The Left’s Muslim Replacement Theology for Jews. By Daniel Greenfield.

The Left’s Muslim Replacement Theology for Jews. By Daniel Greenfield. FrontPage Magazine, December 18, 2015.

Greenfield:

Muslims are the new Jews; time to get rid of the old Jews.

Muslims are the new Jews. You can find this offensive claim repeated everywhere in the media. The Jews, a small ethnic minority of millions that was stateless for thousands of years, are a terrible analogy for a global Muslim population of 1.6 billion and around 50 countries that do not comprise a single ethnicity or race. Comparing the two makes as much sense as comparing the Finns to all of Asia.

The only thing the Muslims and the Jews have ever had in common is that the former conquered, persecuted and enslaved the latter. Any religious similarities are the product of Muslim cultural appropriation of Jewish beliefs and any cultural similarities are the result of Muslim colonization.

Comparing Jews to Muslims makes as much sense as comparing Jews to Nazis. But the media began making the argument that the Jews are the new Nazis from the very moment that the stateless Jews got their first state since Rome and its allied Arab invaders had destroyed the last one.

In this twisted historical revisionism, the Jews, a beleaguered minority hanging on to a country slightly bigger than Fiji, who have spent the last 40 years cutting pieces off their small slice of the world to hand over to the region’s massive Muslim majority in the hopes of being left alone, are the new Nazis.

And the Muslim billion ruling over vast territories where human rights for non-Muslims are rarer than hen’s teeth, where non-Muslim populations decline year after year as they are forcibly converted or are forced to flee their Muslim oppressors, are somehow the new Jews. Orwell would have wept.

The new Nazis are the Jews, who freed hundreds of terrorists to try and restart negotiations with Muslim terrorists. And the new Jews are the Muslims who behead, enslave, rape and bomb their way across the region. The Jewish Nazis have killed about 4 or 5 Muslim terrorists a month on average this year. The new Muslim Jews in Syria alone account for a death toll of over 100 every day.

The analogy makes no sense. But that hasn’t stopped the media from embracing it anyway.

The media compared the Syrian migrants to Joseph and Mary at the inn. When that social media meme got old after about 5 minutes, it was time to compare them to Holocaust survivors fleeing the Nazis.

One analogy made as much sense as the other.

The media had already made it an annual tradition to break out the Joseph and Mary analogy every Christmas to attack Israel.  Now it doubled down on it to attack Americans. But Joseph and Mary were Jewish natives of Israel. They weren’t foreigners. And today it’s the media that insists Jews shouldn’t be allowed to stay in Bethlehem or any part of the West Bank. The innkeeper in this analogy is Obama.

Herod was the foreigner ruling over Israel, the son of an Idumean father and a Nabatean Arab mother, you might think of him as the Obama of the day, while driving the Jews out of their own country. Herod’s father had allied with an Arab ruler who controlled what is today Syria and Saudi Arabia, in an alliance against the next-to-last Jewish king of Israel. Herod had the last Jewish king of Israel killed.  The Jews persecuted by the Arab Herod aren’t the Muslims of today. The Muslims of today are Herod.

The Nabateans and Idumeans (according to the Greek historian Strabo they were both Arabic peoples) had been expanding westward into Israel much the way that their descendants are expanding into the West today. The Idumeans promised to integrate into the Jewish nation, but instead massacred its people and eventually took over the country through treachery and terrorism, and destroyed it.

There may be an analogy there for Muslim migration to the West, but the media wouldn’t touch it with a pole the length of the Atlantic Ocean.

Today, Joseph and Mary might be a Jewish couple who are told by the European Union that they aren’t allowed to live in Givat Hamatos, near Bethlehem, because there is no room for Jews in the West Bank. Or a German couple in a small rural town forced out of their home by the local authorities to accommodate the flood of Syrian Muslim migrants who are beginning their colonization of the country.

There’s always “room at the inn” for Muslim invaders who have colonized and displaced the local population. But there’s never any room available for their indigenous non-Muslim victims.

The media howls that the Syrian Muslim migrants are just like the Jews fleeing the Holocaust. But the Jews were a stateless people who were suffering genocide at the hands of the majority. The Syrian Muslims are not stateless, they’re Syrians, they’re not a minority, they’re the majority, and they’re not suffering genocide, they’re the ones perpetrating it.

