I wish I could be in Chicago this Friday. A murderer’s row of intellectuals, from Noam Chomsky to Tony Judt to Neve Gordon to Akeel Bilgrami, will be speaking at a forum on academic freedom in a church at the University of Chicago. The discussion stems from the blacklisting of Norman G. Finkelstein at DePaul. He will speak, too. So will John Mearsheimer. I imagine Rockefeller Chapel will be jammed.
Speaking of academic freedom, it seems that U of St. Thomas in St. Paul has reversed field on its craven Desmond Tutu disinvite. The cleric who heads the school says he scoured his conscience and figured out it was wrong not to invite Tutu because of stuff he said about Israel 5 years ago.
Though of course there must be context. And the Lord said, Let there be context!!!
Rev. Dease also said he would convene a "forum to foster constructive dialogue on the issues that have been raised… The Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas has agreed to serve as a co-sponsor of the forum, and I expect other organizations also to join as co-sponsors."
Dease said the forum would include a "candid discussion about how a civil and democratic society can pursue reasoned debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and other emotionally charged issues."
Wow that sounds like a hot panel, huh! I wonder if St. Thomas wasn’t influenced by poet Lucille Clifton, who on hearing of the Tutu blacklisting, nixed her own appearance at the school:
“It is with deep regret that I must cancel my visit. … I have spent my life trying to be a human of integrity and hope and peace; and I find it difficult to speak and model these things in light of the situation concerning Bishop Tutu.”
You go, girl. Maybe the world is inching forward after all…
Related posts:
- Will the real people of the West Bank please stand up, please stand up
- Michigan State sticks by its decision to invite Desmond Tutu to speak at commencement
- Walt and Mearsheimer Banned in Chicago
- ‘I have family that lives in Israel’– Stand up if this statement is true
- Desmond Tutu and the Apartheid Analogy
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In 1948, there were 260,000 practicing Jews living in Morocco, 14,000 in Algeria, 56,000 in Tunisia, 35,000 in Libya, 90,000 in Egypt, 6,000 in Lebanon, 4,500 in Syria, 129,300 in Iraq, and 51,000 in Yemen. In total nearly 900,000 from across the Middle East, the communities having roots dating back as far as 2500 years. By 1949, most of these Jews had been stripped of their nationalities, their citizenship rejected, their belongings robbed, their homes taken, and the rising Pan-Arab nationalism giving rise to rabid anti-Jewish riots, championing that unforgettable Hitleric verse: kill the Jews.
600,000 found their only option to seek refuge in the newly created State of Israel – the only land that welcomed them home.
Jews are Israel’s indigenous people. But who will weigh such spurious questions of descent? Unfortunately, this is the only argument existing on the opposite side: since the population exchange of the mid-20th century was all but commonplace, Arabs lost their claim to Israel the moment they massacred the Jews who lived in Arab countries and stripped the remaining Jewish people of their nationalities.
For every refugee – adult or child – in Syria, Lebanon, or elsewhere in the Arab world who compels our sympathy, there is a Jewish refugee who fled from the Arab country of his birth. For every Arab who moved to neighboring lands, a Jew was forced to flee from a community where he and his ancestors may have lived for two thousand years. The Jews escaped to their original homeland, where their roots are even older; the Arabs also arrived where they were in the majority, where they shared the same language and culture with fellow Arabs, and often only a few dozen miles from their places of origin.
Why are the Palestinian refugees treated differently than all the other refugees in the world?
I assume Fluffy is trying to assert that the real dark times relate to the treatment of Jewish Arabs fifty years ago.
Most of Fluffy's claims about Jewish Arabs are simply false. About 12,000 Jews left Iraq in 1949. Something like 110,000 left after 1950. In general Nuri-sSaid did not want them to leave because they were too critical to the economy and the vast majority of Iraq Jews had no interest in Zionism or emigrating to Stolen Palestine (the State of Israel).
It took a combination of incitement, bribery, and false flag operations to induce Iraqi Jews to emigrate to Israel.
Racist ethnic Ashkenazi Zionists had had no interest in Jewish Arabs until after the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the native Palestinian population, for the Zionist leadership realized that stolen Palestine could not be held without an infusion of human cannon fodder and an ersatz native collaborator class, which Jewish Arabs were to constitute. (The Druze community simply was not large enough for Zionist purposes.)
