Islamic Jew hatred. What's old is new again.
Tomorrow (Wednesday) marks the 70th anniversary of the Farhūd (June 1, 1941), the Iraqi Arab equivalent of the mass violence on Kristallnacht.
Below is a piece about the Farhūd by the pre-eminent author, historian and scholar Prof. Robert Wistrich, in which he explains how the event exposed just how vulnerable the Jews in Arab lands really were, and how 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.
While most news outlets will be focusing on Yom Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Day), it is important that this insufficiently acknowledged part of the history of the Holocaust finally receives the attention it deserves.
Photo: Nation Associates Arab Higher Committee, its origins, personnel and purposes 1947 PG scan
Iraq’s Kristallnacht: 70 Years Later By Robert S. Wistrich
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. Please read the rest of this article and the attached 30 posts categorized "Mufti of Jerusalem: Islam's Role in the Holocaust":
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