Last week the first black Muslim woman elected as President of the National Union of Students, UK, Shaima Dallali was sacked before she could even take office.  This is an unprecedented new low point in the onslaught of Islamophobia faced by politically active Muslims in the West.  November is Islamophobia Awareness month in the UK and Shaima found out via Twitter that she had been sacked on the first day of the month.  But she was not hounded out by the traditional far right, but by a campaign of smears, harassment and bullying led by the Zionist movement.           

Zionism and anti-Arab racism

We can start by noting the well known anti-Arab racism of the leaders of the Zionist movement and founders of the state of Israel. This was an ideology that helped to justify the expulsion of the Palestinians – and their continued exile – and the oppression of those who remained within the borders of Israel in 1948. There is a wealth of data indicating the factual basis of this claim. 

A recent study of the (openly) racist right in Israel notes: “The idea of ‘transfer’ (a euphemism for ethnic cleansing), [was] … promoted and pursued secretly or openly by the majority of the Zionist leaders from Theodor Herzl to David Ben-Gurion.’ 

Such ideas are fed by the settler movement, in its ongoing attempts to justify further dispossession and violence.  There are currents of pro-settler opinion in the US , which are informed by this context in “Israel”. These forms of racism were fundamental to the creation of “Israel” and the way it operates today. A taste of them can be gleaned from the widely available footage of the annual “Flag day” in Jerusalem when gangs of extremist settlers rampage round the Muslim quarter of the old city chanting “death to the Arabs”, “may your village burn” and various other direct threats.  

Anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism are accompanied by a deep and abiding complex of anti-Muslim prejudice.  At root these present Muslims as a threat, not just to the Zionist project, but to western “civilisation” as a whole. Amongst them are conspiracy theories that there is a special Muslim propensity towards violence and terrorism, that Islam guides the alleged reactionary political behaviour of Muslims – expressed in the use of the term “Islamism”. As I discussed in a previous article these, originated with the Zionist movement and its associated ideologues, including notably the British historian Bernard Lewis.

“Eurabia” - a Zionist conspiracy theory

Associating Islam with terror and reaction are not the only negative “tropes” used against Muslims.  There are a variety of others including the “Eurabia” conspiracy theory. Very often these theories are discussed as the product of the fa- right.  But this is not the full picture.  For instance Andrew Brown provides a long and coherent dissection of the concept of “Eurabia”: “Once an obscure idea confined to the darker corners of the internet, the anti-Islam ideology is now visible in the everyday politics of the west”.  He refers to Gisèle Littman as “resurfacing” the concept and describes her as “an Egyptian-born Jewish woman who fled Cairo for Britain after the Suez crisis, and then moved to Switzerland in 1960 with her English husband.” Writing under the name of Bat Ye’or, Littman’s “grand conspiracy theory” on “a secret plan to sell out Europe to the Muslims” appeared in book form in 2005. 

But this is not quite the full story.  In 1961 her British husband David led Operation Mural a Mossad operation to kidnap Jewish children from Morocco to become settler colonists in Palestine.  Gisèle spent three months in Morocco assisting in the operation. Both were later involved in a variety of Zionist organisations and went on to become leading lights in the Islamophobic Counterjihad movement. 

The concept of Eurabia has also been promoted in books by a range of neoconservative/Zionist figures including; Melanie Phillips (2006); Claire Berlinski (2006); Bruce Bawer (2006); and Christopher Caldwell (2007). In January 2007 the Zionist historian Bernard Lewis echoed these sentiments stating that Muslims 'seem to be about to take over Europe'.

Islamophobia denial

The alleged negative features of Islam or of Muslim societies or groups gives licence to deny the existence of Islamophobia and/or to deny an equivalence - in principle - between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia as forms of racism. 

