In 2005, Karen Armstrong told Guardian readers what many would like to believe:

Sadly, we have passed our anti-Semitism to the Muslim world. Until the 20th century, anti-Semitism was not part of Islamic culture.

In the same article, she asked:

Why should [Muslims] be impressed by our liberal culture when we persistently cultivate an inaccurate image of Islam that has its roots in the medieval prejudice of the crusaders?

There’s a comical irony here and no small amount of chutzpah, as Armstrong’s own accounts are almost always sanitised, prejudicial and inaccurate, often egregiously so. I’ve highlighted some of her more fanciful distortions elsewhere, so I’ll merely note how eagerly this “provocative and inclusive thinker” steers her readers towards the customary hand-wringing and pretentious guilt.


A much more serious account of Islamic anti-Semitism and its theological roots can be found in Andrew Bostom’s excellent three-part essay linked below. Bostom positions the phenomenon within the broader context of jihad and refutes in detail a number of prevalent fictions – among them, the claim that Islamic anti-Jewish animus began with the creation of Israel and the importing of Nazi sentiment in the mid 20th century: 



Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, then serving as American ambassadors to France and Britain respectively, met in 1786 in London with the Tripolitan [modern Libya] Ambassador to Britain, Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja. These future American presidents were attempting to negotiate a peace treaty which would spare the United States the ravages of jihad piracy – murder, enslavement (with ransoming for redemption), and expropriation of valuable commercial assets – emanating from the Barbary states (modern Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya). During their discussions, they questioned Ambassador Adja as to the source of the unprovoked animus directed at the nascent United States republic. Jefferson and Adams, in their subsequent report to the Continental Congress, recorded the Tripolitan Ambassador’s justification:

… that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every [Muslim] who should be slain in battle was sure to go to paradise.

Thus an aggressive jihad was already being waged against the United States almost 200 years prior to America becoming a dominant international power in the Middle East. Moreover, these jihad depredations targeting America antedated the earliest vestiges of the Zionist movement by a century, and the formal creation of Israel by 162 years – exploding the ahistorical canard that American support for the modern Jewish state is a prerequisite for jihadist attacks on the United States.


It is also worth noting these contemporaneous, early 19th century observations by William Shaler, American Consul General in Algiers (1816-1828), on the plight of the North African Jews of Algiers under the Islamic system of dhimmitude, influenced further by Islam’s own innate anti-Semitism – prior to French colonization, and more than a century before the advent of Nazism:

Independent of the legal disabilities of the Jews, they are in Algiers a most oppressed people; they are not permitted to resist any personal violence of whatever nature, from a [Muslim]; they are compelled to wear clothing of a black or dark color; they cannot ride on horseback, or wear arms of any sort, not even a cane; they are permitted only on Saturdays and Wednesdays to pass out of the gates of the city without permission; and on any unexpected call for hard labor, the Jews are turned out to execute it. In the summer of 1815, this country was visited by incredible swarms of locusts, which destroyed every green thing before them; …several hundred Jews were ordered out to protect the Bashaw’s [local ruler’s] gardens, where they were obliged to watch and toil day and night, as long as these insects continued to infest the country.

Shaler goes on to cite, in addition, violent outbreaks during which,

…the Jews have been indiscriminately plundered, and they lived in the perpetual fear of a renewal of such scenes; they are pelted in the streets even by children, and in short, the whole course of their existence here is a state of the most abject oppression and contumely. The children of Jacob… learn submission from infancy, and practice it throughout their lives, without ever daring to murmur at their hard lot.

Bostom then details the lineage and practice of dhimmitude and its origins in the annihilationist pronouncements of Muhammad. He concludes,

The uncomfortable examination of Islamic doctrines and history is required in order to understand the enduring phenomenon of Muslim Jew hatred, which dates back to the origins of Islam. Even if all non-Muslim Judeophobic themes were to disappear miraculously overnight from the Islamic world, the living legacy of anti-Jewish hatred, and violence rooted in Islam’s sacred texts – Koran, hadith, and sira – would remain intact. The assessment and understanding of Islamic anti-Semitism must begin with an unapologetic analysis of the anti-Jewish motifs contained in these foundational texts of Islam. We can no longer view Muslim Jew hatred… as a “borrowed phenomenon,” seen primarily, let alone exclusively, through the prism of Nazism and the Holocaust, the tragic legacy of Judeophobic Christian traditions, or The Protocols of the Elders of Zion from Czarist Russia. Moreover, the jihad against the Jews is but one aspect – albeit primal – of the jihad to establish global Islamic hegemony.

It’s long but well worth reading. Part 1part 2, part 3


Andrew Bostom is the author of The Legacy of Jihad and The Legacy of Islamic Anti-Semitism.

















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