The Anti-Defamation League has asked the U.S. Embassy in Qatar to pressure Doha to remove anti-Semitic titles from its government-sponsored book fair, which it said “has a record of promoting blatantly anti-Semitic content.”
The 29th Doha International Book Fair ran Dec. 1-8.
In a statement posted on its website on Friday, the ADL noted that the annual book fair routinely promotes blatantly anti-Semitic books, including titles such as Lies Spread by the Jews, The Myth of the Nazi Gas Chambers and Talmud of Secrets: Facts Exposing the Jewish Schemes to Control the World.
Other anti-Semitic titles sold on the book fair’s website include an Arabic version of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke’s anti-Semitic tract exaggerating Jewish influence in the United States, and Henry Ford’s The International Jew, which teaches as historical fact the seminal anti-Semitic hoax, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the statement said.
The ADL has written to U.S. Chargé d’Affaires at the American Embassy in Qatar William Grant, asking that “he leverage the embassy’s participation in the book fair to urge the Qatari government to stop promoting such hateful content.”
“Once again, this high-profile, government-sponsored book fair is being used to promote blatantly anti-Semitic books that deny the Holocaust, and accuse Jews of controlling the world and trying to undermine Islam,” said Jonathan A. Greenblatt, ADL CEO and national director.
“We call on the U.S. embassy to make clear to Qatar’s government that this hate is unacceptable.”
In the letter to the U.S. Embassy in Qatar, the ADL noted that as the Qatari government is responsible for the content at this event, the American envoy should use his “contacts with the book fair’s governmental organizers—and with the Qatari government more broadly—to ensure as soon as possible that this sort of hatred is no longer propagated at an event that boasts of the participation of the U.S. Embassy.”
It is unclear whether the ambassador did as the ADL asked.