Posted on 12/07/2004 2:14:35 PM PST by Alouette
Six decades after the mass extermination of six million Jews in the Holocaust by Nazi Germany, more than 50 percent of Germans believe that Israel's present-day treatment of the Palestinians is similar to what the Nazis did to the Jews during World War II, a German survey released this weekend shows.
51 percent of respondents said that there is not much of a difference between what Israel is doing to the Palestinians today and what the Nazis did to the Jews during the Holocaust, compared to 49% who disagreed with such a comparison, according to the poll carried out by Germany's University of Bielefeld.
The survey also found that 68 percent of Germans believe that Israel is waging a "war of extermination" against the Palestinians, while some 32% disagreed with such a statement.
In a first reaction, the chairman of Yad Vashem's directorate Avner Shalev said Tuesday that the poll's results, which he termed "very worrisome," were indicative of a long-suppressed felling of anti-Semitism among the mainstream "so-called liberals" population which now, under the coating of anti-Israeli criticism, are becoming legitimate again. He added that the poll's results, which he said any objective person would repudiate, are also the result of the release of pent-up feelings of guilt built up from the Holocaust.
"The energies which bring about such answers come to protect feelings of guilt," Shalev said. 62 percent of respondents in the poll said that they were sick of "all this harping" of German crimes against Jews, while 68% said that they found it "annoying" that Germans today are still held to blame for Nazi crimes against Jews.
The survey, which aimed to determine what is "the cut off point" between criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism, finds that while "classical" anti-Semitism in Germany is on the wane, secondary anti-Semitism, often couched in anti-Israel views are on the rise, especially among the Left.
The German researchers who conducted the polls conceded that the results showing a majority of Germans equating Israel's Policy with Nazi Atrocities "may be worrying," but concurred with Yad Vashem's Shalev that the media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinians conflict has made such analogies part of the public discourse.
"When you see an image in the newspaper, in a caricature, which is repeated day in and day out that Sharon is equal to Hitler than the image catches in your head because maybe you do not like Jews so much or maybe you hate Jews, and than this works out excellent," Shalev said, stressing that education of the young generation was the key to stemming such a tide.
In the survey, 82 percent of the respondents polled said that they are angered by the way Israel is treating the Palestinians, while 45 percent of those polled said that considering Israel's policies it was "no surprise" that people were against them.
The telephone poll of 3000 "non-migrant" respondents, which was taken in May and June, did not come with a margin of error.
"This is a very sad commentary about what is happening in Europe today which needs to send a very strong warning signal about how much work needed to be done to deal with these attitudes," said, Dr. Ephraim Zuroff, the Israel director of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Due in part to its blighted history, Germany is generally considered to be one of the more supportive countries of Israel in Europe.
As it should have been. That had to have been a scary time when Hitler and Stalin were allies.
"Germans learned from the WWII is that it is evil to fight but they didn't learn that it is not evil to fight evil."
Very perceptive.
Sixty years of being taught that use of force [by Germans, esp.] is wrong . . . Speculations that Germans are by nature militaristic, susceptible to authoritarianism, genetically deficient . . . [I counter that argument by the millions of German-Americans and descendents who fought in the US Armed Forces during WW I and WW II; look at the unit histories: if they did not italicize the names of the commanders on one side, you would not be able to tell who were the German commanders and who were the Americans, in a lot of cases.]
This is a relatively small survey. [remember the exit polls on 2 Nov?] However, I am NOT surprised that Germans could be rather tired of being brow-beaten about what OTHER German people did during WW II. Guilt is personal, not racial.
Remember, it has only changed in this country in the past twenty years or so. In the 40s 50s and 60s, into the 70s, German-Americans were also painted with the brush of the Holocaust, militarism, etc. A lady told me her 1st-grade students called her a "baby-killer." She was merely a child during WW II. It is only natural to be hurt and to resent being called a murderer when you could not have had anything to do with wartime atrocities.
The Great German Guilt has been the subject of books and studies. It has had several effects. One is to mitigate against legitimate defense and/or fighting legitimately against evil. Another is to cause resentment of a HUGE burden of guilt that no one who was not responsible himself can POSSIBLY bear.
