Scott Abramson is a historian of the modern Middle East and the senior research officer at the Center for Israel Education.
Introduction
A trend in Western discourse has developed in the past few years, observable in full vigour since 7 October, of presenting Islamophobia as the companion bigotry of antisemitism. Some of the prime movers behind this trend (e.g., journalists, politicians, university administrators, entertainers) may be well-intentioned, convinced that Islamophobia truly is antisemitism’s counterpart. Others who use the analogy might just be joining the flock unthinkingly, parroting the equivalence in the same way Western college students chant ‘from the river to sea’ without knowing either the names of these bodies of water or that they are calling for politicide, at best, and genocide, at worst.
Whether well-meaning or unthinking, both are wrong in pairing Islamophobia and antisemitism. Even so, some allowance might be made for them because, if a legal term may be permitted, there was no ‘concurrence’–no ‘guilty mind’ behind the ‘guilty act.’ As for the rest of those promulgating this false equivalence, besides being mistaken, they are neither well-intentioned nor naive, but cynical; they know well what they are doing, and their talk of antisemitism and Islamophobia as twin evils is in bad faith.
Many and varied are the cynical Islamophobia-antisemitism analogists and their motives. For politicos like Britain’s Jeremy Corbyn and America’s Ilhan Omar, mentioning Islamophobia is their price for speaking out against antisemitism. It is also their all-lives-matter counterblow to what they regard as undue attention on unworthy victims: Jews. For Palestinian activists like the founder of the BDS Movement, the dual condemnation is an aesopian restatement of an old Palestinian challenge to Israel’s legitimacy: namely, Jews are, like Muslims, a mere religious group, not a nation entitled to a nation-state. For the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) and other Muslim activists in the West, the dual condemnation is also instrumental, though legally rather than politically so. The MCB has made regular use of the analogy throughout its decades-long campaign to secure for Muslims the same hate speech protections granted to Jews and other groups bound by biology, not just belief. Censorship is their objective. If their efforts are eventually crowned with success, a chilling effect on British discourse would follow, and under threat of prosecution, British discussions of Islam would proceed much more gingerly. Then there are those whose use of the dual condemnation is not instrumental but justificatory. America’s leftist National Lawyers Guild (NLG), for one, has enlisted the dual condemnation to make the point that Jews, being Islamophobes themselves, are exponents of bigotry no less than they are objects of it.
It is the design of the present essay, not merely to survey the various applications of the false equivalence between Islamophobia and antisemitism, but also–and more importantly–to expose its inaccuracy and its illegitimacy. To identify the analogy’s errors is to empty this new weapon against the Jews, a weapon deployed ever more frequently since October 7, of its ammunition. Only then can there be any hope of slowing or, better still, arresting its insidious spread.
This essay aims to refute this analogy on the following five grounds:
(i) ontological-logical–because the analogy is a category mistake, a fallacy comparing two dissimilar things: a form of racism and a religious bias;
(ii) empirical–because it suggests, in the teeth of hate crime data to the contrary, an equal or nearly equal threat to Jews and Muslims;
(iii) semantic–because it misunderstands the original and, still, dominant sense of the word ‘antisemitism,’ i.e., hatred of Jews as a people;
(iv) historical–because it disregards centuries of racist–not religious–Jew hatred, not least the hatred behind the worst genocide in modern times;
(v) moral–because it cynically deflects from, justifies, or promotes the very bigotry it purports to condemn.
But first, it is well to consider the various applications of the analogy and the motives of the analogists.
Part 1: The Analogy in Action: Forms and Motivations
Used in Bad Faith
The bad faith that is often behind the dual condemnation of Islamophobia and antisemitism is easy to spot. What gives it away is either the dual condemnation’s context (i.e., what causes it) or its source (i.e., who is expressing it). It can also be both, and, more often than not, it is.
When it is context that reveals bad faith, the dual condemnation comes in response to something antisemitic that has little or nothing to do with Islam or Muslims–say, an attack on Jews somewhere or an antisemitic pronouncement from some public figure. These analogists will condemn antisemitism, but then, out of nowhere, they introduce a complete non-sequitur into the conversation: Islamophobia.
The NLG, the ultra-leftist self-described ‘alternative’ to the American Bar Association, responded to the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history, the mass shooting in 2018 at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue, by issuing a ‘Statement Against Antisemitism & Islamophobia’ that condemned not only the massacre, but also the Israeli government and its ‘virulent Islamophobia.’ What exactly, one wondered in vain, did a mass shooting at a synagogue in Pennsylvania have to do with Israel or Islamophobia?
The other guide to unmasking bad faith–namely, who is doing the condemning–serves its purpose when the analogists are anti-Israel obsessives and/or obvious anti-Semites. Needless to say, these analogists will deny any impurity of intention, but their history is to be believed before their denials are.
Among the most prolific antisemitism-Islamophobia analogists on the American scene today is Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. For years, Omar has trafficked in antisemitic tropes, claiming that ‘Israel hypnotised the world,’ that there is ‘political influence in this country that says it is OK for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country,’ and that her congressional colleagues’ support for Israel is explained by the title of a rap song, ‘It’s All About the Benjamins,’ that originally featured the lyric, ‘You should do what we do, stack chips like Hebrews.’ In light of her record, one hardly need strain to see why, to such analogists as Omar, pairing antisemitism and Islamophobia is nothing less than a matter of obligation. ‘When we are talking about antisemitism, we must also talk about Islamophobia,’ she said while condemning the 2019 shooting at a Chabad synagogue in Poway, California. Yet, Omar talked neither of antisemitism nor of Islamophobia, opting for silence instead, when, three years later, a Muslim gunman stormed a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas and held hostages for eleven hours. (Nor, for that matter, did the allegedly ‘Islamophobic’ FBI at first. The head of the bureau’s Dallas field office initially told reporters that the synagogue attack was ‘not specifically related to the Jewish community.’)
Transparent or not, bad faith is the common denominator between most uses of the false equivalence. What changes is the motives of the analogists, as we touched on above and will elaborate on now. For those like Michigan congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who can rarely bring herself to condemn antisemitism by itself, the dual condemnation offers a way out of a bind. Tlaib knows that, as a member of Congress, she cannot heed the call of her friend Amer Zahr (an activist who re-labeled Israel ‘Palestine’ on the map in her congressional office) ‘to stop condemning antisemitism.’ So, instead, Tlaib has recourse to a compromise along the lines of ‘I will condemn antisemitism as long as I can condemn Islamophobia too.’ This may be a condemnation of antisemitism, but it is qualified and conditional, and, thus, a less bitter pill to swallow. If the quid pro quo behind this condemnation was implicit, ‘the Squad,’ the cadre of anti-Israel leftists in the American House of Representatives, made it explicit in 2019, when they and their congressional allies threatened to vote against a resolution condemning antisemitism if it did not also condemn Islamophobia. The ultimatum worked, and a seven-page resolution condemning ‘antisemitism, Islamophobia, racism and other forms of bigotry’ was adopted instead of the original four-page draft condemning antisemitism. In the same ‘all-lives-matter’ spirit, Baltimore, Maryland’s city council failed to pass a resolution in December 2023, for the first time since its members were elected three years earlier, because it condemned antisemitism and the 7 October massacre without also condemning Islamophobia.
