During a public U.S. Congressional hearing held in April 2019, data was presented from a worldwide survey performed between 2014 and 2017 by the Anti-Defamation League that found the 16 nations with the highest prevalence of extreme antisemitism to all be Muslim countries in the Middle East. In response to the presentation of these data, the ADL’s Senior Vice President for Policy Eileen Hershenov had this to say: “vulnerable, marginalized communities have bigotry within them.”

If explaining away Muslim Jew-hatred as somehow a result of vulnerability and marginalization in societies that are overwhelmingly Muslim strikes one as troubling, well it should; especially if the person doing the explaining represents an organization that claims “its timeless mission is to protect the Jewish people.” Any person with a healthy sense of self-preservation might ponder other questions that arise from this case. Like, for instance: Why is extreme antisemitism so ubiquitous in the Arab Muslim world? Or: Why is a prominent Jewish advocacy organization so intent on apologizing for Islamic Jew hatred?

Unfortunately, anyone searching for answers to these timely questions is not going to find them anywhere in the public arena. In fact, a conspiracy of sorts has prevailed on college campuses, in Hollywood, in the establishment media, in think tanks, and in other cultural institutions, both Left and Right, where honest and open discussion of Islamic anti-Semitism is taboo because of the fear of social ostracism and professional suicide.

Shamefully, many Jews too often aid and abet this ugly and dangerous conspiracy.

Enter Andrew Bostom, M.D., an Associate Professor of Family Medicine at Brown University, who has just released a second (paperback) edition of his magnum opus The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History. It is a desperately needed corrective to the amnesia, ignorance, and self-destructive denial of reality that currently plagues much of Western Civilization and its Jewish community when it comes to Islam’s historical treatment of Jews.

Full disclosure: I worked with Andrew as a research collaborator and have remained friends since. Bostom drew on his professional skills as a physician, medical researcher and epidemiologist to carefully construct an understanding of the underpinnings of Jew-hatred within Islamic theology and civilization. The empirical evidence Bostom provides is so comprehensive and powerful that it hits the reader like a tsunami.

Bostom is very careful to let Islam’s core texts and its most renowned and influential theologians, scholars, jurists, and leaders–from Islam’s inception to the 21st century–speak for themselves on this matter, which makes the overall argument even more persuasive. Perhaps inspired by his medical training, the author also offers the reader dozens of “case studies” culled from primary sources as well as third-party observers over disparate eras and lands (some translated for the first time) that encapsulate how Jews, identified in the Koran as the worst enemies of the Muslims, have suffered immeasurably as dhimmis, or subjugated people, under Islamic rule up to the present time.