Hey, CarolC, what evidence can you provide about the lovingly tended synagogue in Iraq? This sounds like a load of horseshit to me. I don't even think a Baptist congregation in Philly would lovingly tend a Methodist church if the Methodists all decided to leave.

The idea that the jews in Arab lands were living a bourgeois existence is not evidence of a culture that loves Jews or where Jews are safe. Let's face it, the Jews in Germany and the urban parts of Poland, Lithuania, etc, were living a happy bourgeois existence, both in big cities and in moderate sized Shtetls, until the 1930s. In a country where you are merely tolerated, this can turn on a dime.

There are countries with state religions, such as the UK, where Jews can feel pretty safe. There are others, like Poland, where things have improved (the current Pope has helped), and others where Jews should feel very precarious. Anyone who thinks there is not a degree of bitter feeling between Jews and Muslims in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, etc, is wearing blinders. Anyone who thinks the Jews cannot be scapegoated there is ignoring history.

Notice how the two brutal executions of innocent American civilians that were videoed and made public were both Jews? Notice how they made Danny Pearl say "I am a Jew" before they killed him? Do you think that is a coincidence? Jews are not everyone's favorite people in Iraq, Jordan and the rest of the Arab world.

The fact that they can find one Iraqi Jew to say "Life under Saddam would have been better than life in Israel" is an example of what I call "freakshow politics." George Bush looks for the one middle class Hispanic family who will benfit from his tax cut, then offers them front-row seats at a big Washington event so he can show them off to the world. Big deal. It's still true that most middle class hispanic families have been buggered by his policies.

Let's out it this way: does anyone here really believe that life for a Mizrahi Jew in an admittedly Ashkenazi-dominated Jewish parliamentary democracy is, on average, more repressive than life for a jew under Saddam Hussein? That would have to stretch the credulity of the most fervent Arab apologist...or is it worse than I thought out there?