الإسلام والغرب: نحو عالم أفضل

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Jews and Arabs @ @

deployed by the Nazis, in their racial doctrine and policy. It is striking that until 2002, no inquiry had been conducted – or at least published – regarding the presence or absence of Arab or Muslim detainees in Nazi concentration camps. Similarly, and equally striking, is the fact that there has been little reflection on the name given to the most haunting figures among Auschwitz inmates, the name Muselmänner , or Muslims. That name, widely disseminated throughout the most canonical works of post-Holocaust writing and scholarship remains massively ignored (Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab , 113ff). Any knowledge of the issues sedimented in these two illustrations would make it obvious that Holocaust denial is tantamount to colonial denial of the kind advocated by the French state. Clearly, the two events are distinct events (as all historical events must be), but they partake of the same logic, the same technologies and conceptions with which I began. Moreover, the division between them, a division upon which the Holocaust industry described by Peter Novick and Norman Finkelstein remains dependent, this division and its strategic purposes are singularly illuminated when one considers the revisionist law promulgated by the French parliament on February 23, 2005 – that is, one month minus one day after the much publicized 60 th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. For it is clear that this law was meant precisely to maintain a distinction that has been foundational to colonial knowledge and practice. At a time when the distinction between Jew and Arab is serving so many interests in Palestine/Israel (where “Jew” and “Arab” are distinct “nationalities” that ground in the law the discrimination and the separation – the apartheid logic – that constitute the dominant horizon of a “solution” to the conflict), in France (where anti-Semitism is used to erase other forms of racism, indeed, used to enforce old and new forms of racism and inequalities; where Arab Jews are turned against Arab Muslims), in the United States (where the “war on terror” is waged on Arabs and Muslims while laws condemning anti-Semitism are promulgated, while support for Israel continues to be unconditional, ensuring American hegemony in many

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