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GAZA UNSILENCED. Edited by Refaat Alareer and Laila El-Haddad. Just World Books, Charlottesville, VA., 2015.
Credit: Just World Books
When I received this book in the mail, about a week ago, the first thing that struck me was the amazing cover photo. Now, I think I’m as wary of judging a book by its cover as the next reader/reviewer; and I read through the entire book before ever thinking of starting a review in this way. Does the book justify this sort of cover? Most assuredly it does!
The face on the cover is that of a girl—somewhere between 10 and 13, I’d guess. She has a marred, but beautiful face, striking dark eyes, and she almost seems to be smiling, acknowledging, at once, the onlooker, the photographer, and her own resilience, her capacity to survive. It is a haunting picture because her face is pockmarked by shrapnel in dozens of places—perhaps caused by the illegal “flechette” dart-bombs used unsparingly in “Protective Edge”; or glass fragments, or chips of concrete?
The book tells a story that is almost impossible to tell: the victims’ view of the 51-day, 2014 War on Gaza, euphemistically called, “Operation Protective Edge” by Israel. One element that disturbed me at first, but which I came to appreciate, is the way the narative gyrates chronologically. Sometimes, we are at the beginning of the war, a few pages more and, with another narrator, we are surveying the rubble at the end of the war; a few more pages, and we’re back in the middle of the unfolding horrors. And why wouldn’t this be the best way to render the way war shatters everything—even our sense of time? Here, this structure seemed especially appropriate; for, in reality, “Operation Protective Edge” was just the latest outburst of a war that began in 1948 with the “Nakba” (Catastrophe), with Israeli massacres in Palestinian villages like Deir Yassin, leading to the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes, their native land. As awful as things have been in the West Bank and other parts of Palestine, the situation has been most dire in Gaza—a strip of land about the size of Atlanta, Georgia, hugging the Mediterranean, with about 1.8 million people (Atlanta has about ½ million) who have been “under siege” for more than 8 years in a Sartre-like hell with “No Exit,” surrounded by impassable “buffer zones,” with 60% unemployment rates, a frazzled infrastructure, bombed-out hospitals and schools, and half the population children and/or students!
More than 2200 Palestinians were killed during the 51 days of bombardment and invasion. About 70 percent of those who died were unarmed, undefended civilians—mostly women and children.
This is an anthology unlike any I’ve read. An English major, I’ve read my share of literary anthologies; a professional-and-citizen-journalist, I’ve read and learned from collections of work by master-journalists and social and political commentators. The power of GAZA UNSILENCED is that it is a symbiosis: “you-are-there” journalism (including “blogger” twitter notes), combined with piercingly beautiful, unforgettable, cherishable essays, poems and photos. (One of Yeats’ phrases ran through my mind as I read the book: “A terrible beauty is born.”)
Other words, phrases, ideas were reiterated: “resilience”; “complicity”; “betrayal”; “human shields”; “de-humanization.”
Several of the authors wrote about the resilience of these Gazans who have endured so much, but re-plant themselves, as they re-plant their olive trees in the dry soil. Resilience is undeniable, but two words they eschew are “heroism” and “victimhood.” They do not want to be depicted as “heroes” or as “victims” by a global media infected with reductionism, always reaching for the simplistic explanation. Certainly, there were many heroes among the dead and wounded—those who risked their lives and gave their lives to save and help others. The victimization will continue for lifetimes. One American doctor who visited Gaza some months after the last bombs fell and the last bullets were fired, described the people as living—not with PTSD, but with “continuous, traumatic, stress disorder.”
Editor/writer/educator Refaat Alareer writes unforgettably about the death of his brother, Mohammad, and how his brother’s 4-year old daughter has been so unnerved by her father’s failure to keep his promise to return to her, she has retreated into a fantasy world—talking to herself, imagining her father giving her presents.
There is that kind of pity-evoking work here, and it may be cathartic for thoughtful, sensitive readers to read it, animating them to learn more about this ongoing crisis. Several of the authors stress that, while Gaza, and Palestine in general, constitute humanitarian crises, we must understand the “deep roots,” the “political” nature of this conflict, of this imbroglio—if we are ever to untangle it.
“Betrayals” have occurred on many fronts, and there has been the “complicity” of the global mainstream media, and the political hacks in Israel, the United States, Europe, and in Arab states like Sisi’s Egypt as well, and even with the West Bank’s Palestine Authority where the default position is, invariably, to blame those who resist the Occupation, and the depredations of war: physical and psychological destruction.
Editors Alareer and Laila El-Haddad have done a masterful job compiling this book. “What else can we do?” the survivors of the onslaughts wonder when journalists and human-rights advocates inquire how they manage to continue, to rebuild. They are rooted to their land, like their olive trees, planted and re-planted for thousands of years.
But, considering these stories, these flashes of insight, these twittering reflections, superlative essays, poems, articles and photos…, and considering that shrapnel-pock-marked face of the child in the mirror we gaze at on the front of this book, we also wonder, “What else can we do?”
How much time we spend dehumanizing the Other! And we go to war, and pay our taxes like good, little citizens, so that those who pander in lies and delusions can advance themselves, gain power and privilege in their narrowly-scoped worlds, shutting us and the Other out!
Is there a way to “re-humanize,” editor Laila El-Haddad wonders in her final essay. “There are no easy answers, but the quest begins by asking the right questions and knowing where to look…. We hope to have provided you a starting point in this book.”
El-Haddad and Alareer, and the mighty contributors here, have provided truth-seekers and truth-tellers with much more than a starting point. They have provided us with a mirror of our shattered human family.
Gary Corseri has performed his work at the Carter Presidential Library, and his dramas have been produced on PBS-Atlanta and elsewhere. He has published novels and collections of poetry, has taught in public schools, prisons and universities, and has published work at The New York Times, Village Voice, and hundreds of publications and websites worldwide. Contact: [email protected]
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who would have thought that this is the lesson of the Holocaust
It isn’t. The lesson of the Holocaust is Jews have to have a homeland and defend it. I don’t cry for Gazans- what country on earth would not counterattack after hundreds of rocket and artillery strikes? I’m not surprised the author worked at the Carter Center. So I’d like to pose a question- what would Hillbilly Jimmy do if the neighbors were shooting at his house? Why, he’d grab his shooting iron and shoot back. Notice a pattern?
Jerkwad.
Gaza is the largest and longest-running concentration camp the world has ever seen.
Shame on the Jews!
Set those people free!
Israel is today’s Nazi Germany.
To properly use the adjective “shattered” one must first accept the proposition that there was a time when humanity was unified as a whole. That is not so and myths that claim it are false. Archaeology and history show clearly that groups of men have been at war with each other for as far back as we can trace. In fact, the level of violence was greater in the past.
Nor are we a “family”. We are an aggressive social species, which appears to be slowly evolving both culturally and biologically to be less violent, but are a long way from being as family.
If we were to truly give peace a chance we would have to first give reality a chance. I’m not holding my breath.
Unfortunately that is a truer statement than many would care to admit.
It seems that to achieve the goal of “A Greater Israel” it has in fact become that which it has most despised ,…..Supremacist,militarist,contemptuous of International law, committed to land grabbing ( lebensraum ) and inhumanly sadistic to the Palestinian people.
Hiding that reality from Americans, is becoming increasingly more difficult thanks to the growing number of websites (like this one) that enable critical discussions, fact finding, and clear eyed analysis.
Israel needs to do an about face on its policies, create a ‘peace plan” that is just, and work as hard as it can to implement it .
And the Palestinians? ..
That’s a rhetorical question
It would be like me asking you if the life of an Arab child is just as worthy in the eyes of God as the life of a Jewish child
We all know what I’d say and we all know what’s in your feculent heart.
the german sociologist Gunnar Heinsohn once wrote about Gaza that if Germany would have had the same population growth like Gaza in the last decades there would be 600 million Germans now living in Germany. Then certainly France and the Netherlands would be under constant shelling and the he suprlus of german young males would make a lot of problems. Gaza is like a Frankenstein, made and fed by international donors, in this regard it very much resembles Subsaharan Africa. But of course subsaharan Africa is an even bigger problem
To establish an ethnic nation on someone else’s land is the crime. Just reflect on all the violence this has entailed, and this carnage will never stop until Israel disappears, or the last Palestinian is killed. It’s useless to ask what Israel should or should not do, since as long as it exists, the drive to exterminate Palestinians from Palestine will continue. Israel is the crime. As for complicity, every American taxpayer has blood on his hands, not that we have any choice in the matter, ours being no longer a democracy. Most toxically, the Israeli world view has become the American world view. Often, it is just these two rogue nations against the rest of the world.
The “deep roots” are religious and tribal, we are not going to “untangle it.” There is nothing we can do over there; past time to cut that part of the world loose. Each side visits horror on the other, and then trots the mangled bodies of their own children in front of the media to justify the next tragic round of retribution and dreadful reprisal. The Jews and the Muslims will never stop killing each other, and neither side is without blame. The U.S. needs to stop funding this horror show. Bring our troops home from around the world. Stop starting, funding and fighting wars, and stop letting our masters manipulate us through division, fear and hatred.
” The lesson of the Holocaust is Jews have to have a homeland and defend it…”
I agree, that is a lesson of the Holocaust, but its not the only one….
The horror of Holocausting others to steal their land is equally a lesson, perhaps a greater one…
A lesson sadly lost on Mr Netanyahu and his policies of” Lebensrauming” ALL the territories and eradicating the Palestinians that live there !
If the “Palestinians” of which you speak are Christian, they have nowhere to go. God help the Christian Semite.
If they’re Arabs, however, they have five million square miles of “homeland”, the great majority of which was planted on other peoples’ homelands. Ask any Copt.
As much as I hate to distract from this very fine review of an important book from Helena Cobban’s Just World Books publishing house, it’s necessary to take every possible opportunity to push back against statements such as C Martel’s —
Jewish desire for a “homeland and defend it” has nothing to do with an (alleged) holocaust of Jews.
The zionist political movement had reached a fever pitch already in the late 19th century in Russia, at least 50 years before the real holocaust — that of the German people, in the firebombing of their citizens and cities, rape of their women, the slaughter of their soldiers post-surrender, the population transfer of Germans from their ancient homelands — all of these to enable, provoke, and in many, many cases force through fear the movement of European Jews to Palestine.
As this passage from Jacob Raisin’s “The Haskalah Movement” states unambiguously, nor was zionism a reaction to “modern antisemitism;” rather, it was inspired by the 12th century poetry of Judah Halevy, the “first zionist.”
“So I’d like to pose a question- what would Hillbilly Jimmy do if the neighbors were shooting at his house?”
What would you do after Hillbilly Jimmy stole your house at gunpoint and the police told you to get lost? In your case I suspect you’d sit on the curb and whine.
The white boy nomads here don’t love Palestinians and Arabs. They hate Jews no matter where they live. Palestinians are their (explosive) device to use against the Israelis.
Many-most? are rootless libertarians of the pot smoking Ron Paul persuasion. Sunnis killing Shi’ites, Kurds, Yazidis by the tens of thousands? Selling Shi’ite, Kurd, Yazidi women and teen girls into sexual slavery? Never a peep.
I think David is pulling one of those “fast ones”. I suppose it’s fun having your own website to experiment with. Or maybe not.
How ironic to have the two articles up at the same time.
One article displays a tragic face of a human child showing the scars of war on her face as she tries to smile. Total comments 14 (including this one).
The second article is about the untimely death of Cecil the Farking Lion and displays an impossible, fictional CARTOON of a lion cub. Total comments so far, 116.
Last week the GAO announced that Medicaid has lost over 14.7 BILLION dollars to fraud in 2014 alone. Number of Americans that give a shite: 12. Number of Americans apoplectic with anger at American Dentistry: endless.
At some point you have to stop and face reality: Y’know, I don’t think these people are trying anymore.
The laughable ‘6M & gas chambers’ are scientifically impossible frauds.
Science over racist Zionist profiteering.
Wrong answer. The correct answer has already been provided by Prof. Norman Finkelstein:
@ Patriot
No, it is not.
There is no comparison; quite the opposite.
German nationalism was the attempt of the German people to reclaim their culture and political processes from subversive forces who were attempting to make it a Communist state and that had debased its moral values and financial affairs. Germany under NSDAP — the evil Nazis — had more in common with the Palestinians who are fighting for their freedom from zionist oppression than it does with zionism. Alexander, have you forgotten the helpful summary of zionist accomplishments and goals that Greasy William provided for you? —>
I assume that Alexander and Patriot mean well but by repeating and affirming the “zionism is Nazism” meme they feed the holocaust industry and prolong the suffering of the Palestinian people.
Alexander, I responded at great length to your error-laden thesis that zionism = Nazism in its “supremacism, militarism” etc.
Your version of that thesis is not a clear-eyed analysis, it is a regurgitation of what the propagandists — the Anglo -zionists — have pumped into the Anglo world’s information systems since at least the early 20th century.
Please, for the sake of the Palestinian people and of the Iranian people too, please try to peel away those years of disinformation.
Does a “clear-eyed analysis” persuade you that however noble their intentions, that actions like the entire Presbyterian church divesting from investment in Caterpillar stock (in the secondary market, no less) is going to bring an end to the dreadful suffering of the people of Gaza?
(IMPORTANT: this is not in any way to minimize the effort of the people who are BDS activists, least of all the very good people who after almost a decade of effort achieved a vote to divest. They are heroes and heroines. The purpose here is to show that more powerful tools are necessary, and we must summon the same courage those BDS activists have to pursue that more powerful confrontation.)
