Jews Not the Right Kind of Minority to Get Protection
There's a dispute going on in Iraq as to whether Jews should be defined as a minority or not. The group of Iraqi lawmakers that don't want to extend legal protections to Jews have a powerful argument on their side: there aren't enough Jews for them to be a minority. Jews apparently don't qualify as a minority because they're too much of a minority:
"There have been suggestions that when it comes to minority rights, we specify who are the minorities," Saad Jawad Qindeel, a Shi'ite member said in a phone call from Baghdad. "They [the Iraqi Jews] should not be included as a minority because their number is too small."
Qindeel [is] also the head of the political bureau of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq...
"According to the UN international convention defining minorities, there must be a minimum number," said Qindeel. "The Jews are fewer than that number. I think there are only 60."
There are in fact fewer than 20 Jews remaining in Iraq, all of them in Baghdad.
First of all, this is a dumb argument. The reason that there are no more Jews in Iraq is because about 100,000 of them got expelled during the 1940s for being Jewish - which means Iraq is essentially saying that it doesn't have to protect the remaining, very small Jewish minority because they threw out all the rest of the Jews for being too large a Jewish minority - what an innovative solution! Second, it's just wrong:
Dr. Joshua Castellino, a lecturer at the Irish Center for Human Rights at the National University of Ireland in Galway, told the Post that international human rights law does not specify a minimum number for a group to be considered a minority, only that it should number fewer than the majority.
"There can't be a minimum number," said Castellino. "The idea is if the group is small and the reason for this is either genocide or through policies of persecution that led them to flee abroad, then it would not be appropriate for the state to say there are too few to warrant minority status."
In fact it is their small number that warrants Jews minority status, said Castellino, who is working on his second book about minorities.
How original: a seemingly neutral UN law being misquoted and misapplied as an excuse to disadvantage Jews.
"There have been suggestions that when it comes to minority rights, we specify who are the minorities," Saad Jawad Qindeel, a Shi'ite member said in a phone call from Baghdad. "They [the Iraqi Jews] should not be included as a minority because their number is too small."
Qindeel [is] also the head of the political bureau of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq...
"According to the UN international convention defining minorities, there must be a minimum number," said Qindeel. "The Jews are fewer than that number. I think there are only 60."
There are in fact fewer than 20 Jews remaining in Iraq, all of them in Baghdad.
First of all, this is a dumb argument. The reason that there are no more Jews in Iraq is because about 100,000 of them got expelled during the 1940s for being Jewish - which means Iraq is essentially saying that it doesn't have to protect the remaining, very small Jewish minority because they threw out all the rest of the Jews for being too large a Jewish minority - what an innovative solution! Second, it's just wrong:
Dr. Joshua Castellino, a lecturer at the Irish Center for Human Rights at the National University of Ireland in Galway, told the Post that international human rights law does not specify a minimum number for a group to be considered a minority, only that it should number fewer than the majority.
"There can't be a minimum number," said Castellino. "The idea is if the group is small and the reason for this is either genocide or through policies of persecution that led them to flee abroad, then it would not be appropriate for the state to say there are too few to warrant minority status."
In fact it is their small number that warrants Jews minority status, said Castellino, who is working on his second book about minorities.
How original: a seemingly neutral UN law being misquoted and misapplied as an excuse to disadvantage Jews.
