Israel Matzav

The Islamization of European Anti-Semitism

The American Thinker's Andrew Bostom reports on an overlooked aspect on the endemic anti-Semitism in England and elsewhere in the EU: it's much more likely to be Muslim than Christian. And it's even worse in Jordan and Egypt - the two Arab countries with which Israel has 'peace treaties.'

Drs. Kaplan and Small examined the views of 5004 Europeans, roughly 500 individuals sampled from each of 10 European Union countries (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom). The authors’ main publicized results confirmed their (rather commonsensical) a priori hypothesis: anti-Israel sentiments strongly and independently predicted the likelihood that an individual was anti-Semitic in a graded manner, i.e., the more anti-Israel (on a scale of zero to 4), the more a person was likely to be anti-Semitic.

But perhaps an even more striking finding in light of the burgeoning Jew hatred now evident in Europe’s Muslim communities, has until now received much less attention. In a controlled comparison to European Christians (as the “referent” group), European Muslims were nearly eightfold (i.e., 800%) more likely to be overtly anti-Semitic. Furthermore, in light of the Pew Global Attitudes Project data on Muslim attitudes toward Jews in Islamic countries, the Yale study likely underestimated the extent of anti-Semitism amongst Europe’s Muslim communities. Had more poorly educated, less acclimated European Muslims been sampled, the results would probably have been even worse. Pew’s survey previously indicated,

In the Muslim world, attitudes toward Jews remain starkly negative, including virtually unanimous unfavorable ratings of 98% in Jordan and 97% in Egypt. [Note that these are the two Arab countries with which Israel has treaties. CiJ] Muslims living in Western countries have a more moderate view of Jews – still more negative than positive, but not nearly by the lopsided margins that prevail in Muslim countries.

What is to account for the clear “Islamization” of European Antisemitism? Might this phenomenon be related to the much-maligned descriptive term “Eurabia”? Indeed, the use of the term “Eurabia,” as noted by Bat Ye’or in her seminal 2005 study, “Eurabia-The Euro-Arab Axis”, was first introduced, triumphally, in the mid-1970s, as the title of a journal produced by the Association for Franco-Arab Solidarity, and published in Geneva, Paris, and London.

The articles and editorials in this publication called for common Euro-Arab positions, at every level – social, economic, and commercial – and were contingent upon the fundamental political condition of European support for the Arab (and non-Arab) Muslim umma’s jihad against Israel. These concrete proposals were not the musings of isolated theorists – they in fact represented policy decisions conceived in conjunction with, and actualized by, European state leaders, their ministers of foreign affairs, and European Parliamentarians.

Nearly 2 ½ years ago, Bat Ye’or summarized the bitter harvest Western Europe was reaping from the sociopolitical and cultural changes it had sown by implementing this Eurabian vision:

Arab and Islamic anti-Israeli propaganda, barely disguised in academic and cultural packaging… imposed in universities, the press, and cultural centers. …Israel[‘s] usurped history and identity are projected onto the Palestinians… part of a global movement that is transforming Europe into a new continent of dhimmitude within a worldwide strategy of jihad and da’wa, the latter being the pacific method of Islamization…. this policy has promoted European dhimmitude and rabid Judeophobia.

And rabid Judeophobia is an apt characterization which applies not only to the current “Hezb’allah/Israel conflict-related” upsurge in attacks by European Muslims on Jews. Ten months ago, during a November 14, 2005 presentation at The Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C., Stephen Steinlight, former director of education at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, and subsequently director of national affairs at the American Jewish Committee, cited data demonstrating that Muslim youths, or more appropriately, youthful Muslim thugs, engaged in an average of 12 attacks per day on Parisian Jews,

“putting the figures… close to [those] during the days of the Weimar Republic.”

The clear excess virulence of the Antisemitism in Europe’s Muslim versus Christian populations, combined with the evidence that globally, Muslims in Islamic countries exhibit even more fanatical Jew hatred than their European co-religionists, defies the “conventional wisdom” regarding the ultimate origins of Muslim Jew hatred in Western Europe, and beyond.

Read it all.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:45 AM