AntiSemitism and Islamophobia

Orthodox Judaism and traditional Islam resemble each other more than either resembles Christianity, both being religions of obedience to laws rooted in the huge literature of Talmud and Hadith. Jews and Muslims suffered for centuries from Christian persecution, fleeing together from Iberia and the Balkans. The sacred languages of both are Semitic. You would expect the followers of both religions to stand together today, yet the supporters of Israel are now the greatest purveyors of Islamophobia; how does one explain the paradox? The big change came in the 19th century, when more and more Jews achieved citizenship in West European countries, many of them at the same time abandoning the practice of Judaism. Also, many Europeans were ceasing to practise Christianity, but prejudice against Jews persisted and mutated into a new racist form; it was claimed that Jews are an alien race, an enemy of Western culture. People like Felix Mendelssohn and Gustav Mahler were abused as 'Jews' in spite of being Christians. Zionism was born as a reaction to this racism and was itself a form of racism, based on the myth that all Jews everywhere are permanently in danger of persecution, whether or not they practise Judaism. Anyway, Zionism, and Israel which is its realisation, still need antisemitism both to recruit new immigrants to Israel and to silence critics, who are afraid of being called antisemitic if they criticise Israel. But by calling itself 'the nation State of the Jewish people', Israel seems to make all Jews everywhere responsible for its expropriation and abuse of Palestinians. It is not commonly realised that Hitler multiplied the number of 'Jews' by four; the traditional definition of a Jew was the child of a Jewish mother, herself raised by a Jewish mother; the Nazis regarded anybody with one Jewish grandparent as Jewish, and Israel has adopted the same definition. To delegitimise resistance, supporters of Israel have helped to spread and finance fear of Islam, ably assisted by fanatics such as Bin Laden and al-Baghdadi. You can read all about it in 'The Islamophobia Industry' by Nathan Lean (Pluto Press, 2012), now made into an excellent documentary by Al-Jazeera. The consequence, Muslims in America and parts of Western Europe suffer abuse like that of the Jews in 1930s Germany.