4th Open Letter to Boulder City Council on Upcoming Muslim Declaration

Dear Members of Boulder’s City Council:

I am writing to you in response to the information I have received about the Declaration Condemning Muslim Hate and Recognizing the Contributions, Rights, and Safety of Muslim Communities. 

I commend the group for taking it on, since we are aware that there are increased acts of hatred and violence against the Muslim community. But I do not believe that your Declaration is ready. 

It is concerning that there are mentions and comparisons to the Jewish community. As a reader, it feels as if there is some sort of comparison of suffering that the writer is trying to suggest between Jews and Muslims. 

There is also the use of the term “semites,” again, sharing a relationship between Muslims and Jews. There are many who use this argument to undermine antisemitism/Jew hatred by inferring that Jews and Arabs are all semites, so antisemitism Arabs cannot be antisemities. While the term antisemitism is about 150 years old, anti-Judaism and Jew hatred has been around for millenia. Scholars argue: The word “Antisemitism” was coined by Wilhelm Marr in the late 19th century in Germany as a way to give a pseudo-scientific facade to Jew hatred. While there was no such thing as a Semitic people, just Semitic languages (Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic), the term was lifted from the field of linguistics to give “intellectual” weight to the idea of hating Jews as a “race.” (This explanation was developed by the American Jewish Committee.)

All of this is to say that I strongly urge you to make your commitments to the safety and belonging of our Muslim neighbors without the comparisons or mentioning Jews or Judaism. As it stands, the declaration holds implicit bias against Jews while trying to do the noble act of strengthening the Muslim community. 

Rabbi Fred Greene 
Congregation Har HaShem on the Margolis Family Campus

(See Rachel Amaru’s letter here, and Bruce Shaffer’s letter here, and Rabbi Marc Soloway’s letter here.)