Sunday, August 21, 2022
Elder of Ziyon
As we've been showing, Mahmoud Abbas' outrageous antisemitism in Germany is prompting lots of Palestinians and Arab pundits to let fly their own Holocaust denial and antisemitism.
This example, from Ali Mohsen Hamid at Rai al-Youm, tries to prove that according to Chaim Weizmann, there were only six million Jews in all of Europe before the Holocaust, so therefore six million Jews cannot have died and it is all a Zionist lie.
Hamid quotes Weizmann testifying at the Peel Commission hearings, saying, "six million people pent up in places where they are not wanted, and for whom the world is divided into places where they cannot live, and places into which they may not enter."
He then quotes Weizmann at the UNSCOP hearings on Palestine in Lake Success, NY in 1947 where he says that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust - and uses this "contradiction" to claim that Weizmann made up the six million number out of thin air.
The Peel Commission quote is accurate - and incomplete. Weizmann was only speaking about Jews in specific parts of Europe where their rights were severely restricted, and he specifically excluded the Jews in Russia and Western Europe. In his address, he said:
Poland has slightly over three millions: Germany had in 1932 or 1933 something like 600,000, but that number has since diminished. If one goes further afield, and rakes the Jewries of Rumania, Latvia, Lithuania, Austria. one sees practically the same picture, and it is no exaggeration on my part to say that today almost six million Jews in that part of the world are doomed to be pent up in places where they are not wanted, and for whom the world is divided into places where they cannot live, and places into which they cannot enter.Q. Did I gather from you that you thought the conditions which you mention as applying to Poland, apply equally to these other European countries you have mentioned?A. With the exception of certain small groups. one may say almost equally.Sir Laurie Hammond: Is it the case with Russia?A. I am not speaking of Russia, which is closed. As you were good enough to ask me, I will say a word about Russia. In Russia there are about three million Jews. We have very little contact with them. Russia is a closed country at present. ...
Based on this map, and assuming that Weizmann was also including countries like Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the six million number is reasonably accurate.
Hamid is obviously not interested in the truth. The rest of the article is filled with similar lies, like the laughable claim that BDS only wants to boycott products from the territories. He tries to say that Einstein's Theory of Relativity means that one can compare the Holocaust to Palestinian suffering without being antisemitic.
But anti-Israel propagandists will take a tiny grain of truth and extend it into the realm of fantasy, knowing that their audience will be impressed and wants to believe them as long as it aligns with their prejudice.
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