Anti-Zionism is related to anti-Semitism

RE: OPPOSING ZIONISM IS NOT ANTI-SEMITIC (APRIL 4)

Andrew Bell’s argument that anti-Zionism is not related to anti-Semitism is false.

Pew polls consistently confirm that more than 90 per cent of the people in many of the Muslim- majority states of the Middle East have an animosity toward Jews. The Qur’an refers to Jews as the descendants of apes and pigs and demands their conversion, submission or execution. Imams in Canada and around the world pray for death to the Jews.

When East Jerusalem was illegally occupied by Jordan from 1949-67, they expelled the Jews from there and destroyed their cemeteries and synagogues. Chants to free Palestine from the river to the sea reinforce the Palestinian pledge to create a Jew-free state. Islamic students tweet their admiration of Hitler from Western campuses. Need I go on?!

With rare exception, Islam bears a deep hatred of Jews that dates not to 1948, but all the way back to Mohammed when the Jews refused to accept him as a prophet and to convert to Islam. Didn’t something similar happen after the Jews refused to accept the Christian God?

It is this 1,400-year-old hatred that drives the modern Arab-Israeli conflict and writers like Andrew Bell, especially if they themselves are not anti-Semitic, must hold the Islamic world accountable for the anti-Jewish hatred that infests it. To do otherwise is to wilfully embrace an anti-Semitic goal.

Steven Scheffer, Burlington