Ahmed Al-Tayeb: ‘Die Juden Sind Unser Unglück’

On June 14, the Grand Imam of the Al-Azhar Mosque, Ahmed Al-Tayeb, spoke to the UN Security Council, to which he had been invited as an honored guest, on the “peace” and “tolerance” that, he said, had always characterized Islam. It was quite a performance. You can find out more about it here: “Antisemitic Grand imam of Al-Azhar tells UN Security Council how to be tolerant,” Elder of Ziyon, June 15, 2023:

This [the claim that Islam is a religion of “peace and tolerance”] is only the hypocrisy within his speech. Tayeb has, in the past, shown his intolerance and rabid antisemitism in other contexts. You can trace over the past ten years how he switched from publicly railing against Jews to changing the term to  “Zionists.”

In 2013, Tayeb was not so careful to distinguish between Zionists and Jews. He said, “See how we suffer today from global Zionism and Judaism, whereas our peaceful coexistence with the Christians has withstood the test of history. Since the inception of Islam 1,400 years ago, we have been suffering from Jewish and Zionist interference in Muslim affairs.” He then went on to justify antisemitism with Quranic verses, and then said that people were justified in hating Jews because of their arrogance and behavior.

Yes, let’s recall that “peaceful coexistence” with Christians that “has withstood the test of history.”

We all remember the “peaceful coexistence” that led Arab armies to conquer the Christian populations: Chaldeans and Assyrians in Iraq, Catholics in Syria, Maronites in Lebanon, Copts in Egypt, more Catholics in North Africa, where St. Augustine – he of Hippo – lived, and Tertullian, too, a Father of the Church. We remember how those “peacefully coexisting” Muslim armies crossed the Strait of Gibraltar, conquering in war the Christians of Iberia, and making a thrust deep into France before finally being stopped by the Christians under Charles Martel at Poitiers in 732 A.D. There followed many centuries of Muslim raiding parties up and down the coasts of Europe, where the Muslims would kidnap, and enslave, Christian men, women, and children. Most of these raiding parties focused on Italy and southern France, but the raids went as far north as Ireland and even, on one memorable occasion, to Iceland. More than a million West Europeans thus became slaves of Muslims in North Africa. In eastern Europe, Muslim slavers sought out Christian girls from Circassia and Georgia in the Caucasus. Famed for their beauty, these girls were used as sex slaves by the Muslims. In Spain, it took the Christians more than 700 years of warfare – from 711 to 1492 — to slowly push their Muslim overlords out of one Muslim kingdom after another until their final expulsion in 1492.

Nor was there “peaceful coexistence” between Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land itself. Muslims began to harass, rob, and sometimes kill, local Christians, as well as religious pilgrims from Europe. In 1009, the Fatimid Caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, ordered the Church of the Holy Sepulcher to be razed.

Ultimately this Muslim violence, which made it hard for Christians to visit Jerusalem in peace, led to the Crusades, which were defensive wars, a reaction to the Muslim aggression in the Holy Land. These wars, that lasted from 1096 to 1300 A.D., ended in a Christian defeat, and from then until 1967, Muslims controlled east Jerusalem and the Old City.

During the past 1400 years, as Christian lands were conquered by Muslims, some Christians, finding the status of “dhimmi” too onerous to endure — especially the jizyah payments — slowly converted to Islam to avoid the dhimmi status and, the worst part about that status, the requirement to pay the jizyah to the Muslim state. That is how Egypt, which was entirely Christian in 600 A.D., is only 10% Christian today. And the same is true for the Christians elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa who, over the centuries, have slowly been converting to Islam, in order to avoid the disabilities imposed on dhimmis. These have been conversions of convenience, not of a genuine change in belief; the children and grandchildren of those Christians who decided to convert did indeed became true Believers. For Al-Tayeb, this is an example of “coexistence.”

Tayeb soon changed his lyrics, but not his tune. In 2018, while claiming that there is no antisemitism in the Muslim world, he blamed all intra-Arab fighting and violence on the “Zionists,” saying that they were behind all Muslim strife, and that if it wasn’t for them the Arab world would be progressing. He then added that the Jews – sorry, “Zionists” – intended to march into Mecca and Medina and take over the holy mosques there….

Jews are behind “all Muslim strife.” Also sprach Sheikh Ahmed Al-Tayeb, Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Mosque. Of course. When the Sunni extremists in Pakistan’s Sipah-e-Sahaba set out to murder the Shi’a they describe as “Rafidite dogs,” they are secretly following the instructions of Mossad agents. The Jews were also behind Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, the Libyan civil war, Bashar Assad’s war in Syria, including his use of chemical weapons, and the decision of the Gulf Cooperation Council to temporarily cut off all relations with Qatar. The Jews started the Pakistani civil war in 1971, when the army of West Pakistan tried to crush the independence movement in East Pakistan — a movement directed, though very few know it, by a Mossad agent working undercover as an ice cream salesman in Cox’s Bazar. The Jews are, of course, behind the Islamic State, always trying to make Muslims look bad. They caused the rise of Hezbollah, thereby undermining the Lebanese state so that it would no longer be a threat. Israelis were behind the Houthi revolt in Yemen, hoping to create bad blood between Iran and Saudi Arabia which, if Israel had not meddled so sinisterly, would still be the very best of friends. Nothing bad happens to Muslims that isn’t caused by Jews. By the way, did you know that no Jews went to work at the Twin Towers that day?

Take away the Jews, eliminate them – we all know what Ahmad Al-Tayeb means by that – and the Arab states would thrive, politically, economically, socially. There’d be no stopping them. Israel is the only thing holding them back. That tiny Jewish state, let’s remember, has a population of seven million Jews, and a land area of 8,500 square miles. The twenty-two Arab states, by contrast, have a total population of 460 million, and a land area of 13,000,000 square miles. And those 22 Arab states are among the most richly endowed with natural resources of any countries on earth. They still have ten trillion dollars worth of oil and gas still in the ground. Just one family, the al-Saud, has already reaped for themselves $1.5 trillion from oil sales for themselves. Israel has no oil, and relatively small amounts of natural gas from the three Mediterranean fields, Tamar, Leviathan, and Karish. Israel’s most important resource is the brains of its remarkably talented population. Yet we are asked to believe that this speck on the globe, Israel, has kept those twenty-two Arab states — with a population sixty-seven times that of Israeli Jews, and a land area nearly 1,800 times that of Israel — from progressing. How it has managed to perform this act of geopolitical legerdemain, the Grand Imam of the Al-Azhar Mosque, Sheikh Ahmed Al-Tayeb, does not explain. Nor does he tell us what explains the continuing backwardness of the Arabs, and other Muslims, during the 1300 years when Islam existed and there was no Israel.

And while he emphasized to the UN Wednesday that the Quran says “there is no compulsion in religion,” in 2016 he emphasized that Islamic apostates who refuse to repent should be killed. 

This is who the UN chose as the Muslim representative of tolerance and fraternity. 

If he was Christian or Jewish, the media would be digging under rocks to find anything negative to say about him, and any hypocrisy would be gleefully reported. But the media that saw this broadcast is still  hiding the antisemitism and intolerance he said within his speech at a UN Security Council meeting on…tolerance and fraternity.

The Nazis used to claim “Die Juden sind unser Unglück.” “The Jews are our misfortune.” At the UN on June 14, Ahmed al-Tayeb said the same thing. He no doubt expected many people in his audience at the UN to agree with him. And perhaps they did. That’s the pretty pass we’ve come to.