Dennis PragerThe murder of the Fogel family in their beds and the sexual assault of the non-Jewish reporter Lara Logan in Tahrir Square to the screams of 'Jew! Jew!' are just two examples of an unparalleled tsunami of hate sweeping over the Arab and Muslim world. It's a tsunami which, unless taken seriously, will eventually also engulf everyone, Denis Prager argues in The National Review:
The two incidents tell the same tale. In much of the Arab Muslim world, and some of the non-Arab Muslim world (such as Iran) today, “Jew” is not a person. “Jew” is not even merely the enemy. In fact, there is no parallel on earth to what “Jew” means to a hundred million, perhaps hundreds of millions of Muslims.
Think of any conflict in the world — Pakistan–India, China–Tibet, North Korea–South Korea, Tamil–Sinhalese. There are some deep hatreds there, and atrocities have been committed on one or both sides of each of those conflicts. But in none of those conflicts nor anywhere else is there something equivalent to what “Jew” means to millions of Muslims.
There really is only one historical parallel, and it, too, involved the word “Jew.” The Nazis also succeeded in fully dehumanizing the word “Jew.” Thus, for Nazism, it was as important (if not more so) to murder Jewish babies and children — often through as cruel a means as possible (being burned alive, buried alive, or thrown up in the air and impaled on bayonets) — as it was to murder Jewish adults.
The human being does not have to learn to hate. It seems to come pretty naturally. Nor does the human being have to learn to murder, steal, or rape. These, too, seem to be in the natural human repertoire of evils.
But the human being does have to learn to hate children and babies, and to regard the torture and murder of them as morally desirable acts. It takes years of work to undo normal protective human attitudes toward children.
That is precisely what the Nazis did and what significant parts of the Muslim world have done to the word “Jew.” To them, the Jew is not just sub-human, the Jew — and his or her children — is sub-animal.
Palestinian and other Muslim spokesmen and their supporters on the left argue that this unique hatred is the fruit of Israeli policies, not decades of Nazi-like Jew-hatred saturating Islamic education, Islamic television and radio, and the mosque. But for this to be true, unique hatred would have to be matched by unique evil on the Israelis’ part.
Yet, among the injustices of the world, what the Israelis have done to the Palestinians would not even register on a moral Richter scale. The creation of Israel engendered about 750,000 Palestinian refugees (and an equal number of Jewish refugees from Arab countries) and the death of perhaps 10,000 Palestinian Arabs.
And all of that came about solely because Arab armies invaded Israel in order to destroy it at birth. Yet, when Pakistan was yanked from India and established as a Muslim state at the very same time Israel was established, that act engendered 12.5 million Muslim refugees, and about a million dead Muslims (and similar numbers of Hindu refugees and deaths). Why then doesn’t “Hindu” equal “Jew” in the Muslim lexicon of hate?
Here are some answers in brief:
First, many groups have been hated, but none have been hated as deeply as the Jews.
Second, Jew-hatred is often exterminationist, which is why Jew-hatred has little in common with ethnic bigotry, religious intolerance, or even racism. Rarely, if ever, do any of them seek the extermination of the disliked or hated group.
Third, exterminationist Jew-haters are particularly dangerous people. Non-Jews who do not recognize Jew-hatred as the moral cancer it is are fools. Nazism was born in Jew-hatred and led to the death of more than 40 million non-Jews. Islamic terror started against Israeli Jews (in fact it started against Palestinian and Egyptian Jews - ed) but has spread around the world. More fellow Muslims have now been murdered by Islamic terror than Jews have.
That is why the tsunami the world ignored this weekend — the Palestinian-Arab-Muslim flood of Jew-hatred — is the one that will prove far more dangerous to it than the Japanese one it understandably focused on.
J'accuse: Palestinians of War Crimes and Genocide, by Phyllis Chesler
1) While it is true that Jews are most hated by Muslims, he should have entered the massacres of the Copts and other Christians in the equation. The first and common thread there are the teachings of Muhammed.
