RUTHFULLY YOURS

Veronique Chemla’s article appears at her website
(in French):
http://veroniquechemla.blogspot.com/2010/06/le-maghreb-sous-la-croix-gammee-de-bill.html

————————————————————————-

SUNDAY, JUNE 06, 2010

Holocaust film glosses over Nazi-Arab alliance

A scene from ‘Among the Righteous’ featuring Robert Satloff in Jerusalem © WDR / © Adiel Shmit

The screening of the ‘Among the righteous’ documentary yesterday (Le Maghreb sous la croix gammee) on the Franco-German TV channel Arte has much to commend itself: based on the book by Robert Satloff, his search for ‘righteous Arabs’ who saved Jews in North Africa during World War ll is a well-intentioned attempt to make the Holocaust as relevant to Arabs as it is to Europeans. But writing on her blog, French journalist Veronique Chemla has some well-founded reservations about the film, which are summarised here:

Satloff’s search for an ‘Arab Schindler’ is remarkable, but Schindler himself was ambivalent – he was not another selfless Aristides de Souza Mendes (the Portuguese consul-general who issued visas to fleeing Jews in Bordeaux). Nor does Satloff distinguish between Arabs and Berbers.

The film glosses over Arab mass support for Nazism and extensive connections between Arabs and Nazis – up to 300,000 Muslims fought on the side of the Axis – and makes no mention of the role in the Holocaust of Hitler’s ally the Mufti of Jerusalem.

The film fails to mention that the Tunisian informer who caused the deaths of Gilbert Scemla’s two sons was freed after serving just 10 years, not 14 years. It is vague about the ‘protection’ afforded to Jews by the king of Morocco while the camera lingers on a description of discriminatory anti-Jewish ‘dahirs’, or royal decrees, in a Moroccan newspaper without explaining them, and does not mention the term dhimmitude, the dehumanising status of subjugated non-Muslim minorities. Satloff offers no proof offered for his assertion that Jews had it better under Islam than Christendom.

The film ignores the Nazi-style discrimination and exclusion in Arab countries resulting in the forced exile of a million Jews. The sunlight and shadow of Muslim-Jewish relations is missing from this account. Arab treatment of the Jews becomes a backlash to the creation (or re-creation) of Israel, and for all its good points, the film’s account of an ‘Arab or Islamically-correct’ Holocaust does not tell the whole story.

The film is to be commended for saying that the Holocaust is not just a European story. But the Arab-Muslim world has not recognised its relationship and affinity with the Nazis, and its own contribution to the Holocaust. This explains why, at the end of the film, an Arab viewer makes a comparison between the Holocaust of the Jews and the ‘Holocaust of the Palestinians’ – before a gobsmacked producer.

[…]

http://jewishrefugees.blogspot.com/2010/06/holocaust-film-glosses-over-nazi-arab.html