Ahmadinejad's Holocaust Myths

Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz, blogging at the Jerusalem Post's blogcentral.jpost.com site, notes that Iranian President Mahmood Ahmadinejad promoted two big lies about the Holocaust during his appearances at Columbia University and at the United Nations:

"The first every reasonable [person] knows is a total lie: namely that the Holocaust did not occur. The second myth, however, is one that escapes critical attention for the most part, because many people are not aware of its falsity. The myth is that the Palestinian people and their leadership had absolutely nothing to do with the Holocaust."

Professor Dershowitz recounts how the viciously anti-Semitic leader of the Palestinian Arab community from 1921 through 1948, Grand Mufti Haj Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, actively supported Hitler's Third Reich during the Second World War:

The Palestinians and their Arab allies were anything but neutral about the fate of European Jewry. The official leader of the Palestinians, Haj Amin al-Husseini, spent the war years in Berlin with Hitler, serving as a consultant on the Jewish question. He was taken on a tour of Auschwitz by Himmler and expressed support for the mass murder of European Jews. He also sought to “solve the problems of the Jewish element in Palestine and other Arab countries” by employing “the same method” being used “in the Axis countries.’ He would not be satisfied with the Jewish residents of Palestine - - many of whom were descendants of Sephardic Jews who had lived there for hundreds, even thousands, of years - - remaining as a minority in a Muslim state. Like Hitler, he wanted to be rid of “every last Jew.” As Husseini wrote in his memoirs:

“Our fundamental condition for cooperating with Germany was a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from Palestine and the Arab world. I asked Hitler for an explicit undertaking to allow us to solve the Jewish problem in a manner befitting our national and racial aspirations and according to the scientific methods innovated by Germany in the handling of its Jews. The answer I got was: “The Jews are yours.”

Beginning in the early 1920's, it was the Grand Mufti who fomented Arab riots and pogroms targeting centuries-old Jewish communities in the Old City of Jeusalem and Hebron. Jews were driven from their homes and businesses in what is now referred to by the Los Angeles Times and its ilk as "traditionally Arab East Jerusalem." In Hebron, defenseless yeshiva students and their families at the Hebron Yeshiva were slaughtered, and the British forcibly deported the survivors for their protection. These were Jewish communties that had lived peaceably along side their Arab neighbors for hundreds of years.

As also noted by Professor Dershowitz, the link between Palestinian Arabs and Nazism did not end with the fall of the Third Reich. The next chapter of the Grand Mufti's career was covered by this blog in an August 16, 2006 post, entitled "'Islamic Fascists?' Call them 'Islamic Nazis'". As recounted there:

After Germany's defeat, the Mufti was inexplicably allowed to flee to Cairo, where he continue his anti-Jewish activities. You know his nephew and philosphical heir, Mohammed Abdel-Raouf Arafat As Qudwa al-Hussaeini, by his nomme de guerre, Yasser Arafat, may his name be erased. One may follow the thread of his Islamic Nazism directly to Hezbollah, Hamas and Ahmadinejad today.

Professor Dershowitz provides further historical detail:

"In 1948, the National Palestinian Council elected Husseini as its president, even though he was still a wanted war criminal living in exile in Egypt. Indeed, Husseini is still revered today among many Palestinians as a national hero. Yasser Arafat, in an interview conducted in 2002 and reprinted in the Palestinian daily Al-Quds on August 2, 2002, the chairman calls Haj Amin al-Husseini 'our hero,' referring to the Palestinian people. Arafat also boasted of being 'one of his troops,' even though he knew he was 'considered an ally of Nazis.'"

I was first exposed to neo-Nazi propaganda about the Holocaust as a high school student in Phoenix, Arizona. Even then, I noticed that such "literature" presented two mutually contradictory themes, which I summarized in the following slogan: "The Holocaust is a myth, and we should have allowed Hitler to finish the job." Forty years later, the Islamic neo-Natzis of our time are still touting the same slogan, only now they get to do it from lecterns at Columbia University and the United Nations.