Muslim religious leaders condemn Holocaust deniers

Mulsim religious leaders issue a statement condemning any attempts to deny or justify the Holocaust.

WARSAW: Muslim religious leaders and scholars from around the globe issued a joint statement Monday condemning any attempts to deny or justify the Holocaust in which six million European Jews perished under Nazi Germany.

"We bear witness to the absolute horror and tragedy of the Holocaust where millions upon millions of human souls perished, more than half of whom were people of the Jewish faith," said a statement signed by 10 leading Islamic figures including President of the Islamic Society of North America, Imam Mohamed Magid and India's Chief Imam, Umer Ahmed Ilyasi.

"We acknowledge, as witnesses, that it is unacceptable to deny this historical reality and declare such denials or any justification of this tragedy as against the Islamic code of ethics," they said, adding they "stand shoulder to shoulder with our Jewish brothers and sisters in condemning anti-Semitism in any form".

Imams and Muslim intellectuals from Bosnia, India, Indonesia, Jordan, the Palestinian Territories, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United States knelt in solemn prayer for Holocaust dead at Auschwitz on May 22, their foreheads touching the ground before the notorious Wall of Death at the former Nazi German death camp in southern Poland.

They offered the prayers as part of an anti-genocide programme which also saw them meet Holocaust survivors and their saviours in an emotional encounter at Warsaw's synagogue a day earlier.

"With the disturbing rise of anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of hatred, rhetoric and bigotry, now more than ever, people of faith must stand together for truth, peace and justice," their Monday statement said.

"Together, we pledge to make real the commitment of 'never again' and to stand united against injustice wherever it may be found in the world today," it concluded.

Their visit was part of a Holocaust awareness and anti-genocide programme organised in part by the US State Department's Office of International Religious Freedom.

Of the six million Jews killed by the Nazis during World War II, a million were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau, mostly in its notorious gas chambers, along with tens of thousands of others including Poles, Roma and Soviet prisoners of war.

Operated by the Nazis from 1940 until it was liberated by the Soviet Red Army on January 27, 1945, Auschwitz was part of a vast and brutal network of death and concentration camps across Europe set up as part of Adolf Hitler's "Final Solution" of genocide against an estimated 10 million European Jews.

Once Europe's Jewish heartland, Poland saw 90% of its 3.3 million pre-war Jewish citizens killed out under Nazi German occupation between 1939 and 1945.