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Thursday, July 18, 2019

Any Jews in Somalia? Some Might Think So

Nadene Goldfoot                                               
Somalia is on the right hand side of Kenya and Ethiopia
bordering the Indian Ocean.  
Somalia (Somali:officially the Federal Republic of Somalia (Somali: and formerly known as the Somali Democratic Republic, is a country located in the Horn of Africa.

Somalia was an important center for commerce with the rest of the ancient world, and according to most scholars, it is among the most probable locations of the fabled ancient Land of Punt.
There have been Jews living in Africa since the time of the Pharaohs of Egypt.  After all, Israelites had left Egypt to return to their homeland in Canaan which became Israel later with king Saul.  Many Jews had returned to Egypt finding refuge there at the time of the destruction of the 1st Temple in 586 BCE.  Most likely there were Israelite military settlers in the service of the last Pharaohs as well.  There are many records of this such as an Israelite military colony at Yeb in the 5th century BCE.  Then the Greeks with Alexander the Great conquered Egypt and he brought in Israelite settlers to colonize their new cities.  Alexandria became from the 3rd century BCE on one of the greatest seats of Israelite life and civilization.

                                                      
My wonderful Israeli friend, from Kenya,
a Masai who is also Jewish
He's the greatest!!

We have Ethiopian Jews  that have been flown to Israel in rescue missions as they had been persecuted and killed by the Christians of Ethiopia.  Ethiopia is a neighbor of Somalia, but Jews have never gone there.  Someone from Somalia has had no contact with Jews.  Ethiopian Jews had a history of their Queen of Sheba visiting with King Solomon to see his kingdom.  Many were found to be following Judaism and waiting to be taken to Israel.  

Ethiopians moved into a high rise apartment house in Safed, Israel that was right across the street from me.  They came wearing white sheets and before you could say hi, were trying on clothes in one apartment made over as a shop of used donated clothing, and learning to buy groceries in our supermarket.  They first were taken to the hospital to make sure they were physically ready for our society, checking what diseases they might be carrying and such.  It was good for them and good for us.  

Yahoo answers replied to my question with:  "The thing about Somalia is that people tend to know everyone else's business. lol Since nearly 100% of us are Muslim, news would travel quite quickly if any were non-Muslim. So far, there is only one Christian Somali family I've heard of. No Jews but any non-Muslims in Somali would not be ethnically Somali."
                                                    


JIBOUTI -- The sultan of the Jews in Somalia is a handsome, silver-haired man named Ahmed Jama Hersi who does not know the first thing about Judaism. He is a Muslim, as were his ancestors back at least 800 years. But he and his people are treated badly, cursed as descendants of Israelites. The name of the tribe is Yibir, or Hebrew."  This shows that even in Somalia, Africa 800 years ago there was anti-Semitism.  They of course, were Muslims then and they did not like Jews, as in the Koran Jews were the object of attacks, for if a Muslim saw a Jew hiding behind a rock they were to attack them.  With this new revelation, why is it that we have a new Rep  with parents from Somalia that is so anti-Semitic?  She's Muslim, so perhaps this is a carry-over from African attitudes as well.  First off, he is recognizing his ancestry but not the religion.  It's a tribal issue to him.  He sees Hebrews as a tribe of this day. 
He has no idea that they stood for the religion called Judaism today. I suggest he take a DNA test.  That will tell us a lot.  We need to see his Y haplogroup results, his male line of DNA showing what group he would be classified in.   
                                                  

"For at least eight centuries, the Yibir have lived amongst the pastoralist populations of Northern Somalia. There, the populations are divided into different clan groupings. A strict caste system traditionally organizes the clans into a fixed hierarchy of noble to inferior. Being one of the lowest castes, the Yibir constitute one of the poorest populations in Somalia, if not the poorest."

As a low caste, the Yibir do not traditionally practice herding and are prevented by local customs from owning livestock or land. For most of their history, they made their living by doing low-wage menial labor and housemaid work for other clans. They are also associated with leatherwork occupations, such as tanning hides and handcrafts involving the making of saddles, amulets and prayer mats. The Yibir are also well known for their skill in blacksmithery, in making iron tools and weaponry.

