Shoah and Tell - an Arab's Holocaust Museum

As the sirens wail for Holocaust Remembrance Day and the Israeli diplomatic corps urges the world to remember and never permit such atrocities to happen again, one Arab lawyer takes history lessons about the Holocaust out to the Palestinian people. Khaled Kasab Mahameed faces opposition from Holocaust deniers, but still he persists with his quixotic mission: traveling to the West Bank to educate Palestinians about the Shoah, the final solution, the Holocaust.

Many Palestinians have never heard that the Nazis killed 6 million Jews during Word War II — it doesn't rate a mention in their school history books. Others deny that the Holocaust ever happened. According to this blinkered reasoning, the Jews are fighting Palestinians over their homeland, and they cannot afford to have sympathy for their enemy. Mahameed sees this view as tragically misguided. He says:

The key to the Palestinians achieving their own goals is to understand the Holocaust, and the place it holds in the Israeli psyche and its obsession with security.

Mahameed passes around a death-camp photo of a Jewish inmate standing over a mass grave full of naked corpses. The room of Palestinians falls silent. "That man, that survivor, in the photograph came to Israel. Can you imagine the nightmares, the horrors that he brought with him? It's a suffering that nobody, even us Palestinians, can begin to comprehend," he says with quiet, lawyerly persistence. The photo moves around the room, again and again, in silence. Finally, a retired Palestinian general, Abdul Latah Solimia, once captive in an Israeli military prison in Lebanon says: "As a militant, I know the cost of war and hatred. For 60 years, we have tried to eliminate each other, and neither has won. We Israelis and Palestinians should share this land."

Mahameed's obsesison with teaching Arabs about the Holocaust occurred four years ago, when he took his two children to see the massive 20-foot high concrete wall that Israel has erected around parts of Jerusalem to keep out Palestinians. It is so high in places that it seems to sever half the blue sky. "I told my son to break off a piece of the wall as a souvenir. It was very difficult, and while he was trying, I asked myself, what would drive the Israelis to do such a thing to us, build such a monstrosity as this wall?" He gathered his son and daughter and drove them to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum. "It was very moving. I couldn't breathe. Six million. It's like something off another planet," he recalls.

Touring the somber museum, it occurred to Mahameed that "we Palestinians are the victims of the terrible things that were inflicted on the Jews by the Holocaust." The images of the crimes perpetrated against the Jews of Europe also made him understand international support for Israel. "If an Israeli child dies from a Gaza rocket, the Israelis can take a photo of that child to America and them about 1.5 million Jewish children who died in the death camps, and Israelis will be given more money and weapons to use against us," he says. Most Israelis experience the same images of a Gaza rocket attack in the exterminationist frame of Auschwitz, not simply as a product of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over land.
Using photos donated by Yad Vashem and images from the Naqba — the "Catastrophe," which is how Palestinians refer to the events surrounding Israel's independence, which left thousands of Palestinians in exile and in refugee camps — the lawyer set up a one-room museum in his hometown of Nazareth, called the Arab Institute for Holocaust Research and Education. Every week, he travels to towns, villages and refugee camps in the West Bank trying to enlighten his fellow Palestinians. Says Mahameed, "Even with the militants, when I explain to them that Israel's brutal policies in the Palestinian territories stem from the Holocaust, they tell me 'You're bringing us an atomic bomb. We need to think about this.'"
Sometimes, his message is greeted with hostility — even in his own family. Mahameed has been ostracized by his brothers, who say that his obsession with the Holocaust is tantamount to sympathizing with Israel. False rumors that he is secretly on Israeli payroll dog him.
On the Israeli side, there is incomprehension, too. Yad Vashem staffers question his agenda." Replies Mahameed: "They don't want us Palestinians to have pity on them. They only want to show us how mighty they are."

Mahameed is an avid believer in Mahatma Gandhi's dictum that truth leads to non-violence, and he sees himself practicing a kind of ju-jitsu, using Israel's own moral superiority over the Holocaust as a way to shame the Israeli 'occupiers' in the West Bank into more humane treatment for the Palestinians. "If the Israelis believe that the Holocaust justifies this kind of brutal discrimination, then they're wrong."

He travels through army checkpoints showing his ID card and a photo from Auschwitz. At first he's met with suspicion. "I tell the soldiers that this could be a photo of their grandfather, and that I understand that they, as Jews, are unique victims. But the paradox is that we Palestinians have the Holocaust on our shoulders, too."


Hat tip to TIME magazine

Iran's Mahmoud the Mouth rants

If the world hears what he actually says, Iranian President Ahmadinejad is his own worst enemy. The disturbing bluster just keeps spewing forth.
(Hat tip to Simon Barrett of Realite-EU for dozens of alarming quotes.)

In light of the conference on Iran now taking place in the European Parliament, these utterances by The Islamic Republic of Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad demand interest. For further information about Iran’s well-documented human rights abuses, its role as a major state sponsor of terrorism and its defiant stance on the international community’s insistence that the nation suspends its uranium enrichment program click here, on www.realite-eu.org.

