The Reality of Middle East Anti-Semitism
“The scale and extremism of the [anti-Semitic] literature and commentary available in Arab or Muslim newspapers, journals, magazines, caricatures, on Islamist websites, on the Middle Eastern radio and TV news, in documentaries, films, and educational materials, is comparable only to that of Nazi Germany at its worst.”
So states Israeli historian Robert Wistrich this week in an op-ed in Israel’s (left-wing) daily Haaretz. Wistrich, one of the world’s leading authorities on anti-Semitism, is a scholar who stays out of politics and is not identified with any political camp in Israel.
His op-ed, however, sounds somber notes. “In the Middle East,” he writes, anti-Semitism “has taken on a particularly dangerous, toxic and potentially genocidal aura of hatred, closely linked to the ‘mission’ of holy war or jihad against the West and the Jews…. Yet the Western world largely turns a blind eye to the likely genocidal consequences of such a culture of hatred, much as it did 70 years ago.”