Anyway, Joel Kovel recently asked me why I believed the non-Palestinian origin of ethnic Ashkenazim to be crystal clear, and I put together the short essay below, which can be found on my web site at http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2007/10/origins-of-modern-jewry.html. (Joel Kovel's story is also interesting to the topic of Philip's article because StandWithUs is trying to deny Pluto Press distribution through UMich Press for publishing Kovel's book Overcoming Zionism.)
Personally, I believe that ethnic Ashkenazim should be proud of the role proto-ethnic Ashkenazim and ethnic Ashkenazim played in the construction of the Medieval world and then in the creation of the economy and distribution system of Commonwealth Poland.
Instead ethnic Ashkenazim are so ashamed of the achievements of their ancestors that they for all intents and purposes have stolen the history and country of the native Palestinian population, who are descended from the Greco-Roman Judean, Galilian, Idumean, Nabatian, Samarian, and Greek-speaking Palestinian population.
http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2007/10/origins-of-modern-jewry.html
The Origins of Modern Jewry
Against the Rationalization of Zionist Crimes
by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)
Zionists and their white racist Evangelical Christian Fundamentalist supporters justify mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide against the native Palestinian population by asserting that ethnic Ashkenazim are descended from ancient Greco-Roman Palestinian Judeans or Galileans.
This belief has no connection to the facts as many Jewish studies scholars will admit in private. At an MIT lecture I asked Harvard Professor Shaye Cohen about the ancestral connection of modern ethnic Ashkenazim to ancient Palestine, and he told me there has been a lot of conversion since Greco-Roman times (whatever conversion meant in Greco-Roman times). In 2002 Marc Ferro published Les Tabous de l'histoire, which discusses in detail the conversion to which Professor Cohen referred.
Conversion is not the only process that deterritorialized Judaism. The Hasmoneans and Herodians seem to have pursued a policy of bringing as many worshippers of the high God El as possible within the fold of the Jerusalem Temple in order to improve the Judean kingdom's finances. El was Kronos to the Greeks and Saturnus to the Romans. In Hellenistic Tyre El Kon-Artz (El Creator of the Earth) was worshipped as El Kronos.
At the time of Jesus the vast majority of El-worshippers, who were adherents of 2nd Temple Judaism, probably had no ancestral connection whatsoever to Greco-Roman Judea, Persian Yehud or ancient Judah.
In very careful analysis of the sources, Seth Schwartz concludes in Imperialism and Jewish Society: 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. (Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the Ancient to the Modern World) that by the end of the 2nd century 2nd Temple Judaism was completely shattered. He argues that the Constantinian Church reconstructed late Roman Judaism. In a way Shaye Cohen agrees because in The Beginnings of Jewishness he dates the origin of Jewishness as we understand it today to the 4th century.
In Schwartz's analysis Cohen's dating is probably too early because Talmudic/Geonic Judaism is not clearly the dominant current in late Roman Judaism, and Judean Christianity, which treats Jesus as messiah but not as God or son of God, still has many adherents throughout Palestine, Mesopotamia and Arabia Felix (Hijaz). Such Judean Christians viewed themselves as practicing some form of Judaism, and no Jewish group had a well-defined position on matrilineality or on conversion practices within the Judaism of this time period.
As the Christian late Roman Empire gradually retrenched or broke down, the Khazar Kingdom rose in Southern Russia and flourished from the seventh through tenth centuries. The wealth of the Khazar kingdom seems to have been based in trading Slavs and members of other Southern Russian ethnic groups as slaves first with the Byzantine Empire and then with the early Islamic Empires as well.
Trading in slaves in that time period cannot be equated with human trafficking today. Ancient servitude like later Islamic or Ottoman slavery could provide social mobility, confer political authority and give social status to members of an alien immigrant population. Ehud Toledano discusses such aspects of Ottoman Slavery in Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East. Khazar, Byzantine and early Islamic slavery was probably closer to the later Ottoman system.
