Yom Hashoah - Reflections On The Holocaust

Today is Yom HaShoah, the day Israel and the rest of the Jewish world officially mourn the dead of the Holocaust.

As the elderly witnesses gradually die off and it becomes less common to see people with numbers tattooed on their arms and a certain look in their eyes, remembrance is at a premium.

Holocaust denial is a major industry today, and much of it is enthusiastically received ( and bankrolled) from the Islamic world, not only in the Middle East but at hundreds of mosques and madrassahs in the West, to the point where in Britain and elsewhere, educators avoid teaching about it so as not to make any waves or contradict what many Muslim youngsters are being taught at home or as part of their religious studies.

In fact, the first official act of the Muslim Council of Britain after Tony Blair put it together as a voice for the UK's Muslims was to protest Holocaust Remembrance Day being observed.

This is no accident. There are a lot of people who want what happened to the Jews of Europe forgotten and buried.

In Crusade In Europe, his post-war memoir of WWII, Allied Commander General Dwight Eisenhower over seventy years ago foresaw a time when it would be convenient in certain circles to deny that the Holocaust happened, and he felt he had a moral responsibility to document it for all time:

"I have never felt able to describe my emotional reactions when I first came face to face with indisputable evidence of Nazi brutality and every shred of human decency.Up to that time I had known about it only generally or through secondary sources.I am certain, however that I never at any time experienced an equal sense of shock.

I visited every nook and cranny of that camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that 'the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda.' {...}

I not only did so, but as soon as I returned to Patton's headquarters that evening I sent communications to both Washington and London urging the two governments to send instantly to Germany a random group of newspaper editors and representative groups from the national legislatures. I felt that the evidence should be immediately placed before the American and British publics in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical doubt."

General Eisenhower also saw to it that the camps were filmed and that a number of witnesses were given tours of the camps..and not only from overseas. Eisenhower and a number of his  commanders forced the local townspeople from the adjoining German towns to go through the camps  where the populace claimed ignorance. Footage still exists of American soldiers forcing Germans into the camps to look at what had been done..as if  those Germans hadn't been living downwind from the smell of burning flesh for years. As if they hadn't heard the crying of children at the train stations in the dead of night, or seen their Jewish neighbors dragged away...


This photo was taken in the German camp of Wobbelin. It was one of those places the Americans insisted on taking the townspeople for a little tour after the Germans insisted they had no idea of what was going on.

After they were forced to take the tour, the Mayor of the town and his wife both committed suicide.

As monstrous and inhumane as the German war against the Jews was, to the German's credit (and perhaps because they had no choice) a significant majority of them at least acknowledged what happened, and do to this day.

Many of their willing helpers have avoided the question for years.

For instance, Norway is one of the most openly anti-Semitic nations in Europe and one that frequently poses as a moral arbiter of other countries, especially Israel. It was only this year that Norway finally admitted that yes, we did help the Nazis round up our Jews and deport them, and we were pretty enthusiastic about it too. Sorry about that!

It only took them until 1998, close to 60 years, to get around to finally compensating those survivors who were still alive for property that was seized from them by Norwegians way back in 1942.

Of course, today the main focus on Holocaust denial is in the Middle East.

The Arabs supported the Nazis during the war for the most part. In Iraq, a Nazi friendly Arab government took power and launched a pogrom on Jews in Baghdad that killed almost 200 people. The 'Palestinian' leader the British appointed, Haj Amin al-Husseini was the man who originally translated Hitler's 'Mein Kampf ' into Arabic, where it translates into 'My Jihad' and is still a bestseller in the Middle East today.



 Hitler's modern heirs in the Middle East hold exactly the same views on the Jewish people that he did...that they are unworthy of life by their very nature. After all, didn't Allah's messenger Mohammed say so?

Sahih Bukhari, Volume 4, Book 52, Number 177:Narrated Abu Huraira: Allah’s Apostle said, “The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. “O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.”

Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi has called repeatedly for genocide against Israel and a second Holocaust.In one of his sermons, he asked God "to kill the Jewish Zionists, every last one of them."

In another sermon on his popular radio show on al-Jazeera he said, "Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by [Adolf] Hitler. G-d willing, this time it will be the believers."

Yet President Obama's Deputy Secretary of State Nicholas Burns has had cordial meetings with Brotherhood leaders in Egypt to discuss relations with the US, and Qaradiwi himself is actually employed by our State Department as I write this as an intermediary with the Taliban. And  the EU nations are even less shy about meeting with Hamas and Brotherhood officials than our State Department.

Even the darlings of the EU and the international community, the 'Palestinian Authority',  figure into the desire to deny the last Holocaust in favor of promoting a new, Islamic one.

