Fintan O’Toole is a prominent Irish writer, journalist and theater critic. If you’re Irish and have a comfortable station in life but consider yourself progressive in your politics you probably have a very positive view of O’Toole and have incorporated a good deal of his worldview into your own.
His inevitable post-flotilla encyclical appears here today. It’s a very carefully constructed piece and he isn’t dumb enough to offer a straight quote that summarizes what he says in it. The first half of the text is devoted to assuring readers about how badly he feels about the Holocaust and how deeply he understands Jews. Well done, Fintan, now that you have done that no one will be able to say there’s anything antisemitic about what comes next.
What comes next is this,
Once you decide that your group is especially exempt from the demands of common humanity, there is virtually no limit to what you will do to others.
Being a smart fellow he doesn’t say that he’s referring to Jews here but there is no evidence in the text that he’s referring to anyone else.
He comes nearer to frankness here,
Ghettoes, collective punishment, systematic humiliation, the fetishisation of military force, cynical propaganda machines, lebensraum - the post-Holocaust taboos against such things have withered to nothing. Without such restraint, the need for sanctuary has become monstrous and obsessive. It has consumed Israel’s own safety, which can ultimately be achieved only by making peace with its neighbors.
I’m sure you can spot one word in there with a particular historical resonance, a word inserted to leave readers in no doubt what O’Toole actually means but, once more, without actually saying it simply and clearly. Since he won’t do it himself, let me do it for him. The three core ideas in this article are:
1. The Jews were victims of an attempt to exterminate them. That’s really bad, I feel their pain.
2. The Jews now think that they are above the demands of common humanity.
3. Israel is a contemporary re-incarnation of Nazi Germany.
Eamonn,
I would agree with 1. and 2. but I think you’ve lost the run of yourself with 3.
Your headline is, quite simply, a lie.
Although you don’t seem to be a fan of O’Toole’s work, I’ll be damned if you haven’t read his Six-step guide to justifying atrocities.
do you want to say why you think the headline is a lie?
As regards that article, see here
http://blog.z-word.com/2009/01/gaza-a-theatre-critic-writes/
Eamonn,
Because the “top Irish writer” you refer to didn’t say “Israel = Nazi Germany”, and although you suggest he is saying this in a sneaky way, you haven’t demonstated that, you’ve just stated it.
On the six step guide, sure it was a reference to Israel and in particular to a piece of propaganda Zion Evrony had written in the same paper a few days previously. But if you look at point 6, a lot of people have used these kinds of arguments to justify atrocities. The Serbs jump to mind straight away, for example. But even if he is suggesting - and I doubt he is - that only Nazi Germany and Israel use such arguments to justify their violence it’s still quite a large leap to conclude that he is equating the two regimes.
You seem very eager to take that leap. I wonder why.
Here is the seminal paragraph:
“In Israel itself, the tension between the two imperatives (safety and common humanity) has gradually weakened. The restraining influence of the memory of what it means to be treated as sub-human, to be written out of history, to be subject to arbitrary and lawless power, has slackened over time.
[How has it slackened? Examples of some of Israel’s “crimes”:]
Ghettoes, collective punishment, systematic humiliation, the fetishisation of military force, cynical propaganda machines, lebensraum –
[terms that are directly associated with the Nazi extermination machine, and if you still doubt the author’s intention then he spells it out by directly invoking the word: Holocaust]
the post-Holocaust taboos against such things have withered to nothing. [that is, the taboo against “ghettoes, collective punishment, systematic humiliation, the fetishisation of military force, cynical propaganda machines, lebensraum”]
Without such restraint, [”post-Holocaust taboos” which have already, in Israel, “withered to nothing”,that is, do not exist] the need for sanctuary has become monstrous and obsessive.”
“Which leaves Europe with a historic choice to make. It can continue to assuage its own guilt and meet the need of Jewish people for a sense of security in the way it has always done – at the expense of the Palestinians.”
I don’t think there is anything sneaky about it. O’tool is saying it as loudly and as clearly as he can, as much as his own conscience will allow him to say it.
I wonder how aware he is of how closely he comes to share Nazi thinking. He is speaking of a people’s mega-pathology, he is making a psychiatric diagnosis of Jews. The Nazis also employed psycho-medical methodology to explain why Jews had to be euthanized, for their own peace of mind and the security of the world.
Nothing brings the spectre of the Holocaust and the clausrophobia of 1939 Europe than this kind of talk.
Has he no shame?
Norm weighs in…
http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2010/06/voice-of-restraint.html
Norman Geras has written a gloss on O’Toole’s despicable article which compares the Jewish State to Nazi Germany:
“Anyone wanting an example of the filth that has poured out upon Israel’s head during the time since the flotilla incident would be spoilt for choice. I here highlight a column by Fintan O’Toole in yesterday’s Irish Times, not because it is unusual in being odious in this general line, but merely because it will do; will do as a symptom of what ‘progressive’ opinion today permits itself, just like that, and without a squeak of complaint or protest from like-minded ‘progressives’ on the gesticulating segment (see post immediately below) of the Western left.”
http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2010/06/voice-of-restraint.html
He concludes:
“Israel, for him, is an instance not just of the arrogance of power but of the power without limit - ‘above the demands of humanity’ and treating others as below those demands, treating them ‘as sub-human’ - that terminated in the Shoah. Today’s Nazis are the Jews.
