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Holocaust denial and the Arab world

G. Bagel | 21.06.2006 12:53 | Anti-racism | Social Struggles

Why anti-fascists must be or become pro-Israeli. To support the Arabs against Israel is the support of fascism.

Anti-fascists with long memories will recall that parts of the Middle East offered a refuge for Nazis fleeing Europe after the Second World War, many of whom found work in their new homes by joining the struggle against the new Jewish state in their midst.

German and Italian fascists courted the Arab world in the 1940s, hoping to encourage Arab nationalists to revolt against British power in the region. Their work in Iraq paid off in 1941 when the new Premier, Rashid Ali, attacked a British air base in the country and called on Hitler to help him drive out the British, an uprising that was accompanied by a pogrom in Baghdad that left over 120 Jews murdered.

Haj Amin al Husseini, the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem, thought that a German victory would offer much greater hope for success in the Palestinians’ fight against Jews, and spent most of the war in Berlin coordinating German propaganda that was broadcast throughout the Arab world. In April 1941, shortly after the Iraqi rebellion had been crushed, he offered Hitler the active support of "the Arab nation" in bringing down the "English-Jewish coalition". Haj Amin was involved in the formation of Bosnian Muslims into "Black Legions", units that fought for Nazi Germany on the Eastern Front and were responsible for atrocities in the Balkans.

It was not until February 1945, when Allied victory was imminent, that Syria, Egypt, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia all declared war on Germany, mainly so that they would qualify for membership of the newly formed United Nations. However, this certainly did not mean that their leaders had joined the fight against fascism. When in 1953 a rumour spread that Hitler was still alive, the Egyptian newspaper Al Musawwar asked several leading Egyptian personalities to write him a personal letter. One of those who did so was Anwar Sadat. His message was this: "My dear Hitler! I congratulate you from the bottom of my heart. Even if you appear to have been defeated, in reality you are the victor. You succeeded in creating dissentions between Churchill, the old man, and his allies, the Sons of Satan ... Germany will be reborn in spite of the Western and Eastern powers. There will be no peace unless Germany once again becomes what she was."

Nazis fleeing justice for war crimes they had committed often found refuge in the Arab world. Fritz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka, lived in Damascus for several years before moving to Brazil, where he was finally caught and brought to Austria to stand trial. Alois Brunner, Adolf Eichmann’s aide who played a central role in the extermination of the Jewish communities of Slovakia and Greece, has spent virtually all the postwar years in Egypt and Syria, where he is still believed to live to this day.

Egypt in particular threw open its doors, and this was not merely a case of offering refuge or asylum: as the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser put it, "We will use the services of those who know the mentality of our enemies". Franz Bartel, previously the assistant Gestapo chief of Katowice, worked in the "Jewish Department" of Egypt’s war office, while Standartenfuhrer Baumann, who took part in the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, worked for the Palestine Liberation Front - based in Egypt - as did SS-Sturmbannfuhrer Wilhelm Borner. Several Nazi doctors found work in Egypt after the war, including Dr Herbert Heim, responsible for "experiments" on prisoners at Mauthausen camp, and Dr Willerman, who committed similar atrocities at Dachau. The fact that these Nazis were positively welcomed in Egypt is emphasised by Nasser’s repeated refusals to extradite them for war crimes, even to his East European and Soviet allies.

It was in the area of anti-Jewish propaganda that Nasser most desired Nazi expertise, and the Institute for the Study of Zionism, established in Cairo in 1959, employed several former officials of Goebbels’ propaganda ministry. Luis Heiden, one former Nazi propaganda official, prepared a pocket-sized Arabic translation of Mein Kampf which was issued as a gift to Egyptian army officers. The institute also played a role in another arm of Egypt’s anti-Jewish activities: building contacts with neo-nazis around the world. In 1962 Colonel Muhammad al-Shazli, the Military Attache at the Egyptian Embassy in London, held a series of meetings with (prominent British neo-Nazis) Colin Jordan and John Tyndall to discuss funding of £15,000 from the United Arab Republic for Jordan’s National Socialist Movement.

