Anti-Semitism is Racism (FrontPageMagazine.com) by Daniel Greenfield 05/09/12)
Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/09/anti-semitism-is-racism/
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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.
Like Hitler, Islam and the left have made it their goal to destroy
Jewish ideas, but have found themselves unable to do so without also
physically destroying the Jewish people. The Nazis, the Communists
and the Muslims all came to the conclusion that there is no way to
destroy the Jewish idea without also destroying the Jewish body. For
all three the war of ideas sooner or later comes down to genocide.
The Nazis were open in their racial animus, while Islam and the left
have pretended that their opposition was limited to Jewish ideas, to
Judaism and Zionism, but while their persecution of Jews has been
sharpest toward those who profess Jewish ideas, that never stopped
them from persecuting even Jewish fellow-travelers and dhimmis.
The left begins by denying that it is Anti-Semitic, then it denies
that the Jews are a race, finally it denies that hating them is
wrong. Islam’s chief contribution has been to provide a justification
for progressive Anti-Semitism by once again painting the Jews as
members of an oppressor group. And the left has repaid the favor by
manufacturing an Islamophobia crisis to protect Islamic racism from
criticism while deflecting the accusations of racism as Islamophobic.
Anti-Semitism is racism. It is arguably the most ancient form of
racism dating back far to the first days of recorded human history.
Even as the left prides itself on its tolerance and humanism, it
sinks back into a mire of hatred as old as the pyramids. The
persecution of the Jews has always been racial. It is still racial.
That racial hatred may be dressed up in conspiracy theories about
international Jewish power and an obsessive campaign against the
Jewish State, but friction always exposes the root of the hatred, the
raw throbbing nerve underneath the skin. (Copyright © 2012
FrontPageMagazine.com 05/09/12)
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