How anti-Semitism prevents peace

Despite the obsessive preoccupation with Israeli building activities in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the greatest obstacle to peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians is almost never mentioned in media accounts: virulent, jihadist hatred of Jews. Contrary to what many assume, however, jihadism in its current form is not a throwback to some medieval mindset but a confluence of traditional Islamic teachings and the anti-Semitism and extermination goals of Nazism. Without understanding how the latter has influenced the former, it would be difficult to identify how modern jihadists find a basis for some of their pronouncements. For example, a faithful Muslim could arguably support a Jewish presence in historic Palestine since the Qur'an designates the Land of Israel as a dwelling place for the Jews, to which they will be returned as the last days approach. 1 Clearly this viewpoint runs counter to the jihadists' agenda as well as their rhetoric. But it is through their rhetoric that the deadly adaptation of Nazi views surrounding an Islamic core is seen most clearly. SOURCES OF INSPIRATION Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan alBanna (1906-49) said he learned a great deal from the Nazis about the effectiveness of propaganda in spreading hatred of Jews. 2 Hitler himself makes two basic points in this connection: (1) something of the most insolent lie will always remain and stick, 3 and (2) the aim of propaganda is not to inform but to incite wrathful hatred. 4 Hence, like the Nazis, modern jihadists, who derive much of their inspiration from the writings of Banna and others of the Brotherhood, often invoke such discredited works as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic tract fabricated by the Russian secret police at the turn of the twentieth century, as evidence of a world Zionist conspiracy. They have resurrected the medieval blood libel and have accused the Jews of every evil, from spreading cancer to dispensing aphrodisiacs to Muslim women. 5 When jihadists are not busy denying the Holocaust, they take their cue from Hitler and blame the Jews for the outbreak of World War II and its bloody consequences. 6 Thus, for example, Palestinian Authority (PA) president Mahmoud Abbas argued in his book, The Other Side: The Secret Relationship between Nazism and the Zionist Movement , that less than a million Jews had been killed in the Holocaust and that the Zionist movement was a partner in the mass slaughter of the Jews. 7 Alfred Rosenberg, perhaps the Nazis' most influential ideologue after Hitler, argued that Jews must be annihilated because the Aryan race had been 'poisoned by Judaism' and not merely by Jewish blood: The essence of Jewish evil, he maintained, found its expression in Judaism, and both the 'ism' and the essence were in the blood. 8 All Jews, thus, were essentially evil and must, therefore, be eliminated. Such notions are echoed by Sayyid Qutb, the most influential of the modern jihadist ideologues after Banna, who held that 'Jews were by nature determined to fight God-s truth and sow corruption and confusion,' 9 and that 'the deeper cause of the Jewish hatred of Islam was the malevolent Jewish nature.' 10 As with the Nazis, the jihadists- aim is to eliminate this source of evil that threatens all of humanity. 'Jihad and Jew-hatred belong together,' German academic Matthias Kntzel correctly observes. 11 What drives this hatred is not the Jewish presence in the Middle East-it is the Jewish presence in the world. A televised diatribe delivered by the Egyptian cleric Muhammad Hussein Yaqub epitomized the jihadists- ideological position: If the Jews left Palestine to us, would we start loving them? Of course not. - They are enemies not because they occupied Palestine. They would have been enemies even if they did not occupy a thing. - Our fighting with the Jews is eternal, and it will not end until the final battle - until not a single Jew remains on the face of the earth. …