Used to decentre Jews
For those who cannot let Jews get away with unshared attention, the antisemitism-Islamophobia analogy is also a way of resisting what they regard as Judeo-centrism. This pushback against perceived Judeo-centrism comes as if in response to two implicit questions: ‘What makes Jews so special, and why should hatred of Jews be singled out for condemnation?’ The dual condemnation is their corrective. If Jews want antisemitism condemned, so goes their offer, then they must share the marquee with Muslims. An antisemitic hate crime gives the analogists the perfect opportunity to split the spotlight with Islamophobia, unless the perpetrators are Muslim, as they not infrequently are, in which case, silence is the best course. Massachusetts Congresswoman and Squad member Ayanna Pressley, who rarely if ever condemns antisemitism without also mentioning Islamophobia, explained the Squad’s insistence in 2019 on shoehorning Islamophobia into the resolution condemning antisemitism: ‘We need to have equity in our outrage, and Islamophobia needs to be included in this.’ It is much to be doubted that this principle of ‘equity in our outrage’ would be upheld if support for a resolution endorsing Black Lives Matter were to be conditioned on equal support for ‘Blue Lives Matter’ or ‘All Lives Matter.’
If resorting to a red herring to resist Judeo-centrism sounds familiar, it is probably because it is exactly what many have tried to do by de-Judaizing the history and the commemoration of the Holocaust. Many are the variations on this theme. One is the ‘Double Genocide Theory’ that says that many of the peoples of the Eastern European states that were rife with collaborationists were not accomplices to genocide under Nazi occupation; rather, they were themselves victims of genocide, though under Soviet occupation. Another variation is the Soviet and Russian tradition of anonymizing the Jewish victims, absorbing them into the undifferentiated mass of twenty-million-plus ‘peaceful Soviet citizens’ (never Jews by name) who were casualties of war, not victims of genocide. Still another variation is the claim that Jews were just one of many others killed in the camps (communists, the disabled, gays, Roma/Sinti, Jehovah’s Witnesses) and ought not, therefore, to receive sole or top billing; lastly, there is the universalizing approach of, among others, Britain’s largest Muslim umbrella organisation and serial analogist, the Muslim Council of Britain, and epitomised by the Egyptian delegate’s objection to Holocaust Remembrance Day at the U.N.: ‘Why should there be a remembrance day for the Jews and not for Christians and Muslims? No one had the monopoly on suffering.’
To those who want to excuse antisemitism while appearing to condemn it, the analogy also makes a strong appeal. The NLG’s response to the Pittsburgh shooting is precisely this kind of backhanded condemnation because it says, in effect, ‘Jews might be victims, but they are not innocent victims; they are tainted by Islamophobia as much as they are targeted by antisemitism.’ (A similar red herring was often used in late 2022 amid a spree of antisemitic pronouncements of Black American celebrities: ‘Black antisemitism is real; so is Jewish racism.’ So wrote the celebrated Black American intellectual Michael Eric Dyson. Dual condemnations to this effect, made in response to antisemitism from Black Americans, may not justify antisemitism, but they do deflect from it.)
Used to deny Jewish peoplehood
A further motive behind the false equivalence of antisemitism and Islamophobia is to encode the message that Jews, like Muslims, are a religious community, not a nation. The subtext here is that Jews, a religious community, have no right to a country of their own since it is national kinship rather than religious fellowship that has traditionally validated a group’s claim to statehood. This view, representing the mass of Palestinian opinion, often explains the use of the analogy by Palestinian activists and spokesmen in the West. One such is Omar Barghouti, the Palestinian co-founder of the BDS movement. Barghouti, whose movement declares itself ‘opposed on principle [sic] to all forms of discrimination, including antisemitism and Islamophobia,’ has also said that ‘Jews are not a people, and the U.N. principle to self-determination does not apply to them.’ By equating antisemitism (a form of racism) and Islamophobia (a bias against a religion), Barghouti and other such analogists are positing a correspondence between Jews (a people) and Muslims (a religious community). With the Jewish nation denationalised, the Jewish nation-state is thus delegitimised.
Used to claim a protected status for Islam as a religion, a new blasphemy law
Ironically and no less cynically, another group of analogists uses the false equivalence to make the opposite argument about Jewish peoplehood: If Jews are a people then we Muslims are too and, as such, we ought to be a protected class in the same way Jews are. This redefinition has implications on free speech–not so much in the U.S., thanks to the First Amendment–but in the countries of Europe and the British Commonwealth. Since ethnicity is involuntary and immutable and religion is neither, anti-discrimination law in the West would entitle Muslims, if reinvented as an ethnoreligious group, to legal protections stronger than those they already enjoy as a religious community.
Advocacy groups like the MCB would then invoke these protections to suppress criticism or satire of Islam under the pretext of stopping ‘group defamation’ and ‘incitement.’ Consider the words of the MCB’s founding leader, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, a knight of the realm whose portrait hangs alongside Shakespeare’s in Britain’s National Portrait Gallery. Three statements from the same man present a triptych of the whole cynical agenda: the false analogy, the hostility to Jews, and the hostility to free speech. First, there is the false analogy, by way of a call for government action against Islamophobia: ‘Strong measures to condemn Islamophobia are essential and to take actions similar to those taken to fight antisemitism and other forms of racism.’ Then, there is his hostility to Jews, by way of an explanation of the MCB’s boycott of Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Day: ‘Muslims feel hurt and excluded that their lives are not equally valuable to those lives lost in the Holocaust time.’ Finally, there is his hostility to free speech, by way of a lament on the ‘leniency’ of Ayatollah Khomeini’s death warrant for Salman Rushdie: ‘Death, perhaps, is a bit too easy for him.’
Where Islam is concerned, fear of a violent response from Muslim extremists already enforces self-censorship in the U.K., but this redefinition would make self-imposed censorship state-sponsored, turning a de facto ban on criticism of Islam into a de jure ban–anti-blasphemy laws, in effect. Considerable headway has already been made to that end. To the applause of the MCB, Britain’s ‘All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims,’ a parliamentary interest group made up of MPs and peers alike, formulated a definition of Islamophobia in 2018 that it begins, ‘Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism.’
To be sure, using the protections of an ethnic group as anti-blasphemy laws against criticism or satire of Islam is illiberal, but this is not the cynical part of what these analogists are doing because it is not in bad faith. So deeply are they offended by sacrilege against Islam that they believe, in all sincerity, it is hate speech, even if the speech is against a belief system rather than against an unalterable identity. As they see it, the reaction to alleged hate speech (specifically, the depth of the offence taken) is no less important in deciding what constitutes hate speech than is the speech itself. Accordingly, blasphemy against Islam, a scandalising offence against Muslims’ religious sensibilities, is not, to them, fundamentally different from what Americans would consider unambiguous hate speech–for instance, the ravings of some Southern demagogue a century ago trying to inflame a mob against Blacks. The cynicism lies not in their strategy but in one of their tactics–the analogy–and the giveaway is the analogists themselves, who, more often than not, have a history of antisemitism. The MCB activists are an exemplary representation of analogists who incite antisemitism from one side of their mouth while appearing to condemn it from the other side–and this for the eventual purpose of shutting blasphemous mouths.
The 57-member-state Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the self-described ‘collective voice of the Muslim world,’ has used the false analogy to the same end as the MCB. In 2012, the OIC, which shares the MCB’s insistence that Islamophobia is ‘a form of racism,’ called on the West to ban a crude film made by an Egyptian-born Coptic American that lampoons and insults Islam: ‘Not to do so would be a clear example of double standards. Islamophobia has to be treated in law and practise equal to the treatment given to antisemitism, especially in legislations.’
