The new issue of the quarterly Critical Muslim is out. The theme is Fear and Loathing. It has my review essay on Gilbert Achcar’s great book Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives. Here are a few excerpts:
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The treatment of Jews who have remained in the Muslim world is no better or worse than that of any other minority. Since the founding of Israel their numbers have dwindled. Except for countries like Iran, where a substantial Jewish population still remains, few in the Muslim world ever encounter a Jew. Most know Jews only through scripture or news reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. All Jews as a result have been cast unwittingly as adversaries by a conflict with which most of them have no connection, which many even oppose.
There is no point denying that anti-Semitism exists in the Muslim world today and that Holocaust denial is not uncommon. This is deplorable. But the anti-Semitism of the Muslim world is an epiphenomenon of a political conflict; it doesn’t have social roots. ‘It is functional and political, not social,’ says Yehoshafat Harkabi, the leading Israeli scholar and former head of the military intelligence, no friend of the Arabs. For most Muslims, anti-Semitism is a function of ignorance and unfamiliarity; it is also an abstract means of participation in a conflict where Jews have been cast as the oppressor by virtue of a state which adorns its instruments of war with Jewish religious symbols. In this respect it is quite different from European anti-Semitism; it does not involve any actual contact with a Jew. It is also different in so far as it comes from a position of weakness, whereas European anti-Semitism was born of strength and directed against a vulnerable minority. It is comparable less to the racism of the Ku Klux Klan than to the reaction of the Black Panthers. Both kinds of hatred were totalizing, but only the former existed without a stimulus. Harkabi again:
Continue reading “Muslim anti-Semitism: Myth and Reality”
As conspiracy theorists of the left and right muddy the waters with lies and half-truths, as they continue their exclusive focus on the peripheral with utter disregard for the actual, the voices of the Syrians themselves are drowned out. Jadaliyya deserves credit for giving space to these voices and shedding light on the human dimension of the conflict. Amal Hanano is the most compelling of these voices. Here’s from 
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