Iraq’s Jews

A reader writes:

You write: "Imagine if Iraq's Jews were being rounded up, tortured and murdered on the streets by death squads allied with the ruling Shiite powers. Do you think there would be silence? Or just a small story in the Guardian?"

As it turns out, Iraq's Jews were, in fact, rounded up, tortured, and murdered in Iraq, culminating in the infamous Farhud pogrom of June 1941, in which nearly two hundred Jews were killed and another two hundred were injured. It's hard to imagine today, but Iraq's Jews once numbered over 150,000; Baghdad was once a major Jewish metropolis. Today, about two dozen Iraqi Jews remain in the country. Iraq today is a country whose parliamentary speaker recently felt justified in publicly blaming corruption on "Jews and sons of Jews," and which tried to execute a politician for traveling to Israel for a counter-terrorism conference. (Now there's a perfect example of antisemitism hurting a country's own interests.)

And yet, for most of the last seven decades, there has been almost total silence about the Jews of Iraq. Even the hugely empathetic and well-educated Andrew Sullivan doesn't seem to have heard about what happened to them. It gets only worse when you look at the wider Arab world, whose Jewish population was cleansed from nearly a million before the 1940s down to a few thousand today.

And it wasn't just the Jews, and it's not just ancient history. More recently, Shiite death squads, angry over Saddam's "preferential treatment" of Palestinians who had taken up residence in Iraq years ago, rounded up, brutally tortured (with electric drills), and murdered countless Palestinians, driving many thousands of them into the no-man's land between Iraq and Syria, where they remained in horrible, horrible conditions. Again, there was almost total media silence about their plight. Does anyone even know where they are now?

I don't know why the media don't cover these sorts of stories. But I think it has less to do with the media not caring about gays and lesbians than it does about the media having very low expectations (possibly stemming from deep-seated racist attitudes) of Arab societies.

Of course, a violent police raid on a Jewish community center in America would probably generate far bigger headlines than the horrific raids on gay bars that have been going on down South. Maybe you do make a good point after all.