The OIC also denounced the film as a ‘flagrant incitement to violence.’ It was right about the incitement to violence, but it confused the victim with the perpetrator, because the violence that ensued was committed by Muslims against non-Muslims, not the other way around. Citing the film as their motive, terrorists carried out a number of attacks throughout the world, killing four Americans at the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, killing two American soldiers at a military base in Afghanistan, shooting dead an Israeli recruit on the Egyptian border, and beating Hindus and ransacking a Hindu temple in Pakistan. Muslims, too, were killed, but by other Muslims–either riot police or demonstrators in the Muslim world.
Part 2: The Five Errors of the Analogists
The essay now examines the ontological/logical, empirical, semantic, historical, and moral errors of the analogists.
(i) The Ontological and Logical Error of the Analogy: Jews are a People, Muslims are a Religious Community
Pairing Islamophobia and antisemitism is erroneous on several counts. In the first place, it is an ontological-cum-logical error because comparing Muslims and Jews does not compare like with like. Muslims are adherents of a religion and Jews members of a people. Practising Islam is the totality of being Muslim while practising Judaism is merely a part–and an optional one, at that–of being Jewish. Muslims and, for that matter, Christians are followers of universal religions that seek converts, and, accordingly, they can spring from any ethnic stock. Malaysians, Albanians, Azeris, and Saudis all practice Islam, yet they are no more culturally and ethnically similar than four groups of Christians also chosen at random: Chileans, Poles, Filipinos, and Zambians, for instance. Even the very people who introduced Islam (a religion) to the world, the Arabs (a people), still count many Christians among their number. Some five per cent of Arabs, down from nearly twenty per cent at the beginning of the twentieth century, are Christian, including the majority of Arab-Americans.
But whereas ‘Arab Muslim’ or ‘Arab Christian’ is a perfectly sound ethnic-religious descriptor, ‘Arab Jew’ is an oxymoron. Being Jews, Jews in Arab lands never understood themselves as Arabs at any point in their long history. Nor did Arabs ever look upon their Jewish neighbours, as will be seen, as kin. Nevertheless, this term, which first appeared in the 1970s, is commonly used in the Arab world and on the far left in Israel and the West, never mind that it is ahistorical and rejected overwhelmingly by those to whom it is intended to apply. (It ought not to pass unmentioned that, while the far left defies the preference of Jews from Arab lands not to be called ‘Arab Jews,’ it defers to the preference of Israel’s Arab citizens not to be called ‘Arab-Israelis,’ obligingly calling them ‘Palestinians’ instead. The takeaway here seems to be that a group’s self-identification is to be respected only if its politics are to be respected.)
The Jews’ overlapping ethnic and religious identity has been a cause of confusion to many, even to some Jews themselves. One suspects this is because when Jewish identity is considered by Westerners, no other ethnoreligious groups (i.e., groups that are at once a people and a religious community) come to mind. While it is indeed difficult to conceptualise something with no point of comparison or frame of reference, and while Jews may be the best-known ethnoreligious group, they are far from the only one. Another is India’s Parsis (‘Persians’), descendants of Persian refugees who practised Iran’s pre-Islamic religion, Zoroastrianism, and fled their homeland for the religious tolerance of India. A proper understanding of the Jews’ ethnoreligious identity has also snagged on the idea that one can become a Jew. In this, though, Jews are not alone either. While the Parsis do not accept converts, Sikhs, another ethnoreligious group, are like Jews in that they do not seek converts but they do accept them. Jews may trace their origins to the Land of Israel, but they have welcomed many converts into the fold since antiquity. Similarly, Sikhs may draw their roots from Punjab, the historical region astride the Indian-Pakistan border, but they have received many non-Punjabis into the community over the past 500 years, including thousands in the West since the early 1970s. Yet, to both Jews and Sikhs, whether one belongs to their community by descent or by consent is of no consequence. To anti-Semites, by contrast, Jewish blood is no mere fascination; it is usually an obsession, as will be seen.
Unlike Jews and Sikhs, two ethnoreligious groups with a combined homeland and holy land, Christians and Muslims, two strictly religious communities, have a common holy land but no common homeland. With Christendom encompassing about a third of humanity and the ummah (the Muslim faithful collectively) about a quarter, these two religious communities are a supranational Babel of believers, a cross-section of humanity in all its variety. The diversity of Christendom and the ummah thus makes nonsense of the terms ‘anti-Muslim racism’ favoured by British Muslims and ‘anti-Christian racism’ favoured by the French far-right. The same goes for the Brazilian misnomer ‘religious racism’ (just ‘racism’ would do or, more specifically, ‘ethnoreligious racism’), which designates the bigotry against Afro-Brazilians whose religion syncretises West African and Christian beliefs.
Since these two universal religions, Christianity and Islam, are belief systems, adopting or renouncing them is no more than a matter of personal conviction. Once their new religion’s creed is accepted, and once Christians-to-be are baptised or Muslims-to-be recite Islam’s single-sentence profession of faith, their admission to their new religion is complete. In theory, on 31 March of this year, when Easter and Ramadan coincided, the same person could have gone to an Easter brunch as a Christian and attended an Iftar dinner a few hours later as a Muslim. The exit from these religions, moreover, is as momentary as the entrance to them is. The instant Christians and Muslims renounce their beliefs, they become apostates, former Christians or former Muslims. The novelist Salman Rushdie ceased to be a Muslim, renouncing the Islam he was born into, the instant he decided he was not. Another British believer-turned-atheist, the philosopher Bertrand Russell, ceased to be a Christian when, as a freethinking youngster of 18, he read the autobiography of his godfather, John Stuart Mill.
Yet, whereas Russell could write his famous essay ‘Why I Am Not a Christian,’ a Jew like Isaac Deutscher, the brilliant writer and Talmud prodigy-turned-atheist and internationalist, could only go so far. Hence the title of Deutscher’s work explaining his irreligious commitment to being Jewish, The Non-Jewish Jew. Similarly, the term ‘Jewish atheist,’ unlike ‘Christian atheist’ or ‘Muslim atheist,’ is no contradiction in terms. Non-believers like Deutscher have numbered among the most celebrated Jews of the past century: the agnostic Albert Einstein or the atheists Sigmund Freud and Jonas Salk, to name a few. In their own eyes and in the eyes of society, unbelief made these proud Jews no less Jewish. Nor did it spare them the racial antisemitism that drove Einstein to America, sent Freud to Britain, and barred Salk from living, initially, in La Jolla, California. To the anti-Semite, whether a Jew is observant or irreligious is a distinction without a difference. By contrast, when a Muslim loses his religion, the ‘Islamophobe’ loses interest. What, after all, is Islamophobia without Islam?
