The Jew is Not My Enemy (2 page)

Today, a growing number of Islamists and Muslim intelligentsia accept that the Jews control the world, and that everyone, from David Cameron to Barack Obama, from Stephen Harper to Nicholas Sarkozy, dances to the tune of the Jew.

When one of the towering political leaders of the Muslim world joins in the talk of Jewish conspiracies, it is time to be concerned – not for the sake of Jews, but for Muslims. Tun Mahathir bin Mohamad, the former prime minister of Malaysia, stands, for all his faults, like a giant among the Muslim world’s ragtag army of pompous, overdressed, self-conscious, self-righteous, ego-ridden leaders. A product of a democracy and the leader of a multiracial and multireligious society, Mahathir led Malaysia for twenty-two years, from 1981 to 2003, and is credited not only with engineering Malaysia’s rapid modernization but with rescuing the country from the 1997 Asian economic crisis.

The son of an Indian father and a Malay mother, Mahathir is widely respected and admired in the Muslim world. I have met him twice, once in 2005, when he was still prime minister, and again in 2009, in his office on the eighty-second floor in the Petronas Towers of Kuala Lumpur. I have known him as one of the wiser elder statesmen of the Muslim world. This is why I was shocked when I read his remarks at a 2010 conference in Indonesia. In his speech, Mahathir voiced his disappointment that Barack Obama had not yet ended the war in Afghanistan, and suggested that it was the Jewish lobby in the United States that was behind the president’s decision not to pursue peace. He said, “There are forces in the United States which prevent the president from doing some things. One of the forces is the Jewish lobby.” That was bad enough, but it was what he said next that made me shudder. Jews, he said, “had always been a problem in European countries. They had to be confined to ghettoes and periodically massacred. But still they remained, they thrived and they held whole governments to ransom … Even after their massacre by the Nazis of Germany, they survived to continue to be a source of even greater problems for the world.”
³

Beyond the young Salman Hossain of Toronto and the former prime minister of Malaysia, there are over one billion Muslims worldwide, and they are constantly being told by clerics about the essential deviousness of the Jew and the global conspiracies he weaves. Adding to this paranoia is the global Muslim community’s false sense of victimhood, which is leaving a deep scar on our consciousness. As the rest of the world makes rapid advances in technology, culture, arts, literature, and social development, the Muslim world seems frozen in time, obsessed with the past, and outpaced by such developing nations as Brazil, India, South Africa, and China. The Muslim community – better known as the ummah – is left paralyzed in the quagmire of stagnation. In the absence of any rational explanation for this malaise, all we can do is indulge in blame, self-pity, or hate.

And at the top of the Muslim blame game is the continued occupation of the Palestinian territories. Irrespective of who is responsible for the sorry state of the Palestinians, after thirty-five years of occupation, the cause of Palestine is still invoked around the Muslim world, both to distract the community from its own needs and to blame all our shortcomings on some fictitious Jewish conspiracy. By refusing to recognize not just the legality of the state of Israel but also the right of Jews to have a state of their own in the Holy Land, the Arab leadership has failed the Palestinian people time after time.

For me, a discussion about Muslim-Jewish relations or the Arab-Israeli dispute becomes a non-starter the moment the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state is challenged. Having said that, I firmly believe Israel, in continuing its occupation of the West Bank, is in serious violation of international law. I am against this occupation not because I am Muslim, but because I am against the occupation of any people by a foreign country. Whether it is Morocco’s continued occupation of Western Sahara, Sudan’s occupation of Darfur, Indonesia’s now ended occupation of East Timor, or the refusal by four Muslim countries – Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran – to permit the Kurdish people a state of their own, for me, they all merit equal attention. For the Muslims of the world, the 1925 invasion of the Kingdom of Hejaz by the Sultanate of Nejd and the continued occupation of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina by the Saudi royal family should be our primary reason for anger. But it is not. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find any scholar or sheikh who would dare mention this sad part of contemporary Islamic history.

