Late last year I attended a memorial service organised by a Jewish group in a Midlands town following the horrific attack by an anti-Semite on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. This was an attack which resulted in the deaths of eleven people and causes serious injuries to seven others. It was a moving service and one that I felt I had a religious duty to attend in order to pay my respects to the dead and to pray for the recovery of those injured. The service quite rightly concentrated on the results of the actions of the Pittsburgh murderer, who is currently awaiting trial on 29 Federal and 36 State charges of murder and related offences. However, a small voice within me thought that some of those who grieved with me, both in the shul and in the wider Jewish community, were ignoring an Elephant in the room, an Elephant emblazoned with the phrase ‘Islamic Jew Hatred’.
Whilst it was correct in my view to concentrate at the time on the actions of a murderer who came from the far Right, there should be equal attention paid to the danger posed to our societies, and to Jews in particular, from Islam. I felt that this attention that should be paid to an Islamic threat was missing not just from the service I attended but also from Jewish groups and communal leaders. Now of course I am not saying that every individual Muslim is a Jew hating nutcase, that is plainly not the case, but we have to recognise that Jew hatred is a major part of Islam, even if it is a part of the religion that some Muslims reject. But, it strikes me as foolhardy in the extreme to ignore or downplay the fact that Islamic religious texts and Islamic culture are stuffed full of the sort of Jew hatred that would not be out of place in the writings of the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg.
Some indication of how big a problem Islamic Jew hatred is becoming for Jews in Western nations comes from the increasingly lengthy parade of Muslim religious leaders and activists who have been caught out making anti-Semitic statements or being supporters of anti-Semitic organisations. These men and women have been shown to hold or promulgate views that are not just critical of Judaism, something acceptable as all religions and all ideologies should be debatable, but which cross the line into being exterminatory. We’ve seen major mosques in London have Hamas supporters on their management committees, Imams who rail against ‘Jewish conspiracies’ in East London and mosques in Toronto, Canada and Houston Texas, USA featuring anti-Semitic hate preachers working there.
The latest example of a Jew hating Islamic cleric to come to light comes amazingly from Pittsburgh the site of the horrific massacre on the 27th October 2018. You would think wouldn’t you that having an example of murderous Jew hatred almost on a mosques doorstep would make Muslim leaders think carefully about the sort of statements that they made and the sort of rancid ethno-religious politics that ends up in the deaths of innocents? Sadly this has not been the case.
According to a report carried by the Jewish News Syndicate (h/t ROP), a mosque linked to racist Black nationalists, but which like many other mosques, takes its religious line from Islamic scripture, promoted anti Jewish conspiracy theories between the period October 2016 to December 2018. Readers will no doubt note that they were uploading such guff not just before the Pittsburgh atrocity but also after it.
Jewish News Syndicate said:
In lectures uploaded October 2016-December 2018 to the YouTube channel of the Nur Uz-Zamaan Institute in Pittsburgh, Pa., Pittsburgh-based Imam Naeem Abdullah focused on the subject of the Jews.
He said that the “American empire is often considered by many scholars to be … a continuation of the Roman Empire” and that the Jews are “running everything,” stating either “the real Jews, or the Ashkenazi [Jews].” He noted that the Koran states, in the opening chapter that “we are asking Allah to guide us on the straight path and [to not] make us like the Jews. … ‘And not like those who go astray’—the Christians.”
He added that Moses and Jesus and their true followers were Muslims, noting that “when you corrupt the religion that they came with … you come up with these other religions,” and went on to relate the well-known story, that he identified as from the Koran, about Allah transforming a group of Jews into apes and pigs.
Read the rest of this article via the link below
https://www.jns.org/pittsburgh-imam-jews-running-everything-and-have-all-the-money/
This mosque is, according to Steve Stalinsky of the MEMRI group who was quoted by the Jewish News Syndicate, approximately ten minutes from the Tree of Life Synagogue that was attacked in October. Mr Stalinsky said:
“At a mosque less than 10 minutes away from Tree of Life shul in Pittsburgh, we have now identified sermons and lectures there referring to Jews as ‘apes and pigs,’ and to ‘Jews running everything’ and having ‘all the money.’ This issue needs to be addressed by the Jewish community – including synagogues and leading organizations devoted to fighting anti-Semitism. Since we began our project almost two years ago – many of them have failed to adequately address this anti-Semitism and have chosen to look the other way.”
Mr Stalinsky is correct here. Jewish organisations including those concerned with fighting anti-Semitism have indeed chosen to look the other way when it comes to Islamic Jew hatred. Why this has occurred may be because too many Jewish communal organisations are dominated by the centre and far Left, despite many Jews not being of that political persuasion. It may also be the result of the influence of those who have a naive and unrealistic view as regards the issue of interfaith. People who are of the Left and who are involved in interfaith work do not want to ‘rock the boat’ by criticising Muslims and Islamic groups that engage in the sort of anti-Semitic behaviour that we have seen in the Pittsburgh mosque and elsewhere.
The result of such thinking is that whilst many Jewish organisations quite rightly go after anti-Semites of the Right and the Jew hatred expressed by non-Muslims, but to very little to tackle Islamic anti-Semitism. There needs to be an end to this warped thinking, it is short sighted and dangerous and exposes Jews to potential threat. We also need to see an end to the sort of things we have seen in Britain where a retired Rabbi was caught out treating an Islamic extremist from an equally extremist mosque as a valued interfaith partner. There should be no more free passes for Jew hating Muslims and we all, whether we are Jewish or not, need to wake up to the threat posed by Islamic Jew hatred. For far too long the leaders of Jewish communities, both in the United States and the United Kingdom have tiptoed around the issue of Islamic Jew hatred and have made more than enough allowances for Muslim clerics who encourage and promote Jew hatred. All of us will lose out if this policy of making allowances for Islamic Jew hatred and accepting mealy mouthed and insincere ‘apologies’ from Muslim clerics when they are caught out promulgating murderous anti-Semitism. We owe it to ourselves to tackle this problem and we also owe it to our non Jewish neighbours who will be next in line for targetting by these savage hate filled Muslims after the Jews. Not for nothing does there exist in the Islamic world the phrase ‘first we deal with the Saturday people, then we deal with the Sunday people’. We are all at threat from Islamic hatred and it is time for all of us, but especially Jews to take off the tip toe shoes and pull on the metaphorical ‘bovver boots’ and be honest about the threat of Islamic Jew hatred.