Antisemitism and Being Jewish Without Practising Judaism
Like Jewish believers who became secularists, Jewish converts to other religions not infrequently remained Jews both in their own understanding and in that of society, often a hostile one. Jewish history offers many examples of this from as far back as antiquity, even though in the pre-modern world, beliefs were a stronger marker of group identity than ethnicity/nationhood. The Jewish civil war that accompanied the Maccabees’ uprising against Greek rule in Judea pitted the pious Jewish traditionalists (represented by the Maccabees) against the paganised urban Jewish Hellenisers, yet even the author of the Book of Maccabees, a partisan of pious Jews and no fair-minded chronicler, refers to one of book’s villains (the Greekified Jew Jason) as a fellow Jew. In the Roman province of Judea, Jews and Jewish Christians, despite their enmity, and in common with the Jewish traditionalists and Jewish Hellenizers before them, both saw themselves as Jews, and both appeared to the Romans in the same light. After the Romans subdued the Jewish rebellion of Bar Kokhba (132-135), punishing the Jews by expelling them from Judea and renaming it Syria-Palestina, they pronounced a ban on Jewish residence in the newly renamed province. To the Romans, it was of no consequence that the Jewish Christians opposed the rabbinic Jews and the rebellion alike; the provincial ban was applied to both communities.
In mediaeval Spain, under both the Muslim Almohad Caliphate and the Christian Crown of Aragon, persecution followed Jewish converts into their new faiths. The Almohad caliph ordered the Jewish Muslims to live separately from Muslims, declaring ‘If I were sure about the sincerity of their Islam, I would let them mix with the Muslims.’ In Christian Spain, both before and after the Jews were given the choice between conversion and expulsion, blood purity laws (limpieza de sangre) discriminated against Christians who had even partial Jewish ancestry, barring them from certain civil and ecclesiastical offices. The Jesuits, who emerged in sixteenth-century Spain amid this fetish for blood purity, barred membership to postulants in whose bloodline any Jewish admixture could be traced back five generations, a ban lifted only in 1946.
In the Muslim world, conversion to Islam ordinarily ended the second-class status that was the lot of non-Muslims under Muslim rule, raising their station in an instant and thereby giving non-Muslims a strong incentive to convert. But history records some notable exceptions in Iran, Yemen, and North Africa. Neither Islam nor high rank protected the Jewish-born thirteenth-century Iranian statesman, Rashid al-Din Hamadani. Besides being one of Islam’s greatest historians, Rashid al-Din was vizier in Mongol Iran and one of the ablest men of the age. Although he had renounced Judaism for Islam, his Jewish origins inflamed the resentment of many Muslims who thought it an indignity to be ruled by a Jew, even one who had become Muslim. Rashid al-Din’s Jewish blood proved to be his downfall and was shed accordingly. He was falsely accused of poisoning the king and executed, his severed head held up like a trophy as its bearer proclaimed, ‘This is the head of the Jew who strayed from the religion.’ Though Rashid al-Din had been a pious Muslim, his remains were interred in a Jewish, rather than a Muslim, cemetery. History repeated itself six hundred years later in Kermanshah, Iran in 1909, when the blood libel was levelled against a Jewish convert to Islam. As with Rashid al-Din, the accusation was, of course, false, and like Rashid al-Din, the convert was beheaded. Only this time, the false accusation was avenged on the Jews as a whole, the ensuing pogrom in Kermanshah even making the cover of the New York Times.
Nor did many of the most talented Jewish converts to Christianity in nineteenth-century Europe stop seeing themselves as Jews and stop being seen by their Christian compatriots as such. The statesman Disraeli, the litterateur Heine, and the composers Mendelssohn and Mahler all converted to Christianity but still understood themselves as Jewish. To their Christian neighbours, it mattered little or not at all that these Jews had become their co-religionists. ‘He senses that he,’ wrote Sartre of Jews trying to escape their lot, ‘is at every moment regarded as a Jew. His life among Christians does not bring him the anonymity he seeks.’ Jews whose conversion to Christianity was born of genuine conviction and who saw themselves–and wanted to be seen–as Christians were often not obliged by their Christian neighbours either. For them, Bernard Malamud’s aphorism was only too apt: ‘If you ever forget you are a Jew, a gentile will remind you.’ Even the most pious ethnic Jewish converts to Christianity who consecrated their lives to their new religion were not always accepted. Consider the fate of two eminent women of faith born Jewish in Germany a few years apart: the Carmelite nun Edith Stein and the first-ever female rabbi in history, Regina Jonas. To the Nazis, the two women–one a Catholic monastic, the other a Jewish cleric–were no different, and both were sent to their deaths in Auschwitz. The moral of Stein’s tragic story was that because being Jewish is a life sentence, it can be a death sentence too.
The stigma of Jewish ancestry vs. the nonissue of ‘Muslim ancestry’
While no one speaks of ‘Muslim blood,’ presumably because it makes no sense, it is far from unheard of for non-Jews with some Jewish blood to find that this part of their lineage is a liability. This has been especially notable in politics. It has often happened that the detractors of Christian politicians, whether political rivals or common critics, will call attention to the politicians’ ancestry if their family tree is ‘blighted’ by Jewish roots. The Presbyterian former governor of Virginia George Allen and the Anglican former British foreign secretary Jack Straw, among others, both had to put up with innuendos and aspersions about their Jewish genes. Jewish blood was even at the centre of a recent court case in the American state of Louisiana. In 2019, a Jewish-born Baptist plaintiff brought a civil action against his former employer, Louisiana College, for refusing him a different job on account of his half-Jewish blood. If Louisiana College had discriminated against him on religious, rather than ethnic, grounds, this denial of employment would have escaped controversy. Title VII of the American Civil Rights Act bars employment discrimination on the basis of ‘race, color, religion, sex and national origin,’ but it carves out an exemption for schools, like the officially Baptist Louisiana College, with an institutional religious orientation. However, since the discrimination at issue in this case was ethnic rather than religious, the court found in favour of the plaintiff.
Now consider the contrast between the anti-Semite, to whom Jewish identity is inescapable, and the Islamophobe, to whom Muslim identity is belief-dependent, beginning and ending with adherence to Islam. The case in Louisiana mentioned above presents a striking contrast with the experience of another convert to Baptism, the former Muslim Ergun Caner, and another Baptist institution, the late Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. On the authority of the Aspen Institute, Evangelicals ‘frequently poll as America’s most Islamophobic faith group,’ and according to Diverse: Issues In Higher Education, Liberty University ‘may be the most Islamophobic college in the nation.’ Yet, because Islamophobia is a religious bias rather than an ethnic or racial one, Ergun Caner became the darling of many Evangelicals, even becoming dean of the Baptist Theological Seminary in the belly of the Islamophobic beast, Liberty University. So popular was Caner that even after it emerged that he had falsified much of his biography–though not the fact that he had been a Muslim–he was removed as dean but kept on the faculty. A few years later he landed an even higher post, when he was unanimously elected president of another hickory-smoked Southern Baptist institution, Georgia’s Brewton-Parker College.
Another telling illustration of the stigma of Jewish ancestry versus the nonissue of ‘Muslim ancestry’ comes courtesy of Boris Johnson, the former British prime minister. Johnson was baptised a Catholic and confirmed as an Anglican, but he descends from two non-Christian great-grandparents: a non-observant Jew on his mother’s side and a Turkish Muslim on his father’s side. That Johnson had a great-grandfather who was a hafiz (memoriser of the Qur’an) as well as the interior minister of the Ottoman Caliphate brought him no opprobrium. He was never called a Muslim, and if his Muslim great-grandfather’s religion was mentioned at all, it was as an endearing curiosity; it was never used against him. Of Johnson’s Jewish ancestor, however, the same could not be said. Even though Johnson, being one-eighth Jewish, would not even have qualified as a Jew under the Nazis’ Nuremberg Decrees, he was nevertheless decried as a Jew on right-wing message boards and by Ali Akbar Raefipour, a prominent Iranian professor and media personality linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. Nor did it matter that Johnson is a Christian whose ancestry was no more Jewish than it was ‘Islamic.’ It was his Jewish blood, not his great-grandfather’s Islam, that some found fault with.
