Yemen: Empty Jewish homes destroyed

[Behind the Aegis]

In the latest attack targeting Yemen's few remaining Jews, rebel Houthi militiamen destroyed several homes that had belonged to the now-absent Jewish community in the northwestern Saada province.

"The Houthis destroyed part of my house and looted it," Rabbi Yehia Youssuf told Reuters in the capital, San'a.

All 67 members of Saada's Jewish community fled following threats from the Houthis, the rabbi says. Some locals say the Jews were threatened because they had been selling wine to Muslims - an accusation the Jews deny, according to Reuters.

A local said the Shi'ite rebels attacked the houses of other Jews after looting the rabbi's.

more...

[Fumesucker]

1. Many Muslims think of alcohol

The same way a lot of Americans think of crack

How many of you would tolerate crack users in your neighborhood?

Not saying what happened is right..

Just a slightly different perspective.

[PCIntern]

2. So it makes sense to desecrate the homes of people...

What ever happened to rule of law, justice, appropriate punishments, and most of all, perspective?

Sure you're saying it's right. Of course you are. Your disclaimer is hollow and just absurdist. Are we Americans or have we descended into primitive savagery? We have allowed this Administration to destroy morality and Higher Law.

Next I'm going to read here that if someone paints their house a color which offends the neighborhood, it will be vaguely appropriate to burn it down.

[KharmaTrain]

3. Nothing Like Some Double Standard To Starrt Your Morning

I'm sure that poster would be all up in arms had the story said "Israelis bulldoze Palenstinian houses"...then it's be a worldwide travesty. But when it's Jews who are seeing homes that their families have lived in for hundreds or thousands of years (yes, Jews have been in Yemen since "biblical" times...and most were chased out after 1948 (I'm surprised any remain), then someone here will find a "moral equivelency"...just sayin'...

Cheers...

[treestar]

23. Whatever happened to the rule of law? In Yemen it may not have

ever been there.

The post you responded to simply tried to give us some perspective; your reaction is way out of place. No one said any of that.

[NutmegYankee]

4. Comparing alcohol to crack cocaine is ludicrous.

Religious use of alcohol cannot be compared to the destructive effects of cocaine. The problem here is fundamentalist Muslims who can't accept that other don't follow their religious rules. I don't give a damn about their perspective. They can whine about their perspective in hell.

[Fumesucker]

5. How about if I used marijuana as an example then?

There is a vast amount of evidence that marijuana is much less dangerous than alcohol.

And yet Rastafarians are not allowed the use of their sacrament in America..

[tritsofme]

6. Last time I checked, "militiamen" don't go out destroying the homes of potheads.

Maybe I'm missing something.

[Fumesucker]

7. Get caught with a single plant

In your yard or your basement and you lose your home..

It happened to someone in my neighborhood only a couple of years ago, they had a couple of pathetic plants in a walk in closet.

Black ski masked police kicked down their door in the middle of the night, herded them all out into the yard in handcuffs and ransacked their home..

They lost everything to civil asset forfeiture.

I'm sure the fact that it was "official" made things so much nicer for them.

[Fumesucker]

33. It's telling that no one responded to my post #7

There are injustices all around us and most of us can only see a few of them.

We all wear blinders, some of them are adjusted to a fairly wide scope while others are very narrow.

From my perspective, religious persecution should be trivially easy to stop..

Everyone should just stop believing in fairy tales.

But then we would find some other reason to persecute our fellow human beings..

Too much melanin in their skins or too little..

They have an epicanthic fold or not.

Too tall, too skinny, too fat, too short, straight hair, curly hair, blue eyes, brown eyes, they're male, they're female, they're too young, too old, funny accent.

The list is endless.

[treestar]

24. Well, I guess that makes the militiamen better people than

these Yemenis.

Though not by a long shot.

The only difference is that there is a rule of law here to the extent at least that the militiamen don't think they'd get away with it without arrest and trial. But if they thought they could, and the government would look aside? Not so sure.

[NutmegYankee]

8. Depends on how much alcohol is consumed, but...

Zealots don't go around burning down the homes of someone who uses marijuana. My problem wasn't with you, just the concept of seeing the "perspective" of an animal who abuses people and burns their homes. Criminals will always have a twisted perspective, we just normally don't try to justify their crimes with them, defense attorneys notwithstanding.

[rinsd]

9. So should we randomly destroy homes in inner cities where crack is a problem?

:shrug:

"Just a slightly different perspective."

