Posted on 03/22/2009 2:19:48 PM PDT by PRePublic
http://www.youtube.com/v/iuq3GnOXXjg&hl=en&fs=1
Here is the trailer for the superb filmmaker Pierre Rehov's Silent Exodus. Silent Exodus was selected at the International Human Rights Film Festival of Paris in 2004 and presented at the UN Geneva Human Rights Annual Convention that same year.
Here is a summary of the film:
In 1948 nearly one million Jews lived in Arab lands. But In barely twenty years, they have become forgotten fugitives, expelled from their native lands, forgotten by history and where the victims themselves have hidden their fate under a cloak of silence.
A people whom legend have always associated with "wandering" many of these Jews from Arab lands had lived there for thousands of years and accepted their fate, through good times and bad times.
But 1948, the beginning of their exodus, also saw the birth of the State of Israel.
And, while the Arab armies were preparing to invade the young refugee-country, the survivors of the Shoah were piling up in rickety boats. Meanwhile a few hundred thousand Arabs from Palestine were getting ready to flee their homes, convinced that they would return as winners and conquerors.
Soon - by a terrible twist of fate they, as well, began to fill up refugee camps and passed on their refugee status to new generations.
The Jews, however, did not receive refugee status.
They had just rediscovered the land of their birthright.
And if they came from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq or from Yemen, if they had lost everything, even their relatives and their cemeteries, they were ready to rebuild their lives in the West and for many - in Israel - and try to forget their past.
Without ever asking for compensation or the right of return, or even wishing that their story be told...
And here also is an illuminating article on the subject by Magdi Cristiano Allam, "The Arabs Without the Jews: Roots of a Tragedy" (translated from Italian by Lyn and Lawrence Julius):
Israel is the keeper of a mutilated Arab identity, the repository for the guilty consciences of the Arab peoples, the living witness to a true history of the Arab countries, continuously denied, falsified and ignored.http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/025195.php
Seeing Pierre Rehov's documentary film 'The Silent Exodus' about the expulsion and flight of a million Sephardi Jews helped me gain a better understanding of the tragedy of a community that was integral and fundamental to Arab society. Above all it has revealed to me the very essence of the catastrophe that befell it, a catastrophe which the mythical Arab nation has never once called into question. In a flash of insight I could see that the tragedy of the Jews and the catastrophe of the Arabs are two facets of the same coin. By expelling the Jews who were settled on the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean centuries before they were arabised and islamised, the Arabs have in fact begun the lethal process of mutilating their own identity and despoiling their own history. By losing their Jews the Arabs have lost their roots and have ended up by losing themselves.
As has often happened in history, the Jews were the first victims of hatred and intolerance. All the "others" had their turn soon enough, specifically the Christians and other religious minorities, heretical and secular Muslims and finally, those Muslims who do not fit exactly into the ideological framework of the extreme nationalists and Islamists. There has not been a single instance in this murky period of our history when the Arab states have been ready to condemn the steady exodus of Christians, ethnic-religious minorities, enlightened and ordinary Muslims, while Muslims plain and simple have become the primary victims of Islamic terror.
Underlying the Arab 'malaise' is an identity crisis that neither Nasserist nor Ba'athist pan-Arabism, nor the Islamism of the Saudi Wahabis, the Muslim Brotherhood, Khomeini and Bin Laden has been able to solve. It's a contagious identity crisis, spreading to and taking hold of the Arab and Muslim communities in the West.
I remember that around the mid-1970s the Arab exam in civic education taken in both state and public schools in Egypt defined Arab identity thus: "the Arabs are a nation united by race, blood, history, geography, religion and destiny." This was a falsification of an historical truth based on ethno-religious pluralism, an ideological deception aimed at erasing all differences and promoting the theory of one race overlapping with a phantom Arab nation in thrall to unchallengeable leaders. It was directly inspired by Nazi and fascist theories of racial purity and supremacy which appealed to the leadership and ideologues of pan-Arabism and Islamism. It is no wonder that in this context Manichean Israel is perceived as a foreign body to be rejected, a cancer produced by American imperialism to divide and subjugate the Arab world.
The historical truth is that the Middle Eastern peoples, in spite of their arabisation and islamisation from the 7th century onward, continued to maintain a specific identity reflecting their indigenous and millenarian ethnic roots - cultural, linguistic, religious and national. The Berbers, for example, who constitute half the population of Morocco and a third of that of Algeria, have nothing or very little in common with the Bedouin tribes at the heart of Saudi or Jordanian society. When in 1979 Egypt was sidelined from the Arab League for signing a peace treaty with Israel President Sadat restored its Pharaonic Egyptian identity which he proudly contrasted with its Arabness. Here was an isolated but significant attempt to recapture an indigenous identity - advertising historical honesty and political liberation while saying 'enough is enough' to rampant lies and demagogy. Before the screening of the 'Silent Exodus' in the Congress Hall in Milan, a gentleman in his Seventies came up to me and said, in perfect Egyptian dialect: "I am a Jew from Alexandria. I have recently been in Tunisia and Algeria. I have to say that people there are not like us, they don't have the sense of irony that distinguishes us Egyptians." I smiled and replied that indeed, the Egyptians have a reputation as jokers. They are capable of laughing at anything, including themselves.
