Mohammed Dajani and his Reflections of the Holocaust

Video Of The Week - Medical Volunteers to Care for Holocaust Survivors - https://tinyurl.com/2mh8pbah

By Craig Brandhorst, 10-2-2021. For the full article go to https://tinyurl.com/2hu4fj6

In 2014, Mohammed Dajani, longtime professor at Jerusalem’s al-Quds University, took 27 Palestinian college students to Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp near Krakow, Poland. He wanted them to confront the Holocaust, which he believes is downplayed in Palestinian schools, and to consider the complicated history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from multiple perspectives. The backlash, however, would cost him his job and endanger his life. It would also embolden his commitment to reconciliation.

Mohammed Dajani is a man without a country. Born in Jerusalem in 1946 but driven to Egypt in the Nakba, or Palestinian exodus, during the Palestinian-Israeli War of 1948. Educated in Quaker schools in Jordanian-controlled east Jerusalem and at the American University of Beirut. Banished from Lebanon for radical activity but welcomed by the United States. Graduate of not one but two Ph.D. programs, the first at the University of South Carolina. 

Dajani is also a complicated man. Secular Muslim well-versed in the Quran. Founder of the political science program at Jordan’s Applied Science Private University and of the Institute for American Studies at al-Quds University. Adjunct fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Co-director of the Wasatia Graduate School for Peace and Conflict Resolution at the University of Flensburg in Germany. Scholar. Philosopher. Activist. 

At heart, though, Dajani is a teacher. That’s evident from the start of our conversation, which occurs over two days in September via video chat — him at his Jerusalem apartment, me at home in Columbia, quarantining during the pandemic. I’m intrigued by the Auschwitz trip, which prompted a backlash in the Palestinian press and threats to his safety, but three minutes into the call he is delivering an erudite minilecture on the need for cultural education in a civil society.

“If we look at history, when Plato was disappointed with Greek democracy, he did not reject it but started the Academy,” he says. “When John Dewey felt that democracy in America was faltering, he wrote Democracy and Education. I believe that is what we need here for reconciliation between Israel and Palestine.” 

Dajani is emphatic but polite, soft-spoken, professorial. He tents his fingers, smiles ever-so-slightly at the webcam. He’s not guarded but chooses his words carefully. “Part of our conflict is ignorance,” he explains. “Ignorance of ‘the other,’ lack of empathy for ‘the other,’ lack of knowledge of ‘the other’ — their culture, their history, their literature. I feel that education can play a significant role here.”

But first, he says, Palestinian and Israeli schools need reform. He describes the current education model as “conflict education disguised as national education” and suggests, instead, a curriculum based on conflict resolution, negotiation, tolerance, dialogue — the basic tenets of Wasatia, an initiative he and his brother, Munther Dajani, started in 2007 to promote reconciliation. The word comes from the Quran, he explains, and means “middle path.”

“ ‘Wasatia’ is moderation,” he says. “We would like to raise children within a moderate culture, within a democratic culture, for them to understand the elements of conflict, to understand ‘who is the other,’ ‘why is the other,’ and to appreciate the legitimacy of ‘the other.’ We want to change the mentality from ‘us or them,’ to ‘us and them.’ This is crucial to the existence and welfare of both peoples.”

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75th Anniversary Of The Liberation Of Auschwitz.

Video Of The Week - Powerful Speech- Auschwitz Liberation After 75 Years- https://tinyurl.com/uf42lv7

For full Article and videos go to - https://tinyurl.com/uvwfrat

 by Tom Gross 23-01-2020

There were some important speeches at today’s World Holocaust Forum at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, to mark the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

I attach videos of some of them below. They are short so you may want to make time to watch them.

If you only have time to watch one, I suggest you watch the last one, delivered in a heartfelt way without notes by former Israeli Chief Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau.

Lau was liberated aged 7, in April 1945, by the 89th Infantry Division of the United States army, having already lost both his parents in the Holocaust.

