The Jews of Lebanon Project

Report: Bahrain to name Jewish ambassador to US

Bahrain will name a Jewish ambassador to the United States, a report said. Huda Azar Nunu, a Jewish woman who is a lawmaker in Bahrain’s upper house, will be named to the Washington position, according to a report this week in A Sharq al-Awsat, a Saudi-owned pan-Arab daily published in London.

The sources denied that the appointment of Nunu as a woman and a Jew is a public relations campaign by Bahrain in the West, emphasizing that Huda Nunu has proven her qualifications, whether through her membership in the Consultative Council or through her work in human rights associations, of which she is an active participant in Bahrain; the newspaper said.

Bahrain, a Persian Gulf state sandwiched between Iran and Saudi Arabia, has a tiny Jewish population dating back to Talmudic times. Nunu is descended from Iraqi Jews who migrated to the port of Manama in the late 19th century. Jews in Bahrain have kept a low profile but generally have been treated well.

The nation is considered among the more progressive in the region, and was among the first to allow women to run for public office.

The Lebanese pride themselves as being the most progressive, open-minded, and liberal country in the Middle East. We live in nostalgia for golden age of “The Paris of the Middle East” yet we’re so naïve, we still believe we’re better than everyone in the world. The Lebanese today are too proud to clean their own streets; to proud to clean their own homes so we hire cheap labor from neighboring countries all the way to Sri Lanka and the Philippines.

We must openly study our history and acknowledge the reality of today if we are to build a country for tomorrow. Who would have thought Bahrain would delegate a Jewish citizen as their ambassador to the United States when it was Lebanon, and only Lebanon, whose Jewish population increased post-1948. Today in Lebanon Jews are forced to live in secrecy and all the way in the Arab Gulf they are securing diplomatic positions.

We must break the shell we’re living in; we must reinvent ourselves and break free of the cheap political and sectarian rhetoric paraded around the streets of our country by the very people who destroyed Lebanon. We must remove the conceit and the delusional image we have of ourselves. Are we to trust those who killed our children and destroyed our country in the past with the keys to the future? Those “uncivilized non-Lebanese” we ridicule and make fun of are now reminding us better than ever before, where Lebanon was and where Lebanon is today…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 at 3:31 am and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.