Mick Hartley

At Engage, Matthias Küntzel and Colin Meade review (pdf) Gilbert Achcar’s The Arabs and the Holocaust:

[T]his is a book in which an author from the political left seeks to protect the dogmas of Western anti-Zionism from the reality of Arab antisemitism.

It's a comprehensive demolition:

How can the success of this book and its author be explained? Leaving aside the gullibillity of an academic milieu in which historical truth has increasingly been replaced by “narratives” and the transmission of facts by post-modern relativism, this book clearly meets an urgent need: it helps a particular group of academics to rationalize their own intellectual self-deception.

Declaring solidarity with movements such as Hamas and Hezbollah, despite the fact that they deny the Holocaust and base their policies on Nazi-like antisemitism, exposes the left-wing anti-Zionists whom Achcar represents and for whom he writes not only to external criticism, but also to inner tensions. Achcar’s book is intended to enable his political allies to overcome those tensions and so ensure the smooth continuation of the anti-Israel alliance between “anti-fascists” and “anti-racists” on the one hand and Islamist antisemites and Holocaust deniers on the other.

But read the whole thing.

Atchar responds – Pro-Zionist zealots and intellectual dishonesty (pdf again) – mainly with abuse:

Küntzel is the author of an infamous Islamophobic book that was translated from German by Meade. It was only praised in Zionist propaganda outlets…

And Küntzel and Meade respond in turn to Atchar. 

One of the intellectual self-deceptions which Atchar practices, according to Küntzel and Meade, is his distinction between Holocaust denial in the West, and Holocaust denial in the Arab and Muslim worlds. The former is to be condemned, but the latter is forgiveable because it is, in Atchar's view, caused by “rage and frustration over the escalation of Israeli violence” and stems “mainly from ignorance”. Similarly all manifestations of Arab antisemitism are somehow not to be taken too seriously because….well, because it's different. Because they're different. They don't know any better. Because – the unspoken but all too familiar assumption – Arabs, unlike Europeans and Jews, are not to be viewed as responsible moral agents.