He was the only Holocaust survivor speaking today to the dozens of assembled presidents, prime ministers, kings and princes and in effect he is speaking for the 6 million. (In fact, research and newly opened archives since the fall of communism in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union mean that the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust is much closer to 7 million.)

Previous Nazi camps had already been liberated, starting with Majdanek, freed by the Red Army on July 24, 1944.

But Russian, Polish, French and British officials didn’t want any public knowledge of the camps to be made, or photos released, so as (supposedly) not to alarm people, and strict censorship was imposed.

It was only after US forces arrived in Buchenwald on April 6, 1945 (where Yisrael Lau was imprisoned) and the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, Dwight Eisenhower, visited the camp on April 12, that he said these “conditions of indescribable horror” must be made public, and he ordered all censorship of Nazi atrocities lifted.

Later that month, on April 20, 1945, the BBC radio correspondent Richard Dimbleby accompanying British and Canadian forces into Belsen, said in his report: “This day when we reached Belsen was the most horrible day of my life”:

“Here over an acre of ground lay dead and dying people. You could not see which was which... The living lay with their heads against the corpses and around them moved the awful, ghostly procession of emaciated, aimless people, with nothing to do and with no hope of life, unable to move out of your way, unable to look at the terrible sights around them ... Babies had been born here, tiny wizened things that could not live ... A mother, driven mad, screamed at a British sentry to give her milk for her child, and thrust the tiny mite into his arms, then ran off, crying terribly. He opened the bundle and found the baby had been dead for days. This day at Belsen was the most horrible of my life.”

The last of the dozens of Nazi camps to be liberated was Theresienstadt (Terezin) north of Prague, when Soviet forces arrived on May 8, 1945, over a week after Hitler was dead and Berlin occupied. It could have been liberated earlier and lives of prisoners would have been saved, but American forces (on the order of President Roosevelt in agreement with Stalin) deliberately stopped in Plzen in the west of Czechoslovakia to allow the Red Army time to move westwards and take over the country. 

(Several members of my own family were imprisoned in Terezin before being killed there or taken on in packed cattle trains to be murdered in other camps.)

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IS HOLOCAUST EDUCATION FAILING?

Video Of The Week -Holocaust Education: Nuremberg Laws - https://tinyurl.com/yacaaljf

 JPOST - BY MICHAEL FREUND – 29-01-2019

According to a poll of 2,000 people conducted by the UK Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, one in 20 British adults do not believe the Holocaust occurred.

Over the past 74 years, extraordinary efforts have been made worldwide to commemorate the Holocaust and preserve the memory of the six million holy Jewish souls who were murdered by the Germans and their accomplices.

Museums and memorials have been erected, annual state and communal ceremonies have been held, and countless books, articles and films have been released to ensure that the world never forgets what was done to the Jewish people in the heart of modern-day, 20th-century Europe.

But if the results of two recent surveys are any indication, something is seriously remiss and urgent efforts need to be made to expand Holocaust education.

According to a poll of 2,000 people conducted by the UK Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, one in 20 British adults do not believe the Holocaust occurred and nearly half of all those questioned said they did not know how many Jews had been murdered. Some 20% of respondents said they thought that fewer than two million Jews had been killed while another 8% asserted that the scale of the Holocaust has been exaggerated.

In its report about the findings, The Guardian noted, “The scale of ignorance about the Holocaust has shocked experts.” Olivia Marks-Woldman of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust told the paper, “I must stress that I don’t think [the poll respondents] are active Holocaust deniers – people who deliberately propagate and disseminate vile distortions – but their ignorance means they are susceptible to myths and distortions.”

Indeed, how is it possible that in Britain, the land of Winston Churchill, who once described the murder of Jews at Auschwitz as “the most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world,” so many people can be so ignorant about what the Nazis did to the Jews?

Moreover, the Holocaust is a subject that is taught in British schools. A national commemoration was held in London this past Sunday on International Holocaust Remembrance Day with senior government officials taking part and numerous events were organized throughout the country as in years past.

Yet somehow, there are still sizable portions of British society that are oblivious to the unparalleled slaughter of Jews that took place.  

