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I (coincidentally) stumbled across those infamous hadith passages about Jews the other day. Legolas Send a noteboard - 07/06/2010 09:41:39 AM
You know, the ones about stones crying out "Oh Muslim, there's a Jew behind me, come kill him" and all that crap. Turns out that they are all "end of days" type stuff, in passages detailing all the things that will supposedly happen when the Mahdi and/or Jesus return and the world ends and all (on the same level with predictions that the Muslims will fight the Turks, and with people who "wear shoes made of hair" and "broad-faced people whose faces will look like shields coated with leater". Which nobody ever mentions, of course. It's a bit like quoting from Revelations and taking it seriously.

And you know, other than those verses, you'd be hard-pressed to find anything that is really anti-Jewish or anti-Semite in either the Qur'an or the major hadith collections. Sure, there's a lot about how they don't stick to their religion and misinterpret or have falsified their own holy texts, but then that's kind of an unavoidable stance to take for someone who claims to be the final prophet. And they are blamed for having tried to kill Jesus, but obviously in that regard the Christians viewed things the same way. If you really go searching for hadiths or other stories that show something about how Muhammad treated the Jews or wanted them to be treated, you'll generally find it's quite positive, except in cases of war. There's even a hadith rebuking anti-Semitism - about how Muhammad respectfully stood up when a funeral procession passed, and after being told it was only for a Jew, said "So what, is he not a human too?"

Bottom line is that while a radical Muslim can find religious justifications for anti-Semitism if he looks hard enough and is willing to pull things out of context, he has to reach to do it. Hamas' propaganda that pretends Jews are some kind of eternal enemy of the Muslims is completely false, and as an opponent of Hamas, you should fight it, not run with it.

And the other bottom line is that you have to be very, very careful with making generalizations about Jewish beliefs during the two thousand years since the destruction of the Temple. If there's one thing my Jewish History class taught me, it's that those Jewish beliefs have varied wildly. As did their actions, for that matter. It is your view of history that is "rather limited" because of your misguided generalizations. One has to judge events or people by the standards and the circumstances and the knowledge of the time. It's easy to say afterwards that the Jews who followed Shabtai Zevi were stupid or gullible - because you know how his story ends. But for someone actually living in his time, it was not so easy to determine that Zevi was not the real Messiah.
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Jacqueline Rose on the Dreyfus affair and related problems, in the LRB - 06/06/2010 11:28:14 AM 1071 Views
What she has to say about Dreyfus is very interesting. - 06/06/2010 04:48:16 PM 863 Views
Re: What she has to say about Dreyfus is very interesting. - 06/06/2010 04:56:32 PM 788 Views
*remains amused at the suggestion of the Dreyfus Affairs "pertinence" to "current" events* - 06/06/2010 05:14:23 PM 790 Views
I agree in part and (strongly) disagree in part. - 06/06/2010 05:40:26 PM 766 Views
"If it's an eternal struggle, how could there ever be a solution or a peace?" - 06/06/2010 06:20:39 PM 827 Views
Purim may or may not refer to a historic event. Even if it does, Haman was not likely an Arab. - 07/06/2010 12:00:05 AM 680 Views
I second your main point. - 07/06/2010 12:09:42 AM 690 Views
I don't discount that there is Arab blood in many or even most "Arabs". - 07/06/2010 12:18:32 AM 682 Views
Okay, fair enough then. *NM* - 07/06/2010 08:45:19 AM 300 Views
The holiday is centuries old and real, regardless. - 07/06/2010 12:28:59 AM 768 Views
You're still missing the major point here. - 07/06/2010 12:44:08 AM 676 Views
That seems a rather limited view of history. - 07/06/2010 01:10:11 AM 781 Views
What the Hell are you going on about? - 07/06/2010 04:08:19 AM 733 Views
Oooh - 07/06/2010 11:07:43 AM 598 Views
Yeah, to whom was the claim on that land given? - 07/06/2010 10:35:42 PM 729 Views
jeez Joel... - 07/06/2010 04:24:47 AM 717 Views
No, the Persians are not Arabs. - 07/06/2010 10:09:47 PM 845 Views
I (coincidentally) stumbled across those infamous hadith passages about Jews the other day. - 07/06/2010 09:41:39 AM 762 Views
So? - 07/06/2010 10:50:49 PM 750 Views
So the relevance of apocalyptic passages is close to zero. - 07/06/2010 11:55:05 PM 710 Views
Not to mention - 08/06/2010 09:09:27 AM 647 Views
Then why are they canon? - 08/06/2010 06:25:09 PM 898 Views
are you claiming that people would pull some things out of holy text and ignore the rest? - 08/06/2010 12:16:41 PM 780 Views
*NM* - 08/06/2010 01:16:13 PM 295 Views
well, for me this just proves why we are not supposed to live among non-Jews - 06/06/2010 11:39:45 PM 861 Views
how so? - 06/06/2010 11:41:18 PM 638 Views
It reminds me of what I kept thinking as I read it. - 07/06/2010 12:51:36 AM 662 Views
couldn't get past the part where anyone who opposes Obama is a racist *NM* - 08/06/2010 01:40:07 AM 471 Views
You hallucinated? *NM* - 08/06/2010 08:39:37 AM 347 Views
No, that would've been one of the places where she should've shut up. *NM* - 08/06/2010 08:58:11 AM 284 Views
No - 08/06/2010 09:08:04 AM 643 Views
I think he's not talking about that bit, but about the very first paragraph. - 08/06/2010 09:30:21 AM 770 Views
If there was more I didn't get far enough to hear it - 08/06/2010 12:09:47 PM 631 Views
That's the problem with the speech - the large majority of what she had to say was worthwhile. - 08/06/2010 01:15:39 PM 696 Views
The problem is blatant bias - 08/06/2010 02:24:57 PM 672 Views

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