I discovered a couple of days ago that Daniel McGowan has republished his article, "What does Holocaust denial really mean?" on the "Palestine Think Tank" website. (He apparently republishes this article on a regular basis - it appeared as a letter in the Ithaca Journal a couple of years ago). Why his Holocaust-denying article is published by a supposedly pro-Palestinian site, I do not know, although upon cursory checking of the site, it appears that his is not the only anti-semitic article to appear on the site.
Another site where the same article has recently appeared is a 9/11 "truth" site, "What really happened." Earlier iterations of the article appeared on Rense.com, a right-wing anti-semitic website; CODOH, a Holocaust-denying website; and Dissident Voice, which bills itself as "a radical newsletter in the struggle for peace and social justice" (it also published McGowan's fond recollections of his visit to Ernst Zundel, the German Holocaust denier, in prison in Germany). This same journal has also published Gilad Atzmon, another anti-semitic partisan of the Palestinian cause who does that cause no favors.
The article has also been published on the website of "Deir Yassin Remembered," the organization that McGowan chairs which is dedicated to the memory of the 1948 massacre at Deir Yassin, perpetrated by members of the Stern Gang. While his devotion to keeping the memory of the massacre alive is commendable, his descent into Holocaust denial in the name of supporting Palestinians is not.
I'm really sick of people denying that anti-Semitism is a seriously ingrained part of the Palestinian solidarity movement. That doesn't mean all pro-Palestinian persons are anti-Semitic, that doesn't mean all pro-Palestinian advocacy is or has to be anti-Semitic, it just means it is more than a sporadic or episodic problem, and it is one that the relevant community has shown virtually no interest in combating or even acknowledging.
ReplyDeleteI agree. And often, if people try to point this out - even people involved in the Palestinian solidarity movement for a long time (such as Tony Greenstein and Sue Blackwell in England) - they are relentlessly attacked and smeared by the likes of Gilad Atzmon.
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