Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: The Return of Anti-Semitism
Last Tuesday, a group of Holocaust survivors, by now gaunt and frail, made their way back to Auschwitz, the West’s symbol of evil—back to the slave-labor side of the vast complex, with its mocking inscription Arbeit Macht Frei (“Work makes you free”), and back to the death camp, where a million and a quarter human beings, most of them Jews, were gassed, burned and turned to ash. They were there to commemorate the day, 70 years ago, when Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz and saw, for the first time, the true dimensions of the greatest crime since human beings first set foot on Earth.IsraellyCool: History Channel Knows How To Have A Lot Fewer Problems And Jews
The moment would have been emotional at the best of times, but this year brought an especially disturbing undercurrent. The Book of Genesis says that, when God told Abraham what would happen to his descendants, a “fear of great darkness” fell over him. Something of that fear haunted the survivors this week, who have witnessed the return of anti-Semitism to Europe after 70 years of political leaders constant avowals of “Never again.” As they finished saying Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for mourners, one man cried out, “I don’t want to come here again.” Everyone knew what he meant. For once, the fear was not only about the past but also about the future.
The murder of Jewish shoppers at a Parisian kosher supermarket three weeks ago, after the killing of 12 people at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, sent shivers down the spines of many Jews, not because it was the first such event but because it has become part of a pattern. In 2014, four were killed at the Jewish Museum in Brussels. In 2012, a rabbi and three young children were murdered at a Jewish school in Toulouse. In 2008 in Mumbai, four terrorists separated themselves from a larger group killing people in the city’s cafes and hotels and made their way to a small Orthodox Jewish center, where they murdered its young rabbi and his pregnant wife after torturing and mutilating them. As the Sunday Times of London reported about the attack, “the terrorists would be told by their handlers in Pakistan that the lives of Jews were worth 50 times those of non-Jews.”
Well, yes, if by “problems” you mean Jews (and Christians) then yes, I’m sure there would be fewer Jews in the middle east today were it not for the existence of little Israel, the only oasis of sanity in the Middle East today.Trailer about WW1: world better without Balfour
Here’s where that line was taken from: a trailer for a forthcoming History Channel look at WW1.
Aside from the nonsense about Britain and France breaking up the Arab states: what Arab states? Britain and France CREATED the Arab states. As Anjem Choudry said in his interview a couple of weeks ago with Voice of Israel, modern nation states are an anathema to Islam. The Ottoman empire was a loosely governed amalgam of tribal areas.
It’s not too much of a stretch to say that the only recognisable nation today that should have been created is Israel! If anything created a lot of problems, it was the overlaying of Arab nationalism onto an Islamic base: perhaps they should have left the Arabs as highly fractured, waring fiefdoms and not encouraged to band together in nations at all. Because the only thing Arab nations have ever agreed on is hating Israel (and the Jews who run it).
The Hypocrisy of Iran's Holocaust Cartoon Contest
The purpose of the contest, according to the organizers, is to highlight Western hypocrisy over the value of free speech. Following the attack on Charlie Hebdo, people around the world expressed solidarity through the ubiquitous "Je Suis Charlie" slogan, indicating a defense of the newspaper's right to satirize religious piety. Critics of the newspaper, though, pointed out that Muslims weren't offended by Charlie Hebdo's irreverent speech. They were instead insulted that white Parisians mocked religious values held by France's immigrant population, a group that has long been marginalized within French society. And according to Massoud Shojai Tabatabai, one of the organizers of the 2006 conference, the Western commitment to free speech doesn't always include denying the Holocaust, which remains a criminal offense in countries like Austria.
"Why is it acceptable in Western countries to draw any caricature of the Prophet Mohammed, yet as soon as there are any questions or doubts raised about the Holocaust, fines and jail sentences are handed down?" Tabatabai told the Observer that year.
But there's a difference between drawing an offensive caricature and participating in the negation of an established historical fact. And while Holocaust denial didn't begin with Iran, Tehran's contribution to the practice has been especially shameful. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's president from 2005 to 2013, claimed that the Holocaust was a "myth" designed to protect the existence of Israel. In 2006, the year of the first cartoon contest, Tehran sponsored an international conference to "review the global vision of the Holocaust." Ahmadenijad's successor Hassan Rouhani acknowledged and condemned the Holocaust upon taking office in 2013, but neither he nor his suave, U.S.-educated Foreign Minister Mohammed Javaid Zarif have expressed regret for their country's role in its denial. Ayatollah Khameini, Iran's Supreme Leader and the man who controls the country's foreign policy, has called the Holocaust a "distorted historical event."