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.
Mondoweiss has reported the death of Tony Judt. I daresay they’d know. As good a moment as any to recall that he regarded Jews as morally unfit for self-government and warned that the Jews as a whole might have to suffer as a result of the alleged crimes of some individual Jews.
Continue reading ‘On The Death Of Tony Judt’
Via Ministry of Truth
Last week’s ‘Everybody Draw Mohammed Day‘ generated a number of depressinging stupid responses; nowhere more so than in Pakistan where the government resorted to blocking access to Facebook, Youtube, Flickr and parts of Wikipedia in an effort to ‘protect’ its citizens from the heinous sight of several thousand photoshopped stick-men with word ‘Mohammed’ scrawled underneath.
Continue reading ‘“Everybody Research the Holocaust Day”’
Gideon Levy has a piece here in which he berates the government of Israel for sending ministers abroad to participate in ceremonies marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day. He does this because he regards it as nothing more than cheap propaganda and an attempt to distract attention from criticism of Israel arising out of its policies towards Gaza and, especially, Operation Cast Lead. He writes:
Continue reading ‘Gideon Levy And Holocaust Commemoration’
The British writer Will Self has an essay here about his late German colleague W. G. Sebald’s writing about the Holocaust. In it he objects to the existence of Holocaust Memorial Day in the UK and rejects the idea of the Holocaust being remembered at all. He writes,
Continue reading ‘British Writer Rejects Holocaust Commemoration’
A friend of mine in Warsaw emailed me earlier today with the sad news that Marek Edelman (zichrono livracha) - the last surviving leader of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising - has passed away at the age of ninety.
In 1942, Edelman was one of the founders of the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB) which united Bundists, Zionists, communists and others to confront the Nazi threat. The uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto the following year was the first act of mass civilian resistance in Nazi-occupied Poland - a salient fact that should be remembered by those who portray the victims of the Holocaust as having passively accepted their fate.
Continue reading ‘Marek Edelman z”l: Hero of the Warsaw Ghetto’
At 6:38 AM Eastern Standard Time, President Obama’s speech hit what the Wall Street Journal’s live bloggers called a “sensitive passage.” This one:
Continue reading ‘Obama’s Audience in Cairo’
This is a guest post by Walter Reich, Yitzhak Rabin Memorial Professor of International Affairs, Ethics and Human Behavior at George Washington University and a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Walter is a former director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
President Barack Obama will deliver the keynote address at Tuesday’s Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda. The theme for this year’s ceremony is “Never Again: What You Do Matters.” The theme emphasizes individual responsibility.
Continue reading ‘On “Never Again”’
Just a line to guide readers towards Phoebe Maltz’s excellent blog and, more particularly, to this excellent post in which she savages the latest parcel of pomposity emitted by a columnist well known to regulars at this bar.
Gene described it as a “small, good thing.” An apposite phrase for a special event: a youth orchestra from the West Bank city of Jenin playing for a group of Holocaust survivors in Israel. But it won’t be happening again because the orchestra has been disbanded as a direct consequence of that concert.
Continue reading ‘Jenin Orchestra Disbanded’
“…as some people who don’t like Jews have found, it’s worth acknowledging the Holocaust if you can then turn it into a cudgel against the Jews. And that they’ve done, in spades. According to this crowd, the Jews today have become Nazis. The Jewish state is now supposedly carrying out a Holocaust against the Palestinians. Jews, the haters say, have always been evil, and their evil is only growing.”
Read Walter Reich in the Washington Post.
In the end, Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann, the President of the UN General Assembly, decided not to attend the Holocaust commemoration ceremonies at UN Headquarters here in New York. One can speculate endlessly as to why D’Escoto - whose choice of metaphor to describe Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians is “crucifixion” - bowed out. Perhaps it was because he didn’t want to be in a room where he wasn’t welcome; perhaps something inside him dreaded the prospect of looking actual Holocaust survivors in the eye just a few months after he embraced the world’s most well-known exponent of Holocaust denial; perhaps (let us not forget those who will inevitably say this) he was “leaned on” or “pressured” or “prevented” by you-know-who.
Continue reading ‘D’Escoto and The Holocaust’
The man with his back to the camera is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian President. The man warmly hugging him is Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, President of the UN General Assembly. The occasion for their embrace was Ahmadinejad’s viciously antisemitic speech at the UN last September.
Continue reading ‘Holocaust Memorial Day: Embracing the Devil’
There is a Holocaust abuse tactic that is really only available to Jewish anti-Zionists. Norman Finkelstein, the author of the “The Holocaust Industry,” often uses it. Gerald Kaufman, a British Member of Parliament, has started using it. Basically, it works like this: if your parents or grandparents perished in or survived the Holocaust, you invoke them when venting anger against Israel.
Continue reading ‘Holocaust Abuse Tactics’
