Practical

What does this look like on the ground, and what are people doing about it now?

See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.

This lens is mostly primary documents, because on this theme the movements say what they are doing and people do not believe them. Hamas published a charter citing the Protocols. CUFI publishes why it funds Israel. India’s own commission reported on Ayodhya. The IHRA definition is adopted by governments and the objections to it are published by the scholars who study antisemitism for a living. The argument is usually available in writing, from the parties, and a study circle’s advantage over a news cycle is that it can go and read it.

Anchor questions

• Three serious definitions of antisemitism disagree with each other, and all three were written by people who take it seriously. What is actually being argued about?
• CUFI has millions of members and is the largest pro-Israel organization in America, and it is not Jewish. What is it for?
• Hamas’s 1988 charter cites the Protocols. Its 2017 document does not. Is that a change of mind, of strategy, or of audience?
• Israeli officials say on the record that they tolerated Gaza’s Islamists to weaken the PLO. What does that make Hamas, and what does it not make it?
• Mamdani says the demand that Muslims prove they are the good kind is itself the politics. Have you made that demand?
• Palestinian Christians have been asking the world’s churches to act since 2009. Why has almost nobody heard of them?

Materials

Free unless marked otherwise.

The definitions, and the argument about them

Read all three. They disagree, they were all written by people who take antisemitism seriously, and this school does not tell you which is right.

• IHRA Working Definition (2016). The one your university or city council has probably adopted, and the one whose Israel-related examples are contested. Free: holocaustremembrance.com
• The Jerusalem Declaration (2021). Written by scholars of antisemitism and Holocaust history who believed IHRA was being used to shut down speech: a tight definition, plus an explicit list of things that are not antisemitism. These are not marginal figures; they are the field. Free: jerusalemdeclaration.org
• The Nexus Document (2021). The third way, pitched at American politics: the line is real, crossable, and not where IHRA puts it. Free: nexusproject.us

Christian Zionism, in its own words and answered by Christians

• Christians United for Israel. Millions of members, the largest pro-Israel organization in the United States, and evangelical rather than Jewish. Read its own account of why. Free: cufi.org
• Kairos Palestine: A Moment of Truth (2009). Palestinian Christians, who exist, who are being forgotten by every party to this argument including their co-religionists in Kentucky, calling the occupation a sin and asking the churches to act. Modeled on South Africa’s Kairos document. Free, via the World Council of Churches: oikoumene.org

Hamas, read rather than assumed

• The 1988 Covenant and the 2017 Document of General Principles. Read both or neither. The 1988 charter is antisemitic in content and cites the Protocols, and this school says so plainly rather than routing around it. The 2017 document drops that language, aims itself at Zionism rather than Jews, and accepts a state on the 1967 lines without recognizing Israel. What changed, what did not, and who each was written for, is a session. Free: avalon.law.yale.edu and palquest.org
• Andrew Higgins, How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas (WSJ, 2009). Israeli officials on the record: they tolerated and in places encouraged Gaza’s Islamists against the secular PLO. Hold the sentence exactly where the evidence holds it. Tolerated and encouraged, yes. Created, no: the Brotherhood was in Gaza from the 1940s. The overclaim is available everywhere and it is not in this school. Free via the Internet Archive: web.archive.org
• Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela, The Palestinian Hamas (2000). Two Israeli scholars treating Hamas as a political actor that calculates. Paywalled: cup.columbia.edu

1967, and what repression made

• 1967 and the Rise of Extremism (Al Jazeera). The hinge. The defeat destroyed secular Arab nationalism and left political Islam holding the field. This is precisely where Zionism becomes Islamism’s accelerant without ever having been its cause. Qatari state funded. Free: aljazeera.com
• Clampdown and Blowback (Origins, OSU). Nasser’s prisons, and what torturing the Brotherhood produced. Islamism came out of a cell, not only out of a text. Free: origins.osu.edu
• Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim. The essay is free and does the work: the militants were armed in the Cold War by the people now demanding that Muslims prove which kind they are. Free: jan.ucc.nau.edu; the book is paywalled at penguinrandomhouse.com
• National Security Archive, The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, 1979. The declassified record, included to stop the easy version. America funded the mujahideen: true, documented. America created al-Qaeda: a different sentence, and the documents do not carry it. Free: nsarchive.gwu.edu
• Edward Said, Covering Islam (1997). Paywalled: penguinrandomhouse.com. Read with al-Azm’s reply in the theoretical lens.

