As Gawker reported yesterday, the Anti-Defamation League has been engaged in a bizarre online campaign to supposedly curb antisemitism by launching e-mail blasts with the subject line, "Jews Have Ruined Our Country." The e-mails go on to list quotes pulled from various Internet message boards that fault "The Jews" for the world's current economic debacle, straight from the world's most-respected pundits, people who post racist tirades on anonymous Internet message boards. There are numerous problems with this scenario, not the least of which is obviously the misguidedness of the ADL's weird deployment of reverse-psychology racism as a means to generate awareness of its cause. What is important to note, however, is that although they are apparently very bad at presenting it, the ADL is spot on in its assertion that a wave of antisemitism is right around the corner.

Antisemitism will never go away. For reasons that have been discussed endlessly over the past 5,000 years, people hate Jews. Additionally, people also hate having nothing to do, and hating Jews and having nothing to do often go hand-in-hand (idle hands really are the devil's plaything). With the economic recession putting record numbers of people out of work and hanging around all day without anything to occupy their stupid minds, a new generation of anti-Jewish fervor is hardly out of the question. The ADL is merely co-opting another recent phenomenon, the pre-emptive strike, in anticipation of the gestating hatred.

An almighty row has broken out in Norway following a monologue by comedian Otto Jespersen - and broadcast on national TV - which resulted in a man who lost nine relatives during the Holocaust phoning the police.

Here’s the joke:

”I would also like to take the opportunity to remember all the billions of fleas and lice that lost their lives in German gas chambers, without having done anything wrong other than settling on persons of Jewish background.”

That’s about as sophisticated as the interminable joke popular among American white supremacists about black people (”if we’d known they were gonna be this much trouble, we’d have picked the goddam cotton ourselves.”)

Jespersen isn’t the first European comedian to deploy antisemitism in his act - in France, there’s the notorious Dieudonne. And just as Dieudonne ran into trouble with the law, so has Jespersen.

Aftonbladet, a leading Norwegian newspaper, reports that Kurt Valner, the man who lost nine relatives to the Nazi murderers, reported Jespersen to the police on what appear to be incitement grounds. Jespersen himself has remained silent, but other comedians have jumped to his defense, along with his boss, Alf Hildtrum, who said, “The claims that Jespersen has anti-Semitic sympathies is completely false. I don’t believe it. Otto Jespersen is trying to make a point in these monologues, and the text should be judged in context. It shouldn’t be taken in isolation.”

I’m not quite sure of either the point or the context. But I am mindful of another context: the claim, documented by the scholar Manfred Gerstenfeld and others, that antisemitism, frequently blended with anti-Zionist tropes, is alarmingly prominent in Norway and the other Nordic countries.

Ha’aretz reported that a former Norwegian Prime Minister, Kåre Willoch, responded that these claims amounted to “a traditional deflection tactic aimed at diverting attention from the real problem, which is Israel’s well-documented and incontestable abuse of Palestinians” - a Norwegian version of what David Hirsh calls “The Livingstone Formulation.”

Willoch did not respond to the specific examples raised by Gerstenfeld which, interestingly, included a number of newspaper cartoons designed to raise the same dismissive, morally superior sniggering as Jespersen’s mangled joke. One cartoon showed an ultra-Orthodox Jew engraving “thou shall murder” into an alternative Decalogue. Another cartoon showed Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert dressed up as a guard at a death camp, smiling and holding a rifle.

All of this is illustrative of a wider point. These days, racist jokes about blacks and other minorities are largely - and correctly - regarded as an embarrassment, the preserve of failed comedians performing to inebriated audiences in seedy clubs. But transfer these same themes to Jews and all of a sudden, they acquire a delicious sense of toying with the forbidden. What is reactionary becomes radical, what is stupid and insulting becomes pathbreaking. Thus does the gutter enter the lofty heights of the salon.

Recently Jewcy posted a short opinion piece "On Islamic Antisemitism" which consisted almost entirely of extracts from brief, superficial works on the subject by Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes, Robert Wistrich, and Efraim Karsh--none of whom, despite their other areas of expertise, have ever studied Islamic Antisemitism in a serious, comprehensive manner. The glib conceptions of these authors--which are simply affirmed without ever giving any substantive proofs (perhaps because the relevant doctrinal and historical data provides negative proofs), and repeated verbatim and uncritically in the posting by Michael Ezra--remind me, as a clinical investigator in medicine, of a scene from Woody Allen's film "Sleeper."

In the film Allen portrays Miles Monroe, owner of a health food store in Greenwich Village who is cryogenically frozen, and awakens 200 years in the future. An authoritative, all-knowing doctor who claims to be possessed of "...what we now know to be true," tells Miles, offering him a cigarette, "Here, smoke this. And be sure you get the smoke deep down into your lungs." To which Miles replies: "I don't smoke." The Doctor then declares: "It's tobacco! It's one of the healthiest things for your body!"

There are incontrovertible and overwhelming hard data-pathological and epidemiological-which demonstrate a major causative role for smoking in both the predominant form of lung cancer (i.e., adenocarcinoma), and premature coronary heart disease. Smoking is to these diseases as the Islam in Islamic Antisemitism is to this scourge of Jew-hatred, past and present. It is as destructive to our social and moral health to deny this reality, as it is to human public health disease prevention efforts to deny the causative link between cigarette smoking and adenocarcinoma of the lung, or premature coronary heart disease.

What is the basis for my claim? Contra the shallow contemporary works quoted by Michael Ezra, serious scholars of Islamic Antisemitism -- S.D. Goitein, Hartwig Hirschfeld, Georges Vajda, and Haggai Ben-Shammai -- have demonstrated all of the following: clear historical evidence of specific Islamic antisemitism, from the Geniza record of the high Middle Ages (including the coinage of a unique Hebrew word to characterize such Muslim Jew hatred, i.e., sin'ūth), published in full by Goitein as of 1971; the content of foundational Muslim sources detailing the sacralized rationale for Islam's anti-Jewish bigotry, including Hartwig Hirschfeld's mid 1880s essay series on Muhammad's subjugation of the Jews of Medina, based upon the earliest pious Muslim biographies of Muhammad; George Vajda's elegant, comprehensive 1937 analysis focusing primarily on the hadith (the putative words and deeds of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, as recorded by pious transmitters); and much more recently, Haggai Ben-Shammai's concise 1988 study of key examples of Jew-hatred in the Koran and Koranic exegesis.

My 3-part presentation will introduce evidence compiled from the seminal works of these scholars, Islam's foundational texts, and historical eyewitness accounts-adduced to considerably greater extent in The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism -- which elucidate how the living legacy of Islam's primal anti-Jewish animus, i.e., specific Antisemitic motifs in Islamic theology, including Islamic eschatology, the uniquely Islamic institution of jihad war, and its corollary institution, dhimmitude -- operate in tandem with regard to the annihilationist Muslim Jew-hatred directed at the Jews of Israel, in particular.

