As for (1), ‘Japanese to spread their propaganda and influence’ in the fourth paragraph of this article below is correct, but there were indeed other small cases against this behaviour among some Japanese in those days.
As for (2), I have never heard about the so-called blood libel of Jews drinking gentile blood on Passover at the Christian Churches in Japan. In a sense, I have been living in a fortunate circumstance. But I often imagine if I had been born into the Jewish community as a Jew, I would have felt scared of unknown others whenever travelling around domestically and worldwide. (See: http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/20131021)
As for the Arabs and the Muslims, I think that they are taught and believe that Islam is the final, complete religion. Therefore, they tend to point to others instead of self-criticism. The Jewish people became, sadly, the very target of such absurd blame. (Lily)
Algemeiner(http://www.algemeiner.com)
(1) New Research Sheds Light on Nazi Influence in Arab World, 30 April 2013
Nazi Germany’s effort to recruit supporters in the Arab world is attracting new attention among scholars.
With the 70th anniversary of a Palestinian Arab leader’s sabotage of a plan to rescue Jewish children from Europe coming up next month, Israeli scholar Edy Cohen spoke exclusively to JNS.org about his current research on the role of Nazi and Axis propaganda in the Middle East. Cohen, 41, is on the staff of the Israel State Archives.
During the Holocaust years, Haj Amin el-Husseini, better known as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, lived in Berlin, where he recorded pro-Nazi radio broadcasts that were beamed to the Arab world and recruited Bosnian Muslims to join an all-Muslim unit of the SS. Seventy years ago, on May 13, 1943, Husseini caught wind of a plan to permit 4,000 Jewish children, accompanied by 500 adults, to travel to Palestine in exchange for the release of 20,000 German prisoners of war. Both the Germans and the British had agreed to the exchange, but the Germans backed down when the Mufti objected.
The Mufti was the most prominent Arab figure to support the Nazis, but he was not alone. “My research tracks the effort by the Germans, Italians, and Japanese to spread their propaganda and influence in Palestine and various Arab countries,” said Dr. Cohen, who was born and raised in Beirut and immigrated to Israel in 1995. “They worked hard at it and, to a significant extent, they succeeded.” Cohen has been combing through Arabic-language Nazi and Axis leaflets and radio broadcasts that were collected and analyzed by Haganah intelligence in the 1930s and 1940s.
Some of the leaflets found by Cohen feature stark headlines such as “Kill the Jews and the British!” Some were printed on the back of facsimile British pounds or American dollars, so that when they were dropped by German planes over Arab regions of Palestine, they looked like money and immediately attracted attention.
According to Cohen, some of the Arabic-language Nazi propaganda promised that those who attacked Jews would be rewarded by being given “the most beautiful of the Jewish girls” after Palestine’s Jewish community was vanquished. “That sort of language makes one think of the promise that Muslim terrorist leaders today sometimes offer―that those who die while killing Jews will receive seventy virgins in heaven,” Cohen said.
The text of the leaflets and broadcasts were composed by Nazi authors, and then translated into Arabic by members of the Mufti’s entourage in Berlin. Some of the Mufti’s men in Germany were more than writers: several parachuted into Palestine in 1944 with vials of poison that they intended to dump in the Tel Aviv water system. They were intercepted by the British police before they could carry out the attack.
Cohen found an internal memo from British police headquarters in Jerusalem in 1939 reporting, “The Arab population in Palestine are listening to the Berlin Broadcasts in Arabic most attentively, particularly in town and village coffee shops where large crowds gather for the purpose.” The report stated that the “uneducated classes are undoubtedly being influenced” by the Nazi propaganda.
In 1945, the activists known as the Bergson Group successfully lobbied the government of Yugoslavia to indict the Mufti as a war criminal, because of atrocities committed against Allied soldiers and civilians by members of the Bosnian Muslim SS unit, known as “Handschar,” that he helped create. The Yugoslavs never took steps to extradite him, however.
Husseini fled Berlin during the final days of the war but was briefly detained by the French authorities and placed under house arrest in a Paris villa. In response to Arab pressure, the French permitted the Mufti to stage a faux escape, and he found haven in Cairo. Later he moved to Beirut, where he passed away in 1974.
Earlier this year, Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas stirred controversy when, in a PA television broadcast, he listed the Mufti’s name among a number of “martyrs and heroes” who have died while fighting Jews or Israelis.
・Dr. Rafael Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, in Washington, DC. His latest book is “FDR and the Holocaust: A Breach of Faith,” available from Amazon.
