“…try to answer the most urgent question, the question which torments all those who have happened to read our accounts: How much of the concentration camp world is dead and will not return, like slavery and the dueling code? How much is back or is coming back? What can each of us do so that in this world pregnant with threats at least this threat will be nullified?” –Primo Levi
I read a lot. Perhaps not as much as those who can afford more time to read than I, but I read a lot. And in all my reading, one common peculiarity I find in all the articles written by the academia on the subject of Islamic anti-Jewish hatred is the safely-crafted reference to “the extreme and populist right” and to the fact that they are “definitely anti-Muslim,” to borrow the argot of Dr. Joel Kotek of ISGAP as an example (The New Rainbow Antisemitism: Time To Act, May 26, 2014).
I cannot deny the many good and useful analysis and delineations these academics have contributed to the fight against antisemitism, but the fact remains that they can never bring themselves to consider the possibility, though distant, that the mass renunciation of all Islamic antisemitism, contemporary and otherwise, as a result of honest and courageous exposure of its primary sources (even if such disclosure were extremely inconvenient for many of the culprits), would be a truly healthy example of a populism.
Simply because a movement gathers momentum to the point of what the “elites” would deem “populist” does not necessarily make that movement an evil, in much the same sense that, conversely, as Dr. Irwin Mansdorf points out, “Non-violence by itself does not mean it’s something that doesn’t hurt someone else.” That much of the Western world is waking up to the fact that Islam the religion is become dangerously and obtrusively problematic does not mean that an escape from our past somnolence in our failure to publicly recognize this danger is deserving of condemnation. The French Revolution, the Boston Tea Party, the Women’s Suffrage and the Civil Rights movements were all populist causes. Inherent and commendable within all these movements was that peculiar prejudice common to all those good men and women intolerant of political and religious tyranny.
And in their fight against antisemitism, isn’t the repudiation of all anti-Jewish hatred the end result—the populist movement—these scholars are driving for? Because if we do not intend to make the repudiation of anti-Jewish hatred a populist movement, whatever are we working toward in the meantime? The blasé attitudes of the majority of Western academia are, in my opinion, the only reason for their convenient refusal to publicly identify the religion of Islam—before it was ever “hijacked” by Islamist extremists and radical Muslims; before Zionism was ever espoused by the Arab League as a justifiable reason to murder Jews—as the primary instigant of contemporary antisemitism in the world today. You cannot halt cancer without neutralizing its aggressive cells; you cannot hold back the sea without building dikes; and you cannot eradicate antisemitism, at least from Western democracies, without controverting its primary sources.
Dorothy Rabinowitz writes, “The Obama administration’s propensity for denying reality has been a conspicuous feature from its beginnings, never more so, perhaps, than in the White House aversion to making any connection between Islam and terrorism.” The same can be said about the Western academe and their aversion to making any connection between Islam and contemporary antisemitism. And without making this connection, a populist movement against antisemitism will never be realized. In the meantime, such aversion is unfortunate for the non-Jew, but even more unfortunate for the Jew.
After all the books written about the Holocaust—after all the articles, and essays, and excruciating testimony from survivors and villains—we have another intended genocide gathering steam under our noses and yet we refuse to formally rebuke the religion at the forefront of this malefic onslaught. Blaise Pascal wrote, “To leave the mean is to abandon humanity.” Hence, for Western scholars to pretend today that, in light of a myriad of examples proving otherwise, the “middle way” somehow includes their shameless obfuscation of the fact that the religion of Islam is very much culpable for contemporary antisemitism, to refuse to come right out and say it, is now become an issue of morality. How deserving of honours, really, are their efforts when their toil continues to be inefficacious in removing the stain of anti-Jewish hatred from the heart of man? What are they doing, exactly, so that “…in this world pregnant with threats at least this threat will be nullified?”