Two articles in an official magazine of the Palestine Liberation Organization describe the Holocaust as “the lie of the 20th century,” which contradicts PLO chief Yasir Arafat’s recent claims of moderation, officials of the Simon Wiesenthal Center have said in a letter to Secretary of State James Baker.
The letter requests that the United States “officially protest and raise this matter during the next dialogue with the PLO.”
While other Arab sources have tried to demean the Holocaust in the past, “this is the first time, to our knowledge, that the PLO has done so,” Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Wiesenthal Center, said in an interview.
The two articles appeared Dec. 13 and 20 in the Cyprus-based weekly El-Istiklal (“Independence”), which was started last year by Arafat as the official PLO publication for Palestinians on topics dealing with the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Banner headlines above the articles read: “How Did Zionist Propaganda Cloud Science and Mind? A First Quiet Travel Through the Climate of Fear” and “Burning of the Jews in the Nazi Chambers Is the Lie of the 20th Century in Order to Legitimatize the New Nazism.”
The articles’ author, Dr. Khaled Lel-Shamali of Jordan, is presented as a scientist with special expertise in intensive heat stoves, who said that he visited the former concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, near Berlin, last summer.
Citing first an alleged Encyclopaedia Britannica entry that 6 million Jews and some 7 million other people were killed at Sachsenhausen, Shamali goes on to “prove” that, “contrary to the stupidities of Zionism,” only 28,000 Jews were exterminated at the camp.
Also on the basis of his guided tour of the camp, Shamali claims that “Nazi camps were more civilized than Israeli prisons. Jews are complaining of their treatment by the Gestapo, whereas the truth is that they were served healthy food as proven by the dining rooms that we observed there.”
The letter to Baker, signed by the Wiesenthal Center’s dean, Rabbi Marvin Hier, concludes: “These remarks, printed with the full endorsement of the editor in the most important publication of the PLO on the territories, is hardly conducive to the peace process.
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