Page 14 - TORCH Magazine #14 - July 2019

having to flee Iraq for fear of their own safety. Sarah herself never returned to Iraq from the contest, which was held in the US, and she is now safely living with her family in America.
Despite this situation and the hostility she still faces, Sarah has turned the situation around by using her platform to speak out against the anti-Semitism of the Muslim world. She has visited Israel and has even spoken at the United Nations Human Rights Council.
Shockingly, the Iraqi government is now revoking her citizenship, making her stateless. The reason for this is she used her UN speech to highlight human rights abuses of the Iraqi government and condemned Hamas for using human shields. To top if off, she even said Israel was justified to respond to Palestinian terrorism and challenged the media in its biased reporting on the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Whilst her own country has rejected her, Sarah was warmly welcomed by the Israeli public. On a trip to Israel in 2018, Sarah was regularly stopped on the streets and told how brave she was and how much they appreciated her. Sarah was there specially to meet up with her friend “Miss Israel”, Adar Gandelsman. Sarah and Adar posted photographs and videos together with the caption “Sisters reunion”.
The pair also shared a video with Miss Iraq saying the Hebrew greeting of “Shalom” whilst Miss Israel gave the Arabic greeting of “Salam”. Both words mean “peace” in their respective languages and were a demonstration of what the two ladies hope to achieve - peace between Israel and the Arab world.
In an interview in July 2019, Sarah Idan said, “I feel like I speak for many people when I say we are tired of using the words the 'Palestinian cause' as a weapon to justify hatred, to justify violence, to justify that we need to be at war.”
Sarah explained how she is able to see the positives of Israel and the Jewish people that she was unable to see in Iraq, explaining that there are “many millions” in the Middle East who are brainwashed into believing there should only be “Palestine” and that Israel must be wiped out.
“We were taught that the Jews hate Muslims and the Jews they want to kill all Muslims and they want to invade all the lands... this is what they have been teaching us.” She explained how she was taught the Jews “are evil, they are not people of God, they killed the prophets”.
Sarah explains this is a “major issue” in
the Arab world and believes there is an agenda behind this indoctrination, “because when you teach the people that the Jews hate you. They dehumanise them and their religion, then you believe they shouldn’t have a right in this land and they don’t deserve to live. And I feel like this is what they’re trying to accomplish with these teachings.”
This is the same pattern that has taken place throughout the centuries when it has come to anti-Semitism and how countries and people groups were taught to hate Jews.
The Nazi regime was a brutal example of this. Propaganda films were created depicting the Jewish people as rats infesting Germany,
a plague that needed to be removed. This
was taught to children in schools. Conspiracy theories about Jews controlling the world, Jews being the cause of all problems and Jews not being like other people helped to dehumanise the Jewish people in the minds of Germany’s general population.
What Sarah Idan is saying is that a similar tactic is being used in the Muslim world today that is having any impact on “many millions” of people in the region. They have been brainwashed into hating Jews and Israel, and that is why it is so important that Sarah is using her voice to speak the truth.
“I’m not a politician. I’m trying to open people’s eyes, especially the Arab people, because I am Arab, I am Iraqi and I’m trying to open their eyes to things they are not seeing,” Sarah explains.
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