Anti-Semitism in Arabia

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How seriously should anyone take the supposed Saudi peace initiative when articles like this, mirrored in the Palestine media, continue to be officially sanctioned? (from today's edition of Saudi government newspaper Al-Riyadh):

"I chose to speak about the Jewish holiday of Purim, because it is connected to the month of March. This holiday has some dangerous customs that will, no doubt, horrify you, and I apologize if any reader is harmed because of this.

During this holiday, the Jew must prepare very special pastries, the filling of which is not only costly and rare – it cannot be found at all on the local and international markets.

Unfortunately, this filling cannot be left out, or substituted with any alternative serving the same purpose. For this holiday, the Jewish people must obtain human blood so that their clerics can prepare the holiday pastries. In other words, the practice cannot be carried out as required if human blood is not spilled!!

Before I go into the details, I would like to clarify that the Jews' spilling human blood to prepare pastry for their holidays is a well-established fact, historically and legally, all throughout history. This was one of the main reasons for the persecution and exile that were their lot in Europe and Asia at various times.

This holiday [Purim] begins with a fast, on March 13, like the Jewess Esther who vowed to fast. The holiday continues on March 14; during the holiday, the Jews wear carnival-style masks and costumes and overindulge in drinking alcohol, prostitution, and adultery. This holiday has become known among Muslim historians as the Holiday of Masks.

How the Jews Drain the Blood From Their Young Victims:

Who was Esther, and why the Jews sanctify her and act as she did, I will clarify in my article next Tuesday, Allah willing. Today, I would like to tell you how human blood is spilled so it can be used for their holiday pastries. The blood is spilled in a special way. How is it done?

For this holiday, the victim must be a mature adolescent who is, of course, a non-Jew – that is, a Christian or a Muslim. His blood is taken and dried into granules. The cleric blends these granules into the pastry dough; they can also be saved for the next holiday. In contrast, for the Passover slaughtering, about which I intend to write one of these days, the blood of Christian and Muslim children under the age of 10 must be used, and the cleric can mix the blood [into the dough] before or after dehydration.

The Actions of the Jewish Vampires Cause Them Pleasure:

Let us now examine how the victims' blood is spilled. For this, a needle-studded barrel is used; this is a kind of barrel, about the size of the human body, with extremely sharp needles set in it on all sides. [These needles] pierce the victim's body, from the moment he is placed in the barrel.

These needles do the job, and the victim's blood drips from him very slowly. Thus, the victim suffers dreadful torment – torment that affords the Jewish vampires great delight as they carefully monitor every detail of the blood-shedding with pleasure and love that are difficult to comprehend.

After this barbaric display, the Jews take the spilled blood, in the bottle set in the bottom [of the needle-studded barrel], and the Jewish cleric makes his coreligionists completely happy on their holiday when he serves them the pastries in which human blood is mixed.

There is another way to spill the blood: The victim can be slaughtered as a sheep is slaughtered, and his blood collected in a container. Or, the victim's veins can be slit in several places, letting his blood drain from his body.

This blood is very carefully collected – as I have already noted – by the 'rabbi,' the Jewish cleric, the chef who specializes in preparing these kinds of pastries.

The human race refuses even to look at the Jewish pastries, let alone prepare them or consume them!"

tony, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

i forgot to include the '54' part of my email address. hope that doesn't have any consequences (i selected not to be notified of replies).

tony, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I am offended as being portrayed as a goth.

bnw, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I was a *little* suspicious of this because it seemed sooo inflammatory, plus, I was curious why something from a Saudi newspaper would appear in English. (The Al-Riyadh's website certainly isn't in English.) So I did some snooping around.

Turns out that the article has already been posted a couple times in USENET, and one post directs the reader to a worldnetdaily.com article, who cites the translation's source as being from the Middle East Media Research Institute.

How trustworthy are MEMRI's translations? And are all these stories on their site representative of the Muslim/Arab media's slant on Jews? I can't really say. Some opinions about MEMRI can be found at the USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review and Jewish Community Online.

Michael Daddino, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Apalling though it is that the blood libel is still propagated, this is probably a result of a war mentality still existing among the Arab nations - in other words, it's a reason to take *any* peace initiative MORE seriously, because only in a state of peace and mutual recognition is this kind of dangerous idiocy likely to die out. You can compare the articles in British newspapers in WWI detailing fictionalised German atrocities (baby-killing, nun-raping, etc.) - unthinkable in peacetime. This isn't to deny that anti- Semitism is deeply rooted in the Arab world, but the only way to begin working against that is to find a peaceful solution to the current and long-term crises, it seems to me.

Tom, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I'm not saying the war mentality among Arab nations is Israel's fault either, incidentally.

Tom, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Cate Blanchett - There's so much anti smeitism these days, andnot just against jews either.

Queen G, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

That's not a mental thing to say, actually.

DG, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

um, how so??

bnw, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I've no idea whether this is what DG is referring to but I'm sure I read that the "semitic peoples" of the middle east include more than just Jews. Not sure of the details though, and certainly anti-Semitic has come to mean anti-Jew whatever its precise definition.

Tom, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Tom is 'on the money', as you crazy cats say.