Yeah bigoted (not you)

[Fumesucker]

11. Can you honestly saythat Israel

Has always respected Palestinian property rights and never destroyed their homes unjustly?

I'm an atheist and frankly this whole religious hatred thing is way out of hand, on every side.

[NutmegYankee]

12. I figured that would come up.

The Israelis claim that the houses are used as sniper posts to attack Jews and frankly I believe them.


You know, the Palestinians could just deal with it. So they lost land when Palestine got partitioned. The Germans got into one war, lost badly and lost territory. They got into another, lost horrifically, and lost a whole lot more territory. After that, they grew up and made peace.

The Palestinians and allied forces attacked the Jews, lost badly, and lost territory. They attacked again and again, and lost badly each time and got occupied. Here's a clue - stop attacking the Jews (who are not going anywhere - shit, they'd nuke the middle east to glass before they got pushed to the sea) and turn to building a strong nation that trades well with its neighbors.

I can rattle off nation after nation, like Armenia, who suffered this sad history. Almost all of them have formed a country that doesn't blow up their neighbor's teenagers at the mall.


:nopity:

[Fumesucker]

13. The Muslims claim that the Jews were selling wine to Muslims..

And frankly I believe them. :sarcasm:

BTW, If you're American then your nation just illegally attacked and destroyed a nation that had never done anything to it, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands.

[NutmegYankee]

19. Doesn't compare.

One is murder, and leaves evidence in dead bodies on the ground, the other is a bullshit cover story to justify persecution.

[Behind the Aegis]

14. Which has **nothing** to do with the OP. n/t

[Fumesucker]

15. A double standard is better than no standard at all I guess..

Homes being destroyed versus homes being destroyed.. Yep, nothing similar there at all.

As an atheist I find all this religious hatred on all sides to be quite incomprehensible and more than somewhat stupid.

[Behind the Aegis]

20. Learn the meaning of "double standard."

So homes being destroyed by Israelis equates to Jewish homes being destroyed? Oh yes, those are one and the same. :sarcasm:

If you are an atheist, then perhaps you can learn the difference between the actions carried out by Israelis and those actions carried out against Jews. Here's a hint: the actions in the OP were carried out against JEWS, not ISRAELIS. The homes being destroyed are carried out by ISRAELIS not JEWS. See the difference now?

[rockymountaindem]

29. That's a strange statement n.t.

[LeftishBrit]

17. No. But I've noticed something fairly consistent..

When Israelis do something nasty to Palestinians, it gets quite a lot of attention and condemnation.

When Palestinians do something nasty to Israelis/ Jews, it gets quite a lot of attention and condemnation.

When Arab states do something nasty to Jews (or, as many of them do, to Palestinians), it usually barely gets a mention.

I don't know why this is (Arab states certainly get criticized for other things); but it leads to a lot of distortion of the issues. For example, it's often not recognized that a very large number of Israeli Jews are refugees, or descendants of refugees, not from Europe but from Middle Eastern countries - including Yemen.

This may get the thread moved to the I/P forum - which would be itself a symptom of the problem, as this is not an I/P topic, but a Yemen/ Jews topic.

[treestar]

25. No, that was not said

What's wrong with perspective?

No one is defending what the Yemenis did, simply saying that it was based perhaps in their cultural view. This kind of black and white thinking usually characterizes persons further to the right.

[rinsd]

32. So I guess I can't tell a Klansman he's wrong because of his cultural view?

Is that what you are saying?

Because when group A accuses group B of something not in accordance with their religion and then proceeds to burn down group B homes doesn't require cultural understanding. It should be condemned...period.

[LeftishBrit]

16. So it would be OK...

for people to destroy all the homes in a neighbourhood where crack was a problem?

And I seriously doubt that the alcohol issue was the only or main reason for the action anyway. There are reasons why there used to be a large Yemenite Jewish community, and now hardly any are left in Yemen.

[rockymountaindem]

10. Kick.

[JDPriestly]

18. And then people her on DU wonder why so many Jews immigrated

to Israel and why they establish settlements. The Jews remain on of the most persecuted groups on the earth. Please remember that when you condemn Israel.

[Behind the Aegis]

21. LOL!

You think most posters here give a shit? They don't. Anti-Israeli bigotry is an accepted bigotry here. I could post a poll titled: "Should Israel continue to exist?" and you would be shocked by the responses, though you shouldn't be. It is so funny, in the ironic (oh G-d, they have they same view, reversed, as we do) way, that people would scream at the "axis of evil" being "Iraq, Iran, North Korea," but have no issue saying the same thing about "the USA, the UK, and Israel."

