Eleven Jews were murdered in Pittsburgh; no Muslims were. But Antonio Guterres called on the world to “roll back the forces of racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia…” Why add in “Islamophobia”? Because the idea that “Islamophobia” is akin to anti-Semitism is a common Leftist talking point, along with the Leftist claim that Muslims in the West are being unfairly targeted for discrimination, harassment, and persecution, just as Jews were and are. Many, many Leftists besides Guterres have made this claim, including Noam Chomsky, Bernie Sanders; Prince Charles; the notorious non-Muslim Islamic apologist Karen Armstrong; Jeffrey Goldberg, “journalist” at The Atlantic; Leftist media darling and pseudo-intellectual hack Reza Aslan; Muslim Brotherhood-linked Congressman Keith Ellison; Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times; the deceptive Canada-based Islamic supremacist imam Syed Sohawardy; and Philadelphia chapter leader of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations Jacob Bender. Many others have repeated it.
Daniel Greenfield takes it apart in this video. The idea that Muslims are the new Jews is put forward by the Left, but it also has opponents on the Left. In 2014, as part of his ongoing awakening to the nature and reality of the jihad threat, Bill Maher noted:
Jews weren’t oppressing anybody. There weren’t 5,000 militant Jewish groups. They didn’t do a study of treatment of women around the world and find that Jews were at the bottom of it. There weren’t 10 Jewish countries in the world that were putting gay people to death just for being gay.
Indeed. Further, no one is calling for or justifying genocide of Muslims. No individual or group opposed to Islam is remotely comparable to the National Socialists. Not that facts have ever gotten in the way of a good meme.
Maher isn’t alone on the Left in having pointed out the absurdity of likening opposition to jihad to the lead-up to the Holocaust. The late Christopher Hitchens also refuted this idea when writing a few years ago about the notorious Ground Zero Mosque proposal:
“Some of what people are saying in this mosque controversy is very similar to what German media was saying about Jews in the 1920s and 1930s,” Imam Abdullah Antepli, Muslim chaplain at Duke University, told the New York Times. Yes, we all recall the Jewish suicide bombers of that period, as we recall the Jewish yells for holy war, the Jewish demands for the veiling of women and the stoning of homosexuals, and the Jewish burning of newspapers that published cartoons they did not like.
“Leaders around the world react to Pittsburgh mass killing,” CNN, October 27, 2018:
(CNN) – The massacre of 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh was felt around the nation and the globe.
…UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres
In a statement, Guterres called anti-Semitism “a menace to democratic values and peace.”
“The Secretary-General calls for a united front — bringing together authorities at all levels, civil society, religious and community leaders and the public at large — to roll back the forces of racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and other forms of hatred, bigotry, discrimination and xenophobia gaining strength in many parts of the world,” he said….