Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: musulmani come nuovi ebrei? Not by a long way

Muslims the 'new Jews'? Not by a long way
18/01/2008
By David Cesarani
On January 27, the Muslim Council of Britain will embrace Holocaust
Memorial Day for the first time since it became an official fixture in
the nation's calendar. This is to be welcomed wholeheartedly, not
least because HMD was established to raise awareness of all forms of
racism, not just antisemitism, and because it was always intended to
use the day to commemorate the genocidal assault on the Muslims of
Bosnia in the 1990s. Indeed, this is one reason why many members of
Britain's varied Muslim population were dismayed by the MCB's six-year
boycott.
In January 2006, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown wrote that Muslims had a stake
in HMD and not only because non-Jews were victims of Nazi persecution.
"Nazism", she observed in The Independent, "reminds us of how thin is
the crust of European civilisation, and that it can be thrown off by
the slightest provocation or none at all." Alibhai-Brown had no doubt
where the latest perceived provocation was coming from. "Today the new
Jews of Europe are Muslims," she wrote. Muslims faced the same kind of
hatred that confronted Jews in the 1930s. "By remembering the
Holocaust with past victims, we remind ourselves of what could happen
in the future."
The notion that Muslims are the new Jews has taken hold in many
quarters. In October 2006, the columnist India Knight, writing in the
Sunday Times, laid into Jack Straw MP, after he said that the wearing
of the veil by Muslim women was a "statement of separateness and
difference". She wondered if Straw would have dared suggest that nuns
divest themselves of their habits. What was the problem with a woman
covering her hair? In a peculiar aside, she said that Orthodox Jews
avoided stepping in her shadow because she was deemed by them to be
"unclean", but she wouldn't let that bother her either. Straw's
discomfort was distinctly odd in her eyes and the sentiments he vented
signified something ominous. "It's open season on Islam -- Muslims are
the new Jews."
Soon after this intervention, Ken Livingstone, mayor of London,
ruffled feathers when he presented a report on the life of Muslims in
the capital. It showed that they suffered from extensive
discrimination in housing and employment, and were more likely to
suffer religiously motivated crimes. At the press conference where the
report was launched, Livingstone also condemned the way Muslims are
portrayed. "The entire debate," he said, "has been lopsided as though
somehow it is the Muslims' fault. That echoes Hitler and Goebbels and
all the others who said it was the Jews' fault."
At first, the new president of the MCB, Dr Muhammed Abdel Bari, who
was standing at his side, appeared to distance himself from
Livingstone's contentious parallel. But the following month, when Bari
was addressing a meeting of MPs, he made the same point. He criticised
government ministers for "unfairly targeting" Muslims in the context
of the war on terror and asked rhetorically, "What is the degree of
xenophobia that tipped Germany in the 1930s towards a murderous ethnic
and cultural racism?" When he was asked by a journalist to comment on
the implicit comparison, Bari said, "We know what happened in Nazi
Germany and we have to be on guard against entire communities being
demonised due to the actions of a minority."
Bari's comparison drew a withering response from Jon Benjamin, chief
executive of the Board of Deputies. "To try to recast modern Britain
as equivalent to Nazi Germany is equally offensive and disingenuous,
but also dangerous in that it will fuel alienation and anger,
particularly at a time when conciliation is vital," he told the Daily
Telegraph. Yet a few months later, a similar claim was made by Dr
Mohammad Naseem, chairman of the Birmingham Central Mosque, after
several Muslims were arrested by the police in connection with an
alleged terrorist plot. He told the press that Britain was becoming a
"police state" and compared the police raids to the persecution of the
Jews in Nazi Germany. This time it was the leader of the Conservative
Party, David Cameron, who was on a visit to Birmingham, who dismissed
the notion of Britain as a police state.
After Jonathan Evans, the head of MI5, issued a lurid warning against
the danger of extremism in the Muslim population, Bari returned to the
attack using the 1930s comparison. Speaking to the Daily Telegraph on
November 10, 2007, he complained about the endless negative depiction
of Muslims in the media and warned: "Every society has to be really
careful so the situation doesn't lead us to a time when people's minds
can be poisoned as they were in the 1930s." Bari's words were reported
more bluntly in the Daily Telegraph and on the BBC news. The headlines
proclaimed that the head of the MCB had "warned the UK must avoid
becoming like Nazi Germany". This was not what he had actually said,
and the Council issued a rebuttal.
But whether or not Muslim leaders were directly comparing Britain
under Brown to Germany under Hitler, the implication was clear. There
was, at the very least, a comparison with Europe in the 1930s when
antisemitism was rampant and marked the prelude to the Nazi programme
for wiping out the Jews. Although it evidently riled Jews and non-Jews
alike, the analogy has proved irresistible. "The Holocaust" and the
Nazis get instant recognition and have immense shock value. What
better to alert people to the indignities and injustices afflicting
Muslims, and gain sympathy, than by yoking them together? On Christmas
Day, the Muslim Public Affairs Committee of the UK published a report
on its website about a fatal attack on an Asian man in Bolton, which
police suspected was racially motivated. The report was headlined: We
Are Truly The New Jews.
