Thanks for the sentiments, Mr Editor

Via MEMRI an absolutely charming interview with the Editor-in-Chief of Al Quds al Arabi, a Mr Abd Al-Bari Atwan, which aired on Al Jazeera TV on 2nd November.

Al Quds al Arabi is a Palestinian newspaper, published in London. It has actually been banned in Egypt for criticizing the Egyptian president and is the subject of a campaign by the Arab Association for Human Rights. It's also been banned in Jordan, though I haven't been able to find out why. The enthusiastic coverage it gave in 2002 to a demonstration in Saudi Arabia calling for Israel to be eliminated gives me some inkling of why.

Mr Abd Bari Atwan was giving his views on the recently agreed UN Resolution to commemorate the Holocaust. He managed to come up just about with every standard anti-zionist and anti-semitic canard around the Holocaust unfortunately still regularly used by Palestinian political groups of every persuasion and their supporters . The Jews claim a monopoly on suffering. The Palestinians were made to pay for the Holocaust.  There is no anti-semitism in Europe, just Islamophobia. The Jews practise Nazism. The Palestinians are the real victims of Nazism.

Here's some choice extracted quotes:

I do not see any escalation in antisemitism in Europe and the US. What I see is an escalation in anti-Arab and anti-Muslim (sentiment). Wars are being waged today against the Arabs and Muslims, and massacres are being committed in Iraq....

I believe this resolution is a racist one. I am, of course, against the Holocaust, and against the killing of any human being. Nevertheless, this resolution is a racist one. Why discriminate against (some of) the victims? How come the Jews have a monopoly on pain and suffering?....

How come the Jews are the only ones mentioned? Besides, among us Arabs, there are victims of the Jews, of Jewish Nazism....

What about us, who have paid the price of these holocausts? We in Palestine and the Arab homeland have been suffering for 50 years. What about the Qana massacre? What about the massacre... The American nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?...

But my real favourite is the quote where he talks about the Nazi crime of ....sending Jews to Palestine:

We are the real victims of Nazism, because the Nazis committed all these crimes, and exported the Jews to our country, to Palestine. In case you think this is just the raving of an insignificant extremist, who just happens to be Editor-in-Chief of an international newspaper and who just happens to get an airing on Al-Jazeera, the most popular Arabic TV station in the world, just bear in mind that subsets of sentiments like these still get expressed, cleaned up, a little bit sanitized, and clothed in the altogether more beguiling language of discourse theory, by current anti-zionist campaigns in the US and UK. I hope to post more about that soon. And if you really have a taste for this stuff, you can watch the clip of the interview here.

Comments

[Sunny]

"and who just happens to get an airing on Al-Jazeera, the most popular Arabic TV station in the world,"

to be fair, Al-Jazeera was also the first Arabic station to give a platform to the Israelis. Although they might have an agenda, I think they go further than most in giving both sides of the argument. The Arabic version of Fox News, I call them :)

[Martin Morgan]

Bari Atwan is also a BBC World TV Arab affairs commentator of choice. He manages to temper his rhetoric in English, of course, so it's useful to know what he says to his domestic audience. I suspect the BBC uses him out of laziness - he speaks eloquent English and is based in London. But, I'm glad to say, he's sounding more and more like a dinosaur as the pan-Arab media begins to loosen up a bit.