Islamophobia and AntiSemitism: Equally Abominable – Intifada Palestine

Kourosh Ziabari on the parallels between antisemitism and islamophobia:

Ostracizing and defaming the followers of divine faiths, because people or entities associated or supposedly aligned with that faith commit appalling and vicious crimes, should not be made a tolerable convention: this holds true for the Muslims, Jews, Christians or the people of other faiths. I’m always dismayed and troubled when people, especially my fellow citizens, begin denigrating the Jewish people once Israel launches an offensive into the Gaza Strip and kills a large group of people. The derogatory language used against the Jews and the desecration of their synagogues is utterly obnoxious. Clearly, there’s no justification to the Israeli violence and aggression, but it’s undoubted that the Jewish people are not responsible for what Benjamin Netanyahu decides to do to the suppressed Palestinians overnight. That’s why I reject anti-Semitism in the strongest terms and firmly believe that the Jewish people should be treated courteously, first because they’ve historically undergone discrimination, and the discriminatory measures should come to an end at one point, and also because bigotry against people under the pretext that we don’t like the way they worship or dress, or because a perverted minority has hijacked their ideology and justifies its cruelty through resorting to their sacred beliefs is in my view tantamount to theft in the daylight. For the same reason, I was always disturbed when the statements of my former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fueled a vitriolic anti-Semitic discourse in the Iranian society: totally indefensible.

Equally, I believe spreading Islamophobia and fabricating a Muslim demon which everybody should be scared of is not a reasonable way of dealing with 1.5 billion people who bemoan the mayhem and carnage caused by the ISIS terrorists similarly as the people in the United States, Canada, Australia and Europe do. Yes, it’s true that the “ISIS” stands for the words “Islamic State in Iraq and Syria,” but as the British Prime Minister David Cameron, former Australian PM Tony Abbott and the Obama administration officials have accurately argued, ISIS is neither Islamic nor a state. Islamophobia and anti-Semitism are equally abominable. We simply alienate and isolate people by profiling and accusing them over the wrongdoing of a minority that struggles to attribute itself to the nonviolent teachings and principles of an overwhelmingly peaceful majority.

Source: Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism: Equally Abominable – Intifada Palestine