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Kristallnacht's lesson for today By Naomi Blumenthal, Jerusalem Post 9 November 1998 Sixty years ago today, Nazi mobs rampaged across Germany in the pogrom that would come to be known as Kristallnacht. Over 100 synagogues were torched, Jewish businesses were destroyed and thousands of Jews were rounded up in one of the worst attacks witnessed in Europe in centuries. My family was among those targeted during Kristallnacht. My grandmother owned a small shop; the Nazi mob smashed its windows and caused extensive damage. The next day, non-Jewish acquaintances, ashamed at what their fellow Germans had done, gave my grandmother a bouquet of flowers. Though a nice gesture, it did little to assuage my family's sense of foreboding. The fires that raged throughout Germany that evening ignited the conflagration that eventually consumed six million Jewish men, women and children. Fueling the catastrophe was a hatred that had been carefully stoked, one which played on popular and deeply-ingrained antisemitism. What began as anti-Jewish propaganda eventually snowballed into anti-Jewish violence. The defeat of the Nazis did not result in an end to such hatred. As the survivors of the Nazi atrocities dwindle in numbers with the passage of time, those who would deny the horrors of the Holocaust seem to be gaining in strength. Sadly, these merchants of hate have found an ample market for their wares in the Arab world. Denying the Holocaust has become a favorite theme of Arab columnists and journalists. The official media in several Arab countries repeatedly and unashamedly label the Holocaust a "myth" being propagated by Israel and the Jews for political or financial gain. Among the worst offenders is the official Egyptian press. A September 25, 1998 article in the official Egyptian daily Al-Akhbar, entitled, "The Holocaust, Netanyahu and Me," argued "the Jews invented the myth of mass extermination and the fabrication that 6 million Jews were put to death in Nazi ovens ... the Holocaust is an Israeli myth which was invented to blackmail the world." A July 14 article in the same paper asserted, "The State of Israel is a state based on blackmail. Zionism has elevated the Holocaust to a sacred level and uses it for the purposes of blackmail..." Echoing the pseudo-science of Holocaust deniers in the West, Arab columnists have sought to "prove" that the Nazis could not have murdered six million Jews. In an article sarcastically entitled "Find the Jews," the chief editor of an official Egyptian weekly wrote: "There are no findings to indicate the existence of mass graves, because the size of the ovens makes it impossible for many Jews to have been killed there. According to the lists presented by the Soviets to the Germans, no more than 70,000 Jews were registered as having been at Auschwitz." (Al-Ahram, February 2, 1998). The Jordanian media has made similar allegations. In an editorial entitled "Their Holocaust and Our Cemetery," the Jordanian daily Al-Arab Al-Yom contended that "research has proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that the Holocaust is a great lie and a myth that the Zionist mind spread to lead the world astray." (July 4, 1998). Comparable venom has appeared in the official Moroccan and Syrian media. Ironically, even as they deny the Nazi extermination of Jews, the Arab media continue to assert that Israel is worse than Nazi Germany. The Iraqi daily Al-Thawra declared on September 20 that "The path the Zionists tread is not different from that taken by the Nazis." An article in the Egyptian daily Al-Ahram on May 27 said, "The crimes of the Jews are worse than the crimes of the Nazis. Nazi Germany carried out its crimes to create an empire, but it did not last more than 6 years. By contrast, the Jews have been carrying out their crimes for 50 years to establish their state, which has not yet been erased..." Not content with minimizing the Holocaust, some Arab commentators have gone so far as to say that the Jews actually benefited from it. The official Palestinian Authority newspaper, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, in a July 2 article, asserted that the Jews "invented the shocking story of the gas ovens, where Hitler allegedly burned them...the persecution of the Jews is a deceitful myth which the Jews have labeled the Holocaust and have exploited to get sympathy... "And even if it is possible that Hitler's assault against the Jews hurt them a little, the fact is it did them a clear service whose fruits they are reaping until today..." The mounting wave of Holocaust denial in the Arab world betrays more than just historical ignorance. It is a symptom of unbridled hatred and contempt for the Jewish people and a lack of sensitivity for its unprecedented suffering. Such crude antisemitism may strike us today as pathetic and ineffective propaganda. But the lesson of Kristallnacht is that when a populace is repeatedly fed such coarse indoctrination, the result is often tragic. The time has come for the Arab world to learn this lesson. (The writer is a Member of Knesset and chairwoman of the Knesset Aliya and Absorption Committee.) |
