"Alone, Frightened, & Struggling": The Jewish Remnant in Egypt (video)

Last week, columnist Jeffrey Goldberg wrote here of the visceral antisemitism that has Egypt's masses in its grip:

".... Anti-Semitism, the socialism of fools, is becoming the opiate of the Egyptian masses. And not just the masses. Egypt has never been notably philo-Semitic (just ask Moses), but today it’s entirely acceptable among the educated and creative classes there to demonize Jews and voice the most despicable anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Careerists know that even fleeting associations with Jews and Israelis could spell professional trouble.

The level of anti-Semitism in Egypt has consequences, of course, for Middle East peace and for the safety of Jews. But, importantly, it has consequences for the welfare of Egypt itself. The revolution that overthrew the country’s dictator, Hosni Mubarak, held great promise, but it also exposed the enormous challenges facing Egyptian politics and culture. And anti-Semitism, if nothing else, has always been a sign of a deeply damaged culture...."

This video underlines that antisemitism, and of the danger facing the pitiful Jewish remnant living in Egypt today, the last representatives of a once flourishing community.

Also suffering, of course, are the Christians of Egypt, as many news reports make clear. 

The Arab Israeli journalist Khaled Abu Toameh writes, at the end of an article that's well worth reading:

'In the past two years, tens of thousands of Christians have fled Egypt, mainly due to the rise of Muslim fundamentalists to power. Recurring attacks on Christian families and property and failure of the Egyptian authorities to employ a tougher policy against the fundamentalists have led many Christians to reach the conclusion that they have no future not only in Egypt, but in other Arab countries where radical Muslims are rising to power.

Christian fears are not unjustified. Muslim fanatics will continue to target Christians because they consider all non-Muslims "infidels." If the fanatics cannot tolerate moderate and secular Muslims, why should they be expected to accept those who belong to other faiths?

While the number of Christians in the Arab world continues to decline, Israel remains the only country in the Middle East where they feel safe and comfortable. That explains why Christians living in Israel have been appealing to Israel to open its borders to absorb their brothers who are fleeing from the Gaza Strip, Bethlehem, Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt and Sudan.'

This clearly undermines a recent assertion by Jeremy Moodey, chief executive of the British NGO BibleLands (see here for its most recent statement regarding Israel) that:

"It is a Western conceit that all Arab Christian communities are persecuted minorities and need our help to save them from Islamic fundamentalism. Most Middle East Christians are deeply embedded in their societies, with roots which pre-date even the rise of Islam. Indeed, they are closer to the Oriental origins of Christianity than many Western Christians. They have lived peacefully with their Muslim neighbours for centuries. The Arab Spring has led to a resurgence of Islamism, but it is not inevitable that this will lead to persecution of religious minorities. The overtures of the new Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt to the country’s Coptic community are evidence that the new pluralism could benefit not harm the region’s Christians.

In a sense, it suits us Western Christians to see our co-religionists in the Middle East as ‘victims’. In this way we can live out, vicariously, our own fears of Islamic fundamentalism. But this is not how Middle East Christians always see themselves. Their rootedness in their communities means that they have always been outwardfacing, expressing their faith and relating to their Muslim neighbours through social action. They are living examples of “salt and light”, in the very land where Jesus used these powerful metaphors, and we Christians in the West should encourage them in this ministry.”

 To quote an old adage: None so blind as those who won't see.

Update: see my next post for more regarding BibleLands

“Israel will exist, and continue to exist, until Islam abolishes it"

Israel swings in Tahrir Square

Robert S. Wistrich, Professor of Modern History and Director of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has written in this month's issue of The Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs a scholarly but highly readable analysis of the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan al-Muslimim), which, along with Salafists, has benefited so hugely from the overthrow of the Mubarak regime.


Reminding us that the Brotherhood still cleaves to the motto "Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Quran is our law; jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope" the article laments

"how few professors of Middle East studies at American or European universities seem able or willing to grasp the true nature of the Muslim Brotherhood, let alone display any interest in its visceral anti-Westernism  or ferocious anti-Semitism. Today, very few academics seek to elucidate its core ideology or long-term goals, let alone acknowledge their incompatibility with liberal democracy, human rights, or a stable world order. Instead, the general consensus was that overthrowing Mubarak would lead to pluralistic democracy with the Muslim Brothers pursuing a benignly constructive role. Typically, fundamentalist attitudes to Egypt’s Jews and Christians, or to the anti-Semitic legacy, were either whitewashed or simply ignored. ...."

Regarding its attitude to Jews and Israel, he observes:

"Anti-Semitism and conspiracy-mongering have, of course, been part of Egypt’s political discourse ever since the military coup that brought Nasir to power almost sixty years ago.... But the anti- Jewish conspiracy theories of the Brotherhood and Egyptian preachers are in a class of their own. In an interview on ‘al-Rahma TV’ (26 October 2011), the virulently anti-Semitic cleric Amin al-Ansari even claimed that Jews manipulate women in order to maintain their control of the world, citing The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and adding: “... when Zionism and Judaism benefit, it means the decline not only of Muslim women, but of humanity as a whole.”

