January 26, 2020 / JNS) Whether one considers the masses of Muslims who have been flowing into Europe as (primarily) economic refugees, proud hijra colonists “quietly” Islamizing the continent, or both, these newly arrived votaries of Islam express an unabashed Islamic Jew-hatred.

Their virulently anti-Jewish attitudes are consistent with the disproportionate, approximately three-fold increased rate of extreme anti-Semitism among Western European Muslims, in general, relative to non-Muslims, just reported Nov. 21, 2019 in the latest comprehensive Anti-Defamation League survey findings. Germany’s failed attempt to mollify this new Muslim immigrant animus toward Jews by “sensitivity” visits to Nazi-era concentration camp memorials demonstrates its deep-seated intractability.

The depressing failure to lessen Muslim immigrant Jew-hatred has garnered little attention. Contrast that with the much-ballyhooed pilgrimage to Auschwitz by what was characterized as “the most senior Islamic leadership delegation” to visit the location of a Nazi German death camp. This interfaith junket, spearheaded by Saudi “reformist” secretary-general of the Muslim World League (MWL), Mohammad bin Abdulkarim al-Issa, and the CEO of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), David Harris, took place four days before the 75th anniversary of the camp’s Jan. 27, 1945 liberation.

Far less widely reported was that al-Issa’s Muslim delegation was on a broader tour to “several sites of injustice,” including Srebrenica, Bosnia. There, during 1995, a tit for tat massacre of Bosnian Muslims—bearing no relationship in either scale or single-target, monomaniacal hatred to the Nazi Holocaust destruction of European Jewry–took place during a bloody civil war between the region’s Serbs and Muslims.

Here is the al-Issa/MWL tour’s stated purpose, as described in London-based Arabic daily Asharq al-Awsat:

“The visit of the Islamic delegation confirms the Islamic values and asserts that Muslims condemn every criminal act. The Islamic leaders will visit the sites and affirm that Islam is a religion of mercy and fairness and that it is against all malicious practices, adding that this is not limited to Muslims, but involves everyone. A large number of senior scholars of the MWL participated in various efforts to explain Islamic justice in its related positions, during several visits, meetings, initiatives, and declarations. This was reflected in the positive image of Islam and Muslims against all forms of extremism and radicalization.”

Moreover, in Saudi Arabia, al-Issa, despite being dubbed the so-called “new face of Saudi Wahhabism,” is viewed with understandable skepticism by genuine Saudi reformers. Political scientist Stephane Lacroix, who studies Islamic authoritarianism within Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, has noted, “As one Saudi intellectual said: ‘How can one take Mohammed al-Issa’s statements seriously when religious bookstores in Riyadh are full of books advocating the exact opposite?’”

To which Lacroix added: “Interview with a now-jailed Saudi intellectual, January 2018.”

Other imprisonments of dissident reformers by al-Issa’s powerful patron Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), Lacroix concludes, “…makes MBS’s [and al-Issa’s] religious reforms look more like a public relations stunt than a genuine transformation. No such transformation can happen without an open and frank debate about the Wahhabi tradition—and this is precisely what MBS is not willing to have.”

Returning to al-Issa’s Auschwitz junket, and unpacking his statements about the Holocaust since 2018, demonstrates his rather odious expropriation of the Holocaust’s legacy for Muslim propaganda purposes.

Al-Issa’s putatively “landmark” Jan. 25, 2018, letter to the director of the U.S. Holocaust Museum, Sara Bloomfield, although decrying the Holocaust as “among the worst crimes ever,” was devoid of any reference to Jews as the victims, yet managed to emphasize, “True Islam is against these crimes.” Al-Issa added, mendaciously and contrary to Islam’s Sharia mandates for all non-Muslims and their historical application across 14 centuries, that “Islam has, through long centuries, coexisted with all religions, and respected the dignity of its followers.”

