Educating Daniel Pipes On Islamic Antisemitism Andrew Bostom
http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2013/07/10/educating-daniel-pipes-on-islamic-antisemitism/
It is common knowledge to every schoolboy and even every Bachelor of Arts,
That all sin is divided into two parts.
One kind of sin is called a sin of commission, and that is very important,
And it is what you are doing when you are doing something you ortant,
And the other kind of sin is just the opposite and is called a sin of omission
and is equally bad in the eyes of all right-thinking people, from
Billy Sunday to Buddha,
And it consists of not having done something you shuddha
—Ogden Nash
**
Writing in the Toronto Sun (published 5/16/13) Farzana Hassan claimed Daniel Pipes’ most recent pronouncement on the subject, ostensibly, of “Islamic Antisemitism,” was as follows:
He said the religion of Islam itself is not inherently hostile to Jews, and Muslim Antisemitism scarcely existed before the establishment of the state of Israel.
Pipes, however, subsequently claimed Hassan’s account of his talk to the “Muslim Committee Against Antisemitism,” was “sympathetic, but inaccurate.”
Daniel Pipes doth protest Ms. Hassan’s characterization far too much.
Never denying that he spoke the actual words Hassan claimed, Pipes instead provided this purely casuistic response that avoids the logical implication of his alleged words—and in fact reinforces Hassan’s interpretation of their meaning!
He said “the religion of Islam itself is not inherently hostile to Jews,” Not true. A sense of Muslim superiority over Jews goes back 1,400 years, to the very origins of Islam. “and Muslim anti-Semitism scarcely existed before the establishment of the state of Israel.” True in the technical sense that the tropes of Christian antisemitism, including the obsessive fear of and hostility toward Jews, goes back only two centuries and only came fully into its own after 1948.
Fortunately, Pipes’ own albeit quite limited and superficial writings putatively addressing the subject of “Islamic Antisemitism,” date back just over 30-years. As can be gleaned, objectively, from this “oeuvre,” Ms. Hassan’s encapsulation of Pipes’ views is consistent with what he has actually written, and argued. Indeed, as I will demonstrate, Pipes negates the very existence of Muslim Antisemitism—Muslim conspiratorial hatred of Jews, not mere (and benign) feelings of “superiority”—as an indigenous phenomenon rooted in sacralized Islamic doctrine, and manifested in Islamic history, across a continuum of almost 14 centuries.
The most striking, repeated public examples of Pipes’ willful negation of the doctrinal Islam in Islamic Antisemitism were evident when the same very distinct, Jew-hating Koranic motif received broad media attention, on two occasions, 10-years apart.
During a televised discussion, June 24, 2002 with Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren, Pipes was asked to comment about excerpts from an interview of a three-and-a-half year old Muslim girl, Bismallah, originally broadcast on Saudi Arabian Iqra TV, May 7, 2002. The specific segment Pipes was shown for his analysis included these statements:
Basmallah: Allah’s mercy and blessings upon you.
Amer [adult interviewer]: What’s your name?
Basmallah: Basmallah.
Amer: How old are you, Basmallah?
Basmallah: Three and a half.
Amer: Are you a Muslim?
Basmallah: Yes.
Amer: Basmallah, do you know the Jews?
Basmallah: Yes
Amer: Do you like them?
Basmallah: No.
Amer: Why don’t you like them?
Basmallah: Because.
Amer: Because they are what?
Basmallah: They are apes and pigs.
Amer: Because they are apes and pigs. Who said that about them?
Basmallah: Our God.
Amer: Where did he say that about them?