Elsewhere, Gerhard Frey of the far-right German DW visited Egypt in 1964 and Iraq in 1968, where he was received by the President of Iraq and the Prime Minister of Kuwait. Meanwhile the Arab League representative in Bonn, Hassan Fakoussa, maintained contact with several neo-Nazi writers in Germany. Hussein Triqi, the Arab League’s man in Argentina, openly admitted his close relations with local neo-nazi groups, inviting local neo-nazis to speak at rallies organised by his Arab League office.

As Holocaust denial became a central part of neo-Nazi propaganda, so it followed that Arab backing for neo-Nazi activity in the West increasingly involved denial of the Holocaust. The notion that Israel was formed by Western powers to purge their guilt for the Holocaust - and that Israel uses the Holocaust to justify occupation of Palestinian land - has encouraged the idea that Holocaust denial helps the Palestinian cause by undermining Israeli legitimacy. In March 1976 the Saudi Arabian representative to the United Nations even used Holocaust denial in a speech to the UN Security Council, claiming that Anne Frank’s diary was a forgery and gas chambers were an invention of "the Zionist mass media". The following year the Saudi government provided US$25,000 to American neo-Nazi William Grimstad of the National Alliance to write AntiZion, a collation of quotes from antisemites throughout history.

In 1981, Inamullah Khan, head of the Pakistan-based World Muslim League, put up the money for AntiZion and The Six Million Reconsidered - also by Grimstad - to be mailed to every British MP and members of the US Congress and Senate, and in the 1980s, Britain’s National Front received funding from the Libyan and Iranian embassies in London. Nor is this adoption of neo-Nazi propaganda limited to Holocaust denial. The notorious antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is now much more widely available from Arab or Muslim publishers than from the far right, often masquerading under titles such as Jewish Conspiracy and the Muslim World or Zionism and Internal Security.

The French Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy was feted in the Middle East when he was put on trial in France in 1998 for denying crimes against humanity. The Palestinian Writers Association, the Beirut Bar Association and Egypt’s Arab Lawyers’ Union were among those who supported Garaudy. Naim Tubasi, head of the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, spoke of "the Zionist tale of the victims of the Holocaust", while Lebanon’s Union of Arab Journalists applauded Garaudy’s "courage to divulge Zionist lies". Invited to Egypt by Farouk Hosni, Egyptian Minister for Culture, Garaudy was accorded an hour-long interview on Egyptian state television in which he discussed his views on the Holocaust at length and argued that "95% of the media in the western world are controlled by the Israel lobby". Senior Iranian politicians also rallied to Garaudy’s side: Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, President of Iran until 1997, said that he was convinced only 200,000 Jews died during the war, while Ayatollah Yazdi, head of the Iranian judiciary, claimed that Garaudy "proved that the Zionists fabricated such a big lie in history so as to justify their occupation of Palestine".

Needless to say, it does the Palestinian terrorists and the Arab world no favours to be associated with something that, in the West, is the preserve of neo-Nazis and conspiracy cranks. Whether it is the official Palestinian newspaper, al-Hayat al-Jadida, calling the Holocaust a "deceitful myth" or the Syrian government daily Syria Times denying the existence of gas chambers, it is clear that parts of the Middle East, including the highest levels of government and the media, fail to understand the dangers of denying Nazi crimes.

G. Bagel
- Homepage: http://www.searchlightmagazine.com

Comments

Hide the following 7 comments

yes, holocaust denial is stupid, but. . . .

21.06.2006 15:51

. . . . further investigating is a GOOD sign, - whats most stupid is to fall for the "its this side or that side, you cant ask questions" thing - or letting people(s) get played against each other forever. . . .

BUT SO IS FORGETTING " IRAN'53 ", or that balfour etc lied to the arabs too


Searchlight anti-fascists are very critical of Israel: FACT!

21.06.2006 16:56

Stop Sharon now
Enough Is Enough - The Israeli Genocide of the Palestinian People Must Stop
an open letter by Gerry Gable, publisher Searchlight magazine

In recent weeks even the American public, shackled as it is by the chains of a slavishly pro-Zionist media, has woken up to the reality of the Israeli government's genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people. In Britain as in the United States, we Jews have been too afraid to speak out lest we too be smeared by the same powerful Zionist interests, but now we at Britain's leading Jewish anti-racist magazine have decided that enough is enough.

