Why the Rush to Blame the Jews?
Ari Kohen is dismayed by the rush to finger Jews and Israelis for the controversial fim, "Innocence of Muslims," especially considering that the film's creator was neither Jewish nor Israeli.
[W]hy the jump to blaming the Jews and Israel? Well, first of all, it’s a great disguise. As Juan Cole rightly points out, there are a bunch of now-prominent Jews who have made a career of saying awful and inflammatory things about Muslims. It isn’t too difficult for people to imagine that there’s one more such Jew who has made a film with some help from his Islamophobic Jewish friends.
But the bloggers who quickly bought into and repeated the claim that the Jews or Israelis were behind this latest Islamophobic garbage were buying into an old anti-Semitic trope that Cole notes, the filmmakers took for granted:
The group behind the film, in other words, managed to evoke all the classic themes of anti-Semitism as a way of disguising the Coptic and evangelical network out of which the ‘film’ came. When they weren’t busy picketing Mormons and defaming Muslims they were trying to get Jews killed for their own smears of Islam!
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