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“Until the end of World War II, there was little precedent in Islam for the anti-Semitism that was now warping” Middle Eastern “politics and society,” absurdly claimed Lawrence Wright in his 2006 book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. In an otherwise excellent documentation of Al Qaeda’s 2001 attacks on America, invaluable reading a quarter century later, Wright’s mythical mischaracterization of Islamic Jew hatred astonishes as a unique error.
The above-cited sentence precedes a text quoted in full in a 2008 American Thinker article by Andrew Bostom shortly before the publication of his masterly magnum opus on Islamic antisemitism, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism. To his amazement, Wright asserted:
Jews had lived safely although submissively under Muslim rule for 1,200 years, enjoying full religious freedom; but in the 1930s, Nazi propaganda on Arabic-language shortwave radio, coupled with slanders by Christian missionaries in the region, infected the area with this ancient Western prejudice. After the war Cairo became a sanctuary for Nazis, who advised the military and the government. The rise of the Islamist movement coincided with the decline of fascism, but they overlapped in Egypt, and the germ passed into a new carrier.
As Bostom has copiously documented through decades of research, this “germ theory” of Islamic rage against Jews has no empirical foundation, as apparent in the lack of any endnote in Wright’s book for this passage on page 45. Although Jewish diaspora groups in the Middle East and North Africa lived “submissively under Muslim rule for 1,200 years,” this life hardly proceeded “safely” and exhibited nothing meriting the term “full religious freedom.” Rather, under the historic Islamic societal norms for non-Muslim dhimmis, Jews suffered a precarious existence as subjugated, second-class subjects, in a status not incomparable to enslaved Blacks in antebellum America.
Wright’s own writing suggests that Muslim animus against Jews is not something imported from the West through influences like Christian and Nazi antisemitic beliefs. Just as analysts such as Robert Spencer have correctly identified jihadist ideology as underlying Muslim rejection of Israel, Wright emphasized the centrality of the 1967 Six Day War in Islamic resurgence. Israel’s dramatic triumph developed among Muslims a “tacit understanding that God sided with the Jews” and
was a psychological turning point in the history of the modern Middle East. The speed and decisiveness of the Israeli victory in the Six Day War humiliated many Muslims who had believed until then that God favored their cause. They had lost not only their armies and their territories but also faith in their leaders, in their countries, and in themselves. The profound appeal of Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt and elsewhere was born in this shocking debacle. A newly strident voice was heard in the mosques; the voice said that they had been defeated by a force far larger than the tiny country of Israel. God had turned against the Muslims. The only way back to Him was to return to the pure religion. The voice answered despair with a simple formulation: Islam is the solution.
Wright’s text also indicates that this doctrinal enmity with Jews goes back to Islam’s very founding in seventh-century Arabia. Islam’s canonical accounts describe Jews here as among the very first communities vanquished by jihad as Arabs abandoned the so-called Jahiliya (time of ignorance) for a newfound religious zeal:
The founding of the state of Israel and its startling rise to military dominance unsettled the Arab identity. In the low condition the Arabs found themselves in, they looked upon Israel and recalled the time when the Prophet Mohammed had subjugated the Jews of Medina. They thought about the great wave of Muslim expansion at the point of Arab spears and swords, and they were humbled by the contrast of their proud martial past and their miserable present. History was reversing itself; the Arabs were as fractious and disorganized and marginal as they had been in jahiliyya times. Even the Jews dominated them. The voice in the mosque said that the Arabs had let go of the one weapon that gave them real power: faith. Restore the fervor and purity of the religion that had made the Arabs great, and God would once again take their side.
The perennial persistence of Jew hatred among Muslims present in Wright’s work suggests anything but the periodic influence of outside cultures. The case of Muhammad Atta, who later initiated Al Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks by piloting American Airlines Flight 11 into the World Trade Center’s North Tower, stands out. This Egyptian Muslim living in Hamburg, Germany, at the age of 27 completed a standardized will from a local mosque on April 11, 1996, the day Israel launched in Lebanon the military operation Grapes of Wrath against Hezbollah terrorists. According to one friend, the Israeli action enraged Atta, “and by filling out his last testament during the attack he was offering his life in response,” Wright recounted.