Such Muslim concern for women evidently did not extend to the chief correspondent for CBS News, the non-Jewish American reporter Lara Logan. In February 2011, she was beaten and raped in broad daylight by a frenzied throng of Egyptian men in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, who were screaming “Jew! Jew!” even as they assaulted her. This shocking event (studiously ignored by the ‘New York Times’ print edition [and of course by the BBC]) was virtually contemporaneous with the return of Yusuf al-Qaradawi (the most celebrated Muslim Brotherhood cleric in the world) to Egypt after fifty years in exile.

 Having given several examples of Qaradawi's blood-chilling invective against Jews, Professor Wistrich continues:

"If this is not genocidal anti-Semitic incitement, then the term has little meaning. The current supreme leader of the Brotherhood, Mohamed Budi, undoubtedly shares such views on Israel, Zionism, and the Jews. His advice in 2010 to the Mujahideen in Gaza to continue to “raise the banner of jihad against the Jews, [our] first and foremost enemies” was essentially echoing an undeviating gospel of hatred.

Like Sheikh Qaradawi, the current leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood clearly believe that loathing of Jews and the destruction of Israel is mandated by God himself. Every Jew in the world is thereby designated an enemy within this ideology. Nor is it an accident that Qaradawi, like other Egyptian clerics, should quote an anti-Jewish saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad in a notorious hadith on the preconditions for the Day of Judgment. In his commentary, Qaradawi emphasized that the coming apocalyptic battle will not be “between Arabs and Zionists, or between Jews and Palestinians, or between Jews or anybody else.” His conclusion could not be more explicit. “ This battle will occur between the collective body of Muslims and the collective body of Jews, that is all Muslims and all Jews.”

Such Muslim fundamentalist doctrines on Israel and the Jews are intimately connected to an obsession with purging Muslim countries of all and any Western influences—seen as part of a larger Jewish-Zionist conspiracy against Islam. Since 1928, when Sheikh Hasan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brothers in Ismailiyah, the notion that Jews are by nature evil and can never peacefully co-exist with others has been axiomatic for the fundamentalist organization. An equally self-evident corollary is the denial of any possibility of Jewish self-rule (let alone a Jewish state) or even of civic equality with Muslims.

A  viewpoint expressed in Londonistan

The establishment of Israel in 1948 further reinforced this Islamist doctrine of Zionism as a malevolent force and a permanent enemy. It was given a more systematic expression in the 1950s by Sayyed Qutb, the most important and influential of the Brotherhood’s thinkers, who was repeatedly imprisoned, tortured, and eventually executed by Nasir’s police state in 1966. For Qutb, the term ‘Jews’ became virtually interchangeable with ‘enemies of Islam’. The struggle against the Jews would continue indefinitely because the Jewish enemy would never rest until Islam was destroyed. Qutb was even convinced that Nasir himself was an “agent of Zionism” as were all the secular nationalist westernizing regimes in the Middle East. Qutb also railed against the “army of the learned”—the secularist professors, philosophers, writers, poets, and scientists carrying Muslim names yet undermining the sacred religion of Islam “in the service of Zionism.” Qutb’s heirs in the Brotherhood were especially outraged by President Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem in 1977 and his “fallacious peace” with the arch-enemy Israel.

After 1979, their spiritual leader and the chief editor of 'al-Dawah' [The Call to Islam], Umar al-Tilmisani, spared no effort in denouncing the diabolical nature of the Jews and Israel’s malicious intent to destroy the Islamic foundations of Egypt....

For al-Tilmisani and his fellow Muslim brothers thirty years ago, normalization with Israel was the greatest “catastrophe” imaginable — nothing less than “the most dangerous cancer eating away at all the life cells in our bodies.”  Exchanging ambassadors with the Jewish State was equivalent to “opening the gates of evil on Egypt,” a spiritual death in exchange for the bribe of billions of American dollars and final capitulation tothe “world Zionist conspiracy.”

Courtesy: Edgar Davidson

Following Sadat’s assassination (a revolutionary fundamentalist act), the already cold peace with Israel became virtually frozen - not least because of the strength of the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies. During the next three decades of Hosni Mubarak’s repressive rule, demonization of the Jews continued unchecked in the Egyptian media, despite massive American economic aid to Egypt and a common strategic interest with Israel in containing Islamism. Nonetheless, anti-Semitism remained, as before, the daily bread of Egyptian politics. Mubarak and his government colleagues permitted it as a safety valve and an outlet for popular rage that might otherwise have turned against the corruption of the regime. The fundamentalists, in turn, maintained their long-term goals of one day destroying the peace with Israel, thereby “saving Islam” and establishing an authentic Islamic state ruled by Sharia law.

