As Israel Apartheid Week comes to a campus near you, Lyn Julius in the Times of Israel reflects on the irony at the campaign's heart: much of society under Muslim domination was built on the exploitation of women, Jews and Christians and blacks. The Jews have since found freedom in Israel.
Roll up, roll up for Israel Apartheid Week – a global, multimedia extravaganza devoted to cementing the comparison between the new international pariah, Israel, and the old racist regime in South Africa. And it’s coming to a campus near you.
Anyone who knows anything about Israel will
tell you that the comparison is invidious and malicious. Israeli law
does not discriminate against Arab citizens. Of course there is – there
must be – plenty of room for improvement, but show me one liberal
democracy where minorities do not claim to experience discrimination and
prejudice.
Not only is the Israel Apartheid campaign a monumental lie of gobsmacking chutzpah, but the boot is on the Arab foot. You only have to witness the way that Arab host countries treat their Palestinians, who are denied citizenship. And not only Palestinians - Kuwait has 300,000 Bedoun residents
denied citizenship and the right to vote. Thousands of children born in
Arab countries are deprived of citizenship merely because their parents
were not citizens. Immigrants from South Asia with no rights whatsoever
help keep countries like Dubai, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates running.
Those who berate the West for its orientalism towards the Third World, quoting the late Edward Said‘s
eponymous book, ignore the fact that much of society under Muslim
domination was built on the exploitation of women, Jews (and Christians)
and blacks. Not only are all Arab countries strong contenders in the
Apartheid Oscars, but Saudi Arabia would win hands down. At the bottom
of its obscene pecking order are women, non-Muslims and slaves.
Every year, an unknown number of Filipinos in
Saudi Arabia are victims of sexual abuses, maltreatment, unpaid
salaries, and other malpractices. Wretched Filipina domestics are
virtual prisoners with no rights, their passports confiscated.
Across Muslim Africa, blacks are routinely
mistreated and abused. Some 20 percent of Mauritanians, about 600, 000
people, are still slaves. Mauritania uses Sharia law to justify a racist
system where Arabs exploit the country’s black African population. Last
week, one slave told the Geneva summit for Human Rights and Democracy,
an alternative to what is laughingly called the UN Human Rights Council,
that – according to religious madrassahs – ’slaves are the masters’
properties, who are passed along as inheritance and where the condition
of slavery is transmitted from parent to child, where women slaves must
submit their bodies to their masters.’
Before western colonial rule tempered their status, Jews were dhimmis,
treated as inferiors and denied basic human rights – the ‘dogs’ of the
Arabs. Each religious community ran its own affairs in an atmosphere of
mutual suspicion – a de facto Apartheid. Rabbi Shmuley Boteach recalls his father telling him
how humiliating it was to grow up in (Shi’a) Iran and have Islamic
shop-keepers refuse to take money directly from his hand because as a
Jew, he was impure. Other abuses in Muslim lands : the 19th century
Moroccan Jew beaten to death for taking in a destitute Muslim woman as
his housemaid (that would have been to overturn the natural order); 40
percent of Jews born in Egypt were not granted Egyptian nationality in
the 1920s; Jews were denied justice, because Arabs were never called to
account for abusing them.
Historian Georges Bensoussan has completed the most comprehensive study
to-date of conditions for Jews in Yemen, Iraq and Morocco since 1850
until their mass exodus. He calls the Jews of the Arab and Muslim world
the ‘colonised of the colonised’ – tolerated as long as they were useful
to their Muslim masters.
This is great Lyn, and now a few facts about Israel as an Apartheid State: Tel-Aviv University is full of young Arab students - boys and girls, many-many girls, talking lowdly arabic on their mobiles in buses and everywhere - our Hospitals are full of Arab Doctors and Paramedic, our supermarkets are full of arab ladies working as cashiers (instead of the Russian immigration during the last 2 decades),Arab ladies head covered are seen in the most elegant boutiques of Tel-viv. My husband who had a surgery two days ago at Ichilov Hospital, is treated by an Arab doctor, a most efficient one I must say.
ReplyDeleteThis is the Israeli Apartheid State.I wish Jews in arab lands could be in that situation too.
Levana Zamir
60 Years to "apartheid" slur by pro-Nazi, A. Shukeiri (Shukairy)
ReplyDeleteAhmad al-Shuqairy, Shukeiri, Shukeiry , Shukairy:
* At WW2, and his friends used to pray for Hitler's victories and for the defeat of Britain. (His own admission).
* Escaped in the 1940's with his associate Al-husseini, mufti of Jerusalem, Hitler's ally.
* He "had suggested that Palestinian and Libya's ulama' invite Mussolini to adopt a policy of non-cooperation with zionists and to treat them as the nazis were doing." (Arab source)
* Was a Nazis apologist.
* At the end of 1940s, he "compared Israel's economic planning for Jerusalem with Hitler's planning for a Nazi ruled Europe".
* In 1952 compared plight of living Arab refugees to Millions perished in WW2.
* Invented the "apartheid" slur in Oct. 1961 at his UN diatribe (UN's 16th session). He also -at the same speech- objected to Eichmann being tried in Israel. It was on October 17, 1961. Almost 6 years before the six-day war which some call it an "occupation". Some 41 years before the security barrier anti terror defense erected in Israel. He used the then momentum in U.N. against South Africa. So he just compared it to S.A. without explanation. In the same speech he objected Eichmann be tried in Israel.
* In Nov. 30, 1962 praised, saluted infamous nazi gang Tacuara, some 5 months after (on 21 June 1962) they brutally attacked, carved swastikas on a 19 year old student as a "revenge" for eliminating Eichmann.
* Called to annihilate the Jews in Israel in 1966: "a war of extermination in which not a man, woman, or child should be spared".