Point of no return

The dark side of Turkish tolerance

2012-02-25T18:44:00.011Z

Almost all were lost aboard the Struma after Turkey decided it could not give refuge to people unwanted anywhere else

The sinking of the Struma in Turkish waters 70 years ago, with the loss of all except one of its cargo of desperate Holocaust survivors, shows a darker side to Turkey's relationship with the Jews, Associated Press reports :

(...) The way Turkey _ neutral in World War II _ handled the Struma undercuts claims of favorable treatment that Jews and other minorities purportedly received in that era. Even today, deficits in equal rights and religious freedoms mar democratic advances in Turkey.

"This is a tragedy which is treated as something that has nothing to do with Turkey," said author Rifat Bali, who has written about non-Muslim minorities in Turkey. He said blame is assigned to Britain or the Soviet Union, with some justification, but described the refugee deaths as a "black spot" on Turkey's "rosy rhetoric" about benevolent policies.

A rare commemoration was held at Sarayburnu, a promontory near the Golden Horn inlet in Istanbul. Organizer Cem Murat Sofuoglu said the Turkish establishment was not interested.

"They don't want to shake the cage," said Sofuoglu, a lawyer who wants Turkey and Britain to apologize.

Turkey's Jewish community of just over 20,000 has traditionally kept a low profile to avoid controversy or worse, especially at a time when political ties between Turkey and Israel, a former ally, are frozen. The low point came in 2010 when nine people died during an Israeli raid on a Turkish ship intending to deliver aid to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

In 2003, two Istanbul synagogues were targeted in deadly bombings by militants tied to al-Qaida, and Turkey cracked down on radical Islamists.

Many Turkish Jews had to speak Turkish and drop Ladino, a language that mixes Hebrew and Spanish and is dying out, in the early years of the modern republic. During World War II, Jews, as well as ethnic Armenians and Greeks, were subject to an arbitrary lump-sum tax, and mobs attacked non-Muslim properties in Istanbul in 1955.

Anti-Semitism has risen in Turkey's ultraconservative media over the past five years, said Murat Onur, an Istanbul-based commentator who has studied the issue. Activists want the government to incorporate "hate speech" legislation in plans for a new constitution.

Baki Tezcan, an associate professor of history and religious studies at the University of California, Davis, said the only place to buy a menorah in Istanbul is at the offices of Shalom, a Jewish newspaper. In December, he went there to get one because his father-in-law is Jewish, saw no sign outside, and encountered a strict screening procedure.

"This experience made me realize how difficult it must be to live as a Jew in Turkey, feeling so threatened that they have to hide their community newspaper's offices and apply such high security measures," he wrote in an email.

After the Ottoman Empire collapsed and foreign powers carved up its spoils, Turkey's founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, hauled Turkey onto a secular path, though religious belief remained entrenched. Today, the government is run by pious Muslims who describe themselves as conservative democrats.

One constant over the decades is the fact that Turkish identity cards state the religion of their carriers.

The majority Sunni Muslims stand "at the center of the circle" of Turkish citizenship, according to Tezcan.

"This might go back to the original meaning of the word 'millet,' which is used to refer to 'nation' today," he wrote. "It actually meant a 'religious community.' So we are dealing with the repercussions of late Ottoman history, and the complex dynamics of growing local nationalisms, on the one hand, and European imperialism, on the other."

Eyal Peretz is the Israel-born chairman of Arkadas, a community of ethnic Turkish Jews in Israel. He said the Ottoman welcome to Jews was something "we cannot forget" and an "exceptional story" in a dire catalogue of persecution over the centuries.

However, he criticized Turkey for downgrading relations with Israel, alleging it seeks to curry favor with Muslims worldwide. Turkey is incensed over the treatment of the Palestinians by Israel, which has refused Turkish demands for an apology and compensation in the 2010 raid.

Some historians speculate the Soviets mistook the Struma for a troop ship from Romania, a Nazi ally, and thought they were firing on an enemy. A book, "Death on the Black Sea," cites Refik Saydam, Turkey's prime minister at the time, as saying Turkey was not responsible.

"Turkey cannot serve as a homeland for people not welcomed by others," Saydam said. "That's the way we choose. This is the reason we could not keep them in Istanbul. It is unfortunate that they were victims of an accident."

Deborah Dwork, director of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University in the United States, said studying the past helped to provide a compass for future conduct. She said Turkey's wartime refugee policy was similar to that of other nations in that it welcomed only those Jews likely to make financial or cultural contributions. German Jews had a prominent role in archaeological excavations in Turkey in the 1930s.

"They were going to cherrypick precisely those Jews who would enrich Turkey one way or another," Dwork said. She noted that Turkish authorities waited 24 hours before sending lifeboats to the area where the Struma was struck.

"As far as I'm concerned, that is both compliance and complicity with mass murder," she said.

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Yasmine: a novel of irreconciliable dualities

2012-02-24T07:51:00.017Z

It was translated into Arabic and well received, but Yasmine, by the Iraqi-born Israeli writer Eli Amir, has only just been published in English. Lyn Julius, in this review for the Sephardi Bulletin, finds this Arab-Jewish love story a good read, but the book's political message out of date:

Jerusalem, 1967. Israel has just fought a war to reunite the city’s two halves. Nuri Imari, Israeli ministerial adviser and Arabist, has been entrusted to help restore ‘normalisation’ by reaching out to the conquered Arabs of East Jerusalem. One of his tasks is to attempt to persuade Abu George, a Palestinian Christian and his Muslim partner, Abu Nabil, to start re-publishing their newspaper.

Enter Yasmine, the voluptuous, sophisticated, Sorbonne-educated daughter of Abu George. Yasmine, a steadfastly nationalist young widow, has just returned from several years of radicalisation in Paris. Nuri finds himself falling in love with Yasmine, and she with him. But can love ever be permitted to blossom between Jew and Arab?

Yasmine is the third book of Eli Amir’s trilogy.after The Dover Flyer and Scapegoat. It has only just been published in English by Halban with the help of a grant from Naim Dangoor.

The reader is reunited with many of the characters we find in The Dove Flyer, the largely autobiographical story of the family’s uprooting from Baghdad and their resettlement in Israel.

Sensuously written and skilfully constructed, Yasmine is a novel of irreconciliable dualities. Not only is Jerusalem divided, but Nuri, the narrator, is culturally divided. ‘Like a Pasha with two wives’, he plays classical music in the morning. In the evening, it is the Arabic music of his Iraqi-Jewish childhood. He describes himself as ibn arab, a son of Arabia, as attracted to Arabic poetry, song and language as he is to Yasmine. But he is also an adopted son of the kibbutz and a fully-fledged, if somewhat conditional, member of the Israeli establishment. Jews from Muslim countries have passed the ultimate test of integration – they have spilled their blood in defence of the Jewish state. The older generation, like Nuri’s own father, are overriding the disappointment of their failed aspirations and beginning to take pride in the achievements of their children.

Nuri holds the ring between staunch Zionism and sympathy for the Palestinians. While the characters around Nuri rehearse the familiar arguments – for a Jewish state, against a Jewish state, for Jewish rights in the land of Israel, for Arab rights, for settling the West Bank and against. Characters like Nuri’s uncle Hiskel, who suffered most – spending long years of imprisonment in an Iraqi jail - are surprisingly conciliatory. Nuri himself - almost too scrupulously - tries to straddle both sides.

Abu George and Abu Nabil also represent a duality: the former is a pragmatist willing to collaborate with the new Israeli overlords. Abu Nabil, on the other hand, clings on to Arab ideological intransigence, reverting to printing the old lies about Israel.

Yasmine represents Nasserist yet westernised Arab womanhood, while Ghadir, the pretty shepherdess Nuri befriends on Mount Scopus, symbolises the downtrodden fellah, screwed alike by Israeli bureaucracy and by the cruelty of her male-dominated shame-honour culture.

With the same scrupulous duality Eli Amir balances the narrative of the Palestinians with his own Jewish refugee narrative. “We have the refugee complex and they do too”, he writes. “The difference is that our belly is full and theirs is empty.”

While politics intervene to end Yasmine and Nuri ‘s ecstatic coupling, Yasmine does come around to a grudging acceptance of the other. “I never believed that our conquerors also had wounded hearts as we have.”

Written in 2005, Yasmine is a novel of its time, vaunting the two state-solution. What a difference seven years can make. If Eli Amir were to write it today - with Hamas in power and after the upheavals of the Arab Spring - perhaps it would turn out somewhat differently, divested of the moral equivalence of the Oslo years.

Eli Amir - Brilliant chronicler of the Iraqi exodus

Tunisians nostalgic for Djerba in 1951

2012-02-23T08:01:00.014Z

With thanks: Kouichi Shirayanagi

This video from 1951 is doing the rounds on Facebook among Tunisians. It's a nostalgic look at Djerba, seen through the eyes of a young Jew. The Jew is leaving - a portend of the great exodus to come. He tours the island to say goodbye to the fishermen, the potters, the weavers. Their trades have not changed since Biblical times. The Jews who built the ancient Al-Ghriba synagogue, Djerba's main attraction, first came here, legend has it, 2,000 years ago, in Temple times.

We see the Jewish boys swaying as they recite Torah verses in the packed synagogues of the Hara Khbira. Our young Jew is shooed away from prying at the house where a young bride is being prepared for her wedding. We see the procession to the Al-Ghriba as it used to be in 1951, before the pilgrimage to that ancient synagogue was adopted by the Tunisian Tourist office. The pilgrims hold aloft an assortment of objects, scarves and jewellery, the menara. These are auctioned off to the highest bidder in order to raise money for the community.

Why is this video proving so popular to Tunisians today? The grinding poverty and primitive way of life in Djerba in 1951 is hardly the attraction. More likely they miss a bygone age when Tunisia once had a substantial Jewish population - the country had 100,000 Jews in 1948 - an age when it resembled a multicultural society.

Those days are almost over. The third largest party in the Tunisian parliament is proposing a new constitution based on Sharia law . Sharia law would strip the Jews of many of their civil rights.

It is a fair bet that the 1,500 Jews still living in Djerba, whose livelihoods depend on tourism, are seriously worried, if not planning to leave too.

Original video in French (with thanks: Ahoova)

Hilal's dismissal of Jewish refugees won't wash

2012-02-22T21:09:00.030Z

Leila Hilal's article in the once-respectable Atlantic is crying out to be 'fisked'. Alarmed at Israel's deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon's slick video on refugees, she advances one weaselly argument after another to explain why Palestinian refugees do not merit being resettled like other refugees. It doesn't seem to occur to Hilal (pictured) that it is a tad strange for Palestinians of all refugees to be uniquely wedded to a 'right of return' - a right that doesn't actually exist in international law - when the last thing most genuine refugees would want to do is go back to a country which persecuted them.

I can't improve on David G's thorough 'fisking' at Elder of Ziyon's blog, except to add the following about Hilal's take on Jewish refugees:

In order to avoid any possible comparison between Palestinian and Jewish refugees Hilal echoes Michael Fischbach's argument that Jews left Arab countries for a whole variety of reasons. Those who really do have a grievance should take it up with Arab states, not the Palestinians.

What about the 19,000 Jews directly expelled from Jerusalem and the West Bank? To whom should they address their claims for compensation? The Jordanian Arab Legion?

As David G says, Hilal takes no account of the Jewish Nakba: Jews in all Arab lands suffered simply for being Jews. There is no statute of limitations on the rights of Jewish refugees although their exodus spanned several decades. Many Jews would have left earlier if they had not been kept as virtual hostages.

The suggestion that Palestinians had no part to play in the dispossession of Jews from Arab countries is pure revisionism. The Palestinian leadership is guilty of inciting much of the anti-Semitism sweeping Arab lands from the 1920s onwards. It entered into an alliance with Nazism and dragged the Arab League into invading the nascent state of Israel in 1948. An exchange of refugee populations followed.

Danny Ayalon's presentations may be slick, but they are at least telling the truth.

Arab building goes on unchecked on Jewish land

2012-02-22T16:11:00.012Z

Menahem Begin lands at Atarot airport in northern Jerusalem in 1979. In the background, the Arab village of Qalandia. The JNF owned land in this area, but it has been overrun by illegal Arab building.

The scandal of rampant illegal building on Jewish-owned land in Jerusalem has once again shot to the fore. Some 700 buildings have gone up on Jewish land in Jerusalem in the last two years, and there could be as many as 6,000 built without permission altogether - while the authorities turn a blind eye. Quite often the owners are Sephardi Jews whose property rights are being sacrificed for political reasons.

For generations Jews who dreamed of Zion collected their pennies so the Jewish National Fund could purchase land in Israel. Today illegal Arab building on JNF lands goes unchecked by Israel's leaders.

No fewer than 700 illegal housing units have been built by Arabs in the past two years on land purchased for Jews by the JNF in northern Jerusalem.

Arutz Sheva contacted the JNF to ask about the problem. However, JNF officials say the Israel Land Authority is responsible for administering the lands on their behalf.

Aryeh King, chairman of the Israel Land Fund, says his organization is conducting a careful survey of the illegal structures using aerial photographs, but adds the problem is exacerbated by the fact that the illegal building occurs beyond Israel's security fence. Lands bought by the JNF are on both sides of the fence.

"We're discussing lands in Qalandiya," King explained. "All entry and activity has to be coordinated with the IDF and Ministry of Defense. No enforcement can be undertaken in these areas without the cooperation of the military and police. This is routinely denied on 'security grounds.'"

For example, King says, "We have an aerial photo of an old building from before 2005, but the security fence being built makes these areas out of bounds, and we have no way of documenting and making claims for enforcement."

"This inaction is politically motivated, and people don't realize what is happening. The JNF offers to purchase land at nominal prices in order to return them to the Jewish people, but that's not what is happening."

"I hope that those who donate to the JNF will think twice before giving their money a body that does nothing to secure the assets they hold in trust for the Jewish people," King added.

In light of the grim reality on the ground, King recently sent a letter to JNF donors, as well as members of the JNF board. In the letter, he describes the situation on the ground as seen through aerial photographs which he attached to the letter.

He writes, "The Jewish National Fund purchased lands before the state of Israel was declared with donations from Jews around the world. These lands were registered in the name of the Jewish National Fund. For over a decade the JNF has allowed Arabs to squat on these lands and illegally build without permission."

Read article in full

Arye King will be gving a talk at Ner Yisrael synagogue in Hendon, London NW4 at 8pm on Monday 27th February. For more details see British Israel Coalition Facebook page or email: office@britishisraelcoalition.org

Jewish ownership in 'Arab' areas

Jews arrested for reclaiming Jewish property

'We can't link with countries who justify theft'

2012-02-21T20:40:00.010Z

Reuven Rivlin, Knesset speaker: no peace treaty without reparations

Peace with Arab countries will not be possible if they do not compensate the Jews who were expelled after the establishment of the State of Israel, Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin said on Monday, the Jerusalem Post reports. He was speaking at a conference to mark the second anniversary of the passing of the Knesset law calling for compensation to Jewish refugees from Arab countries and Iran. (With thanks: Simon)

MK Nissim Ze’ev (Shas), whose parents were banished from Iraq, called the conference two years after the passage of his bill to require any peace treaty to include reparations to Jewish refugees, in hopes of ensuring the law’s implementation. He also said that he would form a Knesset caucus to promote the cause.

“In negotiations, there are two sides,” Ze’ev pointed out. “The world – especially the US and Europe – must realize that [Jewish] refugees have rights.”

Speaking at the conference, Rivlin said that Jews from Arab countries were happy to immigrate to Israel, but that does not erase the humiliation of having their property confiscated as they left.

“We cannot have relations with a country that justifies stealing,” he explained. “If there is a treaty between Israel and Arab countries, reparations must be included.”

The Knesset Speaker said that the same demand is made of European countries, not only for victims of the Holocaust, but also for those who immigrated to Israel and lost property because of pogroms and anti-Semitism.

MK Einat Wilf (Independence) pointed out that the UN Relief and Works Agency, which deals only with Palestinian refugees, gives a baby born in Gaza refugee status, not just those who fled the 1948 War of Independence.

“There are 30,000 refugees, not five million. The world only knows half the story,” she said. “There are Jewish refugees and there are Arab refugees. Both sides must be compensated, because there were victims on both sides.”

