Why Do So Many Muslims Hate Jews?

The following are excerpts from an article by Nonie Darwish, a former Muslim from Egypt and author of Now They Call Me Infidel and Cruel and Usual Punishment. 

Recently, a Pakistani religious leader, Pirzada Muhammad Raza Saqib Mustafai, said: "When the Jews are wiped out ... the sun of peace [will] begin to rise on the entire world." The same preaching is routinely done not only by clerics, but by politicians — in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and elsewhere. This is not just Ahmadinejad; it is at the heart of Islamic theology that world peace will be established only when all the Jews are wiped from the earth. But few people in Western media are alarmed by this kind of rhetoric or care to expose this dreadful dark side of Islam's obsession with Jew-hatred.

I do not believe that one has to be an authority on human behavior or group thinking to find out the obvious pathology in Islamic Jew-hatred. It is time for all of us to uncover and expose this atrocity against the Jewish people. We owe that to humanity and the truth.

No true Muslim can see that such hatred is unbecoming and unholy for a world religion to focus on, and that the credibility of Islam is tarnished by such hatred. No Muslim is allowed to go far enough to self-analyze or ask why such hatred exists. Muslims defend Jew-hatred by claiming that Jews betrayed Muhammad and thus deserve this kind of treatment. Even when I was a Muslim, I believed that the one-sided story against Jews by Islam was enough to justify all the killing, terror, lies, and propaganda by Islamic leaders against Jews. To the average Muslim, routinely cursing Jews in mosques feels normal and even holy!

In the eyes of Mohammed and Muslims, the mere existence of the Jewish people, let alone an entire Jewish state, delegitimizes Islam and makes Mohammed look more like a mass murderer than like a prophet. For Muslims to make peace with Jews and acknowledge that Jews are humans who deserve the same rights as everyone else would have a devastating effect on how Muslims view their religion, their history, and the actions of their prophet.

Islam must justify the genocide that Mohammad waged against the Jews. Mohammad and Muslims had two choices: either the Jews are evil sub-humans, apes, pigs, and enemies of Allah, a common description of Jews still heard regularly in Middle Eastern mosques today, or Mohammad was a genocidal warlord not fit to be a prophet of God — a choice that would mean the end of Islam.

- Excerpted from Nonie Darwish's article, Why Muslims Must Hate Jews. Read the whole article here.