Don't cheapen the Holocaust by making it shopworn

Humanity has seen many genocides since our ancestors killed off all the Neanderthals... 

The Holocaust is different.

How is this genocide different from all other genocides?

There is a qualitative difference between ordinary enraged insanity and the carefully planned and managed destruction of an entire people (one of the founders of our civilization) carried out by one the most developed and cultured peoples of that same civilization.

It is the end of the idea, the hope, the faith, that material progress leads to spiritual progress.

The difference between any other genocide and the Holocaust is that in the Holocaust all the techniques of over a century of miraculous scientific and technical "progress", were applied to the task.

The Holocaust is not just another pogrom, ethnic cleansing or enraged genocide. It is the industrial scale, ice-cold destruction of an entire group of human beings using all the tools of modern logistics, recycling and information management, just as if the victims were nothing more than pigs or chickens going to market. The ultimate in depersonalization, in dehumanization: it is the summit of humanity's alienation from itself. It is the dark side of all the material progress made since the industrial revolution... All modern progress since the Enlightenment devoted to evil. 

Because of the symbolism involved the Holocaust is not the same as, for example, the Turkish genocide of Armenians, or the atrocities of Rwanda. Why not?

Germany, pre-Hitler, represented the cutting edge of technology, science and "kultur": the land of Einstein and Adorno, not "just" Bach, Beethoven, Hegel, Kant, Marx and Goethe.  The Jews themselves, of course, before anything else, wrote the Bible, which is nothing less than the founding document of our entire western civilization. 

So we are not talking about the individual suffering involved, which is not in any way different from that of Armenians or Rwandans, but rather the suicide of any moral authority our civilization could claim to possess. That loss was summed up by Gandhi when he was asked what he thought of Western civilization, "It would be a good idea", the Mahatma replied.

In many senses our modern, western civilization died in Auschwitz

I think while we are on subject, I should go on record as saying that, for all the reasons that I have stated above,  I am in total agreement with the Jewish position that the Holocaust was totally unique and cannot be compared to any other event in history. 

But, for the same reason of its uniqueness, I think that it is sinfully frivolous to cheapen something as unique as the Holocaust by blandishing it as moral blackmail to cover the carefully organized and methodical oppression, humiliation and displacement of the Palestinian people. DS

A collection of press snippets

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I began my journalistic endeavors by simply juxtaposing snippets from the press in an electronic collage, hoping that in the end result the total effect would be more than just the sum of the separate clippings. With the quotes below I return to my origins...

According to the Foundation for the Benefit of Holocaust Victims in Israel, 87 percent of Holocaust survivors who request financial aid live on less than NIS 5,000 a month, while 58 percent live on NIS 3,000 or less. Meanwhile, 70 percent of survivors who turn to the foundation cannot afford dental care, and 18 percent need financial aid to pay for eyeglasses. Haaretz

One of every five Holocaust survivors said that he or she had skipped a meal at least once over the past year for financial reasons, and five percent of the survivors said they skipped meals often for that reason. One of every eight Holocaust survivors cited financial difficulty as the reason they had gone without medication at least once over the past year.(...)  Commemorations for Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Day, or Yom Hashoah Vehagvurah, will begin next Sunday night April 7. Haaretz

As soon as next year, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., could feature holograms of elderly Holocaust survivors that answer questions from visitors.(...) When the holograms are ready for the museum, each one will be accompanied by a voice-recognition program that researchers, led by the University of Southern California, are developing. The program will recognize what museum-goers ask and provide answers, a bit like Siri does on the iPhone, except that all the answers must come from the person the hologram represents.(...) For Holocaust survivors, whose estimated average age is 79, this may be taxing work. So far, however, no one has declined to work with the project, the Associated Press reported. The technology team wants to preserve Holocaust survivors' memories and experiences for future generations, hopefully long after the survivors are gone. Tech News Daily

There is little that I could add to the total effect of the above except to say that I am sure that for the price of one (maybe two?) Cruise missiles or the cost of one museum, every single Holocaust survivor in the world could be housed for the rest of their lives in five star hotels, with full board and a personal nurse in 7/24 attendance. In fact I think that the sufferings of a group of poor, old people, who have had the hardest of lives is being “pimped” by a very cynical clique of political manipulators in order to justify apartheid and ethnic cleansing and through them the tragedy of the Jewish people is being turned into Disneyland. DS

America fiddles while the world burns

Israel's deputy defence minister yesterday warned his country was close to launching a huge military operation in Gaza and said Palestinians would bring on themselves a "bigger shoah," using the Hebrew word usually reserved for the Holocaust. News Item - Guardian

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"Relativizing" the Holocaust, comparing it to any other event, diminishing its uniqueness, is considered by Jews and many others as a grave insult to Hitler's Jewish victims and a proof of antisemitism. In what light are we supposed to read the Israeli defense minister statement threatening the Palestinians of Gaza with a Holocaust? Does he mean that since he already has the Palestinians in a concentration camp, that he is now preparing to exterminate them? Is he relativizing the Holocaust?