Basmallah: In the Koran. [emphasis added]
Ignoring the child’s own Koranic reference, confirmed and elaborated by the adult Muslim woman interviewer (in an immediately following portion of the interview not shown that night on Fox News, but widely available), Pipes opined:
My view is that Antisemitism of this sort [emphasis added] is historically a Christian phenomenon [emphasis added], but, in the course of the past two generations, as a result of propaganda coming out of the Egyptian government, the Iranian government, the Iraqi government, the Saudi government of this sort, it has become pervasive. Now what’s so striking about this particular film clip is that it’s a 3 ½-year-old. But you hear the same words coming out of the preachers in the mosques. You’ll hear it from the politicians. You’ll hear it in the schoolbooks, in the schoolrooms. You’ll hear it pervasively. It is…
Just over ten years later, in January, 2013, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) reproduced 2010 video interviews of then popularly elected Egyptian President Muhammad Morsi during which he openly characterized “Zionists,” unmistakably Jews in his parlance, as inveterately “hostile in nature,” “fanning the flames of civil strife wherever they were throughout history,” and being “the descendants of apes and pigs.” Earlier, between 2004 and 2007 as reported by the Muslim Brotherhood’s own Arabic Ikhwanonline.com (translated and published in English on 11/16/12 by The Investigative Project on Terrorism), when serving as an elected Muslim Brotherhood parliamentarian in the Egyptian People’s Assembly, and/or a member of its Guidance Bureau, Morsi had enunciated the same Antisemitic (and jihadist) themes with more specific Koranic references. Ikhwanonline.com, from November 21, 2004, quoted Morsi stating:
It is confirmed by the Quran that Jews are the most hostile of men to Muslims. The Almighty says: “Certainly you will find the most hostile to those who believe are the Jews and those who are polytheists.” [Koran 5: 82] The verse confirms that Jews are the most hostile enemies of the Muslims, as the Almighty says “and prepare for them all you can of power, including steeds” [Koran 8: 60], [Note: The beginning of the verse is on the Brotherhood logo] a verse which urges preparation for this enemy with all our energy to prepare us to confront him at any time; because Zionists are traitors to every covenant and convention … there is no peace with the descendants of apes and pigs, [Koran 5:60]
Daniel Pipes was interviewed by the Jewish News Service about Morsi’s statements—redolent with specific Jew-hating Koranic citations—given the flurry of publicity the Egyptian President’s hateful commentary had generated. Pipes offered only this threadbare “explanation,” once again ignoring the specific Koranic origins of Morsi’s most widely publicized citation referring to Jews as “descendants of apes and pigs.”
Morsi’s “descendants of apes and pigs” quote comes as no surprise, but fits into a long record of his own and of Muslim Brotherhood statements
These two episodes illustrate quite unmistakably Pipes’ deliberate negation of a striking Antisemitic motif from the Koran. Worse still, on the earlier occasion, in 2002, Pipes had the temerity to recast this uniquely Islamic motif as “historically a Christian phenomenon.”(Of note, in his 2003, “Militant Islam Reaches America,” p. 205, Pipes refers to the re-statements of this Koranic theme about Jews by American Muslims, i.e., “sons of monkeys and pigs,” as the “Nazi-like vocabulary of racism.”)
Notwithstanding Pipes’ Islamic negationism, and concomitant, if absurd, projection of Islamic Jew-hatred on to Christianity (or Nazism), the “apes and pigs” references to Jews, derive from motifs repeated in specific Koranic verses, the classical and modern exegeses of these verses by Islam’s most authoritative Koranic commentators, and their elaboration in the canonical traditions of the Muslim prophet Muhammad. Indeed, as I will also show, the overarching historical “context” within Islamdom reveals that this canonical Islamic Jew-hatred and intimately related jihadism has been actualized across a nearly 14-century continuum — past as prologue to the present.
This summary assessment is based upon my own exhaustive study of primary Islamic doctrinal and historical sources—confirmed whenever possible by contemporaneous non-Muslim primary source materials—as well as seminal analyses by the greatest Western specialists who actually took the time to study the phenomenon of Islamic Jew-hatred, including its textual basis, and resultant historical manifestations. These important scholars of Islamic Antisemitism, spanning a century from the late 19th through late 20th centuries — from Hartwig Hirschfeld in the mid 1880s, Georges Vajda in the late 1930s, S.D. Goitein in 1971, and Haggai Ben-Shammai in 1988 — have demonstrated, collectively, all of the following:
– Clear historical evidence of specific Islamic antisemitism, from the Geniza record of the high Middle Ages (10th to 13th centuries)— including the coinage of a unique Hebrew word to characterize such Muslim Jew-hatred, sinuth — published in full by Goitein as of 1971
– The content of foundational Muslim sources detailing the sacralized rationale for Islam’s anti-Jewish bigotry, including Hartwig Hirschfeld’s mid-1880s essay series on Muhammad’s subjugation of the Jews of Medina, based upon the earliest pious Muslim biographies of Muhammad, and George Vajda’s elegant, comprehensive 1937 analysis focusing primarily on the hadith (the putative words and deeds of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, as recorded by pious transmitters)
– Haggai Ben-Shammai’s concise 1988 study of key examples of Jew-hatred in the Koran and Koranic exegesis
In stark contrast, Daniel Pipes published output on (allegedly) Islamic Antisemitism comprises only the thinnest—and dogmatically bowdlerized—gruel. Using both academic (JSTOR, Google scholar, Index Islamicus) and non-academic (Google, Bing, Yahoo) search engines, in addition to searches of Pipes’ extensive personal website archive (www.danielpipes.org), and even writing to Pipes for any additional works of his these searches did not uncover [he declined to reply], I could find only two modest essays which broached the subject of “Islamic” Antisemitism: “The Politics of Muslim Antisemitism,” Commentary, August 1981; and “The New Antisemitism,” 1992, a text submitted to the World Conference on Antisemitism and Prejudice in a Changing World, Brussels: World Jewish Congress, Jonathan R. Cohen, ed.
