Judaeophobia

One reason for this blind spot in the worldview of Western liberals is the refusal to see how far anti-Semitism has penetrated into the body politic of the Muslim Umma. Islamic Judaeophobia goes back 1,300 years to the Koran itself, to the hadith, the sunna and a long tradition of discrimination, not to mention humiliation of Jewish (and Christian) dhimmis. There have been pogroms in the Muslim world through the ages, even if they were generally less frequent and violent than under Christian rule. The status of Jews under Islamic rule was, however, nearly always subordinate and inferior, though one can find periods of relative tolerance, calm and prosperity, especially during cultural peaks such as the Golden Age in medieval Spain and at the height of the Ottoman Turkish Empire.

For the past 65 years, however, hatred of Jews has become far more lethal and toxic in the Muslim world than anywhere else. It has converged with hatred of the West and the growing jihadisation of culture and politics in the Middle East. As the designated enemy of the Muslim Umma after 1948, Zionism has acquired a special status, alongside and sometimes underlying the broader hostility against Western imperialism, secularism and globalisation. The Muslim war against the Jews has been constructed as a "holy war" against contemporary Jewish-American and Israeli incarnations of Satan. To this we should add, in the case of Iran, a populist, revolutionary Shia brand of anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism that has attracted some maverick Western and Third World radicals, disappointed in their hopes for the proletarian world revolution. But the "Arab Spring" did not lead to any diminution in levels of Arab antiSemitism or hostility to Israel. In Egypt, for example, both the present regime and the ousted Muslim Brotherhood accuse each other of being "agents" of the Jews and Israel, as if endemically incapable of freeing themselves from the power of such hoary clichés.

The roots of this pathology lie deep in the collective psyche of a failed modernity in the Arab-Muslim world. For more than a century, Jews have been presented by Arab propaganda as one of the prime symbols of the hated West-as representatives and agents of its most rapacious, repressive and exploitative features. At the same time, the West itself is all too often perceived-in classic Judaeophobic fashion-as being under Jewish/Zionist domination. This twisted stereotype of a Judaeo-Zionist West, usually embodied by a "crusading" America, has built upon the older anti-Semitic legacy of pan-Arabism. Since the Thirties, the Palestinian Arab leader Haj Amin al-Husseini as well as prominent Iraqi and Syrian nationalists openly admired Hitler, forming an alliance with the Nazis based largely on radical anti-Semitism and anti-British sentiment.

Nazism left an unmistakable imprint on the language of both pan-Arabism and Islamism, with its endless evocation of Israel as a "cancer" in the Middle East, long after 1945. One can find traces in the "exterminationist" rhetoric against Israel used since the 1950s by postwar Arab leaders like Gamal Abdul Nasser, King Feisal of Saudi Arabia and in more recent decades by Colonel Gadaffi in Libya. The 1948 Arab war to abort Israel and the broad pan-Arab effort to throw the Jews into the sea in 1967 was a continuation of this drive. It was implicit in much of Yasser Arafat's demagogy and it became altogether explicit in the 1988 Hamas Covenant. Genocidal Jew-hatred still remains very influential in the Arab media, on the Arab street, in Iran and in a number of Asian Muslim countries including Pakistan. Arab-Muslim Holocaust denial is one important component in this genocidal outlook as is the constant reinvention of anti-Semitic Western conspiracy theories. Related themes of global Jewish power-suitably Islamicised and adapted to current requirements-have provided an additional bond between the radical Right in the West, the far Left and militant Muslims from the Middle East. Even the fact that the Sunni-Shia confrontation in the Middle East and the danger posed by a nuclearised Iran objectively dwarf the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems to have made little dent in the proclivity of millions of Muslims to see the "hidden hand" of Israel and world Jewry behind the current mayhem. Such toxic fantasies, far more than the issue of Israeli settlements, have made the Arab-Jewish struggle over the fate of the Holy Land so intractable. One wonders how long Western liberals will remain oblivious to such uncomfortable realities.