Islamic Negationism

[davkakach]

Excerpt from the book
Negationaism in India - Concealing the Record of Islam
by Koenraad Elst
http://voiceofdharma.org/books/negaind/ch1.htm



In the Arab world at large, there has occasionally been official support for negationism. In 1976, the Saudi representative at the U.N. denied in a speech that the Holocaust had occured. Hussein Sumaida, the young Iraqi spy who recently defected, has written in his memoirs how in school he had never learned of the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis, but all the more about the Jewish conspiracy and about the great realizations of Hitler's Third Reich.

I would not make too much of the great admiration which Fascism had evoked among the Muslims, as among many Third World populations. It is true the Baath Party in Syria and Iraq was modelled on Mussolini's Fascist Party. Sir Mohammed Iqbal has written a eulogy for Mussolini. The Yugoslavian Muslims collaborated with the fascist regime in Croatia, and their grand-mufti exhorted them to serve in the Fascist Ustasha militia. Muslim nations (Tatars, Kalmuks, Balkars, Chechens, Ingoosh) in the Soviet Union fought alongside the Nazi invader. The grand-mufti of Jerusalem made a pact with Hitler, if only because he too had wanted to get rid of the Jews once and for all. But let us assume that all that happened because they didn't realize the ultimate consequences of Nazism, or because colonized people had no reason to believe the anti-Fascist war propaganda put out by the colonial powers, themselves veterans of many a massacre. Even then, there is a lot of post-war writing in the Islamic world which restates the Nazi propaganda against the Jews, and for that, there is no longer an excuse.

In the first 1989 issue of Islamic Order, a quarterly published in Karachi, there is an article by Ausaf Saied Vasfi, titled Beware Arafat Beware. It is published "courtesy Radiance, Delhi", which means at least two English-language Islamic papers have published it; and it is by no means the only article of its kind which is currently being fed to the Muslim public. The article states that the sources of Zionism are chiefly these two: the Talmud and the Protocols of the Sages of Zion.

The Talmud is of course the chief Jewish scripture, a comment on the Tenakh (Tanach), and forms a decisive reorientation of the Jewish religion: a pluralistic interpretation of the Biblical texts, recognizing that each interpretation (including the literal one) is always a limited human attempt to understand the unlimited profundity of God's word, and allowing for different levels of understanding (literal, hermeneutical, allegorical, mystical). In the Talmud, Judaism transcends in substantial measure its exclusivistic orgins (which would unfortunately be re-actualized by Christianity and Islam), and develops the typical emphasis on intellectual investigation which will make the Jewish community such a cradle of powerful minds.

But the starting thing about Mr. Vasfi's article is that he presents the Protocols of the Sages of Zion as a source of Jewish inspiration, apparently ignoring the well-known fact that it was nothing but a forgery made by the Czar's secret police in order to underpin the theory of a Jewish conspiracy to control the world. In all seriousness, he tries to prove the Jewish world conspiracy with quotes from the Protocols, like this one: "And the weapons in our hands are limitless: ambitions, burning greediness, merciless vengeance, hatred and malice... It is from us that the all- engulfing terror proceeds... By these acts all states are in torture... We will not give them peace until they openly acknowledge our international Super-Government and with submissiveness."

Mr. Vasfi lists the occasions when Jews have been banished from countries, and comments with a rhetorical question: "The question is: why?" And then he recounts the story of the successive confrontations between Mohammed and the Jews of Medina, which proves the Jews' propensity to mischief. And they have remained mischievous: the Kemalist revolution in Turkey which brought down the khilafat "was planned and executed by the International Jewry", and "the entire Bolshevik Revolution in Russia was engineered by the Jews". It should be made clear that such sweeping allegations are nothing but the well-known stock-in-trade of anti-Judaism.

In late 1992, Western negationist groups had announced a negationist conference, due to take place in Sweden. The Swedish government prohibited the initiative. Among the participants: the Lebanese Hezbollah and the Palestinian Hamas, two Iranian-backed Islamic organizations.

Saudi Arabia is the chief sponsor of negationist activity in the West. The American negationist author William Grimstad has been exposed as being on the Saudi secret service's payroll. In 1981, his books, including Antizion and The Six Million Reconsidered, were sent, along with other negationist literature, to one thousand British political and business leaders, by the Rabita, the Islamic World Council, from Pakistan. The Iranian embassies are also distribution centres of negationist and anti-Jewish material

In her otherwise meritorious book "The Holocaust Denial" , the British leftist authoress Gill Seidel concludes a list of Islamic-sponsored negationist initiatives with the remark that "of course there is nothing intrinsically anti-Semitic to Islam as a religion". That is evidently the Marxist perception propagated by Maxime Rodinson, but it is historically inaccurate. Mohammed had all the Jews in his domain banished, enslaved or killed. After that, the Jews outside Arabia were allowed to survive under a number of humiliating conditions. They were kept down and exploited, and there were frequent progroms, as described by Bat Ye'or in her book "The Dhimmi". They were the target of Islamic hatred simply because they rejected Islam, but also for a more specific reason: they had deleted from their revealed Scripture all references to Mohammed, the future and final prophet.

Apart from the complicity of Muslims in Holocaust negationism, there is a far more pervasive participation of Muslims in a different negationism which concerns Islam directly. In Turkey most people, from the top down, deny the genocide on the Armenians during World War 1 (Which Hitler invoked as a precedent of successful, unpunished genocide). The general who led the operations against the Armenians has a statue in Ankara. This genocide had been declared a jihad by the last caliph, who had fullest authority to make such declarations.

In 1974, the Turkish representative in the U.N. Human Rights Committee demanded the scrapping of the paragraph (in the preparatory report on the prevention and punishment of genocide) referring in diplomatic terms to the Armenian genocide. As Turkey is a cornerstone of the NATO alliance, it manages to get a lot of passive Western support for its attempts to whitewash its own past. The paragraph was scrapped, and the document now only refers to the Nazi genocide. But in recent years, both the U.N. and the European Parliament have adopted resolutions condemning the Armenian genocide, which the Turkish government has angrily kept on denying.