In recent years, Moroccan King Mohammed VI and senior Moroccan officials have taken a clear stance against anti-Semitism and stressed the need to teach values of tolerance and coexistence as lessons of the Holocaust.
(January 22, 2020 / MEMRI) While most Arab countries refrain from addressing the issue of anti-Semitism and do not include the topic of the Holocaust in their school curricula, Morocco appears to be taking a different approach. Speaking at international conferences and forums dealing with the Holocaust and intercultural dialogue, Moroccan regime officials, headed by King Mohammed VI, have frequently raised the need to condemn anti-Semitism, to instill values of tolerance and religious coexistence in Moroccan society and to learn the lessons of the Holocaust, while stressing the pivotal role of education in this context.
The Moroccan king’s position, unusual in the Arab world, was already evident in 2009, when he referred to the Holocaust as “one of the most painful disasters in the history of mankind.” This was at a time when the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was calling the Holocaust “a Western invention,” and while anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial were also rampant in many other parts of the Arab and Muslim world.
The king’s statements were read out on his behalf by the Moroccan minister for religious affairs at the launching ceremony of the Aladdin Project, an international NGO devoted to rapprochement between cultures and especially between Jews and Muslims.
The king said: “My approach and the approach of my people to the disaster of the Holocaust is far removed from the approaches that seem to suffer from a kind of amnesia [i.e., Holocaust denial]. Our approach is intent upon in-depth study of one of the wounds that are etched in our collective memory, and which we have worked to define as one of the most painful disasters in the history of mankind.”Subscribe to The JNS Daily Syndicate by email and never miss our top stories
In another speech, read out by the Moroccan prime minister in September 2018, the king said that “anti-Semitism is the antithesis of freedom of expression [because] it implies a denial of the other,” and called to teach history, including its “darkest hours,” hinting at the Holocaust.
Referring more explicitly to the issue of teaching about the Holocaust in school as part of instilling values of tolerance and coexistence, Moroccan education minister Sa’id ’Amzazi said in 2018 at a conference in Marrakesh that Morocco was considering “teaching the lessons of the greatest tragedies in history, including the Holocaust, as an important component of high-quality education.”
It appears that educational activities pertaining to anti-Semitism and the Holocaust are indeed being conducted in Morocco, albeit on a limited scale and mostly by NGOs, such as the Mimouna Organization, which is founded by Moroccan Muslim Elmehdi Boudra, which deals with the history of Morocco’s Jews and with intercultural dialogue. In addition, in the past few years Morocco has signed agreements with international organizations dedicated to the commemoration of the Holocaust in France and the United States. These agreements include cooperation in educational projects.
“Anti-Semitism is the antithesis of freedom of expression [because] it implies a denial of the other.”
It should be mentioned that in his statements, the Moroccan king stresses that the Jews and Christians living in his kingdom enjoy equal rights and freedom of worship. During Pope Francis’s visit to Morocco in March 2019, the king said that in his capacity as the monarch and the Leader of the Faithful, he is personally committed to ensuring the security and freedom of worship of Jews and Christians in Morocco.
Addressing participants of a September 2018 international conference for interfaith and intercultural dialogue in Fez, in a message read out by Moroccan Justice and Liberties Minister Mustafa Ramid, the king spoke of “the unique Moroccan model” and of “the ingrained coexistence [there], especially between Muslims and Jews.”
In January 2020, the king visited the newly opened House of Jewish Moroccan Heritage in the city of Essaouira. The House of Jewish Moroccan Heritage, launched by royal adviser Andre Azoulay in partnership with Morocco’s Culture Ministry, is dedicated to the historic coexistence of the Jewish and Muslim communities in the city. Located in the former home and synagogue of wealthy Jewish merchants, it contains information on the Jewish community, along with old photographs, archive footage, musical recordings, traditional dress and religious objects. Its second floor will house a research center.
Pro-Palestinian organizations in Morocco have condemned the discussion of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in the country, and the participation of officials in conferences dealing with the Holocaust, accusing them of abetting the “falsification” of history. They oppose including the Holocaust in the curricula and called instead to include material on “the crimes of the Zionist occupation.” In addition, these organizations were involved in the campaign to demolish a Holocaust memorial near Marrakesh, which was also meant to include an education center on the Holocaust.
The full report is available at the MEMRI website.Republish this article in your newspaper or website
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Will the Iranian regime’s obsessive Jew-hatred be its undoing?
It would be ironic if the most dangerous and destabilizing force in the world today—the primary source of the unending misery of the Middle East—were to founder, like Hitler did, due to its own anti-Semitism.
