...When the late 23 year-old Parisian Jew Ilan Halimi was being tortured to death, 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 Koran, while Ilan’s tortured screams could be heard in the background.”

Ilan Halimi’s torturers/murderers did not invoke any non-Islamic sources of anti-Jewish hate, only the Koran.

For the Muslim masses, basic Islamic education in the Koran, hadith (the putative words and deeds of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, as recorded by pious transmitters), and sira (earliest Muslim biographies of Muhammad) may create an immutable superstructure of Jew hatred, onto which non-Muslim sources of Jew hatred are easily grafted. Examples of this archetypal Jew hatred from the sacred Islamic texts, sira, and main early Sunni historiographical accounts, include:

- Koranic verses labeling Jews as malevolent enemies of Islam (5:82), and

- disobedient slayers of their own prophets who suffered justifiable abasement (2:61),

- including, for some, transformation into apes and swine (5:60); or

- the more profoundly hateful narratives (in the hadith, sira, and early histories, for example by Tabari) which maintain that the perfidious Jews fomented sectarian strife in early Islam by promoting heresies—including Shi’ism itself—that threatened the unity of the Muslim community (umma), and

- the canonical hadith (Sahih Muslim Book 026, Number 5431) that the Jews caused Muhammad’s protracted, excruciating death from poisoning...