Disclaimer: This transcript is an edited version version of a transcript created using AI technology and may not reflect 100% accuracy.

The video can be found here.

 

Sarah: Good afternoon, and welcome to another topical and compelling webinar. The late scholar, Bernard Lewis, once wrote, “In 1940, we knew who we were. We knew who the enemy was. We knew the dangers and the issues. On our island, we knew we would prevail, that the Americans would be drawn into the fight. It is different today. We do not know who we are. We do not know the issues, and we still do not understand the nature of the enemy”. This is definitely true today. We in the West do not fully comprehend the nature of our enemies, their ideology and the theology behind their current hegemonic aspirations. This is because we are imbued with a sense of religious egalitarianism.

President-elect Donald Trump selected Pastor Lorenzo Sewell, Rabbi Ari Berman, and Imam Al-Husainy to speak at his inauguration. Al-Husainy is an Iraqi-American Sheikh from the Karbala Islamic Education Center in Dearborn, Michigan. He has refused to designate Hezbollah as a terror organization and has wished death on Saudi Arabia for its military intervention in Yemen. He also called US Forces, “oppressors and occupiers.”

This is another example of us projecting our Judeo-Christian values onto the rest of the world. Dr. Andrew Bostom is here to answer our questions about Islam’s view on the sanctity of all human life, and more.

Dr. Bostom is a retired professor of medicine from Brown University, who has become a renowned expert on Islam. Andrew is a prolific author of articles and blogs, and has written five groundbreaking books on Islam, The Legacy of Jihad, The Legacy of Islamic antisemitism, Sharia Versus Freedom, The Mufti’s Islamic Jew-Hatred, and Iran’s Final Solution for Israel.

Andrew, what does Islam teach about the Jews? Must one be an antisemite to be a good and faithful Muslim?

Andrew: Sarah, thank you very much for having me. I want to keep our discussion evidence-based, to the extent possible. I am going to review Anti-Defamation League (ADL) data to try and outline the problem of antisemitism as objectively as possible. I will be showing the information I discuss on the screen.

We are all aware that ADL has a lot of issues but their survey instrument is simple and elegant, and it has a long track record. Coincidentally, ADL released their latest massive study yesterday. The last time they released a similar study was in 2014. I am going to talk about ADL’s study and then discuss some additional independent validating data. All of the data shows that the most common form of antisemitism comes from the Muslim world,

I hope Al-Husainy will get bumped from the inauguration but I will not be focusing on marginal leaders like him today. Rather, I will discuss major institutional leaders from Al-Azhar University, Sunni Islam’s Vatican equivalent. I will also focus on the most important modern Shiite “theosopher”. Through my discussion, I will try and demonstrate the theological drivers behind the carnage of October 7th.

Vasili Grossman, the Soviet writer and journalist, was the first to report on Treblinka. He ran afoul of communism in his own country because he dared to question the Soviet Gulag state but he was a war reporter for the Soviets before then. He wrote, “Antisemitism is always a means rather than an end. It is a measure of the contradictions yet to be resolved. It is a mirror for the failings of individuals, social structures, and state systems. Tell me what you accused Jews of, I’ll tell you what you are guilty of.” I think this applies to all forms of totalitarianism, including religious totalitarianism.

This audience certainly knows that October 7th was an unprovoked attack by both Hamas and local Gazan Muslims. The attack occurred during a truce, and some Saudi reporting indicates that planning for the attack had already started by 2014. October 7th was the largest single day casualty toll for Jews since the Holocaust. About 1200 people were murdered and around 250 were taken captive, many of whom have subsequently been killed. 90% of those targeted were non-combatant children, women, men, and the elderly. I have summarized the atrocities on the slide I am showing and we do not have to go over them in detail. Suffice to say, they were horrific. They were documented largely by the jihadists’ own videos. We also have evidence from passive surveillance videos, eyewitness testimony, and forensic pathology. So, there’s no question about what happened and that it was truly perverse.

