Posted on 05/24/2006 5:48:41 AM PDT by SJackson
I have been a proud Zionist for 58 years – ever since the state of Israel blessedly came into being. I have wrestled with Jew-hatred on both the Left and the Right for nearly 40 years. I did not, however, feel compelled to break with politically correct academics until I gauged their response to the bloody intifada against Israel launched by Yasir Arafat in September 2000. Either they did not notice it or they blamed Israel for it.
That's when I knew I would have to speak out in a new way. I have done so in my last two books and in hundreds of articles, interviews, and lectures ever since. This has marked me as a "traitor" in the eyes of a great many leftist academics because I do not believe that Israel and America are the greatest terrorists in the world. I believe that al Qaeda, Palestinian human bombs, radical Islamism, Hamas, Saudi Arabia, and President Ahmadinejad's Iran are the greatest terrorist threats in the world.
I have also parted company with the view that Islamic gender and religious apartheid have somehow been caused by Western imperialism, colonialism, or racism.
Unchecked, the 2000 intifada against the Jews inevitably went global.
I do not believe that Europe or America deserved or caused 9/11 in New York and Washington, 3/11 in Madrid, 7/7 in London, or 10/05-11/05 in Paris. In his recent audiotape, bin Laden referred to the "Zionist crusader" war on Islam while he defended Islam as practiced by ethnic Arab Muslims in Sudan who are committing genocide against black African Muslims and Christians in Darfur.
On April 17, a Palestinian homicide bomber murdered nine people and injured 60 more in Tel Aviv – the Mediterranean coast city of Tel Aviv, not a settlement on the West Bank. How did the world respond? On that very day, two dozen speakers at the United Nations, mainly from Arab and Muslim countries but also from Cuba and Venezuela, delivered speeches denouncing "Israeli aggression." Iran's Ambassador, Javid Zarif, denounced Israel's "daily brutality" toward Palestinians and Israeli threats against his country. This from a man whose president has vowed to annihilate the Jewish state with nuclear weaponry, and whose government officials claim to have 40,000 human bombs ready to attack Israel and "29 targets in the West."
*****
People do not always like truth tellers. They challenge our most cherished illusions about the essential "goodness" of humanity and about what we must do in order to remain safe in a dangerous world. As Jews, we know how important memory is.
Remembering the truth about Jewish history is a sacred obligation. Hence, it is a victory for both Jewish and enlightened Western truth-telling values that we commemorate the Holocaust. Doing so is also an act of defiance and moral clarity – especially at a time when the phenomenon of Holocaust denia is growing.
Despite Austria's recent (and problematic) jailing of David Irving for the crime of Holocaust denial, Islamists and not a few Western thinkers continue to insist that the Holocaust never happened or has been wildly exaggerated. They have been published in some cases by distinguished presses and enjoy huge followings. Some say the Jews are exploiting the Holocaust in order to collect reparations money and to justify the creation of a "Nazi Apartheid" Jewish state. They say that the Jews are worse than Nazis and that Israel is perpetrating a "Holocaust" upon the very Palestinians who send human bombs to blow up Israeli civilians.
There are other forms of Holocaust denial which now characterize the new anti-Semitism. For example, the European nations that murdered its assimilated, educated, and peaceful Jewish citizens have now inherited another group of Semites: Muslims, who are far less assimilated and who are violent, not peaceful.
Europeans have had a long romance with the Noble Arab Savage whom they nevertheless brutally colonized. Now, in a frenzy of anti-racist guilt, newer generations of Europeans practice "multicultural" tolerance toward their separatist and violence-prone Muslim citizens. They do so for many reasons – but partly in order to both deny and continue the Holocaust against the Jews.
Such Europeans say: Our ancestors did not commit pogroms or a Holocaust and even if they did we have fully repented/are tired of being accused by Jews. We are now anti-racists who have welcomed twenty-thirty million fertile Muslims of color into our midst. We are not the Nazis. Israel – the Jew that got away – is the Nazi. Look at what Israelis have done to the Palestinians. Ethnic cleansing. Apartheid. Forced transfers. Human rights violations.
