printJust so you know, the Nazis were not the originators of the yellow cloth with which they tagged Jews. The odious tagging rag has its origins in the laws of the Charter of Omar—a set of vicious anti-infidel rules that were applied to Jews with extra vim. These laws were introduced by the caliph who succeeded the prophet Mohammed.
Prior to the prophet, Jews and Arabs did indeed live in relative harmony, but when Mohammed failed to convert the Jews to Islam, the proselytizing prophet of peace exterminated at least one Jewish tribe, etched the Koran with anti-Jewish vitriol, and launched centuries of brutality against Jews. Arabs also preceded the Nazis by centuries with the Jewish ghetto—they pioneered a dwelling designated specifically for Jews and known in Arabic as the hara or mellah.*
Why is this currently relevant?
Over to Andy Bostom, reporting for The American Thinker: “Controversy still swirls over allegations that Iran’s government plans to require non-Muslims to wear identifying clothing. The Canadian National Post has retracted its May 19, 2006 report about a putative Iranian Law requiring non-Muslim minorities—Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians—to wear color-coded strips of cloth attached to their garments, to distinguish them from Muslims. Mr. Amir Taheri, author of the article, is standing by his report.”
Dependably ignorant, Jewish leadership, such as The American Jewish Committee, has done as it invariably—and perennially—does: invoke the Nazi experience as the proper historical context for the alleged reinstitution of the badge in Iran. This is how Dr. Stephen M. Steinlight distilled their ignorance vis-a -vis the nature and source of the existential threat facing the community:
“There is a sad if also somewhat comic irony to the fact that legions of employees at organizations like ADL, the American Jewish Committee, and the Presidents’ Conference must pass through a gauntlet of concrete barriers, armed guards, metal detectors, and double bulletproof anterooms as they come to work each morning to protect them from radical Islamic terrorists, in order to spend their days studying and then disseminating reports on the ‘threat’ posed by Evangelical Christians or the non-issue of Mormon conversion of dead Jews or the imaginary anti-Semitism that ‘The Passion of the Christ’ did not produce. Meanwhile, the legislative affairs staffs of these same organizations are directed to lobby against the very immigration reforms that could minimize the danger.”
Bostom, for his part, has patiently explained to an official at The Wiesenthal Center that, “While memories of the Holocaust are fresher and more widely held than memories of traditional Islamic oppression of Jews, such comparisons should be avoided. To invoke the Holocaust blinds us to the far longer and much more deeply-rooted traditions in the Islamic world which predate the rise of Nazism by well over a millennium.”
To no avail…
* From Andy Bostom more on the meaning of “mellah”: “‘salted, cursed grounds,’ which were in fact the Jewish ghettoes of the Maghrib (North African) cities under Muslim rule. This derives from the fact that Jews were forced to salt the decapitated heads of those the Muslims decapitated (for whatever reason), thus preserving the heads for public display. Jews alone were designated to do this dehumanizing work by their Muslim overlords.”