The Bridge with Islam

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By Haham (Rabbi) Haim Ovadia*
*Haim Ovadia is the Haham of Kahal Joseph (Mizrahi, real Jewish) Congregation in Los Angeles, California.

This article will be published in next week’s ‘Jewish’ Journal of Los Angeles.

I am a Jew of Islam.

Haham Albert J. Amateau

Picture: Haham Albert J. Amateau (1890-1996) of Turkey and later California, US. As a real Jew, Mizrahi, in 1992, to commemorate 500 years of peaceful coexistence between Muslims and Jews in Turkey and other Ottoman lands, he helped found the American Society of Jewish Friends of Turkey and was named its honorary president.

 

Not an Arab Jew, mind you, since that term makes as much sense as Slavic or Baltic or Arian Jew, but a Jew of Islam.

It is not only because in my family’s veins runs the blood of people who lived in Iraq, Syria, Morocco, Tunisia and Turkey, nor because among my congregants there are natives of Bahrain and Indonesia.

It is true that my I-pod is packed with Abdul Wahab, Sabah Fakhri and Farid Al Atrache and the Shabbat songs and liturgy borrows freely from generations of Islamic, Sufi and secular Arabic music, but the connection runs much deeper.

I am a Jew of Islam because Judaism under the rule of the crescent took a different course than that under the rule of the cross. The Jews of Islam, although decreed by the Pact of Omar as dhimmis, or second class citizens, never experienced the same level of hatred, anti-Semitism and persecution which were their daily bread in Christendom. They were not demonized as god killers and did not have to defend their religion in public disputations. They were not expelled en-masse on religious grounds from a Muslim country as they were from England, France and Catholic Spain.

As a rule, Islam used to be much less fanatic then Christianity. The number of wars waged and the amount of lives lost by the followers of the man who said: “Love your enemies; bless those who curse you… Resist no evil, but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also”, is mind boggling. And that violence was not directed only against other Monotheistic heathens such as Muslims and Jews but also against Christians who deviated from the norm.

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Reflections of an Arab Jew

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By Ella Habiba Shohat*

Nostalgia of time fondles the memory of the Jews of Egypt

*Ella Habiba Shohat is an Iraqi Jew (Mizrahi, a real Jew) and a Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. She is writing at length about the nature of Arab-Jewish relations, history and heritage and the totalitarian attempts of falsifying and ‘replacement’ which are made by the Ashkenazo-Zionist regime and minions .

 

If the video doesn’t show up automatically you can watch it directely here.

I am an Arab Jew. Or, more specifically, an Iraqi Israeli woman living, writing and teaching in the U.S. Most members of my family were born and raised in Baghdad, and now live in Iraq, Israel, the U.S., England, and Holland. When my grandmother first encountered Israeli society in the ’50s, she was convinced that the people who looked, spoke and ate so differently–the European Jews–were actually European Christians. Jewishness for her generation was inextricably associated with Middle Easterness. My grandmother, who still lives in Israel and still communicates largely in Arabic, had to be taught to speak of “us” as Jews and “them” as Arabs.

For Middle Easterners, the operating distinction had always been “Muslim,” “Jew,” and “Christian,” not Arab versus Jew. The assumption was that “Arabness” referred to a common shared culture and language, albeit with religious differences. Americans are often amazed to discover the existentially nauseating or charmingly exotic possibilities of such a syncretic identity. I recall a well-established colleague who despite my elaborate lessons on the history of Arab Jews, still had trouble understanding that I was not a tragic anomaly–for instance, the daughter of an Arab (Palestinian) and an Israeli (European Jew). Living in North America makes it even more difficult to communicate that we are Jews and yet entitled to our Middle Eastern difference. And that we are Arabs and yet entitled to our religious difference, like Arab Christians and Arab Muslims.

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The new Muslim anti-Semitism

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By Mark R. Cohen

TS admin: Mark Cohen is an Ashkenazo-Zionist and this article looks like another routine “damage control” propaganda piece due to the constant surge of anti Ashkenazo-Zionists feelings in Israel among the real Jews (Mizrahis). It aims also, by misleading, misrepresenting and other manipulations, sometimes of real facts, to maintain and deepen the decades-old divide-and-conquer violent policy of the Ashkenazo-Zionist regime towards the real Jews and all Muslims in Israel and around the world.

rel-31.gifJewish-Muslim relations are at a nadir today. But the mutual hatred and anti-Semitism on the Muslim side are relatively new phenomena, born of political, rather than religious factors. When the Islamic caliphs ruled large swaths of Asia and Africa, their Jewish subjects enjoyed a protected status their brethren in Christian Europe - victims of anti-Semitism - never thought possible.

Today, Muslim apologists have distorted this age of coexistence. They appropriate an old Jewish myth about an “interfaith utopia” in the Middle Ages and blame the Jews and Zionism for destroying the traditional harmony between the two peoples.

In response, there is a new Jewish “counter-myth” that claims that Islam has persecuted Jews from its origins and that anti-Semitism is endemic in the religion. This counter-myth has been propagated by Jewish writers in the Diaspora especially since the 1970s. It parallels a similar conviction among some Oriental Jews in Israel. Seeking to find their place in a predominantly European Jewish world scarred by centuries of Christian persecutions culminating in the Holocaust, they claim that Islam has persecuted Jews from its origins. By implication, they have a past of suffering like the Ashkenazim, including dislocation from their ancient homelands, and are thus eligible for a larger piece of the Zionist pie than the mostly Ashkenazic founding fathers of Israel have granted them.

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The ORBATs

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by Anwaar Hussain

the-rise-of-islam.jpg

ORBAT is a military acronym for Order of Battle. Technically speaking, Order of Battle is the identification of command structure, strength, and disposition of personnel, equipment, and units of the military of a protagonist. Or, simply put, it is an account of the strengths and assets of a would-be combatant force.

Unless pulled back, the world is now at the very brink of entering one grizzly global battle. The battle ground is the Middle East. And the two chief adversaries in this upcoming battle are the Muslims and the Western forces marshaled by the Zionist Jews.

So it is basically going to be a clash between the Zionist Jews and the Muslims. While these two opponents may possibly be fighting for their individual ideologies, the Western forces, with United States of America in the lead, are in for more than that. As a spin-off benefit, they are also eyeing the still massive, though fast dwindling, energy resources buried beneath the burning sands of the Middle East.

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The IgnoramUS

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by Anwaar Hussain

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Most Americans don’t know that back in November 1999 when George W Bush, the then Republican frontrunner in the United States presidential elections, was subjected to a little foreign policy quiz by a Boston TV, he did not know the names of two leaders, among others, who represented about one-fifth of humanity…the leaders of Pakistan and India.

Most Americans don’t know that such was the state of the awareness of a man about to be handed over the reins of the most awesome military machine of the most powerful country on planet earth and let loose upon the world.

Most Americans don’t know that their country’s foreign policy has been held hostage to the wellbeing of the state of Israel for the past about four decades and all the world’s major crisis, including the so called ‘war on Terror’, can be traced, one way or the other, to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and America’s extremely partisan Israel-centric role in that. Read more



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Anwaar’s articles appear simultaneously here at Truth Spring and at Soul Vibes in The Pakistan Tribune.


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