Orwell would weep at such a brazen misuse of language. The Europeans are projecting their own sins onto their victims, accusing them of committing crimes that characterize European and Arab, but not Israeli, history.
Israel has not committed genocide. Ethnic Arab Muslims in the Sudan have done precisely that. Israel is not a colonial power. Palestinian terrorists and Iran have colonized and occupied Lebanon. Al Qaeda dreams of a caliphate and the establishment of Islamic religious law all over the world. Israel has no such dream. Israel has been demonized for building an "apartheid" wall (i.e., the "security fence"). But now Saudi Arabia plans to build the longest wall in the world in order to keep out Iraqi-based al Qaeda terrorists. And no one says a word.
*****
To some extent, as dangerous as Holocaust denial is, Holocaust memorialization may also function as a form of denial.
How can remembering the Holocaust be a form of denial? Because in this instance it may also allow us the luxury – and the consolation – of assuming that the "worst" has already happened. Alas, this may not be true.
In addition, certain intellectuals, Jews among them, attempt to hide their rabid Jew-hatred by focusing on the European Holocaust – on all the dead Jews – as a way of diverting attention from the impending Holocaust against living Jews. Because they oppose what was done to the Jews in World War Two, they feel justified, credentialed, to say that today's attacks on Israel are "justified," that the Palestinians are now the true victims, (the "new Jews" in a sense), and the Israeli Jews are their "Nazi" persecutors.
Today the danger to Jews – as well as to the Christian West – is far graver and more complex than it was in the past. Old-fashioned Czarist-, Nazi-, and Stalinist-era anti-Semitic stereotypes (the Jews control the media and the banks, seek world domination, killed Jesus) have been added to the pre-existing Islamic views of Jews as subhuman infidels. The mix is a hot brew of relentless hatred.
Today, anti-Jewish, anti-Israeli, and anti-American propaganda is visually masterful, technologically sophisticaed, and available around the clock, especially in Arabic. Jews and Zionists can be "seen" holding a meeting of the (fake) Elders of Zion, (falsely) demanding that Jesus be tortured and crucified, committing (fake) massacres in Jenin, and stabbing non-Jewish children to death for their blood. We are also subjected to films that valorize Palestinian killers – and they are well-done and persuasive films.
One is forced to confront Big Lies at every level. The moment we deal with one lie, ten new ones take its place. Israel and Jews, especially in the Islamic media, are labeled and portrayed as vermin and as child-eating monsters. Islamists feel absolutely entitled to do this – while simulataneously protesting some fairly innocuous Danish cartoons about Mohammed.
Western appeasers are quick to sympathize with Islam's injured "honor" and view the offensive lies about Jews and Israel as Free Speech to which the Islamic world is fully entitled.
Western scholars residing at distinguished universities publish countless 21st-century versions of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. They insist that Arabs and Muslims are being racially persecuted in America and on American campuses by a Zionist cabal that controls the universities, the media, and American foreign policy. As soon as such papers are debunked as propaganda, not scholarship, guess what happens? Even more appear.
And yet there are individuals and organizations who insist that the unmasking of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel propaganda only proves that the Zionists really do control everything. In other words, lies are supposed to trump truth. When truth tellers use logic and facts they are seen as unfairly "conspiring" against the liars.
*****
In my view, all that we are currently witnessing is worse and more widespread than the propaganda against the Jews that was disseminated before the European Holocaust.
We cannot let this stand. We must expose and oppose all such lies. They are an affront not just to Jews but to Western civilization and constitute a real threat to its survival.
Jew-haters are creating a situation in which – dare I say it? I am sorry but, yes, I must say it – another mass murder, perhaps even a Holocaust-like mass murder, of Jews might be possible. In my view, it has already begun, certainly not in America and not yet in Europe, but in Israel. (I do think that the recent horrific torture and murder of Ilan Halimi in Paris is as momentous a turning point as the Dreyfus case was in its day.)
