Apologists for the Muslim violence against Jews are trotting out a new text, Ethan B. Katz's The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa To France.
The title alone tells the lie. Jews and Muslims never lived as brothers. Under Muslim rule in North Africa, Jews were second-class citizens. At best. Jews only received their civil rights under French rule. Jewish civil rights then became another grievance that Muslim Supremacists nurtured against the French and the Jews. Another sign that the rightful rule of Islam had been usurped by infidels.
Ethan B. Katz falsely blames France for "discriminating" against Muslims in favor of Jews. In fact, it was Muslims who discriminated and murdered Jews, forcing them to flee to France.
Many French Jews are actually North African Jews who fled to France to escape Muslim persecution. The flood of Muslim migration however brought back the persecution. So now the descendants of North African Jews are once again fleeing Muslim violence.
This has nothing to do with France's treatment of Muslims, as Ethan B. Katz falsely claims. It has everything to do with a Muslim attitude towards Jews and other non-Muslims that predates France.
Ethan B. Katz's Muslim Persecution Denial follows classic left-wing historical denialist patterns which attempts to sideline the core issue with empty talk about imperialism. The core issue in Muslim violence against Jews is xenophobia, supremacism and racism.
Instead Ethan B. Katz attempts to blame Muslim violence on its Jewish victims, accusing them of complicity in French colonialism. This is exactly the sort of denialist argument used by Holocaust deniers.
Such historical revisionism isn't new. Consider this.
In an act more reminiscent of magician Harry Houdini than a major U.S. newspaper, The Washington Post omitted—and refused to correct—nearly one million Jewish refugees from Arab lands in its infographic “A visual guide to 75 years of major refugee crises around the world” (Dec. 21, 2105).
The graphic, claiming to provide a “brief guide to the major refugee events in recent history,” offers short descriptions of various refugee crises throughout the last 75 years. The displacement of persons from World War II to the ongoing Syrian civil war are noted as “major” events. Inexplicably, the more than 800,000 Jewish refugees who fled Arab lands in the Middle East and North Africa in the period following Israel's War for Independence seemingly does not qualify.
No mention is made of the plight of Jews forced to flee countries or territories, including Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Aden (now part of Yemen).
Texts such as Ethan B. Katz's The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa To France, should be sidelined in favor of the experiences of the survivors of Muslim persecution against Jews which can be found at places like Point of No Return and Justice for Jews from Arab Countries.
The histories of North African Jews are well worth reading. Denialist texts should be rejected by every decent person.