The worst actors in the Syrian Civil War are Sunni Muslims. Some Sunni Muslim groups, such as ISIS, are fighting other Sunni Muslims for power and territory. But Sunni Muslims as a group do not face genocide. They’re the majority. It’s Yazidis and Christians facing genocide at the hands of Sunni Muslims.

The Jews had no Jewish State to go to during the Holocaust. Sunni Muslims have over forty countries to choose from. If they want land area, they have over 30 million square miles to pick from. That’s a territory that is ten times the size of the United States. There’s plenty of room for them all.

The only valid historical analogy involving Arab Muslims, Jews and the Holocaust is the one that Netanyahu was shouted down for making. The Arab Muslims sympathized with the Nazis. Not only did the Mufti of Jerusalem play a vital role in encouraging Hitler’s genocidal plans for the Jews, but after the war Nazi butchers found safe harbor in Muslim countries. Many converted to Islam.

The one thing that both sides in the Syrian Civil War agree on is that the Nazis had the right idea about the Jews. The Muslim Brotherhood’s Sheikh Qaradawi spoke approvingly of Hitler and hoped for a Muslim Holocaust of the Jews, "The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them - even though they exaggerated this issue - he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hands of the believers."

But that didn’t stop the White House from rolling out the red carpet for his deputy a few years later.

On the Shiite side, Assad Sr. had threatened to wreak the “apex of the Israeli Holocaust”. Hezbollah boss Nasrallah had boasted that, “If they (Jews) all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”

In a pre-war poll, 77% of Syrians had expressed support for Hamas whose goal is the extermination of the Jews. Hating Jews and wanting to kill them is the one thing that brings Shiites and Sunnis together.

But hate doesn’t have to be as obvious as Assad or Qaradawi. The constant claims that Muslims are the new Jews carry with them a whiff of progressive replacement theology. The old Jews have been found wanting. Setting up a country and defending it against Muslim terrorism made them bad victims. The Muslims are superior replacement victims. They have the right to Israel and to Jewish history.

Ishaan Tharoor at the Washington Post, whose meme popularized the obnoxious appropriation of Jewish history by claiming that Muslim migrants are just like the Jews fleeing the Holocaust, lectures Jews that Muslim threats to kill all the Jews are “not like the Holocaust.”

The left insists that Jews have no right to their own history. Like Bethlehem and Jerusalem, it belongs to the Muslims. The Holocaust may not be invoked to protest the Muslim murder of Jews, but must instead be invoked to enable the Muslim murder of Jews by bringing millions of supremacist bigots who think that the Holocaust was one of the best things that ever happened to Europe and the United States.

The ADL’s anti-Semitic poll ratings for Muslim refugee countries are 92% for Iraq and 87% for Libya. Those numbers somehow manage to be even worse than those of Saudi Arabia which only scores 74%.

The final act of one people replacing another is genocide. Just ask Herod or Mohammed, whose final deathbed wish was that Jews and Christians should be purged from Arabia. Or ask the latest pundit explaining why Jews can’t live near Bethlehem, but Muslims must be brought to live in New York.

Muslims are not the new Jews. And the idea that Muslims have replaced the Jews and are entitled to appropriate their land and history for their own use is not only anti-Semitic, it’s genocidal.

Islam Isn’t the Problem. Islamophobia Is. By Hafsa Kanjwal.

Islam isn’t the problem: American Muslims should be on the front lines of questioning U.S. policies that have contributed to destabilization, sectarianism and bloodshed in the Middle East. By Hafsa Kanjwal. Salon, December 17, 2015.

Islamophobic bullying of teachers, students on the rise. Imraan Siddiqi (Executive Director, CAIR-Arizona) interviewed by Anya Parampil. Video. RT America, December 9, 2015. YouTube.

Islamophobic attacks on the rise. By Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian. Video. The Young Turks, December 10, 2015. YouTube.

Kanjwal:

As a community we’ve internalized Islamophobia in a desperate attempt to prove we belong. We need a new approach.

The American Muslim community is beleaguered. It seems we’re all trying to understand how — despite our monumental efforts to combat Islamophobia in the years since 9/11 — the discourse on Muslims has only gotten worse, reaching the fascist-like levels seen today, with violent, often fatal results.

After 9/11, Muslim leaders and institutions across the country faced greater scrutiny and marginalization, making them less likely to be at the forefront of critiquing U.S. domestic and foreign policy in the political aftermath. Seeing themselves as underrepresented in the political establishment, they made combating Islamophobia and representing the American Muslim narrative in the corridors of power and influence their top priority.