However that may be, his language is perfectly outrageous.

If I say that, am I "relativizing the holocaust"?

Meanwhile the candidates to the US presidency are lining up to swear eternal loyalty to Israel.

I think that there will be no meaningful debate on Israel, or much of anything else, till after the presidential elections. The elections drain all the vitality from the news cycle. Strangely enough, they put all serious political discussion into the deep freeze. The candidates and their handlers craft positions and try to avoid being shot down. The world burns, but the US elections come first. DS

The simplest test of hypocrisy

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So much of what is said in defense of Israel centers around the Holocaust. Lets talk about it a little.

First let me say that I have no doubts at all that it happened just the way it is portrayed (Raul Hilberg version at least).

Furthermore when I was only seven, the aged lady doctor with a heavy accent who walked several miles through a Midwestern blizzard to give me a lifesaving penicillin shot when I had gone into coma from double pneumonia, after my own pediatrician had refused to make the house call, had one of the tattoos on her arm. The next day, when I had awakened, I asked her about the numbers on her arm and my mother told me to shut up. So I am not a negationist. I loved that old lady and I owe my life to her.

So it strikes me as incongruous that with so much concern about the Holocaust that:

"an umbrella group of Holocaust survivor organizations in Israel estimated that about one-quarter of Israel’s 250,000 survivors are living in poverty."

according to the Jewish Telegraph Agency.

With billions of dollars of American aid going to Israel every year, and all the endless hoohah about the Shoa: the monuments and memorials, the TV programs, the university endowments, the books etcetera... that these poor, old people who are actually all that is humanly left of the Holocaust are lacking in even simple comforts makes me want to puke.

I would think until those that brandish the Holocaust at every turn, to justify Israel, actually do something to help these survivors live tranquilly and in comfort for the little time they have left, they should shut up.

They are fakes, the Shoa was real, but they are fakes and everything they are selling is fake.

The next thing you are going to hear - mark my words - is that Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez are making a fund to help these old people. I'm not joking. DS

Amira Haas on exploiting the Holocaust

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Amira Hass is the daughter of Holocaust victims and reports on Palestinian affairs for Haaretz. This is the sort of clear-sighted, self-aware commentary that you can easily read in the Israeli press.

Try to imagine this article in the New York Times. Imagine Abe Foxman or Alan Dershowitz reading this article over breakfast coffee, imagine their telephone conversations after reading it... Hey, you've got quite an imagination!

AIPAC is destroying Israel by preventing peace and severely damaging the USA's international position in the effort. With such "Friends of Israel", who needs enemies? DS

Amira Hass: The Holocaust as political asset - Haaretz
Abstract: Turning the Holocaust into a political asset serves Israel primarily in its fight against the Palestinians. When the Holocaust is on one side of the scale, along with the guilty (and rightly so) conscience of the West, the dispossession of the Palestinian people from their homeland in 1948 is minimized and blurred. The phrase "security for the Jews" has been consecrated as an exclusive synonym for "the lessons of the Holocaust." It is what allows Israel to systematically discriminate against its Arab citizens. For 40 years, "security" has been justifying control of the West Bank and Gaza and of subjects who have been dispossessed of their rights living alongside Jewish residents, Israeli citizens laden with privileges. Security serves the creation of a regime of separation and discrimination on an ethnic basis, Israeli style, under the auspices of "peace talks" that go on forever. Turning the Holocaust into an asset allows Israel to present all the methods of the Palestinian struggle (even the unarmed ones) as another link in the anti-Semitic chain whose culmination is Auschwitz. Israel provides itself with the license to come up with more kinds of fences, walls and military guard towers around Palestinian enclaves.(...) Holocaust and anti-Semitism researchers fumble for words when in Hebron the state carries out ethnic cleansing via its emissaries, the settlers, and ignore the enclaves and regime of separation it is setting up. Whoever criticizes Israel's policies toward the Palestinians is denounced as an anti-Semite, if not a Holocaust denier. Absurdly, the delegitimization of any criticism of Israel only makes it harder to refute the futile equations that are being made between the Nazi murder machine and the Israeli regime of discrimination and occupation. READ IT ALL

Israel: staring into the abyss

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The social conditions and political values described in this article about poverty, inequality and social exclusion in Israel from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, JTA, will sound depressingly familiar to American readers.

However, it is one thing to have these conditions in a country of 300m people, rich in natural resources and "surrounded" by Canada and Mexico and quite another thing to have them in Israel: without natural resources, hated and feared by all its neighbors and dependent for its economic survival on a tiny, portable, easily fugitive, group of scientists, engineers and financiers and on the volatile, venture capital at the heart of the new economy.

