Galloway and the Stampeding of Arab Jews

Galloway and the Stampeding of Arab Jews
Friday October 07th 2005, 5:39 pm

It really irks the Zionists and their neocon fellow travelers George Galloway has the gall to cite the historical record and thus criticize the settler state of Israel for its immoral use of “dirty tricks.” For instance, Patrick Devenny, as noted on this blog earlier in the week, basically assigned Galloway to the status of a far left lunatic for telling the talk show radio host Alex Jones and his audience the following:

“They (Zionists) created the conditions in the Arab countries and in some European countries to stampede Jewish people out of the countries that they had been living in for many hundreds of years and stampede them into the Zionist state.”

In a response to Devenny’s initial blog entry on Horowitz’ Moonbat Central, I pointed out how indeed a number of German Zionists attempted to collaborate with Hitler and the Nazis, with mixed results. Predictably, Devenny dismissed this collaboration as

“inconsequential and foolish” and the efforts of “misguided Zionists who, in 1933, could not comprehend the extent of Nazi hatred of Jews.”

Devenny also dismisses Galloway’s assertion the Israeli state connived to “stampede” Jews out of Arab countries.

“Just remember that statement—which echoes the worst vitriol spouted by neo-Nazis and holocaust deniers—the next time someone asks you to take Galloway seriously,”

Devenny concludes in response to Galloway’s remarks, quoted above. “A very dangerous man.” But if we are to consider Galloway dangerous, we must also consider the historical record dangerous—or dangerous for prevaricating Zionists, anyway.

Earlier today I received an email with a link to an account written by Naeim Giladi, a Jew from Iraq who was “rescued” by the fledgling Israeli state. John F. Mahoney, Executive Director of Americans for Middle East Understanding, writes in a forward to Giladi’s article posted on the Bint Jbeil website, that

“Israeli historian Ilan Pappe looked at the hundreds of thousands of indigenous Palestinians whose lives were uprooted to make room for foreigners who would come to populate confiscated land. Most were Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe. But over half a million other Jews came from Islamic lands. Zionist propagandists claim that Israel ‘rescued’ these Jews from their anti-Jewish, Muslim neighbors. One of those ‘rescued’ Jews—Naeim Giladi—knows otherwise.”

In his book,

Ben Gurion’s Scandals: How the Haganah & the Mossad Eliminated Jews,

Giladi discusses the crimes committed by Zionists in their frenzy to import raw Jewish labor. Newly-vacated farmlands had to be ploughed to provide food for the immigrants and the military ranks had to be filled with conscripts to defend the stolen lands. Mr. Giladi couldn’t get his book published in Israel, and even in the U.S. he discovered he could do so only if he used his own money.

Giladi begins his article, The Jews of Iraq, with the following statement:

I write this article for the same reason I wrote my book: to tell the American people, and especially American Jews, that Jews from Islamic lands did not emigrate willingly to Israel; that, to force them to leave, Jews killed Jews; and that, to buy time to confiscate ever more Arab lands, Jews on numerous occasions rejected genuine peace initiatives from their Arab neighbors. I write about what the first prime minister of Israel called “cruel Zionism.” I write about it because I was part of it.

As an impressionable 18 year old in 1947, Giladi was part of the “Zionist underground” in Iraq, deeply involved in “smuggling young Iraqi Jews like myself out of Iraq, into Iran, and then on to the Promised Land of the soon-to-be established Israel.” Giladi was apprehended by the Iraqi authorities and imprisoned in Abu Ghraib, but he soon escaped and made his way to Palestine. Upon his arrival, Giladi was subject to racism (he was of Arabic origin and not an Ashkenazi Jew) and witnessed the “transfer” of Palestinian Arabs out of the city of al-Majdal. Both acts disturbed him profoundly. Giladi writes:

I was disillusioned at what I found in the Promised Land, disillusioned personally, disillusioned at the institutionalized racism, disillusioned at what I was beginning to learn about Zionism’s cruelties. The principal interest Israel had in Jews from Islamic countries was as a supply of cheap labor, especially for the farm work that was beneath the urbanized Eastern European Jews. Ben Gurion needed the “Oriental” Jews to farm the thousands of acres of land left by Palestinians who were driven out by Israeli forces in 1948.