I am neither Arab nor Jew. I am an Indian born in Pakistan whose Hindu ancestors in the Punjab converted to Islam in the nineteenth century. My heritage was deeply interwoven with that of the Sikh religion and Hinduism’s ancient wisdom. The Islam of Punjab had no room for hate. The three faith communities were woven together by a common culture, cuisine, and clothing, and by a humour that could defuse the most intense altercation. Yet in 1947 – Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs - we managed to break a thousand-year-old relationship in a frenzy of bloodletting that killed a million people in a matter of six short months. How then could I, a child of a maniacal religious massacre, afford to hate the “other”?

As I write in this book’s closing chapter, my birthplace had no tradition of anti-Semitism in the late 1940s and ’50s. Yet, in a visit to Pakistan in 2006, I was taken aback by the ubiquitous hostility towards the Jewish people. I was told incessantly that the Jews “controlled” the United States and that throughout history the Jews have connived to become the puppet masters of the rest of the human race. My host and his friends were among the wealthy and well-educated elites of the land. The home where Muslim marginalization was being discussed boasted half a dozen cars in the driveway, a retinue of servants, and a front lawn that was larger than several backyards put together. Yet they talked as if they were plotting the Bolshevik uprising in Petrograd.

“Why are all cab drivers in Chicago Muslim, why not Jewish?” one friend asked. I pointed out that the net wealth of American Muslims is almost equal to that of American Jews, but it failed to have any influence on the assembled group. I was accused of being brainwashed by the Jews, of being on their payroll. I laughed off what in the Islamic world is the ultimate insult to a Muslim – an allegation of being a Jewish lackey. I asked my friends if they were aware that Jews had come to the United States as poor immigrants escaping persecution in Europe in the nineteenth century, yet were able to assimilate and, through hard work, make incredible contributions to American life. I urged them to consider the fact that even though Jews make up just 2 per cent of the U.S. population, they form 21 per cent of the Ivy League student body. I pointed out that this 2 per cent of the American population accounts for 38 per cent of
Business Week’s
list of leading philanthropists, 51 per cent of the Pulitzer Prize winners for non-fiction, and 37 per cent of Academy Award–winning directors. But they saw in the same statistics the evidence of their conspiracy theories: “That just proves the Jews control the U.S.A.” I was speechless. Instead of recognizing the Jewish community’s hard work and its focus on education, innovation, and entrepreneurship, my friends attributed Jewish success to the fact that they controlled all the avenues to power.

That was the moment I decided I had to write, to right the wrong. I mulled over the subject for more than a year, talked to a few Islamic scholars, met a couple of rabbis, and read well over a hundred texts of history and theology, but in the end decided to give up. “You will end up antagonizing both the Jews as well as the Arabs,” my wife counselled. “This is not your fight, and no good will come of it.” I reluctantly hung up my gloves.

Then, in November 2008, came the terrorist attacks on Mumbai, in which Pakistani jihadis murdered hundreds, among them a rabbi, his pregnant wife, and other members of a local Jewish community centre. I was horrified. Why would a group of Punjabi villagers seek out a Jewish centre in a densely populated part of Mumbai to massacre Jews? It is unlikely they could ever have met a Jew, let alone have a grievance with him, yet they had been brainwashed by their Islamist handlers to the extent that they were willing to die to kill a few Jews. What had the Jews done to Pakistan? As I watched the television coverage of the flames rising over Mumbai, I resolved to challenge this hate before it consumes all of us in an Armageddon foretold in medieval literature, but one that will occur in the shadows of nuclear mushroom clouds.

This book is an attempt to answer the question, why do Muslims hate Jews? What is the source of this hatred, and how can we end this cancer before it consumes us Muslims?

In my fight against Muslim anti-Semitism, I am not alone. Muslim voices around the world are making brave attempts in the face of intimidation and slander to fight the rise of jihadi Islamism. My friend and Danish member of Parliament Naser Khedar, the son of Palestinian parents, has spoken eloquently against Islamic extremism, despite several death threats. British Muslims for Secular Democracy, the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, the Muslim Canadian Congress, German M.P. Elkin Deligöz, American-Egyptian columnist Mona Eltahawy, Sweden’s Burundi-born minister of integration Nyamko Sabuni, Algerian-born French cabinet minister Fadela Amara, and the Moroccan-born mayor of Rotterdam, Ahmed Aboutaleb, are just some of the prominent Muslims standing up against hate.

