The carnage of October 7, 2023 in southern Israel was wrought by an unprovoked attack by the Jew-hating, jihad terror organization Hamas, in conjunction with local Gazan Muslims. Some 1,200 Israelis were murdered, the victims being overwhelmingly non-combatant children, women, men, and the elderly. Atrocities committed against these primarily non-combatant Israelis included, mutilation, torture, beheadings, and mass rape, followed by burning, helpfully documented by the jihadists' own videos and oral testimony (of captured jihadists), surveillance camera videos, surviving eyewitness testimony of the victims, and forensic pathology evidence.
Perversely, during the two-months immediately after the October 7 massacres, and accompanying atrocities, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) authenticated an "unprecedented" increase in Jew-hating incidents within the United States, marking the "highest number of incidents during any two-month period since ADL began tracking in 1979." ADL recorded a total of 2,031 antisemitic incidents between October 7, 2023 and December 7, 2023, "up from 465 incidents during the same period in 2022, representing a 337% increase year-over-year." Approximately 250 antisemitic incidents "specifically targeted Jewish institutions such as synagogues and campus Hillels."
ADL further recorded a total of 400 antisemitic incidents on college and university campuses, compared to only 33 incidents during the same period in 2022. Ugly incidents of U.S. campus antisemitism persisted (here; here) throughout the spring 2024 semester year. Columbia University—a hub of campus Jew-hatred—was even forced to cancel its main commencement ceremonies, outright.
As Jewish students return to their unchanged (see here; here; here) campus environments for the fall 2024 semester, formal polling data make plain that alarming numbers concealed their identity as Jews (44%), and avoided certain events, locations, or circumstances (78%), because they experienced physical threats, or knew of someone who had (55%). Moreover, anecdotal reporting suggests returning Jewish students worry that Jew-hating, pro-Hamas demonstrations may worsen during the fall semester. Given routine dismissal of charges, or minimal, wrist-slapping "actions" against the most viciously Jew-hating student and faculty offenders, by Columbia and other institutions, this latter fear is understandable.
Routine empirical, if taboo, observation clearly indicates that often, the most vociferous and violent U.S. student campus antisemites share a common Islamic/Muslim religio-ethnic identity. A courageous, expansive Brandeis University study was just published addressing the potential validity of this anecdotal observation by analyzing U.S. undergraduate college student religious affiliation as a critical, independent factor animating their Jew-hatred.
Sadly, but with depressing predictability, the study's seminal, if corroborative findings are being ignored by media, and the most voluble talking heads and "public intellectuals," across the ideological spectrum.
During the spring 2024 semester, survey data were collected from 4,123 undergraduate students (including 313 Jewish students) at 60 U.S. colleges and universities (public and private; geographically varied) with sizable Jewish student populations. The non-Jewish respondents (3810) were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with nine unquestionably negative statements about Jews and Israel, and the pattern of their responses was then evaluated. Here are the nine statements, which overlap considerably with those previously validated and included in major ADL (and other academic) assessment surveys of antisemitism in the past two decades:
- "Jews in America have too much power."
- "Jews don't care what happens to anyone but their own kind."
- "Jewish people talk about the Holocaust just to further their political agenda."
- "Jews should be held accountable for Israel's actions."
- "Israel does not have the right to exist."
- "All Israeli civilians should be considered legitimate targets for Hamas."
- "To what extent is your overall opinion of Hamas favorable or unfavorable?"
- "Supporters of Israel control the media."
- "I wouldn't want to be friends with someone who supports the existence of Israel as a Jewish state."
The study authors concluded that although "a climate of universal anti-Jewish hatred" did not exist, Jewish student concerns about antisemitism were justified, and "driven by about a third of students who held distinct patterns of beliefs about Jews and Israel." Specifically, "Identifying as Muslim was significantly associated with being either hostile to Israel or hostile to Jews, even after controlling for other factors." Furthermore, compared to Christians, for example, Muslims were 2.6-fold more likely to harbor the most virulent antisemitism, namely, shared hostility to both Israel and Jews.
How do these results comport — if at all — with other contemporary assessments of Muslim antisemitism?
The ADL has developed, validated, and applied a simple, elegant survey instrument to determine the prevalence of "extreme antisemitism" — defined as agreement with at least 6/11 antisemitic stereotypes—across, and within populations around the world. Since 2004, ADL surveys of Muslims have been conducted in Western (European and U.S.) societies, and Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries, where Islam is the state religion. MENA Muslim nations are by wide margins the 16 most antisemitic countries worldwide, where the prevalence of extreme antisemitism ranges from a "low" of 74% (in Egypt and Saudi Arabia), to 93% (among the Palestinian Muslims of Gaza, and the West Bank).
