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A New Holocaust Denier for Neve to Defend?Tuesday 11 Mar 2003
author: Eli
Since Gordon has a history of defending and promoting Holocaust Deniers, perhaps he will now defend and promote THIS one in Nation?
Palestinians get a Holocaust denier as
1st prime minister
by Rafael Medoff
While European Union officials praised
Yasser Arafat's decision to appoint his
first-ever prime minister, historians of the
Holocaust winced at the news that a leading
candidate for the job is the author of a book
denying that the Nazis murdered 6 million
Jews.
The candidate is Mahmoud Abbas (also known as Abu
Mazen), Arafat's second in command, and
his book, published in Arabic in 1983, translates as
"The Other Side: The Secret Relations Between
Nazism and the Leadership of the Zionist Movement." It
was originally his doctoral dissertation,
completed at Moscow Oriental College.
The book repeatedly attempts to cast doubt on the fact
that the Nazis slaughtered 6 million Jews,
according to a translation provided by the Simon
Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.
"Following the war," he writes, "word was spread that
six million Jews were amongst the victims and
that a war of extermination was aimed primarily at the
Jews...The truth is that no one can either
confirm or deny this figure. In other words, it is
possible that the number of Jewish victims reached
six million, but at the same time it is possible that
the figure is much smaller -- below one million."
Abbas denies that the gas chambers were used to murder
Jews, quoting a "scientific study" to that
effect by French Holocaust-denier Robert Faurisson.
Abbas' book then asserts: "The historian and author
Raoul Hilberg thinks that the figure does not
exceed 890,000."
That is, of course, utterly false. Hilberg, a
distinguished historian and author of the classic study "The
Destruction of the European Jews," has never said or
written any such thing.
Abbas believes the 6 million figure is the product of
a Zionist conspiracy: "It seems that the interest of
the Zionist movement...is to inflate this figure so
that their gains will be greater," he writes. "This led
them to emphasize this figure in order to gain the
solidarity of international public opinion with
Zionism. Many scholars have debated the figure of six
million and reached stunning conclusions --
fixing the number of Jewish victims at only a few
hundred thousand."
Another falsehood. In fact, no serious scholar
proposes such a figure.
After reducing the magnitude of the Nazi slaughter so
that it no longer seems to have been a full-scale
Holocaust, Abbas seeks to absolve the Nazis by blaming
the Zionist leadership for whatever killings
did take place. According to Abbas, "A partnership was
established between Hitler's Nazis and the
leadership of the Zionist movement...[the Zionists
gave] permission to every racist in the world, led
by Hitler and the Nazis, to treat Jews as they wish,
so long as it guarantees immigration to Palestine."
In addition to encouraging the persecution of Jews so
they would immigrate to the Holy Land, the
Zionist leaders actually wanted Jews to be murdered,
because -- in Abbas' words -- "having more
victims meant greater rights and stronger privilege to
join the negotiation table for dividing the spoils
of war once it was over. However, since Zionism was
not a fighting partner -- suffering victims in a
battle -- it had no escape but to offer up human
beings, under any name, to raise the number of
victims, which they could then boast of at the moment
of accounting."
Perhaps sentiments of this sort were common within
Abbas' circle of graduate students in the Soviet
Union in the 1970s. But in the free world, such
propaganda has never been accepted as serious
scholarship.
In most Western countries, Holocaust-deniers have been
treated as pariahs. In Canada and many
European countries, Holocaust-denial is a criminal
offense. In New Zealand, Canterbury University
recently issued an apology for having accepting a
master's thesis denying the Holocaust, while the
French minister of education revoked a doctoral degree
that was awarded to a Holocaust-denier by
the University of Nantes. A Polish university
professor who denied the Holocaust was suspended
from his position. The Japanese publisher Bungei
Shunju shut down one of its magazines for printing
an article denying the Holocaust.
International pressure compelled Croatian President
Franjo Tudjman to publicly retract statements in
his book doubting that the Holocaust had taken place.
Austrian Freedom Party leader Jorg Haider
was ostracized by the international community for his
remarks praising members of the SS, as was
French politician Jean Marie Le Pen, for questioning
the existence of the gas chambers and belittling
the significance of the Holocaust. A recent poll found
64 percent of Americans believe world leaders
should likewise refuse to meet with Abbas.
Yet some in the media have treated Abbas with kid
gloves, to say the least. The official BCC News
Profile of Abbas reports: "A highly intellectual man,
Abbas studied law in Egypt before doing a Ph.D.
in Moscow. He is the author of several books." The New
York Times recently characterized Abbas
as "a lawyer and historian...He holds a doctorate in
history from the Moscow Oriental College; his
topic was Zionism." Neither the BBC nor the Times
offered any further explanation as to the contents
of Abbas' writings.
Bestowing the title "historian" upon Mahmoud Abbas
awards his writings a stature they do not
deserve, and deals a grievous insult to every genuine
historian.
If Abbas is elevated to the post of prime minister of
the Palestinian Authority, not only the media but
the entire international community will be confronted
with the question of whether Abbas deserves to
be treated any differently from Tudjman, Haider and Le
Pen.