Richard Landes
One of my daughters recently wrote me about a friend who thought that “most of the Muslim antisemitism in Europe wasn’t based on their dislike of what is going on in Israel and not so much on religion.” I knew this belief was widely held not only by anti-Zionists, but also by liberals in general, including Jews. It includes the widely held assumption that suicide bombings were a response to the despair that Palestinians felt because of how Israel treated them. It is also directly related to the problem of “Islamophobia is the new Antisemitism,” in which speaking of Muslim antisemitism becomes a new form of racist antisemitism. Of course, I did not expect a Jewish U.S. ambassador to make those kinds of remarks, which is just what Howard Gutman said to a group of Jewish lawyers in Belgium:
What I do see as growing, as gaining much more attention in the newspa- pers and among politicians and communities, is a different phenomena . . . It is the problem within Europe of tension, hatred and sometimes even violence between some members of Muslim communities or Arab immigrant groups and Jews. It is a tension and perhaps hatred largely born of and reflecting the tension between Israel, the Palestinian Territo- ries, and neighboring Arab states in the Middle East over the continuing Israeli-Palestinian problem. Either the good ambassador has no awareness of just how paranoid, genocidal, and depraved Muslim antisemitism is, or he is contemptuous in his lack of standards. He would never excuse virulent Jewish hatred for
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Palestinians “merely” on the basis of the fact that Palestinians target Israeli children, dance in the street when they succeed, and display exhibits honor- ing the dead Jews. And yet, somehow, virulent Palestinian hatred is understandable.
Of course, the actual situation differs radically from this benign con- tempt. Most of this regional tension is a product of the mainstream [news] media (MSM), both ours and theirs. Virtually none of the people who hate Israel have seen this matter up close: their impressions and beliefs about what’s happening are the product of what they read in the media, and reports from activists who document the “apartheid” ways.
The argument, of course, can work inversely: Palestinians have pro- duced a constant stream of lethal narratives describing Israelis as baby-kill- ers, and have spread the virus throughout the Muslim world. These narratives inspire suicide bombers and their cheering supporters, and the violence that Israel does against the Palestinians—from targeted killings to the separation barrier, to the Gaza blockade responding directly to antisemitic propaganda.
Because the Western mainstream news media has focused some of this propaganda, people, including my daughter’s friend, have formed beliefs that are based on the television images and justify their disdain. “No won- der French Muslims hate you,” the French Christians say to their French Jewish co-citoyens, “look at what your brethren in Israel do to their cousins in Palestine.” To grant the Palestinians and other Muslims permission to hate the Jews reveals unthinking racism: I don’t really expect anything remotely rational or balanced from these folks. If you piss them off, you deserve their rage.
The MSM not only report lethal narratives as news, but omit reporting the hatreds that inspired such narratives. In the summer of 2000, the PA was blasting hatred of Israel. If the MSM were surprised by Arafat’s Camp David “no,” it’s because they ignored what he and his friends were saying in Arabic. On the contrary, driven by a belief that peace was around the corner, they felt that dwelling on such bad news would queer the peace process. Nor did the Oslo war make a difference. Sheikh Halabiya gave a sermon calling on Muslims to “slaughter the Jews everywhere.” William Orme wrote a piece on Palestinian incitement in which he quoted Halabiya saying: “Labor, Likud, they’re all Jews.”
As a result, the ferocious strain of antisemitism in Palestinian irreden- tism transferred easily from the mufti’s contribution to the Final Solution, Nazi propaganda, and helping Nazism flourish in Egypt and Syria, to Arafat’s national liberation and Hamas’s apocalyptic paranoia. Nor is this merely a quirk of journalism, but a widespread practice of the “post-colo-
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nial” field of Middle East studies in the wake of Edward Said’s masterpiece of cognitive warfare forbidding Westerners from othering Muslims.
Yet, what are we to make of crowds rallied by the moderate Muslim Brotherhood chant, “One day we will kill all Jews”? Since 2000, Arab and Muslim news media have been awash with gory video depictions of the Elders of Zion carrying out their blood sacrifices of innocent Muslim youth. Specialists disagree over whether this is primarily an import from the worst of European hate-mongering, or an indigenous growth with roots in the Koran. European anti-Zionists may like their fantasy that their attitude is not antisemitic, but in the case of the Arab and Muslim world, the slide from opposing Israel to ranting about al Yahud everywhere is effortless.1
Phillip (Mondo) Weiss’s response to Ambassador Gutman offers addi- tional insight. Citing two other comments, Weiss proves Gutman’s thesis by pointing to a study showing that antisemitic incidents in England spiked after the Mavi Marmara incident. Of course, the near doubling of antisemitic incidents did not arise in response to Israel’s behavior, but to the reports of them, in which the MSM reported unfiltered anti-Zionist lethal narratives about the IDF coming down spraying bullets and killing 19 peaceful, humanitarian activists. He also omits data showing that, compared to Arabs, Israelis commit a faction of violence. Weiss, who never met a lethal anti-Zionist narrative he didn’t like, probably still believes the initial reports. But unless you are willing to argue that when Israeli soldiers carry- ing paint-gun rifles, defending themselves from a lethal assault by Jihadis posing as activists, kill nine of their assailants, that justifies a wave of antisemitism, this case hardly supports Gutman’s analysis. On the contrary, it proves the opposite.
