Anthony Julius has a new essay at Z Word:
THE WISH TO HAVE bad Jews confess, to catch them owning up to their mysterious, murderous crimes, lies behind the relentless torturing of them in medieval legal proceedings to “confess correctly,” and the fictions of voluntary and involuntary Jewish admission and self-condemnation that litter the history of antisemitism. The Protocols are merely the most completely realised product of just such a wish; there are many other such products. In the evolution of this trope of self-confessed wickedness, several distinct stages may be identified.
In each stage, the antisemites may be imagined responding to sceptics and people of goodwill: “Look the Jews admit it! They hate Gentiles and want to kill them or rule over them.” Here, for example, is a passage from a contemporary Islamist work, available in London: “The Jews admit that fashion is one of the three things they used to westernise our girls …” The statements attributed to Jews comprise simple acknowledgments of guilt as well as more complex self-incriminating statements. In many instances, the acknowledgments are just false and the statements are fabricated; in other cases, the acknowledgments are given too much weight and the meanings of the statements are misrepresented.
Julius surveys various examples of such fabrications, which are endemic in the writings of neo Nazis and Islamists:
In addition, a fresh kind of fabrication emerged – the apparent endorsement by prominent figures of positions taken by antisemites. Benjamin Franklin, for example, was said to have denounced the Jews as “vampires” and called for their expulsion from the United States. A Nazi “research” institute fabricated this document.
A simple Google search for “Benjamin Franklin” and Jews provides ample evidence of the distribution of this lie, and the sort of people who spread it.
What sort of people, in this country, spread anti-semitic lies of this sort?
Here are a couple of examples.
First, let’s listen to Sheikh Rachid Al Ghannoushi, father of the British Muslim Initiative’s and CiF’s Soumaya Ghannoushi the leader in exile (in the UK, actually) of the Tunisian Muslim Brotherhood.
Q. Do you still think that the US is hapless victim of a Jewish conspiracy to use it/push it to fight Islam?
…
Unfortunately, most Americans are not conscious of all this, and those who are, are just full of resentment and bitterness and are not capable of doing anything. For many opportunities were wasted, when Americans did not follow their wise leader Franklin’s advice when he warned them of what Jews could do in America if they were left to their wishes. However, Peoples are similar to giant trees, they lean when faced with wind but soon regain their posture. The American people and the rest of peoples whose dignity is degraded today by the Zionists while they are silent, shall one day rise and reject this nuisance, that of marginal groups which had climbed to authority, monopolising almost all power, without possessing any popular support. One fears for them (Jews) a fate similar to that of Al-Baramikah in Muslim history, but they do not realise any of this. They continue injuring the victim, provoking it, degrading it, attacking its dignity, until the victim one day revolts and destroys all their satanic dreams and Talmudic illusions. Would not the wise among the Jews who are a people of knowledge/science, philosophy and culture, realise the destructive fate of what the actions of Jewish Masonic Zionist atheistic gangs would lead to, so that they rebuke them and save the fate of their people from the dangerous destruction that awaits them, so that they put an end to their oppression of the peoples of the world, their humiliation and their exploitation, instead of recognising the other and his dignity, and choosing the path of understanding and coexistence with Islam. The world is vast enough to accommodate for everyone, so why this egoism and arrogance? Indeed entering into the lion’s den, to Palestine, the heart of the Muslim Ummah, and aiming at eliminating the Muslim and Christian heritage and constructing the alleged temple on the remains of Al-Aqsa Mosque, and transform it into a base for the Jewish monopoly of the region is a satanic dream which has dominated the minds of extremist Jews and towards which they are striving, which would only render every Jew in the world a target of hostility, as well as any American if America continues on the same path of protecting the Talmudic satanic project that today reigns in Israel, embarking with a blind force full of historical hostilities and illusions. Would the wise among the Jews and Americans be aware of this destructive fate towards which they are led by Zionist mobs in Palestine, whether headed by Netanyahu, Barak or Sharon, for their strategy is one: use Palestine as a new centre of the Zionist monopoly of the region and the world, and exploit the West and in particular America as a tool for repressing the peoples of the region and their heritage, and eventually eliminating American and Western interests in the region through controlling oil reserves and all resources and announcing a new Jewish world order on the ruins of the American Western world order. These are not illusions or paranoia, it is a strategy conducted by a state possessing the nuclear bomb and power basis that spread as the arms of an octopus throughput the world, and supported by the most powerful state in the world which is on the verge of being transformed from the position of (actor) to that of the subject.
Ghannoushi’s response on the subject of the notorious Tzarist anti-semitic forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is also worth reading:
Our movement does not usually publish books, but rather stands with respect to the issues posed on the political arena. Our movement published numerous communiqu�s and analyses denouncing the Zionist attack on Palestine, the Muslim Ummah and on international law. Despite the great distance separating Tunisia from the Zionist body, we have not been safe from its hostility and violations of our borders on more than one occasion, and its murder of tens of innocent Tunisians for the sole charge that their country had granted refuge to individuals outcast by the Zionist attack on their country and its neighbouring countries, since they are regarded as terrorists! What is peculiar is that those same ‘terrorists’ have been finally recognised by Zionists.