Test the proposition:
After almost a decade of effort, the New York Times reported on June 24, 2014 that the Presbyterian Church in the USA voted to divest its holdings to pressure Israel.
On July 8, 2014, NBC News reported Israel Launches Operation Protective Edge in Gaza Strip, the war that produced the battered girl-child whose face graces the cover of GAZA UNSILENCED.
She survived the IDF assault on Gaza; 2200 of her friends, neighbors, relatives in Gaza did not.
Despite ten years of effort of Presbyterians and many other Christian activists in the USA and elsewhere, within a fortnight of the successful vote to divest from industries illegally operating in Occupied Territory, Israel’s IDF slaughtered 2200 men, women and children in the open-air prison that is Gaza.
Just as Greasy William taunted you, Alexander, for the most part, the world yawned as the people of Gaza were killed:
Please apply your “clear-eyed analysis” to Greasy William’s statements, Alexander: Is he right or wrong?
How have the Anglo-zionists gotten away with making the people “not care” about the slaughter of other human beings?
What can be done to undo their years of indoctrination of good people everywhere that causes them to yawn as innocent people are slaughtered?
Do you think BDS is the way?
I think Paul Eisen has the right idea:
Is going after the Holocaust a worthwhile endeavor for the goal of liberating Palestine? Paul Eisen thinks it is.
It’s worth a try.
If it’s the truth, why would anybody object?
The truth is the mind’s assent to reality.
Why would anybody object to reality?
The Palestinians are virtually all Arabs. Even the Christian ones. God doesn’t distinguish.
And the Muslim Palestinians don’t have anywhere to go either. It’s not like they can just waltz into Egypt or Jordan or Lebanon. They did go to Lebanon, and Sharon followed them.
for centuries the Palestinian Muslims lived alongside Jews and Christian in perfect harmony. Then came the Zionists, and soon the Christians and Muslims were cleansed from the holy land. And it could have never been accomplished without the eager complicity of the American “Christian” Zionist, coveting their rapture while children (Christian and otherwise) were butchered in their name.
“….Germany under NSDAP — the evil Nazis — had more in common with the Palestinians…”
Well, thank you for admitting that, SolontoCroesus, I didn’t expect you to be so honest.
Maybe there’s hope for you.
I agree that Israel is a crime.
So is America a “crime”? What happened to my forefathers, who you call the Mohicans in Hollywood, we the people of the flowing waters. The very last of them is writing this.
Proper attribution should be given to this phrase. It derives from Plato’s analogy of The Cave, which shows the ascent of the mind from illusion to truth.
That’s cool bro. No one is stopping you from legally immigrating to the United States. You can also join the US Military and defend the United States.
What’s the problem here?
You make an excellent point. The birth rate of Gazans is one of the highest on the planet. It is simply off the charts.
Polygamy and men fathering dozens of children are not uncommon.
Furthermore, thanks to world class UN hospitals the infant mortality rate in Gaza is actually quite low. This, of course, exacerbates Gaza’s explosive growth.
One doesn’t need to be an expert in economics to figure out that the more children you have the lower your standard of living tends to be. Poverty tends to breed violence and extremism – as we can see in Gaza.
Of course, 100 per cent of Gaza’s misery and poverty is the fault of the Zionists…
I agree with you.
The tragedy of the Palestinians is that most of their so-called supporters around the world are not exactly motivated by genuine sympathy for the Palestinians. Furthermore, These supporters lack a true understanding of both sides of the conflict.
Rather, their support for the Palestinians is motivated by hatred of the Jews.
Gary Corseri wrote:
There’s a clue in your handle, Existential Confusion. The people in Gaza are operating in a concrete world, or concrete dust, as it were. Whichever state of being of the concrete, it is not abstract, it is real.
And it is political, just as Corseri observed.
Zionism is a political movement. I’ve never studied politics as a science, but I don’t think it is abstract, it is very real, it’s man-made, and its etiology and historical facticity can be traced quite accurately, once the bulls&%t factor is cleared away.
In other words, we can and must untangle it; W H Auden suggested how to go about doing so in the first words of a verse in “September 1939:”
Accurate scholarship can
unearth the whole offense . . .
Accurate scholarship means separating fact from propaganda; it’s not that hard once you recognize that facts need a basis in evidence and reality while propaganda is a product of the mind (or is pulled out of one’s nether regions, as the case may be).
We in the vaunted West claim to be heirs to the Enlightenment.
Francis Bacon made a giant step into the Enlightened era when he rejected Authority as the first premise and insisted that Truth must be based in Nature (reality), its observation and patterns deduced from those observations.
Bacon was a master of the metaphor and produced this “ants, spiders and bees” analogy:
Ants gather bits of information from the world of nature but did not know what to do with them.
Spiders produce ideas in their heads, that is, imaginings spun of their own substances but not necessarily related to the real world of nature; from these self-produced substances they wove their webs of abstract theories.
Bees were as diligent as ants in gathering information from the world of nature, but then they took that information back to the hive where a systematic method of processing the information was established, in coordinated activity with other gatherers, to produce a useful distillation of nature for real-world use and consumption.
If we are bee-like in gathering information, and resist getting “entangled” in webs of propaganda and deceit (here it seems appropriate to remind readers that Mossad’s motto is “By way of Deception.”
The CIA is the USA’s approximation of Mossad. At the dedication of the original CIA building [Allen] Dulles gave introductory remarks,
Which one is telling the truth?
Every president since (at least) Woodrow Wilson has embroiled the people of the United States in wars based on lies, spider-webs of lies.
In order to free Palestinians from their 100 years of oppression ** at the hands of the political movement of zionism, and in order to avert the intended destruction of Iran at the behest of the same zionists, we must untangle that web of lies — including the lies surrounding holocaustism, “the sword and the shield of Israel.”
—
*** I disagree with Corseri and others who date the oppression of Palestinians to 1948. That date marks a zenith of the destruction of Palestinians, but it is not the point of origin of the zionist scheme to take the lands, homes and culture of the Palestinian people for the benefit of Eastern European Jews,
as Jacob Raisin narrates here, in the late 1800s;
as Arthur Ruppin reveals here, in 1907 and again here, between 1910 and ~1930;
as <a href = "http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ssfc0005/The%20Iron%20Wall.html" Vladimir Jabotinsky declared here,in 1923 and here, in 1935;
as David Ben Gurion made abundantly clear here, in 1937;
and whose “grand strategy” Yossi Alpher praised and re-asserted here in 2015 and
which Benjamin Netanyahu, whose father was an acolyte of Jabotinsky and who wears the shoes of Ben Gurion, reminded Israelis of here, in March 2015, in order to retain political power.
it wasn’t poverty that caused this
*warning*
is this the kind of violence and extremism you’re talking about that is caused by the poverty?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUibXSgILv0
they shoot them for fun
they harvest organs out of murdered teenagers when it suits them
they humiliate them in ways so cruel is it causes world-wide revulsion in anyone still possessed of a shred of simple human decency
what kind of people execute young boys playing on a beach?
what kind of petty sick fucks prevent children from enjoying sweets and chocolate?
monsters is what they are
sick, demented, murderous monsters
no, they’re not like the Nazis
even the most demonic and hysterical caricatures of the Nazis have them kindly handing towels and playing a violin as the Jews were marched into the “gas chambers”
but the Zionists want their tormented victims to suffer
they get off on humiliating them
it is a situation that rips at the soul
there’s tones of evidence of war crimes. Blindfolding and handcuffing men and then shooting them as they stand there helpless. Deliberately bombing schools and hospitals.
And using my tax dollars and corrupting my government and media to create this intolerable hell on earth for a people who suffer like because the Zionists like to make them suffer.
“what would Hillbilly Jimmy do if the neighbors were shooting at his house? ”
It is amazing that still today, someone can get in our face and tell the gigantic lie “that the Israelis are the victims of the people of Gaza.” For the people of Gaza to fight their evil diabolical oppressors is a God given human right.
I feel sorry for the news media war correspondents that have to lie for their Jew bosses – how do they sleep at night. This last attack was a weapons proving ground for the Israeli arms manufactures. All of the media know this – yet they lie and lie and lie!
p.s. One brave US women correspondent reported how Jews were cheering as defenseless women and children were being bombed by the “most moral army on the planet.” Her Jew boss sent her to cover Siberia.
perhaps the “irony alert” flag was not bold enough for you.
Yes, the facts seem to stack up this way:
FDR, Churchill, zionist as well as non-zionist Jews, hired Stalin as their Orca to destroy Germany, for the benefit of the FDRites and zionists, primarily. After all, who hauled in the loot after Germany was destroyed? Follow the money.
Churchill was himself a hireling whose gain — relief of his constrained financial situation — was exchanged for the British empire. Some people know how to drive a bargain.
Germany was savagely depopulated, a demographic catastrophe of unprecedented proportions. Stefan Molyneux called the slaughter of so many Germans the eradication of some of the world’s most successful Ks.
The endgame for zionists was the “ingathering of the diaspora to Palestine.” And, of course, the pre-ordained removal of the Palestinians who were already there but rendered invisible by the spider-web of zionist ideology.
We all doin’ what we can, Mike.
How about you? Are you capable of being so honest as to admit to facts when they stare you in the face?
Back at ya.
Please listen @Clyde too.
The seminal cause of the Gaza overpopulation is due to the utter distortion of Zionism, indeed humanity. I do not support any longer what passes for Zionism, nor am I willing to pine for what it used to be. It is an immoral cause.
People the world over, believe in the inalienable principle of the equality of all human life. The same people that have contributed to provide the hospitals etc. to look after a population under siege.
Israel does not suffer from little children getting torched or their skulls shredded by explosive bullets. Even if suicide bombers wanted to come into Israel, for all intents and purposes they cannot, because IJ etc. have been fully infiltrated. Was this infiltration necessary? Absolutely! But having achieved this end, complemented by the Kipat Barzel (Iron Dome), Israelis are under no realistic threat. I know it.
I don’t recognise the killers as Jews. I don’t recognise them as humans. Go to your rabbis, or whoever you respect, including your own conscience and talk to them about this, tell them to NOT send a single dollar more in support of AIPAC or any other similar organisation.
Should you wish to preserve your Neshama, look no further than stopping this Holocaust.
thank you.
Chris Hedges [he was there, he saw it, he is a witness to Israel’s “inversion of the truth”]
“Sunnis killing Shi’ites, Kurds, Yazidis by the tens of thousands?”
Hey = we all know that is exactly what the Zionist Jews want. The ME was a benign place before Israel – the Zionists have turned it into a hell hole.
Palestine, Jordon, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Project for a New American Century, 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria again, and most Western democracies — all have been negatively impacted by the dirty hand of the Zionist Jews.
Karma is coming to you Zionism.
Hell, Art, Obama himself declared in the space of two minutes that “Iran was the baddest ass in the region, maybe the world,” and then that
That plucky Israel. Ever ready to slaughter anybody– as long as they are unarmed or intentionally weakened.
gutless cowards.
Namaste Sam Shama.
Typically snide and childish; first insult
and then argue against an assertion that was never made:
I never said that the world occupied by either side was any any way not real. It is just a bottomless pit into which we pour blood and treasure, and a means by which our masters keep us confused and divided.
You are more than welcome to head over there and kill or be killed, just don’t try to drag the rest of us with you. Screw the middle east, let them work it out or kill each other, we have more than enough problems of our own. Both sides of this conflict are an ever suppurating wound on the rest of humanity.
Namaste and Shalom
Your handle, “existential,” suggests to me dwelling in the realm of the abstract; that is what was behind the “concrete” references.
I chose not to — or forgot to — comment on the inhumanity, much less the injustice, of your proposal to “screw the middle east … let them work it out or kill each other.”
It’s not like we (Americans) had anything to do with screwing up the region, is it, Existential Confusion, or are you confused about those facts as well?
Remember Colin “We Broke it We Own it” Powell?
The West enjoyed, and I mean really enjoyed, prospered, lived high off the hog of Middle Eastern oil for the better part of a century. The people of the region, ordinary Iranians or Saudi Arabians, never enjoyed anything near the prosperity Americans enjoyed, on the oil that was their resource, that their workers were virtually enslaved to produce — did you ever read about how the British kept Iranian oil workers in virtual refugee camps while their British overlords lived like monarchs?
When I hear US politicians bray that “US is energy independent. We no longer need to rely on people who hate us for our energy needs,” I wonder what their attitude was when it was Iranians who were getting cancers from working oil fields, and Iranians who spent their lives eating dust and grime while Americans drove block-long Cadillacs.
A nation that has any pretensions at all to integrity much less moral authority recognizes its obligations to make reparations for the harm it has done to others.
It’s a concept basic to Law of Equity and to criminal law.
It’s the essence of the Golden Rule, for Zeus’s sake.
Sam, you are the man!
You’re still not explaining how having the world’s highest birth rate has nothing to do with Palestinian poverty.
I have a flaw (one among many, I fear): I relish debates excessively.
I have decided not to take on subject matters that demand a hermetic seal on humanity and morality slipping through. The condition of Palestinians is not a matter where one sharpens skills of argumentation.
I believe that I am getting some encouraging traction with our rabbi and others in our congregation to send a clear signal to AIPAC.
I encourage all my Jewish brethren to do the same.
