Larisa Silbert comments

Ewww.

Yabits: Well, prior to the partition there was the al-Husseini family causing some pretty awful horrors for the Jewish population (such as the wholesale support for the Final Solution, blocking Jewish children from fleeing to areas of Southern Europe not controlled by the Nazis in case they might end up in Palestine, etc.) Stuff like the Hebron and Safed massacres of '29 also springs to mind. There was some anti-Jewish violence in the land long before partition, and even before Zionism existed for that matter (1834 pogrom in Safed, for example). Of course it was much better than what was happening in Europe, but nonetheless, it wasn't exactly the romantic rosy picture that the anti-Israel movement often likes to make out.

Besides, the experience that the Jews living in other parts of the Arab world after partition had, with either fleeing rampant persecution or being literally booted out (having land and assets confiscated that were much larger and of much more value in total than that of the Palestinian refugees of the Naqba) would suggest that even though many of the Jews of the Arab world may have felt that they were of their nationality first and their ethnicity/religion second, that when push came to shove, the majority group felt otherwise. (The numbers of Jews who fled or were expelled were equivalent to the number of Palestinian Arabs who fled or were expelled from Palestine. Unfortunately their similarly terrible experience, despite many parallels, has been very much forgotten by the world. I very much support a free Palestine and a safe Israel, but I do find it sad how selective our humanism is.)

I visited the National Museum in Beijing a couple of years ago. Conveniently overlooking Tiananmen Square, where, of course, nothing ever happened; it is basically one giant shrine to Mao and the Communist Party (both of whom could of course do no wrong. What is this cultural revolution you speak of?), combined with so much anti-Japanese and anti-Western rhetoric that it was unbelievable. Ironic considering Mao was likely responsible for more deaths than the Japanese... It's pretty clear that in order to keep your people placid in the face of one of the world's shittiest governments, the best way to get them to forget about all the evil shit that's been done in its name is to find them someone to despise.

It's definitely true that the levels of antisemitism in a country seem inverse to the number of Jews actually present. Case in point: despite the huge levels of antisemitism in the Middle East, the levels of antisemitism among Muslims/Arabs living in the West are actually quite low (see PEW surveys on the subject for evidence of this). And the Israeli-Arabs, who of course meet more Jews than anyone else in the Middle East, have a relatively positive opinion of Jews compared to the rest of the ME (it was something like 50% antisemitism, which is actually pretty good compared to the rest of the ME which is generally in the high 90 percents).

The firebrand Italian imam isn't necessarily that representative, either: there's even a Muslim Zionist imam in Italy, Sheikh Prof. Abdul Hadi Palazzi. The extremist and anti-semitic violence coming out of the European Muslim community is shocking and terrifying, but I don't feel that it's representative of European Muslims as a whole by any means, and I have seen a lot of pro-Palestine supporters condemn those people very strongly, as they certainly do a lot more harm to their cause than good.

YAYYY I'm so glad. I love Nori-P! Poor girl was seriously hounded to a ridiculous extent