Europe's Nazi obsession
Europe is condemning Israel at every turn because it is seeking absolution for its actions during the Holocaust argues Benjamin Weinthal. The widespread condemnation Europeans have expressed toward Israel after its commandos boarded the so-called peace flotilla on May 31 - and used force only when threatened with death - signals a desire to turn every Israeli action of self-defense into absolution for the crimes of the Holocaust.It gets worse. Read the whole thing.
...
The Europeans' vicious attacks on Israel are animated less by the Jewish state's foreign policy than by Europe's ongoing fixation on the Holocaust. What else could explain the presence of posters equating Israel with Nazi Germany at pro-Hamas demonstrations in Vienna? According to one recent German university study, 45.7 percent of the European respondents supported the contention that "Israel is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians."
In their eyes, apparently, maintaining a naval blockade against a government sworn to destroy you – while providing the unfortunate people living under that government with tens of thousands of tons of supplies and humanitarian aid – now equates to looting and butchering six million people.
Wolfgang Benz, the controversial director of the Berlin Center for the study of anti-Semitism, neatly summed up this incongruity on German television when he insisted that "anti-Semitism is different from anti-Zionism."
Benz embraces the European wish to alleviate guilt by denying the weight of the Holocaust. (As the head of a center for the study of anti-Semitism, he's a particularly strange case; the German political scientist Clemens Heni discovered that Benz's beloved academic mentor was the now-deceased Karl Bosl, an outspoken Nazi who contributed enormously to spreading Hitler's ideology.)
Of course, nothing Israel has ever done can even begin to compare to the crimes of the Shoah. But to help alleviate their feelings of guilt, Europeans delegitimize Israel, ignore modern anti-Semitism, and portray Muslims – who number over one billion and whom no one seeks to eradicate from the earth – as the new persecuted Jews of Europe.
Someone in the comments earlier this week objected to my new European Union flag (pictured). This article shows that the flag is even closer to reality than I thought it was. Europe is obsessed with finding a way to blame the Jews for Auschwitz.
What could go wrong?
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:02 AM
5 Comments:
I once heard an expression for this phenomenon - "The Europeans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz."
A more appropriate expression is:
"Europe Died in Auschwitz" by Sebastian Vivar Rodriguez - Spanish Writer, November 21, 2004.
All European Life Died in Auschwitz
Most translations from the Spanish call the article "Europe Died in Auschwitz."
Auschwitz was a German - and a European creation. The reason Carl and I are still here is because for the Germans, destroying the old order was more important than mere imperialism. Nazi policy had little in common with the sophisticated thrust of European colonial policy, which sought to give conquered peoples a stake in maintaining the colonial order. The Nazis perverted imperialism into crude racism, mass violence against conquered peoples and ultimately genocide. It would have cost them nothing to display a measure of cupidity and restraint to preserve their empire. But ideology won out over and above German interests and that was the beginning of the end of the Nazi nightmare. Which had nothing in common with how Europeans pursued colonialism abroad and the word "colony" implies the subjugated people in question were valuable to their foreign masters. The Nazi policy was the exact opposite. And of course modern Europeans fail to appreciate just how unique it was in the extent and breath of its evil, that makes the sins of European rule abroad look like a minor hiccup in comparison. In short, Europe has drawn precisely the wrong lessons from Nazism.
Europe is not a great place, but it is not like Nazi Germany. Saying so dilutes the very meaning of what it is to be like Nazi Germany.
Equating Israel to a NAZI-regime is over the top, but one has to be able to criticize Israel without involving Godwin. Europe is not saying anything that secular Jews haven't said. Claiming that you can only be a racist if you don't agree, is not a very constructive come back.
Post a Comment
<< Home