Largely consistent with these ADL MENA Muslim data, and strikingly concordant with the 2.6-fold excess of extreme Muslim antisemitism, relative to extreme Christian antisemitism, just revealed by the Brandeis study of U.S. college students, 2015, 2019, and 2023 (here; here) ADL Western European reports, and a 2017 ADL U.S. report, found a 2- to 4-fold excess prevalence of extreme antisemitism, among Muslims versus Christians, or non-Muslims. The only ADL survey statistically adjusted for "confounders" (biases) associated with Antisemitism, was a 2004 Western European report. An academic analysis of these data (reported by Yale investigators, in 2006) described an adjusted nearly 8-fold excess prevalence (Table 3) of extreme antisemitism among Muslims, compared to Christians!
More ominously, non-ADL surveys published after Hamas's October 7 jihad massacres capture distressingly broad pro-Hamas, Jew-annihilationist sentiments among both MENA, and U.S. Muslims. A large (n=8000), population-based survey from 16 MENA countries, representing 95% of the total 320 million MENA Muslims, conducted by Muslim academics, and reported in January, 2024, revealed that 89% supported Hamas' October 7 carnage, and 89% simultaneously rejected Israel's right to exist as an autonomous state. Earlier, in late October 2023, a U.S. poll which oversampled American Muslims, found 58% believed Hamas' October 7 massacres were "justified."
Discussion of the most plausible and discernible explanation for this global surfeit of Muslim Jew-hatred is also shunned: relentless inculcation of antisemitic motifs from the Qur'an itself, and other core Islamic texts, by the pre-eminent authoritative religious teaching institutions in Islam, such as Al-Azhar University, Sunni Islam's putative "Vatican."
Only hours after the October 7, 2023 attacks, Al-Azhar University's current Papal equivalent Grand Imam Ahmed al-Tayyeb, and other Al-Azhar luminaries, celebrated (here; here; here; here) Hamas' jihad carnage, on the University's social media platforms. Less than 2-weeks later, Al-Azhar issued a fatwa declaring that all Israelis were legitimate targets of jihad terror: "the term 'civilians' does not apply to the Zionist settlers of the occupied land," mirroring the Islamic jurisprudence of Al Azhar fatwas, or the resolutions of Al-Azhar Conference Proceedings, regarding Jews and Israel, put forth regularly, since the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine.
In 2007, Al-Tayyeb, then Al-Azhar University President, sanctioned suicide bombing murder of Israeli Jews, non-combatants included, and twice since becoming Grand Imam (here; here), he has condemned Jews, eternally, during national Egyptian television broadcasts, while invoking Qur'an 5:82 — "You will surely find the most intense of the people in animosity toward the believers [to be] the Jews" — a central Antisemitic Qur'anic verse—for causing "Muslim distress... since the inception of Islam 1400 years ago."
Late Grand Imam of Al-Azhar University Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi (d. 2010), Al-Tayyeb's immediate predecessor, was one of the most revered modern authorities on Qur'anic exegesis. Tantawi provided a summary gloss on the "degenerate" Qur'anic characteristics of the Jews (3:112; 4:46; 4:161; 3:120, 5:79; 2:109; 3:113), in his Ph.D. thesis, "The Children of Israel (Jews) in the Qur'an and Traditions," emphasizing their timeless relevance, and denouncing Jews who rejected Islam as "maleficent deniers," further granting Muslims license to commit violence against them, to extirpate Jewish "evil."
Identical, canonically sourced Jew-hating Islamic religious indoctrination is ubiquitous, and even embellished, in mainstream U.S. mosques (such as here, here, and here), a baleful practice that has intensified following October 7, 2023.
Until now, analyses of post-October 7 antisemitism on U.S. campuses by both conservative (here; here), and non-progressive, liberal (here; here; here) "thought leaders," or politicians, have riveted, exclusively, upon the deleterious impact of the Marxist "Diversity-Equity-Inclusion" (DEI) pedagogy which lards university curricula, and administrative procedures. Worse still, this DEI monomania fails to consider—out of ignorance, or fear—the dogmatic Islamophilia, and accompanying whitewash of Islam's "sacralized" Jew-hatred, DEI has begotten in the academy for at least a half century. Already in 1974, the late renowned Islamologist, Maxime Rodinson (d. 2004), noted ruefully, with regard to higher education on Islam,
"The anti-colonial left...often goes so far as to sanctify Islam and the contemporary ideologies of the Muslim world... Understanding has given away to apologetics pure and simple."
Unfortunately, monomaniacal focus on DEI racist bias has become just the latest device to avoid any serious discussion of Islam, and the global pandemic of excess Muslim Jew-hatred. Hope springs eternal publication of the landmark Brandeis study confirming this disproportionate pandemic has reached U.S. campuses, will finally initiate honest reckoning with such uniquely Muslim bigotry.
Andrew G. Bostom, MD, MS, is the author of The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History, Sharia versus Freedom: The Legacy of Islamic Totalitarianism and other books and essays on Islam. His research focus has been on the impact of Islamic conquest, colonization, and governance on non-Muslims.
Percy Bauri