STOP HOLOCAUST DENIAL: We Need Your Help To Spread The Truth

STOP HOLOCAUST DENIAL
We Need Your Help ToSpread The Truth

This week, thousands of us gathered around the world to commemorate Yom Hashoah, Holocaust RemembranceDay. In a historic ceremony at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, we honored the late Tunisian, Khaled Abdelwahhab, the first Arab to be designated as a righteousgentile for saving a Jewish family from the Nazis during the Holocaust.

His story of courage and compassion serves as a small but important component of the efforts to debunkthe worldwide campaign of Holocaust denial led by Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Today, denial of the Holocaust has emerged as the cornerstone of a virulent new ‘Big Lie’ ofantisemitism.

Photo: Lighting of the Flame of RemembranceL-R are: Rabbi Abraham Cooper, SWC Associate Dean; Faiza Abdul Wahab; Nadia Bijaoui; Rabbi Marvin Hier, SWC Founder and Dean; Robert Satloff; Ambassador Mohamed Nejib Hachana; and IsraeliConsul General Ehud Danoch.

Just recently in the UK, a report commissioned by the Department for Education and Skills stated, "...a History Department in a northern city recently avoided selecting the Holocaust as atopic for GCSE coursework for fear of confronting anti-Semitic sentiment and Holocaust denial among some Muslim pupils." In Belgium and France, there are teachers who, in the faceof intimidation from some Muslim students and parents, are increasingly unwilling or unable to teach mandated Holocaust lessons. And, there has even been a call from a prominentMuslim Council in Europe to change January 27th, the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz Death Camp, and the day designated by the UN as Holocaust Remembrance Day, to“International Genocide Day” a move to marginalize the unique enormity of Europe’s crime against its Jews during the Shoah.

So in 2007, despite laws in some countries targeting Holocaust denial as incitement to hatred and violence, despite the overwhelming documentation of the Nazis’ mass murder of EuropeanJewry, this campaign of denial is growing, promoted by governments, fueled by websites, even preached by men invoking G-d’s name. Holocaust denial has morphed from its European roots,taking hold in the mainstream of the Arab and Muslim world, to the extent that a University of Haifa poll showed that this Yom Hashoah, 33% of Israeli Arabs High School and Universitystudents believe the Holocaust never happened.
Photo: Anti-Holocaust demonstration in Iran.

We need to fight back with the Truth. And we are.

Simon Wiesenthal Center researchers have prepared a special report, HolocaustDenial’s Assault on Memory , which directly and clearly refutes the most repeated “big lies” deployed by the deniers (see "Answering the Deniers' 13 Big Lies” -page19-26).

Now we have to get this information to the people who need it the most: young people. You have already helped us distribute "Witness To The Truth" a 2-DVD set of testimonies from a three-cityvideoconference, which brought together Holocaust survivors to confront Iran's Conference of Holocaust deniers.

We cannot allow antisemites, extremists, and haters to be the sole source of information about thehorrors of the Nazi era for millions of youth. That is why we are preparing to translate this new report into Arabic and then Farsi and to release it online for worldwide access. But to do so we need you and the rest of our online activist community to help.

Please partner with us during Holocaust Remembrance Week and help make an immediate impact. By supporting our effortyou can help make a difference today!

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