Tom & Jerry: The Jewish Conspiracy

This is labelled on YouTube as a "Film Seminar on Iranian TV" and has the Prof explaining why "Disney" produced Tom and Jerry to create a more favourable image of the Jews, whose dirty, stingy ways provoked Hitler into trying to wipe them off the face of the Earth, despite his "contacts" with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The worst moment is the last. A young, headscarfed woman noting all this down as if he were explaining how to deliver a baby.

(via Daniel Finkelstein and Instapundit)

Behind the Wahhabis

Roger Simon has one of those illuminating moments which demonstrate that, no matter if across ethnic, religious or cultural barriers all people share so much, there are some tics that can only be picked up in particular places at particular times, some aberrations that are so irrational that future millennia will have to dig hard and deep to understand (let us hope).

In a taxi in Seattle, Simon got talking to the driver, a Somali, who with very little provocation launched into an impassioned attack on al-Queda. He called it "a danger to all mankind" and said it was backed by Saudi Wahhabi money.

He didn't just leave it there. He explained as well who was behind this violent takeover of his religion; ie who was behind Saudi Wahhabism.

Who? Well, it's obvious, isn't it? The Israelis. How did he know this?

The man replied by talking about his childhood, his Islamic education. He had learned about the Jews from the Koran. That was the truth, of course.

See my post on Ayaan Hirsi Ali's recent piece on the Holocaust and my exchange with Wodge in the comments.

But I pray to Allah that ...

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was 24 before she found out about the Holocaust. She was studying a preparatory history course in Holland at the time, and what she had discovered, she told her half-sister, 21, and showed her the photographs in her history book. Her half-sister's reaction was

It's a lie! Jews have a way of blinding people. They were not killed, gassed nor massacred. But I pray to Allah that one day all the Jews in the world will be destroyed.

Ali's point is that her half-sister's reaction would be the reaction of anyone educated as they had been by the Saudi's or on Saudi charity anywhere in the Islamic world.

Jews were said to be responsible for the deaths of babies, epidemics like AIDS, for the cause of wars. They were greedy and would do absolutely anything to kill us Muslims. And if we ever wanted to know peace and stability we would have to destroy them before they would wipe us out. For those of us who were not in a position to take arms against the Jews it was enough for us to cup our hands, raise our eyes heavenward and pray to Allah to destroy them.

She asks (rhetorically) why, in the face of Ahmadinejad's conference, there are no counter-voices raised in the Arab world, why Islamic philanthropy must carry with it the germ of virulent anti-semiticism and why Western charities do not attempt to tell the truth about the last attempt to 'solve the Jewish problem'.

Other Iranians

In the light of events in Tehran this week, an escape into the past and to another Iran.

Abdol Hossein Sardari didn't look like a hero. But when Paris fell to Hitler in June 1940, the 30-year-old Muslim-a dapper man with a receding hairline-took it upon himself to save Jews trapped inside Nazi-occupied France. Sardari, a junior official at the Iranian Embassy, had been left behind to look after the building when the Iranian ambassador and his staff abandoned Paris to establish residence in Vichy, the new home of France's pro-Nazi government. Once the Nazis began rounding up Jews, Sardari, without authorization from his government, made liberal use of the embassy's supply of blank Iranian passports to assign new, non-Jewish identities to those in need, creating his own version of Schindler's list.

Ibrahim Morady, who died this past June in Los Angeles at the age of 95, was one of the hundreds of Jews Sardari helped spare from deportation. "My father moved to Paris from Persia when he was six," recounts his son Fred. Once Morady, a well-to-do rug merchant, had his new identity, he and two colleagues arranged to purchase false papers for about 100 other Jews of Iranian descent. Sardari served as their go-between, passing a bribe to a German official. In return, these Jews were given documents asserting that they were members of "some strange tribe in Iran-Djouguti, or something like that," Fred Morady explains. "I asked my father: 'What does this name mean?' And he said: 'They just made it up.'"

They just made it up. That's what Ahmedinejad organised his conference to say, though his field of reference is a little difference, even if related.

In "How my grandad invented the Holocaust", Eugene peers back at a generation of his family that all but disappeared, pace Ahmadinejad and his "scholars".

Limits of academic freedom (Netherlands)

Is this familiar?

After almost 40 years of lecturing at Utrecht University and with his eyesight failing, professor Piet van der Horst was looking forward to delivering his retirement lecture last summer. He decided to talk on the myth of Jewish cannibalism, a perennial anti-Semitic theme, and part and parcel of his field of expertise, Judaism in the Hellenistic period. As is customary in the Netherlands, he also decided to add a timely twist to his farewell lecture: the resurfacing of the myth of Jewish cannibalism in contemporary Islamic society [as evidenced by] the proliferation of anti-Semitic cartoons, TV-shows, sermons and the like ... particularly in Iran, Syria and the Palestinian territories.

However, Van der Horst was not to deliver his lecture. Flanked by three tenured professors, the university’s dean told Van der Horst that his lecture was academically sub-standard and would, if delivered, create an immediate security risk.

“It was the most humiliating moment of my life,” Van der Horst says. “I was grilled for one and a half hours by the dean and his co-conspirators. At some point I was so confused that I started to wander if they were right. That I had really gone mad. That was how intimidating it was.”

Did professor Van der Horst find solidarity among his fellow intellectual workers in Academe? In a word, no.

When queried by Dutch national daily newspaper, De Volkskrant, eight out of ten supported the decision, arguing that there are limits to academic freedom.

Funny how those limits are so selectively applied.

I have added it to the list.