This is the point where we can start to discuss some of ADL’s data. Immediately following October 7th, ADL began receiving a flood of reports about antisemitic incidents. They recorded the highest number of incidents ever, in the two months following the horrific attacks of October 7th. Many of the incidents occurred on campuses. Others occurred around Jewish religious institutions and many could be clearly linked to the Hamas war. There was one fatality noted by the ADL. They identified the person killed as a pro-Palestinian protestor but failed to mention he was a devout Muslim computer science lecturer at California State University, Northridge. These types of omissions expose a flaw in ADL’s reporting and it is a pattern for them. This is in spite of the valuable antisemitism reporting they are conducting.

The wave of antisemitism that followed October 7th has abated slightly. That said, it has persisted at an unacceptably high level for the last 16 months. Data from other sources shows there have been over 10,000 antisemitic incidents in the United States alone. A recent Ynet headline noted that the world is normalizing antisemitism. At least 1200 incidents occurred on university campuses. In addition to the peak right after the October 7th attacks, there was another enormous uptick last spring which has thankfully died down to some extent. We can observe these upticks as part of a longer 10-year trend that ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt recently identified.

ADL began to see in spike in antisemitic incidents in 2016. Over the last decade, their data indicates about a 900% increase over the decade before that. So, what is the substrate to this ADL data?

ADL developed a very useful and simple tool to identify antisemitism. I am showing a 2004 version of it on my screen. The respondent was asked to respond to questions dealing with 11 antisemitic stereotypes. In the 2004 iteration of ADL’s tool, a yes answer to any of the first 10 questions was counted as an antisemitic response. The 11th question asked if Jews are just as honest as other business people. A no-answer to question 11 was considered an antisemitic response. According to the ADL’s methodology, six out of 11 antisemitic responses, made the respondent an index case of extreme antisemitism.

I was not aware ADL was collecting this type of data when they came out with it in 2004. I was introduced to ADL’s data via a paper from Kaplan & Small which was published in the Journal of Conflict Research in 2006. The paper’s hypothesis was that anti-Israelism would predict antisemitism. It was a very straightforward hypothesis which was proven true and it was the main finding that was publicized. It was pretty self-evident. The data also showed that Muslims in that sample were eight times more likely to exhibit extreme antisemitism than Christians. The authors did not emphasize that they had accessed the ADL’s data for antisemitism in Europe. They did not emphasize that the data they used was based on ADL’s antisemitism questionnaire I discussed earlier. As an epidemiologist, I found it absolutely striking that they tucked this information away on a table somewhere in the paper.

That was the first time I had seen any such data like that. The results of the survey were striking, but what was also striking to me is that the 2004 ADL report did not even mention they had a Muslim oversample in it. I happened to bump into Charles Small at a meeting not too long after the paper was released and I pointed out this finding. I said, “As an epidemiologist, when we see relative risks of 1.6, a 60% increase, we are very excited. This is a 7.8-fold increase should have been in the title of your study and featured in it”. I received a shoulder shrug in response. This foreshadows many of the things I am going to describe to you.

By 2014, ADL had modified their questionnaire. I think they amended it to make it simpler and less confusing for respondents. It is the same questionnaire they used to gather data for the study they presented yesterday. I am showing the modified survey on the screen. If the respondent answers yes to any of these questions on the screen, it is an antisemitic response. If they answer yes to at least six out of 11, they are an index case of extreme antisemitism.

ADL’s 2014 survey revealed that the 16 countries with the highest prevalence of extreme antisemitism were all in the Middle East and North Africa. The percentages were anywhere from 74% to 93%. The pattern of observing extreme antisemitism mostly amongst Muslims, persisted when aggregating people from different religions across the world, although not as severely. In aggregate, Muslims were about two to three times more likely to exhibit extreme antisemitism than Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and those with no religion. This information is from ADL’s 2014 100 country study.

On the next slide, I am showing ADL data for individual European countries and for the United States between 2015 and 2023. I expect the ADL will do some of this type of analysis once they have sifted through the data they released yesterday. They may have some Muslim samples, which they may come back and oversample. Irrespective, for the eight years between 2015 and 2023, it is clear there was a disproportionate amount of Muslim antisemitism as compared to non-Muslim antisemitism. This was true both in the US and in Europe. Again, Muslim antisemitism is two to four times more common than non-Muslim antisemitism. Even in the United States, antisemitism was about 2.4 times more common amongst Muslims than amongst non-Muslims.