The latter 1992 essay elucidates Pipes’ own views—which persist unmodified to this day. He accepts the idea, and its “implications,” that “Muslim” Antisemitism
…is essentially an import from Europe… that [Muslim] Antisemitism is relatively superficial. It is a tool, it is an instrument to be used against Israel or other Jews. It arose as part of the Arab-Israeli conflict, specifically with Gamal Abdul Nasser in Egypt in the 1950s, and it will last only so long as it is useful.
This “profound” insight, what he terms “the heart of the matter,” leads Pipes to conclude:
The phenomenon is more imported than indigenous. And I am somewhat optimistic about the possibility of change, recognizing that the last generation or two have been surrounded by anti-Semitic themes and that some of these will stick. For in contrast with Western anti-Semitism, what one finds in the Muslim world is impersonal. Few Muslims have contact with Jews, and what is emphasized is the conspiratorial dimension, the larger, the theoretical, abstract political dimension rather than personal animus.
That Pipes remains willing to pontificate at all, after his paltry, intellectually lazy, and transparently agenda-driven writings on what he terms “Islamic,” or “Muslim” Antisemitism, is a galling act of hubris. The following succinct overview of painstaking research I have conducted on Islamic Antisemitism soundly debunks Pipes’ slothfully assembled understandings. Not a shard of even this brief, summary evidence I adduce (reams more can be found in The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism) is contained in Pipes’ puny output.
The theological basis of recently deposed Egyptian President Morsi’s conspiratorial, dehumanizing allegations against the Jews—egregiously ignored by Daniel Pipes—is a central Antisemitic motif in the Koran which decrees an eternal curse upon them for purportedly slaying the prophets, and transgressing against the will of Allah (Koran 2:61, and 2:90–91, reiterated at 3:112). It should be noted that Koran 3:112 is featured before the pre-amble to Hamas’ foundational Covenant.
This central motif is coupled to Koranic verses 5:60, and 5:78, which describe the Jews transformation into apes and swine (5:60), or simply apes, (i.e. verses 2:65 and 7:166), having been “ … cursed by the tongue of David, and Jesus, Mary’s son” (5:78). According to the earliest sacralized, pious Muslim biographies of Muhammad (by Ibn Ishaq and Ibn Saad), just before subduing the Medinan Jewish tribe Banu Qurayza and orchestrating the mass execution of their adult males, Islam’s prophet invoked this striking Koranic motif for the Jews debasement, addressing these Jews, with hateful disparagement, as “You brothers of apes.” Muhammad himself also repeats the Koranic curse upon the Jews in a canonical hadith (Sunan Abu Dawoud, Book 37, Number 4322): “He [Muhammad] then recited the verse [5:78]: ‘ … curses were pronounced on those among the children of Israel who rejected Faith, by the tongue of David and of Jesus the son of Mary’ .”
The related verse, Koran 5:64, accuses the Jews of being “spreaders of war and corruption” — a sort of ancient Koranic antecedent of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion — invoked not only by Hamas and Hezbollah leaders, but “moderate” Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who cited Koran 5:64 during a January 2007 speech which urged Palestinian Muslims to end their internecine strife, and to “aim their rifles at Israel.”
