Farhud: Futuwwa; Mufti; Hitler's F. Grobba; Rashid 'Ali
Farhud - June-1941 pogrom on Jews in Iraq, only for being Jews:
Hitler's F. Grobba; Nazi propaganda over the airwaves; ex-Mufti al-Husseini; Rashid 'Ali; Syrian/Palestinisn teachers; Arab-Nazi Futuwwa gang; Iraqi police/army
Between 180 - 780 died and 1,000 injured
____
Carole L. Basri: 'The Jews of Iraq: A Forgotten Case of Ethnic Cleansing,' 2003, p.12
The official Iraqi Government report concerning the Farhud laid the blame for the slaughter on six sources.
First , the report noted the responsibility of the German Legation , for spreading sustained anti - Jewish Nazi propaganda under the direction of Dr . Fritz Grobba.
A second source of incitement was the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseni and his entourage, which accompanied him to Iraq in 1940 . As the report stated: "Once he was firmly established , he began disseminating Nazi propaganda with great cunning, while decrying the injustice done to Palestine and under the guise of Pan-Arabism and the Islamic religion."
Third , the report pointed to Palestinian and Syrian schoolteachers , installed in every school, who "poisoned the pupils' minds and turned them into instruments of their propaganda." Whenever they perceived that the government was taking any steps against Nazism, they went into action , arousing the students who would then go out in demonstrations and issue harmful manifestos. "The new government expelled these teachers."
Fourth , the report blamed the German Arabic - Language Radio Station, which also spread Nazi propaganda and whose persuasive power only increased after it was made legal by Rashid Ali.
Fifth, the report blamed antisemitic incitement broadcast by the Iraqi Broadcasting Station, which over the two months Rashid Ali was in control , "broadcast false reports about misdeeds in Palestine. The broadcasts contained patently inflammatory agitation against Jews and powerful appeals to A British intelligence Nazism."
A sixth element listed in the report were the Futuwwa and Youth Phalanxes , pro-Nazi paramilitary groups summed up the situation which had participated heavily in the Farhud .
The report also as one in which blamed the leadership of the of the Baghdad Police for their inaction, and ordered that they be brought before a military tribunal for their failure to protect the public .
p.13
A British intelligence report also written in 1942 summed up the situation as one in which "whatever the outcome of the war , . . . the Iraqis will punish the Jews eventually."
'Farhud: a slaughter in Iraq.'
L. Julius, The Jewish Chronicle, May 31, 2011 11:31
There was a frenzied banging on the front door. When my mother answered it, she recognised her aunt's Jewish cook, ashen-faced, pleading to be let in: "I was on a bus, and the Muslims were pulling the Jewish passengers out and killing them. I said I was a Christian." A month earlier, pro-Nazi officers led by Rashid Ali al-Ghailani, had staged a successful coup in Iraq. The German-backed Rashid Ali and his men were soon routed by British troops - but not before they had incited murder and mayhem against the Jewish "fifth column".
Seventy years ago, on June 1 1941, a group of Jews, wearing their Shavuot best, had ventured out for the first time in weeks to greet the returning pro-British Regent, only to be ambushed by an armed Arab mob. Terrified Jews barricaded themselves inside their houses, or ran for their lives across the flat rooftops.
The rioting went on for two days: around 180 Jews died in Baghdad and Basra (the exact figure is not known); hundreds were wounded, 900 homes and 586 Jewish-owned shops were destroyed; there was looting, rape and mutilation. Stories abound of babies murdered and Jewish hospital patients refused treatment or poisoned. The dead were hurriedly buried in a mass grave.
Jews recognised some assailants - the butcher, the gardener. But some brave Arabs saved Jews. My aunt tells how the neighbours sheltered her until the trouble had died down. The neighbour was a prominent Nazi, but his wife was "a lady --- she even made the beds for us," my aunt recounts.
The Farhud (Arabic for "violent dispossession") marked an irrevocable break between Jews and Arabs in Iraq and paved the way for the dissolution of the 2,600-year-old Jewish community barely 10 years later.
"The screams reached the ambassador at a candlelit dinner"
A question mark hovers over the role of the British - encamped on the city outskirts, they delayed intervening until the looting had spread to Muslim districts. Yet the victims' screams reached the British ambassador, Cornwallis, who was enjoying a candlelit dinner and a game of bridge.
Loyal and productive citizens comprising a fifth of Baghdad, the Jews had not known anything like the Farhud in living memory. Before the victims' blood was dry, army and police warned the Jews not to testify against the murderers and looters. Even the official report on the massacre was not published until 1958.
