Wised Up Jew Refuses to Fall for Fatah and His Fatuousness

Since Jews appear to be the intended audience of Tarek Fatah's The Jew is Not My Enemy (I can't imagine it being embraced by Muslim groups and the Toronto Islamic Book Fair--if there were such a thing--as it has by Jewish groups and the Toronto Jewish Book Fair), I'm delighted to see a Jew take on and expose Fatah's bollocks, portions of which has been excerpted in the National Post. In a letter to the editor, Michael Devolin of Tweed, Ont. writes:

Re: A Koranic Take On Israel, book excerpt from Tarek Fatah’s The Jew Is Not My Enemy, Oct. 28.

As usual, Tarek Fatah reveals himself as the quintessential sophist when he writes, “Until the 20th century, most Islamic scholars read these verses as benign words about a people whom they had vanquished more than a millennium ago and who posed no threat to the Muslim world.”

Muslim anti-Jewish hatred is documented as far back as 950-1250 CE. A recounting of this ancient Islamic hatred of the Jews was made public by S.D. Goitein when he revealed the existence of the Geniza record stored in Cairo. Andrew Bostom describes this work as “prima facie evidence that there was already a unique form of Islamic anti-Jewish hatred a millennium ago.”

The Geniza record reveals that the Jews of this era had by then adopted a unique term for what was by then an unremarkable Muslim anti-Jewish hatred: sinuth. Bostom points out that this hatred was the result of a certain Jewish “stubborn denial of Muhammad’s message” and that it was existent “a millennium before serious colonial penetration of the region.”

The reality facing the Jews (and especially the Jews of Israel) is that they have been hated by Muslims ever since the advent of Muhammad and his Islam, precisely because of the negative representations of the Jew written in the Koran and the Hadiths.

Right on, Michael! I couldn't have said it better myself.