Indeed, the Koran’s overall discussion of the Jews is marked by a litany of their sins and punishments, as if part of a divine indictment, conviction, and punishment process. The Jews’ ultimate sin and punishment are made clear: they are the devil’s minions (4:60) cursed by Allah, their faces will be obliterated (4:47), and if they do not accept the true faith of Islam — the Jews who understand their faith become Muslims (3:113) — they will be made into apes (2:65/ 7:166), or apes and swine (5:60), and burn in the Hellfires (4:55, 5:29, 98:6, and 58:14, 15,16,17,18,19).
Classical Koranic commentators such as Tabari (d. 923), Zamakshari (d. 1143), Baydawi (d. 1316), and Ibn Kathir (d. 1373), when discussing Koran 5:82, which includes the statement “Thou wilt surely find the most hostile of men to the believers are the Jews,” concur on the unique animus of the Jews towards the Muslims, which is repeatedly linked to the curse of Koran 2:61/2:90-91/3:112.
For example, in his commentary on Koran 5:82, Tabari writes:
In my opinion, [the Christians] are not like the Jews who always scheme in order to murder the emissaries and the prophets, and who oppose God in his positive and negative commandments, and who corrupt His scripture which He revealed in His books.
Between 2004 and 2010, Muhammad Morsi repeated direct citations of or references to Koran 5:60, 5:64, and 5: 82 during interview discussions of the Jews and Israel. Morsi’s understanding of these verses comports with their classical exegesis in the seminal Tafsir al-Jalalayn — meaning “The Commentary of the Two Jalals,” named after its two Egyptian authors: Al-Suyuti (1445-1505), a brilliant multidisciplinary scholar; and his mentor Jalalu’d-Din al-Mahalli (1389-1459). The great contemporary Dutch Islamologist Johannes J.G. Jansen notes in his treatise “The Interpretation of the Koran in Modern Egypt,” Tafsir al-Jalalayn remains one of the most popular as well as the most authoritative Koranic commentaries in Egypt.
Here are the glosses on 5:60, 5:64, and 5: 82 from Tafsir al-Jalalayn:
[5:60] … those whom Allah has cursed and put far away from His mercy and with whom he is angry — turning some of them into monkeys and into pigs by transmogrification — and who worshipped false gods. These are the Jews … “False gods” refers to Shayṭān [Satan]. They [the Jews] worship him by obeying him. Such people are in a worse situation — because they will be in the Fire — and further from the right way (the Path of the Truth) [i.e., Islam].
[5:64] When their circumstances became reduced because of their denial of the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, after they had previously been the wealthiest of people, the Jews say “Allah’s hand is chained” — implying that He is unable to send provision to them and that He is miserly. Allah is far exalted above that. Allah continues by saying: Their [the Jews’] hands are chained — and kept them from performing good actions as a supplication against them — and they are cursed for what they say! No! Both His hands are open wide — and emphatic description of generosity, and the hands are singled out for mention since what the generous give of their property, they give with their hands — and He gives however He wills — expanding and constricting and no one can object. What has been sent down to you from your Lord increases many of them in insolence and rejection of it. We have cast enmity and hatred between them — each group opposing the others — until the Day of Rising. Each time they [the Jews] kindle the fire of war against the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace Allah extinguishes it. Whenever they try to do that, Allah repels them. They [the Jews] rush about the earth corrupting it through acts of disobedience. Allah does not love corrupters and will punish them.
[5:82] You, Muhammad, will find that the most hostile people to those who believe [i.e., the Muslims] are the Jews and the idolaters … on account of the intensity of their unbelief and ignorance and their preoccupation with following their desires.
Morsi’s conjoining of this doctrinal Islamic Jew-hatred to annihilationist jihadism against the Jews of Israel is also entirely consistent with mainstream, classical Islamic tenets.
Muhammad’s brutal conquest and subjugation of the Medinan Jews and their subsequent expulsion by one of his companions, the (second) “Rightly Guided” Caliph Umar, epitomize permanent, archetypal behavior patterns Islamic Law deemed appropriate to Muslim interactions with Jews. George Vajda’s analysis of the anti-Jewish motifs in the hadith remains the definitive work on this subject. Vajda concluded that according to the hadith, stubborn malevolence is the Jews defining worldly characteristic: rejecting Muhammad and refusing to convert to Islam out of jealousy, envy and even selfish personal interest lead them to acts of treachery, in keeping with their inveterate nature: “ … sorcery, poisoning, assassination held no scruples for them.”
