Yesterday's Il Giornale newspaper (Italy) has an interesting essay by Stefano Magni on Islamic anti-Semitism. While acknowledging that anti-Semitism comes from many directions, including the extreme right, Magni argues that most anti-Semitism today comes from Islamic quarters, an opinion I happen to share.
Magni's op-ed is translated by Fousesquawk.
The new anti-Semitism and the Islamic elephant in the room
March 1, 2022-07:42
Stefano Magni
There is much confusion under Heaven about anti-Semitism. Invoked when it doesn't exist, used as a propaganda club against one's enemies, for decades it has been going through a transformation that few analyze, but everyone sees. The principal matrix of Jew-phobia is Islamic and no longer from the extreme right.
There is much confusion under Heaven about anti-Semitism. Invoked when it doesn't exist, used as a propaganda club against one's enemies (the Russians, for example, accusing the Ukrainians of anti-Semitism and neo-Nazism, even if they elected by a wide majority a Jewish president), anti-Semitism is increasing in Western society in an exponential way, especially after two years of a pandemic. Usually, the blame is placed on that which was the most virulent anti-Semite of the 20th century: The Nazi, the fascist, the authoritarian nationalist in its various forms. The root of anti-Semitism is still traced to the 19th century, in the pogroms conducted by Christians, especially Orthodox. And in the centuries of the modern era, to point the finger at the Catholic Church and the Spanish Inquisition. But even if the TV news services, every time they speak of anti-Semitism, by conditioned reflex, images of swastikas and shave heads still being shown, are we sure that that is still the principal matrix of hate against the Jews?
At least since the years of the war on terror, of which the most acute phase was between 2001 and 2008, the most liberal intellectuals in France, like Alain Finkielkraut, pointed to a new enemy: Anti-Judaism of an Islamist matrix ( known as political Islam) and its numerous connections with the maximalist left. In the name of anti-racism, above all, is also associated the rhetoric of Islamic anti-Zionism, which automatically translates into anti-Semitism. The target is not only Israel but the Jew as such, wherever he is. The attacks in France of an anti-Semitic matrix, such as the massacre at the Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012 and that of Hyper Catcher in Paris in 2015 (contemporaneous with the massacre of the editors of the satirical newspaper, Charlie Hebdo), are of Islamic matrix. Also the individual crimes like the robbery, torture, and murder of Ilan Halimi in 2006, more recently, the murder of Sarah Halimi in 2017 (whose assassin remains unpunished because he was deemed "not prosecutable"), and of Mireille Knoll in 2018, were all committed by common delinquents. Who, however, were also Muslims, were radicalized, and killed their victims explicitly because they were Jews. Mireille Knoll, stabbed and then burned in her house by a neighbor who she knew, a victim who suffered the passage from one anti-Semitism to another. The old woman, born 1932, had miraculously escaped the Nazi roundup in 1942. She found death in the following century, at the hand of a young man who adhered to a different totalitarianism.
To reveal the existence of this elephant in the room, which is difficult to see and condemn, most recently is Pierre Andre Teguieff, the Franch sociologist and historian. As a scholar of the New Right, he doesn't deny at all the neo-Nazi and nationalist matrices of part of the current anti-Semitic galaxy, but in his new essay, Leaving Anti-Semitism?, he notes in his interview published by Le Figaro, what is now the new universal tendency of anti-Semitism: "The great transformation resides in the growing Islamization of Jew-phobia, across the space occupied since the end of the 1960s on the part of the "Palestinian cause" raised to the "universal cause" of the new anti-Jewish imagery now shared by Muslims and non-Muslims. Since the beginning of the 2000 (decade), the murders of French people of the Jewish faith as Jews are not committed by extremists of the left or right, but by young Muslim men, often delinquents or ex-delinquents, either being jihadists in mission or not-like Mohammed Merah (the attacker of Toulouse, editor's note) or Amedy Coulibaly (perpetrator of the taking of hostages at Hyper Cacher, editors note).
If Islamism is the principal matrix, this then finds Western shores, the extreme right or extreme left. And in both cases, it exploits the common hate for Israel and Zionism, that which is identified in its conspiratorial mythology (common in both extremes) as the beast that dominates the world, through finance, the media, popular art (especially the cinema), and the infiltration into government. A hallucinatory vision of reality that marries very well with the religious demonization of the Jew on the part of radical Islamists. Teguieff notes, in fact, that: "While from the end of the 1870s to the mid-20th century, militant Jew phobia had embraced the presuppositions of secularization and scientific racism, breaking with the religious anti-Judaism of Christian origin - from which it inherited, nonetheless, the Satanizing vision of the enemy. Then came the vast counter-movement of de-secularization, rediscovering a religious base in a bellicose Islam that we can characterize as a political Islam, which feeds off resentment and a desire for revenge-against the Jews and the "crusaders"- as well as a wish to conquer the world."
The Anti Defamation League, which every year, "charts" the spread of anti-Semitic prejudice throughout the world, in 2021, as always in recent decades, has published data that confirms the Islamization of anti-Semitism. 49% of anti-Semites, throughout the world, are of the Muslim faith, compared to 24% for the Christain faith and 21% for atheists (a significant figure in order to understand the trend of the maximalist left). So almost half of anti-Semitism on the entire planet is of Islamic matrix. Speaking of geographical areas, the area of the world with the highest concentration of anti-Semites is the greater Middle East (including North Africa) with 74% of survey respondents, which shows that they share the worst prejudices and fears against Jews. It is a unique figure in the world compared to 34% in Eastern Europe, 24% in Western Europe, and 19% in America. The nations from which come the greatest part of Muslim immigrants in France are, by far, among the most anti-Semitic in the world. The ADL, in fact, notes the spread of hostility against the Jews at 87% in Algeria, 86% in Tunisia, 80% in Morocco, (and) "only" 53% in Senegal.
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