Douglas Murray Douglas Murray

Anti-Semitism, Islamism and Islam

My blog on last week’s bombing in Bulgaria and convictions in Manchester provoked a response from my colleague Martin Bright which I should like to respond to in turn. In his post Martin writes:

‘You won’t hear me say this very often, but I don’t think Douglas has gone far enough. For once, I think even he has pulled his punches. ‘What links these two events across a continent?’ he asks. ‘The answer is ideology. It is an ideology which deliberately targets Jews as Jews.’ I know what Douglas means: that there is a deeply entrenched anti-Semitism at the heart of the politics of extremist Islamism which strips its victims of humanity. We tip-toe around this phenomenon at our peril. But even describing this as an ideology is to give it a veneer of intellectual structure and logic it does not deserve. The events in Bulgaria and Manchester were driven by pure, irrational racism.’

Unaccustomed as I am to accusations of punch-pulling it is not the second sentence which fuels me to respond, but the last. I am not the one who is giving Islamist anti-Semitism a veneer of respectability by describing it as an ‘ideology’. That legitimacy is given, sad to say, by texts and teachings present from the roots of the religion which must be addressed if they are ever going to be — as we must hope they are — tackled.

In my original post I described anti-Semitism as ‘both a constant and a constantly morphing phenomenon.’ Allow me an example. For much of the last two thousand years there have been varieties of Christian anti-Semitism. There are many contributing strands, but perhaps the most important is derived from the claim that the Jews, rather than the Romans or indeed God, are responsible for killing Jesus.

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