Dealing with the Christian and Islamic Empires put pagan Khazars in a tricky position. Some seem to have converted to Christianity and Islam, but such conversion may have created problems for the slave trade because as Christians or Muslims, the Khazars would have had an obligation to convert Slav subjects to either Christianity or Islam and incorporate them into the community. Slaving in such a situation is quite problematic. That time period's Judaisms, which were far less committed to proselytization than Christianity or Islam, for the most part made strong distinctions between members of the community and gentiles as well as between Hebrew slaves and Canaanite (gentile) slaves. Starting in the 8th century (or maybe earlier) the Khazars began to convert to Judaism, and by the 10th century the Khazar Kingdom officially practiced Judaism. For the entire Middle Ages, Rabbinic Jewish literature consistently refers to Eastern Europe as Kanaan — I presume — because Eastern Europe was a source of Slavs who were treated legally as `avadim kanaanim (Canaanite slaves).
In contrast with Ibero-Berber Jewish naming practices, which often include Talmudic Aramaic names consistent with the occasional immigration of Jews from Babylonia to Spain, Khazar Jewish names show the typical convert pattern of choosing names out of scripture as described in the work of Columbia Professor William Bulliet. Archeological investigation finds mixed Turkic pagan and Judaic graveyards with the earliest such mixed graveyards in Southern Russia and the later such graveyards in the Balkans and Hungary. Archeologists have also found coins with Turkic and Hebrew inscriptions in Hebrew-Aramaic letters. There is no textual or epigraphical evidence of knowledge of Arabic or of Aramaic among Southern Russian and Eastern European Jews of the 10th century or earlier as one would expect if they or near ancestors were immigrants from Palestine or Mesopotamia.
The Khazars corresponded with the Geonim, who seem to have been willing to adjust the sacred law to fit the slave trade in exchange for economic support. Such accommodation is probably the origin of Medieval Rabbinic Judaism as Khazar slavers needed a codified legal system, and Khazar contributions made it possible for Geonic Judaism to dominate and finally absorb other forms of Judaism at the same time that many members of non-Khazar Jewish communities throughout the Mediterranean region, Germany and France became agents of the slave trade either directly or through finance, tax farming, medicine or estate management, which were professions supported almost entirely by the slave trade in the early Medieval Period. The Jewish slavers that accompanied William the Conqueror to England seem to have been of Ibero-Berber origin and not of Khazar background.
Matrilineal non-proselytizing Medieval Rabbinic Judaism proved exceptionally friendly to the Slavic slave trade. Medieval centers of Rabbinic Jewish learning thrived along with the Slavic slave trade while Medieval Karaites were probably the last holdouts against the Geonic accommodation. Karaite centers declined and tended to be in rather isolated parts of the world.
Amitav Gosh translated a lot of Geniza documents written by or about a Jewish slaver in India. The book is called In an Antique Land, and Gosh is somewhat diffident about describing his subject's source of income.
This Khazar hypothesis complements the Pirenne Thesis (Mahomet et Charlegmagne) as well as some of the proposals of Crone, Cooke, and Nevo about the development of early Islam (Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, Crossroads to Islam by Yehuda Nevo and Judith Koren). The spread of various forms of Judaism to Southern Russia probably explains why St. Kliment of Ohrid gave many Cyrillic letters forms similar to those in the Hebrew Aramaic alphabet. Members of a non-Rabbinic Jewish group probably created the Slavonic book of Esther while Bogomili Christianity and Catharism were probably brought westward by Slavic slaves that practiced evolved forms of Judean Christianity, no longer recognized as Judaism by Rabbinic Jewish Khazars.
As the Slavic slave trade expanded the Jewish traders probably needed to free semi-proselyte Slavic slaves to assist in the business. A similar process took place in West Africa as the Black African slave trade expanded. In Germano-Slavic territories where Sorbian and Polabian were spoken, the Slavo-Khazar traders, who initially probably used Sorbian and Polabian, had incentive to relexify their Slavic dialect to German in order to trade with dominant German-speaking populations and to separate themselves from pagan and Christian Sorbians and Polabians. During the 9th-13th centuries this process created an older form of Yiddish, which became the West Yiddish dialects of German territories. During this time period, as the Slavo-Khazar Jewish population became larger and more important within the Jewish community, Arabic died out as a language of religious discourse among non-Khazar Rabbinical Jews.
As the Khazar traders reconstructed trade routes or created entirely new trade routes, Khazar and non-Khazar Jews developed distribution networks for goods unrelated to Slavery. In Spain the Jewish non-Slavery-related trade did not seem to have been highly valued because Spain expelled its Jewish population within 50 years of the shutdown of Slavic slave trade in Mediterranean Christian countries as a consequence of the Ottoman Conquest of Constantinople.
