How a Paris Mosque Sheltered Jews from the Nazis during the Holocaust

– Heroic Tale of Holocaust, With a Twist

By ELAINE SCIOLINO

PARIS — The stories of the Holocaust have been documented, distorted, clarified and filtered through memory. Yet new stories keep coming, occasionally altering the grand, incomplete mosaic of Holocaust history.

One of them, dramatized in a French film released here last week, focuses on an unlikely savior of Jews during the Nazi occupation of France: the rector of a Paris mosque.

Muslims, it seems, rescued Jews from the Nazis.

“Les Hommes Libres” (“Free Men”) is a tale of courage not found in French textbooks. According to the story, Si Kaddour Benghabrit, the founder and rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris, provided refuge and certificates of Muslim identity to a small number of Jews to allow them to evade arrest and deportation.

It was simpler than it sounds. In the early 1940s France was home to a large population of North Africans, including thousands of Sephardic Jews. The Jews spoke Arabic and shared many of the same traditions and everyday habits as the Arabs. Neither Muslims nor Jews ate pork. Both Muslim and Jewish men were circumcised. Muslim and Jewish names were often similar.

The mosque, a tiled, walled fortress the size of a city block on the Left Bank, served as a place to pray, certainly, but also as an oasis of calm where visitors were fed and clothed and could bathe, and where they could talk freely and rest in the garden. …

Read more → The New York Times

Is Egypt Going To Become Pakistan?

by K. Ashraf

We credited Pakistani analysts; commentators and anchormen with the habit of getting carried away with lofty notions like replication of Egyptian events in Pakistan. Now we see some western analysts also expressing identical views. None other than the US Vice President Joe Biden is included among them. Few days ago, he voiced similar concerns. Can events like Cairo repeat in Pakistan ?

There is a remote possibility that Egyptian events will repeat in Pakistan. Pakistan is not following Egypt it is Egypt that is following Pakistan . Pakistan witnessed similar events three years ago. Those events gave birth to present day political set-up—a negotiated democracy.

Raymond Davis … deja vu

– An excerpt from the Khomeini’s Speech that he delivered after an incident similar to the recent Raymond Davis event took place in Iran in 1964.

– Khomeini’s Speech Excerpts “The Granting of Capitaluatory Rights to the US” – 27 October, 1964

….I cannot express the sorrow I feel in may heart…Iran no longer has any festival to celebrate; they have turned our festival into mourning…They have sold us, they have sold our independence; but still they light up the city and dance…The dignity of the Iranian Army has been trampled underfoot! A law has been put before the Majlis according to which we are to accede to the Vienna Convention, and a provision has been added to it that all American military advisers, together with their families, technical, and administrative officials, and servants – in short, anyone in any way connected to them – are to enjoy legal immunity with respect to any crime they may commit in Iran. If some American’s servant, some American cook, assassinates your marja in the middle of the bazaar, or run over him, the Iranian police do not have the right to apprehend him! Iranian courts do not have the right to judge him! The dossier must be sent to America, so that our master there can decide what is to be done… They have reduced the Iranian people to a level lower than that of the American dog. If someone runs over a dog belonging to an American, he will be persecuted. But if an American cook runs over the Shah, the head of the state, no one will have the right to interfere with him. Why? Because they wanted a loan and American demanded this in return.

Source: Islam and Revolution: Writings and Declarations of Imam Khomeini, p 181-188.