Icon of Evil: Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam (19 page)

In more recent decades, similar blood libel accusations have continued to appear in the Arab media. Newspapers in Qatar, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Jordan have reprinted similar claims about Jews and Israelis.
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Al-Ahram,
one of the major government-sponsored daily newspapers in Egypt, devoted a special series of articles to discussing in great detail how Jews used the blood of non-Jews to bake their Passover matzo. In a similar vein, an Egyptian intellectual, writing in
Al-Akhbar
in March 2001, explained that the Talmud (which he described as being the Jews’ second holiest book) required the blood of non-Jews to be used in the preparation of the traditional matzo eaten by Jews during their Passover holiday.
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On January 1, 2000, an Arab weekly paper in Damascus invoked the blood libel, claiming that the matzo of Israel “is soaked with the blood of the Iraqis, descendants of the Babylonians, the Lebanese, the descendants of the Sidonese, and the Palestinians, the descendants of the Canaanites. This Matzah is kneaded by American weaponry and the missiles of hatred pointed at both Muslim and Christian Arabs….”
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In March 2002, Dr. Umayma Ahmed al-Jalahma stated in the Saudi government daily
Al-Riyadh:
“The Jews spilling human blood to prepare pastry for their holidays is a well-established fact, historically and legally, all throughout history. This was one of the main reasons for the persecution and exile that were their lot in Europe and Asia.”
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Yasser Arafat and other Arab political leaders close to the mufti have also thrown their weight behind the blood libel and charges of Jewish ritual murder. On April 24, 1970, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah radio broadcast that “reports from the captured homeland tell that the Zionist enemy has begun to kidnap small children from the streets. Afterwards the occupying forces take the blood of the children and throw away their empty bodies. The inhabitants of Gaza have seen this with their own eyes.”
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In August 1972, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia reported in the Egyptian magazine
Al-Mussawar
that while he was in Paris, “the police discovered five murdered children. Their blood had been drained and it turned out that some Jews had murdered them in order to take their blood and mix it with the bread that they eat on that [Passover] day.”
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The following year, in November 1973, Faisal stated that “it was necessary to understand the Jewish religious obligation to obtain non-Jewish blood in order to comprehend the crimes of Zionism.”
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In 1984, Syrian defense minister Mustafa Tlass published a book called
The Matzah of Zion,
in which he discussed the infamous Damascus affair of 1840, in which the Jews of Damascus, Syria, were falsely accused of ritual murder after a Capuchin friar and his Muslim servant had mysteriously disappeared.
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In
The Matzah of Zion,
Tlass claimed that the Jews of Damascus had indeed murdered the friar and his servant to use their blood to make the holiday matzo for Passover. In the book’s preface, Tlass ominously warned: “The Jew can…kill you and take your blood in order to make his Zionist bread…. I hope that I will have done my duty in presenting the practices of the enemy of our historic nation. Allah aid this project.”
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In 2001, an Egyptian producer announced that he was adapting Tlass’s book into a movie. “It will be,” he said, “the Arab answer to
Schindler’s List.
”
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The blood libel myth was predicated, in part, on the demonization of the Jews and on the belief that the Jews were inherently evil, depraved, and treacherous. This belief was given widespread coverage and credence throughout the Islamic world in 1968 by a conference that was held at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the leading Islamic university in the Middle East,
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attended by delegates from twenty-four Islamic countries. In the papers presented at the conference, which were subsequently published in a book entitled
Arab Theologians on Jews and Israel,
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the conference participants vilified Jews as the “Enemies of God,” the “Enemies of Humanity,” and “the Dogs of Humanity,” while portraying the evil of the Jews “as immutable and permanent.”
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The state of Israel was described as a culmination “of historical and cultural depravity.”
