Fjordman reviews The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism

Robert Spencer

The European essayist Fjordman contributes an important essay on an important book.

Dr. Andrew G. Bostom asked me earlier to write a review of his latest book, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History, which I am more than happy to do. I consider his previous book The Legacy of Jihad to be the most complete book published to date regarding the history of 1400 years of Islamic Jihad, from Indonesia to France. Islam is hostile to everybody, but Jews are singled out for particular hatred. If you believe the prominent historian Bernard Lewis in his book What Went Wrong?, "The earliest specifically anti-Semitic statements in the Middle East occurred among the Christian minorities, and can usually be traced back to European originals." In other words, everything bad in the Islamic world is imported from Europe. This view fits well with the general anti-European bias of modern media and academia.

It is true that anti-Semitism exists elsewhere, too. I discuss this in my essay The Causes of Anti-Semitism at the website Atlas Shrugs. But according to Robert Spencer in Religion of Peace?: Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn't, "While Christian anti-Semitism has been minimized, it still exists, particularly in the Middle East where some Christians have absorbed the anti-Semitism of the Islamic culture which surrounds them."

As Ibn Warraq – be sure to read his latest book, Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism – says in the forward to The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism:

"During the last fifteen years, certain Western scholars have tried to argue that, first, Islamic antisemitism—that is, hatred of Jews—is only a recent phenomenon learned from the Nazis during and after the 1940s, and, second, that Jews lived safely under Muslim rule for centuries, especially during the Golden Age of Muslim Spain. Both assertions are unsupported by the evidence. Islam 1, that is, the Islam of the texts, as found in the Qur'an and hadith (the sayings and deeds of the Prophet and his companions) and in the sira (the biography of Muhammad, which obviously overlaps with the hadith), and Islam 2—that is, the Islam developed or elaborated from those texts early on by the Qur'anic commentators and jurisconsults, and then set in stone more than a millennium ago—and even Islam 3, in the sense of Islamic civilization—that is, what Muslims actually did historically— have all been deeply antisemitic. That is, all have been anti-infidel, so that Christians too are regarded with disdain and contempt and hatred, but the Jews have been served, or been seen to have merited, a special animus."

The myth of the tolerance of Muslim Spain lives on, as my text Refuting God's Crucible demonstrates. The connection between Nazism and Islam has been made by many observers before, but usually with the emphasis that Nazism was like Islam, not the other way around:

"We do not know whether Hitler is going to found a new Islam. (He is already on the way; he is like Mohammad. The emotion in Germany is Islamic; warlike and Islamic. They are all drunk with wild god). That can be the historic future." - Karl Jung, The Collected Works Volume 18, The Symbolic Life (1939)

"Here was the new Koran of faith and war: turgid, verbose, shapeless, but pregnant with its message." - Winston Churchill on Adolf Hitler's autobiography Mein Kampf, in The Second World War, Vol. I (The Gathering Storm).

According to his architect Albert Speer, Adolf Hitler was fond of saying things such as: "You see, it's been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn't we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?"

Nazism was essentially a new religion of Jihadism, which had much more in common with Islam than with Christianity. The admiration was mutual. In 2005, Hitler's autobiography Mein Kampf was among the top bestsellers in Turkey, behind a book about a Turkish national hero detonating a nuclear bomb in Washington D.C. At the same time, Turkish PM Tayyip Erdogan stressed that Islamophobia must be treated as "a crime against humanity." It is banned by law to discuss the Armenian genocide in Turkey. Would a country the size of Germany, with a history of a thousand years of continuous warfare against its neighbors and where Adolf Hitler is a bestselling author, be hailed as a moderate, Christian country?

The president of the Union for Reform Judaism, one of the largest Jewish movements in North America, in 2007 accused the media, politicians and religious groups of demonizing Islam. Addressing the convention of the Islamic Society of North America, Rabbi Eric Yoffie said Muslims have been turned into "satanic figures."

"There exists in this country among all Americans…a huge and profound ignorance about Islam ... there is no shortage of voices prepared to tell us that fanaticism and intolerance are fundamental to Islamic religion, and that violence and even suicide bombing have deep Koranic roots," he said. He said Americans need to know "how far removed Islam is from the perverse distortions of the terrorists who too often dominate the media, subverting Islam's image by professing to speak in its name."