In contrast to the total insignificance of ‘Muslim ancestry,’ the stigma of Jewish ancestry is such that, in the West and the Islamic world both, even non-Jews have endured false accusations of being Jewish. To discredit leaders they oppose, antisemites have often invented Jewish origins for them. Two former American presidents were both accused of being crypto-Jews, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower–’Rosenfeld’ and ‘Ike the kike’ as their detractors called them. Just as the two presidents’ antisemitic opponents were Republicans and Democrats, both the Whites and the Reds in the Russian Civil War falsely attributed Jewish pedigree to Alexander Kerensky, the liberal leader of the Russian Provisional Government in 1917 during the eight-month interlude between the autocracy of the tsars and the totalitarianism of the communists. Not even a detractor of Kerensky who was a notoriously vicious anti-Semite–namely, Joseph Stalin–has escaped accusations of being Jewish. From Hitler, to countless anti-communists in Eastern Europe, to the American conspiracy theorist Candace Owens in August, antisemites have insisted Stalin was Jewish. Little does it matter that Stalin, a seminarian who had swerved into dictatorship from his original career path to the priesthood, was preparing the mass deportation of Soviet Jewry to Siberia when death foiled his plans.
But nowhere do the gears of the genealogy falsification industry grind as busily and as noisily than in the Middle East. The founders of Saudi Arabia, the al-Saud clan, and the founder of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, are popularly, if slanderously, said to have Jewish roots by their detractors. Perversely, even some of the most antisemitic leaders of the modern Middle East–Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Moammar Gaddafi, among others–have been decried by their opponents, baselessly, for having Jewish ancestry.
To be sure, one can harbour a bias against a religion, but a religion is an aggregate of beliefs, ethics and practices voluntarily accepted, and a bias against what is believed by choice is not the same as a bias against what is assigned at birth. A bias against a religion is no more ‘racist’ than is a bias against communism, fascism, existentialism, or environmentalism. The American linguist and philosopher John McWhorter persuasively argues in his 2021 book that wokeism is, by any reckoning, a religion: ‘I do not mean that these people’s ideology is ‘like’ a religion.…I mean that it actually is a religion.’ Some will counter that since a person may not be raised on these ideologies and philosophies in the same way one is raised in a religion, religion assumes a permanence in one’s life comparable to ethnicity. This is specious; changing or renouncing religion is very common, and about a quarter of all Americans change denominations or religions in the course of their lives. Hardly more convincing is the idea that religion’s importance to its adherents elevates it above secular belief systems. Many people espouse ideologies and philosophies with no less zeal than the faithful believe the tenets of their religion and indoctrinate their children accordingly. Although it was with pride that Mussolini said, ‘Fascism is a religion,’ and with scorn that Churchill said, ‘Communism is a religion,’ their point was the same: to the ideologue, an ideology can be as dear as or even dearer than religion is to the believer.
Religion’s impermanence is precisely why Western anti-discrimination law distinguishes between belief and biology and why Jews enjoy certain protections not accorded Muslims. In the language of jurisprudence, ethnicity, unlike religion, is designated an ‘immutable characteristic,’ and as such, it is always a ‘protected characteristic’ in anti-discrimination law. On this basis, Britain’s Race Relations Act (1976), Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act (1975), and New Zealand’s Race Relations Act (1971) all recognise Jews as an ethnic, rather than a religious group. In the United States, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act (1964) bars recipients of federal funds from discriminating on ‘the basis of race, color, and national origin,’ but it omits religion. Yet in subsequent case law, Jews have been adjudged eligible for its protections on the strength of their ethnicity. Under each of the above statutes, the same protections have been extended to another ethnoreligious group, Sikhs, but not to Christians and Muslims, strictly religious groups.
(ii) The Empirical Error of the Analogy: Measuring Antisemitism and Islamophobia
The antisemitism/Islamophobia equation is also defective because it suggests an equality or near equality of danger between the two, implying that Islamophobia is as lethal and pervasive a menace to Muslims as antisemitism is to Jews. Witness, for example, headlines in the recent past in the Washington Post–‘Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are Equally Wrong’–and the Guardian–‘Islamophobia and Antisemitism are Equal Scourges.’ Many have gone further than this, claiming that hazards of being a Muslim in the West are far graver than those of being a Jew. Professor Hatem Bazian, the founder of Students for Justice in Palestine and UC Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Documentation of Islamophobia, and Linda Sarsour, the activist who co-chaired the Women’s March who resigned amid accusations of antisemitism, are just two such voices. The actress Susan Sarandon thinks so too. Speaking at a protest after the 7 October massacre amid an almost 400 per cent surge in antisemitic incidents in the U.S., Sarandon said with no little glee, ‘There are a lot of people afraid of being Jewish at this time, and are getting a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country.’
Had Ms. Sarandon been right and Jews were ‘getting a taste of what it feels like to be Muslim in this country,’ this would be a taste, in the words of a nineteenth-century American playwright, ‘sweeter than manna to a Hebrew mouth’ because it would bring American Jews a good deal of relief from vulnerability. FBI data for 2023 tallied 1,832 hate crimes against Jews versus 236 against Muslims. Indeed, the majority of hate crimes against religious groups (the designation of Jews in hate crime data in the U.S. and the countries considered below) were against Jews–68 per cent against Jews versus 9 per cent against Muslims. What’s more, in America’s ten largest cities, Jews are now the most targeted group overall, more than all ethnic, racial, and religious groups.
Nor is this imbalance unique to the United States; on the contrary, it is even more lopsided almost everywhere else. The brute fact is that in nearly every country that hosts both a sizeable Jewish and Muslim community, Jews are targeted vastly more than Muslims, even though Muslims copiously outnumber Jews in all of these countries except the United States–the only country in the Jewish Diaspora with more Jews than Muslims. Consider the asymmetry in the two countries in the Diaspora with the largest Jewish communities after the U.S., France and Canada. There are ten times as many Muslims as Jews in France and five times as many in Canada. Yet the majority of religious hate crimes in France and Canada, as in the United States, are committed against Jews. In France, where Europe’s largest Jewish and Muslim communities both live, Jews are about one per cent of the population and Muslims about ten per cent, yet in 2018, a French Jew was 25 times more likely to be the victim of a hate crime. In 2023, Canada’s national statistical agency found that 70 per cent of all religious hate crimes targeted Jews. Even in Toronto, Canada’s largest Muslim city, where ten per cent of the population is Muslim, the majority of religious hate crimes are against Jews. In the U.K., there are more hate crimes against Muslims than Jews, but on a proportional basis–Muslims being thirteen times more numerous–the Jews are markedly more victimised: 33 percent of all religious hate crimes are against Jews and 38 percent are against Muslims. The differential is even greater in Germany, home of the world’s eighth-largest Jewish community, where there are thirty times more Muslims than Jews and where, according to the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, the majority of religious hate crimes are against Jews.
