The Jew is Not My Enemy: Unveiling the Myths That Fuel Muslim Anti-Semitism by Tarek Fatah, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto; ISBN 978-0-7710-4783-1 ©2010, $24.95, p. 208 plus notes, bibliography, and index
Reviewed by Fred Reiss, Ed.D.
WINCHESTER, California — Like most people with an Internet account, I receive quite a few emails each day. Most are immediately discarded, but I always read the ones from family and friends. Far too often, I am shocked at the misinformation being carried in forwarded emails. Somehow, too many of my intelligent, worldly friends while sitting in front of a computer lose all sense of critical analysis.
Urban legends spread like viruses because they appeal to some basic fear. Perhaps you’ve received the one about Obama being a Muslim? Or the one urging boycott of a Muslim holiday stamp, the so-called Muslim Christmas stamp? Recently, I received an email claiming that the new health-care legislation passed in 2010 specifically exempts Muslims from the government mandate to purchase insurance and calls this an instance of “Dhimmitude”, a neologism expressing surrender to Islamic law. A few years ago an email message traversed the Islamic world stating that “Israeli trucks were carrying a million HIV-infected melons to Arab consumers in a new biological-warfare plot”, and last December, AISH reported that Egyptians think that its wave of shark attacks is a Mossad plot. It is therefore not surprising to read in Tarek Fatah’s latest book, The Jew is Not My Enemy, that “a growing number of Islamic intelligentsia accept that the Jews control the world.”
The Jew is Not My Enemy is first and foremost an historical account of the leaching of Judeophobia into Islam. Robert Spencer and others argue that the Koran is anti-Semitic. Fatah says that even though one might conclude that from poor interpretation of the text, the Islamic origin of anti-Semitism is not the Koran, but the Hadith literature, which by tradition, is a collection of the sayings and deeds of the prophet Muhammad. The hadiths were first written down in the ninth century, some three hundred years after the death of Muhammad. Of this literature Fatah says,
From labeling Christians and Jews pigs and apes to prohibiting Muslims from playing chess, Hadith literature has been the source of much embarrassment to Muslims. If we Muslims continue to study these Hadith texts as if they were divinely ordained, and believe that they shape our lives in this day and age, then we will have considerable difficulty convincing anyone that Islam is a pluralistic religion that promotes peace and harmony among peoples. Eventually, any student of Islam will pick up these Judeophobic Hadith and literally throw the book at us. We will lose credibility among the nations of this world and be remembered as a people who are anti-Jewish above all.
False knowledge about the interactions between Jews and Muslims likewise bolstered Judeophobia. To prove this point, Fatah takes describes the massacre of the Jews of Banu Qurayza by Islamic forces for treachery. Fatah successfully shows that the event never took place: the Jews of Banu Qurayza were not treacherous and there was no massacre. The Jew is Not My Enemy concludes with a look at the twentieth century’s historical path, which ultimately manifested itself in anti-Zionism and anti-Israeli acts.
America’s support of Israel in 1973 (the Yom Kippur War), which turned a seeming Egyptian and Syrian victory into defeat, gave rise to OPEC’s oil embargo. This in turn led to higher prices per barrel of oil, higher prices per gallon at the pump, and greater and greater profits for the Arab oil-producing countries. In the aftermath, “a new Arab force emerged in the east that would relegate Egypt to the backwaters…. Equipped with billions, the Saudis would work to impede all intellectual progress in the Muslim world, financing the spread of repressive and reactionary fascist ideologies that would turn Muslims against their own culture and hark back to a fictitious medieval era of Islamic supremacy.”
Tarek Fatah, a journalist and political advocate who founded the Muslim Canadian Congress, is not a self-hater. Indeed, he is undoubtedly taking a personal risk to publish The Jew is Not My Enemy at this time. But, neither is Fatah an Isrealophile. He asserts that the world perceived Israel as the David in the story of David and Goliath prior to 1968. Now, Israel is the bully-on-the-block. As such, Israel has the duty to lead the way in establishing Middle East peace.
Is he naïve? Israel has shown time and again that it will trade land for peace. But, if Fatah is correct, and Israel must make the first bold move, then we are faced with the conundrum posed by Dennis Prager in which he asks two simple, yet fundamental, questions. First, what would happen the next day if Israel announced that it is putting down its arms and would fight no more? Second, what would happen the next day if the Arab countries around Israel announced that they are putting down their arms and would fight no more? One does not need a crystal ball to know the answers.
Because the Western World is focused on the Koran and Sharia Law, The Jew is Not My Enemy becomes a beacon of light shining on little discussed areas of Islamic history, beliefs and relations between Jew and Muslim. This book has the power to open a new and perhaps a more fruitful path of communication and discourse between the Western and Islamic worlds.
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Dr. Fred Reiss is a retired public and Hebrew school teacher and administrator. He is the author of The Standard Guide to the Jewish and Civil Calendars; Ancient Secrets of Creation: Sepher Yetzira, the Book that Started Kabbalah, Revealed; and Reclaiming the Messiah. The author can be reached at fred.reiss@sdjewishworld.com .