Reasons why Muslims are not ‘the new Jews’ By Julie Burchill,
http://www.thejc.com/comment-and-debate/comment/153626/reasons-why-muslims-are-not-new-jews
In 2006, the Sunday Times columnist India Knight wrote a piece arguing that Muslims are “the new Jews”, in which she attacked Jack Straw for asking female Muslim constituents consulting him at his Blackburn surgery to consider uncovering their noses and mouths in order to allow better communication. (I use the word “attacked” loosely; if, as Denis Healey said, being dissed by Geoffrey Howe was like “being savaged by a dead sheep” then being attacked by Knight is akin to being traduced by a twice-used tea-bag.)
A decade later, so many sad souls have clambered aboard this ship of fools that it’s a wonder it stays afloat, so extreme is the level of dysentery masquerading as discourse which issues from it. Most recently, Holocaust Memorial Day was used by Islamists and their grisly groupies as the opening steps to a danse macabre of what-aboutery, comparing the Kindertransport to the current influx of refugees from the Muslim world and implying that if we do not welcome them all to our shores with open arms, we are as bad as the Nazis.
But those who make such hysterical comparisons are, in my view, the silly led by the sinister, as the Sainted Hitchens once dismissed the Not In My Name mob.
How are Muslims not the New Jews? Let me count the ways.
For a start, there seems to be no sign of any sort of Kindertransport in action – rather, the modus operandi would appear to be “women and children last” judging by the huge groups of able-bodied young men who have found their way to the West. And this of course leads to the sort of trouble we saw in Cologne. Though no one could accuse Jewish men of not being interested in sex, I don’t recall any accounts of marauding bands of Jewish youths mob-handedly molesting gentile women on the streets of countries which gave them refuge.
Splendidly Chinese girls from poor homes are now the highest achieving group of school children in Britain
Western women are now being told by the governors of some European cities that they should do their best not to inflame men, many of whom are coming from countries where child-marriage is legal, where scholars say it’s fine to sexually assault non-believers and where it is allowable to attack young women out on their own, singly or in groups. The Muslim Brotherhood was behind the gangs of men attacking young women who dared leave their homes unescorted in Egypt from the 1960s onwards.
Which makes one wonder why, if these men find it so hard to drag their sexual attitudes into the 19th century, they can’t seek refuge instead in one of the whopping 50-plus Muslim majority countries, quite a few of which are extremely rich and rather empty.
Here is another way in which Muslims are not the new Jews: there is only one tiny Jewish majority country, which did not exist until 1948, and so the Jews fleeing persecution throughout the centuries had no place of assured safety until recently; yet another reason why supporters of Israel such as myself are so passionate about its survival. The Jews who came to Britain as refugees came to a very different country, with no welfare state, also speaking no English and with little money. The late Lord Weidenfeld famously arrived on the run from the Nazis with 16 shillings in his pocket and went on to become one of the great publishers and philanthropists of our time.
But even for less dynamic Jewish immigrants, “from Bethnal Green to Golders Green took two generations” as the old saying goes, due to this people’s remarkable lack of self-pity and extraordinary work ethic, seen more recently in the Indian and Chinese communities.
Splendidly, Chinese girls from poor homes are now the highest achieving group of schoolchildren in Britain. Sadly, due to much of the Muslim community’s positively Stone Age disdain for educating women (see the recent hysteria which greeted David Cameron’s offer of a £20 million programme to teach Muslim women English; Lord forfend they might pick up any fancy Western feministic ideas – like speaking) they seem unlikely to follow the Jews out of poverty any time soon.
Jewish refugees left the virulently antisemitic countries of Eastern Europe for the moderately antisemitic countries of Western Europe and considered it a good exchange, grasping the new freedom that came their way and running with it. Certain sections of the Muslim community, on the other hand, seem to veer between rather hysterical extremes of victorhood and victimhood – Cry Bullies, if you will – one moment carrying banners telling us that Sharia law will rule us soon, and the next crying to Tell Mama (the organisation which measures anti-Muslim attacks).
Somewhat embarrassingly, a recent Freedom of Information request by a Sikh organisation found that of 400 anti-Muslim “hate crimes” recorded in the first half of last year, 28 per cent were not on Muslims at all.
But I don’t mind the stats which tell us how many Muslims were attacked so long as we also get the stats on how many Muslims attacked people, including their own people in so-called “honour crimes”, which are actually hate crimes of the most cowardly kind, usually committed on defenceless young girls by one or more fully-grown men.
Meanwhile, antisemitic attacks continue to rise – and the Jewish Community Security Trust doesn’t need to add attacks on Christians to bulk up the numbers.
As I pointed out to India Knight, the funny thing is that, if anybody were to tell a Muslim that he’s a New Jew, he will very likely be extremely cross.
It’s fair to say that old, white, right-wing antisemitism was on the wane in Europe – until the influx of Muslim immigrants gave it a fresh’n’funky facelift.
Now it’s becoming grotesquely fashionable. Reuters reported last month that Jews in Germany, of all places, are hiding their identity when volunteering at refugee shelters after being spat on by refugees they were attempting to help.
A 2013 study by the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights found that 64 per cent of German Jews avoid the public display of symbols that would identify them as Jewish, while it also found that only 28 per cent of them bother to report antisemitic incidents.
Muslims are not the new Jews – Jews are the new Jews and sadly Muslims now number greatly among their chief tormentors.
But there is a greater issue at stake here, far beyond the different standards of behaviour displayed by Jewish refugees in the past and Muslim refugees now. Wherever the Jews have gone, they have enriched and opened up the host culture far beyond the extent even to which they have enriched and opened up themselves.
Their gifts to us – Christianity, Marxism, Hollywood – are almost solely responsible for the freedom and dynamism of the Western world. Without these gifts, we would still be inarticulate semi-beasts who belonged to others and dreamed no dreams. (In parts of the Muslim world, this is still the lot of women.)
In my opinion, mass Muslim immigration – and specifically, pandering on the part of vote-hungry politicians – is not only not likely to help us progress further but, in the areas I have outlined, is likely to actually take us backwards.
But of all the issues that I have believed I was right about over the past four decades as a public commentator, there is none I wish more fervently to be wrong about.
In fact, I pray with all my heart that India Knight is right. And there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.
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