Tired of hearing about those much maligned Palestinians, efforts are underway to educate the world that Arab countries forcibly removed Jewish people who had lived side by side with Arabs for centuries in now largely Muslim countries.  Heck, the ethnic cleansing by Muslim countries is still going on—just look at the Christians being pressured out of Iraq.

From JWeekly:

At Israel’s founding, more than 800,000 Jews lived in the Arab and Muslim world. In the face of mob violence and government-sanctioned tyranny, virtually all of them fled. Many lost their lives.

Once-thriving ancient Jewish communities in Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Tunisia drastically shrunk and, in most cases, disappeared.

In an effort to recognize the plight of those Jews, and to demand compensation for their lost property, the World Jewish Congress will host a conference in Jerusalem next week focused on justice for Jewish refugees from Arab countries.

The Sept. 9-10 event will feature two speakers from the S.F.-based nonprofit JIMENA (Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa

“This is an opportunity for various organizations and Jews working on the subject to learn from each other,” said JIMENA director Sarah Levin, who will join the organization’s co-founder, Libyan-born Gina Waldman, at the conference.

Levin will participate in a workshop about online and student activism on behalf of Jewish refugees. Waldman will share her personal story of escaping Libya in the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War.

JIMENA is “one of the only organizations working on this issue,” Levin added. “[The topic] is now getting recognition from the U.S. and Israeli governments. It’s time for a coalition to strategize together.”

Jewish refugee issue to serve as a counterbalance in future peace talks:

“It’s important that the world accept and recognize that most [Jewish refugees] were forcibly exiled and subjected to the worst kind of anti-Semitic assault,” said WJC Secretary-General Dan Diker. “This issue has been largely ignored by Jewish leaders over the past number of years.”

In addition to WJC efforts, the Knesset is slated to vote on a resolution to establish a day commemorating the history of Jews from Arab lands and to found a museum focused on that history. The U.S.-based Justice for Jews from Arab Countries also advocates for refugee rights.

While the campaign for the Jewish refugees ostensibly is aimed at winning recompense for Jews from Arab countries and their descendants — known in Israel as Mizrachim, Hebrew for “those from the East” — it’s also part of a political effort to create a Jewish parallel to Palestinian refugee claims from Israel’s 1948 War of Independence.

Advocates want the Jewish refugee issue to serve as a counterbalance to the Palestinian refugee issue in any future Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, and want recognition and compensation for Jewish refugees to be a part of any final-status deal.

“It restores parity to Arab-Israeli diplomacy,” Diker said. “That narrative has become distorted in advancing the narrative that the Palestinian Arabs are the sole aggrieved party in this conflict.”

Read it all, there is more.

Did you ever notice that Muslim countries—Saudi Arabia and Egypt come to mind—are completely Muslim-dominated and others, Christians and Jews, are not welcome, yet in every other country in the world we are supposed to welcome Muslims and revere diversity.   No one ever asks (demands!) Saudi Arabia to welcome diversity!  Why? What is that sound I hear?

We constantly hear about the Palestinian “refugees” but rarely about the hundreds of thousands of Jews transformed into refugees as they were expelled from Arab countries more than fifty years ago.   Some Israeli leaders want to be sure that information is documented before those now elderly refugees pass away.

Here is the story from Israel National News:

The Knesset’s State Control Committee held a session Wednesday on the subject of the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Arab countries who came to Israel in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

From 1948 to 1956 an estimated 856,000 Jews came to Israel from the Arab world. Of those, around 600,000 were refugees who had been expelled from their homes in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Tunisia and Egypt.

Activist Meir Kachlon credited MK Nissim Zev (Shas) with promoting refugees’ affairs, but warned, “There are excellent intentions, but the state is not giving the right tools. The Arab world is destroying any trace of Jewish presence, we must hurry, because people are elderly and are passing on.”

Some want to make claims on those Arab countries for stolen Jewish property.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is not intimidated by the Sudanese illegal immigrants who want to be classified as refugees. CNN reports:

JERUSALEM – Several hundred Sudanese immigrants rallied Sunday on the streets of Tel Aviv, demanding refugee status.

Marching towards the United Nations Refugee Agency building, the demonstrators held up banners reading “We are not infiltrators, we are refugees,” “We are human beings too” and “We are refugees, we are not criminals.”

Israel is a democratic county that has a lot of immigrants and a high level of social services. No doubt these immigrants thought they could sneak into this first-world country and take their places as low-level workers and/or welfare recipients. But Israel is intensely focused on its national survival, and these immigrants, part of a wave of economic migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, are a demographic threat. So:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced the violence [a May protest that turned violent]. “The problem of infiltrators must be resolved, and we will resolve it,” he said after the protest last month. “We will complete the construction of the security fence in several months and soon will start the process of sending the migrants back to their home countries.”

He added, “We will solve the problem and will do so responsibly.”

That doesn’t sit well with “human rights” groups, social services, and refugee agencies. But those who have to suffer the immediate impact of the immigrants understand.

Some residents of southern Tel Aviv neighborhoods, where there is a large concentration of Africans, have blamed their new neighbors for increasing levels of crime and suffocating the infrastructure and public services. Some also complain the illegal immigration is changing the fabric of Israel.

The word is out in parts of Africa that Israel is the land of milk and honey, and that it’s easy to get in and easy to get taken care of. Furthermore, some people in Israel like this flood of Muslim immigrants and want it to continue. Guy Bechor reports in the Jerusalem Post:

When we published an article in 2007 about the nightmare facing Israel from Africa, many were shocked. Today, this vision has become a reality (Then, 400 infiltrators stole over the border from Africa each month; currently, about 4,000 come here illegally every month).

…The truth is that millions of Africans would like to immigrate to Israel to improve their lives, but it turns out that in Israel there are those who want to exploit this to change our country’s demographic balance. After they failed to let in hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into this country, these people now expect a migration of hundreds of thousands of Muslims from Africa to Israel. It’s not a war on immigration that lies ahead of us, but a war over the continuation of the Jewish majority in Israel.

Who are these people promoting the flood of migrants? As it turns out, people with similar motivations to those who promote floods of refugees and poor unskilled immigrants to our own country.

The “human rights” organizations have easy access to the media, and they do not hide their desire to see Israel as a state of all citizens and no longer a Jewish or Zionist state, and from this perspective, the Muslim migrants from Africa suit their cause very well. These organizations bear direct responsibility for the new plague that has befallen Israel. They direct the migration, organize it, preserve it from the authorities, help the migrants get permits and papers, empower them, teach them how to stand up to the authorities, how to conduct demonstrations that will touch the sensitive nerves of the Israelis, and even made them a newspaper, in African languages, which is funded by the UN.

These organizations have helpers, those with economic interests, profiting at the expense of the new slaves, such as hoteliers, who employ them for pennies (especially in Eilat, which therefore becomes an African city), and the construction industry that profits from this new form of slavery developing in Israel. Do these organizations for so-called “human rights” agree with the new slavery being created here? I don’t.

The article is in the nature of an emergency alert to Israel, with a five-point plan that should be adopted immediately to stop the flood, repatriate most of the immigrants, and end the incentives for them to leave their countries for Israel.

Read the whole thing here.