Antisemitism v Islamophobia

You can't oppose one and not the other!

Antisemitism and Islamophobia are almost identical. And yet, we’re watching them square off against each other, inviting us to ‘pick a side’. It’s absurd, it’s irrational, and it’s pushing us to the brink of civilisational collapse.

Antisemitism is far older. At first, Jews were persecuted for monotheism, but after the Romans embraced Christianity, they were treated as pariahs for not being Christian. In the nineteenth century, it was quite normal for an educated European Christian to be antisemitic; few would have accused them of immoral or unjust behaviour, and even fewer would have used the word racism. There were dissenting voices, but they were a minority. Antisemitism was socially acceptable.

After the Second World War, antisemitism became officially unacceptable, though it’s on the rise again today. Islamophobia, however, has become the norm, even while it mimics antisemitism almost perfectly in form and substance. In fact, it practically is antisemitism; we’re just too blind to see it.

Whereas Jews were collectively blamed for the death of Christ and the Black Death, Muslims are blamed for 9/11, or child abuse. Jews are blamed for conspiring to take over the world via finance and media control, and Muslims are accused of wanting to spread Sharia law across the globe, or being behind organised child abuse gangs.

The racism begins on religious grounds, then moves to the political and economic, though the last step is always the conversion of a religious group into a ‘race’, so that we can speak of them as one entity with shared characteristics. Of course, it’s obvious that Jews and Muslims aren’t bounded by ‘race’ or ethnicity. They are highly diverse, differentiated groups, including citizens from every continent; whites, blacks, browns; atheists, zealots, mystics, leftists, conservatives, and radicals.

When we treat them as one, however, we can punish them all for the crimes, or alleged crimes, of the few. The result is discriminatory laws, expulsions, withdrawals of civil liberties, travel and immigration restrictions, and bans on religious symbols. The inevitable peak is violence: attacks on synagogues and mosques, illegal drone attacks, bombings, invasions, and simple genocide.

So why do we do this? Part of the problem is propaganda: Western neo-imperialist narratives, Hindutva, Hasbara, Islamic zealotry; ideologies that play on fear and hatred, making people believe their prejudice is rational. We end up incapable of seeing that antisemitism and Islamophobia rest on the same core myths, the same cognitive bias, the same racism.

But why do we need this racism in the first place? I would argue that the answer lies in the urge to ‘scapegoat’. The term scapegoating comes from the old Jewish practice of sacrificing two goats on Yom Kippur, one for God, and the other for the community. The idea was that the second could carry away the sins of the people, bringing about a collective atonement.

Today, we talk about scapegoating as a way of displacing our own sins onto a convenient target. We see this in families where one child is often cast as the ‘golden child’, who can do no wrong, and the other is blamed for everything, absorbing all the punishment and execration. The process is often unconscious. The family projects onto the scapegoat the parts of itself that cannot accept — what Carl Jung called the Shadow.

For centuries, Jews and Muslims have been scapegoated by other groups projecting their shadow onto them. Every society in human history has done this, and no amount of counter-argument will dislodge the tendency. The only solution is self-awareness. Unless we have the courage to look at ourselves, to confront the parts of ourselves we despise, our fear, our self-hatred, our shame, it will go on forever. Most political failures, at their root, are failures of self-knowledge. Antisemitism and Islamophobia are no exception.

On Thursday, I'll serialise a short story that explores these same themes. The entire piece will be available to paid subscribers.