Muslim Anti-Semitism: A Clear and Present Danger by Robert S. Wistrich

 http://www.ajc.org/InTheMedia/Publications.asp?did=503.
Muslim Anti-Semitism: A Clear and Present Danger by Robert S. Wistrich

Conspiracy Theories: The Protocols and the Blood Libel in Islamic Garb
Qutb's Islamic Judeophobia, like that of his fundamentalist followers, has blended easily enough with much more modern twentieth-century motifs of racist and political anti-Semitism derived from Western sources. Foremost among these European imports has been the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which provides a complete conspiracy theory of history in which satanic Jews relentlessly strive for world domination.

Communism, Freemasonry, Zionism, and the State of Israel are all deemed to be instruments in this diabolical scheme of Jewry. Its attraction for gullible Muslims has grown immensely with each successive defeat by Israel.38 Anti-Semitic conspiracy theory is, for example, a strikingly important feature of the Palestinian Hamas Covenant of 1988, whose Article 32 states:

For Zionist scheming has no end, and after Palestine they will covet expansion from the Nile to the Euphrates. Only when they have completely digested the area on which they will have laid their hand, they will look forward to more expansion, etc. Their scheme has been laid out in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and their present [conduct] is the best proof of what is said there.

The Jews are openly accused by Hamas of controlling the world's wealth and its mass media, and of instigating the French and Russian revolutions and two world wars to cynically promote Zionist objectives. Equally, they are charged with establishing clandestine organizations (e.g., Rotary and Lions Clubs, Freemasonry, etc.) for the purposes of espionage and subversion.

The Jews, it is asserted, deliberately wiped out the Islamic caliphate and then established the League of Nations in the 1920s, "in order to rule the world by their intermediary."41 According to the Palestinian Muslim fundamentalists, "there was no war that broke out anywhere without their [Jewish] fingerprints on it.

The word hamas means literally devotion and zeal in the path of Allah. The movement-a Palestinian offshoot of what was originally the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood-has consistently mixed a fiercely Islamic Judeophobia with Western anti-Semitic rhetoric. It makes virtually no distinction between Zionists and Jews in its extremely aggressive leaflets. Characteristically, Hamas literature evokes the conquest by Muhammad in 628 C.E. of Khaibar-an oasis in the Arabian peninsula where the "treacherous" Jews were eliminated by the Prophet-as an inspiration for its current war to destroy Israel.

A similarly radical ideology motivates the Lebanese Shi'a movement, Hizballah ("the Party of God"), which rose to prominence following its resistance to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Its total negation of Israel's existence and its view of Judaism as the oldest and bitterest enemy of Islam owe much to the Ayatollah Khomeini's "anti-Zionist" preaching and the movement's symbiotic relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran. In accordance with this doctrinal source of inspiration, Hizballah opposes nationalism, imperialism, and "Western arrogance" while laying special emphasis on the liberation of Palestine and Jerusalem as a major strategic aim.

As with the Hamas and other fundamentalist groupings, Israel is depicted as a Western puppet installed in the Middle East to enable imperialism to continue its domination and exploitation of Arab regional resources. Israel is invariably seen as the source of all evil and violence in the area and as the main obstacle to Islamic unity. Hence it must be totally eradicated. The recent Israeli departure from Lebanon is no more than a prelude to this future obliteration of the great "usurping enemy" of Islam-frequently described by Hizballah (as in Iranian propaganda) as a "cancer" and poison that affects the entire world.

Hizballah's most senior cleric, Sheikh Husayn Fadlallah, continually emphasized through the 1990s that Israel was not just a Jewish state in the formal sense of the word. It was the ultimate expression of the corrupt, treacherous, and aggressive "Jewish" personality. Jews were indeed "the enemy of the entire human race," congenitally "racist" and condescending in their attitude to other peoples, and ruthlessly bent upon global domination. In an interview in the late 1980s, Fadlallah already expressed a widely held fundamentalist attitude toward allegedly boundless Jewish ambitions:

The Jews want to be a world superpower. This racist circle of Jews wants to take vengeance on the whole world for their history of persecution and humiliation. In this light, the Jews will work on the basis that Jewish interests are above all world interests.

