On Thursday, January 20, the United Nations General Assembly passed “by consensus” – meaning no vote was taken – a resolution calling on the world’s states, and on the tech giants of the Internet, to work to combat Holocaust denial.
A report on the resolution can be found here.
The measure was submitted by Israeli Ambassador Gilad Erdan on the 80-year anniversary of the Wannsee Conference, when senior Nazi leaders met to discuss the systematic annihilation of Jews in Europe, known as the “Final Solution.”
Ambassador Erdan stated ahead of the vote that “this will be the first time that the UN General Assembly will explicitly require internet giants to take responsibility for the hatred and incitement spread on their platforms.” Facebook, In particular, which is more powerful than many states in molding the minds of men, has done far too little to ban antisemitic material, including Holocaust denial, from its platform.
“Anyone who denies or distorts the atrocities that took place in the Holocaust for Jews is complicit in spreading hatred and legitimizing attacks against Jews, as we have seen this past weekend in Texas,” Erdan added, referring to a gunman who entered a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, and took four people hostage on Jan. 15.
More from Erdan’s speech before the resolution was adopted:
“The resolution draws on the widely-adopted International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism to identify Holocaust denial, and calls on UN member states to combat the phenomenon, especially on online platforms.
“It also places responsibility on social media giants, including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, to remove hateful content from their platforms, while urging countries to develop and implement Holocaust education programs. UN bodies, in turn, are given guidance to formulate programs against Holocaust denial, and to promote Holocaust remembrance in collaboration with civil society.
“The frightening rise of antisemitic attacks and Holocaust denial obliges all the leaders of UN member states and of the UN itself to not only speak but also to act,” Erdan argued. “If no immediate action is taken, we might see other terrible attacks committed against Jews.”
In recent months, the Israeli ambassador engaged officials from other UN member states to rally support for the initiative.
Action was taken; the resolution was adopted by consensus, with only the Iranians expressing their displeasure. Not even the “State of Palestine” dared to object, although the most famous Holocaust denier in the world today is Mahmoud Abbas, who in light of that just-adopted resolution, deserves a closer look.
Holocaust Denial is a favorite sport and a pastime among a certain group of Muslims who cannot allow themselves to admit that there had ever been a Holocaust in which six million Jews were murdered, for recognition of that truth might increase sympathy for the Jews, and thus for the Zionists, and that would never do. In France, some Muslim students have refused to study the Holocaust, which is part of the national history curriculum, for that very reason: they don’t want to hear about it, they don’t want to think about it, they don’t want anyone else to learn about it. I doubt that this UN Resolution will have much effect on Muslim populations in Europe, or in such Muslim lands as Iran, Pakistan, and the so-called “State of Palestine,” but It will be implemented in the Muslim states that have joined the Abrahamic Accords, especially the U.A.E., but also in Bahrain, and Morocco.
The best known of the Arab Holocaust deniers is none other than Mahmoud Abbas, President-for-Life of the Palestinian Authority, now in the 17th year of his four-year term. In 1984, he earned his doctorate at Patrice Lumumba University with a thesis entitled The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism. According to Abbas, the Zionists were in cahoots with the Nazis: those wicked Zionists figured that if the Nazis persecuted Jews in Europe, more of them would flee to Palestine. And for the Zionists, that was all that mattered.
In his thesis, Abbas said the “so-called” Holocaust had been exaggerated and Zionists had created the “myth of the six million dead,” which was, according to Abbas, a “fantastic lie.”
Here is a key paragraph in Abbas’ dissertation:
“It seems that the interest of the Zionist movement, however, is to inflate this figure [of Holocaust deaths] so that their gains will be greater. This led them to emphasize this figure [six million] in order to gain the solidarity of international public opinion with Zionism. Many scholars have debated the figure of six million and reached stunning conclusions — fixing the number of Jewish victims at only a few hundred thousand.”
Elsewhere in his work, Abbas says that perhaps a somewhat greater number or Jews, possibly as many as 800,000, died. But he was sure of one thing –the total was nowhere near six million; that claim had to have been a deliberate fabrication.
I wonder if the New York Times, or The Washington Post, or The Guardian, in reporting on the U.N.’s adoption of this resolution, will bother to mention Mahmoud Abbas’ very own record of Holocaust denial, or will those newspapers, so unsympathetic in their coverage of Israel, so favorable in reporting on the Palestinians, keep quiet about Abbas’ little hardly-worth-mentioning peccadillo? I think we both know the answer to that.
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