islamo-fascists
• Views: 3,287
Andrew Sullivan, with more about the pathological anti-Semitism (often state-sponsored) that permeates the fundamentalist Muslim world: The Anti-Semitism of the Islamo-Fascists.
The sobering truth is that somewhere in my head, I knew all this already. It is not a revelation that large segments of the Arab world—at all levels of society—are not just anti-Israel, but fanatically anti-Semitic. Bernard Lewis wrote in 1986: “The demonization of Jews goes further than it had ever done in Western literature, with the exception of Germany during the period of Nazi rule. In most Western countries, anti-Semitic divagations on Jewish history, religion, and literature are more than offset by a great body of genuine scholarship… In modern Arabic writing there are few such countervailing elements.” So why did I look the other way? Why did I discount this anti-Semitism on the grounds that these are alien cultures and we cannot fully understand them, or because these pathologies are allied with more legitimate (if to my mind unpersuasive) critiques of Israeli policy? I guess I was thinking like John Rawls. We in the West simply do not want to believe that this kind of hatred still exists; and when it emerges, we feel uncomfortable. We do everything we can to change the subject. Why the denial, I ask myself? What is it about this sickness that we do not understand by now? And what possible excuse do we have not to expose and confront it with all the might we have?