According to Giladi’s recounting of events, it was

“Britain’s pro-Zionist attitude in Palestine” that ultimately “triggered a growing anti-Zionist backlash in Iraq, as it did in all Arab countries.”

Giladi quotes Sir Francis Humphreys, Britain’s Ambassador in Baghdad, who wrote in 1934:

“Zionism has sown dissension between Jews and Arabs, and bitterness has grown up between the two peoples which did not previously exist.”

However, if we are to believe Zionist historians and commentators, the Arabs have always persecuted and abused Jews in Arab countries. Giladi tells us otherwise:

The original Jews found Babylon, with its nourishing Tigris and Euphrates rivers, to be truly a land of milk, honey, abundance—and opportunity. Although Jews, like other minorities in what became Iraq, experienced periods of oppression and discrimination depending on the rulers of the period, their general trajectory over two and one-half millennia was upward.

Under the late Ottoman rule, for example, Jewish social and religious institutions, schools, and medical facilities flourished without outside interference, and Jews were prominent in government and business.

The British engineered riots in the Jewish quarter of Baghdad, according to Giladi.

“Yosef Meir, one of the most prominent activists in the Zionist underground movement in Iraq, known then as Yehoshafat, claims it was the British” who started the riots. “Meir, who now works for the Israeli Defense Ministry, argues that, in order to make it appear that the regent [Abd al-Ilah] was returning as the savior who would reestablish law and order, the British stirred up the riots against the most vulnerable and visible segment in the city, the Jews. And, not surprisingly, the riots ended as soon as the regent’s loyal soldiers entered the capital.”

Giladi cites David Kimche, an operative with British Intelligence during WW II and with the Mossad after the war.

“Later he became Director General of Israel’s Foreign Ministry, the position he held in 1982 when he addressed a forum at the British Institute for International Affairs in London,” writes Giladi. “In responding to hostile questions about Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and the refugee camp massacres in Beirut, Kimche went on the attack, reminding the audience that there was scant concern in the British Foreign Office when British Gurkha units participated in the murder of 500 Jews in the streets of Baghdad in 1941.”

It was the anti-Jewish riots of 1941 that

“gave the Zionists in Palestine a pretext to set up a Zionist underground in Iraq, first in Baghdad, then in other cities such as Basra, Amara, Hillah, Diwaneia, Abril and Karkouk,” according to Giladi.

However, it was not until 1950 that Jews began to leave Iraq in large numbers. On March 19, 1950,

“a bomb went off at the American Cultural Center and Library in Baghdad, causing property damage and injuring a number of people. The center was a favorite meeting place for young Jews.”

A couple weeks later, on April 8, Baghdad’s El-Dar El-Bida Café, where Jews were celebrating Passover, was bombed.

“The next day, many Jews, most of them poor with nothing to lose, jammed emigration offices to renounce their citizenship and to apply for permission to leave for Israel. So many applied, in fact, that the police had to open registration offices in Jewish schools and synagogues,” Giladi explains.

In the following weeks, the Jewish-owned Beit-Lawi Automobile Company was bombed; the El-Batawin area of Baghdad where most rich Jews and middle class Iraqis lived was bombed; the Jewish-owned Stanley Shashua building on El-Rashid street was bombed.

“On January 14, 1951, at 7 p.m., a grenade was thrown at a group of Jews outside the Masouda Shem-Tov Synagogue. The explosive struck a high-voltage cable, electrocuting three Jews, one a young boy, Itzhak Elmacher, and wounding over 30 others. Following the attack, the exodus of Jews jumped to between 600-700 per day.”