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Now is the time to fight for Jewish refugees

Egyptian Jews: write your Golden Book story now

2012-02-21T07:30:00.027Z

The palm, symbol of the Egyptian-Jewish community

If you are a Jew from Egypt there is still a little time left to get your story into the 'Golden Book of the Jews of Egypt'. The book will collect stories of uprooting and exile titled: 'My Own Exodus' and will be published later this year. It will be distributed to universities, schools and libraries.

The decision to publish the Golden Book was made at The World Congress of the Jews of Egypt (2006), founded and chaired by Dr. Ada Aharoni, a professor at Haifa University. Over 70 accounts have been collected so far.

"All the narratives together will rebuild this important aspect of the history of the Jews from Egypt, which has never been fully related before", says Dr Aharoni."The collective narratives of all the participants will demonstrate how this wonderful Jewish community of more than 2000 years, was destroyed and is no more.

"The important and most crucial values of “Remember!”- Tizcor, and “Tell!” - Tagid, are primordial in the Jewish tradition," Dr Aharoni continues. "In the Bible and in the Passover Hagada, it is commanded: “Remember your Exodus from Egypt, and: “Tell your son!” (Exodus chapter 13 verse 8).It is therefore very important not only to Remember and to Tell about our faraway history, our Biblical First Exodus from Egypt, but also about our close history: “The Second Exodus of the Jews from Egypt”. All those who remember and tell also about “The Second Exodus of the Jews from Egypt”, are doubly praiseworthy!"

The Golden Book will also describe the process of emigration of the Jews from Egypt to Israel - the Aliya, their integration, and their great contribution to the State of Israel in all fields.

Send your personal narrative on "My Exodus from Egypt" or "My family’s Exodus from Egypt" to Ada Aharoni (Email : iflac@bezeqint.net ) by April 2012.

'Forgotten refugees' come ashore in Australia

2012-02-20T16:02:00.004Z

Packed house last night in Sydney

Dr Racheline Barda, born in Egypt

The Forgotten Refugees have finally come ashore in Australia. A packed house at the Sephardi synagogue in Sydney applauded the David Project's film detailing the forgotten plight of almost a million Jews displaced from Arab lands. Report on J-Wire: (with thanks: Vernon)

The plight of Jewish refugees displaced from Arab lands was discussed at a meeting in Sydney last night.

More than 150 people packed the Sephardi Synagogue at which ‘Australians For A Secure Israel’ and the Sephardi Synagogue held the information evening.

Dr. Racheline Barda, who was born in Egypt and Ruth Harvey, whose family fled from Libya told their personal stories which were followed by Peter Wertheim, Executive Director of the ECAJ , who told of his experiences from 1989 to 1994 when he was deeply involved in a campaign to help free Syrian Jewry.

The DVD “The Forgotten Refugees” an internationally acclaimed and awarded project of the David Project, the untold and unpublicised story, of the million or so Jewish people expelled, and/or who fled Arab lands after 1948, was screened receiving rousing applause.

This is a story of importance.

The story of these forgotten refugees, is a story that needs to told.

101 United Nations General Assembly resolutions have been raised to deal with refugees arising from the Israel/Arab conflict, but not one has been raised to deal with the plight of Jews displaced from Arab lands.

‘Australians For A Secure Israel’ was formed out of concern for a growing attempt to delegitimise the State of Israel.

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The Mufti and Hitler's shared aim: kill the Jews

2012-02-20T07:31:00.023Z

Bosnian Muslim soldiers of the SS Khanjar Division, raised by Haj Amin al-Husseini, read a pamphlet entitled "Islam and Judaism" in 1943

Palestinians and their advocates are making strenuous efforts to distance their cause from the Mufti of Jerusalem's alliance with Hitler. Fresnozionism blog restates the connection between the Mufti and murderous anti-Jewish riots in in Hebron, the Farhud in Baghdad, anti-Jewish incitement in Egypt and the expulsion of the Jews from Arab countries. Be sure to watch the rare video of Haj Amin al-Husseini's Berlin meeting with Hitler in November 1941, his villa and office:

Al-Husseini — whom Yasser Arafat (probably falsely) claimed as an uncle — had tremendous influence among Palestinian Arabs from 1920 until he fled to Iraq in 1937 (1939 -ed). The vicious pogrom in Iraq in June 1941, called the Farhud, was partly due to his incitement.

The inspiration behind the coup, and the Farhud itself, came not from Baghdad, but Jerusalem. The Grand Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, sought refuge in Iraq in 1939 with 400 Palestinian émigrés. Together, they whipped up local anti-Jewish feeling. An illiterate populace imbibed bigotry through Nazi radio propaganda. Days before the Farhud broke out, the Nazi youth movement, the Futuwa, went around daubing Jewish homes with a red palm print. Yunis al-Sabawi, who, together with the Mufti and Rashid Ali, spent the rest of the war in Berlin, instructed the Jews to stay in their homes so that they could more easily be rounded up. — Lyn Julius, “Farhud: a slaughter in Iraq“

In November 1941 he met Hitler in Berlin, where he helped create a Waffen SS division of Bosnian Muslims to fight for the Reich in Eastern Europe. Here is an incredible video, including WWII German footage and narrated by historians Robert Wistrich and Sir Martin Gilbert, that describes al-Husseini’s service to the Nazis, and shows how the Mufti cross-pollinated Islamic and Nazi antisemitism (7m 55s):

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One of Husseini’s tasks for Hitler involved Arabic propaganda broadcasts to the Middle East:
"The Nazi Arabic-language broadcasts were the result of a collaboration between officials in the German foreign ministry and pro-Nazi Arab exiles who found refuge from the British in Berlin, most notably Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the most important Palestinian religious and political figure of the era, and Rashid Ali al-Kilani, leader of a pro-Axis coup in Iraq in 1941, which was quickly reversed by the British military [but not before the Farhud -- ed.]. Husseini’s and Kilani’s arrival in Berlin in 1941 provided the Axis with a rare asset: Arabs who could communicate Nazi ideas in colloquial, fluent, and passionate Arabic…"

Following the arrival of Husseini and Kilani in Berlin, the broadcasts more skillfully integrated the Nazi perspective on World War II with themes of Arab nationalism, as well as rhetoric that we would now call fundamentalist or radical Islamic. On July 3, 1942, as Rommel’s Afrika Korps advanced toward El ‘Alamein, about 60 miles west of Alexandria, Egypt, a station called Berlin in Arabic announced that German and Italian forces were coming to “guarantee Egypt’s independence and sovereignty,” and “to liberate the whole of the Near East from the British yoke.” Husseini, who came on the air to celebrate Rommel’s “glorious victory,” declared that “the Axis powers are fighting against the common enemy, namely the British and the Jews.” …

At 8:15 p.m. on July 7, 1942, the Voice of Free Arabism played a remarkable program titled, “Kill the Jews Before They Kill You.” The broadcast began with a lie: “A large number of Jews residing in Egypt and a number of Poles, Greeks, Armenians, and Free French have been issued with revolvers and ammunition” to fight “against the Egyptians at the last moment, when Britain is forced to evacuate Egypt.” The broadcast continued:

“In the face of this barbaric procedure by the British we think it best, if the life of the Egyptian nation is to be saved, that the Egyptians rise as one man to kill the Jews before they have a chance of betraying the Egyptian people. It is the duty of the Egyptians to annihilate the Jews and to destroy their property. " You must kill the Jews, before they open fire on you. Kill the Jews, who have appropriated your wealth and who are plotting against your security. Arabs of Syria, Iraq, and Palestine, what are you waiting for? The Jews are planning to violate your women, to kill your children and to destroy you. According to the Muslim religion, the defense of your life is a duty which can only be fulfilled by annihilating the Jews. This is your best opportunity to get rid of this dirty race, which has usurped your rights and brought misfortune and destruction on your countries. Kill the Jews, burn their property, destroy their stores, annihilate these base supporters of British imperialism. Your sole hope of salvation lies in annihilating the Jews before they annihilate you.”

After the war, al-Husseini continued his work toward the extermination of the Jewish people. The British actually allowed him to return to Mandate Palestine, where he became head of the Muslim Brotherhood in Jerusalem. Later he went to Cairo, where he was a key player in the ODESSA network that helped former SS war criminals escape, and in many cases find refuge in Arab countries. It’s said that his influence was partly responsible for the expulsions of Jews from Arab countries after 1948.

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Praise Arab Spring, except for antisemitism

2012-02-19T07:49:00.013Z

Egyptians in Cairo protest against the Syrian leader Bashir al-Assad. But their desire to be free of spiteful and cruel dictators can be expressed in grotesque anti-Jewish terms (Photo: AP)

In spite of Jeffrey Goldberg's idealised view of the aspirations of the Arab Spring, he is right to conclude that Arabs need to free themselves from the delusion that uniquely-evil Jews manipulate, betray and extort from them. Read his piece for Bloomberg (with thanks: Hilda):

The bravery of the youth of Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Libya can’t be denied. It isn’t pepper spray that they’ve been facing. Nor can the idealism of the Arab Spring be denied. The people of the Middle East are finally awakening to the promise of liberty.

There is another truth, however, that shouldn’t be denied. The desire of Arabs to be free of their spiteful and pitiless dictators is sometimes expressed in grotesquely anti-Jewish terms.

On the surface this makes no sense: Arabs are rising up against Arabs, so what does this have to do with the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”? There has been a tendency in the Middle East to blame the general wretchedness of life on the hidden and malevolent hand of Israel, or more generally -- and more prejudicially -- on “the Jews,” but the Arab Spring’s approach at first seemed radically different. Tunisians, Egyptians, Syrians and Libyans were engaged in demonstrations against the actual causes of their day-to-day misery, rather than against Israel. In Tahrir Square, in the early days of the revolution, Israel seemed an afterthought.

But now in Cairo, and across the Arab Middle East, Israel and the Jews are serving once again as universal boogeymen. Once dictators used anti-Semitism to divert their citizens’ attention away from their own problems. Now expressions of the most ridiculous conspiracy theories seem to rise up organically.

This truth doesn’t conform to the generally accepted narrative of the Arab Spring, but ignoring it won’t make it disappear.

Libya provides an interesting example. Its late, unlamented dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, was a terrible anti-Semite, and often argued for the elimination of Israel. At the beginning of his reign, he expelled several thousand Jews (members of a community that predated the Muslim conquest of Libya by hundreds of years). His regime confiscated Jewish property, converted synagogues into mosques and razed Jewish cemeteries. And yet some of the revolutionaries who overthrew him fomented the charge that he was at least part-Jewish, and that his regime operated on behalf of Zionism.

When a Libyan Jew in exile returned to Tripoli earlier this year, he was nearly lynched by a mob that surrounded the shuttered synagogue he was hoping to restore. “There is no place for Jews in Libya,” read demonstrators’ signs. In the Forward, Andrew Engel, who recently visited Libya and discovered endemic anti-Semitism there, described one popular rap song that went, “The anger won’t die, the one who will die is Qaddafi, his supporters and the Jews.”

The Syrian ruler, Bashar al-Assad, is also utterly hostile to Israel and to Jews. He supports Hezbollah and Hamas, each of which seeks the physical elimination of the Jewish people. And yet the Syrian opposition finds it beneficial to spread the lie that Assad is a Jewish agent.

According to a translation posted by the Middle East Media Research Institute, the Syrian writer Osama Al-Malouhi wrote recently on an opposition website that Jews “want that sucker of Syrian blood to remain and continue to prey and suck blood. They not only want their security, but also to enjoy the sight of Syrian blood being spilled.” He went on, “Asking myself why Jewish support of Bashar increased after they saw rivers of Syrian blood this mass-murderer spilled in Syrian towns, an old image leapt to my mind, of Jews bleeding people and using their blood to prepare matzas. Logic does not accept this, but the facts prove it.”

Even in Tunisia, which is commonly thought of as the most moderate of Arab states, the leader of the powerful and putatively reasonable Islamist party, Ennahdha, recently stated that he brings “glad tidings that the Arab region will get rid of the germ of Israel,” according to the Middle East scholar Martin Kramer.

Cairo is rife with anti-Semitism. On my last visit, I met with leaders of ostensibly liberal parties who were convinced Jews were conspiring to bring about the collapse of the Egyptian economy (something that Egypt’s military rulers are accomplishing all by themselves). One suggested to me that George Soros, Benjamin Netanyahu and a certain “Dr. Rothschild” were working jointly to buy the Suez Canal from Egypt.

A BBC journalist named Thomas Dinham recently wrote of his own encounter with anti-Semitism in Cairo. Dinham, who is neither Israeli nor Jewish, told of one potentially dangerous confrontation: “Someone pushed me from behind with such force that I nearly fell over. Turning around, I found myself surrounded by five men, one of whom tried to punch me in the face. I stopped the attack by pointing out how shameful it was for a Muslim to assault a guest in his country, especially during Ramadan.” He went on, “I was appalled by the apology offered by one of my assailants. ‘Sorry,’ he said contritely, offering his hand, ‘we thought you were a Jew.’”

Expressions of anti-Semitism are common even at the higher reaches of Egyptian politics. Presidential candidate Tawfiq Okasha, speaking on the television station he owns, recently said, “Not all the Jews in the world are evil. You may ask: Tawfiq, what is the ratio? The ratio is 60-40. Sixty percent are evil to varying degrees, all the way to a level that words cannot describe, while 40 percent are not evil.” He noted that French President Nicolas Sarkozy is “one of those Jews who adhere to the Zionist ideology, which is one of the worst ideologies.”

Okasha did concede that, while even among the 40 percent of non-evil Jews there is only one in a million who is blameless, it is possible to “coexist” with this sort of Jew because they “do not betray, conspire, extort or view others as Gentiles.”

In Cairo today, this might count as a progressive idea.

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Why antisemitism is a big problem in Arab world

2012-02-18T23:08:00.009Z

Wiji Bohme Shomary, a student reading history and Middle Eastern and North African Studies in Sweden, is originally from Syria. In this candid and brave article for Newsmill, she dares to suggest that antisemitism is a state tool to distract from Arab failure. Rough translation by Google. (With thanks: Torbjorn)

In my grandmother's childhood memory, there is always a beautiful and kind Jewess - why is she not in my memories? When she grew up in old Damascus there lived several Jewish families in the neighborhood, and both she and other girls were asked to do small favors when it was the Sabbath. The cookies which she got for it she never forgets. When I wonder what happened to these families and insist on knowing why they disappeared, and where they went, she told me not to talk so loud - the walls have ears in Damascus. My questions remain unanswered.

I had the chance to move to Sweden and all the knowledge I had about the Holocaust and anti-Semitism was overwhelming at first. I knew nothing about the Holocaust while growing up in Syria for it is not taught in schools and all the talk about Jewish affairs is strictly in order to express disgust or hatred for it. However, I understood immediately why Hitler is admired there and why he is called the "heroic" name of Abu-Ali!

Many of my Arab neighbors are equally ignorant of the Holocaust, and when they find out more about it, see the disaster usually as a legitimate punishment for the Jews. "Look what they do in Palestine," they say, a "tooth for tooth and eye for an eye" The chronological order, of course, is less important.

The Arabs are allowed to be anti-Semites because they have suffered because of Israel's policy. This is an attitude that often occurs in the Western world, simply turning a blind eye to the phenomenon.

In Syria, Jews are considered to be the cause of misery, water and electricity shortages, poverty, disease, economic stagnation, immoral behavior. Israel is blamed for everything and some states in the region are happy of course with the situation. Arab nationalist governments have helped to create the image of a ghostly Jewish identity that haunts their country and destroys everything that they claim they are trying to build. Most of the residents, particularly young people, have themselves never met a Jewish person but may create a mental image based on the state's descriptions.

Every time a grievance regarding the quality of life grows among the people, they zoom the Palestinian question into focus and suddenly the media's total attention spotlights Israel's settlement policy.

The Palestinian question is used by neighboring countries, and in the sentimental Middle East it is a safe bet that Hezbollah and the Syrian government, for example will win support among the people.

These States and the so called resistance organizations do not really give a damn about the Palestinians 'fate , and when you consider how badly the Palestinians are received and treated in Arab countries, these countries' positions become clear and you soon realize the hypocrisy on which they are based.

Antisemitism in the Arab world is really a big problem, both for the region's democratic development and the peace process that could result in an independent Palestinian state. In the Middle East, they argue that Jews can be hated without Israel. But being anti-Israel is often just a politically correct way to express anti-Semitism.

