Oh what a bandwagon that noxious little anti-Islamic video has set in motion.  There seems to be no end of people eager to hop on it for personal and political gain, no matter how many lives it costs.

There’s Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut, reeling from backlash against his support of Bashar al-Assad’s ongoing massacre of Syrian civilians.  What a perfect opportunity to deflect criticism by calling for more and larger protests — not against the Syrian regime, but against America, in the name of “defending the Prophet.” Except that’s not what he’s doing. To cite the headline of Nick Kristof’s NYT column today, he’s exploiting the Prophet.

There’s Ayaan Hirsi Ali, she of the soft voice and the compelling back story, who just can’t stop talking about what she calls “the Muslim mentality.” (Pop quiz:  if someone who generalizes about a stereotyped “Jewish mentality” is an anti-Semite, what’s someone who generalizes about a stereotyped “Muslim mentality”?  Click here if you don’t know.)  Hirsi Ali told her story yet again in Newsweek‘s “Muslim Rage” issue (to which the best answer was the often hilarious #MuslimRage meme on Twitter).  Strange to think that the rapidly failing Newsweek was once a reputable publication.

There’s the sophomoric French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, whose idea of cutting-edge humor is cartoons of politicians with their pants down around the ankles.  This week they ran similar cartoons of Muhammad in order to inject some life into their plumetting circulation by creating controversy.  Oh, and as a beacon of free speech, of course.

There’s Pakistan’s Minister of Railways — the man responsible for the system’s chronic debt, constant strikes, and devastating crashes. What better way to distract people from his total failure than to make himself out to be a “defender of Islam” by offering a $100,000 bounty for the life of the director of that inane video?  There’s nothing quite like incitement to murder to cover up your own corruption.

There’s more — there’s always more of such people, including of course the miserable little bigots who made the video in the first place —  but that’ll do for now. Because none of this reflects the real Muslim rage:  the palpable outrage not only at the killing of Ambassador Stevens, but also at the blatant attempt of Islamic extremists (and their Islamophobic counterparts) to hijack Islam.

Listen, for instance, to Egyptian activist Mahmoud Salem, aka Sandmonkey, who was one of the voices of 2011’s “Arab spring” in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.  Violent protests over the video are “more damaging to Islam’s reputation than a thousand so-called ‘Islam-attacking’ films,” he writes, and calls on Egyptians to condemn Islamic fundamentalists as “a bunch of shrill, patriarchal, misogynistic, violent extremists who are using Islam as a cover” for political ambition.

Twitter is spilling over with similar protests and disgust from Muslims all over the world at the way the “defenders of Islam” are destroying it from within.  And this disgust was acted on in Benghazi on Friday when 50,000 Libyans marched to demand the disarming of the extremist militias suspected of attacking the US consular buildings, then stormed the headquarters of two of the biggest militias and forced them out of town.  Two other Islamist militias instantly disbanded.  Yes, if you unite, you can face down the thugs, even well-armed ones.  This, of course, is not something you’ll see on the cover of Newsweek.

As Libyans, Egyptians, Tunisians, Yemenis, and with especial pain, Syrians know, the “Arab spring” is not a matter of a single season.  The moniker itself is a product of Western media shorthand, of the desire to label a “story” and assign it a neat, self-contained timeline.  But this was no mere story for the people living it.  It was and still is the beginning of a long process.  But one that once begun, cannot be undone.

All over the Middle East, real voices are making themselves heard, unmediated by government control whether in the name of “security” or of an extremist travesty of Islam.

And this is surely the real manifestation of that much abused principle:  freedom of expression.

This past weekend, I spoke to a Hadassah meeting – the Women’s Zionist Organization of America.  The subject, of my choosing, was “What’s a ‘nice Jewish girl’ doing writing so much about Islam?”

The easy answer to the question I’d self-imposed was “Why not?”  A perfectly reasonable answer, perhaps, but not with bigots like Peter King about to begin his witch hunt this week in the form of congressional hearings on the alleged “radicalization” of American Muslims.