Part 1: From Jihad to Dhimmitude

In April 1948, the Grand Mufti of Egypt, Sheikh Muhammad Mahawif, issued a fatwa declaring jihad in Palestine obligatory for all Muslims. The Jews, he maintained, intended "to take over ... all the lands of Islam.." Eight years later, at the height of so-called secular Arab nationalism, a fatwa written January 5, 1956 by then Grand Mufti of Egypt, Sheikh Hasan Ma'moun, and signed by the leading members of the Fatwa Committee of Al Azhar, and the major representatives of all four Sunni Islamic schools of jurisprudence, elaborated the following key initial point: that all of historical Palestine having been conquered by jihad, was a permanent possession of the global Muslim umma (community), "fay territory" [booty], to be governed by Islamic Law. Furthermore, quoting directly from the text, we the see the conjoined motivations of jihad and conspiratorial Islamic Jew hatred:

Muslims cannot conclude peace with those Jews who have usurped the territory of Palestine and attacked its people and their property in any manner which allows the Jews to continue as a state in that sacred Muslim territory.

[as] Jews have taken a part of Palestine and there established their non-Islamic government and have also evacuated from that part most of its Muslim inhabitants... Jihad... to restore the country to its people.. is the duty of all Muslims, not just those who can undertake it. And since all Islamic countries constitute the abode of every Muslim, the Jihad is imperative for both the Muslims inhabiting the territory attacked, and Muslims everywhere else because even though some sections have not been attacked directly, the attack nevertheless took place on a part of the Muslim territory which is a legitimate residence for any Muslim.

Everyone knows that from the early days of Islam to the present day the Jews have been plotting against Islam and Muslims and the Islamic homeland. They do not propose to be content with the attack they made on Palestine and Al Aqsa Mosque, but they plan for the possession of all Islamic territories from the Nile to the Euphrates.

On Friday May 16, 2008 Osama Bin Laden's latest reputed audio message proclaimed, the "Jihad [holy war]" which he emphasized "is a duty to free Palestine...is the most important issue for the Islamic nation," and he urged "iron and fire" to end Israel's self-defensive blockade of Gaza.

Earlier remarks of Hamas MP and cleric Yunis Al-Astal, which aired on Palestinian Al-Aqsa TV April 11, 2008 provide complementary, and even more revealing context:

Very soon, Allah willing, Rome will be conquered, just like Constantinople was, as was prophesized by our prophet Muhammad. Today, Rome is the capital of the Catholics, or the Crusader capital, which has declared its hostility to Islam, and has planted the brothers of apes and pigs [i.e., Jews, Koran 2:65, 5:60, and 7:166, and other foundational Muslim texts] in Palestine in order to prevent the reawakening of Islam - this capital of theirs [Rome] will be an advanced post for the Islamic conquests, which will spread through Europe in its entirety, and then will turn to the two Americas, and even Eastern Europe. I believe that our children or our grandchildren will inherit our Jihad...

These words debunk widely accepted tropes that Hamas is merely a nationalist movement, albeit religious, desiring a "Palestinian homeland" in the territories of Gaza (which it already possesses), Judea, and Samaria. Hamas' blatantly annihilationist rhetoric towards Jews and Israel within the 1949 armistice borders, indicates that the jihadist organization wishes to replace Israel. Why then, in addition to the monotonous rhetoric of Jew hatred (which is Islamic, and specifically Koranic, in origin), the unabashed expression of Hamas' will to wage global jihad?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is just one historically relevant meaning of jihad despite contemporary apologetics. The root of the word Jihad, appears 40 times in the Koran and in subsequent Islamic understanding to both Muslim luminaries-from the greatest jurists and scholars of classical Islam (including Abu Yusuf, Averroes, Ibn Khaldun, and Al Ghazzali), to ordinary people-meant and means "he fought, warred or waged war against unbelievers and the like." As described by the seminal Arabic lexicographer E.W Lane, "Jihad came to be used by the Muslims to signify wag[ing] war, against unbelievers." A contemporary definition was provided at the Fourth International Conference of the Academy of Islamic Research at Al Azhar, Cairo, in 1968 by Muhammad al-Sobki:

...the words Al Jihad, Al Mojahadah, or even "striving against enemies" are equivalents and they do not mean especially fighting with the atheists...they mean fighting in the general sense...

Muhammad himself waged a series of proto-jihad campaigns to subdue the Jews, Christians and pagans of Arabia. Numerous modern day pronouncements by leading Muslim theologians confirm (see Yusuf Al-Qaradawi's, "The Prophet Muhammad as a Jihad Model") that Muhammad has been the major inspiration for jihadism, past and present.

Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), jurist, renowned philosopher, historian, and sociologist, summarized these consensus opinions from five centuries of prior Muslim jurisprudence with regard to the uniquely Islamic institution of jihad:

In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the [Muslim] mission and [the obligation to] convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force... The other religious groups did not have a universal mission, and the holy war was not a religious duty for them, save only for purposes of defense... Islam is under obligation to gain power over other nations.

Classical Islamic jurists such as Ibn Khaldun also formulated the concepts Dar al Islam and Dar al Harb (Arabic for, "The House of Islam and the House of War"). As described by the great 20^th century scholar of Islamic Law, Joseph Schacht,

A non-Muslim who is not protected by a treaty is called harbi, ‘in a state of war', ‘enemy alien'; his life and property are completely unprotected by law...

Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, "spiritual" leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, head of the "European Council for Fatwa and Research", and popular Al-Jazeera television personality, reiterated almost this exact formulation of Dar al Harb during July 2003, both in conceptual terms, and with regard to Israel, specifically. And these innocent non-combatant "harbis" can be killed, and have always been killed, with impunity simply by virtue of being "harbis" during endless razzias (raids) and or full scale jihad campaigns that have occurred continuously since the time of Muhammad, through the present. This is the crux of the specific institutionalized religio-political ideology, i.e., jihad, which makes Islamdom's borders (and the further reaches of todays jihadists) bloody, to paraphrase Samuel Huntington, across the globe.

The essential pattern of the jihad war is captured in the classical Muslim historian al-Tabari' s recording of the recommendation given by Umar b. al-Khattab (the second "Rightly Guided Caliph") to the commander of the troops he sent to al-Basrah (636 C.E.), during the conquest of Iraq. Umar reportedly said:

Summon the people to God; those who respond to your call, accept it from them, but those who refuse must pay the poll tax out of humiliation and lowliness. (Koran 9:29) If they refuse this, it is the sword without leniency.

