DISCOURSES ON ANTISEMITISM AND ISLAMOPHOBIA IN ARAB MEDIA

This paper discusses the relationship between antisemitism and Islamophobia, focusing on debates in Arab newspapers in the wake of the Second Intifada and 9/11 and then in response to two issues of contention for Muslim communities in Europe, the Danish cartoon crisis in 2006 and the Swiss referendum on building minarets in 2009. The paper relates these debates to major UN and EU resolutions for combating racism, Islamophobia and antisemitism. The aim of this paper is to explore how far discussion of antisemitism and Islamophobia in the Arab world is dominated by those who see Islamophobia as the real danger in today's Europe and antisemitism as a Zionist ploy, and how far antisemitism and Islamophobia have become two competing terms relating to two communities that perceive themselves as victims of prejudice and racism and also of each other. The paper seeks to qualify this image. It acknowledges that the entanglement of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict adds a political aspect to the discussion of the two terms, intensifies competition between them for recognition as unique forms of racism and discrimination, and curtails the creation of positive ground for dialogue. However, it also demonstrates the presence of other voices which are more open to addressing both forms of exclusion.

A heated public debate erupted in the wake of a one-day conference on ‘The Concept of the Muslim Enemy – The Concept of the Jewish Enemy’, held in December 2008 by the Berlin Center for Research on Antisemitism (Benz 2008). It brought to the fore the controversial issue of the analogy between Islamophobia and antisemitism.¹ Debates about antisemitism and Islamophobia had taken place before the Berlin conference. In Sweden, for instance, the Living History Forum in cooperation with the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention published in 2003 the findings of a survey conducted among schoolchildren examining antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobia and general intolerance (Living History Forum 2004). Two years later, an issue of the Palestine–Israel Journal was dedicated to this topic and a conference held in Italy in May 2005 on ‘Dissolving Barriers. Intercultural Dialogues in Europe’ had antisemitism and Islamophobia on its agenda.

A new wave of antisemitic manifestations in the wake of the outbreak of the Second Intifada (al-Aqsa Intifada) in the Palestinian territories in September 2000 renewed debate on the term antisemitism in academic and political circles. A year later, the September 11, 2001 attacks in the USA by activists of al-Qa‘ida led to increased suspicion of and discrimination against Muslims in Western countries and to increased use of the term ‘Islamophobia’. Because of these parallel developments, antisemitism and Islamophobia became two corresponding but also competing terms. The entanglements of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict add a political aspect to the discussion of the two terms, intensify competition between them and curtail the creation of dialogue.

Three major approaches emerged in these debates: (i) rejecting the analogy between the two and discounting Islamophobia altogether; (ii) endorsing the term Islamophobia while discounting antisemitism; and (iii) a balanced approach accepting the validity of both terms, Islamophobia and antisemitism.

This paper focuses on the relationship between the two terms as it has appeared in debates in Arab newspapers in response to the rise of antisemitism and the international efforts to combat it on the one hand, and on the other to two issues of particular contention in Muslim communities in Europe: the Danish cartoon crisis of 2006 and the Swiss referendum on building minarets in 2009. This adds an additional dimension to Western debates on these topics, which regrettably rarely maintain a dialogue with Arab discourses, and reveals that, while discussion of antisemitism and Islamophobia in the Arab world is dominated by those who consider Islamophobia as the real danger, Muslims as the new ultimate ‘other’ in today's Europe and antisemitism to be a Zionist ploy; there exist more nuanced positions by critical Arab and Muslim writers that call for an engagement with both forms of racism. The paper relates this discussion of the Arab media to major UN and EU resolutions for combating racism, Islamophobia and antisemitism and compares the grammar of discourses on Islamophobia with those on antisemitism. It seeks to establish that despite its flaws the term ‘Islamophobia’ refers to real and worrying phenomena, whose comparison to antisemitism does not mean equating the two or treating the concept of ‘antisemitism’ as bogus. The paper also observes that those who are likely to hold extreme antisemitic views are most likely to hold Islamophobic views and vice versa.