'Palestinian Authority' Leader Mahmoud Abbas received his doctorate from Moscow University with a dissertation denying the Holocaust occurred and later published most of it in a book, al-Wajh al-Akhar: al-'Alaqat as-Sirriya bayna an-Naziya wa's-Sihyuniya that is still a standard text in the 'Palestinian' school curriculum. This would be illegal in many EU countries, yet Abbas is persona grata not only in Europe but in the United States. And  the money keeps rolling in, not only to Fatah in the Arab occupied areas of Judea and Samaria but to the openly genocidal Hamas who rule Gaza.

And as I write this, the West is 'dialoging' with Iran, whose leaders have repeatedly pledged to destroy the Jews in Israel and are busily working towards acquiring nuclear weapons for their own version of the Final Solution, just as the West negotiated with Hitler while the Nazis built up their war machine.

Mounting a second Holocaust to make up for the one they claim never happened has been Iran's position since 1979. It was, after all, Iran's `moderate' ex-president Rafsanjani who said that the problem of Israel could be "solved by one nuclear bomb".

So it would seem that despite the best efforts of General Eisenhower and others, we really have forgotten the Holocaust as a society.

But there is this.

Out of the ashes of Auschwitz and Treblinka, something amazing has happened, a miracle in our own time.

Ezekiel's prophecy has come true, and just as the Lord showed him, the Valley of Bones has new flesh and sinew and now lives again in the Land of Israel.

This time, the Jews are no longer helpless and defenseless. They have a country and an army of their own, and the Jews of Israel realize that not only do they not have the luxury of disbelief but that they need not suffer for the folly of others who live in denial. They can control their own destiny.

That's the real meaning of Yom HaShoah....because this is a day of renewal as well as sadness, just as the nation of Israel has grown like a brilliant flame out of the ashes of a thousand Jewish communities of Europe liquidated in the Shoah.

That flame is it's own reflection, and illuminates the millions who died and had no voice as well as the living.

Am Yisroel Chai.

The Real Holocaust Denial

Today is Yom HaShoah, the day Israel and the rest of the Jewish world officially mourn the dead of the Holocaust.

It's also the day after Iran's President, serial Holocaust denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad addressed a UN conference on racism and human rights as an honored and invited guest.

True to form, he came up with a speech that demonized Israel as a racist and illegitimate regime and denied the Holocaust, claiming the West used the question of the Holocaust ( and one native Farsi speaker I know who heard it live translated it as the 'questionable Holocaust') as a "pretext" to steal Muslim land.*

Ahmadinejad has referred to Israel as a cancerous tumor, called for it to be wiped off the map repeatedly and has said that Israel is fated to `disappear' soon ...and that the `countdown' towards the end of the Zionist regime will be over soon, Allah willing. He's repeatedly denied the Holocaust actually took place and hosted conferences on Iran on that very subject. And believe it or not, I don't blame him one bit.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is merely doing what he's always done, repeating the stock line of most of the Arab and Muslim world, where Mein Kampf and its dream of a Jew free world is still a bestseller.

No, Ahmadinejad can't be faulted for doing the same old material. The 20 odd Western UN delegates who theatrically walked out on him ? That's another matter.

A number of Western leaders seem bent on doing collective impressions of Claude Rains' famous Vichy French captain at Rick's Place in `Casablanca'..they're shocked, simply shocked.I can't imagine why they would be.

Promoting a second Holocaust to make up for the one they claim never happened has been Iran's position since 1979. It was, after all, Iran's `moderate' ex-president Rafsanjani who said that the problem of Israel could be solved by one nuclear bomb.

These same Western leaders voicing shock and dismay at the spectacle of Ahmadinejad ranting about destroying Israel can't pretend they aren't aware of all this. And they're also fully aware that Iran's denial of the first Holocaust is part of its arming of people like Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad and its pursuit of nuclear weapons to perpetrate a second one.

This is the regime whom people like Barack Obama and Robert Gates want to `negotiate' with, thinking it's going to stop with Israel and the Jews.

In a very real sense, the `Holocaust denial' of the West's leaders is much worse than Ahmadinejad's. Because they have even less excuse for it than they did in 1938. They know that not only did it happen, but that it's entirely plausible.And like the last time, they are doing absolutely nothing to stop it, aside from things like the theatrics we witnessed yesterday at the UN.


Ahmadinejad at least has an explanation, if not an excuse. He obviously thinks of himself as a G-d fearing and pious man who finds his pretext for Jew hatred in the Qu'ran and the Hadith, where it clearly states that Allah's Messenger Mohammed told his followers that on the Day of Judgement the very rocks and trees will call out to pious Muslims to kill the Jews hiding behind them (Sahih Muslim, Book 041, Number 6985). A lot of people who live in Iran and in the other Muslim countries who's delegates cheered his speech yesterday agree with him.

That's because Ahmadinejad's views are shared by much of the Muslim world - that the Holocaust was a myth, that the sinister Jews used it to `steal' Arab land, and that even if a few Jews did become lampshades and chimney smoke,why should the Muslims suffer for it?

Here's why, the dirty little secret that the Muslim world will never acknowledge. The Arab world is directly complicit in the Holocaust. And what's more, they know it, even if they refuse to admit it.