By the time of al-Tabari's death in 923, jihad wars had expanded the Muslim empire from Portugal to the Indian subcontinent. Subsequent Muslim conquests continued in Asia, as well as Eastern Europe. Under the banner of jihad, the Christian kingdoms of Armenia, Byzantium, Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia, and Albania, in addition to parts of Poland and Hungary, were also conquered and Islamized by waves of Seljuk, or later Ottoman Turks, as well as Tatars. Arab Muslim invaders engaged, additionally, in continuous jihad raids that ravaged and enslaved Sub-Saharan African animist populations, extending to the southern Sudan. When the Ottoman Muslim armies were stopped at the gates of Vienna in 1683, over a millennium of jihad had transpired. These tremendous military successes spawned a triumphalist jihad literature. Muslim historians recorded in detail the number of infidels slaughtered, or enslaved and deported, the cities, villages, and infidel religious sites which were sacked and pillaged, and the lands, treasure, and movable goods seized.

And this classical formulation of jihad is very much a living doctrine today. For example, one can read the openly espoused views, and sound Islamic arguments which conclude the contemporary work "Islam and Modernism," written by a respected modern Muslim scholar Justice Muhammad Taqi Usmani. Mr Usmani, aged 65, sat for 20 years as a Shari'a judge in Pakistan's Supreme Court (His father was the Grand Mufti of Pakistan, and one of the most important 20^th century Koranic commentators, Maulana Mufti Muhammad Shafi). Currently Usmani is deputy of the Islamic Fiqh (Jurisprudence) Council of the Organization of the Islamic Conference -- the major international body of Islamic nations in the world -- and serves as an adviser to several global Sharia-based Islamic financial institutions. Thus he is a leading contemporary figure in the world of mainstream Islamic jurisprudence. Mr. Usmani is also a regular visitor to Britain. During a recent visit there, he was interviewed by the Times of London, which published extracts from Usmani's writings on jihad, Saturday, September 8, 2007. The concluding chapter of Usmani's "Islam and Modernism" rebuts those who believe that only defensive jihad (i.e., fighting to defend a Muslim land deemed under attack or occupation) is permissible in Islam. He also refutes the suggestion that jihad is unlawful against a non-Muslim state that freely permits the preaching of Islam (which, not surprisingly, was of some concern to The Times!).

For Mr Usmani, "the question is whether aggressive battle is by itself commendable or not." "If it is, why should the Muslims stop simply because territorial expansion in these days is regarded as bad? And if it is not commendable, but deplorable, why did Islam not stop it in the past?" He answers his own question as follows: "Even in those days . . . aggressive jihads were waged . . . because it was truly commendable for establishing the grandeur of the religion of Allah." Usmani argues that Muslims should live peacefully in countries such as Britain, where they have the freedom to practice Islam, only until they gain enough power to engage in battle. Usmani explodes the myths that the creed of offensive, expansionist jihad represents a distortion of traditional Islamic thinking, or that this living institution is somehow irrelevant to our era.

And what was the nature of the system of governance imposed upon those indigenous non-Muslims conquered by jihad? In his seminal The Laws of Islamic Governance al-Mawardi (d. 1058), a renowned jurist of Baghdad, examined the regulations pertaining to the lands and infidel populations subjugated by jihad. This is the origin of the system of dhimmitude. The native infidel "dhimmi" (which derives from both the word for "pact", and also "guilt"-guilty of religious errors) population had to recognize Islamic ownership of their land, submit to Islamic law, and accept payment of the Koranic poll tax (jizya)-the tax paid in lieu of being slain-based on Koran 9:29. Al- Mawardi notes that "The enemy makes a payment in return for peace and reconciliation... Reconciliation and security last as long as the pavment is made. If the pavment ceases, then the jihad resumes." A treaty of reconciliation may be renewable, but must not exceed 10 years. This same basic formulation was reiterated during a January 8, 1998 interview by Yusuf al-Qaradawi confirming how jihad continues to regulate the relations between Muslims and non-Muslims to this day.

The "contract of the jizya", or "dhimma" encompassed other obligatory and recommended obligations for the conquered non-Muslim "dhimmi" peoples. Collectively, these "obligations" formed the discriminatory system of dhimmitude imposed upon non-Muslims-Jews, Christians, [as well as Zoroastrians, Hindus, and Buddhists]-subjugated by jihad. Some of the more salient features of dhimmitude include: the prohibition of arms for the vanquished dhimmis, and of church bells; restrictions concerning the building and restoration of churches, synagogues, and temples; inequality between Muslims and non-Muslims with regard to taxes and penal law; the refusal of dhimmi testimony by Muslim courts; a requirement that Jews, Christians, and other non-Muslims, including Zoroastrians and Hindus, wear special clothes; and the overall humiliation and abasement of non-Muslims It is important to note that these regulations and attitudes were institutionalized as permanent features of the sacred Islamic law, or Shari' a. The writings of the much lionized Sufi theologian and jurist al-Ghazali (d. 1111) highlight how the institution of dhimmitude was simply a normative, and prominent feature of the Shari'a:

...the dhimmi is obliged not to mention Allah or His Apostle.. .Jews, Christians, and Majians must pay the jizya [poll tax on non-Muslims]...on offering up the jizya, the dhimmi must hang his head while the official takes hold of his beard and hits [the dhimmi] on the protruberant bone beneath his ear [i.e., the mandible]... They are not permitted to ostentatiously display their wine or church bells...their houses may not be higher than the Muslim's, no matter how low that is. The dhimmi may not ride an elegant horse or mule; he may ride a donkey only if the saddle-work is of wood. He may not walk on the good part of the road. They [the dhimmis] have to wear [an identifying] patch [on their clothing], even women, and even in the [public] baths...[dhimmis] must hold their tongue.

The practical consequences of such a discriminatory system were summarized in A.S. Tritton's 1930 The Caliphs and their Non-Muslim Subjects, a pioneering treatise on the status of the dhimmis:

...[C]aliphs destroyed churches to obtain materials for their buildings, and the mob was always ready to pillage churches and monasteries...dhimmis...always lived on sufferance, exposed to the caprices of the ruler and the passions of the mob...in later times..[t]hey were much more liable to suffer from the violence of the crowd, and the popular fanaticism was accompanied by an increasing strictness among the educated. The spiritual isolation of Islam was accomplished. The world was divided into two classes, Muslims and others, and only Islam counted...Indeed the general feeling was that the leavings of the Muslims were good enough for the dhimmis.

It is within this overall historical context that one must view contemporary Muslim pronouncements regarding the status of non-Muslims-under past, present, and future Islamic rule.

For example, during a Friday sermon broadcasted live on June 6, 2001 on PA TV, from the Sheik ‘Ijlin Mosque in Gaza, Palestinian Authority employee Sheik Muhammad Ibrahim Al-Madhi reiterated these sentiments with regard to Jews:

We welcome, as we did in the past, any Jew who wants to live in this land as a Dhimmi, just as the Jews have lived in our countries, as Dhimmis, and have earned appreciation, and some of them have even reached the positions of counselor or minister here and there. We welcome the Jews to live as Dhimmis, but the rule in this land and in all the Muslim countries must be the rule of Allah.

