According to Islamic tradition, when Muhammad migrated from Mecca to Medina, he wasn’t just “seeking the freedom for himself and his followers to worship.” He became at that point for the first time a political and military leader as well as a religious one. He began for the first time to get Qur’anic “revelations” exhorting Muslims to wage war against unbelievers.

Just as Charles is ignoring the historical context and circumstances of Muhammad’s hijrah, so now he is also ignoring the manifest fact that all too many Muslim migrants are not “seeking the freedom…to worship,” but are coming to Europe to conquer and Islamize the land, emigrating, after Muhammad’s pattern, “for the sake of Allah” (cf. Qur’an 4:100).

Charles also says: “We are now seeing the rise of many populist groups across the world that are increasingly aggressive towards those who adhere to a minority faith.” This is the familiar “Muslims are the new Jews” theme. This is a common Leftist talking point. Many, many others have made this claim before Chomsky, including Noam Chomsky; Bernie Sanders; the notorious non-Muslim Islamic apologist Karen Armstrong; Jeffrey Goldberg, the journalist at The Atlantic who some time ago interviewed Barack Obama about why he won’t call Islamic terrorism Islamic; liberal media pundit Reza Aslan; Muslim Brotherhood-linked Congressman Keith Ellison; Nicholas Kristof, one of the New York Times’ Mideast pontificators; Canadian Muslim leader Syed Sohawardy; and Philadelphia chapter leader of the Council on American-Islamic Relations Jacob Bender. Many others have repeated it.

The blazingly brilliant Daniel Greenfield takes it apart in this video.

The idea that Muslims are the new Jews is put forward by the Left, but it also has opponents on the Left. In 2014, as part of his ongoing awakening to the nature and reality of the jihad threat, Bill Maher noted:

Jews weren’t oppressing anybody. There weren’t 5,000 militant Jewish groups. They didn’t do a study of treatment of women around the world and find that Jews were at the bottom of it. There weren’t 10 Jewish countries in the world that were putting gay people to death just for being gay.

Indeed. Further, no one is calling for or justifying genocide of Muslims. No individual or group opposed to Islam is remotely comparable to the National Socialists. Not that facts have ever gotten in the way of a good meme.

Maher isn’t alone on the Left in having pointed out the absurdity of likening opposition to jihad to the lead-up to the Holocaust. The late Christopher Hitchens also refuted this idea when writing a few years ago about the notorious Ground Zero Mosque proposal:

“Some of what people are saying in this mosque controversy is very similar to what German media was saying about Jews in the 1920s and 1930s,” Imam Abdullah Antepli, Muslim chaplain at Duke University, told the New York Times. Yes, we all recall the Jewish suicide bombers of that period, as we recall the Jewish yells for holy war, the Jewish demands for the veiling of women and the stoning of homosexuals, and the Jewish burning of newspapers that published cartoons they did not like.

“Prince Charles Urges Brits To Think Of Muhammad This Christmas, Speaks Out Against ‘Aggressive Populism,’” Breitbart London, December 22, 2016: