Dont Just Take Our Word For It See What Others Have Said

Resignation Letters from DYR

From Lea Tsemel & Michael Warschawski To the Directors of DYR We have been supporters of DYR from its very fisrt days, and identified fully with its goals and objectives. During a recent tour in the US, we discovered that Israel Shamir has been included in the advisory board of DYR. There is no room for a racist in an institution aimed to fight for the memory of the Deir Yassin victims of Ethnic cleansing and massacre. We therefore ask you to clarify whether or not Israel Shamir is indeed part of DYR. If it is the case and you have no intention to exclude him in order to keep the moral integrity of DYR, we will have to disconect ourselves from it. Please forward this letter to all the members of the Advisory board. Lea Tsemel, Michael Warschawski massacre, to identify those elements that exist globally (racism, militarism, fanaticism, perhaps nationalism and more) in order to denounce, resist and ultimately expunge them wherever they appear in the world. Given that, Shamir is a "problem" in two senses. First, he deflects the discussion from the essentials of Deir Yassin onto the supposed characteristics of the perpetrators. To cast all "Jews" as perpretrators of such heinous crimes, which is exactly how the discussion has been going for the past number of months, is racist, absolutely unacceptable -- and deflects entirely from the issue of Deir Yassin itself. Just look at his response to Uri Davis: "a Jew is called upon by his religious law to do utmost damage to one who accepted Christ..." Anyone who knows Uri Davis would know that such a statement is beyond absurd, but the bigger questionis: Who in the hell is "a Jew"? Paul's comment about "Jewish Power" is also outrageous. "THE Jews" is a construct just as false, simplistic, racist (biologically so, it seems) and unacceptable as any other ethnic label used to tar all members of that group with -- inevitably negative -- characteristics. (I know our "fully human" psychotherapist from Australia will read into this primordial "Jewish loyalty.") The innane discussion that has come to characterize the DYR discourse is not even sophisticated racism; its just plain old-fashioned stupid racism. That's enough to get me to leave. But like I said, Shamir is not the problem, he's more of a sympton. A much more troubling dimension of this is what is happening to Deir Yassin. Here an element of "ownership" enters in. I do not accept that groups "own" events. The Jews do not "own" the Holocaust, for example. But I DO accept that they have a special relationship to events that have affected them so deeply, that there voices and concerns cannot be dismissed, minimized or excluded. To turn the Deir Yassin tragedy into a discussion of Jewish racial characteristics, to dirty it with racist discourse, to create a situation where the people who were the most committed to honoring its memory in the senses I described above feel the need to leave, raises serious, fundamental questions. When I hear diabtribes of nonPalestinians against the Palestinian Ali Abunima because he raises concerns over Shamir's racism and the entire tone of the DYR discussion, a red light goes off. Has Deir Yassin been hijacked by a cult more intent on pursuing hate campaigns against the fictive "Jews" than

From Jeff Halper Dear Paul, Dan and the rest of DYR, on "both sides" of the Board, It is with a heavy heart that I write this, because I have been dedicated to DYR for several years now, and fully support its mission. My leaving the Board ha something to do with Israel Shamir, I suppose. I opposed his coming onto the Board in the first place (apparently that was an executive decision and Board members were not consulted), but only marginally because of Shamir himself. Since Shamir came onto the Board, there has been a radical change in tone in DYR that, to my mind, is destructive -- and tragically sidetracking -- of what we had all set out to accomplish. The founding core of DYR simply cannot grasp why Shamir is intolerable -- to the Jews of the organization, certainly, but to others I would hope as well.. The entire point of DYR is to honor the memory of the Palestinians massacred by pre-Israel Jewish militias and to draw critical conclusions from that shameful event. The conclusions, I would think, are two-fold: (1) To identify those elements of Zionism and Israeli policy that could lead to such acts and, to the degree that they still inform both Israeli society and the Occupation (as I believe they do), to denounce, resist and ultimately expunge them; and (2) To universalize the Deir Yassin

in searching for the humanistic, universal, critical and truly relevant elements of the Deir Yassin story? Is Deir Yassin's memory being sullied by those who claim to honor it? Shamir is only the symptom. I am more concerned about the few who have taken over Deir Yassin and, in defiance of anyone else, indeed, in arrogant dismissal of any dissenting voice, presume to be the "true" voices of DYR. The resignation of any one of the people who left DYR, Jewish or not, should be a cause of soul-searching, especially among the non-Palestinian "gatekeepers" of Deir Yassin who may be finishing off the job -massacring the memory of Deir Yassin by making it synonymous with racism and anti-Semitism.

These are issues that go beyond any particular person. None of us has a right to represent Deir Yassin, but we all have the responsibility to ensure that its memory be respected and that the lessons it has to teach us to bring about a more just, inclusive, non-violent (including in language), critical world be nurtured. I call on Paul, Dan and the others of DYR to open a full discussion on what is happening in the organization, where it is going, what its messages are, how the discourse should be held, rather than support the anti-Deir Yassin messages and defend the undefensible. In the meantime, I will find other ways to pursue the lessons of Deir Yassin. Jeff Halper

Serious Concerns About Israel Shamir

From Ali Abunimah & Hussein Ibish (acting solely in his private capacity)
April 16, 2001

