Arabs and The Holocaust

By Farooq Sulehria

Tuesday, July 06, 2010

Courtesy Of "The International News"

For the West, the Holocaust is an extremely sensitive issue. Denial of the Holocaust has been criminalised In 12 Western countries. For Israel, the Holocaust (Shoah in Hebrew) is an "industry." Back in 1965 Gamal Abdel Nasser noted: "Over the past ten years, Israel has received 3,700 million dollars from Germany; that is, more than a million a day." That is the potential of the "Holocaust industry." For the Arab world, the Holocaust has become, in the words of the late Edward Said, "an obfuscatory confection created by the Elders of Zion."

The Zionist propaganda machine happily advertises the outbursts of Holocaust deniers to paint Arabs and their supporters as barbarians lacking humanism. To further discredit Arabs, they swamp the West with literature on the Grand Mufti of Palestine, Hajj Amin, who was a supporter of Hitler.

The London-based Arab intellectual Gilbert Achcar has come out with a brilliant book on the subject. His book, The Arabs and the Holocaust, debunks all clichés about Arab attitude towards the Holocaust. Arab attitudes vary on the Holocaust. As they do on Zionism, which even had Arab allies like Jordan's King Abdullah, the great-grandfather of the present king, and the Maronites of Lebanon.

During the Nazi era, when the Holocaust was in progress in Germany and German-occupied Europe and Israel was in the making in Palestine, the Arab world was convulsed by groups following four competing currents: westernised liberals, Marxists, nationalists and Pan-Islamists. Inspired by Enlightenment, the liberals staunchly opposed Nazism. For instance, the weekly Al-Risala, with a circulation of 40,000 and with contributors like Taha Hussein and Muhammad Husayn Haykal, was running scathing condemnation of Nazism and its actions. But these liberals did not hold mass appeal, given the contradiction between western values and the western occupation of the Arab world. Similarly, Arab Marxists, with many Jews in their ranks, were fighting back Nazi ideas in the Arab world. During the Hitler-Stalin pact (1931-41), they briefly toned down their criticism of Germany.

Likewise, mainstream Arab nationalists refused to sympathise with Nazism. However, ultra-nationalists (including Young Egypt and the Lebanese SSNP) emulated Nazism but did not necessarily collaborate with Hitler's Germany. It was the Grand Mufti of Palestine who openly supported Hitler and Mussolini, following the dictum that "the enemy's enemy is your friend." The pan-Islamist Mufti ignored Italy's brutal treatment of Libya and overlooked Hitler's classification of Arabs as a race inferior even to Jews. It is this Hitler-Mufti relationship that often translates into titles of anti-Arab books adorned with picture of the Mufti shaking hands with Hitler. This is why Zionism has catapulted the Mufti to the status of sole leader of the Palestinians.

Without Zionist propaganda, the Mufti's memory would have disappeared from Palestinian consciousness. A Google search conducted in 2008 turned up ten times more results for the Mufti in the English pages of the search engine than on its Arabic pages. In the hullabaloo about the Mufti's collaboration, Zionism deliberately goes schizophrenic. It ignores that only 6,300 Arabs served in the German military while hundreds of thousands of them (including 9,000 Palestinians) fought in Allied ranks.

Of the 97,000 French causalities from the Tunisian campaign leading up to the German surrender, 52 percent were Muslims. Similarly, Muslim Albania was the only country in Europe to come out of the Second World War with a larger Jewish population than it had at the beginning of the war. (Albanians have been honoured even in Israel as "righteous Gentiles.") What the Zionists also ignore is that Zionism had dealings with Nazism in the 1930s, with its Maximalist faction having affiliations with Mussolini's Italy.

Denial of the Holocaust was not in fashion in the immediate post-Holocaust/post-Israel period, especially with the rise of Nasserism. Even the Mufti refrained from Holocaust denial. Yasser Arafat called for the restoration of "a progressive, democratic and non-sectarian Palestine in which Christians, Muslims and Jews will worship, work and live peacefully and enjoy equal rights."

Denial of the Holocaust gained currency only in the past three decades. This denial is caused by several factors. It is a way to vent anger against Israel's monopoly on victimhood, for which it unfailingly invokes the Shoah. Two cases of Holocaust denial in the last 15 years have attracted worldwide attention. In his 1995 book on Holocaust, French convert to Islam Roger Garaudy contested the validity of Holocaust accounts and had to face trial in France. In 2005, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran issued a statement in Mecca (also to embarrass his hosts) which denied the Holocaust. He thus handed the Zionists a new whip to lash the Arabs with. In 2001, a conference of Holocaust deniers was planned in Beirut. The event was cancelled because of opposition by intellectual like Edward Said, Mahmoud Darwaish and Elias Khouri. Such intellectual giants have always opposed Holocaust denials.

Regardless of the attitudes of varying ideological currents, Arabs of all political orientations opposed Jewish immigration to Palestine in the period leading up to Israel's creation. They talk about the Nakba (Catastrophe), as Arabs refer to the event of May 15, 1948, in relation to the Shoah. Gilbert says: "The Holocaust was incomparably crueler and bloodier than the Nakba. This consideration, however, in no way diminishes the tragedy of the Palestinians, particularly since they did not, as a people, bear any blame for the destruction of European Jewry." How true!

(All facts have been cited from Gilbert Achacar's book 'Arabs and the Holocaust').

The writer is a freelance contributor.

Email: mfsulehria@hotmail.com