A transcript of a very informative lecture by Matthias Kuentzel. A short synopsis can't do the lecture justice, but the basic point is that while there was always anti-Jewish sentiment in the Muslim world, it also was based on the notion of Jews as an inferior group that Mohammed had defeated militarily. Anti-Semitic visions of powerful Jews being behind the world's problesm, and plotting to control the world, found most prominently in the Hamas charter, entered the Muslim world via the Muslim Brotherhood, who in turn took those ideas from the Nazis, which spent significant effort and money propagating them in the Middle East. This all started well before the creation of the State of Israel, belying the notion that the Israel-Palestinian conflict caused modern Muslim anti-Semitism. Thanks to Scholars for Peace in the Middle East for the pointer.
UPDATE: Commenters are missing the point. Islamists hate the Spanish for ruling Spain, hate the Christian minority in Arab countries, hate the Hindus who (re)conquered India from the Muslims, hate the Bahais, the Druze, and, if they're Sunni, Shiites, and so forth. And Jews were always second-class citizens in Muslim countries, though precise treatment varied from era to era, and from country to country. But there is nothing in Islam or Islamic history to explain the virulent, Protocols-style "the Jews are out to dominate the world" style of anti-Semitism that is currently prevalent in the Islamic world, unless you go to Western influences, primarily Naziism (though Soviet propaganda, not mentioned by Kuentzel, didn't help).
Nor can this be explained as a mere outgrowth of Arab nationalism regarding Zionism. Arabs aren't too fond of other ethnic groups with which they have or have had territorial conflicts, including Kurds, Africans, Persians, Europeans, and so forth. But you don't see the kind of nonsense you find in the Hamas charter directed at such groups.
One thing that I don't think Kuentzel says directly, but I think logically follows from his lecture, is that the Muslim Brotherhood not only picked up certain anti-Semitic ideas from the Nazis, but its leaders also learned from the Nazis the effectiveness of using anti-Semitism as a political tool to rally the masses and promote their form of nationalism.
That's not to say that the Arab-Israeli conflict doesn't foment anti-Semitism in the Arab world. But to acknowledge that doesn't detract from a complementary point, which is that the Arab-Israeli conflict would be less severe but for the widespread notion in the Arab/Muslim world that that conflict isn't about "Palestine," per se, but about resistance from Arabs and Muslims to a Jewish-Zionist plot to take over the entire Middle East, and ultimately dominate the world.
Anti-Semitism having seeped into the Muslim world from Nazi propaganda beginning in the 1930s is hardly groundbreaking, and does not belie that Muslims, while contemptuous of both Jews and Christians, treated religious minorities relatively well until mass Jewish migration to Palestine.
Kuntzel comes off in the lecture as the typical Israeli scholar-apologist.
Relative to what?
Did Hitler invent anti-Semitism, or was it wide spread in Europe even before Hitler came to power. And did he has fertile grounds for that ?
Historically majority of Muslim did not know that feeling- anti-semitism, at least comparable in it's intensity and disastrous implementations to European's one. At least not untill 1948..
Best,
Ben
BTW, my wife's great-grandfather was murdered in anti-Semitic violence circa 1939 in Baghdad.
But overall, Jews had quieter and more dignified life in the Islamic countries, then in the Europe, at least before the modern times, at least before the true liberalism entered the minds and souls of many Europeans.
From my personal experience.
I spent 20 some years in Muslim country and about as much in the white more industrialized European country.
Guess where have I encountered anti-Semitism more.
Those people who will claim it will have no grounds to stand on.
But, again, prof Bernstein, those incidents in Islamic countries do not amount in their intensity and numbers to what Jews had to go through in Europe...
And if you're saying that, say, Malaysia is less anti-Semitic than, say, Russia I can believe that, but so what? The author's thesis isn't that every Muslim country is more anti-Semitic than every Christian country, nor, for that matter, that Muslim anti-Semitism was historically as bad or worse as Christian anti-Semitism, but that the form of anti-Semitism that currently exists in Muslim countries is an outgrowth of the influence of Naziism. But I'll grant that to the extent that Muslims would have resisted the "Jews are trying to, and are capable of, dominating the world," theme that emanated from Europe, the various successes of tiny Israel vs. the general impotence of its Arab opponents helped overcome that resistance.
LOL, prof, that was a good one. Can't argue with that point.
That speaks volumes.
Huh? This argument strikes me as spurious. If Muslim anti-Semitism was fueled by Nazism, then sure, it didn't begin with the creation of the state of Israel. But it certainly began (or I suppose reached this new, more vitriolic phase) in immediate anticipation of the creation of the state of Israel. That's not really a very different claim. Sure, the Nazis encouraged anti-Semitism among the Arabs. But why did that encouragement fall on such receptive ears? I think you're just denying the obvious if you pretend that the obvious threat posed to Palestinian society by Zionism wasn't at least one major contributing factor. I mean, come on. Jews were building a new state on top of the Arabs. Of course that motivated anti-Jewish hatred (as some Zionists, like Jabodinsky, correctly understood). Why would you expect otherwise?
I love it. Why is Social Security on a collision course with fiscal realty? Hitler!, of course. Medicare problems? Hitler! Inequality of income? Hitler! Heartbreak of psoriasis? Hitler!.
But, if it were not for the Japanese attacking the U.S and the subsequent U.S. declaration against Japan, Germany would not have declared war against the U.S. So, it was not Hitler!, it was Hirohito!. Imagine that. I owe my existence to Hirohito!.
But, I'm sure that Chamberlain played some role in this. Perhaps it is him we should blame for our existences.
The mind boggles.
