The Scapegoating of Jews

Amil Imani

Almost everyone uses scapegoats. It is in our fabric. The word "scapegoat" has come to mean a person, often innocent, who is blamed and punished for the sins, crimes, or sufferings of others, generally as a way of distracting attention from the real causes. It is a potent human disposition to blame others for our failings. The derivation of the term scapegoat comes from the Old Testament – see Leviticus 16. During the Jewish high holy day of Yom Kippur in the Temple era, high priests would sacrifice a goat that would be consigned "for Azazel" and would carry with it the sins of the nation.

Without scapegoats to blame, we are forced to look at ourselves for our problems. Examining ourselves can be very disturbing, particularly when we either lack the resources or the willingness to tackle them. So, we take the good old easy way out of the mess by shifting our focus to the outside world for targets to blame.

Look at young kids. They are expert blamers. They always have an answer, someone or something to blame in self-defense. We, the chronological adults, don’t completely abandon our childish strategy of ascribing blame to external sources. We simply do so with a greater degree of sophistication by finding, if at all possible, a grain or two of truth to legitimize our attributions.

The most notorious person who blamed the Jews as scapegoat was the Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler. In his infamous book Mein Kampf (My Struggle) blamed the plight of Germany at the end of World War I on an international Jewish conspiracy and used terms such as extirpation and extermination in relation to the Jews. Unfortunately, we have seen in recent years the emergence of a number of such assaults, indeed, conspiracy theories, targeting the Israel lobby and the American Jewish community.

Even former President Jimmy Carter in his book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid and John J. Mearsheimer, an American professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt, professor of international affairs at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government co-authored The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy use the scapegoating of Israel, the Israel Lobby, and American Jews.

Sadly, the Jewish people have been used as scapegoats for many centuries by a variety of non-Jews.

Regrettably, Muslims for their part and have adopted scapegoating as an article of faith. The Muslims blame the Jews for all kinds of heinous things, dating back to the time of Muhammad himself. They say that the Jews of Medina betrayed the holy prophet by their treachery. They charged the poor exorbitant sums for their goods; did no productive work, yet made fortunes through money lending. To make matters worse, the Jews refused to embrace Muhammad’s religion, they say. The story of Banu Qurayza’s Massacre from Koranic verses, is very clear how Allah actually rejoices this in slaughter and enslavement of the tribe of Banu Qurayza’s Jews.


* Koran-33:25- “Allah turned back the unbelievers [Meccans and their allies] in a state of rage, having not won any good, and Allah spared the believers battle. Allah is, indeed, Strong and Mighty.”
* Koran-33:25- “Allah turned back the unbelievers [Meccans and their allies] in a state of rage, having not won any good, and Allah spared the believers battle. Allah is, indeed, Strong and Mighty.”
* Koran-33:26- “And He brought those of the People of the Book [Jewish people of Banu Qurayza’s] who supported them from their fortresses and cast terror into their hearts, some of them you slew (beheaded) and some you took prisoners (captive)”
* Koran-33:27- “And He made you heirs of their lands, their houses, and their goods, and of a land which ye had not frequented (before). And Allah has power over all things.” [Merciful Allah asked Prophet Muhammad to confiscate entire properties of surrendered Jews.


Hence, following the example of Muhammad, many Muslim societies have been blaming the Jews for everything and find them deserving of victimization. The litany of atrocities committed against the Jews by the followers of Muhammad is long indeed.

Regrettably, ascribing blame to others and legitimizing their victimization has become a way of life with the rabid Islamists. As sick as scapegoating is, it confers advantages to its practitioners. For one, it rallies the faithful against an enemy portrayed as depraved and dangerous. That’s how Hitler and his gang of thugs aroused the German nation against the Jews. They falsely, yet successfully, blamed the Jews for Germany’s economic problems.

The Islamists, for their part, are still playing the Jewish blame card as best they can. The State of Israel, by its very existence, has provided the inept and habitually devious Islamists a palpable target to blame and attack. Yet, Israel still not only exists, but thrives in their midst. None of the dastardly actions of the Islamists has been effective at realizing their dream of pushing the children of Israel into the sea.

Islamic turbaned villains in Iran and their hired thugs have done a great job of basically eliminating all internal opposition by their brutality. They have also chased the majority of the Iranian Jews out of the country by making their life as miserable as possible. The few remaining Jews are still used as whipping boys from time to time. Contrary to the Islamic dogma, the Iranian people are proud of their historical friendship with the Jewish people. The bond of friendship goes back to the landmark action of King Cyrus the Great of Persia. In 537 B.C., having, conquered Babylon, the benevolent King Cyrus freed the Jews from captivity and empowered them to return to the Promised Land and build their temple and have a peaceful life and worship their God.

The return of the Jews to the Promised Land did not mark the end of their ordeal. Successive waves of ill wishers, notably the Romans and then the belligerent Muslims, unleashed their unjustified wrath on the Jews. The Jewish people, in spite of suffering huge losses at the hands of their enemies, remained resilient and, with one exception, outlived their tormentors. The Pogroms in Russia, the ghettoization in much of Europe, and even the genocidal Hitlerism failed to wipe out the Jews. One diehard enemy, Islamic scriptures, has been hard at work for some 1,400 years to complete the work of finishing off the Jews that Prophet Muhammad himself had started.

Iranians are saddened and ashamed both by the appearance of Ahmadinejad on the international scene and his declared intent to wipe out the Jewish homeland from the face of the earth. It goes without saying that Ahmadinejad does not represent Iranian people and he is not an Iranian himself. Ahmadinejad is an Islamofascist whose aim is to have a practice run, first on the Iranian Baha’is before embarking on destroying the Jews and other “undesirables,” following in the footsteps of the German fuehrer. Being Iranian is defined by a state of mind, not by a place of residence. In fact, Ahmadinejad despises anything Persian. Numerous photos show him proudly donning the Arab headscarf around his neck – a Palestinian headscarf that presently stands as a symbol of the Arabo-Islamic genocidal hate campaign against the Jews as well as non-believers of all stripes.

The circus in Tehran, billed as a “Holocaust Conference,” was nothing more than a disgusting attempt by the barbaric inheritors of Muhammad’s hate to continue in this tradition of wanton attacks on all unbelievers, particularly the Jews. Regrettably, their journey from their early beginning to the present has been fraught with great suffering. It is a tribute to the indomitable spirit of the Jewish people that they persisted in their valiant struggle to re-gather again in the land of their birth. They should also be applauded for affording millions of Israeli Arabs opportunities denied to them in many other lands.

Many of us Iranians co-suffer with this tragic state of affairs that harms them. We, free Iranians, express our deepest sympathy to the Jewish people for what they have suffered and have been used as scapegoats throughout history and especially at the hands of the Nazis in Germany. We also condemn, in the strongest terms, the new coalition of fascists that is brewing under the disgusting and dangerous banner of Islamofascisim.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Amil Imani is an Iranian-born American citizen and a pro-democracy activist residing in the United States of America. Imani is a columnist, literary translator, novelist and essayist who has been writing and speaking out for the struggling people of his native land, Iran. He maintains a website at www.amilimani.com.