I suggest Mr. Yoffie reads up on the institution of dhimmitude, which is detailed in the work of Bat Ye'or. Sir Jadunath Sarkar, the pre-eminent historian of Mughal India, wrote this about dhimmitude, the repressive and humiliating system imposed upon non-Muslims under Islamic rule: "The conversion of the entire population to Islam and the extinction of every form of dissent is the ideal of the Muslim State. If any infidel is suffered to exist in the community, it is as a necessary evil, and for a transitional period only.…A non-Muslim therefore cannot be a citizen of the State; he is a member of a depressed class; his status is a modified form of slavery. He lives under a contract (dhimma) with the State.…In short, his continued existence in the State after the conquest of his country by the Muslims is conditional upon his person and property made subservient to the cause of Islam."

This "modified form of slavery" is now frequently referred to as the pinnacle of "tolerance." If the semi-slaves desire equal rights and self-determination, Jihad resumes. This is what happened with the non-Muslim subjects of the Ottoman Empire, starting with the Serbs and the Greeks in the 19th century, and continuing with Bulgarians, Croatians and others. They were repressed with massacres, culminating in the outright Jihad genocide by Turkish and Kurdish Muslims against Armenians in the early 20th century. The Jews of Israel are not only attacked because they are Jews, but primarily because they are Jews who do not meekly disarm and accept the status of servitude that they should have according to Islamic law. They are disobedient dhimmis, just as the Armenians were.

In addition to the constant threat of violence and abuse, living under Islamic rule was a serious economic burden even at the best of times. S. D. Goitein's analyses of the Cairo Geniza materials from the High Middle Ages (c. 950–1250) highlighted the adverse social consequences of the jizya tax imposed on non-Muslims, according to Koranic instructions:

"There is no subject of Islamic social history on which the present writer had to modify his views so radically while passing from literary to documentary sources, i.e., from the study of Muslim books to that of the records of the Cairo Geniza as the jizya . . . or the poll tax to be paid by non-Muslims. It was of course, evident that the tax represented a discrimination and was intended, according to the Koran's own words, to emphasize the inferior status of the non-believers. It seemed, however, that from the economic point of view, it did not constitute a heavy imposition, since it was on a sliding scale, approximately one, two, and four dinars, and thus adjusted to the financial capacity of the taxpayer. This impression proved to be entirely fallacious, for it did not take into consideration the immense extent of poverty and privation experienced by the masses, and in particular, their persistent lack of cash, which turned the 'season of the tax' into one of horror, dread, and misery [emphasis added]."

In The Legacy of Jihad, Andrew G. Bostom reprints a text by the scholar K. S. Lal regarding slave-taking under Islamic rule in India, where something resembling the Ottoman Turkish practice of "devshirme" (Greek for "collecting boys") existed. In Europe, boys, Croatian, Bosnian, Serb, Bulgarian, Greek and others, were taken away from their families, forcibly converted to Islam, indoctrinated with hatred of their own people and taught to fight them. According to Lal, in India, "Under Muslim rule, a substantial portion of the agricultural produce was taken away by the government as taxes and the people were left with the bare minimum for subsistence in order to impoverish them because it was thought that 'wealth' was the source of 'rebellion and disaffection.'" This policy was in practice under the Sultans as well as the Mughals:

"Conditions became intolerable by the time of Shah Jahan as attested to by Manucci and Manrique. Peasants were compelled to sell their women and children to meet the revenue demand. Manrique writes that 'the peasants were carried off…to various markets and fairs (to be sold), with their poor unhappy wives behind them carrying their small children all crying and lamenting, to meet the revenue demand.' Bernier too affirms that 'the unfortunate peasants who were incapable of discharging the demand of their rapacious lords, were bereft of their children who were carried away as slaves.' As in the Ottoman Empire, Christians and Jews turned Muslim were trained to fight their erstwhile brethren, so also in India in the medieval period Hindus captured and converted were made to fight their erstwhile brethren in Muslim wars of conquest. Trained or accustomed to fighting their own people, these converts to Islam are posing various kinds of problems in the present-day India and Eastern Europe."

