Thursday, February 28, 2008
Are the difficulties between Muslims and Jews (or, more to the point, Muslims toward the Jews) simply "a clash of ill-informed misunderstandings", as this open letter from a number of prominent Muslims (including Tariq Ramadan) states?
No, says Andy Bostom in this lengthy piece, there is a long history of anti-Jewish policy and polemic within the mainstream Muslim tradition, and ignoring or glossing over this history will not move us forward. Pining away for a Medieval utopian coexistence that never existed will simply put us back in the Dark Ages. We must face the truth of the past and present to move forward -- pretty words aside:
...When the late 23 year-old Parisian Jew Ilan Halimi was being tortured to death in February 2006, his Muslim torturers, as Nidra Poller wrote in the Wall Street Journal "...phoned the family on several occasions and made them listen to the recitation of verses from the Qur'ran, while Ilan's tortured screams could be heard in the background." In the heart of Western Europe, Ilan Halimi's torturers/murderers did not invoke any non-Islamic sources of anti-Jewish hate, only the Koran.
As a pre-condition to real dialogue--not its miserable simulacrum as represented by the February 25, 2008 letter -- Jews and their leadership -- religious, political, and intellectual -- must demand a mea culpa from their Muslim counterparts for the sacralized Islamic Jew hatred which contributed to Ilan Halimi's death, and countless other similar atrocities across space and time, since the advent of Islam.
Let us demonstrate as Jews that we are no longer living with 12th century expectations of Muslims, otherwise they will oblige us.
We are not talking here about empty apologies for deeds purely of the past. The history of Islamic Jew hatred is being written right now, today. Simply ignoring it really moves us no where.
