Very interesting (and controversial) lecture by a German scholar on Hitler's impact on contemporary Middle Eastern thinking with regard to Jews.
Today I will be laying special emphasis on the antisemitism of the ancestor of all forms of Islamism, the Muslim Brotherhood. Why? Because it seems to me that this organization has a particularly strong presence in Britain. Because – as far as I can tell - only in Britain has it succeeded in forging an alliance with certain sections of the left – the Socialist Workers Party and Ken Livingstone spring to mind here. This alliance might also partly explain why one hears proposals being voiced in Britain that leave us in Germany, mindful of what happened in 1933, simply stunned. I am referring here to proposals for a boycott of Israel and I appreciate the British government’s response to the “Report of the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism” which states that “such selective boycotts … are anti-Jewish in practice” and are “an assult on academic freedom and intellectual exchange.”
Islamic antisemitism is a taboo subject even in some parts of academia: a story of intellectual betrayal and the corrupting influence of political commitment. Professor Pieter von der Horst from the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands found this out when he proposed to give a lecture on the topic of the anti-Jewish blood libel. The head of the university asked him to excise the section of his lecture dealing with Islamic antisemitism. When he refused to do so, he was invited to appear before a panel of four professors who insisted he remove these passages. A lecture on Islamic antisemitism, so the argument went, might lead to violent reactions from well-organized Muslim student groups.
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