Although the question as to how Judaism has arrived to Somalia has not been previously researched, certain Yibir cultural features seem to indicate that the community has branched out of an older Beta Israel–Ethiopian Jewish population. (As reported in Jon Entine’s Abraham’s Children, genetic evidence has confirmed that the formation of the Beta Israel goes back approximately to the fourth or fifth century). Both groups, the Beta Israel and Yibir, are perceived as outcasts by their host populations and are associated with magic and superstition. (The Beta Israel are known in Ethiopia as Falasha, meaning exiles or outcasts in ancient Ethiopic. The Beta Israel are also strongly associated in Ethiopian traditions with the Budah, a magical or evil supernatural entity that can inflict curse on the locals).
                                                                 
Ilhan Abdullahi Omar  age 37 (born October 4, 1982) is an American politician serving as the U.S. Representative for Minnesota's 5th congressional district since 2019. The district includes all of Minneapolis and some of its suburbs. " Minnesotans elected Ilhan Omar, the first Muslim woman and first Somali person to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives. Another Muslim woman, Rashida Tlaib, was elected to Congress in Michigan as well." 

We now have a female Rep  born and raised in Somalia, Ilhan Omar.  She is about as anti-Semetic as one can get, and the terrible thing is that she is heard from all the time in her role as a Representative.  She was voted in from her district, a higher Muslim populated area, and they must all be of her persuasion towards Jews.  When told she's anti-Semitic, she denies it.  Of course, all anti-Semites do.  They see things only their way which they think is he right way.  

A timeline shows that she was born on October 4, 1981 and was 8 years old when she fled from Somalia in 1989.  By 1991 there was a full blown Civil War in Somalia.  She was in a refugee camp for 4 years in Kenya taking her to 1993. She was now 12 years old or older.   By 2000 she was a USA citizen, having to wait the usual 5 years as everyone does before filing.  She did get to attend an American High School, Edison in Minneapolis, for how long, I couldn't tell.  Most American conditioning takes place from K-8th grade.  That's when we have stood every morning to say the Pledge of Allegience, and sing American songs.  All a duck has to do when hatched out of the egg is to follow whoever or whatever is presented to them as their parent or role model.  We, on the other hand, need a little more conditioning.  

Right now President Trump is in trouble and is being called a racist by the Senators.  "The post came days after Trump apparently told four Democratic Congresswomen of color—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib—to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” All four women are U.S. citizens and all but Omar, who was born in Somalia, were born in the United States."
                                                       
Somalians seem to have the fine features of many Ethiopians

Isn't he just throwing back to her with his quick statement of "perhaps she should go back to her old country what she has been saying about Jews?  Remember, his daughter is Jewish and so are her children and husband, of course.  He's taking her comments personally, I would think.  "Democrats quickly declared the tweets racist and voted to condemn them, but the President pushed back on that accusation. On Monday, he declared that the tweets were “NOT Racist,” and that he doesn’t “have a Racist bone in my body!”"

Ilhan Omar has taken American citizenship.  She's now an American BUT she has the conditioning of a Somali Muslim.  Citizenship hasn't turned her into an "American, raised in our school system with parents proud of their country who have love for it.  You don't change overnight.  Now she's in partnership with 3 other very young female Congresswomen  who all feel the same way.  Yes, America is changing their attitudes, and again, many have changed back to the attitudes of the 1930 Nazis of being anti-Semitic.  This is what we Jews should be fearful of, and not be caught off-guard like the German Jews were.  Do I hear an uproar from American Muslims against her views about Jews?  No.  i'm waiting.  
                                                                    

Pressured by the U.S. government’s anti-terrorism crackdown, a small Southern California bank is cutting off a crucial source of aid to families in war-ravaged Somalia — money wired from Somali immigrants in the United States.
Merchants Bank of California said it planned to stop wiring the funds to Somalia on Friday, following in the footsteps of a string of other banks that cut off the service since giants Wells Fargo & Co. and US Bancorp ended such transfers nearly a decade ago.
Omar was born in Mogadishu on October 4, 1982, and spent her early years in BaidoaSomalia. She was the youngest of seven siblings, including Sahra Noor. Her father Nur Omar Mohamed, an ethnic Somali, worked as a teacher trainer, and her mother, Fadhuma Abukar Haji Hussein, a Benadiri (a community of partial Yemeni descent), died when Ilhan was two. She was raised by her father and grandfather thereafter. Her grandfather Abukar was the director of Somalia's National Marine Transport and some of Omar's uncles and aunts also worked as civil servants and educators. She and her family fled Somalia to escape the war and spent four years in a Dadaab refugee camp in Garissa County, Kenya, near the Somali border."

She's at the forefront of kicking Trump out of office.  