[LeftishBrit]

22. I've heard this 'Axis of Evil' one too...

I call this sort of attitude 'mirror-image-ism'; some people respond to the right-wing propaganda about a simplistic division of the world into Goodies and Baddies, not by rejecting this whole idea of a simplistic division, but by reversing it so that America's enemies are the Goodies and its allies the Baddies. Some of it is IMO the direct effect of too much RW propaganda - some people end up thinking that ANYTHING that the propaganda supports must be bad and ANYTHING that the propaganda opposes must be good. (In the same way as someone I knew years ago, who had spent much of his life in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe, thought that EVERYTHING that Pravda opposed, including McCarthyism and Maggie Thatcher, must be a good thing!) And some of it just reflects a general tendency to look for over-simple answers - one of the main reasons for prejudice in general, IMO.

[Zynx]

27. Israel is often condemned here as some horrible demon-beast country with

nothing but evil intentions. I find the fact that is accepted here disgusting beyond belief. There's even casual anti-semitism when issues such as Iraq come up where I've seen DUers try to say all Jews supported the Iraq War when in fact Jewish senators opposed the war in a greater proportion than the Senate as a whole.

[leftynyc]

28. I give a shit

The double standard is sickening. But thankfully, I look at the polls that year after year show that the participants on this board are in such a tiny minority, they're meaningless overall.

[JDPriestly]

31. Well, that is why we have to keep posting our opinions here.

Thanks for your response.

People who condemn Israel are ignorant about the history of the Jewish people and the Palestine-Israeli conflict. They do not understand that the Turks who governed the area until around 1917 (could be off a year or two) sided with the Germans in WWI and that the religious leader of Palestine during the English protectorate that continued through WWII sided with Hitler. Palestine, like similar areas in Europe was subject to being divided by the allies in each case. There was nothing unusual about the allocation of land by the winners of WWII with regard to Palestine than there was about the carving up of Austria after WWI or the establishment of new borders for countries all over Europe after WWII. That is the way war works.

Wars make many people homeless. The winner has the responsibility and power to set the new national boundaries. It always works that way. Although many Americans and their ancestors came here as displaced persons after one war or another, a lot of Americans do not understand that war causes people to lose their homes and become displaced persons -- virtually nationless persons. They have to go somewhere. Usually they can't go back to their former homes.

Around a million Jews were still surviving in NAZI camps at the end of WWII. No one knew where they should go. They could not be released into the German population because they would have been killed and could not have survived. The British did not want to establish Israel. The American government was split on the issue. I believe that the USSR was the first country to vote in the UN for the establishment of Israel. If people knew the true history of Israel, they would not judge the country so harshly.

[treestar]

26. Criticism of Israel is criticism of their current policies

Israel does not have carte blanche to do whatever it pleases to anyone.

Why should being the most persecuted group on earth mean it's ok to persecute others? Why brag about it? It's dangerous to claim power due to victimization. (I've been turned off by that ever since my college roomates were arguing about how their respective groups were more persecuted. It's like a contest to see who is owed the most due to past persecution of one's ancestors). Not very productive and in the end, not very sympathetic, even.

The charge of anti-semitism has been watered down so much, people aren't even afraid of it, anymore. Overdo it and that's what happens. Don't work so hard to be a victim.

As for these Yemenis, they should be condemned for what they are doing. Their religion has such a grip on them that they cannot tolerate others.

[JDPriestly]

30. So, let's condemn and stop religious persecution first,

and the incentive for a lot of other horrible things will end. When people feel pushed into a corner and defenseless, they either die or strike back. That is the animal instinct in each of us. Let's stop pushing people into corners. The intolerance, the burning of houses in Yemen is to be condemned just as intolerance and burning houses elsewhere is to be condemned.

I lived in France in the '60s. While there I met many, many Jewish immigrants whose families had left their ancestral homes in various parts of North Africa. They were essentially homeless, trying to become a part of the French culture. My own husband's family was Jewish from an eastern European country. After WWII, the family was penniless. Very few felt safe staying in Eastern Europe. Various members emigrated across the world. Israel is just one country to which some moved. Quite a few came here. Others went to South America -- even Australia. Religious tolerance is the key. Everyone deserves to have it. As long as Israelis fear what will happen to them in countries other than Israel, there will be immigration into Israel and pressure to build new settlements.