Dear Jon: The Jews fled Iraq decades before the 2003 US invasion

...By 2003, when the Allied invasion began, there were only 34 Jews left in Iraq. Today, there are believed to be 5 Jews remaining. The expulsion of Iraq’s Jews occurred due to the rise of Arab nationalism and Nazi-style annihilationist antisemitism in the 40s. To suggest, as Snow did, that Jewish life in the country ended as the result of the US-led invasion is completely ahistorical.

Adam Levick..
UK Media Watch..
10 June '15..

Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow has been roundly criticized for the following tweet about former Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, who died last week in an Iraqi prison.

Former Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz has died in jail: Nice guy in a nasty situation – made no better by Bush/BLair’s Shock and Awe

— Jon Snow (@jonsnowC4) June 5, 2015

Aziz was sentenced to death for his role as a senior member – and the token Assyrian Christian – of a regime which murdered hundreds of thousands of its own citizens. He was a loyal defender of Saddam Hussein until he was overthrown during the Second Gulf War. Nonetheless, Snow defended his comments about Aziz, telling The Independent:

“I think he was made the fall guy by the West. It’s a long time ago. He’s been in prison for a long time. There were plenty of people who needed to go to prison in that regime. He was one of the only ones who were picked off.”
…

“I just described him as a nice guy. It’s an absolute tragic morass in which everybody has behaved badly. What was the idea of going in and smashing that place? It meant Christians couldn’t stay. It meant Jews couldn’t stay.

Note to Snow: The flight of Iraq’s Jews occurred more than fifty years prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

(Read Full Post)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter, 

.

The chronologically-challenged Stephen Walt

Martin Kramer
Inside the Middle East/JPost
11 February '10

In the past, I've demolished Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer's claim that Israel and its friends drove the United States to war with Iraq. I did it when they published their article, and did it again when they published their book, The Israel Lobby. It's a conspiracy theory, pure and simple. And because Walt is a conspiracy theorist, he does what they all do: he rips evidence out of context.

Here's his latest grasp at a straw: his claim that Tony Blair has "revealed" that "Israel officials were involved in those discussions" on Iraq held between Blair and George Bush in Crawford, Texas in April 2002. Walt brings as evidence this quote from Blair's testimony to the UK commission investigating the Iraq war:

As I recall that discussion, it was less to do with specifics about what we were going to do on Iraq or, indeed, the Middle East, because the Israel issue was a big, big issue at the time. I think, in fact, I remember, actually, there may have been conversations that we had even with Israelis, the two of us, whilst we were there. So that was a major part of all this."

Walt's conclusion: "Blair is acknowledging that concerns about Israel were part of the equation, and that the Israeli government was being actively consulted in the planning for the war." Walt goes on to declare that "more evidence of their influence [of Israel and the Israel lobby] on the decision for war will leak out," and that "Blair's testimony is evidence of that process at work."

When people who don't know much about the Middle East, like Stephen Walt, pose as experts, they make basic mistakes of chronology. So let me remind him of exactly what coincided with the Crawford meeting of April 6-7, 2002.

(Read full article)
.