Dr. Andrew Bostom takes the time to highlight the philosemitic history of the Pontiff of Rome, Pope Benedict XVI, and the virulent Qur’anic and Sunna-based Jew hatred of the current Muslim Pope, Shiekh Muhammad Tantawi.
Bostom had mentioned earlier to the Tundra Tabloids that :”using the lessons of Vatican II, I think that a pre-emptive DEMAND for a “Cairo-Mecca-Qom” I, which deals squarely with these texts and there historical consequences given the genocidal hatred they have engendered, is not overdue.” The TT is in full agreement.
Pope Benedict XVI and Holocaust Survivor Rabbi Arthur Schneier
Today, Wednesday April 23, 2008, National Review Online has published my comparison of Pope Benedict XVI and Grand Imam of Al-Azhar University Sheikh Muhammad Tanatwi, vis a vis Jews, and the global Jewish community.
Below is a slightly extended version of the same essay:
This past Friday (4/18/08), Pope Benedict XVI stopped at Park Street Synagogue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, marking the first such visit by any Pope to a temple in the United States. The 81 year old pontiff—a native of Germany, whose father had been anti-Nazi—was forcibly enrolled in the Hitler Youth, and conscripted into the German Army during the final months of World War II, before deserting in the War’s concluding days.
With fitting poignancy, Rabbi Arthur Schneier, who leads the Park Street Synagogue, greeted Pope Benedict. Rabbi Schneier, 78, is a Holocaust survivor, who as a teenager lost his family in the Nazis’ Auschwitz and Terezin concentration camps. Schneier has headed the synagogue since 1962, while championing religious freedom and tolerance worldwide. He founded the Appeal of Conscience Foundation, which promotes interfaith tolerance, and received the 2001 U.S. Presidential Citizens Medal for service to the nation.[…]
For over a thousand years, since its founding in 792 C.E., Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt, has served as the academic shrine—much as Mecca is the religious shrine—of the global Muslim community. Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, the current Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, was born in 1928 in Selim Al-Sharqiya, Egypt. He graduated from Al-Azhar University’s Faculty of Religious Studies in 1958, and received his Ph.D. in 1966. Tantawi’s Ph.D., thesis Banu Israil fi al-Quran wa-al-Sunnah (Jews in the Koran and the Traditions) was published in 1968-69, and re-published in 1986. Two years after earning his Ph.D., Sheikh Tantawi began teaching at Al-Azhar. In 1980 he became the head of the Tafsir {Koranic Commentary] Department of the University of Medina, Saudi Arabia –a position he held until 1984. Sheikh Tantawi became Grand Mufti of Egypt in 1986, a position he was to hold for a decade before taking on his current post, first assumed in 1996, as the Grand Imam.
My forthcoming book The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism includes extensive first time English translations of Tantawi’s academic magnum opus, Jews in the Koran and the Traditions. Tantawi wrote these words in his 700 page treatise rationalizing Muslim Jew hatred:
[The] Koran describes the Jews with their own particular degenerate characteristics, i.e. killing the prophets of Allah [Koran 2:61/ 3:112], corrupting His words by putting them in the wrong places, consuming the people’s wealth frivolously, refusal to distance themselves from the evil they do, and other ugly characteristics caused by their deep-rooted lasciviousness…only a minority of the Jews keep their word {Koranic citations here]….[A]ll Jews are not the same. The good ones become Muslims {Koran 3:113], the bad ones do not.Tantawi was apparently rewarded for this scholarly effort by being named Grand Imam of Al-Azhar University in 1996, a position he still holds. These are the expressed, “carefully researched” views on Jews held by the nearest Muslim equivalent to a Pope—the head of the most prestigious center of Muslim learning in Sunni Islam, which represents some 90% of the world’s Muslims. And Sheikh Tantawi has not mollified such hatemongering beliefs since becoming the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar as his statements on “dialogue” (January 1998) with Jews, the Jews as “enemies of Allah, descendants of apes and pigs” (April 2002), and the legitimacy of homicide bombing of Jews (April 2002) make clear.
