Shalom. We are here with Charles Asher Small, Professor Charles Asher Small.
He is doing great work about antisemitism in one institute and the others.
Would you please introduce yourself what you are doing about your work?
My name is Charles Asher Small. I'm the director of ISGAP.
ISGAP is the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy.
And we do high caliber academic research at top tier universities in North America,
in the United States, Canada, Europe and beyond.
And we try to also train professors on trying to create, we help them create courses
in our summer program at Oxford University on contemporary antisemitism
because contemporary antisemitism has not really been part of the university system.
So we're training professors to teach courses for credits in their home university.
So there is the problem of antisemitism. What's the cause of it?
So I think it's perhaps the longest hatred in history.
So it's a very complicated subject of study.
But I would say if I can sort of brutalize history, I can give you the history of antisemitism in 90 seconds,
which will be very simple. So forgive me.
But I think there are three phases of antisemitism or antisemitism with an S.
The first phase is the religious phase.
I think when the dominant way in the world of seeing reality is through the lens of religion,
particularly in Europe and with Christianity, they perceive Jews as being blinded by evil
because they did not accept the Christian notion of the Messiah.
And Christians, the church thought that not only was the individual Jew unable to have redemption
without accepting the Christian way, but that they were holding up world redemption.
And until the Jews accepted the Christian notion of the Messiah, the world will have no redemption.
And this is where the genocidal tendency is because if you believe a group of people are stopping redemption of the world,
it's a very strong antagonism.
And I think when the world reality, when the perception of the world shifted from religion to science and technology
and to notions of nation and race, the Jews were seen as the quintessential other,
particularly in the Middle East and in Europe.
And the Nazis and racist ideology, eugenics and science that created these notions of race,
the Jews were an impure race, poisoning, so they were taught the purity of the white Aryan race.
And unlike during the Christian phase of anti-Semitism, the Jews couldn't convert out of their religion
because race and national, we were taught, was innate.
It was characteristics innate in us that you can't convert or change.
And I think this form of anti-Semitism culminated in the Holocaust
because the white Aryan race believed they had to purify themselves
and eliminate the impurity of the Jewish race.
And this results in the Holocaust.
I think to a large extent those anti-Semitism in the West anyways are a thing of the past.
But today the dominant form of anti-Semitism is an attack on Jewish peoplehood,
who Jews are as a people.
And the Jewish people have an ancient connection to the land of Israel.
Our notions of freedom in our culture, in our way of life,
is connected to the land of Israel, to Jerusalem and the holy cities in the land of Israel.
And now the attack is on Jewish peoplehood, not the racist anti-Semitism or the Christian anti-Semitism,
but we see the rise of political Islam and political Islam, not Muslims, not Islam, but political Islam,
they took their ideas from the Nazis.
The Muslim Brotherhood worked with the Nazis against British colonialism
and they took some of their ideas and they took some of the most pernicious forms of anti-Semitism ever as a core belief.
If you read the Hamas charter, if you read Yosef Kawadawi, they're using Nazi ideas, European Nazi ideas.
So they're taking European foreign ideas to purify Islam, which is amazing.
So they take Nazi ideology and views of the Jew.
It's in the center, the core of the ideology.
And they're using it now for many generations, two, three generations of poisoning the minds of people in the region,
about the Zionists, about the Israelis and about the Jews.
And Kawadawi and the Muslim Brotherhood and the founders of Al-Bana and Qutub call for the annihilation of the Jewish people.
Kawadawi says that the believers need to finish the work of Hitler.
So imagine a Muslim spiritual leader, a very important spiritual leader, quoting Hitler to exterminate people.
It's amazing.
So on the one hand you have political Islam and they've become very influential in the region.
And I think on the other hand in the West we have this sort of post-modern moment where the West has acquiesced.
The West has not stood up for democratic values and has done a lot of business with the Muslim Brotherhood,
with the Iranian revolutionary regime and other forces, even in Turkey,
who are political Islamists trying to impose a very reactionary view of society on its people.
And the Jews are the best scapegoat.
Elie Wiesel, Professor Elie Wiesel, always taught that anti-Semitism begins with Jews, but it never ends with Jews.
And we can see, tragically, the demonization of Israel, of Zionists, of Jews for a generation, for two generations in the region.
As long as Israel is being demonized, it's okay.
But we now see the enemies of Israel are killing their own people.
Muslims are killing Muslims.
Syria, 600,000 dead people, 15 million refugees, but it's the Zionists, it's the Jews.
And this is the tragedy of anti-Semitism.
We focus on the Jews and the reactionary forces are taking over society and poisoning the mind of the youth
and killing their own fellow brothers and sisters.
It's a very serious problem.
So I agree with you.
I think anti-Semitism was brought into the Middle East or into the Islamic world, if you can say this.
I'd say roughly a hundred years ago.
Professor Bassam Tibi writes very well on these issues and how anti-Semitism was exported by Europeans, by the British, by the Germans into the Middle East.
So that's very important.
I think there was a history of discrimination of Jews in the Arab world or in the Muslim world, not at the level of Europe.
It's very different.
I think anti-Semitism is a phenomenon that's inherently genocidal and that did not exist in the Islamic world.
But Jews were, to me, Jews were not equal citizens with equality.
So there was discrimination, there were moments of violence, but in general, the condition of the Jew in the Muslim world was much better than in the Christian world.
But as you say, roughly a hundred years ago, the exportation of anti-Semitism, this genocidal form of hatred, was brought to the Middle East, to the Arab world, to the Islamic world.
And this new phenomenon has taken hold, and it dehumanizes people.
You know, in Judaism, we believe that we're all created in the image of God.
Every human being is created in the image of God.
That means everybody has a truth, a part of God within us.
And in our teachings, the only way I can become wise, the only way I can learn anything, is to respect the other.
And there's a very famous philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, who brought Jewish ethics to the university in France, in Europe.
And he said, which is based on Jewish ethics, the moment we see our face in the face of the other.
The moment we see our face in the face of the other, this is the instant we become human.
And if we don't recognize the other, if we don't see the other as human, we lose our ability to gain wisdom.
Because if I respect you with humility, and I know you're created in the image of God, and I'm open to you, I can learn, I can become more wise.
If I'm racist against people from Turkey, or Muslims, if I hate Muslims, I eliminate over one billion opportunities for me to become wise.
So I hurt myself, I live in ignorance, I live in darkness.
So we have to, with humility, respect each other and be human.
And when political movements say that a group of people emanate from the urine of donkeys, or they descend from apes and pigs,
and we attribute problems and diseases and animal-like behavior to human beings, we hurt ourselves.
We destroy our culture, we destroy our religion, we destroy our families, we destroy our societies.
And this is the tragedy what's happening in our region and around the world.
And I think, you know, this is a moment when people who are truly connected to something higher, in their own way,
through Judaism, through Christianity, through Islam, and many other religions, people of good faith, we must come together.
Because this is a moment of catastrophe.
And if we don't stop it, if we don't stop it, it's just going to accelerate.
And we see it accelerating.
And this is why, tragically, this conference is important.
We started with 30 people 18 years ago, and now there's almost 2,000 people here.
Because people realize we're living in a moment where we must stop the hate.
OK.
That's it.
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Thank you, Joven said.
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Good thing.
I know.
Well done.
This is true.
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That's a great question.
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The great question.
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