Andy is the only expert voice I trust on the issue.
Not only is he extremely knowledgeable on the subject of Islamic antisemitism and ground breaking with his many books and textual excavations, he has the tenacity (that we yearn for our elected leaders to exude) to state the case in earnest, even to debate those who disagree with him. We owe this man a lot, for it all comes at a personal cost to himself, yet he’s ready to stand there in the breech and be counted along with the rest of us who realize the danger confronting us, fundamentalist, virulently antisemitic Islam.
Al Azhar University is the pinnacle of Islamic religious education for all of Sunni Islam. [Its grand imam] is the nearest equivalent to a pope in Islam and he gave an interview using one of the most profoundly antisemitic themes in Islam, which is this notion [found] in the Koran that the reason the Muslims are so suspicious and hateful toward the Jews is the undying enmity that the Jews have toward Islam.
Andrew Bostom: “It was an attempt to galvanize the entire global Muslim ummah [community] to wage a jihad to destroy Palestinian Jewry and the nascent Jewish state.
“The tropes about the grand mufti [have been that] he was a secular Arab nationalist who gravitated toward Nazism and then became fully ‘Nazified’ and, like the Nazis, wanted to destroy the Jews for his own statecraft reasons. That never made any sense and…historians had to modify that to, well, he sort of fiendishly worked with the Nazis to ‘Nazify’ Islam.”
JT: Yet your analysis showed that his fatwa contained no quotes or references from Nazi documents or even The Protocols of the Elders of Zion?
AB: “It is canonical Islam from beginning to end…[and] there is nothing outside the mainstream in terms of how he interpreted [the verses he used].
“The Mufti ended his 1937 proclamation by invoking an annihilationist hadith [Islamic text], which is also quoted in the Hamas Charter and is exactly what the Iranian theocracy believes in…. You can’t look at these things in isolation.”
