The International Union of Muslim Scholars wants more scholarship on Jews and Israel — as long as it is antisemitic

Ahmed Raissouni, a former president of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, just published an essay complaining that pro-Palestinian scholarship is too thin. He wants Muslim academics to build a real, long-term body of work on Jewish history, Zionism, and Hebrew and Torah scholarship, comparable to what Western universities produce.

In the Orwellian world of the IUMS,  "scholarship" means "cherry picking or fabricating facts to reach antisemitic conclusions."

Raissouni, who effusively praised October 7, names the models of the researchers he wants to see more of. 

The first is Roger Garaudy, the French philosopher whom Raissouni credits with "the study and refutation of the founding religious myths and legends of Zionist theories." He calls on scholars to continue "along the path Garaudy began." Garaudy was convicted in France in 1998 for Holocaust denial, for a book arguing that the Holocaust death toll and the gas chambers were largely invented to serve Israeli political interests. This is the ideal researcher to the Muslim scholars represented by IUMS.

The second model is Abdelwahab Elmessiri, praised for having "disturbed Israel and Zionism more than the Arab armies surrounding it." Elmessiri's life's work was an eight-volume Encyclopedia of the Jews, Judaism, and Zionism arguing that Jewish peoplehood itself is a fiction rather than a genuine identity — treating the existence of the Jews as a phenomenon to be explained away rather than a people to be studied.

Raissouni then turns to Morocco. He writes that Moroccan academic history has spent decades "falsifying" the record to inflate the role Jews played in the country's development, and that the professors doing this work are funded by "poisoned Zionist grants," some of them acting as brokers who bring in the money themselves. The Jews being studied, he says, are not really contributors to Moroccan history at all — "in reality they consider themselves an infiltrated Israeli mission serving the Kingdom of Solomon." Yes, the Jews are so crafty that they sent their people to Morocco in Roman times, before Islam, just so they can pretend to be part of Morocco's history. It takes a special kind of scholarship to come up with this conclusion, and that is exactly what Raissouni and IUMS want to see more of.

Raissouni also wants to tackle scholarship on antisemitism, which he calls "a sword hanging over politicians, thinkers, historians, human rights advocates, and judges." Obviously antisemitism doesn't really exist. Just as obviously, this article isn't Exhibit A.

He also asserts, without a single source, that "perhaps a third of Americans, a third of Europeans, and certainly tens of millions" of people are driven by fabricated Torah and Talmudic myths. Well, duh.

The thing is, as I read this, that the concept of perverting research to reach a predetermined conclusion is not a Muslim innovation. What he demands in the Muslim world is happening, today, among thousands of Western academics in captured fields like Middle East history, social justice, gender studies, art history and dozens of other fields; openly advocating a political position and twisting facts to reach the end goal. Muslims don't need more people who understand Hebrew; they can just read the papers being published constantly by Western universities. 

The only innovation Raissouni brings is that he is unusually candid about naming his goal and his heroes in advance. 

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)