This is a cross-post by Jacobinism
On the 29th of May, Mehdi Hasan published another piece about Islamophobia at the Huffington Post. It came in the wake of alarming gains made by far-right parties in the European elections. As acknowledged by its author, it also came in the wake of a shooting at a Jewish Museum in Brussels in which an Israeli couple and a Belgian woman were shot dead. A fourth victim, critically injured during the shooting, succumbed to his injuries as I was drafting this post.
The only suspect in the shooting, an Islamist jihadi and French national named Mehdi Nemmouche, was not identified and arrested until the day after the publication of Hasan’s article. However similarities to the shooting carried out by Mohammed Merah at a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012 were already apparent, as was the attack’s probable anti-Semitic intent.
Nevertheless, Mehdi Hasan thought that now would be good time to say this:
In some respects, Muslims are the new Jews of Europe. The vile shooting at the Jewish Museum in Brussels on 24 May, in which three people were killed, might make this statement sound odd. Anti-Jewish attacks are indeed on the rise in Europe, which is deplorable and depressing, but thankfully anti-Semitism is now taboo in mainstream political discourse in a way in which Islamophobia isn’t. These days, most anti-Semitic attacks are carried out by second-generation Arabs and are linked to anger over Israeli policies.
For whatever it’s worth, I do not believe that Mehdi Hasan is himself an Islamist. By which I mean that I have seen no evidence that he wishes his own freedom to be subject to the demands of State-imposed Islamic Law of any kind. That said, he displays a disturbing readiness to endorse Islamist arguments and talking points, the chief function of which is to re-describe the victimisers as victims.
Hasan’s reference to the “Jews of Europe” is historically imprecise, but the phrase most immediately evokes the Nuremberg Laws, concentration camps, and gas chambers. In light of Nemmouche’s arrest, and the revelation that he is probably a member of the al Qaeda splinter group ISIS, this sounds not merely “odd”, but deranged. The qualifier offered by Hasan – that Muslims only resemble the Jews of Europe “in some respects” – is being asked to do more work than history or common sense will allow. The respects in which Muslims living in European democracies today are plainly not like the Jews of pre-war Germany so vastly outweigh the similarities that they invalidate the comparison.
You can read the rest of Jacobin’s post here
