Karl Pfeifer, a veteran anti-fascist and journalist and a longstanding contributor to Z Word, interviewed Esther Webman, research fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies and the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism, Tel Aviv University, about her new book on Arab responses to the Holocaust.
Karl Pfeifer: In your book From Empathy to Denial / Arab Responses to the Holocaust (Co-author Meir Litvak) you emphasize discussing “as Jews and Israelis” this subject matter, to have “tried to maintain, as much as possible, a dispassionate approach”. Why did you qualify your ethnic origin as “our shortcoming”?
Esther Webman: Unfortunately, when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict there is a widespread belief that an Israeli is biased when he deals with Arab issues. And we do understand that as historians, we always have our own subjective position which might be reflected in our writing.
Continue reading ‘Arab Responses to the Holocaust: Esther Webman Interviewed’
Those of us who have written about Islamism and its connection to the terrorist attacks of the past decade have always gone to great effort to define this tradition as an extremist interpretation of the traditions of Islam. We have distinguished between Islam and Islamism, but we have also insisted that it is naïve to assume that when terrorists say they act in the name of Islam that their actions have nothing at all to do with their interpretation of the religion. To criticize Islamism is not a sublimation of hostility to Islam. It is the result of an interpretation of widely known facts about one extremist interpretation of that religion.
Achcar is a man at war with what he has written in his own book. It is Achcar, not us supposed Islamophobes and anti-Arab racists, who documents the tradition of Pan-Islamism and the fusion of Nazism and Islamic fundamentalism that was a key chapter in its history. The same author who traced this tradition from Rida to Husseini now writes as if the terms “Islamism” and “Islamofascism” are the product of anti-Islamic bigotry. Isn’t it possible, and even likely, that those he denounces for criticizing Islamism in recent years have arrived at conclusions similar to his own regarding the Islamists of the 1930s and 1940s because they, like him, concluded that there was good evidence in both cases to do so?
From a fine review by Professor Jeffrey Herf of Gilbert Achcar’s new book, The Arabs and The Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives. Read the whole article at The New Republic.
“While no one here would argue that Israel and its supporters played no role in Mr. Hosny’s defeat to a Bulgarian diplomat, many people said that his failure was at least as much a sign of Egypt’s long, slow slide as the center of Arab culture, thought and influence. They said the defeat might represent a rejection of Muslims and Arabs, but perhaps more importantly a rejection of their authoritarian leaders.”
A fine report from Cairo by the consistently excellent Michael Slackman, here.