As recently as 1 January 2012, the deputy leader of the Muslim Brotherhood,Rashad Bayoumi, told the Arabic daily al-Hayat that his organization will never “recognize Israel at all,” whatever the circumstances. He emphasized that the Brotherhood regarded Israel as a “criminal enemy” and would initiate legal proceedings toward cancelling the 1979 peace treaty....

With regard to Israel and the Jews, the fundamentalist attitude has never deviated during the past few decades, closely linked as it is to a truly paranoid fear of “Judaization”—often a synonym for secularism, westernization, liberal modernity, or “globalization.” Paradoxically, Brotherhood ideologues, despite their rabid anti-Westernism, have no problem in drawing liberally on non-Muslim sources for their radical anti-Semitism ....  Egypt has long been saturated by this type of semi-pornographic stream of anti-Semitic vitriol directed at the “Satanic Jews,” publicly licensed and frequently legitimized by seemingly respectable journalists, academics, and Egyptian intellectuals. Such libels have been common among Nasirists, a number of Egyptian “liberals,” and even some leftists as well as among Islamists of every shade or coloring. Though the question of Palestine is often present as the trigger for such deep antagonism, much of the hostility also relates to the presumed “cultural assault” on Egypt that derives not only from Israel’s physical existence but from the imagined “essence” of Judaism and Jewry. [My emphasis]

The current unleashing of radical Islamist forces throughout Egypt has hardly improved matters. Thus, at a venomous Muslim Brotherhood rally in Cairo’s most prominent mosque on November 25, 2011, Islamic activists ominously chanted “Tel Aviv, judgment day has come,” vowing to “one day kill all Jews.” The rally had been  called to promote the “battle against Jerusalem’s Judaization” and was peppered with hate-filled speeches about the “treacherous Jews.” There were explicit calls for jihad and for the liberation of all of Palestine as well as references to the well-known hadith concerning a future Muslim annihilation of the Jews. Ahmed al-Tayeb, head of Egypt’s Al-Azhar University (the most senior clerical authority in Sunni Islam), even claimed that to this day Jews everywhere in the world are seeking to prevent Egyptian and Islamic unity. He added: “The al-Aqsa Mosque is currently under an offensive by the Jews... We shall not allow the Zionists to judaize al-Quds [Jerusalem].” Such threats have been a consistent theme among Egyptian Islamic preachers and spokesmen of the Muslim Brotherhood for the past eighty years.

The theme of the “treacherous Jews” has deep roots indeed in the Quran and hadith. It has also animated the Palestinian Hamas ever since its creation twenty-four years ago—inspiring its visceral Jew-hatred, rabid anti-Westernism, and jihadist ideology. Not surprisingly for an organizational offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas’s Sacred Covenant of 1988 includes in its preamble an emphatic quote from Sheikh Hassan al-Banna: “Israel will exist, and continue to exist, until Islam abolishes it...” [My emphasis] Hamas’s Islamic credo, its advocacy of jihad, its anti-Semitic world-view, and hatred of Israel are all inextricably linked to the ideology of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood—of which it proudly claims to be the Palestinian wing. Article 7 of the Hamas Covenant underlines, for example, the continuous jihad of the Brotherhood against “the Zionist invasion” in 1936, 1948, and 1968, as the unbreakable chain connected to the founding of Hamas itself in 1988. All of these revolts were driven by the same conviction that Palestine is an inalienable possession “for all generations of Muslims” until the end of time.'

Read all of Robert Wistrich's footnoted article here
And while on the subject of brotherly love:

Jihad Against Israel & "One Nation For A New Holocaust" (videos)

I thought this video was unsettling enough:

But then I saw this:

Read more here.

Hat tip: Vlad Tepes blog

Al Beeb's Man In Cairo Mistaken For A Jew

Sometimes - just sometimes - a chink of light penetrates the curtain of denial that the BBC habitually drapes over any suggestion that all is not springlike about the Arab uprisings.

Sometimes - just sometimes - an Al Beeb reporter (though not usually "Middle East editor" Jeremy Bowen) does not stay true to type, but types the truth, by which I mean the situation as it is, and not how Al Beeb (which loves to conceal all sorts of awkward little facts, especially about Islamic extremism, that sit ill with the narrative if feeds the masses) would like the world to be.

Thus the BBC's Thomas Dinham, reporting from Cairo, tells us frankly of increasing antisemitism there, and adds:

'While walking in the street someone pushed me from behind with such force that I nearly fell over.

Turning around, I found myself surrounded by five men, one of whom tried to punch me in the face. I stopped the attack by pointing out how shameful it was for a Muslim to assault a guest in his country, especially during Ramadan.