Dear Friends: In recent months, many people have been reading the writings of Israel Shamir, who describes himself as a Russian-Israeli journalist. Many have been impressed by these writings, and Shamir has been embraced in many places in the US on his current speaking tour. From early on, some of Shamir's writings struck us as straying beyond criticism of Israel and Zionism, and crossing into the territory of implicit anti-Semitism. We have discussed this with many people privately, but now feel compelled to raise some of these objections publicly. While there are many passages in Shamir's rhetoric that cause serious concern, it is sufficient to cite these three: 1) Yesterday we received an "Easter Message" from Shamir in which he repeats the most odious characterizations of Jews as "Christ killers," the staple of classic European Christian anti-Semitism. In the message, which originates from Shamir's own email address, he writes: "Jesus taught, love your neighbour as yourself, even if he is a traditional enemy of Jews, a Samaritan. That is why he was hated by the Jewish supremacists of his time. He said: you can not worship God and Mammon, the god of greed, you have to choose. That is why he was hated by supply-side economists and bankers of his day. They sentenced him to death and the Empire obliged and carried out the execution, in order to keep peace with these all-important forces. Our fathers did not dare to speak against their leaders. The spirit of domination scored a victory, but the spirit of brotherhood did not vanish." Shamir continues: "The Jewish supremacy forces and the greed worshippers united again to crucify Christ.

The US, this New Rome, again gives hand and agrees to become the executioner. Now it is our turn to decide." Palestinians, Shamir argues, are today's Christ, and history has given the Jews a "second chance" i.e. a chance to redeem their earlier crucifixion of Jesus by not crucifying the Palestinians. "If we keep our mouth shut," Shamir writes, "we deserve to be called 'Christ killers.' If we stop it, we shall change history. The scarlet as blood sins of past will become white as snow. [sic]" We cannot agree that Jews "deserve" to be called "Christ killers," or that this kind of rhetoric has anything whatever to offer of value to the movement for Palestinian liberation and human rights. All this sort of rhetoric does, no matter who it comes from, is paint the Palestinian movement as one which includes, requires, or embraces a discourse which vilifies, or threatens to vilify, Jews as "Christ killers." What could be more counterproductive to building the community of conscience, the powerful moral stance, which is and must be the goal of those of us in the United States who support Palestinian rights, than the introduction of this kind of rhetoric into our conversation? How could we do more to discredit ourselves than by allowing such ideas to proliferate in behalf of a movement that has no need whatever to stoop to vilifying others to justify itself? 2) Shamir recently gave a speech at Tufts University. He is quoted as saying at that speech: "Palestinians are perfect mammals; their life is deeply rooted in the ground...Israeli people represent a virus form of a human being because they can live anywhere." ("Israel at fault for Middle East violence, Jewish journalist says," The Tufts Daily, April 10, 2001) The quote appears to be verified and accurate.

This is, if anything, even worse than the "Christ killers" language drawn from traditional European Christian anti-Semitism. The "Jew-as-parasite" analysis recalls the even more vicious political and racial, rather than folkloric and religious, anti-Semitism which emerged during the 19th century in Europe and culminated in the Nazi genocide of World War II. This description of Jews as 'parasites' or "viruses" cast them as immutably alien to all societies in which they lived, and contrasted the 'international Jew' with the supposedly 'authentic' volkish people, who have deep connections to the land of the nation and who are the creators of social and economic value. The 'inauthentic' Jews were always 'foreigners' and "viruses" because, as Shamir puts it, "they can live anywhere," and are not rooted to the land as the non-Jewish population supposedly is. They are cast as parasites and diseases that feed off of the productivity and creativity of the authentic people, without ever contributing anything themselves. It is disturbing to see the Palestinian people cast as the 'honest volkish people' of what is, in effect, racist rhetoric about why Jews are a fundamentally different and dangerous type of human being. Palestinians are not "perfect mammals," they are human beings like everyone else. No better, and no worse. Israeli Jews are not "a virus form of a human being," they are a human form of a human being, whose government and state is engaged in a brutal oppression and dispossession of another group of human beings. Our battle is for human rights and human dignity, and against racism, colonialism and oppression. It should be obvious to everyone that this statement by Shamir crosses all lines of decency, and could not be better designed to damage, denigrate and bring into disrepute the movement for Palestinian human rights. 3) On March 30, the Jerusalem Post published an op/ed that reported: "Two weeks ago, Russian-language journalist Israel Shamir told a largely Jewish audience: 'Jews only exist to drip the blood of Palestinian children into their matzas.'" ("The Jewish student - a minnow

among sharks," March 30, 2001) If this is an accurate quote, it is another example of the repetition of the worst kind of anti-Semitism. Shamir has privately denied saying this, but does not appear to have taken any action to correct the record publicly or to be in any way upset about the attribution. Obviously, we have no trouble believing that the Jerusalem Post might have mischaracterized someone's words. However, if the report is not accurate, one has to ask why Shamir has allowed such a gross misquotation to stand unchallenged. If he is indeed working in the interests of Palestinian liberation, surely he has an obligation not to let such a mischaracterization go uncorrected. Moreover, given the "Christ-killers" and "Jews-as-viruses" statements, the Jerusalem Post quote seems increasingly less out of character. Many people have welcomed the contributions of Israel Shamir in good faith, but we feel they may not be paying close enough attention to what he is saying. Perhaps this is because many of us welcome criticism of Israel from someone who appears to be an "insider," that our hunger for validation from Jewish Israelis sometimes allows us to proceed without the requisite skepticism or overlook excesses we otherwise would not tolerate. Perhaps some are ready to overlook statements that appeal to anti-Semitic sentiments because the person making them identifies himself as a Jew. But the identity of the speaker makes such statements no less odious and harmful. We do not have any need for some of what Israel Shamir is introducing into the discourse on behalf of Palestinian rights, which increasingly includes elements of traditional European anti-Semitic rhetoric. Such sentiments will harm, not help, the cause. We urge all our friends in the movement for Palestinian rights to seriously consider the long-term effects this rhetoric will have on the cause, and act accordingly. Ali Abunimah Hussein Ibish (acting solely in his private capacity)

