New York - The UN General Assembly commemorated the Holocaust with a historic special session on Monday. The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) sent telegrams to the Arab countries strongly condemning the refusal of their delegates, with the exception of Jordan’s, to attend this session. But even the Jordan attendee, UN Ambassador Prince Ra’ad al-Hussein, publicly attacked Israel at the event saying, “one people dominating another, denying the Palestinian Arab many of its most basic rights, and so, with the passage of time, also degrading it as a people.”

ZOA National President Morton A. Klein (himself a child of Holocaust survivors) said, “This appalling refusal of the Arab world to participate in a Holocaust event, that has only to do with the massacre of six million Jews and nothing to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict, exposes the true nature of the Arab world’s ongoing war against Israel. They’ve now made it clear that their hatred is against Jews, not simply against Israel’s negotiation positions.

“But we shouldn’t be so shocked because the media and sermons and speeches in the Arab nations are the most anti-Semitic in the world. Besides which the Arab regimes regularly and officially deny that the Holocaust ever occurred. Only this week, Israeli Minister Natan Sharansky said, ‘Palestinian Arab leader Abbas has engaged in the promotion of genocide. As in Nazi Germany, there is an entire culture of hatred in Palestinian society today, from textbooks to crossword puzzles, from day camps to TV music videos – calling for the murder of Jews is the end result.’

“One would think the Palestinian Arab leader Mahmoud Abbas would have been especially interested in sending a representative in order to make public amends for his own outrageous Holocaust denial. Abbas wrote a book in 1983 stating that there was no Holocaust and that the Zionists and Nazis collaborated to kill several hundred thousand Jews in order to create sympathy for the establishment of a Jewish State. Holocaust denier Abbas’ book was entitled, ‘The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between the Nazis and the Leadership of the Zionist Movement.’” (©2005 Zionist Organization of America 01/26/05)