It is difficult to believe, but in his reporting of the anti-Israel protests on American college campuses, Abdallah Fayyad, a correspondent at Vox, wrote about anti-Palestinian racism!
Fayyad claimed that “The harsh university responses to campus protests – in which administrators called police on students because of vague concerns over safety – are one recent example of how schools can engage in anti-Palestinian racism. That’s why students and advocacy organizations have filed complaints and sued universities, including Columbia University, alleging anti-Palestinian discrimination.”
Although crowds were screaming antisemitic and anti-Zionist slogans (sometimes combining the two hate-filled positions into one), the Vox correspondent was able to twist the clear antisemitism into a new form of previously unheard-of discrimination: anti-Palestinian racism.
Fayyad differentiated between Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism: “While it’s often conflated with Islamophobia, the two forms of discrimination are distinct: Islamophobia targets people for being Muslim and their religious beliefs, while the other targets people because of their Palestinian identity or because they support Palestinian rights.”
Today’s world is extraordinarily sensitive to claims of hate, racism, and discrimination, but a line must be drawn when a perpetrator of hate claims to be the victim.
Generalizing negatively about a race, nation, or religious group is considered racist and a hate-filled way of relating to people. It is inaccurate to judge an entire group based on the actions of a subset of the group. Since a judgment of a larger group based on the smaller group is incorrect, and a person must be acting out of either hate of ignorance when they judge in this way, irrespective of their motivations.
Accustomed to judgement
JEWS ARE accustomed to being judged derogatorily as a group based on a small subset of Jews. These hate-filled judgments have often led to harsh and violent persecution. The first step of antisemitism is judging Jews in a derogatory fashion. Since Jews have faced so much discrimination themselves, they must be extraordinarily sensitive toward other groups and be careful about generalizations that judge them based on the actions of a subset of their populations.
Islam and Judaism are two of the most similar religions in the world today. Both are unequivocally monotheistic, abhor idol worship, and approach God in many of the same ways. Sometimes strong similarities produce the greatest divides – which is the story of Muslims and Jews. While at times they got along and respected each other, they have often not had peaceful relations.
Although Jewish prophets are held in awe by Islamic scholars and Islamic texts show reverence to Judaism – an example is the Quran, which mentions the Jewish people over forty times – Islam’s first moments saw Muslims attacking Jews in the Arabian Desert, slaughtering entire Jewish communities. Muhammad himself incentivized his followers to attack and murder Jews, and his followers have taken his word as divine law for the past 1,400 years. It is an undeniable fact that like Christians killing Jews in the name of Christianity, Muslims have attacked, raped, and killed an untold number of Jews in the name of Islam.
Muslims have historically discriminated against Jews. At times, they allowed Jews to practice their religion, but treated them as dhimmis, forcing them to pay a special tax called the jizya. Jews were not allowed to bear arms or give testimony in courts, and were forced to wear different clothes than Muslims. For many centuries, Jews were forced, upon threat of death, to convert to Islam. Those who refused were either killed or exiled from their homes and lands.
IN CONTRAST, there is no record of Jews attacking Muslim communities. There are no cases of Jewish leaders incentivizing Jews to mass murder Muslims as Muhammad himself incentivized Muslims to mass murder Jews. There are no cases of mass Muslim murders by Jews killing Muslims in the name of Judaism. Jews have never treated Muslims as second-class citizens, charging them a special tax, or forcing them to wear distinct clothing as a form of discrimination. Muslims enjoy equal rights to pray, vote, and all other civil rights in the Jewish State of Israel.
Israel’s normalized and peaceful relations with Muslim countries like Kosovo, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, etc. demonstrate that Jewish-Muslim peaceful relations are not only possible but are a daily occurrence in the Middle East and throughout the world. There are no inherent factors that inhibit peaceful Jewish-Muslim peaceful relations.
It is undeniable that today, the world faces violence, antagonism, and a lack of civility from fundamentalist strains of Islam. Led by the fundamentalist regime of the Islamic state of Iran, and followed by its proxies like Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah – even enemies like Saudi Arabia – Islam incentivizes violence against the Western world and against Jews in particular.
In the same way that Abdallah Fayyad said that highlighting Palestinian violence is anti-Palestinian by nature, many opponents of the West, modernization, and Israel claim that the mere highlighting of Islamic-incentivized violence is Islamophobic by nature. This is a straw man argument meant to distract people from an obvious problem that is one of the world’s biggest impediments to peace.
Until the world can get over its inhibitions based on undeserved sensibilities of calling out fundamentalist Islam for incentivizing violence and terrorism, the problem of killings, sexual violence, and terrorism will continue worldwide. Calling out Palestinian violence and terrorism isn’t calling all Palestinians inherently violent, just like calling out fundamentalist Islamic violence isn’t calling Islam inherently violent. The world must begin to make this distinction to create a more peaceful world.
The writer is a certified interfaith hospice chaplain in Jerusalem and the mayor of Mitzpe Yeriho, where she lives with her husband and six children.