by Dr. Edy Cohen
As a rule, it is forbidden in the 20th century Arab narrative to express pity for the “Jewish enemy” or sympathize with Jews over the Holocaust.
Auschwitz, photo via Wikimedia Commons
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,438, February 5, 2020
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Leaders from around the world recently visited Israel to commemorate the 75th
anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Concurrently with that
visit, another important historical visit took place: for the first
time, a delegation of leading Arabs visited the Nazi extermination camp.
Muslim World Society chairman Saudi Sheik Muhammad Issa visited
Auschwitz on January 23 with a delegation of leading Muslim clerics.
One of the most prominent was Lebanese Shiite leader Dr. Muhammad Ali Husseini,
chairman of the Supreme Islamic Council, who made a statement
condemning the murder of the Jews in the Holocaust. “The visit to
Auschwitz is an expression of Islamic condemnation of Nazi crimes in the
Holocaust,” he said. “These are crimes against humanity. We refuse to
accept any kind of religious suppression whether in the past or in the
future.”
Husseini could pay a heavy price for those
statements. The day after uttering them, at the most recognizable scene
of the Nazi attempt at mass extermination, a group of Lebanese
journalists close to Hezbollah filed a complaint with the Lebanese
courts against him. They accused him of, among other things, contact
with the Zionist enemy, contempt for the Islamic religion, and inciting
war between Muslims.
All because of his visit to Auschwitz.
Why did it take 75 years for some Arab leaders to
acknowledge the Holocaust, even as most of the Arab world still denies
the genocide of the Jewish People? Before delving into this phenomenon,
it is instructive to examine the definition of Holocaust denial.
Holocaust denial is not necessarily denying that
the Holocaust ever occurred. Rather, it is the spreading of lies or
half-truths, and using them as a means of harming the Jewish People and
the State of Israel. These lies include showing contempt for the
Holocaust, minimizing the numbers of victims, or spreading false claims
about the circumstances of their deaths, notably denial of the existence
of gas chambers.
The most severe kind of denial is to accuse the
Jews of being responsible for the Holocaust. Adolf Eichmann tried to do
this when he was a fugitive in Argentina, and many Arabs have since
adopted his twisted narrative. The Nazis were of course the first to
deny the Holocaust when they refused to accept responsibility for their
crimes.
As a rule, it is forbidden in the 20th century
Arab narrative to express pity for the “Jewish enemy” or sympathize with
Jews over the Holocaust. Many if not most Arabs are only able to see
the genocide in terms of the problems it ostensibly caused Arabs, namely
the Palestinians’ loss of the “country” they never had when the Jews
fleeing Europe returned to their ancient homeland.
One of the first cases of public Arab denial of
the Holocaust was when they put pressure on West Germany over the issue
of German reparations to Holocaust survivors and the State of Israel. In
a rare show of unity, the Arab states demanded that Bonn not compensate
individual Jews or Israel but instead give the money to the
Palestinians.
The Arab League even threatened to sever ties with
and boycott West Germany, claiming the Jews were responsible for WWII.
West German Chancellor Conrad Adenauer was not swayed by the threats and
signed the compensation agreement in September 1952.
Many conspiracy theories concerning the Holocaust
still make their way around the Arab world today. The first and most
insidious is the idea that the nations of Europe asked Adolf Hitler to
destroy the Jews because of their treachery and evil influence on local
society, manifested in such wickedness as prostitution, gambling, and
usury.
Then there is the idea that the Jews after WWII
promoted inflated numbers of victims to win favor with the international
community and blackmail Germany financially.
A third conspiracy theory comes from Muslim
extremists like the elder cleric Yusuf Qaradawi, who justifies the
Holocaust by defining it as “proper punishment” meted out by Allah on
the Jews because of their foul deeds throughout history, not least of
which is their refusal to convert to Islam during the time of Muhammad.
The fourth and most common theory belongs to the school of Mahmoud Abbas,
chairman of the Palestinian Authority (PA). In the 1980s, while a
student at Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, Abbas wrote his
doctoral dissertation on the Holocaust. What resulted was less a
dissertation than a piece of Soviet propaganda aimed at maligning
Israel.
The title of Abbas’s grotesque dissertation is
“The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism.” In
it, Abbas claims that the Holocaust was a Jewish conspiracy that began
when Israel’s first PM, David Ben-Gurion, collaborated with Hitler to
kill as many Jews as he could in order to justify the establishment of a
Jewish state in the Land of Israel. He then proceeds to belittle the
number of Jewish fatalities to less than a million and claims they died
not as a result of a Nazi-inflicted Holocaust but as a normal corollary
of war (i.e., through disease, starvation, etc.)
Sadly, in the absence of proper education, many
Arabs believe at least one of these conspiracy theories. In Arab
countries, not only do they not teach the truth about the Holocaust but
they encourage suspicion toward all books and histories that deal with
the subject.
The Muslim delegation’s visit to the death camp
was considered impossible just a few years ago. There is no doubt that
the new openness in Israel’s relationships with the Gulf States
contributed to making this historic event a reality.
Iran’s regional aggression is, to some extent,
encouraging Arab leaders to draw closer to Israel and the US. The Arab
world is also beginning to lose patience with the Palestinian
leadership’s intransigence and corruption, and no longer sees the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict as reason to avoid relations with the
Jewish state. Some Arabs are starting to see Israel as an example of
Western success in their midst and are no longer blind to the enormous
contributions Israel and the Jews can make to the region.
These developments combined to pave the way for
the historic visit to Poland. As for the legal ramifications for
Sheikh Husseini in his home country of Lebanon, Western countries should
immediately grant him and his family political asylum, as he is in
danger of paying a heavy price for his attempts to achieve peace and
coexistence between Jews and Arabs.
This is an edited version of an article that appeared in Israel Today on January 27, 2020.
Source: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/arabs-holocaust/
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