For me, one of the least-justifiable world beliefs is Anti-Semitism. For a nation-sized group of people to declare “death” to another nation in the world’s history means its intent is war. For many nations to declare similar intent has, in two major twentieth century instances, resulted in world wars. But for many nations of the Middle East dedicated to Israel’s harassment and destruction, intentionally to declare such hatred against a little nation of almost seven million people is astounding. In each of the seven wars declared upon Israel since 1948, she was attacked first. I know that several ‘Palestinians’ had to (and chose to) move when that small land was voted in Nov. 1947 by the UN for the “Partition of Palestine,” proposing the creation of a Jewish State, an Arab State, and a UN-administered Jerusalem. This was to be a homeland for the world Jews and the Arabs, but the Arabs rejected it. This land had been homeland for many Jews who have lived there for over 3000 years. There are now more Arabs and ‘Palestinians’ within the present borders of Israel than were there on the arrival of the displaced Jews in 1948. In fact, Israel is the only country in the Middle East where Jews, Christians, and Muslims have the right to vote, and women enjoy full political rights. Israel also welcomes legal immigration. With only 2 percent of the population of the Middle East and only half that of New York City, this little county has more Nobel Prize winners, PhDs, scientists, physicians, and the largest percentage of its workforce employed in the technical professions per capita in the world. The “lemming” phenomenon used here refers to the millions of Arabs, ‘Palestinians,’ Iranians, Europeans, Russians and too many Americans, who depend upon false, but ubiquitous, media and religious persuasive prodding to “believe” in the ‘evil’ of Zionism and the Jews. They do not know Israel, and they show no discernable interest in learning the realities of this small but dynamic democratic nation. They are willing to accept hatred towards Israel because so many of their religious and political leaders stress it. Their children grow up in it; it is almost mothers’ milk to them.
“Arabs and other Muslims who hate America (and the West)
1. Because America alone (with Israel) prevents the expansion of Islamic rule;
2. Because expansionist totalitarian movements, whether Soviet communism or radical Islam, always hate free societies;
3. Because America is not only strong, it is religious;
4. Because America is not only Christian; it is Judeo-Christian, the two religions the Islamists must overcome to expand globally.”
Hatred, of course, provokes anger, and anger can well cover envy that just might creep into observation of the success of that little country. But ignorant pride will suppress any clear evidence that could produce envy, so that they would be unable to recognize or acknowledge it. They will thus simply continue their hating. They continue to indoctrinate their children with it. However, more than just covering their inferiority, the haters of Israel (and America) loathe everything these democracies stand for; namely, freedom, democracy, individual autonomy and liberty, openness, freedom of religion, and women’s equality. The educated fools and the Israel- and America-haters of the West ignore all this and blame Israel for trying to exist and America for enabling it to do so. The ultimate world intent of the Muslim infiltration of Europe and the US is for the establishment of sharia law and domination of the West. Should they ultimately succeed, then their inferiority would be in the majority and be dominant. Thus by suppression, they could eliminate the superior education, democracy, and standard-of-living of the West. Geert Wilders a Dutch member of Parliament, insists that Islam in its essence is a political ideology and means ‘submission.’ It is not compatible with freedom and democracy, because it strives for sharia. Since the lawful boarding of the blockade-running ship, the Mavi-Marmara, in Israel’s self-defense blockade of Gaza, the UN is moving to set up a kangaroo-court that will rule that Israel has no right to defend itself, and this Obama regime is remaining silent. The US (I should say,” Obama.”) is failing to support Israel. By his actions he also disregards our Constitution. Still, the US Constitution stands for the creation of and protection of private property and national security. By his decisions and misleading speeches, this President is disgracing and weakening our great country. By his actions, Barack Obama has demonstrated that he does not support Israel. He is cold-shouldering most of the United States allies, particularly Israel, which is the only democracy of the Middle East. He is doing it in spite of the will of the majority of the US people. In short, his actions are truly of anti-American interest.
