Mick Hartley

Matthias Küntzel, who had a lecture at Leeds University cancelled back in March after complaints from Muslim students, was invited back after the resultant furore, and spoke on Wednesday. Basically, he’s updated and expanded his original essay in the Weekly Standard, on the Nazi roots of Islamism, for a British audience. The text is here, under the heading “Hitler’s Legacy: Islamic antisemitism and the impact of the Muslim Brotherhood ” (via). In this section he looks at the difficulties of putting together a determined opposition to Islamism:

Why- however – is it proving so difficult to mount such an effort – especially, but not only, here in Britain? Three suggestions as to why this might be: firstly, this struggle – at least for the time being – has to be waged in opposition to a political left which has totally lost its moral compass and political bearings. It is, true that Osama bin Laden has embedded his strategic goal of talibanizing America and the world in a language that seeks to connect with Western protest movements and, beyond that, put Islam in the place of the former Communist system. Thus, in Bin Laden’s latest message of September 11, 2007, the fight against global warming is emphasized in order to attract the support of environmentalists, the anti-capitalist drum is banged (“You should liberate yourselves from the deception, shackles and attrition of the capitalist system”) and, lastly, Noam Chomsky, the guru of the leftist anti-globalization struggle, is applauded…

The naivety or malice with which the political left has nevertheless yielded to the siren songs of Islamism is therefore frightening. Thus, in May 2006 Noam Chomsky met the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, and defended and praised Hezbollah’s insistence on keeping its arms, in defiance of United Nations decisions; Tariq Ramadan, an eloquent Islamist, has been given star treatment at European anti-globalization events; the Muslim Brotherhood’s TV preacher, Sheikh Qaradawi gets invitations from the left-wing Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone; while the Socialist Workers Party have made the strategic decision to ally with a British offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood – the Muslim Association of Britain – in building the Stop the War Coalition. Last summer thousands of people were mobilised by this alliance to march through central London chanting “we are all Hezbollah now”.

Of course, a left which brands Israel as abstractly “evil” is not going to take Islamic antisemitism seriously. Demonising Israel entails becoming deaf to antisemitism. Or, as Sigmund Freud put it, “a participant in a delusion will not of course recognise it as such”.

2. Many Europeans assume that to draw attention to Islamic antisemitism is to play into the hands of racists. In Britain, multiculturalism has been the official civic religion for so long that any criticism of any minority group seems to have become the equivalent of profanity. Obviously, racism, discriminating against people on the grounds of their origin or skin colour, must be combated. You can’t be, however, multicultural and preach murderous loathing of Jews. In my opinion, we mustn’t defend Jew-hatred on spurious “anti-racist” grounds; we should rather distinguish between antisemites and non-antisemites within the Muslim communities. We mustn’t advocate a crude “top” and “bottom” dichotomy, in which the antisemitism of people from Muslim countries is excused as a kind of “anti-imperialism of fools”. We should rather insist that the struggle against discrimination is a universal one.

3. Islamic antisemitism is a taboo subject even in some parts of academia: a story of intellectual betrayal and the corrupting influence of political commitment. Professor Pieter von der Horst from the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands found this out when he proposed to give a lecture on the topic of the anti-Jewish blood libel. The head of the university asked him to excise the section of his lecture dealing with Islamic antisemitism. When he refused to do so, he was invited to appear before a panel of four professors who insisted he remove these passages. A lecture on Islamic antisemitism, so the argument went, might lead to violent reactions from well-organized Muslim student groups.