It certainly has much to do with poverty in Gaza. But then one would have to explain the root explanatory factors for that poverty.
I think it is incumbent on Israel to (1) move the IDF out of WB and the lift the blockade on Gaza (2) establish economic zones and projects to aid in alleviating the poverty (3) offer citizenship to all Palestinians.
Agreed @Rurik the Jew is now hiding behind the holocaust and pointing and poking fun at us as it does as it wishes to Gaza behind the screen.
And if we talk out they try and shut us down as antisemitic.
Do the Christians that suffered get compensation till this day? for suffering they lived in WW2 or is that only for the master Jews?
I sum it up like this Israel is not a Nation it is a STO Sophisticated Terrorist Organization.
“their support for the Palestinians is motivated by hatred of the Jews”
When should righteous reasonable disgust turn to justifiable hate – with the bulldozing of Palestinians home and property happens daily – when the illegal settlements go on and on – when the Israeli Jew hate fences go up – when internal apartheid rears its ugly head – when thousand are murdered 2 times in Gaza – when American media is throttled about all this – when every US politician lives in fear of the Zionist Jew – when every dissenting American is attacked as an anti-Semite by his Jew neighbor?
When is all this Jew coercion enough – when is hate justified by the facts?
p.s. Sherman old boy – we know when your hate starts – with first negative truthful word about Israel.
Back to my pseudonym again? Since you obviously need a little help, allow me:
Existentialism – A Definition
Existentialism in the broader sense is a 20th century philosophy that is centered upon the analysis of existence and of the way humans find themselves existing in the world.
http://www.allaboutphilosophy.org/existentialism.htm
The only people who are not confused by the nature of existence are those who are cowardly or simple minded enough to have surrendered reason to the comfort of religion, or fools – both scare me.
No, SolontoCroesus, I am not in the least confused. Blaming the United States for conflict in the Middle East is a ridiculous ploy. The Middle East has been in a constant state of war as far back as recorded history, but most particularly since the “prophet” Mohammad.
Muslim Conquests:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_conquests
List of conflicts in the Near East:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_the_Near_East
List of modern conflicts in the Middle East
(starting in 1902):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_modern_conflicts_in_the_Middle_East
I will agree with you on this much, we should never have supported Israel with money or our military, but that mistake can not be reversed by now spending billions supporting the muslim countries. A pox on both their houses, it is a never-ending domestic dispute between rabid dogs; there can be no profit in it for us.
And, for God’s sake, would you please quit quoting Colon Powel, as some moral arbiter, as if his opinion obligates my children and their children to continue having their pockets picked and their children sacrificed to that dreadful part of the world. Why don’t you and Colon hoist the star and crescent and just tap-dance right over to Mecca and make all the amends you care to. Again, leave the rest of us out of it.
Here, I have a quote for you: Christopher Hitchens – “If the Qur’an was the word of God, it had been dictated on a very bad day.”
As far as the poor Iranian’s who were too backwards to develop their own oil resources, and so had to depend on the Americans to do it for them. So what? We owe them nothing, are you trying to make me believe they would not have taken every economic or trade advantage over us that was available to them?
I have many friends who’s health were damaged working in various industries, from the auto industry to coal mining. My own health was damaged working with asbestos. Again, so what? Is this somehow suppose to obligate the American citizens to send their hard earned dollars to a people who would enslave their children for not bowing towards Mecca? By the way, I have always driven Chevys
And talking about our moral obligation, you aren’t fooling anyone, you use the term cynically to attempt to extract cash from the American taxpayers. Good luck.
As to the “golden rule,” or “the ethic of reciprocity.” As soon as the Palestinians make amends for the children they have murdered, we will discuss your interpretation of the golden rule.
Don’t you mean for Allah’s sake?
who cares? American politics needs more focus on internal/domestic issues.
When the ancient oak tree — the Wye Oak — that was a Maryland state landmark was dying, it produced far more acorns than when it was healthy.
The acorns were gathered and planted; seedlings were sent all over the state and the nation, maybe all over the world.
The Wye Oak lives!
The first goal of every living organism is to remain alive, and to reproduce.
When that requirement is challenged, all resources are summoned to ensure survival.
The more Israelis kill Palestinians, the more the Palestinian genetic material is challenged with extinction, the more the Palestinian people will reproduce.
Israel is the cause of its own demographic threat.
http://mondoweiss.net/2015/08/kagan-father-palestine-
“Here’s some radical news. A video has emerged with a montage of clips from an interview recorded the day after 9/11 featuring Donald and Frederick Kagan, two members of a leading neoconservative family. This father/son Kagan duo were advocating responding to the 9/11 attacks by invading Palestine and taking out the Palestinian Authority. Speaking of those who had attacked America, they said with assurance that we should attack Palestine. “We have to take the war to these people,” Frederick Kagan said.
– See more at: http://mondoweiss.net/2015/08/kagan-father-palestine#sthash.2y1yythA.dpuf”
Taking advantage of the shock,fear,anger,bewilderment,and readiness for revenge ,these murderers ( coming in twin ,coming as father son duo murderers ,sometimes coming as wife and husband ready as double assassins ) tried their best to kill Arafat,poison,the water system with sewage,destroy whatever left of Gaza and WB,and get more Muslim riled up against US so that US would fight the war for the dancing Israelis .
This child is a victim of Kagan’s incitement . Israel took advantage like the neocons took within US to gain upper hand,change the discussion,reshape the Oslo ,and kill thousands and kill Arafat .
.”http://www.lobelog.com/aipac-bristles-at-obamas-reminder-of-iraq-war-lobbying/
Surprisingly, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which plans to spend between $20 and $40 million to advocate against the Iran deal, came out swinging, denying having taken any position on the invasion of Iraq, in comments to The New York Times’ Julie Hirschfeld Davis.
Marshall Wittmann, AIPAC’s communications director, told Davis, “To remove any misinformation or confusion, AIPAC took no position whatsoever on the Iraq war, nor did we lobby on this issue — this is an entirely false and misleading argument.”
Look – How the rats have jumped the ship in broad day light .
Remember that AIPAC 2007 – ” we will Iraq on Iran” – http://www.salon.com
So this is like Israel like AIPAC – we don’t kill Palestinians . High birth rate is killing them . We didn’t cause Iraq war. It was oil! It was clever Iran it was Saudis,it was Saddam himself – he wanted to be a martyr!
Would this be the same Hillbilly Jimmy that launched the Holocaust industry into the stratosphere with his Commission on the Holocaust in 1978? Then he was a great friend of the Jews, but only so long as he did not notice that the Arabs were being systematically squeezed out of their lands.
No good deed goes unpunished as the Americans say.
denying having taken any position on the invasion of Iraq,
Benjamin Netanyahu, Sept. 12, 2002, US House of Representatives, subcommittee chaired by Rep. Dan Burton
http://www.c-span.org/video/?172612-1/israeli-perspective-conflict-iraq
“Iran is the keystone of a terror network that includes Iran, Syria, Libya . . . The keystone should be taken out . . . the rest will follow . . .”
The Kagan Klan:
“We [meaning not WE we but YOU S A we] should invade Palestine, take out Arafat . . . we know where they are … we should send ground troops …”
correction:
should be IRAQ is the keystone of a terror network . . .
Unlike some other Christian minorities in the Arab world, Christian Palestinians overwhelmingly identify as Arabs. This isn’t a recent phenomenon either; Palestinian Christians have been among the most “Arabized” Christians going back as far the 13th century. Unlike, e.g., the Copts, their liturgy has been in Arabic for about as long.
Dear SolontoCroesus ,
It seems as though you and “Greasy Williams” enjoy making the same point to me for each other…and it is a foul 0ne.
I find it fascinating that you not only noticed” his” response to my “If it were a” Jewish” baby burned alive” supposition posted in the comments section of Mr Van Buren’s article but sought to comment on it in “this” one….
The fact that Mr Williams makes the same argument to me, that you do “in reverso.” adds much to the premise that you may function as collaborators in” fraud”.
Your alerting me to his” comments” made in Mr Van Burens post yesterday in “this” response today,underscores that premise.
And if you are not collaborators in fraud, you both share the same woeful ideology( albeit from opposing sides of the spectrum)….It may not be too much to surmise that You and” Greasy Williams” are in fact the same person.(alternating your pro Nazi or extremist Jew position)
but whether it is true , or not, you both failed miserably in being able to understand my supposition or its overriding principle….
That you, and he, are so contorted by your fixation on “ethnicity”, the will to” ethnicity”, and the centrality of “ethnicity”….the crime that actually occurred is obscured completely..
My supposition :”if it were a Jewish” baby burned alive by Iranian terrorists” was meant not merely to call out the media and governmental bias in the event that it were…but the entire “ethnocentric” underpinnings of interpretation of crimes,.in this case a heinous one….and how it “defrauds to the core” the value systems that make us human.
Any baby being burned alive by terrorists anywhere is unspeakably horrible….in an absolute sense..in a universal sense.
The fact of the “ethnic origins’ of either the victim or the perpetrator should be immaterial to the gravity of the crime.
The “wrong” lies in the behavior not who committed it .
Yet this “ethnicity bias” is not merely the filter through which we perceive the “crime”…but actually determines its criminality , the weight we ascribe to it, and any recourse to correct it.
The revealing of the “Jewishness”of the terrorists, in this case, is sufficient to erase from our media and our government any consciousness the event occurred AT ALL
In stark contrast to the notion of it being an” Iranian terrorist” eliciting a” nuclear strike” mindset within hours…….
This is the great fraud, the true fraud at the heart of the faltering of the United States over the last 13 year “war on terror” and the obscene 19 trillion dollar debt that faltering has wrought for us.
We are so contorted by this” ethnicity bias” that we cannot see beyond it to the tragedy we are becoming.
Both your and Greasy Williams response of :” The amount of Germans burned in the Dresden fire” or “the dismantling of the” holocaust lie”as the key”…show just how far down that tragic path we have traveled !
You have written some fine pieces on the diversity of Iranian culture and your visits there ring true…I hope you continue to do so…we are all improved by the knowledge.
But sorry , it won’t make me a pro-holocaust sympathizer or ,for that matter,a pro-extremist Jew .
Neither Nazi nor Neocon become !
Both ideologies proved nearly fatal to the nations in which they were incubated, lets hope as Americans we can stand the course against their “terroristic” drive toward feckless war,the fraud in which its housed, the bankruptcy it portends and the extermination of innocents it will engender.
Shalom to you sir
having a high birth rate is not the cause of Palestinian poverty, it only exacerbates it
the cause of Palestinian poverty is the occupation. It is the Zionist boot they have on their collective necks
they are not free to pursue economic well-being anymore than any other kind of well-being
The Zionists even tax them on their meager earnings and then withhold the tax money as punishment if they don’t toe the line
The Zionists want to keep them poor and next to starving. They even deny them food in a calculated agenda to keep them hungry. They joke about “putting the Palestinians on a diet”. Google it.
They figure as long as they’re poor and hungry and desperate, that they’ll be more willing to do unpleasant jobs in Israel and less worried about their so-called dignity- if they’re more worried about keeping their children from literally starving do death.
Charming people those Zionists.
If the Pals all left tomorrow, the Zionists would want them back. They’ve been tormenting and humiliating them for so many generations now that being a bully has become part of their national identity. It is what they do. It’s now who they are. It’s existential. If the Palestinians were to leave, the Zionists would find some other people to trample on. Perhaps in Lebanon or Jordan or better yet, in Syria where they already are trying to steal the Golan Heights.
John Wayne Gacy didn’t torture those young men and boys to death because they were in his house. He did it because it was his nature to do it. Once he got a taste of it, he had to constantly keep doing it to sate his appetite.
Shalom Rurik
Alexander —
First, perhaps it would be helpful to stop trying to assign S2C to some category based on your imagined theories and assess the words written strictly for what they say.
You appear to be stuck in some truly weird notion that S2C is some form of agent provocateur or psy op agent, an employee of CIA, Mossad, Stormfront and Little Sisters of the Poor all rolled into one, and getting paid by all of them which allows S2C to type these waaaay too wordy comments from the comfort of a villa in Provencal when not enjoying the waters at Capri or a getaway in the hills outside Tehran (Tehran sits in a bowl; in the summer the heat and air pollution are oppressive and those who can leave the city for cooler, cleaner rural summer homes).
See that?
I can create scenarios limited only by my imagination. That’s one of the beauties, and dangers, of anonymous writing on a flyaway forum: when a writer is completely anonymous as S2C is, a reader has only the words of the writer to base a judgment upon. Phil Giraldi, Pat Buchanan, Ron Unz are all real people, ‘public people’ whose positions are generally known to their readers.
I came to this Unz forum because I had met Phil Giraldi in person (he would not remember me, I was one of many people in a crowd, but I was impressed by him). Dr. Giraldi is a public persona — I have no idea ‘who’ Phil is when he’s not functioning as “former CIA analyst, thinker and author on foreign policy, director of CNI. I can imagine whether he feeds stray cats or strangles them, but I don’t know for a fact anything about Phil other than what he writes and the positions he has staked out, in public, that motivate his writing.
You have only S2C’s writing on this forum to use as a guide to assessing S2C’s point of view. S2C remains anonymous. That’s essential because the point of view, the position taken in very many of S2C’s (way too numerous) comments is highly controversial: the most heretical thing one can say in today’s political climate; namely, that the narrative of a holocaust of Jewish people by Germans is false.
