Posted on 01/15/2007 2:58:33 AM PST by Northern Alliance
It only took PBS one hour to uncover the causes of anti-Semitism, now in an alarming heyday. In "Antisemitism in the 21st Century: The Resurgence," narrated by Judy Woodruff, PBS offered the answer: The reason for Jew-hatred, now widely promulgated among Muslim populations, is, well... Jews! Israel! Even Christianity!
Oh, brother. This wreck of a thesis emerged early in the documentary as fact and fiction collided, mangling cause and effect. According to the show, Jews basically caused anti-Semitism in the Arab-Muslim region around them by first building the tiny modern state of Israel (500 times smaller than that Arab Muslim region), and then actually trying to defend it against a host of Muslim armies and terror groups. As PBS tells it, it isn't the genocidal proclivities of surrounding Muslim nations that have caused war unending on the Jewish state; it's the continued existence of the Jewish state that has caused the genocidal proclivities. The show practically begs a viewer to ask, Well, what else could you expect?
(Excerpt) Read more at jewishworldreview.com ...
I'm sorry to see Bernard Lewis contributing to this dreck. He did a lot of very good analysis of the root causes behind the 9/11 attacks.
Who would expect anything different? Not me.
As flawed as this was I think it was good for Jews and Israel to expose, as it vividly did, how endemic virulent anti-Semitism is in the Muslim world, and the level of patently false anti-Jewish propaganda put forth and believed by Muslims and their governments.
So while the program said one thing, it showed quite another.
As to the tolerance of Muslims for Jews in the old days, one need only look to Maimonedes (Rambam) who fled Spain in the 1140's rather than convert to Islam, and wrote a letter comforting the Jews of Yemen who were forced to do the same.
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