The Jew is Not My Enemy Read Free Page A

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:
    If the Jews left Palestine to us, would we start loving them? Of course not. We will never love them. Absolutely not.… They are enemies not because they occupied Palestine.
They would have been enemies even if they did not occupy a thing
[emphasis mine]…. You must believe that we will fight, defeat, and annihilate them, until not a single Jew remains on the face of the Earth. It is not me who says so. The Prophet said: “Judgment Day will not come until you fight the Jews and kill them. The Jews will hide behind stones and trees, and the stones and tree will call: O Muslim, O servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.… As for you Jews – the curse of Allah upon you. The curse of Allah upon you, whose ancestors were apes and pigs. You Jews have sown hatred in our hearts, and we have bequeathed it to our children and grandchildren. You will not survive as long as a single one of us remains.”
    There is no denying that Islamic texts contain language that depicts Jews in unfavourable terms. But much of what inspires Muslims to hate Jews