Icon of Evil: Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam (20 page)

The Palestinian National Authority’s television station, also operating under the authorization and direction of Yasser Arafat, has frequently denied basic facts of the Holocaust in its reporting. In an August 25, 1997, cultural affairs program on Palestinian National Authority television that evoked Israel’s annual commemoration of the Holocaust, the moderator informed his audience: “It is well-known that every year the Jews exaggerate what the Nazis did to them. They claim there were six million killed, but precise scientific research demonstrates that there were no more than four hundred thousand.”
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In another Palestinian National Authority cultural affairs television program that aired in 1997, Hassan al-Agha, professor at the Islamic University in Gaza and a political confidant of Yasser Arafat, declared that “the Jews view it [the Holocaust] as a profitable activity so they inflate the number of victims all the time. In ten years, I do not know what number they will reach…. As you know, when it comes to economics and investments, the Jews have been very experienced even since the days of
The Merchant of Venice.
”
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Several prominent Muslim religious leaders in the Islamic Middle East have also rejected the facts of the Holocaust. One of the most vocal and notorious Holocaust deniers in the Palestinian National Authority, Sheikh Ikrima Sabri, who had been appointed by Arafat as grand mufti of Jerusalem, told
The New York Times
in March 2000: “We believe the number of six million is exaggerated. The Jews are using this issue, in many ways, also to blackmail the Germans financially…. The Holocaust is protecting Israel.”
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In this interview, held at the time of Pope John Paul II’s historic visit to Israel, during which the mufti publicly rejected an invitation to meet with the pope,
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Sheikh Ikrima Sabri added: “It’s certainly not our fault that Hitler hated the Jews. Weren’t they hated pretty much everywhere?”
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These are sentiments that the sheikh’s predecessor as mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, would certainly have shared. In other interviews with journalists and reporters, Sheikh Ikrima Sabri, the highest appointed cleric in the Palestinian National Authority, repeated his claim that the number of six million dead is exaggerated. “There are a lot of stories and we don’t know which are true and which are false,” he told one American writer in his Jerusalem office. “It happened. There is no doubt about that. But a lot of people are suspicious about the number. Now [former Israeli prime minister Ariel] Sharon is trying to make a new Holocaust of the Palestinian people!”
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Sabri couldn’t point to Israeli death camps and, when pressed, said that taking land was akin to murder. “Besides, Hitler didn’t kill the Jews,” he said. “That’s why we still have Jews today!”
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In most Western countries, blatant Holocaust deniers such as Mahmoud Abbas and Sheikh Ikrima Sabri have been publicly ostracized or regarded as pariahs. In New Zealand, Canterbury University issued an apology for having accepted a master’s thesis denying the Holocaust, while the French minister of education actually revoked a PhD that had been awarded to a Holocaust denier at the University of Nantes. So, too, a Polish university professor who denied the Holocaust was dismissed from his faculty position.
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In Canada and many European countries, including Austria, France, and Switzerland, Holocaust denial is now a criminal offense.

Not so in the Islamic Middle East, where several notorious Holocaust deniers have found a safe haven following indictment for the crime of Holocaust denial in their European home countries. Several have turned to the radical Islamic world, and in recent years especially to Iran, for help when facing prosecution at home for illegal activities. For instance, Wolfgang Fröhlich, an Austrian neo-Nazi engineer and author of the Holocaust denial book
The Gas Chamber Fraud,
sought and found refuge in Iran in May 2000 rather than face trial and a prison term for promulgating Holocaust denial in Austria.
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He reportedly still resides in Iran, now as a welcomed guest of the Ahmadinejad regime.