Further, S2C attempts to argue that because that false narrative has gained broad acceptance, it acts as a smokescreen — it hides from view and from common knowledge — the real holocaust(s) that took place in World War II — that of the German, Japanese and Russian people primarily.
The very harmful effects of the propagandizing of the lie (of the holocaust of Jews); the concealment of the reality — the holocaust of Germans, etc.; and the failure to bring to justice the perpetrators of the real holocaust, has created the situation in which these things:
(1) millions of people {{{namely, Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghanis, etc. w/ Iranians threatened}}}
(2) have been made victims of a “holocaust” {{{millions of Arab Iraqis, Palestinians have died; are being killed even as we speak; are threatened with annihilation -did you hear Carly Fiorina? }}}
(3) carried out by the very same people {{{namely, Anglo zionists, as Saker wrote, or the 3 groups that Charles Lindbergh identified in 1940 in Iowa. We — you and I — recognize that Anglos and zionists are killing Arabs etc. today and threatening Iranians. I argue that they are the same people who killed Germans, Russians, Ukrainians & Japanese in WWII and got away with it.}}}
(4) who evaded justice {{{Nuremberg trials were miscarriages of justice in that perpetrators of crimes — the Allies (USA, Britain, Russia) — were simultaneously judge and prosecutor of the sole defendant, Germans, and the judges/prosecutors used torture, falsified documents, extorted confessions and false witnesses to achieve ‘judgments’ that were foregone conclusions.}}}
(5) while claiming victimhood in a false holocaust. {{{Jews claimed unique victimhood in WWII on very shaky grounds and absolutely no forensic evidence; very many of the prosecutors & interrogators at Nuremberg were Jewish; many of the persons who engineered, planned and propagandized the war — that it would happen, that a genocide of the German people would be carried out; that Germans were evil and deserved to be slaughtered) were Jewish — as well as “Anglos;”) and who actually did the torturing and mass killing — were Jewish and Anglos.
btw: In a conference last April Gideon Levy linked the Israeli sense of victimhood with the Israeli capacity to commit crimes against Palestinians here. Check it out.
Here’s an excerpt:
(6) Anglos and zionists/Jews are the persons and groups who are, today, committing or setting in motion the deliberate, mass killing of Arabs, Muslims and Iranians. In a large part those facts are concealed from the awareness of the broad public through a network of lies, intimidation, extortion, etc. The perpetrators of those crimes against humanity are emboldened in their brutality by the fact that they got away with it before.
That’s where S2C is coming from.
It is not the prevailing point of view. (Irony alert).
In many places S2C would be imprisoned or otherwise punished if such an argument were made and attacked to a person that the authorities could identify. (It’s scary enough making such statements from a putatively-anonymous position inasmuch as internet communications are visible to the same people who are carrying out the atrocities mentioned in (6), above).
Why does S2C engage in this extremely risky behaviour?
Is it because S2C lives in a climate that corrodes bungie cords?
Is it because S2C would rather die than pay that parking ticket?
You seem to be stuck in some grooves dictated by your imagination about who S2C is and why S2C writes this very controversial stuff.
You.
are.
wrong.
You are engaged in “spider-thinking.”
S2C writes this stuff, as often and as persuasively as is S2C’s limited ability to do, because S2C thinks that a grave injustice has taken place — the deliberate destruction of Germans and of Japanese — and that the same perpetrators who committed those crimes against humanity and got away with it are committing similar crimes against other peoples — Palestinians and others; and plan to carry the same out against Iranians.
S2C thinks that should be stopped from happening.
S2C maintains that a patriot is called upon to resist the criminal acts of its government.
“If I remain silent I have sinned.” — Mossadeq.
—–
I think I understand a key to your thinking. It is that carrying out a holocaust of anyone by anyone is a horrible, horrible thing to do, a crime against humanity.
Do I have that right?
I agree!
Persons, states, leaders who carry out such things as the burning of a baby or mass killings of people are criminals and must be brought to justice; failure to bring such people to justice indicts our whole society and it gives the perpetrators of such crimes the erroneous belief that killing people on a mass scale, or burning babies, is an acceptable thing to do to the extent that the evil behavior is repeated, and that with impunity.
Do we agree on that?
The next step is to asses the truth-value of each of the scenarios you laid out in your comment.
We could go step-by-step through your statements about Greasy William; hypothetical situations about burning babies and mass genocides vs real situations involving those crimes; and will gladly do so if, after you have read this lengthy comment you have further questions.
For now, the sparkling blue water is lapping at the rocks at Capri, a gentle breeze mitigates the blazing sun . . . .
“If the Palestinians were to leave, the Zionists would find some other people to trample on. Perhaps in Lebanon or Jordan or better yet, in Syria where they already are trying to steal the Golan Heights. ”
Surely, by definition, what Israeli Nationalists want is the same territory as existed in 70AD?
Islam on the other hand, and Christianity, are territorially expansive; Chritianity seeks to convert and create kingdoms (praps not so much nowadays), Islam seeks to convert and create caliphates.
But at the current time it is hard to imagine ‘Israel’ could ever feel safe in the ME because it is surrounded by huge populations of Arabs/Moslems. Or am I missing something? What would make ‘Israel’ feel safe?
They would have peace if people in the strip would quit firing rockets into Israel from the strip. As long as radicals infiltrate and use it as a base to shoot rockets, the trouble will not end.
“Having a high birth rate is not the cause of Palestinian poverty, it only exacerbates it”
Do you have any idea how expensive it is to raise children?
If I had a dozen children – which is quite the norm in Gaza – I would also be living in poverty.
Do you have any kids yourself? Have you ever even kissed a girl?
Perhaps you’re too busy blaming all of your shortcomings on “Zionists”.
You obviously missed my response to Charlesz Martel.
https://www.unz.com/article/gaza-our-childs-shattered-face-in-the-mirror/#comment-1044908
The criminal, racist Zionist entity is an inflamed sore on the world’s ass.
the problem is that is someone else’s land
if I go to your home and claim that I have a religious text that gives me the right to take possession of your house and land because this religious text says that someone who believed in the same religion as I believe in thousands of years ago used to live on that land, and it says here in this text that I should be able to kill you and take your house and your land because my religion says so .. how would you feel about that once I started killing your family and taking your house?
Is that true, helena?
When did that happen that “Arabs/Moslems formed a huge population in the ME?”
Last month?
Last year?
Were Israelis unaware that Palestine was “surrounded by a huge population of Arabs/Moslems” when East European Jews started to colonize there in the 1890s, or was it a complete surprise?
Whenever it happened, was there ever a time when Jews and the “surrounding Arabs/Moslems” did feel secure one amongst the other?
If yes, how and when did that change?
Damn, wouldn’t that just ruin your whole day.
—-
In 2011 “Dana Karon,” born, raised by staunchly zionist parents and educated in Israeli schools, tearfully told a panel chaired by Peter Beinart: We were lied to. We were told there were no Palestinians on this land. Maps and our textbooks do not show Palestinians.
Karon and her family moved to USA where she is (was, in 2011) a student at University of Maryland.
Her colloquy with the panel begins at about 42 min Watch to the end, however, and observe how a “fixer” attempts to carefully reshape her perceptions.
demographics is destiny ; )
Frankly, stupidity deserves punishment, and only an utter moron could not have predicted that Israel would end up besieged by the Arabs.
So yeah. Jews deserve a homeland. They should have gotten, say, half of east Germany. So many Germans died in WWII that this could have worked.
Jews were envied and hated in Europe for their superior talent and success. And they thought that founding a country between people whose entire religion has a giant inferiority complex re Judaism… was a good idea?
A blunder for the ages-, if there ever was one.
Sam Shama’s discerning comments should be required reading in Washington, District of Corruption.
Dear Mr Croesus,
I was fortunate enough to have not been born until after WWII was decades past.But my father wasn’t. He served as a Second Lieutenant in the United States Army, had his own regiment,.. was wounded three times…saw his best buddies head blown off….and more than once informed me that when the first mortar round went off in his vicinity he shit in his pants .
He seemed to indicate to me that war , on the whole, is a nasty business and that nobody who is the midst of it, is really sure when their ticket will get punched.
He receive a purple heart and a bronze star for his service to our country, he didn’t like war , but felt this one was worth fighting, was glad we were victorious and glad he could go home.
He was stationed in Germany through much of his tour and in fact became Burgermeister of a small German town. He, on several occasion’s noted a profound dislike the Russians displayed toward German soldiers in their joint capture…he said the Russians were mean and callous toward the captured Germans….but at no time did either he or they start “exterminating” Germans “en masse”. It certainly never happened on his watch, nor was it an order he was given from his commanders. He did say that if a German soldier stepped out of line..the Russians would quite often just shoot them…just like that !
I asked him once when I was fourteen and studying Hiroshima and Nagasaki in school,how he felt about the dropping of the” Bomb”….. The moment he and his troops were informed…they started jumping for joy…ecstatic at the fact the war was over…and indicated that had we not dropped it, the war might have gone on for years and 20 million more people might have died.
he was happy about it because it meant the war was over…and he was alive.
There was never any indication from him that the Holocaust didn’t happen but rather the horror that it did. Nor did he suggest the REAL holocaust was visited on the German people not the Jewish people…had I suggested it to him..he would of looked at me and said ……..”you are full of shit !”
So Mr Croesus, in deference to my Father’s experience at having” been there”he would no doubt say to you with equal candor and forthrightness…..
” You are full of shit !”
PS. Please note the exclamation point !
I’d temper that bit there a few notches!
1. In a situation of occupation, Occupiers have obligations and the Occupied have rights.
As Norman Finkelstein’s series Has Amnesty International Lost Its Way? reveals, Israel egregiously, persistently and deliberately avoids its obligations and violates the rights of Palestinians in Occupied Territory.
2. The power imbalance between Israel and Palestine is demonstrated in this statistical analysis of deaths from rockets from the Gaza Strip experienced by Israelis between Sept. 2001 and Aug. 29, 2014.
The analysis is summarized thus:
The website If Americans Knew attempts to list all deaths from hostile actions, for both Palestinians and Israeli Jews, from Sept. 29, 2000 to the present.
That analysis is summarized thus:
It should be noted that Palestinians do not have a military force to defend themselves.
To the extent the Palestinian people have defensive capability to fend off the power of Israel, it is supplied by Iran.
Pres. Barack Obama stated on Aug. 5, 2015 that his administration had done more to arm and weaponize Israel, and would continue to continue to do so. Specifically, he said:
In other words, the president of the American people has used their tax dollars and the “diplomatic efforts” they support to ensure that Israel can continue to kill Palestinians efficiently, disproportionately and with impunity, while simultaneously eroding the capacity of one of the Palestinian people’s defenders to continue to defend them.
Applying a back-of-the-envelope calculation of Obama’s assertions to the analysis, above, it appears that between 2001 and 2014 the people of the United States of American have given Israel $39 billion (13 X $3 billion/year) to defend Israelis from the 32 rocket-and-mortar strikes that killed Israelis, or $1,218,750,000 for every Israeli Jewish person who died as a result of rocket/mortar attack from Gaza.
Perhaps Sherman’s statement above requires a slight adjustment:
The solutions seems obvious: In order for Israelis and Palestinians to realize peace, American taxpayers must demand that “our” financial (and political) support for Israel end.
Now.
“The bride is beautiful but she is married to another man”
This is a quote falsely attributed to the Jews by hate filled propagandists like you.
Nobody actually said these words and there is zero evidence of anybody uttering this quote.
In fact, had anybody visited Palestine before 1900 they would have found a poor, neglected and sparsely populated territory. Nobody would have called the place beautiful.
It wasn’t until the Jews fixed up the place that the land did indeed become “beautiful”.
In fact, this is what drew massive waves of Arab immigrants to Palestine from the surrounding basket case Arab countries (and throughout the Muslim world).
The descendants of these recent immigrants to Palestine are, of course, today’s “indigenous Palestinians”.
no they weren’t
they were admired for that, just as they’re admired for that today
it isn’t for their brains or their work ethic that Jews are often resented, it’s for their treachery and hostility to others
that’s why a Jewish homeland is a great idea, because Jews often are hostile to non-Jews
It’s in their religion. It teaches them that they are better and more deserving than non-Jews. It teaches them that it’s OK to cheat and otherwise wrong non-Jews if it somehow benefits the Jews.
But they were hated in Germany for what they did at the end of WWI
Your father: “Nor did he suggest the REAL holocaust was visited on the German people not the Jewish people”
So what? Two wrongs do not make a right – never have, never will. Tribal fascist Nazis, tribal fascist Zionists – there is no real difference
What in your father’s story justifies what Israel is doing to the Palestinians. What would your father say about the Zionists using Palestinian women and children as a proving ground for their weapons sales? What would your father say about Gaza being an open air prison for a million and a half men, women, and children?
We could expect that your father would be very upset with your support of the fascist Jews.
Your father put his life on the line against the fascist Germans – yet you give succor to the fascist Jews – get a life.
You must have gone to the same Israeli schools as Dana Karon, who reported, teary-eyed, that as a student in zionist Israeli schools, “we were lied to.”
Arthur Ruppin’s report to the Jewish Colonization Society of Vienna in 1907 should set Dana straight, answer other readers’s questions, and undermine your contentions, Sherman.
Two things of particular interest: first is the composition and relative prosperity of Jews in Jerusalem — Persian, Bokhara and Yemeni Jews are prosperous; Eastern European Jews less so.
