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ABSTRACT
The predicament faced by Muslims today, either in the United Kingdom specifically or in the West more generally, is often compared with the predicament faced by Jews at some point in the past. Muslims, it is suggested, are the new Jews. Klug's article homes in on one element in this view, the claim that Islamophobia is the new antisemitism, and considers the analogy between them. An introductory section sketches the political context, after which Klug focuses on logical or conceptual issues. The two middle sections contain the core of the analysis: consideration of the two terms ‘antisemitism’ and ‘Islamophobia’ in relation to the concepts they denote, followed by an examination of the concepts as such. Certain conclusions are drawn about both their general logic and their specific logics. The final section returns to the political context and, via critique of a thesis put forward by Matti Bunzl, discusses the uses of the analogy. Klug argues that the question we need to ask is not ‘Are Islamophobia and antisemitism analogous?’ but ‘What is the analogy worth?’ The value of the analogy lies in the light it sheds on the social and political realities that confront us in the here and now. Does it illuminate more than it obscures? These things are a matter of judgement. Klug leans towards asserting an analogy between antisemitism in the past and Islamophobia in the present, within limits.
Notes
1 At the time, Malik was International Development Minister in the New Labour government of Gordon Brown. Subsequently, he was Justice Minister, Home Office Minister and Minister for Race, Faith and Community Cohesion.
2 ‘Muslims “under siege like Jews”’, BBC News, 4 July 2008, available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/bradford/7489392.stm (viewed 4 August 2014).
3 Steve Doughty, ‘“We Muslims are the new Jews” says MP who has been victim of a hit-and-run and a firebomb attack’, Daily Mail, 4 July 2008. Two years earlier, in her piece ‘Muslims are the new Jews' published in the Sunday Times (15 October 2006), India Knight called Muslims ‘the new Jews': cited in the editors' introduction in Ansari Humayun and Farid Hafez (eds), From the Far Right to the Mainstream: Islamophobia in Party Politics and the Media (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag 2012), 21. Earlier that year, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown wrote: ‘Today the new Jews of Europe are Muslims’ (‘Why Muslims must remember the Holocaust’, Independent, 23 January 2006).
4 Miriam Shahiv, ‘No, Muslims are not “new Jews”’, Jewish Chronicle, 11 July 2008, 31. For a similar approach, see Norman Lebrecht, ‘No, Muslims are not the “new Jews”’, Evening Standard, 6 February 2007.
5 Guy Rundle, ‘Rundle: what's with Galliano, Gibson ‘n’ Sheen's anti-Semitism?’, Crikey (online), 8 March 2011, available at www.crikey.com.au/2011/03/08/rundle-whats-with-galliano-gibson-n-sheens-anti-semitism/?wpmp_switcher=mobile; see also Mya Guarnieri, ‘Islamophobia: the new antisemitism’, 26 August 2010, available on the Guardian's Comment Is Free webpages at www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/aug/26/islam-religion; and Daniel Luban, ‘The new anti-Semitism’, Tablet (online), 19 August 2010, available at www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/43069/the-new-anti-semitism-2# (all viewed 3 August 2014).
6 ‘Bigotry’ might not be an adequate term. I use it as a place-marker only.
7 See Brian Klug, ‘Interrogating “new anti-Semitism”’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 36, no. 3, 2013, 468–82.
8 Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, ‘The new anti-Semitism?’, 23 November 2010, blog available on the Standpoint website at http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/3608 (viewed 3 August 2014).
9 For example, Miriam Shahiv, citing ‘police figures from 2006’, says that in Britain today ‘Jews are four times more likely to be physically attacked because of their religion than Muslims’ (Shahiv, ‘No, Muslims are not “new Jews”’). On the other hand, figures for London produced by Scotland Yard and the Greater London authority in 2005 suggest that people from a number of predominantly Muslim states are twelve to thirteen times more likely to be ‘the victim of a racial crime’ than a white European, while a Jewish person is ‘three times as likely to be subject to a racially or religiously aggravated crime’ (Hugh Muir, ‘Report reveals hierarchy of hate’, Guardian, 7 March 2005).
