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Marshall & Sayeed - I’m incredibly proud of you guys.  What they did was simply incredible.  Each went outside it’s own constituency and then inside the other’s “fold” in order to see things from a different perspective.  This is the kind of radical courage and engagement it will take and it has always taken for people to get clear views of things and then lead.  Talk is nice, but it’s also cheap.

Changing perceptions Muslims take ‘historic’ visit Auschwitz, Dachau
by Adam Kredo
Staff Writer
For Sayyid Syeed, the Holocaust “is not just a Jewish issue”—it’s a very real warning for all of humanity.“It’s something that not only can happen once, but again and again,” noted Syeed, a Muslim interfaith activist who made that point with a renewed sense of urgency following what he termed a “historic” tour of the Nazi death camps Dachau and Auschwitz.  Syeed—along with eight other American Muslim leaders—spent five days earlier this month investigating the historical remnants of the Shoah, touring the former Nazi death factories and meeting with survivors.

The trip, ostensibly the first of its kind, left the Muslim leaders jarred, and some fearing that with anything less than hypervigilance, a new genocide could erupt at anytime—and against any religious group.

“If we are not collectively as a human family watching” out for odious rhetoric that aims to scapegoat a particular group, “it could happen anytime, anywhere,” said Syeed, the national director for the Islamic Society of North America’s Office of Interfaith and Community Alliances.

With contentious national debates such as a Muslim center two blocks from New York’s Ground Zero stirring anti-Muslim sentiments, it’s vital that “young people in the Muslim community and Jewish community ... recognize how mankind can go to the lower of the low so they can prevent it ... and will not be silent when they see the demonization of people,” said Mohamed Magid, imam and executive director of the ADAMS Center (All Dulles Area Muslim Society), labeling the Shaoh “a lesson for all humanity.”

The eight Muslim leaders who participated in the Aug. 8-12 study tour weren’t the most likely of candidates, according to Rabbi Jack Bemporad, a co-organizer of the excursion.
Though each of them is a well-established interfaith leader—and most fall on the more moderate end of the Islamic spectrum—“they’re not necessarily those who are completely and unquestionably yes-men to Jewish positions. They come to this with a certain amount of critical independence,” explained Bemporad, director of the New Jersey-based Center for Inter-Religious Understanding.

One of the Muslim delegates, Yasir Qadhi of Connecticut’s Al Maghrib Institute, had notoriously denied major aspects of the Shoah just about a decade ago, though he later retracted those statements, attributing them to ignorance.

Another delegate, Muzammil Siddiqui, an imam from Orange County, Calif., has taken heat for failing to condemn the terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah. That, in part, may be the reason why trip organizers couldn’t secure a single Jewish funder, despite numerous appeals.

Explained the tour’s creator, Marshall Breger, an Orthodox Jew who is a law professor at the District’s Catholic University: “I thought I would raise the matter with some Jewish organizations involved in this activity,” but instead found himself rebuked.
Instead, the trip was paid for by the Konrad Anenauer Foundation, a German think-tank.

Declining to name which Jewish organizations he initially approached, Breger, who served as an official in both the Reagan and Bush I administrations, said, “I do not follow the advice of some Jewish groups ... who make a list of approved and disapproved Muslim groups based on their views.”
Rather, said Breger, “my goal was to get people who had significant constituencies,” and could carry the stories of Adolf Hitler’s heinous crimes back to their congregants.
Delegates needed only to express an earnest willingness to investigate one of history’s darkest periods.

“You should not limit yourself to people who agree with you. If you expose people to new experience, they might change,” he said.  Most of the Muslim leaders, it seems, began their journey with very little knowledge about the Holocaust.

Growing up in India, explained ISNA’s Syeed, the Holocaust was rarely discussed. “It was just a footnote.”  Even after immigrating to America, where Syeed and the ADAMS Center’s Magid both studied the details of Hitler’s extermination plan, the event still felt distant, they said.

“When you witness it, it’s different from knowing it from books,” explained Magid, who plans to distribute an essay about his experiences. “When the physical evidence is before your eyes, it’s different than someone telling you.”

A meeting held at Auschwitz with Wilhelm Brasse, a non-Jewish survivor who was forced by the Nazis to take pictures of Jewish prisoners inside the camp, exposed to Magid just how sinister Hitler’s regime truly was.  Brasse recalled to the group how he was forced to take photographs of naked Jewish children.

“I was devastated” while listening to the stories, Magid recounted. “I cannot imagine a human being in their right mind would take a child and hurt them. ... When I came back [home], I had to hug my children.”

Before the end of their journey, the eight leaders jointly authored a statement condemning Holocaust denial. It reads in part: “We condemn any attempts to deny this historical reality and declare such denials or any justification of this tragedy as against the Islamic code of ethics. We condemn anti-Semitism in any form.”

Hannah Rosenthal, the State Department’s anti-Semitism envoy, was just one of several government officials who accompanied the Muslims on the trip. She praised delegates for participating in the trip, but admitted it’s not likely the experience can remedy anti-Semitism in the Muslim world. “I’m not so silly as to think that one trip and eight imams signing a statement will change age-old perceptions,” Rosenthal told The Jerusalem Post, “but it’s a very, very big step and I’m very excited about it.”