The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: An Interview with Andrew G. Bostom
Since the invasion of Israel by Hamas terrorists on October 7 and the massacre of around 1,200 people there, antisemitic, pro-Hamas marches have swept both majority-Muslim countries and Western nations.‘Elder of Ziyon’ doesn’t want readers to say, ‘I knew that already’
In London, antisemitic hate crimes are up 1,350% according to police, and pro-Hamas protestors chanted, “Oh Jews, the army of Muhammad is coming.” In the Tunisian city of Al Hammah, hundreds of people were filmed setting fire to a synagogue. In Russia’s Muslim Dagestan region, hundreds of people stormed into the main airport and onto the landing field, chanting antisemitic slogans and seeking passengers arriving on a flight from Israel. In California, a Jewish dentist was killed, and two others injured in a shooting by a Muslim. In Chicago, a Jewish man was attacked by anti-Israel protesters at an October 7 documentary screening in the Logan Square. In Paris, a Jewish man was attacked outside a synagogue; and another was stabbed in Zurich.
In the Middle East, North Africa, and the Gulf Region, this genocidal hatred has resulted in the ethnic cleansing of Jews. Over 850,000 Jews were forced to leave their homes in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Morocco, and several other Arab countries in the 20 years following the re-establishment of Israel in 1948. Another major exodus of Jews took place from Iran in 1979-80, following the Islamic revolution. Jews had resided in those lands for over 2,500 years. The rising Muslim population in the West has imported the same—and exceedingly violent—Jew-hatred into Western nations. Antisemitic attacks and threats abound since Hamas ignited the war in Gaza by massacring and raping Israelis on October 7. To learn about the theological and historical roots of Muslim antisemitism, I interviewed a prominent specialist and researcher on Islam, its history and theology.
Dr. Andrew G. Bostom is a leading expert on the history and scriptures of Islam. He is the author of Sharia versus Freedom: The Legacy of Islamic Totalitarianism and the editor of both The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims and The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History. He has also published articles and commentary on Islam in The Washington Times, National Review Online, Revue Politique, FrontPageMagazine, American Thinker, and other print and online publications. More on Bostom’s work can be found at www.andrewbostom.org/blog/. What motivated you to write The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism?
Two specific discoveries motivated my research culminating in The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism.
First, since the end of the 12th century, Al Azhar University (and its mosque) have represented the apogee of Islamic religious education, which evolved into the de facto Vatican of Sunni Islam. Egyptian Sheikh Muhammad Al-Gameia, the Al-Azhar University representative in the U.S., and imam of the Islamic Cultural Center and Mosque of New York City at the time of the September 11, 2001, attacks, provided a very concrete and disturbing example of the authoritative Al-Azhar Islamic mindset exported to America. Within three days of the 9/11 jihad carnage, al-Gameia, who according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch was “known for his moderate views,” sermonized, as the Tampa Bay Times reported, “calling for peace, healing, and love among people of all religions.” The good Sheikh struck an entirely different chord when he was interviewed for an Al-Azhar University website on October 4, 2001. Gameia returned to Egypt after September 11, 2001, alleging, without any substantiation, that he was being “harassed.” Gameia’s interview (original Arabic; extracts translated here) was rife with conspiratorial Islamic antisemitism, which riffed upon his invocation of what I would later come to understand are the central Quranic motifs of Jew-hatred, while equating Jews and Zionists. Al-Azhar’s representative to the U.S. melded this sacralized anti-Jewish bigotry to virulent calumnies against Americans and threats to the U.S.—whom he imagined as witless “dupes” of the Zionist Jews.
Second, in early 2005, when I was nearing completion of my initial book compendium, The Legacy of Jihad (specifically the section about jihad on the Indian subcontinent), I came across a remarkable comment by the Indian Sufi theologian Sirhindi (d. 1624). Typical of the mainstream Indian Muslim clerics of his era, Sirhindi was viscerally opposed to the reforms which characterized the latter ecumenical phase of Akbar’s 16th century reign (when Akbar became almost a Muslim-Hindu syncretist), particularly the abolition of the humiliating jizya (Quranic poll tax, as per Quran 9:29) upon the subjugated infidel Hindus. Sirhindi wrote, motivated by Akbar’s pro-Hindu reforms, that, “Whenever a Jew is killed, it is for the benefit of Islam.”
