Holocaust Memorial Day today 27th Jan

[plekhanov]

Nobody said he did!

 

john x

When you quote a fragment of Lordchaverly's post excising everything he said about why remembering it is a good thing, are clearly arguing against against him and end your response with:

 

"it should in no way stop us from remembering those murdered in the camps.

 

To do so would be an insult to their memory."

 

What you did is a classic smear tactic, you are clearly attempting to create the impression that he did suggest that those murdered by the Naizs should be forgotten hence your need to declare the opposite in direct response to him. There is not other reason for you to have spent half your post saying something completely redundant.

[Wildcat]

When you quote a fragment of Lordchaverly's post excising everything he said about why remembering it is a good thing, are clearly arguing against against him and end your response with:

 

"it should in no way stop us from remembering those murdered in the camps.

 

To do so would be an insult to their memory."

 

What you did is a classic smear tactic, you are clearly attempting to create the impression that he did suggest that those murdered by the Naizs should be forgotten hence your need to declare the opposite in direct response to him. There is not other reason for you to have spent half your post saying something completely redundant.

 

I don't think it is clear at all that John X is arguing against all of Lord Chaverley's post. The selection of the section he has chosen would seem to indicate to me he is arguing against the section chosen nothing more.

 

If you are disagreeing with John X's point... Can we take your objections to mean that you think the holocaust does provide Israel with an unassailable high moral ground ?

 

Somehow I think not, which would mean that despite the rhetorhic about smears etc. you are in fact in agreement on the point John X was making.

[John X]

When you quote a fragment of Lordchaverly's post excising everything he said about why remembering it is a good thing, are clearly arguing against against him

 

That may be how you see it.

 

Others wouldn't.

 

John X

[plekhanov]

That may be how you see it.

 

Others wouldn't.

 

John X

So enlighten us then why did you end your short responce to Lordchaverly with a rebuttal to a position he hasn't taken other than to try and create the impression he had taken that position?

[plekhanov]

I don't think it is clear at all that John X is arguing against all of Lord Chaverley's post. The selection of the section he has chosen would seem to indicate to me he is arguing against the section chosen nothing more.

He was clearly arguing with LordChaverly whether or not he was arguing against every single thing is irrelevant to the fact that he ended his post with a rebuttal of a point LordChaverly clearly never took, hence my objection.

 

If you are disagreeing with John X's point... Can we take your objections to mean that you think the holocaust does provide Israel with an unassailable high moral ground ?

In US politics it pretty much does.

 

Somehow I think not, which would mean that despite the rhetorhic about smears etc. you are in fact in agreement on the point John X was making.

I fundamentally disagree with him on a number of points.

• His claim that Israel only has the high ground in Tel Aviv and New York
  
• His pretence that there's the slightest question about whether or not Israel uses of Holocaust as a political weapon.
  
• The implication LordChaverly suggested those murdered by the Nazis in camps should not be remebered.
  

[callippo]

Israel uses of Holocaust as a political weapon.

 

Israeliis don't deny that other genocides have not happened. Sure, you can say that Israel has - largely - sided with the Turks in the Turkish government's notion that the Armenian genocide never happened, but there were sound political reasons for that. Turkey, like Iran before 1979, is/was a Middle Eastern Muslim majority ally of the type that Israel sorely needs. You could hardly blame the Israelis for keeping quiet about the Armenian genocide question so as not to rock the boat too much with the Turks.

 

and too often, when the notion of 'genocide' comes up, people want to make cheap and utterly innapropriate political points. For example, when the Israelis wanted to attend a Holocaust exhibition in Stockholm in 2004, what did they find but an exhibit in the name of 'art', that drew a comparison between the Nazi Holocaust and the Israelis' treatment of the Palestinians.

 

FACT : Three out of every four Jews in Nazi occupied Europe disappeared in four years.

 

FACT : Since 1967, the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza has tripled in size, life expectancy has nearly doubled, and all educational and socio-indicators have improved massively.

 

how can that be genocide, even 'creeping genocide' (huh?!?!) as Pappe maintains?

 

I think the Jews would have dearly loved to have seen their numbers triple in size in Nazi occupied Europe. Instead, 75% of them were murdered.

 

to draw a comparison between them is just odious.

 

AND THERE'S ALSO ANOTHER COMPELLING REASON TO REMEMBER THE HOLOCUAST, WHICH SO FAR NO-ONE ON THIS THREAD HAS MENTIONED.

 

millions of people all over the world choose to deny that the Holocaust ever happened, or they grudgingly admit that it DID happen, to downplay it.