Five years ago (i.e., in 2003, prior to Hamas' electoral victory in 2006), during a briefing for a visiting United States congressional delegation, then Vatican representative to Israel, Archbishop Pietro Sambi, informed US lawmakers that the Palestinian Authority's new approved state constitution, funded by the US Agency for International Development, provided no juridical status for any religion other than Islam in the emerging Palestinian Arab entity. The Papal Nuncio warned, in addition, that the Palestinian Authority (PA) had adopted Shari'a as the overarching guiding principle of their legal code, thus mandating the absolute supremacy of Muslims over non-Muslims as a matter of law. Archbishop Sambi also initiated a study of the new PA textbooks, which the Vatican deemed to be brazenly Antisemitic.

But how are the jihad and its corollary institution, dhimmitude conjoined to Islamic Antisemitism?

These phenomena will be examined, beginning in Part 2.

[Note: Andrew Bostom's next installment will be published Tuesday.]

An expert scholar on the Islamic Middle East is Bernard Lewis. In a “specialised sense” he defined antisemitism as:

that special and peculiar hatred of Jews, which has its origins in the role assigned to Jews in certain Christian writings and beliefs concerning the genesis of their faith, and which has found modern expressions in such works as the Protocols and similar portrayals of a universal Jewish plot against both God and mankind.

Based on this definition, he comments:

anti-Semitism did not exist in the traditional Islamic world. True, Muslim religious and other literature provide ample evidence of prejudice against Jews, and Muslim history records not a few cases of persecution. But - and this is surely the crucial point - these attitudes and these persecutions were not accompanied by the demonological beliefs and conspiratorial fantasies that are characteristic of Christian anti-Semitism in both medieval and modern Europe, and do not differ significantly from the hostility and persecution to which other religious minorities, besides the Jews, have been from time to time subject.

Noting that the Qur’an shows greater hostility to Jews than to Christians he states that nevertheless:

the Muslim law makes no such distinction, but treats both subject religions on a footing of equality with each other. In practice, in medieval and in Ottoman times, Jews often fared rather better than Christians, for the obvious reason that unlike their Christian compatriots, they were not suspected of treasonable sympathies with the Christian enemies of the Islamic empires.

The conservative commentator Daniel Pipes concurs with these point from Lewis. Both Pipes and Lewis also agree that things changed in the 19th century when the Muslim world started to employ antisemitic imagery and themes more common in Europe. This more familiar style of antisemitism was imported into the Middle East from Christian Europeans to Christian Arabs and did not originate from Islamic sources. In effect, Muslims began to ape the antisemitism of European Christians.

Robert Wistrich, a noted expert on antisemitism, wrote a very interesting paper in 2002 for the American Jewish Committee entitled,Muslim Anti-Semitism: A Clear and Present Danger. He provides examples where Jews are depicted as the enemies of Islam in the Qur’an but notes that in practice, Jews, like Christians, were afforded the status of dhimmis(“protected peoples.”) Whilst Jews had to pay a (poll tax) they were accepted as ahl al-kitab(“peoples of the Book”) and were allowed to practice their faith. Whilst Jews were discriminated against by being dhimmis, it is important to realise that this discrimination was not specifically anti-Jewish, as Christians suffered similiarly. Quoting the work of someone else, Wistrich states:

Dhimmis were often considered impure and had to be segregated from the Muslim community. Entry into holy Muslim towns, mosques, public baths, as well as certain streets was forbidden them. Their turbans—when they were permitted to wear them—their costumes, belts, shoes, the appearance of their wives and their servants had to be different from those of Muslims in order to distinguish and humiliate them; for the dhimmis could never be allowed to forget that they were inferior beings.

This is not to say that there were never incidents of violent antisemitism in the Muslim world. As Efraim Karsh points out in his study published two years ago:

The last and most powerful Jewish tribe – Quraiza – suffered more profusely following the abortive Meccan siege of Medina in the spring of 627. Charged with collaboration with the enemy, the tribe’s 600–800 men were brought in small groups to trenches dug the previous day, seated on the edge, then beheaded one by one and thrown in. The women and children were sold into slavery and the money they fetched, together with the proceeds from the tribe’s possessions, was divided among the Muslims. This process was completed on Muhammad’s deathbed in the form of an injunction ordering the expulsion of Jews (and Christians) from the peninsula: ‘Two faiths will not live together in the land of the Arabs’

The relevant issue is that Muslims took (and still take), in the words of Daniel Pipes, “a somewhat patronizing view of other religions.” As he states:

A Muslim believes so confidently in the perfection of Islam that he cannot quite comprehend why Jews and Christians continue to follow their outmoded and imperfect versions of the truth.

All these scholars note that Muslim antisemitism became rife in the 20th century. As a phenomenon, it has clearly exploded post 9/11, but this does not mean to say that antisemitism is traditionally Islamic. It would be far more accurate to argue that opposition to all other religions has been a fundamental theme in Islamic history.

Given the classic anti-Semitic mantra that the Jews control the world’s money, it is only natural that the current class of anti-Semites are upset that those same Jews are currently doing a lousy job of controlling the world’s money. (What the Rothschilds could teach BearSterns!)  But what distinguishes this latest cycle of blaming bank failure on the tribe is the rapidity with which all the old paranoid themes have spread via the instantaneous medium of the Internet. Americans come out for intellegent discourse about whether or not the Jews secretly control the world

An emerging player in the world of virtual pogromism is TBRNews.org, a U.S. portal that felt the need to mention in its “About” section:

“We have been accused of being neo-Nazis, Communists, anti-Semites, Christian haters, certainly not Bush friendly and guilty of treason, aggravated mopery, theft of mattress tags from cheap motels, chronic jaywalking and disturbers of the political peace.”

According to an article in the Jewish Community Online, TBRNews published a story on Friday, October 3 entitled, "$400b Sent To Israel Ahead Of Lehman BK," with the byline “The Voice of the White House.” The story reported that just before its collapse, the Lehman Brothers investment banking firm transferred $400 billion into Israeli banks, while also taking care to note that “The senders are all Jewish,” and "if the sticky-fingered ones decide to make a quick flight to Israel ahead of FBI investigators, like their new accounts, they are entirely safe," as "Israel does not extradite its citizens."

Pretty humdrum as far as web-savvy bigotry is concerned -- except that the "story" was picked up by a Pakistani television program and reported it as fact. The ADL has reported a recent uptick in anti-Semitic comments being posted on a "wide variety of blogs and conspiracy Websites," and not just the usual fringe message boards. Some of the highlights include:

“(Jews have) infiltrated Wall Street and government and have ruined our country.”