Religious extremism and martyrdom:

*"We don't shy away from declaring that Islam is ready to rule the world.“
*"The wave of the Islamist revolution will soon reach the entire world."
*"Our revolution's main mission is to pave the way for the reappearance of the Twelfth Imam, the Mahdi."
*“Soon Islam will become the dominating force in the world, occupying first place in the number of followers amongst all other religions.”
*“Is there a craft more beautiful, more sublime, more divine, than the craft of giving yourself to martyrdom and becoming holy? Do not doubt, Allah will prevail, and Islam will conquer mountain tops of the entire world.”
*"What is important is that they have shown the way to martyrdom which we must follow.'' [President Ahmadinejad’s comments on an aircraft crash in Tehran that killed 108 people in December 2005].
*Ahmadinejad praises Iran for being able to recruit thousands of suicide bombers a day. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad praised his country's ability to recruit "hundreds of suicide bombers a day," saying "suicide is an invincible weapon. Suicide bombers in this land showed us the way, and they enlighten our future.“ Amadinejad said the will to commit suicide was "one of the best ways of life."


Iran, its nuclear proliferation and sanctions:

*“By the grace of Allah, we (will be) a nuclear power.”
Ahmadinejad fired off a fresh barrage of warnings to the United Nations, saying Iran did "not give a damn" about demands to freeze sensitive nuclear work.
*"Iran does not give a damn about resolutions."
*"The Islamic republic of Iran has the capacity to quickly become a world superpower. *If we believe in ourselves... no other power can be compared to us.“
*"Iran's enemies know your courage, faith and commitment to Islam and the land of Iran has created a powerful army that can powerfully defend the political borders and the integrity of the Iranian nation and cut off the hand of any aggressor and place the sign of disgrace on their forehead."
*"Our enemies should know that they are unable to even slightly hurt our nation and they cannot create the tiniest obstacle on its glorious and progressive way."13
*“In parallel to the official political war there is a hidden war going on and the Islamic states should benefit from their economic potential to cut off the hands of the enemies.”

Israel and the Holocaust:

*“This regime (Israel) will one day disappear.”
*“The Zionist regime is a rotten, dried tree that will be eliminated by one storm.”
*Israel is "a disgraceful stain on the Islamic world"
*Israel is doomed to be "wiped from the map" in "a war of destiny."
*Ahmadinejad said that "the countdown for the destruction of Israel" has begun.
Zionists are „the personification of Satan.“
*"In the case of any unwise move by the fake regime of Israel, Iran's response will be so destructive and quick that this regime will regret its move for ever."
*Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared that the Holocaust is a “myth.”
“Them (the West) invented the myth of the massacre of the Jews and placed it above Allah, religions and prophets.”

Persian villian of Purim, 2007

In the spirit of Purim-- the festive holiday that celebrates the Jews' escape from annhilation in Persia with costumes, masks, noisemakers, and booze-- a West Jerusalem friend shared this composite photo. It is a startling image of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad which is making the rounds and really has the power to straighten the old curly whirlies. Iran's president is a postmodern Haman, the personification of evil, to many Israelis who view him with the same suspicion once reserved for Yassir Arafat. The mention of his name could one day set off a chorus of wooden graggers
But this newswire photo (left) has almost equal shock value, with the added frisson of being real. It was snapped a couple months back at the Tehran Holocaust denial conference. Moshe Aryeh Friedman, a senior member of Neturei Karta, an ultra-orthodox fringe group, soon regretted that public kiss. His Austrian wife was so repulsed by lips that had touched Mahmoud's flesh, she promptly left the guy. Friedman is regarded with contempt and pity, a wingnut who lacks the intellectual rigor of a typical 'self-hating Jew' outside the homeland. Go figure.

phony kasbahs, righteous gentiles, and oily ice cream

After a hiatus in America, Izzy Bee is back in Jerusalem. Such a buzz.

The nomination of the first Arab "righteous gentile", a Tunisian farmer named Khaled Abd al-Wahad who, according to a Jewish woman's testimony, saved Amy Boukris and 24 of her relatives from Nazi persecution, is huge news here. The Holocaust Museum, Yad Vashem, reportedly declined to rate the likelihood of its recognising this Arab hero nominated by the American scholar Robert Satloff, although 60 of the more than 21,000 named heroes who risked their lives to save threatened Jews from the Holocaust are indeed Muslims. Yet Khaled would be the first Arab ever to win such kudos, and some analysts predict that the high profile honor would help counteract the trend towards holocaust denial in some Arab countries.

Haaretz, the leftish newspaper which reported this item on its front page, also ran a weird recipe for a Holy Land ice cream containing whipped cream, honey and olive oil. Sprinkle on a bit of rosemary with the drizzled olive oil and you have a Biblical sweet treat. Milk and honey, I can see...but this takes some getting used to. Not a likely prospect for a Baskin-Robbins scoop of the month.

The Jerusalem Post devoted lots of space to the IDF's new American-built war gaming town, erected near Tze'elim in the southern Negev, where mock mosques, a marketplace, and an ersatz kasbah give a hyper-realistic setting for training exercises aimed at countering urban guerrilla warfare. William Arkin, a Vermont-based reporter, had leaked much of this last year, and the inaugural war games were opened up to the press. According to journalists who looked on, the young Israeli Defence Forces cadets were really ready to rock the kasbah. Canine and media handlers also will undergo training in the mock-up Muslim neighborhood, to prepare new tricks for the old dogs of war.