The Holocaust
Genocide was nothing new in 1939, but the Nazis under Adolf Hitler created an assembly line of murder that has been rivaled nowhere else except modern slaughterhouses. Six million Jewish humans were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators. If we include other ethnic groups, prisoners of war, disabled people, homosexuals, and dissidents who were also exterminated, the death toll is at least 11 million.
These events must be accepted as historical fact. The physical and documentary evidence, not to mention living eye witnesses, belie any and every madman’s attempt to deny these events. There are no logical grounds from which to question their historical veracity, nor moral grounds from which to approve or forget or conveniently ignore. Instead these events ought to be analyzed with open eyes, for signs and causes and outcomes. To deny the trauma of this history is naive and cruel.
Barack Obama
Rest assured that at any given time, I am disapproving of this human capitalist-wolf in sheep’s clothing — much as I disapprove of maligning both sheep and wolves by that trite human analogy. I am often forced to compromise precision of meaning in efforts to communicate through the imperfect medium you call “language.” Betty, Veronica, and I never have trouble understanding each other even without vocalization, symbols, complex syntax or grammar.
Your American president wordmaster must love the limitations of human language, however. He can talk around any issue, leave nasty truths unsaid, and come off looking like a swell guy. If his middle name isn’t “Potent Rhetoric” it should be.
What’s that you say? His middle name is Hussein? Oh yes, that’s right — much has been made of this fact, especially by him, in his recent trip to tyrannical-states/U.S. allies (is there really a difference?) Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Let’s examine some examples of his rhetorical efficacy from his speech at Cairo University. There was this gem:
Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong, and it does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding.
The first statement sounds great to the casual listener — the idea of anyone abandoning violence seems a “positive” development towards a “civilized” resolution of differences. But it presupposes that Palestinians en masse are currently engaged in violent acts which they must abandon. I can only presume Mr. Obama means to evoke the ever-useful specter of rocket fire from the Gaza strip and the image of Palestinian political party Hamas as dangerous extremists. This rabbit has no interest in defending Hamas, but consider for one moment that they are the elected leaders of Gaza. Is there an elected government anywhere else in the world that, if its territory were blockaded by another power and its people bombed, would be expected to respond with no show of force whatsoever? Furthermore, if Hamas as a group is so violence-prone, and so representative of Palestinians at large, they are also remarkably ill-equipped and incompetent. Consider that in the Israeli siege of Gaza in January of this year, 13 Israelis died–four by friendly fire–compared to 1,300 Palestinians. That’s 100 Palestinians killed for every 1 Israeli, 4 of whom were killed by their own side. Leading up to this, ratios of Palestinian deaths due to Israeli military activity compared to Israeli deaths due to Palestinian rocket-fire regularly topped 200 to 1. Mr. Obama included in his speech no recommendation to the Israeli state that they abandon violence, yet these figures crudely suggest that Israel is at least a hundred times more violent than the Palestinians. Should we conclude killing is only wrong when used to resist occupying power, not to entrench it? Or maybe it’s only wrong when Arabs do the killing — I’m not sure which President Barry meant to imply.
One wonders what sage words Mr. Obama would have offered to the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1943. Perhaps they too should have abandoned violence? But let’s not make unfair comparisons, eh? Let’s grant Mr. Obama his way: he evokes instead the civil rights struggles in the U.S. and elsewhere that included leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., who committed themselves to nonviolent forms of resistance. Obama conveniently glosses over the violent conflicts that contributed to the abolition of slavery and the formal recognition of black American rights. He has been out of school for some time, and perhaps John Brown’s raid, the Deacons for Defense and Justice, Malcolm X, et al., were not emphasized in his history classes, but how anyone misses the Civil War is beyond this bunny. Or at Gettysburg was it Union troops’ “peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding” that did in23,000 Confederate soldiers? Obama’s speech also comfortably assumes that full and equal rights have been won for all American citizens. Sure, legally, black and white Americans are no longer segregated, but geographically, socially, and economically, the divide remains — Mr. Obama’s individual rise to fame and fortune notwithstanding. But the speech admits no room to question this presumption.
Instead, with intolerable smugness, Obama’s message to Palestinians is that “we” Americans know how to resist and end injustice like civilized, peaceable people, so take a page from our book and you’ll have your precious civil rights. He either doesn’t know or doesn’t wish to acknowledge the full range of ways Palestinian humans have resisted and continue to resist the Israeli state’s violence against them. These include regular nonviolent protests where and when Israel sends its young people to demolish Palestinian homes or erect apartheid-style walls. Some Americans may vaguely remember Rachel Corrie, an American who traveled to Gaza to live and work in solidarity with Palestinians; an Israeli military bulldozer ran over and killed her in 2003 as she was peacefully protesting. More recently Akil Sadek Sru and Basim Abu Rahmah were killed in separate incidents protesting at the separation wall near the West Bank village of Ni’lin — the site of regular protests and regular violence against these protestors from Israeli forces.
Obama spoke not a word to condemn Israeli violence, which includes not only the direct use of force and weaponry, but the day-t0-day violence of denying basic necessities like food, water, fuel, electricity, access to hospitals. The most charming of hypocrites, he also ignored the blatant violence of his own state against Iraqis, Afghans, and Pakistanis; he ignored the fact that Israel’s violence is funded (in vast majority) by American aid.
How can he get away with this? Why did not truth seekers shout him down at once? Allow me to point out another instance of Obama’s sleight-of-tongue:
Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed, more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, it is ignorant, and it is hateful.
Here he prefaced his remarks on Palestinian violence with a denunciation of Holocaust deniers and anti-Semitism. Fine. But now watch carefully, kids, as he effortlessly allides Nazis with anyone who would dare criticize the Israeli state:
Threatening Israel with destruction, or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews, is deeply wrong and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.
Here the first phrase, “threatening Israel with destruction,” is equated with “repeating vile stereotypes about Jews,” both “deeply wrong.” Thus the listener, if agreeing that the latter action is wrong, is forced to agree that the former is also wrong. But to claim Israel = Jews is wrong, and erases the worldwide diaspora and those within Israel who do not endorse the violence of the Israeli state. The fact is “the peace that the people of this region deserve” is most disturbed not by outsiders threatening Israel with destruction (a tacit rebuke to Iran’s leader) nor by repeating stereotypes about Jews (though stereotyping indeed is a vile human behavior) but by the state of Israel itself — in breaking ceasefire agreements, in bombing a trapped civilian population, in denying basic necessities.
