and Jesus was black, too

Meryl Yourish might be disappointed, but I actually found the column on 1920's Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig's polemics against Islam to be intriguing. The specific attacks on Islam are unoriginal, but the historical context is interesting. Most of the polemical attacks against Islam that I was aware of were from Christian sources stemming from ongoing political dispute over the holy lands (Saladin's memory was still fresh), whereas Judaism at the time was centered in Christian Europe.

I do think that Rosenweig's prophecy that "The coming millennium will go down in world history as a struggle between Orient and Occident, between the church and Islam, between the Germanic peoples and the Arabs," was more of a self-fulfilling one, and that his energies might have been better focused on European/Germanic anti-Semitism rather than the Islamic bogeyman.

As Yourish points out, the same columnist has an essay whimsically titled "Mahathir is right: Jews do rule the world"^[1] which goes on to credit Judaism with the invention of democracy, the philosophical framework that made Protestantism possible, and the messianic inspiration of America's founding. Ok, sure, why not? Though the rest of the essay is devoted to specific faults of Arab cultures (because they have no volunteer fire departments or school boards) and the concept of God in Islam (as explained by Jewish polemicist Franz Rosenzweig! quelle surprise), and doesn't really address how the asserted Jewish foundation of the edifice of Western civlization translates into direct rule over the globe by the Elders of Zion. I am sure this will be a topic of a future column.

^[1]I'm glad the columnist isn't Muslim, he would have had to contend with accusations of blood libel (since, by trying to justify Mathahir's claim, he is encouraging violence against Jews by giving Muslims convenient rationalizations with which to pursue their murderous intent. Without which no doubt they would have gone peaceably home to volunteer on their local fire departments and school boards).