Mick Hartley

Mark Feldon at Spiked – Stop equating anti-Semitism with Islamophobia. "There is no comparison between the hatred of Jews and criticism of a religion."

In the wake of Hamas’s barbaric attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, Germany was almost immediately engulfed by a surge of anti-Semitism. The public response of Germany’s cultural and political elites was swift. They started writing critical articles and organising programmes to counter the rising tide of ‘hate’. Yet what was striking about this intervention was that it continued a longstanding pattern in which no discussion of the threat of anti-Semitism can pass without mention of the supposedly equal threat of ‘Islamophobia’.

Just two months after last year’s 7 October pogrom, the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper warned of ‘more anti-Semitism, more Islamophobia’. In February this year, Raed Saleh, the parliamentary leader of the Social Democrats (SPD), called for the ‘fight against Islamophobia’ to be enshrined in the state constitution alongside the fight against anti-Semitism. This summer, the Free University of Berlin announced its condemnation of ‘anti-Semitism, racism, hostility towards Muslims and other forms of discrimination’….

These are truly dark days for Europe’s Jews. In the words of Rabbi Menachem Margolin, chairman of the European Jewish Association, Jews find themselves in ‘the worst [position] since the Second World War’. Dutch author Leon De Winter believes that European Jewry could disappear by 2050.

It is a very different story for Muslims, however. Hundreds of thousands continue to migrate to western Europe from Islamic countries. While Jews retreat from public life and conceal their identities, many Muslims are increasingly asserting their Islamic identity in public, by attending marches, waving flags and wearing face veils. Islamic institutions, such as mosques and Halal shops, have proliferated.

Muslims are not facing the intimidation that Jews now face daily on the streets. There are no demonstrations calling for the destruction of any Islamic nation or protests demonising Palestinians as ‘child murderers’ or ‘genociders’. Nor are there influential initiatives calling for a boycott of Arab institutions or individuals. German city centres are free of anti-Islamic graffiti and posters.

Compare the tolerance towards Islamic identity with the intolerance meted out to Jews and Israelis. In February, artists demanded the exclusion of Israelis from the Venice Biennale. In May, Israeli singer and Eurovision contestant Eden Golan could only leave her hotel room in liberal Sweden with bodyguards. In July, Belgian authorities refused to host a football match involving an Israeli team.

Muslim athletes, filmmakers and artists are spared such indignities and hostilities. Indeed, Muslims move freely throughout Europe, reshaping public spaces such as squares, parks, shopping streets or schools. There is one mosque in Berlin that requires round-the-clock police protection… not from right-wing, anti-Muslim bigots, but from radical Muslims opposed to the mosque’s liberal female imam.

Given that anti-Muslim sentiment is clearly not as significant a problem as anti-Semitism, why is there so much elite focus on Islamophobia?

To answer this, it’s important to understand that campaigns against Islamophobia aren’t really concerned with promoting tolerance towards Muslims. Though the term was first used over a century ago by French colonial officials in Algeria, it acquired its contemporary meaning when Islamic fundamentalists started wielding it against writers critical of Islam, like Salman Rushdie, Irshad Manji and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Its main function is to shield Islam, often violently so, from any form of criticism. Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran’s supreme leader and the man behind the bounty on Rushdie’s head, even labelled unveiled women as ‘Islamophobic’. As French writer Pascal Bruckner explains, the accusation of Islamophobia represents an attempt to stigmatise or even criminalise any critique of Islam as racist. This, in turn, stifles any discussion of Islamic practices and preaching, even at their most radical. The result is the creation of a legal double standard, where some ideologies and political practices can be criticised, while others enjoy privileged immunity….

Islamophobia is simply not comparable with anti-Semitism. Islamophobia amounts to a new form of blasphemy, in which any criticism of Islam is prohibited. Anti-Semitism is a hatred of Jews, an ideology that unites German neo-Nazis with radical Islamists and even climate activists. It is a universal language of loathing, a kind of Esperanto of resentment that flourishes in times of crisis. As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, the anti-Semite is a ‘destroyer by vocation, a pure-hearted sadist’ who desires ‘the death of the Jews’.

By equating anti-Semitism with Islamophobia, our elites are conflating the hatred of Jews with criticism and mockery of Islam. This conflation undermines the struggle against anti-Semitism. And it empowers Islamic reactionaries.

Feldon is a journalist based in Berlin, but the situation is little different here in the UK. Many on the left – Corbyn set the tone – are simply unable to mention antisemitism without dropping in something about the horrors of Islamophobia. We're still waiting to see if the Labour government will make "Islamophobia" illegal – in effect, a blasphemy law by the back door.