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The Bible of Israel was referred to in pejorative terms as a “counterfeit work,”
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while Jews were accused of “treachery” at all times and wherever they might reside. “Treachery was the business of Jews throughout the ages and times,” alleged one of the Arab theologians speaking at the conference, al-Husseini’s friend Hassan Khaled, the mufti of Lebanon, “as it was their instinct to break their covenant with others and resort to treachery as soon as they had any chance to betray others.”
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Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian National Authority, and Holocaust Denial in the Middle East

As other forms of anti-Semitism, such as the blood libel and ritual murder allegations, have become increasingly widespread in the Islamic world in recent years, so has Holocaust denial become a new weapon in the radical Islamic campaign to demonize and vilify the Jews.
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From its inception, Holocaust denial has attracted widespread support in the Islamic Middle East. The government of Saudi Arabia paid for the publication of a number of books accusing Jews of creating a myth of the Holocaust in order to win support for Israel.
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The Cyprus-based PLO publication
El-Istiqlal,
founded by PLO chief Yasser Arafat, trumpeted the Holocaust denial thesis under the headline
BURNING OF THE JEWS IN THE NAZI DEATH CHAMBERS IS THE LIE OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.
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The July 1990 issue of
Balsam
—published by the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, the Red Cross affiliate of the PLO, whose director was Dr. Fathi Arafat, a medical doctor and brother of Yasser Arafat—featured an article alleging that “the lie concerning the gas chambers enabled the Jews to establish the State of Israel.”
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The Nazi gas chambers “were a Jewish hoax to bilk funds for Israel from Germany,” claimed the article’s author. “Without German money,” he alleged, “Israel would be unable to survive.”
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Saudi Arabia has also surreptitiously helped to finance anti-Semitic Holocaust denial literature in the West, such as
Anti-Zion
(originally entitled
The Jews on Trial
) and
The Six Million Reconsidered,
written by an American neo-Nazi, William Grimstad, registered as a Saudi agent with the U.S. Department of Justice in 1977. These publications were mailed to all members of the United States Senate and the British Parliament in 1981 and 1982 by the World Islamic Congress.
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This organization, as noted earlier, had been founded in 1931 by Haj Amin al-Husseini, who had served as its president until his death in 1974. With its headquarters in Pakistan, and with close ties to the PLO, the World Islamic Congress has from its creation served as a base for radical Islamic anti-Semitism and terrorist activity against Israel and the West.

Arab attempts to minimize or deny the Holocaust date back more than forty years. The first of many Arab heads of state to advance such a view was Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, who told a German newspaper that “no person, not even the most simple one, takes seriously the lie of the six million Jews who were murdered.”
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Since the early 1980s, however, Holocaust denial has found increasingly frequent expression, throughout the Islamic Middle East, in the writings and pronouncements of Arab politicians and heads of state, in articles and columns by journalists, and in the publications and resolutions of Islamic terrorist organizations such as the PLO and Hamas. One of the preeminent Holocaust deniers among the political leadership of radical Islam has been Mahmoud Abbas, one of the cofounders with Yasser Arafat of the Palestinian Arab terrorist group Fatah and Arafat’s successor as president of the Palestinian National Authority and as chairman of the PLO. Mahmoud Abbas (also known as Abu Mazen) is the author of a 1983 book titled
The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and the Zionist Movement,
which was originally his doctoral dissertation, completed in 1975 at Moscow Oriental College in the Soviet Union.
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In
The Other Side,
Abbas claims that the Nazis killed only a few hundred thousand Jews, not six million, and that the Zionist movement “was a partner in the slaughter of the Jews” during the Third Reich.
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Abbas denies that the Nazi gas chambers were used to murder Jews, quoting an allegedly authoritative study to that effect by the notorious French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson.
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A central argument of Abbas’s book is his allegation that postwar Zionists greatly exaggerated the number of Jewish victims of the Holocaust for their own political purposes.