The development of sophisticated heterogeneous distribution networks by Jews in Poland made Commonwealth Poland a wealthy world power while Jewish estate management, finance and tax farming remained important and often thrived in Poland even after the complete shutdown of the overland Slavic slave trade by the end of the Wars of the Reformation.
As Jews from the German territories migrated Eastward because of the Crusades and the Wars of the Reformation, the Slavic Kiev-Polessian dialects of the Slavo-Turkic Eastern European and Southern Russian Jewish populations (with the exception of certain isolated Judeoslavic-speaking communities in Slovakia and the Sub-Carpathian region) were relexified to West Yiddish to create East Yiddish dialects. Paul Wexler explains the vocabulary of Yiddish in Two-tiered Relexification in Yiddish without proposing any historical reasons for the process. The work of Alexander Beider and other specialists in onomastic studies also demonstrate a westward migration of Eastern Slavic-speaking Jews. Some of the linguistic development of East Yiddish may have taken place in German territories.
By the 17th century practically all consciousness of the Khazar kingdom was lost among Jews, and Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews constitute a distinct Eastern European Ashkenazi ethnic group. During the German economic depression of the century following the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), there was considerable mixing of impoverished German Christians and German Jews, and many Jews probably passed into the Christian community while some Christians were probably absorbed in the Jewish community. During the same time period, as Poland collapsed after the Chmielnicki Rebellion (1648), Polish Prussia came under German rule, and German Jews began to develop some familiarity with the Polish estate system. Thus even after the crystallization of Ashkenazi ethnicity, the boundary between German Jews and Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazim has never been particularly solid.
This article seems to conflict with genetic anthropological studies of Hammer, Oppenheim and similar people but these studies are severely flawed as Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh and I point out in http://tinyurl.com/3e4xby . A recent article by Talia Bloch in the Forward ("One Big, Happy Family," Aug. 22, 2007, http://www.forward.com/articles/11444/ ) indicates that even some of the most extreme Zionist genetics researchers are beginning to concede that ethnic Ashkenazim are a separate ethnic group distinct from other Jewish groups except insofar as members of ethnic Ashkenazi communities or related Eastern European and Southern Russian populations have been exported to non-Ashkenazi communities in the past.
The rationalization of Zionist crimes against Palestinians on the basis of some sort of modern Jewish ancestral connection to ancient Palestinian populations has always been unethical, but even those that believe genes confer superior rights to one group over another must concede that ethnic Ashkenazi Zionists in Palestine are murderous genocidal thieves and interlopers.
http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot.com
Take a look at the comments in this entry for the State Department's new blog via http://blogs.state.gov:
http://blogs.state.gov/index.php/entires/foley_saudi_arabia/
I am amazed at how politically tone deaf Foxman and company are. They are doing exactly all the things to elicit exactly the very effects that they fear most.
The democratic traditions of the United States by now are probably like some old, rheumatic, overweight, hound dog with cataracts sleeping by the stove, but no matter how decrepit those traditions are, certain totalitarian practices can get their juices running the way the hound's ears pick up and his tail wags at the sound of a shotgun being assembled or when his leash is rattled against the door.
Reading the efforts of the Lobby to silence M&W, and the reactions they are producing, I wonder if "that dog can still hunt"?
I'm just amazed that it is only the Jews who resort to such tactics. Unbelievable. Who are these people?
Oh, wait a minute. It's not just Jews who engage in such behavior. Only in this little echo chamber is that true.
Now, I know you'll all claim this is just some sort of Hasbra, as Judy Miller is Jewish and Scooter sent her coded poetry to go into operation crafty jew, but just because some of you are prone to conspiratorial delusions doesn't mean the rest of us shouldn't examine the data.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_4_sndgs01.html
Nothing gets a journalist’s attention like a subpoena. While authoritarian regimes silence critics by murdering or jailing them, journalists (and other critics) in the United States face gentler, but still effective, intimidation: libel lawsuits. Over the last few years, Islamists have tried silencing reporters, scholars, and citizens by suing them for defamation, often successfully. But recent legal cases in California, Massachusetts, and Minnesota suggest that the tactic may finally be backfiring, at least in the United States, if not in Britain, where libel laws overwhelmingly favor plaintiffs. The American lawsuits’ outcomes—poorly covered by the media—represent victories for the free expression and public participation that the First Amendment guarantees.