India now

• How the Babri Masjid Was Demolished (Liberhan Commission excerpts). India’s own inquiry took seventeen years and concluded the 1992 demolition was neither spontaneous nor unplanned. The state’s own report; the host is a secular advocacy group, so label the host and use the document. Free: cjp.org.in
• Dhirendra K. Jha, The RSS, Golwalkar, and the Nazi Links (Caravan, 2021). Golwalkar’s 1939 praise of what Germany did to the Jews, and the RSS’s long campaign to disown the book it used to sell. Partially paywalled: caravanmagazine.in
• Azad Essa, Hostile Homelands (2023). India and Israel: arms, surveillance, and ideological kinship. Paywalled: plutobooks.com; his free interview carries it: jadaliyya.com

Sri Lanka: the border in constitutional law

• The Constitution of Sri Lanka, Chapter II. If this theme reads one document, read this one. Not an excerpt, not a commentary: the chapter is titled “Buddhism,” and Article 9 obliges the republic to give Buddhism “the foremost place” and to “protect and foster the Buddha Sasana,” while assuring other religions their rights. Every other case in this theme has to argue that a religion is functioning as a border. Sri Lanka prints it, numbers it, and gives it a chapter heading. Free, official host, Article 9 on page 27: parliament.lk
• Bodu Bala Sena’s own channel. The movement speaking for itself, and now the only place it does: their website is a parked domain, and no BBS manifesto exists in text anywhere. Twelve videos, all from 2012 and 2013. The most-watched, around 91,000 views, is the press conference launching the halal boycott, which was the opening move, aimed not at theology but at a certification label on food. Note where three of the twelve are staged: inside the state’s Department of Archaeology. Free: youtube.com
• Amnesty International, From Burning Houses to Burning Bodies (2021). Aluthgama, Digana, the Easter aftermath, and then the COVID-era policy of forcibly cremating Muslim dead against Islamic rites. The last is this theme at its most literal: a state reaching past the living body to the corpse to enforce a border made of religion. Free, 80 pages: amnesty.org
• CNA, Sri Lanka’s Extremist Monks (2022, 48 min). About 155,000 views, on the broadcaster’s own channel. The only substantial current free documentary on this that could be verified. Free: youtube.com

Myanmar: the law, the genocide, and the man who said so first

• The 1982 Citizenship Law and BROUK’s reading of it. The statute is in the historical lens because it is the historical root; read it here with the Rohingya organization’s own three-page clause-by-clause answer to it. Free: burmacampaign.org.uk
• Maung Zarni and Alice Cowley, The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingya (2014). Assign this before the UN report, not after. Written three years before the clearances, arguing the genocide had been running since 1978, and dismissed then as overstatement. The 2018 UN Mission vindicated it. Zarni is a Burman Buddhist naming his own state and his own majority, which is the hardest place to stand and the reason this is here. Free, from the law school’s own repository: digitalcommons.law.uw.edu
• Al Jazeera, Myanmar: The Hidden Genocide (2013, 50 min). About 703,000 views. Broadcast in 2013 and already saying genocide, while Myanmar was being written up as a democratic success story. Qatari state funded, which is a standpoint, not a disqualification. Free: youtube.com
• International Crisis Group, The Dark Side of Transition (2013) and Buddhism and State Power in Myanmar (2017). The first documents the thing that should stop any easy story: the anti-Muslim violence intensified as the country democratized. The second is the best free treatment of Ma Ba Tha and 969, and it argues explicitly against one-dimensional readings of them, so it works as a brake on this theme rather than fuel for it. Both free; both hosts block automated fetchers and are live in a browser: crisisgroup.org, crisisgroup.org
• UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, Detailed Findings (2018). 441 pages of testimony, intent, and command structure. The summary is the famous document; this is the evidence. Free: ohchr.org

A note on method

Read the documents rather than the coverage. Almost every fight in this theme is conducted in summaries of things people have not read. The Hamas charters are four pages and a click away. So is Kairos Palestine. So are all three definitions of antisemitism. A room that reads the actual texts will disagree better than a room that arrives with positions about them.

Hold the sentences where the evidence holds them. This lens contains two claims that are true in a narrow form and false in the popular one: Israel tolerated and encouraged Gaza’s Islamists, and did not create Hamas; the US armed the mujahideen, and did not create al-Qaeda. The weaker sentences are the true ones and they are damning enough. A school that overclaims here hands its critics the argument for free.

Democratization is not the cure, and Myanmar is the proof. Crisis Group documented the anti-Muslim violence getting worse as the country opened up. A room that assumes these movements are what happens when people lack democracy will have to explain why the border hardened exactly when the megaphone was handed out.

Status

First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Named gaps: nothing here is from inside CUFI’s membership, only its institutional voice, so the theme has the organization but not the believers. There is no Israeli civil society material, which is a hole given how much of the criticism comes from there. Ashin Wirathu is not here in his own words: no full translated sermon and no 969 literature exists on any legitimate non-devotional host, only on the movement’s own channels and on anti-Muslim aggregators, and this school links none of them. He is carried through Crisis Group and through Barbet Schroeder’s film The Venerable W. instead, which is free with a library card via Kanopy, and the refusal is part of the lesson. BBS has no manifesto in text at all, so their doctrine is only available as video. And the free tier here leans on two state-funded broadcasters and two advocacy hosts while the scholarship sits behind paywalls, which is worth telling a room before they read.