These archetypes sanction Muslim hatred towards the Jews, and the admonition to, at best, “subject [the Jews] to Muslim domination,” as dhimmis (as per Koran 9:29), treated “with contempt,” under certain “humiliating arrangements.”
The Koranic curse (verses 2:61/3:112) upon the Jews for (primarily) rejecting, even slaying Allah’s prophets, including Isa/Jesus (or at least his “body double” 4:157-4:158), is updated with perfect archetypal logic in the canonical hadith: following the Muslims’ initial conquest of the Jewish farming oasis of Khaybar, one of the vanquished Jewesses reportedly served Muhammad poisoned mutton (or goat), which resulted, ultimately, in his protracted, agonizing death. And Ibn Saad’s sira account (i.e., one of the important early pious Muslim biographies of Muhammad) maintains that Muhammad’s poisoning resulted from a well-coordinated Jewish conspiracy.
The contemporary Iranian theocracy’s state-sanctioned Jew hatred employs this motif as part of its malevolent indoctrination of young adult candidates for national teacher training programs. Affirming as objective, factual history the hadith account (for eg., Sahih Bukhari, Volume 3, Book 47, Number 786) of Muhammad’s supposed poisoning by a Jewish woman from ancient Khaybar, Professor Eliz Sanasarian notes,
… the subject became one of the questions in the ideological test for the Teachers’ Training College where students were given a multiple-choice question in order to identify the instigator of the martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammad, the “correct” answer being “a Jewess. ”
It is worth recounting — as depicted in the Muslim sources — the events that antedated Muhammad’s reputed poisoning at Khaybar.
Muhammad’s failures or incomplete successes were consistently recompensed by murderous attacks on the Jews. The Muslim prophet-warrior developed a penchant for assassinating individual Jews, and destroying Jewish communities — by expropriation and expulsion (Banu Quaynuqa and B. Nadir), or massacring their men, and enslaving their women and children (Banu Qurayza). Subsequently, in the case of the Khaybar Jews, Muhammad had the male leadership killed, and plundered their riches. The terrorized Khaybar survivors — industrious Jewish farmers — became prototype subjugated dhimmis whose productivity was extracted by the Muslims as a form of permanent booty. (And according to the Muslim sources, even this tenuous vassalage was arbitrarily terminated within a decade of Muhammad’s death when Caliph Umar expelled the Jews of Khaybar.)
Thus Maimonides (d. 1203), the renowned Talmudist, philosopher, astronomer, and physician, as noted by historian Salo Baron, emphasizes the bellicose “madness” of Muhammad — Maimonides refers to Muhammad as “Meshugga” — and his quest for political control. Muhammad’s mindset, and the actions it engendered, had immediate, and long term tragic consequences for Jews — from his massacring up to 24,000 Jews, to their chronic oppression — as described in the Islamic sources, by Muslims themselves.
As also characterized in the hadith, and analyzed by Vajda, Muslim eschatology (end of times theology) highlights the Jews’ supreme hostility to Islam. Jews are described as adherents of the Dajjâl — the Muslim equivalent of the Anti-Christ — or according to another tradition, the Dajjâl is himself Jewish.
At his appearance, other traditions maintain that the Dajjâl will be accompanied by 70,000 Jews from Isfahan wrapped in their robes and armed with polished sabers, their heads covered with a sort of veil. When the Dajjâl is defeated, his Jewish companions will be slaughtered — everything will deliver them up except for the so-called gharkad tree, as per the canonical hadith (Sahih Muslim, Book 41, Number 6985) included in the 1988 Hamas Covenant (in article 7).
Promoters of modern jihad genocide have repeatedly invoked Islam’s Jew-exterminating eschatology. Hajj Amin el-Husseini, ex-Mufti of Jerusalem and Muslim jihadist who became, additionally, a full-fledged Nazi collaborator and ideologue in his endeavors to abort a Jewish homeland and destroy world Jewry, composed a 1943 recruitment pamphlet for Balkan Muslims entitled, “Islam and the Jews.” This incendiary document was rife with the anti-Semitic Koranic verses cited herein, as well as Jew-hating motifs from the hadith, and concluded with the apocalyptic canonical hadith describing the Jews’ annihilation.
Forty-five years later, the same hadith was incorporated into the 1988 Hamas Covenant, making clear its own aspirations for Jew annihilation.