The latest victory came in August, when an Islamic charity, KinderUSA, and its board chairman, Laila Al-Marayati, dropped the libel suit they had filed in April in California state court against former Treasury Department official Matthew Levitt, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (which now employs him), and Yale University Press. In 2006, Yale published Levitt’s book on Hamas, which Washington says supports terrorism. Levitt never mentioned Al-Marayati in his book, but he did assert that KinderUSA, founded to raise money for Palestinian children, had ties to terrorist groups.
Al-Marayati and KinderUSA charged that Levitt had made “false and damaging” charges that caused “irreparable harm to its reputation,” and they sought at least $500,000 in damages, a public retraction, and a halt to the book’s distribution. But Levitt and his codefendants stood by his claims. In June, they filed a motion against the charity and its chairman, seeking to quash the libel suit and demanding that the plaintiffs pay all legal fees. They cited a California law that bans “SLAPP”—or “strategic litigation against public participation”—suits, which aim not at winning in court, but at intimidating into silence a group or a publication raising issues of public concern. “California enacted anti-SLAPP legislation to get rid of inappropriate lawsuits like this one,” they wrote in a 15-page brief.
Less than six weeks later, Al-Marayati and KinderUSA dropped the suit. Todd Gallinger, who represented the plaintiffs, insisted that the charity had sued not to intimidate or silence Levitt, but rather to force him to correct charges that it still considers libelous. “They were trying to suppress the charity’s legitimate activities,” he said. But KinderUSA underestimated the costs involved, he acknowledged, and the defendants’ anti-SLAPP motion was a factor in its decision to drop the suit.
Related reading matter (some pretty biased, but still useful)
http://clog.dailycal.org/720/no-pictures-taken-none-allowed-at-the-hatem-bazian-lecture
http://antiracistblog.blogspot.com/
http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/article.cfm?storyID=2598
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20030115/concordia030115?s_name=&no_ads=
http://www.yerkir.am/eng/index.php?sub=news_arm&id=29645
Guess who wrote the above cut-and-paste from F Tatis–
http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=B189FDC1-026E-46B8-AE3A-A1973041C369
She sure has come down in the world. :)
(BTW, F, if your goal is to demonstrate the vast power of the "Arab lobby," you probably shouldn't use examples where they were ineffective.)
The only "dark time" that I'm aware of, is economic.
While our parents generation benefitted from unprecedented comradarie and an obligation towards relative income equality, we live in the new "gilded age" of American aristocracy.
We are borrowing from our kids (my kids, if not yours) to pay for wars, corruption and waste.
The federal government is by far the largest that its ever been, and government services are at best mediocre.
How do you change that? By agitation?
For what? Better wages? (It just raises the baseline cost of housing.)
COULTER: Do you know what Christianity is? We believe your religion, but you have to obey.
DEUTSCH: No, no, no, but I mean –
COULTER: We have the fast-track program.
DEUTSCH: Why don't I put you with the head of Iran? I mean, come on. You can't believe that.
COULTER: The head of Iran is not a Christian.
DEUTSCH: No, but in fact, "Let's wipe Israel" –
COULTER: I don't know if you've been paying attention.
DEUTSCH: "Let's wipe Israel off the earth." I mean, what, no Jews?
COULTER: No, we think — we just want Jews to be perfected, as they say.
"Guess who wrote the above cut-and-paste from F Tatis–"
You mean the person I explicitly refer to in the 3rd paragraph of my comment?
That's what quotation marks are for, dear Tatis.
Thank you Oarwell. I see where somone may have become confused. In my own mind I had differentiated it by the link. My apologies for any offense given.
"We Live in a Dark Time– Yet Brave People Stand Up"
Thank God for Phil Weiss & Ann Coulter!
Fight back: Jewish Supremacism Awareness Week scheduled for October 22-26.
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/09/islam
An interesting thing happened today. The Israeli ambassador to Turkey apologized to the Turkish government for the fact that a House committee of the U.S. Congress voted to approve a resolution condemning the Armenian Holocaust. The implication here is that Israel had both the power and responsibility to prevent the House committee from voting yes but had unaccountably failed to do so. Does Israel really feel it has such control over the U.S. Congress that it feels the need to apologize to other countries when the U.S. Congress votes the wrong way?