As I mentioned, yesterday, the ADL released an enormous study covering 58,000 adults from 103 countries. There were around 90 countries in the study with about 500 to 1000 samples for each. The same unfortunate pattern persists. The most antisemitic countries in the world are still in the Middle East and North Africa. There is some data from Asia that is alarming, particularly that from Indonesia. Since the 2014 survey, the prevalence of extreme antisemitism in Indonesia has doubled from 48% to 96%. So, Indonesia, the paragon of moderate Islam, is certainly not moderate as regards antisemitism. The relative values in North American and European countries are much lower than those in the Middle East and North Africa. We know the level of antisemitism in these countries is not acceptable, but the data provides a perspective on the relative degree of antisemitism in the different countries.

I want to go over one specific example illustrating ADL’s response to what their data revealed. I helped Morton Klein prepare to present to Congress in 2019. He presented the 2016 data I showed you earlier. The slides showed that the 16 most antisemitic countries in the world were all in the Middle East and North Africa. These countries were anywhere from 90% to 100% Muslim. Lebanon was the only exception and it was at least 60% Muslim.  Eileen Hershenov, ADL’s senior vice president for policy, was present at the hearing. After Morton presented the data, she responded in a bizarre fashion. She said that ADL does track global attitudes toward antisemitism but she implied the reason for Muslim antisemitism was because they were vulnerable marginalized communities. This was a bizarre response. Klein was not referring to a small Muslim minority population in a European country, he was referring to specific Muslim countries as a whole.

We do occasionally observe a crack in ADL’s patterns of explaining antisemitism. I thought Greenblatt’s 2021 confessional was very revealing. Around the time of Operation Guardian of the Walls and other Gaza hostilities, there was a spate of antisemitic attacks.  At that time, Greenblatt said, “Well, let’s be clear, none of the people committing these crimes were wearing MAGA hats, right? We have people waving Palestinian flags and then beating Jewish people.” So, we get the sense that ADL knows what is going on behind the scenes.

I want to show you some non-ADL corroborating data. This is old data that was collected for the EU. It is unique because it was based on the perceptions of Jewish victims of antisemitic violence or violent threats. It surveyed who they thought the perpetrator was. The picture speaks for itself. The aggregated data shows that victims believed Muslims were about 2.2 times more likely than non-Muslims to have been responsible for these attacks or threats.

Now I am showing data from a completely different source. This data is from an academic think tank in Qatar. It was collected between December 2023 through January 2024, after the horrific attacks of October 7th. The survey asked if Hamas’ attack was a legitimate resistance operation. In aggregate, about 88% of the inhabitants of these Muslim majority countries said it was. A question about the recognition of Israel, produced similar results. In aggregate, 89% rejected Israel’s recognition. So, there is a great deal of consistency in the results we are seeing irrespective of the specific questions being asked and who is administering the survey. Again, in this case, this survey was administered by a Doha think tank.

Signal, a well-known political polling organization, collected data about American Muslims after October 7th. I think the results were quite disturbing. In aggregate, 58% of Muslims agreed that Hamas’ carnage and brutality on October 7th, was somehow justified. It is also disturbing that 25% of Americans overall, agreed with that proposition.

Campus antisemitism exploded in the spring of 2024. Brandeis investigators conducted a remarkably courageous study given the climate in universities. They got to the heart of the issue to the best of their ability. Brandeis put together a survey which mimicked that of the ADL to some extent. However, they also included questions about anti-Israelism. They studied 60 colleges with significant Jewish student populations. For their analysis, they excluded the Jewish students and reviewed data from non-Jewish respondents only. They sampled over 3,800 students. Their conclusion was that the climate of anti-Jewish hatred was not universal and was driven about by about a third of the students, which is bad enough. The good news was that only about 2% of the entire sample exhibited extreme antisemitism. Once again, those guilty of extreme antisemitism are disproportionately Muslim. The Muslims were about 2.6 times more likely to harbor the most virulent antisemitism, meaning they exhibited a shared hostility to both Israel and Jews. I do want to emphasize this was only 2% of the sample, but 2% can cause many problems.

