Anti-Semitism Envy and the Myth of Islamophobia

Sept. 13 2017

The term “Islamophobia” conflates “the persecution of believers, which is a crime,” with “the critique of religion, which is a right,” argues the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner. As such, the word serves to “impose silence on Westerners” and as “a weapon of enforcement against liberal Muslims.” To make matters worse, Bruckner writes, leftists in Europe and America have subsumed “Islamophobia” into the broader rubric of racism, thus performing a “transubstantiation of religion into race.” And then there is the idea that Islamophobia has somehow supplanted anti-Semitism:

Already in 1994, in Grenoble, France, young Muslims, marching to protest the government ban of the Islamic headscarf, wore armbands featuring a yellow Islamic crescent—an allusion to the yellow star that French Jews were made to wear during the [German] occupation—against a black background and the line: “When will it be our turn?” . . . And it was the fundamentalist preacher Tarik Ramadan, for a time an adviser to the British prime minister Tony Blair, who explained that the situation of Muslims in Europe was like that of Jews in the 1930s. The implication is clear: to criticize Islam is to prepare nothing less than a new Holocaust.

Why this Islamic desire to be considered Jewish? The answer is clear: to achieve pariah status. But the analogy is doubly false. First, anti-Semitism was never about the Jewish religion as such but rather about the existence of Jews as a people. Even an unbelieving Jew was detested by anti-Semites, due to his family name and his group identity. And second, at the end of the 1940s, there were no groups of extremist Jews slitting the throats of priests in churches, as happened at Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray in France in July 2016, the deed of two young jihadists; there were no Jews throwing bombs in train stations, shopping malls, or airports, or driving trucks into crowds.

There is thus a third anti-Semitism that, since 1945, must be added to [anti-Semitism’s] two classic forms, Christian and nationalist: the envy of the Jew as victim, the paragon of the disaster of the Shoah. This Jew thus becomes both model and obstacle for the Islamist; he is seen as usurping a position that by right belongs to Africans, Palestinians, and Muslims. To make oneself the object of a new Holocaust, however imaginary, is to grab hold of the maximal misfortune and to put oneself in the most desirable place—that of the victim who escapes all criticism.

Read more at City Journal

More about: Anti-Semitism, European Islam, History & Ideas, Islamophobia

Expand Gaza into Sinai

Feb. 11 2025

Calling the proposal to depopulate Gaza completely (if temporarily) “unworkable,” Peter Berkowitz makes the case for a similar, but more feasible, plan:

The United States along with Saudi Arabia and the UAE should persuade Egypt by means of generous financial inducements to open the sparsely populated ten-to-fifteen miles of Sinai adjacent to Gaza to Palestinians seeking a fresh start and better life. Egypt would not absorb Gazans and make them citizens but rather move Gaza’s border . . . westward into Sinai. Fences would be erected along the new border. The Israel Defense Force would maintain border security on the Gaza-extension side, Egyptian forces on the other. Egypt might lease the land to the Palestinians for 75 years.

The Sinai option does not involve forced transfer of civilian populations, which the international laws of war bar. As the United States, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and other partners build temporary dwellings and then apartment buildings and towns, they would provide bus service to the Gaza-extension. Palestinian families that choose to make the short trip would receive a key to a new residence and, say, $10,000.

The Sinai option is flawed. . . . Then again, all conventional options for rehabilitating and governing Gaza are terrible.

Read more at RealClear Politics

More about: Donald Trump, Egypt, Gaza Strip, Sinai Peninsula