Musharraf, Al Jazerra, and Douste-Blazy on The Holocaust

Attitudes towards the Shoa are being pointed out this week.

Over at The Corner, Warren Bell writes:

Daniel Pipes provides his thoughts on Musharraf's speech. This is the strangest compliment to pay a bona fide world leader, but Musharraf did not deny the Holocaust! (Among Muslim leaders this is, shall we say, unusual.)

Still at The Corner, Jim Robbins notes that:

The English online edition of Al Jazeera has a very straightforward obituary on Simon Wiesenthal. They headline it in a big box with a nice photo on the Culture page. Might be called progress. But for some reason I haven't found the same story in the Arabic edition...

And finally, for your consideration, at The American Thinker, the following is quoted from Haaretz by Clarice Feldman:

The French satirical magazine Le Canard Enchaine reported in its September 14th issue that during the visit of French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy to the new Holocaust museum in Jerusalem's Yad Vashem on September 8, he asked - while perusing maps of European sites where Jewish communities had been destroyed - whether British Jews were not also murdered. Needless to say, Douste-Blazy's question was met by his hosts with amazement. "But Monsieur le minister," Le Canard quoted the ensuing conversation, "England was never conquered by the Nazis during World War II."

The minister apparently was not content with this answer, which, according to the magazine, was given by the museum curator, and persisted, asking: "Yes, but were there no Jews who were deported from England?" [emphasis added]

No matter how impressed Pipes may be with Musharraf's speech, I think he himself hints at the problem:

Properly to appreciate the significance of this speech means hearing it with Muslim ears. It may not sound like much, for example, that he referred to the Holocaust as the Jewish people's "greatest tragedy," but the profusion of Muslim Holocaust deniers, including Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, makes this an important statement.

The point is that when they listen to Musharraf's speech with "Muslim ears" the Moslems will hear English and assume that Musharraf is exploiting the pro-Israel card to get something out of the US. Likewise, as Robbins points out, the Al Jazeera piece on Wiesenthal, bluntly acknowledging the Holocaust, only appears in English.

And what about French Foreign Minister Douste-Blazy?

Some things never change.

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