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ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN - Tehran International Conference
"Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision 10-12 December 2006
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From: Charles Bruce, Stewart
Sent: Wednesday, 20 December 2006 2:50 AM
Subject: Is Open Discussion of the "Holocaust Denial" Possible?
Rabbi Lerner;
I find my self in a confused middle-ground, unsure of which side is correct in the "Holocaust" debate. Unlike your words below seem to indicate, I do find at least some evidence that the critics of "Holocaust" belief system are voicing legitimate complaints. But I do admit that I am confused about the matter, and I also believe that there are numerous others who are similarly confused.
You would not consent to participate in a free phone-conference based open discussion of the matter, inviting both sides to go step-by-step through the points in favor and against each point of view, would you?
I have hosted numerous phone conferences, and I do believe we could put together a good event, productive of dispelling this mass of confusion regarding this critically important subject.
This could only work to promote the peace in the mid-east, which we all seek. I do hope you will see fit to consent to such an event. You are welcome to call me at my below phone number, if you like.
Sincerely;
Charles Bruce, Stewart
Sandy Oregon
503-668-5091
http://christiancommonlaw-gov.org
http://christiancommonlaw-gov.org/GeneralAssembly
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Subject: Holocaust Denial--A Palestinian Militant Speaks Out
Date: Tue, 19 Dec 2006 13:19:50 -0500 (EST)
From: Rabbi Michael Lerner RabbiLerner@tikkun.org
To: charles@christiancommonlaw-gov.org
Rabbi Michael Lerner wrote:
An important message!
Dec. 18, 2006 Palestinian Militant Critiques Holocaust Denial, Joining Many other Muslims who also Critique the Iranian sponsored Holocaust Denial Conference. An important message!
The following letter to the President of Iran was written by a Palestinian militant who had spent 18 years in an Israeli prison. It was sent weeks before the Holocaust-denying conference that the Iranian president sponsored last week in Teheran, and was printed in early December, before the conference, in Le Monde, and only recently was translated into English.
I have only one thing to add about the morally disgusting and intellectually bankrupt Holocaust-denying conference: it was an unearned gift to the Bush Administration and its attempt to gather support for a war against the "Axis of Evil" and for regime change in Iran. The president of Iran has weakened those of us in the peace movement who oppose any new US-initiated wars by giving to Cheney and Bush evidence of the irrationality of the Iranian leadership and hence greater credibility to the claim of right-wingers that Iran might use nuclear weapons against Israel and the West even if that was self-destructive, because these people are more interested in their ideology than in their own survival. We reject the conclusion that war is necessary, but it's hard not to feel a deep revulsion at the current leadership of Iran. For those of us who critique the lies and distortions that come from the Western media, it is particularly important to also critique the lies and distortions that sometimes come from the Arab, Muslim and Palestinian world--and this Holocaust denial is the mother of all such lies and distortions. That's why it's particularly significant that so many organizations of Islamic life are joining in the condemnation of the Holocaust denial that was sponsored by the Iranian government, and why I urge you to read carefully the statement from a Palestinian militant below.
Please read the statement below by Mahoud Al-Safadi--it is one of many from the Muslim world that is not given attention in the U.S. press or Israeli press, since these statements critiquing the Iranian leadership’s lies about the Holocaust would weaken the "dominant frame" through which the media views the current stories about Muslims in the world—namely that if they are militantly against western colonialism then they are automatically irrational and anti-Semitic. Part of our task at Tikkun is to provide a more complex analysis of the world (and that is only one of many reasons why we are asking you to subscribe or make an end-of-the-year donation to Tikkun to support our work: checks to 2342 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley, Ca. 94708 or donate on line with your credit card at www.tikkun.org or www.spiritualprogressives.org or by calling 510 644 1200).
Blessings for a Happy, merry and spiritually rich Chanukah, Christmas, Hajj, Diwali, Kwanzaa, and New Year.
Michael
Rabbi Michael Lerner
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A Letter to the President of Iran
Other Victims of Denial
by Mahmoud Al-Safadi
Mr. President, I write to you following the announcement of your intention to organize a conference on the Holocaust in Teheran on 11-12 December, and I sincerely hope that this letter will be brought to your attention.
First of all, allow me to introduce myself: Mahmoud Al-Safadi, a former prisoner from occupied Jerusalem. I was released less than three months ago from the Israeli prison where I had been locked up for eighteen years for having been a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and having taken an active part in resistance to the occupation during the first Intifada. Since you were elected president, I have followed your declarations with great interest -- in particular those relating to the Holocaust. I respect your opposition to the American and Western injunctions concerning the Iranian nuclear program and believe it legitimate that you complain of the double standard that the world has with regard to the nuclear development of certain regimes.
