Israeli Snake Strikes On The Way?

Argh! Jewish snake assassin!

Here's what Islam does to your brain:

Palestinian Muslims believe that Israel is training snakes to attack them as assassins.

No, really.

And nor is this the first time those crafty Zionists have utilised animal power to attack Muslims. The Palestinians have previously accused Israel of using rats to drive Palestinians out of their homes. Meanwhile, Iran has actually arrested peeping pigeons and secret squirrels for being Israeli spies. And don't forget the wild boars.

Such conspiracism is funny, but it also represents a festering Muslim hatred for Jews which goes back to the inception of Islam. Long before the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which many in the Muslim world still take as gospel truth, Jews have been accused of engaging in conspiracies to either take over/corrupt the world or, more specifically, destroy Islam.

It begins in the Qur'an, where Jews are accused of "spreading corruption" in the land (5:64), and most notably murdering or attempting to murder prophets (2:61), including Jesus (4:157). This theme culminates in the allegation that Muhammad's final illness and death in 632 AD were caused by his poisoning by a Jewess at Khaybar two years earlier. For example, Ibn Sa'd, a noted biographer of the Prophet, wrote the following about this incident:

“She poisoned the goat putting more poison in the forelegs…The Apostle of Allah took the foreleg, a piece of which he put into his mouth...The Apostle of Allah sent for Zaynab Bint al-Harith [the Jewess] [and]…handed her over to [those] who put her to death…The Apostle of Allah lived after this three years, till in consequence of his pain he passed away. During his illness he used to say: I did not cease to find the effect of the poisoned morsel I took at Khaybar.”

Since then, the conspiracy theories have kept coming. The famous Muslim historian Tabari (d.923) was influential in spreading the allegation, still believed by some Muslims today, that the entire Sunni/Shi'ite divide was created by a renegade Jew as part of a larger plot to destablise and destroy Islam. Later, when the Jew Sa'd ad-Daula was appointed as vizier to the Mongol Emperor in thirteenth-century Iraq, outraged Muslims (outraged because sharia law forbids infidels from obtaining positions of power over Muslims), levelled all kinds of calumnies and libels against him. One of these accusations was that he was planning to cut down ancient trees in Baghdad and use them to build a fleet so he could attack Mecca and convert the Kaaba into a heathen temple. This incitement led eventually to Sa'd's murder.

Anti-Jewsh conspiracism serves to justify the fiercest and most murderous kind of hatred towards Jews, and it is vital to remember that the sources for it pre-date non-Islamic sources of antisemitic hate by over a thousand years.