The last 10 days - June 12, 2010

 FresnoZionism

The last 10 days have surprised me.

I thought I was cynical about the way humans are capable of believing things that are contradicted by what they see with their own eyes, but apparently I was naive.

I realized that the phenomenon of ideologues only hearing the voices of their own side was much more extensive than I’d thought.

I saw that the amount of ignorance, stupidity and viciousness in the world, especially the supposedly better-educated part of it, was far, far greater than than I had imagined in my worst nightmares.

I saw that a form of atavistic hatred that I had thought was dying out in ‘civilized’ society was alive and breathing heavily.

I saw some ‘critics of Israeli policy’ drop their masks, because it has now become acceptable to admit that the real problem, in the words of Charles Krauthammer, is “Those Troublesome Jews“.

When Helen Thomas dropped hers (OK, maybe it had been slipping for some time), she was greeted with some official condemnation and massive grass-roots support. Rabbi David Nesenoff, who taped her telling Israeli Jews to “go home, to Poland and Germany,” has received over 25,000 hate mails, some of which can be seen on his website.

There’s a Security Council “Presidential Statement,” a vicious Human Rights Council resolution, demonstrations and rallies against Israel all over the world — even in Fresno, California — a surge of antisemitic incidents in France and other places, threats from Turkey, Iran and Syria, and suggestions from Barack Obama that Israel’s policies are ‘unsustainable’ and must change in the direction of concessions to Hamas.

What precipitated the explosion was that a group of violent Turkish Islamists, in an operation probably planned and certainly supported by the Erdoğan regime, mobbed and beat Israeli soldiers in an attempt to take hostages, resulting in the serious injury of several soldiers and the death of 9 of the Turks.

Hardly a legitimate reason for the worldwide explosion of anti-Israel hatred, or the diplomatic pressure being applied to Israel by friends and enemies alike.

Compare Israel’s actions in enforcing a blockade against the remarkably vile Hamas with the behavior of the Iranian regime last year, when the Ahmadinejad-Khamenei regime stole the election and then beat, murdered, arrested, tortured and raped dissidents who pointed this out.

World reaction then, and especially the response from the Obama administration, was tepid. Many similar comparisons can be made.

Several members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors have introduced a resolution condemning Israel and calling for the president to work toward “ending the siege” of Hamas-ruled Gaza. San Francisco, the gay capital of the world, is being asked to support Hamas — I know they would not put it this way, but that’s what it is about — which advocates the death penalty for homosexuality. Indeed, gay Palestinians do their best to escape both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, to Israel, one of the few places that a gay Arab can live in peace.

My wife would explain this by saying “there must be something in the water,” but if so, it’s in the water all around the world.

Here’s how one observer explains it:

…in the last two decades especially, the Left has made anti-Semitism respectable in intellectual circles. The fascistic nature of various Palestinian liberation groups was forgotten, as the “occupied” Palestinians grafted their cause onto that of American blacks, Mexican-Americans, and Asian-Americans. Slurring post-Holocaust Jews was still infra dig, but damning the nation-state of Israel as imperialistic and oppressive was considered principled. No one ever cared to ask: Why Israel and not other, far more egregious examples? In other words, one could now focus inordinately on the Jews by emphasizing that one’s criticism was predicated on cosmic issues of human rights and justice. And by defaming Israel the nation, one could vent one’s dislike of Jews without being stuck with the traditional boorish label of anti-Semite.
So an anti-Semitic bigot like Helen Thomas could navigate perfectly well among the top echelons of Washington society spouting off her hatred of Israel, since her animus was supposedly against Israeli policies rather than those who made them. Only an inadvertent remark finally caught up with her to reveal that what she felt was not anger growing out of a territorial dispute, but furor about the nature of an entire people who should be deported to the sites of the Holocaust. — Victor Davis Hanson, “Helen Thomas, Turkey, and the Liberation of Israel”

Helen Thomas and the Definitive Answer to Why the First Holocaust Happened

NewsRealBlog

2010 June 5

by Jeanette Pryor

 

On January 27, 1998, Yehuda Bauer, Director of Research at Yad Vashem, concluded his Holocaust commemoration address at the Bundestag in Germany with the following:

“Thou shalt not be a perpetrator.”

