ARABS AND HOLOCAUST DENIAL

Arabs and Holocaust denial sixty years later By Steven Stalinsky
To mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, the U.N. held a special session on January 24, 2005. It was reported that over 100 nations, including Arab states such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, supported holding the session.

Syria, on the other hand, was among the few countries not to support holding the UN special session. To understand the official Syrian position on the Holocaust one needs to read what is said in its government-controlled media. Discussing the "myth" of the Holocaust in the September 6, 2000 edition of The Syria Times, Mohammad Daoud wrote: "[The] most famous myth is that of the so-called Holocaust… We strongly believe that gas chambers were not used for burning of Jews."

Arab religious leaders also frequently espouse Holocaust denial. Saudi Sheikh 'Adel Bin Ahmad Bana'ma said at a mosque in Jeddah on October 22, 2000: "Today, they [the Jews] disseminate everywhere the lie of the Holocaust and claim that Hitler killed six million Jews in gas chambers… This is pure falsehood." A cleric from Egypt's prestigious Al-Azhar University, Mahmoud Muhammad Khadhr, published an article titled "In Defense of Hitler" on May 27, 2001: "It is hard to believe that the Europeans and Americans … cannot address … the false Holocaust, whose numbers and scope they have exaggerated until it has reached the level of the merciless destruction of six million Jews..."

Palestinian religious leaders also frequently deny the Holocaust. A sermon by Sheikh Ibrahim Mahdi on September 21, 2001, stated: "One of the Jews' evil deeds is what has come to be called 'the Holocaust'... However, revisionist [historians] have proven that this crime, carried out against some of the Jews, was planned by the Jews' leaders..." The Mufti of Jerusalem, Ikrima Sabri, is Imam of the Al-Asqa mosque and the highest religious authority in Palestinian Islam. Sabri gave an interview to the Italian newspaper La Republica on March 24, 2000, and stated: "Six million Jews dead? No way… Let's stop with this fairytale."

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' 1982 doctoral dissertation was based on Holocaust denial and discussed "the secret ties between the Nazis and the Zionist movement leadership." In the introduction to its first Arabic publishing, well-known Holocaust deniers were referenced, the total number of Jews murdered was formulated to be probably "less than a million," and doubts were raised that gas chambers really existed.