http://www.abunimah.org/features/010416shamir.html

Flirtations with Fascism

Al Hayat Discovers Ezra Pound by Asma Agbarieh Challenge no. 67, May-June 2001

Mussolini's fascism glorified the state as the ultimate human being, for whose sake individual citizens - the parts - would heroically sacrifice their resources and their lives. Hitler's version combined this notion of the state with that of the Aryan race. Both saw warfare and imperialism as "an essential manifestation of vitality" (Mussolini's phrase), through which the state or race

would constantly exercise and re-establish its superiority. The driving force of economic development, on the fascist view, was to be neither the egalitarian motive of socialism nor the free-market competition of capitalism, but rather the bloody competition of perpetual warfare, in which alone humanity could realize its full heroic potential.

Parts of the Arab world have begun to show tolerance for bearers of fascist ideology. One hears clear indications of anti-Semitism*, in which Jews are singled out for hatred merely on account of their being Jews. Formerly, the Palestinian national movement took care to make distinctions, confining its criticisms to Zionists - for Zionism drags with it, inevitably, a racist attitude toward the Palestinian people. But now we hear expressions that arouse concern. The official PA daily, al-Hayat al-Jadida, publishes a denial of the holocaust by Hiri Manzour entitled, "Marketing Ashes". An Egyptian columnist writes: "Thank you, Hitler, that you did part of the work for us. What a pity you didn't finish the job!" (Ahmad Ragheb in the Egyptian government daily, al-Akhbar, April 29 - cited by the Israeli daily, Yediot Aharonot, on April 30.) Lately the tendency has shown up in the Arab world's most influential newspaper, Al Hayat, which is funded by the Saudis and published in London. On April 2, Al Hayat published on its front page an article by its literary editor, Abdo Wazzen, with the following lead: What a happy coincidence! It seems that the great American poet, Ezra Pound, had a son named Omar, who is a poet in his own right. Omar has written poems about the Palestinian intifada under the title, "The Sacred Earth".** Ezra Pound (1885-1972) was known for his "anti-Semitic" tendencies. These led him to oppose the Allies in World War II and migrate to Fascist Italy, escaping from Roosevelt and his Jewish "advisers" (the bankers, as he calls them). Omar Pound demonstrates his pro-Palestinian tendencies when he adopts the issue of the intifada, seeing it through the eyes of its fighters. Thus the article begins, and one reads on, expecting some qualification, some "putting-of-distance" between the position of the father and that of the son - but none such follows. The "coincidence" remains a "happy" one. We go from Ezra's "anti-Semitism" (whatever the quotation marks may mean) to Omar's pro-Palestinian tendencies in a single breath, in the spirit of, "A chip off the old block! The apple does not fall far from the tree!" What are we to make of this? And what are the readers of the influential Al Hayat to make of it? The message that emerges between the lines goes thus: "The father was not only a great poet, but an anti-Semite and a fascist, supporting Mussolini and Hitler. All this is to his credit, and now we have the son taking up the good cause, which in our time is that of the Palestinian Intifada - bravo!" To call such a coincidence happy, to link the fascism of the father - via the son - to the fight against Zionism, is an insult to the Palestinian people. Its struggle appears here as a continuing chapter in the persecution of the Jews - and not as what it is and must remain: a struggle for liberation against a colonialist movement called Zionism, which seized that people's land and resources. A week after publishing the Pound piece, Wazzen came out with an article praising Pablo Neruda, the great

Chilean poet and Nobel Prize laureate. Neruda, a Communist, was also a great political poet, committed to the interests of the working class and of oppressed peoples throughout the world. Where then does Al Hayat's literary editor stand? Is he a nationalist? A fascist? A socialist? Or is he simply an opportunist, taking from anyone who will lend support, never mind the motives? In an age where careful distinctions are necessary, the eclectic opportunist is dangerous. As for Al Hayat, it is not merely the most influential Arab organ - it is also the one most frequently cited and emulated by local papers such as al-Ittihad (the journal of the Communist Party in Israel) and Fassel al-Makal (the paper of Azmi Bishara and his party, "Balad" - the National Democratic Alliance). When the highly respected Al Hayat glorifies a fascist anti-Semite without a word of qualification - linking him via his son to the Intifada, it sends a confirming message of legitimacy to such anti-Semitic impulses as may lurk within Arab public opinion. On April 10, the local Communist paper al-Ittihad reprinted (with credit) the Al Hayat article on Neruda. On April 13, Fassel al-Makal, Bishara's paper nationalist and anti-communist - re-printed the Al Hayat piece on the Pounds without a word of qualification. Bishara's paper neglected to credit the source and author, thus giving the impression that the item was its own. Yet the same Azmi Bishara was one of fourteen Arab intellectuals who signed a petition asking the government of Lebanon to cancel a scheduled conference of Holocaust deniers. (See below.) In sending such contradictory messages, intellectuals like Bishara only increase the lack of clarity surrounding the question: Who is the enemy?

