Omar Mohammed – “Mosul Eye” – is interviewed at Quillette, on Jews in Iraq, the Farhud, Saddam, and ISIS. There’s too much to summarise, but this, in conclusion…
People talk about antisemitism as if antisemitism emerged yesterday, which is not the reality. The concept might have been coined only in recent history, but the actual act and fact of Jew hatred has existed for a very long time. And the reassignment is that in every context, in many countries, it’s always a new assignment. Jews in Spain in the fifteenth century were the traitors, so they had to be expelled. And then in Russia, back then the Soviet Union, Jews were also the collaborators. They were the traitors. They were getting killed as such. In the Arab world, they were the ones who spy. They were the ones who wanted to dismantle the integrity of the Arab world. So every time, there is a new role that gets assigned to the Jews. Today, the one that is really taking hold is that Jews are the colonisers. I think that is the most dangerous reassignment of our contemporary history, and this is being implemented with great effort by people who have really dedicated their time to presenting the Jews this way. In fact, they call it the last colonial project that must be dismantled. That’s how Jews are being presented. I think this is very dangerous. I believe this has been used to justify the killing of Jews. Throughout history, this reassignment has always been used, because first you need to reassign the Jews, and then after the reassignment comes the justification of killing, expelling and so on. So I think it’s becoming more normal for people to say that even if you don’t kill the Jews, if they get killed, it should be okay—…
Finding justifications. Just exactly as when the leftist militias, during the conflicts in Latin America or in Asia, would brutally execute people and say, “Well, that’s liberation.” Didn’t they say that? Actually, on October 7, they said, “How did you expect liberation to be? It has to be violent.” And this is exactly what we are witnessing: that merger of leftist ideas with the anti-Israel, the antisemitic, the pro-Hamas. And everyone who has a problem with the Jews, or has a problem with the West, or everyone who found an opportunity to just show up and say, “Yeah, I’m also anti-Israel”—it’s like they found an opportunity. Today’s entire problem is for what reason? Because the Jews are the last colonial project, and that’s why they insist on apartheid. These are concepts selected carefully. They are not chosen for nothing. They are being selected carefully, because you can see—I don’t know if I can make this claim or not, but this is what I see—we are in a very dangerous precedent where a terrorist organisation is using academic, liberal, leftist vocabularies in its communiqués after massacring 1,200 innocent people—and raping others. And then sending this kind of communiqué using all of these fancy words….
As I said, this is evident in history. It’s not something new. For example, in early Islam, when Muhammad migrated from Mecca to Medina, where he literally established Islam as a system, he looked into the situation and realised that he could only function with Muslims, and non-Muslims, who were also Arabs, he had to convert to Islam or find a way to make an agreement with them. But then he faced the reality that half of Medina was Jewish. He understood that for his project to succeed, he had to get rid of the Jews, which is why Khaybar was one of the earliest massacres against Jews. And hence the chant “Khaybar, Khaybar, ya Yahud, jaysh Muhammad sawfa ya’ud” is always evoked—
Which means “we’re going to kill you.” There’s no other meaning. When you remind someone of a massacre, you’re telling them, “I’m going to massacre you again.” Okay, someone is going to take this and say, “You’re accusing Islam. You’re Islamophobic.” That’s not the case. The reality is that on the streets, these chants are present, they are common, and there are equivalents to them on US campuses, and that is very dangerous, and it requires someone to really start thinking: what the hell are we doing?
Leave a Reply