At present, according to polling data published in July, 2011, 73% of Palestinian Muslims surveyed agree with the annihilationist dictates of this canonical hadith.
Lastly, a profound anti-Jewish motif occurring after the events recorded in the hadith and sira, put forth in early Muslim historiography (for example, by Tabari), is most assuredly a conspiratorial Jew-hating theme associated with “the birth pangs” of Islam: the story of Abd Allah b. Saba, an alleged renegade Yemenite Jew, and founder of the heterodox Shi’ite sect. He is held responsible — identified as a Jew — for promoting the Shi’ite heresy and fomenting the rebellion and internal strife associated with this primary breach in Islam’s “political innocence”, culminating in the assassination of the third Rightly Guided Caliph Uthman, and the bitter, lasting legacy of Sunni-Shi’ite sectarian strife.
Two particularly humiliating “vocations” that were imposed upon Jews by their Muslim overlords in Yemen, and Morocco — where Jews formed the only substantive non-Muslim dhimmi populations — merit elaboration.
Moroccan Jews were confined to ghettos in the major cities, such as Fez (since the 13th century) called mellah(s) (salty earth) which derives from the fact it was here that they were forced to salt the decapitated heads of executed rebels for public exposition. This brutally imposed humiliating practice — which could be enforced even on the Jewish Sabbath — persisted through the late 19th century, as described by Eliezer Bashan:
In the 1870’s, Jews were forced to salt the decapitated heads of rebels on the Sabbath. For example, Berber tribes frequently revolted against Sultan Muhammad XVIII. In order to force them to accept his authority, he would engage in punitive military campaigns. Among the tribes were the Musa, located south of Marrakesh. In 1872, the Sultan succeeded in quelling their revolt and forty-eight of their captives were condemned to death. In October 1872, on the order of the Sultan, they were dispatched to Rabat for beheading. Their decapitated heads were to be exposed on the gates of the town for three days. Since the heads were to be sent to Fez, Jewish ritual slaughterers [of livestock] were forced to salt them and hang them for exposure on the Sabbath. Despite threats by the governor of Rabat, the Jews refused to do so. He then ordered soldiers to enter the homes of those who refused and drag them outside. After they were flogged, the Jews complied and performed the task and the heads of the rebels were exposed in public.
Yemenite Jews had to remove human feces and other waste matter (urine which failed to evaporate, etc.) from Muslim areas, initially in Sanaa, and later in other communities such as Shibam, Yarim, and Dhamar. Decrees requiring this obligation were issued in the late 18th or early 19th century, and re-introduced in 1913. Yehuda Nini reproduces an 1874 letter written by a Yemenite Jew to the Alliance Israelite in Paris, lamenting the practice:
…it is 86 years since our forefathers suffered the cruel decree and great shame to the nation of Israel from the east to sundown…for in the days of our fathers, 86 years ago, there arose a judge known as Qadi, and said unto the king and his ministers who lived in that time that the Lord, Blessed be He, had only created the Jews out of love of the other nations, to do their work and be enslaved by them at their will, and to do the most contemptible and lowly of tasks. And of them all…the greatest contamination of all, to clear their privies and streets and pathways of the filthy dung and the great filth in that place and to collect all that is left of the dung, may your Honor pardon the expression.
And when the Jews were perceived as having exceeded the rightful bounds of this subjected relationship, as in mythically “tolerant” Muslim Spain, the results were predictably tragic. The Granadan Jewish viziers Samuel Ibn Naghrela, and his son Joseph, who protected the Jewish community, were both assassinated between 1056 to 1066, and in the aftermath, the Jewish population was annihilated by the local Muslims. It is estimated that up to four thousand Jews perished in the pogrom by Muslims that accompanied the 1066 assassination. This figure equals or exceeds the number of Jews reportedly killed by the Crusaders during their pillage of the Rhineland, some thirty years later, at the outset of the First Crusade. The inciting “rationale” for this Granadan pogrom is made clear in the bitter anti-Jewish ode of Abu Ishaq, a well-known Muslim jurist and poet of the times, who wrote:
Bring them down to their place and return them to the most abject station. They used to roam around us in tatters covered with contempt, humiliation, and scorn. They used to rummage amongst the dung heaps for a bit of a filthy rag to serve as a shroud for a man to be buried in…Do not consider that killing them is treachery. Nay, it would be treachery to leave them scoffing.
