What the AP Doesn’t Say about the Palestinians and the Holocaust

By Published On: January 27, 2010

AP Barakeh Auschwitz.jpg

In her article about the controversy among Jews and Arabs surrounding an Israeli Arab MK’s trip to Auschwitz today, AP’s Diaa Hadid reports:

The conflict over the Holocaust dates back to the founding of Israel in 1948.

At this point, readers knowledgeable about Mideast history and the Holocaust may have expected mention of the Palestinian Arabs’ close collaboration with the Nazis. Grand Mufti Haj-Amin El-Husseini, with his warm relationship with Nazi leaders, was instrumental in recruiting several SS divisions worth of Bosnian Muslims. It’s not for nothing that he’s been called Hitler’s “Muslim Pope.”

But Hadad does not mention the Palestinian Arabs’ role in the Holocaust here or anywhere else in the article. Instead she goes on to state:

But in the war surrounding Israel’s creation, about 700,000 Palestinians were fled or were driven from their homes, leading to a widespread feeling that they were forced to pay the price of the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews in Europe.

And Mahommed Barakeh, the Israeli Arab MK, is quoted:

“The Jews, who are the victims of the Nazis, are now practicing oppression against the Palestinians. . . I want to tell them: You must learn the real lesson, you must fight oppression and repression in all places and times.”

Haj-Amin El-Husseini’s role in the genocide of the Jews undercuts the claims by Barakeh and others of Palestinian “suffering at Israel’s hands.” Barakeh’s views are certainly worthy of reporting. But fair reporting requires that historical events directly relevant to the subject at hand — either Palestinian Arab collaboration with the Nazis or the Arab rejection of a Jewish state and the subsequent war launched by neighboring Arab states as well as the Palestinians themselves on nascent Israel, leading to the refugee problem — are also worthy of reporting, even if they contradict claims of Israeli responsibility for Palestinian suffering.

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