"The Greatest Story Never Told"

For those who haven't read her book, here's a video by the highly articulate Lyn Julius, co-founder of Harif, on Jews in the Arab Lands, their contributions and persecution.

To quote the uploader,  J-TV:

'When the world speaks of Middle Eastern refugees, it means Palestinian Arab refugees. The truth is that there were more Jews displaced from Arab countries since 1948 than Palestinians from Israel (856,000, as against 711,000, according to UN figures). Some people call the Jewish Exodus The Greatest Story never told. Meet Lyn Julius, author of "Uprooted: How 3,000 years of Jewish civilisation in the Arab world vanished overnight".'

Dhimmitude, Jihad, & That Imagined "Secular, Democratic State"

During the early 1970s the celebrated Tunisian-born French Jewish author and essayist Albert Memmi - who, I seem to remember, remarked in one of his early books "It is a tragedy to be born a Jew, just as it is a tragedy to be born a woman or a negro" - attended a colloquium in Paris organised by the newspaper Le Monde. Muammar Gaddafi was the main attraction, and Memmi had no hesitation in laying into him, asking him, inter alia:

"Is it enough to have been born an Arab to be entitled to everything and to have been born a Jew to have a right to nothing, except to be condemned to remain eternally second-class citizens, exposed to humiliation and periodic massacres? And if you seriously wanted to avoid our gathering together in that corner of land we call Israeli to renew a most ancient tradition, why have you pursued and hunted us down throughout all the regions where your [Islamic] writ runs?"

I found this anecdote in an article in the Jewish Chronicle (7 November 1975) by Marc Tsiboni, who unfortunately does not tell us what the Libyan dictator (whose own halachic Jewish status was already known, by the way, since Maariv had reported in 1972 that his mother was a Jewish woman from Benghazi who converted to Islam on marriage) replied.

Describing the "golden age" of Jewish-Muslim relations in twelfth-century Moorish Spain as a brief aberrant interlude, Tsiboni saw Maimonides' message to the Jews of Yemen in 1172 as typifying the situation:

"And as you know that no nation was more hostile to Israel than they [the Muslims], that no nation has sought such refinements of evil as they have to weaken, diminish and humiliate us."

Of course, Maimonides was writing before many of the horrors inflicted upon Jews in Christian Europe had occurred.  But Tsiboni noted that in his book Juifs et Arabs (1974) Memmi maintains that, the Holocaust excepted, there has been little difference between the treatment of Jews in Europe and in the Islamic world, exactions and pogroms being a feature of both, even in the twentieth century.

"Never, and I mean never," Memmi has remarked, "have the Jews lived in an Arab country otherwise as an underprivileged and insecure group, with the odd pogrom from time to time to keep them in place."

In Les Temps Modernes (1974) the Moroccan Muslim writer Said Ghalleb observes:

"...the worst insult one Moroccan can proffer another is to call him a Jew.  My childhood friends have remained Jew-haters.

They mask their virulent anti-semitism by maintaining that the State of Israel is the creation of Western imperialism... And the whole Hitlerite myth is cultivated among the popular classes.  There, Hitler's massacre of the Jews is acclaimed with delight.  They even believe that Hitler is not dead... and they await his arrival ... to deliver the Arabs of Israel."

A scene in Brussels

A large proportion of Muslims in Europe today are of Moroccan extraction, particularly in France and Belgium, countries in which violence towards and harassment of Jews has occurred for many years (although the BBC and its ilk scarcely report it).

Hungarian-born semitic scholar and educator Georges Vajda, of Paris, an expert on Islam, once said:

"It seems that no Muslim power, however 'liberal' it may like to think itself ... could depart from the line followed in the past and continued de facto in the present, and confer on the Jews anything but the historic status of 'protected persons,' patched up with ill-digested and unassimilated Western phraseology...

If there does in fact exist a path to a harmonious symbiosis between men of divergent convictions, only those who succeed in genuinely breaking with their past will be able to set out on it."

The antisemitism seen in Cairo, Tunisia, and Libya during the so-called Arab Spring reminds us that Vajda's words - though decades old - are still valid.

And of course we have only to search YouTube to see that the following indictment of Jews, by an antisemitic Islamist quoted by the scholar David Littman, is widely replicated:

"...the Jews, whose wickedness is incurable unless they are subdued by force.  No good is expected from them unless they live under the aegis of Islam."

All this does not bode at all well for the status and safety of Jews in that One State that Israel's Western leftist enemies envisage - it's what used to be called, by lefties such as the British Labour politician Peter Hain (when, in an earlier incarnation. he was the enfant terrible of the Liberal Party and as active a campaigner against Israel as he was against South Africa, even opposing the migration of Soviet Jews to the land of their ancestors) a "secular democratic state" of Palestine.

Which is of course why One State must never be allowed to happen.

By the way, as a bonus here's a guy who has answers to four pertinent questions. I don't think he'd claim to be an intellectual like those I've been discussing.  But he seems to know his onions.  At any rate, what he says isn't conducive to a good night's sleep...

