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The New Anti-Semitism, Continued

Park51’s Khan sees resonance with Islamophobia

by
Marc Tracy
August 23, 2010
(Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
(Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Yesterday, Daisy Khan, the wife of Imam Abdul Feisal Rauf (who himself was profiled in the New York Times this weekend), compared opposition to her Cordoba Initiative’s plans for an Islamic center in lower Manhattan to “a metastasized anti-Semitism.” She added, “That’s what we feel right now. It’s not even Islamophobia, it’s beyond Islamophobia. It’s hate of Muslims. And we are deeply concerned.”

Separately, contributing editor Jeffrey Goldberg notes, “Anti-Muslim sentiment in America today has many of the hallmarks of the anti-Semitism of yesteryear. American Jews should be able to see that.”

One American Jew who did see that was Daniel Luban, writing in Tablet Magazine last week about “The New Anti-Semitism”:

Many of the tropes of classic anti-Semitism have been revived and given new force on the American right. Once again jingoistic politicians and commentators posit a religious conspiracy breeding within Western society, pledging allegiance to an alien power, conspiring with allies at the highest levels of government to overturn the existing order. Because the propagators of these conspiracy theories are not anti-Semitic but militantly pro-Israel, and because their targets are not Jews but Muslims, the ADL and other Jewish groups have had little to say about them. But since the election of President Barack Obama, this Islamophobic discourse has rapidly intensified

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.