This aside, I found her assertion of Muslim guilt in re the Holocaust bizarre. Factualy it is - well - a surreal stretch. Let me preface this by noting that one can fairly accuse the Islamic world pre-Israel and after of a number of sins against its Jewish minority, some worse than others and sometimes quite as awful as what Europe pre-Holocaust managed to effect. However, real complicity in the Holocaust proper is not one of them.

I note rather simply that in the only Arabo-Muslim lands (I acknowledge being ignorant of the Balkan situ, but in any case it would seem to me that the Muslim Bosniacs were distant second fiddles to the Croats & Serbs) under Nazi control North Africa, Muslim authorities refused to collaborate with Vichy French authorities attempts to round up and deport Jews to the Nazis (although Tunisia under direct Nazi occupation apparently managed to send some native Jews with French collaboration). Most famous of course was the Moroccan Sultan's principled stand as "Amir al-Mouminine" - Commander of the Faithful - against Vichy, saving in a very literal sense one of the region's largest Jewish communities. (Of course one has to admit that Morocco is one of those odd places where locals embrace "their Jews" (although imperfectly with a combined generic anti-jewish sentiment leading to a peculiar pride in local "arabo-berber" jews loyal to the nation - Morocco being the only nation I have been where I have heard locals claim Arabic speaking Jews as Arabs - I recall a convo where I commented on an Israeli -with a Yemani accent- being interviewed in Arabic on an ArabSat, saying that that Israeli spoke quite good Arabic; the response was without hesitation 'of course, he's an Arab.' ) and are genuinely angry if anyone attacks them - the 2003 bombings produced very real revulsion for the idea a fairly widely cherished social peace).

It is no accident that there are so many North African Jews in Israel and elsewhere, it is because when the chips were down they were protected from the Nazis. Looking to Europe - even indirectly occupied Europe - one does not find too many enlightening stories likes this, although one can easily exaggerate for there is also a dark history of popular violence in the urban areas.

None of this excuses the idiocies that most of the Arab & related world (although again far less so in North Africa) inflicted on its Jewish minority, nor to deny that even in North Africa there was discrimination, outbreaks of mob violence although nothing like Russian pogroms. However, discrimination is not genocide. Let us say that again: discrimination is not genocide and operationaly even the dhimma was liberal relative to European attitudes to religious minorities until the late 19th century.

Further, one has to note the actual behaviour under pressure. I ask myself, would we in the Anglo Saxon world have had the character, given contemporaneosly equivalent prejudices, to stand up to an occupier - leaving aside the the double issue of the double occupation - although I think the question of the dynamic of colonial occupation explains much about what actually ocurred. Little sign of support for the Nazis where Nazi control via Vichy was effective, some signs of collaborationism where Allied rule made "enemy of my enemy" politics attractive.

There appears to be two unattractive streams of politics ongoing at present to rather illogically tie the Islamic world to the Nazis (as opposed to treating that world's real and proper sins). The first, a largely Left as I read it in Manji's statement, is a juvenile desire to connect to "the biggest" sins. Seems typically Left-North American to me, bloody overly confessional "I'm dysfunctional too" ism. Something I personally detest.

The second seems rather darker to me, and derives from a hard-line "likoudnik" type Israeli driven narrative to connect present enemies (Arab-Islamic world in the hardest views) with The Great Enemy (Nazis) in a seamless whole of united evil for the dual purpose of having a motivating nationalist narrative to override opposition and simultaneously deeply discredit their opponents (i.e. The Islamic World).

The absurd assertion that the Ikhouane - Muslim Brothers were a wing of the Nazi party and the blowing up of the meaning and role of the Mufti of Jerusalem, and bizarre assertions that Muslims carry a complicity in the Holocaust (simply not their sin, they have others) all flow into a narrative of agitprop intended to confuse Muslim-Jewish history & relations for the more familiar Xian - Jewish ones.

I would also suppose it makes selling the enemy easier if put in a ready made bad guy mold. Rather like the idiotic phrase, Islamo-Fascist (wierdly popular in the American Right - makes me think it has a similar origin), a phrase detestable for its stupidity and lack of analytical content.

As in the case of the contemptible idiot of a Larouche citer Pundita, users of these phrases and absolute distortions have a particular political agenda, and these distortive usages help sell the product.

All well and fine in the context of poiitics, but unfactual and sadly obscuring. To take an example, Euro style anti-Jewish libels - Elder Protocols of Zion type things. These libels -as Bernard Lewis documents- were unknown until the modern era in the Middle East-North Africa region, race libel against Jews having no sense in classical Islamic thought.

Probably the first step towards opening the door to this particular thought was ironically Colonial rule itself, and certainly colonial era "divide & conquer" helped, but that is perhaps another subject.

Regardless, the main point here is that Islamo-Jewish history, until Israel and colonial rule, had rather little to do with Europe except as receiving point for refugees expelled from Europe (one might write an interesting alternative history of the 1940s with an Ottoman regime rather than a colonial one - although the assumptions would be complex). One will not understand real issues through false, propagandistic connexions.