It also seems exceedingly strange to mark 1948 as the beginning of the conflict between Jews and Palestinian Arabs. Filling in my sketchy memory with Wikipedia, here's some of the back story. The Zionist project of creating a Jewish homeland was underway in the late 19th century, with Zionist conferences meeting, Zionists discussing plans to form a Jewish state in Palestine, and Jews settling in Palestine with Zionist motivations. The issue took off with the first World War, with Zionists abandoning proposals to create a homeland someplace other than Palestine, Palestine becoming a separate territory under British control, and the Balfour Declaration indicating British favour of the establishment of "a national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. Wikipedia summarizes the situation in the postwar decade: "The development of the first modern Hebrew-speaking city (Tel Aviv), the kibbutz movement, and other Jewish economic institutions, plus the use of Hebrew, began by the 1920s to lay the foundations of a new nationality, which would come into formal existence in 1948."
Even Kuentzel marks the Peel Plan to create a Jewish state in Palestine in 1937 as an important turning point in the rise of Arab anti-Semitism, a few paragraphs before inexplicably saying that this history "gives the lie to the assumption that Islamic anti-Semitism was triggered by Zionist or Israeli policies." Contrast that with the view of Edwin Montagu, the only Jew in the British Cabinet in 1917, who opposed the Balfour Declaration in part because "it would be a grave cause of alarm to the Muslim world" (note: I'm not sure whose words are being quoted here).
Under British administration, there was significant Zionist settlement in Palestine. This provoked riots in 1921 and 1929 where the British government protected the Jews, well before the Nazis were in any position to propagandize Arabs. Jews had already been transformed from a weak minority to a special, imperially-protected class.
Imagine you're an uneducated Arab on the streets of Jaffa in 1929. Wouldn't you wonder why the British were bringing all these Jews into your country, and exerting themselves to protect them? Wouldn't the explanation that the Jews were a secret power, and controlled Britain, make sense? Now the Balfour Declaration and the immigration and the British defense of the Jews has a clear motive -- the Jews want the land and arranged it all!
Now imagine, instead, that the British guarantees to the Arabs had been fulfilled, and in ~1920 a unitary Arab state, comprising all Palestine, Syria, and Iraq had come into being, independent (if under the influence of the British), with minimal Jewish immigration and the local government not caring much about any mob violence against the domestic Jews. Come 1933, who's going to pay any attention to the rants of Hitler? Only an idiot could think the Jews were so powerful.
There are various minorities, such as the Jews in Europe and the Chinese in south east Asia among others, that have filled certain occupational niches. Small time money-lender. Peddler. etc.
All of these minorities have been the target of hatred and violence.
Evidence would therefore point to an economic source of the hatred.
Is there a book, or an article (hopefully available online), that could give me an accurate historical portrayal of what happened in the Middle East in the past century? I have heard many conflicting accounts, but usually one "side" or another is taken. I'm especially interested in the interactions between British imperialism, the Arabs already existing in Palestine, and the influx of the Jews, before the creation of Israel.
I'm genuinely curious if there's a good historical account that doesn't indulge in political overtones. I hope someone here can suggest a good source. Thanks.
I'm afraid that a "helpful, unbiased source" can be hard to come by here; tempers have run hot, on the subject of Jews in the Middle East, for a long time.
Perhaps your best bet is to find sources that are biased, in the traditional sense, but do a good job of dealing with that bias, or at least of announcing it up front. Unfortunately, in my experience, relatively unbiased accounts of early Zionism, and its effects, are far more likely to come from Jewish sources than from Arab sources.
(Why "unfortunately"? Because I'd much rather we could read works from both sides, each making a serious effort to see from the other side's point of view. But that sort of thing is only forthcoming from the Jewish side. If both sides had it, the chances for peace in the Middle East would be exponentially higher.)
I would suggest that you consult some of the professional historians cited here. Bernard Lewis is unparalleled. I've learned a lot from the works of Walter Laqueur. Martin Gilbert also does a very nice job.
respectfully,
Daniel in Brookline
I'd like to suggest A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East by David Fromkin, a fairly recent book which provides a balanced description of European diplomacy in the Middle East during the first third of the 20th century. It's a balanced presentation of material which is absolutely crucial to understanding the subsequent history of the region.
"The German Radio and the German Postal Service operated transmitters in Zeesen from 1927 on, first long wave and then short wave. The first foreign program started in 1933; later that year programs were beamed to South America, Africa, and East Asia. The transmitting station was completely rebuilt and expanded in preparation for broadcasts of the 1936 Olympics. It became a vital part of the Third Reich's propaganda system, reaching as far as the U.S. and Australia.
"From the beginning of 1940, under the call sign "Voice of Free Arabia," programs were beamed at Arab lands, including Palestine, hoping that a putsch would overthrow the English colonial government. Up till then, pro-fascist Arabs had only narrow contact with the Nazi regime. The principal behind the programming was the Mufti of Jerusalem, who later emigrated to Germany."
He doesn't mention any anti-Semitic programming, but this is the logical place for it to go.
Muslims and others in the middle east who claim to dislike jews and act upon this dislike because of the existence of Israel aren't being genuine; in fact, the "Israel" story is just a rationale/justification for ideas and behavior they would have in any case.
But that can't possibly be the whole story. Whatever it's merit, there must be a significant portion of anti-semitism in the middle east that is derived from the actions of Israel, based on the test "what would modern middle eastern anti-semitism amount to if Isreal had not been created."
Sure, it'd be there. But it would obviously be different, and I'm personal confident it would not be as strong.
But this all leads to a bigger question: wWhat's the upshot? I can't think of a situation that calls for realism more than this. By your own logic, it seems that the reasons have gone from plausibly rational (we hate jews because of israel) to more irrational (we hate jews because we always have or for some 19th century reason). So i'm not sure the reasons even matter.
I think DB is right about this, tho it's not an either/or.