DG, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

memri runs articles both pro and con towards israel, they had an interesting series on the female suicide bomber how she was forced to divorce her husband because she was infertile, forced to attend his wedding to another and then made to pass out sweets at the birth of his son. she was not wanted by any other man because of her infertility and it even affected her chances at employment, sounds like someone with nothing to live for who was manipulated by the 'cause'.

keith, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I now remember that since 9/11 I've read in a couple places that some govt's in the Arab world cynically use Jew-baitng for its distractive purpopses. The volk would be told, again and again, that the corrupt regime that directly rules over them isn't the source of their problems but the far-reaching tentacles of the International Jewish Conspiracy sure is. So peace alone may not solve the problem of Arab anti-semitism, though it would doubtlessly help. The development of true 'liberal' democracies within the Arab world might help even more.

It's useful that you've drawn attention to the lead sentence of the first post, Tom. When I was poking around for other mentions of MEMRI, I noticed more than a few USNET posters using their translations to crow that you just can't reason with them Arabs, an illusion that's got some truly frightening consequences attached to it. It's one reason I got so suspicious with MEMRI in the first place.

Michael Daddino, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Mike, I don't think my original post implied that 'you can't reason with Arabs'. It just questioned whether we should assume the sincerity of any peace proposal coming from a government which for years seems to have encouraged vile anti-semitic propaganda as a means of re-directing discontents its own oppressive rule is responsible for (maybe we can - maybe there are opposing factions within the Saudi regime, some of them genuinely working to bring about a resolution to the Middle-East situation. I don't know, which is why I asked the question.) But I don't think we should shy away from addressing the existence or extent of such racism for fear of all Arabs being tarnished by it.

tony, Thursday, 14 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Tony, with all due respect, I don't think anyone here is shying away from seriously considering whether this is real anti-Semitic propaganda or not. The "Jews devouring human blood" story is, unfortunately, an old one which began (as far as I know) in Europe, so if it has made its way to the Arab world, it is certainly an imported slander. In our post-Holocaust world, though, it has taken on a (perhaps unfortunate) double edge: for current anti-Semitics, it is a slander against Jews; for people who are sensitive to anti- Semitism (which includes a great number of people), it appears as a slander against its immediate source. Since this has been such a common (and also lowest-common-denominator) story for so long, I think the investigatory effort on peoples' part here is not to deny there might be anti-Semitism in the Arab world, but to determine whether this story in particular wasn't planeted by someone who would want to defame a specific Arab source.

I think Tom put it in perspective very well. Misinformation spreads like wildfire during wartime. Without blaming either side, I think this just returns us to considerations of WHY there has been a war going on in this particular part of the globe for the last 50+ years, and that bringing about a degree of stability for both sides will hopefully help end the spread of this sort of prejudice.

xwerxes, Thursday, 14 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

The thing is, I think it is - perhaps sadly - entirely possible for the Saudi Government to be entirely anti-Semitic from top to bottom and still want a peaceful resolution to the Middle Eastern question. Like I said above, the only way to tackle Arab anti-Semitism is to somehow create normal, peaceful conditions in the region, which under the Saudi peace terms (as I understand them) means long-overdue recognition of Israel's right to statehood by the Arab powers. To parallel another model of conflict-resolution, certainly large sections of Sinn Fein and the IRA still virulently loathe protestants (and the same applies to the Unionists in Northern Ireland and Catholics) but they came to the conclusion that negotiation was ultimately the only way to make any progress. In other words, realpolitik suggests that the existence of sectarian or racial hatred needn't be an obstacle to the initial steps of a peace process.

Tom, Thursday, 14 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

w/o denying the dishonest malevolence of the article (let the fanatically anti-israeli sentiments of many middle east regimes), isn't the fact that the blood libel requires such detailed explanation in this article more an indication that it is NOT yet widespread or established as a propagandic device? if everyone in the arab world who mattered already *believed* this kind of shit, there'd be no need to push the line => not everyone in the arab world believes it, by any means => w/o much more detailed study than just a straight quotation, it is (possibly) no more representative that anne coulter is of "western" opinion (or the New Republic's recent discussion of the practicalities of nuking Mecca, say).

mark s, Thursday, 14 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

(the blood libel began in coventry in the 12th century, I believe, ie in england, — so it is possible for extreme racial animus and murderous religious scapegoating to cool towards pragmatic tolerance, only eight centuries on) (i am not quite as pessimistic as this implies btw)

mark s, Thursday, 14 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Blood nonsense still v.popular in Russia until relatively recently, if 'The Fixer' is anything to go by.

N., Thursday, 14 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

three weeks pass...
As to Tom's comment on the term "antisemitism":

No, the term "antisemitism" was NEVER intended, from moment Wilhelm Marr coined it in a German publication in 1879--to refer to anything but hatred of Jews. By giving his own hatreds a pseudo-scientfic name which at the time conveyed no real connotation of his agenda, Marr hoped, I suspect, to be able to legitimize his racism in the eyes of like-minded people, and to build common cause with them.

(Such use of language has been commonplace since the printed word-- think, in our current economic conditions, of all the euphemisms that are rolled out each week by managers who have to fire staff they can no longer pay--"layoffs", then "cutbacks", then "downsizing", then "rightsizing", then "R.I.F. (Reduction in Force)"...people are very fond of using misleading terms that reduce the risk that those they are about to harm will object while there's still a chance of averting the harm.)

I refer you to http://www.faqs.org/faqs/judaism/FAQ/09- Antisemitism/section-6.html for a discussion of the term and its origins.

Eric, Monday, 8 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Tastes good to me but stains like nobody's business

Jew, Monday, 15 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)


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