Benz (any relation to the car makers?) has apparently never bothered to go to the MidEast. Even today, you can walk through about any market in the “Arab street” and find booksellers hawking both the “Protocols” and “Mein Kampf”. Which have been never-out-of-print bestsellers in the region since they were first published in Europe. The fact that the “Protocols” are a world-famous fraud is never mentioned in any Arabic-language edition. (Another local fave-read? Jimmy Carter’s “Palestine; Peace Not Apartheid”.)
As for his equating Western unease about the aims and means of Islam in “spreading the faith” with anti-Semitism, one need only compare the Torah and Talmud to the Qu’ran. Nowhere in the two Hebrew texts does it call for Jews to kill or enslave everybody else on Earth for not being Jewish. The Qu’ran, by comparison, is replete with exhortations to the faithful to do exactly that to any and all peoples with the “poor judgment” to not be Muslim. Benz apparently does not consider this a significant factor in (a) Muslim cultural behavior toward other cultures for the last 14 centuries or (b) other cultures’ rather understandable concern about what the post- Sayyid Qutb “returning to its roots” version of Islam has done in the last forty-some years, and what it might do next.
There are some people who are so far out there in left field that you wonder if they even know where the ball park is. You also have to wonder why anybody takes their opinions seriously, never mind their supposed academic credentials.
As Orwell said, there are some ideas that are so stupid that it takes a highly educated person to take them seriously.
clear ether
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