Islamist Rashid Hassan denies Holocaust

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Rashid Hassan has his doubts about that so-called “Jewish Holocaust.” He’s convinced it has been exaggerated by the wily Zionists, to gain the world’s sympathy despite Israel’s horrendous treatment of the Palestinians. Writes Hugh Fitzgerald

Elder of Ziyon has taken note of a recent article in “the most influential newspaper in the Arab world” that calls into question the real Holocaust – the murder of six million Jews – and instead, claims that the “worst calamity” of the 20th century was the “Palestinian Holocaust.”

His article can be found here: “‘Most Influential Arab Newspaper’ says ‘Palestinian Holocaust’ worse than …The Holocaust,” Elder of Ziyon, January 30, 2022:

Ad Dustour is a pro-government Jordanian newspaper that was declared as the most influential newspaper in the Arab world in Industry Arabic’s latest rankings. It is partially owned by the Jordanian government itself, so it will never say anything that goes against official government policy.

Ad Dustour is not some disreputable checkout-counter tabloid; the Jordanian newspaper, chosen as the “most influential newspaper in the Arab world,” must be taken seriously, even when it spouts nonsense. It can run articles like this, that question the Jewish Holocaust and bewail the real “worst calamity of the 20th century,” the “Palestinian Holocaust,” and be taken seriously by its benighted audience across the Arab world.

That includes Holocaust denial.

Columnist Rashid Hassan not only casts doubt as to whether the Holocaust actually occurred, but he parrots a claim that the “Palestinian Holocaust” was the worst calamity of the past century.

More than the Shoah. More than Cambodia or Rwanda or Darfur.

The Shoah claimed the lives of six million Jews. The Khmer Rouge killed between 1.5 and 2 million people in Cambodia. In Rwanda, between 500,000 and 800,000 Tutsis were killed by Hutus. In Darfur, the Arab Janjaweed killed between 80,000 and 500,00 black Africans. In the Bangladesh war for independence in 1971, the Pakistani army and Islamist collaborators killed three million Bangladeshis. During the Ukrainian Terror-Famine, or Holodomor, of 1932-1933, between seven and ten million people starved to death. During the Stalinist repression of 1937-1938, between 700,000 and 1.2 million Soviet citizens were murdered — a small part of the total of 40 million people are believed to have died because of Stalin’s murderous rule throughout the 1930s. About 80 million Chinese died unnatural deaths when Chairman Mao ran the country, most of them in the famine following the Great Lea Forward. But what are all these, compared to the “worst calamity of the 20th century” – the “Palestinian Holocaust”?

He writes about how Holocaust Remembrance Day is a cynical ploy by Israel to gain sympathy and distract the world from the real genocide.

Rashid Hassan has his doubts about that so-called “Jewish Holocaust.” He’s convinced it has been exaggerated by the wily Zionists, to gain the world’s sympathy despite Israel’s horrendous treatment of the Palestinians. And what’s more, the world’s Jews have managed to distract attention from the great tragedy of the past century, the “Palestinian Holocaust.” You haven’t heard of it? Of course not. It’s not in any of the schoolbooks. Or the history books. The Jews who, let’s not forget, control the world’s media, have made sure of that. It’s the greatest cover-up in world history. Those diabolically clever and malevolent Jews have simply removed the story of the Palestinian Holocaust from the world’s collective consciousness; it’s a gone down the rabbit hole to that underground river, the Lesser Lethe. So it’s up to a few intrepid souls, with Rashid Hassan in the lead, to make sure that the world remembers the “Palestinian Holocaust.”

While the hypocritical world – and most of it – celebrates the so-called “Zionist Holocaust” and makes a date for it[sic] January 27, we find this world ignoring the Palestinian Holocaust, which has been going on for 105 years… since the ominous promise… the Balfour Declaration of 1917 until today..

The Arab population in Palestine in 1917 was about 600,000. Today there are over, according to the Palestinians themselves, some 12 million Palestinians.

So from 1917 until today, the Palestinian population has, despite this terrible “Holocaust” that no one, save Rashid Hassan, has ever heard of, increased 20 times.

