Religion, Prejudice and Annihilation. The Case of Traditional Islamic Judeophobia and Its Transformation into the Modern Islamist Antisemitism

Abstract

In this paper, I examine contemporary anti-Jewish prejudice that is spreading in Islamic civilization. I pose two core questions. First, is this Jew-hatred recent or traditionally inherited? Second, is it simply a Judeophobia or is it a new variety of antisemitism? Based on the work of Hannah Arendt, I distinguish between two evils: Judeophobia and antisemitism. I also challenge two, in my view, ideologically blinkered interpretations. The first, deflects interpretations that point to the empirical evidence of Islamist antisemitism by calling them examples of Islamophobia. The second, minimizes or even excuses this antisemitism as a justifiable response of Islamic outrage to grievances caused by the Middle East conflict and Western policy more generally. In short, these two interpretations deny the existence of an Islamist antisemitism whose origins lie primarily in the core elements of Islamist ideology. The paper draws attention to denial in a different context, not the now famous denial of the Holocaust in and by Europeans, but the denial of the reality of antisemitism in its Islamist form by observers of recent trends in the Middle East.