In 2009, a fourteen-day event was held in the Indian city of Lucknow—home to a large Muslim minority—where films about the Shoah were shown and lectures on the subject delivered. Its purpose was to counteract Holocaust-denial propaganda emanating from Iran, a country with long and deep-seated cultural connections to Lucknow. There Anwar Nadeem, a distinguished Urdu-language poet, read a poem he had written about the extermination of European Jewry. Navras Aafreedi explains its significance:

The Urdu language is the lingua franca of linguistically diverse South Asian Muslims, who make up almost a third of the global Muslim population. . . . In the 18th century, it emerged as the language of Indo-Persian Muslim high culture. It is spoken as a first language by nearly 70 million people and as a second language by more than 100 million people, primarily in Pakistan and India.

In India, even those with university degrees are often completely unaware of the Holocaust, and history textbooks that cover Nazism at all often omit mention of the Holocaust. Moreover, textbooks and curricula often focus on Hitler’s abilities as an “impassioned speaker,” who “devised a new style of politics,” sometimes portraying him with outright admiration. Worse still is the attitude found in Urdu media:

As a consumer of news provided by the Urdu press, Nadeem had read much that aimed at either denying the Holocaust, minimizing its scale, obfuscating it, or simply reversing it by describing the Jewish Israelis as the present-day Nazis. Even when the Holocaust films retrospective was taking place in Lucknow, . . . the Urdu press there published front-page stories denying the Holocaust and calling it the biggest hoax of the 20th century, with the intention of sabotaging the ongoing event. . . . Muhammad Iqbal, the national poet of Pakistan, revered as the ideological father of Pakistan and one of the greatest Urdu poets ever born, is regularly cited by Urdu columnists for his anti-Jewish statements and couplets.

It was precisely these attitudes Nadeem sought to combat. A translation of his poem can be found at the link below.

Yasir Arafat was often quoted as saying that his “strongest weapon is the womb of an Arab woman.” That is, he believed the high birthrates of both Palestinians and Arab Israelis ensured that Jews would eventually be a minority in the Land of Israel, at which point Arabs could call for a binational state and get an Arab one. Using similar logic, both Israelis and their self-styled sympathizers have made the case for territorial concessions to prevent such an eventuality. Yet, Yoram Ettinger argues, the statistics have year after year told a different story:

Contrary to the projections of the demographic establishment at the end of the 19th century and during the 1940s, Israel’s Jewish fertility rate is higher than those of all Muslim countries other than Iraq and the sub-Saharan Muslim countries. Based on the latest data, the Jewish fertility rate of 3.13 births per woman is higher than the 2.85 Arab rate (since 2016) and the 3.01 Arab-Muslim fertility rate (since 2020).

The Westernization of Arab demography is a product of ongoing urbanization and modernization, with an increase in the number of women enrolling in higher education and increased use of contraceptives. Far from facing a “demographic time bomb” in Judea and Samaria, the Jewish state enjoys a robust demographic tailwind, aided by immigration.

However, the demographic and policy-making establishment persists in echoing official Palestinian figures without auditing them, ignoring a 100-percent artificial inflation of those population numbers. This inflation is accomplished via the inclusion of overseas residents, double-counting Jerusalem Arabs and Israeli Arabs married to Arabs living in Judea and Samaria, an inflated birth rate, and deflated death rate.

The U.S. should derive much satisfaction from Israel’s demographic viability and therefore, Israel’s enhanced posture of deterrence, which is America’s top force- and dollar-multiplier in the Middle East and beyond.