Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

MEMRI is a right-wing Israeli organization that seeks to attribute Arab and Muslim hostility to Israel to anti-Semitism and thereby divert attention from the agony of the Palestinians. This perspective is both absurd and morally repugnant. That said, Islamist antisemitism is also absurd and morally repugnant. Middle East experts who are rightly critical of attempts to demonize all Islamists should not go to the opposite extreme of idealizing them all. The fact that Islamist antisemitism is often used to divert attention from Palestinian suffering does not mean it can be ignored. The following statements by the former Turkish prime minister Prof. Necmettin Erbakan, who is the founder and leader of the Islamist movement Milli Gorus are clearly outrageous. And those of us outraged by Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians should condemn such rhetoric just as vehemently as we condemn the bigotry of Christian and Jewish religious reactionaries. If we do not, we simply invert the moral myopia of the neoconservatives.

MEMRI:
Erbakan: “When we look at the map of the world, we see about 200 countries painted in colors, and we think that there are many races, religions, and nations. The fact is that for 300 years, all these [200 nations] have been controlled from one center only. This center is the racist, imperialist Zionism. Unless you make this correct diagnosis for the illness, you cannot find the cure to it. You will ask, ‘What is this belief, this racist imperialism that destroys happiness in this world?’

“This belief began 5,765 years ago, when the children of Israel were living in Egypt, with a book of magic that was written by someone called Kabbala. The author or authors of this book later claimed that they belonged to the tribe of Moses, but this is not true. They distorted the Tevrat [bible] of Moses and put in it the Kabbala. If you want to see proof of this, you can look at their Tevrat and then look at the Kabbala.

“What do these people believe in? Their belief has four principles [while ours has six] that say: […] 1) You are the real people of God; all others are created to be your slaves; you were created as men and others [were created] as monkeys that later turned into men. This is what they believe and what they teach. They believe that they are the superior class. 2) This superiority will be not only in thought, but will be materialized, actually realized. They will be the masters and the others will be their slaves. 3) For all this to come true, they must perform three duties: The first duty will be to gather all the exiled sons of Israel into Quds [Jerusalem]; the second duty is to build the ‘Greater Israel’ between the Nile and the Euphrates, within these determined borders, and to provide for the safety of this Greater Israel.

“Do you know what the safety of Israel means? It means that they will rule the 28 countries from Morocco to Indonesia. Since all the Crusades were organized by the Zionists, and since it was our forefathers the Seljuks who stopped them, according to the Kabbala there should be no sovereign state in Anatolia. This is these people’s [i.e. the Jews’] religion, their faith. You can’t argue or negotiate with them. This is their religion, and it comes from the Kabbala.