The term ‘antisemitism’ has a long history and diverse definitions. Most scholars and students of the subject share the perception that it is a complex of persistent and profound negative attitudes toward Jews that exceeds ethnic and racial prejudice. It attributes certain unique and permanent characteristics to the Jews and portrays them as an eternally evil force secretly plotting against both God and mankind (Lewis 1997: 21–3). The wave of antisemitism which swept much of the world in the wake of the Second Intifada and the September 11, 2001 attacks prompted the emergence of the term ‘new antisemitism’ (Porat and Stauber 2002: 64–75, 233–46; Iganski and Kosmin 2003). The term was needed to define the new global phenomenon of criticizing Israeli policies and Zionism by intertwining such criticism with antisemitic motifs and by challenging the right of the State of Israel to exist. It expanded old antisemitism to include certain forms of antizionism and certain anti-Israel attitudes and practices. (Webman 2005: 306). ‘Islamophobia’ is a relatively new term, although Christian-European fear of Islam has long existed. It was coined in the West in the 1990s in view of the discrimination suffered by Muslim communities. The term was acknowledged by the Runnymede Trust in its report on the British Muslim community published in 1997, which defined its features and attributed to it a long history of existing ‘dread and dislike’ toward Muslims and Islam in Western countries and culture. After 9/11 and subsequent terrorist attacks in Europe (Madrid in February 2004; London in July 2005), and the eruption of controversies over issues such as the wearing of the headscarf in France, the Danish cartoons affair and the Swiss referendum on the building of minarets, use of the term was consolidated (Allen 2007a). Islamophobia is difficult to separate from other forms of racism and discrimination based on religion, ethnicity, gender or skin color. Although it is not an ideal term, it is, as the Runnymede report put it, ‘a useful shorthand way of referring to dread and hatred of Islam – and, therefore, to fear or dislike of all or most Muslims’. Its practical consequences are exclusion of Muslims from mainstream political and social affairs, discrimination, prejudice and violence against Muslim individuals and communities (Runnymede Report 1997: 1–12; Larsson 2005: 35).

Islamophobia has become a leading form of racism in Europe, according to numerous European government studies. The Annual Report on the Situation Regarding Racism and Xenophonia in the Member States of the EU, published by EUMC in 2006, claimed that ‘The notion that the presence of Islam in Europe, in the form of its Muslim citizens and migrants, is a challenge for Europe and European norms and values has taken a strong hold in European political discourse and has also created a climate of fear’.² An American national media watch group, FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) defined Islamophobia in 2008 as ‘hostility toward Islam and Muslims that tends to dehumanize an entire faith, portraying it as fundamentally alien and attributing to it an inherent, essential set of negative traits such as irrationality, intolerance and violence’ (FAIR 2008: 4).

In Arab discourses usage of the term ‘Islamophobia’ was scarce before the Danish cartoon crisis, although frequent references were made to what is perceived to be the long history of hatred toward Arabs, Muslims and Islam in the West. Imam Abduljalil Sajid, one of the members of the Runnymede Trust's Commission, maintained that ‘hostility towards Islam and Muslims has been a feature of European societies since the eighth century of the Common Era’, and suggested we speak of ‘Islamophobias’ in the plural since it has taken different forms at different times.³ Al-Maktabi took a more critical stance, maintaining that the term ‘does not capture this marriage of fear and hostility, of dread and discrimination, of horror and harassment’, and recommending instead use of the expression ‘“anti-Islamic racism” for it combines the elements of dislike of a religion and active discrimination against the people belonging to that religion’.⁴

