1. Yesterday, Shimon Peres’ policies yielded yet another success when two children were murdered on a Jerusalem bus by the PLO. Meanwhile, Peres continues to undermine the Israeli struggle to survive. The Bush Administration has announced that if Peres can meet with and shake the paw of Yassir Arafat, they see no reason why Bush should not follow suit and shake the paw also.

   Peres yesterday responded to criticism of his cult by saying at the Rabin memorial, "The Oslo process was the most correct thing in the world." No doubt the quotation of the millenium.

2. Only the oldest of the old-time readers of cyber samizdat incitements will recall the predictions from these quarters regarding the "conspiracy" to kidnap Yemenite children in Israel in the 1950s.

   The oldest conspiracy theory in Israel predates those of Barry Chamish by decades. It asserts that back in the 1950s, hundreds of Yemenite children and babies were kidnapped by a nefarious conspiracy of the racist Ashkenazi elite, protected by Ben Gurion, who all sought to remove the children from their backwards culture and raise them in healthy Ashkenazi-European culture. A conspiracy theory to be found today on every Israel-bashing web site on the planet.

   The background to the conspiracy theory had to do with numbers of Yemenite children who seemingly disappeared and whose whereabouts were not accounted for. That gave birth to the conspiracy theories, which have proven among the longest-lived and hardest to debunk in Israel. Perhaps surprisingly, huge numbers of Israelis, probably the large majority, have believed them. The Yemenite children kidnappings theories gave birth to the movement of the flaky violent "Rabbi" Uzi Meshulem, who has shot up streets in the name of the missing children. It has remained a political hot potato for decades.

   We had occasion to discuss these theories several years back, when the Israeli government set up an official commission of inquiry into the matter, the THIRD that had operated since the original accusations. The previous two had found there had been no kidnappings.

   At the time when this third one was set up, your cyber curmudgeon went out on a limb and predicted that this commission and any other would discover that there had been no kidnappings and no conspiracy because there were none to discover. I must say that at the time I was flooded by mail from people insisting that I did not know what I was talking about. And unlike the bulk of those defending the infantile Chamish conspiracy theories, most of these people were neither flakes nor crackpots. Indeed, I have a long-standing bet with my own wife over the outcome of the investigation, and - dear - you may begin your year of vacuuming as we speak.

   Yesterday this third commission released its report and to the great astonishment of most of the public, the report produced what those in my house who need not vacuum for a year knew all along. There was no conspiracy - there were no kidnappings.

   Yemen in the 1940s and 1950s had the world’s lowest life expectancy and the highest infant mortality rates, probably around 70% of children dying. (Yemen is still close to the world’s worst.) When the Jews left and came to Israel, the high infant mortality rates did not disappear overnight. This commission used state of the arts technology, including DNA testing, heard hundreds of witnesses. Of the 800 cases of Yemenite children investigated by the commission, which was headed by a Supreme Court justice, about 750 had died of assorted congenital problems or diseases. The rest had been adopted legally through assorted adoption agencies and procedures. Because of the bureaucratic nightmare of Israel in the 1950s flooded with immigrants, the primitive and overcrowded medical facilities, and the Third World conditions that then characterized post-Independence Israel, proper paperwork and documents were not always kept. Hospitals were not always sensitive and respectful when a child died. If there was any element of cultural snootiness, it was only manifested in insufficient communication and comforting of Yemenite families losing children to disease.

   No kidnappings. No conspiracy.

   Not that this newest report will put an end to the conspiracy theories. Such theories have a life all their own and become cult beliefs, and their believers stick to their guns no matter how overwhelming the evidence to the contrary. Just consider the Rabin Conspiracy theories.

   But there was no conspiracy. Yigal Amir killed Rabin. Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK. No one shot down JFK Jr’s plane. Vince Foster committed suicide. There are no CFR conspiracies. There are no space aliens or UFOs on earth. And no Yemenite children were kidnapped.

As postscript, the life expectancy of Yemenite Jews by the 1960s had so improved that it was the HIGHEST in Israel.

Copyright © 2001 by Steven Plaut.
All Rights Reserved.

-Published with permission