10 Sindre Bangstad and Matti Bunzl, ‘“Anthropologists are talking” about Islamophobia and anti-Semitism in the new Europe’, Ethnos, vol. 75, no. 2, 2010, 213–28 (215).
11 Matti Bunzl, Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Hatreds Old and New in Europe (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press 2007).
12 Matti Bunzl, Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Hatreds Old and New in Europe (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press 2007). The responses are by Dan Diner, Paul Silverstein, Adam Sutcliffe, Esther Benbassa, Susan Buck-Morss and myself.
13 Richard S. Levy, ‘Antisemitism, etymology of’, in Richard S. Levy (ed.), Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution, 2 vols (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO 2005), I, 24–5 (24). The word can also be looked at as a combination of two affixes, ‘anti’ and ‘ism’, plus the stem ‘Semite’; it comes to the same thing.
14 Richard S. Levy, ‘Antisemitism, etymology of’, in Richard S. Levy (ed.), Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution, 2 vols (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO 2005), I, 24–5 (24). The word can also be looked at as a combination of two affixes, ‘anti’ and ‘ism’, plus the stem ‘Semite’; it comes to the same thing.
15 Salman Sayyid, ‘Out of the devil's dictionary’, in Salman Sayyid and AbdoolKarim Vakil (eds), Thinking Through Islamophobia: Global Perspectives (London: Hurst 2010), 5–18 (13).
16 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell 1958), 20.
17 Fred Halliday, for example, argues that ‘the more accurate term is not “Islamophobia” but “anti-Muslimism”’: Fred Halliday, ‘“Islamophobia” reconsidered’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 22, no. 5, 1999, 892–902 (898). See also his Islam and the Myth of Confrontation: Religion and Politics in the Middle East (London: I. B. Tauris 1996), ch. 6, in which he introduces the term ‘anti-Muslimism’.
18 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 37. The interlocutor is imaginary (and could be himself).
19 ‘Secretary-General, addressing headquarters seminar on confronting Islamophobia, stresses importance of leadership, two-way integration, dialogue’, press release, 7 December 2004, available on the UN website at www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2004/sgsm9637.doc.htm (viewed 6 August 2014). Annan, who was Secretary-General at the time, was addressing a UN Department of Public Information seminar in New York. The French islamophobie has been traced back to 1918: see AbdoolKarim Vakil, ‘Is the Islam in Islamophobia the same as the Islam in anti-Islam; or, when is it Islamophobia time?’, in Sayyid and Vakil (eds), Thinking Through Islamophobia, 23–43 (38).
20 As with antisemitism, there is always room for debate about what account to give of the concept and of its relationship to neighbouring concepts, such as xenophobia. But the claim that it has no basis in reality does not hold up. See Brian Klug, ‘Islamophobia: a concept comes of age’, Ethnicities, vol. 12, no. 5, 2012, 665–81.
21 Ali Rattansi, Racism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007), 5. See also Richard L. Rubinstein and John K. Roth, Approaches to Auschwitz: The Holocaust and Its Legacy (Atlanta: John Knox Press 1987), 28.
22 The analysis of antisemitism in this section follows the analysis I first gave in ‘The collective Jew: Israel and the new antisemitism’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 37, no. 2, 2003, 117–38.
23 Similarly, Geoffrey Brahm Levey and Tariq Modood have observed: ‘What we are now witnessing in the treatment of Muslims in the West is the shift from inductive to deductive generalisations about them’: ‘Liberal democracy, multicultural citizenship and the Danish cartoon affair’, in Geoffrey Brahm Levey and Tariq Modood (eds), Secularism, Religion and Multicultural Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2009), 216–42 (239). See also Nasar Meer, ‘Semantics, scales and solidarities in the study of antisemitism and Islamophobia’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 36, no. 3, 2013, 500–15 (503).
24 ‘Rachmanism’ is a word in the Oxford English Dictionary. Rachman's exploits (or exploitations) led to the Rent Act of 1965 that gave tenants security of tenure.
25 Gordon Rayner and Steven Swinford, ‘Woolwich attack: terrorist proclaimed “an eye for an eye” after attack’, Daily Telegraph, 22 May 2013.