The real answer is that it’s precisely because I’m Jewish that I find myself writing so much about Islam these days.  Because as a Jew, I know the dangers of prejudice.  And I can smell it a mile off.  When I hear someone talk about “the Jewish mentality,” I know I’m listening to an anti-Semite.  How else stereotype millions of people that way?   Just as when I read someone like Ayaan Hirsi Ali talking about “the Muslim mentality,” I know — no matter how pretty she is, how soft-spoken, and how compelling her life story – that I am listening to an Islamophobe.

And I recognize that anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are two sides of the exact same coin:  the stereotyping of millions of people by the actions of a few.  That is, prejudice.

So it’s particularly painful, let alone absurd and self-defeating and dumb, to see that some Islamophobes are Jewish.  And equally painful – and absurd and self-defeating and dumb – to see that some Muslims are anti-Semitic.

I have no statistics to say what proportion of Jews are Islamophobic or what proportion of Muslims are anti-Semitic (though I could doubtless make some up and throw them out there with such an air of authority that they’d be repeated ad infinitum until they achieve the status of “fact”).   But the Muslim Brotherhood, for all the changes it has undergone, still distributes The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  And while anti-Zionism does not necessarily mean anti-Semitism, there is a clear overlap, with a venemous hatred finding its outlet in what is now the more acceptable form of anti-Zionism.

So we need to be clear.  We badly need it.

“Islam” did not attack the US on 9/11;  eighteen people with a particularly twisted and distorted idea of Islam did.  “The Jews” do not shoot Palestinian farmers in the West Bank;   Bible-spouting settlers with a particularly twisted and distorted idea of Judaism do.

The Quran is no more violent or misogynistic than the Bible.  In fact it’s less so.  If you insist, as Islamophobes do, on highlighting certain phrases, then you should turn around and do the same with the Bible, which you will find ten times worse, with repeated calls for the destruction of whole peoples. Only the dumbest, most literal, hate-filled fundamentalist, Jewish or Muslim, takes the rules of ancient warfare as a guide to 21^st-century life.

We have to stop this stereotyping.  Now.  All of us.

We have to recognize prejudice not only in others, but in ourselves, Jewish or Muslim.

We have to be able to see that the anti-Semitic trope of “the Jews” trying to take over the world is exactly the same as the Islamophobic one of “the Muslims” trying to take over the world.

We have to acknowledge that an Islamophobic Jew is thinking exactly like an anti-Semite.  And that an anti-Semitic Muslim is thinking exactly like an Islamophobe.

We have to realize that American Jews need to stand up with Muslims against Islamophobia just as American Muslims need to stand up with Jews against anti-Semitism.

Because Islamophobia is, in essence, another form of anti-Semitism, and vice versa.  And it’s in the direct interest of both Jews and Muslims — of all of us — to stand up and confront both forms of prejudice.

In the famous words of an anti-Nazi Protestant pastor during World War II:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a Socialist.

Last year, summer began in Seattle at the end of April;  this year, I find myself saying, we are paying for that.

And yet, record-breakingly gloomy as it still is, I can hardly believe I’m really saying such a thing.   True, I say it half-jokingly, but that’s the problem — at least half is serious.  What do I mean by “paying for it”?    Am I implying there’s some kind of divine retribution at work, biblically cruel and vengeful?

In fact I’m not sure if I think of this strange weather as a matter of divine intervention, or climate change, or simply the way of the world.  But I do suspect I’m subject to some kind of hangover from childhood — an almost superstitious way of thinking in which one needs to be aware that every good may be balanced by bad, and nothing good can be taken for granted.

I was reminded of this by something in Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s new book ‘Nomad‘ — an unpleasant read as it dawns on you just how reactionary her views are, starting with her constant harping on “the Muslim mind”  (replace the word Muslim with male, female, Jewish, black, gay, or any other category, and you’ll see how gross such a generalization is, let alone how absurd).    At one point, she fumes at her sister’s constantly adding “Insh-Allah” to the end of any sentence about something planned for the future.  In Hirsi Ali’s newly atheist and devoutly anti-Muslim eyes, her sister is a believing fool.

I found this fuming particularly grating because my father, a deeply observant Jew, used to do the same as Hirsi Ali’s sister, employing the identical phrase in English:  “God willing.”