Second is Ruppin’s keen interest in the area around Jaffa, where a mixture of Jewish groups varied widely in their relative prosperity but for whom
That is to say, someone else built the railroad from which Jews benefited.
What makes this so interesting is that when Ruppin returned to Palestine to manage colonization — and to acquire, by stealth and other means, some of the finest real estate in the region, including the extraordinarily fertile and well developed Jezrael valley, one of his first acts was to build Tel Aviv close-by to Jaffa. Etan Bloom explains:
An acquaintance with the work of Arthur Ruppin reveals what Jews confronted, took advantage of, and built upon in Palestine in the early years of (modern) Jewish colonization of Palestine.
A perspective on what was already there, what had been built by Arabs in collaboration with assimilated Sephardic Jews can be fleshed out here — Those People in Gaza: Where Do They Come From, And Why Are They So Mad?
and here:
Thank you for the story about your father and his charming sentiment that he was pleased that 100,000 Japanese civilians were incinerated because it meant that he could go home.
I guess he would know about shitty people from the inside out, so to speak.
As you have demonstrated, you appear to reflect your father’s shitty outlook on life.
Regarding Jews and their suffering during the war, etc.
My Father and Mother taught me to respect, even revere, Jewish people. Mom had dear Jewish friends with whom she communicated regularly and who became almost a part of the family, tho I never met them.
If it rocks your boat to call shitty names, knock yourself out. It really doesn’t affect me. My standard is whether my Mother would frown at me for failing to respect people as she taught me to do.
You don’t mention where your father was stationed in Germany. Did he ever talk about the devastation all around, inasmuch as Allies had reduced to rubble 75% of the country?
Maybe, in addition to the good fortune of 100,000 Japanese being incinerating so that he could go home, he had the good fortune to be stationed in the 25% of Germany still standing.
Did he mention raping any German women? Oh — bad form. ‘scuse me. Most likely he would not have mentioned that to 14-year old Alexander.
“My Father and Mother taught me to respect, even revere, Jewish people”
Why do I find this impossible to believe?
You’re delusional.
“. . . He served as a Second Lieutenant in the United States Army, had his own regiment . . .”
I think you’re mistaken, aren’t you? Second lieutenants command platoons. Bird colonels command regiments.
Sherman, do you have any comments on Arthur Ruppin’s activities in Palestine, or the British Mandate’s analysis of Arab vs Jewish crop production?
That’s objective information that is open to discussion.
My relationship with my parents is not something you are in a position to know anything about or form an opinion upon.
I can tell you this about my parents, however: neither my Mother nor my Father ever, in their entire lives ever said anything remotely like “You are full of shit.” Nor were our children ever subjected to that sort of low treatment.
>>>> And the Palestinians? ..
Jordan is Palestine.
that’s a lie
Who were the over 700,000 (that’s seven hundred thousand) people who fled for their lives from the Jewish terrorists who were hacking up and slaughtering Palestinian villagers including women and children in places like Deir Yassin?
Whether or not the diplomat said those words exactly is irrelevant. The people murdered at places like Deir Yassin and the hundreds of thousands who fled to the dessert to escape the blood bath were all those Palestinian husbands who were married to the Palestine ‘bride’ ~ the land and their homes and their farms and businesses and churches and mosques and streets and beds and heirlooms from thousands of years of living on that land. Their land. All of it stolen by terrorists who butchered old men, women and children in the worst ways possible in a calculated agenda of terror to drive the ‘husbands’ from their ‘bride’ so that another man could defile her. And defile her they did.
The indigenous Palestinians you mention are the same ones who survived the Nakba- the Palestinian holocaust and fled to the dessert. Many still have the keys to their homes that were stolen from them. They can watch the Jews living in their houses and farming their land with tractors that are paid for with American tax dollars- like so many other things that make the life of the Jews over there so pleasant while at the same time the people whose lives were stolen from them by terrorists are made as horrific and woeful as possible.
Once you wipe all the lies away from the conflict over there, the stark truth becomes impossible to sugar coat.
It’s genocide
You wish!
I checked a few of your posts to see if you were sincere
“Arabic blood will flow”
like it did at Sabra and Shatila?
like it did in Deir Yassin?
like it did in Gaza so recently
Like it’s doing in Syria as we speak?
From the King David hotel cowardly terrorism- to the attack on 911- to the slaughtered people in Iraq and Libya and Ukraine today, don’t you ever worry about Karma Eliezer?
It’s also culture-cide:
Eliezer
Disputing the history of the creation of modern Israel, means that you are either unaware, or willfully attempting to whitewash it. My grandfather was a participant in that war. All the Arab radio broadcasts urged Palestinians to flee. Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon radios called out the massacre at Deir Yassin at the hands of the Irgun. The Arab population listened. So would anybody in that situation. Over 700k, with just the clothes on their back, simply left their lives behind. My grandfather’s commander, when the Hagannah reached Deir Yassin, called out to the Irgun killers “Menuvalim! Menuvalim!”….do you know what that means? Disgusting soulless creatures! Yafo fell. Yerushalayim. Teveriya. Galil. Nartseret. A hundred other communities fell.
Its 2015. The Hebrew year 5775. Every bit of perfidy, every atrocity, every drop of blood splattered on the land is meticulously recorded. Digitally. For eternity. It will remain a pockmark on the face of humanity, a blight on the Jewish soul if we cannot acknowledge what happened. And redress.
Do we understand?
I see no difficulty with proper planning to bestow citizenship to all Palestinians. It will be a truly modern semitic country in the ME. We have the knowledge and the capability to make this come true. It is not a “dream” fraught with impossible odds against it. Its eminently possible. The wherewithals are in our (Jewish) hands. We can make it happen. We should.
The Russians like Lieberman are NOT Jewish. I don’t need the fucked up interpretation of the Torah from these murderers to contaminate our thoughts. I know it far better than than those killers who do not even know the Shema Yisrael!. I once spoke to a group of these grinning halfwits , reciting the passages they were made to memorise. I then got into the Talmud with their “rabbi”, who did not even know why or what the Sanhedrin of the Talmud intended with the Old Laws. They wanted each generation to apply their minds and conscience to change with the times! For example, “Eye for an Eye” of the old laws was rendered impossible, especially by the State, since 70 Judges would never agree on one thing! So went out of the window, many things that do not resonate with the times.
We must do this, or it will consume us, and our children will stop loving us if we fail. They know the truth. Again its the year 5775.
Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon implied that Israel may seek to assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists in order stop Iran’s nuclear program in an interview with the German newspaper Der Spiegel, released on Friday.
In response to the question “So will we see further deaths of Iranian nuclear scientists through attacks or malware compromising Iranian computer networks?”, Ya’alon said: “We should be ready to defend ourselves. I’m not responsible for the lives of Iranian
read more: http://www.haaretz.com/beta/1.670116
Israel isn’t responsible for the misfortunes of Gazan.
Israel has no choice when the choice is justice . It has no partner when it is the partner.
The Original Sin –
New York Times archives dating back to 1947 1948 can elucidate
what actually happened are entirely diffetent from what American and countless other across the world have boon told by Hollywood ,by book like EXODUS ,media,weekly magazine ,periodicals and by AIPAC
http://www.thejerusalemfund.org/ht/a/GetDocumentAction/i/29282
http://www.thejerusalemfund.org/ht/a/GetDocumentAction/i/29281
http://www.thejerusalemfund.org/ht/a/GetDocumentAction/i/29280
http://www.thejerusalemfund.org/ht/a/GetDocumentAction/i/29283
http://www.thejerusalemfund.org/ht/a/GetDocumentAction/i/29284
http://mondoweiss.net/2011/05/picking-apart-the-new-york-timess-zionist-narrative-on-the-nakba-using-the-new-york-times
Compromise on the basis of even remote semblance to justice was not an option . War was the choice ,always and consistent, like the rise of the Sun.
“Similarly, in 1949 the Syrian regime of Husni Zaim proposed a settlement with Israel: if Syria was granted permanent access to the waters of the Jordan River and Lake Tiberias, the Zaim government would not only sign a peace agreement but would permanently resettle 300,000 of the Palestinian refugees in its own territory. Despite urgings from U.S., UN, and even some leading Israeli officials, David Ben-Gurion refused even to discuss the offer. Zaim was succeeded by a military government headed by Adib Shishakli, who renewed the Syrian proposal on even more favorable terms, offering to resettle most of the Palestinian refugees (500,000) in Syria. Again Ben-Gurion refused to negotiate.
– See more at: http://mondoweiss.net/2013/12/israels-dangerous-shavits#sthash.x4OjaSy4.dpuf
Hi Art,
did you read what I wrote? or anything I have written?
My central thesis for the past several months has been The holocaust of Palestine today is in every way as brutal and as reprehensible as the Holocaust that happened to the Jewish people in Nazi Germany……Nothing that was done to the Jews excuses what is being done in Palestine to the Palestinians people…as a matter of fact it makes it more odious and more evil !
.
… .What is it about what I have written in this post or any other that has ever suggested otherwise ?
Mr Croesus insists the holocaust never happened at all…and that Nazism was never an ideology based on supremacism, lebensraum,conquest and empire.
he claims that making an equivalence with Jewish supremacism today and Nazi supremacism of 1938 is wrong…i say its spot on !
And its been my argument all along !
If you have a problem with it take it up with him .
could be Orville,
He had a picture of it and referred to it as a regiment, it was about 250 troops or so …if that’s a platoon than it was a platoon .
You want to take another crack at this before I blister your hide, Sam Shama?
I’m not sure what your point is. One of your articles discusses how the Jews successfully fought off multiple attacking Arab armies and held off attacks by Palestinian Arabs (they were called Palestinian Arabs not “Palestinians” back then but I don’t mean to digress).
If you’re trying to make the Jews look bad or delegitimize Israel you’re not doing a very good job.
You’re not even a competent anti-Semite.!
I have a rather thick hide. Do your worst.
I think I might have an inkling as to what you are about to say. But read the 3rd paragraph from the end in this entry:
https://www.unz.com/article/israels-100-million-gamble/#comment-1039867
Don’t take it personally ( I mean Semitically, then you won’t know the truth)
The information contained in those archives show the essence of the Zionism . It has been a corrupted lying machine and nothing from the very inception of its existence .
Lying goes back to the days of the creation of Israel , to its beginning. Nothing new , no truth has ever emerged from any of its claims .
I’m not sure what this means:
“Russians are not exogenous to this requirement.”
Please clarify —
Sam Shama:
You’ve wiped away the fundaments of 4000 years of civilization, Sam, in preference for those (rather weak, I must say) quirky pillars that support your historically singular construction. That may be satisfying in the short term, inasmuch as in the short term the situation trends the way you prefer them. This combination of particularist (i.e. Balfour) and short-term (you endorse the UN mandate but Israel has rejected every other attempt by that same UN to regulate Israel’s behavior) is what got Israel into this a-moral, a-civilizational mess in the first place. (PS I believe the Persian model worked pretty well for a long time.)
But if your law, which is basically the law of the jungle, of might makes right, prevails; and if Jews remain a minority, as they have throughout history, then what are you going to do when somebody becomes stronger than you and conquers you? Will Jews concede obligingly, turn over the keys to their homes and businesses and say, “that’s the way history has worked, from before Diocletion. Your turn now …”
And anyway, is that any way to live — relying always on punishing and killing to enforce your rights?
I’m reminded of something Chas Freeman said in a speech at the Palestine Center several years ago:
The present chaos in the region that is consequent to prior application of the principle you now espouse for 1SS Israel might be considered a petri dish of Israel’s future under your proposal.
and Sam Shama said:
Does that mean that the Jewish right of return is also vitiated, which, if I understand zionism properly, means that the entire raison d’être for the Jewish state is wiped away — wiped off the map, so to speak?
And if you do not intend that the Jewish right of return is abolished in favor of a “purely economic model,” then in what sense is this to be “one state for all its citizens” if one group of citizens has preferential rights and another group is denied those rights?
With reference to “economic models,” for a dozen years or more Alan Greenspan ran the Federal Reserve and thereby the US economy on a particular model, one that, I believe, posited that markets were self-regulating —“we don’t need no stinkin’ rule of law.”
On October 23, 2008 (iirc), the US economy having failed and the global economy threatened with collapse absent a US taxpayer bail out of banks who had been the winners in this model, Greenspan appeared before a US Senate Committee and excused himself from accountability for the mess with these words that, in my view, demand to be carved in stone:
The model was flawed.
Economic models built on the foundation of “might makes right” will eventually lead to grief; always have, always will.
Yes, of course America is a crime. A series of crimes, first against the indiginous population, and later against other groups. The difference is that America has admitted its crime, tried to make reparations (I agree, too little, too late!) and now provides the descendants of the victims with the same legal and civil rights as all other Americans. Do you not see how Israel is a totally different situation? How many people live in limbo in the territory controlled by Israel, territory which includes both the West Bank and Gaza? These people have lived without civil and legal rights for many years.
“My central thesis for the past several months has been The holocaust of Palestine today is in every way as brutal and as reprehensible as the Holocaust that happened to the Jewish people in Nazi Germany”
Sorry Alexander – my bad my error – I apologize big time — Art
Meaning that they are very much subject to the same rules and limitations (economic sustainability) as the Arabs applying under RoR. In fact I would go further to suggest no more Russian entry for a period of a decade until RoR is fully satisfied.