This instability brought on by social failure is at the heart of all of Israel's policies and is a major factor in evaluating the tensions of the Middle East. Such a failed society in a tiny country would have trouble surviving even in a quiet part of the world, in an area where its physical survival has always been in dispute, Israel is truly staring into the abyss. This angst is transmitted directly to its most committed American supporters as a toothache in a tiny tooth absorbs the total attention of entire body and ... as the narrators in old newsreels used to solemnly intone, "the rest is history"... History which we shall all have the privilege of living through. DS

Poverty in Israel: The great divide - JTA

Abstract: Once idealized as a socialist paradise, the Jewish state is increasingly becoming a country of two classes — those who have soared in the increasingly capitalist economy and those who have stumbled in its wake. Despite its much mythologized egalitarian image, Israel has always experienced economic gaps. But now the divide between haves and have-nots has grown to alarming proportions. If economic policies and other factors have spawned a privileged class, they also have produced a deeply entrenched underclass populated by the elderly, Holocaust survivors, Arabs, immigrants, fervently Orthodox Jews, single parents — even two-income families.(...) Poverty rates in Israel reached a new peak in 2005, although they leveled off in 2006, according to statistics by the National Insurance Institute. According to institute findings, one of every four Israelis lives below the poverty line — that’s 1.6 million people. Thirty-five percent of children are living in poverty, leaving Israel with this unhappy distinction: It ranks among Western countries with the greatest percentage of poor children, according to the insurance institute. “Children who grow up in poverty are more than likely to live in poverty as adults,” said John Gal, an economist at the Hebrew University. “They won’t have the capacity, human capital and capabilities to be able to get out of poverty, to be mobile in society.”(...) As evidence that at least one sector is thriving, consider that the number of Israeli millionaires per capita is twice the world average, according to the 2005 World Wealth Report. Some 7,400 Israelis are worth at least $1 million, the report said, including 84 who have at least $30 million. The total liquid assets of Israel’s upper echelon grew by 25 percent, to $30 billion, between 2004 and 2005, according to the report. Those designated by the report as the nine richest Israelis made their fortunes in everything from diamonds to real estate to communications to entertainment.(...) Although the general standard of living in Israel has risen in recent years, the lower socioeconomic classes have seen their situation plummet, largely due to massive cuts in government social spending that began in 2002. The budget cuts reflect an ideological and policy trend that is reordering the country’s class structure, according to Uri Ram, a sociologist at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and the author of the upcoming book “The Globalization of Israel: McWorld in Tel Aviv, Jihad in Jerusalem.” Even the Labor Party, which typically is associated with generous social welfare spending, has gone back on its founding values, said Ram, to become a part “of this process of transforming Israel from a welfare society into this kind of free-market, corporate-dominated society.”(...) Some say the current economic disequilibrium in Israel can be traced to the neo-conservative fiscal policies of the Likud Party acting at the behest of then-Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who believed that Israel’s economy had become too bloated and bureaucratic to compete in the global market. Netanyahu’s remedy: Cut spending, reduce dependence on government services and reduce inflation. While Netanyahu is no longer the finance minister, the same approach remains in place today. The resultant budget cuts that began in 2002 included the elimination of food subsidies, a decrease in child allowances, increasingly stringent eligibility standards for welfare, the elimination of many social programs for the elderly and a reduction in welfare benefits. The cuts effectively shredded the social safety net, leaving many families unprepared for the misery that would follow, social policy activists say. But since the early 1990s, with the mass arrival of immigrants from the former Soviet Union and the growth of the high-tech sector, Israel has seen itself become an increasingly capitalist society, a society where the economically strong survive and those in the middle and lower rungs have had some trouble adjusting.(...)In contemporary Israel, minimum-wage salaries — about $12,800 per year for a couple with two children — are insufficient to pull a family out of poverty. As a result, even many dual-income earners find themselves setting stark spending priorities for themselves and their families. They sometimes have to choose between buying food or medicine or paying the rent.(...) Among the impoverished elderly are many Holocaust survivors. In fact, Noah Flug, who heads an umbrella group of Holocaust survivor organizations in Israel estimated that about one-quarter of Israel’s 250,000 survivors are living in poverty. “There is lots of focus in Israel on those killed in the Holocaust, but those who lived through it are forgotten,” said Flug.(...) Ironically, though, the war highlighted the chasm in Israeli society between haves and have-nots. Those who could afford to leave the North did so. The poor, however, were left behind to fend for themselves in bomb shelters. READ IT ALL

Ahmadinejad: why does he do it?

