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Mr. Mohaeimen and Mr. Amanullah’s analysis and comments to The Oberlin Review about recent expressions of Islamic Judeophobia are judicious reactions to a terrible problem, which unfortunately, is all too familiar, in its psychodynamics and even its terminology. Paranoid thinking; stereotyping; scape-goating; wild projections of power and control to demonized “others” are certainly nothing new in Jewish experience and in that of other groups, although the ability of this particular dynamic to adhere to racially constructed Jews in so many different cultural contexts and eras is as baffling as it is troubling.

Now Islam even has a version of the blood libel against Jews, a sorry borrowing from medieval and early modern Christianity, as well as Europe of the imperial era, and an utter innovation to Islam. (Would knowledge of its illegitimate paternity help delegitimize this terrible myth among Muslims? What are Muslim nationalists doing adopting such filth from Christian, colonialist, Europe?)

As the authors note, expressions of racialized, paranoid hostility to funny-looking Jews deflect desperately needed attention from economic, social and political problems of crisis proportions and are themselves symptoms of a pathology that must be addressed if further problems, which have caused unfathomable catastrophe for European societies (never mind Jews), are not to be created for the Muslim world. More frightening than the ravings of Mahathir Mohammad is the wildly enthusiastic reception – a standing ovation – they got from the delegates to the conference of the Organization of Islamic Countries, including representatives of Afghanistan, Jordan and Egypt, who one would think, know better: both that the substance of those remarks was nonsense and that that type of thinking and rhetoric is as dangerous as it is misdirected.

How do you say, “Been there, done that” in Arabic? Malay? Can History heal social pathology? I certainly hope so. Would that Mssrs. Mohaiemen and Amanullah get their word out.

–Shulamit Magnus
Associate Professor
Jewish Studies and History

The Review requested Shulamit Magnus’s response to Naeem Mohaiemen’s column last week. Point-Counterpoint is a column for the Oberlin community to debate the pressing issues of today.