Hamas (the Islamic Resistance Movement) has recently published a denial
of the Jewish Holocaust on its official website. Although Hamas often uses
anti-Jewish phrases, this publication marks the first time the organization
has officially denied the Holocaust.
Background
In the 1940s in many parts of the Arab world, there was a great deal
of sympathy toward Nazi Germany--but mostly on the grounds of strong anti-British
hostility rather than support for Nazi racist doctrines. That said, the
then-Palestinian national leader in exile, Haj Amin al-Husseini, sided
openly with Nazi Germany and its doctrines, and assisted in recruiting
a Muslim battalion of Bosnians for the Nazi war machine. Anti-Jewish riots
occurred in Iraq under the pro-German regime of Rashid 'Ali al-Kailani,
in Syria under the pro-German Vichy French government, and in Morocco and
Tunisia under a combination of
Vichy rule and partial German occupation.
During the 1950s and 1960s, anti-Jewish sentiments were heard less in
the Arab world, partly under the influence of the good relations that some
Arab countries enjoyed with the Soviet Union, where the victory over Nazi
Germany played an important ideological role. An additional factor was
the emigration of most of the Jewish populations in these countries. More
prominent were anti-Israeli or anti-Zionist themes.
The Holocaust is still an unknown issue to most Arabs; it rarely appears
in textbooks or educational programs in most Arab
countries.
Arab Holocaust Deniers
In the 1990s, many of the Islamic social and political movements in
the Arab world joined the resurgent trend of Holocaust denial among European
anti-Semites. This was mainly the result and influence of the persistent
activity in this field by Roger Gauroudi, a French scholar and leading
European anti-Semite. Gauroudi, a former Christian Marxist and French Communist
Party member of the French parliament, converted to Islam following the
1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. He soon became a prominent figure in promoting
anti-Semitism among Islamic movements. But since he was known for his anti-Jewish
writings
as a Marxist too, he gained the support of many Arab circles beyond
the Islamic movements. When he was put on trial and convicted in France
for Holocaust denial several years ago, his popularity in Arab and Islamic
countries increased. Even the Islamic official establishments in Saudi
Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority (PA) supported
him. For instance, in 1997, Al-Azhar, the official monthly of the highest
Islamic religious authority in Egypt, published sympathetic articles supporting
both Gauroudi and his ideas on Jews and Judaism.
Palestinian Anti-Semitism and Holocaust Denial
The Islamic establishment of the PA, headed by Shaykh 'Ikrimah Sabri,
has taken a strong anti-Jewish tone, but it has so far not been accompanied
by a denial of the Holocaust. Instead, the most common claims have been
that Israel has used the same methods against the Palestinians as those
used by the Nazi Germans against the Jews. Hamas, on the other hand, went
much further in its 1988 charter, making a comparison between Jews and
the Nazis. Many of Hamas's pamphlets have included severe anti-Semitic
expressions not just against Israelis or Zionists, but against the Jews
in general, with such phrases such as "sons of pigs and monkeys" being
the most common. The official organ of the movement, the monthly London-based
Filastin
al-Muslimah, frequently presents anti-Jewish arguments, usually on
a religious basis.
But until this recent press release, Hamas had not denied the Holocaust,
except perhaps in the leaflets issued by some of its local groups. The
statement was released on the Hamas website in Arabic; it was not translated
in the English section of the site, probably due to the Western resentment
of such ideas. Hamas issued the press release in reaction to the Stockholm
conference on the Jewish Holocaust, held in late January 2000, in which
several heads of state and officials from many countries participated.
The conference emphasized the need to fight the phenomenon of total or
partial Holocaust denial by
political movements, historians, or anti-Semitic groups and individuals
on an international level.
The Hamas press release represents an escalation in the organization's
rhetoric and a hardening of its position toward Israel. But it is also
important to view this statement in the context of the declining support
by the Palestinian public for Hamas in general and the group's terrorist
activity in particular.
An excerpt of this press release follows. It is taken from the official
website of Hamas (www.palestine-info.org) and is translated from the original
Arabic:
| Following the special international conference in Stockholm concerning
the alleged Jewish Holocaust during World War II, a senior leading member
of The Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas states the following:
This conference bears a clear Zionist goal, aimed at forging history
by hiding the truth about the so-called Holocaust, which is an alleged
and invented story with no basis. . . . The invention of these grand illusions
of an alleged crime that never occurred, ignoring the millions of dead
European victims of Nazism during the war, clearly reveals the racist Zionist
face, which believes in the superiority of the Jewish race over the rest
of the nations.
Not only does this attempt to focus on an alleged story ignore the suffering
of our people and disregard the massacres committed by the Zionists against
them, such as Dir Yasin, Kafr Qasem, Tanturah, Jerusalem, Hebron and Sabra
and Shatila?not to mention the massacres committed by the enemy against
the people of our nation, such as in Bahr al-Baqr and Qana, the killing
of thousands of Egyptian captives, and so on?but the story itself has no
proof. . . . The Zionist entity is using psychological and ideological
terrorism through the Stockholm conference and the alleged Nazi Holocaust.
. . .
We call the free scholars of the world and its vital forces to expose
the crimes of global Zionism against our people, our nation, and against
all human civilization, and to refute them and not to fear the hostility
of the Jews and their ideological terrorism or their influence through
which they shut mouths and prevent objective, unbiased scholars from revealing
the Zionist claims as lies. By these methods, the Jews in the world flout
scientific methods of research whenever that research contradicts their
racist interests. |