The tsunami and Jews

Editorial

About 150 imams and rabbis from across Europe are meeting to promote friendship and coexistence or, as the news agency Reuters puts it, "to quell the rising tensions between Muslims and Jews in Europe."

The intercultural confab is a sign of progress and worthy of commendation. But there is something deeply troubling in the way this event and the larger conflict that led to this meeting are being depicted. The "rising tensions" between Muslims and Jews in Europe is not a two-way street. Jews are being attacked on the streets of Europe and, for the most part, the attackers are products of Muslim societies (of North Africa, the Middle East and, notably, Europe itself). "Rising tensions" exist mostly for Jews. For their Muslim attackers, the only thing rising is the level of violence.

Any effort to confront this European powderkeg is to be welcomed. But the proof of the Muslim world's intent toward Jews will be demonstrated more clearly in international relief efforts in the aftermath of the cataclysmic tsunami last week. Early reports indicated that 150 Israeli medical and relief workers who were slated to fly to Sri Lanka hours after last week's tsunami were told "no thanks."

This is similar to the approach we witnessed after the Bam earthquake in Iran, which occurred a year to the day before the tsunami. The Iranian regime refused to accept help from Israel, the country with the world's greatest expertise in disaster relief. The refusal by some in the Muslim world to accept help from Jews demonstrates that the depth of anti-Jewish hatred in the Muslim world often eclipses even self-preservation.

Rabbi Nechemia Wilhelm, a Chabad Emissary in Thailand, sent an update around the globe through e-mail this week, explaining how everyone was pulling together to help the victims. On a larger scale, he said, "this disaster has joined every race, creed and religion together. There are no divisions in suffering. There are no barriers." Perhaps this is so in Thailand, but not, apparently, on the other side of the Bay of Bengal.

The counterintuitive, self-destructive Jew-hatred that permeates the Muslim world is never more clearly evident than at times like these. One likes to imagine that the reflexive distrust of Jewish assistance is a pathology only of the autocratic leadership of the Muslim world; that those suffering without food, water or medical care would be happy to see any face of assistance, Jewish or otherwise. But even this might be optimistic. Citizens of almost every Muslim country, most of whom have probably never met a Jew, have been taught to hate and fear Jews. This is not, as many Canadian activists like to pretend, an issue of unjust Israeli policies. No, this is base Jew-hatred, incitement against Jews, genocidal intent against Jews, call it what you will. Israel, or as the Muslim world prefers to call it, the Zionist entity, is hated not because of its treatment of Palestinians but for its very existence as a homeland for Jews. Whatever fancied-up jargon and justifications we might employ to convince ourselves otherwise, the conflict between Israel and Islam is not one of borders or policies or diplomacy; its continuing fuel is not Israeli action but Muslim incitement.

You can make the case, as a vast number of peole do, that anti-Jewish behaviors in Europe, North America and elsewhere will decline when the "source" of the "conflict" is resolved – when peace comes to the Middle East (probably through some variation of surrender on Israel's part). But that demonstrates a deeply mistaken understanding of this conflict.

The past six decades have seen the almost universal condemnation of anything Jewish throughout the Muslim world. There are, effectively, no thriving Jewish communities left anywhere in predominantly Muslim societies. No one contests the idea that "Palestine" is the pre-eminent foreign policy issue of the world's 1.2 billion Muslims. Even North Americans who consider themselves even-handed seem to find nothing fundamentally odd about the fact that Israel – a country with seven million Jews, outnumbered 2,000-to-one by Muslims – should be the foremost concern of effectively every Muslim government's foreign policy.

The distrust and hatred of Jews – so blatantly evident in times of crisis – should give pause to well-intentioned people in Canada and elsewhere who believe that the conflict between Israel and the Muslim world has to do simply with borders and contending diplomatic demands. The Islamic world has a deep and intrinsic problem with anti-Semitism. A meeting of European imams and rabbis is an important first step, but no one should be deluded. Jew-hatred is a curse that pervades the Islamic world in ways that are dangerous not only to Jews and international cohesion but, as demonstrated by the refusal of some Muslim societies to accept life-saving help from Israel, can be deadly to Muslims as well.

^TOP