No less worrisome is a survey conducted last month in France by the Ifop research group for the American Jewish Committee and two other organizations, which revealed that 10% of respondents had never heard of the Holocaust and 21% did not know when it had happened. 

This, too, is simply difficult to fathom in light of France’s own sordid involvement in the Holocaust, when the collaborationist Vichy regime passed a series of antisemitic laws known as the Statute des Juifs in October 1940 and subsequently began to deport thousands of Jews. In the Vel d’Hiv roundup on July 16-17, 1942, French police arrested 13,000 Jews in just two days. Altogether, more than 75,000 French Jews were sent to death camps, where over 96% of them were murdered, including my grandmother’s first cousin and his wife.

Three French presidents, Jacques Chirac, Francois Hollande and the incumbent Emanuel Macron, have all acknowledged to one degree or another France’s responsibility for the persecution and deportation of Jews.

Nonetheless, as in Britain, a not insignificant number of citizens appear to be clueless in regard to the worst act of genocide committed by mankind.

These studies are in line with other, similar surveys in recent years that show a mounting and worrisome trend toward Holocaust ignorance, particularly among the younger generation.

In April 2018, a poll conducted by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany found that 22% of American millennials said they either have not heard of the Holocaust or are not sure if they did, while an astonishing two-thirds did not know what Auschwitz was.
These figures were much higher than those among older Americans, indicating the existence of a generation gap in knowledge about the Holocaust.

It is difficult to ponder these statistics, as they appear to show that Holocaust education is failing to achieve its objectives as a growing number of people are simply uninformed. And as we all know, it is ignorance of the Holocaust which opens the door to its denial.

But not all is bleak and there is a silver lining to be found in the data. In the study conducted in the UK, 83% said that it was important to know about the Holocaust and more than three-quarters of those surveyed said that more must be done to educate people.

Similarly, the April 2018 survey among Americans revealed that 93% believed that all students should learn about the Holocaust in school.
This demonstrates that people are open to learning more and grasp that the Holocaust was a major historical event worthy of study. They are not hostile to the idea of Holocaust education nor do they minimize its value but rather seek to be more knowledgeable.

Our task now is to seize upon this openness and redouble our efforts to make sure that the horrors of the past are not lost with the passage of time.

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A Visit to the Old and New Hells of Europe

by Alan M. Dershowitz
May 17, 2016

For the full article go to:  http://tinyurl.com/jpa5q77

I just returned from a week-long journey through Hell! It began with a visit to the site of the Auschwitz and Birkenau death camps in Poland (built by Nazi Germany during its occupation of the country), as a participant of the March of the Living, following a conference commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Nuremberg Laws and the 70th anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials. My week was consumed with recurring evidence of the worst crime ever perpetrated by human beings on other human beings – the Holocaust.

I traveled from the death camps to several small Polish towns from which my grandparents emigrated well before the Holocaust, leaving behind relatives and friends. During the course of my travels, I discovered the fate of two of my relatives. Hanna Deresiewicz (an original spelling of my family name) was a 16-year-old girl living in the small town of Pilzno when the Nazis arrived; she was separated from her siblings and parents. "The soldiers took several of the most beautiful Jewish girls for sex, and then killed them. [Among those] taken [was] Hanna Deresiewicz, 16."

I also learned that another Deresiewics, named Benjamin, survived, though his wife and five children, along with his parents and siblings were all murdered. He may have been Hanna's father, although I can't document that. In the book Schindler's Ark, on which the movie Schindler's List was base, the following account is given: "[The Commandant of Auschwitz] suspended his 15 year old orderly, Poldek Dereshowitz, from the ringbolts in his office ..." Although the book is fictionalized account, it is based on the recollections of an eyewitness. I cannot, therefore, be sure of the veracity of that episode. But seeing the name Dereshowitz associated with Auschwitz had an impact on me.

This is not the first time I have visited Nazi death camps. I was fully familiar with the statistical evidence of how six million Jews were systematically murdered. I was also familiar with how the Nazi death machine searched out Jews in the furthest corners of Nazi occupied Europe, even as far as the island of Rhodes in the Aegean Sea, and transported them to Auschwitz to gas them. 