Now I want to segue from polling data to discuss what drives this Islamic antisemitism. We can start with examining Hamas’ covenant and then examine the unique polling data covering its features. There are some good translations of the Hamas covenant available. MEMRI has one and Yale University has another. The first statement in the covenant, even before the preamble, is the 112th verse from the third Surah chapter of the Quran. It attacks the Jews for having committed all kinds of transgressions. The Jews are accused of killing prophets and other such transgressions and this justifies debasing them under Islamic law. Then we move on to the preamble which extols the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas’ connection to it.

Article seven features Muhammad’s tradition of claiming that the Jews have to be annihilated to usher in the Messianic age. It is the ‘rocks and trees’ or the ‘gharqad’, hadith. It is an end of time hadith that is fairly well known. Article 15 is pretty long. In Article 15, Hamas calls the global Muslim community to join together in waging a Jihad to destroy Israel as a political entity. So, I would say Article seven borders on being genocidal while Article 15 encourages politicide.

In 2011, Stanley Greenberg did something remarkable. Greenberg was a well-known democratic pollster, especially during the campaigns of both Bill and Hillary Clinton. He entered Gaza and the West Bank and polled over a thousand Palestinian Muslims face-to-face. He spoke to them in Arabic and asked them to opine on quotes from the Hamas charter. 80% agreed with article 15. They agreed that the Arab and larger Islamic world should wage a war of jihad to destroy Israel as a political entity. 73% agreed with the canonical hadith, the proposition that could be viewed as an end of times idea or one that is even more immediate.

Since 1947, the Jihadists have aimed to control Syria and they appear to have met their goal. An article in the Jerusalem post on January 4th, described the changes they have made to their education system. One of those changes was the inclusion of a Quranic verse from the first surah, or chapter in the Quran. It is the seventh verse. It might be an elusive reference to people, but it was pretty clear to me. It states, “Those who are damned and have gone astray to be identified as the Jews and the Christians.”. It is a very short surah that’s spatchcocked onto the Quran. It says, “Muslims are told… to follow the path of those upon whom you, Allah, have bestowed favor… Not of those who have evoked his anger or those who are astray.” Muhammad’s canonical tradition identifies the Jews specifically as having incurred Allah’s anger and Christians as having gone astray. I have reviewed Quranic commentaries, and others have done this formally. 90% of them agree this interpretation is correct and that is largely because it is what Muhammad himself said. It is disturbing that pious Muslims repeat this verse up to 17 times a day, in their five prayer sessions. It is a tremendous form of indoctrination against both Jews and Christians.

If you want an example of a current important commentary on this verse, we can look no further than late Grand Imam Tantawy, Grand Imam of Al-Azhar University. He said, “Those who have incurred Allah’s anger are the Jews, and those who are misguided are the Christians.” This interpretation comes from Muhammad. This is the classic view. Some Quranic commentators say that the Jews knew the truth but departed from it out of stubbornness and denial. That is why they have incurred Allah’s anger. That is a very common theme linked to all kinds of other pejorative characteristics about the Jews in the Quran. I recently discovered that a mosque in Providence has been using this verse and tying it to what they call, “The Gaza Genocide.” So, it can be a very, very toxic verse.

Sunni Muslims comprise about 90% of the world’s Muslim population. Al-Azhar University has been a major center of Sunni Islamic education since the time of Saladin. Its’ Grand Imam is the nearest you will get to a papal equivalent in Sunni Islam. We hear that Islam is decentralized all the time. This is certainly true relative to Catholicism. That said, Islam does have its own major seats of learning. In Cairo, for example, cabbies refer to Al-Azhar as their Vatican. As such, I want to look at Al-Azhar historical declarations of jihad against all the Jews.

These declarations go back to the day the partition plan was announced. The state of Israel did not yet exist at that time. In 1948, when Israel declared its independence war, Al-Azhar University declared jihad once again. It happened once more in 1956 before the Sinai war, and in 1967, about nine months before at the outset of the Six-Day War. Their 1968 Worldwide Muslim Conference centered around jihadist proclamations and a very toxic Jew hatred, The same occurred in 1973.

In the aftermath of the resounding defeat that the Arab-Muslim world suffered during the Six-Day War, there was a formal renunciation of the galvanizing pseudo secular Arab nationalist ideology, which frankly sat lightly on the majority of the Muslims in that part of the world. It had had its day and the 1968 conference was organized to reject it.