Jew-hatred has always existed in the region and the Holy Qur'an tells of feuds that arose between Muslims and Jews in Islam's early years. The yellow star of David has its origin in the Abbasid Baghdad's golden age. The long coexistence that arose between Muslims, Christians and Jews in al-Andalus is a constructed myth, the pragmatic Muslim elite who ruled in southern Spain was forced to be tolerant because they represented a minority in the beginning. There were, however, periods of peaceful coexistence, but when unrest and discontent arose in the community, the first to be persecuted and discriminated against were the 'dhimmis'.

'Dhimmi' Christians and Jews lived in a Muslim society. They were protected by the state / Caliphate by paying taxes, they were allowed to practise their religion in peace and had to live by their own religious laws as long as they respected the Muslim community.

This status was abolished in the Middle East and the Ottoman Caliphate and was followed by the introduction of nationalist ideologies. The religious minorities welcomed nationalism and saw in it their chance to achieve equal opportunities in society because religious identity becomes less important.The Arab countries were liberated from Ottoman rule and to be a Muslim, Jew or Christian soon was associated with an archaic mentality. Nationalism became even more important for people under colonial rule. They identified themselves now that Iraqis, Syrians, Egyptians, etc., and they fought side by side to achieve autonomy.

Meanwhile, Western antisemitism, based on racist ideology, was exported to the Middle East. The Jews in the Arab world were suspected soon of collaborating and conspiring to take over the world with Jews outside. There are historical records that show Hitler in the beginning helped Jews flee to Palestine; at the same time he warned, and incited the Muslim leaders there against them.

Haj Amin al-Husseini played a leading role in spreading Nazi anti-Semitism in the Arab world. The allegations against the Arab world's Jewry increased when Israel declared its independence in 1948, but it was the Arabs' defeat in the Six Day War which gave a boost to Jewish persecution and discrimination. The ancient Jewish minority in Syria, Iraq and Egypt were forced in some way to escape (in fact the vast majority had already left these countries by 1967 - ed). Belonging to the same religion as the enemy was considered by the Ba'athists and Nasserist revisionists as a sufficient reason to chase the Jews out.

The Arab world's cultural heritage was hard hit by the Jews' exodus. Their contributions and efforts were of great importance in the musical, literary, artistic and linguistic domains.">The peoples of the Middle East have now dared demand their freedom and many will pay for it with their lives. Unfortunately, dictatorship's grip on the Arab countries is much weaker than its spirit.">If we take Syria as an example, the people, for example, may take years - if the Assad regime falls - to free themselves from the hateful ideology of the Ba'ath, which was forced upon them.

Despite the fact that Islam, like Christianity, can be (mis) interpreted and (mis) used to incite against the Jews, I believe that anti-Semitism in the Arab world today is dictated from above and maintained by the state apparatus. The development of democracy in the Arab world would only benefit the region's cultural and ethnic multiplicity.

Can I dare wonder if the Arab world will have its Jews back eventually? One question that may sound naive to those who anticipate long-term fundamentalist Islamist rule in the region.

I'm hopeful ....

Read article in full (Swedish)

Antisemitism in the Muslim world is rampant

2012-02-17T07:12:00.020Z

Crowds gathered in Baghdad's main square to celebrate the hangings of nine Jews on 27 January 1969

Since nine Jews were hanged in Baghdad 43 years ago - Michelle Huberman reflects in this column for Jewish News - Jew-hatred in the Arab and Muslim world has not lessened. Indeed, the genocide of the Jews is now official government policy in Iran.

One of my earliest awakenings to anti-semitism in the Arab world was in January 1969. I remember the picture of nine Jews swinging from the gallows in Baghdad on the front page of a newspaper. It was so disturbing.

I was only a child. I thought those images of dead Jews had passed with the Holocaust and couldn't believe they were still happening. The 43rd anniversary of this terrible occasion was commemorated on 27th January.

Nobody I know remembers those events, but recently I have met people who lived in Baghdad during that period who have told me first-hand of their experiences. There were only 3,000 Jews left in Bagdad after the migration of the 137,000-strong community in the 1950s. The Arab armies suffered a humiliating defeat after the Six Day War in 1967 and the Iraqi rulers took revenge on the last Jews in this small community.

In the film The Forgotten Refugees, which I show to organisations around London, there is live footage of Iraqis en route to the square singing and dancing to watch the spectacle of the executions. Quite unbelievable, but true.

As well as the executions, scores more Jews were arrested and imprisoned. The remainder were placed under virtual house arrest. There was no escape. All passports were confiscated. Jewish businesses were closed, bank accounts frozen, phones cut. The Jews were made to carry special ID cards. When the community escaped in the early 1970s, they did so in secret, in disguise and at great personal risk through remote mountain tracks.

And this story is not exclusive to Iraq. Terrible atrocities happened across the whole Muslim world throughout the last century. It is a myth that Jewish communities lived in harmony with their neighbours: 95% of the old people I've encountered have told me stories of fleeing in the night with a single suitcase. An Egyptian Jewish friend said to me recently when he saw the Copts being massacred in Cairo, "that's what they did to the us when we lived there, I remember exactly the same".

A Libyan friend who watched the Arab uprisings, and was not in the least bit surprised by the recent chants of "No Jews in Libya" that greeted David Gerbi, a Libyan Jew who returned to restore an old synagogue in Tripoli. Gerbi had to be hurriedly whisked out the country for his own safety.

Nor were my Tunisian friends from Marseille surprised to see their old countrymen chanting "Death to the Jews!", when Tunisians greeted the Hamas head, Ismail Haniyeh, last month at Tunis airport.

The hatred we are seeing across the Arab world towards Jews is nothing new. It happened in the 20's and 30's before the State of Israel was even born. It happened before Israel recaptured Judea and Samaria in 1967. If people think Israel handing back the disputed territories will bring peace, they are sadly mistaken.

The seeds of contemporary Jew-hatred were planted immediately after the 1st World War by Haj Amin Al Husseini, the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem (a relative and mentor to Yasser Arafat). He later worked in collaboration with Hitler in Berlin during WWII. He was spreading the Fuhrer’s doctrines across the Arab world and intended murdering all the Middle East's Jews. Fortunately he never achieved those goals, but his propaganda, a toxic blend of Nazi and Islamic bigotry, still remains, and has been carried through the successive generations. Sadly the Moslem countries have never been through a de-Nazification programme, so the Mufti’s teachings still remain at the root of the conflict with Israel, and colour Arab hostility to Jews.

The anti-Jewish ideology of the Islamist parties, who have swept to power as a result of the Arab Spring, is also heavily influenced by Nazism. It begins with the indoctrination of the illiterate masses in the mosque and though poisonous propaganda beamed into Arab homes by satellite. In Iran, an Islamic theocracy, the genocide of the Jews is official government policy.

Instead of addressing the root causes of anti-Jewish hatred, the West deludes itself that housebuilding in Jerusalem is the main problem.

There is nothing moderate, tolerant or democratic about Islamic fundamentalism. If it wants to achieve peace in the Middle East the West needs to take an active part in encouraging liberal and tolerant forces – not just in the Arab world but in our back garden.

Jewish News article on page 11

For this we left Baghdad? Inside the ma'abarot

2012-02-16T00:02:00.015Z

The ma'abarot - transit camps - were home to hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees flooding into the state of Israel in its infancy. Here are a few examples of around 150 photographs taken in the ma'abarot, from a wonderful national archive, launched to coincide with Israel's Jubilee in 1998, but just released for public use.

Canalisation pipes being laid at a Tel Aviv ma'abara

Girl carrying her baby brother through the mud at Beit Lid camp (Z. Kluger)

The conditions in these settlements were often terrible, with little amenities and very poor sanitation. Novelist Sami Michael, a refugee from Iraq, describes his first days in his new home.

“I woke from a deep sleep to a chill dawn. I rose, wrapped myself in my grey blanket as in a prayer shawl, and stood watching the turquoise strands of the first light. Pearly drops of dew had collected on top of the tent and dripped in a dark line on the sand. A gleam beyond the mountains heralded the sun striving to rise on a new day.

Children stepped out into the narrow passageways between the tents and went to defecate by the fence, covering their excrement with sand like a cat.

"The camp was waking up. Men fetched water from stand-pipes in buckets and pots and long lines began to form everywhere. My mother, uncombed and wrinkled looking, peered out from the tent flaps at a queue in front of the toilet and muttered:“For this we left our house in Baghdad?””

Search national photograph archive

"Death to the Jews! " heard again in Tunisia

2012-02-14T22:33:00.012Z

The seven-thousand strong crowd listening to Egyptian cleric Wajdi Ghonim yesterday morning in a sports stadium in Tunis was clearly heard to utter antisemitic slogans. It was the second time in a few weeks. More worryingly, the audience this time consisted of thousands, not hundreds (with thanks: Michelle):

According to a video report by Metula News Agency carried by the weblog Harissa, Islamist supporters were clearly heard to shout 'Slaughter the Jews!' and 'the Army of the Messiah is on the move!'

But opinion is clearly polarised in Tunisia. The video shows a Tunisian lawyer explaining that the event was interrupted by the authorities, fearing a confrontation between the Islamists inside the hall and 500 to 700 people outside.

A strong constituency remains in Tunisia for intellectual freedom and secular democracy. Some six thousand demonstrators turned out to protest religious extremism at the end of last month, according to this report on Tunisia Live.

The oldest diaspora, safe in Israel - warts and all

2012-02-13T07:16:00.001Z

With thanks: Eliyahu

Norman Berdichevsky has set himself the laudable task of writing eight articles devoted to Edot hamizrah - the Jews from different Arab countries now settled in Israel. The February 2012 issue of the New English Review carries the second of Berdichevsky's articles - this one on the oldest diaspora - the Jews of Iraq.

While the article is interesting and well written, I'm afraid it contains numerous errors. For instance, Abdel Karim Kassem in the late 1950s was by no means a dictator on a par with Saddam Hussein - in fact Jews refer to his rule as a Golden Age of freedom and prosperity. Conditions for the Jews deteriorated under the pro-Nazi king Ghazi, not Faisal, who reigned from 1933 - 1939. The Jews of Iraq were not the most westernised - that accolade probably belongs to the Jews of Egypt. Zionism was quiescent in Iraq until after the 1941 Farhud. The community left Baghdad and other cities and Kurdistan in the airlift of 1950, not 1948. Berdichevsky has got his sequence of the 'Zionist bombs' wrong: the American Cultural Center bomb went off in March 1951, not 1950. And Shaul Mofaz is of Iranian, not Iraqi descent.

Here is an extract from Berdichevsky's article:

"In the December issue of NER, I wrote the first article (on the Yemenites) of a planned 8 part series to examine that segment of Israeli Jewish society that is often neglected or misrepresented – the Oriental or Eastern communities, sometimes referred to as the Mizrahim and Sephardim, constituting at least 50% of the total Jewish population (as they do in France as well) in contrast to less than 5% in the United States (see “Edot Hamizrach” Israel’s Oriental Jewish Communities, New English Review, August, 2009). The simple consequence of this, is that many American Jewish spokespersons when commenting on what they believe are traditional “Jewish” customs, values, traditions, social mores, political behavior, food, music, dress, humor, language, and heritage are often remote from the realities they find when visiting Israel.

"During my eleven years residence in Israel, I did my Ph.D. research on the community of Sha’arayim, a Yemenite ethnic neighborhood in the town of Rehovot (The Yemenites New English Review, December, 2011) tracing the changes it underwent due to the transformation of the original Zionist agricultural settlement to a thriving town. For much of my time in Israel, I worked for a translation agency located in Ramat-Gan in what is considered a predominantly “Iraqi” area where one can still hear the older generation speak a distinctive ‘Jewish Arabic’ that was once the daily jargon of a large part of Baghdad (more than 25% Jewish in 1945)."

Read article in full

The forgotten genocides haunting the Arab Spring

2012-02-12T07:21:00.001Z

Kurdish man on horseback

This fascinating article in Conservative Papers by Hindu human rights activist Ranbir Singh explains how 19th century Turkish nationalism prefigured bigotry and genocide against non-Muslim and non-Arab groups in the Middle East. Even its limited secularism has been rolled back as post-Arab Spring Salafist governments prepare to rule the region:

It was in a speech of 22 August 1939 that Hitler urged his volk to slaughter without mercy men, women and children of the inferior Slavic race as he planned to invade Poland. He ended this speech with these chilling words:

“Who, after all, speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians?”

Of course it was not just the Armenians who have been forgotten. The Assyrian nation were also prime targets of the Ottoman policy to deliberately exterminate ancient Christian nations of the Middle East.

It has often been cited as a template for the very Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis in which six million Jews were deliberately wiped out in the name of racial purity.

What makes it more poignant as that there is one other very inconvenient fact that is ignored in all this. For years we have been fed information that Israelis an apartheid state and that the Zionists foisted their unwelcome colonialist intentions on the Palestinian natives. But if we look back to the very genesis of the Zionist project we find Jewish pioneers from Europe making arable land and small communities in what was desert and malaria-infested marsh sparsely inhabited by nomadic Bedouin. This land was bought legally from the Ottoman authorities but nevertheless alarmed the sublime Porte enough for the caliphate to deliberately settle Circassians, Egyptians and Crimean Tatars in the region. Sultan Abdülhamid II candidly admitted that this was because he did not want Palestine to become a “Second Armenia”.

The question of recognising the Armenian genocide has become the subject of recent high level diplomatic conflict between France and Turkey. France has made it a crime for anyone to deny that the Armenian genocide took place, something which modern secular Turkey continues to do officially. For its part Turkey has accused France of having committed genocide on the natives in its colonisation of Algeria. There is once again a deep poignancy to all this. It was to France that Atatürk had turned in his efforts to make Turkey a secular, modern and civilised nation. The French Revolution was his model and he prided himself on being a product of the Enlightenment. But just as France had suppressed diversity in the ideal of creating a common citizenship so too did a secular Turkey impose a homogenous ethnic identity on what remained of the previous Ottoman Empire.

Kurds were denied the very right to be Kurdish and were pejoratively termed ‘Mountain Turks’. Was this so different from Algerian schoolchildren reading history books which began with “Our ancestors the Gauls”? Now when the Arab revolutions broke throughout 2011 there was optimistic yet naïve talk that the new governments would steer their states towards the much vaunted Turkish model which apparently emphasised secularism and democracy. To say that this was clutching at straws is an understatement. In any case it is apparent now that the new states will have strict Salafi-style governments to replace the pro-western despotisms: these have prepared the groundwork for the Salafists, and have been anything but moderate and secular.

Just as the National Party in South Africa did not actually invent apartheid in 1948, but merely codified the racial segregation and discrimination against non-whites which had been practised and even extended by the ‘liberal’ government of Jan Smuts into a statist ideological framework, the Salafi regimes already have had much of their work done for them by dictators such as Mubarak under whom official discrimination against minorities and rampant anti-Semitism was rife. Calling the Salafi parties moderate will not change this reality one iota.

To return to the relevance of Turkey - how actually secular was it? Atatürk salvaged the remnants of the Ottoman state in order to build modern Turkey and in doing so united all Muslims against the Christian enemy. The sultan had actively used pan-Islamic sentiment to court Kurdish support in the First World War and in the genocide against Armenians and Assyrians. Kurdish chieftans had seized Armenian land after the deportations and genocide of 1915 and were easily persuaded by Turkish nationalists to join with them as fellow Muslims in a common resistance to wiping out the Armenians.

In May 1919 the Grand Vizier Ferit Pasha sent Mustafa Kemal to Kurdistan where he appealed to the population using the self-styled title “saviour of Kurdistan”. He championed the cause of the Khilafat in his appeal to Islamic sentiment to expel the kuffar from sacred Muslim land in which he stressed the Ottoman fraternity that bound Kurds and Turks together.

Appeal to the Turkish nation was not even on his lips here or in the Erzurman Congress of July and August 1919. Turkish officers commanded Kurdish soldiers in order to defeat the armies of Christian Georgia. These same largely Kurdish armies helped liberate Anatolia for the Turks against the imperialist aspirations of Greece. But as the war progressed Kurdish aspirations were crushed. On 1 November 1922 Kemal declared that the new Turkish state had been created. The Treaty of Lausanne of 24 June 1923 carved up Kurdistan and established the borders of modern Turkey. Kurds were said to be equal partners with Turks in this new state.

