It defied belief that a people who have expended so much talent and effort in educating the world as to the horrors of genocide should turn around and threaten others with what they themselves suffered.
This wretched denouement will come as no surprise to those who recognize in Zionism the same fatal ethnic idolatry that agitated Nazism. The difference between legitimate ethnic pride and pathological ethnic narcissism is always a question of degree. But when self-worthiness passes into self-worship it inevitably ends up worshiping at the expense of others
The reaction among most Israelis and their supporters around the globe fell into two categories: (1) denial that anything so outrageous had been said and (2) an attempt to shift the blame onto the victims.
The back-pedaling of the first would be comic were it not so hypocritical. It was said that the word “shoah” (or holocaust) didn’t always mean holocaust, but was used colloquially to refer to the mess in the kitchen, messed up accounts, and any kind of routine fiasco. Ergo, the Gazans weren’t really be threatened with anything like genocide. Not to worry.
This hasbara (“forensic defense of Israel”) is just an outright lie. Just last year, AIPAC and Jewish Groups in the United State fought tooth and nail to prevent an official commemoration of the “Armenian Holocaust.” Over and over again Jewish spokesmen declaimed that the word “holocaust” had a specific meaning limited to Jewish suffering and the “extent of the horror” would be cheapened by being applied to any else.... except of course as we now learn, the mess in the kitchen, the fiasco at the picnic and other such disasters which afflict ordinary people in daily life.
The only way Israel can disequilibriate the sheer disporportionality of its conduct is to shuffle and switch the things compared. “Israel” is not under attack in any real sense. Sderot, a small township, near the Gaza border is being harrased by jumbo firecrackers that in a period of four years have killed two, perhaps now three or four people. By way of a true comparison all of Gaza is under siege and daily attack by the Israeli military and In the same period, hundreds verging on a thousand Palestinian civilians have been killed by Israeli collateral actions. The false equation foisted is revolting.
What Israel is doing in Gaza is evil, and has been condemned by the UN, the Secretary General, the World Court and numerous human rights organizations. For years the Israel government has subjected Gaza (and the West Bank) to restrictions that clearly qualified as “genocide” under the definitions studiously worked out by Rafael Lemkin who coined the word.
©WCG, 2008
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