Moses and the Jews

The newspaper of the Palestinian Authority leadership, al-Hayat al-Jadida, contained an article this month, not the first of its kind, which attempted to delegitimize the Jewish connection not only to their own history, not only to their own land, but to their very religion, Judaism, and its leader, Moses. The article attempts to square the circle of the Moslem belief in the prophecy of Moses and the Torah with the modern, vicious anti-Semitism of official Moslem Arab leadership today. The author, a religious leader, resolves the contradiction by claiming, ?The Jews are liars when they relate themselves to Moses, of blessed memory.?



How does he know that the Jews are lying when they claim Moses as their prophet? Simple: “Not only was Moses respectable, but he is among the best of the prophets and his Torah is a lighthouse, guide and bright light; whereas, the Jews are the opposite of all this.” Unlike Moses, according to the PA newspaper, the Jews are “the instructors in crookedness and the purveyors of ruin, destruction and corruption, accursed traders for whom the ends justify the means. That is the reason they manage to achieve so many of their goals using women and money, especially if they need to take advantage of people of weak character.”



The writer attempts to base his thesis on the Quran, thus giving his anti-Semitic rant a theological justification. According to al-Hayat al-Jadida, “Great Allah spoke the truth when He said of them [the Jews], ‘And they are the purveyors of corruption on earth.’ It seems that that trait will characterize them till the end of days…” Not only does the Quran, according to the PA newspaper, back up his anti-Semitic view of the Jews, but the Jews themselves encourage the character traits attributed to them by the Quran among themselves. The author writes, “The greatest of them [the Jews] teaches it [corruption] to the least of them, in order to educate him in the ways [of corruption].”