Quote of the Day

I came across this passage in the book I'm reading, Robert Wistrich's A Lethal Obsession: Antisemitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad. It explains a lot about whassup today (and why that 'two-state solution' is and will remain a non-starter):

The emancipation of the Jews in Israel/Palestine from Muslim rule by 1948 was a theological-political  problem of the first magnitude. It came to haunt Islamic fundamentalists precisely because of its symbolic importance. Muhammad's early victory over the Jews was traditionally seem as a prelude to Islam's impending world conquests and future ascendancy. However, repeated Muslim military defeats by Jews after 1948, the fact of Israel's political independence and its rule over a sizable Muslim population--not to mention the capture of East Jerusalem in 1967--seemed to signal the opposite trend. It was as if Islamic civilization itself was beginnning to unravel. The rapidly expanding anti-Jewish literature inspired by the Koran, the hadiths and other Islamic sources must be seen in this historical context. The harshness, hysteria and apolcalyptic tones built upon a systematic satanization of the Jews no less extreme than anything in medieval Christendom or in Nazi propaganda. None other than the rector of Al-Azhar University in Cairo (under President Sadat) declared in 1974: "As for those who struggle against the Faithful [the Muslims], they struggle against the elimination of oppression and emnity. They struggle in the way of Satan. Allah commands the Muslims to fight the friends of Satan wherever they may be found. And among Satan's friends--indeed, his best friends in our age--are the Jews."

Al-Azhar University, in case your memory needs jogging, is where Obama chose to give his infamous "outreach" speech to the Muslim world.

Update: This is good, too:

In the past thirty years, this left-wing masquerade has become considerably more toxic, even when anti-Semitism comes nicely wrapped in the radiant and beatific glow of human rights. This is a post-Holocaust Jew hatred with a good conscience because it claims to speak in the name of the oppressed and the "damned of the earth"--a language also adopted by Ayatollah Khomeini at the very outset of the Iranian Revolution in 1979. It is unavowed--an "anti-Semitism without anti-Semites"--impeccably "anti-imperialist" yet fully mobilized, in the Iranian case, to wipe Israel off planet or forcibly remove it elsewhere. As a consquence of this Islamo-fascist axis (backed by "Islamo-progressive" fellow-travelers), the genocidal perspective has been reopened after sixty years, aiming once more at the radical uprooting of the Jewish people from its homeland. The focus of the "new" anti-Semites is disproportionately centered on one tiny spot on the world's surface--the State of Israel--as if that place were the source of all discord, dissension, subversion and terror in the world today. This negationist anti-Zionism that delegitimizes and dehumanizes Zisrael is not only Manichean in the philosophical sense, but totalitarian in its polical essence, and theological in its insistence that Israel was "born in sin." Its demonological fantasies about the "wickedness" of Israeli Jews have become obsessive, animated by the conspiratorial anti-Semitism embodied in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion--currently so popular in the Arab world.