Searchlight magazine was founded in 1975 by the late Maurice Ludmer, a dedicated and lifelong Jewish anti-racist and anti-fascist. When he died in 1981, Maurice left Searchlight as his legacy not just to us Jews, not just to Britain, but to the world. Maurice, like the rest of us, was committed to a world free from hatred, racial bigotry and intolerance. That is why we have opposed tooth and claw any platform for the Nazis of the National Front and the BNP here in Britain. That is why like so many of our fellow Jews we have striven to encourage multi-racialism and assimilation. That is why we have never given up and never will give up.

And that is why it saddens us to see the good name of the Jewish people tainted and dragged through the mud by the butcher of Beirut and his gang of genocidal thugs in the Israeli government.

We deplore the suicide bombings, the terrible slaughter of both innocent Israeli citizens and the horrendous self-destruction of young Palestinian zealots. But much as we deplore, we understand. We understand why Jews have become hated in Palestine, and indeed in Israel itself.

We the undersigned call upon the Israeli government to withdraw immediately and unconditionally from the Occupied Territories, to refrain from the torture and murder of innocent Palestinian men, women and children, and to institute immediate negotiations with Chairman Arafat for a just and lasting peace for all the peoples of Israel and Palestine: Gentile and Jew.

signed
Gerry Gable, publisher
Mrs Sonia Gable
Steve Silver, co-editor
Nick Lowles, co-editor
Michael Cohen, photographer

jewish anti-fascist
- Homepage: http://www.labournet.de/krieg/nahost/oth/gable.html


Why appease Judaeo-fascist child killers?

21.06.2006 17:11

"Anti-fascists with long memories will recall that parts of the Middle East offered a refuge for Nazis fleeing Europe after the Second World War,"


You mean apart from the ones that went to America and helped build it's missile programme, right? Why no criticism of that? Anything to do with the billions of US taxpayers money bankrolling the Zionist state and it's criminal occupation?

Meanwhile ..... the US-funded Israeli war machine has killed yet more Palestinian children

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/5099978.stm

Boycott Israeli Goods


Words Or Actions?

21.06.2006 18:27

Sorry, but while Antisemitism worldwide remains at its lowest level in recorded history, Hate Sites like the one where this ridiculous article originated, and the Neo-Fascists it supports, have driven the recent flourishing of Islamophobia and Anti-Arab sentiments.

Thanks to countries like the US, England, and Israel, which have allowed a relatively small band of violent, racist Ideological Extremists and Fascists to seize power - then allowed them to escape the consequences of their criminal activity - the Arab World has, sadly, become "the Jews" of our Dark Time.

It's only right that we support them against this evil and aggression.

Regardless what a timy minority may or may not think or say ...

Field Guide To Hasbara (Zionist Propaganda):
 http://vancouver.indymedia.org/news/2003/01/28174.php

25 Tactics of Disinformation:
www.benfrank.net/disinfo/

Weak Hasbara


5 year old article

21.06.2006 21:00

John Doe


"why anti - fascists must become pro Israel". strange logic

21.06.2006 23:00

"why anti - fascists must become pro Israel". I do not understand the reasoning here. Why is it considered impossible to oppose anti semitism/holocaust denial AND Israeli crimes against the palestinian people. Fascism and Nazism are not entirely the same thing, not all fascism is based on anti semitism as HItler's variety was. Check the Oxford English dictionary: Fascism "Extreme right wing, authoritarian, or intolerant views or practises." Aspects of Israeli policy, most notably the treatment of palestinians as subhuman, and the apparent worthlessness of palestinian life when it crosses the path of Israeli national interest, are fascist tendencies. An illegal military occupation and the deliberate impoverishment of a people, is distinctly fascist. As much as those responsible for Nazism should be punished, and its lingering remains erradicated, so too fascist policies must be opposed wherever they are found.

andy


CONTEMPORARY HOLOCAUST DENIAL

22.06.2006 05:49

For the third time in a week israeli soldiers killed children

800 hundred children were killed during these 4 last year . 9000 injured .

Here is the contemporary holocaust denial.

 http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3265784,00.html

ENOUGH


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