'The warm ties between the swastika and the crescent' [Holocaust perversion and Palestinian Nazi links]

Submitted by Miriam S (United States), Mar 13, 2022 at 06:58

The warm ties between the swastika and the crescent

Shraga Blum
Published April 29th 2014

I24 News

http://web.archive.org/web/20140503203823/https://www.i24news.tv/en/opinion/140429-the-warm-ties-between-the-swastika-and-the-crescent

An article published on this site by Nazir Mgally ("Understanding Auschwitz as a Palestinian," 26.04) recounts a visit to the extermination camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau by Professor Mohammed Dajani, a lecturer at al-Quds University in Jerusalem, which generated a wave of condemnation by Arab and Palestinian organizations.

Professor Dajani's actions may have been well-intentioned, but it is clear that the visits of Palestinian Arabs to the sites of the atrocities have almost all resulted in conveying the opposite message which should be retained. They should have realized that what they were seeing was the final step in a process that began long before with words, lies, and slander, which then led to the demonization and dehumanization of Jews, which ultimately resulted in the "crime of crimes." But most of them, without denying the horror of what they saw, return with a perverse equation: "The former Nazi victims have become our tormentors;" "The Israelis are doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to the Jews;" "The Palestinian Naqba is equivalent to the Holocaust," and similar statements that trivialize the Holocaust or exploit it in order to label Israël as "Nazi."

Even the less objectionable conclusions deliver an ambiguous message: "The Holocaust should teach us respect for the freedom and rights of all peoples and the rejection of injustice, racism and barbarism." Indeed. But what hides behind this beautiful slogan worthy of Soviet rhetoric? Who do these visitors think about upon their return from Poland? When asked, they are quick to respond...

Nazir Mgally even makes mention of it in his article, when he justifies these trips: "To embark on this journey amounts to a great act of humanity, and one that is imbued with national significance, as it sends the powerful message that Palestinians, in spite of all the suffering brought about by the Naqba, the displacement and the occupation, have not lost their capacity for compassion."

In the statement about the Holocaust that Abbas deigned to make this week for the first time, he drew the same indecent parallel: "I call on the international community to do everything possible to fight against racism and injustice in order to bring justice and equity to the oppressed people wherever they are. The Palestinian people are suffering from injustice, oppression and denied freedom and peace..."

Abbas was given an opportunity to be more specific and to acknowledge the brazen lie he told in his revisionist doctoral thesis, in which he claimed that "the number of victims of the Holocaust was deliberately exaggerated by Jewish organizations to soften global public opinion and receive great support from the powers in favor of Zionism."

Will he take the opportunity of this statement to delete from the official media and schoolbooks that he controls all the anti-Semitic accusations that he took directly from the Nazis? The praise for Hitler that appears here and there in his media and schoolbooks? The site www.palwatch.org that scrutinizes everything that is said, written, and taught in the official Palestinian arena lists hundreds of references to the Nazification of Israel, Holocaust denial or the rewriting of history. Recently, Jibril Rajoub, Deputy-Secretary of the Fatah Central Committee, took the liberty of saying that "if Hitler had come [here], he would have learned from them [the Israelis] how to oppress humans and learned from them about concentration camps, extermination camps." (Official PA TV, April 4, 2014)

The position of the Palestinian Arabs regarding the Shoah is actually more problematic. How can they denounce Nazism when their national movement has drawn so heavily from this ideology? The first nationalist leader of the Palestinian Arabs, the Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini - a relative of Yasser Arafat - was an admirer of Nazism and Hitler's personal friend. He actively collaborated with the Third Reich, in which he saw a model and an ally in his war against the Jews. He who created the "Nazi Scouts" in Palestine in 1936 never ceased to encourage Hitler and Eichmann to implement the "Final Solution" during his stay in Berlin. The "deal" between the Mufti and Nazi authorities provided that upon the entry into Palestine of Rommel's Afrika Korps, the Arabs would be first in line to implement the "Final Solution" for the Jews in Palestine, in return for Arab support of the Nazis. The Jews of Palestine were saved by Montgomery's victory at El -Alamein in Egypt.

Many books have been written in recent years about the fascist and Nazi inspirations of the Palestinian national movement and the Muslim Brotherhood. Curiously, during my travels in Europe, I have great difficulty finding this kind of literature on the shelves of bookstores.

Self-censorship is the general rule when it comes to the relationship between the swastika and the Crescent.

Only an honest and hard look at their past and their very recent origins will perhaps, one day, permit the Palestinian Arabs to visit Auschwitz without revising its history.

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