Today, Jews who live in the Jewish state – the nation that was initially envisioned as the solution to the ceaseless persecution of the Jews – are besieged. Israel endured the equivalent of 9/11 every month for four years during the intifada that began in 2000. Even in 2005, during a supposed lull in hostilities, seven Palestinian homicide attacks killed and wounded scores of Israeli civilians; an additional 15 such terrorist attacks were thwarted.
True, Israel is a well-armed ghetto with a nuclear capacity. But the very existence of the Jewish state is now being used to justify verbal and physical attacks against Jews everywhere in the Diaspora.
There are approximately fourteen and a half million Jews in the world. About a third (5,021,506) live in Israel; more than six million live in the United States (5,914, 682) and Canada (393,660); a little less than a third (2,327,848) live in Europe. About 650,000 Jews live in central and South America. The Muslim Middle East is, of course, almost entirely judenrein – only 20,000 Jews remain where more than 800,000 Jews once lived. Now just 76,000 Jews live in Turkey, Iran, Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia – countries where large communities of Jews once resided.
What am I saying? Simply that Jews mainly live in Israel and the Western democracies which are under jihadic siege. They could, conceivably, be wiped out.
How does a Holocaust happen? First, you demonize the group you wish t exterminate. You persuade people that this group has caused the world's suffering and that if this group could be "disappeared" that everything would improve. Then, you seize state power by means both fair and foul as Hamas, the Iranian mullahs, the Saudi princes, and the serial killer Osama bin Laden have done.
You fund terrorists, you fund the demonizing propaganda, (which has created a fifth column in our midst), you condemn only Israel and America at the United Nations for the crimes actually being committed by Islamists and the Islamic nations.
You start slaughtering Israeli civilians. You do not stop. You test world public opinion. How many Jews will have to die before the world is willing to stop this carnage?
The world has not yet acted in the matter of the Sudan. Will it act in the matter of Israel?
How does a Holocaust happen? You tell the demonized scapegoats that they are imagining and exaggerating their victimization. You demand that the scapegoats apologize, bow and scrape a bit more. And then you commit the unthinkable: You wipe out a large number of civilians, either in Israel, Europe or America.
Iran's President Ahmadinejad has threatened to annihilate Israel by nuclear means. He has said: "The Zionist regime is heading toward annihilation. It will be eliminated by one storm. Believe that Palestine will be freed soon." I take him seriously. He must be stopped. Who will do it? And when?
What matters is not just what evil people do. They are evil, they do evil things. What matters is what the good people do – or fail to do. Victims of horrific, even genocidal violence are haunted by what the good people failed to do. The time to act is upon us. May we act wisely and decisively before it is too late.
In the merit and the memory of the six million-plus who have been murdered by Jew-haters, we must not rest on our illusions. Heroism is now our only alternative.
Oh where should we start then? Malthus? How about Amalek?
I'm well aware of the history of the eugenics movement. It may explain why the Germans had no qualms about exterminating classes of people (such as the mentally or physically non-productive), but it doesn't explain Germany's direction of that philosophy toward exterminating Jews.
Of course Germans fell into Hitler's arms, but one of the reasons they did so was because of his views on the "Master Race", an extension of eugenics theories.
Allow me to quote you again: He is missing a whole lot of the background which helped to cause the Holocaust.
At which point you expounded upon eugenics. I did not dispute those facts, nor the role that the Darwinist philosophy that precipitated eugenics played in permitting the extermination of classes of people. I merely pointed out that you were "missing a whole lot of the background which helped to cause the Holocaust." You missed the reason that the philosophy which justified the means (genocide) had the end of exterminating Jews in particular.
The great German/Jewish poet Heine said that it is Christianity which is the bulwark of justice, freedom and tolerance. He predicted the Holocaust and other disasters.
When people stop to sing carols they will sing The Internationale or Horst Wessel Lied. The actual first step (presumably favority of NYT guys) is Lennon's Imagine.
"The concluding passage of [Heine's] Religion and Philosophy in Germany [1832] is one of the most remarkable prophesies in all literature. [...]
