After `poisoned Iranian rain' - Hazem Saghieh - Haaretz 1/2/2006

[Coastie for Truth]

"Denial of the Holocaust: Stupidity seizing our summits" is the headline of an important article published last weekend by Lebanese thinker Hazem Saghieh in the international newspaper Al-Hayat, which is published in London. An important thinker, an important newspaper and a very important article that appeared on the editorial page.

"Most importantly, the `culture' of denying the Holocaust - which is, among other things, the outcome of lack of education - has grown to occupy a dominant position in Arab and Islamic public life," wrote Saghieh. "Although the issue was about to come to an end and be confined to narrow margins that combine utter fanaticism with utter retardation, the heavy, poisoned Iranian rain blew on us and was welcomed, quite avidly, by the eager Arab deserts ... This means that we are not to be envied at all. The ailment is swelling up from the heart of the societies to the decision makers therein.

"It is not a coincidence that the elements of the bloc spreading and disseminating the above-mentioned `ideas' are those same elements who promise us salvation from occupations and darkness to a brighter and more glowing horizon. It is also not a coincidence that the same bloc represents an anti-modern sensitivity coupled with a certain regression to what has been tried many times before, in power as well as in opposition .... As for the preachers of democracy in the United States, they had better draw lessons from what is going on. No matter how ignorant they may be, they should know how ailing societies vote, when they do."

Saghieh is not hinting. He is asserting that when the Iranians in their millions elect a president like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, when Egyptians elect the Muslim Brotherhood and when the Palestinians vote for Hamas, whose leader Khaled Meshal is a Holocaust-denier - it is better to rethink the question of democracy, just as it is well to examine the issues of education in the Arab countries. The one depends on the other, believes Saghieh.

Writer Zvi Bar'el notes that Saghieh's article is unusual in that Saghieh did not wait to ascertain whether there is anyone else besides him who deplores Holocaust denial. Bar'el comments on Saghieh's timing noting that Saghieh published the day that Ahmadinejad proposed the establishment of a research institute to study and publish information on the Holocaust, and the day on which a "correction" was published with remarks by the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood movement in Egypt, the knights of the new democracy there.