Our stand as ‘enemies of Zionists’ does not emanate from their being Jews, for we have no problem with Judaism as a religion or Jews as a religious group, and does not have its origin in the document entitled “Protocols of the elders of Zion”, regardless of its genuineness… (cont, p 94)
Uh huh.
Also, worth reading is the hilarious list of dedications that Ghannoushi gives in his masterpiece, Civil Liberties in the Islamic State. Alongside Malcolm X, Prof John Esposito, Amnesty International, his daugher Soumaya and Jamaat e Islami, Abdallah Azzam – the midwife of Al Qaeda – gets a special dedication. See if you can find any other fun ones.
And which organisations are particularly active in forging racist lies, and propagating them in this country? You’ll be unsurprised to hear that I’m talking of Britain’s Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood franchise, the Muslim Association of Britain.
Here’s a copy of Inspire a newspaper they handed out on a Stop the War demo a few years back. It is a wonderful example of the sort of things that Tamimi and Al Tikriti’s Muslim Association of Britain used to say, before they got media savvy. Enjoy the great piece on the death penalty for apostasy, read the geneology of the Great Islamists of History, but in particular, enjoy a game of “spot the forgery”.
You get one point for the made up quotations from Nelson Mandela, which were in reality, simply a pastiche written by Arjan El Fassed of the Electronic Intifada. You get an extra point for the forgery that has Ariel Sharon “admitting” that “We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it“. There’s a bonus for the others.
If you’d like to test the writings of Ghannoushi and the Muslim Association of Britain against Anthony Julius’ thesis, you won’t be disappointed.
There’s a serious side to this.
Ghannoushi is a colossus in British Islamism, and the ‘great white hope’ for those who imagine Islamism in general, and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular, to be a potentially benign movement. Indeed, Azzam Tamimi is best known as a disciple and promoter of Ghannoushi, as well as an apologist for the equally racist and genocidal Hamas. Tamimi has been pimped around by Alistair Crooke’s “Conflicts Forum” as ‘the guy we can do business with’.
They’ve been pretty successful, to be frank.
Here they all are – including Ghannoushi pere et fillette at that Conflicts Forum-Demos workshop, putting themselves forward as sober and sensible partners for government.
What can be done about this?
UPDATE
More on Ghannoushi.
He was a Saddam fan:
Ghannouchi visited the United States in December 1989, when he attended Islamic conferences in Chicago and Kansas City. At the time, he impressed some as a “moderate” Islamist, amenable to dialogue. But this reading of Ghannouchi was completely overturned by his reaction to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.
Ghannouchi not only denounced King Fahd of Saudi Arabia for the “colossal crime” of inviting the U.S. to deploy forces, he also fully justified Saddam’s invasion and annexation of Kuwait. Ghannouchi compared Saddam to Yusuf Ibn Tashfin, the 11th-century Almoravid ruler who forcibly unified the Muslim principalities of Spain in order to wrest them from Christian domination. According to Ghannouchi, the Muslims now faced “Crusader America,” the “enemy of Islam,” and Saddam had taken a necessary step toward unity, “joining together two Arab states out of twenty-two, praise be to God.”1 Although other Islamists criticized Saudi Arabia, none embraced Saddam as fervently as Ghannouchi.
Ghannouchi also threatened the United States. Speaking in Khartoum during the crisis, he said, “There must be no doubt that we will strike anywhere against whoever strikes Iraq … We must wage unceasing war against the Americans until they leave the land of Islam, or we will burn and destroy all their interests across the entire Islamic world… Muslim youth must be serious in their warning to the Americans that a blow to Iraq will be a license to strike American and Western interests throughout the Islamic world.” He also called for a Muslim boycott of American goods, planes and ships.2
After the war, Ghannouchi requested a U.S. visa. His request was denied. Since then, he has angled for a review of his application by praising former Assistant Secretary of State Edward Djerejian’s speech on Islam, made at Meridian House in June 1992. He also wrote to Djerejian, professing his willingness for dialogue. The U.S. is not the enemy of Islam, he now argues. It is the hapless victim of a “Jewish strategy” for “waging war against Islam.
He supports terrorism:
Sheik Ghanushi, began by blessing the mothers of the suicide bombers: “I would like to send my blessings to the mothers of those youth, those men who succeeded in creating a new balance of power… I bless the mothers who planted in the blessed land of Palestine the amazing seeds of these youths, who taught the international system and the Israeli arrogance, supported by the US, an important lesson. The Palestinian woman, mother of the Shahids [martyrs], is a martyr herself, and she has created a new model of woman…
His group was also involved in an incitement to kill a Tunisian author, accused of writing an “irreverent book” about Mohammed.
Then, there is this from Juan Cole:
In the 1970s Ghanoushi was a theocrat, but he may have changed. Tunisian university friends of mine remember him trying to take over the faculty union and get them fired for being secularists. They remember him as ruthless.
A lovely man!
