Islamic Terrorists Target Moroccan Jews

Moroccan Muslims are a tad excited.  Having seen their co religionists in Yemen finally force out the tiny Jewish community there, they seek to accomplish the same thing in Morocco:

From Agence France-Presse, May 21:

RABAT (AFP) — A group of  Islamists recently arrested in Morocco planned to attack Jewish interests in the country, a court source said Thursday, citing the charges against them.

The suspects, alleged to be members of a cell that was part of the radical Islamist movement Salafia Jihadia, were also preparing attacks against Moroccan security services, the source said.

The cell — Jamaat Al Mourabitine Al Jodod, or New Fighters Group — allegedly began operating in March 2008 in southern Morocco and sought to recruit militants from Koranic schools with the intention of infiltrating political parties.

Authorities announced their arrest on May 12 and they face charges including forming a criminal gang with the aim of carrying out “terrorist” acts. They are being held in jail.

“Police dismantled the cell as part of a regular operation in the battle against terrorism,” the court source said.

Jews have been living in Morocco since the time of Antiquity. Prior to WWII, the Jewish population of Morocco reached 225,000.

But life in Morocco was not without its problems. In 1943 a series of  pogroms occurred. And in June 1948,  forty-four Jews were murdered during riots in Oujda and Djerada.  Also in that year,  an unofficial economic boycott was instigated against Moroccan Jews.

In 1965, Moroccan writer Said Ghallab had this to say about the feelings of his fellow Muslims towards Jews:

The worst insult that a Moroccan could possibly offer was to treat someone as a Jew.

My childhood friends have remained anti-Jewish. They hide their virulent anti-Semitism by contending that the State of Israel was the creature of Western ‘imperialism’

A whole Hitlerite myth is being cultivated among the populace. The massacres of the Jews by Hitler are exalted ecstatically. It is even credited that Hitler is not dead, but alive and well, and his arrival is awaited to deliver the Arabs from Israel.

And this is hardly surprising. For the Quran is replete with anti semitism. Mohammed may have started off by wooing Jews in a bid to convert them to his new faith, but the second they declined, his ‘love’ turned to hate and Islamic anti semitism was born.

Author Andrew Bostom (The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism) presents  an enormous amount of documentary evidence testifying to the humiliations Jews experienced at the hands of Muslims.

Bostom also points out  that the extremist, Jihadist description of Jews as “apes and pigs,” in accord with the Qur’an, has historical precedent.

Indeed, Muhammad himself used it before ordering that every adult male of the Banu Qurayza, a Jewish tribe, be killed, calling the Jews “you brothers of monkeys.”

And Zaynu’d-Din Ali b Said, praised the anti-Jewish riots and massacres in Baghdad in 1291 (which spread widely in the region), saying, “These apish Jews are done away and destroyed.”

Bostom also references another slaughter:

Referring to the Jews as “brothers of apes,” who repeatedly blasphemed the prophet Muhammad, and whose overall conduct reflected their hatred of Muslims, the Moroccan cleric al-Maghili (d. 1505) fomented, and then personally led, a Muslim pogrom (in ~1490) against the Jews of the southern Moroccan oasis of Touat, plundering and killing Jews en masse, and destroying their synagogue in neighboring Tamantit. Al-Maghili’s virulent Islamic antisemitism was perhaps captured best in a line from a verse diatribe he composed: “Love of the Prophet requires hatred of the Jews.”

“Love of the Prophet requires hatred of the Jews.”