New York City Schools Give “Jihad” A Makeover

Following a wave of anti-Semitism in America’s schools, colleges, and public spaces, the New York City School Department set out to remedy the problem by instituting a series of voluntary programs for public school teachers, with the first aimed at combating “anti-Muslim bias,” followed by one on anti-Semitism. Unfortunately, the training program on Islam was thoroughly distorted for ideological purposes and implied a false moral equivalence – as if there were no more reason for Americans to fear violence from Muslims than from Jews.

Central to the training video on anti-Muslim bias (obtained by the New York Post) was the denial that the term jihad – commonly used by Muslims throughout the world to refer to both terrorist violence directed at non-Muslim individuals and rebellions or warfare by aggressive Islamic regimes like that of Iran or the Taliban – necessarily had any violent implications.

Instead, after explaining that the literal meaning of jihad is “struggle” or “great effort,” the video offered three ostensibly representative interpretations of that term. In succession, the slides included these examples: “My Jihad is to never settle short of my best effort,” “My Jihad is to not judge people by their cover,” and “My Jihad is to build friendships across the aisle.” The instructor added as another illustration, “getting fit.”

These interpretations of the term jihad were pure pabulum, designed to indoctrinate and mislead rather than instruct. While it is true, as the scholar Daniel Pipes explains in his classic study In the Path of God: Islam and Political Power, that the term has three subsidiary meanings – one concerning personal righteousness, the other two involving “doing one’s best in speech and deed to create a society which lives according to Islam’s laws” – its primary meaning, certainly the one most commonly in use today, is “righteous war,” directed at “spread[ing] the rule of Islamic law” throughout the world.

By contrast, I challenge anyone to report a single example of a Muslim individual using the term in any of the senses used in the training video – each of which sound as if they had been borrowed from some second-rate, Western-produced corporate textbook on human relations.

As Pipes is careful to explain, it is incorrect to translate jihad as “holy war,” as is commonly done, since that interpretation “brings to mind warriors going off to battle with God in their hearts, intent on spreading the faith,” as did medieval Crusaders or “soldiers of the Reformation.” Rather, since Islam (like Judaism) is primarily a religion of law rather than of personal belief, jihad’s purpose isn’t “to spread the faith,” but only “the rule of Islamic law.” Hence it is better understood as “righteous war.”

Consequent to this distinction, as Pipes explains, Islam – unlike medieval Christianity – does not entail inquisitions or forced conversions. However, in its orthodox interpretation, the Muslim religion “requires the expulsion of non-Muslims from power and their replacement by believers, by force if necessary.”

Given this distinction, it must be acknowledged that for almost a millennium, Jews and Christians living under Islamic regimes were typically (not always) treated with greater moderation and tolerance than were Jews inhabiting Christian Europe. Jews, Christians, and other monotheists were regarded by medieval Muslims as “People of the Book… faulty but nonetheless acceptable to God.”

So long as they submitted to Islamic governance, Christians and Jews were treated as dhimmis – “protected peoples” – who paid extra taxes and were subject to various disabilities, such as being prohibited from proselytizing or building new houses of worship, as well as from riding horses or living in multistory buildings. But they were allowed to continue practicing their religions in peace.

Nonetheless, a fundamental difference between Islam and both Judaism and Christianity, as Pipes stresses, is the centrality of politics to Shari’a law (literally translated as “the correct path” in Arabic) in contrast to Jewish Halakhah. Having “exist[ed] as a people before they became a religious community,” he explains, “the Hebrews depended politically less on their religion than did the Muslims, who had come together only on account of religion.”

Being accustomed, from the fall of Jerusalem in 586 B.C., to “liv[ing] almost always under non-Jewish rule,” the Jews “learned to accommodate virtually any regime by insulating themselves from the affairs of state and creating islands of Halakhic piety,” acknowledging, from the third century A.D. onwards, “the religiously binding character” of the civil law of the country they inhabited, “so long as it did not conflict with the Halakah.” Indeed, even when Israelis regained their own state in 1948, they “made no serious effort to conduct public life” in accordance with Jewish law – aside from accommodations to orthodoxy like banning public bus service on the sabbath.