Even as a child, I registered this less as a profession of faith than as one of deep insecurity.   For all his religiousness, my father clearly doubted the benignity of God’s will, as any thinking person inevitably must.   It was as though to plan for good could only tempt fate and invite the possibility of bad.  But then his own childhood — an almost Dickensian one of beatings and abandonment — had given him good reasons to mistrust the world’s capacity for kindness, let alone God’s.

Once, not long before he died, he asked me very seriously if I thought that God really exists, and the way he asked made me realize that he must have put this question to each in the series of rabbis who’d presided over the Reading Hebrew Congregation over the years, and never with any satisfactory answer.

I wish I’d said simply “I don’t know.”   Perhaps we all wish too late for greater kindness to our parents.  Instead, I ran on about the idea of God and the nature of belief and the human need for mystery — an evasive, intellectual answer that could only disappoint him.   I didn’t actually say that I thought his question simplistic, even child-like, but I must certainly have implied it.

Perhaps I was right, but so what?   In these gloomy Seattle days, I find myself adopting my father’s outlook despite myself.  God or the gods or fate is not willing.  I didn’t propitiate them.  I made the mistake of taking summer for granted.

So I find myself longing for kindness — for a kinder idea of God, a kinder childhood and a kinder daughter for my father, and right now, the kindness of summer:  the gift of warmth and sunshine and the simple enjoyment of what is.  Free. like a child, of all sense of consequence.

A bonfire of vanities is breaking out in the American political punditry about one single Muslim.   Not a terrorist, but a European intellectual — scholar and activist Tariq Ramadan, the Oxford professor who argues that Islam has a positive, ethical contribution to make to Western culture, and who was named one of the top innovators of the 21st century on the impeccably non-radical Time.com.

Fresh fuel for the fire comes from The Flight of the Intellectuals, a new book accusing American and European intellectuals of pandering to Islam, specifically to Ramadan, while ignoring signs of his extremism.

It will appear to be a splendidly principled debate, with everyone taking impassioned positions in defense of liberte, egalite, and if not fraternite, certainly sororite.   Women in Islam, that is.   As usual, male Western intellectuals get most worked up about “the question of women” in Islamic societies, thus presenting themselves as comfortably situated white knights in shining armor, armchair warriors protecting the innocent from barbarism.

It will also be a peculiarly sophomoric debate, essentially asking “who’s our Muslim intellectual?”  Is it Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose book Infidel rejected Islam outright and led to her flight for safety to the US, where she’s now at the American Enterprise Institute?  Or is it Tariq Ramadan, who has consistently argued for a “third way” blending traditional Islamic values with western democratic ones?

In books like What I Believe, Ramadan advocates greater democratic political involvement by western Muslims.  This may seem reasonable enough, but reason, for his critics, is just a mask.   His hidden agenda is an extremist one, they say;  see how he refuses to outright condemn punishing women for adultery (he only says he opposes it)  or antisemitism (oops, strike that one, he did).

In fact the language used about Ramadan has a distinctly antisemitic tint.   He’s shifty, they say;  he’s two-faced;  he hides his true loyalties — all the sort of things said about Jews in 1930s Germany.   They point to Ramadan’s “connections” (his grandfather founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, so obviously the grandson is carrying out the grandfather’s program).   So what if Ramadan is a charming and sophisticated European intellectual?  That very charm and sophistication make him suspicious.   (There’s a strong tint here of “who does he think he is?  he’s just a Muslim putting on airs”).  He has to be a fifth columnist in the ranks of naive post-Enlightenment scholars who have no idea of the treacherous and devious depths of Islamic thinking.

The ultimate insult for such critics seems to be that Ramadan is a religious man.   A pious Muslim, as they see it, cannot possibly be a liberal intellectual;  his whole argument that Islam and social democracy are not necessarily opposed can thus, ipso facto, only be false.

What they’re really saying is that the only kind of Muslim intellectual who’s acceptable is one who’s absolutely kosher.  One who, like Hirsi Ali, has renounced all ties with the demon Islam.  One who has repented, seen the error of his/her ways, and accepted the superiority of the secular.

Perhaps that’s why the bonfire:  the language, attitudes, and assumptions behind this debate all seem to me to bear the distinctly pious fervor of  Inquisition.