The founding of Israel created an antipathy that then, seeking expression, seized on the available ideologies.
Had the Jews decided to create their homeland in, say, Montana, then it's very difficult to imagine that Nazi-style anti-semitism would've caught on in the Middle East, tho perhaps it would have in Montana.
It is true the topic has little to do with Torts II, Products Liability, Evidence, American Constitutional History, Constitutional Law, and Scientific and Expert Evidence. But I guess the number of responses generated will indicate whether the topic is of interest.
Excepr that in the British Mandartory territories, Jews were not filling these niches. They were establishing themselves in all economic niches to create a viable Jeish society. Labor Zionixm, the most numerous movement among the settlers, self-consciously rejected the traditional role of Jews in Europe as artisans, merchants, and money handlers.
Other propaganda stations were directed towards Great Britain (featuring the notorious Lord Haw-Haw), the Soviet Union, the U.S., and India (The Voice of Subhas Chandras Bose's Freedom Movement). Again in India the idea was to get the locals to overthrow British colonial government.
Though no one in the vicinity was apparently bothered by 600 years of Turkish Imperialism in the ME. It's well known that the Turks were such mellow imperialists.
BTW, from 1919 to 1949 the Arab population of the British Mandate increased by much more than the Jewish population. The Brits restricted Jewish immigration because of fear of conflict while Arab immigration was uncontrolled.
Note who's missing from all this - American Imperialism. We weren't in the League of Nations. We had no (significant) military. We didn't sell arms to the Jews until the '60s. We opposed the '56 war. Czechoslovakia supplied most of the arms the Jews had before the '50's and France the most during the '50s and '60s but Islamics don't like us anyway.
They kill Thais too. I guess Thai Imperialism must be a big problem for the Sons of the Prophet.
Some of us in the 'House of War' have a problem with the 'House of Submission' because between 630 and 770 they swarmed out of Arabia (without provocation) and conquered 2/3 of Christendom (including 3 of our 5 holiest cities - the 4th fell in 1453). Christians have a long memory.
Perhaps a different fellow might have written, say, after a wave of lynchings, murders, and church burnings in Mississippi during Civil Rights movement:
"Whatever its merit, there must be a significant portion of these lynchings, murders, and church burnings that is derived from the actions of the Negroes, based on the test 'what would Mississippi look like today if the Negroes hadn't started getting so darned uppity.'"
In both cases, the built-in assumption is that the solution to centuries of abuse -- the creation of the state of Israel, on one hand, and the movement toward actually giving full citizenship rights to blacks -- is somehow provocative.
So, Kuentzel says Hamas heard it from the the Muslim Brotherhood, who heard it from the Nazis. Who got the Protocols from the Russians (who had scapegoating down), and the idea of conspiracist anti-semitism from, you know, long-standing European Christian tradition. Which is to say, Arab conspiracist anti-semitism comes from Europe. As far as I can see the only point of making a big deal out of the Nazi link in the causal chain (calling Hamas "Hitler's legacy" and so forth) is to suggest that Hamas are like the Nazis. The advantage of that technique being that the implicit allegation (that Hamas are genocidal, I suppose) can be safely implicit.
Also,
Way to accuse an entire language family of racism.
I would suggest, Professor, that had more Jews moved to India and China, the same discrimination would have developed. I believe that a certain level of tribalism is genetically based, and so "hard wired" into the human psyche. Once an identifiable "different" group becomes sufficiently numerous, and powerful in the relevant terms of the society (financially, militarily, politically, etc.), an "us" vs. "them" mindset develops. Understanding that is essential to understanding groups like Hamas and their appeal.
I grew up in a semi-rural area of the South. In my H.S. graduating class of about 220, there were 2 Jews. They were also Polish. They were the butt of and knew the best Pollack jokes – but, I never recall hearing a comment about their religion. I went to college in the Northeast, and saw a lot of anti-Semitism, and self-segregation by Jews. Once, in college, a Jewish friend from the NYC area asked me “Why do Christians hate Jews so much?” My response was “What? Jesus was a Jew.” The question dumbfounded me. Didn’t everyone know that it was the Romans who crucified Jesus? Sure, some of the Rabbis asked for that, but that was so Jesus could rise from the dead and show that the New Covenant was greater than the Old Covenant. I’d never heard anyone say “The Jews killed Jesus” until my friend, with the patience of an explanation to someone who’s a bit slow, explained that idea. When Israel won the Six Day War, everyone I knew thought it was great. We thought that the Jews should be put in charge of running Vietnam, so we could “Kick the Commies’ asses.” I knew a little about the Holocaust, since friends of my parents were WWII vets who had liberated some of the camps. I also knew the Einstein and other Jewish scientists had fled the Nazis and come to the US. In Jr. High and H.S., my opinion and that of my friends was that the Nazis had to be among the most stupid people to ever have existed for forcing their smartest scientists to leave. In other words, there weren’t enough Jews around to be a “them” group, so the concept of anti-Semitism didn’t make any sense, or trigger any form of tribal instinct.
