Dear Prof. Rubin,

My two-sentences statement about the British boycott – mainly about the non-Jewish and Jewish fellow travelers of antisemitism – was certainly no explanation of the origin of Islamic antisemitism. In my writing (see: www.matthiaskuentzel.de ) I never claimed “that all Muslim antisemitism derives from the West” but always described this antisemitism as a fusion of Nazi-style world conspiracy theories and the Jew-hatred of traditional Islam.

And I surely never blamed all the world’s problems on the West.

Nazi Germany, my field of expertise, was no part of the West. While there are indeed many historians who draw attention to the impact of Western “colonialism and imperialism” on the non-Western world, there are not so many researchers dealing with the impact of European fascism or Nazism on the beginning of Islamism during the Thirties. This is my special field of research and the topic of my book “Jihad and Jew-Hatred. Nazism, Islamism and the roots of 9/11” which is forthcoming with Telos Press this fall.

To concentrate on one side of the coin does not necessarily implicate the negation of the other side. I had no problem, for example, to give a lecture on “Muhammad’s legacy: Islamic antisemitism in the middle east” if someone wanted me to do this, because this legacy exists as well.

Yours sincerely,

Matthias Küntzel