On April 30, in a “memorandum of understanding” with the AJC unveiling the planned visit to Auschwitz, al-Issa denounced the “heinous attacks in Pittsburgh​, Pennsylvania, in Christchurch, New Zealand, and most recently in Sri Lanka.” Al-Issa’s comments, however, ignored the endless paroxysms of violence by Muslims directed at the Jews of Israel, and the excessive, if more sporadic, ongoing Muslim attacks on European and American Jews. He also refused to acknowledge, let alone condemn, mainstream, institutional Islam’s continuous espousal of canonical Islamic Jew-hatred, and the resulting grossly disproportionate rates of extreme Muslim anti-Semitism, and Muslim anti-Jewish violence, worldwide.

There has been a longstanding refusal of Muslim leaders such as al-Issa to recognize the World War II-era Nazi collaboration—punctuated with overt calls for Jew-annihilation, by jihad—of arguably the most influential Muslim of that era: the jihadist, Caliphate-championing “godfather” of the Palestinian Muslim movement, Hajj Amin el-Husseini.

Contemporary Muslim leaders of al-Issa’s ilk have proven equally incapable of acknowledging how Muslim leaders such former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat admired Hitler even after World War II, or how after the war escaped Nazis—many of whom converted to Islam (most notably Johannes “Omar Amin” von Leers, whose conversion Husseini himself oversaw!)—were granted asylum, particularly in Egypt, and contributed to the incessant Muslim jihad campaigns to destroy Israel, and annihilate its Jews, from 1948 through (at least) 1973.

That reprehensible legacy of Muslim denial continues and now has been extended to ignoring the current global pandemic of Muslim Jew-hatred and anti-Jewish violence. This Muslim caricature of “Holocaust remembrance” further cynically equates the systematic Nazi annihilation of six million Jews during the Shoah with the Srebrenica murders of perhaps 7,000 Muslims during the 1990s Muslim-Serb civil war in Bosnia, a conflict rife with reprisal killings.

What ordinary, sensible Jews should “Never Forget” is that what passes for “Jewish leadership” proudly orchestrated this hideous spectacle of mutual Jewish-Muslim denial.

Andrew G. Bostom, M.D., M.S., is a Brown University academic physician who has been studying Islamic doctrine and history for the past 18 years. He is the author of “The Legacy of Jihad,” “The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism,” “Sharia Versus Freedom,” “The Mufti’s Islamic Jew-Hatred” and “Iran’s Final Solution for Israel.” He has published numerous articles and commentaries on Islam in print and online publications.

Source: https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-muslim-holocaust-remembrance-farce/

The post The Muslim ‘Holocaust remembrance’ farce first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

One of the world’s most fraught relationship triangles is the one connecting Germans, Jews, and Muslims. Suspended over that triangle is of course the Holocaust. For seven decades, post-war Germans thought they understood their unique burden and responsibility. It was and is to atone for Auschwitz by taking it as a mandate to be and to do good — at home and abroad, today and tomorrow.

But the passage of time has a funny way of confusing old certitudes. One question that was never clarified — because it never needed to be asked — is whether German atonement should be particular or universal.

The particularist conclusion says that Germans must never again harm Jews. They must protect their former victims wherever they can, on the streets of Berlin or Tel Aviv, at the United Nations or on the Golan Heights.

The universalist lesson is general: Germans must never again discriminate against any minority — white, brown or purple; Jewish, Muslim, or Wiccan; Western, Eastern or exotic. And Germany, which once not only murdered millions but also turned millions more into refugees, must be a haven to those human beings who legitimately deserve refuge today.

For decades, there was no conflict between the particularist and the universalist responses to the German past. Germany has stood by Israel more reliably than any other country in the EU. Germans have also become the world’s most avid commemorators. They memorialize the Holocaust in their cities, on their buildings, on their streets. (The form I find most moving is Stolpersteine, the little brass “stumbling stones” that I described here.)

At the same time, Germany for a long time pretended that other minorities pose no major dilemma. Muslims started coming to Germany in large numbers in the 1960s, mainly as Turkish “guest workers”. They have kept coming ever since, from various countries. (In the Neukölln borough of Berlin, the latest buzz is about Syrians driving out Turks.) Today about 5 million Muslims live in Germany.