In my experience, when a “them” group doesn’t exist, people create one. I spent nearly a year and a half in Bosnia and Croatia. Before deployment, I read scores of articles about the conflict and its causes – including that it was due to “ancient ethnic hatreds.” I soon found that despite the emotional appeal of that explanation, it was false. They couldn’t tell each other apart by looking. We couldn’t tell them apart by DNA testing. The surest way to distinguish between the so called “ethnic groups” was by first name. Yugoslavia means “Land of the South Slavs.” The Croats were Roman Catholic Yugoslavs. The Serbs were Serbian Orthodox Yugoslavs. The Bosniaks were Muslim Yugoslavs. Or, more accurately, their grandparents had been of such religious affiliations. Between 30% and 40% of the population was “mixed” – of mixed religious heritage (e.g., Tito’s parents were Croat and Slovene), or other groups, like the Sarajevian Jews, who’d come there from Spain after being expelled in 1492. They had grown up together, gone to school together, worked together, intermarried, and for five years, murdered, raped and tortured each other. That’s nearly impossible to understand, unless some instinctual response is considered as part of the answer. The Producer of TV SFOR was a young woman who was in what we’d consider Middle School when the conflict began, and lived in an “ethnically mixed” suburb of Sarajevo. She was Bosniak. Her neighbors, whose apartment shared a back wall with that of her parents, were Serbs. She told me that during the conflict, while her parents and the neighbors couldn’t meet face to face, they would talk through the back wall, and arrange things like where to drop off letters and gifts to friends and relatives “on the other side.” She learned of the conflict while walking with her best friend. In that area of Europe, a social custom is that girls and young women who are best friends frequently walk with their arms around each other. Her best friend was killed, literally in her arms, by a sniper. A few weeks later the sniper was identified, and his rifle, with its 20x power scope, was found. He was their teacher. I found her story so troubling that I checked the records, and confirmed it.
You’re a teacher. What would it take to motivate you to murder one of your students, knowing that that person is one of your students and knowing that person poses no threat to you? That cannot be understood without some instinctive level of hate for someone who is one of “them.”
One of the things that struck me about the Hamas Covenant is that it reads very much like other conspiracy theorists’ manifestos. For the military, I’ve read conspiracy tracts by the Klan, Aryan Brotherhood, various Black radical groups (US and foreign), and other groups. I’ve also read tracts by 9/11 deniers, anti-papist groups, and, when looking for information on Albert Pike (a truly interesting 19th century American character), came across a lot of Free Masons-New World Order conspiracy stuff. Except for adding the Lions Club (my wife, a born and bred Southern girl, will be surprised that she’s part of the International Zionist Conspiracy to start world wars. She thinks it’s a social club that mainly holds pancake breakfasts and raises money for scholarships and to help the blind), the Hamas Covenant is almost verbatim in many parts of so many other of conspiracy theories. At their basic level, there’s an appeal to “us” as the good people, versus “them” who are evil.
However, after an exceptionally poorly written novel inspired McVeigh to blow up the federal building in Oklahoma City and kill over 180 people, some of them infants, in order to start a race war, I no longer ignore the potential impact of such tracts. The people who write them aren’t stupid, and truly believe what they say. And, they inspire their followers to kill others, and themselves, in furtherance of whatever particular cause.
With the internet, TV and radio, it’s much easier to create a “them” that lives hundreds or thousands of miles away. And, it’s easier to claim that the “them” is a vast, faceless, evil conspiracy.
The question I asked of you isn’t rhetorical. Rather, as my favorite translation of Sun Tzu puts it “To know yourself and know your enemy is the foundation of victory.” While I don’t doubt your knowledge and intellectual skills, until you deal with the emotional, instinctual message of “us” versus “them” by Hamas, and other violent groups, you will not defeat them. You have to get into their heads and see the world as they see it to do that. A war is won when the will of the enemy to resist is overcome. To do that, you have to understand how your enemy sees the world.
Why do I care if Israel exists or whether some group wants to exterminate the Jews? I’m not Jewish and have never been to Israel. However, once such a group destroys its “them”, they create more “thems.” Sooner or later my family and I will be their “them.” For that reason I would add a fourth reason to Dr. Kuentzel's reasons on why it is so difficult to organize an effort to oppose such groups: The failure to understand Benjamin Franklin’s wisdom that “We must all hang together or we will surely all hang separately.”
I agree that many of the commentators have missed the point. I’m not sure you understand. They hate you because they have to define themselves as an “us” and you happen to be one of their current “them.” In logic, facts are important to testing the validity of a theory. However, when the basic premise is instinctual, the “facts” only need to provide a pretext. To be an “us”, who are good, there must be a “them” who are evil. That’s not an appeal to logic; it’s an appeal to emotion. Professor, when you can answer the question I posed, then you’ll begin to understand groups like Hamas and their appeal. Then you can use your knowledge and intellect to defeat them.
Muslims vs Muslim Brotherhood
-- Jealousy. The Jews came with cash to purchase land (although usually overpaying for just the worst land), while the Arabs were nearly all tenants, paying rent or crop-shares to absentee owners. And then the Jews took their "worthless" land and wrung better crops from it than the Arab tenant-farmers were raising...
-- Zionism and the Balfour declaration. Palestine had been Arab/Muslim land for 13 centuries, now one foreign government was giving it to another group of foreigners!
I doubt that in the 1920's the Arabs thought much of theories that the Jews ran the world. They must have been having too much trouble adjusting to how Christians such as the British had suddenly came into their world and were running everything. But they had enough reason to hate the Jews without adopting poisonous European antisemitism; I'm sure that came later, and through contact with European antisemites.
OTOH, it's possible that it wasn't the Nazis that first passed on those ideas. There were too many British and French antisemites, and enough of them among the British rulers of Palestine to ensure that the Jews were often unprotected against Arab terrorism. There were Americans publishing translations of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and trying to blame every problem on Jewish/Marxist immigrants. Etc.
Adrian,
Doesn't change the fact that its true - just like saying: "In the ___ times, ethnic ____s weren't too fond of other ethnic groups with which they had territorial conflicts." That's always been the case. It just happens to _remain_ a problem in the middle east.
Go find your nearest Persian and refer to him as an Arab. Or label an Arab Egyptian as African. Or call a Bosnian a Turk. Or call an Arab a Jew. See how they react. Racism is still incredibly prevalent in the middle east, and particular so among Arabs and subsets. That's a fact, not a smear.
Wow! See they look like fascists, so they are fascists!
So he just asserts this and its called scholarship?
