James Abourezk On Muslim Persecution Of Christians: Blame Bush And Israel!

James Abourezk served from 1971 to 1973 in the House, after which he became the first Arab-American to serve in the Senate--representing South Dakota from 1973 to 1979.

Not surprisingly, he has been critical of US support for Israel.
Equally unsurprisingly, Abourezk has come out in defense of the Arab world in the face of the many recent attacks on Christians in the Arab world that have gained media attention.

So it's only natural that Abourezk's response to Arab persecution of Christians is to attack th 'Israel Lobby':

The article in the Dec. 20 Argus Leader by Los Angeles Times columnist Tim Rutten reads like a talking points memo from the Israeli lobby.

...For those who have studied the history of the Middle East, as I have, Rutten is engaged in a
massive lie, designed, one supposes, to elicit sympathy for Israel from the American reading
public.

I have no idea who those people are who have studied the history of the Middle East, as Abourezk has, but I do hope they are not all as sloppy in the argumentation as he is. Abourezk writes:

What really happened in those Arab countries was that the Zionist movement, the one that created Israel out of stolen Palestinian lands, deliberately tried to frighten the ancient Jewish communities in the Arab world in an effort to have them emigrate to Israel. In Iraq, Zionist agents were caught bombing coffee houses where Iraqi Jews congregated, with the result that, fearing injury and death, a great many of them left for Israel.

Let's put aside the fact that this was supposed to be about the Muslim persecution of the Arabs (Rutten mentions Israel as a side point at the end of his article) and address this tangential claim. Firstly, he claims that in all Arab countries where Jews fled, it was the 'Zionists' who scared them out--but offers only Iraq as proof. In point of fact, there actually is a dispute as to whether the Arabs were behind it or the Jews. Abourezk is of course free to choose whichever side he chooses, but there are reasons to be suspicious of claims that Israel was behind this.

Checking Wikipedia about the Baghdad bombings, we find--

According to Israeli historian Moshe Gat, in his book The Jewish Exodus from Iraq, 1948–1951 the attacks were the work of Arab extremists and Jews rushed to take advantage of the March 1950 Denaturalisation Act allowing Jews to emigrate after renouncing their Iraqi citizenship--and they were well aware the law was due to expire just one year later. Anti-Jewish disturbances only added to the the impetus. Gat also points to the difficulty Israel was having absorbing the current rate of Iraqi emigration as a further reason to doubt that Israel would take measures to increase it. Additionally, an Iraqi army officer, known for his anti-Jewish views, was originally arrested for the attacks but never charged--this despite the fact that explosives similar to those used were found in his home. In fact the bombings followed the pattern of anti-Jewish incidents in Iraq, and the prosecution was unable to produce any eyewitnesses.

Historian Esther Meir-Glitzenstein, in her book, Zionism in an Arab Country: Jews in Iraq in the 1940s writes that many thousands of Iraqi Jews had already registered to leave by the time the bombings started. According to Meir-Glitzenstein, the arrests and trials were the Iraqi government's attempt to demonstrate it was not "helping Israel" by letting Jews leave.

Abourezk is still not ready to address the Muslim persecution of Christians. Instead he invokes Mike Wallace to prove what a swell place Syria is for the Jews:

When Mike Wallace, also a Jew, did a CBS "60 Minutes" investigation of Zionist claims that Syrian Jews were being persecuted, he found - and showed - that Syrian Jews were treated no better or no worse than Syrian Arabs were treated. When the Israeli lobby vigorously complained about his report, Wallace returned to Syria and did another investigation of the treatment of Syrian Jews and made the same finding. After two such shows on CBS, the lobby stopped complaining.

The truth is not that simplistic. Robert Tuttle writes about Dr. Nassim Hasbani, who spoke glowingly to Wallace about life for Jews in Syria--and then retracted:

On the one hand, critics of 60 Minutes were correct to doubt Hasbani’s rosy portrayal of Jewish life in Syria. In a country considered Israel’s most formidable enemy, Syrian Jews had long been subject to special restrictions, mistrust and, at times, outright persecution. In the northern city of Aleppo, Synagogues were burned and vandalized shortly after the United Nations voted to partition Palestine in 1947. In 1949, a bomb was placed in a Damascus Synagogue killing 12 people. During the 1967 Arab-Israeli War - in which Syria lost control of the Golan Heights overlooking the Galilee – armed Palestinian fighters broke into the homes of Jews and pointed guns at family members. No one was shot but the incident was a reminder to the community of its vulnerability.

For most of Syrian history after 1947, Jews could not travel outside their country except on rare occasions and travel within Syria required permission. The Jews who did leave Syria escaped covertly through Turkey or Lebanon. Most continued onto the United States or Israel. Those who were caught were imprisoned.

Hasbani said that his glowing portrayal of Syria was intended to win favors from Syrian authorities. Yet, he added, the 60 Minutes broadcast was not totally false either. Conditions were beginning to improve for Syria’s Jews and would continue to improve in the months and years after Wallace’s visit.