I also knew that this was the only time in human history when people were brought from far distances to camps designed for one purpose only – to kill every possible Jew they could, find no matter where they lived. And I knew that because this was part of a planned genocide of the Jewish People, it was most important to kill every child, woman and man capable of producing future Jews.

But this visit, during which I learned the fate of members of my own family, brought the horrors home to me in a manner more personal than any statistic could provide. I was traveling with my wife and daughter, and I repeatedly imagined what it must have felt like for the parents and spouses of the murdered Jews to realize that everything precious to them was being annihilated, and that there would be no one left to morn them or to carry their seed to future generations.

From the old Hell, Poland, I traveled to a new Hell, called Hungary. Budapest is a beautiful city, but it too, provided a hellish end to its Jewish residents in the final months of the Second World War, when Hungarian Nazis turned the Blue Danube into a red mass grave. They shot their Jewish neighbors and dumped their bodies into the Danube River, even as the Nazis were retreating. And now in modern-day Budapest, I was told of the resurgence of Nazism among many ordinary Hungarians. An increasingly popular fascist party, Jobbik, boasts of its anti-Semitism and of its desire to rid Hungary of its few remaining Jews. The Jobbik party in Hungary also hates Israel, and everything else that is a manifestation of Jewishness.

I ended my trip meeting with a Jewish man of Greek background who told me that his grandfather was murdered by the Nazis and that he was now being targeted by Greek fascists for his outspoken defense of Israel and the Jewish people. Athens, too, has become a hotbed of Jew-hatred, with is popular fascist Golden Dawn party.

There was not a moment during my visit to Europe that I was not reminded of that continent's sordid history with regard to the Jewish people. Now, many Europeans — the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those who were complicit in the murder of six million Jews — have turned against the nation state of the Jewish People with a vengeance. This time the bigotry emanates mostly from the hard left, but has the support of many on the new fascist hard right. The British Labour Party is as rife with hatred of the Jewish People and Jewish Nation as is the Hungarian fascist Jobbik party.

 Once again, European Jews are caught between the extremes of the Black and the Red. Extremists on both sides seek the demise of Israel, arguing that there is no place in this world for one state that is overtly Jewish in its character, despite the universal acceptance of multiple Muslim and Christian nations. Other Europeans seek to boycott Israel's products, its professors, and its performers. While still others simply apply a double standard to its actions — a standard they apply to no other nation, including their own.

My visit to Europe made one thing unmistakably clear: if there is any group in the world that needs a safe homeland — a sanctuary from bigotry and hatred — it is the Jewish people. When Hitler was willing to expel them from Europe, before deciding to exterminate them, no country — not even the United States or Canada — would give them asylum. Britain closed the doors of what is now Israel to them. They had no place to go. So they were murdered by the Nazis and their willing executioners throughout Europe. There is no group whose history entitles it to a safe and secure homeland more than the Jewish people.

For reasons that are difficult to explain, the hatred of the Jewish people and its nation defies rationality, but it is as real as the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau and the emerging fascist parties of Greece and Hungary. Jews today continue to be scapegoated in many parts of the world, and their nation state is demonized at the United Nations, on university campuses, in the media and in legislative assemblies. Following the Holocaust, there seemed to be an understanding that Jews would no longer be victimized. Now, less than a century after the Nazis came to power, that moratorium on Jew-hatred seems to have expired, as the memory of the Holocaust grows dim in most parts of the world.

My week-long visit to Hell reaffirmed my commitment to defend Israel's right to exist, to speak out for Israel when it is unfairly attacked, and to defeat its enemies in the marketplace of ideas. We owe nothing less to the victims of the worst crime in the history of humanity — a crime that could not have occurred without the complicity of most of the world. And a crime that will not recur if there is a strong and secure Israel.

Video of the week - Lebanese Muslim converts to Judaism -  http://tinyurl.com/jt9aj49

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