Acknowledging the Obvious: Presbyterian Aggression. By Michael Lumish. Elder of Ziyon, April 13, 2014.
Placing the Colonial Boot on the Arab Foot. By Lyn Julius. NJBR, September 11, 2013.
Lumish:
Most
Americans, particularly those of us with liberal inclinations, think of Arab
peoples as persecuted minorities who are struggling, to this day, to free
themselves from the ongoing social and economic implications of western
imperial and colonial aggression in the Middle East. For centuries white-Anglo
westerners dominated that part of the world and, therefore, progressives who
care about universal human rights are not surprised at the Arab push-back,
including the Palestinian-Arab push-back against Israel.
Certainly
those of us who marched against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan largely
perceived the peoples of those countries as innocent victims of western and
American hostility. We understood that those wars were racist wars that
needlessly slaughtered innocent Arabs in number of lives going to at least the
hundreds of thousands, if not considerably more.
What we
tend not to appreciate in the United States is that the great Arab-Muslim
nation was one of the foremost imperial endeavors within recorded human
history. The Arab peoples are not merely pawns batted around by powerful,
racist, white westerners, but peoples with long and proud histories that cannot
be reduced to a demeaning history of victimhood.
In a
recent piece for Arutz Sheva we are reminded of this by the San Francisco-based
non-profit organization, JIMENA: Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa, which describes itself as “dedicated to educating and advocating
on behalf of 850,000 Jewish refugees displaced in the 20th century, after the
establishment of the State of Israel, from the Middle East and North
Africa.”
As
people who follow the ongoing Arab aggression against the Jews in the Middle
East know, the Presbyterian Church (USA) recently published a booklet entitled “Zionism
Unsettled” in which the American branch of that denomination condemns Israel
and Zionism for the deterioration of relations between Arabs and Jews in the
Middle East.
As the JIMENA author of the piece writes:
But
instead of recognizing the reality of rampant, deep-seated anti-Semitism in the
Middle East & North Africa, “Zionism Unsettled” places blame on the State
of Israel and presents a revisionist history of the Mizrahi refugee experience.
Among many unfounded claims, the blooklet states that Mizrahis “share a history
of largely harmonious integration and acculturation in their host countries.
Sadly, this model of coexistence was destabilized by the regional penetration
of Zionism beginning in the late 19th century.”
It
staggers the imagination to realize the degree of hatred, ignorance and moral
stupidity required of the Presbyterian Church for them to publish such toxic
rubbish under their official seal. Whatever their reasonings or excuses or
justifications or apologetics, this little “booklet” is nothing less than a
true kick in the head to the Jewish people.
First,
let it be understood that the Jews of the Middle East outside of Israel do not,
and did not, live in “host countries.” That land is land that Jews have been
living upon for thousands of years before the birth of Muhammad and the rise of
imperial Islam. That land was conquered and controlled by the armies of Islam
following the death of the founder of the faith in the 7th century – long after
the Jewish presence – and the non-Islamic population were pressed into
submission under the terms of dhimmitude
as laid out in the seventh-century Pact of Omar.
There
was, furthermore, never “largely harmonious integration” among Jews under
Arab-Muslim domination. In some times and places the conditions of dhimmitude and submission represented
lighter and more benevolent systems of oppression and in some times and places
those systems of oppression were much worse. However, to describe the
circumstances of dhimmitude
throughout the history of the Jews under Arab-Muslim rule as “harmonious
integration” would be something akin to describing the plight of black people
living under Jim Crow in the American South as “harmonious integration.”
In
other words, the very notion of it is total nonsense.
JIMENA
writes:
In his “Open
letter to the Presbyterian Church USA from an Iraqi Jew,” Joseph Samuels
describes the ongoing brutality which culminated in the Farhud, a Nazi-incited
riot in 1941 that claimed the lives of 180 Jews, destroyed Baghdad's Jewish
quarter, and forced the couuntry’s Jewish population to live in absolute fear.
“The
cause of the Farhud wasn’t Zionism . . . [it was] purely an anti-Jewish act. At
14, I was chased by two Muslim youths with a knife for stopping them from
molesting my neighbor’s teenage daughter in broad daylight. At 18, after
graduation from Al A’Adadiah High School, I was refused an exist visa to leave
Iraq to study in American because I was Jewish. My story is not unique. I am
one of 150,000 Iraqi Jews who was discriminated against, oppressed, and forced
to escape religious persecution because of my faith.” The fear of impending
violence dictated and suppressed Iraqi Jewish life.
So much
for “largely harmonious integration.”
It’s
doubtful that most westerners are familiar with the Farhud and most are probably unfamiliar with the fact that the
Arabs, including the Palestinian-Arabs, generally allied themselves with the
Nazis during World War II. The genocidal riots in Baghdad in early June of 1941
were because of pure genocidal racism and had nothing, or next to nothing, to
do with the movement for Jewish national liberation.
In The Farhud: Roots of the Arab-Nazi Alliance in the Holocaust, by Edwin Black, we read this:
Baghdad
was a burning madhouse. It burned not just with ethnic hatred but with cries to
murder and destroy the Jewish community who had lived peacably in the country
for 2,600 years, since a millenium before the advent of Islam. The rampage
would be forever seared uponn the collective Iraqi Jewish consciousness as the
Farhud. In Arabized Kurdish, farhud means something beyond mere chaos,
something more than a riot. Perhaps farhud is best translated as “violent
dispossession.” Some translate it as “mass rape and killing.”
But the
events of June 1 and 2, 1941, were not just the sudden frenzied carnage of
local Arab hooligans against their neighbors. This was a well-planned
Holocaust-era pogrom, organized by Arab Nazis in sympathy with, and under the
direction of the Third Reich’s surrogates in Iraq, the Arab and Islamic world,
as the ignition switch for an international Arab-Nazi alliance. This alliance,
embraced by many ordinary Arabs, was led by Hajj Muhammmad Amin al-Husseini,
the Mufti of Jerusalem. The Mufti was acknowledged by Hitler himself as Berlin’s
most important leader in the Arab nation.
(Black,
Edwin, The Farhud: Roots of the Arab-Nazi
Alliance in the Holocaust, Dialog Press, pg. 4, 2010.)
Finally,
Zionism did not “penetrate” anything at the end of the nineteenth-century since
it had been around in that part of the world since the destruction of the
Second Temple by the Romans in 70 AD. All “Zionism” means is the longing of the
Jewish people to reestablish our home on the land that we come from and that
longing has been part of the Jewish soul for thousands of years, now. This is
so in part because, like all peoples, the Jewish people wish to have
sovereignty on the primary land of their history, and because of the remarkable
mistreatment of Jewish refugees by majority populations throughout the diaspora
over the course of millennia, whether in the Middle East or in Europe.
Shortly
we are going to again celebrate Passover which, along with Thanksgiving, is one
of my favorite holidays. We will celebrate the freedom of the Jewish people
from oppression and submission.
At the
very end we will raise our glasses and cry out, “Next year in Jerusalem!”
For two
thousand years the Jews have yearned to restore our country and now we finally
have.
I may
like to return to Jerusalem next year, but for something approaching half the
world’s Jews they do not have to wait until next year because they are home
now.
They
are home and they are going to continue to build their home and create lives
for themselves and their children in their home.
Our
home.
The
restitution of the Jewish people upon traditional Jewish land is now an historical
fact and if the Presbyterian Church (USA) does not like it, well, we all know
what they can go do . . . pound sand.
