DID THE JEWS KILL MOHAMMED TOO? Seems like everyone wants a piece of us. In an email to Powerline, Andrew Bostom writes:

Cat Stevens, now known as Yusuf Islam, the name he assumed upon converting to Islam, was simply quoting Koran in these antisemitic remarks: Koran 2:61/3:112, the Koranic curse for disobeying Allah and slaying the prophets (which is updated with flawless logic in the canonical hadith wherein the Jews poison Muhammad, leading to the Muslim prophet’s prolonged and painful death as well); Koran 5:64, which Abbas quoted in Gaza before his Fatah faction was defeated and removed from Gaza by Hamas, accuses the Jews of spreading corruption on earth, sort of an ancient antecedent to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; and the Koran also mocks the Jews claim to be Allah's chosen people: The Jews wronged themselves (16:118) by losing faith (7:168) and breaking their covenant (5:13). The Jews (echoing an ante-Nicaean, Marcionite polemic) are a nation that has passed away (2:134; repeated in 2:141). Twice Allah sent his instruments (the Assyrians/or Babylonians, and Romans) to punish this perverse people (17:4-5)-their dispersal over the earth is proof of Allah's rejection (7:168). The Jews are further warned about both their arrogant claim that they remain Allah's chosen people (62:6), and continued disobedience and "corruption" (5:32-33).

I go into great detail about all this in my forthcoming book The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, but I provided a summary here. It is time for all of us to state clearly for the larger public consumption the ultimate Koranic and other "sacred" Islamic text sources of these hateful motifs which those like Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam espouse proudly as indicators of their piety. Only then will the oublic begin to understand the profundity of the threat we are facing.

His article in The American Thinker (that Bostom links to above) contains the following background on the Koranic roots of Islamic Anti-Semitism:

From the advent of Islam, dehumanizing Jews as apes (Koran 2:65/7:166), or apes and pigs (Koran 5:60) transcended any mere application to "Sabbath breakers." Muhammad himself, in both the sira (early, sacralized Muslim biographies) of Ibn Ishaq and Ibn Sa‘d, referred to the Medinan Jews of the Banu Qurayza as "apes" just before orchestrating the slaughter of all their post-pubertal men.

This sacralized massacre is the prototype. Large scale massacres of Jews by Muslims occurred in Granada (circa 1066; 4000 killed, and Jewish society destroyed; more Jews killed in this one pogrom than in the Crusaders' much more infamous ravages through the Rhineland 30 years later); Baghdad (1290/91; hundreds killed with pogroms extending throughout Iraq, and into Persia); and the southern Moroccan oasis town of Touat (~ 1490; many Jews killed, and their Temple destroyed).

Each of these massacres was incited and/or celebrated by depictions of Jews as apes in verses by popular clerics-in the case of Touat, the "composer" of such a verse al-Maghili (d. 1505), an important Muslim theologian whose writings influenced Moroccan religious attitudes towards Jews into the 20th century-led the pogrom himself. Maghili also declared in verse, "Love of the Prophet, requires hatred of the Jews."

The centrality of the Jews' permanent "abasement and humiliation," and being "laden with God's anger" in the corpus of Muslim exegetic literature on Koran 2:61 (including the hadith and Koranic commentaries), is clear.

The long history of Islamic Anti-Semitism is as important to remember as is the equally long history of Muslim global conquest (see Israeli Occupation? Moslems are Just Being Modest). Unfortunately, history and remembering is not a strong point of the West these days.

Technorati Tag: Koran and Quran and Anti-Semitism and Andrew Bostom.