Dinner in Baghdad with the Grand Mufti
She spoke English and Malay, not Arabic. She cut her hair short, wore western dresses, and thrived on progressive ideas. Being young and bright, she picked up Arabic quickly, but she was not about to cover her face, shroud her body or stop dancing.Why Would a Peace Activist Fly to Iran With Sept. 11 Truthers and Other Crackpots?
The very traditional Baghdadi family she married into couldn’t accept her, and she didn’t understand what it was to grow up in fear as they did.They didn’t understand how she, a Jew and a woman, dared speak out and talk back.
When men on the streets taunted her children or cursed her for a being a Jew she cursed them, in English.
She met a young non-Jewish Syrian couple, a doctor and his wife, who were enchanted by her. “They loved me so much, they were Muslim and they loved me so much, ‘you are not like the other Jews, we like you,’” they told her.
She felt embraced by this couple and their eclectic group of Muslim and Christian friends.
Granny loved it all and defied the family. She refused to give up her freedom.
“They, (the Jews) were like mice, I didn’t understand,” Granny said; until the dinner party where the guest of honor was none other than Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.
She sat in stunned silence as he spun his diatribe against the Jews of Palestine, Jews of Iraq, and the Jews of the world. She sat there quietly “like a mouse,” as a fear she had never felt before drowned out his words.
She never imagined “educated people” sitting around a dinner table listening to his plan to ethnically cleanse Jews out of the Middle East. She felt the hate and heard the silence of her friends.
Dear Medea Benjamin,
I address you because your recent participation in a Tehran conference of anti-Zionist zealots suggests a larger and graver moral and political folly afflicting many others as well—the legions who think that hatred of America and of Israel are decisive criteria, perhaps even qualifications, for membership in “the left.”
You believe in speaking truth to power. You have gone to jail to do so. I admire your courage. But the Islamic Republic of Iran is also a power. It makes war and supplies war criminals, not least in Syria. Amnesty International maintains a formidable roster of the Iranian regime’s crimes against human rights. Human Rights Watch reports about 2013 in Iran: “The judiciary released some political prisoners, but many civil society activists remained in prison on political charges.” You are a longtime activist against corporate globalization, a vigorous Ralph Nader supporter and Green candidate for governor of California in 2000, and co-founder of the nonviolent peace group Code Pink, launched in 2002 to oppose the impending Iraq war. My guess is that, if you were Iranian, you would be one of those civil society activists who are enduring terrible conditions in prison right now for opposing or even merely criticizing the rule of their clerical leaders.















