I am not comfortable with this. I don't think it's fair to associate an entire religion and all its practitioners with a far right wing political ideology. It's also way counterproductive, preventing people from learning about each other and seeing each other as human beings and as individuals.

What's the difference between this, which I think could rightly be considered Islamophobic, and antisemitism?

Frankly I do not see a difference. Moreover I think if we're going to start labelling Islam like this then every other religion, culture or creed on this planet is probably also fair game.

When do we take on the Christians - much of the Bible is antisemitic and maybe one could even say Jesus was a "socialist"? - or the ancient Hebrews - also capable of bloodthirsty deeds - and extrapolate from there - and damn a few billion more people - just as a couple of examples?

Your discomfort is understandable, and to an extent, I share it. Let me say a couple of things:

1. Is it the same as anti-semitism? Our minds are very good at drawing associations, so this is a natural road to go down. But, without putting too fine a point on it, Islam and Judaism aren't the same. They are different religions, cultures and histories. Jews and Muslims exist in different numbers, Jews don't proselytize, etc... In the abstract it *sounds* right to say it's the same, but the closer you look, the faster the comparison falls apart.

2. We have to discuss this issue. It's a fact that you would not want to live as a Jew or a Westerner in any majority-Muslim country. There are reasons for that. Are ALL Muslims a problem? No. There are very good people, reformers, non-fundamentalists, fundamentalists who actually do buy-in to Western openness... But the FACT is that even a moderate, wonderful Muslim who comes to America is going to have to work hard to maintain that openness. The fact is that any young Muslim looking for a Mosque or a college group here in the Boston area (for instance) is absolutely going to find themselves involved with organizations and leaders whose strings are pulled in Saudi Arabia...and THOSE are Nazi strings. That is a big problem, particularly for well-meaning Muslims.

The bottom line is that you may disagree with Bostom's approach, (and I have my own concerns which I have expressed to Andy, a friend) but we MUST be able to discuss it as part of the dialog. We CANNOT simply write this off for the sake of avoiding discomfort. Good conclusions rely on consideration of all of the data, all of it. Flawed or incomplete data will result in disastrous decisions and we'll never understand why.

As far as finding horrible things in Christian scripture, and extrapolating, well...the thing is, as Bostom and others who have his approach show, we don't have to do thought experiments, we just need to look at real history and real current events. Again, we dare not avert our eyes for the sake of our own comfort.

What conclusions you draw are your own, but I think there is important information to be considered here. This is not a "what if." We're facing it.

One more thing: It doesn't do the Muslim reformers any good to refuse to face this, or people will wonder why THEY make such noise about the problems in Islam. What problems, one may reasonably ask if you haven't faced the facts.

Your final point, about the reformers, is very well taken.

About our own Western blindness though, I think that's also something that requires some insight.

For example, Nicholas Kristoff wrote in the NY Times today about female leaders, and one of the "greats" he included was Isabella of Spain.

Well. From a Christian standpoint, or an American standpoint, I guess Isabella was a Great Leader. From a Jewish or Moorish/Muslim standpoint, she was an absolute disaster. 1492 may have been the year Columbus Discovered America but it was also the year we were expelled from Spain, and the Spanish Inquisition commenced shortly thereafter. So from the Jewish/Muslim POV Isabella was a monster. If you consider too the subsequent events in America, what happened to the "Indians" - the forced conversions in particular - enslavement - the subsequent enslavement of Africans to work the new plantations, the exploitation in the South American mines, ongoing to this day - a class system based on heritage - I'm sure you see where I am going here.

As far as the "Nazi strings" are concerned: yes they are very real. But - where did those sentiments evolve? Whence came the Nazi propaganda? Unfortunately it came from Europe, it was nurtured in the very bosom of Western Civilization, which has seen the worst antisemitism the world has ever known.

I think the German scholar Matthais Kuntzel is one of the great writers on this subject, the introduction of Nazi propaganda into the Arab world. Unfortunately as you know he was recently forbidden from speaking at Leeds University in Britain - apparently for fear of offending Muslim students - but again - that decision was made not to KSA but in Great Britain - why? If the real point of our civilization, Western civilization, is to defeat facism, Nazism, really conquer "fear of the other" - the sort of stereotyping that led directly to the Shoah - shouldn't we first try to eradicate it here, to face up to its disastrous and ongoing effects within our own culture? How much home-grown fascism and racism and antisemitism are we actually exporting even now? I'd bet an awful lot - I don't think it's an accident that some British Muslims are among the most radical in the world. They're soaking up an ethos that has been badly damaging to Jews, to take one example, for hundreds of years.

Finally, I think antisemitism is probably a far graver and more irrational problem than Islamophobia - so far. But they aren't really different in nature - I mean the real irrational fear of people simply because they are different and/or have been stereotyped - I do want to think about this further so if you'll forgive me I will leave this here for the moment.