 

even if it wasn't for the massive and totally unprecendented industrial scale of the Nazi genocide, that alone is a compelling reason to remember it.

 

and it's especially appropriate that Muslims in the western liberal democracies, who may be more exposed to Holocaust denial influences than most, should be educated about the reality of it.

[LordChaverly]

thus many Zionists are 'expulsions deniers'. As Ilan Pappe has demonstrated in his book 'The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine', far from being an unintended side-effect of war, the expulsion of the Palestinians was a deliberate policy of the Zionist state.

 

what LordChaverly, taking his lead from Pappe, is doing is here is trying to put across the notion that the 1948 expulsions - which nobody I know of, Zionist or not, denies took place, and 'ethnic cleansing' are ONE AND THE SAME.

 

as for 'ethnic cleansing', yes some did take place, but to understand it properly one needs to regard it in context :

 

1. The Arabs started a war with the stated intention of ethnically cleansing Jews from the land.

 

2. As a result of this Arab aggression, ALL Jews in the territories illegally seized by invading Arab armies were ethnically cleansed.

 

3. Also as a result of this Arab war, many Arabs fled and some were expelled.

 

4. The majority were not "expelled". They fled without even seeing a Jewish soldier.

 

5. Most of those who did not voluntarily flee were not expelled, harmed or killed. A few were expelled, but most lived to become full citizens of Israel with equal protection under the law.

 

6. Yes, there were scattered expulsions during the Arab initiated war.

 

7. Pappe makes much of the so-called Plan Dalet, but totally ignores overtures made to include Arabs in the Israeli state. There was no plan for ethnic cleansing nor was Israel ethnically cleansed of Arabs, as is evidenced by the fact that there are today over a million Arabs in Israel.

 

8. Yet in the territories illegally seized by invading Arab armies in 1948, ALL Jews were expelled (or just killed).

 

9. Unless you're a propagandist pushing "ethnic cleansing" as a sound-bite, a slogan to be used for propaganda purposes, you should by now start understanding that expulsions and 'ethnic cleansing' are not one and the same.

 

10. Jews in what Zionists refer to Judea and Samaria, plus Gaza and eastern Jerusalem, were expelled to such an extent (totally) that not one remained. The area was "ethnically cleansed" of all Jews by Arabs.

 

13. The opposite cannot be said.

 

See the difference?

 

 

No, I don’t see the difference between the mass expulsions of an ethnic group (cf, the Palestinian Arabs in 1948) and ethnic cleansing. They are exactly the same. You may baulk at the pejorative terminology, but ethnic cleansing it was. I very much doubt if the Palestinians uprooted from their homes in 1948 would find much comfort in the assertion that they were not being the target of ethnic cleansing, but merely being ‘expelled’. Even if, as you say, the majority fled without ‘seeing a single Jewish soldier’, they were fleeing for fear of their lives (and reasonably so, given the massacres in Arab villages which did take place) and were not allowed to return. Moreover, the point of these massacres by the Irgun and similar terrorist groups was precisely to spread fear in order to encourage Arabs to flee. Thanks to the work of various historians (and by no means only Pappe) we now know very well the context in which these events took place, i.e. the Zionist policy to create a Jewish state which was as free as it could possibly be of Arabs (a dream still kept alive by none other than the current Israeli foreign minister, who even now favours the ‘transfer’ of the Arab population from Israel).

 

As for your comforting assertion that all Zionists now acknowledge that ‘expulsions’ did take place, well, here is a quote from none other than Eli Wiesel, who on a lecture tour stated that ‘incited by their leaders, 600,000 Palestinians left the country convinced that, once Israel was vanquished, they would be able to return home." This idea (or rather lie) that the Arab population left voluntarily as a result of incitement from their leaders has been far more common in Zionist hagiography than recognition of the grievous wrongs done to the Palestinian population in 1948 and indeed for the past six decades).

 

But the point of this thread is not to rehearse the events of 1948, but rather to discuss the moral lessons of the Holocaust, which should be one of the main purposes of Holocaust Memorial Day. In this regard, we might learn something from the Auschwitz survivor Hajo Meyer, who’ although now 86 years old, has recently been on a lecture tour of the UK to talk about precisely this (indeed, he gave a wonderful and very moving talk in Sheffield in January). You would think that the organizers of Holocaust Memorial Day Trust would be very keen to publicise Meyer’s lecture tour on their website. After all, he must be one of the few survivors of the camp who are still living. However, instead, the Trust refused to include any mention of Meyer’s tour on the Holocaust Memorial Day website, despite repeated requests to do so. Indeed, you will not find any mention of Meyer on the Holocaust Memorial Day website – a glaring, but in fact a very instructive omission.

