[See previous related articles: 1) Mamdani Madness and Mania; 2) The New Face of Jihad and Intifada in America; 3) The Mindset of Radical Islamic Politicians in America; 4) The Islamic World Versus the Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman Worlds - Part I:Origins]
The Sunni Caliphate of the Ottoman Turkish Empire was the major Islamic power in the world until it was defeated during the First World War (1914-1918) mostly by Britain and France. The Ottoman Turks began their rise as a powerful empire in the thirteenth century that eventually stretched over three continents: West Asia and the Middle East; South Eastern Europe and North Africa until failing and falling in the early twentieth century. The non-Arabic Turks suppressed the Sunni Islamic Arabs under their control and ruled them with an iron fist not allowing for any dissent against Turkish rule.
During the First World War Islamic Ottoman Turkey joined the Central Powers of Imperial Germany and Austro-Hungary. This was in itself a portentous symbol of a nexus between super-nationalist Germanic hegemonistic ambitions and the Islamic Ottomans, something that the rising creed of German antisemitic Nazism would continue to push among the Islamic Arabs of the former Ottoman Empire.
The British were the first European colonial power to fan the earliest flames of Arab nationalism. They did this to undermine the Ottoman Turks. Interestingly the Jews of Turkish Palestine also aided the British with undercover work, spying and intelligence most notably by the NILI ("Netzach Yisrael Lo Yishaker") spy ring. The Jews who did this for the British were also hoping and aiming to attain Jewish independence in Palestine once the British won and the Turks were defeated and expelled.
The British used and politically manipulated both Jews and Arabs in their war against the Ottoman Turks by creating successful military and intelligence alliances with Jews and Arabs living in Palestine and the Middle East..
During the First World War the British instigated what has become to be known as the Great Arab Revolt led primarily by (King) Hussein bin Ali of the Hashemite Kingdom of Hejaz in western Arabia (now in Saudi Arabia) officially launched in 1916. From that point on, whenever the Turks would be defeated and pushed out of an area, the local Arabs would rise up in arms and demand independence which the British and French had promised the Arabs but which they did not fully grant them. This caused the Arabs to view the British and French as the new occupying colonial overlords and masters and hated them looking for ways to gain full Arab independence.
It should be noted that Arab and Jewish experiences paralleled each other in that the British did not grant the Jews full independence in Palestine, instead ruling Palestine under a League of Nations Mandate and thus in effect becoming the imperial and colonial masters of Palestine from 1920 to 1948.
During this time there were Jewish resistance groups such as the IRGUN and LECHI that took up arms and fought the occupying British forces who had set up quotas and limits to Jewish immigration into Palestine mainly to appease Arab leaders, such as the Mufti of Jerusalem Mohammed Amin al-Husseini (1897-1974), who virulently opposed Jews coming to settle in Palestine and moved to Berlin during the Second World War encouraging Hitler to murder the Jews of Europe so that they should not reach the shores of Palestine.
The time frame between the First World War (1914-1918) and the Second World War (1939-1945) saw the rise of the antisemitic Muslim Brotherhood, starting in 1928 in Egypt, as well as the rise of Nazism in Germany. Both were nationalist movements that were not just highly antisemitic but fostered anti-Jewish actions by their adherents. Once the Nazis rose to power in Germany in 1933 they actively reached out to Islamic fundamentalists in Arab countries who resented the British and French control over them to foment not just anti-British resistance but also to carry out acts of anti-Jewish hate.
There were over one million Jews living among the Arabs of the MIddle East and North Africa when it passed from being controlled by the Ottoman Turks to the various successive colonial powers such as the British and French. The Turks, although involved in acts of antisemitism themselves from time to time, managed to keep the lid on over the antisemitism by the Arab populations they controlled.
Historically, the Ottoman Turks had welcomed many Jewish refugees who had been expelled by the Christian Spanish monarchy from Spain after 1492. In fact there is a line attributed to the ruling Sultan of Turkey when he heard that the king of Spain had expelled the Spanish Jews to the effect that; "The king of Spain must have gone mad because has just made me into a very rich man" — with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain who would then as new citizens of Turkey go on to help Ottoman Turkey become a fabulously wealthy empire.
Turkish control was removed from over the formerly subjugated Arabs by 1918. That was combined with the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 among the newly-freed Arabs, and the rise of Nazis to power in 1933 in Germany, and later added to general Arab fury over Israel gaining its independnce in 1947. The confluence of these events started to see not just anti-Jewish hate but violent and bloodthirsty anti-Jewish rioting, killing, rape and all sorts of anti-Jewish bedlam breaking loose all over the Middle East and North Africa.
The following are just a few of the major examples:
"In Mandatory Palestine, riots against Jewish populations occurred due to a complex interplay of political, economic, and religious tensions, particularly fueled by [Arab opposition to] Zionist immigration and the British Mandate's policies [of permitting limited Jewish immigration to Palestine]. Notable events include the 1921 Jaffa riots, the 1929 riots resulting in massacres and expulsions from Hebron, the 1933 Palestine riots, for example, were fueled by Arab resentment towards Jewish migration and British policies and the 1936 Jaffa riots marking the start of the Arab revolt. These events often involved attacks on Jewish communities, including massacres and destruction of property, and were characterized by religious, nationalist, and economic grievances [by the local Arabs]." (Google AI Overview).
