Posted on 11/18/2003 9:27:28 AM PST by knighthawk
On Saturday, suicide bombers detonated pickup trucks full of explosives outside two Istanbul synagogues, killing at least 22 people and wounding more than 300. It was the sort of atrocious, senseless crime that has come to be the calling card of militant Islam. For all the Muslim world's accusations against the United States and Israel, no one has done more to debase and defame the religion of Muhammad than the murderers who blow themselves up in its name.
As for the many Jews who died in this attack, their only crime was belonging to the one religion on which the Muslim world's conspiracy theorists have fastened all their society's sorrows and backwardness. In South Asia and the Middle East, Muslim schools teach the vilification of Jews the way Canadian schools teach the multiplication tables. Anti-semitic tracts such as Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are brisk sellers. As Middle East expert Martin Kramer wrote a decade ago, Islam's fundamentalists "de-emphasize the long history of Islamic tolerance of the Jews across centuries ... fixating instead upon the early conflict between Muhammad and the Jewish tribes of 7th-century Arabia. The Jews who clashed with Muhammad are presented as archetypes of a universal Jew, treacherous by nature, whose perfidy threatens not only Islam but all humanity."
Anti-Semitism is on the rise in Europe too. Muslim immigrants in France, especially, have imported the bigotry taught overseas. And many left-leaning intellectuals, eager to demonstrate their solidarity with the Palestinian cause, often blur the line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. In Britain, for instance, editors have tried to shut Israeli authors out of scholarly journals -- for no other reason than that they hail from the Jewish state. Just this past weekend, a Jewish boys school in Paris was firebombed. In Italy, a recent cartoon in the newspaper La Stampa showed the baby Jesus in a manger, threatened by an Israeli tank. The caption read: "They don't want to get rid of me again, do they?"
And yet, there may be some grounds for optimism on both fronts. Last week, al-Qaeda overstepped badly by bombing a predominantly Arab housing complex in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The 18 victims were Muslims, four of them children. The attack, which took place during the the holy month of Ramadan, generated an unprecedented backlash against al-Qaeda in the region -- a significant development given that Saudi "charities" comprise al-Qaeda's primary source of financing. One can only hope that such revulsion leads to greater introspection among the region's Muslims in general, and, eventually, a wholesale rejection of both terrorism and Jew hatred.
Meanwhile, in Europe, political leaders seem to be increasingly aware of the problem of anti-Semitism. Until recently, French President Jacques Chirac repeatedly declared that "there is no anti-Semitism at all in France." But this week, in the wake of the boys school attack, it was announced he will meet Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin and three of his ministers to address the problem. As well, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon will be in Italy this week, where he will discuss the issue with Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Having lost 19 of his country's police and soldiers to a terrorist attack in Iraq last week, Mr. Berlusconi is in a position to understand the horrors of the terrorist plague Mr. Sharon and his government must guard against every day.
Anti-Semitism and terrorism are both deadly symptoms of an Islamic civilization in crisis. France, Italy and all Western nations must do everything in their power to fight them -- both on foreign shores, and at home.
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