Madam, - Dr Hikmat Ajurri's claim that the Palestinians "do not deny and have never denied the Holocaust" (February 28th) is difficult to take seriously.
Can he really be unaware that his own President Mahmoud Abbas wrote a book in which, drawing on the "research" of well-known Holocaust deniers such as Robert Faurisson, he dismissed the accepted history of the Holocaust as "a fantastic lie", accused the Zionist movement of being the Nazis' "basic partner in crime," questioned the existence of the gas chambers and argued that the number of Jewish dead was probably lower than 1 million?
Can it also have escaped Dr Ajurri's notice that Hamas, the soon-to-be Palestinian party of government, has been denying the truth of the Holocaust since February 2000 when it issued a press release describing the Shoah as "an invented story with no basis" and "an alleged crime that never happened"?
For instance, in August 2003 Abdel Aziz Rantisi called the Holocaust "the greatest of lies" and the gas chambers a "myth" while last December Khaled Mesha'al enthusiastically endorsed the Iranian President's declaration that Zionism had invented "a legend" called "the massacre of the Jews" to further its ambitions in the Middle East.
Dr Ajurri's rejection of the claim that the Palestinian Authority is a prolific purveyor of anti-Semitism is equally surprising. Someone in his position can scarcely be unaware that the Palestinian civil administration, religious leadership and official media establishment have spent 10 years moulding ancient anti-Semitic motifs into modern anti-Zionist propaganda.
For example, the EU-funded Palestinian schoolbooks he cites in support of his argument have in fact showcased the institutional anti-Semitism of Palestinian Authority to the extent that the EU on more than one occasion has threatened to withdraw its funding if anti-Jewish references were not expunged from the texts.
In spite of this, the latest report from the Centre for Monitoring the Impact of Peace found that Palestinian school textbooks still include anti-Jewish content, notably the notorious Czarist anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which it said they "treated as a historical document."
This is hardly surprising given that the Protocols are frequently presented as fact in the official Palestinian media, featured prominently on the PA State Information Service website until May 2005 and are, like Mein Kampf, widely distributed with official sanction throughout the West Bank and Gaza where they periodically make the bestseller lists. - Yours, etc,
SEAN GANNON, Chairman, Irish Friends of Israel, Ontario Terrace, Portobello, Dublin 6.