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As Abbas argued: “During World War II, forty million people of different nations of the world were killed. The German people sacrificed ten million; the Soviet people twenty million; and the rest [of those killed] were from Yugoslavia, Poland, and other peoples. But after the war it was announced that six million Jews were among the victims, and that the war of annihilation had been aimed first of all against the Jews, and only then against the rest of the peoples of Europe. The truth of the matter is that no one can verify this number, or completely deny it.”
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Less than two years after it was completed in Russia, Abbas’s PhD dissertation was translated into Arabic and published in Jordan, with a new introduction by its author. It is now accepted as a standard work of Holocaust denial widely cited by Arab academics, politicians, and propagandists alike.
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Abbas has repeatedly refused to retract or repudiate the outrageous claims and assertions that he made in his now classic work. Indeed, shortly after his appointment as Arafat’s prime minister, Abbas, who is widely considered to be a Palestinian moderate, reasserted his views about the Holocaust in a May 28, 2003, interview with journalists from the Israeli daily
Yediot Aharonot.
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Other Palestinian leaders, politicians, and diplomats have followed suit, espousing Abbas’s line. In 1978, for example, in the midst of the political activity surrounding the historic diplomatic summit at Camp David attended by Jimmy Carter, Menachem Begin, and Anwar Al Sadat, Holocaust denial found public expression in a memorandum submitted to presidents Carter and Sadat by the Palestinian Arab diplomat Issa Nakhleh. Nakhleh, one of the mufti’s closest political confidants and collaborators and a noted Holocaust denier,
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had served for several decades as the permanent representative of the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine at the United Nations. “The hoax of the six million Jews who supposedly perished in Europe,” Nakhleh stated emphatically, “has been used by the Zionists to win sympathy for the Jewish occupation of the Palestine homeland.”
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Holocaust denial has now become a widely shared view, endorsed and promoted by many Arab politicians, diplomats, and pundits throughout the Islamic Middle East. It has now become another standard radical Islamic calumny against the Jews.
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Since the 1990s, Holocaust denial has become ever more popular throughout the Arab media. This is true even in Egypt and Jordan, the two Arab countries that have diplomatic relations with the state of Israel. Among the newspapers that have consistently featured Holocaust denial are the Jordanian daily
Al-Arab al-Yom,
the Syrian daily
Teshreen,
the English-language Iranian
Tehran Times,
and the Palestinian National Authority’s
Al-Hayat al-Jadida.
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A January 31, 2000, article in
Teshreen,
the official newspaper of the ruling Ba’ath Party in Syria, claimed that Israel used “the legend of the Holocaust as a sword hanging over the necks of all those who oppose Zionism” and was seeking “to strangle any voice that reveals the truth.”
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In a similar vein, the English-language
Tehran Times
has maintained that its own researchers have proved that Jewish claims about the Holocaust have been fraudulent and unverifiable, fabrications of a Zionist plot.
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In July 1998, an especially virulent essay entitled “Jewish Control of the World Media” appeared in
Al-Hayat al-Jadida
that tried to explain how the Jews got away with falsifying the history of World War II. The essay’s author, Seif Ali al-Jarwan, argued that international public opinion, controlled and manipulated by the Zionists, grossly exaggerated the German persecutions and fabricated horrendous stories about the mass murder of European Jewry and the use of gas chambers to exterminate millions of Jews. Al-Jarwan, writing for a newspaper officially published under the auspices and direction of Yasser Arafat, went on to assert that the Holocaust was a fabrication of the world Jewish conspiracy:

The truth is that such persecution was a malicious fabrication by the Jews. It is a myth which they named ‘The Holocaust’ in order to rouse empathy. Credible historians challenge this Jewish [myth], calling for [more] persuasive evidence to be presented. The Los Angeles Historical Society declared that it would grant U.S. $50,000 to anyone who could prove Jews had been gassed to death. Jews exerted intense pressure and cast accusations of anti-Semitism everywhere in order to silence this challenge. Even if Hitler’s onslaught facilitated the persecution of Jews to some degree, Jews certainly benefited from its aftermath….
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