15-Feb-11: Islamists bring their freedom, democracy to synagogue gates in Tunisia

The excitement about new winds of freedom blowing through the casbahs and central squares of the Arab world have not changed the ongoing influence of the reactionary Islamist forces and their age-old hatreds and demons.

The video clip above is from this past Friday. The location is the Tunisian capital and its historic and beautiful Grand Synagogue de Tunis. The thuggish mob, relishing their new-found freedom to incite and hate, is chanting (the words can be heard in the clip) "Khaybar, Khaybar, ya yahoud, jaysh muhammad saya'oud". (Translation: "Jews, just wait. The army of Muhammad is coming back!"). It's a blood-chilling war cry, recalling a massacre of Jews and the ransacking of their material possessions by Moslems in the seventh century, bringing a final end to a once-thriving Jewish presence in what we today call Arabia.

It's the same frenzied celebration of hatred heard in numerous central squares in the Moslem world in the recent past. Just as one instance, the jihadists on board the Turkish "relief" ship Mavi Marmara chanted it for the cameras before setting sail in the direction of Gaza last year.

Friday's Tunisian mob and their ring-leaders evidently continue to have problems with their Jewish neighbours. There were about 110,000 Tunisian Jews up until 1948. Shortly after Tunisia achieved independence in the 1950s, it abolished by law its Jewish Community Council. Today, after waves of pogroms and an Al Qaida massacre in 2002, some 700 Jews still live in the capital Tunis. About 1,000 more continue to dwell in the ancient Jewish community on the island of Djerba.