Thank you for the discussion.

I hope Andy isn't reading this. He may pop a blood vessel. The point of his books is that Jew-hatred pre-dates the Nazis in the Islamic World, and he takes issue with people like Kuntzel and Bernard Lewis for failing to recognize this sufficiently. Yes, certain specific tropes are imports, but they had fertile ground.

I hope he IS reading it:)

Yes, I think he has a point about Islamic antisemitism, and bias against other religions as well: beyond "the people of the book," which other religions are to be tolerated at all? Even Copts, Maronites and other Christians, as well as Jews, were distinctly second-class citizens at best and at worst, practically starved out and humiliated depending upon the times and individual rulers. Mughal India should be studied: it was a time of glorious artistic creativity but also, the case could be made that the entire Hindu population of India was enslaved.

There was also no question that leadership was religious, theocratic in nature and everybody had to submit to the Muslim overlord, once Islam had been established as a military power. Entire Jewish tribes were massacred in the days of Mohammed himself and women taken in slavery and wealth confiscated, and the remaining Jews expelled en masse from Arabia.

On the other hand, in practice, many Muslim people, leaders and empires WERE tolerant. The Jews, expelled from Spain, fled to the bosom of the Ottoman Empire. Jews had communities in the Arab world that dated back thousands of years, until pogroms erupted in modern times and most fled after 1948.

In Central Asia and Turkey there are Jewish communities to this day although rising extremism has greatly reduced the Jewish presence in Iran, Afghanistan and other Central Asian states. Nevertheless over history, Jews were an important presence all along the Silk Road, and all the way west to Morocco - although as stated above the Arab Jewish communites are virtually extinct now, having fled to Israel or beyond.

So, let's extend the conversation to include "cultural identity bias" and more recently, nationalism; and Bostom's argument gets stronger I think.

Paternalistic tribal cultures, that exclude even Muslims from the "wrong" sect, oppress women and gays, and threaten to tear apart Lebanon, Pakistan, Iraq, the Palestinians, other states and communities throughout the M.E., Africa and Central Asia, and which manifest most strikingly in armed militias and "political parties," and happen to be Muslim - of these I think one can ask whether Islam is a determining factor? Or is the key issue tribalism rather than Islam? Or is there a combination of factors that is oppressing people within those cultures and threatening us as well?

In other words, when we speak of "bringing democracy" to the world, and then encounter cultures to which the very idea is anathema, are we correct to blame Islam or is it a family, clan and tribal social structure that is the problem? Both?

Look for example at Rwanda: the horrible genocide there was an inter-tribal matter. People murdered their neighbors because of tribal identity. We're seeing that unfortunately in Kenya - apparently there, Islam might be a factor but is it a determining factor? The people who are rebelling against the ruling party there are poor; might not this be at least as much a factor as religion? Is poverty, lack of social status and opportunity combined with religion creating problematic situations?

Maybe we need to look at ALL these factors, and also another: pride. People who have lived in traditional cultures for thousands of years are loathe to change them simply because we say so and simply because we feel our value system is better. That in itself creates a culture of "resistance" and one can well understand it, I think - maybe especially we Jews, who have been under such incredible pressure to abandon our history and our identity and be "saved".

Sophia,

The Jews who fled to "the bosom of the Ottoman Empire" got there only after fleeing the rest of Europe and it was not a Golden era as they lived under the same torturous dhimmi status as the Copts of Egypt do today.
Maybe Isabella kicked out Jews and Muslims but don't use the in two to sort of balance the equation. She was a monster, but the Moors were monsters too. She also destroyed Spain so far as progress and quality of life goes cause in getting rid of the Jews she destroyed the "baking powder" so to speak.
Read Bat Ye'or's work to find out how marvelous life was for the Jews living under Muslim rule. Actually she tried to get an article published in the Jerusalem Post in January but the Editor refused her rebuttal to an article by Mark R. Cohen published by the Post:
http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/019633.php

Islam may not be a "determining factor" in Kenya but it certainly is in Sudan, Nigeria, Thailand, India, the Balkans, not forgetting Algeria, Phillipines, Indonesia. East Timor mean anything?

By the way when you mention slavery who do you think went around catching the people to sell to the Europeans? Where do think that the British got that equivalent of America's N word which they introduced into South Africa and used against the indigenous population. The K word (Kaffir) which is Arabic for infidel and applied to the peoples they enslaved and which Hamsa used with distinction in his public diatribes in London streets and mosques, you know the guy with the hook for a hand who is supposed to be extradited to the US.

We have to act on our behalf and well being and cannot consider the ills practiced over the centuries and permit that to modify our stance.
We have to look reality in the face and know that the nice guy from the other side won't be around to help us because he will be just as terrorised by the thuggery.
Kum baya won't in this case. Not when the other side is playing zero sum games and in the case of the Shia ready for martyrdom with the coming apocalypse.