[lbo-talk] Ahmadinejad's letter

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Fri May 12 09:40:14 PDT 2006


On 5/11/06, martin <mschiller at pobox.com> wrote:
> On May 11, 2006, at 7:30 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> > If Ahmadinejad can try to build a good relation with Iranian Jews and
> > reach out to Jewish leftists in the diaspora, it will be even better.
> > That will strengthen his support for Palestinians and flummox
> > Washington. But, so far, his flirtations with Holocaust revisionism
> > have done the opposite and given ammunition to imperialists: "The head
> > of Iran's Jewish community, Haroun Yashayaei, has sent a letter
> > complaining to President Mahmud Ahmadinejad over his Holocaust denial
> > comments"
>
> Ahmadinejad's letter to the US president contained the following.
>
> "After the war, they claimed that six million Jews had been killed. Six
> million people that were surely related to at least two million
> families. Again let us assume that these events are true. Does that
> logically translate into the establishment of the state of Israel in
> the Middle East or support for such a state?"
>
> Do you see this as conciliatory re the Iranian jewish community?

No. Why couldn't Ahmadinejad bring himself to write: "After the war, six million Jews had been killed. Six million people that were surely related to at least two million families. Does that logically translate into the establishment of the state of Israel in the Middle East or support for such a state?"


> Personally, I find that the holocaust has been mythologized in the
> sense that it hasn't been studied to expose the sequence of events and
> development of social attitudes that led to it's occurrence - studies
> that might dispose of the recent arguments that consume lists like this
> about the use of terms like 'fascist', 'fascism' or 'genocide'.

There are many interesting studies of the Holocaust, and I've posted an excerpt from Alex Callinicos' overview of the debate between intentionalist and functionalist historians: <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2003/2003-June/014957.html>. But that's not what Ahmadinejad has made use of -- he simply appealed to an urge to knock the Holocaust off the pedestal among Arabs and Muslims, a number of whom suffer from what I would call "Holocaust envy." You see, they have been told over and over again that their oppression doesn't measure up to the Jewish people's under the Nazis and that the Holocaust justifies the establishment of the Jewish state and expulsion of Palestinians. As Edward Said said, it's hard being victims of victims. So, a number of Arabs and Muslims have been tempted to either downplay the Holocaust or compare the Zionists to the Nazis. But that's a wrong way to go. Instead, say simply: The Holocaust, perpetrated by German Nazis and their collaborators, never justifies the oppression of Palestinians by Zionists, no matter how many Jews were killed in the Holocaust. The disabled were the first to be killed by the Nazis, but that doesn't justify the establishment of a state of the disabled, nor would it occur to disability rights advocates to demand such a thing.


> As a child I was extremely confused about how my german surname
> associated me with the holocaust.

I'm Japanese, but frankly, I don't identify with other Japanese just because they live in Japan or speak the Japanese language. My friends are leftists of whatever nationalities, and my enemies are rightists of whatever nationalities.


> I've always felt that the root historical cause (of jewish
> scapegoating) was the jewish refusal to adapt to a state religion

The Ottoman Empire had an Islamic character, but it provided Jews, Christians, and other recognized religious minorities with well-defined rights and privileges as well as duties, without persecuting them in the fanatically theocratic Christian fashion. That limited but significant tolerance was favorably recognized by Enlightenment philosophers who correctly realized that Christian Europe was incomparably more intolerant of religious differences than the Muslim world, China, etc.

-- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>



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