Around 1.1 millions Jews live in the European Union and 19 million Muslims. It’s obviously very difficult to compare the situation of an ethnic/cultural/religious minority living in Europe for centuries with the situation of religious and/or national minorities whose importance has massively grown after the Second World War, and in some cases only during the last 40 years.

Nevertheless, many militants (inspired by left academic researchers) compare anti-Semitism in the 30s to the situation of Muslims in Europe today.

This comparison is flawed, for many reasons, but it remains a fact that the anti-Islam paranoia which dominates Western media, and the long and complex relations between the Islamic world and Western powers nourish extended racist discrimination and social exclusion against Muslim workers, "alien" or not, living in Europe.

For definitions of anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim racism this text mainly uses those provided by the European Fundamental rights Agency (FRA) with a few additions. Obviously they have not been conceived by so-called "revolutionaries" and do not have a great theoretical significance. They are clearly focused on discrimination : this legalistic and multiculturalist perspective deliberately neglects, or even completely erases, social inequalities, the division of society into classes, and refuses to take into account discriminations if they are not based on ethnic, racial, religious, or gender pecularities.

In addition, if you study in detail, from a historical and anthropological point of view, anti-Semitism and all the issues linked to the cultural, religious, economic and military contacts between Islam and the "Christian West", contacts which have given birth to today’s anti-Muslim racism in Europe, then the differences between anti-Muslim racism and anti-Semitism appear so huge that you can no longer engage in any comparison - or only so from a purely demagogic angle. The too famous "competing memories" can lead you to compare the statistical figures of the Armenian, Jewish, Gypsy, Cambodian, Tutsi genocides with the number of victims of the transatlantic slave trade or the number of victims of colonialism ; and then you will be inevitably led to establish a dangerous hierarchy between these evils. Or you can even go as far as suggesting that capitalist Europe is preparing a "muslimicide" analogous to Hitler’s Judeocide, as if European Muslims in 2015 are in a similar position to European Jews in the mid 30s ...

This article deliberately takes a minimalist focus : the issue of democratic rights for all human beings, whatever are their origins and philosophical or religious beliefs. In this limited frame, the great advantage of the ERA definitions is that they focus on concrete, identifiable, phenomena, which we want to fight and defeat today, even if they don’t cover their more general socio-economic causes.
The polemics which have been launched between social scientists - and by extension between radical left activists - around the content of these two definitions often hide ideological issues ("Zionists" against "anti-Zionists", secular Republicans against supporters of "multiculturalism", sectarian atheists against intellectually dishonest believers, partisans of a binational State in Palestine and supporters of two separate states, etc.) and their main effect is to divide and paralyse the militants concerned with an efficient struggle against all forms of racism, here and now.

Anti-Semitism is an ideology based on the conscious, or unconscious, hostility to the "Jews" for religious, social, national, racial and/or economic motives. "Jews" maybe actually Jewish by religion or culture or not. It does not matter for the anti-Semite ; what matters for him is to attribute them negative or even sometimes positive qualities in order to discriminate and exclude them.

To this very general definition, one can add that anti-Zionism can sometimes, not always, lead to anti-Semitic conclusions : when Jews are accused of exaggerating the Holocaust ; when they are denied the right to self-determination, granted to all the other peoples living on this planet ; when classic anti-Judaic and anti-Semitic clichés are used to characterise Israel or Israelis ; when Israeli policy is systematically compared to that of the Nazis ; when Jews are considered as a "fifth column", a "lobby" of "cosmopolitan" people who are only loyal to Israel, etc.

Anti-Muslim racism (“Islamophobia” for the European Union and Organisation of Islamic Cooperation) is an ideology which sees Islam as a “monolithic bloc”, sharing “no common values with other cultures”, “inferior to the West and barbaric”, more “sexist” than all the other religions, “supportive of terrorism” and of an agressive politics leading to military conflicts and war.

Anti-Muslim racists justify "discriminatory practices towards Muslims and their exclusion from mainstream society", practices which they want to enshrine in laws.

To the elements of this FRA definition, one can add that anti-Muslim racism is often mixed to (and fuses with) anti-Asian, anti-African, anti-Arab or anti-Turkish racism, up to the point it’s difficult to distinguish between them.

Today in the Western world, anti-Jew racism and anti-Muslim racism are not, most of the time, religiously motivated. They can mobilise "anti-capitalist" or "anti-imperialist" plot theories which denounce the role of "the Jews", or present Islam as the main threat to human civilisation today. Anti-Semites and anti-Muslim racists hide their political agenda behind all sorts of radical, leftish or pseudo-humanist reasoning : some pretend they are particularly moved by the sufferings of the Palestinians ; others that they only want to defend women’s rights and democracy ; some pretend European Muslims should not be blamed for what happens in the Middle East and North Africa, but constantly blame European or American Jews for what happens in Israel ; some consider Europeans Muslims should spend all their time condemning Daesh (ISIS), Boko Haram or al- Qaeda, but defend any military aggression of Tsahal, any "targeted murders" with their inevitable "collateral damages", or find lousy excuses for racist Israeli settlers or Israeli far right politicians. It’s rather easy to unmask these discourses, including in our own ranks, provided we open our eyes and are ready to lose... some "friends" or "comrades".