Arabes et la Shoah

Currently up: Gilbert al-Ashqar / Achcar's The Arabs and the Holocaust, as tr. GM Goshgarian 2010.

I'd seen this around in 2010. I looked up the index and did not find the word "Farhud" in it. I found instead Edward Said (pro), Bernard Lewis (against), and a blurb by Rashid Khalidi. 2010-Me gave this book a big miss. This book I have here, now, seems to have been sold by Picador in Israel 2016 before making it to 2nd and Charles over in Broomfield, 2018. Where everyone ignored it until, apparently, 2021-Me and his six-dollar bill burning that hole in his wallet. Which 2021 persona still doesn't like Said or Khalidi, and still thinks highly of Lewis overall... but, keep reading.

As I look up Achcar's name 'round the interweb I find he is a "socialist" who hates Trump. Still, Arabes was before all that and it doesn't read as a socialist tract. Keep in mind: Bernard Lewis was pretty much a Marxist, himself. If we're keeping score mine own House of War owed much to Lewis including where he was Marxian. As to what Achcar thinks of his fellow leftie, we'll get to that.

So far I am finding it a worthy sequel to Mark Cohen's Under Crescent and Cross. It has something to offend everybody. If Arabs kill Jews in Constantine département (1934) or in Baghdad (1941), Achcar will tell you - which is where he utters "Farhud". If a local youth movement is pro-Nazi, like the Futuwwa, Achcar will tell you. And... if local Arab movements or local Jews excoriate such pogroms, as most did, Achcar will tell you.

The "Arab world" was a wide and diverse land, analogous to talking about the "Hispanic world". Over the 1930s the peoples here worried about European colonialism, especially those in Algeria and Libya whither French and Italians were settling in. They could see a Jewish colonialism on its way. The consensus was that Europeans should quit persecuting their Ashkenazim and also Algerians should not persecute the Sephardim that they'd got. Later they would slam Gaylani in Iraq for what he'd been up to. Palestine was the issue (we'll get to why): this was, under the Mandate, becoming a magnet for Jews everywhere.

Ashcar finds the 1930s Near East lacking in nearly the "anti-Semitism" that common European midwit opinion over the early 2000s has assumed of that earlier era. I mean, sure: it existed, as Constantine proves. But when and where such outbursts burst out, most Arabs (quite a few still Christians who, as Cohen has documented, were more antiJewish than were Muslims) considered the thuggery an embarrassment and an evil. Some thinkers even argued for a panSemitism which would include Jews, as long as those Jews did not immigrate into Palestine. Others offered to open up their own countries to refugees, as the Syrians had done for the Armenians and other Christians fleeing the Young Turks. Again: as long as these refugees did not swamp Palestine.

Achcar has harsh words for Bernard Lewis, whose 1986 book on Arab antiSemitism really was not on par with, say, The Political Language of Islam nor the earlier (magisterial) summaries of the Arabs in history. Achcar hadn't read Cohen but I get the feeling he'd approve, as I approve, despite both of us thinking less of Lewis than Cohen did. Achcar does approve Lewis' The Jews of Islam, which book I haven't read myself.

Achcar also cannot stand Stefan Wild, who in 1985 seems to have botched a study on fascist influence upon Arab nationalisms. As mentioned, sometimes the "Nazi" influence went more to supporting the Semites - including Jews - against the Aryan phantasies of Europe at the time. The late 1930s Ba'th ideology argued more for a local social-democracy than for anything coming out of Berlin or even Rome (it got... worse, as Achcar notes). The "Young Egypt" was just a clownshow, to such a degree Abdel Nasser quit it 1937 in disgust.

Achcar notes the early Zionist-Nazi alliance, the Ha'avara. This alienated the Arabs and did not endear them. The Arabs were pro-German... over the 1920s, just because, unlike France, Italy, and England, the Germans weren't marching their troops around Arab cities. The Nazis changed that happy state of affairs by exiling their Jews over there.

That said, Achcar does not go nearly as far as Tom Suarez and others in the Unz sphere. The Jews did engage in some terrorism and, on some occasions, massacre. These attacks - Achcar must point out - pale before the slaughters enacted in the Algerian départements; which in turn were as nothing to what was going on south of the Sahara or, for that matter, north of the Cilician Gates. Even some Palestinian activists had to admit their difficulties in getting others to care about their plight when others would say back, "well... you're here to tell the tale, that's not the case for a lot of Jews".

UPDATE 8:30 PM MST - Rooting about the 'Tubes, to the extent Google lets me, I am told the latter part of this book is worse. I couldn't find "Achcar" over at (say) JihadWatch, since 2003 (which is before our scope); but Achcar's book poked Daniel Pi(e)pes by name, so the Pipes forum has pointed me to several antiAchcar rebuttals some of which are hitting the earlier parts of the book.

FIN 5/1 2 PM - Overall, a highly spotty work. I've had to deal with some personages and events in their own essays. Let us all point and laugh at his claim that Dubya was America's most right-wing President up to 2008, which just shows how little Achcar knows or cares what "the Right" means.

We might also discuss to what degree "Islamophobia" is "racism", especially from one who doesn't practice a lot of Islam himself - this, itself, conceals his own racial asabiya I dare say. Or to what degree "racism" even has meaning but ... well, socialist.