The Farhud, Iraq's Kristallnacht

[Mediocrates]

http://www.thejc.com/lifestyle/lifes...-kristallnacht

From news article:

For a dwindling number of Iraqi Jews, the holiday of Shavuot brings back each year the traumatic memory of one of the worst racial attacks in modern history. Over two days in 1941 around 800 Jews were murdered in their homes in Baghdad by a huge mob of Muslim rioters as the British army, forbidden from entering the city, looked on from the outskirts.

June 1 and 2 this year mark the 70th anniversary of what became known as the Farhud ( "violent dispossession" in Arabic). As significant as Kristallnacht, the pogrom sounded the death-knell for the oldest community in the diaspora and was a clear demonstration of the hatred exported to the Middle East by Hitler. The Farhud brought to an end 2,600 years of Jewish settlement, yet little has been written about it, very little is taught in Holocaust studies about it, and the British role has never been fully investigated, although many survivors still bear a lifelong distrust of Britain.

The Jews of Iraq had been living peacefully for millennia in Baghdad since the time of Babylon and by 1941 numbered around 150,000, over a third of the population. Professor Heskel Haddad, now an ophthalmologist in Manhattan, was 11-years- old at the time and recalls a happy and secure early childhood. "We had many Jewish and Arab Muslim neighbours and we were very friendly with them. I was Jewish in religion but I felt very much Iraqi. I loved Iraq and I loved the people, whether Muslim or Jew."

One month before the Farhud a violent coup brought a rabidly pro-Nazi lawyer, Rashid Ali al-Gaylani, to power, forcing the country's regent, a friend of the Jews, to seek British protection. Rashid Ali brought to his side the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, a man with strong ties to the Third Reich who had fled from Palestine. Together, they indoctrinated the country with Nazi propaganda; children in Iraqi schools were taught to praise Hitler and that Jews were the internal enemy; Radio Berlin began regular broadcasts in Arabic. Their aim was to rid Iraq of the British presence and turn the country's oil reserves over to the Germans.

See also

http://www.amazon.com/Farhud-Roots-A...=1Y494EZVX4FWI

[Mediocrates]

Even the Beeb calls it Nazi inspired:
http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/201...go-farhud.html

But of course they finish with a lie by proclaiming it was all peace and harmony before the Germans came. Which is nonsense.

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2011...-and-nazi.html

Nazi influences & the pogrom fully documented at the time.

http://hurryupharry.org/2011/06/02/t...unts-us-still/

With many embedded links to other resources

http://www.haaretz.com/misc/article-...169%2C2.208%2C

Ha'aretz comments

http://www.thejc.com/comment-and-deb...slaughter-iraq

The JC (UK)

[Mediocrates]

Colonial powers involvement in the Farhud and other pogroms:

http://hurryupharry.org/2011/06/09/farhud-footnotes/

The behavior of locally-based British decision-makers at the time of the Farhud was not the only example of passive complicity by quasi-colonial or quasi-imperial authorities acting in Britain’s name, motivated by various realpolitical considerations. There was also the 1945 massacre in Tripoli, which caused over 100 deaths and many more injured, when the British Military Administration deliberately waited two days from the initial outbreak on November 5 before intervening decisively (as documented in detail for example by the Quai d’Orsay officials and diplomatic representatives whose correspondence is contained within the file series Afrique-Levant, 1945- ). There was also the pogrom which erupted in Aden at the beginning of December 1947.

Britain was not the only European power guilty in certain situations of abandoning increasingly vulnerable and precarious minority communities to murderous mobs composed of members of the “colonized” majority. In August 1934 the Jews of Constantine paid a bloody price for the manipulation of local passions by professional anti-Jewish agitators, various mainstream Algerian nationalist leaders and morally corrupt pied noir politicians. Whereas such cases of the abandonment of minority communities usually coincided with times of crisis for (quasi-) imperial or colonial domination (another example from Iraq is that the government condoned if not promoted the massacre of Assyrians in Simele in August 1933), the April 1912 Fez massacre occurred at the very beginning of the French protectorate in Morocco (ratified by the Treaty of Fez of March 30 1912). The non-intervention of French troops stationed just outside the mellah had been preceded by raids in this Jewish quarter which ended with the extensive confiscation of arms both allegedly or actually illicit and weapons legitimately held for self-protection.