 Skip him to sleep tight!

Lest We Forget: Jews in Muslim Lands (videos)

These documentaries date from 1987, and provide a good introduction to the fate of Jews living under Islam:

The Heroine from the Harem – and Jewish Dhimmitude in Old Barbary

My latest dip into historical archives turns up this not uninteresting little item from the London Voice of Jacob (24 June 1842). It tells of a stubbornly Christian captive rescued from Muslim slave traders by two Jews. If only the Coptic girls of the present day, seized from their families and forced to convert to Islam, could be rescued from their living nightmare the way the trafficked (and uncommonly lucky) Christian girl in this report – probably captured somewhere along the Mediterranean coast by Barbary corsairs, who took innumerable Europeans (and Americans) into captivity and enslavement over the centuries – was rescued from hers:

"According to private communications ... from Alexandria [is] a curious fact concerning two Jews, Messrs. T. Sonino and Guiseppus di L. Marpurgo [sic; Guiseppe di L. Morpurgo?], of Trieste, who succeeded whilst travelling near the mouth of a channel of the Nile, called Mahmudin, in releasing, though not without endangering their own lives, a Christian female slave from Turkish captivity. She had been conveyed, some time previously, into the harem of a powerful dignatory of Constantinople, who out of revenge, because she persisted in remaining faithful to her belief, sent her to Alexandria, to have her sold there as a slave.

Under the pretext of a walk, she was brought to Mahmudin, to be embarked for Cairo; she, however, resisted vigorously, and attracted by her cries, the above gentlemen, among many other persons, came to the spot; recognising that the person so ill-used was a Christian, they interfered, without being deterred by the imminent danger to which they exposed their lives, and a great crowd of fanatical Arabs having gathered round them, and having succeeded in releasing the heroic girl, they brought her to Alexandria, where the Russian vice-consul took her under his protection, and thus put a stop to all further persecution [of her]."

And here’s a report from the same newspaper (28 March 1845), concerning the degraded dhimmi Jews of the Barbary States; it’s actually an extract from Notes on North Africa, the Sahara and Soudan (New York, 1844) by William Brown Hodgson, formerly US Consul in Tunis:

"Jews are numerous in all the villages of Biscara and the Wadreng. They enjoy an efficient protection among the Berber tribes in all the wide regions of Algiers and Morocco. This is afforded by a system of individual relationship, which may be compared to that of patron and client. Every Jew has his particular Sidi, patron or magister, who is responsible for his acts, and to whom he looks for counsel and protection. The defence of his Jewish dependant is a point of honour with the free Amazirgh, or Numidian; and he will protect him from injury or aggression at the risk of his life. Such is the patronal relation of the Israelites among the Scbelechs [sic] or Berbers of Morocco, where their numbers are estimated at half a million. The Arabs do not yield to them this protection. Deprived of civil rights in Barbary, the social condition of the Jews merits investigation."

The Expulsion of the Jews from Muslim Countries, 1920-1970: A History of Ongoing Cruelty and Discrimination

This article by Professor Shmuel Trigano is a must-read in the light of the ruthlessly waged campaign of delegitimisation of Israel using the Nakba, the “Right of Return” demand, and the“Born in Sin” allegation as weapons. Professor Trigano is a Fellow of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and Professor of Sociology at the University of Paris-Nanterre.  He is director of the College of Jewish Studies at the Alliance Israélite Universelle, editor of Pardes, a journal of Jewish studies, and founder of L'Observatoire du Monde Juif, a research centre on Jewish political life. 

Between 1920 and 1970, 900,000 Jews were expelled from Arab and other Muslim countries: from Morocco to Iran, from Turkey to Yemen, including places where they had lived for twenty centuries. The 1940s were a turning point in this tragedy; of those expelled, 600,000 settled in the new state of Israel, and 300,000 in France and Canada. Today, they and their descendants form the majority of the French Jewish community and a large part of Israel's population.

How does one explain this exodus? It is the blind spot of contemporary political consciousness and an object of denial. There is not even an expression to name this major event. "The Forgotten Exodus" is the most commonly used term. But it actually masks the nature and impact of this historical event. "Forgotten" by whom, other than ideologues? "Exodus" is an apt description of the situation but not of its causes, which the adjective "forgotten" occults even more. For those who underwent the expulsion have not forgotten it at all. Moreover, it is also an important historical fact.

This is a major transnational phenomenon. Jewish communities were expelled either in their entirety or almost so. Communities of some significance remain in Iran, Turkey, Morocco, and Tunisia. All the countries that expelled Jews have one thing in common: they belong to Islam (including Turkey and Iran, which are not Arab countries). However, it is hard to view this exodus as a whole. It largely took place over a thirty-year period (1940-1970) and covered a huge geographical area, from Morocco to Iran, from Turkey to Yemen.

In the countries that expelled Jews, a combination of six legal, economic, and political measures aimed at isolating Jews in society was instituted:
denationalization;
legal discrimination;
isolation and sequestration;
economic despoilment;
socioeconomic discrimination;
and pogroms or similar acts.
....