Atta in 1999, Wright added,
himself often said that the Jews controlled the media, banks, newspapers, and politics from their world headquarters in New York City; moreover, he was convinced that the Jews had planned the wars in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Chechnya as a way of holding back Islam.
Atta also likewise suspected the White House intern Monica Lewinsky, caught in 1998 having a sexual affair with President Bill Clinton in the Oval Office. Atta considered her “a Jewish agent sent to undermine Clinton, who had become too sympathetic to the Palestinian cause,” Wright noted. Such conspiracies became common among Muslims after Clinton ordered missile strikes against Afghanistan and Sudan on August 20, 1998, in response to Al Qaeda’s August 7, 1998, bombings of American embassies in East Africa.
As suggested by “No war for Monica!” signs in many Arab streets, Wright explained that for
Islamists and, indeed, many Arabs, the relationship between the president and his intern perfectly symbolized Jewish influence in America, and any military response to the bombings was likely be seen as an excuse to punish Muslims and divert attention from the scandal.
Jew hatred infected also “Egypt’s best-known Islamist,” as Wright described him, namely Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, known as the Blind Sheikh due to his blindness from childhood diabetes. He had been a theologian at the Asut, Egypt, branch of Cairo’s Al Azhar University, Sunni Islam’s leading authority, and had become leader of Egypt’s militant Islamic Group. He later sought American political asylum despite being on a State Department terrorism watch list. As in Egypt, Rahman in Jersey City, New Jersey’s Little Egypt neighborhood issued a fatwa permitting his followers to rob banks and kill Jews, all while he conspired to destroy in 1993 the World Trade Center across the Hudson River.
If Wright doubted the existence of any Islamic doctrines of antisemitism, he might have considered how Christians as fellow dhimmis with Jews have fared historically under Islamic rule. A jihadist slogan proclaims, “On Saturday we kill the Jews, on Sunday we kill the Christians,” indicating that Jews and Christians with their respective sabbaths are equally targets of sharia subjugation. Correspondingly, Christian societies under Islamic rule throughout history have experienced dramatic declines.
Rahman’s Egypt was no exception, as Wright noted that Islamic Group members “were financing their activism by shaking down Coptic Christians.” These Christians were “perhaps 10 percent of the Egyptian population but who included many shopkeepers and small business owners. On a number of occasions, the young radicals stormed into Coptic weddings and robbed the guests.” Rahman “obligingly issued fatwas that countenanced the slaughter of Christians and the plunder of Coptic jewelry stores, on the premise that a state of war existed between Christians and Muslims.”
Wright’s own research therefore belies his one significant blind spot concerning Islamic antisemitism in a book well-deserving of a Pulitzer Prize. Although his work remains essential reading concerning the dark day of September 11, 2001, and his lengthy history offers numerous insights into jihadist groups like Al Qaeda, this flaw first revealed by Bostom remains troubling. Even among some of the best examinations of Islam, politically correct mythologies persist, revealing the need for continuing scrutiny of this faith in intellectual circles and beyond.
Walter Sieruk says
The despots on power of hostile and dangerous Islamic regime of have always hated America and the American people. Those vicious Muslim tyrants of that Islamic regime have always hated the State of Israel Jewish people , as it supplied weapons to Hamas to commit the murderous against the Jews on October 7th 2023.
Therefore , this leads to the subject of Iran and September 11, 2001 jihad murderous affront against both humankind and America the following might be interesting to some people. A type of thinking of many from Middle East is the sayings that “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” This type of Middle Eastern “philosophy” may explain, to a degree, how Muslims of two different branches of Islam, which are hostile to each other, can work together against what they perceive as a “common enemy.”
In this case the mullahs and other in power in Shi ‘ite Iran can work with the jihadists of al Qaeda against which they see as “The Great Satan” By that term they mean the United States of America. As the Muslim author, Rohan Gunaratna , explained in his book INSIDE AL QAEDA . For on page 198 it reveals that among different Islamic terror organizations that “Ideological tolerance and intergroup cohesion as a means confronting a common enemy.” So another author, Robert Spencer, in his book, which is entitled THE COMPLETE INFIDEL’S GUIDE TO IRAN supply’s information about this topic. It has been keyboarded that this book reveals “Iran’s long –standing support of terrorists- including shocking evidence that Iran helped plain the 9/11 attack.”