Islamización del Antisemitismo: de la Judeofobia al Antisemitismo

El antisemitismo latente en los países árabes y musulmanes es un fenómeno importado e incluye las peores calumnias rituales desarrolladas durante siglos por los cristianos en Europa. Basándose en pasajes del Corán, los musulmanes radicales, y quienes no lo son tanto, exponen con claridad su antisemitismo. Un informe de Memri (video) traducido y producido por la Cara de la Verdad sobre el tema: Parte I y Parte II.

En The Salience of Islamic Antisemitism (1995), Martin Kramer señala que el antisemitismo musulmán no es mero antisionismo, pero también que el "islam no es inherentemente antisemita. Pero el islamismo sí lo es, y cualquiera que vea el mundo con su prisma inevitablemente verá judíos conspiradores", "así, sobre sus orígenes, el antisemitismo islamista no es una mera continuación de una tradición ni una respuesta a una injusticia. Como otros antisemitismos, tiene sus orígenes en las ideologías irracionales de la Europa moderna, que ahora han infectado el mundo islámico. Si esto es así, ni la ruptura con la tradición ni una disminución de la injusticia lo pararán. Existe sobre todo porque es necesario para completar una lógica irracional" y "la existencia de una conspiración judía contra el islam forma parte integral, no tangencial, de la ideología islamista. En todos los sitios donde esa ideología es predicada y en todos los sitios en que es acogida la conspiración judía aparece incluida en el paquete, lo que es tanto como decir que no debería sorprendernos que aflore en los sitios más inimaginables de Asia y África". Dice, además, en su artículo:

(...) Taking a hard look at hard evidence and assessing it soberly means breaking the long habit of emphasizing only the tolerance of Islam—a tolerance which drew so many Jewish scholars to study it in the first place. Islam today is not what it was, and nostalgia is not a very practical sentiment. Today there is Islamic antisemitism—a belief among many Muslims that Jews everywhere, in league with Israel, are behind a sinister plot to destroy Islam. Some of these Muslims believe the battleground is anywhere on the globe where Jews are organized to assist and aid in this plot. As I wrote last year in my Commentary article, “The Jihad Against the Jews,” this antisemitism seems to me so widespread and potentially violent that it could eclipse all other forms of antisemitism over the next decade. (...)

What Are the Origins of Islamic Antisemitism? (...) The two most common answers—which do draw straight lines—locate the source of this antisemitism either in the essence of Islam, or in the creation of Israel. Let me begin with the first: the idea that Islamic prejudice against the Jews goes back fourteen centuries, that Islamic theology is ipso facto antisemitic. At the time of the Prophet Muhammad, relates the Qur’an, some Jews engaged in treachery against him. This is recorded in the Qur’an as God’s word. (...) There is a view that Islam in its very essence is antisemitic, and that the roots of the antisemitism we see today are authentically Islamic.

This answer touches on some truths, yet it misses many others. One is that the Islamic tradition did not hold up those Jews who practiced treachery against Muhammad as archetypes—as the embodiment of Jews in all times and places. This makes for a striking contrast with a certain Christian concept of the eternal Jew, who forever bears the mark of the betrayer of Jesus. The Qur’an also includes certain verses which attest to the Prophet’s amicable relations with some Jews, and while religious supremacism always coloured the traditional Islamic view of the Jews, it also coloured the Islamic view of Christians and all other non-Muslims. In the Islamic tradition, the Jews are regarded as members of a legitimate community of believers in God, “people of the Book,” legally entitled to sufferance. The overall record of Islamic civilization’s tolerance of Jews is not a bad one, especially when compared with the record of Christendom in most periods.

Does that mean that today’s Islamic antisemitism has no grounding of Islam? No; there is no doubt whatsoever that the Islamic tradition provides sources on which Islamic antisemitism now feeds. Here is the mentor of Hizbullah in Lebanon, Ayatollah Fadlallah, pointing to the Qur’an as just such a source: “In the vocabulary of the Qur’an,” he says, “Islamists have much of what they need to awaken the consciousness of Muslims, relying on the literal text of the Qur’an, because the Qur’an speaks about the Jews in a negative way, concerning both their historical conduct and future schemes.”

Today’s Muslim antisemites make very effective use of the Qur’an and Tradition of the Prophet. But it is also a selective and distorting use. For Muslims to arrive at the idea of an eternal Jew in Islam, for them to portray the Jews as “enemies of God,” some additional influence must be at work. (...)

It would appear, therefore, that for Muslims to portray the Jew as the eternal Jew, for Muslims to portray the Jew as the arch conspirator, there must be more at work than Islamic tradition and Israeli policy. If these themes seem distressingly familiar, it is quite likely because they are borrowings from the canon of Western religious and racial antisemitism. The antisemitism we see today in the Islamic world owes a crucial debt to the antisemitism of the West. Like so much else in Islamist thought, it is derivative of Western ideological excess. How did it reach Muslims? I think it is highly relevant that many Islamist thinkers of the present generation have spent time in the West, collecting advanced degrees at the universities of London and Paris. There they seem to have absorbed the antisemitism of the extreme Left and Right, which they now retail as a comprehensive indictment of the Jews extending far beyond anti-Zionism.

