Muslim Anti-Semitism

Retiring Malaysian dictator Mahathir Mohamad continues his ahistorical anti-semitic rant:

"We [Muslims] sympathize with [the Jews]. We were very sad to see how the Jews were so ill-treated by the Europeans."

He reiterated Thursday that the root problem between Jews and Muslims was the occupation of Arab land to form the state of Israel.

"It is not religion at all. It is territorial," he said. "You take somebody's land and they will fight for it."

Mahathir Mohamad's Malaysia, which is 4,800 miles from Israel, has never had a significant Jewish community. So that might help explain Mahathir's ignorance of Muslim ill-treatment of Jews.

In fact, Jewish communities throughout the Middle East had been expelled by the local Muslims (and Jewish land and property confiscated) before there was a State of Israel.

For example, the Jewish community of Hebron (now in the disputed part of the West Bank), which had existed almost continuously for centuries, was nearly exterminated in Muslim pogroms in the 1920s and 1930s, and finally extinguished in 1948 when the city was illegally captured by the Jordanians.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at October 30, 2003 10:18 AM