Greenfield - Anti-Semitism Is Racism

Daniel Greenfield..
Frontpagemag.com
09 May '12..

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.

Link: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/09/anti-semitism-is-racism/

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. He is completing a book on the international challenges America faces in the 21st century.

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