Another of them is Cem Özdemir, the head of the German Green Party. Of Turkish ancestry, he is the first Muslim to head a major political party anywhere in Europe or North America. In February 2009, Özdemir told the German newspaper
Frankfurter Rundschau
that he was worried by the rise of Muslim anti-Semitism in Germany, and asked Berlin to take anti-Semitic tendencies among its Muslim population seriously. “We must unfortunately acknowledge that there are anti-Semitic mindsets not only in the right-wing or among the so-called left-wing anti-imperialists, but also in the Muslim community – particularly among male Arabic, Turkish and Kurdish youths,” he said. He urged other Muslim-German leaders to draw clear lines and to stress that anyone who displays anti-Semitic sentiments would not be allowed to represent the community. Özdemir was responding to a study by the German Interior Ministry that found that almost 16 per cent of Muslim students surveyed agreed with the statement “People of Jewish faith are arrogant and greedy for money.”
⁴

For Jew-haters like Osama bin Laden and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the question of Palestine is merely an excuse, not the reason. The Islamist hatred of the Jew has little do with the state of Israel or a supposed love for Palestine. If tomorrow Ahmadinejad was able to fulfill his threat to wipe Israel from the face of the earth, hatred of the Jew would continue unabated. The only way to end it is to challenge with courage the fundamental myths that sustain Judeophobia.

To help understand this phenomenon of hatred, consider this speech by Egyptian cleric Muhammad Hussein Yaqub that aired on Al-Rahma TV on January 17, 2009:

There is no denying that Islamic texts contain language that depicts Jews in unfavourable terms. But much of what inspires Muslims to hate Jews comes from man-made texts known as the Hadith literature, the supposed sayings of Prophet Muhammad recorded two hundred years after his death and passed off as divine truths. (I will address these in more detail in
chapter 5
.) Sheikh Yaqub is just one of countless clerics schooled by Saudi universities or Saudi-funded madrassahs in the Hadith literature. The clerics study Islamic history not as history per se, but as theology.

By any rational standard, Muslims and Jews should have been, and could be, partners. Their faiths are very similar; the Jewish Torah, customs, rituals, and diet found their way into Islam to the extent that one Muslim has described Islam as “the Jewish faith planted on Arab pagan culture.” That may be an exaggeration, but the fact remains that far more unites the two people than divides them. We pray to the same God; Muslims honour Abraham, Moses, David, and Solomon as our prophets; and we are free to marry among the Jews. There were times when Muslims and Jews even prayed together around the stone covered today by the Dome on the Rock.

Prof. Moshe Sharon of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University writes about an early Jewish Midrash – a commentary on Hebrew scripture – known as Nistarot Rabbi Shimon Bar Yohai, which hailed Muslims as the initiators of Israel’s redemption and the Muslim caliph Abd al-Malik, who built the Dome on the Rock, as the builder of the House of the Lord. Sharon quotes one tradition that says, “The Jews used to light the lamps of Bayt al-Maqdis.” “Bayt al-Maqdis,” he writes, “is the exact Arabic rendering of the Hebrew Beit Hamikdash, and is reminiscent of the lighting of the Menorah in the Temple.” Other Islamic traditions mention Temple customs practised by Jews in the Dome, such as the use of incense and oil lamps, and prayer services conducted by
wuld Harun
, Arabic for “the sons of Aaron.”
⁵

Where we Muslims differ from Jews is also significant. Jews consider themselves a specific monotheistic people, with roots going back to Abraham, his son Isaac, and the ancient Holy Land, whereas Muslims, while adhering to the same tradition of strict monotheism, define themselves not in geographic or ethnic terms, but rather as a community that transcends ethnicity and race, at least in principle. This makes it possible for anyone to embrace Islam, be they from China or Brazil. The Muslim is tied not to land, but rather to God and Muhammad’s message. The Jew, on the other hand, defines his identity with a return to Jerusalem and Eretz Israel as his eternal homeland.