Pakistan’s Jewish Ghosts

[Solomon2]

They are not trying to hide that is why they are showing this

As long as I can't find multiple minyans in Pakistan I won't believe it.

From asking around, nobody I know of has heard of even one minyan still active in Pakistan. I recall one newspaper story about one Pakistani Jew working for the Pakistani government. He has no contact with other Jews. So even if there are some Jews left in Pakistan, it's undeniable that they have no collective activity, neither religious, social, or even family - and that nearly all Pakistanis are happy with the situation, or else they'd express their desire to change it.

 

[MadDog]

@ Solomon2...Thanks Solomon for sharing this amazing article..I shared it on my facebook..alot of friends liked it...I wish we could know more about these Pakistanis..who have been forced to live in exile because of politics in Middle East...after all they are the sons of this soil...and ( in my view ) are closer to me than any Arab...Best Regards....Shabbat Shalom ( since its Friday night..correct me if I am wrong ).

 

[Contrarian]

yh but people living in pakistan always lived in here or moved from india they didnt come from europe or russia,
israel has 80 percent of people coming from europe while pakistan doesnt even have 20 percent coming from india.
maybe you start to think before you type non sense

i think if india didnt have a country to compete with(pakistan) and didnt have to make it self look good in front of the world they'd show how they exactly feel about minorities. same way as barbri masjid, violating sikh religious grounds.

muslims of india are in a way protected by pakistan from hindus, the hindus know that if they start slauthering them pakistan would invade them. same thing about sikhs, they know if they bother them then pakistan will help them make khalistan.

If you expect a reply from me then post some sense.

Pakistan is probably the worst thing to have happened to Muslims globally. Pakistani's are generally involved in terrorism globally or global terrorist camps located in its territory. The strong association between Muslims and Terrorism is significantly because of Pakistan.

 

[illusion8]

IMO, the purpose of 26/11 wasn't just to kill Jews; the timing was dictated by the need to precipitate a crisis with India that would keep Zardari from wresting the ISI, etc. into some sort of civilian control. Sure enough, once Indian talk of retaliation began all such talk ended. By the time the hubbub died down Pakistan had once again (as it had in 1971, 1990, 1965, and 1999) lost its moment to make the military accountable.

"Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me."

It wasn't only to kill Jews, but killing Jews was a priority - The terrorists were quite interested to look for Jews among the two hotel guests besides Americans and kill them and also the specific targeting of the Jewish synagogue and the brutal killing of the Jewish family there.

 

[PlanetWarrior]

Perhaps these 800 Jews are BlackOps/CIA operatives who have lived so long in Pakistan that they have become naturalised citizens ? After all there are tons of CIA roaming around Pakistan

 

[schadenfreude]

I would love to meet a Jew in Pakistan. Besides those 800 registered Jews there would be many more in 100's at least. Unfortunately Pakistan didn't treat them right from the beginning. Everyday I feel we are becoming more extremists one way or the other in both actions and thoughts.

 

[Slayer786]

For God sake just when I thought it could not get worse in Pakistan. Now we have Jews too. OH!!!! SHHHH!!! F$Ck!!!! Unbelievable.
Next thing someone will write that we have Martians living in Pakistan too.

 

[DESERT FIGHTER]

If you expect a reply from me then post some sense.

Pakistan is probably the worst thing to have happened to Muslims globally. Pakistani's are generally involved in terrorism globally or global terrorist camps located in its territory. The strong association between Muslims and Terrorism is significantly because of Pakistan.

oh yes we crashed the jets in the wtc...

 

[Umair Nawaz]

Pakistan’s Jewish Ghosts
According to the state’s election commission, there are 800 registered Jewish voters. That’s bogus.
By Liel Leibovitz | April 4, 2013 12:00 AM​

People gather at Seaview waterfront to celebrate Pakistan’s Independence Day on August 14, 2011 in Karachi, Pakistan. (Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images)

The News, Pakistan’s largest English-language publication, had some stirring political tidbits to share with its readers yesterday: “According to the Election Commission of Pakistan,” the newspaper reported, “there are around 800 Jewish voters registered in Pakistan out of which 427 are women and 382 men.”

Karachi’s campaign managers, however, needn’t polish their Hebrew just yet. Even if there are indeed as many Jews in Pakistan as the election commission claims—which is highly unlikely—the Islamic nation’s relations with its Jews is a long and grim story, one that begins with mere tolerance and ends, famously, horrifically, with the slaying of Daniel Pearl in Karachi in 2002.

