Posted on 05/12/2003 9:59:57 PM PDT by JohnHuang2
The Harvard Divinity School may return a $2.5 million donation from the United Arab Emirates ruler, Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan, earmarked to fund a Professorship in Islamic Studies. Why? As reported by Boston Globe reporter Jenna Russell, the benevolent Sheikh openly espouses a virulent Judenhass. Moreover, his Zayed Center funds lectureships for noble, learned figures like perennial presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche, who opines on international Jewish conspiracies, Roger Garaudy, an "expert" Holocaust denier, Umayma Jalahma, a Saudi blood libel "scholar", esteemed for her authoritative claim that Purim pastries contain Gentile blood, and Thierry Massan, author of a runaway bestseller in France maintaining that the U.S. government orchestrated the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center.
The Globe report, however, completely missed a less sensational, but equally insidious thread related to this story: the attempt by the Zayed Center to negate and re-write the millennial history of brutal oppression of Mizrachi (Oriental) Jews under Arab Muslim rule. A June 2002 report in the Gulf News, highlighted the "findings" from a symposium sponsored by the Zayed Center, entitled ' The Jews in The Arab World '. The Goebbel's- like summary communique included such frank howlers as:
"… [the Oriental Jews'] situation in the Arab countries throughout the history of the Arab Islamic civilization…rendered an exemplary model of tolerance, understanding, peaceful living, religious and sectarian freedom, in addition to preservation of the rights to privacy…"
"… [the present] peaceful co-existence of Muslims and Jews in Arab Muslim countries, where Jews are treated equally and enjoy their fundamental rights and freedom, which they cannot under Israeli regimes…Arab Jews have always been denied their fundamental rights and freedom under Israeli regimes…"
Even more disturbing was the openly proclaimed agenda, based upon this obscene historical negationism: "The participants also called upon Arab research centers to conduct studies and research focusing on the fact that the Jews have never enjoyed freedom and good treatment such as that provided under the Arab Islamic rule."
Primary source documents compiled by a serious, objective Middle East Studies scholar, Dr. Tudor Parfitt (a Gentile), characterize the plight (which had persisted for over a millennium) of 300,000 Moroccan Jews, until Morocco became a French Protectorate in 1912. Only then, in the early 20th century, was the discriminatory treatment of Jews under the Shari'a (Islamic Holy Law) abrogated by direct French control. Jews throughout North Africa, as well as in Yemen and Palestine, shared a similarly bleak fate under the Shari'a.
Professor Parfitt's essay, "Dhimma Versus Protection in Nineteenth Century Morocco", [Pp. 142-166, In: "Israel and Ishmael: Studies in Muslim Jewish Relations", edited by Tudor Parfitt, New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000] contains a written appeal from the President and Vice President of the Anglo-Jewish Association in February, 1888 to Lord Salisbury, elucidating the horrific persecution of the Jews of Morocco. Their basic desire was abolition of the dhimma imposed on their Moroccan co-religionists. This pact (dhimma) by which Jews (and other non-Muslims) conquered by jihad wars were afforded their lives and some limited autonomy, in exchange for payment of the blood ransom poll tax (jizya), also entailed a host of discriminatory and humiliating regulations. These regulations created longstanding, serious disabilities for Moroccan Jews, twenty-seven examples of which were enumerated in this 1888 appeal:
Well-healed, oil-money supported, pseudo-academic "think tanks", such as the Zayed Foundation, should not be allowed to promote their warped historiography, which negates the suffering of Oriental Jews, in Islamic Studies and/or Middle East Studies programs. Under the Shari'a in Morocco, into the early 20th century, the murder of a Jew by a Muslim could be "compensated" for by the payment of £40 . At the beginning of the 21st century, in a free and decent society like the United States, we must make clear to our academic institutions that no donation, whatever its sum, will permit the suppression of this sad, brutal historical legacy.
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