The popularity that Holocaust denial was enjoying throughout the Islamic Middle East generally, and in Iran especially, was reflected in the response to the trial of Roger Garaudy in France in 1998. Garaudy, one of Europe’s most notorious Holocaust deniers, had been charged with violating a 1990 French law that made it illegal to deny historical events that have been designated as crimes against humanity, and with inciting racial hatred. These charges, for which he was convicted in 1998, stemmed from his 1995 book,
The Founding Myths of Modern Israel,
in which he states that “there was no Nazi pogrom or genocide during World War II and that Jews essentially fabricated the Holocaust for their financial and political gain.”
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As the trial unfolded, Garaudy was hailed as a hero throughout the Islamic Middle East. Although Garaudy had converted from Catholicism to Islam in 1982 and had married a Jerusalem-born Palestinian woman, it was primarily his outspoken and audacious denial of the Holocaust that evoked the public acclaim and celebrity he received throughout the Muslim world.
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The Holocaust revisionist message of his book, whose Arabic translation became a best seller in many countries of the Middle East, clearly resonated among his appreciative Muslim readers, who made the book a runaway best seller. The former president of Iran, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, announced in a sermon on Radio Tehran that Garaudy’s personal scholarship on the subject had convinced him that “Hitler had only killed twenty thousand Jews and not six million,” and he added that Garaudy’s only crime was that he had cast doubt on the historical falsehoods and fabrications of Zionist propaganda.
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Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani’s Radio Tehran sermon was notably illustrative of the widespread support that Holocaust denial and its advocates and promoters have enjoyed in contemporary Iran. Since the beginning of the Ayatollah Khomeini regime in the early 1980s, Holocaust denial had coexisted alongside other virulent forms of Jew hatred and anti-Semitism, including the obsessive state promotion of
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
In 2000, the leading Iranian newspaper, the
Tehran Times,
insisted in an editorial that the Holocaust was “one of the greatest frauds of the twentieth century.”
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The following year, in April 2001, then president of Iran Ayatollah Khomeini would publicly proclaim that “there is evidence which shows that Zionists had close relations with German Nazis and exaggerated statistics on Jewish killings. There is even evidence on hand that a large number of non-Jewish hooligans and thugs of Eastern Europe were forced to emigrate to Palestine as Jews…to install in the heart of the Islamic world an anti-Islamic state under the guise of supporting the victims of racism.”
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Islamic Holocaust Denial Comes of Age

