Individuals

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Last Friday night I was in Hendon, London at a casual dinner for a wedding earlier in the day between an Arab Singaporean Muslim and a British Jew with Iraqi roots. About at least two thirds of the grooms guests were Iraqi Jews, now British for over three to four decades, who all spoke Arabic as their first language.

At about 9pm, I tweeted,

just finished chatting politics with two 60 somthing former Iraqi, now British Jews about how lovely Iraq was, in every aspect, 40 years ago.

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One of the things I gathered from speaking to them was that, after the revolution in 1958, the country was going down, gradually towards disarray. Prior, they were not great, but doing as good as they could and that was brilliant.

Later when Saddam Hussein came in power, a man according to them, could run the country and knew how to run things, despite being a man of no good, no principles, no religion, etc.

A large number of jews left because the regime were persecuting them, as well as other Christians and Muslims. He said,

we were living in fear. People would come to houses and ask the a citizen to come with them for thirty minutes to speak about something and that was the last you saw them. And this happened to many people and we knew about it.

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Following that, later we went on to speak about the imposition of democracy by external forces. I said that there are a number of countries in the world, either due to fight of independence or the doctrine of self-detemination after World War II, were not in fact ready for, or actually wanted, first independence, and second, democracy.

I explained that in Malaysia some argue that 1969 riots was not a racial issue, but an indication that the people were not (entirely) prepared to govern themselves post independence from the British. An issue of governance, not race. And they shared the view that now after Hussein is gone, everyone is trying to be in power and nothing is getting done.

The Sunni’s have always been in power, deservedly so, despite being the minority. In the ‘social strata’ the Shi’ites of Iraq, mostly in the south, were farmers (as people in that region are) and naturally not better educated as a whole.

And today the Iranians are coming in wanting to see the Shi’ites be in power, but at the same time, the Shi’ites of Iraq are nationalistic and they don’t want this Iranian Shi’ite influence. Sure, they are also Shi’ites, but they are also Iraqis, and they are proud of that.

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At this juncture, I must point out that one of the moods I picked up in the chat, especially in the beginning especially in one of them (the man seated on my right as I was on the phone, as above), was of sadness. They also did not refer to themselves as British, or Israeli. But as Iraqi’s despite having left the country years ago.

I suppose to end this post in a lighter note, to share, Arabic is a third language for me. Due to my South American trip in 2008/9, so has Spanish. And since I’m going there again, I’ve been learning and bracing myself habla Espanyol. Problem is, when you are trying to speak a language that shares the same status in your head, it’ll get mixed up.

As I chatted with these two men, whenever I was in agreement with them, because I was trying to accommodate, instead of saying na’am or aiwa (yes, for Arabic), I was going si, si (yes, for Spanish). I know that don’t seem much, but it’s one of those repeated moments where you know you can’t trust your instincts. It is foolish for your own good.

- http://zainhd.com/2010/06/brief-jewish-chat-on-iraq-years-ago-and-now