This is what may be written without a blush in the contemporary liberal press. Filth.”
Sorry, Eamonn didn’t see you previous post with its link to Norm’s article.
no worries, good to have a summary for the those who aren’t inclined to click through
“Because the “top Irish writer” you refer to didn’t say “Israel = Nazi Germany”, and although you suggest he is saying this in a sneaky way, you haven’t demonstated that, you’ve just stated it.”
Of course he did. Here it is, in case you missed it:
“Which leaves Europe with a historic choice to make. It can continue to assuage its own guilt and meet the need of Jewish people for a sense of security in the way it has always done – at the expense of the Palestinians. Or it can face up to the second imperative of the Holocaust – the one that says “never again”. But it can no longer do both.”
In other words, the only thing stopping Europeans saying ‘never again’ (to another Holocaust he means - because there is simply no other meaning the use of this phrase could reasonably be argued to carry) is because they feel guilty about the last one. No ‘large leap’ needed to come to this conclusion. No leaping required at all. He even translated ‘living space’ into German in case anyone couldn’t catch the music of what he was saying, for goodness sake.
Amazing how this latest incident in Israel has brought so many virulently anti-Israel people out of the closet. Helen Thomas, anyone?
What a digusting Jew-hating filth he is.
Shuggy’s parsing is excellent.
In case there’s any further doubt, back in early 2009 O’Toole wrote a column headlined, “Israel must be held to account over Gaza action”, in which he explicitly compared Israel to the Nazis. He acknowledged that Israel had no policy of extermination, but he wrote that Israel was practicing collective punishment and exhibiting “profound racism” in a fashion reminiscient of the Nazis.
And man, O’Toole’s Gaza columns are the kind of column that drives me nuts. It’s a genre unto itself that can be named “Mournful Smugness”. Its practitioners claim to feel profound sadness over Israeli bad behavior, yet seem quite keen to demonstrate their moral superiority over Israel. Perhaps O’Toole believes that invoking Nazi crimes will shock the Israelis to their senses, but to me it looks like a Euro-wanker assuaging his post-colonial guilt by flaunting his moral righteousness.
The most frustrating thing is that in terms of specific policies — what Israel should do and should not do — I agree with O’Toole 60% to 70%. But he doesn’t get any points for making patronizing Nazi analogies.
A final note. At the end of his column O’Toole writes that Europe should be a “friend to Israel”. But why does he think Europe should befriend a state that he just compared to the Nazis? Is it because he knows that he made a lame exaggeration?
His use of the word “lebensraum” says it all, as far as I am concerned. Eve Garrard’s article on Normblog has him and others like him pegged perfectly.
In making wild unfounded claims that Israel acts in Nazi -like ways towards its enemies, O’Toole has branded and libelled the Israeli nation as Nazis. Nice, isn’t it. Two letters in response to the Irish Times exposed his outlandish and offensive parallel, his not mentioning the extermination aims of Israel’s enemies, etc.
To my mind one particular sentence of O’Toole’s serves as an outrageous example of his Nazi libel against a whole nation, and demonstrates his almost psychotic way of thinking:
“Once you decide that your group is especially exempt from the demands of common humanity, there is virtually no limit to what you will do to others”.
In one crazy unsubstantiated generalisation he is saying that the Israelis have somehow as a nation decided that they are “ESPECIALLY EXEMPT FROM THE DEMANDS OF COMMON HUMANITY”..and therefore they are no limits in what they will do to others. In his later discussion of “Never Again” this clearly includes genocide of their enemies. What was done to them, they will do to others is the message.
In O’Toole’s world Hamas’s Charter and aims to destroy israel does not exist, and if it does it is not a factor to be included in the equation. Ditto the non-existence of thousands of rockets fired on Israeli towns. Not relevant. All that is relevant are Israeli reactions.
What might this kind of one-sided half-minded thinking be indicative of?
Simply a blind hatred of Israel? Anti-Israelism?
Simply blind hatred of America, through its strong ally Israel?
Simply some darker type of hatred that is not socially acceptable since the Holoccaust hiding under the cloak of anti-Israelism? Who knows, I don’t.
Or perhaps all three? For starters.
Well, in the end who cares, for the likes of O’Toole and those who think along similar biased lines on Israel - for whatever stange mix of motives - will always be with us. The irrational thinkers who pose as reasonable, humane people, concerned of course for those in need of help. But hey, let’s exclude the Israelis from our concerns. They got you all into this mess in the first place, didn’t they?
Now, why do I think there’s a parallel between with these sort of thinkers and the Nazis?