My late mentor and friend, David Litman made me aware of what happened there. In October of 1968, David came across an English translation of all the proceedings in a library in England. He describes how toxic the content was and decided to create a 100-page booklet summarizing it. I am going to give you David’s summary. I photocopied the entire horrific thing, and I went through it. It is horrible but it probably should be republished though for historical purposes since it is out of print.

I think David’s analysis of the text is fair and accurate. David summarized the recurring themes he observed. According to the analysis, Jews are frequently denoted as the enemies of Allah. The Jews manifest in themselves an historical continuity of the evil qualities described in the Quran. The Jews do not constitute a true people or nation. The state of Israel is the culmination of the historical and cultural depravity of the Jews and has to be destroyed by a jihad. The superiority of Islam over all other religions is brandished as a guarantee that the Arabs will ultimately triumph. The Jews have traditionally been kept by Arab-Islam in a humiliated, inferior status. It is outrageous for the cowardly Jews to defeat the Arabs who have their own state. This causes the contraction of the abode of Islam.

David’s concluding concern was that propagating this ideology provided a license to liquidate Israel. Also, teaching about the immutable evil of the Jews, provided a license for genocide. His concerns were downplayed at the time. This was around 1971, before the 1973 war. After 1973, a lot of the scholars that dismissed his concerns admitted that he had a point. That is the way things work.

Grand Imam Tantawy was the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar from 1996 to 2010. I believe he was Hafiz as a young man. This means he memorized the Quran. Equally important, he was one of the most significant modern Quranic commentators. He actually developed a site with about 100 of the earliest known contemporary Quranic commentaries online. Anyone can interrogate the site and it is helpful in many ways. He is considered very learned in the Muslim world and he is a vociferous Jew hater. In April, 2002 this Grand Imam said that the Israeli Jews were enemies of Allah and are descendants of apes and pigs. This is a Quranic reference. Even worse, he sanctioned homicide bombings. He did this after the gruesome Netanya Passover massacre had already occurred.

I think the summary from his 1968 PhD thesis is very important. It reflects some of the content from the 1968 conference which included litanies of pejorative characteristics of the Jews as depicted in the Quran. Tantawy includes this in his full PhD thesis and in the summaries of it. I have been working with a translator for about a year now, and we have it translated. Now, I just have to get it ready for publication. I want this work to be published in English because I think it’s a very important work.

In one of his summaries, Tantawy notes that the Quran describes the Jews with their own particular degenerate characteristics and accuses them of killing the prophets of Allah. Again, this is derived from the Hamas covenant and is repeated several times in the Quran. He accuses the Jews of corrupting Allah’s words by putting them in the wrong places and of consuming the people’s wealth frivolously. He also blames the Jews for their refusal to distance themselves from the evil they do, and other ugly characteristics caused by their deep-rooted lascivious envy. According to Tantawy, only a minority of the Jews keep their word and those good Jews become Muslims while the bad ones do not. The Jews always remain maleficent deniers and should desist from their negative denial. Some Jews have gone overboard in denying their hostility and gentle persuasion can do no good with them. So, Muslims should use force against the Jews so as to be effective in ridding them of their evil. One may go so far as to ban their religion, their persons, their wealth, and their villages

I was hoping maybe he would mellow after his PhD thesis and this would be reflected in his mature commentary. Unfortunately, he did not. I am highlighting two verses from this 10-volume work, the broad interpretation of the Holy Quran. One is the ‘apes and pigs’ verse and the other is the permanent injunction to wage war and submit Jews and Christians to Islamic law. His interpretations as regards the Jews and Christians are very traditional and very mainstream.

Ahmed el-Tayeb succeeded Tantawy who died while he was still the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar. He’s not nearly as learned as Tantawy, but he is still a recognized authority. He too is a virulent Jew hater. In 2007, before becoming Grand Imam, he sanctioned homicide bombing against all Israeli Jews. In 2014, and again in 2018, Tayeb blamed the Zionists for the intern strife in the Muslim world caused by ISIS and other Jihadists.

