Morocco on My Mind

By Phyllis Chesler

As I contemplate “Jew hunting” in Amsterdam

Morocco has been calling to me for decades. I’ve never actually been there but I’ve read whatever I could find. Actually, I’ve read quite a lot.

Morocco is the ancestral country of the second and third generation Dutch-Moroccans who just went on a “Jew hunt.”

Moroccan Muslims needed no alleged “provocation” to persecute and slaughter Jews. There really was no provocation but it took the media many days to admit this.

Morocco on the Mediterranean, Morocco on the disputed, western Sahara, (where the Swiss-Russian Arab-lover and mystic poet, Isabelle Eberhardt/Si Mahmoud), died in a flash flood).

Morocco where Islam is the dominant religion (99.6%) and agnostics, Ba’hai, Christian, and Jews constitute 0.3% of the population.

Morocco, the country from which the Egyptian-born scholar Bat Ye’or’s husband, David Littman, heroically rescued 530 Moroccan-Jewish children in 1961. Jews had not been allowed to leave; I found that this had also been true in Afghanistan and is still true now in Iran. Both persecuted, impoverished, and held hostage.

In the beginning, I did not really understood how terrifying life really was in Tangier, Fez, Casablanca, Rabat, and Marrakesh, both for women and for Jews. Lucky women were clapped up in posh harems for the rest of their lives, they never saw daylight again; less lucky women led impoverished lives in brothels, and as servants, seamstresses, and street vendors.  Jews were confined in mellahs (ghettoes), and were permanently persecuted and sometimes, even maryred, for refusing to convert to Islam.

Here’s a story about Morocco, long, long ago. It, too, called to me; for awhile, together with composer, Stuart Diamond, I worked on an opera about a legendary Jewish-Morocan martyr, Sol Hachul. I’ve writtten about her before.

In 1834, Sol was a devout seventeen year old Jew whose impoverished father was a Talmud scholar. She lived in Tangier. Somehow, she became friendly with a neighboring Muslim woman named Tahra de Mesoodi who was eager to convert a Jew to Islam. Tahra falsely claimed that Sol had converted. Sol disagreed, but was still viewed as an apostate, which is a capital crime – even today. Dragged before the governor, Sol said: “A Jewess I was born, a Jewess I wish to die.”

The Basha of Tangier, Arba Esudio, threatened that he would “load (you) with chains…I will have you torn piece-meal by wild beasts, you shall not see the light of day, you shall perish of hunger…in having provoked the anger of the Prophet.”

Amazingly, Sol responded: “I will patiently bear the weight of your chains, I will give my limbs to be torn piece-meal by wild beasts; I will renounce forever the light of day….I will smile at your indignation, and the anger of your Prophet: since neither he nor you have been able to convert a weak female!”

Sol was chained both hand and foot and confined to a “lightless dungeon” with an iron collar around her neck. The Muslim authorities threatened her distraught parents with 500 lashes if they did not immediately come up with the cost of Sol’s transport to Fez and the cost of her execution. In Fez, the Jewish community was threatened with extermination if their leaders failed to persuade Sol to convert to Islam. They tried but failed to do so. The Sultan condemned Sol to death in the public square. She fasted and prayed. She was dragged along the ground like an animal with a rope around her neck.

The executioner asked her one last time if she would convert. According to an eye-witness: “Sol, then raising her streaming eyes to heaven, repeated with the utmost devotion, the Shema (the central prayer in Judaism), which having concluded, kneeling and casting her eyes to the ground, she said to the executioner–”I have finished, dispose of my life.”

Sol became known as a sacred martyr among Moroccan Jews. According to Jewish law, every drop of her blood was scooped up and she was buried in her bloody clothing immediately, in a place of honor, right next to a great Jewish sage.

Dr. Andrew Bostom wrote about her in his excellent book: “The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism.” His cover consisted of an 1860 painting, by French painter,Alfred Dehodencq.  He titled it: “Execution d’une juive au Maroc” (Execution of a Moroccan Jewess.) Like many Europeans, Dehodencq was enamored of the Islamic and Iberian (Spanish) East which he learned about from Byron and Chateaubriand.

The West has always been enamored of the East. They still are. For me, that changed, but slowly, far too slowly.

Since 1972, when antisemitism sent me to Israel on a long overdue first-time visit, I’ve been warning the entire world (first the Israelis, then the Jews, then all infidels, definitely all anti-Islamist dissidents with whom I’ve worked), that radical Islam/Islamism is determined to take over the world and, specifically, to bring the West down.

That I did so is now forgotten. That I, (and others), have done so is also forgotten. Now, some newbies on the block are saying what we alone had said a long time ago. I wonder if they will be heard, their warnings heeded? Or is it just too late, will the lethal lies turn into “Jew hunts” everywhere? Yes. They. Will. We must do everything that we can to defeat this “globalized Intifada.”

Having once been held captive in Kabul in the very early 1960s, I understood something about traditional Islam–and this was long before the Taliban. Women in shrouds, women in headscarves, women sitting literally at the back of the bus.

And yet, I still loved the idea of Morocco–its tourquoise tiles, cooling fountains, crumbling villas, fabulous vistas, its folkloric djinns.

The Muslim persecution of infidels–Jews, Christians, Ba’hai, Sikhs, Hindus is rampant. Few Western “wokesters” want to hear about the gender and religious apartheid practiced by Muslim countries; the long history of Islamic imperialism, colonialism, penchant for slavery, and conversion via the sword. Few Westerners have focused on the taxing, pogroms (farhuds), execution, and exile i.e. the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Muslim countries; or about the ongoing persecution of Christians in Muslim countries.

No one wanted to believe me (or others) when we wrote that Arabs/Palestinians are not interested in land acquisition in sovereign Israel but rather in exterminating, genocidally, all remaining Jews in the Middle East. We were racist Islamophobes for saying so.

The media did not want to write that the “Jew hunting” terrorists were all Muslims, primarily Moroccan-Dutch Muslims. The media also tried hard to blame the Israelis for having “provoked” the Muslim mob. That did not really happen. What did happen was a long planned “Jew hunt,” among mainly Dutch-Moroccan taxi cab drivers. Afterwards, it became very clear that Dutch non-Arabs are also Jew haters–this is precisely what “Free Palestine” has come to mean.

There is no talking to “politically correct” folk who have absolutely no knowledge base, who read left-wing media and swear by it. For example, literally every day, day after day, The New York Times has a four column photograph on its first page of suffering Arabs/Palestinians. They have at least three to six articles demonizing Israel with further color photos of Arabs suffering in Gaza.

What happened in Amsterdam is due to the lethal lies that the media, including the New York Times, and all the other Western and Arab media tell around the clock about Israel.

The pogroms are on them.

First published in Phyllis’ Newsletter