Strange Alliance
Beirut was scheduled to host a conference of "revisionist historians" - that is, Holocaust deniers - on March 30. It was no "happy coincidence" that an Arab capital was chosen: here the existing anti-Israel sentiment could easily be translated into anti-Semitic feeling. Under pressure from the West, Lebanon cancelled the conference. Protest followed, notably from groups opposing normalization with Israel. In this affair too, the Palestinian struggle lost some of its progressive, revolutionary content. One figure in these proceedings was Ibrahim Alloush, editor of a website called Free Arab Voice (www.fav.com) and a leading member of the Association against Zionism and Racism, located in Jordan. Here is the chain of events, summarized from Alloush's communications: Opposition to the conference came not only from the West and the Zionist movement, but also from fourteen Arab intellectuals, among them Edward Said, who petitioned the Lebanese government to cancel it. Alloush and his colleagues attacked the intellectuals, especially Said. How is it possible, they asked, that Arab intellectuals, knowing the severe limits on

freedom of expression in the Arab states, would lend their voices to banning a conference? Under this pressure, Said withdrew his signature. Alloush and several other Jordanian intellectuals then took a counter-initiative, proposing to hold a conference in Amman on April 9 on the topic: "What happened to the revisionist historians' conference in Beirut?" As an appendix to the invitation, Alloush included a piece of his own, called "Revisionist Historians for the Arabs: A Preview." In it he surveys the views of the Holocaust deniers with approval. Here, for example, is an excerpt from the second point of his article: "Do revisionist historians deny that Jews died in WWII? "Revisionist historians do NOT deny that Jews died They say, however, that hundreds of thousands of Jews died along with the forty-five million who perished in that war. The revisionist historians used hard sciences like physics and chemistry in proving that the so-called gas chambers were not used to exterminate Jews systematically, but to burn the corpses of people from different nationalities (after their deaths) to circumvent plagues." Alloush's conference about the cancelled conference never took place. Four days short of the event, the Jordanian police banned it. Ever since Jordan signed the peace treaty with Israel, Jordanian groups such as the Writers' Union and Alloush's Association have done important work in spearheading opposition to the "normalization" of contacts between the two countries. Yet these opposition groups have never established red lines, nor formulated a political program. As a result, they have isolated themselves unnecessarily on many issues - for example, on the question, With whom is it acceptable to meet? Not, it turns out, with a Jew, even an anti-Zionist Jew. But with an Arab supporter of Oslo? Sometimes Yes, sometimes No. Two years ago I visited Jordan and interviewed several of these intellectuals, among them Fakhri Qa'awar, chairperson of the Writers' Union. I presented my view that the struggle should focus on those Oslo supporters, both Jewish and Arab, who are helping Israel to penetrate the Arab world in order to dominate it economically and culturally. Oslo, I said, must be the focus, because Israel and the US have used it to split the Arab world. We must not put all Jews in the same category: in doing so, we divert our struggle from its proper course. The struggle is class-based: it is between those whom Oslo benefits and those whom it does not. It must not be sidetracked into a narrow nationalism that would delude the Arab refugees and workers into thinking they are in the same boat with the bourgeoisie. Qa'awar answered that the number of Jews on the Left who oppose Oslo is so small that, practically speaking, he sees no reason to change the position against any relations with Jews.

Given their lack of political clarity, the Jordanian opponents of normalization have adopted an antiSemitic Arab chauvinism. The fact that Israel exploits the Holocaust in order to justify the Zionist project has led them to take a counter-position, downplaying the extent of German fascist crimes. It is as if they acknowledged that the Holocaust would justify the existence of Israel - and so they must show it didn't happen! Such logic does these Jordanian intellectuals discredit. Not only do they fall into the trap of connecting the Holocaust to the establishment of Israel, but they also link themselves to a bunch of quacks who are trying to rewrite the past in order to pave the way for a return of fascism. As for Zionism, it is a colonialist movement that arose decades before the Holocaust. It exploits the murder of six million Jews in order to justify a project that is itself inherently racist. The Palestinian case is strong enough - without the need for Holocaust deniers.

Reactionary nationalism
The escape into extreme nationalism is dangerous. In the Marxist view, nationalism is a vessel whose character alters depending on what you pour into it. Filled with socialism, it can be progressive - part of a liberation movement. If it exchanges this content for capitalism, it becomes reactionary. When the Palestinian and pan-Arab causes lost their progressive backer, the Soviet Union, the romance with capitalism began. The Arab leaders, and above all Yasser Arafat, promised their peoples economic prosperity, provided they submit to American domination and the capitalist ideology. Today they find themselves at a dead end. Not only has Oslo collapsed, but capitalism itself has entered a deep economic crisis. In the absence of progressive socialist support, Arab nationalism is in danger of falling into the waiting arms of fascism. The Arab world is not ready to confront the US and capitalism, because until now no true oppositionmovement has arisen from within it. Given the vacuum, nothing is easier than to blame everything on the Jews while supporting fascist forces in the US and in Europe, looking to the latter to "purify" the Arab world of the Jewish "parasite". For the Arab regimes, above all the Saudi funders of Al Hayat, anti-Semitism is preferable to a confrontation with the real enemy: American capitalism and its agent, Israel. As long as the latter are strong, after all, they guarantee the survival of the dictators. These prefer to see the people going after Jews rather than attacking their own corrupt regimes. When Holocaust deniers convene in Arab capitals, they are not adopting the Palestinian cause for its own sake, but rather exploiting it as fertile ground for their ideas. In this way they degrade the struggle - originally

political, ideological, and conscious - to a more nefarious level. When Arab leaders join hands with them - as did the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin alHusseini, who sought support from Hitler - they betray their cause. Fascism is not just the enemy of the Jews, but of all humanity - and especially of the organized working class. The only way to fight such a trend is to warn

against its consequences and to establish a socialist program. The vital prerequisite of such a program is to keep the real enemy in focus. The enemy is not an ethnic or religious group. It is the combined forces of American capitalism, Zionism and the reactionary Arab regimes.

