Holocaust Memorial Day - Reality, invention, memory and media - by Arnold Roth

All the worthy memorials and monuments and anniversary events are helpless in the face of reportorial incompetence, massive ignorance, malevolence and fabrication. The deliberate rewriting of history absolutely matters. So does forgetting the victims and their suffering and the lives they built afterwards.

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Arnold Roth..
This Ongoing War..
27 January '16..

We're fans of the columns penned by the journalist and commentator Evelyn Gordon. This paragraph comes from one of her latest:

..[F]or anyone who’s still confused about the difference between a real siege and a fictitious one, here are two simple tests: First, in real sieges, people die of starvation, because the besieger stops food from entering; in fake ones, the “besieger” sends in 2,500 tons of food and medicine per day even during the worst of the fighting. Second, real sieges get swept under the carpet by the UN; only the fake ones merit massive UN publicity. And if you think I’m joking, just compare the actual cases of Madaya and Gaza... So next time you hear people talking about the “siege of Gaza,” remember Madaya. And then tell them to stop wasting their breath on fake sieges when people are dying in real ones. ["How to Spot a Fake Siege", January 25, 2016]

Being reminded of the difference between reality and ideologically-driven spin is especially relevant today, January 27. That's the date on which, annually, Holocaust Memorial Day is observed - at least in those places where it's remembered at all.

What's remembered, what's forgotten and what's willfully twisted and distorted is, of course, part of the reason the commemoration exists. How effectively is a matter worth thinking about.

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter.

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A moral inversion that conveniently ignores legacy of Nazi past

Bataween..
Point of No Return..
28 January '13..

Two events shook Jews the world over on or around Holocaust Memorial Day: The pronouncements of a British MP, David Ward, accusing the Israelis of failing to learn the lesson of the Holocaust by committing atrocities against the Palestinians'. The other was an antisemitic cartoon (above) in the Sunday Times by the controversial Gerald Scarfe showing Benjamin Netanyahu building a wall with the blood of crushed Palestinians. But for all the furore and the condemnations, critics have been guilty of moral inversion, failing to see in Palestinian and Arab exterminationist intentions the legacy of a pro-Nazi past.

*Take Matt Hill, who rightly condemned David Ward in his Telegraph Blog. But he also had harsh words for 'paranoid' Israelis (to use Amos Oz's words): "half-hysterical refugees and survivors, haunted by dreadful nightmares”, who see in the Arabs a reflection of their former oppressors."

But the Arabs are their former oppressors, not a reflection thereof, Matt! The Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem was an active collaborator in Hitler's Holocaust, and was responsible for causing the deaths of tens of thousands of Jews in Europe. In the Middle East too, he incited riots in Palestine and Iraq which cost hundreds of Jewish lives. He had a plan to deport Iraqi Jews to camps in the desert and planned death camps for the Jews of Palestine near Nablus. After the war, the Arab states colluded in Nuremberg-style laws to engineer the ethnic cleansing of their Jews.

Today's Palestinians nurse the same genocidal intentions as the Mufti, try as they might to cloak their aims in language acceptable to western ears. Just read the Hamas charter. The difference between then and now, is that today's Jews have the means to defend themselves.

Nazi ghost still unexorcised in Islamism

Bataween
Point of No Return
11 April '10

On the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel, Lyn Julius considers how the lingering influence of Nazism still fuels Jihadist Jew-hatred in the Arab world in her review of Matthias Kuntzel's book: Jihad and Jew-hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the roots of 9/11:

Who said: “the victory of the Zionist idea is the turning point for the fulfilment of an ideal which is so dear to me, the revival of the Orient”?

Was it Herzl? Ben-Gurion? Jabotinsky? None of those. These words were spoken by Ahmed Zaki, a former Egyptian minister, on the fifth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration in 1922.

For a mainstream Arab politician to pronounce his support for Zionism nowadays appears to be revolutionary and heretical. But in 1922, and into the 1930s, Egypt stood aloof from pan-Arabism and Islamist movements. Even in 1933 it allowed 1,000 Jewish immigrants on their way to Palestine to pass through Port Said.

In his passionate, perspicacious and articulate book Jihad and Jew-hatred, the German political scientist Matthias Kuntzel describes how fundamentalist discourse, with at its core, Nazi-inspired anti-Semitism fuelled by conspiracy-theory propaganda such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, adopted the Palestinian cause of Nazism’s local henchman the Mufti of Jerusalem, insidiously took over Arab politics, and have driven them ever since. Even nominally secular leaders like Nasser and Arafat had been infected with Islamist ideas. Arafat was a disciple of Hitler’s ally the Mufti of Jerusalem, a distant relative, and Nasser had been brought up in Young Egypt, the para-Nazi youth group. Hamas, the Gazan branch of the Muslim Brotherhood with its blatantly antisemitic Charter, holds power today. As Kuntzel says, it is virtually impossible to graduate from Gaza’s Islamic university without being antisemitic.

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Israel, the Holocaust and the Survival Lesson

Daniel Greenfield
Sultan Knish
03 February '10

Last week's Holocaust Memorial Day, part of that dubious practice in which we assign one day to important events and people, Mothers, Grandmothers, Presidents, Veterans, WW2 and forget them the rest of the time, has come and gone. But the Holocaust itself was long ago co-opted to promote a humanist philosophy of universal tolerance, and in doing so it was universalized and turned into nothing more than another reason we all need to learn to get along.


Some have expressed wonderment that European countries and cities where Muslim persecution and violence is intimidating and driving out Jews at a rate unseen since the 1930's are still going through the farce of holding official ceremonies, nodding at how awful the whole thing was and beaming confidently that it can never happen again. But the humanist hijacking of the Holocaust is only another of the weapons used to promote tolerance toward Muslims, and intolerance toward Jews.

The universalization of the Holocaust was also the dejudaization of the Holocaust, turning the dwindling number of survivors into props in the great international classroom of tolerance, even as rocks are being thrown at their heads by the Muslim beneficiaries of that school of tolerance. All the while the humanist hijackers of the Holocaust who vociferously insist on using the murder of six million Jews as an illustration in their multicultural curriculum, angrily denounce any Jews who actually try to connect the hate toward Jews then and the hate toward Jews no. The same humanists who cynically exploit the Holocaust in their distorted version of history can always be counted on to jump up and denounce Jews for... exploiting the Holocaust.

But the Holocaust does indeed have a very important lesson to teach both Jews and non-Jews. Not the lesson of universal tolerance, but the lesson of the need for individuals and communities to be able to defend themselves.

There are essentially two responses to the Holocaust. The first is the humanist one, which treated the murder of six million as a "teachable moment" in which the world could be led to a great moral awakening that would insure that nothing like it could ever happen again. Ridiculous amounts of Jews and non-Jews in the West accepted it as a given, just as they had accepted it as a given in the 1930's that no such event could ever take place in a civilized country. That faith in human moral evolution was a product of the Enlightenment and for all its pretenses at a higher morality, was based on the arrogant notion that people were becoming progressively more moral, as they became more educated. That correlation was the product of a misplaced faith in culture as morality. The Nazis conclusively demonstrated that technological and cultural sophistication is not indivisible from morality, that one can be a cultured monster after all.

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