The editors and publisher of Comparative Studies in Society and History would like to amend errors that appeared in the January 2016 issue. In a note sent to the journal, Esra Özyürek (Reference Özyürek2016), author of the essay, pinpoints the errors and explains why corrections are necessary:
In my article (Özyürek Reference Özyürek2016), I mistakenly attributed arguments made by Jonathan Müller to Günther Jikeli (p. 57). In the text below, I have corrected these errors. I have also removed a reference to the viral spread of certain sentiments (ibid.). The use of the term “virus” was my own, and it is consistent with how these sentiments are discussed in other contexts, but my original wording implied that the scholars I describe in the essay used this specific term at the conference in question. I regret the inaccuracies in my original text, and I thank Günther Jikeli for bringing them to my attention.
The corrected text reads as follows:
One of the conference participants, Johan Müller, argues that it is first and foremost Palestinians who see themselves as a “community of victims” in relation to the policies of Israel. This false psychology, according to him, combined with their “Arab culture characterized by desire for pride leads to antisemitism” (in Jikeli Reference Jikeli, Jikeli, Stoller and Thoma2007: 10). This kind of “self-victimization,” he posits, is accompanied by a feeling that the Western world is conspiring against the Arab and/or Muslim world. Such unjustified feelings, he argues, are then used by Islamists and Arab nationalists to spread their propaganda (Müller Reference Müller, Jikeli, Stoller and Thoma2007: 35–37). He finds this feeling especially dangerous because, he contends, it has the ability to spread to other groups: first Palestinians, then other Arabs, and then other Muslims, but not non-immigrant or non-Muslim Germans.