(January 22, 2020 / JNS) Qassem Soleimani was a terrorist’s terrorist, who was directly responsible for numerous acts of terrorism against the West and Israel and, more importantly, had the resources of a state at his disposal in his project to develop asymmetric warfare assets throughout the Middle East. He was quite successful in building up Hezbollah in Lebanon into what is arguably the first truly existential threat to the Jewish state since 1973. He was in the process of doing the same for Shi’ite militias in Iraq and Syria when U.S. President Donald Trump wisely put an end to his mischief.
But he had another goal, apart from weakening Iran’s rivals Saudi Arabia and Israel, getting control of Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, and forcing the United States out of the region. That was to target the Jewish people worldwide. In addition to attacking Israeli diplomats in several locations, Soleimani’s terrorists murdered Jews in Argentina, Bulgaria, Panama and Lebanon. Of course his prime Jewish target was Israel, and although his support for Hezbollah plus various Palestinian factions can be seen as part of Iran’s struggle to dominate the region, it can also be understood as part of an overall anti-Jewish project.
Israel, as Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini, well understands, is the locus of Jewish power in the world. Expressing this idea in 2018 with typical anti-Semitic imagery, he tweeted that Israel “is a malignant cancerous tumor in the West Asian region that has to be removed and eradicated: it is possible and it will happen.”
The supposedly moderate Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, has used this metaphor, as did his predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iranian officials have likened Israel to a dog, and their expressions of hostility toward Israel are far more vicious and “personal” than those directed at their other regional adversaries. The regime regularly holds Holocaust cartoon contests despite the fact that Western countries, even those relatively hostile to Israel, find this kind of anti-Semitism offensive, damaging the image of a modern, progressive nation Iran wants to project.Subscribe to The JNS Daily Syndicate by email and never miss our top stories
This is an anti-Semitic regime, and inviting and subsidizing visits from members of the anti-Zionist Jewish Neturei Karta faction—representatives of which attended Soleimani’s funeral—can’t wash it away.
In Lucy S. Dawidowicz’s The War Against the Jews 1933-1945, one of the theses is that Hitler’s ravings against the Jews were more than, in Irving Howe’s words, “mere bait for the masses,” but rather “the Nazis’ deepest, most ‘authentic’ persuasion.” The murder of millions of Jews was not an epiphenomenon of Hitler’s expansionist aggression, but rather one of his main war objectives.
It seems to me that the hostile expression of the Iranian revolutionary regime toward Israel is like that. In this case it draws its hatred from the well of Islamic doctrine rather than the combination of crackpot economic and racial theories that fueled Hitler’s, but it is still significantly more than just propaganda to support practical geopolitical ambitions. As with Hitler, the Jew-hatred of the Iranian regime is not an epiphenomenon; it is the “authentic persuasion” of Khameini (and of Soleimani, too, until Trump’s Hellfire missiles came along).
It’s instructive to note that the Quds Force commanded by Soleimani, which is responsible for covert operations and unconventional warfare (read: terrorism) throughout the world, is named after al Quds, Jerusalem. It’s an obsession with them.
The statements of the Jew-haters in Iran are more honest and straightforward than those of the Palestinian Authority or the still more disingenuous BDS Movement. Ahmadinejad famously threatened that Israel “would be erased from the map,” not that Israel would be forced to “end the occupation.” It’s often said that one of the most important lessons of the Holocaust was that when Jew-haters make threats, it’s foolhardy to ignore them. Therefore we must not ignore the nuclear threats of the Iranian regime.
You may notice that I say “the regime” and not “Iran.” This is because while the regime in Tehran pumps out anti-Jewish propaganda daily, the Iranian people are arguably the least anti-Semitic in the Middle East. So says the ADL’s Global 100 poll, which found that “only” 60 percent of Iranians showed anti-Semitic attitudes or beliefs. This compares to 93 percent for our Palestinian peace partners, 74 percent for the Middle East and North Africa as a whole, 19 percent for countries in the Americas, and a worldwide average of 26 percent.
Iranians are far less anti-Semitic than Jordanians (81 percent) and Egyptians (75 percent), with whom we are supposedly at peace. Yes, 60 percent is a high number, but given the conflict and the regime’s propaganda, it is surprisingly low.
Iran was a highly developed country before the 1979 popular revolution, with a relatively well-educated and liberal population. The government of the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was an absolute monarchy (shah means “emperor”) in which dissent was harshly suppressed; but when it was overthrown by a popular revolution, many commentators—and probably many Iranians—were surprised to see it replaced by an Islamic regime that was no less harsh. The shah had been a relatively enlightened king, a modernizer who improved the economy and introduced women’s suffrage. The new regime quickly established clerical rule and decreed mandatory hijab for women.