“They (Jews) love money nothing else, no faith or religion can be so heartless to their victims."

“That's how they work, they short the stock all the way making billions and then cover right it up sell (sic) and then taxpayers to the rescue and it is true all those institutions are ran by Jews...”

Wow. At least the spelling in the Protocols was impeccable.

A Jewish-American soldier stationed at Fort Benning in Georgia was taken to a local hospital last week after being badly beaten by fellow privates in what his father believes was an act of anti-Semitic violence. The US Army

Pvt. Michael Handman had complained of religious discrimination on the base in past letters home, and had apparently been informed on at least one occasion that he may have been in danger. Two Fort Benning drill sergeants have been reprimanded for religious discrimination toward Handman, having reportedly referred to him as "Juden"—the German word for Jews – and asking him to remove his yarmulke, which Handman was wearing with his uniform.

Handman’s father, Jonathan, says that his son fears future attacks and that he regrets encouraging his son’s enlistment in the armed forces.

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Jewcer Roi Ben-Yehuda wrote up his recent trip to Barcelona for Haaretz. If youEuropean Antisemitism: Straight up, no chaser want to see antisemitism done right --- or if you want to restore your confidence in the importance of Zionism --- go to Europe and then wait around a while:

If the presence of swastikas were not enough, Barcelona also has the dubious honor of being home to Europe's most infamous neo-Nazi bookstore, brazenly titled "Europa Bookstore: Persecuted Books - The Truth Will Set You Free."...

The books in the store were a literary mix covering revisionism, fascism, Israel-bashing, Hitler-praising, anti-immigration and homophobia. To this was added DVDs and CDs of Hitler's "greatest hits."

In my best Spanglish, I told a young woman who asked if I needed help that I would like to take some pictures and talk to her. She hesitated and then declined, but told me that I could "come back tomorrow and speak to the leader."...

[A]s I walked around I had a "for the six million!" moment. One of those moments that lead Jews to do something about injustice. So I took out my camera and started taking pictures...

"Give me your camera," she had raised her voice. "I want to see the pictures. I want to eliminate the pictures!"

"Leader"; "eliminate." The great thing about European fascists and racists is that they traditionally haven't put up much of a pretense of not being fascists and racists. Sadly, though, the new crop of the European far-right seems to be taking trans-Atlantic PR cues. Even the most deranged neo-Nazis on these shores feel compelled to wrap their hatred up in some public interest cause --- like saving the wombs of white women from the Pornocaust. So it's comforting, in its way, to learn that there's a little corner of Catalonia where the good stuff, the real unadulterated neo-Nazism is served straight up, no chaser.

It is the question. It is the reason for Jewcy. The question's celebrated and undeserving cousin -- What will become of Judaism? -- gets all the attention and money. It's surely not as important, but its tacit implication of crisis has just the right pizazz, creates just the right amount of fear, to get the checkbooks out.

Confronting the question of what value Judaism will offer its adherents and the world at large is too complicated, creating so much fear that questions start getting asked while the checkbooks remain closed.

Judaism's rasion d'etre surfaced in an online forum of that shadowy and exclusive Jewish non-profit, Reboot (it's really quite innovative and filled with fine folks). Everything Judaism seems to be about these days - intermarriage, antisemitism, who qualifies as Jewish, the silly political machinations of this or that denomination - is so uninspiring. Tell me, the questioner pleaded, that there will be something more.

What exactly that addition will be strikes at the heart of this transitional, and one hopes transformational, moment in Judaism's history; a moment encapsulated by the shift of the central question facing the non-Ortho Jewish community of the last 100+ years from how to why be Jewish.

I'm optimistic. From monotheism to civil rights to socialism, you'd be hard-pressed to identify a social movement that Jews weren't somehow involved in or directly responsible for, including the American evangelical movement of the last 20 years (see Jewcy's story, The Jewish Jihad for Jesus).

In those movements, in the advent of monotheism itself, I see the answer in Judaism's utopian imagination. We need to reignite that imagination - on a conceptual level, in the conversations we have communally, and on a practical level in how we live our lives. We need to apply that imagination from 30,000 feet - creating movements or getting behind existing ones -- and then, on increasingly granular levels -- to our country, our states, our neighborhoods, our homes, and in our selves.

The challenge will be to get beyond the organizational rot that has made many of our institutions useless; to get beyond the scarcity of effective leadership, religious or otherwise; and finally, get to a place where we can revive Judaism as a viable conceptual technology that provides the tools and language to make good on those utopic impulses.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on blacks and Jews:

There is this constant meme among black folks that we can never come together to do anything right. As Ice Cube once said, "Broke up the family forever\And to this day black folk can't stick together." The other part of that logic holds that other ethnic groups--Jews are usually cited--are somehow better at supporting their own. I remember, a few years back, me and my good friend Eyal Press were coming home from a party and Brooklyn. During the train ride, I explained to him that while black antisemitism gets all the headlines, there is a certain sector of black folks that worship Jews for their vaunted sense of unity. Eyal got a good laugh out of that, mostly because in his picture of Jewish life, debating and fighting were central.

Actually, I think it's often the same sector. Jews see that kind of admiration as threatening because to them it sounds a lot like traditional antisemitism, especially when you get into stuff like "Jews only spend money in their community.” But even when the most antisemitic Black Nationalist starts talking about the Jews, there's this grudging respect, like "You're ruthless, but we wanna be like you and run shit."

The most famous black Jew since Jesus: Sammy Davis Jr But even the idea that Jews "run shit" is based off antisemitic conspiracy theories. Yeah, there are a lot of Jews in high places, but the vast majority of people in positions of power are white gentile men. Stating that white men run things is simply stating the obvious—although don't mention it on TV, because Fox News will run a clip of you saying that one phrase for the next three months.

The reason people notice Jews in high places is that they're still kind of "not white." (Off-white?) You rarely hear about the Catholic conspiracy to control America anymore (except maybe from McCain supporter John Hagee) even though there are five Catholics on the Supreme Court.

It's not the same thing coming from black folks as it is coming from white folks. You don't have the same history of persecution, blood libel, and genocide. But most Jews won't make the distinction between admiration informed by stereotypes and plain antisemitism. Talking about Jewish "unity" and economic savvy sounds to them like it sounds when white people talk about how good at sports black folks are.

But really, you get the sense that the media focus on "black antisemitism" is not only to let more mainstream white antisemites off the hook, but also so that white people get really angry about black antisemitism—not because they care about the Jews, but because they identify with Jews as white people under such circumstances. It gives them an excuse to accuse black folks of racism while still insisting they possess no prejudice of their own.

