"When the dispossession of Iraqi Jews is discussed, it is mistakenly attributed to events growing out of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict.
"Even Dr. Amir Araim, an Iraqi scholar and respected member of the Contra Costa Interfaith Community, writing in the May/June issue of the local interfaith newsletter "Ministering Together," makes a similar error -- ignoring that the Farhud occurred a full seven years before the Arab/Israeli war and eight years before there was a single Palestinian refugee.
"The Farhud was an outgrowth of the spread of Nazi sympathies within the Arab world. Grand Mufti Haj Amin el-Husseini, the Islamic religious leader of Jerusalem, came to Iraq in 1939 to assist in staging a coup by a group of Iraqi Nazis known as the Golden Square.
"A vicious anti-Semite, the Mufti used Nazi propaganda techniques to make Iraqi Jews a scapegoat for unifying pro-Nazi sympathies.
"When the coup failed in 1941, the Mufti fled to Berlin where he spent the war years as the personal guest of SS Chief Henrich Himmler and Adolf Hitler.
"Although the Mufti was only in Iraq for a few years, he laid the foundations for marginalizing Iraq's Jews as "enemies of the state."
"The United Nations has passed hundreds of resolutions commemorating the tragedy of Palestinian refugees. Yet, to date, the U.N. has passed not one on behalf of the Mizrachim and Sephardim refugees of the Middle East and North Africa.
"Here in California, the California Center for Excellence on the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, Human Rights and Tolerance at Chico State University and the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust have recently recognized the Farhud as another act of Nazi aggression, albeit Iraqi Nazis.
"On Thursday, Arab and North African Jews, especially here in California, will begin to see that their tragedy is also becoming part of the world's acknowledgment of the evils of racism."
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