The JCRC is going to run this forum to encourage dialogue around the I-P conflict??? The same JCRC whose spokesperson is quoted in the JTA as alleging that Tutu compares "the Jewish lobby to Hitler???"
BIggest laugh of the night…
Fluffy wrote:
"For every refugee – adult or child – in Syria, Lebanon, or elsewhere in the Arab world who compels our sympathy, there is a Jewish refugee who fled from the Arab country of his birth."
Fluffy are you intent on treating us to one Zionist myth after another? On the previous thread you wrote about Barak's fantastic offer at Camp David. When it was then pointed out to you that that offer was not that fantastic after all you just moved on to the following staple item of Zionist propaganda.
According to the figures you gave, the biggest Jewish communities were in Morocco and Iraq.
As far as Morocco is concerned I will quote some statements from Professor Pinto, a Jewish Dutchman of Moroccan origin, who is presently president of the European Federation of Moroccan Jews. The quote is from the Dutch paper "De Telegraaf" of 9/20/2005.
"Many young Dutch people of Moroccan origin don't realise, according to Pinto, that Morocco was for a long time a quite pleasant land for Jews to live in." In my time there were 300,000 Jews living in Morocco" said the Professor who moved to Holland in 1963. Jews could function in all sections of society, he said. There was absolutely no question of discrimination.
Pinto refers to the adviser of King Mohammed VI, A.Azoulay, as an example of the fact that Jews and Moroccans can live well together."
Thus far Pinto.
What also seems to be forgotten is that, when in 1940 the German controlled French Vichy government issued racist laws excluding Jews from public functions and obliging them to wear the yellow star of David, Sultan Mohammed V refused to apply these laws in his country, then still a French colony, and made a point of inviting Moroccon rabbis to the enthronement celebrations.
It is true that after the foundation of Israel there have been locally some anti-Jewish riots but it is to me an open question to what extent the migration of the Moroccon Jews was a matter of the push from Morocco or the pull of Israel.
At any case, according to Job Cohen, Mayor of Amsterdam, who recently visited the place, the remaining Jewish population there is doing quite well.
Also, King Hassan II issued invitations for the Jewish migrants to return. These seem not to have been taken up.
In my next post I will deal with Iraq, the other country with a large erstwhile Jewish population.
Fluffy, consider the following quote:
"I write this article for the same reason I wrote my book: to tell the American people, and especially American Jews, that Jews from Islamic lands did not emigrate willingly to Israel; that, to force them to leave, Jews killed Jews; and that, to buy time to confiscate ever more Arab lands, Jews on numerous occasions rejected genuine peace initiatives from their Arab neighbors. I write about what the first prime minister of Israel called "cruel Zionism." I write about it because I was part of it." Naeim Giladi
When I first encountered this article by an erstwhile Iraqi Jew, Naeim Giladi, from which this quote is taken, on the internet, I took some trouble to get some more information regarding his claim that the Jewish community in Iraq was around 1950 driven out by a bombing campaign inspired by Israel. This is what I found. If anybody has more information on this I would be pleased to hear about it.
Giladi himself referred to the late Wilbur Crane Eveland, erstwhile CIA operative, whose book "Ropes of Sand: America's Failure in the Middle East", N.Y. Norton 1980, was quite unwelcome to the foreign policy establishment.
Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht, who wrote an equally unwelcome book that was suppressed after the first print run of 7,000 copies (The fate of the Jews: a people torn between Israeli power and Jewish ethics, New York Times Books 1983) quotes extensively from Eveland:
"Just after I arrived in Baghdad an Israeli citizen had been recognized in the city's largest department store: his interrogation led to the discovery of fifteen arms caches brought into Iraq by an underground Zionist movement. In attempts to portray the Iraqis as anti-American and to terrorize the Jews, the Zionists planted bombs in the U.S. Information Service Library and in synagogues. Soon leaflets began to appear urging Jews to flee to Israel. Although the Iraqi police later provided our embassy with evidence to show that the synagogue and library bombings, as well as the anti Jewish and anti-American leaflet campaigns, had been the work of an underground Zionist organization, most of the world believed reports that Arab terrorism had motivated the flight of the Iraqi Jews whom the Zionists had 'rescued'…"
Indeed, the habitual assertion is that the two Jews who were hung for the affair after a trial had been 'falsely accused'. I don't know of any evidence that can lead to that assertion. And in case any one sniffs at the idea that the Iraqi police of around 1950 could come up with such a thing as reliable evidence s/he should consult the book of David Hirst, Middle East correspondent for the Guardian and contributor to such publications as the Christian Science Monitor, The Nation and others.
