Albanian Muslims Risked Their Own Lives To Save Jews In World War II

[Ken Burch]

http://www.ksdk.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=222601&catid=3

(from the link)

With rising anti-Muslim sentiment across the country, an untold story is raising greater awareness about the Muslim faith and the teachings of the Quran. That awareness comes from an unlikely source: a small Jewish congregation in Creve Coeur.

Temple Emanuel is premiering a groundbreaking exhibit of photos that reveals Albanian Muslims who saved 2,000 Jews during World War II.

It's a story you've likely never heard. It is a story told through the faces of Albanian Muslims who risked their own lives to live by a code of faith and honor called Besa.

Dr. Ghazala Hayat is a neurologist at St. Louis University and serves as spokesperson for the Islamic Foundation of Greater Saint Louis.

Hayat said while Besa is an Albanian word, it is part of Islamic culture and teachings. According to Dr. Hayat, Besa is an ancient code which requires people to endanger their own lives if necessary to save the life of anyone seeking asylum. To this day, Besa is the highest moral law of the region, superseding religious differences, blood feuds, and even tribal traditions.

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Just thought that people should know of this.

[kestrel91316]

1. Teabaggers to deny that any such thing ever happened in 3....2....1....

And more than a few DUers who hate all religious folk equally will join them too.

[Chulanowa]

5. They don't hate all religious folk equally

Some bigotries are more acceptable around here than others, is all.

[renate]

2. K&R

This is important to know about. Thank you.

[yurbud]

3. great find

[Scruffy1]

4. wonderful post

[Joe Chi Minh]

10. Yes, wonderful.

[grantcart]

6. 250,000 jews fled the intolerance of the Christian middle ages to live

in the tolerant and more enlighted Muslim world.

250,00


It was during this time, known as the Islamic Golden Age that Islamic Universities maintained ancient writings of the Greeks while books about Socrates and Democracy were being burned in Christian Europe.

Among other inventions by Islamic scientists and scholars of the time is the Peer Review System that would later be formalized by the English hundreds of years later.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age

[aquart]

7. And these are the people the Serbs massacred while the world watched.

Clinton begged the Europeans to stand with him but they preferred to just stand aside. But then the returning UN troops from Belgium threw their peacekeeper caps on the tarmac in disgust. And even Europe had had enough.

And you are absolutely right. People should know this as well as they know about the Huguenots and Catholics who hid Jews in France, and the Danes, and the Catholic Polish farmer who hid Jews throughout the war. So many people whose interpretation of faith is an obligation to decency and kindness.

It is the grateful Jewish people that keeps a record of the righteous who saved us, sometimes at awful cost. But in other places and other times, even though they never heard of besa, there have been people who never stopped to question their impulse to help.

During the St. Bartholomew's Massacre, conducted at the behest, among others, of Catherine de Medici, a bleeding, wounded man burst into her daughter Margot's room in the Louvre. When the murderers came to get him, she wouldn't let them take him.

You never know who will step up. And whenever, wherever we can, they all should be remembered.

[Violet_Crumble]

8. That'd be a really good exhibition to see...

I'd like for every Islamophobe in the US to go and see it, though those are the sort of people that would never look at anything that might challenge their ugly stereotypes of Muslims...

[pnorman]

9. Thanks for that!

I had no idea!

[Blue_In_AK]

11. Thank you, Ken.

This is an excellent point. I'm sick of the Muslim-bashing, too. It's not what our country is supposed to be about.