Iran’s President Ahmadinejad is one in a long line of Middle Eastern rulers who have used the Palestinians for their own political purposes. So it wasn’t surprising that he used the UN Conference on Racism in Geneva this week in order to fight his own political battles on the back of the Palestinians, and thus bolster his own regime. What is more surprising that there are still people taken in by these tactics.
Iran is the main regional beneficiary of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. The US puppet government of Iraq of Maliki is closely allied to the Iranian regime. It is this which lies behind the US/Israel rhetoric about its nuclear threat. But although we would naturally defend Iran against US or Israeli aggression that doesn’t mean that Ahmadinejad is some form of anti-imperialist or progressive.
Iran is also a vicious police state which hangs gays, flogs and stones women, jails and tortures trade unionists, oppresses its own Arab, Kurdish and religious minorities and has one of the highest rates of execution in the world. Its regime has consistently used the threats by Israel and the US in order to silence the opposition. And Ahmadinejad has no hesitation in using the plight of the Palestinians to bolster his regime internationally.
Much of his speech was unremarkable, such as the assertion that the Zionists had used the Nazi holocaust and anti-Semitism as part of the rationale for creating the Israeli state. His argument that the Iraq war was planned by the Zionists is simply wrong. The part of his speech concerning the holocaust, which he left out at the last minute, showed that his ‘anti-Zionism’ is not so much anti-Semitism, although it is also that, but a typical example of the bombast and crudity which Arab rulers display in abundance. His reference to “the ambiguous and dubious question of the Holocaust” demonstrates that he has learnt nothing from his disastrous conference on the holocaust some years ago.
There is of course nothing ambiguous and dubious about the Nazi holocaust. The fact that Zionists have used the holocaust to justify Israel’s expulsion of the Palestinians and its continuing racist practices does not mean there was no holocaust. It just means that Zionism has no political principle and will use the very Jewish victims of murder that they abandoned in order to justify their own racism. It is testimony to the stupidity of Ahmadinejad and his fundamentalist supporters that they believe that if Israel derives its legitimacy from the holocaust then all they have to do is deny there was a holocaust and, hey presto, Israel has no legitimacy.
There is just one flaw in the above argument. If in fact, and it is a fact, that there was a millions of Jews and non-Jews died, then presumably Zionism is right and Israel does indeed possess the moral and political justification it claims?
But if stupidity is a congenital disease that afflicts most Middle Eastern dictators, then that is no justification for those whose trade is ideas to deal in facile and childish rhetoric that has little connection with reality. It is everyone’s right to behave like a fool and an imbecile but it is not compulsory to do so. Yet that is exactly what the Arab Media Internet Network (AMIN) is guilty of. An article on the Geneva Conference entitled ‘Racist Israel vs Durban Conference Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, who is the Racist of them All’ by one ‘Dr.’ Elias Akleh, is a perfect example of someone who is no doubt outraged by all sorts of terrible things that the Israelis and the Zionist movement does, yet who is unable to make sense of them other than by resorting to conspiracy theories. What the Aklehs of this world lack is any form of class analysis, any means of understanding society that rises above trivia such as whether European Jews came from around the Caspian Sea or Outer Mongolia.
Instead Aklehs gathers together all sorts of inquities and even more absurdities. The Jews were responsible for the Atlantic slave trade,
‘100 million Christian Russians [who] were exterminated by the Jewish Commissars under the orders of Leon Trotsky (a Jew) in 1917-1945. Russian Jews were also responsible for the killing of 65 million other Christians in the Bolshevik Revolution.’
The fact that Trotsky was exiled from Russia in 1929, had not been in command of anything since 1925 and was murdered in 1940 matters not a jot to Akleh who conjures figures out of the air – the bigger the better. It’s a surprise that there was anyone left in Russia since 165 million is more than the population was at the time!
But to a fool with no lodestar then the ‘fact’ that the ‘the majority of Zionist Jewish Israeli citizens are originally Khazars, Russian, European and North and South Americans and not Semitic.’ is important rather than a complete irrelevance. Even were it true, what would it matter? As if the origins of the American settlers mattered a jot when they exterminated the Amerindians.
Aklehs describes himself as ‘an Arab writer from a Palestinian descent born in the town of Beit Jala. His family was first evicted from Haifa after the “Nakba” of 1948, then from Beit Jala after the “Nakseh” of 1967. He lives now in the US, and publishes his articles on the web in both English and Arabic.’ Judging by his article on AMIN, ‘Dr. Elias Akleh’ probably bought his degree at a southern Baptist ‘university’ or the Internet equivalent. Either way it’s no surprise that no reputable journal will touch him.
