Israel, Zionism and the Media

Tag: Nazis

Why David Ward’s remarks about Israel and the Holocaust are mainstream

David Ward MP is in a spot of bother with the Liberal Democrats.

On the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day in the UK he chose to make the following slanderous comparison between Israeli Jews and Nazi Germany:

” [he was] “saddened that the Jews, who suffered unbelievable levels of persecution during the Holocaust, could within a few years of liberation from the death camps be inflicting atrocities on Palestinians in the new State of Israel and continue to do so on a daily basis in the West Bank and Gaza”.

Even to rebut this piece of trash is like trying to respond to a ‘when did you stop beating your wife’ question, but here goes.

There are about a hundred things wrong with this statement so let’s dissect it.

Firstly he makes the telling conflation of Jews and Israelis. Is he really saying that, given his statement that ‘atrocities’ are and have been visited upon Palestinians that the Jews are responsible wherever they are in the world? Israel may be the nation state of the Jews but not all Jews live there or even identify with it.

Second:  he uses that trick which others have used before; to be ever so sorry about the Holocaust and to tell us how awfully the Jews were treated and then go on to accuse them of ‘not learning the lesson’ of the Holocaust as if it’s the victims who have a lesson to learn and not the perpetrators. it also conveniently avoids the fact that it is Israel’s and the Jews’ enemies who daily proclaim their wish to annihilate Israel and the Jewish people: Hamas, Hizbollah and the Iranian regime.

Third: He says ‘within a few years’ of the lesson that the world taught the Jews, they were themselves perpetrating atrocities. Oh, really. In the 19 years between the declaration of the State of Israel when it was attacked by armies of the Arab League intending to finish Hitler’s work, until 1967 when the same Arab League lost a war in 6 days and had to concede territory after attacking Israel once again, all the ‘atrocities’ were against the Jews.

Fourth: He says that these atrocities were perpetrated IN the new State of Israel. Is he referring to the hundreds of thousands of Arabs who fled or were forced out as a result of the attack on Israel by the Arab League? Did atrocities occur? Of course they did; war always produces atrocities whether it be in Afghanistan, World War II or Vietnam. Israeli atrocities as regrettable as they were were certainly no greater than those of their enemies and, in my view, considerably less. However, an atrocity is an atrocity. But is Mr Ward, therefore, holding Israeli Jews to a higher standard than the rest of the world? If so, than this is actually a marker for anti-Semitism – not that I would accuser Mr Ward of that, that would be too simple. it’s far deeper than a irrational hatred, it’s a pathology.

Fifth: ‘continue to do so on a daily basis’. So Mr Ward is saying that Jews (presumably those in Israel) are daily committing atrocities. Like what? No doubt there is much Israel can be criticised for. No doubt that innocents die. But there is a context for this, whether you agree with Israel being in the West Bank, for example, or not what atrocities are here? Maybe he means settlers allegedly taking Palestinian land? Or, maybe some settlers have shot and even killed Palestinians. Is he referring to the awful ‘Price Tag’ actions which target Mosques and farmers’ crops. These may all be crimes, but are they atrocities like the Nazis committed atrocities? Do they deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence? If so, half the countries of the world should have learned these lessons – why pick on Israel, of all countries, or rather ‘Jews’ as examples of atrocity perpetrators when he could have mentioned: Cambodia, Rwanda, Tibet, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Algeria, Mali, Nigeria, Congo. This is not an exhaustive list. Every one of those conflicts exhibit truly awful atrocities on a large scale of both genocide, and ethnic-cleansing as well as internecine and tribal warfare.

Even the USA and the UK have not been atrocity free in recent years. And this is to say nothing of Islamist atrocities, including those against Israel, which have been a part of everyday life for over a decade.

He also mentioned Gaza which was ethnically cleansed of Jews by the, er, Israelis eight years ago, since which time its inhabitants have set a course of suicide bombings and rocket fire against Israel. Its government, Hamas, has a charter which clearly sets out its mission to destroy Israel and the Jews. Nice. Clearly THEY didn’t learn the lesson of the Holocaust; or maybe they did, and the lesson was that if you threaten to wipe out the Jews no-one will believe you.  Meanwhile Israel continues to provide them with water, electricity, hundreds of truckloads of goods daily and treats thousands of Gazans every year for free in Israeli hospitals.

So  Mr Ward, the British provided the Germans with all that was necessary to sustain life whilst the Luftwaffe blitzed England, is that right, Mr Ward?

Yet it is Israel who has to learn the lesson of its own intended destruction.