After World War I, the former Ottoman province that became the Palestine Mandate was given by the League of Nations to British authority for the express purpose of creating a Jewish nation. In the area west of the Jordan River, the only real populated communities were places like Jerusalem and Safed, where the majority of the inhabitants were Jews. Britain's first act was to take 80% of this land, everything east of the Jordan River, give it to the Arabs as Trans-Jordan and forbid any Jews from living or settling there.

The Zionist movement was promised by Britain that the rest of Palestine - everything else west of the Jordan River-would be the Jewish homeland. This promise was never kept. The British, during their tenure in Palestine put all kinds of arbitrary barriers on Jews migrating to Palestine, while allowing unlimited immigration to what was left of Palestine to Arabs from Syria, Egypt, and the Hejaz.

Of course, even 80% of Palestine was not enough for the Arabs to accept Jews living next to them in peace and equality. Incited by their leaders, the Arabs rioted and created such unrest from the 1930's onward that the British halted all Jewish immigration to the Holy Land on the eve of the Holocaust with the issuance of the White Paper in 1938, trapping millions of Jews in Europe without a place to flee to. If not for that, the death toll in the Holocaust would have been nowhere near what it was.

If the Arabs `gave' the Jews three times as much land as Israel consists of today,it would not be enough to compensate for their part in the slaughter of the Jews of Europe or their attempt to murder the survivors. And they've compounded this sin - and I use the word advisedly - by ethnically cleansing almost a million Jews from the Arab world since 1948,and trying to complete the task of genocide up to our present day.

And then as now, they had the willing help of the West, who had no such `religious' excuse.

All during WWII, when a third of the Jewish population of Palestine was in uniform fighting for the allies, the British allowed unlimited migration from the Arab world into Israel. In 1944, Himmler attempted to make a deal with the Allies to exchange the Jewish population of Hungary, about 500,000 people, for a few trucks. The Americans signed on to the deal but the British vetoed it, explicitly because they were afraid of Arab unrest and did not want these Jews in Palestine.

Hungary's Jews went to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen instead of Israel. A picture of how almost all of them ended up is at the head of this piece.

During WWII, the Arabs largely sided with the Axis against the allies. The `Palestinian' leader, the British appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem spent most of the war in Europe recruiting Muslims from Bosnia and the Caucasus to fight in SS divisions for Hitler and the Nazis. In the French provinces of Syria and Lebanon, Arab troops fought with Vichy against the allies and Iraq was taken over by a pro-Nazi Arab regime. And in Egypt, numerous veterans of the British 8th Army who fought and defeated the Nazis at El-Alamein have related how the Egyptians had Cairo all decked out in Nazi flags to welcome the German `liberators' when the British marched back into the city.

In spite of this, the British were happy to arm and train the Arab armies that attempted to massacre the Jews of Israel in 1948, three years after Auschwitz was liberated. The most effective Arab fighting force in that war, the Jordanian Arab legion, was led by British officers under the notorious Jew hater Colonel John Glubb (`Glubb Pasha'). Nor were the British alone, though they were the most blatant. The UN did nothing to stop their Arab member states from their attempted genocide and even the United States had an arms embargo on the infant Jewish state. Anyone interested in the full sordid story should read Lucy Dawidowicz's ` The War Against the Jews : 1933-1945: and Joan Peter's prize winning From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine.

In his book, `Crusade in Europe' written in 1946, General Eisenhower wrote about what he called `horror camps' and his reaction on seeing his first one. He made a point of recording those feelings, of seeing that the press toured the camps and took pictures, because somehow he foresaw even then a time when people would deny that the Holocaust occurred.Footage still exists of American soldiers forcing Germans into the camps to look at what had been done..as if some of those Germans hadn't been living downwind from the smell of burning flesh. General Eisenhower wanted to make sure that `plausible denial' would no longer be an excuse.

Based on how the West is reacting to another Holocaust in the making, he failed, through no fault of his own.Listening to Gordon Brown and Barack Obama, you can hear the same tired phrases of appeasement and cowardice as the winds of history whistle and chuckle.

The difference of course is that this time, the Jews have a country and an army of their own. While the West may indulge itself in Holocaust denial again to its own ultimate peril, the Jews of Israel realize they do not have that luxury and need not suffer for it.

And that's the real message of Yom HaShoah, as well as the reason for Israel's existence. Never again, indeed.

*UPDATE: Another note on the speech - oddly enough, Ahamadinejad's original text as released to the media read that "following World War II, they resorted to military aggression to make an entire nation homeless on the pretext of Jewish sufferings and the ambiguous and dubious question of Holocaust."

Ahmadinejad appears to have dropped the terms "ambiguous and dubious," referring instead in Farsi to "the abuse of the question of the Holocaust" as a substitute, perhaps thinking that would make it more palatable.I still go with the translation of my Farsi speaker as given above.