Be it in media, entertainment, business or public policy, there have been innumerable initiatives to ensure Muslim representation at the highest levels of government, and special effort has been made to highlight the contributions of Muslims to American society. We have endured the indignity of having to humanize our identity, even having numerous anthologies dedicated to showing how we love, and make love, like everyone else.  At this critical juncture, when hate crimes against Muslims are at an all-time high, the question must be asked: Where has this approach taken us? And are we partly responsible for the cumulative bigotry that has now peaked against us?

The time for American Muslim self-reflection at the community level  is long overdue.

Internalized Islamophobia

It should be clear that in our response to accusations of terrorism and the like, we have internalized Islamophobia. By this I mean that we as a community have uncannily accepted a direct link between Islam and violence, and the narrative that there is a “problem” with our religion, or rather an interpretation of it. So, when Paris or Boston happens, we scream at the top of our lungs that “our” Islam is a religion of peace, that not all Muslims are terrorists, etc. We make feel-good videos, holding up signs that say #notinourname, and write article after article talking about our normal aspirations of taking long walks on the beach and how ISIS’ Islam doesn’t represent us. An unopened Coke can on a United flight gets us more riled up than secret agents parading through our mosques. We “understand” that “surveillance” is for our own “good,” thereby agreeing that this is an issue borne within our communities, and not a symptom of a larger cancer that is not of our making. It should come as no surprise, then, that when Trump calls for special registrations for Muslims, we make our own Muslim IDs showcasing our many privileged accolades. We are desperate to prove that we belong. “Look, I am a lawyer, a father, a connoisseur of potato chips, and an avid Broncos fan!” This ensures that the conversation always remains superficial; the debate is sidetracked into one of a clash of values and whether we belong in this society, the exact discussion that Islamophobes want us to have.    

We are at our lowest point in this country, and this approach has not worked. The rhetoric has deepened, its supporters only multiplied.

It has not worked because we fundamentally misunderstand the root causes of the issue that we are dealing with.

We have bought into the state narrative that Islam is the problem. This is despite the fact that since 9/11, there has been even greater American and Western interference in Muslim-majority countries. From Afghanistan to Yemen, to Libya and Iraq, American policies have contributed to destabilization, sectarianism and bloodshed. American Muslims should have been at the front line of questioning these destructive state policies and imperialistic economic interests that have led to the emergence of groups like ISIS.

American exceptionalism

For too long, American Muslims have been led to believe that we are the most privileged Muslim community on the planet, i.e., American exceptionalism. This, in turn, has led to a belief that “we” have a responsibility to dictate true Islam to the rest of the world. As a result, our engagement with international issues has been haphazard, and deeply schizophrenic. At one level, being an American Muslim has meant that issues affecting Muslims elsewhere are of little concern to us unless and until they have an impact on us—take the shocking silence on Yemen or drones in Pakistan—as we try to build our utopia here. The domestication of the American Muslim agenda is seen as a source of empowerment, but is in fact an attempt to dictate the terms of what the community can and cannot advocate for. Nothing exemplifies this arrogance more than the Muslim Leadership Initiative (MLI), a program that displaces Palestinian voices and situates an issue of Israeli occupation of land, illegal invasions and colonization as one that can be resolved by “inter-religious dialogue” and not as one that addresses the question of justice.

Meanwhile, critical Muslim voices that question the impact of destructive imperial, military and economic policies abroad and our own community’s complicity in it are drowned out by voices that are far more palatable to the mainstream American audience.

If American Muslims have to bear responsibility for one thing, it is not terrorism; it is for contributing to the problematic narrative that allows the political establishment to evade responsibility for its destructive policies.

To solutions

In these terrifying times, the P.R. campaigns to humanize our existence might very well be needed for basic survival. Yet, this cannot exist in a vacuum. If we are to think long-term, we must speak truth to power and align ourselves with marginalized and oppressed groups both here and abroad. American Muslims can’t expect Muslim bodies in the U.S. to be treated with dignity and respect when they are being decimated abroad.

Islamophobia is not exceptional; it exists in the same political hell as anti-immigrant racism and the atrocities being committed against black and brown bodies. There can be no freedom or equality for Muslims if other bodies are not treated equally.

Hafsa Kanjwal is a Ph.D. candidate in history and women’s studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.