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The People Voices
"This morning we saw pictures
of the Warsaw ghetto at Yad Vashem and this evening we are going to
the Ramallah ghetto." - German Bishop Gregor Maria Franz Hanke
during a visit to Ramallah in March 2007
Last week, Israel marked the “Holocaust Day” in
West Jerusalem amid the usual fanfare of sanctimonious rituals,
never-again speeches and glorification of Zionism.
The solemn but also highly propagandistic
occasion is manipulated to the fullest by Zionist leaders in order
to justify the crime against humanity, otherwise known as “the state
of Israel.” -This year, too, Zionist leaders preyed on the memories
of holocaust victims by seeking to blackmail the collective
conscience of the world into recognizing the “uniqueness of Jewish
pain” ” as if non-Jews were children of a lesser God and their pain
was unimportant.
Thus we had the political and ideological gurus
of Zionism, from the morbidly sanctimonious Elie Wiesel to the
pathologically duplicitous Ehud Olmert berate the world for the
“reincarnation of anti-Semitism,” a deliberately twisted reference
to legitimate criticisms of nefarious treatment of Palestinians,
including the adoption of such policies as apartheid, ethnic
cleansing and the use of brutal tactics for the purpose of forcing
the victims of Zionism to leave their ancestral homeland.
Nobody does or should question the enormity of
the holocaust. Doing so, besides being morally unconscionable,
serves the interests of Zionism, which has morphed the Holocaust
Industry into a virtual religion that encompasses even Judaism
itself.
However, manipulating the holocaust to justify
the treatment Israel has been meting out to millions of helpless
Palestinians is no less obscene and no less outrageous than the
utilization by the Third Reich of the outcome of the First World War
to wage war on Europe and cause the death of tens of millions of
people.
All humanity had suffered through history,
recent, past and distant. Nobody, not even Jews, could claim that
the suffering of one group is more special and more unique than the
suffering of others.
Russia, for example, lost tens of millions to the
Nazis in the course of the Second World War. The same thing applies
to other European peoples, who too, suffered immensely. The Gypsies
were also incinerated and gassed in great numbers in Hitler’s
liquidation chambers, but we see no holocaust memorials perpetuating
the memory of these hapless and unwept victims as if they were
lesser and insignificant human beings.
Of course, nobody objects to Jews commemorating
the holocaust and reminding humanity of its evils. I, too, would
join conscientious Jews in remembering the victims of Nazism.
However, remembering, when done in the wrong way, can be worse than
forgetting.
The world, including Jews, doesn’t have to choose
between “remembering” or “forgetting” the holocaust or any other
enormous crime against humanity. Instead, the choice should be
between learning the “right” or “wrong” lessons.
Today, in the name of the holocaust, Israel wants
the world to give her a carte blanch to commit another holocaust
against the helpless and virtually completely unprotected
Palestinians.
In the name of the holocaust and the “never-again
mantra,” Israel wants the world to allow it to commit every
conceivable crime and every abominable violation of human rights in
the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, from murdering school
children on their way to school “for security reasons” to shooting
pregnant women on their way to hospital (also for security reasons)
to dumping tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians into
modern-day concentration camps deep in the Negev desert.
Indeed, in the name of the holocaust, Israel has
been hounding, brutalizing and tormenting four million impoverished
Palestinians, barring them from accessing food and work, and utterly
ravaging their lives and livelihood as well destroying their
streets, colleges, bridges, and power stations. And, as if these
obscenities were not enough, the Israeli state has augmented its
oppression with an Satanic wall that is effectively reducing the
bulk of Palestinian population centers into updated versions of the
Ghetto Warsaw.
In short, the holocaust and the memory of its
victims, have been used and are being used outrageously and
relentlessly by Israel in order to justify and legitimize crimes
against humanity that, while not as enormous as the holocaust in
their magnitude, have non the less many similarities with it in
terms of their brutality, insidiousness and criminality.
The holocaust, we all know, didn’t start with
Auschwitz or Bergen Belsen. It started with a book, some sporadic
acts of harassment, a Kristalnacht, and some discriminatory laws
against Jews, things very much like what Israel has been doing to
the Palestinians
Today Israel is on its way to being a
fully-fledged apartheid state. It systematically discriminates
against its non-Jewish citizens in ways reminiscent of the overall
German discourse against Jews in the mid 1930s.
One ominous portent is the fact that a majority
of Israeli Jewish citizens, who are bombarded 24 hours per day by
virulent anti-Arab propaganda, readily support the deportation of
non-Jewish citizens who make up nearly a quarter of Israel’s
population. Needless to say, this state of affair is very similar to
the state of affair that prevailed in Germany prior to the outbreak
of the Second World War.
Unfortunately, the holocaust, which was
perpetrated by Europeans, has caused European states to go morally
blind, a blindness that, even today, is preventing most Europeans
from seeing the outrageous crimes committed by their former victims
against the Palestinians, Germany’s and Europe’s victims’ victims.
Europe has been either completely silent, or
blithe, or actively and enthusiastically supportive of crimes
against humanity Israel has been perpetrating against the
Palestinian and Lebanese peoples.
Last year, Israel dropped as many as 3.000.000
cluster bomb-lets throughout Lebanon as, we were told, a “ defensive
action” against Hizbullah.
The three million bombs, for those who still
don’t know, are sufficient to kill three million children. In other
words, they could cause a holocaust, or at least half a holocaust by
Jewish calculations.
Unfortunately, this outrage drew only sporadic,
shy or half-hearted criticism from European leaders who never stop
lecturing the Third world, especially the Muslim world, about human
rights and terror.
This is no less than a moral whoredom on the part
of Europe. Allowing Israel to turn the holocaust into a propaganda
asset, as Israeli journalist Amira Hass wrote recently, enables the
Israeli state to further oppress the Palestinians and legitimize the
oppression.
“Turning the holocaust into an asset,” wrote
Hass, “ allows Israel to present all the methods of the Palestinian
struggle (even the unarmed ones) as another link in the anti-Semitic
chain whose culmination is Auschwitz. Israel provides itself with
the license to come up with more kinds of fences, walls and military
guard towers around Palestinian enclaves.”
Indeed, Europe’s, especially Germany’s,
obsequious, even acquiescent, reactions to Israel’s unmitigated
crimes against the Palestinian and Lebanese peoples shows that
Europe has not learned the right lesson from the holocaust.
It shows that Europe is atoning for one holocaust
by adopting policies that effectively encourage and facilitate the
perpetration of another holocaust.
If this is not moral whoredom, then what is it?
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