It was only after the establishment of the republic that ethnic identities of Kurds, Laz and Circassians were suppressed in favour of the surrogate faith of Turkish nationalism which was to replace a state based on Islam. Turkish national and racial identity is still extolled - schools, barracks and public buildings prominently extolling slogans such as “What a joy it is to be able to call oneself a Turk”, “A Turk is worth the whole universe” and that Turks are “the most valiant and noble race on earth”.

Republican secular Turkey continues to deny the very historical fact of the Armenian genocide by the Islamic empire of the Uthmani Khilafat. In ‘Hitler’s Apocalypse’ Robert Wistrich of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem has elaborated on how Kemal merely extended the nationalistic trends which were evident even under the caliphate:

“The Turkish government’s objective was to destroy the Christian Armenian population inside Turkey, which was deemed to be actively seeking full independence or autonomy. Previously regarded as a constituent dhimmi millet (a non-Muslim religious community in the Ottoman Empire) the Armenians found themselves stereotyped as an ‘alien nationality’, especially after the modernising rulers of Turkey adopted the new ideology of Pan-Turkism. This was a xenophobic nationalism intended to underpin their dreams of a new empire stretching from Anatolia to western China, based on Islam and Turkish ethnicity. The Armenian nation, with its ancient ethnic culture and Christian religion, stood in the way of the "homogenising nationalism embraced by the young Turks.”

The Turkish-speaking Christians of Karaman were held to be Greek and hence expelled to Greece. But they spoke no Greek at all, only used Greek script to write their mother tongue. When one realises that the “Turks” expelled in turn from Greece actually spoke only Greek which they wrote in Arabic script, it was in fact a forcible exchange of Muslim and Greek Orthodox Christian populations, since Arabs, Kurds, Bosniaks and Albanians could be accepted as Turks because they are Muslims. Hardly secular for a supposedly secular state. Indeed Turk continued to equal Muslim, and non-Muslims are not considered to be Turks. President Süleyman Demeril put it so succinctly in 1995:

“We are all – barring non-Muslims – owners of this land.”

That same logic was used to brutally suppress any hints of Kurdish identity as Atatürk crushed this minority throughout his premiership. Kurds were forcibly Turkified and forbidden from speaking their own language. In disturbing echoes of Australia’s Stolen Generation, children were deliberately removed from Kurdish families in order to remove the inferior racial and cultural strains. Again the genocide of Christian minorities by both the Ottoman Empire and the caliphate’s successor state of modern Turkey is instructive here. Between 1925 and 1928 about a million Kurds were deported and thousands died en route. While the survivors were dispersed throughout Anatolia in order to make Turkification easier, ethnic Turks were settled to dilute Kurdish demographics in Kurdistan.

Turkish language was of course enforced throughout the country, especially on the Kurds. In 1927 in Bihandus, Lebanon, the Hoyboun (Independence) Congress brought together Kurdish nationalist groups who in desperation made overtures to the Armenians. Indeed Vahan Papazyan from the Armenian nationalist Dashrak Party attended the conference.Turkey sensed a Kurdish-Armenian conspiracy and in 1930 persuaded Iran to cut off aid to the Kurdish revolt around Mount Ararat. Kurdish villages suffered aerial bombardment for months and yet again thousands were killed by the Turkish military. In August 1930 Prime Minister Ismet Pasha triumphantly announced:

“Only the Turkish nation is entitled to claim ethnic and national rights in this country. No other element has any such right.”

Minister of Justice Mahmut Esat Bozhurt was even more forthright: “We live in a country called Turkey, the freest country in the world. As your deputy, I feel I can express my real convictions without reserve: I believe that the Turk must be only lord, the only master of this country. Those who are not of pure Turkish stock can have only one right in this country, the right to be servants and slaves.”

In 1937 and 1938 the last Kurdish resistance was snuffed out in Dersim. In disturbing echoes of the Armenian genocide, Kurds were burnt alive in barns, caves and forests. Women and girls committed mass suicide. Kurdish identity was now subsumed under the unconvincing label of “Mountain Turks”. Turks were a civilised and valiant people who had attained victory over a savage and backward enemy, an inferior race against whom Turkish nationalism could assert itself; the Kurds. Savage repression followed with even the faintest stirrings of Kurdishness being crushed. For example, in June 1967 the nationalist journal Otuken carried an uncompromisingly venomous piece by one Nihaz Atsiz :

“If they want to carry on speaking a primitive language with vocabularies of only four or five thousand words, if they want to create their own state and publish what they like, let them go and do it somewhere else. We Turks have shed rivers of blood to take possession of these lands; we had to uproot Georgians, Armenians and Byzantine Greeks….let them go off wherever they want, to Iran, to Pakistan, to India, or to join Barzani. Let them ask the United Nations to find them a homeland in Africa. The Turkish race is very patient, but when it is really angered it is like a roaring lion and nothing can stop it. Let them ask the Armenians who we are, and let them draw the appropriate conclusions.”

Colonel Alpan Turkes enjoyed huge influence with his calls for pan-Turanianism. In 1965 he formed Milliyetci Harekat Partisi (Nationalist Action Party) or MHP to defend Turkey against the twin threats of communism and Kurdish separatism. After 1967 the MHP organised paramilitary units known as Bozkurt (Grey Wolves) to murder and intimidate left-wing Turkish and Kurdish students. The party only gained two seats in parliament but exerted much wider influence with its extreme views that the Kurds had to either accept assimilation as Turks, or face physical annihilation.

Only in 2002 did Turkey make grudging reforms in allowing Kurdish language broadcasting and education. Lack of major changes meant that violent resistance to Turkish rule continued. Kurdish politicians who have tried to use the existing parliamentary mechanisms to elicit change suffer harassment by the state, including jailing and assassination. Turkey still does not exactly encourage ethnic diversity. Many Turks are of Albanian descent but outwardly conform as Turks. Albanian-speaking Muslim Kosovar refugees in the 1990s were treated as outsiders. Even the late prime minister Turgut Ozal suffered taunts from Turkish ultra-nationalists due to his part-Kurdish origins. In Turkey the unskilled workers operate closed shop trade unions that exclude marginal and minority groups such as the Roma Gypsies.

Even the limited secularisation by Kemalism has been rolled back. Since the time of Ismet Inonu, Islam has made a comeback in Turkey. The military is regarded as the stalwart of Kemalist secularism and the most devoted disciple of Atatürk’s legacy. Yet after the coup of 1980 the ruling military junta made religious lessons compulsory in order to counter the influence of the Left. Özal’s Motherland Party had a strong Islamic element within it. Even the pro-Islamic leader Erbekan, leader of the National Salvation Party and later the Welfare Party, was a virulent Turkish nationalist who wanted all of Cyprus occupied by Turkey.

As it happens there can be no doubt that even the much vaunted Turkish model is not going to be exported to former Ottoman colonies. Indeed even within Turkey, the Kemalist system is fast ditching its secularism while retaining its nationalist core. Now the Arab Spring has brought Salafi forces into dominance who seem intent on following the Pakistani model of regression. Of course this failed state has been bolstered not just by western aid but has become a vassal of Saudi Arabia For some years, along with other Third World guest workers, Pakistanis toil in jobs which until 1962 would have been the preserve of black slaves and which still offer them few rights.

Pakistan’s largest city of Karachi is rife with ethnic conflict between the country’s main ethnic groups of Sindhis, Punjabis, Pathans and Muhajirs. The Baluch have had their aspirations crushed right from inception in their native homeland. Failing to become full members of the Arab master race the leaders of Pakistan retain attachment to the language of Urdu while feeling it necessary to disown or downplay the majority language which is often their own mother tongue of Punjabi.

Similarly, we can expect to see the native inhabitants of the Maghreb known variously as Berber or Kabyle suppressed in favour of Arabisation which has been carried out since the departure of the French colonialists.Pakistan also offers another sinister precedent which again brings us back to the genocide of Armenians and Assyrians in 1915. At independence the area which is now Pakistan was about twenty per cent Hindu and Sikh.

Where are these communities now? They barely make up one per cent of the population. Along with much larger Christian communities and the microscopic Kailash people extinction of these once vibrant non-Muslim minorities is within sight, as western democracies once again avert their gaze from inconvenient facts.

Of course one does not even need to look at Pakistan. Witness how half of Iraq’s Christians have fled, many into Syria where the imminent fall of the Assad regime does not bode well for minority Christian, Shia and the dictator’s very own Alawite community. The Assyrians of Iraq have faced the unrelenting and uncompromising hatred of the state since they were machine gunned by the regular army and massacred in pogroms by Arabs and Kurds in 1933 whipped up by King Faisal’s prime minister, the pan-Arabist Rashid Ali. While Saddam Hussain gassed the Kurds, there were elements among the Kurdish ‘freedom fighters’ who vented their own genocidal hatred against the Assyrians in their midst. Therefore to blame the genocide of ancient Middle Eastern nations on simply Turkish nationalism is missing the point and is inaccurate.

Does it explain the demographic catastrophe suffered by Maronite and other Christians who once formed the majority population in Lebanon? Or the present situation of Iraqi Christians, the half century of slavery and genocide against southern Sudanese, the grim future faced by Copts in Egypt? Ethnic cleansing, forced assimilation, rape and conversion to Islam at the point of the gun and dagger will become more commonplace. Again the precedent of Pakistan is relevant. At partition Mahatma Gandhi urged Hindus and Sikhs to remain in the new state of Pakistan. The result was that they were driven out, raped, slaughtered or forcibly converted.

The same will happen to those minority groups in the post-revolution Arab nations. Simply averting our gaze will not change this. While an earlier generation of Jews from Iraq, Egypt, Libya and former French North Africa found sanctuary in Israel, where will the Christian minorities go?

Read article in full

Same article on AINA (Assyrian) website

Shi'ite view of non-Muslims rooted in 17th century

2012-02-10T12:57:00.016Z

Mohammad Baqer al-Majlisi, who did much to influence Persian attitudes to non-Muslims in the 17th c.

The re-establishment of a theocracy in Iran has revived the Shi'ite concept of najis, as applied to 'impure' or 'unclean Jews', thus seamlessly connecting today's Islamic regime with their Safavid or Qajar forbears, Dr Andrew Bostom argues in The National Review:

Shiite clerics emphasized the notion of the ritual uncleanliness (najis) of Jews in particular, but also of Christians, Zoroastrians, and others, as the cornerstone of relations toward non-Muslims. The impact of this najis conception was already apparent to European visitors to Persia during the reign of Ismail I. The Portuguese traveler Tome Pires observed (between 1512 and 1515) that “Sheikh Ismail . . . never spares the life of any Jew,” while another European travelogue notes “the great hatred [Ismail I] bears against the Jews.”

The writings and career of Mohammad Baqer al-Majlisi elucidate the imposition of Islamic law (Sharia) on non-Muslims in Shiite Iran. Al-Majlisi (d. 1699) was perhaps the most influential cleric of the Safavid Shiite theocracy in Persia. For six years at the end of the 17th century, he functioned as the de facto ruler of Iran, making him the Ayatollah Khomeini of his era. By design, he wrote many works in Persian to disseminate key aspects of the Shia ethos among ordinary persons. In his Persian treatise “Lightning Bolts Against the Jews,” Al-Majlisi describes the standard humiliating requisites for non-Muslims living under sharia, first and foremost the blood-ransom jizya, or poll-tax, based on Koran 9:29.

He then enumerates six other restrictions relating to worship, housing, dress, transportation, and weapons, before outlining the unique Shiite impurity or najis regulations. It is these latter najis prohibitions which lead anthropology professor Laurence Loeb — who studied and lived within the Jewish community of Southern Iran in the early 1970s — to observe, “Fear of pollution by Jews led to great excesses and peculiar behavior by Muslims.” According to Al-Majlisi:

And, that they should not enter the pool while a Muslim is bathing at the public baths . . . If something can be purified, such as clothes, if they are dry, they can be accepted, they are clean. But if they [the dhimmis] had come into contact with those cloths in moisture they should be rinsed with water after being obtained. . . . It would also be better if the ruler of the Muslims would establish that all infidels could not move out of their homes on days when it rains or snows because they would make Muslims impure.

The dehumanizing character of these popularized “impurity” regulations fomented recurring Muslim anti-Jewish violence, including pogroms and forced conversions throughout the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, which rendered areas of Iran Judenrein — free of Jews. For example, the preeminent modern historian of Iranian Jewry, Walter Fischel, provides these observations based on the 19th-century narrative of Rabbi David d’Beth Hillel and additional eyewitness accounts:

Due to the persecution [by] their Moslem neighbors, many once flourishing communities entirely disappeared. Maragha, for example, ceased to be the seat of a Jewish community around 1800, when the Jews were driven out. . . . Similarly, Tabriz, where over 50 Jewish families are supposed to have lived, became Judenrein towards the end of the 18th century through similar circumstances. The peak of the forced elimination of Jewish communities occurred under Shah Mahmud (1834‒48), during whose rule the Jewish population in Meshed, in eastern Persia, was forcibly converted, an event which not only remained unchallenged by Persian authorities, but also remained unknown and unnoticed by European Jews.

The so-called “Khomeini revolution,” which in 1979 deposed the secular, Western-oriented regime of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, was in reality a mere return in full (including najis regulations, etc.) to oppressive Shiite theocratic rule, the predominant form of Iranian governance during four centuries. Conditions for all non-Muslim religious minorities, particularly Jews, rapidly deteriorated. Historian David Littman recounts the Jews’ immediate plight:

"In the months preceding the Shah’s departure on 16 January 1979, the religious minorities . . . were already beginning to feel insecure . . . Twenty thousand Jews left the country before the triumphant return of the Ayatollah Khomeini on 1 February . . . On 16 March, the honorary president of the Iranian Jewish community, Habib Elghanian, a wealthy businessman, was arrested and charged by an Islamic revolutionary tribunal with “corruption” and “contacts with Israel and Zionism”; he was shot on 8 May."

Indeed, the demographic decline of Iranian Jewry after the creation of Israel was dramatic even before the revolution — from nearly 120,000 in 1948 to roughly 70,000 in 1978. The current Jewish population is perhaps 10,000, or less.

Ayatollah Khomeini’s views were the most influential in shaping the ideology of the revitalized Shiite theocracy, and his attitudes towards Jews — both before and after he assumed power — were particularly negative. Khomeini’s speeches and writings invoked a panoply of Judenhass motifs, including orthodox interpretations of sacralized Muslim texts, and the Shiite conception of najis. More ominously, Khomeini’s rhetoric blurred the distinction between Jews and Israelis, reiterated paranoid conspiracy theories about Jews (both within Iran and beyond), and endorsed the annihilation of the Jewish state. The pillars of this continuous modern campaign of annihilationist anti-Semitism are the motifs from traditional Islamic Jew-hatred, including Islamic eschatology, grafted seamlessly to jihadism. These deep-seated Islamic theological motifs are further conjoined to Holocaust denial and the development of a nuclear-weapons program intended expressly for Israel’s eradication.

The writings and speeches of the most influential religious ideologues of this restored Shiite theocracy — including Khomeini himself — make apparent their seamless connection to the oppressive doctrines of their forebears in the Safavid and Qajar dynasties.

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Persian Jews conflicted, Ayatollahs aren't

2012-02-10T09:05:00.014Z

Iranian Jews celebrate a Shabbat service in a Tehran synagogue

Mixed feelings amongst Persian Jews are the order of the day in this NPR radio report, although no actual Jews in Iran are interviewed, only their relatives in Israel. Meanwhile Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, has no mixed feelings whatsoever: in this widely-reported speech a few days ago he is unequivocal that the Jews should be annihilated.

Iranian Jews travel to Israel via Turkey, with special documents from the Israeli Embassy there that let them enter the country undetected by Iranian authorities.

Aaron says his cousin visited from Tehran just two months ago. Unfortunately, he says, he can't travel to Iran because he only has an Israeli passport.

Aaron says he is proud of his Persian ancestry, yet he's also loyal to the Jewish state. But lately, he says, because of the tension with Iran, he feels conflicted about what could happen next.

There are fears that Israel could strike at Iran's nuclear facilities. Israel says Tehran wants to develop nuclear weapons; Iran maintains that its nuclear program has only civilian uses. There have been four rounds of U.N. sanctions against Iran, as well as harsher measures taken by the U.S. and the European Union.

