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November 2012/Kislev 5773
The Jewish Voice and Opinion
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Kurds Are True Friends of Israel: The Children of Media from the Septuagint’s Book of Tobit (Tobias) By Ayub Nuri
I am from the Middle East, but
I do not celebrate the recent uprisings and regime changes. It is good to see Arabs topple their dictators, but I worry that their revolution today may harm an existing democracy that is Israel tomorrow. If Arab demonstrations can add new democracies to the region I will welcome it. However, I feel that some of them want to overthrow their regimes in order to get a free hand to wage a war against Israel at some point. People may wonder why I care about Israel, and my re-
Ayub Nuri ply is because we have a lot in common with the people of that country. I am a Kurd from Iraqi Kurdistan, and as far back as I can remember, we have been repressed, tortured, killed, bombed and gassed by
the same countries that vow to destroy Israel. Only Democracy In just one day in 1988, Saddam Hussein’s army killed 5,000 innocent men, women and children in my town, Halabja, with chemical bombs. The Syrian regime denies the existence of hundreds of thousands of Kurds in Syria, and for the past three decades there hasn’t been a day in which the Islamic regime in Iran hasn’t executed a Kurdish man or woman. Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, and for us, the Kurds, who do not have
our own state, Israel is a source of inspiration. We genuinely believe the Jewish people deserve a state of their own, and I would want our state, if one day we have one, to be modeled after Israel rather than any of our neighbors. Our neighbors are police states where citizens are detained, tortured, and killed with impunity. Their dictators can give and take away life as they wish, and any voice of dissent is mercilessly silenced. But when I look at Israel and see a country where politicians, no matter how high-ranking,
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