re: #92 Destro

I did not morph a thing. That was my first statement at the start. Daniel Pipes points to the Damascus incident where the French consul imported the blood libel into Syria. Then we have European colonial rule of the middle east and imported culture then we have Nazi Germany influencing the Arabs.

Sure. You have influences in the 19th and 20th centuries, although I am frankly startled to see you referencing any Nazi influence on the Arabs. Isn’t that what Pam Geller says?

The problem is that violence and discrimination against Jews in the region predates that by, oh, quite a bit.

BTW, Bernard Lewis does not quite seem to share your belief that because anti-Semitism is a European word, it can only describe European things.

Particularly instructive in this respect is an ancient Anti-Semitic poem of Abu Ishaq, written in Granada in 1066. This poem, which is said to be instrumental in provoking the anti-Jewish outbreak of that year, contains these specific lines: “Do not consider it a breach of faith to kill them, the breach of faith would be to let them carry on. They have violated our covenant with them, so how can you be held guilty against the violator? - How can they have any pact when we are obscure and they are prominent? - Now we are humble, beside them, as if we were wrong and they were right!”

That was, of course, the year of the Granada massacre. Yosef ha-Nagid set that one off, of course, by being appointed to too high a public office. You can see Ibn Naghrela two ways, I suppose—a poster child for the tolerance of Muslim Spain, and also a poster child for what happened when a Jew got too uppity and people got upset.