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Opinion Editorials, March 2008

 

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Editorial Note: The following news reports are summaries from original sources. They may also include corrections of Arabic names and political terminology. Comments are in parentheses.

 

Jews and the Gaza Holocaust

By Khalid Amayreh

PIC, March 1, 2008

   
  Funeral of the four boys killed Thursday in an Israeli airstrike while playing outside their homes Comment  

In  June, 1942, in reprisal for the assassination of  the Nazi commander Reinhard Heydrich, the Germans carried out a murderous  rampage of murder and terror throughout Czechoslovakia. The small Czech village of Lidice bore the brunt of the German revenge, with the SS killing all the men, deported all women and children and razed the village to the ground.

Similarly, in March 1944, thirty-three German soldiers were killed when members of an Italian resistance group set off a bomb close to a column of German troops who were marching on via Rasella in Rome .  Adolph Hitler got furious and ordered that within 24 hours, ten Italians were to be shot for each German soldier that had been killed. Herbert Kappler, the local German commander, quickly compiled a list of 320 civilians who were to be assassinated as vengeance.  On March 24, the victims were transported to the Ardeatine caves where they were summarily executed by the SS.

Numerous other  ‘pacification operations’ were carried out by the Nazi armies against civilians throughout Nazi-occupied Europe, in which men, women and children were brutally killed to avenge the death of German occupation soldiers by local resistance fighters.

Now what is the difference between these Nazi atrocities and  what  Israel, the “only democracy in the Middle East” is doing in the Gaza Strip,  where “the most moral army in the world” is slaughtering babies as young as six-months’ old?   I know that  many Jews, especially Zionist Jews, have developed  almost instinctive knee- jerk defensive reactions  to any comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany. However,  the truth must be proclaimed aloud, irrespective of how many Zionists will get angry. 

Israel claims that it doesn’t murder innocent civilians deliberately. But this is  a big, obscene  lie, of which even  most Israelis aware. Mistakes happen a few times, but when the wanton slaughter of children occurs each day and every day of the year, it means it is policy.

In addition, when the number of victims, especially innocent victims, as in Gaza, even intent itself becomes irrelevant.

In the final analysis,  murdering knowingly is murdering deliberately, regardless of the prevarication and the verbal juggling.

Hence, Jews around the world, especially those who support Israel,  should be willing to  bring themselves to recognizing  that  what  their wonderful  state  is doing to these helpless Palestinians is a virtual  holocaust or at least a holocaust in the making.

How else can any honest person relate to these phantasmagoric images that keep coming from Gaza,  haunting the conscience of every human being?

True, Israel had not  introduced gas chambers in Beit Hanun and Khan Younis or Rafah. But we have F-16s  raining down bombs and death on sleeping children and women  and innocent civilians.

If Jews who support this satanic entity  are not willing to call the spade a spade and recognize a holocaust as a holocaust, then they should be viewed as active accomplices in this wanton rampage of murder and terror.

This is not a war. Calling the current Israeli onslaught on Gaza  a war is like fornicating with words.  Wars occur between armies and states.

 What is happening in Gaza is actually a merciless and brutal  rampage of murder and terror waged  by  a Wehrmacht-like army against a blockaded, beleaguered and starved people who want to survive and be free, very much like Jews did under the Nazi occupation of Europe.

Indeed, when Israel murders a hundred Palestinian, mostly innocent civilians,  for every Israeli  killed, there is a name for that, it is massacre.

It  is conscionable that honest people around the world, including  many conscientious Jews who can’t bear watching the  heinous crimes Israel is committing in their collective  name,  must call the spade a spade. A holocaust, after all, doesn’t become lesser or less evil when perpetrated by Jews. There is no such a thing as a kosher holocaust or kosher massacres.

Vilnai

Now, once again,  human decency  is being  affronted  and insulted by  this reptile terrorist  Matan Vilnai,  Israel’s deputy defense minister, who  has gone as far as threatening  the thoroughly tormented Gazans  with a holocaust.

Speaking to the Israeli army radio Friday morning, 29 February,  Vilnai said “the more Qassam rockets fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, the Palestinians will bring upon themselves a bigger holocaust because we will use all our power to defend ourselves.”

Well,  if Israel  thinks  that carrying out a holocaust against its victims in Gaza and Rafah and Khan Younis can be justified, then why blame Hitler for effecting a holocaust against his  own respective enemies?  Is Vilnai vindicating the holocaust?

I think  Jews should realize that this  criminal state, with its  manifestly intransigence and bellicosity, is forcing them to make a moral judgment. In the face of evil, and Israel is a clear embodiment of evil, one can’t be neutral. It is either one stands with evil or stands against it.

Today, people around the world, including millions of Jews,   are watching  the pornographic slaughter in Gaza  live on their TV screens. And no amount of spin, lie,  or hasbara will make the images of  mutilated babies look innocuous.

 


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