of the Jewish tribe Banu Qurayza. Muhammad ratified a judgment that saw as many as nine hundred men from this tribe beheaded and their decapitated corpses buried in a pit while he looked on. The Muslims then sold most of the murdered men’s wives and children into slavery, while distributing some of them as gifts among Muhammad’s followers (Muhammad took one Qurayza woman, Rayhana, for his own pleasure).[xxiii] In his 1895 biography of Muhammad, which relied entirely on the original Muslim sources, the scholar Sir William Muir observed: “The massacre of the Banu Coreiza was a barbarous deed which cannot be justified by any reason of political necessity…. [T]he indiscriminate slaughter of the whole tribe cannot be recognized otherwise than as an act of monstrous cruelty…”[xxiv]
These crimes by Muhammad himself serve as a foundation for Muslim hatred and persecution of Jews throughout history. In AD 807, for instance, Harun al‐Rashid, the caliph of Baghdad, enforced Muhammad’s directive to humiliate Jews by mandating that they wear a yellow belt and dunce cap. If they failed to do so, they faced execution. In different periods of dhimmitude, Jews were also forced to wear the image of an ape on their clothes and to nail onto their front door a board bearing the sign of a monkey.[xxv] This was the inspiration for the yellow star later used by the Nazis.[xxvi]
We get a clear picture of how Islam’s ancient hatred of the Jews has fused with present‐day resentments. Israel, like the United States, has become a symbol of modernity, freedom, corporate capitalism, and globalization—all things that are reviled by Muslim fundamentalists. And it is no coincidence that the Left despises modernity, freedom, corporate capitalism, and globalization as well. Jew hatred, therefore, serves as an indispensable element in the leftist‐Islamist romance.
Notes:
[i] Kenneth R. Timmerman, Preachers of Hate: Islam and the War on America (New York: Crown Forum, 2003), p.2.
[ii] Loftus, “The Muslim Brotherhood.”
[iii] DiscovertheNetworks.org, Hasan al-Banna profile.
[iv] Robert Spencer, “Islamo-Fascism Denial.”
[v] For an excellent account of the al-Husseini story, see Chuck Morse, The Nazi Connection to Islamic Terrorism: Adolf Hitler and Haj Amin al-Husseini (Lincoln, Neb.: iUniverse, 2003).
[vi] See Kenneth Timmerman’s comments in Jamie Glazov, “Symposium: Islamic Anti-Semitism,” FrontPageMagazine.com, October 31, 2003.
[vii] Quoted in Timmerman, Preachers of Hate, p.122.
[viii] Loftus, “The Muslim Brotherhood.”
[ix] Ibid., p.104.
[x] David Pryce-Jones, “Their Kampf: Hitler’s Book in Arab Hands,” National Review, July 29, 2002.
[xi] Scholars have comprehensively documented the brutal realities of Soviet Jew hatred. See Elie Wiesel, The Jews of Silence: A Personal Report on Soviet Jewry, trans. Neal Kozodoy (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1966); Theodore Freedman, ed., Anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union: Its Roots and Consequences (New York: Freedom Library Press of the New York Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, 1984); and Ronald I. Rubin, ed., The Unredeemed: Anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1968).
[xii] Jonathan Brent and Vladimir P. Naumov, Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot against the Jewish Doctors, 1948–1953 (New York: HarperCollins, 2003).
[xiii] For a comprehensive account of the KGB’s propaganda activity in the Middle East and its influence on Islamic anti-Americanism, see Andrew and Mitrokhin, The World Was Going Our Way.
[xiv] Ion Mihai Pacepa’s comment in “Symposium: The Terror War: How We Can Win,” Frontpagemag.com, November 15, 2004.
[xv] Ibid.
[xvi] Ibid.
[xvii] Suras 3:71 and 4:46.
[xviii] Suras 2:61–58 and 5:78–82.
[xix] Suras 5:60–65, 2:65, and 7:166.
[xx] Mishkat Al-Messabih, vol. 2, no. 5,552.
[xxi] Jamie Glazov, “The Anti-Terror, Pro-Israel Sheikh,” Frontpagemag.com, September 12, 2005.
[xxii] Muhammad, as quoted in Ibn Ishaq, Sirat Rasul Allah, translated by A. Guillaume as The Life of Muhammad (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p.369.
[xxiii] Andrew G. Bostom, “Muhammad, the Qurayza Massacre, and PBS,” Frontpagemag.com, December 20, 2002.
[xxiv] Ibid.
[xxv] Christians were forced to wear the image of a pig. See Bat Ye’or, The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians under Islam, trans. David Maisel, Paul Fenton, and David Littman (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985), pp. 186–187, 420, and 440.
[xxvi] Timmerman, Preachers of Hate, p.99.
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