So resisting Jewish immigration into Palestine is tantamount to "Jew-hatred"? I guess the British were busy hating jews too!
Why does he get a pass on making a connection between an anti-semitic tactic and Nazism without evidence supporting a connection?
This may make sense to someone who is completely ignorant of Palestine prior to the founding of Israel. Do I need to point out that anti-Zionism was present before Israel as large number of Jewish immigrants entered the mandate?
This is just silly.
So Kuntzel's entire rests on argument is this: The Mufti collaborated with Nazis (duh) and the Muslim Brotherhood was subsidized by Germany (duh).
This justifies the title "HITLER'S LEGACY: ISLAMIC ANTI-SEMITISM IN THE MIDDLE EAST". Really?
I'm surprised that comment has not generated a response along the lines of "Conflation of the Day!"
But instead, I'll just say that solutions imposed by greater powers on the lesser, with something less than the consent or acquiescence of the interested parties, can indeed be provocative. I'm gratified by the efforts of all the groups who played a constructive part in achieving civil rights for Black Americans, and I hope that someday there will be more groups playing a similarly constructive role in ensuring the permanence of the state of Israel.
"BTW, from 1919 to 1949 the Arab population of the British Mandate increased by much more than the Jewish population. The Brits restricted Jewish immigration because of fear of conflict while Arab immigration was uncontrolled." Duncan Frissell
That and the remainder of your comment illuminates a great deal.
Horse hockey.
The British did NOT protect the Jews -- their history of abject failure to do so was the inspiration for the Haganah.
After each of the major riots the British further restricted Jewish immigration -- to the very territory intended to be a Jewish homeland -- to appease Muslims.
British administration of the Palestinian Mandate was disgraceful.
One such book is "From Time Immemorial" by Joan Peters.
It's not easy to get through and it's not written that well, but there's a lot of information.
Its also been completely debunked by scholarly community for having no scholarly value or intellectual honesty.
Three primers by the same author:
Islamic Antisemitism And Its Nazi Roots
European Roots of Antisemitism in Current Islamic Thinking
National Socialism and Anti-Semitism in the Arab World
That's a mere beginning. Though it's not at all apparent you're inquiring seriously to begin with.
The origins of the Baathist Party, Black September and other antisemitic Arab political parties are Christians of the Catholic Communion and Catholic antisemitism flowed from them freely. The Plight of the Palestinians as the Passion of the Christ as an operative paradigm freely accepted in Western media is one of their contributions.
Christian Muslims exploit antisemitism cravenly and shamelessly in the hope of redirecting antichristian Jihadist heat to the Jews. Their success can be measured in the catastrophic decline in Christian population throughout the Islamic world.
Hitler's antisemitism was inbibed with Frau Schtickelgruber's milk but it was at Mass antisemitic rallies organized by the Catholic League that Hitler learned the galvanizing power of antisemitism. There are photographs a smiling and happy young Hitler marching along in one of the League's big fuck-the-Jews street parades, under placards, banners and streamers covered with Jew hatred, crusader's crosses and other heraldic drek. One more penniless scuffler, living in a rooming house and depending on his Jewish friend in the next bed to peddle his constipated watercolors--inevitably to other Jews.
The Vatican opposed the foundation of the State of Israel and did everything in its power to prevent it. The Vatican has sided with the Arabs and against the Jewish State in every forum ever since. It continues to maintain ties and strongly support antisemitic Arabism.
A final point: Muslim triumphalist fantasies to the contrary, Mohammad came to the Jews first in friendship. Jerusalem and the Jewish Temple, not Mecca and the Kebaa, is why Muslims originally faced East in prayer. Had the Jews of Medina welcomed Mohammed and accepted his offer, Judaism, not something called Islam, would hold sway in what is today called the Muslim world
As it is, the Jews of Medina fell over themselves laughing at the notion of an illiterate Arab as Prophet of the People of the Book. The Jews of Medina were too fat and comfortable to recognize they were being made an offer they couldn't refuse. The Jewish city of Medina was the richest and most enlightened in Arabia. It was ony after the conquest and plunder of Medina that the unlettered prophet had the wherewithal to get his show on the road and go agalavanting in the Levant. The Christians of the Levant who had cheered and offered up prayers of thanks the day the Caesar and last Roman army fell lived to see the Muslims sweep in to fill the vacuum. Just deserts.
In "His Chance In Life", a "Eurasian", Michele D'Cruze, courts Miss Vezzis, a "Eurasian" governess (both are 95% native, but consider themselves "white"), but there are obstacles:
In "On the City Wall", Wali Dad, a young, "enlightened" Moslem says to the narrator
How the Hindus felt, Kipling never touched on: but Jews would be, literally, "outcaste" and therefore, I guess, despised.
And if the Palestinians had decided to create their homeland in Montana, then its very difficult to imagine the Nazi-style Anti-Arabism would've caught on in the Middle East.
IMO the main causes of Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism are Israel's hard-line policies and the one-sidedness of US support for Israel, which the Arabs and Muslims blame on the influence of Jews and Christian "crusaders."
IMO, the main causes of bad feelings towards Arabs are Arabs hard-line policies, throwing out/killing virtualy all Jews in all Arab lands, and one-sidesness of Russian support for Arabs, which the Jews blame on the influence of expediency and anti-Semitism. And doesn't the rest of your post speak much more about the UN than anything else?
And says
I would suggest that one way to get people to act rationally is to assume their capable of it. If you take as an article of fact that no peace settlement is possible, the chances of a peace settlement drop precipitously.
The first anti-Jewish blood libel in the Arab world was the (in)famous 1840 case in Damascus, which was spearheaded by the French consul (see Wikipedia article on the case). That in turn created fertile ground for other (also originally European) anti-Semitic ideas and literature, such as the Protocols.
