Formaldehyde
Both Fair And Balanced
Reuters: Abbas calls Holocaust "most heinous crime" against humanity
The Guardian: Arabs have a complex relationship with the Holocaust
I find it quite interesting that both Netanyahu and Kerry were "shocked" to supposedly finally find that there was no real basis for their incessant paranoia and warmongering.(Reuters) - Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called the Nazi Holocaust "the most heinous crime" against humanity in modern times, in an apparent bid to build bridges with Israel days after troubled peace talks collapsed.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected the overture on Sunday, saying Abbas's Palestinian power-sharing deal with Hamas, which led Israel to suspend the negotiations on Thursday, put him in partnership with an Islamist group that denies the Holocaust and seeks the Jewish state's destruction.
"What I say to him very simply is this: President Abbas, tear up your pact with Hamas," Netanyahu said on the CBS news program Face the Nation.
Abbas's message, published in Arabic and English by the official Palestinian news agency WAFA, coincided with Israel's annual remembrance day for the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, and included an expression of sympathy for the families of the victims.
"What happened to the Jews in the Holocaust is the most heinous crime to have occurred against humanity in the modern era," WAFA quoted Abbas as saying at a meeting a week ago with an American rabbi.
By speaking in superlative terms, Abbas could risk a backlash from Palestinians who draw comparisons between their suffering at the hands of Israeli occupiers and that of Jews under Hitler's Third Reich.
Abbas has condemned the mass killings of Jews in World War Two before and challenged allegations, stemming from a 1983 book he authored, that he is a Holocaust denier.
But the timing of the publication of his latest comments gave them extra significance, a day after he signaled he remained committed to the peace talks and said a future Palestinian unity government would recognize Israel.
"SHOCKED"
On CBS, Netanyahu said he and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry "were both shocked" to learn last Wednesday of the reconciliation agreement between Hamas and Abbas's Palestine Liberation Organization.
The peace negotiations, championed by Kerry, were facing an April 29 deadline, with little public sign the two sides were making progress toward a U.S.-mediated deal to extend the talks.
Netanyahu said in the TV interview, however, that he had negotiated in earnest for nine months, working closely with Kerry, and "we made some significant progress".
Palestinian officials have blamed Netanyahu for the peace impasse, noting he failed to carry out a pledged release of Palestinian prisoners and citing Israeli announcements of further construction in settlements in the occupied West Bank.
Netanyahu has said Abbas's refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state blocked progress in talks aimed at ending decades of conflict and creating a Palestinian state.
The Palestinian unity accord followed seven years of failed reconciliation attempts after Hamas seized the Gaza Strip from forces loyal to Abbas in 2007.
The agreement envisages the formation of a Palestinian government of non-political "technocrats" within five months and new elections six months later.
On CBS, Netanyahu said Abbas "cannot embrace Hamas and say that he wants peace with Israel". In a separate interview with CNN, Netanyahu reiterated he would never negotiate with a Palestinian government backed by Hamas, a group that both Israel and the United States regard as a terrorist organization.
Hamas officials were not immediately available to comment on Netanyahu's Holocaust-denial accusations.
But in an open letter to a senior U.N. official in 2009, Hamas branded the Holocaust "a lie invented by the Zionists". Hamas was protesting U.N. plans at the time to start Holocaust studies for children in Gaza.
Yad Vashem, Israel's national Holocaust memorial, gave a guarded welcome to Abbas's statement on Sunday.
"Holocaust denial and revisionism are sadly prevalent in the Arab world, including among Palestinians," Yad Vashem said. "Thus the statement, that the Holocaust is the most heinous crime to have occurred against humanity in the modern era, coming from Abbas, might signal a change."
The Guardian: Arabs have a complex relationship with the Holocaust
The issue of Holocaust denial in the Arab world has been widely covered in the media. Every public display of Holocaust denial by an Arab source is prominently reported and construed as further evidence of the pro-Nazi inclinations that Arabs, or Muslims, hold in their deepest hearts, especially when they are hostile to Israel. The deliberate provocations that the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, stages regularly contribute considerably to fostering this image.
There is no dispute that Holocaust denial has been on the rise in Arab countries during the last two decades. This has been illustrated in a disgraceful way by the hero-like reception that Roger Garaudy, the French former communist turned Catholic, turned Muslim, turned Holocaust denier, received in several Arab countries in the late 1990s, after his sentencing by a French court for a Holocaust-denying book. Likewise, the rise of Holocaust denial among Palestinian citizens of Israel has been attested by recent opinion polls.
