Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Andrew Bostom: Cleveland’s Imamate of Jew Hate

Dr. Andrew Bostom, the best-selling author of The Legacy of Jihad and the forthcoming The Legacy of Anti-Semitism, has offered his analysis of the recent Ahmed Alzaree situation at the Islamic Center of Cleveland this afternoon for the New English Review:

Cleveland’s Imamate of Jew Hate

. . . Alzaree’s March 2003 sermons are in fact far worse than has been portrayed by the Cleveland media. One assumes that either they have not been read at all, or at best only perused, and those reading these sermons, by and large, have no idea about the virulently Antisemitic motifs in the Koran and hadith (i.e., the words, deeds, and even physical gestures of Muhammad as recorded by pious Muslim transmitters). Moreover, these sermons were also virulently Christianophobic, invoking combined anti-Christian/Jew-hating motifs from the Koran (for example, Koran 4:157–159), as well as anti-Christian eschatology (linked explicitly to Jew-hating eschatology) from the hadith, particularly with regard to “Jesus,” or to be precise, the Muslim simulacrum of Jesus, “Isa,” as characterized in Islam’s foundational texts. Alzaree simply recounts Islamic doctrine (as per the Koran and hadith) regarding “Isa” — the Muslim Jesus — which emphasizes the Jews overall perfidy, especially their gloating (but unknowingly “false”) claim to have killed Isa. According to this sacralized Islamic narrative, Isa is merely a Muslim prophet whose ultimate “job description” includes the destruction of Christianity. Thus Alzaree’s sermon invokes the canonical hadith that this Muslim Jesus — who was never crucified — the perfidious Jews prodding the Roman’s to kill Isa’s “body double” — will return as a full-throated Muslim to break the cross, kill the pig, and end the payment of the deliberately humiliating Koranic (9:29) poll-tax demanded of Christians (i.e., the jizya). This hadith states, “He [Isa] will fight the people for the cause of Islam. He will break the cross, kill swine, and abolish jizya” — because Christians will be converted to Islam (and thus exempt from the jizya), or eliminated — “Allah will perish all religions except Islam.” Alzaree concluded the second sermon with an apocalyptic canonical hadith — repeated in the 1988 Hamas Charter (in article 7) — stating if a Jew seeks refuge under a tree or a stone, these objects will be able to speak to tell a Muslim: “There is a Jew behind me; come and kill him!”
I doubt you'll read that kind of analysis anywhere in the Ohio establishment media. Follow this link for my previous Ahmed Alzaree posts.