Redeeming Humanity from the Evil of the Jews: Islamist Rationalization of Antisemitism

Abstract

siveness, this will not forever be the case [ … ]. It can be said that, of all the peoples of the world, only the Jews lack any [common] features that make them into a people, except for their religion, and throughout history this has never been sufficient to make them into a kind of nation. They have always been, and still are, nothing but concentrations of greedy crooks. Even if wars will not defeat them today, history indicates that a million Hitlers from all over the world will [appear and] eliminate them and get rid of them forever.This will not be long in coming, because they are the problem of the whole world and not just the Arabs. ⁴ signals the recognition of the failure of that ideological alternative and represents an un-compromising determination by a new generation of Muslims to redesign Islamism and to bring Islam as a “ master signifier ” back to the center stage of politics, economics, society and culture.This twenty-first century Islamism, an amorphous entity splintered by objectiv-ity and subjective elements but united in methodology of unmitigated violence, was born out of the impotence of a Muslim leadership that abysmally failed to repair injustices and humiliation inflicted upon the umma by yesterday ’ s colonizers and today ’ s imperia-lists.²²