New York City, where Ms. Sarandon made her speech, affords a useful basis of comparison to test the claim that antisemitism and Islamophobia are equal or near-equal menaces. NYC is the largest Jewish city in the world and the largest Muslim city in the Western hemisphere, with thirteen per cent of New Yorkers being Jewish and 9 per cent being Muslim. But in NYC, Jews are the victims of the majority of hate crimes–whether ethnic, racial, or religious. In January 2024, Jews were the victims of 69 per cent of all hate incidents in the city (including several assaults) and 57 per cent in July 2024 (also including assaults). So, what of hate incidents against Muslims in the same city in the same two months? Zero.
Although underreporting (whether by the victims themselves or by local law enforcement agencies to the FBI) is a chronic problem in documenting hate crimes against all groups, when it comes to news reporting on hate crimes, it is only those against Jews that go underreported. A 2022 study by the media watchdog Honest Reporting found that of all attacks on ethnic and religious groups, those against Muslims receive the most news coverage and those against Jews the second least–after Asians (‘Asian’ in the American sense of the word). The mainstream media can only seem to discover an interest in antisemitic hate crimes when the perpetrators are white nationalists. Otherwise, the media can be counted on to ignore or, failing that, to justify the crime or suppress the identity of the criminals. Ignoring was indeed the tack taken by the Washington Post in late June, when a violent mob of pro-Palestinian protestors converged on LA’s largest Jewish neighborhood to hector and assault its residents. Even after President Biden, the governor of California, and the mayor of Los Angeles all condemned the mob, the Washington Post–a newspaper whose Global Opinions editor endorsed the 7 October massacre–still found nothing newsworthy to report.
The data for hate crimes committed during the 2021 Israel-Hamas war presents a case study in the chasm between what is popularly reported about antisemitism and Islamophobia and what is actually done to Jews and Muslims. ‘Latest Gaza conflict fuels antisemitism, Islamophobia across U.S., Europe,’ screamed a headline in the left-wing news outlet Axios. This headline, as is common in today’s media, was only half-true. Throughout the eleven-day confrontation, dozens of assaults–not just vandalism or hate speech–against Jews swept the U.S., Canada, the U.K., France, and Germany. At the same time, however, no attacks against Muslims anywhere in the West were reported. The Islamophobia watchdog of the 57-member intergovernmental body, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation’s (OIC) Islamophobia, recorded not a single episode of anti-Muslim violence during the war. The reach of the OIC’s monitoring is global, but single-country Islamophobia watchdogs reported no attacks either, whether the Council on American-Islamic Relations Research or Advocacy Department or Britain’s Tell MAMA (Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks).
The hard data notwithstanding, there remain sceptics of the threat of antisemitism in the West. One former naysayer was Adam Armoush, an Arab atheist raised in Haifa with a circle of friends that was, in his words, ‘ninety-nine per cent’ Jewish.’ Armoush’s conversion from sceptic to believer is most instructive.
While touring Berlin in 2018, Armoush found an opportunity for a social experiment. To prove to his Jewish friends back home that their talk of antisemitism was a bit of neurosis, he and his companion both donned kipas and set out on a stroll through an upscale neighbourhood in Berlin. Yet, no sooner had Armoush pressed record on his cell phone camera to document the experiment than three men began pursuing them. Screaming ‘Yahudi! Yahudi!’ (‘Jew’ in Arabic) one of the pursuers lashed Armoush with his belt and threw a bottle at him, missing his mark. The assailant, a Palestinian with Syrian citizenship, later defended himself against accusations of antisemitism, claiming, ‘I don’t hate Jews or Christians or anything [sic] else.’ He might have done better to say his beef was only with Zionists, not Jews.
In light of the statistics above, there can be no doubt as to which of the following two wearers of religious garb has more reason to fear while walking through a Western city: a man in a kipa or a woman in a hijab. And if the kipa wearer is vulnerable in Western cities, one dare not imagine what fate would befall him in al-Manara Square in Ramallah or Tahrir Square in Sanaa–or, for that matter, in the plaza of almost every other Arab capital. Such is the hostility to Jews in the Arab world, from which almost all Jews have been ethnically cleansed, that with no more Jews to attack, the ghosts of the Arab world’s Jewish past–shrines, synagogues, cemeteries–have sometimes stood in as surrogates to attack. For instance, in al-Hamma, Tunisia in October, a mob stormed the shrine where a sixteenth-century Kabbalist is entombed, hacking away at its walls and eventually burning it down. The destruction came a month after the country’s president speculated about a supposed Zionist connection to Storm Daniel, the cyclone that battered neighbouring Libya.
That the threat of antisemitism to Jews is far graver exposes the hollowness of Ayanna Pressley’s ‘equity principle’ vis-a-vis antisemitism and Islamophobia, a principle that deprioritises the threat of antisemitism. The gravity and the urgency of a problem determine the attention it is given. This, after all, is the principle of triage in emergency medical care or prioritisation levels in police and fire dispatch. To uphold the ‘equity principle,’ then, is to have misplaced priorities. But in the zeitgeist of today, this is to be expected. Many universities seem to be more concerned that there are too many microaggressions and misgenderings and too few trigger warnings and safe spaces than they are about frothing mobs calling for the genocide of Jews.
(iii) The Semantic Error: Redefining Antisemitism
To compare antisemitism and Islamophobia is not merely to posit a correspondence between two biases that differ in degree and in kind, it is also to rewrite the definition and the history of antisemitism, thereby converting anti-Jewish racism into anti-Judaism. To understand the racial intent behind the word ‘antisemitism’ and to appreciate further how antisemitism and Islamophobia differ, the semantic stream must be followed to its headwaters. The words ‘antisemitism’ and ‘racism’ are both modern coinages (1879 and 1933) that originated in German (Antisemitismus and Rassismus). The earliest use of the word ‘racism,’ was, like antisemitism, in reference to the ethnic, not religious or cultural, bias against Jews. ‘antisemitism’ and ‘racism’ are thus two among many words (e.g., ‘ghetto,’ ‘pogrom,’ ‘inquisition,’ ‘genocide,’ ‘Holocaust’) inspired by history’s oldest and deadliest hatred. More significant than Jew hatred’s contributions to lexicography is the fact that ‘antisemitism’ and ‘racism’ were coined expressly to describe hatred of Jews as a people, hatred that animated the worst genocide of the modern era. The meaning of ‘racism’ broadened after its first use to refer to other groups, but even today, the word antisemitism, in the strictest sense, preserves its original meaning of hatred of Jews as a people.
It was Wilhelm Marr, a German pamphleteer, who coined the pseudoscientific word ‘antisemitism’ in his 1879 bestseller, The Victory of Jewishness Over Germanness. Marr advances one central thesis in the book–Jews must be hated for ‘the right reasons’: their racial characteristics. To be sure, Marr’s term was new, but racial antisemitism was not. As we have seen, there were mediaeval antecedents like Spain’s blood purity laws, and racial antisemitism had been stirring in Europe since the beginning of Marr’s century. Moses Hess, a proto-Zionist forerunner of Herzl, wrote compellingly about this bias in his 1862 work Rome and Jerusalem. In this work of remarkable insight, which Herzl so admired that he said he might not have written The Jewish State if he had read Hess first, the author writes, ‘The Germans hate the religion of the Jews less than they hate their race; they hate the peculiar faith of the Jews less than their peculiar noses.’