Aaron says it's all taking its toll. He says he feels terrible for people in Iran, where life is getting difficult.

On a recent day, he calls his cousins in Iran to see how they are. Speaking in Farsi, his relatives there tell him that they want to sell their house but can't, the currency is devaluing and it's a struggle to make ends meet.

Tears rolls down Aaron's face as he hears their news.

After he hangs up, Aaron says he doesn't think it's right to hurt the people in Iran. He says something should be done to hurt the Iranian government instead.

Those mixed feelings are pervasive among the Iranian Jewish community here.

Read NPR transcript in full

Now is the time to fight for Jewish refugees

2012-02-08T23:57:00.007Z

Ma'abara housing Jewish refugees at Bet Lid, Israel, 1951

Even the Israeli government seems to agree that it's time to fight for the rights of Jewish refugees. But a 'right of return' to Arab states is not one of them, writes Lyn Julius in the Jerusalem Post:

Some years ago, a daughter of the wealthy Jewish Castro family from Egypt heard Anwar Sadat’s widow Jehan deliver a talk in New York. Congratulating her afterwards, the Egyptian Jewess exchanged pleasantries with Mrs. Sadat. “But you must come back to visit [Egypt] and to show it to your children,” Mrs. Sadat said, adding the traditional Egyptian courtesy, beti betak – “my house is your house.”

Little did she appreciate the irony, but Jehan Sadat’s presidential villa had literally belonged to the Castro family, which was expelled by Nasser in 1956. Observers of the Middle East conflict frequently talk of trampled Palestinian rights, but suffer from a blind spot when it comes to the mass dispossession of a greater number of Jews across 10 Arab countries.

Few Jews lived as opulently as the Castros, but all over the Middle East and North Africa, Jewish homes, shops and businesses were seized or sold for well under market value as fearful Jews fled or were forced out. Communities predating the Islamic conquest by 1,000 years have been driven to extinction.

Economist Sidney Zabludoff estimates that there were 50 percent more Jewish refugees than Palestinian Arab refugees, and that they almost certainly lost 50% more in assets and property. While the world is fixated by Israeli building in a (Jewish-owned) Jerusalem suburb, nobody reproaches Arab states for seizing Jewish land and property in Baghdad, Cairo, Tripoli and Damascus, estimated by the World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries at five times the size of Israel itself.

Two years ago this month the Knesset quietly passed a bill stipulating that the Israeli government must include Jewish refugee rights, notably compensation, in all future peace talks.

MK Nissim Ze’ev (Shas) proposed the law, inspired by a 2008 US Congress resolution.

When the time comes to discuss “final status” issues, the Israeli government will be committed to upholding the rights of 850,000 Jews scapegoated as Zionists after 1948 and driven from their homes. In the meantime, Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon is spearheading a campaign to raise the public profile of Jewish refugees. His team is preparing a report on the issue. And on the second anniversary of the passing of the Knesset law on 21 February, we can expect to hear a lot more about Jewish refugees.

Before any talk of compensation, however, Arab League states must recognize their culpability for creating the Jewish refugee problem.

All too often, the issue is met with disbelief or denial. If it is acknowledged, wild counterclaims for compensation are made. Arabs blame the exodus on the Zionists, or rationalize it as a justifiable backlash to the creation of Israel. The myths are peddled that Jews and Muslims lived together harmoniously before Zionism, or that Jews were better treated in the Muslim world than in the Christian.

Arab propaganda and Israeli silence have conspired to make the world believe that the Palestinians are the victims of an Israeli injustice.

By restoring Jewish refugees to the picture – they and their descendants make up 52% of the Jewish population of Israel – it becomes clear that two sets of refugees, in roughly equal numbers, exchanged places in the Middle East.

Although no Jew would today consider himself a refugee, justice for the Jewish refugees, for which there is no statute of limitations, is a moral imperative. It is not simply a matter of compensation for stolen assets and property.

Jews hundreds of miles away from the battlefield suffered state-sanctioned discrimination, violence and abuse simply for being Jews.

Palestinian refugees, on the other hand, were caught up in a local war launched by their own leadership.

Jewish refugees could help achieve peace by acting as a counterweight to the Palestinian “right of return.” Even the “moderates” of the Fatah camp cling to their demand for the Arab refugees of 1948 (their numbers have ballooned to more than four million because, uniquely, refugee status is passed on to their descendants ) to return to what is now Israel.

The Palestinian “right of return” amounts to the destruction of Israel by demographic means and the de facto creation of two Palestinian states, one in the West Bank, and one in place of Israel.

In contrast, Jewish refugees were successfully resettled in Israel and the West. The Palestinian refugee problem, perpetuated by UNWRA, the United Nations Works and Relief Agency, could be resolved at a a stroke if the Jewish model of resettlement were followed. Palestinian non-absorption in Arab host countries is an abuse of human rights. It is not only counter-intuitive, it is inhumane.

Contrary to recent misleading press reports, no Jew seeks a “right of return” to Arab states.

A Foreign Ministry spokesman categorically denied that the Israeli government supported such a demand. Firstly, there is no precedent for a return. The seven million Hindus and Muslims who swapped places in the Indian- Pakistani war of 1947 constituted a permanent exchange. So did the Greeks expelled from Turkey and Turks driven from Greece after the end of the First World War.

Secondly, apart from the upheaval generated by a further mass migration, a Jewish “right of return” to countries poisoned by anti-Jewish hatred is unthinkable. Wild horses would not drag three generations of Jews, permanently integrated in Israel and the West, back to lands that are neither hospitable nor safe. The Arab Spring has only made anti-Semitism worse.

And if one set of refugees can’t return, neither should the other.

The Jewish refugees are the key to understanding the bigotry against non-Muslim minorities which drives the conflict with Israel as long as fascism holds sway over the Arab world, its grip strengthened by the Arab Spring.

As the plight of Copts and Assyrians shows, the native Jews would have been victimized even if Israel had not existed. They were the first to suffer ethnic cleansing, but they will not be the last.

Israel’s failure to fight for the rights of Jewish refugees has been a catastrophe of public diplomacy – one that the government is at last trying to remedy after 60 years of neglect. Danny Ayalon’s ministry is expected to make recommendations for recognition and redress for Jewish refugees. He is launching an official PR campaign and will be instructing Israeli embassies around the world to bring up the issue with their counterparts. Watch this space.

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A thoroughly-researched study by Sir Martin Gilbert

2012-02-08T07:36:00.013Z

Martin Gilbert's groundbreaking book In Ishmael's House was published in 2010, but it is not too late for Jay Levinson's review in the Jewish Magazine (February 2012). (With thanks: Eliyahu)

What went wrong? It is common belief that Jews under Moslem rule experienced virtual "honeymoon" conditions until enmity and violence broke out only after the publication of the Balfour Declaration. The epitome of cooperation was the Middle Ages, a golden age of literature and culture. Why did sweet wine turn into sour vinegar? How did friendly relations deteriorate into open warfare? Sir Martin Gilbert, a renowned British historian of impeccable repute, tries to answer these questions in a thoroughly researched study.

Gilbert's research clearly belies commonly held misconceptions. More than once he stresses that historically Jews fared much better under Moslem rule than in Christendom, but he essentially contradicts the existence of a medieval golden age. There certainly were Jews who attained high achievements, but the community as a whole were kept in dhimmi status, a polite way of saying tolerated subjects restricted in residence and employment, and required to pay special taxes. Throughout the centuries there certainly were outbreaks of anti-Jewish rioting, however by-and-large life in the Moslem world offered more security and safety than the Christian-inspired Inquisition and waves of pogroms.

As modern ideas began to take hold in the 19th century, even the decadent Ottoman Empire recognized the new value system, Jews were granted increasing equality. A new nationalism spread as the world entered the 20th century, and Jews in Moslem countries such as Iraq and Egypt rose to high positions in business and government. The 1910s and 1920s were the heyday of success and prosperity. Then, the bubble burst. Tolerance degenerated into the invasion of five Arab armies determined to squash the newly declared State of Israel.

The author ascribes the decay of relations to three basic causes: (1) the rise of Zionism seen by many as a contradiction to Arab nationalism, (2) European political interests, and (3) Nazi agitation and propaganda.

The 1920s and 1930s were a period of national movements in the Arab world, culminating in the independence of the Trans-Jordan, Syria, and other countries, eventually including Morocco and Algeria. Yet, the direction of nationalism was unclear. Pan-Arabism worked against the concept of individual nation-states. Military and dictatorial governments were pitted against monarchial rule. There was unity at the governmental level on one point --- there was no room for a Jewish state in what was perceived to be the great Arab expanse (although there are some examples of Arab leaders who supported Zionist ambitions). Gilbert does give numerous cases of Moslem-Jewish interaction at the personal level; many friendships continued despite political strains.

Middle Eastern politics cannot be divorced from European interests. England and France were struggling to hold on to their crumbling empires and were reluctant to offer too much support to Jews at the expense of angering the Arabs. Russia's primary motivation was to spread communism.

Nazis viewed the Arabs as potential cohorts, particularly in light of the staunch support that Hitler personally received from the Mufti of Jerusalem. Even before the outbreak of war Nazi radio broadcasts and written propaganda were aimed at stirring up anti-Jewish sentiment along with agitating against the British and French. This helped gain support for the Germans as their army swept through North Africa with an evantual goal of wrestling Palestine from British control.

The results of the general situation were ugly. Jews were interned under Nazi rule in North Africa, and there were instances of anti-Jewish riots even without the presence of Germans. The May 1941 pogrom in Iraq was the ugly culmination of anti-Jewish legislation promulgated in the country that welcomed the Mufti of Jerusalem as a political refugee from the British.

Fervor swept the Arab world as their armies drove into Israel in what was promised to be a quick rout of the Jews. In the eyes of many, Judaism and Zionism had become synonymous, and as Zionists became the enemy, so did the Jew become the foe. It was time to leave. The centuries of productive lives for Jews in the Moslem world were coming to a bitter end. As the years went by, life became worse for those Jews who would not or could not leave. Gilbert gives all too many examples of Jews in places like Egypt, Syria and Iraq who were jailed without cause. Their property was often confiscated, and many were lucky if they were released alive from prison.

Gilbert is steadfast in his conclusion that Jews from "Ishmael's House" are no less refugees than Arabs who perpetuate their status through such mechanisms as UNWRA. He adds one point which all too many Arabs chose to ignore --- the Arab countries have lost all of the contributions that Jewish exiles have made to literature, science, and numerous other fields.

Read article in full

More reviews of Sir Martin Gilbert's 'In Ishmael's House'

Paris Jewish leader remonstrates with Tunis envoy

2012-02-07T17:38:00.019Z

Protesters against normalisation with Israel demonstrating in Tunis

The leader of a Jewish organisation in Paris has challenged the Tunisian ambassador to France to confirm or deny that his government approved of the 'scandalous declarations' of the Committee for Arab Resistance and Support of the Fight against Normalisation with Israel.

Ahmed Kahlaoui, the Committee chairman, had called for a clause to be inserted in the new Tunisian constitution 'against normalisation with the Zionist entity' at a press conference in Tunis on 30 January. "The state of Israel had been created to dissolve the Arab nation", he claimed. He declared that his Committee would set up a tent at the Bardo Museum in Tunis, a major tourist site, in order to stage a sit-in.

Roger Pinto of the Jewish organisation Siona expressed his consternation to the ambassador that the existence of Israel, a UN member, should be called into question. He hoped that the Arab Spring, in which people had invested such hopes, would not turn into a Tunisian Winter, much to the Tunisian people's loss.

Tunisian Jews should take death threats seriously

2012-02-07T08:01:00.009Z

Tunisian Prime Minister Hamadi Jebani greets Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh

Mohsin Habib is a Bangladeshi commentator writing for the Stonegate Institute. In this article analysing recent death threats to the Jews of Tunisia, he reaches rather more pessimistic conclusions than the BBC. The Ennahda party is just biding its time until it reveals its true Islamist colours: (with thanks: Denis):

Gilles Jacob Lellouche, owner of a kosher restaurant said, "I am proud of being a Tunisian Jew. Where would I go -- to Europe? Come on, I am not stupid. To Israel? I am not that stupid either."

Earlier, as the only candidate not elected in the October 23 election, Lellouche said." I want to break the taboo that someone from a minority cannot get involved in politics."

Rabbi Daniel Cohen of the Beit Mordechai Synagogue said, "The problems between Israelis and Palestinians should not be a concern to such an extent that it has caused some people to become extremist and anti-Semitic." He added," I am sure the Tunisian Government does not want this to happen, as even Ennahda can not afford to have this kind of extremism take over a section of Tunisian community."

And an unnamed Jewish jeweler said on Tunisialivenet, "The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not our problem. I have grown up my whole life breaking bread with my Muslim neighbors, living freely with my Muslim friends."

For his part, Rashid Ghannouchi, the leader of the Ennahda Party said, "In our party's rules and in the country's constitution, it is important to emphasize that all our faiths and traditions are respected equally."

And last month the new President of Tunisia, Moncef Marzouki, asked the Tunisian Jews to return to the country.

In practice, however, the scenario is a bit different. During the recent welcomed visit of Ismail Haniyeh to Tunisia, the extremely conservative pro-Saudi Salafists chanted at the airport, "Kick the Jews -- it is our religious duty. Expel the Jews -- it is our religious duty. Kill the Jews -- it is our religious duty."

The Ennahda-backed government said in a press release that the slogans do not reflect Islam and its principles. But some reliable sources, such as Roger Bismuth, president of Tunisian Jewish community, observed that not only were the Salafists saying this, but Ennahda party supporters as well, who were also chanting, "Tuez les Juifs – Kill the Jews."

As the visit by Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was an official state visit -- he met Prime Minister Hamadi Jebani and other high officials -- many analysts strongly believe that in course of time, after their power is more solidly established, Rashid Ghanouchi and his Ennahda Party will reveal their true Islamist image.

Some observers are asking, "Is it possible for a Jewish community to live under an 'Arab democracy with Muslim coloring'?"

The Jewish people inherited Tunisia more than two thousand years back, after the dispersal of the Jews from what is now Israel in about 67 CE. Even more Jews came to Tunisia during the Spanish Inquisition in 1492. In 1956, at the time of independence from France, the local Jewish population numbered at least 100,000; but the new government imposed a series of anti-Jewish measures. In 1958, the Tunisian government abolished the Jewish Community Council and ordered the demolition of ancient Synagogues and cemeteries.

Since the rise of Islam in Tunisia, the Jews have been obliged to choose either conversion or submission to dhimmitude, the status of second-class citizens who, among many repressive rules, have to pay an extra "tax" [jizya] to buy "protection."

Similarly to what occurred in the World War I and World War II, there was a wide rumor in 1967 that Tunisian Jews had helped the French Army. Consequently there occurred a number of anti-Semitic acts: demonstrators stormed into the Synagogues and burned the holy Torah. Thus people gradually drove the Jews out of the land. Now, under the rule of new "Islamist-Democrats," there are fewer than 1,500 hundred Jews living in Tunisia.

It is a challenge to the only parliamentary republic, the Jewish-majority state of Israel, and the mainstream Jewish community that some of the Jewish Diaspora, especially the young generation do not care about their identity. Some neutral observers are nevertheless deeply concerned that every society can have different moods that turn on changing situations: What will happen to the Jewish Diaspora in Tunisia if, for example, Israel becomes involved in a state of war against any of its Muslim neighboring states? Tunisia is now totally under Islamic control. How much can anyone depend on Ennahda's oral commitment?

Jews were once deceived by the Germans (who are now trying to absorb some Sharia law into their country) who used the phrase "Arbeit Macht Frei" or "Work Shall Make You Free." But the world knows very well how millions of Jews were freed – from their lives.

Perhaps some of the learned people around the world will start to appreciate Silvan Shalom's beckoning.

