Why Holocaust education has failed
It needs to teach the link between Nazism and genocidal Islamism
The wartime Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, meeting Hitler in November 1941
This year, on Holocaust Memorial Day, educators are wringing their hands in despair. Eighty years of Holocaust education have failed, they lament, as antisemitism skyrockets. The numbers of UK schools observing HMD has plummeted, while a minority insist on also commemorating the Gaza ‘genocide’.
How has it come to this?
The problem with Holocaust education is that it is stubbornly Eurocentric. It is necessary to understand the connection, often erased for reasons of political correctness, between the Nazis, their Arab sympathizers and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the 1930s, Arabs were active collaborators with the Nazis. The Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al Husseini, played a leading role in inciting the genocide of Jews. Despite strenuous efforts to downplay it, his legacy of Nazi-inspired antisemitism inspires the Palestinian cause today.
The Mufti helped stage a pro-Nazi coup in Iraq in 1941 and incited the anti-Jewish massacre known as the Farhud, making no secret of his wish to exterminate the Jews in his sphere of influence. As Hitler’s guest in Berlin, the Mufti obtained Hitler’s blessing to manage the destruction of MENA Jews, raised SS units of Muslim troops and broadcast poisonous anti-Jewish propaganda. For reasons of realpolitik, he was never tried at Nuremberg for war crimes, though he could have been.
The Mufti was, according to the scholar Matthias Kuentzel, the lynchpin of the Nazis’ great war against the Jews and the Arabs’ small war against Israel. Nazis fought alongside Arabs in the 1948 war and Nazis became military advisers to Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt. Nasser used Israel as an external threat in order to unite the Arabs into a single political entity.
The moral architecture of Palestinianism was erected to dehumanise and delegitimise Zionists. This was the work of the Soviet Union’s Zionologists in the 1950s. Inversion was the name of the game: Israelis were the new Nazis intent on genocide. (In reality, most Arab states and the Palestinian leadership never abandoned their objective of wiping out Israel, physically or demographically. ) Ethnic cleansing was what the Israelis had done to the Palestinian refugees. (In reality, it is what Arab governments had done to their Jewish citizens, driving out 99 percent.) Apartheid was supposedly practised by the Jewish state. (In reality, it is how Islamic law treats its women, its subjugated Jews and minorities).
Also in the 1950s, through the writings of the ideologue Sayyid Qutb, Islamized antisemitism, influenced by European ideas of Jewish conspiracy and control, became entrenched in the Muslim Brotherhood’s philosophy. Palestine is the central focus of their campaign to rebuild the caliphate. Hamas is none other than the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Its ideology has been to spearhead the destruction of Israel through terrorism. Its aim has always been genocidal – a never-ending series of October 7 massacres.
The only books translated from Arabic by the Islamic Republic of Iran were by Sayyid Qutb. The Ayatollahs do not attempt to conceal their ultimate aim: to perpetrate a second Holocaust while denying the first.
Because of a lack of western understanding of antisemitism in the Muslim world, Arabs are misleadingly portrayed as “innocent bystanders” to the Holocaust who “paid the price” for a European problem through the creation of Israel. In fact, many were sympathisers and collaborators with Nazism.
Israel was the solution, not the cause of antisemitism in the Middle East and North Africa. But Israel is barely mentioned by Holocaust educators.
Holocaust education needs to teach about the direct link between Nazism and the genocidal ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, and its offshoots like Islamic State and Hamas.
Lessons cannot be learned if the Holocaust is viewed in a vacuum, divorced from its impact on politics today.
Holocaust education has succeeded! It has successfully taught an attentive world that Jews are easy targets, fun to torment and kill, and that only by a miracle will a few of the criminals doing it face any sanctions.
And further, that your cause, whatever it is, can be wrapped in virtue by calling the opposing side’s actions a genocide.
Thank you for this information and the knowledge of it that is so lacking in the majority of people. So disappointing and frustrating that people do not know or sadly might not want to know history. Their knowledge is seen through such a tiny lens. Thank you again and keep writing!