What SolontoCroesus said was a lot more nuanced than that.
Go back and read what was written, not what’s squeezed aus dem Arsche
As my Italian Aunt used to say, “I right, you wrong.”
You, Alexander, are wrong on the facts and wrong on the analysis.
Ask your father about the rape of German women
Ask your father about the destruction of 75% of Germany
Ask your father about the forced “population transfer” of 12- 15-million ethnic Germans
Ask your father about the confessions-by-torture extracted from Germans in Nuremberg “trials”
Ask your father about “de-Nazification-by-torture” of German citizens that went on for five years if not more post-German surrender
Or better yet, consult someone who was there and in a less shitty frame of mind than your father: Freda Utley’s The High Cost of Vengeance
Ask your father if he’s ever noticed the relationship between Henry Morgenthau, Jr. who was FDR’s right hand man from 1936 onward in planning a war against Germany, funneling money to Russia, abetted by the Russian spy in his office, Harry Dexter White;
and the Morgenthau Plan that was carried out against the German people for over two years AFTER German surrender, until US military leaders were sickened by its barbarity and put a stop to it.
There is this equivalence between the German people and the Palestinians:
Zionist Jews planned and carried out the ethnic cleansing of both of their peoples and cultures, and devastated both of their lands and built structures.
Other than that,
Spot on
!
And I thought your parents told you to love Jews. 🙂
No worries !
Quite true.
What has that got to do with the facts listed at 100, above?
Are the facts incorrect? If so, show your evidence.
Sorry Mr Croesus ,
You can believe until you are blue in the face how wonderful the fuhrer was, how the holocaust never happened and how Nazism is your Utopian wet dream come true…
That’s your choice…..just stop trying to foist it on me !
Alexander, I don’t pluck things out of the air to “believe;” I try to follow the evidence.
If your agenda is to somehow aid the Palestinians to free themselves from 100 years of oppressions, you might want to consider that you are accomplishing just the opposite.
Consider what Gideon Levy said from the National Press Club last Spring:
Every time you say “Remember the holocaust! a thousand weeds sprout.
Ten thousand Israelis say — or reinforce in their minds) “I was a victim of the Nazis! I can do whatever I want! Seventeen-year olds from Brooklyn who are now settlers in Israel call themselves holocaust survivors and not only claim but act as if they can do whatever they want, including kill Palestinian children.
You enable that behavior when you continually reinforce the holocaust narrative that was created and is used by people like Benjamin Netanyahu to keep Israeli Jews in a state of psychological disequilibrium, because it serves their political purposes. You are not doing any favors for the Palestinian people by reinforcing a (bogus) narrative.
—
Several years ago members of Israel’s IDF spoke at Kent State University. I’m a little fuzzy on the details but something like this happened: A Palestinian man called out from the audience something about Israelis oppressing Palestinians. He didn’t say anything bigoted, racist, ugly, foul; he didn’t throw anything, hurt anybody.
He was booted out of the meeting hall.
The newspapers went crazy. The man was condemned as a deranged antisemite.
Numerous Jewish persons and leaders of Jewish groups wrote and complained about the outburst.
One letter to the newspaper was noteworthy: A Jewish man wrote, “You have to understand that we Jews have post-traumatic stress syndrome. If we feel threatened we react violently. We can’t help it. We were victims.”
I think that’s bullshit.
Gilad Atzmon and Helen Thomas discussed Atzmon’s book, The Wandering Who” a few years back. Atzmon explained how he re-cast the concept of PTSD; he calls it pre-traumatic stress disorder. It’s learned/taught behavior that has no basis in real experience.
When otherwise well-meaning people reinforce those concepts, they are perpetuating the psychopathologization and infantilization of Jewish people and condemning Palestinians to ever more years of suffering at the hands of Israeli Jews who have given themselves permission to avoid the hard work of growing up.
Israelis have made an industry of having “post traumatic stress syndrome.” It’s a get-out-of-jail-free card. They don’t have to do the hard work of shaping their character to live sane and wholesome lives. Instead, as Avigail Abarbanel has described, Israeli society has devolved into psychopathology.
As Abarbanel noted, Israeli society is “not right in the head;” it has a “national psychosis.” “People are not kind to each other,” she writes; “they come together only when there is war.”
Wolfgang Samuel grew up during war years in Germany. He collected the stories of 27 others like himself and produced The War of Our Childhood: Memories of World War II.
Those memories include
The most significant thing Samuels wrote is this:
How is it that German children could become “sane and productive,” but Israelis are in a state of perpetual pre-traumatic stress that they feel requires them to lash out?
Are Palestinians going to be able to normalize their lives as long as Israelis reinforce their pre-traumatic stress disorder?
How can Israeli behaviour be changed to put an end to the national psychosis?
A must see is the documentary Defamation It is directed by Yoav Shamir, an Israeli who travels the world asking what constitutes anti-Semitism in modern times.
http://youtu.be/OR-aPeOAtG0
NB – If there are issues with the video, perhaps someone could provide a link to a better one.
Dear Mr Croesus,
I have already watched Gideon Levy at the press club last spring as well as every other speaker who was present, and I have read most of what he has written over the last ten years, as well as Amira Hass, Akivar Eldar,Uri Avnery, and a host of other writers on the topic. I have read Benny Morris, Tony Judt, Norman Finkelstein, Mearshimer and Walt, President Carter, Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, Alice Walker,Judge Richard Goldstone,Phyllis Bennis, Dr Mads Gilbert, David Sheen, and Max Blumenthal. I have read, watched and listened to dozens of individuals, journalists, historians and intellectuals speak on this issue, to this issue….to learn the facts. viewpoints and positions of many thoughtful intelligent people….I certainly hope to continue to do so….
Let me say this quite clearly to you, to “see” if I understand” your” position…
Your argument, Mr Croesus, is your belief that the attitude exists that since the “Holocaust happened to the Jewish people” they can now “do whatever they want”, Having endured such a horrific historical tragedy they are now EXEMPT from the “behavioral, legal , ethical and moral norms” that bind the rest of us to human decency… or rather your argument is that “they feel that way”.!
So your “strategy” is to revise history to “undo” the Holocaust and disarm the “Jewish people”of the singular weapon they use time and time again, to “blackmail”, coerce, and manipulate much of western civilization to do what they want…..is that a correct synopsis ?
Is that correct, Mr Croesus ? Your reference to Mr Paul Eisen would indicate this to be so.
Your goal, then, to counter the prevailing “dogma” that “the Jewish people are the true and only real victims of history” is to , in effect, dislodge the centrality of the Holocaust from the moorings of “our” collective historical narrative ….to in effect displace it…and erase it !
This, you surmise ,will deliver civilization from the baleful and mendacious clutches of world jewry?
Which is what Hitler tried to do, Nazism tried to do yet failed that time around….but if you are able to somehow redirect the tragedy of the holocaust onto the “German people” and steal it away from the Jews you can win this ‘great struggle” once and for all !
Is this correct also?
So the(heroic) task you have set out for yourself is to “pull back the curtain” once and for all on the “Great Holocaust hoax” and dissolve it from the materiality of western consciousness?
Before I go forward and address you with ” my concerns” or what your fraudulently refer to as my “agenda” I would like to be sure that this is indeed yours…
I await your reply…..
Just like Dresden was. They didn’t just want to slaughter (burn alive) the people of Dresden, they wanted to destroy for all time the ancient Baroque culture which was an iconic expression of those people and their history.
Just like they way they loot and destroy the museums of Mesopotamia and now Syria, trying to wipe out history and truth.
Like the burning of the Library of Alexandria, destroying sublime knowledge and culture if it isn’t their knowledge and culture. They want to rewrite history to conform to the tenants or their egocentric (to say the least) tribal narrative. And destroy any and all evidence that is inconvenient to that narrative.
The systematic internment and murder of Jews by the Nazis is fact. My father was with the 3rd Armored Division when they liberated Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp, on April 11th, 1945.
Whether the numbers associated with the holocaust are inflated I don’t know, I am not the trusting type, but I know that what my father saw at Dora-Mittelbau scared him for life.
Rurik,
The massive “culture -cide or “cultural extermination” that went on in Iraq, that is occurring even as we speak in Syria and Palestine…..Of what possible Interest can that serve the American people ?
How am I (or you ) better served knowing that the architecture, monuments, artistic creations and artifacts that trace a history and a civilization back thousands of years have been eradicated?
Isn’t it, by implication, an assault on all of world culture ?
Isn’t it, in the end, an assault on us, too?
the last first:
Mr. Croesus is guilty of having formed an opinion of your agenda, Alexander. Mr. Croesus surmises from your writing that you are an advocate for justice for the Palestinian people. Mr. Croesus surmises that the approach you have crafted is to create an equivalence between what you assess to be the goals of Nazism and what you assess to be the goals of zionism.
Whether that conclusion is “fraudulent” or otherwise, it is what Mr. Croesus believes to be your “agenda.”
Attributing those beliefs to “Mr Croesus” is inaccurate.
Those statements and beliefs were explicitly and repeatedly articulated by Golda Meier, Gideon Levy, Gilad Atzmon, Paul Eisen, Avigail Abarbanel and others. Mr. Croesus has never been to Israel, therefore must rely on those who are there.
Not quite correct. Mr. Croesus’ strategy, believed to be a fair and equitable approach, is to tell the whole and non-propagandized truth of the wars in Europe.
Yes Mr. Croesus does seek to
“disarm the ‘Jewish people’ ” of the singular weapon they use time and time again, to “blackmail”, coerce, and manipulate much of western civilization to do what they want etc.,”
or at least that perception of the Jewish people as has been created by Abe Foxman and the like, and undercut their ability to “blackmail, coerce and manipulate,” etc.
Two points:
First, David Biale’s “The Cultures of the Jews” offers an explanation of how the notion of “perpetual victimization” took hold among the “Jewish people” and how it is obviously and dangerously distorted.
Second, one public intellectual whom I greatly respect, Hillary Mann Leverett, is among those Jewish people who maintain that Israel maintains it ‘special relationship’ to the USA by means of that holocaust narrative, which is harmful to both the Jewish people and American national interests, not to mention the Palestinian people.
With you up until “erase it.”
Displace it, yes. Erase it, no.
More like re-proportion it: get a true picture of events from a basis in fact, not hysteria, emotion, hasbara, propaganda, and Hollywood.
Bit of charged rhetoric in there, Alexander, but it contains a kernel of truth.
If Germany were “delivered” from the “mendacious clutches” of holocaust guilt, perhaps Germany would refrain from delivering submarines to Israel that are nuclear capable and with which Israel can thereby threaten the people of Gaza from sea, in addition to land and air.
.
I suspect a trap in here.
70 years has demonstrated that the very mention of “Hitler” and “Nazism” is accompanied by distortion of the goals and means of the German people. Mr. Croesus insists that the whole story of what “Nazism and Hitler” tried to accomplish demands to be told fully, factually, and fairly.
Once again, slightly strident in rhetoric and off-kilter in its absolutist terms.
The facts about the suffering of the German (and Japanese) people — civilians and later unarmed former combatants– are verifiable. The stories of the fire bombings, rapes, starvation, population transfer of millions, forced labor etc. are not false.
On the other hand, the stories of “soap and lampshades,” and “showers that are gas chambers” are not verifiable, and to the best of my knowledge there is no evidence that Jewish people died in Allied firebombing in Germany nor of mass rapes of Jewish women by Germans.
There’s an old, old movie, Hell is for Heroes. I’m no hero. If I were a hero I would make my identity known as do Phil Giraldi, Gilad Atzmon, Andrew Bacevich, Flynt and Hillary Leverett and others whom I admire for their public courage.
I hide behind “Croesus,” the king who lost his kingdom because he misinterpreted the oracle, much as American leaders misinterpret, indeed bastardize history.
It seems obvious that the USA is on a catastrophically wrong path. Croesus-like, it makes policy and takes action based on “manufactured narratives,” “manufactured crises,” “manufactured consent,” even “manufactured reality.”
Those terms are another way of saying Lies.
George Washington’s Farewell Address is a compelling document. It does not endorse lying, much less killing other people in mass numbers, in the conduct of the great nation he pledged “his life, his fortune, his sacred honor” to establish.
To return to your parting statement, which Mr. Croesus placed at the beginning of this comment, regarding what Mr. Croesus believes to be Alexander’s agenda:
Mr. Croesus believes Alexander is passionate in the attempt to advocate for the Palestinian people. Gilad Atzmon maintains a running argument about leftists and anti-zionists and pro-anti-zionists that, frankly, makes Mr. Croesus’s eyes glaze over. I think the argument saps the strength of those who are genuinely appalled at the conditions Palestinians are forced to endure and who seek to change their situation.
Mr. Croesus has been told — warned, even — that attempting to undercut the holocaust narrative is likewise an unhelpful distraction from the pressing project of freeing the Palestinian people.
As Mr. Croesus sees it, the Occupation has persisted for 70 years. Nothing else has worked to change the situation. As Dr. Faurisson stated, the holocaust narrative is the “sword and shield,” the “great wall” behind which Israelis enjoy impunity to kill and oppress Palestinians.
Mr. Croesus echoes Mr. Reagan: “Tear down this wall.”
Tear down the false narrative of holocaustism.
Your turn, Alexander.
Take your best shot.
EC, did your father see with his own eyes in real time “Jews being systematically murdered?”
Or did your father see emaciated people and corpses of persons who died relatively recently?
