In fact, you're in the minority if you don't.



Some political leaders and officials in the Middle East have used the populist rhetoric of Holocaust denial to bolster their own positions, reinforcing the lack of knowledge about the horrors the Jews suffered in the Second World War in those societies. "There is definitely a high proportion of people who genuinely believe out of ignorance – and it is a matter of ignorance really, because there is very little education and knowledge of the Holocaust in the Arab countries – that this is something that has been exaggerated or even invented for the purpose of getting the West to support Israel," Professor Gilbert Achcar, a Middle East expert at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), told IBTimes UK. "

Of course, it's a very, very foolish theory. But ignorance allows such views to be widespread. Senior politicians are no exception to the rule of ignorance. The selection of leaders in the Middle East is not based on academic achievement or intellectual capacity." Achcar, who wrote a book in 2010 titled The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives, said the explosion of Holocaust denial in the region "is actually linked to a regression in the quality of the intellectual debate" after the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and religious conservatism since the 1960s, such as the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

There is also an uncomfortable history between the Arabs and Nazis. Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem before and during the Second World War, was a collaborator with Hitler's Nazi regime. Not only did the Mufti hate British imperial rule, he also hated the Jews who had been migrating into Palestine as they fled persecution in Europe – and he knew there was a genocide taking place under Hitler.