American Muslim Leaders Visit Concentration Camps (Updated)

Giving credit where credit is due:

A group of eight American Muslim leaders have visited the Dachau and Auschwitz concentration camps to learn more about the Holocaust and to pay respects to its victims.

The excursion, which ran from August 8 through August 10, was organized by Marshall Breger, an Orthodox Jew who served as a senior White House official under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. The trip was co-sponsored by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, a German think tank, and the Center for Interreligious Understanding, a New Jersey-based interfaith dialogue group, the Jewish Daily Forward reported.


"There is a view that there is growing anti-Semitism in the Muslim world, reinforced by people like [Iranian] President Ahmadinejad, that there is growing Holocaust denial in the Muslim world,"Breger, now a law professor at Catholic University, told the Jewish Daily Forward. "In light of that, the idea was to offer education to those who might not have the kind of knowledge that we've had about World War II and the Jewish community, and to do this in a public way."

Among other activities, Muzammil Siddiqi, imam of the Islamic Society of Orange County, Calif., led prayers at the concentration camps, saying: "We pray to God that this will not happen to the Jewish people or to any people anymore."

Apparently, the trip was more than just a tour and actually may have changed some minds as well:

Mohamed Magid, imam and executive director of the Washington area mega-mosque All Dulles Area Muslim Society, is now preparing an article for the Muslim magazine Islamic Horizons on Holocaust denial.

"No Muslim in his right mind, female or male, should deny the Holocaust," Magid, a native of Sudan, told the Forward. "When you walk the walk of the people who have been taken to be gassed, to be killed, how can a person deny physical evidence, something that's beyond doubt?"

Former Holocaust denier Yasir Qadhi, the dean of academics at Al Maghrib Institute in New Haven, Conn., said the trip was eye-opening.

"Anybody who is a Holocaust denier should deserve a free ticket to see Auschwitz and Birkenau," he told the Jewish Daily Forward, "because seeing is just not the same as reading about it." [emphasis added]

It's a good first step.

I don't want to diminish the importance of the trip, but I can't help wondering what the response would have been if they had been asked if they would consider building a mosque there.

UPDATE: Obviously, not all Muslim leaders are making a point of visiting a concentration camp. In a comment below, someone linked to this post, translated from the German via Google, about an Iranian visit last month that refused to visit a concentration camp:

Press statement on the visit of the Iranian twin town in Weimar

Joint press statement by the German-Israelin Gesellschaft AG Erfurt, the country's Jewish community of Thuringia and the AG Church and Judaism:

No excuses for Holocaust denial - the city of Weimar has the behavior of the delegation of the Iranian city of Shiraz partners take a clear position
During the Weimar's visit was a delegation from the Iranian city of Shiraz partner it a shocking scandal. The Iranian delegation refused to express the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial site to visit. This is a unique process that is allowed no toleration.

On the history of Weimar is also the horror historiane of only a few kilometers from Buchenwald concentration camp, where, during the Nazi period, almost 250,000
Estimated 56 000 people were arrested and came to death or murdered. Any partnership with the city of Weimar has to this part of the

Be aware of history. But not only the behavior of the Iranian delegation is unacceptable, outrageous, we are mainly the response of the city of Weimar, in particular the attempt to speak to this incident and not to mention beautiful dead. This approach provides the city of Weimar Neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers and antisemites feed and undermines the work of all who stand up against right-wing and anti-Semitism.

As long as emerging in the City of Shiraz no fundamental change in relation to the Holocaust and a visit to Buchenwald, there must
No further cooperation with the city of Shiraz, and must give the partnership until then immediately be suspended.

First steps are no good if no one else will follow.

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