Bunk beds in a barrack at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Photo: wiki commons.

According to a report by media analysts at MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute) an opinion piece written in a Qatari daily newspaper last month charges that the Jewish people will be punished with a second Holocaust due to their treatment of the Palestinians that places roadblocks on their quest for statehood.  According to Lebanese author and commentator Jihad Fadhl’s article in Al-Raya on May 7, the Israelis are guilty for “Judaizing” Jerusalem and the West Bank by continuing to build hotels and settlements in these areas.

In his political commentary, Fadhl compared the Israelis’ treatment towards the Palestinians to the European colonists’ treatment towards the Native Americans, charging  that both the Palestinians and Native Americans were persecuted because of their dark complexions. Furthermore, he accuses the Israelis of being inflexible and uncompromising towards the creation of a Palestinian state. “The Jews have insisted on burying alive any Palestinian hope to have Jerusalem as the capital of their mini-state, ever since they occupied Arab Jerusalem in the Nakba of 1967,” wrote Fadhl.

Fadhl’s prediction for a second Holocaust for the Jews differs from Holocaust denial in the Arab world. Instead Fadhl claims that the Jewish people deserved its atrocities through blood libels and a perceived failure to assimilate in their surrounding cultures.

Fadhl is not alone in this belief. A recent Egyptian television documentary also displayed footage of the death camps while the narrator can be overheard saying; “This is what we hope will happen, but Allah willing, at the hands of the Muslims.”

Fadhl, a literary critic, is known for his biographies of Arabic singers such as Um Kalthum and Muhammad Abd Al-Wahab.

Al-Raya is an Arabic daily newspaper based in Doha, Qatar and has been published since 1979, covering local news, sports, community events, jobs, and business as well as publishing opinions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including pieces that are openly critical of the Jewish State.