Jews and Muslims “share so much in common about our dreams of what a just, fair, compassionate, whole world should be for all God’s children,” stated Rabbi David Saperstein at Washington, DC’s Newseum on December 3. These remarks at the previously discussed launch of the Inter Jewish Muslim Alliance (IJMA) ignored historic Jewish subjugation under Islamic sharia, a distortion that indicated IJMA’s shaky intersectional foundation.
Addressing about 50 conference participants, the IJMA board member and World Union of Progressive Judaism president Saperstein evoked historical multicultural myths of Jews and Muslims. These “two historic communities…have been bound together from the start of Islam until today,” he stated, as if, for example, Muslim outrage at Israel’s 1948 establishment had not precipitated a cataclysmic Middle Eastern and North African exodus of Jews. The IJMA website similarly stated falsely that Jews and Muslims “are members of minority communities with many common values and traditions that have lived together for centuries in many parts of the world.”
This myopic American view wrongly equates a global Islamic civilization with a small Jewish people. While globally Muslims currently claim some 1.7 billion adherents, Jews still only number 14.5 million, as Jewish communities worldwide are still suffering the lingering demographic aftershocks of the Nazi genocide of 75 years ago. As the 57 Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) nations (including “Palestine”) show in United Nations voting patterns against the world’s lone Jewish state, Israel, Muslims generally do not identify with Jews.
Saperstein’s fellow afternoon panelist and IJMA board member, Georgette Bennett, similarly sounded questionable multicultural themes. She recalled that her foundation, the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, had been “very, very supportive of” what became known as the proposed Ground Zero Mosque in New York City. Overwhelming majorities of Americans opposed in 2011 this project near the site of the World Trade Center, destroyed by Al Qaeda on September 11, 2001, and with good reason, given the mosque backers’ faux-moderate background.
Bennett also made the questionable theological claim that “Judaism and Islam have much more in common than either Christianity and Judaism or Christianity and Islam.” This would surprise Protestants such as Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Albert Mohler, who has discussed the theological “genetic link between Judaism and Christianity.” The Vatican as well has declared that Christians and their Jewish “elder brothers” in faith “are irrevocably inter-dependent.” Jewish scholars like David Gelernter have additionally termed Christianity as the “Jews’ gift to mankind” for globally transmitting humanistic Jewish values in a “dialect of Judaism” that has profoundly influenced Western history.
Panelist and IJMA board member Wael al-Zayyat, the CEO of the Muslim-American political organizing group Emgage, gave urgency to Saperstein and Bennett’s expressions of Jewish-Muslim unity. He ominously saw an “ascendance of international fascism from Brazil to Russia,” while IJMA board member Rabbi David Fox Sandmel stated during audience comments that the “American house is on fire.” The Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) Director of Interfaith Affairs argued that American “Jews and Muslims are together in the crosshairs” of white supremacists.
Sandmel, a President Barack Obama supporter, downplayed conflicts between Jews and Muslims. While Israel is now home to almost half of world Jewry, he dismissed Israeli conflicts with its neighbors as a “conflict that is 6,000 miles away.” His judgment on these matters is questionable, as he noted past accusations of being a “rabbi for jihad” (FrontPage Magazine’s Daniel Greenfield has listed him among “rabbis for Hamas” who want to negotiate with these terrorists).
Former Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) official Eftakhar Alam similarly dismissed in an audience comment concerns about ISNA’s radical origins in the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) and its terrorism ties as something bygone. He noted his experience in forming the Muslim-Jewish Advisory Council (MJAC) in 20116 between ISNA and the American Jewish Committee (AJC) while stating “forget the past, what is the future.” He praised that the IJMA conference “kicked a huge glass” and “knocked it well” by bringing ADL members together with Anwar Khan, the head of the American chapter of Islamic Relief, an organization with numerous global jihadist links.
By contrast, this author during an audience question cited an extensive Middle East Forum report on numerous radical speakers at ISNA’s 2018 conference, but received curt dismissals. IJMA board member Majid al-Sayegh simply rejected “demonizing an organization because of a speaker it has. We are about building bridges of understanding.” He noted the various IJMA conference participants with ISNA links, like IJMA board member and conference panelist Mohamed Magid, a former ISNA president.
Precisely Magid exemplified IJMA’s troubling implications for Jews. He bestowed in 2012 an ISNA “diversity award” upon Dawud Walid, the anti-Semitic director of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), another terrorism-linked MB organization condemned by the ADL. In turn, IJMA board member George Selim, who moderated the conference’s afternoon panel and today is an ADL official, had held hundreds of meetings with CAIR representatives while working for Obama’s Department of Homeland Security. The not-so-funny IJMA board member Dean Obeidallah has also used his status as a comedian to promote CAIR and false “Islamophobia” narratives.
Particularly conflicts over Israel’s Jewish homeland placed in doubt just what consensus IJMA could ever have, as the MB apologist and “Islamophobia” propagandist Wajahat Ali indicated in his earlier conference address. He, who has previously ludicrously defended (along with IJMA board member Rabia Chaudry) Representative Ilhan Omar from antisemitism charges, noted that Israel is the “pink elephant in the room” for many Muslim relations with Jews. Muslims have often told him that “we don’t want to normalize Zionism, but we are fine with interfaith” activities.
Such a posture would be difficult for IJMA board member Carly Pildis, as she observed in her audience remarks. Her organization, Zioness, is expressly Zionist and thereby aims at “keeping Jews in progressive spaces and not having them sort of lean to the right politically because of tensions around Zionism.” Yet indicative of leftists’ souring relationship with Zionism, Zioness received start capital from conservative Jewish groups. IJMA board member and former AJC official Richard Foltin also emphasized Zionism’s importance in his audience comments, for the “demonization of Israel and Zionism has incredible implications for Jews in the United States.”
All such Jewish-Muslim conflicts over issues like Boycotts, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel (supported in principle by Chaudry) raise the question, just who benefits from IJMA? She and Ali provoked fierce backlash among their fellow Muslims for daring to engage with Israeli Jews by participating in recent years in the Shalom Hartman Institute’s Muslim Leadership Initiative (MLI) in Jerusalem. A Muslim organization rescinded an award to her and ISNA disinvited him from its 2018 national conference, just as similar backlash had forced ISNA to qualify that it was not officially a MJAC “co-convener.”
Compared to this tepid engagement by Muslims with Jewish national liberation in Zionism, IJMA’s Jews are giving full-throated endorsement to Islamists. While Ali smears President Donald Trump as an anti-Semite, IJMA is unquestioningly accepting Ali’s slander of numerous Jews and others who correctly warn against Islamic doctrinal dangers. The IJMA website correspondingly shows IJMA leaders listening to Dahlia Mogahed, another “Islamophobia” propagandist who once advocated greater “resistance” to Israel.
Thus IJMA’s Jews are uncritically joining Islamist-leftist choruses with their dubious themes of white supremacists and other bigots overrunning America. While Jews and others can join with any number of groups like the NAACP to combat racism, legitimizing Islamists and providing cover for their various hatreds serves no purpose. Unfortunately, IJMA will only enable Islamic antisemitism against Jews in America, Israel, and beyond.