*Editor's note: We are aware that the word "anti-Semitism" seems doubly problematic in this context: first, because Arabs too are Semites, although the usage applies only to Jews, and second, because Arab anti-Jewish feelings - as distinct from the European example - began with experiences of Zionist colonization. Whatever the causes, however, the distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism must be maintained. We shall abide by ordinary usage, meaning by anti-Semitism the hatred of Jews as Jews. ** Translated from the Arabic of Al Hayat. We have not been able to find the precise English title of the collection. http://www.hanitzotz.com/challenge/67/asma.html

Semites and anti-Semites, that is the question

Today the real victims of Western anti-Semitism are Arabs and Muslims, argues Joseph Massad* Al-Ahram Weekly, Issue No. 720, 9 - 15 December 2004

There is much misunderstanding about the term "antiSemitism" among Jews, Arabs, and European Christians. The term is bandied about as a description of attitudes deemed anti-Jewish, and on occasion antiArab, but much of its use is anachronistic and ahistorical. While Zionists and their supporters have been using the charge of anti-Semitism against any and all who oppose Israel and its policies, especially, although not exclusively, in the Arab World, Arabs have taken offense countering that they are "Semites" and therefore by definition cannot be "anti-Semitic". What are the merits of such arguments? Perhaps some history will help: The term "Semite" was invented by European philologists in the 18th century to distinguish languages from one another by grouping them into "families" descended from one "mother" tongue to which they are all related. In this context, languages came to be organised into "Indo-European" and "Semitic", etc. The philologists claimed that Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Amharic, etc., were "Semitic" languages, even though philologists could never find a parent Semitic language from which they all derived. In the 19th century and with the rise of European biological racism, those who hated Jews could no longer rely on religious difference to mark out postEnlightenment Jews as objects of their hatred. As religion was no longer part of the argumentation that could be used in a "rational and scientific" Europe, a new basis for the hatred of Jews had to be found. This did not mean however that certain religious ideas could not be rationalised. They often were. In keeping with the Protestant Reformation's abduction of the Hebrew

bible into its new religion and its positing of modern European Jews as direct descendants of the ancient Hebrews, post- Enlightenment haters of Jews began to identify Jews as "Semites" on account of their alleged ancestors having spoken Hebrew. In fact the ancient Hebrews spoke Aramaic, the language in which the Talmud was written, as well as parts of the bible. Based on this new philological taxonomy and its correlate racial classifications in the biological sciences, Jews were endowed with this linguistic category that was soon transformed into a racial category. Accordingly, haters of Jews began to identify themselves as "antiSemites". Thus the object of hatred of European antiSemitism has always been European Jews. The claims made by many nowadays that any manifestation of hatred against Jews in any geographic location on Earth and in any historical period is "antiSemitism" smacks of a gross misunderstanding of the European history of anti- Semitism. While oppression of, discrimination against, and hatred of communities of Jews qua Jews are found in many periods of European history, the basis for this hatred is different from modern anti-Semitism, as its inspirational sources are not rational science and biology or Enlightenment philology, but religious and other political and economic considerations that scapegoated Jews. This may not be important for those who want only to produce a lachrymose history of European Jews, but it is crucial to the understanding of how the identities produced since the European Enlightenment are different from preceding periods, and that they function as new bases for nationalism, racism,

oppression, discrimination, and liberation, and for the modern mechanisms put in place to institutionalise such identities and categories of humans. The defensive claim made by some that Arabs cannot be "anti-Semitic" because they are "Semites" is equally erroneous and facile. First, I should state that I do not believe that anyone is a "Semite" any more than I believe anyone is an "Aryan", and I do not believe that Arabs or Jews should proudly declare that they are "Semites" because European racists classified them as such. But if the history of European Christian antiSemitism is mostly a history targeting Jews as objects of discrimination and exclusion, the history of European Orientalism and colonialism is the one that targeted Arabs and Muslims, among many others. This does not mean that Arabs are not considered Semites by European racialist and philological classifications; they indeed are. Nor does this mean that much of the hatred of Arabs today is not derived from a prior antiSemitism that targeted Jews. Indeed it is. The history of European Orientalism is one that is fully complicit with anti-Semitism from which it derives many of its representations of ancient and modern Arabs and of ancient Hebrews and modern Jews. As Edward Said demonstrated a quarter of a century ago in his classic Orientalism, "what has not been sufficiently stressed in histories of modern anti-Semitism has been the legitimation of such atavistic designations by Orientalism, and... the way this academic and intellectual legitimation has persisted right through the modern age in discussions of Islam, the Arabs, or the Near Orient." Said added: "The transference of popular anti-Semitic animus from a Jewish to an Arab target was made smoothly, since the figure was essentially the same." In the context of the 1973 War, Said commented that Arabs came to be represented in the West as having "clearly 'Semitic' features: sharply hooked noses, the evil moustachioed leer on their faces, were obvious reminders (to a largely non- Semitic population) that 'Semites' were at the bottom of all 'our' troubles." This is important, as many people in the Arab world and outside it think that European Jews are the ones who called themselves "Semites", rather than European Christian racists who invented the term. Of course this misunderstanding is understandable given the fact that Zionism, which adopted wholesale anti-Semitic ideologies, would also call Jews "Semites" and would begin to consider Jews as Semites racially from the late 19th century to the present. In this sense not only do many Arabs think that "Semites" is a Jewish-invented category but so do many European Jews who were (and in some contexts remain) victims of this anti-Jewish designation. But this is different from the spurious claim that "Arabs cannot be anti-Semitic because they are Semites." There are Arabs today who are anti- Jewish, and they borrow their anti-Jewish rhetoric not from the Palestine experience but from European rhetorics of anti-