In any case, back to unity:

Barack Obama won over 90 percent of the black vote in Indiana and North Carolina. I don't know what that is, if it isn't sticking together. Unity, in and of itself, isn't a virtue--black folks "unified" behind OJ. But I really believe, given the people left in the running, black folks really got behind the best man for the job. Last year pundits delighted themselves by pointing out that Barack Obama wasn't black enough. I don't know how you get any blacker than having 9 out of 10 of us behind you. I mean really. Malcolm couldn't even have gotten 9 out 10. To paraphrase Chris Rock, Obama is entering into Pat Riley territory.

Yeah but to be fair, Malcolm probably couldn't have won Iowa. I would have liked to see that shit.

I'm categorically opposed to all fonts that look like handwriting -- I mean, seriously, Comic Sans, you're not fooling anyone -- so I'm not a huge fan of the new ads for Showtime's television version of the radio show This American Life, which depict host Ira Glass with a cutesy little tag identifying him, as if a helpful imp had just graffitoed it on with a Sharpie. Plus I know messing with posters in the subway is a time-honored New York City art, even when the artistry consists entirely of drawing mini-peens on Jodi Applegate's neckerchief. But still: L-train riders of the East Village, the picture below has made me extremely disappointed in all of you.

(Wait! Is this maybe a statement about Jewishness and how we define it in our post-religious, post-nationalist era? About how any show that aims to analyze how we live now is, by its very nature, "a Jew of a TV series"? In that case, though, what's with the "queen" tag?)

Mosely: If you click on the video link, you can see him naked!Proving once again that sex scandals are more entertaining in Europe, Formula One head Max Mosely was recently caught on film acting out a Nazi–themed orgy with five hookers, and then relaxing with a nice cup of tea. (Seriously. There is tea in the video, as well as nudity and a really unsexy striped concentration camp uniform. Not that a sexy one would have been any better. Actually, it almost certainly would have been worse. But I digress.)

It’s creepy, though not criminal, that Mosely gets off on Nazi fantasies. It’s significantly creepier when you realize that Mosely’s parents were two of the most prominent British Nazi sympathizers. Hitler came to their wedding, which took place—for some reason this is the detail that really gets me—in Joseph Goebbel’s drawing room.

Naturally, Britian is totally up in arms about this, as are some Jewish groups. Should Mosely step down? Is the UK’s answer to NASCAR permanently besmirched by its leader’s penchant for pretending to be both a concentration camp inmate and a guard? (If you watch the video, which I strongly recommend you don’t, you’ll see him in both roles.) Hilarious, crotchety British writer Howard Jacobson takes a clear-eyed look at the scandal, asking

why a man shouldn't indulge in a bit of retro-Nazi sado-masochistic role-play in the quiet of a house of ill-repute in leafy Chelsea when the fancy takes him, provided no one gets seriously hurt in the process – other than, one hopes for his sake, himself.

Jacobson is less repulsed by Mosely’s fetishes and more repulsed by his upper-crusty excuses:

The only reason he is to be heard speaking German, he insists, is that two of the five prostitutes he hired – at least one of whom is seen in a striped uniform reminiscent of those worn by prisoners in the camps – are German speakers. In other words, what we are watching is not depravity but good manners and a cosmopolitan education.

Oh, and also race car driving. He is also repulsed by race car driving:

I would prefer him to have owned up to depravity and told the News of the World to go hang. But he has his job as president of FIA to think about….Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Formula One dedicated to the promotion of the sale of killer cigarettes, the wanton spillage of expensive champagne, the encouraging of easily excited rich young men (and that is not an oxymoron) in their pursuit of acceleration, exhaust noise and extruded showgirls?

Jacobson concludes, in a logical flourish both utterly implausible and kind of brilliant, that Mosely must have been acting out some kind of Freudian destructo-urge aimed at both his father and Hitler. S&M is always parody, after all, he explains:

Certainly, if I were a Nazi I wouldn't appreciate Mosley's travesty of my beliefs and uniform. I put it to you, anyway, that it is not impossible he is avenging himself, now upon his Führer-fetishising father Oswald, now upon his Goebbels-glorifying mother Diana, once a Mitford "gel".

Lady Diana Mosley's biographer, Anne de Courcy, guesses that Max's Nazi romp in Chelsea would have shocked her deeply. "Even though she admired Hitler, she deplored any form or depiction of violence and cruelty." Drink deep of that. The monstrous hypocrisy of the genteel. Get the whips out more often, is my advice to Max. The more you parody the violence your parents were in awe of, the less of a sucker you'll be for it in reality yourself.

Jewcy’s comic artist turns his gimlet eye away from the Jewish people and towards their detractors.

As Britian’s former European minister noted in The Washington Post this fall, antisemitism is on the rise in the UK. Jews are four times more likely than Muslims to be attacked because of their religion, according to a widely circulated article in City Journal, and hate crimes against Jews have doubled since 2001.

Below, Eli Valley imagines what happens when this trend hits the schools.

CLICK TO ENLARGE

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Bobby Fischer, one of the great chess players of the last century, is dead, aged - what else? - 64.

The controversial former world chess champion, Bobby Fischer, has died in Iceland at the age of 64. The US-born player, who became famous for beating Cold War Soviet rival Boris Spassky in 1972, died of an unspecified illness, his spokesman said.

He was granted Icelandic citizenship in 2005 as a way to avoid being deported to the US.

“Controversial” is a very British way of saying that the guy was, at least in his latter years, a deranged, anti-Semitic loon.

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Apollo Creed wants his hat back: San Franciscan nutjob Joe WebbWell, the Nazis have noticed us. Okay, not lots of Nazis, just one. We were finishing a soundcheck for our San Francisco show at the Great American Music Hall, the sixth of thirteen cities on the Good For The Jews national tour, when the lighting guy shouted, "Well boys, you've made the big time. You have a protester outside." We're two guys who sing funny and profane songs about being Jewish. Who would protest that? My family's not impressed, but I don't think they'd follow me to San Francisco and picket.

So we went outside to find a surly, nervous man holding a sign that said "I WANT YOU TO DIE FOR ISRAEL." He'd spelled the S with a swastika. I asked him if he was affiliated with any group. "Yeah," he growled. "I'm a Nazi. And you can publish that." Sure, I knew Nazis existed, but I never expected to see one up close. It was like standing in front of the Great Wall of China, or the Mona Lisa – it's startling, no matter how many times you've seen the image, to confront the real thing, in three dimensions. His sign had small plastic skulls dangling from the top, and he was dressed as Uncle Sam, in a red, white and blue hat, though in truth he looked more like Apollo Creed. He cooperatively posed for pictures, even when I asked him to raise his arm a little higher.