The specific preoccupation of international bodies with both antisemitism and Islamophobia started only after the UN World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance held in Durban, South Africa from 31 August to 8 September 2001. Until then no mention was made of them in the declarations of UN conferences that dealt with issues of racism and discrimination since the Second World War. The Durban Declaration ‘recognized with deep concern the increase in antisemitism and Islamophobia in various parts of the world, as well as the emergence of racial and violent movements based on racism and discriminatory ideas against Jews, Muslim and Arab communities’, and called upon states to counter them.⁵ The wording reflected a compromise since the conference had become a stage for a fierce anti-Israeli campaign by some Arab and Muslim countries. Encouraged by the declaration of the International Conference of Non-Governmental Organizations Defending Palestinian Rights adopted in Tehran on 23 April 2001 (Declaration 2001), they concentrated their efforts on removing references to antisemitism, trivializing the Holocaust and reintroducing the equation between Zionism and racism in conference resolutions (Colson 2001).⁶ The Cordoba Declaration (2005) generally condemned ‘racism, xenophobia, antisemitism, and other forms of intolerance and discrimination, including against Muslims and Christians’, and the Warsaw Declaration of May 2005 referred again to antisemitism and Islamophobia as two specific forms of intolerance and discrimination. A year later the EUMC issued its first report on discrimination and Islamophobia, in which it tried to define the term by adopting the Runnymede 1997 typology (EUMC 2006: 60).

Convening in Islamabad in May 2007 after the Danish cartoon crisis, the Islamic Conference Organization (OIC), an association of 56 Islamic states, used the term Islamophobia in its final declaration for the first time, condemning ‘the growing trend of Islamophobia and systematic discrimination against the adherents of Islam’.⁷ The Durban II Declaration also recognized with deep concern the increase in antisemitism and Islamophobia in various parts of the world, as well as the emergence of racial and violent movements based on racism and discriminatory ideas against Jewish, Muslim and Arab communities.⁸

Arab public discourse was not preoccupied with the issue of antisemitism up until the mid-1990s, after the signing of the Oslo accords and the peace treaty with Jordan in 1993 and 1994, respectively. Yet, despite the peace process antisemitic manifestations in the Egyptian, Jordanian and Palestinian media did not diminish and at times increased. As a result of interventions by Israeli and Jewish organizations Arab leaders and commentators were confronted with charges of antisemitism. Their initial response was largely one of total rejection and blaming Israel for using antisemitism as a ploy to mute criticism. One common response was the erroneous claim that Arabs could not be accused of being antisemites since they are Semites themselves. Another was to interpret antisemitic rhetoric in the Arab media as simply expressions of anger with the Israeli administration. Others were happy to be included in the list of antisemitic writers.

The rise of antisemitic incidents in Europe that led to various international initiatives to combat antisemitism also triggered extensive public debate across the Arab countries and exposed a wide range of views. Most writers chose to ignore violent incidents against Jews, the most conspicuous aspect of new antisemitism in Europe and one in which Muslim extremists played a significant role, and concentrated on verbal criticism of Israel in European newspapers, demonstrations, academic protests and public polls, considering it as a burst of suppressed emotions that marked a new phase in Europe's relations with the Jews. What happens in Europe, claimed Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, the late spiritual leader of Hizballah, means the failure of the brainwashing campaign of the pro-Israeli or Jewish-controlled media to deceive Europeans.⁹ Ahmad ‘Amrani argued that ‘a political revolution against the Jews’ is taking place in Europe. He maintained that the 400 cases of attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions in France in 2003, the targeting of the Jewish synagogue in Istanbul in mid-November 2003, statements against Jews in Germany and the results of the EU opinion poll held in 15 European countries in October 2003 (in which Israel was perceived as the most serious threat to world peace and the USA as the greatest contributor to instability in the world) were all part of a new European trend. He concluded that ‘the European Street was waiting for a sign to express hidden feelings toward the Jews’ against their excessive political influence.¹⁰ Several other motifs emerged in this debate:

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  Israel and the international Zionist lobby exploit the September 11 events and the weapon of ‘antisemitism’ to stem criticism of Israel's ‘terrorist acts against the Palestinian people’.¹¹

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  The real antisemites are the members of the Israeli government. Their vision and behavior are immersed in hatred of Arabs.¹²