Arabs in Israel are equal citizens with the right to vote, to protest, to work or to live on Israeli largesse. How many Jews are allowed entry into Saudi Arabia or Kuwait? How many Christians are permitted to show the cross in public on the streets of Yemen? "Jews are children of pigs and donkeys" is a favorite phrase being heard again and again in Mosques all over the world. That is pure racism, isn’t it? And in which Arab country is the Palestinian Arab anything but a second class inhabitant? Racism, is keeping the Palestinian Arabs compressed under the umbrella called refugee, refusing to allow any of them to become citizens so that they be able to vote or become a landowner in Jordan or Kuwait or Saudi Arabia. How many Jewish parliament members are there in Egypt? (I forgot for a moment that there is a very slim possibility for a Jew to be elected to the Egyptian Parliament. The Jews were expelled and forced to emigrate so there are very few left.) That is pure racism. How many are there in Jordan or Saudi Arabia or Algeria or Libya? (There I go again forgetting my history. There are practically no Jews left in Algeria or Libya after being robbed, persecuted and expelled.) How many are there in Jordan? None! In the Israeli Knesset there are over a dozen Arab members who were voted in by the Arab population of Israel. Some of these elected Arab Knesset members spy for the enemy, support suicide bombers and rejoice at the murder of innocent Jewish children. They openly abuse their privileges granted to them by the State of Israel, privileges that grant them the freedom to spew the kind of distorted hate and misinformation you are writing about. This is freedom and privilege which they can never have in any of the Muslim countries. Racism is the denial of voting rights to women in countless Muslim countries. Racism is keeping the women as lower class citizens by denying them the freedom to walk the streets unescorted and not allowing them to drive. In Israel, this racism doesn’t exist. Racism is demanding that the American-Jewish soldiers who risked their lives to liberate Kuwait from the maniac Saddam Hussein were forewarned not to pray, not to expose any religious items, not to wear any telling necklaces or other jewelry. Racism is the fatwa which decrees that any Jew who violates this discriminatory Islamic law is subject to severe punishment, perhaps even, death. Racism is Islamic murderers who butcher young men on the streets of England or shoot down soldiers in Fort Hood, USA. It is racism combined with discrimination and coated with a thick dousing of pure hate which drives Muslim mothers to rejoice when their sons blow themselves up amidst innocent people. Racism, is the fact that Islam is inherently racist against every other human being that it is incapable and unwilling to ever create, manufacture, produce, invent or discover anything which will benefit humanity. Racism is when the Muslim suicide killers target for murder the same doctors who saved their eyesight yesterday or their lives last week.
It was known during the war that Jews in Europe were being exterminated. It was known that the ex- Mufti had a hand in the massacres of Jews in the Arab countries. But it was not known until after that war that Haj Amin’s anti-Jewish activities had extended beyond the incitement stage. It has now been established that five million seven hundred thousand Jews in Europe were exterminated in Nazi concentration camps. It has now also been established that the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el Husseini, played an active role in that unprecedented massacre of a people. Records found in Nazi archives and evidence produced at the Nuremberg trial reveal in specific terms that the ex-Mufti was a leading henchman of the SS Obersturmbannfuehrer Eichmann, principal executive officer in the liquidation of European Jewry. It is now established that, but for Haj Amin, the scale of murder might not have been so extensive, and hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives might have been saved. Suspicions that the ex-Mufti’s voice was not being used for the microphone alone were first aroused in 1942 when the first European Jewish refugees managed to reach Palestine. They brought stories from some of Europe’s ghettoes where German Templars were reported to be in charge of the liquidation of Jews under the supreme direction of Eichmann. Eichmann, who had himself spent some years in Palestine as a Nazi agent, was an expert on Jewish affairs, and he had directed the Gestapo department of Jewish affairs at the Gestapo head office in Berlin since 1936.It was he who before the war had directed the expropriation and dispatch to concentration camps of German Jews. It was he who after the war had started