Giladi quotes Wilbur Crane Eveland, a former senior CIA officer, who wrote:

In attempts to portray the Iraqis as anti-American and to terrorize the Jews, the Zionists planted bombs in the U.S. Information Service library and in synagogues. Soon leaflets began to appear urging Jews to flee to Israel…. Although the Iraqi police later provided our embassy with evidence to show that the synagogue and library bombings, as well as the anti-Jewish and anti-American leaflet campaigns, had been the work of an underground Zionist organization, most of the world believed reports that Arab terrorism had motivated the flight of the Iraqi Jews whom the Zionists had “rescued” really just in order to increase Israel’s Jewish population.”

By 1953, according to Giladi,

“all but 6,000 of an estimated 125,000 Iraqi Jews had fled to Israel…. An ancient, cultured, prosperous community had been uprooted and its people transplanted to a land dominated by East European Jews, whose culture was not only foreign but entirely hateful to them.”

In conclusion, Naeim Giladi writes:

Alexis de Tocqueville once observed that it is easier for the world to accept a simple lie than a complex truth. Certainly it has been easier for the world to accept the Zionist lie that Jews were evicted from Muslim lands because of anti-Semitism, and that Israelis, never the Arabs, were the pursuers of peace. The truth is far more discerning: bigger players on the world stage were pulling the strings….

We Jews from Islamic lands did not leave our ancestral homes because of any natural enmity between Jews and Muslims. And we Arabs—I say Arab because that is the language my wife and I still speak at home—we Arabs on numerous occasions have sought peace with the State of the Jews. And finally, as a U.S. citizen and taxpayer, let me say that we Americans need to stop supporting racial discrimination in Israel and the cruel expropriation of lands in the West Bank, Gaza, South Lebanon and the Golan Heights.

Giladi’s story underscores precisely the assertion George Galloway made on Alex Jones’ radio program—to a documented degree, Zionists “stampeded” (or euphemistically “rescued”) Jews from Arab countries and corralled them in Israel, where they endured second class citizen status, a step or so above indigenous Arabs.

“The reality is [the Zionists] have used Jewish people, and they have used them with this ideology of Zionism, to create this little Hitler State on the Mediterranean, to act as an advance guard for their own interests in the Arab world, and we’re all paying for it, the Palestinians have paid for it, the Arabs have paid for it, and now the American people are paying for it, and why should we? We don’t want to live our lives in a permanent state of warfare and division,” Galloway told Jones.

Indeed, we are paying for it, as the invasion and occupation of Iraq, to a large degree, is in the interest of Israel.

“Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I’ll tell you what I think the real threat (is) and actually has been since 1990—it’s the threat against Israel,” declared Philip Zelikow, executive director of Bush’s nine eleven whitewash commission. ”And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don’t care deeply about that threat, I will tell you frankly. And the American government doesn’t want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.”

In other words, the American people were duped into supporting the invasion, in large part in the interest of Israel. Galloway rightfully characterizes this deception as “dirty tricks” devised to reduce us to “live our lives in a permanent state of warfare and division,” as engineered by vicious neocons and Likudite Zionists.

Naturally, mentioning Naeim Giladi’s account of the “Zionist underground” in Iraq using terrorism to “stampede” Iraqi Jews into a desperate emigration to Israel—arriving penniless and dependent on the welfare of racist Ashkenazi Jews in need of field hands—will be considered anti-Semitic by Israel’s apologists, most notably those over at Moonbat Central.

“It’s permissible to discuss the power of every other group, from the Black Muslims to the Christian Right, but the much greater power of the Jewish establishment is off-limits,” notes Joseph Sobran.

It is, as well, off-limits to mention and argue historical fact at variance with the pro-Israel orthodoxy. With each passing day, the mention of such established fact moves further into the territory of criminalized behavior, as the Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act becomes law and with the passage of the Global anti-Semitism Review Act last October the State Department has become a de facto anti-Semitism ministry with an appointed anti-Semitism envoy.