(2)Why are Human Rights Organizations Silent About Arab and Muslim Anti-Semitism? , 9 May 2013
In 2003, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International issued a joint statement on antisemitism:
Recognizing anti-Semitism as a serious human rights violation, we also recognize our own responsibility to take on this issue as part of our work. It should not be left to Jewish groups alone to highlight this issue and to appeal to the international community to address it. We are firmly committed to joining their ongoing efforts and to helping to bring problems of anti-Semitism into the overall human rights discourse.
Now, in 2013, if you look through the Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International websites, it is difficult indeed to find any condemnations of Arab or Muslim antisemitism. While they condemn anti-semitism in Western countries, I cannot find a single mention of the phrases “Arab anti-semitism” or “Muslim anti-semitism” on either of their sites. Their typical mentions of antisemitism are usually together with Islamophobia.
Given the daily antisemitic incitement in the Arab and Muslim worlds, this is yet another indication that “human rights” organizations have a significant blind spot and are anxious to judge Arabs and Muslims by quite different standards than they judge Westerners.
In the past two days I posted crazed Jew-hating diatribes shown on Lebanese TV, in a popular Egyptian newspaper. Also recently we saw two accusations of the medieval blood libel in Egypt, a newspaper series insulting Judaism in Jordan, as well as examples of antisemitism in the Iraq media, Saudi Arabia newspaper, a Palestinian Arab “human rights group” and “peace activist,” and pan-Arab media, and many more.
It is endemic. But worse than that, the hatred is mass produced.
In 2001, a hugely popular 30-part Ramadan TV series aired in the Arab world based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was rerun in Egypt this year.
Iran released an antisemitic movie last year.
A purely anti-semitic TV series (“Khaybar”) is being filmed now in Egypt and Morocco to be shown in Arabic TV will be used to incite hundreds of millions of people against Jews during Ramadan next year to the Arab world. The filming of the series gets regular coverage in Arab media, and they make clear that it is meant to demonize Jews. The director doesn’t even attempt to hide the purpose of the film.
Naturally, “human rights” organizations are silent about that as well.
So where are the condemnations from the mainstream defenders of human rights who have said that antisemitism is a serious human rights violation? Or is it simply too touchy a subject for them?
Simply put, human rights organizations do not insist that Arabs and Muslims adhere to the same standards that the rest of the world must.
I think there is another reason why this issue is roundly ignored by the mainstream human rights organizations. They want to believe that if only Israel would offer more concessions, then peace is possible. They want to frame the Arab-Israeli conflict in terms of human rights and international law and fairness and other Western constructs. The Arabs happily take advantage of this blind spot and speak only in those terms to Westerners as well, so the cycle of self-deception is complete.
Publicizing the rampant Jew-hatred in the Arab and Muslim worlds, however, will show that the hate transcends any other claims.
The Arab goal isn’t human rights. They want to destroy the Jewish state and have Jews revert to the second-class status (at best) that they held in the Middle East for the past 1400 years. The idea that Jews aren’t meekly submissive to their more numerous cousins is what causes this pure hate, not land disputes or “settlements.”
Once this realization sinks in, the Western liberal mind would despair. Peace, it would appear, isn’t possible in such a toxic environment. But since peace is imperative, the thinking goes, all evidence to the contrary must be downplayed. Pretend it is a political problem with a political solution, and don’t let anything get in the way.
The irony is that soft-pedaling Arab and Muslim antisemitism does no one any favors.
HRW, Amnesty, Oxfam and all the other human rights organizations can help the cause of peace immensely by shining light on this oldest hatred. Publicizing the issue is necessary for ridding the Muslim world of their hate - or at least opening up a debate about it, a debate that is all but silent. (I have rarely seen a talkback in Arabic condemning an article that denies the Holocaust or accuses Jews of drinking gentile blood on Passover.)
Peace is literally unthinkable when the Jewish people are viewed as evil incarnate. Human rights organizations have clout. Shining light on this problem is essential, and it is not an obstacle to peace – it is a prerequisite.
Right now, the human rights organizations have a chance to prove that they mean what they say. The Khaybar TV series is coming, and it is pure incitement against Jews. Denouncing this as a human rights issue – which it is, according to Amnesty’s and HRW’s own words – can show that these organizations are serious about their own stated purposes.
Elder of Ziyon is one of the world’s most popular pro-Israel bloggers. His website is elderofziyon.blogspot.com.
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