The spectacle of President Ahmadinejad of Iran (above) condemning Zionism as racism and Israel as the perpetrator of genocide at 'Durban 11' - on the very eve of Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel - should sicken any decent person on this planet. But Orwellian lies, disinformation and ignorance are so widespread that it is as well to restate a few basic truths.
The worst racism is to be found in the Arab and Muslim world. Over a million Jews have fled persecution, violence and harassment in Arab states over the last 60 years and only some 4,000 are left. There are no Jews living in Jordan, Libya or the Sudan, and Jews are banned from entering Saudi Arabia.
Iran has lost four-fifths of its Jewish population since the 1979 Islamic revolution and those who remain are under constant pressure. Other religious and ethnic minorities have also suffered persecution and ethnic cleansing.
Over 40 percent of the Jewish population of Israel consists of Jewish refugees from Arab or Muslim states or their descendants, indigenous to the region. It is an outright lie to suggest that Israel is a colonial outpost of Western Europe or the US.
History has been rewritten to suggest that the Arab and Muslim world was an innocent bystander while Europeans perpetrated the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews. North African Jews did die - hundreds in Libyan camps. The fate of thousands of Jews would have been sealed had the Allies not defeated Rommel. The Palestinian leader, the Mufti of Jerusalem, was a staunch supporter of Hitler - spending the war years in Berlin - and an active player in the Nazi project to exterminate the Jews. He was directly responsible for the incitement that led to the Farhoud massacre of hundreds of Jews in Baghdad in 1941.
Although individual Muslims did save Jews, many had sympathy for the Nazis. One Jew tells how in the 1930s the gardener, who lived on the family property in Baghdad and worked for them for years, had named his baby Hitler.
An impassioned post that is a somber reflection of reality.
ReplyDeleteThe West is so inundated with guilt and moral self-absorption that it often believes it is the cause of all the evils of the Middle East and the rest of the world.
As a result, it frequently fails to recognize the racist and supremacist nature of much of the Arab-Muslim world.
If one cannot see that after Ahmadinejad's tirade, they are willfully deluding themselves. I can't wait for another Roger Cohen piece now about how Iran is extending the olive branch to the U.S. and Israel... oh lord.
Bataween, here in Israel we heard on radio the ceremony at Auschwitz of the March of the Living commemoration. The chief Israeli delegate was Sylvan Shalom, deputy prime minister. He spoke movingly about his family's experiences in Tunisia during the German occupation there. As you know, many Tunisian Jews [you mention the Libyan Jews] were sent to forced labor camps at that time. Shalom was careful to mention that an Arab neighbor had helped his family escape by telling German troops that came to arrest them that the women could not open the door to them if the menfolk were not there and that they could come back when the menfolk returned. This gave the family time to escape.
ReplyDeleteI was impressed by Shalom's dignified presentation compared to the ineptitude of the previous govt's spokesmen.
Eliyahu,
ReplyDeleteGratifying to hear that Shalom makes an eloquent spokesman. About 100 Tunisian Jews died during the Nazi occupation.
http://jewishrefugees.blogspot.com/2009/01/nazi-plans-to-exterminate-jews-of-n.html