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Jewish World Review
Jan. 31, 2005
/ 21 Shevat5765
Arabs and Holocaust denial sixty years later
By
Steven Stalinsky
There's good reason why so few representatives of Arab states showed up at the UN's Holocaust commemoration
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
“No one … takes seriously the lie about six million Jews who were murdered.”
— Gamal Abdel Nasser, Deutsche Soldaten, 5/1/64
To mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, the U.N. held a special session on January 24, 2005. It was reported that over 100 nations, including Arab states such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, supported holding the session.
Syria, on the other hand, was among the few countries not to support holding the UN special session. To understand the official Syrian position on the Holocaust one needs to read what is said in its government-controlled media. Discussing the "myth" of the Holocaust in the September 6, 2000 edition of The Syria Times, Mohammad Daoud wrote: "[The] most famous myth is that of the so-called Holocaust… We strongly believe that gas chambers were not used for burning of Jews."
Arab religious leaders also frequently espouse Holocaust denial. Saudi Sheikh 'Adel Bin Ahmad Bana'ma said at a mosque in Jeddah on October 22, 2000: "Today, they [the Jews] disseminate everywhere the lie of the Holocaust and claim that Hitler killed six million Jews in gas chambers… This is pure falsehood." A cleric from Egypt's prestigious Al-Azhar University, Mahmoud Muhammad Khadhr, published an article titled "In Defense of Hitler" on May 27, 2001: "It is hard to believe that the Europeans and Americans … cannot address … the false Holocaust, whose numbers and scope they have exaggerated until it has reached the level of the merciless destruction of six million Jews..."
Palestinian religious leaders also frequently deny the Holocaust. A sermon by Sheikh Ibrahim Mahdi on September 21, 2001, stated: "One of the Jews' evil deeds is what has come to be called 'the Holocaust'... However, revisionist [historians] have proven that this crime, carried out against some of the Jews, was planned by the Jews' leaders..." The Mufti of Jerusalem, Ikrima Sabri, is Imam of the Al-Asqa mosque and the highest religious authority in Palestinian Islam. Sabri gave an interview to the Italian newspaper La Republica on March 24, 2000, and stated: "Six million Jews dead? No way… Let's stop with this fairytale."
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' 1982 doctoral dissertation was based on Holocaust denial and discussed "the secret ties between the Nazis and the Zionist movement leadership." In the introduction to its first Arabic publishing, well-known Holocaust deniers were referenced, the total number of Jews murdered was formulated to be probably "less than a million," and doubts were raised that gas chambers really existed.
To prove such claims, Arab media outlets often cite theories of European Holocaust deniers, who are celebrated in the Middle East. Fatma Abdallah Mahmoud wrote in Egypt's Al-Akhbar on April 29, 2002: "With regard to the fraud of the Holocaust … many French studies have proven that this is no more than a fabrication, a lie, and a fraud!" In an article in Egypt's Al-Gumhuriya on March 4, 2000, columnist Dr. Lutfi Nasef wrote: "Zionist propaganda continues … to raise the issue of the Nazi crematoriums for Jews, although [European] historical evidence … proved that claims that such crematoriums existed in the Nazi detention camps are jokes..."
Columnist Muhammad 'Abd Al-'Azim, also in Al-Gumhuriya on February 22, 2000, explained that "Israeli claims [that] six million Jews were killed" have been discredited by Holocaust denier and convert to Islam "the great French intellectual, Roger Garaudy." The Palestinian newspaper Al-Manar also praised Roger Garaudy on May 3, 1999: "Nobody in the West dares to stand up, when the subject is the fictitious Nazi Holocaust against the Jews of Europe… Dozens of intellectuals and politicians in the West … refuted the false claims of this legend … ending with the reknown French intellectual Roger Garaudy … who exposed the legends…"
Another European Holocaust denier, David Irving, was praised by 'Isam Al-Khadhr, a columnist for the Syrian paper Al-Ba'ath, on September 7, 2000: "The English historian David Irving's description of the so-called Jewish Holocaust by the Nazis in gas chambers as a big lie was enough to shake the foundations of Europe and turn Irving into a target for a campaign of slander... The caliber of the 'Holocaust' lie, the greatest lie in History."
In the last week of December 2004, interviews with two infamous Holocaust deniers appeared in the Iranian press. French Professor Robert Faurisson, former lecturer at Lyon University, gave an interview to Iran's Mehr News Agency on December 18th, discussing "The big lie of the alleged Holocaust." On December 29, Australian Fredrick Tobin also gave an interview to Mehr stating: "No Arabic-speaking regime, except recently Egypt, has openly pushed for adopting a 'Holocaust' expose. It is this information that will help to dismantle the Zionist entity because the State of Israel is founded on the 'Holocast' lie."
Tobin is referring to the activity of some of Egypt's leading think-tanks. For example, on June 24, 2004, Dr. Rif'at Sayyed Ahmad, director of the "Jaffa Research Center" in Cairo published an article titled 'The Lie About The Burning of the Jews' for Egypt's ruling National Democratic Party's paper, which stated: "Did this Holocaust indeed take place, and what is the truth about the numbers?... What interests us here is that this lie [about] the burning of the Jews in the Nazi crematoria…"
Egypt's Mihwar TV defended this article on August 28th after it caused a controversy: "This article was scientific research… The lie about the burning of the Jews in the Nazis' ovens … [was] an event that was, at the very least, falsified or exaggerated."
To date, there have been only a handful of prominent Arabs who have spoken against Holocaust denial. Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak's political advisor Osama Al-Baz has done so on numerous occasions, but this usually results from criticism of Egypt for antisemitism in its media. With the majority of Arab states supporting the U.N. special session commemorating the liberation of the concentration camps, one can hope that this marks an aspect of change in the way the Arab world relates to supporting antisemitism and holocaust denial.
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Steven Stalinsky is Executive Director of The Middle East Media Research Institute (www.memri.org). Click here to comment on this column.
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© 2004, MEMRI
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