Andrew Bostom writes about a second similarly questionable source about life for Jews in Syria that Wallace accepts at face value--he quotes Saul Friedman, from his Without Future: The Plight of Syrian Jewry:

...a Wallace segment on 60 Minutes in 1975 would paint an equally misleading picture of conditions in Syria. Once more carefully selected spokesmen expressed gratitude to the Ba'athist reime for bringing stability to their lives. One, Maurice Nuseyri...offered his own identity card as evidence of a thaw in Arab-Jewish relations. Although there was a line where Nuseyri's religion was typed, the hateful Mussawi was lacking. Wallace did inquire how long Nuseyri had had the card but did not follow-up when the latter responded, "Oh, about one week." Nor did the normally relentless journalist inquire after two of Nuseyri's children who had fled the country, abandoning all property in their quest for freedom. [emphasis added]

See also Bostom's The Legacy of Islamic Anti-Semitism, p162-164.

CAMERA has noticed that the "normally relentless" Mike Wallace does in fact appear to have a blind spot in matters having to do with Israel:

In a 1987 story on Soviet Jews, including refuseniks, invited to immigrate to Israel, Wallace concluded that “one and a half million Soviets identified as Jews apparently live more or less satisfying lives.” Wallace acknowledged that Russia had a history of harboring antisemitism, but then said that anti-Jewish activities were against the law, without mentioning that the law was frequently broken — often by the government.

Notice any similarity to what Wallace reported about Syria?
CAMERA continues:

After talking with refusenik mathematician Victor Brailovsky, whose family had been trying to emigrate to Israel for 15 years, Wallace said, “If it is just Jewish culture the Brailovsky family seeks, they could go to the Jewish Autonomous Region.” This region in Siberia, Birobidzhan, was Stalin’s solution for the Zionist challenge of Jews wanting to move to Palestine and was never popular in the Russian Jewish community. In 1987, the year Wallace filed his story, only 12,000 of the 200,000 residents of Birobidzhan were Jewish.

As Bar-Illan noted, in Birobidzhan “there are no Jewish schools and no study of Hebrew, and ... Jews are incessantly pressured to disappear as an ethnic group ...”

While Brailovsky was the only refusenik shown in the broadcast, Wallace did interview Samuel Zivs and Mikhal Milschstein, described by Bar-Illan as “the most notorious ‘court Jews’ in the USSR ... despised by all self-respecting Jews and representing solely the authorities.”

Read the whole thing for numerous other examples of Wallace's blind spot.

At this point, Abourezk plays games with the reader of his article:

Syria, which Rutten should know, is a secular state, meaning the government does not impose religious requirements. The government is controlled by Alawite Muslims - an offshoot of the Shia movement - but Sunnis, Jews, Christians and Shiites live in relative harmony.

That harmony was disrupted a number of years ago when right-wing Muslims - the Muslim Brotherhood - tried to destabilize the Alawite government and subsequently were wiped out by the government. The Syrian government is tolerant of all religions - but apparently not of those who try to overthrow it. [emphasis added]

Jews live in "relative" harmony?--I will leave it to Abourezk to explain how much disharmony that implies.
As far as Syrian "intolerance" for the Muslim Brotherhood--the slaughter of an estimated 7,000 to 35,000 members of the Muslim Brotherhood qualifies as a bit more than mere 'intolerance'. Some might call it a massacre.

Getting to the point of the article--finally--the Muslim persecution of Christians, Abourezk turns to his second scapegoat: if you can't blame Israel, blame Bush:

In Iraq, from where Rutten claims that Christians are fleeing, he is correct that they are fleeing, but what he omits is that even under the dictator Saddam Hussein, Christians lived safely and without persecution. It was only after President George W. Bush invaded Iraq, bringing chaos and disorder, that the ensuing vicious civil war between Sunnis and Shiites made it totally unsafe for Christians to be caught in the middle.

In response, it is worthwhile noting an editorial in The Morning Sun of Michigan, which doesn't have to look outside of Iraq to explain  why Muslim persecution of Christians has increased in Iraq:

One of the more unfortunate consequences of the U.S. invasion of Iraq has been the virtual decimation of the already small Christian community in Iraq.

Christians were hardly immune from persecution under Saddam Hussein, but since they constituted less than 3 percent of the population and were not a threat to the regime, they were not often a specific target, as were Shia Muslims and Kurds.

Since the 2003 invasion, however, things have gotten worse - not necessarily because of specific government policies (the current constitution offers protection on paper to religious and ethnic minorities) but because of the dynamics of post-invasion Iraq.

Saddam was nominally a secular ruler, though he invoked Allah whenever he ran into trouble or opposition. Iraq now recognizes Islam as the official state religion, and no law can be passed that contradicts its basic tenets.

Abourezk finishes off with his claim that the whole reason the US invaded Iraq to begin with was because of Israel--allowing Abourezk to combine his two favorite scapegoats together.

The fact that members of the Bush administration have debunked the myth that Israel wanted the US to invade Iraq will mean nothing to Abourezk:

Israeli officials warned the George W Bush administration that an invasion of Iraq would be destabilizing to the region and urged the United States instead to target Iran as the primary enemy, according to former Bush administration official Lawrence Wilkerson.

Wilkerson, then a member of the US State Department's policy planning staff and later chief of staff for secretary of state Colin Powell, recalled in an interview that the Israelis reacted

immediately to indications that the Bush administration was thinking of war against Iraq. After the Israeli government picked up the first signs of that intention, said Wilkerson, "The Israelis were telling us Iraq is not the enemy - Iran is the enemy."

Wilkerson describes the Israeli message to the Bush administration in early 2002 as being, "If you are going to destabilize the balance of power, do it against the main enemy."

At the end of the day, nothing here will dissuade Abourezk of any of his opinions.
But then again, obviously I have not studied the history of the Middle East the way he has.

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