Anti-Semitism would have developed even without the existence of the state of Israel because of Arab-Islamic nationalism, which resulted in xenophobia. In the twentieth century, hostility toward Jews was spreading well before Israel's creation: in Yemen, Syria, Mandatory Palestine, Turkey, and Algeria.

It is the custom to say that Zionism was responsible for this development. But Zionism is to be understood, in the worldview of the Islamic mind, in another perspective. With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of intolerant Arab nationalism, long-dominated nations (such as the Armenians and the Jews) sought independence. This was understood by the Arab world as a rebellion not only against the new Arab nation-states but also against Islamic law, which puts non-Muslims in the inferior status of a dominated nation: the dhimmis.

Both the Armenians and the Jews were subjected to violent repression. The former were massacred by the Ottoman Empire in 1894-1895 – around 300,000 victims – and suffered a genocide – 1,200,000 victims  –  by the Turks in 1908. The latter in Mandatory Palestine suffered pogroms in 1920, 1929, 1936, and 1939. And the Jews in Muslim countries ... were forced to leave. Hardly any Jews remain in the abovementioned countries, and the number of Christian Arabs is now dwindling in them as well.

The new Arab anti-Zionism contained classic anti-Semitic policies, as demonstrated by the "Statute of the Jews" that could be compared to the Vichy Statute of the Jews, except that it developed over a long time, in a huge geographical area, and at different periods. Jews were accused of being co-responsible with Israel for the war that the Arab states declared against the new state and then lost. Regardless of their ideological affiliation - communist, nationalist, Zionist, religious, and so on - they were subjected to special laws specifically aimed at Jews. They were expelled from all Arab-Muslim countries because a collective responsibility was imputed to them. This is typical anti-Semitic reasoning.

The Jews from Arab-Muslim countries were powerless. They had no army. They did not take part in the conflict. They were not responsible for triggering hostilities between the Arab states and Israel. That the Yishuv, the quasi-Jewish state that developed in Mandatory Palestine, became a state according to the United Nations Partition Plan was not also responsible for the war except for the scandal of its existence. Instead, the cause of the situation was the intolerance and imperialism of the new Arab states: before these attained independence, there were indeed no such states. Before the Western colonial empires there was another Islamic colonial empire, the Ottoman one. Palestine never existed as a political or cultural entity. The new nation-states – Israel included – were a product of the Western colonial empires and all were "invented." Why were these Jews in Arab countries persecuted and expelled if not as a result of an anti-Semitic ideology and policy? It was a continuation of the traditional Islamic anti-Judaism but defined in reference to the symbol of the rebellion of the Jewish dhimmis: Zionism.

The fact that these events have been obscured has served in the campaign to delegitimize Israel, and therefore to a large extent, the same population that suffered this oppression. The fate of Palestinian refugees, their proclaimed innocence, and the injustice they endured form the main thrust of this delegitimization.

About 600,000 of the Jews forced out of Islamic countries in those years attempted to reconstruct their life in Israel. They have suffered more than the Palestinian refugees and undergone greater spoliations.

They became citizens of the countries of refuge (Israel and France especially), while Palestinians were ostracized from the Arab nations. Unlike Israel, the Arab states have refused to integrate (Palestinian) refugees in the hopes of keeping hotbeds of conflict alive.

Today, 20 percent of Israeli citizens are Palestinian Arabs, while the few thousands of Jews still living in Arab and Muslim states (almost exclusively Iran, Morocco, Turkey, and Tunisia) are tiny quasi-dhimmi minorities, probably destined to disappear. Except in Turkey, they depend on a despotic or monarchic regime that needs them for specific interests in international politics. Since 1922, a Palestinian Arab state has already existed on the territory of Mandatory Palestine: Jordan, with 75 percent of its population Palestinian. The Palestinian Authority rules part of the remainder in what became "Cisjordania" after its annexation by Transjordan in 1948, which then became Jordan.

The Palestinians' fate is mainly the result of the policy of their leadership, who have always rejected the further division of Mandatory Palestine (as proposed in 1937 and 1947). The creation of Transjordan in 1922 apparently was not sufficient. Arabs from Palestine were the allies of the five Arab states that attacked the newly created state of Israel: Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Lebanon, as well as the Arab League. Even today, both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas reject the division of the land, denying Israel its natural right to a national existence while defining Palestine as exclusively Arab and Islamic.

The Jewish people are a people with a long history – contrary to the Palestinians –  and have the right of sovereignty in a land that has been the seat of three Jewish states since earliest antiquity. Zionism is the culmination of a process of self-determination, from a dominated nation in the Arab-Muslim world to an emancipated one within this world – that is, in the Middle East. There has been a population exchange. Israel's "original sin" is a fiction. These are the historical and political facts on which Jewish discourse must be founded. It is time to take back the initiative and restore the Jewish narrative.


You can read the entire article here http://www.mideasttruth.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=21921&sid