Something interesting happened at Auschwitz in recent days. It appears that the former death camp was visited by a group of religious leaders, including the largest Muslim contingent known. According to a media account of the event, ” The delegation, comprised of 150 people, included citizens of Morocco, Jordan, Turkey, and Iraq, as well as rabbis and priests, who flew from Paris to Krakow and from there traveled to Birkenau by bus. Some canceled their participation due to the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, but Muslim presence was still tangible.”
It seems that some of the Imams were genuinely moved by what they saw. Some reportedly promised when they returned home to talk more about anti-semitism and make sure that people in their mosques are fully aware of the Holocaust.
The visit was apparently arranged by an organization called the Aladdin Project, and was sponsored in part by the United Nations. (The Aladdin Project has also translated The Diary of Anne Frank into Persian, a worthy endeavor.) The hope was to combat the fact that a fairly significant portion of Muslims apparently agree with Iran’s president that the Holocaust is a myth. Does this sort of a project really amount to anything?
I want to believe that a visit to this place of death will move individuals and make a difference. But frankly, I’m skeptical. I don’t believe that the problem here is ignorance. It’s not a lack of information that is propelling Muslims to proclaim that the Holocaust didn’t happen. Deep down I believe that they know it happened. The problem here is hate. Their hatred for Jews and for the West is so great that they are willing to spread lies, known untruths, because it feeds their pathological hatred. The simple fact is that any Imam that is willing to take a trip to Auschwitz for the expressed purpose of better understand the Holocaust is probably not someone who has a huge problem with anti-semitism to begin with.
Fighting ignorance is done through education. But how do you fight hate? The kind of hate that leads one to embrace and spread known untruths?