According to a recent history by Hebrew University anthropologist Shalva Weil, as Pakistan slouched toward independence, it had a number of minuscule but thriving Jewish communities in Karachi, Peshawar, Quetta, and Lahore. Some of Pakistan’s Jews belonged to India’s Bene Israel community, others were brought on by the British to fill a host of administrative positions, and still others had trickled in from Afghanistan. By 1941, a government census recorded 1,199 Jews nationwide, sufficiently at home for one of them, a local leader named Abraham Reuben, to become the first Jew elected to Karachi’s city council.

All that soon changed. As India was partitioned in 1947, Mohajir, or Muslim refugees, filed into the newly minted Dominion of Pakistan, often ransacking Jewish synagogues and prayer halls on their way. Many of Pakistan’s Jews, in turn, fled in the opposite direction, settling in India. The following year, with Israel having declared its independence, things grew even tenser when rioters burnt down a Karachi synagogue to protest Harry Truman’s diplomatic recognition of the Jewish state. Wasting little time, Pakistan’s Jews soon began their exodus, scurrying to Israel and elsewhere.

But even if the disappearance of its Jewish population was of little concern to the Islamic republic, the existence of the Jewish state presented far thornier issues: It was difficult to look at the two nations—born within months of each other, each having bloomed, as one scholar put it, as a result of “a religion-based territorial division”—and not notice the striking similarities.

These commonalities encouraged many of Israel’s early leaders to pursue an alliance with Pakistan. In January of 1948, for example, Chaim Weizmann, soon to become Israel’s first president, corresponded with Sir Zafrulla Khan, Pakistan’s eloquent and charismatic foreign minister. “Our small state in Palestine,” Weizmann wrote, “shall soon have to follow you. Many problems will be common to both of us, and it is my earnest hope that it may be possible for us to deal with them together, and in cooperation, for the good of both of our peoples.” Khan was inclined to listen, even meeting with Weizmann in New York later that year. But his advocacy of embracing the Jewish state soon failed. Fashioning itself a champion of Muslims everywhere, and actively involved in supporting the Palestinian cause, Pakistan quickly sided with the Arabs in seeing Israel’s establishment as land theft pure and simple. Khan himself made that argument well, claiming that while Pakistani Muslims have only claimed the regions in which they were a clear majority, the Jews in Palestine did no such thing. “The United Nations,” he thundered, “cannot subscribe to the principle that a racial or religious minority, whether arising from national development or created as a result of immigration, can insist upon the breaking up of a homeland or shatter the political, geographical, and economic unity of a country without the consent and against the wishes of the majority.”

The same logic prevailed for decades to come, intensifying with the political ascent of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. “There were two issues he was strong on,” a friend of Bhutto’s once confessed, “the destiny of Pakistan and a fanatical hatred of Israel.” As host of the Second Islamic Summit Conference in Lahore in 1974, he made his opinions of the Jewish state clearly known: “Any agreement,” he stated, “any protocol, any understanding that postulates the continuance of Israeli occupation of the Holy City or the transfer of the City to any non-Muslim or non-Arab sovereignty will not be worth the paper it is written on.”

And yet, for all his vehemence, Bhutto also insisted that his grievance was with Israel, not with Jews as such. “To Jews as Jews, we bear no malice,” he said shortly after taking office as Pakistan’s prime minister. “To Jews as Zionists, intoxicated with their militarism and reeking with technological arrogance, we refuse to be hospitable.”

The difference between Jews as Jews and Jews as Zionists, however, was often blurred. With each new conflagration in the Arab-Israeli conflict came new waves of anti-Semitic violence. By the time the dust settled in the aftermath of the Six Day War, Weil had found, there were only 350 Jews left in the entire country, all of them in Karachi. Two decades later, in 1988, when President Zia Ul-Hak ordered the razing of the historic Magen Shalom synagogue in Karachi to make way to a shopping mall, there were no more than a handful of Jews present to object.

And with no Jews to witness firsthand, Pakistanis were free to nurture the darkest thoughts about their enemies. After he’d crashed into a parked vehicle and killed its driver four years ago, Nazir Ahmed, the Pakistani-born member of the British House of Lords, gave an interview to a Pakistani television station and, speaking in Urdu, blamed his incarceration on anything but his driving. “My case became more critical because I went to Gaza to support Palestinians,” he said. “My Jewish friends who own newspapers and TV channels opposed this.” He then argued that the judge in his case owed his appointment to a Jewish friend of Tony Blair’s. Ahmed has since apologized for his statements, but his opinions seem to be far from a rare occurrence among Pakistanis. Writing in the New Statesman last month, columnist Mehdi Hasan argued that anti-Semitism was commonplace among Pakistanis and British Muslims of Pakistani descent.

