As I mentioned in a comment here at LGF on Friday, earlier in the week I had responded to a tweet by Chris Hayes comparing Islamophobia to antisemitism, and three days later the idiot below showed up in my mentions.

@CuriousLurker AntiSemitism is deeply rooted in Islam. @chrislhayes

— Henry Rops (@HenryRops1) September 23, 2016

#Ignorant #AntiMuslim #bigot #block triggered. #p2 #tiot https://t.co/X1h19psRKy

— CuriousLurker (@CuriousLurker) September 23, 2016

I ignored & immediately blocked him, but it got me to thinking about something I’d pondered before, especially after having done a good bit of reading on antisemitism over the past couple of years:

@HenryRops1’s assertion comes straight from the Islamophobia industry—it’s practically Geller’s daily mantra, though she says something along the lines of (I’m paraphrasing) “Jew hate, it’s in the Quran.” Oh, here it is—I was pretty close—she even uses it in her hateful bus ads: Here’s one from D.C. in 2014 (source article here).

The only way you can come to such a conclusion is if you cherry-pick Qur’anic verses, interpreting them literally and devoid of any context. For those who don’t already know it, Sharia & Halacha are similar in that both involve not only law, but also other scholarly interpretation (and in the case of Islam, hadith, which is a whole other complicated ball of wax involving the strength or weakness of chains of transmission).

If antisemitism is so deeply rooted in Islam, then why did the Holocaust not happen until the mid-twentieth century, and why did it happen primarily in Christian Western Europe? Islam has been around for almost 1400 years now, and for the 100 or so years of the Umayyad Caliphate and the nearly 600 years of the Ottoman Empire—never mind all the other powerful regional Caliphates—it was a major force to be reckoned with, one of the superpowers of its time, if you will. So if antisemitism is so deeply rooted in Islam, why didn’t earlier Muslims wipe out all the Jews in their lands when they had the opportunity?

I won’t pretend Jews & Muslims have always been on good terms (they haven’t) or that there were never pogroms (there were), but not on the level of a systematic, genocidal holocaust like the one that killed six million Jews in Europe. Yes, Jews were considered dhimmis in Muslim lands, as were Christians. For what it’s worth, dhimmi actually means “protected person,” certainly not in the way we understand rights & protections today as they didn’t have equal rights, but they had legal rights & protections nonetheless (which is more than they had in most of Christendom until fairly recently).

Why would Jews, like Maimonides and many others, voluntarily choose to live in Muslim lands instead of Christian ones? The mass migration (and in some cases expulsion) of Jews from Muslim lands didn’t happen until the rise of Nasser & pan-Arab nationalism and the establishment of Israel. Ask yourself why they didn’t leave sooner if Muslims were so awful to them—was it because there was nowhere to go before the establishment of Israel, or because Europe was far more toxic? Both? Neither?

Also, if antisemitism was some sort of freaking requirement for Muslims, then why are I and the other LGF Muslims not raging antisemites? Perhaps we’re all secret Islamist extremists using taqiyyah to mislead everyone about our true feelings & intentions? This seems to be what the Islamophobes would have everyone believe. // ಠ_ಠ

When I think about Muslim antisemitism for even five minutes—as if Muslims invented it or promoted it for religious reasons (rather than opportunists & demagogues employing it for political ones, much as the GOP has been doing with Islamophobia)—the whole notion of antisemitism being “deeply rooted in Islam” falls apart, logically speaking.

There’s a BIG difference between something existing, as Muslim antisemitism undeniably does, and that thing being an integral component of a given belief system. It’s abundantly clear that antisemitism also exists here in the United States, as does racism, but neither one of those things are “deeply rooted” in what it means to be an American citizen or an American Christian, which is what is implied about Muslims WRT antisemitism.

Racism is deeply rooted in our (U.S.) history of slavery, and Christian antisemitism is almost as old as Christianity itself. Does that mean racism and antisemitism are “deeply rooted” in Christianity? No, but there were certainly Christians who used verses from the Bible to support slavery and their claims of racial superiority, just as there have been Christians from the religion’s earliest days who used antisemitism as a means of promoting & expanding Christianity. Don’t believe me? Go read up on it yourself, you can start with this book or these recommended by VB in one of the main threads.

If we sat down and started examining the Old & New Testaments and treating the writings of various famous (and infamous) Christian & Jewish politicians, writers, thinkers, scholars, theologians, etc. as the de facto stance of their respective religions and all its adherents, then it wouldn’t be especially difficult to demonize said Christians & Jews as being racists, supremacists, etc., would it?

Okay, that’s all for now.

I’ve edited a couple of paragraphs for clarity and wanted to add the following tweet from earlier this month to support my statement about Christianity being used to buttress slavery & white supremacy—note how “Divine Law” and “the revealed will of the Almighty Creator” in the very last parts of the the highlighted portions of the first & third paragraphs is very clearly used as justification:

Next time you’re told the Confederacy & its flag weren’t about #racism & #slavery: https://t.co/TjgTxVhX8A #p2 #tiot pic.twitter.com/5uCHHzzQvy

— CuriousLurker (@CuriousLurker) September 19, 2016