Jordan is part of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. MENA refers to those states immediately west of India, including the states on the Arabian Peninsula, and the northernmost states in Africa. These states are grouped together because of their predominantly Muslim populations. The intention of this grouping is not to reify Muslim “difference” or to “orientalize” the region. Though there are clearly ethnic differences among the peoples of such a far-flung set of countries—the disparate ethnicities here include, for instance, Berbers, Arabs, Persians, and Afghans—relations between Muslims and Jews in the region have been exacerbated by the Arab-Israeli conflict. The conflict is the overriding prism through which most political leaders and at least a large portion of the citizenry view the Holocaust, if they have knowledge of it.
JORDAN has been noted as the “Arab country in which Holocaust deniers are most active.” In April 1997, Jordanian journalist Muwaffaq Muhadin, for example, argued that “not a single country in history was founded by turning fiction into fact, save for the country of the Jewish enemy.” In 2001, the Jordanian Writers’ Association held a conference in which 200 attendees heard speeches “denying or diminishing the systemic murder of six million Jews by the Nazis." read more
In 2005, the Palestinian-Jordanian Ibrahim Alloush, while not outright denying the Holocaust, compared Nazism to ‘what the Zionist movement is doing … and what the U.S. government is doing … . The new Nazism of today wears the robes of new liberalism. The new Nazism is imperialistic and Zionist policy, witnessed on a universal and globalized level today.’
RESOURCES
GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES ON HOLOCAUST EDUCATION: Trends, Patterns, and Practices, a publication of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Salzburg Global Seminar, 2013
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