A former Reagan administration figure, Marshall Breger, helped create a trip to the Nazi Death Camps by several American Muslim religious leaders. They were accompanied by various Obama officials in the hopes of limiting Holocaust Denial among the Islamic Community.

Krakow, Poland — It was a perfect summer day at the Dachau concentration camp. The clear skies and pleasant breeze seemed almost offensive. And there, beneath the main monument, a bronze sculpture of writhing bodies intermeshed with barbed wire, was an uncommon sight: a group of Muslims leaders prostrate in prayer.

At the end of the service, prayer leader Muzammil Siddiqi, imam of the Islamic Society of Orange County, California, offered up an additional prayer: “We pray to God that this will not happen to the Jewish people or to any people anymore.”

Siddiqi was one of eight American Muslim leaders on a study tour to Dachau and Auschwitz that was co-sponsored by a German think tank and the Center for Interreligious Understanding, a New Jersey-based interfaith dialogue group. […]

The unusual trip was the brainchild of Marshall Breger, an Orthodox Jew and a Republican who served as a senior official in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Breger, who wore his yarmulke on every leg of the trip, said he first had the idea of organizing the expedition last year, while he was in Israel during the visit of Pope Benedict XVI. He described it simply as a kind of eureka moment.

“There is a view that there is growing anti-Semitism in the Muslim world, reinforced by people like President [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad, that there is growing Holocaust denial in the Muslim world,” explained Breger, now a law professor at Catholic University. “In light of that, the idea was to offer education to those who might not have the kind of knowledge that we’ve had about World War II and the Jewish community, and to do this in a public way.”

Not surprisingly, many of the Imams who traveled to Dachau and Auschwitz were deeply moved. Many remarked how they had learned things that they had not been taught much about as children regarding the suffering of the Jews in WWII. Many have pledged to prepare sermons and articles about the Holocaust now that they have witnessed the horrific evidence that still exists.

What was surprising was the lack of support Breger found among prominent Jewish organizations in America:

Breger related that he had appealed to numerous Jewish organizations for financial assistance without luck, as he sought to make the trip a reality. But the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, a think tank affiliated with Germany’s Christian Democratic Union, agreed almost immediately upon being approached.

I commend the trip and Breger’s attempt to reach out to a leaders of a faith tradition that, sadly, many Jews and many other Americans consider their “enemy.” The Holocaust was one of the worst mass slaughters of the twentieth Century and certainly the most infamous because of it was accomplished as an intentional policy using all the means of the modern industrialized state to murder Jews, Roma, Gays and other “undesirables.” To deny that it occurred or that Jews were its principle target is to deny that the Earth revolves around the Sun.

Now, can we have a similar trip of American Jewish leaders and Rabbis (not those already associated with the Peace Movement) to visit Gaza and the West Bank? The practice of ethnic cleansing and “apartheid” being practiced today by the Israeli government, would also be an “eye opener” I believe for many Jewish Americans who support Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians without question.

Are the two events equivalent? That is not the point, and I will not engage in a comparison of relative suffering. An evil is being perpetrated by the Israeli government, just as South Africans of primarily Dutch heritage in control of South Africa’s government during the 20th Century perpetrated an evil against the majority African population and all who opposed its policies of apartheid. One does not compare evils, one exposes and then opposes them.

No one should be deliberately denying the Holocaust for political gain or to spread hatred and anti-semitism. That is rightly anathema to me and I hope all decent people of whatever faith or political ideology. However, neither should we, Americans of whatever faith or humanistic tradition, deny what is happening right now to the people who reside in Gaza and the West Bank at the hands of the Israeli government, Israeli settlers and the Israeli Defense Force.

Just watch:

And if you want documentation, read the Goldstone report commissioned by the UN after the 2009 Israeli attack on Gaza. It provides more than enough evidence that Israel is a willing participant in war crimes and crimes against humanity; it is not simply the “terrorist” Hamas organization which is to blame as many would like to believe.

Perhaps a similar trip to Gaza by American Jewish and Christian leaders who support Israel’s policies is just the thing to continue this dialogue and educate everyone about the ability of even former victims to behave toward others with the evil that was directed at them once upon a time.