Opinion Editorials, April 2012

By Khalid Amayreh

PIC, Al-Jazeerah, CCUN, April 23, 2012

Author's Note:

I wrote this article a few years ago to protest Israel's pornographic exploitation of the holocaust memory in order to to blur, or divert attention from, or extenuate her equally evil crimes in the eyes of humanity. Needless to say, such crimes are tantamount to a slow-combustion holocaust. On this somber, annual holocaust anniversary, Israel continues to exploit the German holocaust in order to liquidate Palestinian national existence and arrogate more and more lebensraum at the expense of a thoroughly tormented people that had absolutely nothing to do with the original holocaust. Hence, the republication of the article. KA

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Does One Holocaust Justify Another One?

Writing in the Ha’aretz newspaper on Thursday, 28 January, under the title “holocaust remembrance is a boon for Israeli propaganda,” the noted Israeli journalist Gideon Levy accused Israel of employing the holocaust memory as a Public Relations gimmick to divert attention from the savagery and brutality meted out to the Palestinians.

“When the world is talking Goldstone, we talk Holocaust, as if out to blur the impression. When the world talks occupation, we’ll talk Iran as if we wanted them to forget.”

But Levy, like many other conscientious observers, know this won’t help the Israeli goal of making the world forget the Palestinians, or more specifically what Israel has done and is doing to them.

“It won’t help much. International Holocaust Remembrance has passed, the speeches will soon be forgotten, and the depressing everyday reality will remain. Israel will not come out looking good, even after the PR campaign”

To be sure, Levy is not against marking the Holocaust day. In fact, he insists that it is an incomparable event. And it may well be so.

However, he reminds the Israeli establishment that “a thousand speeches against anti-Semitism will not extinguish the flames ignited by Operation Cast Lead, flames that threaten not only Israel but the entire Jewish world.”

He adds: “As long as evil is rampant here at home, neither the world nor we will be able to accept our preaching to others, even if they deserve it.”

This introduction is necessary to understand the Satanic game Zionism and its numerous propaganda outlets are playing in order to divert attention from the genocidal brutality Israel is carrying out against the Palestinian people.

Today, Jewish-Zionist circles are leaving no stone unturned in order to immortalize the holocaust, not so much to warn the world against the recurrence of such an abomination, but rather to obtain from the world a tacit permission to destroy the Palestinian people either in one fell swoop or step by step.

What else explains all this propaganda about the holocaust while the Israeli state and its para-military thugs, otherwise known as settlers, keep up tormenting and savaging the Palestinian people, destroying their homes, stealing their land and denying them access to food and work?

In so doing, Israel and its hasbara doctors not only are displaying spasmodic sensitivity toward any comparisons between the German holocaust and the quasi-holocaust being carried out against the Palestinian people, but are also using every opportunity to divert attention from Israeli atrocities in places like the Gaza Strip.

In recent days, the Israeli hasbara machine utilized to the fullest the highly-propagandistic rescue mission Israel sent to Haiti in an effort to make the world forget what Israel did to the people of the Gaza Strip last year.

But that won’t erase the ugliness from Israel’s face.

A child killer’s ugly face will remains ugly even if dressed in a boy-scout’s uniform. An Israeli soldier who murdered babies in Gaza several months ago shall not be transformed into a charitable figure just because he took part in efforts to rescue Haitians from under the quake rubble. A murderer remains a murderer even if he, on his way home, helped an elderly lady mow her lawn.

In the final analysis, honest and intelligent people just wouldn’t take it. A country that uses F-16 fighters to rain death on school children and prevents milk from reaching babies in order to make them die by way of starvation is a criminal country even if it dispatches rescuers to Haiti where the propaganda teams are filmed rescuing a few victims from under the rubble. It is always difficult to thank people for doing a favor which they never meant to do in the first place.

Zionism has two main goals behind its obsession with the holocaust, an obsession that has been elevated to the level of a religion: First, there is the declared goal, namely to keep the memory of the holocaust alive and to remind the world of what happened to European Jewry at the hands of the Third Reich more than 60 years ago.

This is a legitimate goal as humanity must learn from its tragic mistakes in order not to repeat them. We study the day before yesterday in order to understand yesterday and we study yesterday in order not to spoil our tomorrow.

The second but undeclared goal behind this holocaust religion is to justify Zionism, a racist ideology that eventually bred a gigantic crime against humanity called Israel. In the final analysis, Israel embodies an evil desire to annihilate the Palestinian people and steal their ancestral homeland. And when the Palestinians cry out for justice and humanity, we see and hear the shipyard dogs of Zionism shout “holocaust, Auschwitz, Gas chambers, Hitler!!”

Last year, the Israeli army and air force rained death on Gaza for three uninterrupted weeks. Warplanes dropped bombs on unprotected civilians throughout the small enclave. Heavy artillery bombarded homes, schools, hospitals, mosques and public buildings, creating a massive carnage. White Phosphoric fire storms raged over Gaza, incinerating numerous civilians. People fleeing for their lives and carrying white flags were systematically gunned down by Israeli army snipers. This happened as army rabbis were encouraging soldiers to murder men, women and children because this is the way to endear themselves to God.!!

There is no doubt that the massive killings and pornographic destruction in Gaza last year was a genocidal act comparable to what was happening during the holocaust. The world shouldn’t raise its eyebrows when such comparisons are made.

After all, the attempted annihilation of European Jewry didn’t begin with Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen. It started much earlier with comparatively innocuous things in the early 1930s. And then in 1938, there was the Kirstallnacht, a pre-taste of which the Palestinian people have been and are experiencing at the hands of the children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of the holocaust victims.

In short, the holocaust started with very much the type of things Israel is doing to the Palestinians these days. The unmitigated attempted killing and starving of Gaza are merely an epitome of a larger picture which shows the systematic Nazi-like savagery and brutality to which most Palestinians are being subjected.

Palestinians are not claiming that Israel is gassing them en mass. However, Israel is occasionally murdering Palestinians en mass by bombing their homes and denying them access to food and essential consumer products. Israel is murdering Palestinians by denying them access to health care abroad or in the West Bank.

Israel denies that its treatment of Palestinians is reaching Nazi proportions. Well, then how can we describe the Gaza Strip which has been morphed into a huge concentration camp?

Besides, must the level of Israeli Nazism meted out to the Palestinians be equal to that of German Nazism in order to sound alarm bells and alert the world that Jews are going too wild? And who says that the Palestinian victims of Israeli brutality must reach 6,000,000 in order to grant Palestinians a hearing before the world’s court?

The holocaust was nefarious not because many of the victims were Jewish. (many millions of non-Jews were killed during the WWII). It was diabolical because innocent human beings were killed unjustly. The horrendous killings wouldn’t have been less evil had the victims been non-Jewish and their number a few millions less.

The world must make every conceivable effort to prevent the recurrence of genocides and massacres and destructive wars. And one of the key ways to do that is to prevent Israel from using the Nazi holocaust to bully the world to keep silent in the face of Israel’s genocidal crimes and designs against the Palestinians and other peoples of the Middle East.

Yes, the holocaust was evil, but it must never be used as an excuse for tormenting and savaging other people and trying to destroy their national existence which they have earned in spite of a cruel history.

Indeed, if the world allows Israel to strangulate the Palestinians, starve Gaza by transforming it into an updated version of the Warsaw Ghetto, then the world will be effectively transforming itself into a real human jungle, a jungle that is far worse than a real animal jungle.

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