The Nazi identified himself as Joe Webb, a retired corrections officer in his 60s, and he told us he'd been looking for movie listings in the newspaper—he wanted to see No Country For Old Men—when he read an article about Good For The Jews. Since the film would still be playing after we'd left town, he put on his best patriotic costume, Xeroxed some pamphlets and came down to the Tenderloin to protest the worldwide Jewish conspiracy. If there is one, how do I join? I'd like to be staying in nicer hotels. "I bet you'd like to punch me in the face," he said to me. "Yeah, that sounds pretty good," I agreed.

Soon, a squad car pulled up outside the club – summoned by Mr. Webb himself, who insisted the police a) protect his First Amendment right to protest, and b) arrest me for threatening to assault him. The two officers—a woman of color and a man I'm pretty certain was gay—were not sympathetic to his cause.

My friend who grew up in San Francisco, and is the daughter of two Auschwitz survivors, says that when her family went to Jewish events in the early 1970s, there was often a small group of Nazis outside, jeering at the Jews. San Francisco is famous for its permissiveness, so I guess it's a good place for a Nazi to live. The weather's better than Idaho or Montana, and there are lots of freelance Web designers to help you build your white-pride web site.

The Tenderloin is home to every group Nazis revile, and pretty soon, Mr. Webb was being heckled and jeered by blacks, gays, Asians and even a few trannies. Another police car arrived, then a few more, until there were five cruisers with their red lights running. One of the club's security men, a half-black guy in cargo shorts, tossed his cigarette butt into Mr. Webb's burlap bag. By the way, the San Francisco Weekly reported this story on their blog, adding, "Nazis give the best PR."

Not terribly sympathetic: The cops Our Nazi's pamphlet listed sixteen things he'd dubbed "NOT GOOD FOR THE JEWS," beginning with "Jewish behavior" and "Shiksas who figure it out" and moving on to "5 million Palestinians who want their land back" and "Jewish ownership and/or domination of almost all the media." The name of our band, he wrote, typified "the Jewish categorical imperative," as well as Jewish racism. "How is that old Jewish sense of humor doing?" he asked at the end. "Are you laughing yet?"

And no, I wasn't laughing. Any Jew, when confronted with a Nazi, is going to feel a mixture of fear and rage. I was wondering how many other people also thought six million dead Jews wasn't enough. The police insisted he remove the plastic skulls, which kept hitting pedestrians as he marched in front of the building. He tried to pull off the string that attached the skulls to the sign, but couldn't do it. "Officer, can I borrow a knife?" he asked. "Unfortunately, sir, I'm not allowed to hand a weapon to a civilian," the cop said. "Especially not a civilian who's a Nazi," I added.

Right about then, the cigarette butt did its work, and his burlap bag began to smoke. He complained to the officers, emptied his bag onto the cement and began beating the bag to put out the spark. The Jews who'd come outside to gape at him laughed, and then, en massed, we went back inside the club, relieved that this particular Nazi posed no imminent danger. In fact, he'd kind of unified everyone there: As comedians say, our show killed.

Tour scorecard

Cities we've played: Cleveland, Milwaukee, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, San Francisco

Cities still to come: Denver (The Soiled Dove), Orlando (The Social), Boca Raton (NY Comedy Club), Baltimore (Recher Theater), Washington, D.C. (Birchmere) and New York (Highline Ballroom).

[Read the entire Good for the Jews Tour Diary here.]

Jewcy's Abe Greenwald shouldn't worry so much about France -the Algerian government (well, one of its ministers, but he has received no official rebuttal) tells us who's really in charge: Sarkozy was put in power by the "Jewish lobby,which has the monopoly of industry in France;" Bernard Kouchner rallied the right-wing government because he's Jewish too. The Jews control everything: they even get themselves born and raised in Algeria to pretend that they have something to do with this country -what a provocation! Singer Enrico Macias, object of this attack, renounced accompanying Sarkozy in his state visit to Algeria -the rest of the official French delegation will be unaffected. The French Foreign Affairs Ministry simply expressed its "surprise" at the declarations of Algerian Minister Cherif Abbés.

Macias is by now a familiar target of official Algerian anti-Semitism. His apparent popularity with Kabyle taxi-drivers might not help. A singer who works for peace, that sounds bad to start with, a Kabyle one at that has all the chances of getting himself killed. In the meantime, I leave you with the secret weapon of the Judeo-Ziono-Masonic Conspiracy. Scary.

Sunset over Jerusalem: What does it mean to an American Jew?I am a playwright, director and actor, and the artistic director of Traveling Jewish Theatre, a 29 year-old experimental company based in San Francisco. I’ll be posting a weekly blog about the process of writing my new play “A Jerusalem Between Us.”

I start with the question, why? Why write this play?

The Sundance Institute Theatre Program is producing a reading in Los Angeles this coming Friday night. They sent out a flyer that reads:

"A Jerusalem Between Us" takes stock of some of the recent controversies that have divided Americans and American Jews. Davidman untangles the Rachel Corrie controversy, considers the word “apartheid”, reflects on the spirit of Jewish values and wonders what’s left of the Left. This solo play follows one man’s journey from America to the Middle East on a quest to answer some of the most provocative questions of our time.

The other day a gentleman sent an email to the artistic director of the LA theatre that has generously offered to host the reading. He offered to moderate. When the artistic director replied that Sundance had already chosen a moderator, the gentleman replied with the following:

If I'm not going to speak, I probably won't come. But I'd like to see a review of it...I don't want this guy sitting there spewing some anti-Semitic, self-hating Jewish crap. Can you find out something about it? I can't find any reviews online. It's important that we don't use the theater as a forum for any anti-Israel propaganda, right? The way the blurb is written about that horrible Rachel Corrie character gives good reason for concern that there might be a problem brewing....Please find out more. It's never too late to cancel an anti-Semite!

Why write this play? To bring forward a nuanced, complex and dynamic story about an American Jew and his relationship to Israel in the midst of a culture of fear, one-dimensional analysis and hysterical allegiance. This blog will cover the developments of the play. For more information you can also stay tuned to aarondavidman.wordpress.com.

In his recent Jewcy piece "The Betrayal of Turkish Jews," Khatchig Mouradian paints a dark portrait of Jewish life in Turkey, one in which Turkish Jews hope to escape antisemitic violence by proving their extreme loyalty to Turkey. Ami Eden, the managing editor of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, asked me the following questions about how Khatchig's piece bears on the ongoing ADL/Armenian Genocide controversy:

Not to sound snarky, but...

Doesn't this go along way toward validating the view of those who say they are worried about the safety of Turkey's Jews?

Do you think the ADL is concerned about Turkish Jews, but being shortsighted, or that the organization is just using the issue as an excuse to protect Turkey?

Put aside the ADL and its motivations... Do you accept the proposition that, at least in the short term, having Jewish groups successfully secure passage of the resolution is more dangerous for the Jews of Turkey than if Jewish groups are seen as opposing the resolution? That certainly seems to be the logic of this article.