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  The accusation of antisemitism is ‘intellectual terrorism’, a ploy preserved as the unique prerogative of the Jews. ‘A whole culture of antisemitism developed’, one writer declared. ‘It's either agreement with Israel on all issues and deeds, or being classified in the category of racism as an opponent of the Jewish race – God's chosen people’.¹³

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  Some of the arguments on Israeli and Western accusations of antisemitism were intertwined with motifs of Holocaust denial. It was argued that the Holocaust had become part and parcel of a ‘total antisemitic culture … turning the victims into a new fence between Israel and the world, particularly the Arabs, instead of a humanitarian bridge. And be careful not to touch this “shrine” – its numbers or its chronicles’.¹⁴

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  In some articles there was an attempt to link antisemitism and Zionism, charging that Zionist discourse created the association between international Judaism and Israel and was responsible for presenting European opinion as antisemitic.¹⁵ Arab Israeli MK Muhammad Baraka claimed, for example, that with its insistence on placing Jews and Arik Sharon's government policies in one basket, the Zionist movement put the burden of its crimes against Arabs onto Jews.¹⁶ The Zionist movement and Israel were accused of triggering incidents against Jews in different parts of the world and of magnifying the threat of antisemitism in order to encourage Jews to stay in Israel and intensify immigration to the ‘Zionist entity’.¹⁷

A smaller group of writers acknowledged antisemitic manifestations in Arab discourses and deplored them, suggesting nevertheless that Israel's crimes were their cause. Jihad al-Khazin, the editor of a daily column in the independent daily al-Hayat, wrote: ‘I do not justify antisemitism in the East or in the West, but I know its reasons … Israel's crimes are responsible for the antisemitic wave in the East and the West. Israel's supporters won't be able to stop antisemitism. It will stop only when Israeli crimes against the Palestinians will stop and will intensify when they intensify. The descendants of the Nazi victims created a Nazi government in Israel and everybody pays the price’.¹⁸ In response to the intifada and September 11 some Arab writers, among them the Lebanese liberal intellectual, Hazim Saghiya, had conceded that Arab antisemitism exists and ‘that it is powerful, even dangerous’. Saghiya blamed a mix of Zionist zealots, Muslim clerics and the Arab media for causing it. He maintained that the celebration of Holocaust deniers prove its existence, but argued it is both different from Christian antisemitism and lacks ‘the functional modernism of Nazism’.¹⁹

Discussion of antisemitism in the Arab public sphere continued in response to international and European efforts to combat antisemitism. The international conference on antisemitism held in Berlin in April 2004 under the auspices of the OSCE was generally met with suspicion. The conference was often characterized as a ‘sly distraction’ aimed at diverting attention from Israel's behavior toward the Palestinians. In an interview to Qatar satellite channel al-Jazeera, Palestinian author Mahmud Nammura compared antisemitic attacks on Jews and Israeli military attacks, wondering ‘which crime is more serious: the desecration of a Jewish grave in some French town, or destroying an entire neighborhood in Rafah? Scrawling a swastika on the wall of a Jewish synagogue in Italy or turning Palestinian towns and villages into virtual concentration camps?’²⁰ It would have been more proper, added an Egyptian journalist reporting from Berlin, if the conference had also dealt with negative attitudes toward Arab and Muslim communities in Europe or at least with Israeli violations against the Palestinian people.²¹ Other writers were more demagogic. For example, the Jordanian scholar, Jurj Haddad, contended that this kind of conferences was taking place according to a plan set up by ‘International Zionism’ and aimed at ‘fighting by law and punishment whoever criticizes or denounces an Israeli crime or a Jewish movement’.²²