Semitism. The point is that Arab Christians and Muslims can be anti-Jewish just as Jews can be, and American and Israeli Jews often are, anti-Arab racists, even though many among these Jews and Arabs use the category "Semite" for self-classification. Indeed a large and disproportionate number of the purveyors of antiArab racism in today's United States and Israel as well as in Western Europe are Jews. But there is also a disproportionate number of Jews among those who defend Arabs and Muslims against Euro- American and Israeli racism and anti-Semitism. The majority, however, of those who hate Arabs and Muslims in the West remain European and American Christians. It is often pointed out by Zionists and their supporters that holocaust denial in the Arab world is the major evidence for "Arab anti-Semitism". I have written elsewhere how any Arab or Palestinian who denies the Jewish holocaust falls into the Zionist logic. While holocaust denial in the West is indeed one of the strongest manifestations of anti-Semitism, most Arabs who deny the holocaust deny it for political not racist reasons. This point is even conceded by the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim Orientalist Bernard Lewis. Their denial is based on the false Zionist claim that the holocaust justifies Zionist colonialism. The Zionist claim is as follows: Since Jews were the victims of the holocaust, then they have the right to colonise Palestine and establish a Jewish colonial-settler state there. Those Arabs who deny the holocaust accept the Zionist logic as correct. Since these deniers reject the right of Zionists to colonise Palestine, the only argument left to them is to deny that the holocaust ever took place, which, to their thinking, robs Zionism of its allegedly "moral" argument. But the fact that Jews were massacred does not give Zionists the right to steal someone else's homeland and to massacre the Palestinian people. The oppression of a people does not endow it with rights to oppress others. If those Arab deniers refuse to accept the criminal Zionist logic that justifies the murder and oppression of the Palestinians by appealing to the holocaust, then these deniers would no longer need to make such spurious arguments. All those in the Arab world who deny the Jewish holocaust are in my opinion Zionists. Anyone who believes in social justice and opposes racist oppression must be in solidarity with all holocaust victims, especially European Jews, 90 per cent of whom were exterminated by a criminal and genocidal regime. Such a person must equally be against the Zionist abduction of the holocaust to justify Israel's colonial and racist policies. The attempt by holocaust deniers to play down the number of holocaust victims is obscene, as whether one million or 10 million Jews were killed, the result is still genocide and this would never justify Israel's oppression of the Palestinians. Such obscene number games on the part of holocaust deniers are hardly different from Zionist Jewish denial of the Palestinian nakba and are also

similar to the continued Zionist attempts to play down the number of Palestinian refugees. While the nakba and the holocaust are not equivalent in any sense, the logic of denying them is indeed the same. I should stress here that the Palestine Liberation Organisation and most Palestinian intellectuals have spoken and written since the 1960s of their solidarity with Jewish holocaust victims and have attacked those who deny it took place. Unlike the official and unofficial Israeli denial of the expulsion of the Palestinians and the numbers of the refugees, those who deny the holocaust among Palestinians have no position whatsoever inside the PLO nor any legitimacy among the Palestinian intelligentsia.

Today we live in a world where anti-Arab and antiMuslim hatred, derived from anti-Semitism, is everywhere in evidence. It is not Jews who are being murdered by the thousands by Arab anti- Semitism, but rather Arabs and Muslims who are being murdered by the tens of thousands by Euro- American Christian antiSemitism and by Israeli Jewish anti-Semitism. If anti* Joseph Massad teaches modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University in New York.

Semites posited Jews as the purveyors of corruption, as financier bankers who control the world, as violent communist subversives, and as poisoners of Christian wells, the Arab and the Muslim today are seen as in control of the oil market and therefore of the global financial market, the purveyors of hatred and corruption of civilised Christian and Jewish societies, as violent terrorists, and as possible mass murderers, not with some Semitic Jewish poison but with Semitic Arab nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons (which are nowhere to be found). Thus Michael Moore feels vindicated in telling us in his recent film, Fahrenheit 9/11, about the portion of the American economy controlled by Saudi money while neglecting to mention the much, much larger American share of the Saudi economy. Anti- Semitism is alive and well today worldwide and its major victims are Arabs and Muslims and no longer Jews. The fight should indeed be against all anti-Semitism no matter who the object of its oppression is, Arab or Jew.

