Raised on hatred

I hadn't seen this before - Ayaan Hirsi Ali last week at the NYT, when Egyptian leader Mohammed Morsi's anti-Semitic rant of three years back emerged:

For far too long the pervasive Middle Eastern qualification of Jews as murderers and bloodsuckers was dismissed in the West as extreme views expressed by radical fringe groups. But they are not. In truth, those Muslims who think of Jews as friends and fellow human beings with a right to their own state are a minority, and are under intense pressure to change their minds.

All over the Middle East, hatred for Jews and Zionists can be found in textbooks for children as young as three, complete with illustrations of Jews with monster-like qualities. Mainstream educational television programs are consistently anti-Semitic. In songs, books, newspaper articles and blogs, Jews are variously compared to pigs, donkeys, rats and cockroaches, and also to vampires and a host of other imaginary creatures.

Consider this infamous dialogue between a three-year-old and a television presenter, eight years before Morsi’s remarks.

Presenter: “Do you like Jews?”

Three-year-old: “No.”

“Why don’t you like them?”

“Jews are apes and pigs.”

“Who said this?”

“Our God.”

“Where did he say this?”

“In the Koran.”

The presenter responds approvingly: “No [parents] could wish for Allah to give them a more believing girl than she ... May Allah bless her, her father and mother.”

This conversation was not caught on hidden camera or taped by propagandists. It was featured on a prominent program called “Muslim Woman Magazine” and broadcast byIqraa, the popular Saudi-owned satellite channel.

It is a major step forward for a sitting U.S. administration and leading American newspapers to unequivocally condemn Morsi’s words. But condemnation is just the first move.

Here is an opportunity to acknowledge the breadth and depth of the attitude toward Jews in the Middle East, and how that affects the much desired but elusive peace process between Israel and the Palestinians.

So many explanations have been offered for the failure of successive U.S. administrations to achieve that peace, but the answer is in Morsi’s words. Why would one make peace with bloodsuckers and descendants of apes and monkeys?

Millions of Muslims have been conditioned to regard Jews not only as the enemies of Palestine but as the enemies of all Muslims, of God and of all humanity. Arab leaders far more prominent and influential than Morsi have been tireless in “educating” or “nursing” generations to believe that Jews are “the scum of the human race, the rats of the world, the violators of pacts and agreements, the murderers of the prophets, and the offspring of apes and pigs.” (These are the words of the Saudi sheik Abdul Rahman al-Sudais, imam at the Masjid al-Haram mosque in Mecca.)

The level of anti-Semitism in the Muslim world is indeed one of the great unspokens of the debate on Israel and Palestine. Maybe that's starting to change.

Comments

[Bob-B]

I suspect many commentators think that it would be racist to draw attention to this. In fact it's racist to have a different set of standards for Muslims from everyone else.

[RichardPowell]

Well, a quick search reveals the following Koranic references to Jews:

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/k/koran/koran-idx?type=simple&q1=jew&size=First+100

They don't make much sense to me - perhaps a fault of the translation. But they seem particularly negative, and certainly don't express hatred for Jews.

I'd have thought that it would be regarded as very wicked - blasphemous, even - to mislead a young child about the contents of a sacred book.

[RichardPowell]

Sorry I missed out a "don't" - the Koranic references to Jews don't seem particularly negative. Next time I'll use the preview facility.

[sackcloth and ashes]

This is the elephant in the room when it comes to the Israeli-Arab peace process, ignored even by good quality journals such as 'the Economist'.