We’re Going the Wrong Way

There was a time, a period of time that some call The Golden Age of Islam, when, in a good part of the civilized world, Christians, Jews and Muslims lived together in peace and harmony.

Today, they don’t even live together. Virtually all of the Arab Jews have left their home countries and have moved to Israel. Most of those Jews have been asked, in one way or another, to leave.

And now we have these two stories that speak to a result that if ‘humankind’ had a collective conscience, humankind would be thoroughly ashamed.

Baghdad, the ‘home’ of Jews during the Babylonian Exile (about 2600 years ago) is virtually devoid of Jews as the NY Times reports here.

Just over half a century ago, Iraq’s Jews numbered more than 130,000. But now, in the city that was once the community’s heart, they cannot muster even a minyan, the 10 Jewish men required to perform some of the most important rituals of their faith. They are scared even to publicize their exact number, which was recently estimated at seven by the Jewish Agency for Israel, and at eight by one Christian cleric.

. . . snip . . .

Most of his other relatives departed in 1951, among more than 100,000 Jews who fled Iraq between 1949 and 1952, in the years after the state of Israel was created. Their exodus was code named “Operation Ezra and Nehemiah,” after the Jewish leaders who took their people back to Jerusalem from exile in Babylon beginning in 597 B.C.

And if the above is sad, which I feel it pre-eminently is, I juxtapose it against what I consider to be a totally stupid policy by the state of Israel. Again, from the NY Times

The American State Department has reinstated seven Fulbright grants offered to Palestinians in Gaza for advanced study in the United States, reversing a decision to withdraw the scholarships because of Israel’s ban on Palestinians’ leaving Gaza for study abroad.

The American Consulate in Jerusalem sent e-mail messages on Sunday night to all seven telling them it was “working closely” with Israeli officials to secure them exit permits. Maj. Peter Lerner, spokesman for the Israeli Defense Ministry’s office of civilian affairs, said the Gazans would be granted permits after individual security checks.

The policy of not allowing Arabs to get an education and being a force to counter extremism is very similar to the policy in the United States before the Civil War of not allowing slaves to learn to read.

Today

Israel’s Supreme Court will hear petitions brought by Gisha on behalf of two students seeking exit permits for study programs in Germany and Britain. Since January, Ms. Bashi said, almost no students have gotten out of Gaza for such study.

There can only be one outcome to this, if Israel wants to begin to return sanity to an upside-down world.

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