Antisemitism and Islamophobia: Competition or Compassion?

I, and three colleagues more distinguished than I, have been unsuccessful in obtaining a research grant for our planned major project on Antisemitism and Islamophobia. We believe that there are important parallels as well as differences between these two forms of hatred. Our research was meant to demonstrate that in the imagination of the mainly Christian Western world, they have been intertwined for centuries. We think that important parallels exist – along with major differences – especially between how Muslims are defamed today and how Jews were defamed about a hundred years ago, before antisemitism progressed to the Nazi genocide.
No one is predicting a Holocaust of Muslims, yet there are still moral lessons to be learned. We do not want to subject anyone, Muslim or otherwise, to the hostility and humiliation that Jews suffered, or to ignore the potential that such mistreatment, if unchecked, has to grow to ever more monstrous proportions.
Unfortunately, it seems that at least one of our reviewers was heavily offended by the comparison of antisemitism and Islamophobia. He was upset, above all it seems, by our suggestion that Muslims now, and Jews a hundred years ago, were both falsely accused of a desire to dominate the world. This is just one example of his thoughts and style: “Due to a complete absence of empirical evidence and actual experience of an international Jewish conspiracy, scholars rightly reject antisemitism as delusional. The same cannot be said about contemporary Western perceptions of, and reactions to, radical supremacist movements in the Islamic world that have taken responsibility for many attacks on civilians in Asia, Europe, the Americas, and the Middle East.”
Such clearly Islamophobic statements probably do not deserve a response, especially since they are irrelevant, from the purely scholarly point of view, to what we were proposing to do. But just to be clear: even the most extreme and despicable of “radical supremacist movements,” such as al-Qaeda, have never called for the whole world to become an Islamic State. And even if they did, they would remain marginal to mainstream Islam. So accusing “Muslims” of aiming for world domination would still be no less an example of hate speech than accusing “Jews” collectively of the same thing.
What I am most surprised by is that the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada would not only countenance this kind of ideas and language among its reviewers, but even base its decisions on them.
No reasonable person will say that Islamophobia has produced suffering comparable in degree or kind to the Holocaust. But comparing antisemitism and Islamophobia should not lead to a defensive competition about who has greater victim rights.
There is no future if we, on either side of the unfortunate Jewish-Muslim divide, refuse to recognize the degree to which our own travails resemble those of the other. Comparison must lead to compassion, not competition.