"A frequent critic of Israel, Omar has denounced its settlement policy and military campaigns in the occupied Palestinian territories, and what she describes as the influence of pro-Israel lobbies  such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)."  I happen to be a member of AIPAC!  AIPAC is not pushing Israel in any direction as Israel is their own Democratic country, the ones who have to live in such a dangerous climate.  They trust their decisions about their own lives.  They work on explaining issues to those who do not have the time to learn, to understand.  They are advocates of Israel as I am, not naysayers.  There is another group, J Street.  I cannot say such nice things about them.  They were created under Soros.  Need I say more?  They are the critics who do so as sheep, only following their leadership.  Criticism has value only if it helps, not deters the object being criticized.  A child will not blossom if he is constantly being told he has no value, is bad, needs to stop XYand Z, etc.  He'll only turn into a serial killer.  
                                                          
probably an Ethiopian Jew, now in the IDF

In early 2019, Omar was criticized by a number of Democrats, Republicans and Jewish civil rights groups for comments about American support for Israel that they said drew on anti-Semitic tropes. Omar apologized for some of the remarks."  It was Trump who has finally kept an American promise of moving the consul from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.  This was a big plus in Israel's eyes.  It was a Trump accomplishment, and Democrats are having a hard time dealing with that.  They are doing their best to kick Trump out of office.  Omar, of course, is a Democrat.  Minnesota has a population of 5,303,925 people.  274,412 of them are either Black or of African heritage.  Somalians must be included in this group.  


Hodan Natayeh is a female Somali-Canadian journalist who went to Somalia for research and was murdered with 25 others in her hotel.  

Somalia has a history of Muslim slave trade, terror, piracy and civil hostility which drove Ilhan Omar's family to the USA along with many others.  Piracy even existed in Somalia.  "Slavery in Somalia existed as a part of the Arab slave trade. To meet the demand for menial labor, Bantus from southeastern Africa captured by Somali slave traders were sold in cumulatively large numbers over the centuries to customers in Somalia and other areas in Northeast Africa and Asia."

As people are Sunni Muslims, their culture allows honor killings and includes female genital mutilation. " In 2012, Somalia introduced a new constitution that was supposed to ban female genital mutilation. But a few years later, there had been little follow-up, and UNICEF still estimated that up to 98 percent of girls and women there had been cut."

This is the country that Omar praises.  She is a leader of calling Trump racist now that she's in Congress where she is already known for her anti-Semitic and hatred for Israel messages to her cohorts.  Looking at her country of origin and the USA, I'd take the USA anytime and thank G-d and praise the USA, even with all it's faults.  After all, it's not heaven.  That depends on the population and their values of life.  More likely the USA is like a rose garden with those prickly stickers on the stems.  


Resource: "haruth.com/JewsSomalia.html
https://jewishbubba.blogspot.com/2019/02/a-new-anti-semite-in-our-government.html
https://www.goodreadbiography.com/ilhan-omar-biography/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/07/20/most-girls-in-somalia-experience-genital-mutilation-the-ritual-just-killed-a-10-year-old/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.0d6454511aae
https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2013/09/03/ethiopian-jews-in-somalia-tracing-remnants-of-the-yibir/
https://suburbanstats.org/population/how-many-people-live-in-minnesota
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia:  Africa
https://time.com/5629368/merriam-webster-racism/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maasai_people
https://news.yahoo.com/latest-pence-dems-led-liberals-233225798.html;_ylt=AwrWmn2lnTBd_GgAKAAPxQt.;_ylu=X3oDMTByZDNzZTI1BGNvbG8DZ3ExBHBvcwMyBHZ0aWQDBHNlYwNzYw--
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Somalia
https://jewishbubba.blogspot.com/2019/03/hamas-supporter-helps-ilhan-omar-house.html
Leonard Baum:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Somalia
https://jewishbubba.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-justice-democrats-of-usa-backers-of.html
https://nationalpost.com/news/world/send-her-back-crowd-at-trump-rally-echo-presidential-remarks-towards-minority-congresswoman?video_autoplay=true
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somali_Civil_War
Update: 7/19/19 morning:  https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/What-There-were-Jews-in-Somalia-540076**** A must read.  There was one family, mother and son, who were Jewish and have disappeared since the Civil War.  

1 comment:

  1. Just wanted to clarify, that as a person from another Somali sub clan, the Yibir are oppressed not because of their Jewish roots, which isn't well known to people in the region, but because they are a part of sub clan. The clan hierarchy in Somalia is what caused both the civil war and the current oppression that is experienced by other subclans in the regions of Adwal, Sool and Sanaag from the those of the more dominant Isaaq clan. And although I agree that antisemitism is prevalent in Somali community, the reason why the Yibir are demeaned and discriminated against is due to their clan origin and not their Hebrew ancestry.

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