The Centre For Social Cohesion

It was also reported last week that Ayman al-Zawahri, the Al-Qaeda number two, had just issued over the internet an audiotape calling on fellow Muslims ‘to harm Jews … the world over, with Allah’s help and according to his command’.

What is about Jews that so gets up the noses of all like him who abhor freedom?

When I read of al-Zawahri’s latest anti-Semitic outburst, I was put in mind of some interesting words Ludwig von Mises wrote on this subject in 1944, when Jews faced a similar kind of fanatical enmity:

“If the cause of anti-Semitism were really to be found in the distinctive features of Jews, these properties would have to be extraordinary virtues and merits which would qualify the Jews as the elite of mankind. If the Jews themselves are to blame for the fact that those whose ideal is perpetual war and bloodshed, who worship violence and are eager to destroy freedom, consider them the most dangerous opponents of their endeavours, it must be because the Jews are foremost among the champions of freedom, justice, and peaceful cooperation among nations…. As the parties seeking to destroy modern civilisation and return to barbarism have put anti-Semitism at the top of their programmes, this civilisation is apparently a creation of the Jews. Nothing more flattering could be said of an individual or a group than that the deadly foes of civilisation have well-founded reason to persecute them.”
[Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1944), pp. 184-85]

While, not quite as flattering as claiming Jews responsible for creating civilisation -- a claim, by the way, which von Mises himself rightly rejects, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government Hazel Blears recently made some kind remarks about this group that also could help explain why Al-Qaeda has them so much in their sights.

Addressing a conference in Manchester at the end of March, Ms Blears said:

“Community cohesion … means how we all get in, people of different backgrounds, in a rapidly changing world…. The challenge is – how do we enable new arrivals to get on and make a meaningful contribution to the places where they live?

“There can be few more powerful illustrations of how to get it right than the history of British Jewry…. Since their resettlement [under Cromwell], Jews have won ever Nobel Prize going. They have become chess grandmasters and Olympic Gold medallists. They have been awarded Field Medals, BRITS, BAFTAS, Grammys, Ivor Novellos, Oscars, Golden Globes and Victoria Crosses.”

Could it be that the likes of Ayman a-Zawahri reserve such hatred for Jews because they hold up to their co-religionists a picture of what it could be like for them to live in perfect peace and harmony with those not of their faith, and without need of having to abandon it in any way?

I do not wish to suggest that many Muslims do not already do so, and without using Jews as their role models.

But Muslims are relatively newcomers in the West by comparison with Jews. All too many of them seem not yet to have managed to escape from their self-imposed ‘ghettoes’ of the mind that prevent them integrating as fully as Jews have done.

It is because Jews show Muslims how it is possible for non-Christians to retain their faith and yet thrive within a secular culture that Al-Qaeda seeks their destruction. Jews show Muslims the bright alternative possible future they could enjoy besides the abysmal descent into a barbaric past that Al-Qaeda seems intent on planning for them... and not just them.