Claims of unassimilability structure both Nazi ideology and contemporary Islamophobia

Evidence

We should keep in mind the productive power of the idea of the foreigner and the unassimilable minority. As George Mosse has shown, the myth about the ‘Wandering Jew,’ the eternal foreigner in our midst who clings to his backwardness and who ‘would never learn to speak the national language properly or strike roots in the soil,’ was a central plank in the ideology of national socialism in Germany. Ordinary Germans held a cultural model of Jewish difference and believed in the fundamental unassimilability of Jews, Daniel Goldhagen argues, a model that made them receptive to the messages of national socialism. The unassimilability of Jews and their cultural inferiority became the proof of the superiority of German culture, a dynamic equally apparent with respect to Muslims in the contemporary European context. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 270

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to earlier claims in this book about secularism and state racism, and to the Mosse scholarship already flagged in ch6. — connects to: The Islam-fascism equation derived from Likud-style Zionism among neoconservatives; A non-normative measurable criterion like indiscriminate beats normative terms like unjustified for defining Islamophobia — Erik Bleich, What Is Islamophobia and How Much Is…, 30