In the same spirit, Marr took particular care to impress on readers a point that Hungarian and German sloganeering would later formulate in these terms: ‘On the Jew’s faith I do not look, his race is what I cannot brook.’ In making his case, Marr might have drawn on the vast corpus of Christian polemics against Jews, not least the works of another German from Saxony, Martin Luther. But so keen was Marr to emphasise the Jews’ racial evils that he not only avoids Christian polemics, he defends Jews against them. After exposing the falsity of the blood libel and the injustice of the deicide charge, he affirms, ‘I therefore unconditionally defend Jewry against any and all religious hatred.’ The oft-forgotten subtitle of Marr’s book, Viewed from an Irreligious Standpoint, makes the author’s intention plain. It also throws light on the incongruity between an ethnic and a religious bias–i.e., antisemitism and Islamophobia. How, after all, could Christians and Muslims be viewed from an irreligious standpoint? Whereas Jewishness (i.e., the condition of being Jewish) endures without Judaism (i.e., the religious dimension of Jewishness), what becomes of a Christian without Christianity or a Muslim without Islam? Such an ontological question about changing or removing the defining essence of a thing evokes Hemingway’s line in For Whom the Bell Tolls: ‘If thy aunt had cojones she would be thy uncle.’
(iv) The Historical Error: Antisemitism has never been analogous to Islamophobia
Quite apart from the unblushing chutzpah of defining a group’s identity for them, the proposition that Jewish identity can be compartmentalised, restricted to something purely religious, is rigorously ahistorical, at odds with three millennia of Jewish self-understanding. Palestinians may be the main exponents of this argument today, but they were not its authors. Jews were. The novel idea that Jewish identity could be reduced to a religion originated a little more than two centuries ago on the eve of emancipation–that is, the nineteenth-century process by which European Jews were given citizenship, civil rights, and permission to live beyond the ghetto walls. This religionisation of Jewish identity, conceived and espoused by Jews who hoped to smooth the obstacles to social acceptance and acculturation or assimilation, was nothing short of revolutionary. ‘Prior to modernity,’ writes the philosopher Leora Batnitzsky in her celebrated book How Judaism Became a Religion, ‘Judaism was not a religion, and Jewishness was not a matter of culture or nationality. Rather, Judaism and Jewishness were all these at once: religion, culture, and nationality … Despite local differences, premodern Jews imagined themselves as one united people.’
Such was the complete novelty of restricting an all-encompassing identity to one sphere of one’s existence that Hebrew even lacked a word for ‘Judaism’ (i.e., the Jewish religion). Although Hebrew is a three-thousand-plus-year-old language, this word, Yahadut, was coined only in the nineteenth-century, the word representing one part of Jewish identity and the idea circulating in one part of the Jewish world. The religionisation of Jewish identity appealed to many Jews in Central and Western Europe and, through subsequent immigration, in the United States. Yet even in these most tolerant corners of the Jewish world where integration held out the most promise, the idea met with a mixed reception, and many of its most zealous champions–Jews who called themselves ‘Germans of the Mosaic persuasion,’ for instance–found that their self-reinvention did little to temper their neighbours’ hostility. Even many of the Jews who had originally favoured a religionisation of Jewish identity, most notably the Reform Movement, later retreated from it. Nor did the idea make any inroads among the world’s largest Jewish community, that of Eastern Europe, or among the Jews of the Arab and Islamic world.
For their part, Europeans had always seen Jews as a people, ‘Palestinians among us,’ as Immanuel Kant called them at a time when ‘Palestinian’ in Western usage was synonymous with ‘Jewish.’ But as the nineteenth century advanced, antisemitism came to infect this conception with racism. Although racial antisemitism was not a completely novel strain of the ancient virus of Jew hatred, its contagion in Europe in the course of the nineteenth-century, reaching epidemic proportions, was indeed unprecedented. So was antisemitism’s alliance with pseudoscience and biological racism. For Europe’s Jews, this was an especially ominous development. Whereas pre-Enlightenment religious hatred of Jews might be escaped by conversion to Christianity, anti-Jewish racism (i.e., antisemitism) sealed off every escape route. Biology condemned Jews to permanent otherness, and there could be no compromise with this intractable hatred.
The spread of racial Jew hatred and of chauvinistic nationalism frustrated the hopes of many Jews who had longed to integrate into European society. In the countries that had recently granted them citizenship and released them from the ghettos, they found that they could not be nationalists; they were merely the compatriots, not the coethnics, of the national community, living in the nation-state without belonging to its nation. ‘The legal emancipation of the Jews is the culminating achievement of our century,’ wrote Leon Pinsker, another proto-Zionist forerunner of Herzl’s, in 1882, the year of the First Aliyah, ‘But legal emancipation is not social emancipation.’ The Jews accordingly learned that nationality (citizenship) was not the same as nationhood (peoplehood) and that citizenship in a country was a civil right, but membership in a people was a birthright; European nationality could be acquired, European nationhood could not. Starting in the nineteenth and continuing into the early twentieth centuries, Jews, for the first time, could become French, Polish, Romanian, Hungarian, or German. But they could never become Gallic, Slavic, Vlach, Magyar, or Teutonic. Similarly, Jews in the Arab world would learn decades later that they could become Syrian, Egyptian, and the like, but not Arab–a lesson the Kurds of Iraq and Syria have also learned.
True acceptance for much of Diaspora Jewry would remain elusive. Unlike the indigenous European, ‘whose origins belong to his soil,’ as the notorious French fascist Xavier Vallat put it, the foreign origins of Jews could not be forgotten. As Herzl lamented in The Jewish State, ‘In countries where we have lived for centuries we are still cried down as strangers.’ It was Zionism’s fate to enter history both as an answer and a corrective to this exclusionary nativism. The Zionists reasoned that if being Jewish stamped the Jews as perpetual foreigners, making them society’s hated ‘other,’ then they ought to return to the one place in the world that was their homeland, not just a host-country, where Jews were natives and not foreigners.
Thus did a fateful dialogue develop between the social forces of nineteenth-century Jewish Europe. If antisemitism was racism’s response to Jewish peoplehood, Zionism was Jewish peoplehood’s rejoinder. It was in Jewish peoplehood, then, that the anti-Semites saw a problem and the Zionists, in turn, found a solution. Tragically, the anti-Semites would realise their solution–the Final Solution–before the Zionists could realise theirs. Had the Zionists been first, history would remember the 1940s as the decade that brought just one, not both, of the two defining events of modern Jewish experience.
If Jews are not a people, then they are dupes of a ‘false consciousness,’ as Marxists say. Pace the analogists who denationalise Jews, Jews are not only one of antiquity’s few surviving peoples, they are the only one whose self-understanding, national consciousness, language, and culture show multi-millennial continuities. To deny that the Jews are a people is as impudent and irrational as claiming that the Democratic Party (one of the first modern political parties and the oldest continuously active one) is not a political party or that Britain’s Royal Society (one of the first learned scientific societies and the oldest continuously active one) is not a learned society.
(v) The Moral Error of the Analogy: Denying Zionism’s Cause (Hatred of Jewish Peoplehood) to Destroy Zionism’s Effect (Jewish Statehood)
Of all the cynical uses of the false analogy between antisemitism and Islamophobia, none is quite as sinister as pretending to condemn antisemitism in order to promote antisemitism.
These analogists’ purpose is not so much to condemn antisemitism and Islamophobia as to compare Jews and Muslims, casting them as exact analogues–two strictly religious communities. This negation of Jewish peoplehood is the intermediate objective in the service of their ultimate objective: the abolition of Jewish statehood.
