A Perfect Storm

 https://quillette.com/2025/10/28/a-perfect-storm-israel-gaza-palestine/

But it is not only the Quran with its tales of the 7th century that is responsible for modern Muslim antisemitism. The 19th century saw a resurgence of antisemitism as an offshoot of the traditional Christian Jew-hatred in various parts of Europe, alongside the flowering of nationalist movements that generally castigated “the Other.” And there was no more prominent “Other” than the Jew. European nationalist and antisemitic tropes gradually penetrated the Ottoman-ruled Middle East, generating Arab nationalism while adding a new European layer to the existing base of Muslim detestation of and contempt for the Jews. The 1840 Damascus Affair, in which Jews were falsely blamed—and tortured and a number of them were killed—for murdering two Christians to obtain blood for ritual purposes, exemplifies this importation of European antisemitic tropes to the Muslim Arab world.

Generally, as long as Islam’s Jews were submissive and obedient nothing much happened. The rise of Zionism and the movement’s gradual empowerment in Palestine changed all that. The Jews living in the Arab lands increasingly came to be seen by their Muslim neighbours and rulers as actual or potential allies of Zionism; in June 1941, Muslim mobs rampaged through Baghdad, killing and raping hundreds, and six to seven years later similar mobs converged on Jews in Morocco, Aleppo, Aden, and other sites around the Arab world.

But somehow the demonstrators don’t see Hamas for what it is. One major agent in the whitewashing efforts has been the Gulf emirate of Qatar, with its jihad-supporting broadcasting network, Al Jazeera. Qatar has poured many billions of dollars into the West and especially into its university campuses to market a rosy-spectacled version of Islamism and has even channelled millions to Netanyahu’s inner circle of aides. (In Israel, it is rumoured that Netanyahu himself has long enjoyed largesse from Doha). Over the years, Netanyahu has directly, personally facilitated Qatar’s subsidies of Hamas, which bankrolled the tunnels, rockets, and Kalashnikovs used on 7 October and since, as well as the mosques and schools that dispensed the organisation’s ideology