What struck me was the "us" - "us Egyptians": even if we were both Italian citizens, he a Jew and I a Muslim. It reminded me that just after the 1967 defeat, I discovered by complete accident that the girl I was in love with - we both were 15 - was Jewish. For me she was a girl like any other. But for the police who submitted me to intensive interrogation she was a 'spy for Israel' and I was her accomplice.
In fact 'the Silent Exodus' testifies that anti-Semitism and the pogroms against the Jews of the Middle East preceded the birth of the state of Israel and the advent of ideological pan-Arabism and pan-Islamism. It infers that hatred and violence against the Jews could originate in an ideological interpretation of the Koran and the life of the prophet Muhammed taken out of context.
It would be a mistake to generalise and not to take into account that for long periods coexistence was possible between the Muslims, Christians and Jews of the Middle East, at a time when in Europe the Catholic Inquisition was repressing the Jews and when the Nazi Holocaust was trying to exterminate them. In the same way, one cannot ignore Israel's responsibility together with Arab leaders in the emergence of the drama of millions of Palestinian refugees and the unresolved question of a Palestinian state.
The fact remains that of the million Jews who at the end of 1945 were an integral part of the Arab population, only 5,000 remain. These Arab Jews, expelled or who fled at a moment's notice, have become an integral part of the Israeli population. They continue to represent a human injustice and an historical tragedy. Above all, they are indicative of an Arab civil and identity catastrophe. That is why to recognise the wrongs committed towards the Arab Jews - as the maverick Libyan leader colonel Gaddafi has recently done - by objectively rediscovering their past and millenarian roots, by finding again their tolerant and plural history and by totally and sincerely reconciling themselves with themselves, the Arabs could free themselves from the ideological obscurantism which has relegated them to the most basic level of human development and has changed the region into the most problematic and confict-ridden on earth.
The G-d of Abraham, Issac and Jacob is regathering His people. I only wish that he would regather the 6,000,000 Brothers and Sisters in this country. They are complacent as were their kin in Europe. Perhaps this latest economic upheaval will call them back to Eretz.
richardtavor,
The Jews of America voted overwhelmingly for the magic negro who is throwing Israel under the bus.
Israelis seem unwilling to take the steps necessary to defend their own lands.
Land for peace?
Bull shiit, that thinking is going to get Israel dead.
Land For Peace... Formula for the Destruction of Israel!Leftist Jews and other Anti-War protestors think giving land to the Arabs ... and it will NEVER work if Israel is sacrifice to the Arab-Muslim Nazis now. ...
http://www.masada2000.org/land4peace.html
Land for Peace Doesn’t Work, Giving away an area does not help..
http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2009/01/land-for-peace-doesnt-work.html
Most interesting.
The logical population exchange took place beginning in 1948. Israel absorbed the displaced Jews, and the Arabs should have absorbed the displaced Arabs. No negotiation should take place without that point being made over and over, no matter how much it might infuriate the Arabs. That's a good starting point for negotiations, and it puts things in proper historical context.
I thought nearly all Jews in savage Muzzieland after 1948 would have long since skedaddled. Why is this news now?
You may find this documentary informative, even if you don’t always agree with it.
It's probably not news, but it's also not mentioned very often. It happened practically concurrent with the departure of Palestinians from Israel, the Palestinians who became the Palestinian refugees that we hear about incessantly.
The Jews took care of the Jewish refugees from Arab countries. The Arabs turned the Palestinian refugees into seemingly eternal political pawns. That fact is seldom mentioned, but I think it should be mentioned every time the Palestinian problem is mentioned, which is almost daily.
It’s a miracle! (That there are still any Jews in muslim lands)
The results can be kind of entertaining.
It depends on which country. Morocco's 300,000 Jews left somewhat slowly, as conditions were better there, and the King took pains to protect them. A lot left after the 1967 War (including my wife's family), when popular sentiment turned more and more against the Jews. Even though most Moroccans remained friendly, there was a vocal minority who made known their deep hostility, and the Jews decided to make their way somewhere else (mostly to Israel).
There will be no land for peace. Israel will survive because G-d said so. The 6 million who are still here will eventually make aliyah and return to Eretz Yisrael.
Not all Jews in moslem countries have been permitted to leave. Syria is holding about 10,000 Jews hostage in ghettos and does not permit them to travel abroad. The headquarters of Hamas is located in the Jewish quarter of Damascus. Hamas members take Jews off the street there and torture them for amusement.
There are some Jews in Iran as well.
Why is it so difficult to not regard Arabs in general as a pack of bloody savages?
If you'd like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
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A rarely discussed act of genocide.
Note that the author of this article is a Muslim. Hope he’s watching his back, because he’s now a “collaborator”.
I hope, no dangerous “Fatwa” reaches him.
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