Monday, November 17, 2014
From Ian:
The Ivory Tower’s Nazification of Israel
The Ivory Tower’s Nazification of Israel
“What if the Jews themselves were Nazis?,” mused French philosopher, Vladimir Jankélévitch in 1986. “That would be great. We would no longer have to feel sorry for them; they would have deserved what they got.”Dutch Officials Demonize Israelis
The recasting of Israelis, and, by extension, Jews as Nazis has, in fact, taken place, just as Jankélévitch envisioned. This summer’s Israeli incursion, Operation Protective Edge, provided anti-Semites and loathers of the Jewish state with resurgent justifications for assigning the epithet of Nazi on the Jews yet another time, together with oft-heard accusations of “crimes against humanity, “massacres,” genocide,” and, according to recent comments by Turkey’s prime minister Tayyip Erdoğan, in their treatment of the Palestinians, Israel has demonstrated that “. . . their barbarism has surpassed even Hitler’s.”
The Nazification of Israelis—and by extension Jews—is both breathtaking in its moral inversion and cruel in the way it makes the actual victims of the Third Reich’s horrors a modern-day reincarnation of that same barbarity. It is, in the words of Boston University’s Richard Landes, “moral sadism,” a salient example of Holocaust inversion that is at once ahistorical, disingenuous, and grotesque in its moral and factual inaccuracy.
In reflecting on the current trend he perceived in the burgeoning of anti-Israelism around the world, Canadian Member of Parliament, Irwin Cotler, once observed that conventional strains of anti-Semitism had been masked, so that those who directed enmity towards Jews were now able to transfer that opprobrium to the Jew of nations, Israel.
The truth is that there has never been an Israeli genocide against Palestinians, neither systematic nor acute, and that Israel has done everything in its power apart from not going to war at all -- that is, apart from surrendering -- to spare innocent lives, including the lives of the people trying to destroy it. This argument falls on deaf ears among many Muslims, as well as on those of the youths who support them.Australian Spectator: The Girl from Sderot
Sadly, it was not long before more prominent and mainstream Dutch figures began expressing similar thoughts. Pieter Broertjes, Labour Party mayor of the Dutch city and "media capital" Hilversum, said during a radio interview, when asked what to do about Dutch Muslims travelling to foreign battlegrounds: "They are adults. Dutch citizens went to Israel to fight the British, we didn't stop them either."
After his remarks produced a backlash, Broertjes's spokesperson formally apologized, but not Broertjes himself, although he did comment on his self-described "clumsy" comparison during later interviews.
A few months earlier, his Labour Party colleague, Yasmina Haifi, championed the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion, by stating (with a straight face): "ISIS has nothing to do with Islam. It is part of a plan by Zionists who are deliberately trying to blacken Islam's name" -- in other words, part of the supposed "Zionist conspiracy."
Jan Wijenberg, a former Dutch Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and Yemen among other places, and known for his fierce anti-Israeli stance, wrote an op-ed that took the comparison even further: "The IS goal is to establish a utopian religious state, just as the Zionists have done."
As a child, she and her family frequented the beautiful beaches of Gaza, enjoyed the fruits of Gaza’s famed market gardens and bought elegant furniture from local Arab craftsmen. Her family counted Palestinians among their friends, neighbours, acquaintances. In 2005, Israel unilaterally – and optimistically – withdrew from the Strip. Soldiers departed, settlers left or were forcibly removed.
And then came hell.
Today, aged 24, she – like everyone else throughout the Negev – lives on a permanent fifteen second fuse; the time it takes between loudspeakers announcing ‘Colour Red’ and Katyusha rockets hitting the ground, obliterating everything for a hundred metres and sending deadly nails, ballbearings and shrapnel for up to a kilometre. Like all women and children in Sderot she also now lives with the dread of being massacred in her bed: notes recently discovered in an Hamas tunnel reveal plans for such an attack.
Yet, devoid of bitterness or hatred, she studies Arabic at Ben-Gurion university, in the hope of eventually working as a diplomat, politician or NGO worker who might – just might – help bring about peace with the Palestinians. She is the determined face of young Israel.
Bob Carr [former Aust. FM], a lazy narcissist too concerned about his silk pyjamas and rolled oats to bother getting to grips with the wretched complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during his 18 months as Australia’s foreign minister, now seeks to grandstand with the left by cynically demonizing Israel as an ‘apartheid’ state. The girl from Sderot puts him to shame.
