This is Dr. Denis MacEoin's take on yesterday's Leeds University lecture on Hitler's legacy to Islamicism, by Dr. Matthias Kuentzel:
Denis MacEoin
http://mid-eastplus.blogspot.com/
'Today I attended a lecture in Leeds University. The speaker was Dr. Matthias Küntzel of the Vidal Sassoon Centre for Research on Anti-Semitism in the Hebrew University. If you remember, Dr. Küntzel was prevented from speaking on this topic last March when the university authorities, shaken by contact from the Islamic Student's Society, pulled the plug at the last minute and then made all sorts of feeble excuses. A lot of us protested their action and, several months later, here he was again speaking to what was certainly a larger audience than he might have found then.
Even though I've gone over most of this material in my own researches, I have to say that Küntzel's presentation was simply rivetting. He has a very fine understanding of the political significance of Arab and Islamic anti-Semitism, and this came across time and again. Irene Lancaster has posted the text of the lecture on her blog, from where I have stolen it to paste in below. It makes powerful reading. And yet, judging from many of the questions that followed, some of the audience just didn't get it. One young man I spoke to afterwards shocked me. I mentioned the Iranian-funded contingent at this week's anti-Afghan war demo, and said they had been chanting 'Kill, kill, kill the Jews', and asked why the organizers had not stepped in to dissociate themselves from this call for murder. There was nothing wrong with it, he told me, since we don't have the right to turn away away if they want to demonstrate against the war. I felt he had dishonoured something of the greatest value. But he wasn't alone.
Matthias's book
Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Naziam and the Roots of 9/11 comes out in November. You can pre-order through Amazom.com, but it doesn't yet show with ~Amazon.uk. I'm going to try to find a UK distributor for it. The more people know about this the better.'
I'd just like to add that the call to 'Kill the Jews' is not just exclusive to Islamicists. When I attended a Christian Aid Roadshow at Manchester University's Methodist Chaplaincy in 2002, as a representative of the Manchester Jewish Community, having been booed, spat at and generally reviled, a Jewish student got up and said that the last time there had been a meeting at the Chaplaincy, the call 'Kill the Jews' had come three times and yet no-one - and certainly not the chaplain - had done anything about it.
When I mentioned this to the Anglican Chaplain, a friend of mine, he said that they were not responsible for the Methodist Chaplaincy (talk about Pilate washing their hands). I mean, couldn't they have just had a little word, man to man? No: protocol always comes first when dealing with anti-semitism, it seems.
The reaction of the Christian Aid organisers and audience? What do you think? See yesterday's blog on Professor Dina Porat's London lecture
http://irenelancaster.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/10/just-as-antisem.html
to draw your own conclusions.
This is why the work of Dr. Denis MacEoin and Dr. Matthias Kuentzel is so important and their writings should be read by as many people as possible, especially by those in the BBC (whose Religion and Ethics Unit, based in Manchester, knew about the Christian Aid farrago and did nothing about it); newspapers such as the Guardian and Independent; denominations such as the Church of England and other Protestant denominations (the Catholic Church does not go in for this sort of thing) and the British university unions.
The main thing is to dereify the concept of 'Jew' in our society.
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