PLO Article Endorses Holocaust as Hoax : Revisionism: Officials from Wiesenthal center plan to protest in Geneva.

An article in a Cyprus-based magazine associated with the Palestine Liberation Organization has endorsed the view of Holocaust revisionists that the Nazi extermination program was a hoax perpetrated by Jews.

Officials from the Simon Wiesenthal Center of Los Angeles will meet in Geneva with the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross on Monday to protest the article. It appeared last July in the Balsam, a publication of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, the humanitarian arm of the PLO. The article, in Arabic, only recently came to the attention of Westerners.

Although some Palestinians have espoused similar views, the PLO itself has never before taken up the revisionist cause, Middle East experts say.

“This may well be path-breaking for the PLO,” said Daniel Pipes, director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia.

Deborah E. Lipstadt, a historian at Occidental College who is writing a book about Holocaust revisionism, said: “They (the PLO) have made hints at it, but nothing I have ever seen has been this explicit.”

But Palestinian officials say the article does not reflect a turnabout in their thinking. “Our official position is that we don’t question the Holocaust,” said Khalil Foutah, assistant director of the Palestine Affairs Center in Washington. “We feel sorry that it happened.”

The article in Balsam, which has a circulation of 10,000 and is distributed throughout the Arab world, cites the 1976 work of French literature scholar Robert Faurisson in challenging the existence of the death camps.

“The lie concerning the existence of gas chambers enabled the Jews to establish the State of Israel,” Syrian writer Ream Arnouf asserts in the article. She goes on: “Faurisson described the lie about the gas chambers as a historical deception, which allowed large-scale extortion, which benefited Israel and international Zionism at the expense of the German people but not its leaders and the whole of the Palestinian people.”

The Wiesenthal Center last month called on the International Committee of the Red Cross “to condemn this terrible provocation and to immediately discontinue (its) relationship with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society.” Led by Dr. Fathi Arafat, the brother of PLO leader Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian group has non-voting observer status in the international organization.

Although officials of the Geneva-based committee have agreed to meet with the Wiesenthal Center’s European director, Red Cross Deputy Director Francois Bugnion said there is no chance the Palestinian society would be expelled.

Reached at his office in Cyprus, Dr. Imad Horani, a physician who serves as editor of Balsam, said Arnouf’s article does not represent the Palestinian Red Crescent Society’s official position. The editors made a mistake in not saying so when the article ran, he said, adding: “In our next edition we will say it is not our official opinion.”

But he maintained that the magazine was justified in publishing the article. “We are not a political magazine,” he explained. “We are not supposed to have only one opinion.”

For the International Committee of the Red Cross, staffed by Swiss nationals, the protest over the Balsam article is the latest in a series of conflicts with Jewish leaders. The group has been widely criticized for failing to do enough to save Jews during the Holocaust. Last year, in response to a book by a Swiss historian documenting these charges, committee president Cornelio Sommaruga acknowledged that more could have been done.