‘Sons of Apes and Pigs’
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The World Wide Web is percolating this week with the remarks of President Morsi of Egypt calling Jews “descendants of apes and pigs.” We first read about it in Jeffrey Goldberg’s blog on TheAtlantic.com. “Egyptian President Calls Jews ‘Sons of Apes and Pigs’; World Yawns,” was Mr. Goldberg’s headline. The remark was made in 2010 in an interview on a television broadcast at Lebanon. It was translated and published this month by the Middle East Media Research Institute known as Memri.
What these columns can add to the story is to note that the epithet that Mr. Morsi uses for the Jews forms, among other things, the title of a new book, “Sons of Pigs and Apes: Muslim Antisemitism and the Conspiracy of Silence.” It has just been brought out by Potomac Press. The author, Neil Kressel, holds a Ph.D. from Harvard and currently directs the honors program in social sciences at William Paterson University in New Jersey.
Professor Kressel’s book offers an illuminating history of how what he calls “dangerous, old-fashioned Jew-hatred” spreading through large parts — not all, but large parts — of the Muslim and Arab World. He also explores what he characterizes as “the failure to address this exploding hostility” and what it means for those of us who care about the progressive values of Western civilization. He suggests the problem “goes way beyond the Nazi-like rants of extremist clerics” and is far from being but “a by-product of the Arab-Israeli conflict.”
Our own acquaintance with Mr. Kressel’s work goes back to a piece he wrote in the 1990s for the Forward, arguing that the Nobel Peace Prize should be given to GI Joe, that is, to the American GIs — Joe and Jane — who have risked so much for peace in our modern world. The Forward and the Sun have nursed the idea since then, with, alas, no results so far. Every time we sit down to write about it, we think of the brilliant professor from New Jersey, who has, in addition to his scholarly mein, a knack for staying ahead of a story. His latest is a story that, as Mr. Goldberg reminds us, is growing more ominous by the day.