One of the leading analogists with this agenda is Professor Hatem Bazian, who, as mentioned above, is the professor that thinks Islamophobia is a greater danger than antisemitism. Far from being coy about his agenda, Bazian has said, ‘We cannot deal with Islamophobia and antisemitism without dealing with Israel and Palestine.’ Lest there be any doubt about his intentions, he has also stated, ‘The “Jewish nation” is the central myth of Zionism. It needs to be dismantled.’
Bazian is no minor figure among Palestinian activists in the United States. On the contrary, few others who espouse his cause have his reach among the young and the impressionable. Not only did he found the Center for the Study of Documentation of Islamophobia and co-found Zaytuna College, America’s first Muslim liberal arts college, he also founded the group that was at the vanguard of the 2024 anti-Israel campus protests in the United States, National Students for Justice in Palestine, and its parent organisation, American Muslims for Palestine (AMP). (Incidentally, the AMP is the veritable reincarnation, albeit under a new name, of an outfit that disbanded in 2004 after its material support for Hamas was unmasked in federal court).
Bazian, Ilhan Omar, and the like deny Jewish peoplehood in order to dismantle Jewish statehood, insisting that the Jews are not a people and that the very thing that protects them as a people–the Jewish state–should not exist. In short, all is nihilism where the Jews are concerned–‘a nullified state for a nullified people.’ To put it across that Jews are, like Muslims, a mere religious community they rely on historical negationism and historical revisionism. With these dubious epistemological supports, hatred of Jews as a people is revised into a mere religious prejudice.
While affirming the non-existence of a Jewish people and demanding the non-existence of a Jewish state, they are not above changing the motive from ethnic to religious even when the Jews were murdered precisely because they were a people. In 2022, the prolific analogist Ilhan Omar tweeted, ‘Today, we remember the 6 million Jews who were murdered during the Holocaust and redouble our efforts to stand up against antisemitism and all forms of religious discrimination.’ Here Omar is engaging in ‘Holocaust revisionism,’ the euphemism deployed by Holocaust deniers for their pseudo-scholarship. In this ‘revisionist’ spirit, Omar profanes the memory of the victims of the Holocaust while appearing to honour it, telling us that the Nazis killed the Jews because of their religion, not their peoplehood. This is either an expression of cosmic ignorance of the history of the Second World War or it is, like her use of the false analogy, an anti-Jewish statement in the guise of a pro-Jewish statement.
Since the Jews are not a nation and Jewish nationhood is a Zionist construct, insist these analogists, Israel cannot be said to be a nation-state like Ireland is for the Irish people or Greece for the Greek people. As a peculiar religious state (not unlike Vatican City), Israel is thus an anomaly in the international democratic order, it being neither a nation-state (e.g., Greece and Ireland) nor a civic state (e.g., the U.S. and Canada). Since Israel cannot be the nation-state it purports to be because the Jews are not a nation, the anomaly of Israel, a religious state, can only be redressed if Israel becomes ‘a state for all its citizens’ instead of an officially Jewish state. Reborn as a civic state, the Jewish theocracy formerly known as Israel would have no special Jewish character; it would not be a Jewish state, but a state of Jews–Jewish only insofar as many of its citizens happen to practise Judaism.
The use of the false analogy to this end is old wine in a new bottle, a revised edition of an argument belaboured by Palestinians for decades. The PLO charter (1964) offers a succinct description of this view of Jews as a sham people: ‘Judaism, a revealed religion, is not a nationhood with an independent existence. Nor are Jews one people with an independent personality because they are citizens of the countries to which they belong.’ Yet for all the Palestinians’ talk of the non-existence of the Jewish people, their rhetoric is belied by their actions. If the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world had truly believed that Jews were ‘not a nation’ but rather ‘citizens of the countries to which they belong,’ then they would have considered the Jews of the Arab world fellow Arabs no more responsible for Israel’s actions than Arab Muslims or Arab Christians. They never have, and this has been obvious since well before the state of Israel was established. In the 1929 pogroms in the British Mandate of Palestine, the Palestinians made no distinction between other Jews and the veteran Arabic-speaking Jewish communities of Hebron and Safed. Nor did the 10,000-strong demonstrations in Baghdad the day after, demonstrations at which ‘Death to the Jews’ was chanted. Indeed, far from reassuring their ‘fellow Arabs,’ Arab leaders threatened the Jews under their rule and Arab mobs massacred them. In 1947, amid the U.N. deliberations on the Palestine question, the Iraqi prime minister warned, ‘Should it come to a clash of arms, severe measures should be taken against all Jews in Arab countries,’ and Egypt’s U.N. representative threatened that ‘the lives of one million Jews in Muslims countries would be jeopardised by the establishment of a Jewish state.’ They made good on their word. The Jews of Arab lands became the easy prey of mobs avenging developments, political and military, in Palestine. Pogroms broke out in Aden (December 1947), Manama (December 1947), Aleppo (December 1947), Tripoli (June 1948), Oujda (June 1948), Djerada (June 1948), and Cairo (June 1948). Thus began the ethnic cleansing of the 850,000 Jews in the Arab world, a number that now hovers around 5,000.
Conclusion: Retiring the Analogy
Antisemitism is sui generis among the bigotries of the world. Not only is it the oldest and the deadliest group hatred, it is also the most malleable. The plasticity of this singular hatred is such that it has even suggested contradictory reasons to hate Jews. The Jew has been hated for being a communist and a capitalist, a cosmopolitan and an ethnocentrist, a superhuman and a subhuman, a secularist and a pietist, a foreigner from Palestine and an invader in Palestine, a non-white and a white oppressor. The identities of the anti-Semites themselves–illiberal leftists, isolationist rightists, Islamic extremists, white nationalists, Black separatists–are nearly as varied as the identities they assign to the Jews they hate. Yet, despite these singular distinctions that mark antisemitism off from other bigotries–its longevity, lethality, plasticity–antisemitism now is, for many, the only group hatred that cannot be mentioned by itself. As Ilhan Omar insists, ‘when we are talking about antisemitism, we must also talk about Islamophobia,’ they are ‘two sides of the same coin of bigotry.’
The equation of Islamophobia with antisemitism recalls another and earlier cynical device deployed in bad faith. For more than a century, antisemitism emanating from an Arab source has been defended on the grounds that Arabs, too, are Semitic and as such, they cannot be antisemitic. This defence is still occasionally mounted. No less an authority than Encyclopedia Britannica promulgated it in 2022, before backtracking, and in November 2023, Margaret Brennan, the host of the influential American political talk show Face the Nation, invoked it to resist the governor of Florida’s claim that Gazans are antisemitic. This, of course, is a form of etymological literalism that derives a word’s meaning from its etymology instead of from its usage. (By the same absurd semantic logic, Moroccan Jewish David Levy Yulee–Senator from Florida from 1855 to 1861–can be celebrated not only for being America’s first Jewish Senator, but also for being its first African-American Senator). This argument, having been called out for its self-evident absurdity for so many years, is now vanishingly rare. The similar inaccuracy of the Islamophobia-antisemitism equation, and the similar cynicism of many of those who invoke it, make it no less deserving of oblivion. It, too, ought to be resisted and, one may dare to hope, retired. And so, may the day not be far distant when the Islamophobia-antisemitism equation is as discredited as the ‘Arabs-cannot-be-antisemitic’ defence.
