Holocaust denial and objective reporting: how the Arab World related to Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day
Responses in the Arab world to Israel’s Yom HaShoah, its national Holocaust Remembrance marked on Thursday, spanned from objective coverage to Holocaust denial.
Photo by Hillel Maeir/TPS on 2 May, 2019
Some media outlets used the term “Holocaust” when covering the events, basing their reports on Israeli media. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s remarks about the Iranian threat on Israel mentioned during his address at the opening ceremony in Yad Vashem were highlighted.
Some sites published media clips on the Holocaust, covered the March of the Living in Poland, posted photos from the Holocaust with the captions “Never again,” and even wrote about the Nazi atrocities committed during the Holocaust.
Other sites took advantage of the solemn day to attack Israel. Under the title “Nazi Rabbis,” Israel was presented as a racist state that is motivated by xenophobia. The articles quoted rabbis who have allegedly called for the subjugation of Arabs. These sites claimed that “Zionist rabbis around the world” have adopted Adolf Hitler’s ideology.
Yet others claimed that racism has been on the rise in Israel in recent years and has pervaded the educational system and the entire government. They charged the Jewish state with not learning the lessons of the Holocaust.
Sites in the Palestinian Authority (PA) accused the Jews of viewing themselves as “the chosen people” and as “the superior race” in comparison to the Arabs.
Another PA site alleged that several imperialist and racist movements have sprouted from the Zionist movement in recent years.
Responses on social media varied.
Ali Hijazi, a student at Bar Ilan University in Israel, wrote that “the Jews’ Holocaust, the Armenian holocaust, the genocide in Bosnia, hunger, strife, occupation, colonialism, ethnic cleansing and even the incidents in Sri Lanka are all crimes against humanity.”
Abed Rahman Fuad of Egypt denied the Holocaust ever happened. “The legend says that the Nazis exterminated six million Jews, even though reality proves that only 100,00 Jews were interned in German camps, alongside hundreds of thousands of others, as part of the Nazi war effort.”
Fuad claims that while one can prove that only 2.4 million Jews resided in the areas occupied by the Nazis, “a well greased and effective propaganda machine has been successful in disseminating the lie that the Nazis murdered six million Jews.”
“This is a holy cow we will have to slaughter in the near future,” he surmised.
TPS