The inclusion in the working definition of the EUMC of forms of anti-Zionism that deny Israel's right to exist drew harsh criticism from Arab commentators, who repeated the claim that antisemitism is widely abused by Israelis and Jews alike to answer accusations of maltreatment against Palestinians.²³ Various Arab writers contested the adoption of the Global Antisemitism Review Act in the USA in October 2004 and its commitment to support efforts to combat antisemitism worldwide. Some concurred that it is a racist law hostile to Arabs and Muslims and ignores Arabs as victims of discrimination and persecution. Some conceded that antisemitism is a deplorable phenomenon but considered that Arabs are paying the price for the antisemitic crimes perpetrated in Europe. Others warned that the new Act would divide the world into two axes – one accused of antisemitism, including the Muslim world, Europe, Latin America, and China; and one that accuses, consisting only of Israel and the USA.²⁴ In this array of opinions voices expressing support for the new law were rare. ‘Abd al-Rahman Rashid, director general of al-‘Arabiya satellite TV and former editor of the London-based al-Sharq al-Awsat, persistently warned Arabs against aligning themselves with antisemites and Holocaust deniers. The law should be understood for what it is – a law for monitoring antisemitism, he explained to his readers, and instead of condemning it, Arabs should encourage it and seek to expand it to include incitement to racism against Muslims, blacks and other minorities. ‘We must not confuse Israel with Judaism, or extremist nationalist Zionist thought with the Jewish religion’, he warned, or stumble into racism ‘no different than the racism of those hostile to Arabs and Muslims’.²⁵ Former Middle East correspondent for the New York Times, Youssef Ibrahim, also supported the Act in view of continued antisemitic abuses. However, he also criticized it for its shortsighted and incomplete nature: ‘Why stop at Jews?’ he asked. Limiting the concept of anti-bigotry to the Jewish people marks ‘a further descent toward a bizarre sort of “amorality”’, he claimed, which goes beyond the realm of the American Congress’ pro-Jewish and pro-Israeli bias. Protecting Jews should be the first part of protecting everyone.²⁶

Nonetheless measures to combat antisemitism were widely perceived as directed against Arabs. They also served as an incentive to some writers to offer practical suggestions to Arabs over how to confront them. ‘Imad Jad, a researcher at the Egyptian al-Ahram Center for Strategic and Political Studies, contended that the trend to expand the meaning of antisemitism is an official trend directed by the US administration and diametrically opposed to popular sentiment in Europe and the USA which perceives Israel as the most dangerous state to world peace. He argued that this challenge requires positive action from Arab governments and civil societies. He called for a conference to draft a ‘document of terms’ for the use of the Arab media, which would provide a clear definition of what can be considered antisemitism that would prevent its political abuse as a weapon against the Arab media.²⁷

The terms antisemitism and Islamophobia are interlocked in several respects. Europe had a far reduced Jewish population after the Holocaust and Muslim immigrants from former European colonies emerged as the new foreign ‘other’ – the ‘new Jews’ of Europe. British sociologist, Tariq Modood, maintained that the term ‘Islamophobia’ was formulated ‘in opposition or in relation to debates on antisemitism, racism and xenophobia in Europe and the United States’ (Runnymede 1997: 4). FAIR compared virulent expressions in publications, such as While Europe Slept by Bruce Bawer (2006), which evokes the Islamic design to dominate the West, to charges made in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the notorious antisemitic tract (FAIR 2008: 4).

Comparing the situation of Muslims in Europe today to that of Jews before the Second World War has in some instances slipped into a competition of victimhood that holds that current antisemitism is in fact directed against the Arabs and Muslims. Joseph Massad argues that the term antisemitism is ‘anachronistic and ahistorical’ and that today antisemitism's major victims are Arabs and Muslims: ‘It is not Jews who are being murdered by the thousands by Arab antisemitism, but rather Arabs and Muslims who are being murdered by the tens of thousands by Euro-American Christian antisemitism and by Israeli Jewish antisemitism’.²⁸ He elaborated that ‘the transference of popular antisemitic animus from a Jewish to an Arab target was made smoothly, since the figure was essentially the same’.²⁹