Sure. But, by and large, the majority among white Southerners who didn't like having civil rights for blacks imposed on them and the minority of those folks who reacted to that with lynching and other forms of terrorism gave it up.
Granted, many did feel provoked, but when the Feds finally made it clear that terrorism wasn't going to be tolerated, they largely gave it up.
You're correct, though in suggesting that the undoing of Jim Crow and the creation of the state of Israel are different in many ways.
In the former, correcting those serious wrongs was a matter of violations of some civil rights; for the folks involved in the latter, it was a matter of much more serious oppression (the Jewish refugees from Arab countries lived under regimes far more oppressive than the US South) and/or survival.
But there certainly are differences; it's not exactly common to hear excuses for Bull Connor, the Klan, George Wallace, or that crowd, for example, and when they are given, it's not complaints about how the Negroes were just too darned uppity.
I think a much better (although not perfect) analogy would be the ending of slavery. I think we can agree that ending slavery was a largely positive step (just like we can agree that creating Israel was a positive step), but at the same time agree that the planter class of this south was financial ruined despite doing nothing illegal, just as many Arabs were injured by the creation of Israel. That the planters hated blacks prior to the civil war, or that the Arabs hated jews prior to the creation of Israel bears little on the question of whether the freeing of the slaves or the creation of Israel influenced that hatred. It did, period.
Good policies --- even great policies --- can have some negative effects, you know? We aren't trying to justify southern hatred of blacks or Arab hatred of jews, we are trying to explain it. Those are two different things.
While I certainly get the point you are making (and agree with it to an extent), how exactly did the creation of Israel injure many Arabs?
If you commit bad acts that place me in reasonable fear of death or grievous bodily harm because someone upset you, I get to kill you just as if you were committing those acts for fun.
Well, I know there is heated debate around here about who was responsible for the displacement of non-jews living in what became israel, i think it's safe to say that a good number of people were uprooted from their lives and forced to find new living situation with worse conditions, with the only alternative being to stay and face certain second-class (even if it was benevolent second-class) treatment in the new state of israel. Basically, i think there were many people living in the area who legitimately would have been materially better off personally without the creation of israel.
I think this very much makes the akin to the planter class of the south during the war. They suffered personally for the greater good, and while i would never want to suggest that blacks did not deserve freedom or the jews a state, i think it is worth recognizing that there were people negatively affected who were doing nothing illegal, and in some cases perhaps (planters who had long since freed their slaves; pro two-state arabs in the 1940s) nothing even remotely immoral or unethical, even by the standards of today.
mg
It kicked many of them out of their homes, many were killed, and, perhaps worst of all, gave an excuse for conservative Arab politicians to exploit the issue. See Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
It is also a spectacularly beautiful and desirable piece of real estate in that region, and vulnerable from a purely military standpoint. Not a good mix.
Where are you getting this information from? I'm curious.
Agreed, I have no real desire to rehash who did what to whom exactly.
But what exactly was the impetus for people to be uprooted? The creation of Israel, or the fighting that came afterward?
Also, and its certainly a hypothetical, but I do wonder if the Arabs there would have been "materially better off" without the creation of Israel. Looking at the typical Arab living in Israel and the typical Arab living in Egypt, who is "materially better off"? Or an Arab in Israel vs an Arab in Gaza--who is "materially better off"?
Again though, it wasn't the creation of Israel that did that.
Also, I believe you excuse too much--wouldn't the Arab politicians (I would say dictators but to each his own) have found some other rationale anyway? Yes, Israel is a handy excuse but there's always something and the Arab world has not shown itself to be inclined towards liberalism or freedom.
A better analogy, sure -- although the balance is a bit off, given the difference between the harms and dangers suffered blacks of the Civil Rights era south and the Jewish refugees from Arab countries as well as Europe.
But there's still the major -- the damage done to the planter class in the south was inflicted by external forces, widespread, great (sure, and necessary).
The damage done to a number of Arabs was almost entirely self-inflicted -- while there were a (very) few incidents of expulsions of Arabs during the War for Independence, most of it was the result of a combination of panic and direction of other Arabs, and the damage has only spread. The failure of the Lebanese to integrate their cousins from the into the Lebanese polity, the addition of hundreds of thousands of local Arabs to subject class of the Hashemite-ruled Transjordan (largely from the snatching of Judea and Samaria), etc.
I think, though, we can equally dispense with the "harm" done to the slaveowners by not being able to own humans, and the harm done to Arabs by having to tolerate non-dhimmis in their midst as being worth compensation or sympathy. I hope so.
If not, perhaps we can dispense with the notion that it was some outside force that inflicted such "second class" status on the Arabs of Israel; that was a clear and predictable result of the combination of the Arab rejection of Partition and the actual survival of Israel. Surviving the war pushed for something closer to demonstrably defensible and defended borders than the almost twists and turns of Partition.
Had the Arabs of Judea, Samaria, and those West of the Green line simply agreed to Partition, those for whom it was important would have had their state, which would have been largely judenrein.
There is a constant effort in Arab nations to deflect attention from internal problems to the external "problem" of Israel. Unemployment, poor schools, underperforming economies, despotism, corruption, health care, and poverty all take a back seat to Israel. There is a very widesperad reluctance to face these problems, and an eagerness to rant against Israel instead. However, the most infuriating aspect of the situation is the progress Israel has made while the Arabs have at best been treading water.
Yours,
Wince
The first step is to open minds. The surest way of doing this is demographics: educate the wide-eyed and impressionable young and outlive the problem. The second best is to divide and conquer, and cause one portion of the closed-minded to consider (rationally or not) the other as potentially a greater threat, and set aside their prior distaste for the previous "enemy". Küntzel's speech hints at one possible direction:
I suggest the West should be focusing a lot more on effort on Islamic women, especially in Iraq. They're the ones with the most to gain.
