Andrew Bostom: Is Antisemitism Intrinsic to Islam……?

The Tundra Tabloids’ dear colleague, Dr.Andrew Bostom sends the following three links to a series he wrote over at Jewcy.com, that delves into the subject of whether antisemitism is part and parcel of Islamic thought. I believe that it is, and that the evidence Bostom provides in his book, “The Legacy of Antisemitism” is irrefutable. Andy, take it away. KGS

A Three-Part Series Examines the Origins of Hatred

Part 1: http://www.jewcy.com/post/understanding_islam_islamic_antisemitism

Part 2: http://www.jewcy.com/post/antisemitism_islams_foundational_texts

Having introduced the living uniquely Islamic institutions of jihad war and dhimmitude in Part 1, Part 2 examines how jihad and dhimmitude operate in tandem with central Antisemitic motifs from Islam’s foundational texts.

Part 3: http://www.jewcy.com/post/islamic_eschatology_annihilationist_muslim_jew_hatred

Part 3 focuses on the Antisemitic motifs in Islamic eschatology and how they have become enmeshed with the “corporeal” Antisemitism from Islam’s foundational texts to engender a contemporary atmosphere of genocidal Muslim Jew hatred. This third and final installment also illustrates the interaction between indigenous Islamic Antisemitism, and two salient “imports” from colonial Europe-specifically, the blood libel, and Nazism. Concluding observations illustrate the scope of contemporary Muslim Jew hatred fueled by orthodox motifs in Islam’s foundational texts, and reinforced by Islam’s central religious educational shrine, i.e., Al Azhar University, and its Muslim Pope equivalent, to textbooks widely used in Islamic schools across the globe, even those within the United States.

Understanding the Islam in Islamic Antisemitism

A three part series by the author of “The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism”

By Andrew G. Bostom
Created 11/17/2008 – 13:31

Introduction:
Recently Jewcy posted a short opinion piece “On Islamic Antisemitism” which consisted almost entirely of extracts from brief, superficial works on the subject by Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes, Robert Wistrich, and Efraim Karsh–none of whom, despite their other areas of expertise, have ever studied Islamic Antisemitism in a serious, comprehensive manner. The glib conceptions of these authors–which are simply affirmed without ever giving any substantive proofs (perhaps because the relevant doctrinal and historical data provides negative proofs), and repeated verbatim and uncritically in the posting by Michael Ezra–remind me, as a clinical investigator in medicine, of a scene from Woody Allen’s film “Sleeper.”

In the film Allen portrays Miles Monroe, owner of a health food store in Greenwich Village who is cryogenically frozen, and awakens 200 years in the future. An authoritative, all-knowing doctor who claims to be possessed of “…what we now know to be true,” tells Miles, offering him a cigarette, “Here, smoke this. And be sure you get the smoke deep down into your lungs.” To which Miles replies: “I don’t smoke.” The Doctor then declares: “It’s tobacco! It’s one of the healthiest things for your body!”

There are incontrovertible and overwhelming hard data-pathological and epidemiological-which demonstrate a major causative role for smoking in both the predominant form of lung cancer (i.e., adenocarcinoma), and premature coronary heart disease. Smoking is to these diseases as the Islam in Islamic Antisemitism is to this scourge of Jew-hatred, past and present. It is as destructive to our social and moral health to deny this reality, as it is to human public health disease prevention efforts to deny the causative link between cigarette smoking and adenocarcinoma of the lung, or premature coronary heart disease.

What is the basis for my claim? Contra the shallow contemporary works quoted by Michael Ezra, serious scholars of Islamic Antisemitism — S.D. Goitein, Hartwig Hirschfeld, Georges Vajda, and Haggai Ben-Shammai — have demonstrated all of the following: clear historical evidence of specific Islamic antisemitism, from the Geniza record of the high Middle Ages (including the coinage of a unique Hebrew word to characterize such Muslim Jew hatred, i.e., sin’ūth), published in full by Goitein as of 1971; the content of foundational Muslim sources detailing the sacralized rationale for Islam’s anti-Jewish bigotry, including Hartwig Hirschfeld’s mid 1880s essay series on Muhammad’s subjugation of the Jews of Medina, based upon the earliest pious Muslim biographies of Muhammad; George Vajda’s elegant, comprehensive 1937 analysis focusing primarily on the hadith (the putative words and deeds of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, as recorded by pious transmitters); and much more recently, Haggai Ben-Shammai’s concise 1988 study of key examples of Jew-hatred in the Koran and Koranic exegesis.

My 3-part presentation will introduce evidence compiled from the seminal works of these scholars, Islam’s foundational texts, and historical eyewitness accounts-adduced to considerably greater extent in The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism — which elucidate how the living legacy of Islam’s primal anti-Jewish animus, i.e., specific Antisemitic motifs in Islamic theology, including Islamic eschatology, the uniquely Islamic institution of jihad war, and its corollary institution, dhimmitude — operate in tandem with regard to the annihilationist Muslim Jew-hatred directed at the Jews of Israel, in particular.