No doubt the sight “scared him for life.”
A close relation is a psychotherapist who specializes — volunteers, even — to assist people who have experienced such life-changing and “scarring for life” traumas. They are embedded in the brain and the psyche. I have no idea what techniques my relation uses to help to heal these scarred souls, but I suspect that a form of reality therapy is part of it: attempting to examine the meanings applied to what was seen seems important: challenging the conclusions one leaps to in the process of experiencing that trauma —
We have all seen pictures of the heaps of bodies that, we have been told, American or British forces saw when the liberated camps.
The DVD “Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust” was among the first things that, for me, “pulled back the curtain” on holocaustism.
According to the DVD, Allied leaders entered the camps with film crews from Hollywood, and before anyone else arrived. The pictures taken are real, of course. But the narrative, the story surrounding those horrible scenes were contrived by Allied leaders, and the creation of that narrative had one. singular. powerful goal: to complete the demonization of Germans.
They aren’t just destroying and looting the artifacts of Iraq and Syria per se, (two of the most important treasure troves at the center of the history of human civilization) but they’re trying to destroy our history. ‘Our’ being the uniquely human story.
It is akin to the infamous burning of the Library of Alexandria, because they’re tying to wipe out knowledge itself, so they can replace it with an ignorance that suits their terrible agenda.
It is an unprecedented crime against truth and our collective ancient legacy.
I’ll never forget the feeling in my gut when I first heard they were looting the Museum of Baghdad, (while protecting the oil fields). The curators were saying that the people behind the looting knew what they were doing and knew what they were looking for. Who doubts that today many of the most precious of those artifacts have found their way into private collections in London and Tel Aviv?
Orwell was right about everything
Haim Saban, The Influencer: An
entertainment mogulcartoon peddlersets his sights on foreign policy. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/05/10/the-influencer
—–
Iran is one of the most architecturally rich nations in the region.
Some of its ancient shrines, tho listed as UNESCO World Heritage sites, were damaged during the Iran-Iraq war.
As well, Iran’s own Muslim government is antipathetic to preservation of its more ancient history and heritage.
There is much to be feared …..
S2C, what you need to realise is that you were not an “an eye witness” to what actually happened to Jewish people and many others in Germany either. You were not an eye witness to what Der Fuhrer said or intended. You depend on documentation as much as anyone else, and you dismiss the evidence of history when it does not suit your narrative as fictitious.
These continuous salvos from you regarding “re-proportioning” the Holocaust, do more harm than good. They poison the well of truly humanitarian intentions for people like Alexander.
I asked you, in fact offered to pay for your trip to Jerusalem and visit the Yad Vashem. You declined. That is fine; it therefore negates your claim of any objective, comprehensive study of the heart-rending Event.
Individual Jews and Israelis do not remember the Holocaust for the nefarious purpose of extracting benefits (Do the various Jewish politically inclined groups use it to gain a voice? Absolutely! But so do many minority groups. Its a feature of our political landscape). Mostly it is to remind ourselves, humanity at large, what can happen if we let the Beast out.
Jews and Armenians in Jerusalem commemorate the Armenian Holocaust.
http://www.armenian-genocide.org/Memorial.96/current_category.67/memorials_detail.html
Jews regularlty travel to Cambodia to commemorate the Killing Fields in Cambodia (http://www.jewishtimesasia.org/community-spotlight-topmenu-43/cambodia/281-cambodia-communities/1235-whats-jewish-about-cambodia ).
There are many other such memorials in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Point is, you are wrong.
Mr Croesus.
I see you have most graciously EXTRACTED you “Holocaust never happened” tract ,or at least modified it ‘ now that you realize how kinda stupid it is….that is a positive …maybe we can move forward on a more constructive note….
A full and honest recounting of the horrors that befell ALL people during WWII is always welcome, but the fact that nearly sixty million people died and almost all of western civilization was destroyed as a result of this war, has not gone unnoticed by me, nor has it by most of humanity.
I recall reading in the New York Book Review four years ago that in excess of 15 million people died from a deliberate plan of Mass Starvation by Stalin, in Belarus. Pretty gruesome, no?
There seems to be no shortage of awfulness or unconscionable acts that occurred during that war…. which ones we choose to shine the light on, at any given moment, may in the end be a political decision, not a moral one….But it shouldn’t be.
The horror of war is indeed just that..a horror…..
..The pernicious” defrauding” of the United States into the Iraq War, primarily by Bibi , Israel and its coterie of Neocons , has yet to be met with the justice that should be served upon it.
Had we, in fact, been attacked by Iraq ,on 9-11, had it, in fact, been “Saddam’s Anthrax” in Senator Leahy’s and Tom Brokaw’s office and had our intelligence on an “imminent threat” been concrete, our recourse to war would have had real justification…
But it was all Fraud, Mr Croesus, horrible, evil fraud !
I see that “defrauding” as a supreme act of terrorism against the decency and good will of the American People (many of them Jewish) and as an inescapable one against the millions of innocent Iraqi people who have suffered and died for it….
But that doesn’t propel me to revisit history imposing that “defrauding” on all our actions .
I disagree with you ,profoundly, on the first Iraq War….Iraq’s invasion and attempted annexation of Kuwait was REAL…it was not a Fraud , a Hoax, or a Delusion..
you can make an argument that the war we fought there was unjustified, but not that the catalyst for it was a” fake” one.
Sometimes, we look at recent events in history, the mistakes we made,and the lies we were told to make them, and revisit ALL of history through the filter of that “defrauding”,.
I understand the tendency…if we were duped now…why hasn’t every war we have fought been a duping , or every action we’ve taken, as a nation been a duping too?
you can go there if you want to, Mr Croesus…but that’s not my thing.
There shouldn’t be any defrauding of the American people AT ALL…certainly not towards war .
The point about Palestine is that for the first twenty years of American’s perception of the birth of Israel…is that there were NO palestinians there at all… Nada , Not a one..
“It was a land without a people for a people without a land”
Why was this so?…. why was a great curtain pulled over “the Nakba”…Why was “the ethnic cleansing of Palestine” so feverishly and fervently erased from American perceptions and American consciousness ?
because the Holocaust never Happened?.., Mr Croesus ?…OF COURSE NOT…but precisely because it DID !
The Jewish people in the founding of Israel could not BE SEEN to have committed such horrors to the Palestinians…. after condemning, with enormous and justifiable vehemence, it having happened to them.
That is the locus of MY argument, and always has been…that the “ethnic cleansing ” of Palestinians was and is no LESS pernicious than the “ethnic cleansing” of the Jews.
it is not out of a “specific affiliation toward Palestinians or a dislike of Jewish people that the statement is made…
Its made out of the condemnation of all” holocausts” to anyone.
I do not need to “rewrite history” to find that center…its always been right there !
Sam, it is difficult to express the contempt with which I greet your offer to “pay my way to Yad Vashem.”
Mark Braverman as well as Phil Weiss and others have written of the psychological manipulation that is the alpha and the omega of the yad vashem project. It is despicable as is your “offer to pay my way.” Deserving nothing but scorn.
Several years ago I attended a conference where a 93-year old woman approached me, out of the crowd, with no prior information about me, and gave me her flag of Palestine and a handful of fliers about the oppression of Palestinians. She told me that for over 12 years she stood outside the holocaust museum in Washington, DC (a place that I consider an abomination and an affront to the American people) and distributed fliers and attempted to inform the many visitors of the reality of what Israel does to Palestinians.
She told me that USHMM has a large number of employees, subsidized with US tax dollars, whose job it is to arrange tours from around the nation and the world, to go to USHMM. The scheme, the psychological manipulation that takes place, is to feel sorry for those poor Jewish people.
Your last comment sealed it: I don’t feel sorry for any Jewish person. None. Not one.
How dare you think you are entitled to manipulate the world to endorse a land grab.
The facts of the holocaust of the German people are real, verifiable, but hidden.
Through the efforts of Jews, mainly, the many contributions of the German people to the creation and prosperity of the United States have been not only hidden, even stolen from them by “high IQ Jews” (who got their start, by the way, in German as well as Russian & other universities), but have been actively demonized. Americans of German origin are made to feel ashamed of their cultural heritage.
I’m not German; German culture is an academic and aesthetic interest, but not ethnic. But the injustice is overwhelming. One small voice can start the process of changing that injustice.
Bully for you, Jews commemorate the Armenian genocide. Jews were among the people who enabled it. I’ve been to the Cathedral at Vank in Jolfa in Isfehan, and the Armenian museum on the grounds. I read the documents in the case that gives orders to carry out the removal of Armenians. I have lunch with Armenian-Iranian friends whose grandparents are “Armenian genocide survivors.”
Jews have had their 15 minutes of fame. Your time is up.
You’ve got a little group of cheerleaders here, Sam. Enjoy the donkey dance.
I’m not among them.
SC,
My father never saw anyone being murdered, he would have intervened. As you say, he saw the aftermath. As far as film crews preceding troops, I can not say it did or didn’t happen at other camps, but it didn’t happen at Dora-Mittelbau – my father’s unit fought heir way there – they were the first in.
Sam, it is difficult to express the contempt with which I greet your offer to “pay my way to Yad Vashem.”
Mark Braverman as well as Phil Weiss and others have written of the psychological manipulation that is the alpha and the omega of the yad vashem project. It is despicable as is your “offer to pay my way.” Deserving nothing but scorn.
Several years ago I attended a conference where a 93-year old woman approached me, out of the crowd, with no prior information about me, and gave me her flag of Palestine and a handful of fliers about the oppression of Palestinians. She told me that for over 12 years she stood outside the holocaust museum in Washington, DC (a place that I consider an abomination and an affront to the American people) and distributed fliers and attempted to inform the many visitors of the reality of what Israel does to Palestinians.
She told me that USHMM has a large number of employees, subsidized with US tax dollars, whose job it is to arrange tours from around the nation and the world, to go to USHMM. The scheme, the psychological manipulation that takes place, is to feel sorry for those poor Jewish people.
This dear lady told me with tears in her eyes that she was no longer able to carry on her work, and would I please take her place.
I do so willingly.
—
Your last comment has me sputtering: Exactly who do you think you are? Were you there?
Gertrude Stein was There. Stein lived in Paris during WWI, during Weimar, during the birthing of zionism, during World War II.
Stein spoke out forcefully against zionism.
Stein said that “Hitler should be nominated for the Nobel peace prize.”
For this, such worthies as Alan Dershowitz demanded that Gertrude Stein’s name be stricken from the rolls of Jews honored by the United States government.
If Dershowitz hates Gertrude Stein, I figure she’s was on to something.
Gertrude Stein Was There.
How dare you think you are entitled to manipulate the world to endorse a land grab.
How dare you presume to attempt to manipulate me, to think that I could be bought. How dare you. What a low life.
The facts of the holocaust of the German people are real, verifiable, but hidden by the utter falsity of obscenities like yad vashem.
Claims of an alleged holocaust of Jews are nearly identical, over time, to the propaganda effort that began as early as 1900.
Through the efforts of Jews, mainly, the many contributions of the German people to the creation and prosperity of the United States have been not only hidden, even stolen from them by “high IQ Jews” (who got their start, by the way, in German as well as Russian & other universities), but have been actively demonized. Americans of German origin are made to feel ashamed of their cultural heritage.
I’m not German; German culture is an academic and aesthetic interest, but not ethnic. But the injustice is overwhelming. One small voice can start the process of changing that injustice.
Bully for you, Jews commemorate the Armenian genocide. Jews were among the people who enabled it. I’ve been to the Cathedral at Vank in Jolfa in Isfehan, and the Armenian museum on the grounds. I read the documents in the case that gives orders to carry out the removal of Armenians. I have lunch with Armenian-Iranian friends whose grandparents are “Armenian genocide survivors.”
Jews have had their 15 minutes of fame. Your time is up.
You’ve got a little group of cheerleaders here, Sam. Enjoy the donkey dance.
I’m not among them.
Alexander, I’m not convinced you are able to assess facts logically.
No longer willing to spend time attempting to untwist what I assess to be your flawed sense of history.
You are emotional, but not rational.
You are propelled by your sense of outrage but incompetent to perform even a basic chronological assessment; rather, you engage in completely incomprehensible righteous rants such as this:
That’s such a weird conglomeration of non-facts and non-sense that it’s hard to fathom where to start to unravel it.
So I’m not going to bother.
Think about it some more.
Try to get some calm, some balance, some sound facts, some clarity.
Then come back and we can talk.
I’ll be here.
Rurik,
I remember that feeling too when the museums were looted…it was awful…it still is…
I have to confess I believed nearly everything I was told…I had never been lied to like that before…I remember jumping up in my chair yelling Yahoo when the statue of Saddam came down on the television…..
What an evil … Evil Con.. what a horrible tragedy…..they should all be in Guantanamo Bay for that…maybe its a bit too good for them ……….maybe a “poop pit” dug out in Guantanamo ?
and all the remaining “yet to be charged or tried” Afghani peasants still stuck there……could deposit a little daily justice ?
What do you say?
Dear Croetus,
I am sorry that the historical obfuscation of “the Nakba’ and the reasons for it… transcend your intellect .
Truly I am.
It is not such a hard concept to get ones mind around.. if you think about it….
If it is for you….what can I tell you ?
Listen, my aim is farthest from getting you so incensed.
I am participating in a discussion and vetting my ideas with a smart group of people, just as you are, I presume.
