Sunday, February 27, 2011

Countering Campus Zionhass Via the Truth

In the run up to this year's campus Israel-thrashing (Israeli Apartheid Week), Allan Dershowitz calls for a week examining genuine--i.e. Arab--instances of apartheid in the region (the rumour about the Jews practising "apartness" being merely the latest in a ongoing series of Big Lies intended to undermine and ultimately terminate the Jews' Israel.

Pace Mr. D., I don't think that's nearly enough. To equip students with a true understanding of historical and regional dynamics, I would make copies of Edwin Black's book The Farhud available free of charge to university students. An exhaustive and scholarly account of the Judenhass shared by Nazis and Arabs--a hatred that prompted the genocidally-minded Grand Mufti to take a pro-active, hands-on approach to assisting Hitler in his Final Solution for the world's Jews, and that led to the horrific 1941 pogrom against the Jews of Baghdad (a.k.a. the "Farhud," which translates as "violent dispossession," but which in fact constituted the most barbaric and savage sort of mass murder by a deranged, ginned-up, Jew-hating mob). For those who don't think that such savagery is not possible in this day and age, and who have convinced themselves that what's taking place in the Arab world at the moment marks some sort of great leap forward, I offer this brief except. It goes a long way toward explaining why Egypt was and remains the world's most antisemitic  nation:
Hitler's deafeat in May 1945 did not bring the Arab world squarely into the Allied fold. Many Nazis melted away from the Reich, smuggled out by such organizations as the infamous Odessa group and the lesser-known Catholic lay netword Intermarium, as well as the CIA and the KGB. They insured the continuation of the Nazi legacy in the postwar Arab world.

Egypt was a prime destination for German Nazi relocation in Arab world. Dr. Aribert Heim was notoriously know as "Dr. Death" for his grotesque pseudo-medical experiments on Jewish prisoners in the Sachenhausen, Buchenwald, and Mathausen concentration camps. He was fond of surgical procedures including organ removals without anesthesia, injectiong gasoline into prisoners to observe the manner of death, and decapitating Jews with healthy teeth so he could cook the skulls clean to make desk decorations. Dr. Heim converted to Islam and became "Uncle Tarek" Hussein Farid in Cairo, Egypt, where he lived a happy life as a medical doctor for the Egyptian police.
Two of Goebbel's Nazu propagandists, Alfred Zingler and Dr. Johann von Leers, became Mahmoud Saleh and Omar Amin respectively, working for the Egyptian Information Department. In 1955, Zingler and von Leers helped establish the virulently anti-Semitic Institute for the Study of Zionism in Cairo. Hans Appler, another Goebbels propagandist, became Saleh Shafar who, in 1955, became an expert for the Egyptian unit specializing in anti-ewish and anti-Zionist hate progaganda. Eric Altern, a Gestapo agent, Himmler co-ordinator in Poland, and expert in Jewish affairs became Ali Bella, working as a military instructor in training camps for Palestinian terrorists...

Black goes on to quote a young Egyptian army officer who, post-WW2, was so enamoured of Der Furher that he wrote him a fan letter, as if he were still alive, and hoping that "a new Hitler" would arise in Germany. The name of officer: Colonel Anwar Sadat.
In an afterword, Samuel Edelman writes:
The greatest irony is the contemporary application of the label "Nazi" to Israel by many in the Arab world and elsewhere when it was the very selfsame Arab world that embraced and carried out the Nazi policies against the Jews of Iraq and mandate-era Palestine. Black's work gives the lie to the allegation continually made by anti-Israel propagandists that Arabs had nothing to do with the mass murder of Jews in Europe so why must they pay the penalty of having a Jewish entitiy (Israel) in their midst. Black's writing documents the very core of the Arab embrace of Nazi ideology int he very center of the Arab world that led to the mass murder of thousands of Jews and evenually the exile of  more than 800,000 to one million Jews from Arab and Iranian lands after the State of Israel was born in 1948. Jewish communites that had existed for many centuries were completely destroyed in only a few short years.

What began in Palestine and Baghdad in the 1930s and 1940s still plays out in much of the twenty-first century Arab world...The chief lesson of the book teaches how critical it is that we believe that people really mean what they say--and say what they mean. Time and time again, people and governments did not believe the Nazis would do what they  promised or that the Grand Mufti and his cohorts would not do what they swore to do. It was a major error to ignore what Hitler and the Mufti said in public, just as we are in error if we ignore the words of twenty-first century hatemongers who preach the making of another Farhud.
And not just another Farhud--another Holocaust (or, as some see it, the completion of the first one).

That should be the message of those who oppose the Lefto-slamist campus Jew-bash, a message that crushes the calumny about Israel's "crimes" and exposes the real agenda--the Grand Mufti agenda--of Arabs and other Muslims who purvey it.

We have the truth of history on our side. It's high time we made use of it.

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