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It's not too late to remember the Jewish Nakba

2012-02-06T08:22:00.020Z

Iraq-born Zvi Gabay, pictured when he was serving as Israeli ambassador to Dublin

The tragedy (or 'Nakba') of the Jews from Arab countries has been ignored - but it is not too late to remember it, argues Iraq-born Zvi Gabay in the Israeli daily Maariv (with thanks: Yoram):

At the end of January every year, a humble memorial service is held at the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center in Or Yehuda, in memory of the Martyrs of Iraq. 80 Iraqi Jews surrendered their souls since the establishment of the State of Israel. They were executed by hanging, died in torture or while escaping to Israel. Jews have experienced similar difficult tragedies in Arab countries; Algeria, Tunisia, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Syria, Yemen, Egypt. Jews paid with their lives before the establishment of Israel, and in retaliation for Israel's victories over Arab armies in the battlefield.

On the eve of the establishment of the State of Israel, there was a horrifying anti-Jewish atmosphere in all Arab countries, accompanied by inflammatory anti-Jewish declarations, including from upon the podium of the United Nations. Pursuant to Israel’s birth, serious plots began to be formed by the Arab authorities, as well as damage to person and to property by the masses. All these forced the Jews from Arab countries to flee and emigrate from every Arab country, while leaving behind all their personal and communal possessions. From a population of approximately one million Jews in Arab countries on the eve of establishment of the State of Israel, nowadays there are only very few Jews residing in Arab countries.

Few are those who remember the horrible human tragedies experienced by the Jews in Arab countries. Their catastrophe is almost forgotten; it is not properly taught in schools, it is not discussed in the media and it is not marked either nationally or within the United Nations institutions. Very few people in the world are aware of the fact that approximately half of Israel's population originates from Arab countries, where Jews have lived for thousands of years.

Arab propaganda has wisely concealed from international discussions the chapter of population exchange conducted between Israel and Arab countries during Israel’s Independence War. It repeatedly claimed the "right of return" for Palestinian Arabs who fought Israel, some of whom fled fearing harm. Simultaneously, Arab propaganda has succeeded to ingrain in the general public worldwide the notion that Israeli Jews "have come from Poland and Germany…," while the "Palestinian Nakba", which occurred through no other fault than that of the Arabs, is the only disaster tak

This historical distortion of the demographic and political reality has occurred in part due to our own fault. Israel – the government and organizations of Jewish people from Arab countries – must place the issue of Jews from Arab countries on the agenda, as a main part of the history of the Israeli people in their country. A national memorial service must be organized for the hundreds of Jewish victims who lost their lives in Arab countries. It is mandatory that the heritage of the Jews from Arab countries is studied in schools. Simultaneously, the issue of Jews from Arab countries must be raised on international podiums.

Pursuant to pressure imposed by Jewish organizations abroad and a resolution of the United States Congress, two years ago, on February 22^nd 2010, Israel’s Knesset promulgated an act for payment of compensation to Jewish refugees who fled from Arab countries within the framework of the peace process. There is no doubt that this is a first step in the right direction, however, the act must be promoted, in order to achieve compensation for the substantial Jewish assets left in Arab countries. The matter of Jews from Arab countries has been abandoned in Israel for too long and without an understandable reason. The sooner we rectify the injustice, the better it will be.

The author was an ambassador and a Deputy Director-General of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Original article (Hebrew)

Foreign office denies Jewish 'right of return' report

2012-02-04T21:20:00.018Z

Jews are seeking a 'right of return' to Arab countries, claims this Israel Hayom article of 2 February. (With thanks: Levana)

Activists campaigning on behalf of Jews from Arab countries are said to be furious at a report in the Israeli daily Israel Hayom (recirculated by Yeshiva World) claiming that a Foreign ministry report will demand a 'right of return' for the 856,000 Jewish refugees driven from Arab countries in the last 60 years.

The article says that prime minister Bibi Netanyahu was in favour of a 'trade-off' between Arab and Jewish refugees.

However, a foreign ministry spokesman denied that the report contains such a demand.

He could not say too much about the report until it is officially released, but it calls for recognition and redress. "It does not call for a 'right of return," the spokesman told Point of No Return.

"We are launching an official PR campaign on the issue and will be instructing our embassies and consulates around the world to bring up the issue with their respective counterparts. This is all at the behest of Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon."

According to Yeshiva World," Ayalon is working to change Israel’s tactical approach to negotiations, formulating a plan to demand compensatory payment to Jews who fled Arab countries. He suggests establishing an international monetary fund based on a decision of President Bill Clinton in 2000 and a congressional decision in 2008. This fund would assist Palestinians, including retroactive assistance to nations that assisted them, including Israel and Jordan. The fund would also address Jewish property in Arab countries."

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Will Jews be able to visit post-Gaddafi Libya?

2012-02-03T09:31:00.014Z

Maurice Roumani, Libyan-born historian

The attitude of Libya's new government towards Libyan Jewry will depend on its composition, argues Benghazi-born historian Maurice Roumani in this interview with Manfred Gerstenfeld in Arutz Sheva. If Libya addresses the compensation issue, Libyan Jews may go back and visit:

“Libyan Jews almost unanimously greeted the fall of Muammar Qaddafi believing that he deserved his fate. Qaddafi was notorious for being anti-Israeli.

With regard to Libyan Jews in Italy, he played games of being close at times, while distant on other occasions. On his last visit to Rome in 2010, Qaddafi was only willing to meet the Jews during the Sabbath. He was well aware that such a meeting would be humiliating, as the Jews would have to desecrate their holy day. Only a few women met with him. They were later condemned by most of the community.

“Qaddafi had promised compensation for the huge collective and private property which the Jews left behind when forced to flee Libya. He never delivered however. Qaddafi also invited Jews to return to Libya, which they regarded as a ploy. All they wanted was to recover their possessions, or to renew business ties with Libya.”

Professor Maurice Roumani, a world expert on Libyan Jewry, taught politics and the Middle East at Ben-Gurion University in Beer Sheva and is the founding director of the J. R. Elyachar Center for Sephardi Studies there. The latest of his many books is The Jews of Libya: Coexistence, Persecution, Resettlement (2008).

He observes: “The great majority of Libyan Jews now lives in Israel. They regarded Qaddafi’s fall as an even more positive event than Libyan Jews elsewhere - mainly in Italy, the United States and the United Kingdom. Qaddafi had repeatedly invited his former countrymen in Israel to come back to Libya thus allowing the Palestinians to regain Palestine. Qaddafi was also a terrorism supporter.

“The general consensus among Libyan Jews toward the present rulers, the Transitional National Council (TNC), is one of skepticism and ambivalence. No one knows where developments of the ‘Arab Spring’ including those in Libya will lead. North African Islamic political culture is different from that of the Middle East. In the past, Libya was characterized by a strong nationalism and moderate Islamism. That is, however, no guarantee for the future.

“Through overseas representatives, the World Organization of Libyan Jews in Or Yehuda, Israel has had some contact with the TNC.

"Presently, the country is only at the beginning of putting its house in order. There is tribal rivalry, many militias retain their weapons, no national army exists and there is thus no law and order. Furthermore, there are no political parties and no civil society. It will take a long time before a Libyan constitution can be formulated and promulgated. Hopefully that would give minorities a respectful status in the country.

“The attitude of the future Libyan government toward Libyan Jews abroad will largely depend on its composition. It is far too early to assess what the role of the Islamists will be, or that of the revolutionary elite. Libya as a Muslim country, cannot ignore the geopolitical situation in the Middle East including the Palestinian issue.

“Psychologist David Gerbi is the one Libyan Jew who has tried to play an active role in this situation. He was born in Libya in 1955 and became a refugee after the 1967 war. He was then airlifted to Italy like many other Jews. The Libyan Jewish community, which goes back 2,500 years, ceased to exist when Gerbi brought his aunt, Libya’s last Jew, to Rome in 2003. For many years he has been in favor of building bridges with the Arabs. Gerbi visited the country again in 2007 and in 2011, he went there trying to give humanitarian help to victims of the revolution in hospitals.

Read article in full

Jewish landholdings in Syria seized in 1940s

2012-02-02T07:48:00.018Z

Map shows Jewish-owned land in Syria in green

This blog has already drawn attention to the little-known fact that Jews own substantial property in what is now Syria. Now more evidence comes from Guy Bechor in this GPlanet article in Hebrew: (via Elder of Ziyon)

Bechor writes that some 100,000 hectares were Jewish-owned in the Houran region, (as Michael Fischbach explains in his book Jewish property claims against Arab countries) landholdings almost equivalent to the total area of the Golan Heights, annexed to Israel since 1967. In the late 19th century a member of Hovevei Zion, Adam Rosenberg, a US lawyer, encouraged the purchase of cheap land in the Houran. Another leading purchaser was Baron Edmond de Rothschild. In spite of an Ottoman ban on immigrants and initial refusal to register the purchases, Jewish settlements were established on the land.

But the settlements were attacked and in 1896 all settlers were expelled. The Golan and Houran became part of the French mandate of Syria 'for reasons unclear', according to Bechor. Between 1944 and 1948 Syria confiscated the land - registered in the name of PICA, the Palestine Jewish Colonisation Association - without compensation. Title to the land was transferred in the 1950s from PICA to the Jewish National Fund.

Bechor makes the point that the Syrian seizure of these lands, replicated all over the Arab world where property belonging to 850,000 Jews was appropriated, was peacetime theft. These lands were not conquered in war.

He questions Israel's timidity asserting its rights to Jewish lands in the Houran. These lands were purchased with the hard-earned cash of individual Jews. They should be traded for the Golan Heights, which constitutes a mere 1/2 percent of Syrian territory, Bechor argues.

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Iraqis may make travel to Israel illegal

2012-02-02T07:00:00.005Z

The Iraqi parliament is planning to pass a new bill banning Iraqis from travelling to Israel, Al Jazeera online reported this week. If passed the bill would be one more nail in the coffin of 'normalisation' between Israel and Arab countries. Ynet News takes up the story:

The bill was proposed following a number of incidents at Baghdad airport. A local security officer working there said the passport had caught a number of Iraqi officials carrying passports with Israeli entry visas. The officer, speaking on a condition of anonymity, reported that the passports of some nine high-profile Iraqi politicians were clearly marked with Ben-Gurion Airport stamps as well.

According to the source, the politicians made their first trips to Israel after the Iraqi elections, held on January 2010, until around October that same year. The officer claimed that during questioning of the Iraqis, it was discovered that they were operating as envoys to Israel on behalf of Iraqi politicians.

The Iraqi parliament may be targeting Israel (Photo: Reuters)

In response to the report, Iraqi Parliament Member from the National Iraqi Alliance Mohammad Redha al-Khafaji declared that some 50 parliament members have already put their John Hancock (signatures - ed) to a bill proposing to ban such trips to Israel. Khafaji emphasized that in the past, Iraqi senior officials had visited Israel secretly.

Meanwhile, a member of the parliament's judicial committee said these signatures do not necessarily mean that such a law should be passed.

Forbidding a citizen from traveling is against the Iraqis' right to freedom, as written in the constitution. However banning travel to Israel has nothing to do with politics, she told Al Jazeera, explaining that Iraq has never had any diplomatic or political relations with Israel, nor has it acknowledged the State of Israel.

Israel classifies Iraq, as well as most Arab countries, as an "enemy state." However, over the years senior Israeli officials have hinted on numerous occasions that despite having no official diplomatic relations with such countries, many times there are economical and security ties.

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The Jewish faith triumphs over the Taliban

2012-02-01T11:01:00.001Z

Zebulun Simantov - the last Jew in Afghanistan

Lyrical piece by Alex Thomson for Channel 4 News about Zebulun Simantov, the last Jew of Afghanistan. Simantov is an enduring symbol of the Jewish faith in Kabul, having survived Communism, death and destruction.

As we talk, I begin to see how this one man could have left even the Taliban mullahs so confuzzled, they simply left him to get on with his unspeakably un-Islamic practices. In fact, they came to, well, if not exactly like him, certainly let him be.

"It must have been pretty bad during the Taliban time here, no?" I suggest.

"Oh, no, no, no. Not really. You see, they were simple people. "

"Simple?"

"Yes, I used to tease them a lot."

"Let me get this straight Zebolon. You were even then one of perhaps two Jews in the entire country and you teased the Taliban about religion. Is that what you're saying?"

"Yes, yes. Why not?"

"Well I can think of -" but I get no further.

"I used to say to them: 'Come on - you should convert. You should become Jewish.' "

"You what?"

"Yes, and they would just laugh and say I must become Muslim. But I never did."

And so it goes on. Along the verandah from his tiny flat above a restaurant in central Kabul, there is a forlorn, dusty synagogue. Great black cobwebs hang from the ceiling corners. There are pigeon droppings from some unseen roost above.

Zebolon Simontov recites and chants aloud in this forgotten, echoing place. At one point the call to prayer from mosques near and far theatens to drown him out.

There is something moving, almost heroic in this lone recitation of faith. He kisses the scriptures. The smack of devotional lips reverberates from what may very well be the last of this synagogue's faithful.

His wife gone, his children all but strangers to him. Faith remains the one constant. A faith quietly accepted by his friends and neghbours around him. A faith that has come through the godless Communist days of the Russians and then Najib. A faith that remained standing as the city around him was pulverised by the Mujaheddin rocket salvoes which followed. A faith that cracked the beards of the Talibs with smiling incredulity.

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Cleric: Jews have no claim on the Muslim world

2012-02-01T07:16:00.015Z

Jews have no claim or presence in the Muslim world, and if they do want their property back, the Arabs won it fair and square in military campaigns. That's the essence of a Friday sermon delivered by Sudanese cleric Sheik Abd Al-Jalil Al-Karouri, which aired on Sudan TV on January 6, 2012 ( via MEMRI). Why the rant? I can only surmise that Al-Karouri is wracked by guilt every time he is stuck in traffic by the Jewish cemetery in northern Khartoum (with thanks: Lily) :

Abd Al-Jalil Al-Karouri: Since the Arab Spring, Israel has found itself in a fix. That is a fact. As the saying goes: "A bankrupt merchant goes through his old accounting books." [The Jews] are after the property of the Qurayza and Nadhir tribes, Khaybar and Taymaa, from fourteen centuries ago. They ask for information about the Jews who came… We often hear that there were Jewish families in… What were they doing? They were serving alcohol. We saw this when we are young students. They were the ones serving alcohol to people.

The expulsion [of the Jewish tribes from Al-Medina] was a military campaign, because the Jews of the Qaynuqa' tribe incited the people of Mecca to avenge their casualties in the Battle of Badr. As for the Jews of the Qurayza tribe, they supported the [enemy] coalition at the Battle of the Trench, and attacked the Prophet Muhammad and his Companions from the rear.

The only expulsion that took place was in days of Omar [Iban Al-Khattab]. When he confirmed the hadith that "there cannot be two religions in the Arabian Peninsula," he expelled the Jews from Khaybar. How did he do this? This can be the first counter-argument to the Jewish claims. He expelled them by buying their property. So all we need is the record of this purchase. He bought their property and then settled them in other parts of the Islamic world. That was the only expulsion that took place. In all other cases, these were military campaigns. If everybody in the world were to sue following military attacks, all the people would find themselves in debt.

I once asked whether the Jews were planning to sue the apes just because they once were apes themselves. It is written in the Koran that at one point the Jews were transformed into apes in a city called Eilat, which the Jews now occupy. They became apes. Will they demand compensation because they were apes before becoming human again?

The [Jews] flocked to their country in 1948. Do they plan to sue the Arab world – Egypt, Mauritania, and Sudan? I don't think they have anything [Jewish] here, except for the graveyard that obstructs the traffic in north Khartoum. If they want, they can come and take it, and bury their dead wherever they like. Apart from this, they have nothing in the Islamic world.

See clip

Arabs fear Israel will demand Saudi compensation

Jews 'reject' calls to go to Israel - says the BBC

2012-01-31T09:35:00.021Z

Jacob Lellouche, owner of the last Kosher restaurant in Tunis

What's the story on the Jews of Tunisia? They are defiantly rejecting Israeli calls to leave, says the BBC. (Extended article here).

BBC reporter Wyre Davies says there used to be 300,000 Jews in Tunisia ( there were never more than 120,000, but oriental exaggeration is catchy). Numbers, however, came 'crashing' down with the creation of Israel. Those dastardly Zionists, spoiling centuries of interfaith coexistence.

In other words, the BBC neatly avoids any discussion of antisemitism. Could Tunisian Jews have left to escape their historic second-class and insecure status as 'dhimmis' under Muslim rule? And how do you explain the fact that not every Jew left for Israel? We are not about to find out from Wyre Davies.

