Indebted to the Nazis
It's becoming rather fashionable in some circles to accuse Israel of behaving like the Nazis - and the Nazis probably wouldn't mind this kind of "legacy": they killed one third of world Jewry, but they didn't achieve the "Final Solution" they had planned for. The Jews survived as a people and even managed to build their own state among hostile neighbors, most of whom have never clearly distanced themselves from the hatred preached by one of their political leaders, Amin al-Husseini - and there is good reason why al-Husseini is sometimes referred to as "Hitler's Mufti."
Yet, those whose views barely differ from the ones held by al-Husseini, have today the support of activists like Lauren Booth, who found it appropriate to lecture Israelis in a recent interview from Gaza: "You were in the concentration camps, and I can't believe that you are allowing the creation of such a camp yourselves." In another interview, conducted by a like-minded activist and British politician on Press TV, an Iranian English-language 24-hour news channel based in London, she was asked: "Why are they keeping you cooped up in the concentration camp called Gaza?" To which she responded enthusiastically: "I want to say thank you for using the word concentration camp because the word prison has been applied in the last few years and that's a lie."
Comments (12)Don't dare to care!
Are you Jewish? Are you an Israeli, or would you describe yourself in any way as pro-Israel? Are you an American?
If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, you better 'don't dare to care' about the suffering in Darfur. Just ignore that this Sunday, April 13th, marks Global Day for Darfur, with protests planned around the world to highlight the terrible plight of the victims of this ongoing conflict. Some estimates say that close to half a million people have been killed in Darfur in the past five years; more than a million, maybe even two million people have been driven from their homes, and every day, scores of women are raped and abused. But there are people who cynically claim that to campaign against this horrific violence is just "Darfurism", which "is central to the US/Israel agenda in the remaking of the Middle East; it ... also figures in the global resource wars. These are the reasons why Google and [the] Holocaust Museum have thrown their weight behind [the] Darfur propaganda project."
The birthday bashers
There is something sad and pathetic about the efforts of pro-Palestinian activists to hijack events celebrating Israel's 60th anniversary. These activists insist that, instead of focusing on what was achieved by those who accepted the UN partition sixty years ago and ever since invested all their energies into building a successful state, the world should be transfixed by the misery of those who rejected the partition plan and for decades invested all their energies into turning back the clock.
The false premise underlying the appeals that the plight of the Palestinians should be in the center of everyone's attention is the notion that Palestinians never had a choice: Israel's establishment had to become their "naqba" and thus the focal point of a Palestinian identity that centers on victimhood and a sense of resentment and grievance. And often enough, the very same people who are most vociferous when it comes to accusing Israel of focusing too much on the Holocaust will insist that the "naqba" is the most natural point of reference for anything and everything to do with the Palestinians.
Hate on Holocaust Memorial Day
It is utterly depressing to see how quickly a well-intentioned and well-written article about Holocaust Memorial Day will attract anonymous talkbacks that eagerly insinuate that Gaza is Warsaw, that the Palestinians are the Jews, and that the Israelis are the Nazis. Take as just one example Karen Pollock's "Confronting our past" that was published on the Guardian's website last week. Pollock who is chief executive of the British Holocaust Educational Trust tried to explain that even though more than 60 years had passed since the liberation of Auschwitz, it would be wrong to "simply consign the terror of the Holocaust to our history books"; instead, she argued, everyone still had "a duty to learn from the past and apply those lessons today". But among the first dozen readers to respond to her article, quite a few were all too sure that they had learned whatever was to learn and that they were thus ready to "apply those lessons today".
The very first talkback read: "Pity that on Sunday [i.e. Holocaust Memorial Day, January 27] the Palestinians will still be off their own land and barricaded in ghettos. Tantamount to ethnic cleansing." Talkback number 5 asserted: "What relevance does the Holocaust have for modern Britain? None." Another talkback read: "This week hundreds of thousands of Palestininans starving and dying in a ghetto closed off to the outside world (Warsaw redux) blasted thru a wall into Egypt in order to get basic goods like medicines, food, mattresses [...] Israel slowly starves and kills a powerless, impoverished people to death because they did not have the privilege of being born Jewish. [...] 60 years ago it was perfectly ok to starve Jews to death because they didn't matter as human beings to an anti-semitic world. Decades later it's perfectly ok to starve Arabs to death for the same reason." Or, another variation on the same theme: "What a pity that the memory of the Holocaust is invoked as justification for the persecution of others that continues to this day."
History lessons yet to be learned
The recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear capabilities prompted many commentators to conclude that the US intelligence community was trying to learn the lessons from its failure to accurately assess Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. However, the question is of course whether the right lessons were learned - or, as the Washington Post's "Fact Checker" columnist put it bluntly: "The history of the CIA is littered with spectacular intelligence mistakes. Sometimes, the correction of one error can lead to a new error, as analysts atone for past mistakes by moving too far in the opposite direction."
This debate reminded me of the research I did for my Ph.D thesis about the work of the CIA's predecessor during World War II, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Back then, one of the issues intelligence analysts had to deal with was information about the fate of Europe's Jews. What becomes disturbingly obvious when you study how this information was evaluated and reported is that intelligence assessments are never produced in a political vacuum; instead, and perhaps inevitably, they are influenced by the political orientation of the analysts and their interpretation of the political and military context in which the intelligence would be relevant.
About this blog The Warped Mirror
How the world sees Israel - comments and analysis by a contemporary historian.
Search this blog |
| Archives |
Combined feed for all JPost.com blogsAll Categories
Top Rated Posts
Most Commented Posts
|
Recent Comments
|
