Israel Matzav

The imams go to Auschwitz

I actually read about this story in a Tweet from the US State Department, but obviously the article behind that was far less detailed than the article to which I am about to refer you.

A group of imams visited several concentration camps in Germany and Poland last week. While the State Department is attempting to take credit, and in fact their special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism was along on the trip, the trip was the brainchild of an Orthodox Jew named Marshall Breger, who served as a senior official in the Reagan and Bush I administrations, and wore his yarmulke the entire time.

Some of the imams were apparently people who had some not nice things to say about Jews in the past, and it is hoped that this will result in them changing their tune a bit.

The picture at the top is the imams praying outside the gates of the Dachau concentration camp, and the picture at the bottom is a Holocaust survivor showing them the number tatooed on his arm.

I will give you a short excerpt and then you should read the whole thing.

Among other developments, Mohamed Magid, imam and executive director of the All Dulles Area Muslim Society, a mega-mosque in the Washington area that serves more than 5,000 families, is preparing an article on Holocaust denial for Islamic Horizons, the magazine published by the Islamic Society of North America. “No Muslim in his right mind, female or male, should deny the Holocaust,” said the Muslim leader, a native of Sudan. “When you walk the walk of the people who have been taken to be gassed, to be killed, how can a person deny physical evidence, something that’s beyond doubt?”

Breger related that he had appealed to numerous Jewish organizations for financial assistance without luck, as he sought to make the trip a reality. But the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, a think tank affiliated with Germany’s Christian Democratic Union, agreed almost immediately upon being approached.

The delegates were put up in five-star hotels, and sampled German and Polish delicacies at a number of gourmet restaurants. But the trip was physically and emotionally grueling. The experience of grilled fresh flounder followed by a visit to the crematoria only added to the frequent sense of jarring dislocation.

On Monday, August 9, the delegates met in Munich and traveled to nearby Dachau. There they met with Max Mannheimer, a survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau, before being guided through the camp. The visit to Auschwitz, and to Birkenau two days later, included a meeting with Wilhelm Brasse, a non-Jewish survivor of Auschwitz who took photographs inside the camp for the Nazis, including some for Josef Mengele.

The delegates’ level of knowledge about the Holocaust prior to the trip seemed to be fairly low. Some had read up on it online, while others had seen films that depicted horrors of the Nazi period. None, however, was an expert in the subject. Some were visibly shaken by what they saw. The delegates seemed especially affected by seeing the number tattooed on Mannheimer’s arm by the Nazis. They asked things like, “Did you see any of your family members killed?” and, “When did you find out about the crematoria?” As they toured the sites, they posed questions that seemed tinged not with skepticism, but rather with outrage and a desire to understand.

“These imams all have significant constituents in American Muslim communities as recognized legal scholars, people with mega-mosques, people with radio shows, people on the web, people who reach out to youth,” Breger noted. He said that the Jewish community, in contrast, often looks to engage with Muslims who meet specified criteria but do not have large constituencies.

Indeed, it was not hard to imagine that some of the Muslim delegates might be viewed as imperfect candidates for dialogue by Jews wary of discussions with those they see as Islamists or as prone to extremist views.

...

The delegation’s youngest member was Yasir Qadhi, 35, dean of academics at Al Maghrib Institute, in New Haven, Conn. He also reaches Muslims across the globe via lectures on the Internet. Qadhi was arguably the delegation’s most controversial member, owing to comments he made nearly a decade ago that disputed Hitler’s plan to exterminate the Jews.

Qadhi has since recanted, both vocally and in print, explaining that the spurious claims stemmed from ignorance. “The fact that I was in a certain environment and a certain culture [where] I was taught this doesn’t exonerate me,” Qadhi told me, adding that he had exposure to “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” while studying in Medina, the Muslim holy city in Saudi Arabia. “That’s why I was very happy to come on this trip, because I wanted to see for myself how wrong I was.

“Anybody who is a Holocaust denier should deserve a free ticket to see Auschwitz and Birkenau, because seeing is just not the same as reading about it. And we met people who have seen and witnessed it,” he continued. Qadhi said that he couldn’t peer into the displays of children’s toys and shoes without thinking about his own four children.

Read it all.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:34 PM