The debates on the Danish cartoons in 2006 and the Swiss referendum on the building of minarets in 2009 intensified usage of the term Islamophobia and its comparison with antisemitism in Arab discourse. The reaction to the publication of the cartoons on Prophet Muhammad in the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten on September 5, 2005, outraged Muslim communities in Europe and the Middle East. This was not only reflected in fierce protests in Arab capitals but in a lively debate on Muslims in the West. Two major points raised in the discussion were the right of freedom of expression and the limits of tolerance toward antisemitism. Many Arab writers felt that behind the treatment of freedom of expression as a basic sacred right in the West hides a self-imposed limitation when it collides with Jewish issues. Contrasting attitudes toward Muslims and Jews, ‘Amr Musa, SG of the Arab League, described the problem bluntly: ‘When antisemitism is concerned, then it is not freedom of expression. It is a crime. Yet when Islam is insulted, certain powers raise the issue of freedom of expression’.³⁰ Attacks on Islam and the Prophet, explained editor ‘Abd al-Bari ‘Atwan in pan-Arab daily al-Quds al-‘Arabi, ‘came in a context of a wave of hostility to Islam that has begun to take root in the West since September 11’. He reiterated that the major European TV stations and newspapers do not attack Judaism or Christianity and do not dare raise doubts about the Holocaust. In the West, he went on to say, antisemitism is a crime ‘but anti-Islamism is an ordinary matter that is classified under freedom of expression. Any protest is met with denunciations and charges of backwardness’.³¹

A common theme in the Arab press was to portray the cartoon crisis as part of a wave of global Islamophobia instigated by Zionists to divert hatred from Jews toward Muslims. The charge that the cartoons were a Zionist conspiracy was raised by, among others, Iranian Supreme Leader, ‘Ali Khamanei.³² Other writers perceived the crisis as part of a centuries-long ‘showdown of cultures’, or ‘clash of civilizations’, aggravated by 9/11:³³

A more reflective position was expressed by the scholar, Ali Hussain. Focusing on freedom of speech and religious sensibilities, he maintained, obscured the root cause of the conflict, namely that both the Muslim world and the Western world suffer from gross misconceptions of the other. He referred to two misconceptions on the part of Muslims during the cartoon crisis: that Western artists would never profane their own religious figures as they do Muhammad; and that the West is engaged in a renewed Crusade against Islam (Hussain 2007). In response to the cartoon crisis several journalists called on Arab and Muslim leaders to ensure the adoption of an international law by the UN to criminalize the defamation of religions.³⁵ In March 2008 the Human Rights Council did adopt a resolution on combating defamation of religions³⁶ along lines drawn by the Organization of the Islamic Conference in Islamabad in May 2007³⁷ and in Dakar in March 2008.³⁸ It condemned Islamophobia and the negative stereotyping of Muslims and Islam and emphasized the need to take effective measures to combat defamation of religions.

The referendum which took place in Switzerland on November 29, 2009, in which 57.7 percent of the votes favored a ban on the construction of minarets, triggered a renewed debate in the Arab media on Europe's relations with the Muslim communities in its midst and the limits of its tolerance toward them. The Swiss vote was denounced by prominent Arab and Muslim politicians and clerics, and by the ICO as xenophobic, prejudiced, discriminatory and against the universal human rights values.³⁹ Overlooking the widespread lack of freedoms in Arab countries, several Arab commentators mocked the ‘fake’ rights and freedoms for minorities in the West and insisted that the banning of minarets is but another link in a chain of events of deliberate abuse and degradation of Muslim individuals and Islamic symbols in western countries. Syrian Minister for Expatriate Affairs Buthayna Sha‘ban defined the Swiss vote as ‘a blow of racist barbarism against Islam and Muslims’, emphasizing the moral superiority of Islam as a religion of coexistence, in contrast to European civilization ‘founded on the annihilation of indigenous people, settlement in their lands and expropriation of their wealth’.⁴⁰

This affair was perceived as deliberate and premeditated and as proof that the notion of a ‘clash of civilizations’ prevails among Westerners. If Islamophobia was in the past confined to political and media circles, it has recently reached the street, argued the chief editor of Qatari daily al-Raya, Salih bin ‘Ufsan al-Kawari. Khayri Mansur in the Jordanian Islamist weekly, al-Sabil, similarly warned of its escalation into a war of religions.⁴¹ As in the debate on the Danish cartoons, attitudes toward Muslims were contrasted with attitudes toward Jews. No country would have dared to put limits on places of Jewish worship for fear of being accused of antisemitism, some argued, while others explicitly implicated Israel and Zionism as being a driving force behind the scenes for banning the construction of minarets.⁴²

