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Fast Money & Foreign Objects
MAY 20, 2014
Brendan Nyhan
@BrendanNyhan
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Brendan Nyhan
@BrendanNyhan
Continue reading the main storyShare This Page
- Sarah Palin and Michael Moore, for instance. The same logic often applies internationally.
Consider the prevalence of Holocaust denial, which a large multicountry poll released last week by the Anti-Defamation League found to be highestin the predominantly Muslim countries of the Middle East and North Africa. Among those respondents in the region who reported having heard of the Holocaust, 63 percent either said it was a myth or that the number of Jews who died had been greatly exaggerated.
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- By contrast, Holocaust denial is much more common in countries where more Muslim respondents reported a continuing struggle in their country between modernizers and Islamic fundamentalists — a striking result given that the Pew data predates the events of the Arab Spring and the messy aftermath. The most significant exception to this relationship is Morocco, where struggle over the role of the Muslim faith in political life hasseemingly intensified in recent years.
Photo
A Jewish nonprofit hosted a group of Muslim clerics from the United States on a visit to Dachau in 2010 with the aim of combating Holocaust denial. CreditTyler Hicks/The New York Times
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RECENT COMMENTS
Mark
23 minutes ago
To doubt the accuracy of the standard claim that some six million Jews perished in the (capital-H) Holocaust hardly amounts to "Holocaust...
article by the political scientists Lisa Blaydes and Drew Linzer, who found that anti-Americanism among Muslim respondents to the Pew poll was strongly associated with internal conflict among religious elites.
“When the struggle for political control between these two groups escalates,” they write, “elites of both types have incentives to ramp up anti-American appeals to boost mass support.” Conflict over the role of religion in society can lead elites to scapegoat external enemies like Jews in an effort to attract popular support. These attacks can extend to Holocaust denial, which is used to deny the suffering of Jewish people and undermine their claims to a state in Israel.
Of course, elites are not the only source of misperceptions about the existence or severity of the Holocaust, but their role in the phenomenon is hard to deny.
Brendan Nyhan is an assistant professor of government at Dartmouth College. Follow him on Twitter at @BrendanNyhan.
- http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/21/u...icmst=1388552400000&bicmet=1420088400000&_r=2
