How can you talk to someone who wants you dead?

Bataween
Point of No Return
17 September '10

Iraq-born TV broadcaster Salim Fattal is unforgiving of Arab enmity towards the Jews; he believes the world's media bias towards Israel is a new form of antisemitism. Dan Pine interviewed him for the San Francisco J. News Weekly:

One day in the early 1940s, little Salim Fattal ran away from Muslim toughs in his dusty Baghdad neighborhood. The older boys finally caught the 12-year-old and slapped him around for no reason other than Salim was a Jew.

Bolting home, he cried to his mother, “Where is the justice?” Salim’s mother laughed out loud and replied in Arabic, “You are looking for justice? You are Jewish.”

Such was life for Iraqi Jews before the founding of Israel in 1948. Once Fattal and his family escaped to the Jewish state in 1950, they started life anew. But Fattal never forgot, or lost, his Mizrachi roots.

Fattal, 79, is a retired Israeli broadcaster and writer. He pioneered Israel’s Arabic-language radio and television. He directed acclaimed documentaries, including a three-part series on the Jews of Iraq and a six-part series on the Jews of North Africa.

(Read full story)

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