from treating antisemitism as a quirk of individual psychopathology to treating it as a type of social or cultural pathology, and therefore as something for which responsibility, and at least the basic tools required for understanding and resistance, may reasonably be regarded as generally shared.
The object of the present book is, in effect, to take up that thought again but this time to develop it a good deal further and more systematically than was possible in 2006. It is not merely that my thoughts on these matters have changed and developed a good deal over the intervening years. Over the past decade, a substantial academic and extra-academic literature of remarkably high quality has grown up around the topic, the work of a formidable collection of academics and media commentators, not to mention major political figures of the calibre of Manuel Valls, until recently prime minister of France, Irwin Cotler, lately attorney general of Canada, or the former Soviet dissident and later Israeli cabinet minister Natan Sharansky in Israel. To this recent body of work, either to borrow or to dissent, I shall be making constant and extensive reference in what follows. If that to any extent proves helpful in making this literature better known to the general reading public, I shall be well content.
NOTES
1. Robert Booth, “Antisemitic Attacks in UK at Highest Levels Ever Recorded,” The Guardian, Thursday, February 5, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/05/antisemitic-attacks-uk-community-security-trust-britain-jewish-population.
2. Aftab Ali, “Oxford University Labour Club Co-chair, Alex Chalmers, Resigns Amid Anti-Semitism Row,” The Independent, Wednesday February 17, 2016, https://www.independent.co.uk/student/news/oxford-university-labour-club-co-chair-alex-chalmers-resigns-amid-anti-semitism-row-a6878826.html.
3. Rich 2016, 239.
4. Rossman-Benjamin 2015, 218.
5. Rossman-Benjamin 2015, 230–31.
6. Michael Kaplan, “Attacks on France’s Jews Surge amid Concerns of Rising Anti-Semitism in Europe,” International Business Times, July 13, 2015, https://www.ibtimes.com/attacks-frances-jews-surge-amid-concerns-rising-anti-semitism-europe-2006003.
7. Marcus 2015, 148, citing Wistrich, Lethal Obsession, 323–24.
8. Itamar Eichner, “French Immigration to Israel Surges in Summer of 2015,” Ynet News.com, June 17, 2015, https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4669430,00.html.
9. Ilanit Chernick, “German Cardinal: Antisemitism Is an Attack on Us All,” Jerusalem Post, November 4, 2019, https://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Antisemitism/German-Cardinal-Antisemitism-is-an-attack-on-us-all-606821.
10. Tom Gross, “A Shitty Little Country,” National Review, January 10, 2002, http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-gross011002.shtml.
11. By one of my Indiana University Press editors, Katelyn Klingler, to whom my thanks are due.
12. The Compact Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (London: BCA, by arrangement with Oxford University Press, 1994), 60. Complete text reproduced micrographically.
13. Harrison 2006.
HAMAS ADDRESSES THE JEWISH QUESTION
To take only the subject of the Jews: it would be difficult to find a form of bad reasoning about them which has not been heard in conversation or been admitted to the dignity of print.
—George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such
NAZI ANTISEMITISM IN ARAB DRESS
The prewar German National Socialist Party made itself notorious, as we all know, for promoting the kind of antisemitism with which this book will be mainly concerned: the kind that sees a Jewish conspiracy at the root of every non-Jewish reverse and holds that the inimical influence of the Jews, or Zionism, can only be countered by getting rid of them, or it, altogether.
It is common to hear it said today that that kind of antisemitism died as a serious political force with the final defeat of Nazism in 1945 and nowadays survives in the Western world only among tiny neofascist groups with neither the numerical strength nor the political influence to revive it.
Despite the undeniable frequency and savagery of Islamist assaults on individual Jews and on Jewish institutions and property, one commonly also hears it said that there is in the Islamic world no equivalent to Western antisemitism, of this or any other kind. In the same vein, it is widely assumed in the more bien-pensant liberal and left-leaning sections of the media that Muslim opposition to Jews, far from being antisemitic, is wholly political in nature, stemming purely from resentment against the threat to Muslim interests posed by the establishment and continued existence of the State of Israel.
I shall be arguing at length in this book that both these claims are false. Argument starved of concrete instances, however, soon becomes vapid and overformal. It seems appropriate to begin, therefore, with two chapters offering instances of both the survival and the influence today of exactly the kind of antisemitism popularized by the Nazis. The present chapter will contrast the overt antisemitism of an Islamist organization with the covert but not dissimilar implications of a Eurobarometer poll. Chapter 2 will examine an American academic debate ostensibly concerned with the “scholarly” issue of the uniqueness of the Holocaust.
Hamas, the Islamist1 organization that at present controls Gaza, is a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood (the Society of Muslim Brothers, Jama’at al-ikhwan al-muslimin), an organization founded in 1928 in Egypt by the charismatic preacher Hassan al-Banna. A leading scholar of Islamic antisemitism has this to say of the latter: “The significance of this organization goes far beyond Egypt. For today’s global Islamist movement the Muslim Brothers are what the Bolsheviks were for the Communist movement of the 1920s: the ideological reference point and organizational core which decisively inspired all the subsequent tendencies and continues to do so to this day.”2
Hamas currently enjoys support in the West both among elements of the Muslim community and in those parts of the left whose dislike of the United States and Israel allows their sympathizers to overlook the utter moral and intellectual incompatibility