“Thou shalt not be a victim.”

“And Thou shalt never, but never be a bystander.”

It is remarkable that Bauer saved the strongest admonition for bystanders.
On Friday May 27, at the White House Jewish Heritage Celebration, Helen Thomas, the “Dean” of the White House Press Corps, answered a journalist’s request for an opinion on Israel:

“Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine. Remember, these people are occupied and it’s their land…not German and not Poland.”
“So, where should they go?”
“Go home. Poland, Germany.”
“So, you think the Jews should go back to Poland and Germany?”
“And America and everywhere else.”

Helen Thomas is a perpetrator.  Perpetrator, because the most important aspect of the War Against Israel is the War to erode American support for Israel, the War for public opinion.  As in Vietnam, the Marxist Press in America will bring about the fall of Israel and the annihilation of her people long before and more surely than those seeking the physical destruction of the Gaza Blockade.

In spite of this, Helen does not fully explain the “Why” of the Holocausts.  Within hours of Thomas’ Reichstag-worthy revelation, the video evidence circled the globe.  It is safe to assume that the people who come in daily contact with Helen knew what she said.

These journalists and reporters, as every educated American, have seen pictures of the Holocaust; they have probably looked in horror at images of the selection at Auschwitz, the mass-shootings in Ukraine, the portraits of Eichmann and Mengele.  This contemplation probably led to self-reassuring oaths that, “Had I been there, I would have resisted.  I would have spoken out.  The Nazis were evil monsters. HOW could this have happened?”

Certainly, the White House Press Corps is full of those who have thus reacted to the Nazi Holocaust.  And yet, they will sit down to dinner with Helen Thomas.  They will continue to say, “Good Morning,” to her, and will treat her like an icon worthy of respect.  She will stoop in her throne in the Press Corps galley.  She will not be shunned in the halls of the White House, and senators and representatives will still curry her favor or, at the very worst, attribute her rant to notorious spunk.

This is why the Holocaust happened.  A dozen average men and women weighed their careers against the consequence of protest and permitted the penetration of respectable society by anti-Semitism. The looming destruction of Israel is not to be attributed to hate-filled sectarian ideologues like Thomas, but to the reporters and journalists who will avoid nasty personal consequences, and refuse to treat her with the utter contempt she merits.  If ever Eichmann and Mengele and Goebbels deserved to be shunned as enemies of civilization, then likewise a woman pretending to exemplify investigative excellence while suppressing the truth of the Jews’ tri-millennial claim to a homeland in the Holy Land, ought to be ostracized by anyone with a conscience.

The path to the first Holocaust was that of politically justified anti-Semitism.  Hitler began his crusade against the Jews under the pretext that they had caused, through self-interest, the defeat of Germany in the First World War.  We, fleeing precipitously towards a Second “Final Solution,” witness a similar attempt to disguise racial hatred of the Jews as dissenting political opinion.  We hear words such as “occupation, apartheid, human rights violations,” only because they camouflage an embarrassing, crass hatred.  Penetration of respectable society by this “classy, political” anti-Semitism is the first step to Genocide.

The choice to become a bystander faces each member of the White House Press Corps.  Together, they should demand Helen Thomas’ expulsion from their midst, if they wish to retain their integrity and honor.

Should authorities refuse, for the obvious reason that anti-Semitism has been given the green light (no pun intended) by the example of the Administration, then it is the personal responsibility of each member to treat the “Queen,” and her supporters as they claim they would have treated the last batch of Selectors who favored deporting the Jews to their “homeland” in the ovens of Poland.

 ani ma'amin

This song was composed by a young man on the cattle-train to the death camps. He taught it to two young men and asked them to "bring it" to his rabbi(of Modzhiz). The two succeeded to jump off and the train.They survived the war and kept their promise - came to America and sang it to that man's rabbi. The rabbi burst in crying. Though he never heard the song before, he recognised who made it. That young man perished in the Holocaust, but his song and his spirit live on. Yehe zichro baruch.