LA GRANDE TOLERANCE DE L'ISLAM

History And Disappearance

Of Jewish Presence In Pakistan

Posted on July 18, 2011 by creepingsharia

Some interesting editorials recently, in light of U.S. relations with al Qaeda-harboring Pakistan. via Why My Father Hated India*

The idea of Pakistan was first seriously formulated by neither a cleric nor a politician but by a poet. In 1930, Muhammad Iqbal, addressing the All-India Muslim league, made the case for a state in which India’s Muslims would realize their “political and ethical essence.” Though he was always vague about what the new state would be, he was quite clear about what it would not be: the old pluralistic society of India, with its composite culture.

Iqbal’s vision took concrete shape in August 1947. Despite the partition of British India, it had seemed at first that there would be no transfer of populations. But violence erupted, and it quickly became clear that in the new homeland for India’s Muslims, there would be no place for its non-Muslim communities. Pakistan and India came into being at the cost of a million lives and the largest migration in history.

via History And Disappearance Of Jewish Presence In Pakistan – Analysis.

On 15 August, India was partitioned and the Dominion of Pakistan was declared. Partition effectively signaled the end of the British Empire. Fearful of their future in the new Islamic state, Jews began to flee. Some from Afghanistan and the Bene Israel community in Lahore fled to Karachi and from there moved to Bombay. Muslim refugees from India called Mohajir streamed into Pakistan, and attacked Jewish sites. The situation was exacerbated by the declaration of independence for the state of Israel in May 1948. Many of the Karachi Jews left the city in 1948, after rioters attacked the Karachi synagogue during a demonstration in May of that year against President Truman’s recognition of Israel. Some members of the community emigrated to Israel via India, while others settled in Canada and the United Kingdom.

Pogroms against the Jews recurred during the Suez War in 1956 and the Six Day War in 1967.

Most of the remaining Jews emigrated and, in 1968, the Pakistani Jewish community numbered only 350 in Karachi, with one synagogue, a welfare organization and a recreational organization.

After 1968, there is no record of any Pakistani Jews outside Karachi.

Today, anti-Israel discourse manifests itself in the notion that Israel and Pakistan are ultimately in competition and only one can flourish.

In April 2008, Lt-Gen Hamid Gul, the former chief of Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence, proclaimed that “two states came into existence in 1947 and 1948: one, Pakistan; two, Israel.

The two are threats to each other. Ultimately, only one of them will survive.”

Pakistan aligns itself with the Palestinian Muslim cause and rejects the US insofar as it is allied with Israel.

The Jews are gone, and the Indians are continuously fighting against Islamic jihad.

Even Muslims who step out of line are killed. *The author of the first link is the son of a Pakistani governor, “killed by his own bodyguards for defending a Christian woman accused of blasphemy.”

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