Neil Shimmield

I took Middle Eastern History with Neil. It was a joke. He went on to propagate the age-old anti-semitic sentiment among Arabs, that lived in the the British Mandate of Palestine, that Jews were Europeans or these land-grabbing immigrants. He propagated the myth that the Jews of Israel were Europeans several times. In fact, most Jews in Israel are of Middle-Eastern descent (I wonder why that was? it was never mentioned in this class... ) He showed us fake maps of the land of "Palestine" being taken over by those racist Jews over the 20th century. Notwithstanding the fully Arab villages that flourished in Israel. Failed to include any history of Jews in Israel before the Mandate (ongoing for millennia. some towns, that withstood expulsion by Jordanians, include Tzfat, a medieval Jewish city that founded jewish mysticism, when the Ottomans at one point had invited/permitted Jews to live in the land, away from Byzantine rule). He failed to include any mention of the territories like Gaza and the "West Bank" (hmm, I wonder where it got its namesake from; the WEST Bank? ) that were initially under Jordanian and Egyptian rule. Or that the PLO were an organization formed in Egypt during an Arab League summit in Cairo. I wrote in my final exam essay, vaguely writing about anti-semitism in the Middle East, before the state of Israel. I was not fully aware of sharia law and did not know that dhimmitude ever existed under every islamic and arabist empire that ruled the region over millennia. I was singled out by Neil as having gone to "one of those jewish schools" for simply mentioning that antisemitism happened in the Middle East before the State of Israel. Where did I go to one of those "jewish schools"? at Choate? I grew up secular knowing vaguely about my Iraqi Jewish background. So "I went to one of those jewish schools" just for mentioning antisemitism in Iraq (I hadn't even mentioned nor known the fascist Farhud massacre of 1940 that was instigated and cooperated with by Nazis and Amin Al-Husseini. ) After sharing false history of Israel he went on a propaganda tour of Iran's martyrs and what's it like living idolizing martyrdom. No mention of Kurds, Assyrians, Yazidis. Just, look at those European Jews and how about extreme Islamism in Iran? Strangely no mention of Iran's major influence in proxy wars in the Middle East. Nothing even about the protests for reform in Iran that were going that year, where women were STILL wearing hijabs were being shot in the streets by Iranian police, over 10 years BEFORE Jina Amini. The class was a failure by a Brit who must've felt some sense of being overly apologetic, for the British Empire? I'm not too sure. But one can argue that any sense of a disillusioned education backed by some undemocratic foreign body can be experienced here.

He’s a bit old in his language but is a nice grader even though the tests are insane