——Mirror Dance, Lois McMaster Bujold
There's no question in my mind that Hitler's anti-Semitism provided a useful model for Muslim contempt for other groups to turn into its modern Muslim anti-Semitism. But you have to wonder how much of this is economic as well. Can you imagine anything more galling to someone who believes that their religion makes them special in the eyes of God--and in spite of sitting on top of oceans of petroleum, not just Jews, but Christians, and a bunch of cattle-worshipping heathens (which are well below People of the Book in Muslim theology) are overtaking Muslims?
Saul Friedlaender's second volume and the Nazis and the Jews points out the weird situation where Nazi Germany, before embarking on the Final Solution (and even after getting it under way) was still trying to do swaps where they would exchange Jews for hard currency--but the problem was always where to send them.
Germany was still trying to keep good relations with Arabs as part of the wartime alliance against Britain, and so sending them to Palestine was not feasible. Britain had the same interest in not seeing them go to Palestine, along with concern about putting hard currency into Germany's hands during the war.
This will, no doubt, come as a great surprise to those Jews from Arab countries, and their children, grandchildren, etc., who fled the Arab countries for Israel. Maybe you should tell them that Israel wasn't created for their benefit; I bet that they don't know that.
Israel was created as a necessity for Jews everywhere, both those in the galut, and those then in the fraction of the Palestine Mandate that became Israel.
So you're saying we should blame Arab anti-Semitism on DB's soft bigotry of low expectations?
The mind boggles."
But of course, Hitler declared war on the US shortly after the Japanese bombing, as you will recall. I guess lots of people can share the blame for WWII, but most people concede that Hitler was one of the main culprits. And most people agree that the baby-boomers occured because of that war.
It does indeed boggle the mind how our world would be different with that war. Perhaps no Cold War? Would the Soviet Union and the US be the only superpowers? Many German cities would still have their old character but for the allied bombing. Dresden, for one. But those are other issues that deviate from the discussion at hand.
Its sad, especially in these scoundrel times, to hear a lay Roman Catholic defend his church from minor and entirely legitimate criticism. It seems no amount of humiliation or insult will shake a benumbed and confused American Catholic laity from lockstep loyalty to its Roman priesthood. The pope and his priests are unworthy of their flock.
All the best to you and yours, Tony. I wish you no ill. But you need a reality check. You need to follow St. Paul and remove the scales from your eyes. In 1944, George Orwell remarked on the inability of English Catholics to recognize manifest evidence, clear to all non-Catholics, that the Vatican supported Hitler and the Nazis. The catholic hierarchy compromises the honesty of ordinary Roman Catholics by forcing them to defend the indefensible.
My family lived in the Ancient City under the Turks since the early Nineteenth Century. My birth certificate identifies me and my parents as Palestinian. Members of my family were business partners with prominent and titled Arabs. Under Menachem Begin, my mother’s oldest brother once carried the highest price on his head in the British Empire. My family suffered prolonged starvation in Jerusalem in the nineteen-forties. My brother was killed by Glubb Pasha’s Transjordanian Legionnaires. I know something of the tenor and texture of recent Middle East history. My criticism of the Roman Church’s attitude toward Jews and the State of Israel is mild and anything but gratuitous.
You have my sympathy, Tony. I can’t imagine what could be going on in the minds of lay Catholics today. I don’t wonder that they feel shaken and put upon. If Jewish rabbis were settling suits for the kinds of crimes Catholic priests and whole Catholic orders including the Jesuits and Franciscans are accused of, I would hide my head for shame. But I would also read the sonsofbitches the riot act, something lay Catholics seem incapable of doing to their priests.
The best approach to consideration of the Roman Church is that of the Christian Evangelicals. Love the sinner and hate the sin. Lay Catholics are sinners like the rest of us and deserve our best wishes. The Roman Catholic Church is another matter.
ahahahaha...ass.
The evidence is very, very clear regarding the role of the Vatican and Pope Pius XI and XII. They were opposed to the Nazi regime, and Pius saved thousands of Jewish lives through his various interventions.
Most people think that the Nazis were a-religious. Not at all. All german troops had access to catholic chaplains at any time.
Additionally, the Vatican sent a letter in 1932 urging all German bishops to support Hitler and urge his election as chancellor. Once installed, the Vatican was the first foreign state to recognize the Nazi takeover in 1933.
More importantly, in 1939 Italy, about 99% of the population was Catholic, and in Germany it was a large minority. (A majority in some parts). All the Pope had to do was say that no good Catholic should take up arms. Just saying that would have prevented Italy from entering WWII at all, and would severly have weakened Hitler's support. Remember, this was a time when people actually obeyed the Pope. No one, including Hitler or Mussolini, would have been able to counter such an argument.
(Or perhaps they could have. We will never know, because it wasn't even attempted). We do know, however, that when two S. American countries threatened war against each other in the 1980s, Pope John Paul II told them that there will be no war, and that ended that. Surely, such a proclaimation in 1939 would have carried great weight with the public.
I know this is a hot topic, and one that won't be settled here. Suffice it to say that these are hardly the actions of an institution opposed to the Nazi regime.
Again, world history wasn't taking place in a vacuum.
Additionally German officers would commonly discourage enlisted personnel from any associations with Christian churches, the more restrained forms of that general and broadly based attitude, for example in the lower and more peripheral echelons of the army, involved daily mockings of such associations; such reflected that often gradual cooptation of that and other publics.
That apologizes not a jot or tittle of what actually did take place, but what did take place is at variance, shall we say, with Randy's version of events, not the least of which concern prominent and decisive omissions.