Perhaps the best-known and most widely publicized event relating to Holocaust denial in the Islamic Middle East took place in 2006, when Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, amid great fanfare, convened an international conference on the Holocaust to which most of the world’s most celebrated and notorious Holocaust deniers were invited. This was not the first symposium devoted to Holocaust denial convened in the Middle East. In August 2002, for example, the Zayed Center for Coordination and Follow-Up, an Arab League think tank whose chairman, Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahayan, served as deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, promoted a Holocaust denial symposium in Abu Dhabi.
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But the conference convened by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the most notoriously celebrated and publicized gathering of its kind. In recent years, Iran has become the center of Holocaust denial in the Islamic Middle East, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is its most virulent and vocal champion. In December 2005, the new Iranian president, while declaring his intention to “wipe Israel off the map,” announced that “we do not accept” the claim that “Hitler killed millions of innocent Jews in furnaces.”
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The Holocaust was a “fairy tale” to protect Israel, alleged Ahmadinejad. “They [the Jews] have fabricated a legend under the name of ‘Massacre of the Jews,’ and they hold it higher than God himself, religion itself and the prophets themselves,”
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he claimed. Ahmadinejad’s remarks struck a responsive chord throughout much of the Islamic Middle East, where they were widely applauded and praised. Khaled Mashaal, the political leader of the terrorist group Hamas, described Ahmadinejad’s comments as “courageous” and stated that the “Muslim people will defend Iran because it voices what they have in their hearts.”
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Ahmadinejad’s statements denying the extent of the Holocaust were followed by a cartoon contest, sponsored by Ahmadinejad’s Iranian regime, which organized an international exhibition of anti-Holocaust cartoons in Tehran and distributed cash prizes to cartoonists who best mocked Israel and the Holocaust. When asked about the future, the exhibition organizer stated “that the project will continue as long as the Jewish state has not been destroyed.”
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On December 5, 2006, Ahmadinejad announced that Iran would sponsor an international conference to examine the historiography of the Holocaust, specifically addressing the questions of whether the Holocaust had been exaggerated or whether it actually took place, as well as whether the gas chambers had actually been used by the Nazis. In so doing, he announced, Iran would be encouraging scholarly debate and honest research on the subject of the Holocaust, which Ahmadinejad claimed could not be done in several European countries in which it was a crime to deny the Holocaust.
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Amid much fanfare and press coverage the following week, more than sixty invitees from thirty countries gathered in Tehran to participate in the two-day conference hosted by the Ahmadinejad regime. The conference brought together a rogues’ gallery of Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites from around the world, including white supremacists and neo-Nazis, radical anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian activists, and radical Islamic clerics with close ties to Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Islamic terrorist groups. Attendees included the American racist David Duke, former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and Bradley R. Smith, one of the leading American propagandists for the Holocaust denial movement. Also participating were Wolfgang Fröhlich, the Austrian neo-Nazi author of
The Gas Chamber Fraud,
and Mohammed Hegazi, an Australian-based champion of Palestinian terrorist activity who has described suicide bombings against Israel as “the noblest form of self-sacrifice” and who claims that Australia is controlled by “Jewish supremacists in New York.” Another notable conference participant was Robert Faurisson, the notorious Holocaust denier from France who had been suspended from his academic post at Lyon University and fined by a court in Paris for the crime of Holocaust denial, and who argued in his conference speech “that the Holocaust was a myth created to justify the occupation of Palestine, meaning the creation of Israel.”
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In his prepared remarks, distributed by the Iranian Foreign Ministry, David Duke claimed that the gas chambers in which millions perished “actually did not exist.” Rather, argued Duke, the “inventions about what happened to Europe’s Jews were part of a plot. Depicting Jews as the overwhelming victims of the Holocaust gave the moral high ground to the Allies as victors of the war and allowed Jews to establish a state on the occupied land of Palestine.” Another American Holocaust denier, Veronica Lake, stated unequivocally that “the Jews made money in Auschwitz,”
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a claim ludicrous even by the outrageous standards of contemporary Holocaust denial.

The Tehran conference was unprecedented in a number of horrific ways. Never before had an assemblage of Holocaust deniers been given the respectability of state sponsorship. The conference in Tehran was convened under the official sponsorship of the Ahmadinejad government. Invitations to participants were sent out by the Iranian Foreign Ministry. The conference itself was held on government property. The lavish hospitality of the Iranian government, which generously funded the travel and accommodations of those in attendance, was noticeable everywhere. Receiving a standing ovation, Ahmadinejad himself opened the conference with welcoming remarks in which he reiterated his claim that the Holocaust was a fairy tale fabricated by the Jews and in which he called for the destruction of Israel in a new, twenty-first-century Holocaust in the Middle East. His call for this new Holocaust, at a gathering dedicated to denying the first one, was met with deafening applause.

Not a single scholar of the mainstream field of Holocaust studies was present at the conference. No Israeli scholars were permitted to attend.
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Iran also denied a visa to Khaled Kasab Mahameed, a Muslim lawyer from the Israeli city of Nazareth who had opened the world’s first Holocaust museum for Arabs, the Arab Institute for the Holocaust Research & Education,
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and who had hoped to speak at the conference.

The Iranian government’s state sponsorship of its Holocaust denial conference was an event unprecedented in the annals of modern anti-Semitism. It was an event that Haj Amin al-Husseini, had he lived to attend the conference, would have been the first to applaud and approve. Ahmadinejad’s impassioned call for Israel’s destruction and for a new Holocaust to complete the extermination of the Jews that Hitler and the mufti had begun was a historic vindication of the mufti’s life’s work. For Ahmadinejad and his cohorts, the mufti’s infamous call to genocide—“Kill the Jews…. This pleases God, history and religion”—remained an inescapably relevant and enduring message that they were dedicated to transmitting to a new generation.