No violent anti-Arab demonstrations exploded on British soil when Lebanese soldiers killed seventy Palestinian refugees in a massive air assault in 2007, or during the last year while the Syrian army killed over 3,000 of its own people. If you were to argue that Islamophobia is caused by Muslim behavior, would you not get accused of Islamophobia by the same people so ready to blame Israel for antisemitism?
All of it is linked to a particularly dangerous form of political correct- ness, in which criticism of Muslims is the new form of antisemitism. As a Parisian colleague insisted, “The experience of the Muslims in Europe today is exactly the same as the Jews a century ago.” Of course, that’s not the case at all: both in terms of the wildly different behavior of the two minorities, and in terms of how the European elites reacted to their pres-
1. Mohammed’s mission to retroactively supersede and claim the origins of Judeo-Christian monotheism, then to “correct,” and finally to complete the Jewish and Christian revelations.

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ence. By that logic, however, any attack on Islam is immediately compara- ble to an attack on Jews a century ago.
Even those Jewish organizations designed to protect Jews from antisemitism share this attitude. Berlin’s Zentrum fu ̈r Antisemitismusfor- schung held a conference whose main theme was the close identity of Islamophobia and Judaeophobia. In the United States, the Anti-Defamation League released only 2.6 percent of 4,269 press releases since 1995 on either Islamic extremism or Arab antisemitism, of which only .005 were released since September 11, 2001—precisely when the threat to Jews from Islamic extremism dramatically increased. That is almost as small as the percentage of Jews in the world, or the percentage of the Arab world “occu- pied” by Israel: 0.002.
Which brings us to the dilemma that faces the morally concerned Western observer. We are faced with two opposing narratives: one in which the Muslims/Palestinians are victims who might be forgiven their imperial- ist Israelis hate; and one in which the Israelis are victims, who might be forgiven their resistance to assaults from paranoid, sadistic antisemitism.
Why not toss a coin? Aside from the fact that in so doing one would greatly increase support for the imperialist Zionists to 50 percent, there are serious consequences to misreading this situation.
If I am wrong, and Palestinian hatred is merely a result of the occupa- tion, then Israeli concessions should lessen Palestinian hatred. Of course, if the Palestinians really are rational—really want their own state rather than to destroy Israel, then they should be amenable to making some important moves toward reconciliation, such as, for example, cutting off the hate incitement on TV, and resettling their refugees out of the miserable camps they’ve been confined to since 1948.
If I am right, if Muslim antisemitism is profoundly rooted among Arabs and Muslims today, then it’s another story entirely. Solving the refu- gee problem by allowing these poor victims of war to have a real home is not on the Palestinian agenda. On the contrary, these refugees are desig- nated victim-weapons in a war of annihilation.
If I am right, then every time Israel makes concessions, it encourages further aggressions. So despite the politically correct paradigm, each time Israel engages in anti-imperialist activities—withdrawing from most of the West Bank (1994-2000), southern Lebanon (2000), and Gaza (2005)— increased aggression occurred.
There is a widespread fantasy that throwing Israel into the maw of the beast will somehow solve the problem. Ultimately, the dilemma of antisemitism is not a Jewish but a Christian problem. Granted, the Jews suffer from antisemitism, but the ultimate price is paid by those foolish
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enough to get sucked into the vortex of hatred and paranoia that antisemites peddle. As any historian of World War II can tell you, if six million Jews were murdered, more than ten times as many Christians died in that madness!
The Arab world in the latter half of the 20th century offers a striking parallel to Spain in the 16th century. Both worlds had expelled their Jews (Spain in 1492, Arabs in 1948); both experienced a flood of wealth (New World gold and petrodollars); and both failed to parlay that wealth into a thriving culture that made life better for its people.
In a recent article, Jeffrey Goldberg tried to acknowledge the problem of antisemitic sentiments pervading the Arab Spring, all the while preserv- ing the belief that “the people of the Middle East are finally awakening to the promise of liberty.” But the two are intimately related. Indeed, Jude- ophobia is not the problem, but the symptom.
It’s the conspiracy thinking that blames everything on the other—Mus- lims attack Copts? It’s the Jews. Arab Spring turning into Islamist Winter? It’s the Jews. If you’re the BBC, it’s the Jews, aka “outside forces.” How can one possibly inaugurate, foster, and sustain a democratic culture of free- dom, one that, in words of Isaiah Berlin, considers it “shameful not to grant to others the freedom one wants to exercise oneself,” without an ability to self-criticize?
Antisemitism is everyone’s problem—my daughter’s friend, Ambassa- dor Gutman, and the Muslims. The sooner well-meaning progressives stop feeding their antisemitic vulnerabilities and begin critical thinking, the sooner we will see a real Arab Spring—one in which all people can rejoice.
*Richard Landes is an associate professor of history at Boston University and the author of several books, including Heaven on Earth (Oxford University Press, 2011). He edits The Second Draft and The Augean Stables. This article is repro- duced by permission of the author and originally appeared in The Telegraph December 1, 2011, under the title “Muslim Antisemitism, Israel and the Dynamics of Self-Destructive Scapegoating.”
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