By contrast, the long survival of Islamic regimes – most notably the vast Ottoman empire – until well into the twentieth century made it much more difficult for devout Muslims to make their peace with living under non-Muslim governments, let alone accommodate international rules of order that forbade wars of aggression aimed at overthrowing such regimes.

It was all the harder for Muslims, having long enjoyed not only vast political and military power (their invasion of central Europe being halted only by their defeat at the siege of Vienna in 1683), to discover, late in the eighteenth century, how far behind they had fallen an increasingly secularized, industrializing, and commercial Europe by that time. (This is the theme of the great Islamicist Bernard Lewis’s book What Went Wrong? The Clash between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East.)

At this point I must add that, despite the failure of Muslim and Arab regimes to establish stable, constitutional political regimes along Western lines (with the possible recent exception of Indonesia), millions of Muslims did make their peace with liberal, essentially nondenominational regimes over the past century by emigrating to countries like Britain, France, and above all the United States.

Having known some Muslim Americans, I have no doubt that the large majority are loyal, law-abiding citizens of this country, with considerable numbers even serving in our armed forces. Nor, in my estimation, do many of them have any wish to commit criminal acts against their Jewish fellow Americans – whatever their disagreements about Israeli policies.

The U.S., it should be noted, has been far more successful at integrating Muslim immigrants than countries like France and Germany, not only because they’ve arrived at a slower rate, but because this country still rests on the principles of the Declaration of Independence, dedicated to securing the equal rights of all citizens – rather than on an inherited notion of ethnic, racial, or religious solidarity.

The core of Muslim anti-Semitism in this country, however, lies in our college campuses, as was illustrated in the mushy response of the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT to Congressional inquiries about the subject. To illustrate, I copy here a list of recent events from The College Fix website in early March:

UCSB Black Studies faculty plan anti-Israel ‘day of interruption’

Jewish student president at UCSB personally targeted

Pro-Palestinian protesters shut down Penn trustee meeting

Jewish students at Tufts spat on, told to ‘go back’

ASU Latino organization calls for death to Zionists, settlers

Commies burst in on Yale professor, wave anti-Israel signs

Barnard College seniors demand school divest from Israel

Needless to say, it would be impossible to find in the records of any American college a list of such abuses and atrocities perpetrated by Jews against Muslims. However, Muslim anti-Semitism has become no less a problem at secondary schools that have significant Islamic populations.

To take just one example, drawn from the Post, several dozen Muslim students at Origins High School in Brooklyn (where Muslims constitute some 40 percent of the student population) have instigated an effectual reign of terror, marching through hallways carrying Palestinian flags chanting “Death to Israel!” and donning Hitler mustaches.

Black as well as Jewish students at the school have been targeted by the demonstrators. They posted swastikas on three classroom doors. One Jewish teacher who has been targeted and threatened by the demonstrators – one of whom threatened to kill her, with another expressing the wish that Hitler had killed more Jews, and another chasing her down the hall with bigoted remarks – told The Post, “I live in fear of going to work every day.” A teacher of global history, she had posted flags of hundreds of countries on her classroom walls, but entered the room one day to find that the Israeli flag had been removed.

So far, Origins teachers report, the “teen tormentors” have “faced no serious discipline” under the school’s acting principal, who has done little beyond contacting parents in an effort to practice “restorative justice.” (Restorative justice presumably means: both Jews and Muslims will express their grievances against one another, and the result will be a group hug.) Appeals by the Jewish teacher to her school’s “safety committee,” her union, and the Brooklyn district superintendent have met with no meaningful response.

Herein lies the root of the problem: heavily indoctrinated and resentful students, spurred to expressions of violent jihadism and criminal behavior by demagogic politicians and by spineless administrators at both the collegiate and lower levels of the education system, whose only response is to euphemize the problem through misleading teacher-training programs and exhortations to “restorative justice.”

The start of a real solution must lie in speaking the truth, and refusing to be intimidated by self-serving politicians, academic ideologues, and undisciplined teenagers and college students. The preservation of our political order demands no less.

David Lewis Schaefer is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at College of the Holy Cross.