AP Again Idealizes History of Moroccan Jews
Two years ago, the Associated Press ran a story about Moroccan Jews that relayed a glowing account of Jewish-Arab relations in Morocco. There was no mention of the murderous pogroms and discrimination faced by the community, and the only hint at adversity sometimes endured by Jews in Morocco was a passing reference to “some street protests.”
Two days ago, a new AP story discussed Jewish-Arab relations in Morocco. In this latest story, the “some street protests” whitewash was replaced with a marginally more accurate reference to “riots,” as well as “fears of living in an Arab state and sporadic discrimination.”
Still, this description falls short of fairly conveying, for example, that
bloody riots broke out in June 1948 against the Jews in Oujda and Djerada in Morocco. In Oujda, within three hours, five Jews had been killed, 30 seriously injured, shops and homes sacked. In Djerada, the Jewish population of 100 suffered 39 deaths and 30 severely wounded, the remainder less seriously.
Nor is there any sense that, as one observer put it, “in disputes with Moslems, or on civil commercial, and criminal issues among themselves, Jews are almost entirely subject to Islamic courts. … [E]ven under the best of circumstances [the courts] regard Jewish litigants as unclean, inferior beings.”
For CAMERA’s comments about the first AP story, see here. For CAMERA’s analysis of a similar whitewash of Iraqi Jewish history, see here.
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