A perplexing rewriting of history
“The Encyclopaedia of Jewish-Muslim relations from their origins to the present day” was launched in November 2013. There is a more modest English version, published by Princeton.Iraqi Writer: The Jews Are Behind All Confrontations Worldwide
Critics such as the authority on Sephardi Jews, Professor Shmuel Trigano, have charged that the encyclopedia is nothing but a work of propaganda. It is all the more insidious because so much money has been spent on its promotion. Unusually for a book, the encyclopedia has a website all to itself and was the subject of a TV series on the French channel Arte.
Among the sponsors are The Alliance of Civilisations (co-sponsored by Spain and Turkey, and adopted as a UN initiative which excludes Israel from its Council of Friends), whose task is to change the ‘narrative’ by promoting the Spain of the Three Religions, the Andalusian Golden Age, and so forth.
As far as Arab collaboration with the Nazis is concerned, Dr. Roth accuses Henry Laurens, the author of the two pages on the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, of minimizing his role. There is no mention, says Roth, of the pro-Nazi Palestinian leader Fawzi al Qawuqj, or the Mufti’s broadcast calls for genocide on Radio Berlin, nothing on the Mufti’s creation of the SS Handschar division staffed by Bosnian Muslims, nothing about the part he personally played in condemning 20,000 European Jewish children to the death camps, and nothing about the Mufti having contact with the Nazis as early as 1936.
Regrettably, the Encyclopaedia is typical of the politicization of the study of Islam and its treatment of non-Muslims. Young minds are being brainwashed by a sanitized version of history with a huge promotional budget – replete with distortion, minimization and omission. Are we going to sit back and let it happen?
In an antisemitic article titled "Al Qaeda – a Zionist Product," Iraqi writer 'Amr Hadi Al-'Issawi argued that the Jews viewed other peoples with arrogance, following the directives of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and that they have deceived other peoples –the Arabs in particular – and fed them poison for decades. Al-'Issawi added that the Jews and the Hebrew state are responsible for stoking conflict in all the world's hotspots, and are behind all major events in the world, including the toppling of the constitutional monarchies and the deposing of Arab dictatorships – this, in a bid to transfer control to political Islam and set the entire region ablaze as a prelude to the establishment of Greater Israel.Obama Apologizes To Muslims For Anti-Jewish Kansas Attacks (satire)
“In is unconscionable that in twenty-first century America a man can, with the pull of a trigger, manage to generate solidarity, even empathy, for non-Muslims,” read the statement. “In the name of all Americans of conscience, we beg the forgiveness of our Muslim countrymen and resolve to work diligently to prevent any cause for sympathy for anyone else, especially Jews.”
Muslim representatives welcomed the apology as a necessary first step. “We would have liked to see a more comprehensive expression of solidarity with our worldview,” said the director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Mahder Fahkir. “But this is at least a suitable preliminary indication that we are headed in the right direction, that eventually the non-Muslim establishment will acknowledge that no other religious or ethnic group is worthy of protection. We encourage our non-Muslim co-citizens to embrace their status as dhimmi.”
Other leaders said the statement did not go nearly far enough. “Where is the open condemnation of Israel? Where is the naked justifying of the act as a natural consequence of Jewish behavior?” wondered influential political commentator Max Blumenthal, whose Jewish followers number at least in the teens. “The president squandered a golden opportunity to state openly that violence against Jews can only be blamed on Jews, since nobody else has any agency.”
