----- Original Message ----- From: "Yoshie Furuhashi" <critical.montages at gmail.com> To: "lbo-talk" <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Thursday, December 14, 2006 1:43 PM Subject: [lbo-talk] Mahmoud Al-Safadi, "Other Victims of Denial"
>I found this open letter in Le Monde and translated it into English. --
>Yoshie
>
> <http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/alsafadi141206.html>
> 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 the 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.
> --
> Yoshie
> <http://montages.blogspot.com/>
> <http://mrzine.org>
> <http://monthlyreview.org/>
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