Commenter IvanIvanovIvanovich (no. 423916) robustly rebuts Tamimi's tissue of lies:
"This article is so full of falsehoods that literally every sentence could be successfully deconstructed, but for the sake of brevity, I'll just concentrate on the most egregious...
TAMIMI: "The centuries-long harmonious coexistence between the Muslims and the Jews could have gone on."
RESPONSE: That "harmonious co-existence" was in fact a system of discrimination in which Jews lived as dhimmis, second-class citizens with legal liabilities such as the payment of Jizyah, the inability to repair old temples or build new ones, and during certain periods, the humiliating imposition of identifiable clothing such as huge collars and yes, the infamous yellow badge, which the Nazis later mimicked.
TAMIMI: "However, it was shattered, regrettably, when the Western European powers decided to solve their own Jewish problem by banishing the Jews to Palestine. Western Europe feared an influx of Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe, and the idea of sending the Jews to Palestine seemed to some Christian-Zionist leaders in London to pave the way for the second coming of Christ.It is a historical fact that most Jews had at the time been opposed to the idea of migrating to the "promised land". Nothing would have persuaded European Jews to leave their homes; for many of them the countries where they lived were their homelands."
RESPONSE: There were between 10 and 20 million Jews in Europe at the turn of the century. Less than 500,000 went to Palestine to live the Zionist dream. On what does Tamimi base his "historical fact" that Europeans forced the Jews to emigrate to Palestine? If their expulsion was forcible, why did so few Jews go?
TAMIMI: "Since then, history has been rewritten and its facts distorted; Jewish youngsters have been brainwashed to believe that Israel is the oxygen without which they will suffocate and that it is their God-given right and God-ordained duty to claim the land allegedly promised to them."
RESPONSE: On the contrary, it is Islamic propaganda that brain-washes young Muslims into believing that Palestine is their birthrite and that martyrdom is the path to paradise. The Jewish claim to the Holy Land certainly pre-dates Islam's.
TAMIMI: "It is no wonder that Jewish young men and women from the UK and other European countries have been going to Palestine to serve in the Israeli army whose primary mission is to suppress and oppress the Palestinians."
RESPONSE: On the contrary, the primary mission of the Israeli army is to protect Israeli citizens against attack from their enemies.
TAMIMI: "To assume that the Jews cannot survive without a state of their own called Israel is extremely foolish. The Jews have been around for thousands of years without a state of their own."
RESPONSE: Yes, and have suffered innumerable persecutions at the hands of Muslim and Christian alike.
TAMIMI: "Jews have a future and a place in the Muslim world; but the future of an exclusively Jewish state in the heart of the Muslim world is in doubt. What is more certain is a reality in which Muslims, Christians and Jews can live together again in peace and harmony enjoying equal citizenship rights; none should be superior to another."
RESPONSE: So why then is the Arab world being systematically emptied of its ancient Christian populations? Iraqis, Palestinians, Egyptian Copts, Christians from all over the Arab world are emigrating in droves to escape the discrimination and persecution of their Muslim overlords.
TAMIMI: "In a post-Israel era Jews will still be living in Palestine and other regions of the Muslim world just as many Jews lived with Muslims before they were intimidated by Zionism to leave their ancient dwellings in Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Morocco and many other places to provide this Zionist apartheid entity with a badly-needed population."
RESPONSE: This is the most despicable and diabolical of historical revisionism. The Jews in the Arab world faced persecution and pogroms at the hands of the Arab mobs after the creation of Israel, and yet here, Tamimi blames their subsequent emigration on Zionist "intimidation."
What an absolute disgrace that the likes of Tamimi has carte blanch to spread his malicious lies in the Western media. His presence here at the Guardian is just one more example of the cultural/political Islamization process underway in Europe."
And a poster called Farina does a fabulous demolition job too (no.423920). (Thanks for your wonderful 'plugs' for this blog, Farina):"Mr Tammimi tries to sell the old rose-tinted history of harmonious coexistence of Jews under Muslim rule. Although conditions varied from place to place and from time to time, he picture he paints is less than a half truth, and certainly no basis for Jews to consign their fates to living in an Islamic country. [Leave aside the current state of oppression and apartheid against non Muslim subjects in such countries].
"Historically the Jews' condition under Islam was relatively preferable to the option of death or conversion, and inquisition in Christian lands. But their condition as dhimmis in Muslim lands over 1400 years was always as second class citizens subject to endless humiliations under laws which in many cases were the precursers of the Nuremberg laws, and always precarious- at the mercy of capricious rulers when humiliation veered into violence:certainly in the Arab lands this was the case, and even in the so-called Golden Age of Spain- See The myth of the Andalucian Paradise.
"For an overview see the following post and many more on the history and current conditions of Jews in specific Arab lands elsewhere in this blog.
"From half truths to downright untruth, Mr Tamimi disseminates the libel about Zionists deliberately fomenting violence in Arab countries to get Jews to leave:
For years anti-Zionists have maintained that the Zionist underground in Iraq had planted bombs aimed at Jewish targets to cause or hasten the Jewish exodus in 1950 -51. Now evidence vindicates the official Israeli line that Iraqi Muslims, not Jews threw the deadly bomb at the Masuda Shemtov synagogue in January 1951 which killed four Jews and injured 10.
"Jews and Arabs will have to find a way to cooexist, but the solution proposed by Mr Tamimi, is not only devoid of realism, but by trying to sell a future under Islam on the basis of the historical record, is utterly cynical and devoid of any idealism for a future of equality and reciprocity of respect."