The US-backed Arabic TV channel Al-Hurra is showing a 22-part series on the Jews of Iraq, a topic it has never covered before. The founder of the Babylonian Heritage centre, Mordechai Ben-Porat, Hebrew University Professor Shmuel Moreh, and Iraqi music expert Linda Menuhin were among those interviewed. The crew filmed an Iraqi hafla (party) and the Hatikva market in Tel Aviv.
An Arab poster, Wameeth, posted his reaction to the series trailer on the weblog Mideast Youth. Iraqis seemed to be guilty of double standards when it comes to Iraqi Jews and their rights, he felt.
The Jewish market was once the centre of trade in Baghdad, but since the departure of the Iraqi Jews, no-one seems to mention the Jews and their right to reclaim the property they left behind, not even since the advent of democracy in Iraq, he writes.
Abandoned Jewish property became state property. Most of it was sold off to the public over the last 30 years. According to Iraqi law, however, anyone who can prove ownership can make claims, opening the floodgates to Iraqi-Jewish claims. But the government has denied newspaper reports that many Jewish families have indeed made claims.(And as Point of No Return has commented, no Jewish claims have yet been met).
Wameeth finds it odd that "The public considers that the Jews have no rights in Iraq as they sold everything and left, but so did the Iranian Kurds and the Iranian Shi'as. They took back their property when the Saddam regime ended. The Kurds are using 100-year old documents to prove their rights in Kirkuk. So why do we deny the rights of an ethnic group of Iraqi origin? Because they went to Israel. What about those from other ethnicities who left Iraq, from the opposition and those who went to Iran, the country we had a ten-year war with?" he asks.
Read post in full
No comments:
Post a Comment