Hirst is in "The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East" 1977, 1st ed., reissued 2003, quite emphatic about these Zionist bombings and he provides some further evidence for them.
As Eveland mentioned above, the whole affair started rolling when an Israeli citizen was recognized in a Baghdad department store by a Palestinian refugee.
This Israeli, Yehudah Tajjar, was in the first instance sentenced to life imprisonment, but released after ten years. He broke Jewish silence on this Zionist conspiracy when he was back in Israel. This led, in 1966, to a publication in the weekly magazine Ha'olam Hazeh. The full story was published, in 1972, in the organ of militant Sephardim Jews "The Black Panther", which also drew on the testimony of two Israeli citizens who were in Baghdad at the time, a certain Kaduri Salim and an Iraqi lawyer, then living in Tel Aviv.
The Black Panther article is apparently very bitter about the fact that Iraqi Jews were 'induced' in this way to move to Israel. David Hirst quotes its statement that a community that "ruled over most of the resources of Iraq … was turned into a ruled group, discriminated against and oppressed in every aspect". This transformation took place in Israel.
One of those erstwhile Iraqi Jews is Ella Shohat, Professor of media and cultural studies at the City University of New York (CUNY). In her article "Rupture and Return : A Mizrahi Perspective on the Zionist Discourse" she is quite categorical on the Zionist bombings. She writes:
"The displacement of Iraqi Jews for example was not, simply, a choice of the Arab Jews themselves. Even if some Arab-Jews expressed a desire to go to Israel, or to "Zion", the question is why, suddenly, after millennia of not doing so, would they leave overnight? I would argue that Arab-Jewish displacement was the product of complex circumstances in which panic rather than desire for Aliya was the key factor. The 'in-gathering' seems less natural when one takes into account the circumstances forcing their departure: the efforts of the Zionist underground in Iraq to undermine the authority of the community leaders such as that of Hassam Sasson Khturi, Zionist attempts to place a 'wedge'between the Jewish and Muslim communities, for example by placing bombs in synagogues to generate anti-Arab panic on the part of Jews…"
Who smuggled the weapons, for the Zionist organization called "The Movement", into Iraq. Hirst quotes a letter from Yigal Allon, then chief of the Palmach commandos and later Foreign Minister of Israel, which seems to reveal that his group was responsible for this ( below I will quote Ben Cohen regarding a telling statement by Allon on this).
In his article Neve Shalom / Wahat al-Salam, Israel, published in the School for Peace Annual Review, January 2001, Yehudah Shenhav also refers to the bombing as if it is a matter that is commonly known. He writes:
"Around this time, working undercover as representatives of Solel Boneh, Israeli Mossad agents began underground activities in Iraq. All of a sudden there was an explosion in the Mas'uda Shem Tov synagogue and immediately afterwards 24,000 Jews registered to leave the country. Abbas Shiblak describes in his book how each time there was a fall in registration, another bomb went off followed by another mass exodus. Five of these bombs did the job".
Shenhav also makes short shrift with the 'argument' that Israel did not even want these Iraqi Jews because they were deemed to be inferior to its own Ashkenaze elite. He writes:
"The Zionist movement began to pay attention to Mizrahi Jewry in the years 1941 – 1942.It was then that Ben Gurion introduced his 'one million plan' Anticipating that many Jews will be annihilated by Nazi persecution causing problems for the Zionist movement, Ben Gurion decided that a plan must be introduced based on Jews from Arab lands. In 1950 an agreement was reached with Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri Sa'id, as a result of which a law was passed allowing Jews to forfeit their Iraqi citizenship and leave the country without their property."
Is there any scholarly weight now to the publications that have denied that there was a Zionist conspiracy here? The most authoritative of these seems to me the book by the Israel historian Moshe Gat, entitled "The Jewish Exodus from Iraq, 1948 -1951" London: Frank Cass, 1997.
Daniel Pipes, the auctor intellectualis of 'campus watch', says, in his review of this book, inter alia:
"The author puts to rest the notion that Israeli agents used terrorism to get Iraqi Jews to make aliyah; 'there was no connection between the bomb-throwing incidents and the departure of the Jews'".