Despite their deep roots, the Jews understood that they would never, along with other minorities, be an integral part of an independent Iraq. Fear of a second Farhud was a major reason why 90 per cent of Iraq's Jewish community fled to Israel after 1948.
But the Farhud was not just another anti-Jewish pogrom.The Nazi supporters who planned it had a more sinister objective: the round-up, deportation and extermination in desert camps of the Baghdadi Jews.
The inspiration behind the coup, and the Farhud itself, came not from Baghdad, but Jerusalem. The Grand Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, sought refuge in Iraq in 1939 with 400 Palestinian émigrés. Together, they whipped up local anti-Jewish feeling. An illiterate populace imbibed bigotry through Nazi radio propaganda. Days before the Farhud broke out, the Nazi youth movement, the Futuwa, went around daubing Jewish homes with a red palm print. Yunis al-Sabawi, who, together with the Mufti and Rashid Ali, spent the rest of the war in Berlin, instructed the Jews to stay in their homes so that they could more easily be rounded up.
The Farhud cemented a wartime Arab-Nazi alliance designed to rid Palestine, and the world, of the Jews. The Mufti's postwar legacy endured. The uprooting of the 140,000 Jews of Iraq followed a Nazi pattern of victimisation - dismantlement, dispossession and expulsion. Nuremberg-style laws criminalised Zionism, freezing Jewish bank accounts, instituting quotas and restrictions on jobs and movement. The result was the exodus of nearly a million Jews from the Arab world.
More Jews died than on Kristallnacht, yet the Farhud has not become part of Holocaust memory. Indeed, the Washington Holocaust Museum had to be vigorously lobbied to include the Farhud as a Holocaust event.
Nazism gave ideological inspiration both to Arab secular parties and the Muslim Brotherhood (Gaza branch: Hamas). The unremitting campaign to destroy Israel is simply a manifestation of the genocidal intentions of Arab nationalism and Islamism. The demons awakened by the Farhud are still with us today.
'Farhud memories: Baghdad's 1941 slaughter of the Jews,'
By Sarah Ehrlich Reporter, Witness
BBC, 1 June 2011
On 1 June 1941, a Nazi-inspired pogrom erupted in Baghdad, bringing to an end more than two millennia of peaceful existence for the city's Jewish minority. Some Jewish children witnessed the bloodshed, and retain vivid memories 70 years later.
[Image caption: Steve Acre witnessed the bravery of his Muslim landlord from a palm tree]
Heskel Haddad, an 11-year-old boy was finishing a festive meal and preparing to celebrate the Jewish festival of Shavuot, oblivious to the angry mob that was about to take over the city.
Thousands of armed Iraqi Muslims were on the rampage, with swords, knives and guns.
The two days of violence that followed have become known as the Farhud (Arabic for "violent dispossession"). It spelt the end for a Jewish community that dated from the time of Babylon. There are contemporary reports of up to 180 people killed, but some sources put the number much higher. The Israeli-based Babylonian Heritage Museum says about another 600 unidentified victims were buried in a mass grave.
"On the first night of Shavuot we usually go to synagogue and stay up all night studying Torah," says Haddad, now a veteran ophthalmologist in New York.
"Suddenly we heard screams, 'Allah Allah!' and shots were fired. We went out to the roof to see what's happening, we saw fires, we saw people on the roofs in the ghetto screaming, begging God to help them."
The violence continued through the night. A red hand sign, or hamsa, had been painted on Jewish homes, to mark them out. Families had to defend themselves by whatever means they could.
Haddad remembers the marauders coming down his street at dawn, and watching them from the roof as they looted his neighbour's house.
"My father had a dagger in his hand and a pipe to prevent people from attacking us on the roof. An idea came to me and I took some bricks from breaking the walls and started throwing them. Other kids came with me and began throwing rocks on these people.
"And when we hit somebody and they began to bleed, they began screaming 'Allah!' and they left. And they left the loot behind them."
Some families bribed policemen to stand guard, paying half a dinar for each bullet fired. Others owe their lives to Muslims who took great risks to protect them.
Woman's breast
In a nearby street in a mixed Jewish and Muslim quarter, Steve Acre lived with his widowed mother and eight siblings in a house owned by a Muslim.
Acre, now 79 and living in Montreal, climbed a palm tree in the courtyard when the violence began. He still remembers the cry "Cutal al yehud" which translates as "slaughter the Jews".
