Imam: Holocaust
Denial Cannot Be Islamic Cause
By Andrea Barron
Eight
days after Iran held a two-day conference denying
the Nazi Holocaust, Washington-area Muslim leaders
gathered at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum to
honor the memory of Jews murdered during the Shoah.
Standing before the eternal flame in the DC museum's
Hall of Remembrance, they lit candles to remember
Jewish suffering.
Muslims "have to learn from the lessons of
history and to commit ourselves, never again,"
said Imam Mohamed Magid of the All Dulles Area
Muslim Society (ADAMS) in Sterling.
Joining him were American University professor
Akbar Ahmed, who helped arrange the visit on Wednesday
of last week, museum director Sara Bloomfield,
three Holocaust survivors, ADAMS president Rizwan
Jaka and representatives from the Council on Islamic-American
Relations (CAIR), the Muslim Public Affairs Council
and the Arab American Institute.
Magid, whose father had been a mufti of Sudan,
had heard about the Teheran conference on his
car radio. He wanted to go beyond condemning the
event by organizing a delegation of Muslim leaders
to declare their solidarity with Jewish victims.
"No Muslim anywhere has the right to turn
Holocaust denial into an Islamic cause,"
the Sudanese native said. "I applaud the
Jewish community for making sure humanity never
forgets how the Nazis murdered Jews, gypsies and
disabled people, including more than 1 million
children. They set an example for the rest of
us on how to make people more aware of horrors
like the genocide in Rwanda and slavery."
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad saw the
Tehran meeting, which brought together Holocaust
deniers from all over the world including former
Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, as a vehicle to
delegitimize the state of Israel, which he wants
to see "wiped off the map."
Bloomfield said she was proud to be standing with
her Muslim friends at an institution devoted to
history and committed to confronting hatred. Ahmed
agreed, but also emphasized that "hate is
not only about hating Jews or anti-Semitism, but
also about Islamophobia, the hatred of Islam."
The Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at American
University, Ahmed is a longtime activist in interfaith
dialogue. For the past two years, he and Judea
Pearl, the father of slain Wall Street Journal
reporter Daniel Pearl, have led public dialogues
nationwide on Muslim-Jewish reconciliation. Last
June, he led a conversation at the museum on "How
to tackle Anti-Semitism and Anti-Americanism in
the Muslim world."
Nihad Awad, CAIR's executive director of the Council
on Islamic-American Relations, said "misguided
people" are wrong to question whether the
Holocaust took place. "Belittling the suffering
of any people contradicts Islamic teachings and
the actions of the prophet Muhammad. It's a red
line that no one should cross."
A Palestinian who grew up in Amman, Jordan, Awad
acknowledged that Jews and Muslims have differences
on contemporary issues such as the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. But, he said Muslims are reflecting
their faith when they sympathize with how Jews
suffered in Europe, and cited a Koranic verse:
"Let not the dispute with other people make
you swerve you from being just."
Halina Peabody, 74, was one of the Holocaust survivors
attending last week's event. The Bethesda resident
said she was "overwhelmed with happiness"
at this gesture by Muslim leaders.
"This makes me believe there are moderate
Muslims, but I keep wondering if they are living
under a cloud and are in danger of being assassinated,"
she worried.
Peabody, her sister and mother had survived the
war in their native Poland after buying papers
from a priest certifying that they were Catholic.
Another survivor, Silver Spring's Johanna Neumann,
and her parents were saved by Njazi and Liza Pilku,
Albanian Muslims whose names are inscribed at
the Holocaust museum and Yad Vashem among the
"Righteous Among the Nations."
The Pilkus hid Neumann's father during the war
while the teenage Johanna and her mother passed
themselves off as members of the Pilku family.
When Magid lit a candle commemorating victims
of the Holocaust, he mentioned the Pilkus. Neumann,
76, was impressed, saying, "I mentioned their
name only once in a conversation with him before
the candle-lighting ceremony."
She and her parents had fled their home in Hamburg,
Germany, in early 1939, shortly after Kristallnacht
("Night of the Broken Glass") in November
1938, the date often used to mark the onset of
the Holocaust.
On the day after the museum ceremony, Magid led
a delegation of 100 Muslims on the annual hajj
to Mecca. He said that once he returned, he wanted
to invite Neumann to address youth at the Sterling
mosque. This would not be the first time that
ADAMS reached out to the Jewish community. Last
April, it hosted a Jewish-Muslim Passover seder
for 30 people in the mosque.
Neumann said she would be pleased to speak there.
"Education is the best way to counteract
negative propaganda. I can tell them about how
my own experiences and how Albanian Muslims saved
more than a thousand Jews from the Nazis,"
she said. "This is a historical fact that
no one can dispute." (Courtesy Washington
Jewish Week)
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