Historically, Muslims believed that the Jews would march on the Kaaba, a central stone structure in the Holy Mosque in Mecca. Some Muslims believed the Jews will also march on the prophets’ mosque in Medina. Ahmed el-Tayeb asserted this is on the minds and in the hearts of the Zionist entity. I do not think this is in our minds and in our hearts but I do think it is in el-Tayeb’s mind and in his heart. In 2018, he asserted that the issue of antisemitism is a lie that continues to deceive nations to this day. This is an example of remarkable cognitive dissonance.

El-Tayeb is riveted on the verse that some argue is the central antisemitic verse in the Quran. The gist of it is that the Jews have been the strongest enemy against the Muslims and that necessitates hate for them. It sounds a lot like psychological projection to me. Twice, Tayeb has argued on national TV that this is why Muslims suffer from global Zionism and Judaism. He conflates Zionism and Judaism and refers to them as the source of 1400 years of Muslim suffering. It can all be explained in that verse.

On the day of October 7th, Al-Azhar’s clerics put out statements celebrating the resistance of the proud Palestinian people. They did not express any regret whatsoever for the carnage and for the suffering of their 1200 victims who were murdered and for those that were taken captive. Less than two weeks after the carnage of October 7th, they issued another long-standing fatwa which received no attention but should have been condemned by every decent politician and religious figure in the world. It targeted all Israeli Jews. According to this fatwa, all Israeli Jews are Zionist settlers, irrespective of whether they are combatants or non-combatants. This is typical of the way these fatwas are issued. They do not come from Hamas or Hezbollah but rather from the Vatican equivalent of Sunni Islam. It received not a word of condemnation.

The dean of the faculty for Islamic and Arabic studies at Al-Azhar professed how treacherous the Jews are in murdering prophets. The Inspector General of Al-Azhar repeated the ‘apes and pigs’ reference. On the 77th anniversary of the partition plan, Tayeb wrote on the al-Azhar Twitter site that he rejects the partition plan. As such, any delusions about a two-state solution from the Muslim side, have to be put to rest. According to Tayeb, the collapse of Syria and other situations are all related to the Zionists. Then he used a reference from the Mullahs in Iran. He said that the Jews are a cancer that must be prevented from spreading into the Arab body. How you prevent cancer, you destroy it. You eliminate it.

On the Shiite side, you can read gushing praise about Mohammad Tabatabai, one of the leaders of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution. It is really quite remarkable. Non-Muslim academics in Islamic studies, and pious Iranian Shiite academics literally invented a neologism for him. He is not just a theologian and he is not just a philosopher. He is a theosopher. The largest social sciences university in Iran is named after him. Tabatabai died a while ago, but I went through his massive commentary which is about twice that of Tantawy. It is recognized as the most important modern Shiite Quranic commentary. When it comes to the Jews, it is absolutely toxic. There are some subtle differences between the Shiite and Sunni perspectives but the key attitudes towards the Jews, are the same. The Jews repeatedly broke the covenants made with Allah. They committed capital sins, heinous crimes, and shameful deeds. Their spiritual poverty and moral bankruptcy in open defiance to their book and total disregard for reason, is even more despicable. It is all because their hearts were hardened, their souls lost, and their endeavors worthless.

The central Quranic verse in terms of Jew hatred is probably Quran 5:82. Tabatabai finds that this verse is relevant to the current era. In terms of his commentary on Quran 9:29, Tabatabai makes it very clear it is an active doctrine designed to prevent non-Muslims from propagating their lunacies and corrupt human societies. The non-Muslims he refers to are primarily Jews and Christians. As such, asserts Tabatabai, they must be forced to submit to Islamic law. This is living doctrine.

I think it is very important to highlight these types of ideologies. This is true in a case like that of the Dearborn Shia Imam who is to speak at the inauguration. He is a Hezbollah supporter and a conspiratorial hater of Jews, and apparently Saudis as well. Hopefully, the controversy over him speaking at the inauguration will be resolved but it will not get rid of his ideology. It is not going to solve these profound theological challenges that are propagated by revered religious leaders like Tabatabai and we have to consider long term solutions for this.