The scholar who reviewed the book for the Journal of Palestine Studies (in Vol.27, No.4, Summer 1998), Ben Cohen, was considerably less complacent on this point.
He wrote:
"Gat lists a number of writers who have concluded that Israel was behind these attacks to terrorize the Jews into leaving. For Gat, however, it is 'unlikely that there will ever be' a definitive answer to the question of responsibility (p.187). But then he exonerates Israel in an example of the periodic inconsistencies that mar the text; he argues that the Zionist underground would not have adopted such a risky strategy at a time when the Iraqi police was closing in on them (p.186). Yet, he does not consider the possibility that leading Iraqis, whose pockets were being lined, turned a blind eye; nor does he take into account Yigal Allon's admission, in comments on the 'Lavon affair' of 1954 (i.e. a Zionist bombing campaign in Egypt – AB) that such a method of operation – a bombing campaign – 'was first tried in Iraq' "
The perverse and misguided zeitgeist that the European Jews are descended from Khazar Turks has been repeatedly been debunked by rigorous genetic analyses. See, for example …
Y chromosomes of Jewish priests.
Skorecki K, Selig S, Blazer S, Bradman R, Bradman N, Waburton PJ, Ismajlowicz M, Hammer MF.
Nature. 1997 Jan 2;385(6611):32.
The Y chromosome pool of Jews as part of the genetic landscape of the Middle East.
Nebel A, Filon D, Brinkmann B, Majumder PP, Faerman M, Oppenheim A.
Am J Hum Genet. 2001 Nov;69(5):1095-112.
Jewish and Middle Eastern non-Jewish populations share a common pool of Y-chromosome biallelic haplotypes.
Hammer MF, Redd AJ, Wood ET, Bonner MR, Jarjanazi H, Karafet T, Santachiara-Benerecetti S, Oppenheim A, Jobling MA, Jenkins T, Ostrer H, Bonne-Tamir B.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2000 Jun 6;97(12):6769-74.
As for the specious claims that Jewish tragedy in the middle east pre-1949 was exaggerated, and that the Iraqis begged them to stay, I have a hard time understanding why in 1948 Iraq, along with Egypt and Morocco, would go through the trouble of legislating not only stripped its *small* (indeed numbering half a million) Jewish community not only of its citizenship, but of its nationality as well.
To Jews Israel, to Arabs, the rest of the middle east.
Who says that the Iraqis "begged them to stay"? The point is they were not chased out, in that sense they were not refugees and thus were certainly not comparable to the Palestinians who were chased out.You tried to suggest in your first post that these cases were comparable.
That they wanted to leave in a panic was mainly due, it seems, to the nefarious activities of their own dear future compatriots.
As far as them being stripped of their citizenship is concerned: that was done on the basis of an agreement with Israel.They were allowed "to forfeit" their citizenship which is rather different from "being stripped" of it.
In many cases you can only acquire the citizenship of another country (in this case Israel) if you forfeit your original citizenship.
Look again at this statement by Yehudah Shenhav:
"The Zionist movement began to pay attention to Mizrahi Jewry in the years 1941 – 1942.It was then that Ben Gurion introduced his 'one million plan' Anticipating that many Jews will be annihilated by Nazi persecution causing problems for the Zionist movement, Ben Gurion decided that a plan must be introduced based on Jews from Arab lands. In 1950 an agreement was reached with Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri Sa'id, as a result of which a law was passed allowing Jews to forfeit their Iraqi citizenship and leave the country without their property."
The "specious claims" were yours.
Your chromosome story etc. I leave to Martillo.
Fluffy's "myth" of Arab persecution, vs reluctant rational choice, vs fraudulent representation and pressure from Zionists.
Each are partially true.
The Arab world reacted in 1948, stepping up the fear of Jewish minorities. Much of the Arab world was newly independant and struggled to determine what the basis of that independance should entail.
Some, most, regarded Jews as dangerous for their "dual loyalty", even the former government officials and business leaders.
"Minor" persecutions occurred and escalated in all Arab and Muslim countries from 1948 to 1967.
I read that that the largest Jewish populations in the Arab and Muslim worlds are in Iran and Turkey, in that order (each at 10% of their population prior to 1948 though).
Certainly, although Ahmenijidad claims that they are comfortable and loyal there, the periodic waves of hangings of "spies" still chills.
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