[Published on the Roger Cohen blog, NYT, September 6, 2009].
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The Egyptian cultural minister responded in 2008, in the following fashion to a deputy of the Egyptian parliament who was alarmed that Israeli books could be introduced into the Alexandria Library: “Burn these books; if there are any there, I will myself burn them in front of you”?
Now he is leading candidate for UNESCO, to the alarm of Claude Lanzmann (author of the documentary "Shoah"), Bernard-Henri Lévy (philosopher) and Elie WieselNobel (prize winner in literature). They want "to prevent the irreparable".
But are they barking up the wrong tree?
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When confronting a single statement, or just a few statements, one has to be cautious about the context that brought them up. This is what happens when people joke: people utter statements that make no sense in a more global context, and the logical incoherence gives pleasure (probably a way evolution has found to encourage the imagination, the source of mental insight).
But statements that make no sense in a more general, but intended context, can happen in other situations too, and not just to amuse, but to instruct directly. Maybe Hosny was trying to shake things up, while giving a few rhetoric morsels to opponents. That is what his "solemn" excuses seem to indicate.
"Anti-Semitism" has come to mean "Anti-Judaism". "Anti-Judaism" originated with Christianism, the so called Catholic Orthodoxy of emperor Constantine and many of his imperial, superstitious, fanatical and extremely atrocious successors.
At the time, the Catholics were busy killing everybody they disagreed with, and they disagreed with whoever had the slightest different philosophy about anything. The Jews barely escaped with their lives as a culture and religion, others were so thoroughly exterminated, nearly nobody knows their names (Arians, Nestorians, Gnostics, etc...). Three centuries later, the concept of fanatical Anti-Judaism was picked up by those who wrote the Qur'an (a bunch of military men under Caliph Uthman, ~ 645 CE).
The Qur'an is violently against the "Jews". OK, not as ferociously as it is for the extermination of some other categories of unbelievers. But I do not see Elie Wiesel, Claude Lanzmann and Bernard-Henri Lévy protesting against the blatant hatred of the Jews in the Qur'an. Why? All the more troubling since Adolf Hitler expressed his admiration for, and knowledge of Islam many times (let alone made more than friends with the Mufti of Jerusalem!)
It seems clear to me that, as long as the Qur'an will be viewed as "holy", all what is inside will be viewed as "holy". Many statements in the Qur'an can be interpreted as calling for the death of Jews and saying they refused God, and Muhammad, and are unbelievers, etc... All these categories of thinkers the Qur'an calls to kill. Shocking but true.
I know this sort of observation on the text of a superstition is viewed as "racist" by people with little brainpower. But it is not anymore racist than observing that the Christian superstition's highest authorities tortured to death millions of Jews and other "heretics" over the centuries. In that sense the catholic Hitler was just the bouquet final of attempted Jewish holocausts(and Hitler was, indeed, not so discreetly supported by the Pope himself).
The hadiths of Muhammad, another sacred text of Islam go even further than the Qur'an: "The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. 'O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him'".(Sahih al-Bukhari 4:52:177) This hadith has been quoted countless times, and it has become a part of the charter of Hamas.
So let those lions of justice and courage, Elie Wiesel, Claude Lanzmann and Bernard-Henri Lévy, lay the blame where it mostly lays. Differently from Hosny, they are better protected, so we expect more from them.
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Patrice Ayme
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[A much longer and elaborated version, filling in a lot of savory details, will hopefully be put on:
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/]
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