MEMRI hired an observant Muslim director for their Project for Reform in the Arab and Muslim World. He reviewed hundreds of Friday-mosque sermons after October 7th and the results were very interesting. All the sermons seem to share similar themes with respect to how they framed the attack. They amplified a single narrative justifying Hamas’ attack as a legitimate act based on Allah’s commands and on the teachings of the prophet Muhammad. They did not condemn the atrocities committed. Rather, the preachers focused on highlighting the similarities between Hamas’ attack and the wars fought by Islam’s prophet and the companions. They demonized Israel and narrated historical antisemitic stories attributed to Muhammad including the hadith about the stones and the gharqad tree.

So, these sermons repeat the hadith in the Hamas covenant. Across the US, preachers are citing verses from the Quran, like the ones I’ve introduced to you. They are characterizing Jews as corrupt, treacherous, untrustworthy, and the killers of prophets.

There was an interesting story which I came across about six or seven years ago. It illustrates how far back this type of hateful preaching goes. The story describes a black convert to Islam railing in a Washington DC mosque against the Jews and calling for a jihad against Israel. This happened in 1975 and this type of Jew-hatred is not new.

Yigal Carmon, president and co-founder of MEMRI, issued a warning about this in 2019. This was after a series of mosques had been filmed and a documentary made about what was going on inside them. Unfortunately, six years later, nothing has changed and the urgency is so much greater. The documentary depicted how incitement from the Mosques deteriorated into threats of violence. The incitement was based on Islamic texts, from the primary basic Islam of the time of Muhammad.

The Jewish communities who are the direct victim or the direct target of this incitement, are afraid to do anything. They do not protest or take public action for fear of being labeled Islamophobic. This is the great triumph of organizations like CAIR and others. They are under the umbrella of the Muslim Brotherhood, Deobandi, Al-Azhar, or another such organizations. They spray the charge of Islamophobia and shut down any criticism and it is tragic.

David Litman mentioned the unaided text of the 1906 Jewish encyclopedia to me, and it was really fascinating. The great traveler Benjamin of Tudela journeyed around the world. In 1170, his estimate was that about half of the world’s estimated 750,000 Jews lived in Islamdom. By 1906, 93% of the world’s then estimated 11.3 million Jews either lived in Europe, about 80%, or in North America, about 13%. Only 7% remained in Muslim countries. There are many arguments as to why this would have happened and economic development is one of them. That said, it certainly does not argue for great tolerance in Muslim countries.

Mordecai Ha-Cohen provided the perspective of a Mizrachi Jew on the life of Jews in Muslim countries. He was an autodidact anthropologist who conducted an ethnographic study of North African Jewry, published in the early 20th century. Harvey Goldberg translated it into English many decades later. In his summary statement of the conquest and colonization period, Ha-Cohen says that the Muslims pressed the Jews to enter the covenant of the Muslim religion. Many Jews bravely chose death. Some of them accepted Islam under the threat of force, but only outwardly. Others left the region, abandoning their wealth and property and scattering to the ends of the earth. Many stood by their faith, but bore an iron yoke on their necks. They lowered themselves to the dust before the Muslims lords and accepted a life of woe. They carried no weapons, never mounted an animal in the presence of a Muslim, did not wear a headdress, and followed other laws that signaled their degradation.

So in conclusion, I want to emphasize that the polling data, particularly that of ADL, is depressingly consistent. I think ADL has the most useful and effective instrument to identify extreme Muslim antisemitism and their data shows Muslims are two to four times more likely than non-Muslims to display extreme antisemitism. It is remarkable that few are aware of it. I do not think ADL will not break down their data from yesterday the way I broke it down for you.

Both ADL data and data from outside sources have been remarkably consistent over 20 years. The same is true from the data gathered from authoritative institutional Islam. We could review a whole litany of mosque sermons in the United States and the Middle East and they will repeat the same themes. Sometimes we will see the Imams with the veins bursting out of their necks. However, I think it is more important to go over what the major Islamic seats of learning are teaching because those are the institutions training the Imams. We have to share that this is not confined to terror groups. This is sadly mainstream, and we have to condemn it.

Deborah Lipstadt, Biden’s antisemitism envoy, recently made a trip to Cairo. She visited the artifact synagogues in Cairo. These were the synagogues that people like my dear friend, Badior, were forced to abandon in the 1950s. This was the period when Nasser essentially liquidated the Jewish community. To me, they look like mausoleums but Lipstadt is there celebrating them. I guess they have some tourist value but there are no Jews remaining there to attend them.