Since the revolution, he tells us, Tunisians are 'expressing their beliefs' in an overwhelmingly Islamic country. Pray what beliefs may these be? 'Death to the Jews', screamed supporters of Hamas - the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza - at Tunis airport recently. But Rashid Ghannouchi of the Islamist Ennahda party (the Tunisian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood) reassures Wyre that Islam is a tolerant religion (although it was he who invited the Hamas leader to visit Tunisia, and his supporters who shouted anti-Jewish slogans). The government posts guards to protect synagogues. So that's all right then. Wyre is not in the mood to ask searching questions.

In contrast to news outlets like Tunisia Live, the BBC acts as a mouthpiece for the 'moderate' Islamists of Tunisia. Two dhimmi Jews are trotted out to give credence to the official line. Look, they even have a Kosher restaurant in Tunis. And a working synagogue. We are not afraid.

Just petrified.

See clip (extended article here)

A date in Tunis (Biased BBC)
Ynet news

Tunisians push to make Israel normalisation a crime

2012-01-30T21:17:00.015Z

National Committee for Supporting Arab Resistance and Fighting Normalization and Zionism

Instead of transmitting messages of false comfort, the guys at Tunisia Live are doing a great job exposing antisemitism wherever it might be rearing its ugly head. Regrettably this is not the first time that we have had news of pressure in Tunisia against normalisation with Israel since the start of the 'Arab Spring' (via EoZ) :

The National Committee for Supporting Arab Resistance and Fighting Normalization and Zionism, is a post-revolution Tunisian association whose mission is to lobby the National Constituent Assembly to criminalize normalization with the State of Israel.

The association organized a rally on Sunday, January 29th at the Ibn Khaldoun Cultural Center in downtown Tunis. Almost 100 people attended.

“We want our new constitution to include an article outlawing all types of normalization with the Zionist terrorist entity,” announced Ahmed Kahlaoui, President of the National Committee for Supporting the Arab Resistance and Fighting Normalization and Zionism.

Kahlaoui expressed his discontent with Tunisian civil society for their disinterest in the Palestinian cause.

He blames the lack of interest on what he calls foreign funding coming from “Zionist bodies” attempting to divert Tunisians from paying more attention to normalization.

“But what can we expect from people receiving huge amounts of money from Zionist bodies disguised behind the masks of tolerance and democracy,” Kahlaoui declared.

Hatem Dkhil, is a high school teacher and an anti-Israel advocate. He accused the Ben Ali regime of cultural normalization with Israel.

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Different Mufti, same message

2012-01-29T16:48:00.014Z

Haj Amin al-Husseini meets Hitler in November 1941

As the world marks Holocaust Memorial Day, Petra Marquart-Bigman in her Jerusalem Post blog can't help but recognise an eerie similarity in genocidal intent between the Palestinian Mufti and his 1940s predecessor, Haj Amin al-Husseini..

Sheik Muhammad Hussein, the mufti of Jerusalem, who is the Palestinian Authority's senior religious official, recently recited a traditional Islamic text urging Muslims to “fight and kill the Jews” during a ceremony celebrating the 47th anniversary of Fatah’s establishment, he unintentionally revealed how little the messages of Palestinian religious leaders have changed since the days of another Palestinian mufti by the name of Husseini.

This deplorable rhetorical continuity also serves as a timely reminder that words are usually spoken to inspire deeds. Palestinians, eagerly echoed by many of their world-wide supporters, like to claim that they had no part whatsoever in the Holocaust, and that they should indeed be seen as indirect victims of the Jews who fled Europe.

This “narrative,” which seems particularly popular among Germany’s progressive elites, requires that the historical record of Amin Al-Husseini – the predecessor of the current Palestinian mufti – is ignored. While both muftis call for killing the Jews, Husseini sought and seized the opportunity to contribute to the Nazi’s genocidal undertaking to kill as many Jews as possible.

In a review of a book by Klaus Gensicke about Husseini’s collaboration with the Nazis, John Rosenthal emphasized that the mufti did not only collaborate with the Nazis by contributing to propaganda activities aimed at Arab speakers and by organizing the Muslim SS division “Handzar” in Bosnia:

Indeed, perhaps the most shocking finding of Gensicke’s research concerns the repeated efforts of the mufti after 1943 to ensure that no European Jews should elude the camps [...] Thus, for example, Bulgarian plans to permit some 4,000 Jewish children and 500 adult companions to immigrate to Palestine provoked a letter from the mufti to the Bulgarian foreign minister, pleading for the operation to be stopped. In the letter, dated May 6, 1943, Husseini invoked a “Jewish danger for the whole world and especially for the countries where Jews live.” [...]

Inevitably, some people will be inclined to argue that Husseini was only defending the national interest of the Palestinian Arabs when he tried to prevent any Jewish emigration from Europe. But as Gensicke has shown, Husseini was convinced that there was a “Jewish danger for the whole world and especially for the countries where Jews live,” and in May 1943, he also expressed this view in a letter.

Soon after Husseini had written these words, Arab regimes proceeded to demonstrate that they shared this view. The Arab League drafted Nuremberg-style laws designed to disenfranchise and dispossess Jews, and Arab states began to encourage the ethnic cleansing of the ancient Jewish communities that had existed for millenia all over the Middle East. Hundreds of thousands of the Jews who had to flee from Arab countries found refuge in the fledgling Jewish state that the Arabs vowed, and tried, to wipe out.

Back then, the motives may have been rooted in Arab nationalism, but as the recent remarks by the Palestinian mufti illustrate, there is a long and – according to the mufti, “noble” – tradition of Jew-hatred in Islam that up to this day is regularly invoked to present the Arab and Palestinian refusal to accept the existence of Israel as a Jewish state as part of a fight against Jews that is an integral component of Muslim identity.

Nazi-like rhetoric about Jews is nowadays mostly expressed in Arabic and Farsi, and just like 70 years ago, there is widespread reluctance to confront this rhetoric and face the fact that it is meant as incitement to deadly deeds.

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The Mufti and the US election, then and now (JTA News - with thanks Eliyahu)

Indian Jews on 'roots' trip to 'God's own country'

2012-01-29T07:16:00.003Z

The Paradesi synagogue in Cochin, Kerala

Israeli Jews from the Indian province of Kerala have been on a 'roots' trip, reports the Indian medium NDTV. (In this article 'God's own country' is India, not Israel.)

Thiruvananathapuram: Over five decades after they settled down in Israel, a group of Kerala-born jews are back in God's Own Country on a nostalgic trip.

The 20-member team, which included 16 women, who were at the Santhigiri Ashram near here yesterday, said the long-cherished journey to their birth place was a refreshing and inspiring experience.

Many of them were born at Kochi, which had a centuries old Jewish settlement and often cited as a shining example of Kerala religious harmony.

The forebears of the Cochin Jews had come as spice traders from West Asia and the local ruler gave them permission to build Synagogues for maintaining their faith and religious traditions. But most of the Jewish families shifted to Israel last century.

"Though we have made Israel our home, Kerala has always remained a nostalgia. Now we are here with a great sense of belonging," they said.

"Kerala is not just beautiful but a land pervading with peace and harmony," said Tobia Eliace, a teacher.

Some in the team could still speak Malayalam since they had studied upto 4th class in Kerala. One of them even sang the Indian National Anthem and a couple of lines of an old Malayalam film song.

They said it was with great difficulty that they could obtain visiting visa to come to India. "I feel it like a dream-come-true. How beautiful and calm is Kerala."

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You can't beat Tbeet, the Iraqi Sabbath dish

2012-01-27T15:18:00.000Z

There is a saying in my house: 'you can't beat Tbeet.' It's hard to serve up chicken and rice in a more appetising way. I can almost smell the aroma of cardamon and turmeric rising from the photograph. Excuse me, dear reader, while I hurry off to the kitchen. I'll leave it to Vered Guttman, food blogger at Haaretz, to resurrect her great aunt Toya's Tbeet recipe for you:

In her modest, shack-like home in southern Israel, my great aunt Toya served some of the best food I’ve ever tasted.

After my Iraqi grandmother, Rachel, passed away, her cousin Toya (Victoria) Levy took it upon herself to fill void in our hearts and in our bellies. One of her duties was to prepare tbeet for us on shabbat.

Tbeet is the Iraqi version of a Shabbat overnight stew. A chicken is stuffed with a mixture made of its inner parts, rice and spices, then covered with more rice, topped with hard boiled eggs and cooked overnight. The rice comes out moist and flavorful, the chicken so soft you can literally chew the bones.

The tradition of the Shabbat overnight stews grew from the desire to serve a hot meal on Shabbat, while keeping the Jewish law that prohibited lighting fire on the holy day. Women prepared the dish on Friday and baked it overnight, usually in a communal bakery, so it was ready at lunch time the next day when the men came back from synagogue.

Many people are familiar with the Ashkenazi (Eastern-European) Shabbat stew, the cholent, that is made of beans, potatoes and meat.

But Shabbat stews developed all over the Diaspora, and each community had its own version, using some of the local spices and ingredient that were available to them.

The Iraqi Jews had the tbeet; Yemenites had jachnoon and the kubaneh (both are basically breads that are baked all night and served with spicy tomato salsa); the North African communities had the d’fina, or skheena, a stew of meat, chickpeas, grains and spices; and the Sephardi Jews of Jerusalem had their own version of Shabbat stew, made with beans, meat and bread patties, called chamin.

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This tragic day, 43 years ago

2012-01-27T05:02:00.004Z

Memorial to the nine Jews hanged in Baghdad on 27 January 1969

January 27, marks the anniversary of one of the darkest chapters in the annals of Iraqi Jewry. On that day in 1969, nine Jews were hanged in Baghdad’s central square. Few of the Jews who lived through that terrible period will ever forget it, writes Lyn Julius in the Jerusalem Post magazine.

Over 40 years later, the community and its representatives are still trying to grapple with the consequences of that fateful day.

Following the defeat of Arab armies on all fronts by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War and the 1968 ‘war of attrition’, the 3,000 Jews who remained in Iraq following the mass migration of the 1950s were being singled out for vengeance by the Iraqi regime. Dozens of Jews had been arrested and imprisoned. The remainder were placed under virtual house arrest. One Jewish girl remembers that secret service men installed themselves in armchairs opposite her house in order to keep her family under 24-hour surveillance. The tension was such that she and her mother made a suicide pact.

Jewish bank accounts were frozen. Jews lost their jobs. Jewish students were not allowed to pursue their university studies. Foreign trade agencies were taken away from Jews and handed over to Muslims. Telephones were cut off. There was no escape: Jews had to carry special identity cards and could not obtain the necessary passports in order to leave the country. They were virtual hostages to the regime.

Antisemitism intensified with the rise to power of the Ba’ath party in 1968. Saddam Hussein was its deputy leader. Before long the regime had concocted a story of ‘Zionist espionage’. The stage was set for a show trial of unspeakable cruelty and cynicism. Of nine Jews falsely accused of being Zionist spies, four were under the legal age to face execution. No matter – the regime falsified their ages.

The late Max Sawdayee describes the scene on 27 January 1969 in his book All waiting to be hanged:

“Masses of people, red, excited, smiling, laughing, walking fast, running, jostling – all with one and only one goal: to reach as quickly as possible the square where the ‘traitors’ are hanged. We take the same streets we came from, and return home. Wife tells us that she has heard from neighbours that the ‘spies’ now hanged in the Liberation Square were actually executed at the central prison at about eleven o’clock last night. They were brought to the Liberation Square at about two in the morning after improvised scaffolds had been erected by prisoners mobilised from the central prison, and by soldiers. She has heard also that many people were already there at two in the morning watching the scene of preparations for the hanging.

“The poor ‘actors’ of the scene... are dressed in special, humiliating brown linen trousers and shirts, barefoot, with the hands of some of them (for some mysterious reason) dressed in special white gloves. All of them are labelled with large sheets of paper stating, first of all and in big letters, their religion, then in small letters the reasons why they are hanged.

“ The sight of the nine, their heads twisted and drooping, their bodies dangling from the gallows and swinging high in the air, with all these vengeful mobs, all excited, agitated, cheering, dancing, chanting, singing, cursing the dead, spitting and throwing stones on them, or jumping high to catch their feet or their toes – well, this sight is most humiliating and sad, and most unforgettable. It shakes one to the bones. It shakes even one’s faith in humanity.

“When we tune in to our car radio, the announcer is still howling madly. ‘Great people of Iraq! You great people of Baghdad and Basra! Today is a holy day for all of you! Today is your feast! The day of your joy and happiness! The day on which you have got rid of the first gang of despicable spies! Iraq, your beloved Iraq, has executed, has hanged, has settled the account with those traitors! You great people of Baghdad and Basra, get free, move, go to your Liberation Squares to see with your own eyes how the traitors are hanged!’ then he goes on to read the names of those ‘traitors’, perhaps for the third or the fourth time. “

Morris Abdulezer, an Iraqi Jew now living in Canada, describes the lead-up to the hangings:

“These innocent men were tortured then put through a televised mockery of a military trial, which culminated in nine of them being publicly hanged, one acquitted and two others were sent to Basra to face another trial and then were hanged on August 25, 1969 in Basra.

“I can recall precisely how terrified and confused we were throughout the entire trial and, more precisely, the night of January 26 when the guilty verdict was announced by the military judge. We did not believe that the sentence of death by hanging would be carried out because the whole court process did not make sense, from the defendants who were not allowed to appoint their own lawyers, to the stories and accusations that were outrageous and full of lies, where the defendants were being asked to bear witness against each other.

“We waited in fear, praying and trusting in our Jewish faith and hoping for pressure to come at the last minute from the international community to end this mockery.”

But international pressure did not come - until it was too late.

The reign of terror continued. Iraq’s rulers promised that there would be further hangings. Every citizen was urged to inform against their Jewish neighbours. Scores of Jews disappeared. Linda Menuhin, now a columnist and peace activist in Israel, recalls that her own father was abducted on the eve of Yom Kippur on the way to the synagogue. He was never heard of again. “We don’t know what happened to my father exactly. Until today we have never said Kaddish for him.”

Maurice Shohet, president of the World Organisation of Jews from Iraq (WOJI), believes that the number of Jews who were executed in prison, abducted, or simply vanished without trace exceeds 50. After the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, a young Jewish jeweller, newly-wed to one of the few eligible Jewish women in Baghdad, was abducted in December 2005 and never found again.

The advent of ‘democracy’ in Iraq has left much unfinished business vis-a-vis the Jews. The vast majority of the 3,000 Jews still in Iraq at the time of the hangings had managed to escape, risking their lives, through the Kurdish mountains to Iran in the early 1970s. When the Americans arrived in 2003, there were some 30 Jews still in Baghdad. All but six have since died or fled, and anti-Jewish sentiment is running at such levels that Canon Andrew White, the vicar of Baghdad and ‘de facto’ protector of non-Muslim minorities, feels their lives are at risk as long as they remain in Iraq.

On 28 November 2008 WOJI wrote to the Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki with a list of Jews who were kidnapped off the street, or arrested and disappeared in prison. The organisation asked for any information about them from the thousands of documents retrieved from Iraqi intelligence headquarters. No reply was ever received.

According to Maurice Shohet, WOJI has also written to the Iraqi government following Iraqi media reports that Hebrew inscriptions at Ezekiel’s tomb at al-Kifl and the shrine of Ezra the Scribe at al-Uzair were being removed by the Sh’ia Religious Endowment directorate, which reports to Al-Maliki’s office. None of these letters received answers either.

Another source of friction is the fate of the so-called Jewish archive. The US and Iraqi governments are embroiled in a tug-of-war over priceless documents, books and Torah scrolls seized from the Jewish community and shipped to Washington for restoration. The Iraqis want the archive back, claiming it is part of Iraq’s national heritage. Others argue that the archive should be returned to its rightful owners, the Jewish community, now mainly living in Israel.

To-date, no Jew is known to have received compensation for property seized under the Ba’ath regime in spite of a claims commission set up by the interim US administration in 2003.

In meetings with the Iraqi ambassador to Washington, Samir Sumaidie, members of the World Organisation of Jews from Iraq reminded him that the new Iraqi constitution was founded on a basis of non-discrimination.

“ We applaud the new constitution,” says Maurice Shohet of WOJI. "Our goals are to protect, preserve and promote Iraqi-Jewish heritage – including holy sites, shrines and cemeteries. We will continue to pursue our goals. First among them is to find out any information of the tens of Jews who disappeared in Iraq.”