The Washington think tank Jewish Policy Center has called him an “essential” read half a dozen times, and the watchdog CAMERA UK said he is “indefatigable” and “one of the best pro-Israel bloggers out there.”Seth Mandel: What Chuck Schumer Has Wrought
“Elder of Ziyon” is the pen name of a man who works in high tech and, for the past 20 years, has authored some 40,000 posts on a reader-supported, pro-Israel blog that goes by the same pseudonym. The site has received between 30,000 and 500,000 daily views, “Elder” told JNS.
The anonymous poster’s first entry was dated Aug. 15, 2004, and it ran five words, linking to an article in the Israeli press. Since then, “Elder”—whose identity is unknown to JNS—has reported longer-form material, including an investigation that led McGraw-Hill Education to pull the publication of a textbook he accused of anti-Israel propaganda.
In 2022, “Elder” self-published Protocols: Exposing Modern Antisemitism, which Gerald Steinberg, founder of NGO Monitor, called “the essential reference handbook” in “exposing the lies behind the modern embodiment of the infamous ‘Protocols.’”
“In tackling the broad range of hate campaigns, from manipulating the slogans of international law and human rights in the United Nations, to the fake media experts and the NGO anti-Zionist jihad, the new Protocols is a concise and fact-filled response,” Steinberg added.
“Elder” spoke with JNS some four-and-a-half months before the 20th anniversary of his blog, which remains on the platform Blogger, which launched in 1999 and which Google acquired in 2003.
“Maybe people are overwhelmed with the anti-Israel arguments. They’re overwhelmed with the sheer volume of hate that’s out there,” he told JNS. “I hope to be a place that they can go to get informed.”
Congratulations to Chuck Schumer, this year’s true April Fool. The predictably vile consequences of his public attacks on Israeli democracy are here, and no doubt there will be more coming.
Schumer has long fashioned himself the shomer—Hebrew for “watchman,” a play on his last name—of Israel. But he has revealed himself instead to be more of a mashgiach, the man who officially certifies products as kosher. And he has been certifying the political version of porkchops and pepperoni.
“I’m 100% with Senator Schumer,” declared Jamaal Bowman, the Squad-adjacent Democrat who has built his brand around anti-Jewish incitement. “[Benjamin Netanyahu] needs to be removed. He is a blockade to a pathway to peace. And we need a ceasefire right now. That’s what we should be focused on, humanitarian aid, not weapons.”
Appearing on MSNBC yesterday, Bowman had more to say: “The majority of Gaza has already been destroyed through acts of collective punishment by this maniac, Benjamin Netanyahu.”
Bowman was last seen yelling on a New York street corner that Israeli women were lying about the rapes committed by Hamas terrorists. Previously, he had been cited after he was caught on camera pulling a fire alarm to prevent a congressional floor vote. So it’s possible that Bowman uses the term “maniac” as a compliment, that it’s his way of trying to find common ground with the Israeli prime minister.
There were even worse things said by people in Congress yesterday, more evidence that Schumer has helped to open the floodgates of Jew-baiting when he called for regime change in an allied country.
Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon posted yesterday: “On this Easter, let’s ponder Netanyahu’s indiscriminate bombing of Gaza, which has killed more than 20,000 women and children, and his restriction of humanitarian aid, which has pushed Palestinians to the brink of famine.”
There is a long tradition of using Christian holy days like Easter to scapegoat the Jews for the world’s misfortunes. The Kishinev pogrom of 1903, the most infamous of its kind and the closest relation to Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, began stirring on Easter. Warsaw was the site of an Easter pogrom in 1940—presumably folks remember what happened next.