Militant: Denying the Shoah Hurts Palestinian Struggle
The Independent reports,
Mr Ahmadinejad has been condemned on the eve of the conference by Mahmoud al-Safadi, who was sentenced to 27 years by Israel for throwing Molotov cocktails during the 1988 intifada. In an open letter to the Iranian president, he says that Mr Ahmadinejad’s stance is a “great disservice to popular struggles the world over”.
“Perhaps you see Holocaust denial as an expression of support for the Palestinians,” he writes. “Here, too, you are wrong. We struggle for our existence and our rights, and against the historic injustice that was dealt us in 1948.
“Our success and our independence will not be gained by denying the genocide perpetrated against the Jewish people, even if parts of this people are the very forces that occupy and dispossess us to this day.”
Mr Safadi says that reading the works of Arab intellectuals helped convince him that the Holocaust was a historical fact.
Great post . . .
Now Ahmejihad is in the clear because his Holocaust denying is helping us in our battles with the Militants and the militants (terrorists) are good guys because they only blame some of the Jews for the “atrocities” they contend with.
Ahemedinejad is potentionaly the next Hitler (as Eli Wiesel as well as many others believe), this conference is his version of Mein Kampf, y’all can live in denial as did many of our brother in the Thirties.
the next Hitler? I think you might be jumping the gun there dude. Is the dude a lunatic? Yeah, he’s a lunatic. Is he the first lunatic in his position? Hell no. Is he a dictator? No. Does he really have all that much power in his position? Not really. Will he remain in his current position? Ehh…maybe, but maybe not. Popular support isn’t that great for him right now.
gee merliner’s right… after all look at how seriously the u.s. is taking the iranian nuclear threat
That don’t mean shit. How seriously is the US taking North Korea? And they already have nukes!!!! (thanks Clinton, Albright et al)
oh right, because it wasn’t the policy of the bush admin. to completely ignore nk and iran until they became an actual issue and go after a non-issue like iraq instead.
God, I’m looking forward to the 2008 elections, when overwhelming majorities of the U.S. electorate once again tells the Republicans that they’re an aggregation of theiving, incompetent hacks who aren’t qualified to pick up dogshit on the side of the road, much less run the government of the United States. And while the least egregiously stupid of them are abandoning Bush and the cabal of neocons like greasy, fat rats off a sinking ship, it’s good to see there are plenty of the rank and file brainless enough to maintain their demand to increase the pace of senseless slaughter in Iraq. Oh yes, there’s also the psychotic Clinton obssession, still prominently on public display. Bush and the warmongering Republcans have been unable to do a thing about Osama bin Laden or Iran or Korea for 6 goddamn years, yet they continue to bleat about Clinton in between drooling sessions.
Fortunately, the public at large doesn’t seem to share the Republicans’ endemic contempt for the notion of personal accountability.
David Smith: I’m not so sure the democrats are going to prove themselves vastly better.
striking article here:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2499938,00.html
Iran students denounce Holocaust denial
Palestinian-American prof. Joseph Massad:
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/720/op63.htm
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.