Gideon Levy has a piece here in which he berates the government of Israel for sending ministers abroad to participate in ceremonies marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day. He does this because he regards it as nothing more than cheap propaganda and an attempt to distract attention from criticism of Israel arising out of its policies towards Gaza and, especially, Operation Cast Lead. He writes:
The British writer Will Self has an essay here about his late German colleague W. G. Sebald’s writing about the Holocaust. In it he objects to the existence of Holocaust Memorial Day in the UK and rejects the idea of the Holocaust being remembered at all. He writes,
Continue reading ‘British Writer Rejects Holocaust Commemoration’
A friend of mine in Warsaw emailed me earlier today with the sad news that Marek Edelman (zichrono livracha) - the last surviving leader of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising - has passed away at the age of ninety.
In 1942, Edelman was one of the founders of the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB) which united Bundists, Zionists, communists and others to confront the Nazi threat. The uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto the following year was the first act of mass civilian resistance in Nazi-occupied Poland - a salient fact that should be remembered by those who portray the victims of the Holocaust as having passively accepted their fate.
Continue reading ‘Marek Edelman z”l: Hero of the Warsaw Ghetto’
At 6:38 AM Eastern Standard Time, President Obama’s speech hit what the Wall Street Journal’s live bloggers called a “sensitive passage.” This one:
This is a guest post by Walter Reich, Yitzhak Rabin Memorial Professor of International Affairs, Ethics and Human Behavior at George Washington University and a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Walter is a former director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
President Barack Obama will deliver the keynote address at Tuesday’s Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda. The theme for this year’s ceremony is “Never Again: What You Do Matters.” The theme emphasizes individual responsibility.
Gene described it as a “small, good thing.” An apposite phrase for a special event: a youth orchestra from the West Bank city of Jenin playing for a group of Holocaust survivors in Israel. But it won’t be happening again because the orchestra has been disbanded as a direct consequence of that concert.
“…as some people who don’t like Jews have found, it’s worth acknowledging the Holocaust if you can then turn it into a cudgel against the Jews. And that they’ve done, in spades. According to this crowd, the Jews today have become Nazis. The Jewish state is now supposedly carrying out a Holocaust against the Palestinians. Jews, the haters say, have always been evil, and their evil is only growing.”
Read Walter Reich in the Washington Post.
In the end, Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann, the President of the UN General Assembly, decided not to attend the Holocaust commemoration ceremonies at UN Headquarters here in New York. One can speculate endlessly as to why D’Escoto - whose choice of metaphor to describe Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians is “crucifixion” - bowed out. Perhaps it was because he didn’t want to be in a room where he wasn’t welcome; perhaps something inside him dreaded the prospect of looking actual Holocaust survivors in the eye just a few months after he embraced the world’s most well-known exponent of Holocaust denial; perhaps (let us not forget those who will inevitably say this) he was “leaned on” or “pressured” or “prevented” by you-know-who.
The man with his back to the camera is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian President. The man warmly hugging him is Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, President of the UN General Assembly. The occasion for their embrace was Ahmadinejad’s viciously antisemitic speech at the UN last September.
Continue reading ‘Holocaust Memorial Day: Embracing the Devil’
There is a Holocaust abuse tactic that is really only available to Jewish anti-Zionists. Norman Finkelstein, the author of the “The Holocaust Industry,” often uses it. Gerald Kaufman, a British Member of Parliament, has started using it. Basically, it works like this: if your parents or grandparents perished in or survived the Holocaust, you invoke them when venting anger against Israel.
Stanley Milgram’s famous obedience experiments in the early 1960s were widely regarded as laboratory proof of Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “banality of evil.” Ordinary, unremarkable people will commit terrible acts of violence and cruelty under orders.
My earlier post about Avraham Burg has generated some sharp exchanges in the comments. One contributor feels that I unfairly compared Burg with Norman Finkelstein. But I stand by that comparison and I will now make one more.
There’s a certain irony about the title of Avraham Burg’s forthcoming book, “The Holocaust Is Over: We Must Rise from its Ashes.” Those very same words could be the motto of the State of Israel itself, given its emergence just three years after the defeat of Nazism.
On her consistently excellent blog, Petra Marquardt-Bigman takes aim at the activists of London University’s Goldsmith’s college who draw a seamless line between the Warsaw Ghetto and what they describe as the Gaza “Ghetto.”
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