Jews lynched in Muslim lands from the 1940s onward were often falsely accused of being agents of Zionism. The lynching in Basra of one of Iraq’s wealthiest Jews, Shafiq Ades, on September 22, 1948, provided the occasion for masses of Muslims to openly display their intense antisemitism. After a quick trial “behind closed doors,” a military court sentenced Ades, a non-Zionist, to death for shipping surplus British army weapons to Jews in Palestine and for “organizing Zionism” in Iraq. Ades insisted he was innocent. The Baghdad newspaper Al Yaqthah estimated that more than 15,000 people witnessed Ades put to death, a crowd that did not include a single Jew.
Al Yaqthah demonized Ades and associated him with filth, describing how “his dirty body hung in the air amidst the victorious cheers of the crowd.” A doctor examined his corpse and testified that “his devilish soul had parted his defiled body.” Ades’s body was left hanging for two hours, “during which time a great number of photographs were taken.” In a final humiliation, the crowd “heap[ed] excrement on the dead body.”
The public hangings in Baghdad in 1969 of eleven “accused Israeli spies,” most of them Iraqi Jews, provided another example of the numerous lynchings of Jews in Muslim lands. The New York Times described the festive atmosphere in Baghdad’s Independence Square, with spectators “shouting and dancing around the square” as the bodies were hanging. The brother of one of the murdered Jews, a refugee in the United States, told the Times that “Jewish men, women, and children [in Iraq] are picked up at random and are brutally given over for public hangings.
Read the full piece by Eunice G. Pollack and Stephen H. Norwood on Middle-East Forum.
Remembering the Farhud and the Jewish Nakba 