And yet Muslims were never accepted as “belonging to” or “being part of” Germany. When a former German president used that exact phrase in 2010, a controversy erupted that still rages, and even strains the current governing coalition.

But then there was the autumn of 2015. Nobody who was in Germany during that refugee crisis will ever forget the experience. Many Germans in late summer of that year got goosebumps as they saw on the TV news — and pay attention to the iconography — crowds of dark-skinned men, women and children in tattered clothes, camped on the platform of an eastern-European train station (in Budapest) where they were trapped, waiting for … trains.

The trains they were waiting for promised to take the huddled masses not east but west, not toward death but toward liberty and safety, in a land called Germany. “Germany, Germany,” the wretched masses were chanting, right through the cameras and into German living rooms. Victims of war atrocities were using the English name of the country that had once run trains from the same place toward the camps. Now the name meant salvation. History appeared to have symmetry. Germany was good at last.

Out poured emotions that had been bottled up for decades. As the refugees disembarked from their trains in September 2015 — in Munich, the site of Hitler’s failed putsch of 1923 and the unofficial Nazi capital — Germans were lining the exits and streets. Entire families had turned out. They bore teddy bears, candy, bottled water. Above all, they bore smiles. All across the country, Germans volunteered — their money, clothes and time — to help the refugees.

But historical narratives are clean in a way that real life is not. A few months later, on New Year’s Eve 2015, hordes of young Muslim men in Cologne assaulted, molested and violated scores of German women who had turned out for the fireworks. Most of the men were neither refugees nor Syrians, but economic migrants from northern Africa. But the distinctions were lost in the outrage that followed.

Out poured countervailing emotions, also bottled up for a long time: Fears of “the other”, of alien men bringing misogyny or even terror. And also bringing hatred of Jews.

To say that all or even most Muslims hate Jews is untrue and grossly unjust, just as it was to tar all Germans as anti-Semitic in the 1930s. But to pretend that hatred of Jews does not run like a deep current through Muslim culture today as it ran through German culture then is panglossian, naive, delusional — and probably just disingenuous. Just visit a few schoolyards in Berlin, where the children of Muslims use “Jew” as a catch-all slur and harass the children of Jews.

And there it is: The universalist German responsibility (don’t stereotype minorities like Muslims) has slammed right into the particularist duty (protect Jews). And the “Germans”, from teachers and deans to parents and politicians, have frozen up, like deer in headlights. Some can’t even bring themselves to admit the distinction — on the playground, Muslim, Jew and gentile alike are probably German citizens.

In that helplessness, mainstream Germans resemble people everywhere who genuinely try to do right in a world that just isn’t. And they prove, yet again, what Karl Popper called “the paradox of tolerance”, that bane of liberal progressives in particular. If society values tolerance above all, Popper observed, it will eventually be destroyed by the intolerant. The only answer, he thought, is to be resolutely intolerant of intolerance.

A first step is for Germans to find words for their dilemma. In so doing they must steer between the Scylla of anti-Muslim populism and the Charybdis of politically correct waffle. It may take new and fresh faces to do so.

Perhaps a young, female, Muslim face such as Sawsan Chebli’s. Today, she is an up-and-coming politician in Berlin. But she was born in Germany as a stateless daughter of Palestinian refugees. She is German and Islamic, part of the majority and the minority, a former refuge seeker who is now among the refuge givers. The other day, she suggested that asylum seekers trying to integrate into German society should, like Germans, be required to to go on field trips to former concentration camps. Among native-born Germans her idea proved controversial. It shouldn’t be.

Andreas Kluth is editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global. You can reach him at a.kluth@handelsblattgroup.com

Source: https://global.handelsblatt.com/opinion/germans-jews-muslims-and-the-paradox-of-tolerance-908064

The post Germans, Jews, Muslims and the paradox of tolerance first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.