Today the Islamic regime is in trouble, its economy devastated by sanctions, and popular anger has risen against the choice of the regime to spend large amounts of money to develop militias in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen, fight a hot proxy war against Saudi Arabia and a warm one against Israel and develop ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons. Although the regime has been successful in getting Lebanese, Syrians, Iraqis and others (Palestinians, too) to die for it in its military adventures, it has to arm and pay them.
Probably a majority of the money it is spending on military programs goes for its strategic encirclement of Israel and the provision of arms with which to try to neutralize Israel’s great military advantage. It’s probably reasonable to count a large part of the expensive nuclear and missile programs as Israel-related as well. So if it should happen that the Iranian people overthrow the Islamic regime, it will be in part because of the regime’s irrational anti-Jewish obsession (and in part because of the actions of Donald Trump).
And this brings up an interesting parallel. Some historians think that Hitler’s obsessive desire to kill all Jews led to his irrational and disastrous decision to invade the Soviet Union in 1941. Others point out that the diversion of resources to murdering Jews greatly damaged his war effort and even led to his defeat on the critical Eastern Front.
It would be particularly ironic if the most dangerous and destabilizing force in the world today—the primary source of the unending misery of the Middle East—were to founder, like Hitler, because of its obsessive Jew-hatred.
Victor Rosenthal was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., lived on a kibbutz through the 1980s and returned home to Israel in 2014 after 26 years in California. He writes at the Abu Yehuda blog.
Pro-Israel groups urge University of Michigan to cancel SJP conference featuring ‘vicious’ anti-Semites
The conference comes after the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights launched two investigations into UCLA for its repeated failure to “prevent a hostile campus environment for its Jewish campus community in direct violation of the school’s Title VI obligations.”
BY SEAN SAVAGE AND JACKSON RICHMAN
(January 21, 2020 / JNS) Several pro-Israel groups are urging the University of Michigan to cancel an upcoming conference at the school that is featuring anti-Israel groups and speakers that “have a long record of vicious anti-Semitism,” according to Roz Rothstein, co-founder and CEO of StandWithUs.
The event, titled “2020 Youth for Palestine Conference” is slated to take place from Jan. 25-26 on the campus in Ann Arbor, Mich., and is being hosted by Midwest Students for Justice in Palestine, Palestinian Youth Movement and Students Allied for Freedom and Equality.
“The Students Supporting Israel (SSI) movement expects the University of Michigan to condemn and cancel such a hateful conference,” Ilan Sinelnikov, president and founder of the Israeli advocacy organization, told JNS.
He noted that several anti-Israel/anti-Semitic groups are involved in the event, and that, similar to other like-minded groups, have been spreading hateful messages on social media.Subscribe to The JNS Daily Syndicate by email and never miss our top stories
“One of the sponsor organizations of the event ‘Anakbayan USA’ wrote in their statement that they are sponsoring the conference to ‘continue struggling in solidarity with the Palestinean [sic] people in order to confront or [sic] shared enemy: US imperialism and its puppet regimes,’ ” he said.
Sinelnikov added that “such a statement exposes the true face of this conference, and voices like these should have no room on our campuses, let alone in our country.”
The Michigan Union on the University of Michigan Campus. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
According to conference organizers, the event comes at a time when Palestinian student groups are “being attacked at every corner” from university administrations and “Zionist groups” to President Donald Trump’s executive order on discrimination of Jewish students. As such, the goals of the conference include “contextualizing the current political climate in the U.S., offering tools to carry your organization through times of hardship and encouraging mobilization on a mass level.”
The conference comes just weeks after the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights launched two investigations into UCLA for its administration’s repeated failure to “prevent a hostile campus environment for its Jewish campus community in direct violation of the school’s Title VI obligations,” which included verbal harassment of a Jewish student, while the second investigation into the school’s decision to allow the National Students for Justice in Palestine conference in November 2018.
The investigations themselves come about a month after Trump’s December 2019 Executive Order that that protects Jews from discrimination under Title VI, enacted as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
‘Could be a violation of Title VI’
Ahead of the event, the Zachor Legal Institute sent a letter to the general counsel of the University of Michigan advising administrators of the Executive Order, in addition to noting the UCLA conference and complaint the organization had filed with the U.S. Department of Education.
“In short, we said that if the same things happen at the upcoming conference as happened at UCLA with SJP, it could be a violation of Title VI, and if that was the case, we’d file a Title VI complaint on behalf of any student(s) who were discriminated against,” Greendorfer told JNS.