In The Great Divergence, Kenneth Pomeranz notes that Indian income distribution was significantly more unequal than in China, Japan or Western Europe, yet he doesn't explain why. Mr. Pomeranz is too busy bashing or belittling Europe, as are most scholars these days, and does not mention the words "Jihad" or "jizya," even though he probably should have:

"A study of Mogul land taxes for 1647 finds that 445 families received 61.5 percent of all revenues, which were about 50 percent of gross agricultural output, and that roughly one-quarter of the revenue flow to those families represented actual personal income. (The rest was consumed in various expenses of office.) If this is accurate, these 445 families – presumably less than .002 percent of the population – would have received an income from their offices alone equal to 7.5 percent of total agricultural output, or perhaps 6 percent of the society's total income! An estimate based on Shireen Moosvi's reconstructions for 1595 is similar: it suggests that 1,671 Mughal nobles would have had a net personal income from their claims on government revenue alone equal to about 7 percent of total empire-wide output. Although the records Moosvi worked from have been questioned, her calculations could be off by quite a bit and still confirm our general picture. And while at least some European visitors to China commented on a lack of severe poverty there, Europeans in India seem to have been struck by its extremes of wealth and poverty."

Non-Muslims could suddenly be the victims of even stricter Islamic rulers. As Bostom writes:

"Rigid conformity to a motif in the hadith (and sira) based on the putative deathbed wish of Muhammad himself, as recorded by Umar (the second Rightly Guided Caliph), 'Two religions shall not remain together in the peninsula of the Arabs,' had tragic consequences for the Jews of Yemen. (The hadith and sira further maintain that Umar did eventually expel the Jews of Khaybar.) Thus a pious seventeenth-century Yemenite ruler, Al- Mahdi, wishing to fulfill the mandate of this hadith in Yemen in 1679–1680, expelled the entire Jewish population of Yemen—men, women, and children—deporting them to the inhospitable wastelands of the plain of Tihama. This expulsion was accompanied by the destruction of synagogues, desecration of Torah scrolls, and inducements for conversion to Islam. Three-quarters of the thousands of Jews expelled perished from exposure to the intense heat (and cold), absence of potable water, and the subsequent spread of epidemic disease. The major Yemenite Jewish community in San'a experienced a 90 percent mortality rate from this catastrophic exile—of about ten thousand persons exiled, only about one-tenth survived."

Dehumanizing Jews as apes (Koran 2:65/7:166), or apes and pigs (Koran 5:60) has been common throughout Islamic history, more than 1300 years before the establishment of the state of Israel. Muhammad himself referred to the Medinan Jews of the Banu Qurayza as "apes" before orchestrating the slaughter of all of their men. There are anti-Semitic statements in the hadith, traditions about the Prophet: "The Last Hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: 'Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him.'"

Shaikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, who is currently the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt, the most prestigious center of learning in Sunni Islam, in a 700 page treatise [Jews in the Koran and the Traditions], originally published in 1968/69, and then re-issued in 1986, explains in detail why Jews are cursed by Allah:

"[The] Koran describes the Jews with their own particular degenerate characteristics, i.e. killing the prophets of Allah [Koran 2:61/ 3:112], corrupting His words by putting them in the wrong places, consuming the people's wealth frivolously, refusal to distance themselves from the evil they do, and other ugly characteristics caused by their deep-rooted lasciviousness...only a minority of the Jews keep their word....[A]ll Jews are not the same. The good ones become Muslims [Koran 3:113], the bad ones do not."

When the late 23 year-old Parisian Jew Ilan Halimi was being tortured to death in February 2006, his Muslim torturers, as journalist Nidra Poller wrote in the Wall Street Journal "...phoned the family on several occasions and made them listen to the recitation of verses from the Koran, while Ilan's tortured screams could be heard in the background." Halimi's murderers did not invoke any non-Islamic sources of anti-Jewish hate, only the Koran. Islamic texts, the Koran and the hadith, are the causes of Islamic hatred of infidels, and Bostom does an excellent job at demonstrating this.

I recommend sending a copy of this book to Bernard Lewis, Eric Yoffie of the Union for Reform Judaism in the USA, as well as to every member of the Israeli cabinet and parliament. The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism is massive in scope, just as Bostom's previous book The Legacy of Jihad is. Those who have never progressed beyond the "Islam for dummies" stage and believe Britney Spears is the greatest Western musician since Beethoven may find it a bit overwhelming. For those looking for a serious, scholarly work on the subject of Islamic hatred of Jews, there is simply no better book available on the market today.