Tempering My Sympathy For Yemen’s Current Plight With a Remembrance of How Its Jews Were Chronically Treated

One cannot be completely inured to the ongoing Sunni-Shiite sectarian carnage in Yemen.

Yet we must also recall that Shiite worshippers from Iran’s surrogate minions at the Houthi Al-Hashoush Mosque in Sanaa, Yemen, on March 20, 2015, were engaged in the following exchange just as they were immolated by an ISIS homicide bombing:

“Preacher: Our belief in Allah will increase after today. We will triumph over their deceit and their arrogance. Allah is with us…Worshippers: Death to America. Death to Israel. Curse upon the Jews. Victory to Islam. Allah Akbar.”

Moreover, that ghoulish scene of depraved Islamic Jew-hatred, eight days ago, in the midst of internecine Muslim sectarian slaughter, brought to mind the chronic plight of the now virtually extinct Yemenite Jewish population—liquidated, and air lifted (via “Operation Magic Carpet”) to Israel en bloc, within two years of the Jewish State’s creation in 1948.

From my 2008, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, p. 46:

Yemenite Jews had to remove human feces and other waste matter (urine that failed to evaporate, etc.) from Muslim areas, initially in Sanaa and later in other communities such as Shibam, Yarim, and Dhamar. Decrees requiring this obligation were issued in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century and reintroduced in 1913.Yehuda Nini reproduces an 1874 letter written by a Yemenite Jew to the Alliance Israélite (Universelle) in Paris, lamenting the practice:

[I]t is 86 years since our forefathers suffered the cruel decree and great shame to the nation of Israel from the east to sundown . . . for in the days of our fathers, 86 years ago, there arose a judge known as Qadi, and said unto the king and his ministers who lived in that time that the Lord, Blessed be He, had only created the Jews out of love of the other nations, to do their work and be enslaved by them at their will, and to do the most contemptible and lowly of tasks. And of them all . . . the greatest contamination of all, to clear their privies and streets and pathways of the filthy dung and the great filth in that place and to collect all that is left of the dung, may your Honor pardon the expression.

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