Yet despite many reactions in this vein the referendum also sparked off an unprecedented number of introspective articles which offered different perspectives on the roots of European Islamophobia and acknowledged the responsibility of Muslims and particularly that of Islamist rhetoric and actions. A two-part article in al-Ahram entitled ‘Islamophobia – An Attempt to Understand’, argued that several factors play a role in inculcating European fear of Muslim presence in European societies, including the escalation of the economic crisis, the rise of unemployment and increased financial debts. It also included among them such self-referential factors as Muslim resistance to social and cultural integration, the maintenance of external manifestations of Muslim identity, such as traditional clothes and food, and the comparatively high birth rate among Muslim immigrants. The referendum exposed the fact that Muslims in Europe face the same hatred that Jews encountered up through the end of the Second World War.⁴³ Muhammad Munir Mujahid wrote in a leftist Iraqi-Kurdish publication based in Denmark that European right-wing parties are not solely responsible for this situation and he pointed the finger inward: ‘Our religious rhetoric exposed us most of the times as unjustifiably hostile to the other’.⁴⁴

Islamists were blamed by some fellow Muslims for the Islamization of public space and turning faith into ideology and mosques from places of worship into a scene for the dissemination of hatred toward western culture and the propagation of ideas that lead Muslim life to an identity crisis. Hazim Saghiya, for example, blamed Muslim immigrants in Europe for overlooking the contradiction between developing identities which oppose modern western culture and demanding equality and rights. He wrote that Islamists do not propagate Islam as a religion but as a Jihadist project that encourages its adversaries to confront it. His worry was that despite the fact that Islamists are a small minority, they have become the most conspicuous voice of Islam and have drowned out other voices.⁴⁵ In the same vein, a Lebanese commentator claimed that Islamist rhetoric harms first and foremost Muslims living in the West. Instead of finding ways to integrate into their new societies, they learn hypocrisy, deceit and violence. Another writer recommended that Muslims in Europe disassociate themselves from their countries of origin and particularly from the Arab world, on the grounds that such allegiances ruin the foundations of their future identity.⁴⁶

Arab discourses around Islamophobia both mirror and challenge those around antisemitism. Arab and Muslim countries succeeded in introducing Islamophobia as a form of racism and racial discrimination alongside antisemitism in international declarations and resolutions since Durban I. The term antisemitism became a guideline for the definition of forms of xenophobia, racism, and discrimination against ethnic and religious minorities. The ways for combating antisemitism are also being adopted as a model, and the Jews as a metaphor for a discriminated against minority. As a result, Muslims in Europe who replaced the Jews as the ultimate ‘other’ minority, consider themselves as the new Jews of Europe.

