Thoughts on Holocaust Day: Past, Present and Future

Tomorrow is Holocaust Day, marking the systematic extermination of 6,000,000 Jews and numerous Slavs, Gypsies, disabled people and mentally ill people (HaShem avenge their blood all). It is neither the first genocide nor the last, neither in general history nor in Jewish history; its significance lies in its systematic, mechanical execution, and in the fact that it was planned and carried out by a nation hitherto deemed one of the most accultured, and finally in its continuing influence in the politics of today, particularly the Israel/“Palestine” conflict.

Present-day dangers regarding the Holocaust are threefold, each pertaining to one of the three tenses:

1. Past: “The Holocaust never happened”, or “The number of the victims of the Holocaust is greatly exaggerated”.
2. Present: “What Israel is doing to the Palestinians is the same as what the Nazis did to the Jews in the Holocaust”.
3. Future: “The Zionist Entity will be wiped off the map” (G-d forbid).

It would seem that one could never hold all of those positions at the same time, for they contradict; but beside that fact that that has never stopped a deranged enough hater from doing exactly that, the three positions can work in synergy, feeding each other in the framework of the Left/Islam alliance.

The Leftists repudiate the first position; however, they confine their repudiation mainly to the traditional Holocaust Deniers, the remnants of the Far Right such as David Duke. It serves their agenda of showing that racism and anti-Semitism are exclusively right-wing positions, while the truth is both are now far more to be found in left-wing circles, especially the latter, under the guise of anti-Zionism. When Holocaust Denial is found emanating from Islamic sources, the reaction of the Leftists is a show of “understanding”, namely, “What do you expect when the Holocaust is being used by the Zionists as justification of their colonialist land-grab?” This highlights the other facet of the Leftists’ attitude regarding the Holocaust Past: they are quick to admit it happened, but they are just as quick to say, “But the Palestinians shouldn’t be paying the price for it”.

The second position brings the Left/Islam alliance in full bloom: the Leftists now have the “Zionism = Nazism” libel engraved in stone, as a sacred tenet, and the Muslims, even those denying the Holocaust Past, are with them in the narrative of the Holocaust Present, in accusing the Jews of today of “having learned from their former oppressors”. The narrative of the Holocaust Present is the grounds for justification of the following:

The Muslims have no problem holding to the third position, for they can support it from their canon. One would expect the Leftists to be against the plan of the Holocaust Future, as they purport to be against all atrocities. But aside from the fact that the Left, apart from a few holdovers and revivalists, no longer stands for good values, the fact is a growing number of Leftists have all but found justification of, a quieting of the conscience for, such an occurrence. Mark Steyn quotes “BBC’s in-house poet” (acculturation and genocide-incitement go hand in hand, then as now) Tom Paulin saying Jewish “settlers” on the “West Bank” should be shot dead (G-d forbid) because “they are Nazis” and “I feel nothing but hatred for them” (hat tip: Melanie Phillips). Recall also my quote of a commenter on The Guardian (from my post of April 4, 2007, bottom), saying, “Personally if somebody was driving me from my country and colonising it. I’d kill them if I could and it would matter to me if they were civilian or military”. Combine the two thoughts: settlers “stealing Palestinian lands” should be killed (G-d forbid), and the recent trend of regarding the whole of the state of Israel, including Tel-Aviv and Haifa, as being a “colonialist land-grab, based from start to finish on robbing the indigenous people of their lands”, and you have the result that many Leftists would not shed a tear were Adolfhitlerjad to carry out his cartographic amendment proposal.

And now to our possible responses. Jewish defense groups have given exclusive focus to combating Holocaust Denial far too long, while the other two prongs of this fork have been neglected. Also, more importantly, the policy of justifying the state of Israel with the Holocaust was misguided from the start, and we now know this from the way it has backfired. Indeed, this is one of the few points of agreement I have with the Leftists: if we were to grant, for the sake of assumption, that the Zionist project involved the dispossession of an existing indigenous people from their land, then that would be that, and we could not use the Holocaust to justify that kind of thing. If the purpose of the setting up of a Jewish state was nothing but to address Jewish persecution by non-Jews, then I fail to see why the state needed to be set up on this particular geographic location and none other. But the political movement of Zionism predates the Holocaust by over half a century, and although persecutions of the Jews catalyzed it, its emphasis on the Land of Israel—indeed its very name, Zionism—cannot rest merely upon the pogroms.