Abu Ishaq’s rhetorical incitement to violence also included the line,
Many a pious Muslim is in awe of the vilest infidel ape
Moshe Perlmann, in his analysis of the Muslim anti-Jewish polemic of 11th century Granada, notes,
[Abu Ishaq] Elbiri used the epithet “ape” (qird) profusely when referring to Jews. Such indeed was the parlance.
The Moroccan cleric al-Maghili (d. 1505), referring to the Jews as “brothers of apes” (just as Muhammad, the sacralized prototype, had addressed the Banu Qurayza), who repeatedly blasphemed the Muslim prophet, and whose overall conduct reflected their hatred of Muslims, fomented, and then personally lead, a Muslim pogrom (in ~ 1490) against the Jews of the southern Moroccan oasis of Touat, plundering and killing them en masse, and destroying their synagogue in neighboring Tamantit. An important Muslim theologian whose writings influenced Moroccan religious attitudes towards Jews into the 20th century, al-Maghili also declared in verse, “Love of the Prophet, requires hatred of the Jews.”
Mordechai Hakohen (1856-1929) was a Libyan Talmudic scholar and auto-didact anthropologist who composed an ethnographic study of North African Jewry in the early 20th century. Hakohen describes the overall impact on the Jews of the Muslim jihad conquest and rule of North Africa, as follows:
They [also] pressed the Jews to enter the covenant of the Muslim religion. Many Jews bravely chose death. Some of them accepted 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 of the land, and accepted a life of woe — carrying no weapons, never mounting an animal in the presence of a Muslim, not wearing a red headdress, and following other laws that signaled their degradation.
Here is but an incomplete sampling of pogroms and mass murderous violence against Jews living under Islamic rule, across space and time, all resulting from the combined effects of jihadism, general anti-dhimmi, and/or specifically Antisemitic motifs in Islam: 6,000 Jews massacred in Fez in 1033; hundreds of Jews slaughtered in Muslim Cordoba between 1010 and 1015; 4,000 Jews killed in Muslim riots in Grenada in 1066, wiping out the entire community; the Berber Muslim Almohad depredations of Jews (and Christians) in Spain and North Africa between 1130 and 1232, which killed tens of thousands, while forcibly converting thousands more, and subjecting the forced Jewish converts to Islam to a Muslim Inquisition; the murderous persecutions of the Jews of Egypt by al-Hakim during the early 11th century, one of which was timed for Passover in 1012; Jews in Alexandria and Cairo being pogromed and plundered in 1047, 1168, 1265, and 1324; and Sultan Baybars in the 13th century blaming Jews for starting a plague, and subjecting them to extortion, massacre, and expulsion; the 1291 pogroms in Baghdad and its environs, which killed (at least) hundreds of Jews; the 1465 pogrom against the Jews of Fez; the late 15th century pogrom against the Jews of the Southern Moroccan oasis town of Touat; the 1679 pogroms against, and then expulsion of 10,000 Jews from Sanaa, Yemen to the unlivable, hot and dry Plain of Tihama, from which only 1,000 returned alive, in 1680, 90% having died from exposure; recurring Muslim anti-Jewish violence — including pogroms and forced conversions — throughout the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, which rendered areas of Iran (for example, Tabriz) Judenrein; the 1834 pogrom in Safed where raging Muslim mobs killed and grievously wounded hundreds of Jews; the 1888 massacres of Jews in Isfahan and Shiraz, Iran; the 1910 pogrom in Shiraz; the pillage and destruction of the Casablanca, Morocco ghetto in 1907; the pillage of the ghetto of Fez Morocco in 1912; the government sanctioned anti-Jewish pogroms by Muslims in Turkish Eastern Thrace during June-July, 1934 which ethnically cleansed at least 3000 Jews; and the series of pogroms, expropriations, and finally mass expulsions of some 900,000 Jews from Arab Muslim nations, beginning in 1941 in Baghdad (the murderous “Farhud,” during which 600 Jews were murdered, and at least 12,000 pillaged) — eventually involving cities and towns in Egypt, Morocco, Libya, Syria, Aden, Bahrain, and culminating in 1967 in Tunisia — that accompanied the planning and creation of a Jewish state, Israel, on a portion of the Jews’ ancestral homeland.
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