U.S. Muslim leaders condemn Holocaust denial

From: http://www.politico.com/

U.S. imams pray at Dachau. | Photo courtesy of Suhail A. Khan

Imams join U.S. officials at Nazi sites

By: Laura Rozen

U.S. officials participated in a trip of eight Muslim-American clerics to the sites of the former Dachau and Auschwitz concentration camps last week in what one official called a transformative experience.

“These Muslim leaders were experiencing something they knew nothing about,” President Barack Obama’s envoy to combat anti-Semitism, Hannah Rosenthal, told POLITICO Tuesday. Rosenthal lost many family members at Auschwitz, including her grandparents. “I can’t believe anyone walks into Auschwitz and leaves the same person. I watched them break down. I broke down in front of suitcases. ... It is the cemetery of my whole family.”

The participating imams “were totally aware that they were visiting my family cemetery, and they were very loving about it,” Rosenthal said.

At the end, the imams — from a broad range of backgrounds — issued a far-reaching statement, condemning anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial and religious bigotry.

“We bear witness to the absolute horror and tragedy of the Holocaust, where over 12 million human souls perished, including 6 million Jews,” the group said in a joint statement issued after the trip. “We condemn any attempts to deny this historical reality and declare such denials or any justification of this tragedy as against the Islamic code of ethics.”

Beyond Rosenthal, among those from the Obama, Reagan and George W. Bush administrations who accompanied the imams on the Aug. 7-11 trip to Germany and Poland were Rashad Hussain, Obama’s envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference; Nasreen Badat, a State Department official working on religious freedom issues; Marshall Breger, former special assistant to Reagan for public liaison and his liaison with the Jewish community; and Suhail Khan, an official in Bush's public liaison office. Also participating was Rabbi Jack Bemporad from New Jersey.

The trip was co-sponsored by Germany's Konrad Adenauer Foundation and the Center for Interreligious Understanding, of which Bemporad is executive director.

The letter was signed by Imam Abdullah T. Antepli, the Muslim chaplain of Duke University; Imam Syed Naqvi, director of the Islamic Interfaith Center in Washington; Shaikh Yasir Qadhi, dean of academics for the AlMaghrib Institute in New Haven, Conn.; Laila Muhammad, daughter of late Imam W.D. Muhammad of Chicago; Imam Suhaib Webb of the Muslim Community Association of Santa Clara, Calif.; Sayyid Syeed, national director of the Islamic Society of North America’s Office of Interfaith & Community Services; Imam Muhamad Maged of the All-Dulles-Area Muslim Society in Virginia and vice president of the Islamic Society of North America; and Imam Muzammil Siddiqi of the Islamic Center of Orange County, Calif.

Organizers of the trip say they were dismayed that the Anti-Defamation League’s Abe Foxman lobbied U.S. officials against participating. They also say the Investigative Project’s Steve Emerson, author of "American Jihad," lobbied against the trip, arguing that one of the imams planning to participate had made Holocaust denial statements a decade ago.

Emerson was unavailable for comment and Foxman did not respond to repeated queries from POLITICO.

Organizers say they tried to pick imams from a wide range of American constituencies.

“The Muslim faith and community leaders represented the broad diversity of the Muslim-American community including Arab, South Asian, African-American, Caucasian, Sunni, Shiite, men, women, young and older established leaders,” Khan told POLITICO. “Most knew very little about the Holocaust, and all were eager to learn and personally witness the reality of this historical tragedy.”

“There is a view among some people in the Jewish community that you should not meet with certain Muslims because they are in some way not worthy or they don’t meet the right criteria,” former Reagan special assistant Breger, now a professor of law at Catholic University, told POLITICO. But, he said, it was the trip organizers’ belief that “it is important to reach out to Muslims prepared to talk to us, people who are ready to open themselves to experiences which might be transformative for them — as occurred on this trip to Dachau and Auschwitz.”

At the sight of the imams praying in Dachau, Rosenthal said, “All of the tourists stopped in their tracks. I don’t think anyone has ever seen anything like it.”

In Poland, the group met with the chief rabbi of Poland as well as with the cardinal of Krakow. On the last night of the trip, Rosenthal said, the group went to an Iftar dinner at a Turkish mosque in Munich.

“It was truly an interfaith experience,” Rosenthal said. “There were representatives from the Catholic community, from the Jewish community and members of the mosque. It was wonderful. They were very curious about what we had just done. I am sure a number of them had no idea what we were talking about. How can you?”

“I can’t really put into words what we saw there,” Imam Suhaib Webb of Muslim Community Association in California, told POLITICO Wednesday. Webb, 38, originally from Oklahoma City, said he converted from Christianity to Islam. “I would have to say the sheer inhumanity of what we saw I was not able to comprehend — the systematic killing of people. … The whole time we were asking the rabbis, ‘why did they do this?’ ”

Webb said he and Rabbi Bemporad and Imam Muhamad Maged have discussed organizing future trips for Jewish and Muslim youth groups to Poland, Germany and Bosnia.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Germany's Konrad Adenauer Foundation was the sole sponsor of the trip. Suhail Khan's name was also spelled incorrectly.

Editor's note: After this story was published, Steve Emerson disputed the assertion that he lobbied against the trip. POLITICO tried to reach Emerson repeatedly before publication. In an email, Emerson wrote: “I never lobbied against the trip of the Imams. What I did was provide background material on 2 of the Islamic leaders attending the trip who had made anti-Semitic, radical Islamic statements or justified terrorist attacks. The request of me to provide background material on two Imams was made by one of the leaders of the trip. I never lobbied whatsoever against the trip—that statement is a blatant lie but pointed out the previous radical statements of these 2 Islamic leaders—something you somehow neglected to point out to your readers."

