THE HOLOCAUST IN PERSPECTIVE

by Dr. Chandra Muzaffar

On 20 January 2006 Iranian Television recorded an interview with me here in Kuala Lumpur in which I was asked to give my opinion of the holocaust.  Since the issue has received considerable media coverage in recent months in the wake of certain comments by the Iranian President, Mahmud Ahmadinejad, I thought it would be useful to present my answers in that TV interview to a wider audience especially since International Holocaust Remembrance Day was observed a few days ago on 27 January 2006.

It is wrong - and utterly inhuman—- to deny the holocaust.  It is an irrefutable truth that the holocaust happened.  Millions of people—- perhaps six million, perhaps less—-died in gas chambers and in other barbaric ways at the hands of Hitler during the second world war.  Most of those who were sent to the gas chambers were European Jews but there were also gypsies, Catholics, Protestants, homosexuals and the disabled who were murdered in a most callous and cruel manner.

This mass murder is well documented.  It is not just Jews who have studied the holocaust but also a number of non-Jewish scholars.  While there may be some disagreements about the details, they arrive at very similar conclusions about how the holocaust unfolded and who were targeted.

As a Muslim—- and this would be true of the followers of other religions too—- I regard the holocaust as a monstrous injustice for two reasons. One, it was wholesale massacre of innocent human beings.  The entire episode was an unconscionable act which would be repugnant to any person who believes in the sacredness of human life.  Two, since the annihilation of Jews and others was motivated by racist ideology—- the superiority of the so-called ‘Aryan race’ and the inferiority of other ethnic communities—- Muslims should view the holocaust as a horrendous expression of chauvinism and bigotry.  Needless to say, racism in whatever form is anathema to Islam since the religion rejects totally both the glorification, and the degradation, of any individual or community based upon race or colour.

Having said that, let me admit that there are certain aspects of what has now emerged as ‘the holocaust syndrome’ which I find disturbing.  There are many within the Jewish intelligentsia who consciously project the holocaust as the only great catastrophe that has befallen humankind. They ignore the fact that the elimination of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australasia was also a holocaust.  Perhaps more than 30 million were wiped out by the colonizers and through the spread of contagious diseases.  The colonization of Asia and Africa was another holocaust.  Some historians opine that about 40 million were killed in the two continents by the marauders from the West.  Wasn’t Hiroshima and Nagasaki a holocaust?  And for the Vietnamese, wasn’t the brutality of French colonialism followed by the ugly assault of American imperialism - millions died in those decades—- a holocaust of sorts?  We can go on and on.

What saddens me even more is how a huge segment of the Jewish community—- in spite of the holocaust—- justifies and legitimizes the suppression and oppression of the Palestinian people by successive Israeli governments.  It is hard to believe that a people who have suffered so much in history, a people who have been traumatized for eternity by the holocaust, can inflict so much pain upon another people who had not harmed them in any way.  In a sense, this makes a mockery of the memory of the holocaust.  Instead of sensitizing the Jews as a people to the plight of the Palestinians, the holocaust appears to have transformed the Jewish elite in particular into ruthless wielders of power.

Have we learnt anything from the holocaust?

Dr. Chandra Muzaffar,

President,

International Movement for a Just World (JUST).  Originally published on the JUST website at http://www.just-international.org/article.cfm?newsid=20001206 and reprinted in TAM with permission of the author.