There are, indeed, points in common between the historical experience
of Jews and Muslims in the country and elsewhere. One of the most
sophisticated explorations of this shared experience was by the
academic lawyer Maleiha Malik in the Guardian last year. She observed
that in Britain between the 1880s and the 1930s the Jews were regarded
as self-segregated adherents of an obscurantist, narrow and intolerant
faith. East European Jewish immigrants were depicted as a threat to
the country's morals, its health, and public safety. "There are," she
wrote, "recurring patterns in British society that racialise Jews and
Muslims, which we need to understand if we are to develop an effective
strategy for national security."
But Muslims are not the new Jews. The racism they face and the current
surge of prejudice against Islam have their own specific causes and
contexts, and however seductive the parallels may appear they tend to
be shallow and anachronistic. Britain today is not the late Victorian
and Edwardian country into which Jews immigrated from Eastern Europe.
Europe has not slipped back into the 1930s. Jews were vulnerable then
because they had no state of their own. Today many prejudiced
observers see Pakistan, with its nuclear weapons, behind every
immigrant from South Asia. Before the establishment of Israel, Judaism
was the creed of a stateless, powerless, dispersed minority. Someone
watching the ayatollahs addressing tens of thousands of supporters in
Tehran might be excused for (wrongly, as it happens) conflating Shiite
Islam with the power of a sovereign state.
Indeed, the very lessons of the 1930s and 1940s mean that we deal with
other faith groups and immigrants quite differently, if not always for
the better. Despite their flaws and attempts to flout the letter of
the law, the UK Human Rights Act, the UN Refugee Convention and a
myriad other statutes prevent Muslims in Britain or the EU suffering
the ghastly fate of Europe's Jews. It is simply inconceivable to think
of this body of legislation, and associated habits of thought rooted
in decades of multiculturalism, being dismantled or simply
evaporating.
Which is not in any way intended to minimise the fact that Muslims
today suffer appallingly from Islamophobia and racist violence. But
while racism has generic qualities, it has particular variants and
these can only be fought by grasping what is specific about them.
Using education about the Nazi persecution of the Jews to combat other
forms of prejudice may serve as a good justification for keeping alive
the memory of that atrocious period, but there are pitfalls to this
approach.
Nazi propaganda fastened on distinctive aspects of Judaism and Jewish
society. The genocidal rage emanating from Nazi believers against the
Jews was singular in character and outcome. Learning about it will not
necessarily explain why some people hate Muslims. Nor will it
necessarily deter the haters. Specifically because they may not have
anything against the Jews, they may feel that their violent fantasies
about Islam are unimpeachable. Or they may have prejudices against
both Jews and Muslims, but perceive each group quite separately with
each meriting their antipathy for distinctly perverse reasons.
In any case, surely people of all creeds and ethnicities should
observe Holocaust Memorial Day because it commemorates a crime against
humanity, and we are all human. It is hardly edifying if people pay
obeisance to the memory of slaughtered Jewry because they are
convinced they might be next in line.
However, if Jews expect others to stand with them in solidarity while
they grieve, and if we expect others to empathise with the
extraordinary nexus of social tension, supercessionist Christianity,
"scientific" racism, and political messianism that eventuated in
genocide, then we have to reciprocate. We may know about the
Holocaust, but that does not mean we know about the horrors of the
transatlantic slave trade or the ravages of colonialism. Once it is
established that Muslims are not the new Jews, there is no excuse for
failing to get to grips with Islamophobia and the daily racism Muslims
suffer, which Jews thankfully do not.
I have not argued that the Holocaust is unique (as distinct from being
specific), nor that other folks should leave our genocide alone. Nor
am I suggesting that if the similarities between the historical
trajectory of Muslims and Jews do not run deep this means that we, as
Jews, no longer have any "take" on Islamophobia. On the contrary, too
many Jews use false and fatuous comparisons between antisemitism and
anti-Muslim attitudes as a substitute for really understanding the
struggle of Muslims in this country and the perils they face in parts
of Europe. Either they think they know what is going on (they don't),
or they aren't bothered because, well, we Jews had it worse.
Holocaust Memorial Day is an opportunity for Muslims to learn about
the singular and often tragic course of European Jewish history. It
should also be a spur for Jews to engage with the story of Islam and
the vast, variegated pattern of Muslim society over the centuries. If
it is to be a bridge between the two faith groups then it is one that
should carry traffic in both directions. We Jews have a long, long way
to go.
David Cesarani is Research Professor in History at Royal Holloway,
University of London. With Prof Humayun Ansari, he co-edited Muslim-
Jewish Dialogue in a 21st Century World (Royal Holloway, University of
London)
http://www.thejc.com/Home.aspx?ParentId=m12s114&AId=57545&ATypeId=1&secid=14&prev=true

Che i musulmani, grandi sterminatori di ebrei e cristiani in tutto il
mondo, siano da considerare vittime come gli ebrei è una cosa che fa
proprio ridere! Gli abitanti del Darfur ne sano qualcosa.