The roots of Arab Anti-Semitism/Radical Islam’s favorite Western tradition

[Elise]

This anti-Semitism isn’t just the sort of everyday stereotyping or genteel snobbery or even official intolerance that’s familiar, if mostly obsolescent, in the West. No, this is the strong stuff: fantasies that Jews ritually slaughter children and oversee secret conspiracies to rule the world. What’s more, unlike, say, Noam Chomsky, most Arab anti-Semites don’t bother with the protestations about how they only oppose Israel’s Palestinian policies and don’t really hate Jews per se. In their usage, Zionist, Israeli, and Jew are pretty much interchangeable terms.

Finally, and most important, Arab anti-Semitism isn’t confined to the fringes of society. Whereas in Israel, as in other Western countries, overt bigotry is scolded, ignored, or kept out of politics, mainstream Arab culture promotes extreme anti-Semitic ideas through schools, newspapers, television, popular culture, and official ideology. It’s hardly even controversial.

Islamic teaching, too, has been radically retrofitted to accommodate the new anti-Semitism. Whereas traditional Muslim accounts depict the fate of the Jews as tragic, that of a people too benighted to follow Muhammad the Prophet, current Muslim scholarship in the Arab world imaginatively rereads the Quran for evidence of the Jews’ devilish nature. Meanwhile, films showing sympathy for the Jews or depicting the Holocaust are censored, while staples of old-fashioned European anti-Semitism—cartoons portraying greedy hook-nosed Jews, popular novels with conspiratorial Jewish villains, public lectures drawing on phony scholarship like the Protocols—became staples of the new Arab culture.


.............excerpted from http://slate.msn.com/?id=2057949

[pnorman]

1. There seems to be an "anti-Semitic" dig here at Chomsky,

that I feel is totally unwaranted. He's openly critical of what he terms "political Zionism", but only a chauvinist could read ant-Semitism in his words or actions.

For the record, I'm half-Jewish by birth, although I have nothing to do with the religion, and I'm Foreskino Intactus. Coming of political age just before the onset of McCarthyism, I was fully alert to the anti-Semitism that was so much a part of it. I regarded it personally, and took DEEP offense. Then, Jew and Commie wasn't two words hyphenated; it was ONE WORD.

I retain what I believe to be the core of Judaic ethics (a passion for justice, and an empathy for the underdog), but I aply them UNIVERSALLY.

pnorman

[Lithos]

2. Locking

Per I/P guidelines. Not based on a recent news or op-ed piece.

Lithos
I/P Moderator
Democratic Underground