 

Even worse, when Meyer gave a talk about the moral lessons of the Holocaust in London recently, he was repeatedly heckled. Now who would stoop so low as to heckle a frail Auschwitz survivor? Was it the neo-Nazis?; was it Islamic extremists? It was actually a group of Zionists, who (like many of the leading figures behind Holocaust Memorial Day) are desperate to avoid any linkage between the moral lessons of the Holocaust (i.e. the dangers of extreme ethno-nationalism) and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Meyer does see parallels between the extreme ethno-nationalism of the Nazis and that of the Zionists, in that both, in his words, involve forms of dehumanization. On the other end of the moral compass, you have someone like Eli Wiesel who, as I have said in a previous post have been a principal proponent of the ‘uniqueness doctrine’ with regard to the Holocaust and who has been totally indifferent to the plight of the Palestinians, as well as being an ‘expulsion denier’ (despite being a former member of the Irgun, which undoubtedly played a role in these expulsions).

Edited February 7, 2010 by LordChaverly

[callippo]

I don’t see the difference between the mass expulsions of an ethnic group (cf, the Palestinian Arabs in 1948 and ethnic cleansing.

 

perhaps you WILL see the difference between the scattered expulsions of Palestinian Arabs following the Arab initiated war, compared to what happened in the territories illegally seized by invading Arab armies in 1948 and which became, similarly illegally, parts of Jordan and Egypt. There, ALL Jews were expelled (or just killed), in accordance to the stated aim of the Arabs before the war, to ethnically cleanse all Jews from Palestine.

 

not a single Jew remained. By contrast, in Israel, within a few years, Arabs became full citizens together with the Jewish majority with equal rights under the law.

 

In this regard, we might learn something from the Auschwitz survivor Hajo Meyer.

 

Mr Meyer is entitled to his opinion, and I'm not surprised to see that the Palestine Solidarity Campaign has managed to find an 86 year old 'good Jew' from somewhere to opine, in what seems very generalised terms indeed, that Israel 'acts like Nazis'.

 

unlike Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, Israeli Arab citizens, 20% of the total and numbering 1.5 million, have equal rights under the law to Jews in Israel and enjoy probably more political rights than Arabs anywhere else in the Middle East.

 

in the West Bank and Gaza since 1967, the number of Palestinian Arabs has tripled in size, life expectancy has almost doubled, and socio economic indicators like educational attainment and general health have improved massively. Calling that some sort of 'ethnic cleansing', in the manner of the Nazi Holocaust, where 3 out of every 4 Jews were murdered in a few years, is nothing short of obscene.

[LordChaverly]

 

Mr Meyer is entitled to his opinion, and I'm not surprised to see that the Palestine Solidarity Campaign has managed to find an 86 year old 'good Jew' from somewhere to opine, in what seems very generalised terms indeed, that Israel 'acts like Nazis'.

 

unlike Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, Israeli Arab citizens, 20% of the total and numbering 1.5 million, have equal rights under the law to Jews in Israel and enjoy probably more political rights than Arabs anywhere else in the Middle East.

 

in the West Bank and Gaza since 1967, the number of Palestinian Arabs has tripled in size, life expectancy has almost doubled, and socio economic indicators like educational attainment and general health have improved massively. Calling that some sort of 'ethnic cleansing', in the manner of the Nazi Holocaust, where 3 out of every 4 Jews were murdered in a few years, is nothing short of obscene.

 

Hajo Meyer is indeed entitled to his opinion, but not according to the Zionists who subjected him to such a disgraceful tirade of abuse in London recently, nor to the proprietors of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, who have refused to include any mention of his name on their website.

 

Israeli Arabs undoubtedly have more rights than Arabs in other Middle Eastern countries (but by no means de facto equal rights with other Israelis). But what about the rights of the expellees? The very fact that they are in Gaza and the West Bank in such large numbers, rather than in their original homeland, is proof if any proof were needed of 'ethnic cleansing' - which of course is not necessarily the same thing as genocide.

 

It is no good, as you repeatedly do on this forum, to seek to divert attention from the abominable treatment of the Palestinians by pointing to the abominable treatment of Jews by Arabs. This thread, as I have said before, is about the moral lessons of the Holocaust for our times (which is precisely the focus of Meyer's writings and speeches).

Edited February 9, 2010 by LordChaverly

[John X]

he ended his post with a rebuttal of a point LordChaverly clearly never took, hence my objection.

 

So how does that work then?

 

Logic fail.

 

John X