organized the deportation of Jews from Germany and the occupied territories to what eventually became the extermination camps in German, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. It was he who planned the gas chamber method of mass murder. It was assumed that there might be some connection between Haj Amin and Eichmann as soon as it was learned that he had roped in the Palestinian German Templars as some of his key men. This assumption was strengthened bt a Radio Berlin broadcast of 5th October, 1943, which reported that “Haj Amin el Husseini, Mufti of Jerusalem, has arrived in Frankfurt for the purpose of visiting the research Institute on Jewish Problem. At the time of his visit, Haj Amin declared that the Arabs and the Germans are partners and allies in the battle against world Jewry.” Subsequent German broadcasts showed that the ex-Mufti was a leading figure at most of the anti-Jewish conventions in Germany and the occupied territories. In July, 1943, the Nazis announced that, unable to attend that Nazi conference of journalists held in Vienna, the Mufti had sent them a message “congratulating them on the success of their anti-Jewish campaign and conveyed special greetings to Arab and Indian delegates.” Then came a hint in one of Haj Amin’s broadcasts which was not fully understood at the time. In a Berlin radio speech on 21st September 1944, the ex-Mufti asked: “Is it not in your power, O Arabs, to repulse the Jews whose number does not exceed eleven millions?” Why “eleven millions”? No one outside Germany knew at the time the scale of Jewish extermination. It was known that before the war the Jewish population numbered nearly seventeen millions. The ex-Mufti’s figure was written off at the time as a slip of the tongue, or an error in the script. But now the facts are known. It was no arithmetic error. Haj Amin knew then what only Hitler, Himmler and Eichmann knew: that more than five million Jews had been liquidated.
Seventy years ago, on June 1, 1941, the most dramatic and violent pogrom in the Arab Middle East during World War II took place in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. Known in Arabic as the Farhūd, this devastating pogrom left approximately 150 Jews dead, hundreds more wounded, and led to the ransacking of nearly 600 Jewish businesses. The grim events of June 1-2, 1941 were the Iraqi Arab equivalent of the mass violence on Kristallnacht, which had taken place some two and a half years earlier across Nazi Germany. The anti-Jewish riots were mainly led by Iraqi soldiers (bitter and frustrated by their defeat at the hands of the British Army), some members of the police and young paramilitary gangs, swiftly followed by an angry Muslim population that went on the rampage in an orgy of murder and rapine.
The pogrom struck at what was the most prosperous, prominent and well-integrated Jewish community in the Middle East – one whose origins went back more than 2,500 years – long before there was any Arab presence in the country. The 90,000 Jews of Baghdad, it should be said, played a major role in the commercial and professional life of the city. However, in the 1930s they already found themselves confronted by an increasingly virulent anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist propaganda in the Iraqi press and among nationalist political groups. This agitation treated the intensely patriotic Iraqi Jews as an alien, hostile minority who had to be ejected from all the social, economic and political positions it held in the Iraqi state.
Iraqi Arab nationalists, like their counterparts in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Egypt, had been much influenced in the 1930s by the rise of Nazi Germany. Hitler’s National Socialism attracted them as a spectacular, authoritarian model for achieving Iraqi national unity and a wider union of Arabs in the region. It was no accident that the pro-German ideologue of pan-Arabism, Sati al-Husri, exerted a major influence on Iraqi education after arriving in Baghdad in 1921, or that Michel Aflaq, the chief theoretician of the Iraqi and Syrian Ba’athists had also absorbed German national-socialist ideas while studying in Paris between 1928-1932. The Director General of the Iraqi Ministry of Education in the 1930s, Dr. Sami Shawkat, was another fanatical ideologue, especially active in instilling a military spirit (resembling the German Nazi model) in Iraqi youth. He also developed radically anti-Jewish ideas which were heavily indebted to Nazi anti-Semitism. In a book published in Baghdad in 1939, These Are Our Aims, Shawkat openly called for the annihilation of the Jews in Iraq, as a necessary prerequisite for achieving an Iraqi national revival and fulfilling the country’s ”historical mission” of uniting the Arab nation.