Sixth: Mr Ward’s words imply strongly, and please read them very carefully, that Israel’s actions are, somehow, comparable to the actions of the Nazis. This is in itself actually an anti-Semitic marker, but let’s again exonerate Mr Ward from that accusation; I’m sure many of his constituents in Bradford would never countenance, let alone elect anyone with such views.

So let’s look at what characterised the Nazi’s atrocities against Jews (and here I also have to mention Roma, Gays and the mentally ill etc. who, it is presumed, have indeed learned the lessons of their experiences in the Holocaust and would never commit a single atrocity against anyone, ever again, as a result, their all being very special super-human people who inherited the no-atrocity gene from their forbears, whereas the benighted Jews did not).

Please, Mr Ward, show me the death camps, the labour camps; show me the ghettos (and, no, Gaza is not a ghetto, it’s a political entity which happens to be an outclave of the Palestinian Authority thanks to Egypt cutting it loose some time ago). Show me the starving millions; the cattle trucks; the gas chambers; the denial of paid work; the laws. Show me the death pits, the disease, the torture, the summary executions of innocents – show me the genocide, Mr Ward.

So, Mr Ward has knee-jerked his anti-Semitic trope, inspired as he was by Holocaust Remembrance Day which sticks in the throat of certain people on the Left in British political classes, because their favourite victims, the Palestinians, engineers of their own fate, and themselves as anti-Semitic as they come, don’t figure in this national breast-beating for the wrongs done to the Jews and others. They cannot abide that the Jews should garner a single drop of sympathy or that maybe some people might just begin to figure out why the Jews need their own country and justify defending it against those who are themselves inspired not by Holocaust Remembrance Day but by the perpetrators of the Shoah, the Nazis, to whom Mr Ward so egregiously compares the Jews.

Some have said that Mr Ward is playing to his Muslim constituents gallery. If this were true it would be a calumnious attitude towards them in that it implies that Muslims in his constituency would be more likely to vote for him because he accuses Jews of behaving like Nazis. After all, Mr Ward is not George Galloway.

All this goes to show that, in the UK today, you can get away with (give or take a reprimand) slandering Israel – even on the eve of a day intended to remind us what such attitudes can lead to.  Such views are now mainstream because the public has bought into the anti-Israel narrative to such a degree that they will even believe that Israelis behave like Nazis thus demonstrating not only ignorance of Nazis but also Israelis.

 

 

Sir Gerald Kaufman gives succour to Holocaust Deniers and anti-Zionists

On Friday last week the Labour MP for Gorton, Sir Gerald Kaufman, made a statement in the House of Commons where he accused Israel of behaving like Nazis in its conduct of the operation against the Hamas terrorists in Gaza. He also uttered one of the most offensive and potentially damaging sentences I have ever heard come from the mouth of a fellow Jew: “The present Israeli government ruthlessly and cynically exploits the continuing guilt from Gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians.” This followed his description of his grandmother being shot dead in her sick bed by a German soldier during the Holocaust: “”My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza.”

Sir Gerald thus aligns himself, by his use and careful choice of language, with every anti-Zionist, Holocaust denier or trivialiser, and every Jew-hater here and abroad. This is the latest in a long history of Kaufman’s outspoken attacks against Israel and its policies.

Sir Gerald, despite claiming to have “been a long-term supporter of Israel”, went virtually unchallenged by the media and the Jewish community. Louise Ellman MP, someone for whom I have immense admiration for her forthright defence of Israel and the Jewish people, could only find a somewhat vapid riposte: “”The Nazis were about rounding up and exterminating people because of their origins..” No, Ms Ellman, they were about a lot more than that. And this is why the invidious comparison places Sir Gerald firmly in the camp of Israel’s and the Jew’s enemies.

Let’s examine Sir Gerald’s claim that the Israeli government were behaving like Nazis, a claim for which he provides cover by revealing his authority on the subject since his own grandmother was a victim; so he should know Nazi behaviour when he sees it, right? A Jew knows what a Nazi is, surely? Well, in Kaufman’s case, decidedly not.

Kaufman was not specific about which particular aspect of the IDF’s behaviour was comparable to the Nazis. It is the use of these broad smears which are the hallmark of prejudice and ignorance. Let’s help him out here by providing a litany of Nazi policies, actions and atrocities and see if they stand up to comparison with the actions of the Israeli government and its armed forces in Gaza.