As long ago as August 2001, B’nai B’rith International (BBI) – a formal member of the Zionist movement – held a press conference to highlight the then-upcoming World Conference on Racism. BBI decried the attempt ‘to link anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and anti-Arabism, as manifestations of racism’ as ‘phenomena of equal gravity’. The author of the paper Manuel Prutcschi wrote:  “There neither is nor can there be such phenomena as ‘Islamophobia’ and ‘anti-Arabism’.”  He went on:”The equation of anti- Semitism with ‘Islamophobia’ and ‘anti-Arabism,’ … is a fundamental element in the campaign to attack, delegitimise and indeed dismantle the State of Israel.” 

Any link between the two: “diminishes anti-Semitism, on the one hand, by turning it in effect into one instance of racism among many.”  The result is that it allows “Islamist” regimes and groups with an “to neutralise.. criticisms.”

B’nai B’rith Europe advanced a similar position in 2015 arguing that the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency should not hold a conference which was “inappropriate[ly]” to “juxtapos[ing] hate directed against Muslims with anti-Semitism as if both were one and the same”.

This is the kind or argument regularly made by far right and Neoconservative commentators such as Douglas Murray, for example.  It downplays – at worst denies – Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism.  Of course, the reality is that in practice today, racism and discrimination (including violent attacks, police and state harassment and economic disadvantage) against Muslims is significantly worse than that faced by Jewish citizens of the US, the UK and other Western European societies. 

Islamophobia and the Community Security Trust

Of course, there are elements of the Zionist movement that appear not to deny Islamophobia. Indeed, the UK-based Community Security Trust (CST) pointed out in 2011 that ‘there is no reason why someone cannot support Israel in the Middle East and also oppose hate crimes against Muslims in Britain’. The CST also claimed that it should not be ‘taken for granted that somebody who is a “Zionist” is ipso facto anti-Muslim’. We should certainly acknowledge that groups like the CST do not openly demur from publically opposing anti Muslim ‘hate crimes’. 

However, this does not mean that they or other pro-Israel organisations that claim to oppose Islamophobia should not be subject to scrutiny. In the case of the CST, the same article says elsewhere that: “A worrying trend [is]… the attempts by some people to associate Zionism with Islamophobia, and to blame rising Islamophobia on ‘Zionists’ ... This is a conspiracy theory, which originates with Islamist groups, but is no longer limited to those circles.” 

This is a bizarre formulation, which seems to claim that there is no association of any sort between Zionism and anti-Muslim racism. It is odd to state that “Islamist” groups originate this argument, since this is both untrue, and Islamophobic. The idea that discussing the relation of Zionism to racism is somehow a strategic move to distract from “concerns about political Islamism” arguably strays back into the territory of Islamophobia denial which it might appear the CST had left. 

So, while it may be possible that defenders of Israel can state they are opponents of Islamophobia, it is by no means clear that they should be taken at their word. We should not be surprised that the CST is dangerously Islamophobic since it is the creation of Gerald Ronson, the convicted fraudster, who makes his anti-Muslim views clear in his memoirs. Here, he writes that :  “the left, … now sees Israel as the aggressor and has become pro-Palestinian, which in turn has become pro-Islamic and in many ways is looking to justify Islamic fundamentalism.” “Possibly most dangerous of all” he goes on, “is the rise of Muslim fundamentalism being stuffed down people's throats in mosques and schools”.

Ronson, of course also sends money from his family foundation to Zionist extremist groups like the Jewish Agency, the United Jewish Israel Appeal, the Jerusalem Foundation, the UK Association for the Wellbeing of Israel’s Soldiers’ and the ultra-extremist Chabad Lubavitch movement – all of which are both anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic. He has also given to the well known Islamophobic think tank Policy Exchange. 

It is not just that Islamophobia runs all the way through the Zionist movement from right to left, but that the Zionist movement has proactively developed a wide range of Islamophobic ideas and concepts and ceaselessly promoted them to the global right and far right. It is no exaggeration to say that the Zionist movement provides a key structural underpinning to Islamophobia – and denial of Islamophobia – world-wide.