En The Sources of Egyptian Anti-Semitism (2014), el egipcio Samuel Tadros hace una análisis más detallado de la extensión y las raíces del antisemitismo en Egipto sosteniendo que el "antisemitismo es uno de los pilares de la vida socio-política en Egipto" y "quienes toman las decisiones en Egipto no solo no son inmunes al antisemitismo sino que de hecho están entre sus creyentes más comprometidos. En los más altos escalones del ejército egipcio, en su comunidad de inteligencia y entre los funcionarios del estado la creencia universal sobre la existencia de una conspiración judía contra la patria es peligrosa y afecta a la percepción de la realidad y con ello a la política":

(...) The first introduction of anti-Semitic ideas in the region had taken place earlier at the hands of Catholic missionaries in the Levant. The Dreyfus Affair served as one of the earliest episodes of the dissemination of anti-Semitism. The impact was first felt among Christians in the Levant who attended missionary schools and for whom France was the source of inspiration. By the late 1920s and early 1930s, French influence was being replaced by Nazi Germany. Jeffrey Herf’s book Nazi Propaganda for the Arab Worldprovides illuminating details of the extent of the deliberate Nazi efforts to spread their ideas among the peoples of the region, and the collaboration of Haj Amin El Husseini with Nazis has been thoroughly exposed and documented. Haj Amin El Husseini’s efforts succeeded in giving anti-Semitism the Islamic flavor that it had lacked, which proved to be crucial to its ongoing appeal. Scholars have paid less attention to other Nazi collaborators among Egypt’s fascist Young Egypt movement and Islamists.

The Nazi efforts had a lasting impact on Egypt. Nasser and his fellow officers belonged to those organizations and movements from the Muslim Brotherhood to Young Egypt that had collaborated with the Nazis and were greatly influenced by them during their formative years. Following the military coup in 1952, anti-Semitism moved from the state of appealing ideology to State-sponsored ideology. While some scholarly attention has been given to the role of German scientists in building the Egyptian rockets program, less attention has been given to the role of Nazi ideologues in shaping educational and propaganda efforts in Egypt. “In 1956, Nasser hired Johann von Leers, one of the Nazi regime’s leading anti-Semitic propagandists, to assist the Egyptian Ministry of Information in fashioning its own anti-Semitic and anti Zionist campaigns” (Herf, Nazi Propaganda).

Sadat’s decision to change course and seek peace with Israel meant that the state no longer occupied the commanding heights of anti-Semitism in Egypt. The vacuum left by the state was filled by intellectuals of all stripes and colors. This did not mean, however, that the state bureaucracy and decision-makers had become less anti-Semitic; rather, they were now forced to conceal their ideology and conspiracy theories in order not to elicit a negative reaction from their patrons in the West. On occasion their anti-Semitism was exposed, as documented in incidents mentioned in this article. The nomination of Egypt’s Minister of Culture Farouk Hosny to head UNESCO was one such ugly episode. (...)

de Qutb a Jamás

From Sayyid Qutb To Hamas: The Middle East Conflict and the Islamization of Antisemitism (Bassam Tibi, 2010) - ABSTRACT: The major concern of this study is to relate the lack of a conflict resolution in the Middle East to the ongoing process of an Islamization of European Antisemitism carried out by the Islamist movement. This study is a political analysis combined with a history of ideas. Historically, there exists Judeophobia in Islam, but not Antisemitism. Based on the research of Hannah Arendt and Bernard Lewis, a distinction is made between Judeophobia and Antisemitism, both are evil, but to a differing degree. While Judeophobia is a hatred and prejudice, Antisemitism is a genocidal ideology that identifies the Jews as evil and calls for their eradication. This genocidal sentiment did not exist in classical Islam. The story of Antisemitism in the Middle East exists in two segments, one is secular (pan-Arab nationlism), the other is religious-fundamentalist (Islamism). The focus of this study is the latter. In terms of the history of ideas, the Islamization of Antisemitism can be traced back to the work of Sayyid Qutb, the mastermind of Islamist ideology. Following the explanation of this phenomenon and the identification of its main features, the work of Qutb is analyzed. This study relates the history of ideas as background to the contemporary reality of the Palestine conflict, which is now dominated by Hamas. This Islamist movement subscribes fully to the Antisemitism Islamized by Qutb. Hamas combines the Islamist ideology with Jihadist action. This paper demonstrates that the religionization of the pending issues renders the conflict intractable. Islamist Antisemitism closes the door for a negotiation of the conflict through its religionization.

Más sobre Sayyid Qutb y más sobre Jamás y sobre La Hermandad de Musulmanes.

Negación de la existencia de Israel

From nationalist battle to religious conflict: New 12th Grade Palestinian schoolbooks present a world without Israel (Itamar Marcus y Barbara Crook, February 2007)

PA media, school books use ‘systematic indoctrination’ (Ben Hartman, May 6, 2011)