Christianity -- and that is its greatest merit -- has somewhat mitigated that brutal German love of war, but it could not destroy it. Should that subduing talisman, the cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane Berserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame. ... The old stone gods will then rise from long ruins and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes, and Thor will leap to life with his giant hammer and smash the Gothic cathedrals. ...
[Philip Kossoff, Valiant Heart: A Biography of Heinrich HeineCornwall Books, NJ and London, 1983]
Do not smile at my advice -- the advice of a dreamer who warns you against Kantians, Fichteans, and philosophers of nature. Do not smile at the visionary who anticipates the same revolution in the realm of the visible as has taken place in the spiritual. Thought precedes action as lightning precedes thunder. German thunder ... comes rolling somewhat slowly, but .. its crash ... will be unlike anything before in the history of the world. ... At that uproar the eagles of the air will drop dead, and lions in farthest Africa will draw in their tails and slink away. ... A play will be performed in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like an innocent idyll.
"I merely pointed out that you were 'missing a whole lot of the background which helped to cause the Holocaust.'"
I didn't mean to imply that eugenics was the sole cause. It was a major contributor, though.
But I'm not just focusing so much on what Germany did with the idea of eugenics, I'm focusing in a larger sense on what the rest of the world thought about it. The rest of the world pretty much accepted eugenics so it was easy for them to ignore the use of it in Germany -- until they actually saw the magnitude and the horrors of the Holocaust.
"but it doesn't explain Germany's direction of that philosophy toward exterminating Jews."
Germany exterminated more than just Jews in the 30's; certainly Jews became the focus but initially the idea was to exterminate the unfit in general. The concept of removing those who were unfit was already in place when Hitler began to demonize the Jews. AFAIK, no one really knows why Hitler chose to try and wipe out the Jews.
Jews were exterminated more as a threat than merely "unfit" in the Darwinian sense.
Germany exterminated more than just Jews in the 30's; certainly Jews became the focus but initially the idea was to exterminate the unfit in general.
In the list of leaders of the Spartakusbund you'll find a substantial number of Poles as well.
AFAIK, no one really knows why Hitler chose to try and wipe out the Jews.
Well then by all means don't learn more about the Spartakusbund by availing yourself of the link I provided you.
At that time, it was not uncommon to regard communism as a Jewish plot. Fascism was being sold across Europe as a defense against anarchy and communism. Interstingly, the capitalist role in fomenting soviet style communism as a fascist foil (the Popular Front) was made abundantly clear in the Spanish Civil War when the Stalinists did more to defeat the Spanish anarchists than Franco's fascists did.
" Jews were exterminated more as a threat than merely "unfit" in the Darwinian sense."
It was both. Later on it was played up more as a threat. In the earlier part of the century they were seen as mentally unfit.
" Well then by all means don't learn more about the Spartakusbund by availing yourself of the link I provided you."
I see no reason for you to be a sarcastic jerk, especially since that link you provided had no specific information about why Hitler wanted to get rid of the Jews. Also, a casual reading of history and a search of the web shows that the reason for Hitler wanting to exterminate the Jews is still debated. Contrary to what you say there's no real consensus on why Hitler was so intent on their annihilation.
Prove it, statistically; I don't buy it. The early exterminations were of the aged, insane, and those with serious birth defects.
I see no reason for you to be a sarcastic jerk, especially since that link you provided had no specific information about why Hitler wanted to get rid of the Jews.
Name calling already? You misread what I wrote in the first place, and condescendingly chose not to investigate it, taking the post as an attempt to refute the accuracy of the facts in your thesis rather than it's obviously erroneous claim to be the comprehensive cause. Your post implied that the sole reason a well-educated and industrial nation like the Germans were murdering Jewish doctors, lawyers, scientists, and technicians because they were considered "genetically inferior." That contention fails the test of simple logic.
Contrary to what you say there's no real consensus on why Hitler was so intent on their annihilation.