"Absolutely! "
You are boycotting the half that had the other response, too, then.
It is a survey, not a plebiscite . . .
Make that a 10 second delay.
The last thing I need is a lecture by Germans about human rights.
We dropped the bomb on the wrong Axis nation.
With the help of the good ole US of A by giving Germany such retarded borrowing terms that set up the Great Depression worldwide. I believe that the idiot who proposed the idea won a Noble Peace Prize. Reminds me of a couple of Peace Prices won in the past two decades.
I admit that the French screwed Germany over by occupying the Ruhr valley, but the US allowed a terrible banking scheme to run between us and Germany. We aggravated the situation that led to WWII.
Unfortunately the atomic bomb wasn't ready until after the Germans surrendered. Otherwise instead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki we'd be talking about Hamburg and Kiel.
I'd love to see him respond to some sniveling reporter's question from the BBC.
And this is an excuse for genocide just how exactly?
"Second, the Germans are anti-Semites, and have always been anti-Semites."
That is a broad statement.
Read Thomas Mann: "Dr. Faustus"
He has some interesting commentary about the complex relationship between Jews and Germans.
(opinion pure)
They're not entirely bad.
They're just socialist tainted, have inferiority complexes, a new found hyper sensitive national sense of sovereignty (Easily infringed upon), typical European anti-Semitic under tones (It truly is Europe wide and not just German) and still live with the WW2 guilt.
The last aspect applies here. If you demonstrate that the Israelis are no better than you were then you're not that unique when you mass destroy 6+ million people systematically. That’s why there is this subtle but constant attempt to show connections between the destruction of the Indians, the Palestinians, the oppression of blacks and and and. After all, everyone does this kind of stuff! It’s all relative and though wrong not really that spectacular. That’s why the focus of these comparisons are mostly with those nations and people who are perceived as rubbing history in their face (Even though we’re not) and those who were wronged (The Jew/Israelis). It’s a way to deal with guilt. It’s a defense mechanism where you rationalize the irrational.
Red6
It isn't an excuse. It just means that complex political situations aren't caused by a single party. WWII was a world war because the entire world was involved in the fighting and its development.
Actually Frankfurt a.M. was a target but Germany collapsed faster than anticipated.
Red6
Ummm . . . That Germans would know evil when they saw it is a ludicrous concept.
The Germans were never sorry for their Nazi past. They have only been resting. Their true racist, zenophobic nature is coming out bit by bit.
Really?
Show me the cattle cars crammed with "subhuman undesirables."
Show me the concentration camps.
Show me the showers spewing Zyklon-B.
Show me the torture rooms and medical "experiments."
Show me the thefts of art, businesses, property and other personal assets.
Show me the massive propaganda campaign for the annihilation of palestinians.
Show me the court-ordered sterilizations.
Show me the 6,000,000 dead innocent civilians.
Put up or shut up, krauts!
"Germany collapsed faster than anticipated"
. . . than anticipated by whom? Roosevelt knew . . .
that the German forces couldn't wait to surrender to the Americans. Rommel wanted to surrender the whole Western Front before D-Day -- he was in discussion with the German resistance (Hitler did not know this); Eisenhower and others were in favor: Roosevelt, however, wanted unconditional surrender and . . . ahem . . . Lebensraum in the middle of Europe for his pal Joe Stalin . . .
Yeah, and that's why the Arab population in Israel has been increasing, not decreasing since 1949. /sarcasm
Germany and the rest of the Europe are Islamic terrorist appeasers, and are entities which see "good terror" and "bad terror." I wonder how Germans would feel if Islamists were blowing up busses in Berlin. Sooner or later it is going to happen, and then they will finally realize that years ago they should have aided Israel's war against militant Islam.
"The Germans were never sorry for their Nazi past. They have only been resting. Their true racist, zenophobic nature is coming out bit by bit."
that in itself could be seen as a racist statement . . .
There are people of German heritage, presumably with German "nature" [if there even is such a thing], in a whole heck of a lot of places in this world besides the German nation state.
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