But I am furious about your insistence on claiming that the Holocaust never took place and about your doubts about the number of Jews who were murdered in the extermination and concentration camps, organized massacres, and gas chambers, consequently denying the universal historical significance of the Nazi period.
Allow me to say, Mr. President, with all due respect to you, that you made these statements without really knowing the Nazi industry of death. To have read the works of some deniers seems to be enough for you -- a little like a man who shouts above a well and hears only the echo of his own voice. I believe that a man in your position should not make such an enormous error, because it could be turned against him and, worse still, his people.
Like you and millions of people in the world -- among whom, alas, are innumerable Palestinians and Arabs -- I was also convinced that the Jews exaggerated and lied about the Holocaust, etc., even apart from the fact that the Zionist movement and Israel use the Holocaust to justify their policy, first of all against my own people.
My long imprisonment provided me with the occasion to read books and articles that our ideology and social norms made inaccessible to us outside the prison. These documents gave me a thorough knowledge of the history of the Nazi regime and genocide that it perpetrated. At the beginning of the 1990s, by reading articles written by the Palestinian intellectuals Edward Said and Azmi Bishara, I discovered facts and positions which contradicted mine and those of many Palestinians. Their writings having piqued my curiosity and given birth inside me to the need to know more, I set about reading accounts of survivors of the Holocaust and the Nazi occupation. These testimonies were written by people of various nationalities, Jews or non-Jews.
The more I learned, the more I realized that the Holocaust was indeed a historical fact and the more I became aware of the monumental dimension of the crime committed by Nazi Germany against the Jews, other social and national groups, and humanity in general. I discovered that Nazi Germany aspired to found a "new world order" dominated by the "pure Aryan race" thanks to the physical annihilation of "impure races" and the enslavement of other nations. I discovered that various "normal" official institutions -- bureaucracies, judicial systems, medical and educational authorities, municipalities, railroad companies, and others -- had taken part and collaborated in the implementation of this new world order. From a theoretical point of view, this objective, just like the victories won at the time by the Nazi armies of occupation, threatened the existence of the Arabs and Muslims as well.
Whatever the number of victims -- Jewish and non-Jewish -- the crime is monumental. Any attempt to deny it deprives the denier of his own humanity and sends him immediately to the side of torturers. Whoever denies the fact that this human disaster really took place should not be astonished that others deny the sufferings and persecutions inflicted on his own people by tyrannical leaders or foreign occupiers. Ask yourself, I beg you, the following question: were hundreds of thousands of testimonies written about death camps, gas chambers, ghettos, and mass murders committed by the German army, tens of thousands of works of research based on German documents, numerous filmed sequences, some of which were shot by German soldiers -- were all these masses of evidence completely fabricated?
Can all that be summed up simply as an imperialist-Zionist plot? Are the confessions of high-ranking Nazis officials about their personal role in the project of extermination of whole nations only the fruit of the imagination of some disturbed spirit?
And all these heroic deeds of the people subjected to the German occupation -- the first among whom were Russians, Polish, and Yugoslavs -- only lies and gross exaggerations? Could the struggle of the Soviets against Nazi Germany be only a phantasm? The Russians continue to celebrate their victory over Nazi Germany and remember millions of their civilian and military compatriots who lost their lives in this struggle. Are they lying, too?
I invite you to read historical studies and serious testimonies before making your public statements. You divide the world in two camps: the imperialists-Zionists, who manufactured the myth of the Holocaust, and the adversaries of imperialism, who know the truth and uncover the plot. Perhaps you think that the act of denying the Holocaust places you at the vanguard of the Muslim world and that this refusal constitutes a useful tool in the combat against American imperialism and Western hegemony. By doing so, you actually do great disservice to popular struggles the world over.
At best, you cover your people and yourself with ridicule in the eyes of political forces who reject imperialism but cannot take your ideas and arguments seriously, due to the fact that you obsessively deny the existence of an abundantly documented and studied historical period whose consequences are still felt and discussed today.
At worst, you discourage and weaken the political, social, and intellectual forces who, in Europe and in the United States, reject the policy of confrontation and war carried out by George Bush, but are forced to conclude that you, too, jeopardize the world by your declarations denying the genocide and by your nuclear program.
Concerning the struggle of my people for their independence and their freedom: perhaps do you regard the negation of the Holocaust as an expression of support for the Palestinians? There, again, you are mistaken. We fight for our existence and our rights and against the historical injustice which was inflicted on us in 1948. We will not win our victory and our independence by denying the genocide perpetrated against the Jewish people, even though the forces who occupy our country today and dispossess us are part of the Jewish people.
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Mahmoud Al-Safadi is a former Palestinian militant who was imprisoned in Israel for eighteen years and freed in 2006. The French text, a translation from English by Gilles Berton, was published in Le Monde on 4 December 2006. English translation from the French text by Yoshie Furuhashi.
