In his March 30 commentary “Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and two responses to darkness,” Warren Harbeck, in reference to “certain imams in eastern Canada … proclaiming that Allah wants all Jews killed,” wondered, in seeming astonishment, if these incidents were “examples of anti-Semitism to justify Islamophobia.”
Huh, you would logically ask, how could such hateful words spoken by Muslim imams not justify some concerns about Islam, or “Islamophobia” if you choose to embrace a politically-correct term used by so-called “progressives” to shut down any debate or discussion, a kind of linguistic fascism which at the end of the road leads to nothing but tyranny. A “phobia,” by the way, is a medical term referring to an irrational fear, like arachnophobia, a fear of spiders.
Well, Harbeck gives an answer to this seeming conundrum in his mind by citing his leftist Rabbi friend, Shaul Osadchey, who, while acknowledging that “there have been recent reports such as those about a few imams who preach hate and violence toward Jews, Christians, and others,” opines, however, that one should be “very cautious about generalizing this to many imams” as they these imams are extremists, “a small fringe and who are disavowed by the majority of their co-religionists.”
In Harbeck’s mind, his friend Osadchey’s opinion on the matter settles it. Noteworthy, however, that while Hitler’s Mein Kampf, the “gold-standard” for anti-Semitism, contains seven per cent anti-Jewish text, 9.3 per cent of the text in the Islamic trilogy, which defines Islam (Koran, Sira, and Hadith) is anti-Jewish, according to Bill Warner, founder and director of the Center for the Study of Political Islam. I wonder.
Another Jew, Lorrie Goldstein, a columnist for The Toronto Sun, provides another perspective to that of Osadchey in a recent article, “Here’s why I fear Islam, Prime Minister.”
Citing the diatribes from imams in Canada calling for death to the Jews in their sermons, Goldstein concluded, “As a Jew, my fear of Islam – pertaining specifically to that malignant and widespread strain of it that hates Jews – is completely rational.”
Ron Voss
