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Saudi journalist condemns hatred of Jews in Islamic culture

Saudi journalist and businessman Hussein Shobakshi says “Allah commanded us to love and respect” the Jews; “anti-Semitism in the Arab world is the product of loathsome racist education.”

Hussein Shobakshi. Credit: Czechsaudi.cz/en.(MEMRI)
Hussein Shobakshi. Credit: Czechsaudi.cz/en.(MEMRI)

In his March 3 column in the leading London-based Saudi daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, Saudi journalist and businessman Hussein Shobakshi condemned the deeply rooted hatred of Jews in Islamic culture, in which the term “Jew” is strongly derogatory.

Shobakshi mused on why the Muslims do not differentiate between the Israeli Zionists and the Jews in general, even though Allah had instructed the Muslims to love and respect Jews and Christians, and even though the Prophet Muhammad himself had married a Jewess, made pacts with Jews and maintained relations with them.

He called on the Muslims to first achieve peace among themselves and with those around them, and to recognize that they have profound anti-Semitic hatred and racism, and that they are capable nevertheless of carrying out Allah’s commandment and respect the Jews.

The following are translated excerpts of Shobakshi’s column:

“When the extremists in the political Islam organizations want to carry out character assassination against a leader in the Arab world, they are accustomed to reiterating over and over that ‘his mother was a Jewess’ or that ‘he has Jewish roots.’ Often, the supporters of this or that leader respond to this by saying of the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood that ‘his mother was a Jewess.’[1] This has made me wonder about the scope of the hatred for Jews in our culture, and about our inability to distinguish between the Jews as People of the Book—whom Allah commanded us to love and respect, and permitted us to trade with them, eat their foods and marry them—and the Israeli Zionist political project that has instilled [in us] schizophrenia [in our attitude towards the Jews] from which we have not yet awakened.

“The intensity of the Jew-hatred disseminated by the media and by art, literature and political cartoons [in the Arab world] has reached a degree that cannot be ignored. No one, of course, is arguing that the Jewish and Israeli arena itself is free of a culture of hatred within it. In the extremist religious Jewish schools, there is [also] the  same  takfir [i.e., accusing others of heresy, as there is among Muslims] and differentiation between the [Jewish] people and the ‘gentiles,’ who are worthless and may be robbed and killed. From these schools emerged the well-known extremist terrorists Meir Kahane and Baruch Goldstein.

“However, anti-Semitism in the Arab world is the product of loathsome, racist education that is rooted in the Arab mentality that is used to labeling people according to tribal, family and racial affiliation, and according to the religious school to which they belong. It is this education that prompted thousands of Jews who were citizens of Arab countries to emigrate after the establishment of the State of Israel. … (This is the same mentality faced by Christians of the Arab Orient and by all other religious [non-Muslim] streams in the region).

Full article at MEMRI.

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