Of course not. Between Jewish victimhood and neo-NAZI apologists there never could be a consensus. There is more distorted information over this history than there is anything else (whether by commission or omission), scholarly research consisting mostly of work somebody will fund. It's easy to select facts to support a position. It's even easier to omit them, whether by intent or selective blindness.
That's enough for today. I have to help prepare our facility for a bar mitzvah.
"At that time, it was not uncommon to regard communism as a Jewish plot. Fascism was being sold across Europe as a defense against anarchy and communism. Interstingly, the capitalist role in fomenting soviet style communism as a fascist foil (the Popular Front) was made abundantly clear in the Spanish Civil War when the Stalinists did more to defeat the Spanish anarchists than Franco's fascists did."
This is spot on and explains how fascism was aided by anti-communists and by capitalists seeking to stop Bolshevism. There's another angle that created a perfect storm, which allowed fascism to become strong: in the early days, when leftists in the west were infatuated with the Soviet Union and the Soviets were in leagues with the Nazis for several years. These leftists were reluctant to criticize the Nazis, because, after all, friends of the Soviet Union (in their minds the true good guys) can't be all that bad.
It was only after the break up of Stalin and Hitler that the left became anti-Nazi. I'm sure in that incubation period enough of them picked up some nice anti-Semitic tendencies.
Moreover, it is often forgotten that Mussolinni was an express leftist early on and only became a fascist later.
At the end of the day, we have to keep reminding ourselves that there are really two camps: 1) those who believe in the historic freedoms and Christian culture of the West, and 2) those who love tyranny and seek to destroy 1.
The politics of a given era might well include some pretty awful alliances, just like WWII. But we can not forget the fundamentals.
Of course leftists in Europe (ie, 98% of all of Europe) are now reaping the whirlwind they have sown. They have successfully demolished freedom-enhancing Christian civilization in Europe, and in that vacuum the Muslims are rushing in. There will be temporary setbacks for the Muslum hordes, but unfortunately, that will come from fascist types who will seek not to restore Christian civilization, but, rather, to simply kick out the Muslims. Places like Denmark are not going to be able to offer up any alternative better than that. We might applaud these extremists on in the short term, but they are not our friends, either.
The survival of the west - indeed the Christian west - is the only hope for Jews, and for the rest of us, as well. It appears, though, that we are about 75 years away from losing it all. And Israel might go under sooner than that.
In reality, it was the Communists above all others who prevented revolution in Spain. Later, when the Right Wing forces were in full control, the Communists showed themselves willing to go a great deal further than the Liberals in hunting down revolutionary leaders.At that time, Orwell did not yet understand the depth of unity behind "the right wing forces" and the Popular Front, but, given his connections in England, you can bet that by the time Animal Farm and 1984 were written, he did.[Snip]
Between the Communists and those who claim to stand to the Left of them there is a real difference. The Communists hold that Fascism can be beaten by alliance with sections of the capitalist class (the Popular Front); their opponents hold that this maneuver simply gives Fascism new breeding-grounds. The question has got to be settled; to make the wrong decision may be to land ourselves in for centuries of semi-slavery.
The important thing is that there are no nations carrying out genocide today. Except for those that are.
Our enemy's enemy is not our friend.....
Yo, bwana, Kemo Sabe. Allow me to Hegel you a bit further!
Thesis/antithesis IS sin-thesis, uh, so to speak. ;-)
" Name calling already? "
'Jerk' is an appropriate word for people who are sarcastic with no reason. Your sarcasm was totally uncalled for. As I mentioned before, I didn't ignore any data you linked; there wasn't any data in that link about why Hitler wanted to wipe the Jews off the face of the earth.
"Your post implied that the sole reason a well-educated and industrial nation like the Germans were murdering Jewish doctors, lawyers, scientists, and technicians because they were considered "genetically inferior."
No, I implied no such thing. As I mentioned, Hitler specifically wanted to exterminate the Jews for some unknown reason.
I have better things to do than banter back and forth with you when you aren't even reading what I wrote.
I had never used "Hegel" as a verb before...but now I shall...I like it.
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