Homophobia and Anti-Semitism

It is a striking fact that people who are anti-Semitic are so often homophobic and many who are homophobic are anti-Semitic as well. At the end of October, Malaysia's prime minister — dictator, actually — Mahathir Mohamad retired after ruling for 22 years. Shortly before, in mid-October, Mahathir gave a widely publicized speech to a gathering of leaders of Islamic countries in which he charged that “Jews rule the world by proxy” and “get others to fight and die for them. ” Further, “They invented socialism, communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so they can enjoy equal rights with others. ” If we took such charges seriously enough to rebut them, we could point to Jews serving in the American and other western militaries as well as the fact that military service is mandatory in Israel, where Jews have fought and died since 1948 repelling repeated invasions from surrounding countries who oppose Israel's mere existence. We could point out that democracy was invented not by Jews but by ancient Greeks. Natural human rights were first conceived by the English philosophers Hobbes and Locke. Socialism was invented by early 19th century French writers. And Communism was invented by Plato, another Greek, as an ironic construct — as the Soviet Union so painfully discovered — of the politically impossible.

But clearly such factual corrections would have little impact. The hostility comes first, then “facts” are imagined or rearranged to support the prejudice. Does that sound familiar?

It is now barely recalled that in 1998 Mahathir suddenly turned against his presumptive successor Anwar Ibrahim, accusing him of corruption and sodomy and after a flamboyant show trial had him sentenced to prison for 20 years. The charges were almost surely false, prosecution testimony coerced and perjured, and human rights groups protested the whole affair as politically motivated.

Most Arab countries are both viciously homophobic and obsessively anti-Jewish.

Far from being unique, Mahathir is all too typical. Most Arab countries are both viciously homophobic and obsessively anti-Jewish. Saudi Arabia lashes, imprisons and executes gays and not only prohibits Jewish (and Christian) worship services but has its government-owned newspapers print absurd medieval libels against Jews.

Egyptian police conduct sweeps of gay cruising areas and entrap gays they meet on gay websites. At the same time, Egyptian government television broadcast an interminable mini-series based in part on “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,” a late Czarist forgery about supposed Jewish plans for world domination.

In any case, it was not until the 1960s that the Catholic church formally declared that, oh, by the way, “the Jews” were not responsible for the death of Jesus after all. Small comfort to the generations of Jews excluded, harassed, assaulted and killed in pogroms by pious Christians doing the Lord's work.

It is scarcely necessary to recount the arrest, torture, executions and burning at the stake of “sodomites” when the Catholic church held political power, nor the innumerable hate-inspiring sermons denouncing homosexuality and “sodomites” in both Catholic and evangelical Protestant churches. Even today the Vatican and conservative Protestant churches inveigh against homosexuality and are the strongest supporters of sodomy laws and opponents of gay equality.

The reasons for the frequent appearance of both hostilities in the same person or culture are complex, speculative and deserve a column of their own. But here is a start.

Most people seem to want to think that however they are is the right way to be — that their conduct and beliefs are true and natural for everyone. Both gays and Jews diverge in noticeable ways from the usual, the familiar, so people conclude that gays and Jews must be wrong to be as they are. And since how “we” — the majority — are is “natural” the others are somehow “unnatural” and probably malicious in rejecting the obvious superiority of our practices and beliefs.

Thus Jews are an affront to Christianity because they do not accept the founding Christian myth that Jesus is a savior or messiah — or, in Islam, Mohammed the last and truest prophet. Since the truths of Christianity (or Islam) are so blindingly obvious to their proponents, they think that Jews are being willfully stubborn when they refuse to accept them as true and may well be motivated by evil intent to harm Christians (Muslims) and undo Christianity (Islam).

In a similar way, gays are an affront to heterosexuals who cannot imagine that anyone can really have different desires from their own except by virtue of something unnatural about them or else motivated by evil intent to harm heterosexuals or undo heterosexuality. So mere difference is interpreted as opposition and then as a threat.

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