Relieved that a seemingly random assault was over, I was appalled by the apology offered by one of my assailants. "Sorry," he said contritely, offering his hand, "we thought you were a Jew."

Shaking his head in disbelief on hearing the news, an Egyptian friend sympathised: "That's stupid, you are obviously not a Jew."

The chilling implication I was left with was that, had I been Jewish, the assault would have apparently been justified.'

Well done, Mr Dinham!
Read it all:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-14911786
Hat tip: Rita

Brotherly Love: What Some Egyptian Clerics Have been Teaching about Jews

Have you noticed that in recent days there are more women with Islamic head coverings, and occasionally the full niqab, in Tahrir Square? It strikes me that way – a definite contrast with earlier days, when the overwhelmingly majority of the women on the square were secularly dressed, resembling the average woman on the average high street anywhere in the West.

Professor Emerita Phyllis Chesler, who’s drawn attention to the trend in an intriguing article (http://www.phyllis-chesler.com/933/cairo-street-scenes) about what she sees as the Islamification of Egyptian women, also notes, based on a study of Cairo University graduation photographs over the past few decades – in the years 1959, 1978, 1995, and 2004, to be precise – that the incidence of head coverings has been steadily increasing. She sees it as evidence of steady Islamification. (Not all the hihabbed women seem to support the opposition forces, however – I’ve seen some on television who support Mubarak, and see http://www.slate.com/id/2283629/).

But, more generally, Phyllis Chesler also points to a poll of Egyptians taken in June 2010:

“Fifty nine percent said they back Islamists. Only 27% said they back modernizers. Half of Egyptians support Hamas. Thirty percent support Hizbullah and 20% support al Qaida. Moreover, 95% of them would welcome Islamic influence over their politics….Eighty two percent of Egyptians support executing adulterers by stoning, 77% support whipping and cutting the hands off thieves. 84% support executing any Muslim who changes his religion…When this preference is translated into actual government policy, it is clear that the Islam they support is the al Qaida Salafist version.

When given the opportunity, the crowds on the street are not shy about showing what motivates them. They attack Mubarak and his new Vice President Omar Suleiman as American puppets and Zionist agents. The US, protesters told CNN's Nick Robertson, is controlled by Israel. They hate and want to destroy Israel. That is why they hate Mubarak and Suleiman.”

Not surprisingly, when London-based Kamal Helbawy (one of Al Beeb’s favourite talking heads, and a man with the ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood in his very DNA) appeared on Press TV last evening (Tuesday), billed as “ex-Muslim Brotherhood Spokesman,” he could hardly contain his bile regarding the Mubarak regime’s support for Israel and the United States– and of course, despite his ducking and weaving on western TV channels, the Brotherhood is pledged to revoke the 1979 Peace Treaty. See also his remarks here http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/2797.htm

Whether the Islamified Egyptian women and other religious opponents of the regime who are now so prominent among the Tahrir Square demonstrators also seek revocation of that Treaty is for the time a matter of speculation.

Here's Rabbi Marvin Hier, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, on the Muslim Brotherhood and its implications for Israel:

I fear, hopefully without foundation, that many of the Islamified may have been exposed to the quite horrendous antisemitism that apparently blights so much Islamic teaching about Jews – there’s the familiar description of Jews as “apes and pigs” and there’s an equally familiar story about a Jewish woman (often described as a prostitute, it seems) who attempted to kill Mohammed with a poisoned lamb shank: there are disturbing videos on You Tube that show Muslim children of the tenderest years repeating these descriptions and indictments of Jews, learned by rote.

So, in preparation for what we may expect if the Egyptian Revolution turns Islamic, let’s remind ourselves of just what some of Egypt’s imams have been teaching about “The Jews “in recent years . Here’s a small selection, but there are plenty more:

Here's Yusuf al-Qaradawi, telling why he's against the Peace Process (the BBC's Jeremy Bowen, who thinks the Muslim Brotherhood is "moderate," should be compelled to watch this one):

“The Jews are the People of Treachery, Betrayal, and Vileness ... that is the most beautiful thing I have ever heard”:

“The worst enemies of the Muslims – after Satan – are the Jews”:

“The Jews are the offspring of snakes and vipers ... It’s our duty to hate the Jews as part of our faith”:

“Jews, the Day of Vengeance is Nearing...”:

“They spread wars, homosexuality, and corruption...”:

“I will devour them with my teeth”:

“It got to the point that the rulers themselves had no solution but to annihilate them....”:

“The Koran tells us to hate them... There are black-eyed virgins waiting for you.... The peak of my happiness ... is to raise a martyr...”:
 

Let’s hope that most Children of the Revolution are indeed true progressives and democrats, and have not imbued that hateful, demented stuff spewed by clerics of this kind, which would take their society back to the Dark Ages and spell great danger for the region.