Holocaust Denial: Ahmed Rami
One high-profile Arab Holocaust denier who advocated for Garaudy's acquittal
was Swedish-based Moroccan exile Ahmed Rami, creator of the Radio Islam
Web site. Once a lieutenant in the Moroccan military, Rami reportedly
played a leading role in a failed 1972 coup d'état and fled, gaining political
asylum in Sweden. In 1987, Rami began using a public access Swedish radio
station to broadcast Radio Islam, ostensibly a public relations program
for Sweden's Muslims but in fact a vehicle for unvarnished anti-Semitism.
Rami has rationalized his bigotry as support for Palestinian causes.
While he has become a source of embarrassment for serious Palestinian
activists, Holocaust deniers have unabashedly and enthusiastically associated
with him. Rami has attended forums hosted by David Irving; spoke at the
1992 IHR conference, and has often been praised by Ingrid Rimland, among
others.
Off the air from 1993 to 1995, Rami's program returned in 1996, the same
year that he established the Radio Islam Web site. From the start,
Rami's site offered visitors anti-Semitic material in English, French,
German, Swedish and Norwegian. Early versions of the site described the
"so-called 'holocaust'" as a tool used by "Zionists"
to win "sovereign rights to oppress and vilify other people,"
namely Palestinians. These "Zionists," according to Radio Islam,
have a monopoly over "information services in the West" and
bribe Western politicians to support them in their "Anti-Arab and
anti-Moslem racism" and "hatred against everything German."42
Today, visitors to the Radio Islam site are greeted with a statement
that seems to deny Rami's extremism: "No hate. No violence. Races?
Only one Human race." Yet his site has become even more bigoted than
ever and demonstrates the implicit connection between Holocaust denial
and other forms of anti-Semitism. Radio Islam promotes a myriad
of anti-Semitic works in addition to those of Holocaust deniers such as
Robert Faurisson, David Irving, Greg Raven, John Ball, and Bradley Smith.
The Radio Islam site continues to portray the Holocaust as part
of a Jewish conspiracy to draw the world's attention away from "the
ongoing Zionist war waged against the peoples of Palestine and the Middle
East" and "Zionism's totalitarian and racist backgrounds."
To support this theory, it provides numerous anti-Semitic texts that allege
Jewish conspiracies for political domination, such as The Protocols
of the Elders of Zion.
Expanding on the anti-Semitism expressed by its denial of the Holocaust,
Radio Islam equates "Jewish Racism," envisioned as Jewish
prejudice against Muslims, with "Jewish 'Religion,'" as outlined
by the Talmud. Visitors to Radio Islam can read "The Truth
About The Talmud" by Michael A. Hoffman II and Alan R. Critchley,
which asserts that Jews are impelled, by religious law, to mistreat and
attempt to dominate non-Jews. The Nature of Zionism by Vladimir
Stepin, also available at the Radio Islam site, declares that Zionism
rests on three basic beliefs: that Jews are "God's chosen people";
that all others are "merely two-legged animals (goys)," and
that "Jews have both the right and the obligation to rule the world."
Furthermore, according to Radio Islam, the Jews are not the "chosen
people" for they are not "'descendants' of the mythic Jews of
the Bible." Rather, today's Jews are "descended from Mongolians
and other Asiatic peoples who had adopted 'Judaism' as their 'religion'
over 1,000 years ago and had become know as 'Jews.'" Often advanced
by Identity believers, this theory alleges that most, if not all, Ashkenazic
Jews descended from the Khazars, an obscure Turkic people whose leaders
converted to Judaism in the eighth century. While Identity adherents employ
this theory in order to bolster their assertion that Anglo-Saxon whites
are actually the biblical Church of Israel, Rami uses it to demonstrate
that the ancestors of the Jews were not from Palestine, implying that
Israel has no right to exist.
Finally, the Radio Islam Web site voices support for the anti-Semitic
preaching of Black racist Minister Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation
of Islam (NOI). The site provides an audio recording of Farrakhan speaking,
available to Web users at the click of a mouse. Linking to the Nation
of Islam's Web page, Radio Islam calls Farrakhan "America's
most outspoken black leader" and praises Farrakhan's meetings with
"such enemies of World Zionism as Muammar Gadaffi of Libya and Saddam
Hussein of Iraq..." Additionally, the Radio Islam site links to,
and reprints much of the contents of, the Blacks and Jews Newspage,
a Web site maintained by the "Historical Research Department"
of the NOI.
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