Significantly, it was also in Baghdad that the first official Arabic translations of parts of Hitler’s Mein Kampf appeared in 1934. In order not to offend Arab sensibilities the final translation “edited” out Hitler’s racial theories about inferior “Semites” – making it clear that anti-Semitism related only to Jews, not to Arabs. The Iraqi translator of Hitler’s “magnum opus” was Yūnus al-Sab’āwī, a young Nazi enthusiast and extreme anti-Semite. A close confidant of nationalist officers in the Iraqi army, Al-Sab’āwī came to play an important role in Iraqi politics. From April to June 1941 he even served as Iraqi Minister of Economics. Al-Sab’āwī was indeed one of the architects of the Farhūd in which his anti-Semitic para-military youth group also took part. Al-Sab’āwī had earlier established a close connection with Nazi Germany’s Ambassador to Iraq in the late 1930s, Dr. Fritz Grobba. The latter was a distinguished Orientalist (fluent in Arabic, Persian and Turkish) who eventually convinced Hitler that helping Arab nationalists to throw off British control of Iraq should be part of German strategy. Grobba also contributed much through the networks he had established in Iraq, towards spreading the idea that Iraqi Jews were a “fifth column” of Great Britain – sworn enemies of Germany and of the Arab nation. Equally, Palestinian nationalists, led by the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini (who had had fled to Baghdad in the late 1930s), conducted an especially vicious campaign to incite a jihad among the local Arab population against Great Britain, Zionism and the Jews of Iraq. The Mufti – a close ally of Hitler during the four years he spent in Berlin between 1941 and 1945 – would also exert a particularly toxic influence on the pro-Nazi politician Rashid Ali al-Kailani, whose successful anti-British coup had forced the unpopular Hashemite Regent Abd al-Ilāh to flee the country. The coup brought to power on April 1, 1941 some of the most rabid Jew-baiters in Iraq. Anti-British and anti-Semitic propaganda now reached a zenith that greatly contributed to the violence that burst forth two months later.
Ironically enough, it was the decisive victory of the British and the return of the Regent on June 1 that immediately provoked the pogrom, an act of unparalleled revenge by the Muslim masses against the Jews of Baghdad that expressed their deep disappointment at the fall of the popular Rashid Ali regime. The British Army, now encamped on the outskirts of Baghdad, could easily have intervened but it chose not to do so, dubiously claiming this would have damaged the prestige of the (pro-British) Regent in the eyes of his own people. The British behaved in a similar fashion on several occasions in Mandatory Palestine, in Libya (November 1945) and in Aden (December 1945) – standing by as Arab mobs killed defenseless Jews. In fact, for most Iraqi Muslims in 1941, the British were perceived as oppressive colonizers, the Jews as their “agents” and the German Nazis as “anti-imperialist” saviors! But German military assistance, when it finally came, was too little and too late to save the Rashid Ali regime.
The Farhūd has been incomprehensibly ignored or downplayed both in Zionist historiography and even more in general histories of the Middle East. Arab historians have been silent or else falsified the facts and there are even Israeli and Jewish writers who have unconvincingly tried to dismiss its importance. Yet this traumatic event was indeed of seminal importance. It proved beyond reasonable doubt the strength of Arab nationalist anti-Semitism and of Nazi-style incitement on a Muslim population that had come to see in its patriotic Jewish minority “the enemy within.” The Jews of Iraq, seventy years ago, suddenly found themselves in the crossfire of three converging forms of murderous anti-Semitism – that of the German Nazis, the Palestinian exiles in Baghdad led by Amin el-Husseini, and Iraqi pan-Arab nationalists. Ten years later, the government of Iraq under the pro-British Nuri es-Said, expropriated, dispossessed, disenfranchised and brought about the forced emigration of nearly 120,000 Iraqi Jews, thereby cruelly terminating the oldest of all Diaspora histories. This was not only a crime against humanity but an insufficiently acknowledged part of the history of the Holocaust. The Farhūd exposed with shocking clarity just how vulnerable the Jews in Arab lands really were and what their fate was likely to be under any decolonized Arab regime in the future, especially if there was a breakdown of law and order.
Despite the “Arab Spring” not much has changed for other minorities in the Middle East in the last 70 years. As for the Jews, from Morocco to Iraq and Iran they would be “ethnically cleansed” after 1945 by their Muslim rulers. The Farhūd already represented the writing on the wall for those willing to read it. The reinforcement of a strong Israel was and still remains the only viable long-term answer to the repetition of such horrific atrocities in the future.
