Turkey to broadcast pro-Holocaust film

The Turkish public television (TRT) is set to air a Holocaust documentary said to be the first broadcast of its kind by a Muslim country’s national media.

A TRT spokesman said the 1985 French production, titled Shoah, will be shown on one of the network’s 14 channels, AFP reported.

Sponsored by the Paris-based Aladdin Project, the nine-hour-plus documentary is directed by Claude Lanzmann and has never been completely shown in a Muslim country.

Shoah mostly consists of interviews with those who claim to be Holocaust-survivors, exploring the alleged killing of European Jews in Nazi death camps during the World War II.

Turkey’s move can be considered as controversial and unacceptable since Muslim nations hold that Holocaust believers have lost touch with the reality and that western governments are using the saga to play the role of innocent victims.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has on several occasions called for a historical research to find realities about the Holocaust. His remarks have sparked outrage among the pro-israeli powers, which labeled him a Holocaust denier.

Prominent American scholar Norman Finkelstein argues in his book The Holocaust Industry (2000) that many exploit the myth of Holocaust as an “ideological weapon”, saying this is also the case with israel, “one of the world’s most formidable military powers, with a horrendous human rights record, [can] cast itself as a victim state” in order to garner “immunity to criticism.”

Questioning the Holocaust is an offense in Germany where the deniers could face a jail term of up to five years. ‘Holocaust denial’ is also against the law in Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Hungary, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, and Switzerland.

A French court fined author Roger Garaudy $20,000 in 1998, for questioning the Nazi Holocaust during the World War II.

The French scholar was convicted of challenging crimes against humanity and of racial libel.

In his book The Founding Myths of israeli Politics, Garaudy argued that Hitler’s killing of the Jews could not be described as genocide.

He also questioned whether gas chambers were used for mass slaughter.

Garaudy said his book was an attack on israeli government policy, which he said used the Holocaust as a “justifying dogma” for its actions.

A former Communist, Garaudy converted to Islam in 1982 and adopted the name “Ragaa.” He has become a prominent Islamic commentator and supporter of the Palestinian cause.