HOW THE ANTI-SEMITES OF HEZBOLLAH HAVE SENT ANNE FRANK BACK INTO HIDING
By Robert Fisk
The Independent/uk
Dec 4, 2009
A facsimile of Anne Frank’s diary is displayed during a press
conference at Anne Frank House in Amsterdam last June 11.
"This young woman who upsets people …" was the headline in Lebanon’s
L’Orient Littaraire yesterday [Thursday]. The teenager was Anne Frank,
who died of typhoid at Bergen-Belsen in 1945 after being betrayed to
the Nazi authorities, along with her family, in her Amsterdam "safe
house". The upset people were the Lebanese Hizbollah, who successfully
persuaded teachers at a Beirut school to withdraw an English language
primer from the library after it discovered extracts from Anne Frank’s
world-famous diary in the book. Yesterday, in a brave and literary
defence of freedom of speech, Michel Hajji Georgiou told his readers
why this act of censorship was against the Arabs.
Anne Frank, he said, was "a child in revolt against fear, against
intolerance, against a mad world, who escapes her Lebanese critics …
Anne, under injustice, in a suffering transcended by art and writing,
is nothing less than the sister of the Palestinian or Lebanese children
in the novels of Elias Khoury or Ghassan Kanafani … of the British
children in J G Ballard’s Empire of the Sun and John Boorman’s Hope
and Glory."
Jews and Israelis may object to the parallel – indeed, will object
to the parallel – between Jewish suffering under the Nazis and
Palestinian suffering under the Israelis, but they should at least
admire Georgiou’s front-page article. It is accompanied by a large
and well-known photograph of Anne, smiling in all innocence into
the camera, unaware how short her life will be. The Jewish Holocaust
is not a subject which Arabs have learned to live with. While Arab
censorship is not as outrageous as Turkish laws against all mention of
the 1915 Christian Armenian Holocaust by the Muslim Ottoman Turks –
which can send writers to prison – Hitler’s Mein Kampf is freely on
sale in Beirut and reference to the Jewish Holocaust has been censored
on television.
When I made a two-and-a-half-hour documentary on the Arab-Israeli
conflict, Lebanon’s New TV channel initially cut out a 16-minute
sequence on the murder of Polish Jews whose surviving families
eventually arrived in Israel. Only after angry remonstrations did I
persuade the station’s owner to show the uncut film – which he did
the following night. But being the first Westerner to put the Jewish
Holocaust on a Lebanese television channel did not win any favours.
Respectable, well educated families in Beirut argued with me for
years afterwards that the Nazi massacres were either exaggerated
or non-existent.
There is no doubt that Israel’s use of the Holocaust to suppress
any legitimate criticism of Israel’s current brutality towards
the Palestinians has much to do with this. Holocaust denial is
anti-Semitic, but the facile slander of anti-Semitism against anyone
who condemns Israel’s outrageous behaviour towards its neighbours long
ago provoked a deep sense of cynicism among Arabs towards the facts of
20th century Jewish history in Europe. The insistence of Palestinian
academics such as Edward Said that the Jewish Holocaust should not
be denied – on the basis that a denial of one people’s suffering
automatically negated another people’s suffering (the Palestinians,
albeit on a far smaller scale) – has received little understanding
in the Muslim world. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s ravings
about the Holocaust have only encouraged the habit of "denialism".
A pity. For while serious study of the subject might have been denied
to pupils at a school at Mseitbeh – a Shia suburb of Beirut – who
were using The Interactive Reader Plus for English Learners, Lebanese
students are also deprived of Victor Klemperer’s diaries. Klemperer,
a German Jewish academic, condemned the Jewish colonisation of
pre-Second World War Palestine even as he and his wife were threatened
by the Nazis in his native Dresden. Ironically, I bought my copy of
Klemperer’s books in highly Islamic Pakistan.
In other words, not all Jewish Holocaust survivors – or victims –
would automatically have supported the creation of the State of
Israel. Israel’s constant demonisation of Palestinians as Nazis –
the late prime minister Menachem Begin specifically compared Yasser
Arafat to Hitler – finds its apotheosis in the Holocaust museum at Yad
Vashem outside Jerusalem where the equally late Grand Mufti Haj Amin
al-Husseini is pictured with Hitler. Al-Husseini’s picture is real;
Israel’s racist foreign minister used it a few weeks ago to further
demean the Palestinians, although it is immensely to Israel’s credit
that the fairest biography of this anti-Jewish figure was written by
a former Israeli military governor of Gaza.
Hizbollah, of course, has well and truly managed to put its foot
in it in Beirut. Its Al Manar television station criticised Anne
Frank’s diaries because they are "devoted to the persecution of the
Jews… Even more dangerous still is the dramatic and theatrical way
in which the diary is written – it is full of emotion." Poor 15-year
old Anne Frank’s record of her suffering was not unemotional enough
for the warriors of the Hizbollah, her book mere proof of "the Zionist
invasion of [Lebanese] education." In fairness, Beirut’s bookshops
show no fear of selling books on the Jewish Holocaust and the evils
of the Second World War. The Jews of Lebanon were once counted in
their thousands; many came from Nazi Germany en route to Palestine
but stayed because they loved the country and the Arab people. The
government is repairing the old Jewish synagogue whose roof was shot
off in 1982 – by an Israeli gunboat.