Hizballah's consistently intransigent philosophy of all-out war against Israel, Zionism, and the Jews has an unmistakably virulent anti-Semitic underpinning linked to its overall pan-Islamic, revolutionary perspective. Its special venom also draws from the traditional Iranian Shi'i attitudes toward Jews as unclean, impure, and corrupt infidels. This is a theme that pervaded the outlook of the Ayatollah Khomeini and still influences the present Iranian leadership.

Like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Hizballah engages in a total demonization of the Jewish and Zionist enemy, eagerly embracing violence, "suicide bombings," martyrdom, and terror as the only path to "liberate" Palestine, destroy Israel, and defeat the West.

Everything is made subordinate to the supreme imperative of the jihad-the holy war that must be waged to the death against the infidel-until all Islamic lands are liberated and a truly Islamic state is restored.

The Western media, as is its custom, has been extremely reluctant to relate the current terrorist war against Israel and the West to its ideological roots in Islam or to the sources and meaning of jihad. It is equally averse to connecting terrorism with the anti-Jewish obsessions that currently animate millions of Muslims. Amazingly little attention has been paid to the sheer abundance, energy, and viciousness of contemporary Muslim anti-Semitism from Cairo and Gaza to Damascus, Baghdad, Tehran, and Lahore.

The seemingly endless parade of grotesque falsehoods exhibited in Arab and Muslim defamation of Jews and the Jewish state scarcely seems to impinge on Western consciousness. At most it is perceived as a footnote to the raging storm of anti-Americanism or as a form of "political opposition" to Israeli actions. Not even the rampant Arab claims that the Holocaust was a fabrication invented by Zionists and Jews (which attracts much attention in the European media when made by neo-Nazis or far rightists) stir more than the faintest of responses in the West. Nor has there been much interest in the anti-Semitic ravings of the current Syrian defense minister Mustafa Tlas (in his post since 1972!), who has for years been pursuing with zealous determination the medieval accusation that Jews drink the blood of gentile children.

In the preface to his by-now "classic" book, The Matzo of Zion, first published in 1983.
Tlas wrote: The Jew can kill you and take your blood in order to make his Zionist bread. Here opens before us a page more ugly than the crime itself: the religious beliefs of the Jews and the perversions they contain, which draw their orientation from a dark hate towards all humankind and all religions.

On February 8, 1991, the Syrian delegate to the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva actually urged all the representatives present to read Tlas to better grasp the nature of "Zionist racism." In 1999 the Syrian defense minister was still repeating his claim in The Matzo of Zion that the 1840 blood libel case in Damascus had been based on the "known fact" that fanatical Jews do commit ritual murder.

Later in the same year, a prominent Syrian literary magazine published the following "masterpiece," which combines several strands in contemporary Arab anti-Semitism, including the blood libel:

The Talmud instructions, soaked in hatred and hostility towards humanity, are stamped in the Jewish soul. Throughout history, the world has known more than one Shylock, more than one Father Thomas [the alleged Christian target of the Damascus Jews in 1840], as victim of these Talmudic instructions and this hatred.... Now Shylock of New York's time has come.... Israel's matzo will continue to steep in blood, the spilling of which is permitted in the Talmud, in order to glorify the Jewish military.

This dehumanizing and delirious rhetoric, currently echoed in countless variations throughout much of Arab and Muslim culture, is slowly but surely infecting other parts of the world. The misnamed "conference against racism" in Durban, South Africa (concluded only forty-eight hours before the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York), is a notorious case in point.

The nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) at Durban produced perhaps the most brazenly anti-Semitic document at any international gathering since 1945. Led by Arab, Palestinian, and Muslim organizations, they repeatedly accused Israel of genocide against the Palestinian people, ethnic cleansing, and being a purely "racist apartheid state." The so-called Israeli-perpetrated Palestinian "Catastrophe" was labeled at the Durban NGO forum as a "third holocaust." A key paragraph condemning anti-Semitism was deliberately eliminated from the discussions, but in an act of pure Orwellian doublespeak, "Zionist practices against Semitism" were now elevated into a major form of contemporary racism.

This venomous carnival of incitement, which contributed to an American walkout, soon spilled over from the conference halls into the streets. Hate literature distributed by Arab NGOs did not shrink from portraying Jews with fangs dripping blood and wearing helmets inscribed with Nazi swastikas. Perhaps most telling in all this orgy of hatred was a Palestinian pamphlet displayed at the Durban Exhibition Center featuring a picture of Adolf Hitler with the caption "If I had won the war there would be no Palestinian blood lost."