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Why did Ahmadinejad organize the Holocaust "conference"? The short answer is because he can and to prove that he can and that nobody can do anything about it. The United States is tied in a knot in Iraq, if it attacks Iran, the beleaguered US army could be cut off from its supply lines and a blocking of the Persian Gulf would mean that America's entire position in the Middle East could collapse in a matter of days and with it... perhaps the world economy. Russia is supplying Iran with advanced antiaircraft missiles that would make that attack itself very costly and Russia and China will not hear of stiff UN sanctions. Why the Holocaust? The Holocaust is the greatest of all western taboos. To relativise its horror is to be struck dead by lightining on the spot. Ahmadinejad, like most Muslims, believes that the United States government is run by "the Jews". By flagrantly breaking the greatest of all western taboos he is rubbing the United State's nose in its own mess. This is what it means to be defeated. Ahmadinejad is clearly sending a message to the "west". The message is, "y'all can kiss my ass". Message received. DS

Israel: a personal statement - News Links

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Since I write a lot about the Middle East and especially Israel (not all very complimentary, I'm afraid) some readers might be interested in what I actually know about that country and what might be the background for the opinions I hold. Not that long after the "Six Day War", during the "War of Attrition" , when Golda Meir was prime minister, I lived and worked as a journalist for a year in Tel-Aviv. I wasn't a tourist "volunteer" on a Kibbutz. I worked on an equal footing and on a day to day basis with Israelis. I had many friends and no enemies I know of. Shortly after arriving in the country a young Israeli girl and I fell in love and it is one of the nicest memories I carry from my youth. We were together all the time I was there. When my work took me away, we were too young for our relationship to endure separation and we went our own ways. She is now happily married and so am I. However, whenever I see pictures of young Israelis manning checkpoints in "Judea" and "Samaria, I always think how easily they could be sons or daughters of mine. Nurit (not her real name) was the daughter of prominent journalist from the left-wing of the Israel labor movement. He and my girlfriend's mother had immigrated from Poland to British Palestine before WWII and helped found a kibbutz, where they lived and where my girlfriend and I visited them on weekends. We had a wonderful time. We were "young and healthy" and in love. I thought Israel was Paradise. I heard and participated in the best political conversations in the world. Israel was a socialist country at that time and I met hundreds of people and heard their stories, from the French resistance, the Spanish Civil War and service in the Red Army at Stalingrad... And of course the Holocaust... I already knew that had happened before I arrived. As a small child my life was saved by a German-Jewish lady doctor, a refugee who could barely speak English and who walked across the village where we lived in the dead of a ten below (Fahrenheit!) Midwestern winter, with the roads blocked with snow, to give me a penicillin shot. On the following day, when I had regained consciousness and she was examining me, I was fascinated by the numbers tattooed on her arm. There was an awkward silence in the sick room and later my mother explained what the tattoos were and how they got there. So, to cut to the chase: I am not a Holocaust denier or someone who finds Jewish people either physically, intellectually or spiritually repellent. I loved Israel and bought the whole, "Beautiful Israel" and "a land without people for a people without land"... stuff. Later beginning with the first Intifada, I had some doubts, but my mind was on other things. Really, my personal epiphany, began when the Internet came in and I began to read the Israeli press (in English) again on a daily basis, listening to the voices. Then again, thanks to the Internet, I discovered the revisionist historians like Ilan Pappe and then many strange stories, with even stranger silences, came back to my memory and finally made some sense. So what is my final opinion on a place and people that I love, an opinion that, correct or not, is validated by what the junk mail "universities" term "life experience"? I believe that today's Israel bears the same relationship to the United States as French Algeria bore to France. The Israelis are America's "pied noir". I am just waiting for an American president to tell them, "Je vous ai compris". I believe that Jewish settlement in Palestine was a tragic mistake, with the Jewish people left "holding the bag" of western imperialism. Like the slogan of the Sam Peckinpah western, "The Wild Bunch", "they came too late, they stayed too long". I truly believe that the "Promised Land" of the Jewish people, from the Haredim on out to the far left is the United States of America, where as Tony Judt so accurately puts it the Jews have never in their history been so welcomed, so powerful and so secure and I am very worried that the coming disintegration of America's power due to the Iraq fiasco and the "who lost the superpower?" witch hunt to follow may even spoil that promised land. I believe that there was a brief window of opportunity for peace and survival of the Zionist dream after the first Gulf War and that Bush/Baker were prepared to drag the Israelis kicking and screaming through it. The window no longer exists and Bush/Rice don't have the chops to drag the Israelis even if the window were still there. Is there a solution? Finally I think it would be cheaper and better for the United States to give every man woman and Israeli child a million dollars apiece and a green card and resettle them anywhere in the USA they wish, with a Cuban style fast track to citizenship. Is that an antisemitic idea? I still think that if Israel were an Island off the coast of the Carolinas it would be a paradise. I hope this post helps my possible Jewish readers understand my little 'rants" in the future. DS