“It strikes us as curious, to say the least, that not a single Jewish death was recorded in the country not only on the day of the stampede, but for decades.”
Mina, Saudi Arabia, September 29 – Investigators into last week’s fatal stampede near Mecca are looking into reports that not a single Jew was among the hundreds dead or injured, raising questions about who might have been responsible for the tragedy.
More than seven hundred people were killed during the culmination of the Hajj pilgrimage when two groups of travelers converged on a narrow bridge, while hundreds more were injured. Saudi authorities immediately set up a commission of inquiry to determine whether all the proper safety precautions were implemented, and how to avoid a recurrence of such disasters, which last occurred on such a scale nine years previously. The lessons learned from stampedes in prior years, especially one that killed more than 1,400 people in 1990, were thought to have prompted the development of safety measures robust enough to prevent such debacles. The suspicious failure of those measures, which had proved satisfactory for nearly a decade of Hajjes, combined with the telling statistic that not a single Jewish casualty has been registered, have made investigators question whether simple human error can account for the magnitude of the catastrophe, or whether more malicious forces were behind the incident.
Given the precedent of the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Virginia, in which many in the Muslim world believe no Jews were killed because they had been warned to stay home, authorities have quickly latched onto the similarities between the stampede’s outcome and that of 9/11, noting that coincidence alone was not enough to explain why no Jews seem to have been among the Mecca dead, said a Saudi investigator who spoke on condition of anonymity.
“While I cannot confirm hard evidence of any specific cause other than a systemic failure, the irregularity of no Jews dying in this stampede raises more than a few eyebrows,” he said. “Naturally, it would have to appear that the catastrophe was an accident, so the initial evidence would have to be consistent with human error, or some unfortunate confluence of circumstances. The red flag is the utter lack of Jewish deaths – not just in the stampede or its aftermath, but in the entire Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It strikes us as curious, to say the least, that not a single Jewish death was recorded in the country not only on the day of the stampede, but for decades.”
Indeed, the mysterious and suspicious lack of Jewish deaths is not restricted to Saudi Arabia. Certain towns and villages in Eastern Europe appear to have recorded no Jewish deaths since 1942, and until the first half of the sixteenth century, no Jewish deaths at all were registered in the Americas.