Akleh goes through various genocides and holocausts. That the slave trade was a terrible example of western racism at its most lethal, the product of a vicious and barbaric political and economic system of primitive imperialism, in not doubted. No one will know how many died in over 3 centuries that the triangular slave lasted. Estimates vary enormously.
For example Robin Blackburn’s ‘The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery: 1776-1848’ estimates less than 10 million slaves in all were transported. (547). Likewise Philip Curtin’s ‘THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE – A Census’ revises downwards Deerr’s estimate in his History of Sugar from nearly 12 million to 9.5 millions. Oliver Ramsfur mentions 14m and K Davies 20m. Wikipedia’s states that ‘Most contemporary historians estimate that between 9.4 and 12 million.’ ‘Dr’ Akleh however is nothing if not original:
‘99 millions in a span of a hundred years, while being transported on slave ships belonging to Jewish slave traders.’
Of course estimates of the Atlantic slave trade vary widely, as do the numbers of those murdered by the Nazis. This is not surprising. It took the US 3 years to get an accurate figure of those who died in 9/11. How can it possibly be imagined that accuracy with respect to other acts of genocide will be accurate when records were destroyed if they ever existed?
If one didn’t know better, one would believe Aklers to be in the business of slave-trade denial since what better way is there to discredit something than to magnify its numbers? But of course the slave-trade too was a Jewish monopoly!
Someone like Akers gathers different ‘facts’ together, some true, some not, he adds a few quotations that he’s come across, he can’t make sense of any of it but he knows there’s something wrong. So he marries every conspiracy theory that comes his way, mixes it into a pot-pourri of literary absurdity and hey presto, he believes he’s struck gold. One sees this scrambling of the human brain in Aker’s statement that
Ahmadinejad’s speech was anti-Zionist and not anti-Semitic, for these are totally two different things, although Zionists claim them to be the same.
It is true that anti-Zionism is a different creature from anti-Semitism, despite the efforts of fascists, neo-Nazis and Zionists to pretend otherwise. But Akleh is the last person to understand the difference. Likewise Idiot AMIN.
For what better conspiracy theory is there than to pretend there was no Nazi holocaust. Hitler didn’t openly speak of ‘annihilation’ of Jewry. Akleh writes that:
‘All these holocausts, and many others, are well documented historical events, while the Jewish Holocaust is surrounded by many doubts and denials. It is a real perplexing issue that any scientific study of this holocaust is met by resistance and is severely punishable by laws.’
That the Nazis did indeed murder between 5 and 6 millions is now accepted by all reputable historians. Nor is it denied, even by someone like David Irving that the Nazis murdered millions through the use of poisonous gas. In his famous and failed libel trial against Penguin books, he conceded that millions died in the Action Reinhard extermination camps [Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmno and Treblinka] whilst denying that Auschwitz was such a camp.
If 3 volumes of Hilberg’s ‘Destruction of European Jews’ are a bit too much for ‘Dr’ Aklers then he could always read something simpler like Dawidowicz’s Holocaust Reader and read the translation of Einsatzgruppen [Nazi killing squads in Poland and later Operation Barbarossa] Situation Reports on how many thousands of Jews and Russians they murdered.
The idea that holocaust deniers (‘revisionists’) do serious scientific analysis or research is not even funny. How can one compare the painstaking research with German documents of someone like the late Professor Raul Hilberg compared with the Electrical Engineering Professor from the American South, Arthur Butz?
Akleh demonstrates the ideological absurdity of the rhetoric derived from Arab regimes. What it lacks in analysis and fact it makes up for with exagerration and bombast. So Zionism is analysed in terms of the genocidal quality of the Jewish religion. And of course the Jewish religion, like most other religions can be used to justify all sorts of iniquities. The Book of Joshua is a Book of Genocide. But were the Prophets, Isaiah, Mikah, Jeremiah also mass murderers? The Koran too can be and is quoted for its more bloodthirsty aspects. And Christians too have their Book of Revelations and similar texts.
But Zionism was a political movement that cloaked itself in religious rhetoric. Fools like Aklehs and the AMIN editors are unable to discern the difference between cause and effect. Which is why their protestations that they are anti-Zionist rather than anti-Semitic are so laughable.
But the real question is why, when there are plenty of questions to ask over Ahmedinajad’s motives and his hijacking of the Palestinian cause, the relationship between Zionism and US foreign policy initiatives and exposing the hypocrisy of Western delegates who object to Zionism being described as a form of racism, did the Arab Media Internet Network decide to post this junk essay?
Tony Greenstein