26 Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the ‘Philosophical Investigations’ (Oxford: Blackwell 1969), 17.
27 Salman Sayyid, ‘“Thinking through Islamophobia”’, in Sayyid and Vakil (eds), Thinking Through Islamophobia, 1–4 (2).
28 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 32.
29 This oversimplifies it. The figure of the ‘Jew’ is not just the sum of its traits but the character that results from the way those traits are put together. Even this is too quick, but it must suffice for the present purpose.
30 Simon Weaver, ‘A rhetorical discourse analysis of online anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic jokes’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 36, no. 3, 2013, 483–99 (483). On the other hand, he found that ‘the stereotypes and exclusions of Muslims and Jews presented in the jokes are not the same’ (483).
31 Simon Weaver, ‘A rhetorical discourse analysis of online anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic jokes’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 36, no. 3, 2013, 483–99 (483). On the other hand, he found that ‘the stereotypes and exclusions of Muslims and Jews presented in the jokes are not the same’ 485.
32 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books 1979).
33 Elsewhere I have argued against the idea that Judaism can be adequately summed up as a religion: see Brian Klug, Offence: The Jewish Case (London: Seagull Books 2009), 5–27. But let that pass.
34 See Brian Klug, ‘Ritual murmur: the undercurrent of protest against religious slaughter of animals in Britain in the 1980s’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 23, no. 2, 1989, 16–28. See also Tony Kushner, ‘Stunning intolerance: opposition to religious slaughter in twentieth-century Britain’, Jewish Quarterly, no. 133, 1989, 16–20.
35 I develop this theme in ‘Dealing with difference: Jews, Muslims and the British left today’, lecture delivered in the European Leo Baeck Lecture Series, London, 16 May 2013, unpublished but a podcast is available on the German Historical Institute website at www.ghil.ac.uk/download/podcast/2013-05-16_Klug.mp3 (viewed 6 August 2014).
36 Johann Gottfried Herder, quoted in Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar, ‘Orientalism and the Jews: an introduction’, in Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar (eds), Orientalism and the Jews (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press 2005), xiii–xl (xiv). Herder (1744–1803) is a figure of both the Enlightenment and the Romantic reaction that followed. Kalmar and Penslar observe: ‘orientalist depiction of the Jews was common in the late eighteenth century’ (xvi). It persisted into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
37 Sander L. Gilman, ‘Can the experience of diaspora Judaism serve as a model for Islam in today's multicultural Europe?’, in Sander L. Gilman, Multiculturalism and the Jews (London and New York: Routledge 2006), 1–22 (8).
38 Said, Orientalism, 27. There is a voluminous literature on Said's general thesis about Orientalism as well as his specific take on antisemitism.
39 Thomas Linehan, ‘Comparing antisemitism, Islamophobia, and asylophobia: the British case’, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, vol. 12, no. 2, 2012, 366–86 (380).
40 I have slightly embellished what Linehan says.
41 Linehan, ‘Comparing antisemitism, Islamophobia, and asylophobia’, 380.
42 Nasar Meer and Tehseen Noorani, ‘A sociological comparison of anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim sentiment in Britain’, Sociological Review, vol. 56, no. 2, 2008, 195–219 (209). This article is notable for its careful, measured approach, drawing attention to significant analogies and disanalogies.
43 Matthew Carr, ‘The Moriscos: a lesson from history?’, Arches Quarterly, vol. 4, no. 8, 2011, 10–17 (14).
44 Matthew Carr, ‘The Moriscos: a lesson from history?’, Arches Quarterly, vol. 4, no. 8, 2011, 14.
45 See the excerpt in Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz (eds), The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1995), 331–3.
46 Martha C. Nussbaum, The New Religious Intolerance: Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2012), 237.
47 Martha C. Nussbaum, The New Religious Intolerance: Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2012), 24.
48 Much analysis and research has, of course, been done in this area, but it is scattered and uneven.
49 Bunzl, Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, 45.
50 Bunzl, Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, 14.
51 Bunzl, Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, 45.
52 Bunzl, Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, 14.
53 Bunzl, Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, 37–43.
54 Bunzl, Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, 4.
55 Bangstad and Bunzl, ‘“Anthropologists are talking” about Islamophobia and anti-Semitism in the new Europe’, 214–15.
56 Joseph Banister, quoted in Bernard Harris, ‘Anti-alienism, health and social reform in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 31, no. 4, 1997, 3–34 (6).