Some Holocaust!

Oh, and the UN spends orders of magnitude more time and money on Palestinian issues than on the [Jewish] Holocaust.

The U.N. gives more critical attention to Israel than it does to any other country. At every session of the UN Human Rights Council, a special agenda item – Item #7 – is devoted to the “Human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories,” which is defined by UNHRC Resolution 5/1 as covering “Human rights violations and implications of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and other occupied Arab territories.” The other nine items on the Council’s permanent agenda are all generic, and do not refer to any particular country or situation. There is no special agenda item on Iran, Syria, North Korea, China, Russia, or any other country. Only Israel.

And the U.N. General Assembly similarly spends an inordinate amount of time on Israel. In 2020, the UNGA singled out Israel for condemnation a total of 17 times, while for the entire rest of the world combined – 192 countries – there was a total of six such condemnations.

Now the UN General Assembly has voted to establish a commission that will engage in an open-ended investigation of Israeli “war crimes.” No other country – not Syria, not China, not Russia – will have its “war crimes” investigated by a permanent commission of inquiry.

Rashid Hassan wants us to believe that Israel has managed to win the world’s sympathy by spinning tall tales about the so-called Holocaust of the Jews. The record at the U.N. do not support that claim about Israel having “the world’s sympathy.” Nor do the venomously anti-Israel reports issued by such NGOs as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

When did this “Palestinian Holocaust” begin? In Rashid Hassan’s telling, it all started with the Balfour Declaration, though not a single Arab in Palestine died when the Declaration — in the form of a letter to Lord Rothschild — was issued. It was only when the Palestinian Arabs began to attack the Jewish pioneers, in the 1920s, and the Jews fought back in self-defense, that hundreds of Arabs died. More Arab combatants were killed, mainly by the British Army, during the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939; possibly as many as 5,000 died. During the 1948 war, about 800 Arab civilians were killed.

Holocaust? What Holocaust?

Certainly, this hypocrisy is linked to the major international conspiracy carried out by Britain, America and many Western countries to establish the Zionist entity on the land of Arab Palestine… and to displace its people in the four winds of the earth.

There was no “international conspiracy” to establish the Zionist entity. In fact, the British refused to recognize their duty, under Article 6 of the Mandate for Palestine, to facilitate Jewish immigration and “close settlement by Jews on the land.” From the late 1930s on, the British did everything they could to prevent Jewish immigration to Palestine. In 1939 the British government’s White Paper allowed for a maximum of 15,000 Jews to enter Mandatory Palestine during each of the next five years; after that, any Jewish immigration would be subject to an Arab veto, which meant that such immigration would stop. This White Paper was adopted just when the Jews of Europe were entering a state of maximum peril. Just before and during World War II the British prevented ships carrying Jewish refugees from reaching Mandatory Palestine. This policy prevented perhaps a million desperate European Jews, who might have escaped to Palestine by sea from French and Romanian ports early in the war, from doing so. After the war, the British continued their unspeakably cruel blockade, in order to prevent Jewish survivors of the Nazi camps from reaching Palestine. The most famous episode of wanton cruelty by the British concerned the ship called Exodus. From the Holocaust Encyclopedia:

In July 1947, the President Warfield left Sète, France, for Palestine. It carried over 4,500 Jewish men, women, and children, all displaced persons (DPs) or survivors of the Holocaust. Even before the ship (by then renamed the Exodus 1947) reached Palestine’s territorial waters, British destroyers surrounded it. On July 18 a struggle ensued between British naval forces and passengers on the ship. A Jewish crew member and two passengers were killed. Dozens suffered bullet wounds and other injuries.

Attempting to make an example of the Exodus 1947, the British towed the ship to Haifa and transferred the passengers onto three navy transports which returned to Europe. The ships first landed at Port-de-Bouc, France, where the passengers were ordered to disembark. When the French authorities refused to forcibly remove the refugees, British authorities, fearing adverse public opinion, sought to wait until the passengers disembarked of their own accord. The passengers, including many orphaned children, forced the issue by declaring a hunger strike which lasted 24 days. Mounting pressure from international media coverage pressed British authorities to find a solution.

