A new Arabic imprint of Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" has been thundering off the presses of a publishing company high in the hills above Beirut. With its cover adorned with a swastika and a photograph of a young, earnest looking Hitler, 2,500 copies have already been distributed to Lebanese book shops.
In his windowless printing offices in Kesrouan a bunkerlike building whose walls of prestressed concrete would have appealed to the author of the book Selim Sader agrees that Hitler was "not a very nice man". But he adds, "If you ask the Nazis, they would have told you something different."
The preface to the edition originally printed in 1963 and also distributed in Iraq would certainly not have offended the Nazis. Louis alHaj, the former editorinchief of the Beirut newspaper An Nahar, who died two years ago, tells readers that Hitler's theories of nationalism, government and race are "eternal" issues, that Hitler "one of the few great men who almost stopped the passage of history" left behind him an "intellectual heritage".
(The author) set(s) off into an argument that is today heard ever more frequently and disturbingly throughout the Middle East. "It is not true that six million Jews were killed in the Second World War," he said. When I told him he was wrong that documentation and historical research had conclusively proven this figure to be true he brusquely changed his argument.
"If Hitler did kill six million Jews, then I am against the killing of these six million. But I am against the killing of even one citizen of any country. The Israelis say that the Jewish suffering entitles them to take Palestinian land and make a state. So do millions of Palestinians have to be killed for them to be afforded human rights?"
The Holocaust and the attempt to deny its reality has always proven an intractable problem for Arabs. Over the years, I have listened to Lebanese and Syrians and Egyptians and Saudis insisting that Hitler's destruction of Europe's Jews was a "myth" invented by the Israelis to justify their seizure of Palestinian Arab land. . . .
But the new wave of historical denial in the Middle East appears to have sprung from the growing if tardy realisation that Israel, supported by the most pliant of all US administrations, would win whatever peace was made with the Arabs, and that the "peace process", heavily in Israel's favour (since it guarantees no military withdrawals, no Palestinian capital in Jerusalem and no Palestinian state), would be imposed on the Middle East whether or not the Arabs liked it.
If that "process" is now regarded here as already buried and Israel's determination to build yet more Jewish homes on Arab land as part of the funeral service this has of course not staunched the growing refusal to understand and to concede the facts of the Holocaust. Roger Garaudy, the French philosopher whose book "Les mythes fondateurs de la politique israelienne" calls into question the very nature of the Holocaust, has now been honoured with an Arabic edition of his work, published by the El Ghad el Arabi press in Cairo.
Last month Mr Garaudy undertook a tour of Arab capitals, received by Vice President Abdul Halim Khaddam in Damascus, by Lebanese intellectuals both Christian and Muslim in Beirut and by the Jordanian Association of Writers in Amman. He was feted in all three cities and given prominent and almost exclusively favourable coverage in the Arab press. . . .
Holocaustdenial has become institutionalized in some Arab countries. Most refused to show Stephen Spielberg's film Schindler's List, citing a variety of specious reasons for their decision. In Egypt, the government banned the film on the grounds that it contained "too many murders" . . .
The author then shares a personal vignette:
". . . When I worked on a series of three films in 1993 for Britain's Channel 4 and the American Discovery channel, under the title From Beirut to Bosnia, part of the second film recorded the fate of a Jewish family during the Holocaust, a family whose survivors now lived in the home of an exiled Palestinian in presentday Israel.
But when the Beirut New TV channel bought the rights to the film to show in Lebanon, they abruptly ended the second film as I approached the door of the Holocaust survivors in Acre, cutting off the elderly Israeli's description of his family's murder, pictures of his original home in Poland and scenes of the railway station and memorial ground at Treblinka extermination camp.
When I protested to one of the station's officials, he replied that "Lebanese security people don't like film about the Holocaust." . . .
When the same film series was shown in the United States, an Israeli lobby group brought commercial pressure on Discovery not to reshow the series. They complained, among other things, that I should never have referred to the West Bank as "occupied" it was at the time occupied by thousands of Israeli troops, as most of it still is, and claimed that a pregnant Palestinian girl whom the Israeli army refused to assist to hospital during a curfew was not in fact expecting a child. She later gave birth to her supposedly nonexistent baby, but Discovery caved in and refused a second showing to the series thus ironically ensuring that the Holocaust sequence also disappeared.
This is only one small example of the problem encountered by anyone trying to report the facts of Israeli history. Reporters, for example, who regularly refer to the expulsion of Palestinians by Israelis in 1948 at least 750,000 were driven from their homes regularly receive letters from supporters of Israel who accuse them of antisemitism, adding, untruthfully, that the Palestinians left under the orders of their own political leadership.
. . . the Holocaust requires an empathy which a humiliated Arab world cannot find within itself."
There is much to be learned from the Arabs.
Ingrid
Thought for the Day:
"The highest compact we can make with our fellow is: Let there be truth between us two forevermore."
(Ralph Waldo Emerson)