The spectre of nine bodies swinging from the gallows in Baghdad’s central square on that dreadful January day still haunts Iraqi Jews. Until the corpses and the rest of the missing Jews are returned to their loved ones, the living will not achieve closure.

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Forty years since the Baghdad hangings

Safeguard Christianity in the Middle East

2012-01-26T17:36:00.014Z

A cross on Mount Lebanon

I may be mistaken, but I think we are seeing an awakening of western interest in the plight of Middle East minorities. Some people are even beginning to join the dots between the plight of Christians and that of Jews. The next challenge is to apply this new awareness of Arab and Muslim bigotry to an understanding of the rejection of Israel. Dexter van Zile in The Algemeiner covers a recent US conference on minority persecution (with thanks: JIMENA):

Walid Phares, an American scholar born in Lebanon who advises the U.S. Congress on issues related to terrorism, said Christians and other minorities have been the victims of violence for decades. “I lived through it in the 20^th century. Now we’re all living it, trying to witness for it,” he said. “We have crossed the threshold of a new century and yet it’s still happening.”

Attendees of the conference heard testimony from Juliana Taimoorazy, founder of the Iraqi Christian relief council and Egyptian human rights activists Cynthia Farahat. Taimoorazy, who reported on the plight of Assyrians in Israq stated that since June 2004, churches in Iraq have been bombed more than 80 times. Sometimes, multiple churches would be bombed at the same time as part of a coordinated attack.

“Most of these attacks happened on Fridays, marking the day of Islamic prayer,” she said. Clergy have been routinely kidnapped and killed on a regular basis. Even children have been killed by Islamists, Taimoorazy reported.

“In October of 2006 – in the 21^st century – a 14-year-old boy was crucified in Basra, in the center of the city,” she said.

Farahat reported that Copts are second-class citizens in their homeland

“But for me, as a woman and a Copt, I am a fourth-class citizen,” she said. “The first class citizen is the Egyptian Sunni Muslim male, the second class is the Sunni female. The third is the Christian male. The fourth is the Christian female. I’m a fourth-class Egyptian citizen with absolutely no legal rights.”

The plight of religious and ethnic minorities in Muslim and Arab majority countries in the Middle East has largely been ignored because of an obsession with the Arab-Israeli conflict, Phares said during his keynote address. Phares first witnessed this after immigrating to the U.S. from Lebanon in the 1990s.

“In the 1990s, if there as an incident in the West Bank, the son-in-law, the mom, the uncle of both sides would be interviewed and the psychologists would come in and talk about the deep roots of the conflict,” Phares said. “At the same time, two villages were burned in Egypt or the Kurds would be gassed. Zero [coverage] in the New York Times.”

Franck Salameh, assistant professor of Near Eastern Studies at Boston College, echoed Phares’ complaint.

“There’s clearly a prevailing hierarchy in the media’s treatment of Middle Eastern violence,” he said. “Some victims get airtime on prime time, all the time. Others simply don’t. Middle Eastern Christians are not a top priority. Those uncouth, cross-wearing primitives are not cause for curiosity. They are too Christian in a world plagued by political correctness, cultural relativism and a false conception of the Middle East as an Arab Muslim preserve.”

Documenting attacks on Near Eastern minorities is not fashionable, Salameh said, because it is viewed as being anti-Arab and anti-Muslim and part of a Western attempt to divide a cultural and linguistic monolith. If this thinking were applied to North America, no one would talk about the plight or fate of Native Americans because it would be regarded as subversive to the Anglo-European paradigm.

“Middle Eastern minorities, Christians and Jews, are the native Americans of the Middle East,” Salameh said. “The dominant Arab-Muslim culture is indeed the colonizing intruder culture here.”

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The Copts face same fate as the Jews of Medina

2012-01-26T07:42:00.013Z

Salafist Yassir al-Burhami

With thanks: Lily

Here's a chilling reminder of what lies in store for the Copts of Egypt, in the words of the Egyptian Salafi preacher Yassir Al-Burhami (via MEMRI). The Salafists are the doctrinaire Islamists who won around a quarter of the vote in the Egyptian elections.

Al-Burhami compares the Copts to the Jews of Medina whom Muhammed vanquished and exterminated after a temporary truce.

While Muslims are weak they are enjoined to bide their time until the opportune moment arrives for the mass slaughter of non-Muslims.

Here is a transcript of a clip from Egyptian TV, broadcast in December 2011:

Yassir Al-Burhami: Appointing infidels to positions of authority over Muslims is prohibited. Allah said: "Never will Allah grant the infidels a way [to triumph] over the Believers."

We are not afraid of losing the elections or of not getting votes. We are not trying to ingratiate ourselves before the people.

Can the Christians of Egypt be compared to the Jews of Al-Medina? The case of the Jews of Al-Medina is one example of the relations between the Muslims and the infidels. The Muslims can implement any form of conduct used by the Prophet Muhammad. When the Prophet Muhammad was still in Mecca, he dealt with the infidels in a certain way, and when the Muslims are weak, they should deal with the infidels this way. "Refrain from action, pray, and pay the zakkat."

In many infidel countries, such as occupied Palestine, we instruct Muslims to do just that. We are not telling the Muslims in Gaza to launch rockets every day, which would lead to the destruction of the entire country. We tell them to adhere to the truce.

When the Prophet Muhammad first arrived in Al-Medina, he signed a treaty with the Jews without forcing them to pay the jizya poll tax. This was necessary at the time, but when they breached the treaty, he fought them, and eventually, he imposed the jizya upon the People of the Book.

The Christians [of Egypt] can be dealt with like the Jews of Al-Medina. This is possible.

This article explains what happened to the Jews of Arabia in the 7th century, according to a Muslim source. There are no Jewish sources because the Jews of Arabia were exterminated, and dead people are not known to write history.

No room for religious minorities in an Islamist Egypt

2012-01-25T08:28:00.009Z

The traditional Hilula to the tomb of Rabbi Abu Hatseira was cancelled this year

The news that 75 percent of votes in the Egyptian parliamentary elections went to the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood should be setting off alarm bells in the democratic West: yesterday's chants, intolerant of non-Muslim minorities, have become today's policy - argues Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal center on Fox News.

Some see the results of proof that the democratic process is alive and well in the Arab world's largest nation. Indeed, former President Jimmy Carter declared he was "pleased" by the orderliness of the process; yet he and other international figures are devastatingly silent about Islamists’ moves to curb the liberties of religious minorities, starting with the Jews.

Witness the broad-based protest spearheaded by the Muslim Brotherhood that led the Foreign Ministry, on the day after the final election run-off to announce the cancellation of an annual religious pilgrimage to honor a saintly Jewish Scholar who died over 1,100 years ago.

Jews from North Africa have an age-old tradition (Hilula) of visiting the graves of the pious on the anniversary of their death. The Hilula combines prayers and songs. Each year hundreds of Jews, including Israelis, made a pilgrimage to a hilltop mausoleum Egyptian city Damanhour, to the Tomb of Rabbi Yaakov Abu Hatzeira, a renowned religious figure from Morocco, who fell ill and died there in 1880, enroute to the Holy Land.

Sometimes contemporary events, like Israel’s 2009 incursion into Gaza made such visits impossible. But as late as last year, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak allowed hundreds of Jewish pilgrims to visit the Abu Hatzeira’s Tomb, which is an official antiquity site protected by the government of Egypt.

Not this year.

According to, MENA, the state-run news agency reported that a number of political groups announced that they would form a human chain if necessary, to block any “Zionists” from reaching the mausoleum for the religious rite.

The groups signing on to the protest were led by Egypt's new power brokers-- the Muslim Brotherhood, the Freedom and JusticeParty, along with the Nasserist Trend, the April 6 Youth Movement, BloggersAgainst Abu Hasira and Mohamed ElBaradei's presidential campaign. The Hilula celebration, in the view of these groups “was unpopular, and unacceptable legally and politically.”

It is easy to see why a ‘Hilula’ taking place on an isolated hill in a small town would horrify so many Egyptians. After all, the celebration traditionally includes the consumption of dried fruit, butter and feteer, as the faithful sit alongside the mausoleum, cry, and the recitation of King David's Psalms.

Yesterday's intolerant chants have already become today's policy.

It is clear that the heroes of Tahrir Square and all the hopes that their struggle would lead their nation and the entire Middle East into a 21st century of change and freedom have been "democratically" defeated by fanatics seeking to drive their nation's value system back to the 12th century.

We got the message loud and clear: There is no room in the new Egypt for Jews, dead or alive.

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Pilgrimage cancellation 'disrespects' all Jews

Rabbi Abraham Cooper's interview with David Gerbi

More about Arab Jews (updated)

2012-01-24T17:46:00.012Z

Although this blog has already fleetingly referred to the article: Arab Jews: are they extinct? I was asked by blogger Elder of Ziyon if I would comment further on it. My comment has turned into an EoZ guest post:

Naava Mashiah’s article is doing the rounds of the Arab media, gaining prominence in Arab News. Much of what she writes is only partially true, and is designed to ingratiate herself with her Arab Muslim readership.

Is there such a creature as an Arab Jew? Even Naava’s own father says there is no such thing. We agree.

Very few Jews from Arab countries self-define as ‘Arab Jews’, unless they are far-leftists. The ‘Arab world’ is itself a modern false construct, defining identity by language and culture. It’s like saying that a Spaniard and a Peruvian are both bound by a ‘Hispanic’ identity. But whereas a Spaniard and a Peruvian might have the same ancestry, religious communities in the Middle East always kept apart from each other; there was limited social interaction and almost no intermarriage.

Moreover - If you scratch away at an ‘Arab’’s identity, you will often find that he or she is not Arab at all. The region is a kaleidoscope of sects, religions and ethnicities. There is no such thing as ‘Arab’ culture. The famous singer Farid al-Atrash was not Arab but Druze, and many of the stars of Egyptian 20th century cinema were Jews or Copts. The roots of 20th popular ‘Arab’ musical culture in Iraq - the Jewish al-Kuwaity brothers had a powerful influence – could be said to be Jewish.

When she tries to explain why Jews left Arab countries, Naava Mashiah assigns equal blame to Zionism and antisemitic propaganda. In fact antisemitism alienated Muslims from Jews. Miss Mashiah makes no mention of the 1941 Farhud pogrom, seven years before Israel was established, and the rise of pro-Nazi feeling in the 1930s. Zionist activity in Iraq was a response to the Farhud, not the other way around.

Miss Mashiah’s allegation that Israel ‘effaced’ the identity of Jews from Arab countries is a charge commonly levelled by radical leftists and anti-Zionists. It is true that in its zeal to create a new Israeli, the establishment disparaged ‘Arab culture’, in the same way as it did ‘Yiddish culture’. But whatever the situation in the 1950s – and there was real discrimination then – Mizrahi culture has come back with a vengeance in Israel today.

In the final paragraph, Miss Mashiah herself gives the reason for writing her article: ‘my interest in my Arab roots grew about 10 years ago when I established my business which focuses on economic cooperation between Israel and the Middle East.”

So now we know. Being an ‘Arab Jew’, and downplaying the impact of Arab antisemitism, is good for business.

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Is it coz I iz black (or white) ?

2012-01-24T11:50:00.011Z

Why it makes sense to be colour-blind when discussing 'colonialism' in the Middle East: AKUS, writing in CiFWatch, takes Comment is Free contributor Khalid Diab to task for his reflections on Arab and Israeli stereotypes.

His article included the following:

On a lighter note, she [Israeli student Rachael studying Islam] recalls that their group included a couple of fair-complexioned Palestinians, one of whom even had red hair. This apparently threw some of the Israelis who expected all Palestinians to look “Arab”.

The majority of Diab’s article deals with what he believes is Israelis’ surprise at the ability of Arabs to hack Israeli computer systems and stereotypical responses such as the surprise of a West Bank Arab IT professional at discovering that Israelis are human beings just like himself.

But the above reference to Rachael’s friends’ surprise at seeing “fair-complexioned Palestinians” seems to say more about Diab’s prejudices than those of Rachael and her friends.

One of the common charges leveled at Israel by those who wish to challenge its legitimacy is that it is peopled by European colonists (who should pack up and “go back to Poland, Germany America and everywhere else” as Helen Thomas notably recommended). That Diab selected the issue of Israeli attitudes to Arab “complexions” in contrast to Arab accomplishments but without a similar example from an Arab suggests that he has a frame of reference which is roughly this: Israelis are “light complexioned” and therefore are colonials, while Arabs are “ many complexioned” and therefore indigenous. Of course, it also implicitly implies that Israelis are (white) racists without any similar reference to Arab attitudes to “complexion”.

Diab even quotes an Israeli Arab woman from Nazareth who has absorbed the mantra of Jews as colonists:

“It’s not because [Jewish] Israelis don’t encounter Arabs. It’s just more comfortable for them to look down on us – it makes their colonial enterprise easier,” she contends. “If they acknowledge that we are similar, this will raise the uncomfortable question of why they don’t treat us as equals.” [emphasis added]

I would contend that the intifadas and the wedge-politics of Arab MKs and references to colonials with the implication that Jews do not belong in Israel (i.e. – which is really Arab Palestine) have had more to do with Jewish suspicions about their Arab fellow citizens than some imaginary “colonial enterprise”.

Of course, while many Israelis are “light-complexioned”, most are not. Even with the arrival of the Russian Jews in the 1980s the majority are descended from parents who fled from Arab countries in 1948-1951.

Jews who fled Iraq in 1951 register upon arrival in Israel.

To quote Diab, they “look Arab”. In addition, Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews frequently inter-marry so most Israelis are “dark-complexioned” to one degree or another. Diab seems to view Rachael and her friends as white, blue-eyed European colonials who expect their neighbors on the West Bank conform to a dark, brown-eyed Arab stereotype.

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Azeris thwart terrorist attack on two rabbis

2012-01-23T22:32:00.005Z

It's been hailed as one of the few Jewish communities in a Muslim state to be thriving - and its brand new synagogue is proof enough - but is the honeymoon for the Jews of Azerbaijan over? Haaretz reports:

Three men were detained last week after planning to attack two Israelis employed by a Jewish school in Baku, the Azerbaijan Ministry of National Security has revealed. Meanwhile, an Azeri commentator considered close to the republic's president has launched a scathing indictment of Iran.

The Azeri ministry said it had arrested a cell that planned to "kill public activists," before it became apparent that the intended victims were two Israeli Chabad emissaries, a rabbi and a teacher employed by the "Chabad Or Avner" Jewish school in Baku. The ministry said that the three men, named as Rasim Aliyev, Ali Huseynov and Balaqardash Dadashov, received smuggled arms and equipment from Iranian agents. The action was apparently planned as retaliation to the gunning down of Iranian nuclear scientists.

	Waterfront in Baku, Azerbaijan.
	Photo by: AP

"The Azeri security forces acted covertly without alerting us," said Rabbi Shneor Segal, one of the two targets. "It was published that they originally planned to attack 'people who look Jewish and hold foreign passports,' near the school, but when the school guards began suspecting them, they started monitoring the area where I live," he told Haaretz.

Segal added that the second target was Rabbi Mati Lewis.

Irani-Azeri relations, which were never rosy, recently deteriorated even further after Azeri Communication Minister Ali Abbasov accused Iran of carrying out a cyber attack against several offices in the country accused of "cooperation with Israel."

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Maoz not sacked after all for 'white tribe' remarks

2012-01-23T14:52:00.006Z

Shlomo Maoz... his sacking is now in doubt

Shlomo Maoz was not sacked by investment firm Excellence-Nesuah, but only relieved of some of his duties, an official in the firm told the Knesset Monday. Maoz, a Sephardic Jew, aroused the firm's ire when he made a speech denouncing "white" Ashkenazi elites that he claimed wield unfair power in the country, Arutz Sheva reports.

Excellence-Nesuah's Deputy Director for Management, Moshe Barmak, told the Knesset's Finance Committee that Maoz was removed from the positions of chief economist and presenter, but continues to serve as director and funds manager.

The Finance Committee was scheduled to discuss the Maoz affair but did not do so because Maoz and Excellence-Nesuah's General Manager David Baruch both failed to show up for the session. Neither man explained why he did not come.

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Mizrahim are movin' on up