Our contributor Andrew Bostom examines the words of the Grand Imam of Al Azhar University in Cairo, the closest to a supreme religious authority in Islam in exitence, hence the sobriquet "Muslim Pope." Almost needless to say, he finds some appalling stuff. The marvelous Pamela of Atlas Shrugs posts his essay. An excerpt:

Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi wrote these words in his 700 page dissertation rationalizing Muslim Jew hatred, Banu Isra'il fi al—Qur'an wa al—Sunna [Jews in the Koran and the Traditions], originally published in the 1970s, and then re—issued in 1986:

[The] Koran describes the Jews with their own particular degenerate characteristics, i.e. killing the prophets of Allah, corrupting His words by putting them in the wrong places, consuming the people's wealth frivolously, refusal to distance themselves from the evil they do, and other ugly characteristics caused by their deep—rooted lasciviousness...only a minority of the Jews keep their word....[A]ll Jews are not the same. The good ones become Muslims, the bad ones do not.

Tantawi was apparently rewarded for this scholarly effort by being named Grand Imam of Al—Azhar University in 1996, a position he still holds. These are the expressed, 'carefully researched' views on Jews held by the nearest Muslim equivalent to a Pope—the head of the most prestigious center of Muslim learning in Sunni Islam, which represents 90% of the world's Muslims. And Sheikh Tantawi has not mollified such hatemongering beliefs since becoming the Grand Imam of Al—Azhar as his statements on the Jews as 'enemies of Allah, descendants of apes and pigs', the legitimacy of homicide bombings of Jews, or 'dialogue' with Jews (excerpted just below), make clear.

Thomas Lifson   7 29 06