Know Thy Enemy: Al Quaradhawi speaks (again).

Well, we all knew he was an Jew hater for the hell of it- though I didn't receive a response from my email to the BBC where I observed they were softening Al-Qaradhawi's ideology for public consumption- but he goes about confirming that in this Memri translation of an Arabic newspaper analyis of comments from his regular broadcast on Al-Jazeera.

'The iniquity of the Jews, as a community, is obvious and apparent. Let me explain: The West, I can say about some of them [i.e., Westerners] who are iniquitous, and others who are not iniquitous. And it is possible. But iniquity on the part of the Jews is great iniquity, grave iniquity, iniquity that is incomparable and overt. Therefore, when it was suggested to me that Jews would be participating in the dialogue in the upcoming interview, I rejected this. I said no, we should not conduct a dialogue with these [people] while their hands are stained with our blood.'

Now, such is my Dhimmi mindset I'm almost inclined to gratitude that Al Qaradhawi saw fit to say that some of us westerners are 'not iniquitous', and that his objection to the Jews relates to their "hands... stained with... blood"- implying an act they could atone for- but no, I'm actually not grateful to this bloody idealogue for anything at all.

As the Iraqi emigre writer Hassan Assad puts it neatly in a must-read feature about Red Ken and Al-Qaradhawi from the same Memri report, 'he dissimulates'.

In the case of the passage above it is necessary to unpack a bit of Al-Qaradhawi's religious perspective. But first, I observe that Jewish iniquity is 'incomparable' with Western iniquity- when you might have thought that because Muslims have been killed in Afghanistan and even the holiest of Iraqi cities by US and other invading Western troops the Jews ought not to be so different. This is because Islam agrees with the other two faiths that the Jews were specially favoured by God- after all, Abraham and Moses etc. were Jews. Islam also believes that Jesus was just a man and not the son of God- so the Christian led/based Westerners are barking up the wrong tree, as dogs are inclined to do I suppose. The point is that the Westerners/Christians are misled, the Jews rebellious, and rebellion is qualitatively worse than foolishness, so Jewish iniquity is 'incomparable'.

For Al-Qaradhawi, the Jews in occupying the Muslim land without being Muslims is where they are delighting in their rebellion, and the blood of Muslims seals that iniquity- hence he is implacable.

That's where the religious outlook and the political ideology of Al-Qaradhawi and his many followers are united.

Memri, incidentally, noticed how the BBC's coverage of Al Qaradhawi promulgated his line nicely for him as well:

'According to the BBC, he is reported to have said, "Do these people know me? If they are really after the truth why don't they try and find it instead of this venomous media campaign?" '

*

Tim Blair meanwhile has picked up on another alliance between Islamic dogma and the far left from his perennial bete noir Margo Kingston. Many comments follow after Margo's little slip:

"the fundamentalist Zionist lobby controls politics and the media in the US and Australia"

Just one of those phrases that slips out occasionally by accident, I'm sure.