"The 1947 anti-Jewish riots in Aleppo were a mob attack on Syrian Jews in Aleppo, Syria in December 1947, following the United Nations vote in favour of partitioning British Palestine. The attack was part of an anti-Jewish wave of unrest across the Middle East and North Africa at the time of the 1948 Palestine war. According to Jacob Freid, the riots resulted in some 75 Jews murdered and several hundred wounded. In the aftermath of the riots, half the city's Jewish population fled the city." (Wikipedia).
"The Farhud was a pogrom carried out against the Jewish population of Baghdad, Iraq, on 1-2 June 1941 immediately following the British victory in the Anglo-Iraqi War. The riots occurred in a power vacuum that followed the collapse of the pro-Fascist and pro-Nazi government of Rashid Ali al-Gaylani while the city was in a state of instability. The violence came immediately after the rapid defeat of Rashid Ali by British forces, whose earlier coup had generated a short period of [Arab] national euphoria, and was fueled by allegations that Iraqi Jews had aided the British. More than 180 Jews were killed and 1,000 injured. Looting of Jewish property took place and 900 Jewish homes were destroyed. On account of the role of Axis and pro-Axis elements in inciting and eventually carrying out the pogrom, it is often argued to have constituted the extension of the Holocaust in Iraq," (Wikipedia).
Two more major factors should be noted as active driving economic and geopolitical forces during this time. One is the discovery of petroleum oil in many Arab countries that made their Arab and Persian rulers and governments fabulously wealthy and created an "oil rush" by the great oil-hungry industrialized nations of the world who needed these new sources of oil wealth. It also meant that the newly oil rich Arab countries could buy the armaments of their choice which they would eventually use against the hated common enemy of Israel.
The second important factor is the rise of the Communist Soviet Union and Red China as world powers after the Second World War. They wished to undermine and subsume the geopolitical influence of Great Britain, the United States and all of the Western powers by creating alliances with the new Arab dictators of the Middle East such as with Nasser of Egypt, Gaddafi of Libya, Assad of Syria, Saddam Hussein of Iraq and building up their militaries.
This unholy alliance between the atheistic and antisemitic Communist regimes of Russia and China with the fanatically Islamic Arab rulers of the Middle East posed a threat to the Western Powers who, over time during subsequent various Middle Eastern wars, with and without the active involvement of Israel, brought down the arrogant rule of the likes of Nasser, Gaddafi, Assad, Saddam Hussein and eventually confronted oil rich Shiite Iran as well in 2025.
The greatest catastrophe to befall the Jews living in Islamic countries was the Jewish exodus from the Muslim world during the twentieth century: "Approximately [more than] 900,000 Jews migrated, fled, or were expelled from Muslim-majority countries throughout Africa and Asia, primarily as a consequence of the establishment of the State of Israel. The first large-scale exoduses took place in the late 1940s and early 1950s, primarily from Iraq, Yemen, and Libya. In these cases, over 90% of the Jewish population left, leaving their assets and properties behind. Between 1948 and 1951, 250,000 Jews immigrated to Israel from Arab countries. 600,000 Jews from Arab and Muslim countries had relocated to Israel by 1972 while another 300,000 migrated to France, the United States and Canada. Today, the descendants of Jews who immigrated to Israel from other Middle Eastern lands (known as Mizrahi Jews and Sephardic Jews) constitute more than half of all [Jewish] Israelis." (Wikipedia)
Not content with letting history take a breather, the growth of Islamic Fundamentalism and aggression both in Sunni Arab countries like Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya and others and in Shiite Muslim countries such as Iran has seen fit to confront not just Jewish Israel but the Christian West.
The instability in the Middle East brought waves of millions of Muslim refugees to Western Europe and North America who had liberal open-border policies. No sooner had the millions of Muslim refugees arrived in their new home countries when they turned to mass disturbances and acts of violence terrorism in keeping with their wild notions of Jihad and Intifada wherever they made their new homes.
Western Christian countries such as France, Great Britain, Belgium, Netherlands, Sweden, United States and many others now find themselves under siege from protesting and hostile Muslim rioters who have no respect for the traditional ways of life of the Western World, rooted in the combined Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman heritages.
Rabbi Yitschak Rudominwas born to Holocaust survivor parents in Israel, grew up in South Africa, and lives in Brooklyn, NY. He is an alumnus of Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin and of Teachers College-Columbia University. He heads the Jewish Professionals Institute dedicated to Jewish Adult Education and Outreach - Kiruv Rechokim. He was the Director of the Belzer Chasidim's Sinai Heritage Center of Manhattan 1988-1995, a Trustee of AJOP 1994-1997 and founder of American Friends of South African Jewish Education 1995-2015. He is the author of The Second World War and Jewish Education in America: The Fall and Rise of Orthodoxy. Contact Rabbi Yitschak Rudomin at izakrudomin@gmail.com