Please thank the Guardian for two related commentaries on 4 November 2008. One is by columnist Anne Karpf, entitled "Islamofascist slanders." The other is by Canon Dr Paul Oestreicher, a former chair of Amnesty International UK, entitled "The legacy of Kristallnacht."

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Below are extracts of each commentary, and links to the full pieces.

Islamofascist slanders

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/04/israelandthepalestinians-middleeast1

"It is, perhaps, understandable that Israel invoked the spectre of a Holocaust in the Middle East in the aftermath of the liberation of the concentration camps; but Israeli historians have documented the ways in which, as the country became the dominant military power in the region, successive Israeli prime ministers deployed it as an ideological tool, even as the state demonstrated indifference to real Holocaust survivors in its midst. No one collapsed the differences between the Nazi genocide and the Middle East conflict more unashamedly than Menachem Begin who, at the height of his country's bombardment of Beirut, sent a telegram to Ronald Reagan declaring that he felt as though he was facing Berlin where Hitler and his henchmen were hiding in a bunker."

"…the biggest weapon wielded by those intent on confusing Arabs or Muslims with Nazis is the person of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinian leader known as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. In a new book, Icons of Evil, two American academics rehash the charges against the Mufti - that he received funding from the Nazis, met Hitler, sat out much of the war in Berlin, and helped establish a Muslim-Balkan unit in the Waffen-SS. In their inflation of the importance of the Mufti (an inflation deliberately encouraged in Israel by the 1961 Eichmann trial), what such accounts fail to provide is evidence that the Mufti gained any power over Nazi policy. Conversely, plenty of evidence shows he lost almost all his influence over Palestinian Arabs in the period. More recently, consanguinity is claimed between the Mufti and Yasser Arafat and Saddam Hussein - all of whom are brought in to retrospectively implicate the Palestinians in the Holocaust, as if this might somehow prove that they're entitled to only a small portion of their own land."

"Since the Jewish genocide is used so shamelessly in legitimation of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians, it's hardly surprising if many Arabs and Muslims respond either with Holocaust denial or by trying to appropriate the Holocaust themselves. In a mirror-image of Arabs-are-Nazis, Zionism-is-Nazism: they accuse Israel of acting like Nazis even while they represent Jews in the crude and offensive stereotypes used by Nazi propaganda."

"Invoking the Holocaust won't help solve the Middle East crisis, nor assuage the genuine anxiety felt by Jews who survived it."

The legacy of Kristallnacht

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/04/germany-secondworldwar

"An even sadder consequence of this story of anti-Jewish inhumanity is that many of the survivors who fled to Palestine did so at the expense of the local people, the Palestinians, half of whom were driven into exile and their villages destroyed. Their children and children's children live in the refugee camps that now constitute one aspect of the Israeli-Palestinian impasse that embitters Islam and threatens world peace: all that a consequence of Nazi terror and indirectly of the Christian world's persecution of the Jewish people over many centuries."

"With fear bred into every Jewish bone, it is tragic that today many Israelis say of the Palestinians, as once the Germans said of them: 'The only solution is to send them away.' However understandable this reaction may be, to do so, or even to contemplate it, is a denial of all that is good in Judaism. To create another victim people is to sow the seeds of another holocaust."

"Today, those of us who offer our solidarity to the minority of Israelis working - in great isolation - for justice for the Palestinian people, are often accused of being antisemitic. The opposite is true."