http://pjmedia.com/blog/muhammad-morsis-islamic-jew-hatred-bernard-lewis-islamic-negationism/?print=1
Why do the media’s Middle East pundits ignore the Jew-hatred intrinsic to Islamic doctrine?
A month has passed since the Middle East Media Research Institute posted a 2010 video interview [1] of Muslim Brotherhood leader, and now Egyptian President, Muhammad Morsi spewing Antisemitic vitriol. Morsi’s comments [2] included a characterization of today’s Zionists — plainly Jews in his parlance — as “descendants of apes and pigs” — a specific invocation of Koran 5:60 [3], which he had repeated, elsewhere, in print interviews [4], and commentaries [5].
That this dehumanizing Koranic [6] depiction was in reference to Jews has been validated by the most authoritative classical and modern exegeses [6]* (“tafsir,” or commentaries) on the Koran [7], the words [8] of Muhammad himself (as recorded in the sira, or pious Muslim biographies of Islam’s prophet), as well as a large corpus of Islamic theological writings [6] which demonstrate the motif’s application [6] by Muslims over a nearly 1400-year continuum.
Yet to this day, thousands of reports and opinion pieces later (search “Morsi” + “apes and pigs” using Google.com to estimate the vast output [9]), only a handful have noted this irrefragable [6] link to a Koranic verse [7] (i.e., 5:60 [3]) declaring the Jews to be apes and pigs. The apotheosis of this negationist trend was captured in a January 27, 2013 Times of Israel interview [10] of Charles Small, head of the itinerant Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP). Small piously proclaimed that ISGAP was uniquely committed to addressing what was framed as “Islamic” Antisemitism, because,
There’s a reluctance among scholars to open up this subject [i.e., “Islamic” Antisemitism]. This subject is dangerous, embarrassing. It touches on various political interests in international relations that people don’t really want to engage with.
However, also ignoring Morsi’s repetition of the Koran 5:60 [3] “apes and pigs” reference, Small made this pathognomonic assertion [10], “The danger does not come from Islam itself.”
What explains the almost uniform, egregious omission of Morsi’s Koranic reference, and Small’s [10] broader see-no-Islam in “Islamic” Antisemitism mindset, displayed even by politically centrist [11] or conservative [12] Western media outlets, and the centrist or conservative “Middle East experts [11]” opining for them? I argue that such willful blindness is rooted in the misrepresentation of Islamic Jew-hatred — indeed its frank denial as a coherent doctrine — by one of the leading contemporary scholars of Islam, turned late-blooming, ubiquitous public intellectual, whose limited, dogmatic investigation of the subject, has smothered all such desperately required discussion. That scholar is Bernard Lewis.