MEMRI, February 1, 2000
A Syrian government newspaper accused Israel on Monday of creating “the
myth of the Holocaust,” enraging Israeli leaders who warned that the tirade
could hinder efforts at forging peace between the two arch-foes.
The official newspaper Tishrin accused the Jewish state of using the “myth” of
the murder of millions of Jews by the Nazis during the Second World War to
“blackmail and terrorize politicians and intellectuals around the world.”
Written by the Tishrin editor-in-chief, Mohammed Kheir al-Wadi, it also
expressed support for those “who speak the truth,” such as British historian
David Irving, who is suing author Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books for
publishing a book which labels him a Holocaust denier.
Israeli Minister for Diaspora Affairs Michael Melchior, a rabbi who chairs
a forum for coordinating the struggle against anti-Semitism, expressed his
revulsion at the remarks.
“It is not possible to show restraint over these unbridled statements
which deny the Holocaust and compare Israel to the Nazis,” he said in a
statement.
“The Syrians know no bounds in anti-Israel incitement, both morally and
diplomatically; this makes continued dialogue with them more difficult.”
Tishrin accused Israel and the Zionist movement of deliberately fostering the
“myth” of the Holocaust so as to “continue to extract money from European
countries on the pretext of compensating the victims.”
“Individuals and the media in Europe are beginning to ask questions in
order to know the truth which has been altered by the Zionists, which is why
the latter staged an international congress in Stockholm recently to prop up
their lies and give them sense.”
“Israel, which presents itself as the inheritor of the Holocaust victims, has
committed, and is still committing, crimes against the Arabs which are more
horrendous and horrific than those carried out by the Nazis.” said the front-page
editorial in the Tishrin daily.
The editorial was published Monday morning, at least 12 hours before
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak announced that peace talks with Syria
wouldn’t resume until it reined in the Hezbollah guerrillas.
The editorial in Tishrin, which reflects government thinking, laid the blame for
the impasse in the various tracks of the Middle East process on the shoulders of
the Jewish state, saying that
“Israel has practiced the policy of Holocaust in the (Israeli-) occupied
Golan, Palestine and south Lebanon and is burning any chance for a
comprehensive and just peace.”
“Zionism has fabricated the myth of the Holocaust to blackmail the world.
The world has strongly denounced the Nazi crimes; it is now obliged to
confront this Nazi plague, which has made its home in Israel.”
The article, titled “The Plague of the Third Millenium” says:
“The Nazi war-machine annihilated more than 50 million lives, including
Russians, Poles, French, Italians, and people of other nationalities.
However, Zionism erased the blood of all those victims from the human
memory and focused on the suffering of the Jews during the war.
This, despite the fact that there is sound historical proof that Zionist
leaders collaborated with the Nazis in order to escalate the Jewish Problem.
Furthermore, some of them did not hesitate to commit murders and direct
terror attacks in order to encourage Jewish immigration to
Palestine. This, of course, in full cooperation with the German Nazi
leaders…”
“Zionism hides the dark chapters of its black history. It invents stories
regarding the Nazi Holocaust in which the Jews suffered and inflates them to
astronomic proportions…”
“The problem is not in the Zionist ambition to forge history, but rather in
the Zionist organizations’ ambitions to revive their distorted version of
history and use it to deceive international public opinion, win its empathy,
and blackmail it…”
“Israel and the Zionist organizations strive for two goals: first, to be
granted more funds from Germany and European states and institutions;
second, they want to use the legend of the Holocaust as a sword hanging over
the necks of all those who oppose Zionism who are accused of
anti-Semitism…”
“The countries of the world, that fiercely condemned the crimes of Nazism,
adamantly oppose the new Nazi Plague that breeds in Israel and
whose poisons and dangers are being spread wherever it reaches…”
“This is a kind of ideological and physical terrorism that was known even in
the darkest centuries in Europe. While history turned the page on the Nazi
acts, the Zionist terrorist acts reached their peak. They committed
massacres against innocent people and led a policy of aggression and
expansion. This is the plague of the twentieth century that was passed to
the third millennium and it spread destruction in every place it reached…”
“The Zionist effort does not stop at paralyzing human memory, it also tries
to shatter logic and distort reality. Israel, that presents itself as the
heir of Holocaust victims, has committed and still commits much more
terrible crimes than those committed by the Nazis. The Nazis did not expel
a whole nation nor buried people and prisoners alive, as the Zionists did.”