“The truth,” he wrote, “is that the virus of anti-Semitism has infected members of the British Muslim community, both young and old. No, the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict hasn’t helped matters. But this goes beyond the Middle East. How else to explain why British Pakistanis are so often the most ardent advocates of anti-Semitic conspiracies, even though there are so few Jews living in Pakistan?”

Meanwhile, some Pakistani politicians are arguing that normalization of relations with Israel was inevitable. Former President Pervez Musharraf, for example, last year became the first Pakistani official to give an interview to an Israeli newspaper, arguing that his nation had to “keep readjusting its diplomatic stand toward Israel based on the mere fact that it exists and is not going away.” Musharraf is most likely plotting his re-entry to Pakistani politics; too bad he won’t even have 800 Jewish voters in his corner.

***

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Liel Leibovitz is a senior writer for Tablet Magazine.

i have read comics in my childhood but this one was the best of the bests.

All hail to the writer n mr @Solomon2

 

[Umair Nawaz]

The author offers highly suggestive arguments. Some commenters say Jews are pretending to be others but in that case how does the election commission know different?

It is slightly heartening that Pakistanisage misses his friend, yet I note that no Pakistani on this thread sees ousting the Jews as something wrong, an injustice that needs to be addressed. For "the land of the pure" to ignore justice means God is far, far away from their minds and souls, is that not so?

sure ''land of pure'' eehhh

So what does israel means??
Land of NetenYahoo or Bombs on Muslims

As yr American Jew so yr love for Israel is understandable but every Jew else where is NO an Israeli.

I dont think most Pakistanis would approve of ousting any Jews from Pakistan. A lot of Jews left for Israel when it was created and not necessarily due to discrimination purposes. I mean if there is still one Jewish person living in Afghanistan, then I'm sure there are still Jews left in Pakistan

there r some 15-20 families living in Karachi according of Gov.

 

[Pboy]

I would have never wanted them to leave Pakistan. Zionists can go if they want and so can right wing and muslim extremists.

But im sure that these people only wants to live a peacful life.

Unfortunately some crazy clerics has spread poison by claiming that every jew is same. What about those who wants Palestina to be an own state and those that just want peace in the world? They`re all evil too = The mentality of many of our people.. Sadly.

 

[jaibi]

I really hope we can have a Pakistan where Jewish members of our community, no matter how small, can easily live and be an actor for our society (Not in the Zaid Hamid or Hamid Gul way though)

 

[MadDog]

i have read comics in my childhood but this one was the best of the bests.

All hail to the writer n mr @Solomon2

The worst thing is being both Ignorant and at the same time Chest-thumping about it ...please go and search...how many Jewish Pakistanis (Gujrati speaking and Pushtu speaking Jews were in Pakistan) left Pakistan since 1960s...and Solomon isn't the writer ...its an article online....People of this mindset are the biggest threat to Pakistan right now...May God guide you !!!

 

[queerbait]

For God sake just when I thought it could not get worse in Pakistan. Now we have Jews too. OH!!!! SHHHH!!! F$Ck!!!! Unbelievable.
Next thing someone will write that we have Martians living in Pakistan too.

whats so re-pungent about jews i wonder...hmmm..maybe they smell bad to pakistanis

 

[Umair Nawaz]

The worst thing is being both Ignorant and at the same time Chest-thumping about it ...please go and search...how many Jewish Pakistanis (Gujrati speaking and Pushtu speaking Jews were in Pakistan) left Pakistan since 1960s...and Solomon isn't the writer ...its an article online....People of this mindset are the biggest threat to Pakistan right now...May God guide you !!!

LOL really?

Aik or Netenyahoo fan aa gya

Dude there is no denying they werent ever here. But the thing is that they r NOT part of our country not anymore!!!!!!!

did i or my fellow countrymen asked them to leave?
No, they made their own choise!!!!!! OK

Its not my or my countrymen business anymore to advocate those who have forgotten/left their Pakistan out of their own will!!!!!

and i do know that its not written by him n thats why i said all hail to the writer AND Solomon who has shared this!!!!

If you expect a reply from me then post some sense.

Pakistan is probably the worst thing to have happened to Muslims globally. Pakistani's are generally involved in terrorism globally or global terrorist camps located in its territory. The strong association between Muslims and Terrorism is significantly because of Pakistan.

And Hindis r the most sophisticated, well educated Global power of the world