Anti-Semitism Is Racism Posted By Daniel Greenfield
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/09/anti-semitism-is-racism/print/
Islam is not a race. Even though Islamophobia has become the great obsession of the politically correct elites of the Western world– there is nothing innate about Islam. One is not born a Muslim and there is no double helix of DNA that intertwines with the Koran. Muslims are followers of a belief system and no belief system should be above criticism or reproach.
Jews however are a race, a fact that has been known for thousands of years and has been backed up by genetic evidence in modern times. A fact that has been dismissed by liberals who are eager to denounce racism except when it comes to the one particular race that they have given themselves permission to hate.
By embracing the Islamophobia narrative, the left prioritized combating discrimination against a belief system over combating discrimination against a race, reversing its past position that racial prejudice is worse than any other form of prejudice because it persecutes an innate aspect of the individual, rather than an external adopted one. And when the two were in conflict over the racist aspect of the ideology, it chose the ideology and its racism.
Leftist and Islamic persecution of Jews and the common alliance of the two groups have made it necessary for the left to ignore or even legitimize displays of Anti-Semitism. The supremacy of these two ideologies over the rights and humanity of the most persecuted racial minority in the world are the toxic ingredients in the “New Anti-Semitism” which has revived Anti-Semitic racial prejudice as a progressive value.
American and European elites have become obsessed with protecting a single religion from any criticism, even when that religion comes burdened with an ugly legacy of racism that believes the Jewish people are its eternal enemies who must be destroyed in an apocalyptic Islamic genocide that concludes with every rock crying out, “O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him!”
The rocks have remained silent, but left-wing newspapers have taken up the call in their place. Jewish store windows are smashed, synagogues burned, schools attacked and children murdered, while the media ignores, justifies, whitewashes and even occasionally praises these crimes. Every other news story from the Middle East is either an attack on the Jewish State or a celebration of the Muslim Brotherhood and its plans for a genocidal theocracy stretching across the region and eventually across the world.
Attacks reminiscent of the work of Goebbels’ pet propagandists regularly make their way into the pages of The Guardian and Time Magazine as part of the Leftist-Islamic alliance against the Jews. Warnings about growing Anti-Semitism are ridiculed or dismissed while Islamophobia is treated as a grave threat, even though crime statistics clearly show a far higher numbers of attacks on Jews contrasted with a fairly insignificant numbers of attacks on Muslims.
The left cannot deny the hate crimes statistics, so instead it chooses to ignore them. The artificial reality bubbles sent up by its media empires clamor about the manufactured crisis of Islamophobia, while claiming Anti-Semitism is largely overblown, a tool that it insists Jews use to silence Muslims and leftists. The same elites who claimed that McCarthyism was worse than the Gulags, now claim that Islamophobia is worse than Anti-Semitism.
Criticize the affiliates of the genocidal Muslim Brotherhood and the cry of “Islamophobia” goes up from the disciples and propagandists of a group that was inspired by Mohammed and Adolf Hitler. And the media immediately takes up their call. No sooner does a Muslim leader, from Ahmadinejad to Raed Salah, make an Anti-Semitic statement than a thousand columnists rush to claim that he was mistranslated, misquoted or misunderstood.
Israel stands at the critical intersection of this debate. The Jewish claim to the land is based on the history of its people while the Muslim claim to the land is entirely ahistorical. Islam is a religion, not a people, and its claim to the territory rests on religious supremacy through a trip taken by Mohammed on a flying horse. The fiction of an ancient “Palestinian people” was a temporary convenience that is being set aside by Hamas leaders looking to join Gaza together with a Muslim Brotherhood run Egypt.
The struggle between Israel and the Muslim world is a struggle between a people and an ideology, just as the struggle between Israel and the left is a struggle between a people and an ideology. Islam and the left both represent transnational ideologies and as an ethno-religious group, the Jews remain an obstacle for the transnationalists of Islam and the left.