In a statement to JNS, Rick Fitzgerald, assistant vice president for public affairs, said the university was aware of the conference being hosted “by a recognized student organization on our campus.”
“With more than 1,300 student groups on the Ann Arbor campus, events organized by students—many open to students from other campuses—happen with some regularity.”
Nevertheless, NSJP, along with several other groups involved in the event, have a long history of promoting support for terrorism and anti-Semitism.
An October 2019 report by the Institute for the Student of Global Antisemitism (ISGAP) revealed how NSJP “leaders and official university chapters espouse blatant forms of anti-Semitism on social media and use the national conferences as a platform to propagate their discriminatory ideas.”
The 2018 Students for Justice in Palestine Conference at UCLA. Credit: National Students for Justice in Palestine via Facebook.
At its most recent national conference, held at the University of Minnesota in November 2019, NSJP promoted terrorist Ahmed Saadat, General-Secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States.
Additionally, the Palestinian Youth Movement has also shown support for U.S.-designated terror groups and glorified leaders of such groups on social media. At a July 2018 event hosted by the group, it encouraged the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers. Due to these problematic ties, a Toronto church decided to cancel an event with PYM in June 2019.
Similarly, the involvement of two other groups—the American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) and Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network—also have problematic ties.
In particular, Samidoun is a proxy of PFLP, and its coordinator, Khaled Barakat, is a senior PFLP member and head of its foreign-operations department.
‘A worrying example of bigotry’
Roz Rothstein, co-founder and CEO of StandWithUs, told JNS that her organization is “deeply concerned” about the event, and in particular, its keynote speaker, Hatem Bazian, who “has a long record of vicious anti-Semitism.”
Rothstein said that “his organization, which is sponsoring the conference, has denied the Armenian genocide, spread homophobia and expressed support for terrorist groups. The University of Michigan must unequivocally condemn this hate and make clear what steps they will take to ensure a safe educational environment for students on campus.”
Avi Gordon, executive director of Alums for Campus Fairness, told JNS that the conference threatens to create a “discriminatory environment” at Michigan.
He said it is “a worrying example of bigotry taking place and follows incidents last academic year in which two instructors refused to write letters of recommendation for students solely because they decided to study abroad in Israel.”
In November 2018, John Cheney-Lippold, an associate professor in the university’s American culture department, refused to write a letter of recommendation for a student—citing support for BDS—after initially agreeing to do so. The University of Michigan later denounced the professor’s actions and sanctioned him.
University of Michigan professor John Cheney-Lippold refused to write a letter of recommendation in 2018 for a Jewish student applying for a study-abroad program in Israel. Source: Screenshot.
“The administration must continue to make clear that hate directed against any group, including Jewish students and their allies, will not be tolerated,” said Gordon.
Hali Haber, director of campus programming and strategic relationships with CAMERA, said the campus has become a hostile environment for pro-Israel students.
“For many years, and especially since the University of Michigan’s student government passed a BDS resolution in 2017, Ann Arbor has been a hotbed for anti-Israel activity. Students for Justice in Palestine and their affiliates propagate misinformation, whitewash the threat of terrorism against Israel and advocate for the dissolution of the world’s only Jewish state,” she said.
Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, AMCHA Initiative co-founder and director, told JNS that while SJP has the right to hold its conference there, numerous studies by her group have shown that universities with SJP chapters are more prone to acts of aggression against Jewish and pro-Israel students.
“Every one of our studies has found that schools with SJP chapters are about seven times more likely to have acts of aggression targeting Jewish and pro-Israel students, including assault, harassment, suppression of speech and destruction of property. And the guilty party behind many of these incidents is SJP—both members and the group as a whole,” she said.
SJP students across the country routinely disrupt and shut down events organized by Jewish and pro-Israel students; vandalize pro-Israel fliers, displays and student property; denigrate Jewish and pro-Israel student groups with spurious charges of racism, Islamophobia and white supremacy; and engage in sustained campaigns of defamation, marginalization and harassment against presumed pro-Israel students,” according to Rossman-Benjamin.
“These behaviors time and again deprive Jewish and pro-Israel students of their freedom of speech, assembly and association,” she continued, “and deny them access to a campus safe from harassment.”
As such, Rossman-Benjamin stopped short of calling for the conference to be canceled, but warned the school of possible repercussions.
“The University of Michigan should make clear to SJP and all its students that while anti-Zionist speech is protected under the First Amendment, the intolerant behavior such rhetoric often incites will not be tolerated under any circumstances and, if those behaviors occur, serious consequences will result.”