Emerson also said POLITICO's account failed to mention that he had "called the statement issued by Islamic clerics 'impressive' even though the full statement was replete with contrived statements falsely equating the notion of 'Islamophobia' with anti-Semitism and also omitting the fact that the Grand Mufti, Haj Al-Husseni, the leader of the Muslims in World War 2, actively collaborated with the Nazis.”

A Holocaust Survivor Dances at Auschwitz

From: http://www.theatlantic.com/

This video depicts a Holocaust survivor—flanked by a handful of younger family members—dancing at several concentration camps, with a cover of "I Will Survive" in the background. Buzzfeed calls it "the most heart-warming Holocaust memorial ever displayed."

UPDATE: Alyssa Rosenberg points out that this isn't history's first example of dancing at a Holocaust site: Groucho Marx performed a two-minute Charleston on Hitler's grave in 1958.

'Among the Righteous:' Arabs Saving Jews in the Holocaust

Posted By Robert Satloff

From: http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/

"Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust in Arab lands," is a new documentary I made in partnership with MacNeil-Lehrer Productions, airing tonight on PBS. It retells largely forgotten stories from World War II in North Africa of Arabs who saved their Jewish neighbors from the Holocaust -- a story which Holocaust historiography has largely left untouched. The documentary digs into history to uncover not only cases of Jewish persecution in North Africa similar to the Jewish experience in Europe, but also stories of the "righteous" Arabs that protected Jews. Filmed in eight different countries stretching from Morocco to Israel, the documentary reveals surprising discoveries about the past that can help challenge how Arabs and Jews alike view this part of Holocaust history.

The documentary airs tonight on PBS at 10 p.m. eastern time.

Robert Satloff is executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Anne Frank diary guardian Miep Gies dies aged 100

Speaking in 1995, Miep Gies shares her memories of Anne Frank

Miep Gies, the last surviving member of the group who helped protect Anne Frank and her family from the Nazis, has died in the Netherlands aged 100.

She and other employees of Anne Frank's father Otto supplied food to the family as they hid in a secret annex above the business premises in Amsterdam.
Anne's diary of their life in hiding, which ended in betrayal, is one of the most famous records of the Holocaust.
It was rescued by Mrs Gies, who kept it safe until after the war.
Miep Gies died in a nursing home after suffering a fall just before Christmas.
Speaking last year as she celebrated her 100th birthday, Mrs Gies played down her role, saying others had done far more to protect Jews in the Netherlands.
She and her fellow employees kept Anne and the seven others supplied for two years, from 1942 to 1944.

Anne Frank died of typhus in a Nazi concentration camp in 1945

When the family were found by the authorities, they were deported, and Anne died of typhus in the German concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen.
It was Mrs Gies who collected up Anne's papers and locked them away, hoping that one day she would be able to give them back to the girl.
In the event, she returned them to Otto Frank, who survived the war, and helped him compile them into a diary that was published in 1947.
It went on to sell tens of millions of copies in dozens of languages.
Mrs Gies became a kind of ambassador for the diary, travelling to talk about Anne Frank and her experiences, campaigning against Holocaust denial and refuting allegations that the diary was a forgery.
For her efforts to protect the Franks and to preserve their memory, Mrs Gies won many accolades.
Memories of Anne
In an interview from 1998, published on the annefrank website, Miep Gies says she thought it "perfectly natural" to help Anne and the seven others despite the penalties she could have suffered under the Nazi occupation.

Mrs Gies, bottom left, and Otto Frank, next to her, were reunited after the war

"They were powerless, they didn't know where to turn..." she says. "We did our duty as human beings: helping people in need."
Her role was, she recalls, to fetch vegetables and meat while others supplied bread or books.
Her memory of Anne is of having the feeling she was "speaking to an adult".
"I'd say to myself, 'My goodness, child, so young and talking like that already'," she says in the interview.
She believes that she once came across Anne writing the diary.
"It was a very uncomfortable situation," she says.

FROM THE TODAY PROGRAMME More from Today programme

"I tried to decide what to do. Should I walk away or go to her? At that moment she glanced at me, with a look that I'll never forget.
"This wasn't the Anne I knew, that friendly, charming child. She looked at me with anger, rage. Then Anne stood up, slammed her diary shut and glared at me with great condescension. 'Yes,' she said, 'I'm writing about you, too.'
"I didn't know what to say. The only thing I could manage was: 'That ought to be interesting.'"
Mrs Gies also remembers the day the Franks were taken away and how she went up into the empty annex to find the pages of the diary lying on the floor.
Removing the pages, she did not read them immediately, telling herself at the time: "These may belong to a child, but even children have a right to privacy."

Video: Holocaust Survivor Shares Her Story In Second Life

By Nate Ralph

With some help from her daughter's Second Life avatar, Holocaust survivor Fanny Starr met with a group of the virtual world's citizens to share her personal experience of the horrors of genocide.

The video, while only a few minutes long, provides a brief glimpse of the horrors she endured, including an encounter with the notorious Dr. Josef Mengele. The lecture becomes especially noteworthy in light of the technology being leveraged -- the 87-year-old Starr has given many similar talks on her experiences throughout the past 30 years, but Second Life allowed her to reach a much wider audience without the burden of travel.

The full lecture is over an hour long, but features an in-depth question and answer session with members of the audience. A video is available from Second Life user GeoMeek.