Reality check: Konrad Adenauer Foundation brings Muslim leaders to Holocaust sites
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Visiting Dachau last month are Dr. Norbert Wagner, Rabbi Jack Bemporad, Imam Syed Naqvi, Nasreen Bedat, Special Envoy Hannah S. Rosenthal, Sheik Yasir Qadhi, Imam Abdullah Antepli, Imam Suhaib Webb (behind Antepli), Dr. Syed Syeed, Imam Muhammad Maged, Imam Muzammil Siddiqi, Suhail A. Khan, and Prof. Marshall Breger. Photos Courtesy Center for Interreligious Understanding |
Rabbi Jack Bemporad wants it known that the visit he organized of eight Muslim-American leaders to concentration camps was a historic success.
Bemporad, director of the Carlstadt-based Center for Interreligious Understanding, called the Aug. 7 to 11 trip to Auschwitz in Poland and Dachau in Germany “a breakthrough in many respects, because … we took imams like [Yasir] Qadhi, for example,” who 10 years ago called the Holocaust a hoax. (Bemporad led the trip, which was sponsored by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, with Prof. Marshall Breger of the Catholic University of America.)
“The problem is,” said Bemporad, an Englewood resident, that “many imams came out of Saudi Arabia and Egypt because that’s where they get their education. That’s very unfortunate. The education they get is in many ways based on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” he explained. “The single greatest instrument of anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism in the world today, it gives the erroneous view that the Jews are a devilish group that wants to control the world by dominating the press, economies,” and so forth.
One reason that proven fraud is invoked, he said, “is to diminish the significance of the Holocaust. The whole point is to show that the Holocaust was an invention to take Israel and have a beachhead in the Middle East that should really be Muslim.
“The best way to convince people of a reality they are not sure of is to expose them to that reality in a way that is undeniable.”
Thus, he said, even “many who accepted the Holocaust never had a sense of the reality and the totality of it. As a result practically all of us were in tears or broke down” at the concentration camps.
“The main point,” said Bemporad, “is that … they are using this experience in their services and talking to their people – that’s talking about tens of thousands of people.”
Also, he said, “They want Jews to speak in mosques about this reality so they can unite with us to condemn anti-Semitism in all its forms.”
Meanwhile, a rumor swirled around the blogosphere, and was discussed at sites like Politico and Salon, that Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, had lobbied against the trip. That, together with the ADL’s recent opposition to the planned mosque at Ground Zero, fueled speculations that he, the defender of bias against Jews, was biased against Muslims.
But Foxman told The Jewish Standard on Tuesday that there had been “a lot of noise and not so much light…. Nobody bothers to check the facts anymore,” he complained. “All of a sudden you will read [an allegation] in God knows how many places as a fact.”
What he did, he told the Standard, was question the participation of Hannah Rosenthal, the State Department’s anti-Semitism envoy. He said he had “shared with her a concern” about the appropriateness of a government representative’s joining a private mission. “Unfortunately,” he said, “it didn’t stay there and took on a life of its own.”
He had “no problem with [the Muslim leaders] going” on the trip, he said, adding, “I welcome the fact that they returned with the statement that they did.”
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