The tiger of terrorism: Islamic anti-semitism

Richard Webster has written an article for the New Statesman which directly addresses an issue many leftists (including myself) fail to adequately confront, partly because of the fear that doing so will serve as a further rationalization to crush Arabs and Muslims: Islamic anti-semitism. He observes,

The charge that militant Islam is inherently anti-semitic is, or should be, a deeply disturbing one. The first question we need to ask is ‘is it true?’. My impression is that this question tends to be avoided (or at least not adequately addressed) by commentators such as John Pilger, Robert Fisk and Noam Chomsky who have written most critically about the war on terrorism. If so, the omission is a dangerous one, for it leaves extraordinarily powerful ammunition in the sole possession of those who are the advocates of war. Those advocates sometimes seem, on this issue, to be seeing reality more clearly than their opponents do. If we are to redress the balance we need to reconsider the entire question of Islamic anti-semitism.

…One reason we hear so little about Arab and Muslim anti-semitism, except from pro-Israeli commentators, is that to draw attention to it might seem unhelpful to the Palestinian cause. It may also seem unjust to accuse of vilifying their enemies those who fight in the cause of the very group of people who are among the most vilified in the world: leading Israeli politicians have described Palestinians as ‘cockroaches in a jar’, ‘two-legged beasts,’ ‘lice’ and ‘a cancer’. As Edward Said (among many others) has pointed out, few national groups have been robbed of their humanity in the eyes of the world more comprehensively than ordinary Palestinian men and women.

Just as importantly, some pro-Israeli commentators and pressure groups have used the charge of anti-semitism to conduct a relentless and bullying campaign against any journalist who dares to make entirely legitimate criticisms of the Israeli government or the Israeli military. The tactic has been frighteningly effective, particularly in America. As Robert Fisk has written: ‘Our gutlessness, our refusal to tell the truth, our fear of being slandered as “anti-Semites”, the most loathsome of libels against any journalist, means that we are aiding and abetting terrible deeds in the Middle East.’

Webster goes on to conclude,

The great danger of the left’s omissions, and in particular its failure to engage with the problem of Arab anti-semitism, is that Hitchens, Sullivan and all those commentators who have characterised their opponents as ‘Islamofascist’, are currently succeeding in persuading many people of what is false by urging upon them what is true.

Contrary to what they suggest the greatest threat to world peace we now face is not that posed by Islamist dreams of world-domination; it is that which is posed by our failure to understand that these cruel and destructive dreams are themselves intimately related - by a complex process of reciprocal influence - to western fantasies of world-domination.

Largely because of the masssive increase of military and economic power which has taken place in America over the last half-century, it is these western fantasies which are much nearer to being realised than their Islamic counterparts. Yet precisely because the imperialism of the United States is the habitual environment in which we live, these fantasies have been rendered, like the ocean to the fish, all but invisible to us. So too has the extent to which we have dislocated the rest of the world in order to turn them into reality.

…But the idea that there is some kind of autonomous ‘Islamofascism’ which can be crushed, or that the West may defend itself against the terrorists who threaten it by cultivating that eagerness to kill militant Muslims which Hitchens urges upon us, is a dangerous delusion.

The symptoms that have led some to apply the label of ‘Islamo-fascism’ are not reasons to forget root causes. They are reasons for us to examine even more carefully than we have done up to now what those root causes actually are.

When we do so, we find that the key to the problem remains in the history of Western colonialism in the middle east, and above all in Palestine. It is there, and not in Iraq, or Iran or Syria that our main political energies and our strategic intelligence should now be deployed.

Frankly, excerpts cannot do the article justice. It is a long piece, yes, but I urge you to read the whole thing. Also be sure to check out the web bibliography Webster has compiled at the end of the article.