Tel-Chai Nation

Lyn Julius addresses the subject of Arabic/Islamic antisemitism and Holocaust denial, which a Washington Institute manager hasn't discussed well enough, rather predictably:

The walls of Holocaust denial are crumbling, wrote Washington Institute for Near East Policy executive director Robert Satloff earlier this month. We are seeing the green shoots begin to sprout that he personally had helped seed to combat Holocaust denial in the Arab world.

Since Satloff published his book Among the Righteous in 2006, calling for an awareness that Arabs were bystanders, perpetrators and also rescuers in the Holocaust in North Africa, there has been an explosion of academic research; Emiratis and Saudis have visited Auschwitz; and Holocaust denial has been condemned by Morocco.

Change may be painfully slow but is to be applauded and must give us hope for a better future.

On the same day that Satloff published the above blog, however, three broadcasts on official Palestinian Authority TV indicated that Holocaust distortion and denial are still very much alive. These shows charged that Jews had betrayed "the warm Palestinian welcome" given to them as refugees, called Hebron a Nazi-style ghetto and equated Israeli leaders with Nazis.

Despite Satloff's strenuous efforts to the contrary, his campaign still has the unfortunate side-effect of projecting the Holocaust as a European story. The complicity of key Arab figures in the Nazis' extermination project, such as "leader of the Arab world" Haj Amin al-Husseini, is barely touched upon in Among the Righteous.

The mufti broadcast virulent anti-Jewish propaganda from Berlin, where he and dozens of other Arab Nazis were Hitler's guests. He was a willing party to the "final solution." For political reasons, he was never tried for his war crimes, which entailed sending 20,000 Jews to their deaths, and massacres perpetrated in Yugoslavia by the SS units he established.

The Palestinian leadership has never repudiated the eliminationist antisemitism spearheaded by the wartime mufti, who concocted a deadly blend of Koranic anti-Jewish prejudice and antisemitic conspiracy theories imported from Europe. Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas himself wrote a PhD thesis minimizing the Holocaust.

I'm very disappointed with Satloff for failing to stress the details more firmly in dealing with Islamic antisemitism during WW2, but it's hardly a surprise when you consider political correctness and its negative impact in the US, and elsewhere. Only by doing an unambiguous study on Islam itself and its connections to nazism during WW2 will you be able to solve all these problems past and present.

Labels: Africa, anti-semitism, dhimmitude, Europe, germany, islam, Israel, jihad, terrorism, United States