Ayaan Hirsi Ali explains in the LA Times (thanks to Doc Washburn) why Muslims deny the Holocaust. Her points are well taken, but the main reason why Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is denying the Holocaust is so that he can portray the founding of the State of Israel as a reaction to an event that was trumped-up in order to provide a justification for European colonialism in Islamic lands. It never happened, he wants us to believe, so that we will also believe that there is no need and no justification for a Jewish State.
ONE DAY IN 1994, when I was living in Ede, a small town in Holland, I got a visit from my half-sister. She and I were both immigrants from Somalia and had both applied for asylum in Holland. I was granted it; she was denied. The fact that I got asylum gave me the opportunity to study. My half-sister couldn't.In order for me to be admitted to the university I wanted to attend, I needed to pass three courses: a language course, a civics course and a history course. It was in the preparatory history course that I, for the first time, heard of the Holocaust. I was 24 years old at that time, and my half-sister was 21.
In those days, the daily news was filled with the Rwandan genocide and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia. On the day that my half-sister visited me, my head was reeling from what happened to 6 million Jews in Germany, Holland, France and Eastern Europe.
I learned that innocent men, women and children were separated from each other. Stars pinned to their shoulders, transported by train to camps, they were gassed for no other reason than for being Jewish.
I saw pictures of masses of skeletons, even of kids. I heard horrifying accounts of some of the people who had survived the terror of Auschwitz and Sobibor. I told my half-sister all this and showed her the pictures in my history book. What she said was as awful as the information in my book.
With great conviction, my half-sister cried: "It's a lie! Jews have a way of blinding people. They were not killed, gassed or massacred. But I pray to Allah that one day all the Jews in the world will be destroyed."
Read it all.
There is an excellent PhD just waiting to be written re. the peculiar mental pathologies that Islam inculcates in its adherents.
Or am I wrong? Has that PhD been written? If so, why haven't we heard about it?
To be fair, her sister was just expressing the hatred of Jews that can be found throughout the koran.
A common mistake among anti-Israelis is to proclaim the ugly anti-Semitism in the Arab media a result of the Israeli "occupation". It never occurs to these people to think "hmmm maybe they don't hate Jews because of Israel, maybe the hate Israel because they hate Jews"
"There is an excellent PhD just waiting to be written re. the peculiar mental pathologies that Islam inculcates in its adherents....Has that PhD been written?"
-- from a posting above
Yes. Here and there. Look at Andre Servier's book, now on line (put on line by a JW poster alerted to its merits). Look at "The Arab Mind" by Patai; figure out where he avoids the word "Islam" and supply it yourself. Other books -- such as that by John Laffin -- limn the same, sometimes better. Studies of the Qur'an that show how replete with aggression the text is, and which draw the obvious conclusions -- the conclusions that so few in Washington or other Western capitals will draw, or even dare to think much less talk about -- have been completed, but at the moment the names of the Danes and the Dutch involved escape me.
It's all there. How Islam discourages free inquiry at every step. How Islam encourages submission to the blind and irrational (or at least not necessariy rational, but rather whimsical) will of Allah. How Islam encourages intolerance of others and an inability to compromise, but rather inculcates a zero-sum view of the world as divided between the victor and the vanquished. It starts with Believer (victor) and Infidel (vanquished) but can also be seen in the way that various groups of Muslims naturally treat each other.
Look at the Fast Jihad (Hamas) and the Slow Jihad (Fatah or PLO) in Gaza. Look at Sunnis and Shi'a in Iraq (not to mention Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Pakistan, and even Yemen). All of it clearly related -- and yet somehow never related -- to not merely the tenets, but what has been carefully described here, about two thousand times, as the "attitudes" and "atmospherics" of Islam, that arise naturally out of the canonical texts -- Qur'an and Hadith and Sira -- and the most authoritative commentators on those texts.
