So much sympathy for dead Jews - how about some empathy for live ones?
Another Yom Hashoah came and left.MEMRI: Moroccan Writer: The Jewish Holocaust Is An Undisputable Fact; Commemorating It Is Legitimate, Especially In Light Of Iran’s Threats To Eliminate Israel
One out of every three Jews on Planet Earth were slaughtered by Nazis and their various collaborators in the Holocaust. While there were unfortunately many other victims, Jews and Roma (“Gypsies”) were the ones targeted for total extinction. Of the six million Jews who perished, a million and a half were babies and children. The Nazis were proud of their work and took many pictures…
There were many worthy commemorative articles by esteemed authors regarding this somber annual event, but two especially come to mind that should be read. The first one by Meir Jolovitz gave me yet another reason to like the actor Morgan Freeman,. Ruthie Blum honored the martyrs beautifully as well
This year, due to the current pandemic, we all recalled these tragic events at home. Since the Hebrew calendar is both solar and lunar, the corresponding dates on the Western calendar change yearly.
I obviously agree that it’s good to have a day set aside to recall the Holocaust and its lessons. Indeed, I’ve worked most of my life trying to assure that “Never Again ! ” will be a truism forever by defending Israel, its right to thrive–not just survive–in relatively secure, far more defensible, real borders than those imposed upon the reborn Jewish State by the United Nations armistice lines in 1949.
The 1949 lines made Israel smaller in width (9-15 miles) at its strategic waist than the size of some Texas driveways, at least according to President George W. Bush.
Additionally, I’ve fought for relative justice for all peoples– Jew and non-Jew alike–with my pen, via other media, and additional means of communication and education for well over half century now. That’s also what http://q4j-middle-east.com is all about.
But, last year, before corona, I stayed away from this public display of sympathy for dead Jews.Putting it bluntly, too many people attending annual Yom Hashoah commemorations leave and then, either consciously or unconsciously, aid and abet those who claim that Arabs are now allegedly the new stateless, oppressed Jews; Gaza is the new Warsaw Ghetto; Jews are the new Nazis; and so forth.
If that above paragraph had even an iota of truth to it, Israel would have solved its Gaza terror problem long ago.
On January 24, 2020, one day after the Fifth World Holocaust Forum in Jerusalem, which marked the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and was attended by dozens of leaders from across the world, Moroccan writer Kamal Ait bin Juba posted an article on the liberal website ahewar.org,[1] in which he noted that the Holocaust was an undisputable fact and an indescribable horror. He added that commemorating the Holocaust was legitimate and justified, especially in light of Iran’s threats to eliminate Israel, and called to continue commemorating it so that tragedies of its sort never recur. He also expressed sorrow that many Islamic countries today still teach children to hate Jews.Amb. Dore Gold: 100 Years Since the San Remo Conference
The following are translated excerpts from his article:
"I have no intention of discussing in this [article] who has the right to live in the Jewish lands in Israel today, for this is not the place to do so… But as human beings, we do not condone the extermination of any nation in the world, be it the Armenians, the Palestinians, the Rohingya Muslims, or anyone else. When the Jews accuse the dictator Hitler of exterminating millions of Jews in gas chambers in Germany [sic] as part of what he called the ‘final solution,’ the world knows they are not directing accusations against a person who brought joy to people’s hearts… but against a person who commanded vast, destructive military and intelligence forces… and who attacked others. And how can they [not accuse him], when he wrote in his book that capitalism and communism were both invented by the Jews, and expressed covert hostility towards them[?]…
"The truth is that, when I myself studied the issue of the Jewish Holocaust… I found it to be an undisputable fact… It was a terrible tragedy that befell the Jews of Europe in [the era of] Nazi Germany, [a tragedy] whose heinous nature cannot be imagined, except by those who are directly connected to it, being Jews or descendants of [Holocaust] survivors, who transmit from generation to generation the stories about this sad and tragic affair.
"On January 23, 2020, a ceremony was held in Jerusalem to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Germany [sic], where many Jews were exterminated. The anniversary of this event becomes [especially] justified and meaningful in light of the existence of a state like Iran, which never stops threatening to wipe Israel off the map… by means of its supporters, who take every opportunity to chant slogans like ‘death to Israel, curse the Jews.’
"Moreover, hatred of Jews is still being taught in many schools across the world, [including] in so-called Islamic states, some of which may even have diplomatic ties and peace agreements with the state of Israel. These people [the Jews] are described [in their curricula] as devils, violators of agreements, etc.
In April 2020, the Jewish people will be commemorating the 100th anniversary of the San Remo Conference, convened in Italy from April 19 until April 26, 1920, in the aftermath of the First World War. British Prime Minister Lloyd George and his minister of foreign affairs, Lord Curzon, attended along with the prime ministers of France and Italy. Representatives of Belgium, Greece, and Japan also took part. They constituted what was called the Supreme Council of the Principal Allied and Associated Powers. Most people have heard of the other great postwar conferences, like the Paris Peace Conference or the Geneva Conferences at the end of World War II. But San Remo has not been on many people’s radar screens, despite the fact that it created the geographic basis of the modern Middle East for most of the 20th century.
San Remo dealt with the disposition of territories that until 1920 were a part of the Ottoman Empire, which had been defeated in the war. Formally, the Ottomans renounced their claim to sovereignty over these lands, sometimes called Arab Asia, in the Treaty of Sevres, which was signed the same year as San Remo, on August 10, 1920. It was at Sevres that a draft peace agreement between the allies and the Ottoman Empire was worked out. What these postwar treaties enabled was the emergence of the system of Arab states, on the one hand, and the emergence of a ”national home for the Jewish people,” on the other hand. The Balfour Declaration from 1917 was in essence a declaration of British policy. But San Remo converted the Balfour Declaration into a binding international treaty, setting the stage for the League of Nations Mandate, which was approved in 1922. It has been noted that at San Remo, Jewish historic rights became Jewish legal rights.
Were these legal rights of the Jewish people superseded in subsequent years? At the time that the UN Charter was drafted in 1945, officials were cognizant that this argument might be raised. Therefore, they incorporated Article 80 into the UN Charter which stated specifically that “nothing in this chapter shall be construed in or of itself to alter in any manner the rights whatsoever of any states or any peoples or the terms of existing international instruments to which Members of the United Nations may respectively be parties.” Thus, the foundations of Jewish legal rights established through San Remo were preserved for the future.