Yet western-style Holocaust denial – that is, the endeavour to produce pseudo-scientific proofs that the Jewish genocide did not happen at all or was only a massacre of far lesser scope than that commonly acknowledged – is actually very marginal in the Arab world. Rather, manifestations of Holocaust denial among Arabs fall for the most part under two categories.
On one hand, there are Arabs who are shocked by the pro-Israel double standard that is displayed in western attitudes towards the Middle East. Knowing that the Holocaust is the source of strong inhibition of western critiques of Israel, many Arabs tend to believe that its reality was amplified by Zionism for this very purpose. On the other hand, there are Arabs who express Holocaust-denying views out of exasperation with the increasing cruelty of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. Unable to retaliate in kind, they believe that they can harm Israel symbolically in this way.
In both cases, Holocaust denial is not primarily an expression of antisemitism, as western Holocaust denial certainly is, but an expression of what I call the "anti-Zionism of fools". Yet it remains a minority phenomenon in the Arab world, fought by enlightened intellectuals and politically educated activists who explain that such attitudes are not only based on ignorance but do a disservice to the Palestinian cause. They point to the way any utterances of Holocaust denial are relayed by pro-Israeli websites, which use them in their propaganda.
Much less reported, however, are public acknowledgements by Palestinians of the Holocaust and of the universal lessons it bears for all persecuted peoples and groups. When researching my book, The Arabs and the Holocaust, I found innumerable reports about the enunciation by Palestinians or other Arabs of insanities about the Holocaust, while I noticed that expressions of Palestinian compassion with the victims of the Holocaust were barely reported, if not blatantly ignored. During my public talks in various countries, every time I told the audience about some of the most impressive examples and asked if they had heard about them, I encountered general surprise.
It sounds like the Israeli and US governments may have to soon come up with an updated propaganda campaign to rationalize their continued atrocities and resistance to a lasting peace in the region.In January 1998, the Palestinian negotiators in the Oslo process advised Yasser Arafat to visit the Holocaust museum in Washington in order to undo the damage wrought by the Garaudy affair. The planned visit was, however, aborted by the refusal of the museum's directors to receive the Palestinian leader as a VIP. Arafat sought to make up for the missed occasion by visiting the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam three months later, on 31 March 1998. Despite its obvious symbolic importance, this visit received very little coverage in the western media. In Israel, however, it provoked bitter controversy.
On 27 January 2009, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, an exhibition on the Holocaust, opened in the West Bank village of Ni'lin (or Naalin). It was reported by Israel News as follows: "Naalin, a village that has become the symbol for the Palestinians' battle against Israel's construction of a separation fence in the West Bank, erected a display of photographs purchased from Yad Vashem Holocaust museum and invited the public to learn more about the persecution of the Jews." What is remarkably moving is that these victims of the Israeli occupation wanted to "empathise with and further understand their occupier".
Most stunning of all, on 9 January 2009, at the peak of the brutal Israeli onslaught on Gaza, inhabitants of Bi'lin, another West Bank village known for standing at the forefront of the struggle against the Israeli occupation, organised a demonstration in protest, wearing striped pyjamas similar to those of Nazi concentration camp inmates. An account by the Bil'in Popular Committee states: "Protesters also wore small yellow cutouts in the shape of Gaza with the word 'Gazan' written on them to symbolise the yellow 'Jude' stars of David worn by European Jews during World War II." The BBC briefly broadcast a glance at this astounding event: a video is still available. That the message the Palestinian demonstrators conveyed was "exaggerated" is obvious (and natural); but the point is that they were identifying with the Jewish victims of Nazism and regarding the Holocaust as the highest standard of horror, rather than denying it.
Very few people have ever heard of these occurrences. In the context of a worrying rise of Islamophobia in the west, most media – often unconsciously – play a negative role in putting much more emphasis on the dark side of the Arab world or the Muslim world than on the bright side. This increases public prejudices against Arabs and Muslims, and sends back to the latter a detestable image of themselves with damaging consequences.
One would wish that the media instead promoted expressions such as the three reported above. Unlike counterproductive pronouncements by apostates of Islam busy outdoing the neocons in pro-western or pro-Israeli statements, these are expressions by credible and respected fighters against the national oppression that their people endure. Such are the most truthful Arab or Muslim upholders of the universal lessons of the Holocaust – like the Palestinian demonstrators in striped pyjamas.