Al-Ahram Weekly Online : Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/720/op63.htm

Ways of denial
The Holocaust must be contextualised, and its lessons learned, writes Azmi Bishara Al-Ahram Weekly, Issue No. 825, 21 - 27 December 2006 The Nazi Holocaust aimed to rid Europe of its "Jewish taint". By this was meant banking capital as opposed to industrial capital and the moral degeneracy, lack of patriotism, scorn for national values, heritage and other such ills caused by the "worm" that ate away at all that was noble and pure in the Germanic people. That worm was the racial strain that never belonged, that was intrinsically alien and that nevertheless insisted on remaining in order to wreak its pollution; it was European Jewry and its various manifestations including capitalism, communism and liberalism, and its mere presence, according to this diabolical system of thought, that were a scourge to racial purity. Late capitalism, as forcefully imposed by the centralised bureaucratic state, converged with a fanatical and rabidly xenophobic and very ideological late nationalism of the "vesrspaeteten Nationen" with a history of religious anti-Semitism dating back to the Middle Ages and the crusader expeditions that attacked Jewish villages in central Europe en route to Palestine, a religious exclusionism that targeted both Muslims and Jews in Andalusian Spain and that shaped part of European identity in terms of both an external determinant -- the Muslims -- and an internal determinant -- the Jews. But the Nazis' obsession with the annihilation of the Jews was also fired by an ideology that incorporated totalitarian social engineering, founded upon social Darwinism and assorted recent biological discoveries that were applied to human beings, together with a populist romantic socialism that was hostile to communism, democratic socialism and liberalism, all regarded as alien to the "Volksgeist", "the spirit of the people". This form of pseudo-scientifically justified and coldly carried out mass extermination would not have been possible without a strong ability to compartmentalise between the bureaucratic functionary and the duty to obey orders, on the one hand, and the individual and his private moral sphere on the other, a phenomenon that is one of the characteristics of the modern state apparatus. Nor would it have been possible without all the business of documentation, recording and archiving, which is also a characteristic of the modern state. The irony of all this pseudo-scientific human taxonomy and the obsessive documentation of the names, addresses, confiscated possessions and physical details of the people who were rounded up and freighted to the concentration camps and from there to the gas

chambers is that this paperwork has become the most important primary historical source for the Holocaust and the most important instrument with which to refute the claims of those who deny it occurred or belittle its magnitude. It is not so much the sheer numbers of victims that distinguishes the Holocaust. As unique as it was in the 20th century, millions of native inhabitants were exterminated en masse in the Americas over the course of previous centuries. Nor is it just a question of scale: many more millions died in the course of World War II, alone, than in the Nazi gas chambers and these included Russians, Germans, Poles, French, Italians and many other nationalities. The true horror of the Holocaust resides not only in the deliberate singling out of entire peoples -- Jews and Gypsies -- for extermination and in the scale of this crime, but also in the totality of the target and the "rational" way in which it was carried out. Jews were snatched from their homes amid the general silence of their neighbours, a silence interspersed by hatemongering by anti-Semitic groups and by the active complicity of informers. Most of the Jews who died in the concentration camps were not Zionists; in fact, many may not have even heard of Zionism. Moreover, the role of the Zionist movement in saving Jews, or in conspiring with the Nazis, was very marginal, regardless of the number of studies that have been produced on both cases and regardless of the fact that most of their findings have been corroborated. Zionism did, indeed, have two faces; it was the perspectives and aims of the researchers that were and remain at odds. The Zionist movement began, and had set its sights on Palestine, long before the Holocaust. Zionists only used the Holocaust to justify their national project in hindsight, even if that justification is what drove some Arabs to deny the existence of the Holocaust. Yet, while there are people who have felt that by minimising or even refuting the Holocaust they undermine Jewish claims to a state in Palestine, the majority of educated and informed Arab opinion has never denied the Holocaust or the existence of anti-Semitism in Europe. Rather, they have argued -- correctly -- that since this horror took place in Europe the Palestinians should not have to pay the price. Although it vaguely existed as a blend between the residue of a religious culture and extremist nationalist ideas imported from Europe even in early stages, antiSemitism in the sense of hostility towards the Jews only began to spread significantly in the Arab world in the form of cultural and intellectual output after 1967. Clearly, the rise of this phenomenon coincided with the rise of a metaphysical attitude that sought to explain the overwhelming Arab defeat of that year in terms of the confrontation with an absolute evil bent on a global conspiracy of the nature of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", which has been proven to be an invention of

the Russian secret service at the end of the 19th century but which nevertheless found many gullible ears in the Arab world in the wake of the 1967 defeat. Holocaust denial similarly emerged during this period and in the same spirit of a fantastic conspiracy theory that ascribed to an international Jewish cabal the power to invent and dupe the entire world into believing a stupendous set of lies. I would like to suggest that there are two types of Holocaust denial. One, espoused by elements of the European traditional right and neo-ultra right, is to deny it happened. This form has not acquired sufficient roots to become a determinant of the behaviour of nations and societies. The other form of denial is to ignore that the Holocaust occurred within a particular historic context and, hence, to deal with it as some fiendish aberration that somehow occurred outside the bounds of time and place. One major consequence of this approach is that it inhibits the study of the Holocaust as a historical phenomenon and as a sobering primer on the dangers of racism, extremist nationalist chauvinism and totalitarian social engineering in modern mass societies. But Holocaust denial can assume another face, which is to reduce it to an instrument for realising political ends. The Zionist movement has excelled in this, its rituals and rhetoric in commemoration of Holocaust victims far outstripping its concern for the victims and its activities to combat the phenomenon when it occurred. In fact, the subject was not even on the agenda of the Jewish organised community, the "Yeshov", in mandate Palestine during the war years and many Zionists at the time found it embarrassing to hear of Jews being dragged off to be slaughtered without putting up a resistance; it conflicted with the nationalist fighting spirit and the image of the new man they were trying to inculcate. It was not until the Eichmann trial that the embarrassed silence was broken and emotions suddenly gushed out. In the course of Zionism's attempts to portray the history of the entire Jewish people as one uninterrupted stream of oppression and persecution that culminated inevitably in the Holocaust, Holocaust history has been transformed into an exclusively Israeli property. Victims of the Nazi gas chambers have been nationalised and converted, in spite of themselves, either into an episode in the Zionist struggle to create a state or into an instrument for blackmailing others into supporting Zionist aims or for justifying the crimes the Zionist state perpetrates against others. It is as though the magnitude of the crime entitles Israel to play the victim par excellence or the victims' sole proxy, placing it beyond accusations of wrongdoing because it is the victim by definition. The Zionist casting of all Jews as victims of Nazi atrocities has given rise to two curious phenomena. The first is that any Israeli can speak and act as the victim even if he has more in common ideologically and