The British clearly did allow Jewish immigration, even if they increasingly restricted it as time went on. Or are you going to pretend they outright banned it from day one? Any allowed immigration is sufficient to explain the genesis of a belief (reasonable or not) by the Muslims of the area that the British favored the Jews.
Similarly, inadequacy of British defense of Jews does not indicate nonexistence of British defense. For that matter, the fact that there were Jews capable of self-defense without the British launching an effective campaign to suppress them would be enough to force a re-evaluation of the view of Jews as a powerless people.
Certainly, the British were hardly hearty, fully committed partisans of the Zionist cause. But they were sufficiently pro-Zionist, however marginally to an objective observer, to create a soil in which the European view of the Jews as shadowy manipulators of the world could take root.
I admit that Austrian antisemites were Catholic, because except for a few Lutherans, rump Austrians were either Catholic or Jewish. By the same token, French antisemites were Catholic.
In the UN General Assembly in 1947, Russia (then USSR) voted in favor of the partition of Palestine. This partition created Israel. Russia is now one of the "quartet" responsible for the "road map" agreement for settling the Mideast conflict.
Your argument that all the rest of the UN is anti-Israel is just plain stupid. Those 40 US vetoes of UN Security Council resolutions without a single supporting "no" vote from any of the 14 other members are a disgrace.
Tony Tutins' comment is correct, in that Aflaq was born to a Greek Orthodox (not Catholic) family in Syria. It is not Aflaq's religion, but his pan-Arabism, into which he embedded fascist and national socialist philosophy, which is important.
This brings up a good point -- it is not Islam per se that we should be talking about, but rather Arab political culture. Other than post-1979 Iran, it is the off-kilter and blood-soaked landscape of Arab political culture that is the nemisis, not only of us, but of the various Arab peoples.
J. Early, it is of interest that in order to argue against the notion of Russian support for the Arabs of late you go back over 60 years. Is it your contention that the Russia of years ago, the land of the Protocols, the pogroms and the Pale was a particularly Jew-friendly place?
Your argument that all the rest of the UN is anti-Israel is just plain stupid. Those 40 US vetoes of UN Security Council resolutions without a single supporting "no" vote from any of the 14 other members are a disgrace.
It might be stupid, except for the fact that
1. it is sadly overtly obvious, and it gives me no joy to say so, and
2. I never said 'all' the members of the UN so you are erecting your own little strawman.
Just out of curiosity, do you happen to know the only one of the 185 or so UN members who are not eligible for the Security Council? Do you truly wish to engage in a discussion of whether the UN suffers from institutional anti-Semitism? Trust me, you won't like the result J. Early.
After the Russian support of the partition resolution they changed sides. Ever since they have been strong supporters of the Arab position (from the Jordan to the Sea) on Palestine.
Their earlier support of the Arabs was political (anti-US). Their current support is more pragmatic. Turmoil in the ME raises the value of Russian oil.
Whoever wrote this obviously is ignorant of Jewish-Muslim history. My family is from Central Asia which had a thriving Jewish community as part of the Persian Empire for centuries. I can tell you that the Jews were not treated relatively well (whatever that means) during the 18th, 19th and 20th Century in Central Asia.....long before Jewish migration to Palestine. Read history. It is very enlightening.
Unfortunately, the Pope did try to prevent Italy from entering the war. If all my books were not packed away because of a move, I could offer a more substantive account of this. However, let me just offer some books that you may like to check out (I am not 100% sure of the authors...because the books are packed away):
Hitler and the Vatican - Godman
Papal Diplomacy in the Modern Age - Peter Kent and John Pollard
The Myth of Hitlers Pope - Dalin
However, I will grant that there were particular members of the clergy, even high ranking ones, that fully supported the Nazi regime. The Godman book in particular looks at those people. Yet, it was understood that the Vatican (and Pius XI and XII) were strongly opposed to the racialism and religious nature of Nazi Germany.
I would also recommend the Kent and Pollard book, which is a collection of essays be historians on many different aspects of Vatican diplomacy, but which has a few chapters of Italian and Vatican relations.
I think that the preponderance of evidence showed that the Vatican was opposed to the Nazis. Whether they adopted the wisest policy is another debate, and one that, quite frankly, I do not think is fair to even have, what with hindsight and all...
While true that we might be able to draw a connection between past events and the behaviors of certain groups, every individual is personally responsible for their own actions and beliefs. When people become stuck in the wrong beliefs and actions of their fathers we don't excuse their wrongness, for they have the opportunity to think differently, but have chosen otherwise.
I owe you an apology, Tony. I thought Aflaq was Maronite (hence “of the Catholic Communion” in my original statement). Fouad Adjami’s is an elegant and thoughtful voice and I read Dream Palace when it was published. This was several years ago, however, and I don’t recall a fellow named Aflaq. I don’t dispute that he’s in there somewhere but the Dream Palace of the Arabs is such a big place. The only Aflaq I know is an insurance company using a duck in its advertising in imitation of another insurance company using a lizard.
That said, I would insist that the substance and thrust of my argument is valid. Pan Arabism is rooted in Christian Arabs seeking to ingratiate themselves with their Muslim Arab neighbors at the expense of the Jews. The Christians were selling antisemitism as a common bond between Muslim and Christian Arabs. Pan Arabism is an attempt to recenter Arab Culture under national and racial standards and reduce its Islamic character.
The current Jihad and the collapse of Arab Christian populations in the Middle East marks the failure of the Christian Pan Arabist enterprise. A case of an arsonist burning down his own house in the attempt to burn down someone else’s. If it makes you feel better, Tony, I like the Greek Orthodox Church even less than I like its Roman Catholic competition.
Rick, you sound like a thoughtful and reasoned fellow whose library suggests an interest in Papal and Vatican complicity in the unspeakable crimes of the Third Reich. On balance you feel the Vatican