57 Quoted in Bernard Harris. The passage begins: ‘While not possessed of the courage of some Asiatic races, the immateriality of others, and the love of cleanliness of others, [the Jew] is nevertheless a fair specimen of the Asiatic brand of man.’ In other words, the Jew is cowardly, materialistic and dirty—classic antisemitic qualities—and thus a poor ‘specimen’ of the ‘brand’. But there is a brand: a broad racial identity that he calls ‘Asiatic’.
58 On Islamophobia as the racialization of Muslims, see Nasar Meer and Tariq Modood, ‘The racialisation of Muslims’, in Sayyid and Vakil (eds), Thinking Through Islamophobia, 69–83. See also Nasar Meer and Tariq Modood, ‘Refutations of racism in the “Muslim question”’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 43, no. 3–4, 2009, 335–54.
59 Paul Silverstein, ‘Comment on Bunzl’, in Bunzl, Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia’, 61–8 (63–4).
60 In an unpublished discussion paper, David Cesarani rejects Bunzl's thesis. His grounds, however, are different from mine. So is his bottom line: the comparison between antisemitism and Islamophobia, in his view, ‘is not only inappropriate’ but ‘positively dangerous’ (quoted with permission of the author). See David Cesarani, ‘Are Muslims the new Jews? Comparing Islamophobia and anti-semitism in Britain and Europe’, 2008, originally a Discussion Paper for the Yale Institute for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (since closed), now available on the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy at www.isgap.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/cesarani-paper.doc (viewed 11 August 2014). See also David Cesarani, ‘Why Muslims are not the new Jews', Jewish Chronicle, 22 October 2009, and his ‘Muslims the “new Jews”? Not by a long way’, Jewish Chronicle, 17 January 2008. The latter is in part a response to the article by Maleiha Malik cited in the next footnote.
61 Maleiha Malik, ‘Muslims are now getting the same treatment Jews had a century ago’, Guardian, 2 February 2007, available on the Guardian Comment Is Free website at www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/feb/02/comment.religion1 (viewed 11 August 2014).
62 For a model of how to handle the question with both balance and sensitivity, see Sabine Schiffer and Constantin Wagner, ‘Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia—new enemies, old patterns’, Race and Class, vol. 52, no. 3, 2011, 77–84. See also Nasar Meer (ed.), Racialization and Religion: Race, Culture and Difference in the Study of Antisemitism and Islamophobia (London: Routledge 2014). The book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 36, no. 3, 2013.
63 Bunzl, Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, 37–43; Bangstad and Bunzl, ‘“Anthropologists are talking” about Islamophobia and anti-Semitism in the new Europe’, 225. The far right also leans towards Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, thus exploiting a further wedge between Muslims and Jews.
64 Quoted in Anne Karpf, ‘Don't be fooled. Europe's racists are not discerning’, Guardian, 28 March 2012, 30.
65 Bunzl, Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, 24.
66 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Penguin 1992), xi. Fukuyama had second thoughts about his thesis; see his ‘Second thoughts: the last man in a bottle’, The National Interest, no. 56, Summer 1999, 16–33.
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Brian Klug
Brian Klug is Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at St Benet's Hall, Oxford, member of the faculty of philosophy at the University of Oxford, Fellow of the College of Arts and Sciences, Saint Xavier University, Chicago, and Honorary Fellow of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations, University of Southampton. In 2012 he was Visiting Scholar at the International Centre for Muslim and non-Muslim Understanding, University of South Australia, Adelaide. Since the 1980s, he has published extensively on antisemitism, race, Jewish identity and related topics. He is the author of Being Jewish and Doing Justice: Bringing Argument to Life (Vallentine Mitchell 2011) and Offence: The Jewish Case (Seagull 2009). He has co-edited several books and contributed chapters to others. He is an Associate Editor of Patterns of Prejudice. Email: [email protected]