[Image caption: Nazi influence in Baghdad fanned anti-British and anti-Semitic sentiments]
From the tree he could see the landlord sitting in front of the house.
"When the mob came he talked to them. He told them that we are orphans who took refuge in his house and they cannot touch us. If they want us they have to kill him. So lucky for us, the mob moved away, moved to other houses," he remembers.
The men then crossed the street and screams began to emanate from the house of his mother's best friend.
"Later lots of men came outside and set the house on fire. And the men were shouting like from joy, in jubilation holding up something that looked like a slab of meat in their hands.
"Then I found out, it was a woman's breast they were carrying - they cut her breast off and tortured her before they killed her, my mother's best friend, Sabicha."
Until the Farhud, Baghdad had been a model of peaceful coexistence for Jews and Arabs. Jews made up about one in three of the city's population in 1941, and most saw themselves as Iraqi first and Jewish second.
Nazi tide
So what caused this terrible turn of events?
[Image caption The Grand Mufti and Hitler, pictured, were closely linked with Rashid Ali]
A month earlier, a pro-Nazi lawyer Rashid Ali al-Gilani, had overthrown Iraq's royal family, and started broadcasting Nazi propaganda on the radio.
But when an attack on a British Air Force base outside Baghdad ended in humiliating failure, he was forced to flee. The Farhud took place in the power vacuum that followed.
In a tragic twist to the tale, it turns out the British Army could have intervened to halt the violence. On 1 June, British cavalry were just eight miles from the city, having raced 600 miles from Palestine and Egypt under orders to prevent Iraqi oil falling into Nazi hands.
"To Britain's shame, the army was stood down," says historian Tony Rocca, co-author with Farhud survivor Violette Samash of the book, Memories of Eden.
"Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, Britain's ambassador in Baghdad, for reasons of his own, held our forces at bay in direct insubordination to express orders from Winston Churchill that they should take the city and secure its safety. Instead, Sir Kinahan went back to his residence had a candlelight dinner and played a game of bridge."
A move to halt the pogrom was finally taken by the Mayor of Baghdad and police loyal to the Iraqi monarchy, who imposed a curfew at 5pm on 2 June.
After the Farhud, life changed drastically for the city's Jews. Up to that point Haddad had had many Muslim friends.
"Suddenly I changed my attitude. I didn't feel any more Iraqi. I felt I'm a Jew and I vowed that I wanted to kill an Arab," he says.
One day, swimming in the River Tigris, he encountered a drowning man, and instinctively helped him to the shore.
"When I came home I was shook up. Not because I saved the guy but because I didn't follow my vow to kill an Arab. And when I went to see the rabbi, he said, 'You can't make a vow to kill. You can only make a vow to help.'
"That's what stimulated me to go into medicine, actually. I knew that I want to save lives, not to kill people."
Lingering distrust
The anti-Semitism that Hitler had successfully exported to Iraq made life unbearable for the Jewish community. There were frequent arrests on false charges of spying and public hangings of prominent Jews.
Morris Zebaida, a survivor who now lives in London, says: "We learnt to live like mice. If we didn't, we would be spat upon or arrested."
In 1950, Jews were finally allowed to leave, on condition they give up all their property and assets, including their bank accounts. By 1952, only 2,000 of 150,000 were left.
Acre and Haddad still feel a lingering distrust of the British, because of their failure to stop the violence.
For Haddad, another legacy of the Farhud is a contradictory attitude to Iraqi Muslims. He has operated on injured Iraqis free of charge, has visited Iraq as an adviser to the government, and is described by Iraq's ambassador in Washington as "the best Iraqi I know". But while he numbers some Iraqi Muslims among his friends, he remains on his guard in the presence of others.
"I have this feeling, a sort of distrust, that the Farhud created," he says. "It's an emotional thing that you cannot eradicate that easily."
'Remembering the Farhud massacre of June 1941,'
Edwin Black/Guest columnist, May 31, 2015, Winston-Salem Journal Now
“Violent dispossession.” In an Arabic dialect, the word is Farhud. For decades after it occurred, many thought the nightmare was a sudden and unexpected convulsion that afflicted the Iraqi Jewish community, one that lived in that land for some 2,600 years. But in truth, the wild rape and killing spree of June 1-2, 1941 was not unexpected.
