27-Nov-10: Quote of the day

Moslem Pakistani-born journalist Tarek Fatah immigrated to Canada from Saudi Arabia in 1987 and founded the Muslim Canadian Congress. Now he says if Muslims in the Middle East have anyone to blame for their plight it's their own political and religious leaders. In his newly published book, The Jew Is Not My Enemy, he argues that despite his solidarity with the Palestinian cause "I denounce anti-Semitism and refuse to hate either Israel or the Jewish people."

• The Palestinians, espousing an all-or-nothing doctrine, repeatedly have squandered opportunities to secure a state for themselves.
• The virulent anti-Semitism that has infiltrated Islam is a "medieval madness that is creating monsters within the Muslim community."
• Muslims are told early and often by clerics and in religious tracts that Jews are the descendants of pigs and apes and the brothers of monkeys, that they annually sacrifice people to drink their blood.
• This has been fuelled by the spread of Wahhabism, courtesy of a wealthy "Saudi hate machine" that geared up in earnest after oil prices soared in 1973. Saudi Arabia preaches hatred of Jews in its schoolbooks and that it exports Korans that feature interpretations promoting Judeophobia.
• Clerics regularly close Friday prayers with a call to arms to defeat the Jews. By contrast, Fatah notes, Jewish scriptures and teachings do not feature anti-Muslim preachings.
• "I have spent countless hours trying to locate explicit attacks on Islam by Jewish religious authorities, but have found little evidence of such literature."
• His book points out that Israeli Arabs regularly state a preference for living in Israel rather than under Hamas or Fatah rule or other Middle East regimes. Many hold favourable views about Jews, says Fatah. When he has randomly asked Israeli Arabs if they believe Israel is an "apartheid state," they laugh out loud.
• His fellow Muslims "have a choice. Either we allow ourselves to be consumed by hatred, or we approach Jews as fellow human beings, at worst as adversaries in a political dispute, not as monsters destined to be our enemy for all time."