Robin Shepherd
What happens when multi-culturalist, anti-Israeli pieties clash with a full and rounded rendition of the Nazi past? If recent events in Berlin (of all places) are anything to go by the answer may be as follows: important truths will be denied so that those multi-culturalist, anti-Israeli pieties may be preserved.
In the most important commentary on the subject for quite some time, Daniel Schwammenthal of the Wall Street Journal Europe relates a story about such events which everyone should read and internalise. It is not only shocking in itself, it holds up an image of one of Europe’s possible futures.
Schwammenthal’s piece pegs off an attempt by a German journalist, Karl Rössel, to stage an exhibition at a state funded multi-cultural centre in an Arab and Turkish dominated area of Berlin. The exhibition was entitled “The Third World in the Second World War” and included a small section on the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al Husseini — the Palestinian leader and national hero who was an admirer of Hitler, a prolific propagandist for the Nazi cause and an active recruiter for the SS in wartime Yugoslavia where he participated in genocide.
Such facts, unfortunately, do not fit with the multi-culturalist narrative in which the people of the third world can only be counted as victims. Nor do they fit with important elements of the anti-Israeli narrative in which, as Schwammenthal notes, the notion that the Palestinians are “paying the price for Germany’s sins” as “the second victims” of the Holocaust is deeply rooted. The event was, therefore, cancelled. The Berlin authorities initially supported the decision but then belatedly and reluctantly backed down following accusations they were pandering to historical revisionism.
In Schwammenthal’s words:
“Mr. Rössel [the author of the exhibition] says this episode is typical of how German historians, Arabists and Islam scholars deny or downplay Arab-Nazi collaboration. What Mr. Rössel says about Germany applies to most of the Western world,where it is often claimed that the mufti’s Hitler alliance later discredited him in the region. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the Mideast, Nazis were not only popular during but also after the war—scores of them found refuge in the Arab world, including Eichman’s deputy, Alois Brunner, who escaped to Damascus. The German war criminals became trusted military and security advisers in the region, particularly of Nazi sympathizer Gamal Nasser, then Egypt’s president. The mufti himself escaped to Egypt in 1946. Far from being shunned for his Nazi past, he was elected president of the National Palestinian Council. The mufti was at the forefront of pushing the Arabs to reject the 1948 United Nations partition plan and to wage a “war of destruction” against the fledgling Jewish state. His great admirer, Yasser Arafat, would later succeed him as Palestinian leader.
“The other line of defense is that Arab collaboration with the Nazis supposedly wasn’t ideological but pragmatic, following the old dictum that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” This “excuse” not only fails to consider what would have happened to the Jews and British in the Mideast had the Arabs’ German friends won. It also overlooks the mufti’s and his followers’ virulent anti-Semitism, which continues to poison the minds of many Muslims even today.”
But not, it seems, if you listen to the BBC or read the Guardian or most other bien pensant organs of the media in western Europe. The inconvenient truths about Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism must be denied even if this means providing a distorted picture of the Holocaust and its participants and collaborators.
The other significant part of this story, of course, is that the furore arose in large part because of the location of the planned exhibition in an area dominated by Muslims. But since any discussion of potential problems arising from Europe’s soaring Muslim populations has been a prioridesignated as “racist” by multi-culturalist ideologues, that issue cannot be properly discussed either.
I’m afraid that this is the way things are going in modern Europe. And, be warned, this is just the start of it.
To read Schwammenthal’s excellent piece, click here:
http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com/2009/09/mufti-of-berlin.html#links
For a broader discussion of such issues as they relate to Israel, click here to purchase my recently published book, A State Beyond the Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel:
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This is a storm in a tea cup. The reason the exhibition was rejected by the multi-cultural institution Werkstatt der Kulturen was because Karl Rössel's exhibition was considered racist for reasons I will explain later.
ReplyDeleteThe reason you are at all reading anything about this issue is because Karl Rössel is a journalist who knows exactly how to time innuendos of anti-semitism. In a later statements he admitted that he "only assumed that the reasons why his exhibition wasn't hung was because of the mufit".
This is how crazy these debates have become when it comes to Arabs, an experienced journalist who in this case is the exhibitor himself is writing inflammatory press releases, claiming that a small cultural institution in Berlin refused to hang certain images of an Arab collaborator and the press jumps at it, because everyone these days hates muslims.
The real reasons his badly researched exhibition was rejected were that Karl Rössel is exhibitin a bad colonial show in which he portrays any non-white soldier during WW2, even if thay hailed from the US, Britain, France or maoris from New Zealand and native Americans, as third worldler.
Anyone outside Europe understands that this is idiotic, but hey presto here go the unitelligent reprints of his lies.
Interestingly, the people on this blog who went to see the exhibition went there to look for only more information on collaboration, rather than what Rössel pretended the exhibition was about, namely getting an understanding of the contribution of the "now not so-called-anymore" developing world.
Haters like you are just looking for confirmation to hate.
If you haters want to continue hating Arabs go-ahead, everyone does, but don't pretend to abhor anti-semitism, because if you did you would have noticed that the exhibition lacked
- any mentioning of the holocaust, (3rd Reich without holocaust?)
- good picture research, as the pictures from Asia were embarassing, Rössel used a famous image from Asia and subtitled it with wrong locations, (doesn't matter it's not here in Europe anyway, by the way just one picture as opposed to 18 of the mufti)
-the former USSR wasn't mentioned and so on. (3rd Reich without USSR hmm)
But the only thing that matters to you haters is that a lie is propagated in which you want to believe it like real Nazis should.
Rössel wants to sell his world view into publishing houses who write text books for schools that is all he is interested in.
I cannot believe that you supposedly '"pro-semitic' peolpe here on the blog have not noticed that he is also managing to point all the blame for the 3rd Reich at Arabs. Even Nazis who have tried to aportion blame for the holocaust didn't manage to do this, and you guys in your islamophobia are really subscribing to that view - laughable.
In a minute or two you will have convinced yourself that it was not the Germans but the evil Arabs who killed all the Jews during the 3rd Reich.