The term ‘Islamophobia’ is as controversial as that of ‘antisemitism’. Anti-antisemitism activists, such as Matthias Küntzel, the Hamburg-based political scientist, see it as a misleading term on the grounds that it mixes two different phenomena – ‘unjust hatred against Muslims and necessary criticism of political Islam – and condemns both equally’. He categorically claims that antisemitism and Islamophobia ‘cannot be equated since the differences are enormous’. First, he argues that ‘anti-Semitism makes the Jews delusionally “big”’, holding the Jews responsible for every ‘inexplicable’ catastrophe of modernity, while racism usually tends ‘to make people “small” in order to enslave or expel them’. Second, he maintains that reservations about Muslims are based on real acts of murder committed by some Muslims in the name of Islam, which he claims have no counterpart in Jewish tradition. Third, he argues that the effects of the ‘concept of the Muslim enemy’ and the ‘concept of the Jewish enemy’ are qualitatively different: ‘No one wants to erase a Muslim country from the map the way some people threaten to do with the Jewish state’ (Küntzel 2008). The core of Küntzel's claims may be true but it does not obviate the necessity to take seriously both forms of discrimination and persecution, and it ignores that parallel claims are made by Arabs and Muslims with reference to Israel and the Jews. Klaus Faber, a lawyer and a member of the Coordinating Council of German NGO's against Antisemitism, criticized the comparison along similar lines: ‘“Islamophobia” … does not refer to actual discrimination against Muslims, but to allegedly inappropriate criticism of shari‘a law and Islam in general’. Equating antisemitism and Islamophobia, he said, ‘relativizes not only the Holocaust, but also current anti-Semitic dangers … obstructs the struggle against anti-Semitism, and … hobbles the boycott policies against Iran and its genocidal plans’.⁴⁷ In discussion of the proposition to adopt a resolution on ‘defamation of religions’ in the UN Human Rights Council, Roy Brown, representative of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), also considered the term Islamophobia as misleading and unhelpful, since it ‘implies that any criticism of Islam is based on “irrational fear” and must lead automatically to hatred of Muslims’.⁴⁸ Drawing the opposite conclusion the American scholar Matti Bunzl also argues against the common impulse to analogize antisemitism and Islamophobia, contending that the two phenomena are located in different projects of exclusion. Whereas ‘antisemitism was invented in the late 19^th century to police the ethnically pure nation-state’, Islamophobia ‘is a formation of the present, marshaled to safeguard a supranational Europe, and threatens to become the defining condition of the new Europe’ (Bunzl 2005: 499). He agrees that the EUMC analogy between antisemitism and Islamophobia has some validity inasmuch as both are ‘exclusionary ideologies’ mobilized in the interest of collective engineering, but for Bunzl the similarities end there and only Islamophobia is pertinent to the present day (Bunzl 2005: 506).

The growing awareness of Islamophobia in the Arab world moved leaders to seek ways to fight it. Saudi Arabia launched an inter-religious dialogue with a meeting in Madrid in 2008,⁴⁹ and the OIC not only included a reference to it in its final declaration in Islamabad but decided in June 2009 to open a new embassy in Brussels for the purpose of combating Islamophobia,⁵⁰ presumably echoing the Jewish activities for combating antisemitism. Both combating efforts are equally justified. However, the deployment of the concepts of ‘antisemitism’ and ‘Islamophobia’ in state discourses encourages a competition of victimhood in which the one negates the other.

Islamophobia and antisemitism are often shared by the same people, and ‘antisemitic prejudices develop in the same milieus as racist prejudices, that is among poorly educated people in a situation of economic insecurity and social inferiority who make minorities the scapegoat for their problems’ (Mayer 2007: 56). Referring to the findings of the Pew Global Attitudes survey carried in 2008, Muqtedar Khan points to a surge in prejudice that imperils both Muslims and Jews in Europe: ‘the rise of nationalist sentiment in Europe is a development that neither Muslims nor Jews can overlook’.⁵¹ As Nazir Ahmed, a Labour member of the House of Lords put it, he always considered antisemitism as an attack on himself and Islam (Ahmed 2004: 126).⁵² Clearly Islamophobia is not an ideal term but it reflects real problems. Europe is still arguably gripped by past encounters with Islam and Muslims, reincarnated in the minds of some in a renewed encounter with Muslims on what they see as their own territory. Comparisons between antisemitism and Islamophobia do not imply equation. On the contrary, they can also lead to a better understanding of the differences between the two phenomena. Dealing with one should not undermine the task of dealing with the other.

Dr. Esther Webman is a Senior Research fellow at the Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies and the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Antisemitism and Racism at Tel Aviv University. She heads the Zeev Vered Desk for the Study of Tolerance and Intolerance in the Middle East and acts as the director of the Stephen Roth Institute from 2007. Her fields of interests include antisemitism and perceptions of the Holocaust in the Arab world, and Islamist movements and Muslim communities in the West. Her book, From Empathy to Denial: Arab Responses to the Holocaust, won the Washington Institute 2010 Gold Prize. She recently edited and contributed to The Global Impact of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion – A Century Old Myth, June 2011.