First, read

http://jmm.aaa.net.au/articles/21447.htm

then this:

Bat Ye’or

Comments

I fully agree with Mark Durie’s analysis of the Muslim theological view on Jews and Christians. The distinction he mentions between the two religious groups has many factors. Jews lived in Medina but not Christians; they were artisans, cultivators, poets and scholars. The community met every Sabbath and on festive days in its synagogues to study the Bible. Pagan Arabs were jealous of them and asked Muhammad for a Book similar to that of the Jews which would give them moral guidance. Muhammad’s wish to put his new religion in the continuity of the biblical faith led to quarrels with the Jews caused by the numerous inconsistencies between the Bible and Muhammad’s assertions. Muhammad, who never read the Bible, then accused the Jews of knowing the truth—his revelation— but concealing it out of jealousy for its perfection. Jewish resistance to his demand to recognize his message as in conformity with the Bible led to their expulsion from Medina and, in the case of the last Jewish tribe, the massacre of every man and the deportation and enslavement of their wives and children.

The other factors pertain to Christian hatred of Jews in the surrounding Byzantine provinces, where the anti-Jewish Byzantine laws initiated for the first time an era of severe religious persecution and huge massacres of Jewish communities in Palestine, Egypt, and the Middle East. Venomous anti-Jewish accusations by Church Fathers like St. Chrysostom and St. Augustine resonated in the Qur’an. Jews represented a weak, persecuted people easy to prey upon, while Christians were protected by a powerful empire. However, in the Qur’an we see an evolution for the worse against Christians, whose characterization as "associationists" (those who associate others to Allah) earned them a greater wrath than the Jews.

Mark Durie rightly points out the Jewish negation of traditional Muslim hatred and their constant persecution of Jews. This is mainly a result of the traumatic experience of the Shoah and the wish to develop peaceful relations with the Muslim world, in the hope that denying the truth will impact and change reality. With some exceptions, Ashkenazi Jews ignored Jewish dhimmi history and Islamic civilization. Dr. Andrew Bostom’s superb anthology of Jewish life in Islamic lands will hopefully correct this vacuum. In Europe, Jewish communities constitute the most vulnerable and endangered people, victims of repeated murders, aggressions, insults and vandalism mainly done by immigrants. This results from forty years of constant indoctrination of hate against Israel as a European pro-Palestinian policy and a denial by state authorities until 2003-04 of antisemitism in Europe. This changed in France with President Sarkozy, especially after the recent horrific attack in Paris on a young Jew that left him for some days in a coma.

But we note the same attitude of denial in Christian academia and politicians who keep the history of jihad and dhimmitude under wraps and spread the Golden Age mythology, to be found in the High Level Group Report of the Alliance of Civilizations (here and here), a body link to the UN. Those who dare oppose its politically correct multicultural doctrine and infringed its strategy and rules, as academics, teachers, writers, politicians, priests or journalists sometimes do – suffer law-suits, harassment in their jobs and threats under the accusation of Islamophobia. Muslim apostates and freethinkers are even more targeted.

When I published The Decline of Eastern Christianity.From Jihad to Dhimmitude (French ed. 1991), an Italian Catholic priest sent me a letter criticizing the truthfulness of my analysis on the basis that it will justify Muslim violence whereas pretending that Islam was a religion of tolerance and love would encourage Muslims to prove it. This latter approach became—from the 1960s—the foundation of Western world policy and the main instrument of its current dhimmitude. Terrorism has seized hostage both truth and intellectual freedoms.