UNRWA's Alleged Holocaust Curriculum: The Only Resource Offered Is Abbas Thesis Denying Holocaust

Well, it did make for good headlines:

Hamas Refuses UN Plan to Teach Holocaust

Hamas has condemned a United Nations decision to teach refugee children in Gaza about the Holocaust, saying it is a “lie invented by the Zionists” and would reinforce Israeli control over the Holy Land.

Reuters broke the story on Monday, saying the Hamas terrorist movement, which currently controls the Gaza Strip, demands that UNRWA – the UN organization that controls many aspects of the lives of Arab refugees and their millions of descendants - withdraw plans for a new history book in UN schools in Gaza.

After all, it demonstrated that UNRWA was trying to be evenhanded--and if the curriculum was never used, it was the fault of Hamas.

Actually, the curriculum was never used because there never was a UNRWA curriculum for teaching the Holocaust:

“There is not, and has never been, a plan for a Holocaust curriculum in any UNRWA school,” reports Bedein, who heads the Jerusalem-based Israel Resource News Agency (IRNA).

“When this story first surfaced [last year], our agency explored every level of the PA Ministry of Education,” Bedein noted, “because UNRWA schools in Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem and Gaza follow the curriculum and use the school books of the Palestinian Authority... We also examined all levels of the UNRWA education department to follow this up, and found out that there is no plan whatsoever by UNRWA to launch any kind of Holocaust curriculum.”

IRNA sent a formal query to UNRWA in this regard, and received a response from Michael Kingsley-Nyinah, Director of the Executive Office of UNRWA, which stated emphatically: "I am writing to clarify that there is no ‘Holocaust curriculum’ as such in UNRWA schools and there are no plans to introduce one." [emphasis added]

I suppose that  is to be expected, considering UNRWA's history of using textbooks that deny Israel's right to exist.

The irony is that there actually is a resource on the Holocaust available in the UNRWA camps:

In every PA school library, the students have easy access to the doctoral thesis written by Palestinian Authority [chairman] Mahmoud Abbas only 26 years ago [later published as a book] entitled, ‘The Other Side: The secret relations between Nazism and the leadership of the Zionist movement,' which he submitted to obtain his Ph.D. at Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow. That is the level of Holocaust education taught in the UNRWA Palestinian schools, inculcating a new generation of Palestinian pupils to believe that the World Zionist Congress worked in tandem with the Third Reich to murder millions of Jews.”

Here are 2 excerpts from Abbas's thesis, The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism which was later published:

o "Having more victims meant greater rights and stronger privilege to join the negotiation table for dividing the spoils of war once it was over. However, since Zionism was not a fighting partner -- suffering victims in a battle -- it had no escape but to offer up human beings, under any name, to raise the number of victims, which they could then boast of at the moment of accounting…

It seems that the interest of the Zionist movement...is to inflate this figure so that their gains will be greater. This led them to emphasize this figure in order to gain the solidarity of international public opinion with Zionism. Many scholars have debated the figure of six million and reached stunning conclusions -- fixing the number of Jewish victims at only a few hundred thousand."

o "A partnership was established between Hitler's Nazis and the leadership of the Zionist movement... [the Zionists] gave permission to every racist in the world, led by Hitler and the Nazis, to treat Jews as they wish, so long as it guarantees immigration to Palestine."

Aside from the his denial of the Holocaust, Abbas' ignorance of history is illustrated by his claim that "Zionism was not a fighting partner -- suffering victims in a battle"

Not surprisingly, the truth is the exact opposite of what Abbas writes. In his book, The Palestinian Right To Israel, historian Alex Grobman writes:

In September 1949, the British established a Palestinaian battalion attached to the East Kent Regiment, but the Jews wanted to fight under their own Jewish flag. The British wanted the battalion to be composed of equal numbers of Jews and Arabs, but this was unrealistic due to the large number of Jews who volunteered and the "grater proneness to desertion of the Arabs".

By the end of war, there were more than 26,000 Jewish men and women from Palestine serving in the British Air Force, Navy, and Army. (p. 129)

History is obviously not Abbas' forte.
Just as education is not one of UNRWA's strengths.

Technorati Tag: UNRWA and Holocaust.