Letters
Muslim comparison with pre war Jews
17 July 2008
Dear Sir
Last week Labour MP Shahid Malik voiced an increasingly fashionable view that Britain’s Muslims now felt like the pre war ‘Jews of Europe’. He claimed they were suffering from a post 9/11 ‘Islamophobic’ backlash whipped up by the worst excesses of our tabloid press.
But like a lot of fashionable opinion, Malik’s claim is nonsense. In the 1930s, the Nazis attacked Jews, not because of any disagreement with Judaism, but because of an odious racial ideology which depicted its victims as lecherous vermin. Translated into public policy, this led to Jews being sacked from the teaching profession and civil service, stripped of their citizenship and then selected for extermination.
If any commentators today described Muslims using such poisonous terminology, they would instantly see their careers extinguished (rightly so), while facing charges of incitement. More to the point, if British Muslims were harassed like ‘the Jews of pre war Europe’ they would have recourse to the laws of a civilized and tolerant country. Germany’s Jews were not so lucky.
The analogy is grotesque for another reason. The Jews of pre war Europe posed no threat to anyone. There were no subversive Jewish networks plotting a ‘Hebraic jihad’ against Christendom, or conspiring to overthrow European civilisation.
Yet radical Islam, the guiding ideology of today’s terror networks, is a plausible interpretation of the Islamic faith. It is backed by a number of leading imams and religious figures, in Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, who quote chapter and verse to justify violent outrages. Islamist violence has not been created in a vacuum.
Certainly, there are vile hatemongers who depict Muslims (and other minorities) in the basest terms. They merit our contempt. But for Malik to draw an analogy between Jews in pre war times and Muslims in our own is both ill informed and perverse.
Yours sincerely
Jeremy Havardi
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