Tobin - Plotting Genocide in Wansee and Tehran

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary/Contentions..
20 January '12..

Seventy years ago today, some of the German government’s top bureaucrats gathered in a Berlin suburb. The event, known to history as the Wansee Conference, after the name of the neighborhood in which these Nazi technocrats came together, was remarkable for the commonplace way in which the participants approached their problem as if it were a normal matter in which inter-governmental agency cooperation was necessary. But there was nothing normal about their task: the extermination of the Jews of Europe.

Lawrence Kadish notes the event today in an important article in the New York Post. But the point of the piece isn’t merely commemoration of a milestone event in the Holocaust. Rather, Kadish wisely compares the bureaucratic thoroughness with which much of the considerable power of the German state was put at the disposal of the Nazi death machine with the way Iran is currently marshalling its resources for a similar purpose: the construction of a bomb that might be used to eradicate the state of Israel.

Kadish’s comparison is apt and not just because both Nazi Germany and Islamist Iran are tyrannical states governed by vicious anti-Semites who scheme against the Jews. He rightly points out that just like Adolf Hitler, a man who made no secret of his plans for genocide, the Iranian regime has also not been shy about telling the world its intentions for dealing with Israel. But in both cases, much of enlightened opinion dismissed their warnings as being mere rhetoric intended for domestic consumption. Few took the Nazis at their word in the 1930s. The same is true about the West’s refusal to take the apocalyptic warnings of Israel’s destruction, ironically by leaders like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who deny the original Holocaust while boasting of wishing to start another.

There may be those who will object to conflating the discussion of the Holocaust with concern about Iran, but any such complaints are without substance.

Jewish History Never Ends

Daniel Greenfield
Sultan Knish
27 February '10

We all know the famous Santayana quote, "Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it." But why is it that we are so forgetful that we cannot remember the past, and thus must keep repeating it, over and over again?

Human self-centeredness convinces us of our own specialness and uniqueness, and all too easily fosters the historically fallacious idea that we are living in a unique time and a special age. That we have left behind history with our progress and our achievements, and with our very existence. That we exist now apart from the great roll of human history. And as soon as we become convinced of this idea, the past comes sneaking up on us, dooming us to repeat it.

That is why it is so very dangerous to forget history, to sacrifice the past to our own egotism, to convince ourselves that it doesn't matter anymore. And that is why so many of the Jewish holidays are historical holidays. To observe the Jewish calendar, is to immerse oneself in Jewish history. Its holidays do not simply link the present to the past, they incorporate the past into the present, making them into one great whole.

In the winter, we rise up against an empire and fight for our freedom. In the early spring we are sentenced to death and fight for our lives in the streets of the Persian Empire. We build pyramids for a Pharaoh, feel the lash on our skin and are led out through the Red Sea by the hand of G-d. In the summer our temples fall and we are led into exile. In the fall, we wait out the desert heat of the Exodus in booths as we prepare for our new life. We cannot let go of history, because we are history. It is the history we have carried with us in our calendar, for our holidays and our history are one.

To observe Purim now and hear the Megillah read, is to bear witness to a planned Holocaust that is aborted at the last minute. Someone who comes to sit and hear the Wannsee Conference take place in Persia, 2500 years ago, understands that the Holocaust was not a new development, but a very old one. That is what too many Jews failed to understand in 1939. It is what too many Jews fail to understand in 2010. Because history has never ended. History never ends until it is done.