By
Ayaan Hirsi Ali:
As a child growing up in Saudi Arabia, I remember my teachers, my mom, and our neighbors telling us practically on a daily basis that Jews are evil, the sworn enemies of Muslims, and that their only goal was to destroy Islam. We were never informed about the Holocaust. I remember that the building of mosques and donations to hospitals and the poor went hand in hand with the cursing of Jews. If we ever wanted to know peace and stability, and if we didn't want to be wiped out, we would have to destroy the Jews. For those of us who were not in a position to take up arms against them, it was enough for us to cup our hands, raise our eyes heavenward, and pray to Allah to destroy them.
This is the Saudi Arabia whose thinly veiled "peace plan" for the obvious destruction of Israel is what Amir Peretz calls a "good starting point" for the next "peace process."
For the majority of Muslims in the world, the Holocaust is not a major historical event that they deny. We simply do not know it ever happened because we were never informed of it. For generations, the leaders of Muslim countries have been spoon-feeding their populations a constant diet of propaganda similar to the one that generations of Germans (and other Europeans) were fed. In Europe, the logical conclusion was the Holocaust. The world needs to be informed again and again about the Holocaust - not only in the interest of the Jews who survived and their offspring but in the interest of humanity.
