TGIF: The Abused Jews of Iraq

From April 1950, two years after the Zionists in Palestine unilaterally declared the independence of the state of Israel, to March 1951, three bombs exploded among Jews in Baghdad, Iraq: one each outside a cafe on Abu Nawwas Street; at the US Information Centre, a popular reading place for young Jewish Iraqis; and outside the Mas'uda Shemtov synagogue, where Kurdish Jews worshiped. Suspicion was immediately directed at "an extremist Iraqi organization," David Hirst writes in The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East. These acts of terrorism, however, "were the work not of Arab extremists," Hirst continues, "but the very people who sought to rescue [the Jewish Iraqis]"

Read TGIF at The Libertarian Institute.

TGIF (The Goal Is Freedom) appears on Fridays. Sheldon Richman, author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, keeps the blog Free Association and is executive editor of The Libertarian Institute. He is also a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com.

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