Tenets, attitudes, atmospherics of Islam -- they are all part of the same thing, and they can all be seen at work in societies suffused with Islam. There are those most suffused, with legal systems closest to the Shari'a: Saudi Arabia, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Sudan, Pakistan, and now Somalia may be added to the list. There are those only slightly less complete and fanatical in their adherence to Islam: Egypt, Jordan, the U.A.E., the so-called "Palestinians" in those territories some call "Palestinian"; areas of Iraq under local control of local Shi'a (as in Basra) or Sunnis (as in Ramadi). Then, less still in Morocco and Algeria and Libya (where the colonel has his own ideas, some of them hardly Islamic at all). Then still another group, with Tunisia and Oman being milder, the former the result of secularizing Bourguiba and the Destour Party and now Ben Ali, who runs a police-state designed to keep Islam down, the latter a special case because of the influence both of Ibadiya Islam, and Sultan Qaboos's wisdom; and then Syria, with its Alawites needing to preserve the role of the local Christians who are no threat to Alawites and who can help withstand the Sunni Ikhwan; Turkey with its Kemalism tattered but not completely torn; and assorted non-Arab Muslim states, such as the "five stans" of Central Asia, in which so much stamping out of Islam as of all religion was accomplished by the Soviets during the basmachi uprisings, and where a non-Muslim population in Kazakhstan, for example, as well as the intelligently secular Kazakhs, have helped to keep Islam down as a political and social force, or Indonesia, which until recently managed, partly under Dutch rule, and then under the secular Sukarno, to constrain Islam because there was another, non-Arab identity and history to appeal to, whereas Arab Muslims have an ethnic identity that overlaps almost completely with, reinforces and is reinforced by, Islam.
And so on.
But start with those books. Then go on from there.
Do you think anyone in the Pentagon or the State Department has managed to produce a list such as that above, with a sliding scale that measures the suffusion of a particular Muslim society or state with Islam? It would take a minute. But they don't do it. They don't even think in those terms. And if you think they could produce such a list, and what's more, offer a coherent explanation, with reference to local histories, as to why one country is this way and another that way, you are far too hopeful. Whatever your worst fears about the level of understanding in our government may be, they do not come close to the awful truth.
"The Awful Truth." A wonderful movie in which Irene Dunne sings a funny song to a bunch of stuffed-shirt swells before Cary Grant again carries her off in his automobile. Funny for the movie.
Not so funny when it applies to that State Department, that Pentagon, that Congress, that Washington press corps.
Look at where this story is: The LA Times, MSM.
I'm detecting the slow but sure percolation through a hopefully increasingly worn and porous PC filter of that coffee we've been wanting people for so many years now to wake up and smell.
Monkey man probably denies it because he's miffed that someone else beat him to it. His warped logic is that if the Holocaust is refuted and he wipes out Israel then he can go down in history as the top Jew killer. The honors heaped upon him by Islamania would never end-even after his death he'd be placed in the Islamaniac Hall of Fame with such titans as Satan Khomeini and Arafatso.
Only Mr. Perfect would stand above such a hero of the people.
Robert:
I believe your analysis is correct as far as it goes, but there is something further.
Amadamadingdong has made a bold and clever move. By Denying the holocaust he is forcing the western world to PROVE it happened, and forcing Germany to publicly assume its own responsibility once again.
After rubbing Germany's face in the mess, he can rationally point out that German responsibility should translate into German action, namely, the establishment of a jewish state in Germany.
The reasoning is: Israel was created due to the holocaust caused by Germany, so, if the western world wants to SAVE Israel, then the western world should move it to Europe, onto German territory, where it belongs.
This argument cleverly carries some moral weight, but it will enrage Germans, and will probably result in a renewal or revival of anti-semitism in Germany.
I find it inconceivable that there is anyone on this planet above the age of, say ten, that hasn't heard of the holocaust.
First, muslims say that jews and christians are People of the book, then they say jews and christians are pigs and apes. Make up your mind already.
The holocaust did occur. Nazis hated the jews because they wanted to find an escapegoat for all their problems just like the arabs and other muslims are doing today.
Those who bless Israel are blessed and those who curse Israel are already cursed.
I think Ahmadinejad is just thinking about how history will view him.
Clearly, he intends to be the agent of Israel's demise. He intends to annihilate the Jewish people.
Now, his worst nightmare is that, decades or centuries hence, historians will give most of the "credit" for this genocide to Hitler, and footnote Ahmadinejad as merely the guy who finished the job. Thus, he must busy himself in dismantling or at least obfuscating Hitler's "legacy."