Soon after Hitler took power in 1933, Germany’s chargé d’affaires in Baghdad, Nazi operatives, acquired the newspaper Al-Alem Al Arabi, converting it into a Nazi organ that published an Arabic translation of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” in installments. Radio Berlin beamed anti-Jewish Arabic programs across the Middle East. The Nazi ideology of Jewish conspiracy and international manipulation was widely adopted in Iraqi society, especially within the framework of the Palestine problem that dominated Iraqi politics.
As Arab Nationalism and Hitlerism fused, numerous Nazi-style youth clubs began springing up in Iraq. One pivotal group known as Futuwwa was nothing less than a clone of the Hitler Youth. In 1938, Futuwwa members were required to attend a candlelight Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg. When the delegation came back from Germany, a common chant in Arabic was, “Long live Hitler, the killer of insects and Jews.”
By the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, and a coterie of transnational Palestinian agitators had thoroughly permeated Baghdad’s ruling circles.
By April 1, 1941, with World War II in full swing, a group of pro-Nazi Iraqi military men known as the Golden Square staged a coup, ousting the British-dominated government. Quickly, the Golden Square welded Iraqi actions to Berlin’s iron will. Why did they become partners? The Golden Square wanted Germany to destroy the British and Jewish presence in their country. The Third Reich craved what was beneath the ground — oil.
On June 1, British authority was nominally restored, but still withdrawn beyond the outskirts of Baghdad. During the few hours surrounding the British-controlled regent’s return, a power vacuum existed in the country. It resulted in the bloodbath of June 1-2 that became known as the Farhud.
Lists of Jews had already been compiled. Jewish homes had been marked in advance with a blood-red palm prints. The text announcing the mass murder was already prepared and scheduled for radio broadcast.
But Jewish leaders who learned of the impending disaster begged for mercy from the temporary local mayoral authorities, who successfully engineered the expulsion from Baghdad of the massacre planners. The radio broadcast on May 31 merely announced that the British-appointed regent would return to his palace from his temporary refuge in Trans-Jordan.
Baghdad’s Jews had every reason to celebrate. June 1 was the joyous holy day of Shavuot, commemorating when the Law was given to the Jews on Mt. Sinai. Baghdad’s Jews thought stability had returned to their 2,600-year existence in Iraq. They were so wrong.
At about 3 p.m. that June 1, Regent ’Abd al-Ilah landed at the Baghdad airport. He was making his way across al-Khurr Bridge when a contingent of Baghdadi Jews went out to greet him. As the group came to the bridge, they encountered a contingent of dejected soldiers just returning from their dismal surrender to British forces. The mere sight of these Jews, bedecked in festive holiday garb, was enough to enrage the soldiers.
Suddenly, the Jews were viciously attacked with knives and axes. Several were hacked to death right then and there on the bridge. The planned systematic extermination, now foiled, broke down into a spontaneous citywide slaughter.
Baghdad became a fast-moving hell. Frenzied mobs raced throughout the city and murdered Jews openly on the streets. Women were raped as their horrified families looked on. Infants were killed in front of their parents. Home and stores were emptied and then burned. Gunshots and screams electrified the city for hours upon hours. Beheadings, torsos sliced open, babies dismembered, horrid tortures, and mutilations were widespread. Severed limbs were waved here and there as hideous trophies.
In home after home, furniture was moved up against the door to create a barricade. As Arabs breached the entrances, many families escaped to the roof, one step ahead.
Fleeing Jews jumped from one roof to another. In some instances, parents and siblings threw children down from roofs to waiting blankets below.
Women were defiled everywhere. Arabs broke into the girl’s school and the students were raped — endlessly. Young or old, Jewish females were set upon and mercilessly gang raped and often mutilated.
In truth, no one will ever know many were murdered or maimed during those two dark days. One Iraq historian suggested as many as 600 were murdered during the overnight rampage.
Farhud — in Arabic, the word means violent dispossession. It was a word the Jews of wartime Europe never knew. Holocaust — it was a word the Jews of wartime Iraq never knew. But soon they would all know their meaning regardless of the language they spoke. After the events of June 1-2, 1941, both words came together.
Edwin Black is the author The Farhud -- Roots of the Arab-Nazi Alliance in the Holocaust and other books. Today, he will lead a commemoration of International Farhud Day at a globally streamed event at the United Nations
When Nazism met Arabism
When Baghdad Burned: The June 1941 Farhud Massacre
The fusion of Nazism and Arab nationalism in the Middle East spelled unimaginable horror for Iraq's ancient Jewish community.
E. Black , Israel National News, 27/05/15 16:44
Comments
Post a Comment