Did the IDF round up every man woman and child and send them without food, water or sanitation in a cattle truck for several days and then humiliate them, gas them and burn their bodies? No, Sir Gerald, they did not.
Did the IDF enter hospitals and old-age homes and throw Gazan’s from windows or shoot them and their doctors on the spot. No, Sir Gerald, they did not.
Did the IDF string anyone up from lampposts?
Did the IDF standby whilst hundreds of thousands of people died of starvation and disease?
Does the Israel government have a policy of exterminating every last Palestinian?
Did Israeli doctors carry out experiments on the living tissue of Palestinians without anaesthetic? Sir Gerald?
Were any Palestinians forced to dig trenches and then made to strip naked before being shot in the back of the head and dumped into the graves they had dug for themselves? No, no, NO!
When you compare anyone to a Nazi you have to understand fully what that means; it is not a term of abuse to be bandied about recklessly. To do so trivialises the actions of the Nazis and insults the memory of the millions who died, Jew and Gentile, at the hands of these murderous scum. How dare you, Sir Gerald compare Israel to its oppressors. How dare you trivialise the murderers of your own grandmother. How dare you give succour to our enemies by using the language of hate.

This is what Arutz Sheva reported today on its website: “15 Gazan children with cancer will be transferred to Israeli hospitals Monday. They will first go to the medical clinic at the Erez crossing before being transferred.” How many children did the Nazi’s treat for cancer, Sir Gerald? The report goes on: “Residents of Gaza routinely receive medical treatment as part of Israel’s humanitarian aid to Gaza. In addition, 200 trucks of humanitarian aid were transferred to Gaza Monday.” How much aid did the Nazi’s send into the ghettos or the shtetls, Sir Gerald?

Sir Gerald swallows whole the statistics which come from Hamas and the UN via Hamas. They are unverifiable, completely one-sided and do not tell the truth about what really happened in Gaza and why innocents were killed.  An Israeli soldier reports: “..in Gaza, where there are bombs all over the place all the time, we’ve seen kindergartens filled with 150 or 200 children, and the kindergartens are boobytrapped! They even shoot rockets from inside mosques..”

The real Nazis are not the IDF, but Hamas. They are the ones who seek to exterminate the Jews with their openly genocidal policies. It is they who terrorise Gaza with murder and assassination. It is they who use their own citizens as human shields. It is they who forced their own people into areas the Israelis warned the Gazans to evacuate so that they would maximise casualties. It is their munitions which were placed in huge dumps within the centres of population which caused deaths and widespread destruction.  It is Hamas that hijack aid convoys and then sell it to their own people. It is Hamas that fire from schools, hospitals, mosques and media centres to force the IDF into perceived atrocities. It is Hamas who have infiltrated UNWRA schools to teach hate by day and build rockets by night. And it is Hamas who take the Geneva Convention and laugh at it whilst firing rockets indiscriminately into urban areas to maximise civilian deaths and at a time when they know Israeli children will be going to school. Who are the Nazis, Sir Gerald? Who?
Israel estimates that the majority of casualties and deaths in the conflict were Hamas fighters. Yet the world just accepts 1300 dead as if they were ALL innocent. The world and Sir Gerald believe Hamas but ridicule Israeli claims.

There is no doubt that innocents were killed. There may well have been mistakes made. But consider if you will, Sir Gerald, if it were Hamas entering Tel Aviv. No doubt their actions would be seen as ‘understandable’ as a result of the ‘occupation’ and 60 years in ‘refugee camps’. No doubt, Sir Gerald, you would be the first to excuse them along with Jenny Tonge and the other enemies of truth and justice who crawl out the woodwork to spit hate and venom at Israel every time it dare defend itself. Where were your Nazi jibes against Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe or the Janjaweed in Sudan or the Taleban in Afghanistan. Instead Sir Gerald dismisses Hamas as a nasty group of ineffective insurgents. “We had an IRA bomb in Manchester which destroyed much of the centre – we didn’t send troops over to Belfast to murder 1,000 Catholics”. He thus makes another false analogy which his rhetorical brilliance covers. How absurd. The IRA did not send a barrage of rockets onto Manchester for 7 years. Manchester citizens did not have to live in shelters for fear of their lives. Belfast is part of the United Kingdom, Gaza is not part of Israel. Hamas are the rulers of Gaza, the IRA were not the rulers of Ulster. The IRA did not seek to exterminate every last British citizen. Israel did not murder 1000 innocents, it eliminated hundreds of terrorists bent on its destruction. Maybe if the Irish Republic was shelling Belfast everyday, Dublin and its citizens would not have escaped the wrath of the British Army.

Whilst Sir Gerald pours out his hatred on the Israeli government, the rest of us have to live under the increased threat of violence from the usual suspects in British society who can now point a finger at Sir Gerald Kaufman and say, “Look, even the Jews think Israel is a Nazi, apartheid, racist state”, and thus justify their attacks on synagogues, shops and British Jews going about their everyday business. Thanks to Sir Gerald Britain has become an even more uncomfortable place for Jews of all persuasions, even a Jew like him.