psychologically with the offender or the "Capo" -- the Jews who cooperated with the Nazis in the concentration camps. In other words, the mere fact of being born to a Jewish mother somehow gives licence to represent all victims, including in front of those who actually are more victims than he is and those who are more hostile to Nazism, racism and its offshoots. The second phenomenon is the monopoly claimed by the Israeli ruling establishment to speak on behalf of Jews and Jewish history in general, which largely translates into soliciting, and pressuring for, political and financial support for Israel. In the first instance, the challenge of truly understanding and learning lessons from the Nazi phenomenon is reduced to something akin to a therapy session in which those in the role of victim help those in the role of perpetrator purge their guilt by satisfying the psychological and material demands of the former. There is something morally repugnant in this passing of the sins, or innocence, of the fathers to the sons, as opposed to engaging in an objective process of historical investigation with the aim of combating racism in all forms and in all societies. After all, the main victims of European racism today are not Jews, and in Palestine Zionism is not the victim but the perpetrator. Unfortunately, the Israeli- German therapy sessions ignore such stark realities and, in so doing, offer both the Israelis and the Germans carte blanche to vent their racism on others, as though the Holocaust were a purely German-Israeli concern and the greater phenomenon of racism something else entirely. It is as if through their mutual catharsis with regard to the former they exonerate themselves from responsibility for the latter. Meanwhile, Zionism's unwarranted, illogical and historically unsubstantiated monopoly on the role of Holocaust victims' spokesperson sits well with Europe. Most of Zionism's aims and demands do not require Europe to engage in a serious process of introspection in order to uproot the deeper causes that gave rise to the Holocaust. Contrary to what one may logically expect, this suits Zionism's purposes because it keeps the monolithic discreteness of the Holocaust intact and diminishes, in comparison, the significance of Europe's other crimes. The upshot is to toss the entire Jewish question outside Europe and dump it in the Middle East. It may come as a relief to European officials to be able to exonerate themselves for the Holocaust by placating Israel with anti-Palestinian, anti- Arab and even anti-Muslim sympathies. If anything, however, this form of behaviour confirms the continuation of the underlying syndrome, a syndrome that is nevertheless glossed over with a fresh bill of moral health, authorised and stamped by Israel after every visit of atonement a European leader makes to the "Yad Vashim" Museum in Jerusalem.

It is for this reason that all victims of racism across the world should campaign to break the Zionist hold over the role of spokesman for victims of the Holocaust. Conversely, the Arabs and Palestinians who deny the Holocaust offer European and Zionist racism no greater gift than this denial of the occurrence of the Holocaust. What possible Arab or Islamic interest can it serve to even offer to exonerate Europe of one of the blackest pages in its history? To do so is not only to absolve Europe of a crime that was, in fact, committed, but also to earn its contempt and to wake up one day to find Europe and Israel joining forces against Arab or Muslim Holocaust deniers with such venom that one might imagine that the Holocaust had occurred in Egypt or Iran and that Holocaust denial is a far graver crime than the perpetration of the Holocaust itself. Holocaust denial is just plain stupid, also as a political argument. But Israel will be no less expedient in turning the provocation against its regional adversaries who had nothing to do with the Holocaust. On the other hand, the Holocaust is a phenomenon that merits proper scholastic study, the purpose of which is to sort fact from fiction, and myth form reality. No incident in history lies beyond the realm of historical research. This said, Tehran can hardly be said to have a tradition of Holocaust studies; the subject does not rate very high in Iranian academic priorities. And a conference in Tehran that was proceeded by a political speech denying the Holocaust cannot be said to be an academic conference; it was a political demonstration, one that harms the Arabs and Muslims and serves only the ultra-right and neo-Nazi forces in Europe and the Zionist movement. During World War II, when some Arabs and other Third World peoples were rooting for Germany because it was fighting the colonial powers France and Britain, the Arab and Third World left, which had allied with the Soviet Union, argued that it was wrong for the victims of racism to side with the racist Nazi regime. Their position was correct. Today, there is not even a pragmatic immoral justification whatsoever for siding with European racism. Holocaust denial does not undermine the moral justifications for the existence of the state of Israel, as some imagine. What it does, however, is hand the European right and Israel a convenient enemy upon which to unload their problems. This enemy comprises Palestinians and Arabs, specifically fundamentalist Muslims, those Bush is fond of calling "Islamic fascists". The initial Arab reaction to the Holocaust was simple and straightforward and much more rational. The Holocaust occurred, but it was a tragedy for which the Europeans, not the Arabs, should assume responsibility. This is the opinion that prevailed throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the sense of normalcy that survived in all of us continues to hold it.

Al-Ahram Weekly Online : Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/825/op2.htm