You really are a classy chap aren’t you? So comfortable with expletives.
Sweetie pie, SolontoCroesus is not for sale, and if he were, you could not afford him.
—
Machiavelli wrote that the wise prince, and people of virtu like the Roman republic, his model of the the finest form of government of all time, did not use wealth to achieve authority or power. Machiavelli thought displays of wealth in an attempt to suborn power were debauched. Fortunately, Niccolo is dead these 500 years or his head would have exploded at US politics.
—
Make your offer to Alexander.
Heck, she’ll probably pay you for a trip to the freak show on the hill overlooking Deir Yassim.
Hi Sam,
Gosh..Mr Croesus has really busted a nut …….Was it something I said ?
I presume nothing. Yet spare me the righteous act. You did ask me if I would offer to pay for your trip to Iran instead:
https://www.unz.com/article/keep-your-eye-on-the-camel/#comment-971617
You don’t seem to understand that I have been condemning all genocides without qualification. Your overarching objective, on the other hand, has clearly been to “proportion the Holocaust” and endorse the notion of awarding Hitler the Nobel Peace Prize posthumously.
Nothing you said, that I can objectively discern as anything but logical and moral. I think it was my earlier comment.
…Although when you addressed him as Croetus (mistakenly I am sure), I did for just an instant, equated it to the posterior lobe of the sagittal epididymus (Fred Reed’s recent piece playing in my mind)
That is one really weird statement. Sounds like something “Mango” from SNL would utter, while slapping his own hindquarters.
the world suffers a demonic fiend
the monsters of the human id unleashed
they’re using the technology we created to forge our chains, and soon the drones will fly our skies like they do the skies of Pakistan and Yemen, and for the same reasons
yes, there is
**equated = equate
proofreading
I was fooled initially about 911 and first figured it was Muslim terrorists, but that soon changed and I knew what they were up to.
So when the howls for ‘war’ began, and on the usual victims by the usual suspects, I knew what was up. I’ve known for a long time ‘The Agenda’ of Zionism’s intentions to dominate the planet. So when ‘Shock and Awe’ began raining its bombs down, I remember my office manager and myself looking at each other with this pitiful, far away stare in our eyes. We both understood what it all meant and why it was being done. We’d both come to understand the plight of the Palestinians and the treason of our own governments, (she was Canadian). We understood the nature of the people doing it. We understood what power does to men. And how they can never get enough. And it’s always the most innocent who suffer at the hands of the most evil. The ‘war on terror’ was to be no different. We (our occupied governments of the west) were going to show- especially the Muslim world- what terror really was.
Do I think they belong in Gitmo? Officially no. But if it took a little harsh questioning of Dov Zekheim or Philip zelikow, even tho I don’t approve of any kind of torture, I’d like at least to ask these boyz some questions.
As for the rest of them, a cage at the Hague would satisfy me. Something about as cozy as the one they put Milosevic in before they murdered him.
As for what I say.. A light is going out.
We are entering a new dark age. A time when the truth is not even given lip service. Rather they use the word as a pejorative. ‘911 truth’ for instance is considered ‘out there’. They wrap themselves in lies on top of lies and surround themselves with liars. It’s seems to be all there is anymore. And we’re all forced to go along with the pathetic charade.
That’s how I see it. And it’s also why I decided to start speaking out. Even if only on Ron’s nice website here ; )
I guess those… “butt jokes”… do it every time.
what would you say if Hitler had been willing to stop at the return of all German speaking peoples and lands back to the Fatherland, including Danzig and the Sudetenland, the Volga Germans, etc..?
Were he simply to be contented with the Nuremburg laws, the consensual return of German lands and peoples, the revival of German dignity and a repudiation of the wrongs of the Treaty of Versailles, would that have been acceptable to your mind? Should it have been?
I think at one time that would have meant peace in Europe.
“ but I know that what my father saw at Dora-Mittelbau scared him for life”
Would your father be horrified by what the Israeli Jews are doing in Gaza and the West bank – how about you? How is their fascism different from German fascism?
There have been horrific things done all throughout history – shouldn’t we be about stopping the current evil?
The Jews have used the wrong done them – to do more wrong.
There is no question but that the Zionist Jews are taking mankind backwards.
You need to get your back up about it!
The fanatic always returns to their own trough. My post was a rebuttal, through first hand information – imparted to me by my father, to the denial of German atrocities at the camps; a specific response to a specific assertion.
My grandmother was a full-blooded Cherokee, a peoples that the American government, after stealing their land, attempted to eradicate. So, Art, was your father horrified by that, are you? Many of my ancestors died on the trail of tears, others who stayed to fight, were hung or shot. I don’t see anybody spilling any tears over their plight. It seems everybody has their own atrocity to to fuel their hate.
There are atrocities being committed in every corner of the globe, many of them in the name of god by muslims, as well as jews and christians. Wherever there is religion there is hate and war, joining in on one side or the other is insanity, there will never be an end.
We have enough problems to deal with in this country. We need to extricate ourselves from the Middle East. No more taxpayer money and no more American blood spilt for Israel, Iraq, Ukraine or any other damn country. Hell, we should have stayed out of WWII, Pat Buchanan made a good case for that:
What I don’t need is some self-righteous internet warrior telling me what I need to do.
Rurik,
I say Gitmo all the way,,,,,,but to be honest with you about Zionism, I never saw that coming either….part of me would like to believe that kind of ideology of brutal domination, land grabbing, and sadistic dehumanization couldn’t really be part of a “Jewish state”.
I felt that the war of 67 and the capture of the West Bank, the Golan Heights and the Sinai was part of a grand bargain in waiting, so to speak….let Israel exist , was the idea…and we will return the stolen lands…..I always kinda believed that…I really did..
I guess after all that has happened, a real disillusionment has taken over…
Its very sad…in fact ….its tragic.
Rurik, I am aware where you might be going with the argument. After the taking of Bohemia and Moravia in contravention of the ToV, the Allies were convinced that Adolf H. was not about to negotiate Danzig in good faith.
It would be a great blessing if wars were wiped off the history of man, and treaties respected. What we have instead, is the Dystopia of our own creation.
I hate to be quarrelsome, EC, but by your own statements, your father did NOT see the “murder of Jews by the Nazis,” he saw “the aftermath.”
One supposes he saw corpses, and emaciated, perhaps diseased people.
Unless the live persons were chained to pillars or cuffed to racks or there was some other evidence that they had been tortured or abused or were about to be murdered;
and unless the corpses showed clear signs of having been “murdered,”
and unless there was some solid evidence that the murders had been carried out by “Nazis,”
and unless it was in some physical way clear that the corpses were “Jews,” what you relate that your father saw does not create a “fact” that “Nazis murdered Jews.”
It just doesn’t, Existential Confusion.
You couldn’t contest a parking ticket on that level of evidence, as horrible, scarring, and as outrageous an assault on your father’s humanity as it surely must have been.
It’s reasonable to state that what he saw establishes the fact that Germans systematically interned persons, some of whom may have been Jews.
But I should think a competent court would require records, or sound testimony, and full context of the situation, to make any “fact” statements beyond that.
—
Mittelbau was a labor camp, hastily built to assemble V2 rockets after another manufacturing site had been destroyed by Allied bombers.
The new camp was built in tunnels, which is also where slave laborers slept until above ground facilities were prepared for them. Conditions were very harsh.
Wikipedia notes that:
In The Fire: The Bombing of Germany 1940 – 1945, Jorg Friedrich wrote about the Allied bombings that concentrated on dam busting. In one such bombing raid, a city five miles down from the bombed dam, flood waters wiped out a town, killing 859 inhabitants. Further downstream 750 prisoner-laborers were drowned.
What those two little factoids reveal is that Allied bombing precipitated the harsh conditions in labor camps and Allied bombing caused the deaths of prisoners in labor camps.
Please don’t misconstrue this as a justification for the prison camp system. Adding this context to situations such as those of the Mittelbau prison camp is simply an attempt to tell sides of the story that are almost never told.
Allied firebombing of German civilians was a deliberate strategic choice. It was also a war crime and crime against humanity for which the US and Britain have never been called to account.
The US military-industrial-congressional complex set the standard in World War II: just as Americans were not informed of the planned deaths of civilians in Germany and Japan, so the American people are almost never told of the many thousands of deaths of civilians in Iraq, etc. that have been caused by the actions of their government.
“We have enough problems to deal with in this country. We need to extricate ourselves from the Middle East. No more taxpayer money and no more American blood spilt for Israel, Iraq, Ukraine or any other damn country. “
Amen!
Would have been more accurate if he had stopped at Israel:
How so?
1. Iraq – read Mearsheimer and Walt
2. Ukraine – Russia supports Syria and Iran, both are sponsors of Hezbollah, Israel’s arch enemy. Russia also has a veto as a permanent member of UNSC. The neocons (Victoria Nudelman is the spouse of Robert Kagan, co-founder of PNAC) have publicly threatened to remove Putin from the Kremlin, feet-first.
Need more proof?
Page 32 and references are in page 179 from ISRAELI PEACE PALESTINIAN JUSTICE
LIBERATION THEOLOGY and THE PEACE PROCESS by Thomas L Are
——-In 1961 Irish Journalist Erskine Childers examined the American and British broadcasting records and found ” there was not a single order or appeal,or suggestion about evacuation from any Arab station inside or outsidePalestine in 1948. ”
On the other hand Zionist radio stations had been broadcasting in Arabic urging Palestinians to leave home .
An Israeli officer revealed just how deliberate the broadcasts were :
…. as uncontrolled panic spread through all Arab quarters,the Israeli brought up jeeps with loudspeakers which broadcast recorded ” horror sounds’
These included shrieks,wails and anguished moans of Arab women,the wail of sirens and the clang of fire alarm bells,interrupted by sepulchral voice calling out in Arabic: ” Save your souls,all ye faithful: The Jews are using poison gas and atomic weapons. Run for your lives in the name of Allah”
Sources–
1 The Other Exodus
2 The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East
3 Facts and Fables : The Arab Israeli Conflict
4 The Arab Israeli Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict.
I will not disagree with the two examples you give, but I do not believe that every conflict we have become involved in e.g.: Bay of Pigs, Dominican Civil War, Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Somali, etc…. were all the results of Israeli machinations. A cabal of international banks, corporations and other monied interests were pulling the strings of our greedy crooked politicians long before 1948.
I shall read. Thx
Agreed. I was referring to all the treasure spent and bloodshed that has taken place post 9/11.
No to Gitmo. No to torture, even for that lot.
Return to 1948 borders of original UN mandate and full rights for all Palestinians including the right of return of all Pals.
The experiment didn’t work. The Jews were given a country fee simple and they proved to the world that they didn’t have the maturity to make it viable without billions of dollars of lucre from an extorted Germany and American tax-slave as they turned the Holy Land into a grotesque Nazi dystopian nightmare.
“Operation cast lead”
No wonder the Romans dispersed them. There is a serious flaw there. I think it has to do with the racial supremacist crap in their religion.
“treaties respected”
Hitler and the German people should have respected the Treaty of Versailles?!
Have you heard of the The Kaufman Plan detailing the castration of all German men over 16 years of age?
I stumbled across that when I was looking for an account of German boys being castrated by Polish (Bolshevik) partisans in Danzig. It was the abuses the ethnic Germans were suffering in Danzig that forced Hitler to demand a corridor. There is no evidence that allowing a corridor into Danzig would have meant global domination of the planet by Nazis. Hardly. The idea isn’t that the world had to be protected from Nazis, the idea rather was the Anglo/Jewish desire that Germany be spiritually and eternally (if not physically) emasculated for all time. A boot had to be placed on their necks- if not the even better total sterilization and extermination. It was because of such attitudes that Germany became so militaristic. Looking at the Kulaks and reading the words of men like Morgenthau and Kaufman, they knew what was in store for them too.
Rurik,
I think we all are, in varying degrees, familiar with the use of propaganda throughout the history of wars, and specifically as a device during the period, say 1914-1942.
Needless to say, there are two versions of the Polish-German story. I am not a trained historian, but shall at some point in the future, engage respected historians to obtain their recounting of the circumstances.
Here is what I have read recently:
https://books.google.com/books?id=nvRNx6YM7LIC&pg=PA34&lpg=PA34&dq=Polish+castration+of+Germans&source=bl&ots=llaHLghZXQ&sig=8N5QBYViSGCTSvYhSe-M2ipIuf4&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CDYQ6AEwA2oVChMIwNy01eujxwIVSnc-Ch0GTg2O#v=onepage&q=Polish%20castration%20of%20Germans&f=false
read pg-34 and onwards.
thx
Sam Shama,
Before there was Gleiwitz there was intense negotiation to try to settle the conflict nonviolently.
Maj. Gen. Gerd Schultz-Rhonhof,
1939: The War that had Many Fathers
Lots of Iranians drove block long Cadillacs
when we were buying their oil. And lots of Americans didn’t have cars and took the bus or walked.
Iran always was a very rich country If it’s wealth was not distributed equally, well that’s the way of the entire world.
It’s true the British did their best to turn southern Iraq into a colony.
So what if the Arabs fled when the fighting went on. The Arabs owned t their properties and the Jews had no right to steal the real estate.
I’m 420 miles from home right now. I’ve been away 4 months Does that mean I have given up my property to any thug with a gun who who breaks the locks and moves in?
Jews are just doing to the Palestinians what they did to the Russians 1919 to 1990
and what they would like to do to us American goyim.