In an article in today’s Front Page Mag, Matthias Küntzel takes notice of notable media resources, like the NYT or CNN talk show host Larry King, as well as international organizations like the UN and the EU, and academics like Juan Cole, have willingly turned a blind eye to Iran’s use of Zionist or Zionism as code words for Jews and Judaism.
“Sixty-three years after Auschwitz, then, has anti-Semitism entered “acceptable” discourse? Or is the New York Times actually fooled by a rhetorical trick? Where Mahathir was crude enough to denounce the machinations of “the Jews,” Ahmadinejad attacks only “the Zionists.”
He says, “Two thousand Zionists want to rule the world.” He says “the Zionists” have for 60 years blackmailed “all Western governments.” He says, “The Zionists have imposed themselves on a substantial portion of the banking, financial, cultural and media sectors.” Perhaps this is why he is hailed as an anti-imperialist star.
But the Iranian president uses the term “Zionist” in precisely the way Hitler used the term “Jew”: as the embodiment of evil. Even if the Iranian regime tolerates the presence of a Jewish community in Tehran, whoever holds Jews responsible for all the ills of the world–whether calling them “Judases” or “Zionists”–is propagating a potentially genocidal creed.
In fact, anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism have gone hand in hand for over 80 years, not only in the annals of Nazism but also in the intellectual foundations of the Iranian revolution”
I believe however, that Küntzel needs to explore Islamic history even further than the 1920′, in his search for Islamic antisemtism, for it extends all the way back to the founder of that political movement called Islam. From the very beginning, Islam has been at odds with Judaism, so much so that it claims that the Jews not only corrupted their own holy texts, but that they schemed and murdered the founder of Islam, Mohamed himself.
I point everyone who wants to no anything further on the subject, to the website of Dr.Andrew Bostom, who is a scholar on the subject. I count him as one of my friends and colleagues in the Counterjihad. Bostom knows his stuff, and while Küntzel is absolutely correct about the depth of Nazi influence on Islamic antisemitism, he’s wrong to conclude that it began with the Nazis, it began with Mohamed and with those that followed his example. KGS