Lipstadt did not go to Al-Azhar University and demand a meeting with Ahmed el-Tayeb. She did not tell him that his virulent antisemitism is unacceptable. She did not remind him we are not living in the 12th century. She did not insist that he stop espousing hate for Jews through social media, speeches and television interviews. She did nothing at all like that.

The tragic legacy of Christian antisemitism provides some lessons on how to counter antisemitism in other religions. Vatican II and the Nostra Aetate reforms changed the Catholic approach to antisemitism to some extent. The success of this was demonstrated at the joint AJC and US Conference of Catholic bishops, about a month ago. They provided a glossary on antisemitism. They reaffirmed the Nostra Aetate reforms and then gave examples of antisemitic terms, phrases, conspiracies and themes. The Conference of Bishops also annotated how Catholics should deal with them. We know that a lot of the Jew hating theology was removed from the catechism.  Jules Isaac was one of the important people responsible for bringing this process to fruition. Before World War II, French Catholic clerics started the process. Isaac was a hero who had been wounded in World War I and who had lost half his family during the Holocaust. He was also a very important educator in France who was responsible for the textbook series that they used to teach history in their secondary schools. So, he was very respected. After the Holocaust, he joined the movement to remove antisemitic content from Catholic doctrine. He convinced the Catholics that they would not be able to change either the New or the Old Testaments. However, he advocated for changing what is clearly manmade, the catechisms and the commentaries of the church fathers. He persuaded them to mollify them or remove the antisemitic material from them, because it was clearly manmade.

He succeeded in wiring that into the approach to counter antisemitism in the Catholic church. A couple of popes later, the process was finally approved. It is hardly perfect, but it is something. I think we need to follow a similar paradigm with respect to Islam. Our religious leaders need to suggest, or even demand, that the Muslim world refrain from propagating Jew-hatred at the highest levels. They are not going to do it on their own. Christianity already had the intrinsic culpa strain which Islam, unfortunately, does not.

Sarah: Okay. Thank you, Andrew. I feel terrible because we’ve had so many questions come in, and it is one o’clock. We have to do a hard stop. Unfortunately, I have to run to Capitol Hill.

Andrew: Please email the questions to me, Sarah. People can send me their email addresses and I will try and answer their questions directly.

Sarah: Okay. Andrew, many people are requesting the slide presentation.

Andrew: Absolutely. I’ll send that to you.

Sarah: Okay. If you would like to request the slide presentation, please contact me at sstern@emetonline.org . This webinar will be posted on YouTube and on our website. A transcript also will be available on our website with the slides.

For 10 years, EMET has been working on the Antisemitism Awareness Act. It would mandate that the Education Department adopt the broad definition of antisemitism used by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), an intergovernmental group, to enforce anti-discrimination laws. This IHRA definition of antisemitism protects against those who deny Jews the right to self-determination and claim that Israel’s existence is a “racial endeavor”. The Act will protect Jewish students at all levels. Please watch this space very carefully because the bill will probably pass in a few days.

Andrew, I cannot thank you enough. I have many of my own questions. One of them relates to the PLO charter, which I understand contains a tremendous amount of antisemitic and anti-Zionist rhetoric. I am not convinced that the PA is the moderate alternative to Hamas.

Andrew: I do not think it is. The PLO has espoused the same theological Jew hatred that you hear coming from Hamas. This goes back as far as 1968.

Sarah: Yes. I would love to invite you again soon for another webinar, because we have received so many questions that we have not had time to answer. Thank you so much.

Andrew: I would be more than happy to come back and just answer questions if you want to do that.

Sarah: That would be wonderful. Thank you so much, Andrew, for sharing your years of scholarly research with us and for helping to equip us with the facts and with the EMET.

Andrew: Thank you, Sarah.

[END]

 

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Founded in 2005, The Endowment for Middle East Truth (EMET) is a Washington, D.C. based think tank and policy center with an unabashedly pro-America and pro-Israel stance. EMET (which means truth in Hebrew) prides itself on challenging the falsehoods and misrepresentations that abound in U.S. Middle East policy.

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