ReplyDelete2)Blaming Jew hatred on the Nazi connection/influence is to get them off the hook. Like they couldn't have thought about it all by themselves.
3)This view, which only conceives of history since the rise of nazism, overlooks 1300 years of suffering under Muslim bondage - without any help from the nazis.
Well, that makes us all one happy family with a common history - the evil of nazism.
4) I don't like the way things are presented. While the Husseini/Nazi copnnection is real and has had some degree of influence, it doesn't explain everything.
The brighter side of this tsunami, if only it were true, is that good and evil have to part, to be recognized for what they are, before the evil can then be swept away. I refer to the "end of days" wherein a utopic world shall supplant the "dark exile" one we live with today. If only this will finally be that time.
ReplyDeleteSylvia,
ReplyDelete|It is true that the Nazi connection does not explain everything, but as the German scholar Mattias Kuntzel says, Nazism introduced the concept of the Jews as cosmically evil into the Arab and Muslim world. Of course Islam has its own prejudices against Jews and Christians, and an idea of supremacy reminiscent of Nazism. Jews and Christians are to be held in contempt and are only fit to be the slaves of the Muslims.
But before Nazism came along, the Jews were not a threat and not important enough to be disposed of as the all-powerful epitomy of evil. Of course, as you say, people don't like this explanation because it lets the Arab Muslims 'off the hook'. But Islamism is itself a unique combination of Koranic antisemitism and Nazi ideas, and it is this view which has infected the Arab and Muslim world.
I do not believe Dennis Prager is letting Muslims off the hook in his essay. Perhaps his historical narrative of Jew hatred since the dawn of enlightenment period inadvertently pushes readers to suppose that. We have to understand that Jewish and non-Jewish scholars, writers and journalists have only few things at their disposal to alert people to the incoming danger in Arab-Jewish relations. Historiography is what is being used here, albeit in a journalistic and simplistic way, but Prager is Prager, not a political policy analyst or heavy duty intellectual. He writes commentaries and editorial pieces and he is writing for the public at large and for a mass audience. He is very good at it.
ReplyDeleteI think the question that seems to be emerging from his essay is this. Are the current so-called “revolutions” sweeping the Arab world also carrying the anti-Zionist (anti-Jewish) ideology? From the look of it and the constant talks and slogans in the streets and on Arab television news, they seem to heading that way. The sad and surprising example of Tunis synagogue is very telling. The branding of Mubarak as an Israeli Zionist agent is also foretelling a chilling reality that any upheaval in the Arab world will need its anti-Jewish “raison d’être”. It is a fact.
In consequence, there is no denial that any institutional change an Arab country undergoes because of these “pseudo-revolutions” be it toward a secular authoritarian regime or a God help us a theocratic one, or let us hope a “democratic” one (which is a wishful thinking); anti-Jewish sentiments will be the predominant ideology both internally (to unify the tribal mentalities and redirect frustration and anger) and externally (to show off to the Arab world the conventional and accepted hard line of strong Arab state ideology).
As a way of the usual saddening analogy (although alarmist I concord), there is no denial that”IF” the current Arab states had the political upper hand, the worst forms of genocide will befall on Jews. It is their weakened economic, political and military will that do not permit them to carry out such agenda. It is to these issues and realities that Dennis Prager is trying to allude to, through his essay of historical facts and insinuated comparative analyses about Jewish Arab relations. In the end, no matter what social changes might sweep the Arab states for the better or for worst, what awaits Israel is the same denial of its existence, the same threats of genocide and the same eternal Jew-hatred.
In response to Sammish,
ReplyDeletewho writes:
"Prager is ... not a political policy analyst or heavy duty intellectual",
let me quote Eleanor Roosevelt:
"Great minds discuss ideas;
Average minds discuss events;
Small minds discuss people."