I'll assume this exchange is on-the-record unless you say otherwise.

Here's my response.

Ami,

Obviously, our article "The Betrayal of Turkish Jews" departs pretty radically from the "Oh, Turkish Jews are just fine!" rebuttal that we sometimes hear in response to the supposed concerns of Foxman et al. Khatchig shows Turkish Jews to us as a harried minority whose "loyalty" has been extorted from them in exchange for physical safety.

But no, the article doesn't at all validate the concerns of those who claim we must appease Turkish antisemites in order to protect Turkish Jews. Khatchig and the scholars he interviewed see crude antisemitism as a staple of Turkish life and politics, but they deny that eruptions of antisemitic violence are a plausible outcome of the passage of the Armenian Genocide resolution. This is because Turkey's international ambitions (particularly re: the European Union) would be badly compromised by outbreaks of antisemitic violence.

Are these people wrong? Has Khatchig perhaps understated the antisemitism in Turkish life? Is Turkish society so profoundly antisemitic, so beholden to Protocols-style absurdities about Jewish unity and world influence, that Turks would set upon Turkish Jews with implacable rage if the U.S. House of Reps passed a resolution over which even American Jews have limited influence? And is the Turkish government so feckless and unpragmatic that it would allow its most cherished political ambitions to be scuppered as Turks took violent "revenge" on the country's Jews?

This all strikes me as rather far-fetched, as it does Professor Porter. So no, although the leadership of our community has thrown its weight behind the world's most successful campaign of genocide denial, I doubt they've managed even to serve the short-term interests of Turkish Jewry. And you can bet they've considerably complicated the future of that community by demonstrating to Turkey that popular antisemitic hatred is a valuable political asset.

Your second question: "Do you think the ADL is concerned about Turkish Jews, but being shortsighted, or that the organization is just using the issue as an excuse to protect Turkey?"

I certainly accept that some in the Jewish community—perhaps including some of the commissioners of the ADL—are genuinely concerned about the fate of Turkish Jews. I have more difficulty believing they truly think that by gutlessly jumping at the demands of antisemites we can earn a happier outcome for Jews. I'd thought the 20th century had taught us that this was a losing strategy, and I'm mystified as to how any American Jew could conclude that we were too hasty in giving up on this approach, and ought now to give it another whirl.

Still, I suppose that if the leaders of the ADL—which once stood as a symbol of modern Jewish assertiveness and refusal to accept the traditional indignities of Jewish life in Europe—can today be co-opted as compliant Court Jews for Ankara, then it's no more startling to learn that they and others in the Jewish community are prepared to sit cringing at the feet of Middle Eastern leaders who clearly think they know a thing or two about how to keep irksome Jews in line. Turkish antisemites must have been gratified that American Jewish leaders—representatives of the most empowered, integrated Jewish population in the history of the diaspora—could be so easily managed like a gaggle of korkak Yahudiler, responding to threats of antisemitic violence with desperate smiles and obsequious supplications. As the Turkish ambassador to Israel helpfully explained, so far as the Turks are concerned, a Jew is a Jew is a Jew. How do you say QED in Turkish?

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Beth Young’s article (free, but you have to register) looks at Paul’s “loyal, albeit small, Jewish following.” According to Jim Perry, the 22-year-old head of Jews for Ron Paul, Libertarianism and Orthodox Judaism share an emphasis on personal responsibility:

"It's the idea that people are meant to be equal and free in a just society. Those are the same things that draw me to be an observant Orthodox Jew," said Perry, who commands an Internet forum whose advisers include political and law professors spanning the country. "I believe Judaism puts strong emphasis on individual meaning, personal responsibility," he said, adding that God "calls us to take responsibility for our own actions."

Perry says he’s aware of the controversy over neo-Nazi groups supporting Paul, but adds that he’s befriended—and possibly reformed—at least one white supremacist through his work on the campaign:

"Here I am a kipah-wearing, fringes-hanging Orthodox Jew and he had a tattoo with the National Alliance. He starts to see me as a human being," Perry said. "I've met him seven times, and I've gotten him to drop the title of white supremacist. He's getting his tattoo covered up. I think that freedom message, when really taken seriously, brings us together. I would be very comfortable inviting him over for Shabbos dinner."

Stinky Fish: not kosherIt's a simple fact of life: If you're not partaking in the meal, other people's fish smells bad.  Not always, but often.  There are other foods in the "if you're not eating them, they stink" category, for example cauliflower, which can reek up to high heaven.  Trust me, my olfactory set-up is unrivaled.  Case in point:

"What's that smell," my mother asked last week, as we walked our dogs together through her dense, urban neighborhood.  She sniffed, she snuffed, she couldn't quite place it.  

"It's a potato knish," I said.  "About two blocks away."  I'd been enjoying its aroma for the past few minutes.  

"You're right," she exclaimed.  "How do you do that?" 

I shit you not.  I can't explain it, it's just the way I'm built.  The nose knows.  That's why I can sympathize with the passengers and flight crew who freaked out about a stinky, stanky fish dinner brought on board a United Airlines flight last week.  The family guilty of bringing the noxious nourishment onto the flight happen to be religious Jews, the meal happened to be kosher, and now the subtle scent of antisemitism is permeating the eternally recirculated air.  

"As you can see, I wear these holy fringes. I wear a kepa. My son wears a kepa," Robert Blum said, according to WBNS-10. "And maybe that's what the steward saw. And I am sure it was. Because why did he single us out?"

Well, buddy--taking into account my aforementioned olfactory superpowers, my guess is that you were singled out because you were stinkin' up the cabin.  We all know how much it sucks when someone subjects their fellow flyers to an unnecessarily foul-smelling meal.  The least you can do is choose something inoffensive.  Malodorous mistakes aside, was the Blum family subjected to unusually rude treatment because of their Judaism? They're claiming that it was a classic case of discrimination: 

"He said, 'I don't want you eating that food on the plane,'" Blum said of a flight attendant, who told him passengers were complaining about the smell of the fish.

"He said, 'I don't want the food on the plane. If you don't trash the food, I'll trash you. You'll get off the plane, you and your wife and your kids,'" said Blum.

Blum said the pilot harassed him about the food as well.

"The pilot says to me, 'are you going to give us any more trouble because I have to worry about 220 passengers smelling your stinking food?'" Blum contended.

The confrontation created a scene on the plane forcing Blum to throw the food away when the pilot threatened to throw the family off the plane.

Sounds like a regular old flight to me.  So, what have we learned?  Kosher fish on a plane is not kosher in the colloquial sense if it stinks.  Flying sucks, but it sucks worse for everyone if you unleash a stench, so choose wisely, and should you opt for the fish, make sure it's fresh.  

Larry Summers, President of Harvard University, January 14^th, 2005:<