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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
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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
David Seaton's News LinksGideon Rachman writes in his first class blog in the Financial Times, "Mr. Ahmadinejad is a rather sinister figure. Or a complete clown." Sinister he may be, but in my opinion, crazy he isn't. What Ahmadinejad is doing by publicity stunts like the "cartoon contest" and the "Holocaust conference", with its endless shocking headlines and photo-ops with rabbis included, is to get lots of media exposure for the central idea he is peddling, which is the question: "Why should the Palestinians be the ones to pay the price for Europe's persecution of the Jews?" The idea that the Holocaust has been thus hijacked has quite a lot of resonance in the 3rd world and even among westerners who don't question in any way the tragic reality of the Holocaust itself. Drilling by repetition the idea that the Holocaust is merely being used to justify the suppression of the Palestinians and that this misappropriation is central to Israeli hasbara or PR machinery. Ahmadinejad is successfully using the headline hungry western media as a sounding box to propagate and repeat the question over and over again. The bait has been taken hook line and sinker. As P.T. Barnum said, "there is one born every minute". DS
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