The responses to each prong are:

1. Past: the Jews returned to sovereignty on the Land of Israel because it is their ancestral land. More: because it is their land as promised to them by the Creator-Owner of the world and all that is in it.
2. Present: the suffering of the “Palestinians” is nothing comparable to the Holocaust or even lesser atrocities. Also, most of it is necessitated as self-defense, and self-inflicted by people who focus on destroying the other rather than building their own.
3. Future: the return to Jewish sovereignty on their land was for the purpose that they could defend themselves from any threat, never mind what it might take; therefore, in the interests of preventing a future Holocaust, Jewish leaders should ignore laws, even international laws, that prevent the state of Israel from defending herself.

The first point avoids the issue (valid, I said) that people should not have to suffer for something that happened far away from them. Reminding the world that the Land of Israel is our ancestral land has the first benefit of bringing the two claimants to an equal level; then, with a little use of historical facts showing that the “Palestinians” are descendants of Arab immigrants to the land during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, after the first Zionist settlers began to make it bloom, as per G-d’s promise (His promise that the land would not bloom under any other nation), the Jewish claim comes out the victor. If you are a religious Jew like me, citing our title deed to this land in G-d’s Word (the Torah) closes the case; though the unbelievers may scoff, this is a war they cannot possibly win, even if they appear to win some of its battles.

The Leftists claim the obsession with the Holocaust belittles other atrocities. Bring, then, the second point, namely that their “Zionism = Nazism” canard belittles not just the Holocaust, but atrocities everywhere and at all times. There are no extermination camps, no death marches, no forced labor, no crematoriums, nothing at all of what the Nazis did as a systematic plan. There is no lining-up of women and children to be shot as happened to the Armenians and the Tutsis and, now, Black Sudanese in Darfur. There is, however, a group of people who prefer to use the millions given to them in foreign aid in order to buy weapons rather than to feed their children (whom they raise to use those weapons); people who destroy greenhouses in order to build terrorist training camps on their grounds, and who dismantle their sewage pipes in order to construct rockets, and then wonder why they swim in sewage. Those people do this because they are part of the movement of Islam, a global fascistic imperialist movement that is worthy to be called the heir of Nazism in our present times.

And now to the third point: We must live (literally) up to our motto of, “Never Again”. Enough about how Ahmadijenad’s words may have been “mistranslated”; we have the benefit of hindsight, meaning we now know that a Holocaust did happen, so we no longer can shrug any threat off, saying, “You really think he could do such a thing? It’s all rhetoric, he’s a pragmatic person, he knows what the consequences would be”. It happened in the past, so it could happen again. People can do things out of ideology, even against their pragmatic interests, as laid out superbly by the late Barbara Tuchman in her The March of Folly. Finally, what with the British sailors incident and the aforementioned comments from the Leftists, it is not at all clear that there would be consequences. Muslim advocates of wiping the Zionist Entity off the map can now feel themselves at the same position as did the Nazis after the 1936 Evian Conference, safe in the conviction that the world, the “enlightened” world, the “accultured” world, the “justice-minded” world, would acquiesce.

Therefore, we must be strong; we must pay less attention to the opinion spewing forth from that same world; we must show the other side that their actions have consequences, no matter whether they live outside the 1949 Armistice Line or inside it (that was for you, Azmi Bisharah); and we must discard international law as our basis for warfare, for international law was conceived by a world oblivious to an enemy capable of using its own women and children as weapons and shields.

“Never Again”—never again a Holocaust for the Jews, never again the threat of a fascistic imperialism to the whole world. At the head of this post I stated that the Holocaust did not affect only Jews; at the close of it, I say that the fight of Israel against her Islamic enemies and their non-Muslim sympathizers and enablers is the fight of the whole world.