The ships sat for three weeks in the sweltering summer heat, but the passengers refused to voluntarily disembark and the French authorities were unwilling to force them to leave. The British government then transported the passengers to Hamburg, where they were interned in camps in the British zone of occupation in Germany.

Rashid Hassan, please explain. Does that sound like the British were, as you claim, part of “the major international conspiracy carried out by Britain, America and many Western countries to establish the Zionist entity”?

During Israel’s war for independence, there was no “international conspiracy” to help the Zionists. During the 1948 war the major powers imposed an arms embargo, supposedly on both sides. The Jews had few arms, whereas the six Arab armies that invaded Israel – those of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia – were well-armed. And during the war, despite the embargo, the British continued to supply arms to Egypt, Iraq, and — especially — to the English-officered Arab Legion of Jordan, led by John Bagot Glubb (“Glubb Pasha”). The Israelis did manage to buy arms from cash-strapped Czechoslovakia. The shipments consisted of some 400 tons of mortars and other heavy machinery, aerial bombs, rifles, ammunition, machine guns, flamethrowers, explosives, tanks, and combat vehicles from the Czechs. A separate deal provided Israel with twenty-four Czech-built Avia S-199 fighters, a lesser version of the German Messerschmitt. After his first flight, Lou Lenart, an American fighter pilot and volunteer, said the plane was “the worst piece of crap I have ever flown.” Some arms were bought abroad and smuggled into Palestine/Israel by American volunteers and well-wishers — including Frank Sinatra — of the Jewish state. And that was it; there was no “international conspiracy” by nation-states to supply arms to Israel, or to help the nascent state to survive the Arab onslaught. The Jews of Israel fought, and defeated, those six Arab armies by themselves.

Rashid Hassan again:

Washington is behind the marketing of the Western world with a stick, in order to remember by force the so-called “Zionist Holocaust.” In return, the world must shut its mouth, eyes and ears from the Holocausts that the Palestinian people are exposed to, from the year of the Nakba until today. As the Palestinian historian Salman Abu Sitta says, “No people in the world have been subjected to massacres over a century like the Palestinian people… who gave more than half a million martyrs, and more than a million have entered Israeli prisons and prisons since 1967, and 7 million people were sentenced to displacement in places of refuge in the diaspora, while the other half, more than 7 million at home, suffer the bitterness of Zionist terrorism around the clock.. which desecrated trees, stones, and sanctities, and burned homes on the head of their residents.

Elder of Ziyon’s response:

Somehow, the Palestinian “Holocaust” didn’t make it on Wikipedia’s list of genocides. It must have been an oversight.

Half a million martyrs? By the most generous count, no more than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed in conflicts with Israel, and the majority of them have been militants. And at the same time thousands of Palestinians were killed by Arabs (Lebanese civil wars, Black September, War of the Camps in Lebanon, Sabra/Shatila) and by fellow Palestinians (Second Intifada.)

The article goes on to curse the Arab nations that are normalizing relations with Israel.

And this [Rashid Hassan’s article] is coming from Jordan, which has been at peace with Israel for close to 30 years.

I have looked through works by Arab and Palestinian historians and polemicists – both Khalidis, Walid and Rashid, Hisham Sharabi, Sami Hadawi, Edward Said, and assorted contributors to the Journal of Palestine Studies. But not one of them mentions a “Palestinian Holocaust.” None of them seemed in all of their research to have run across, or heard a word about, Palestinians subject to mass shootings at open pits, gas chambers, mobile gas vans, death camps. And in determining the number of Palestinians killed, both soldiers and noncombatants, from 1948 on, the figures are uniformly in the low tens of thousands.

Rashid Hassan, please produce your evidence. We’re all ears. Tell us where these mass killings took place, and when, and how., and provide for us the number of victims at each site. And how do you explain why no one before you, no Arab or Muslim, save for your single source, the civil engineer turned amateur historian Salman Abu Sitta, has ever mentioned this “Palestinian Holocaust”? How did it manage to escape the Palestinians themselves, who appear not to have noticed “the worst calamity of the 20th century” that apparently befell them?

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