About those anti-Israel Holocaust survivors
You've all seen them - the 'Holocaust survivors' who consider themselves great moral authorities and use their 'expertise' to
bash Israel. Who are they? Alvin Rosenfield gives us some insight.
What makes the IJSN statement noteworthy, therefore, is not the
litany of emotionally-charged accusations against Israel but the
identities of those making these accusations. They present themselves as
“Survivors,” “Children of survivors,” “Grandchildren of survivors,”
“Great-grandchildren of survivors,” and “Other relatives of survivors.”
They total 327 people. Who are they, and what importance, if any, should attach to their proudly proclaimed pedigrees?
If we take their self-descriptions at face value,
some (a small number) had been in the Nazi ghettos and camps or claim to
have been resistance fighters. Others had been children spirited out of
Europe on the Kindertransports or were hidden by Christians during the
war. Some say they are “cousins of survivors,” or “friends of
survivors,” or “relatives of victims,” or “relatives of many victims,”
or the “spouse of a hidden child,” or grandchildren and
great-grandchildren of “refugees.” One identifies herself as “the great
niece of an uncle who shot himself”; another as a “3rd cousin of Ann
[sic] Frank and grand-daughter of NON-survivors.”
The distance from Auschwitz and Treblinka grows as
the list grows and, with it, the credibility of those on the list
plunges. Nevertheless, all claim some special connection, however
remote, to Jewish suffering during the Hitler era, and they expect
others to recognize their anti-Israel diatribe as the product of unique
insights they now possess by right of such suffering. Invoking the
historical and moral weight of the Holocaust by speaking “as Jewish
survivors and descendants of survivors,” they apply their presumed
authority to the present war between Israel and Hamas and “unequivocally
condemn” Israel.
Two thoughts come immediately to mind: Whenever
someone begins a sentence with the words “as a Jew…,” what follows is
likely to be full of political posturing and should be met with
skepticism. The same often holds true when someone opens a sentence with
the kindred formula, “as a Holocaust survivor….” On hearing those
words, one no doubt is inclined to pay attention to what follows; but as
IJSN’s ad demonstrates, the status of Holocaust survivor, let alone the
status of the children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and other
assorted relatives and friends of survivors, carries no special
entitlement to superior ethical insight or elevated political awareness.
The signatories to IJSN’s ad, however, invoke just
such an entitlement as they ostentatiously pull rank as Holocaust
survivors in condemning Israel. In inflating and exploiting a status
they regard as privileged, they are guilty of doing precisely what they
falsely accuse Elie Wiesel of doing: “manipulating the legacy of the
Nazi genocide to justify the unjustifiable.” Their abuse of Jewish
suffering for contemporary political ends comes especially to the fore
whenever they proudly parade forth their pedigrees as survivors to
defame Israel. Some have been doing so for years — way before Gaza. To
reflect briefly on just two of them:
Hajo Meyer, whose signature is the very first on the
list, is the author of a book entitled “The End of Judaism: An Ethical
Tradition Betrayed,” which argues that Zionism and Judaism are radical
opposites and incompatible with one another. Meyer equates Zionism with
“fascism” and “criminality” and believes that Zionists “have given up
everything that has to do with humanity.” “As a confirmed atheist,” he
boasts that he “has never been a Zionist.” And as a Holocaust survivor —
he was in Auschwitz for 10 months as a young teenager — he is certain
that Israelis “have no idea about the Holocaust. They use the Holocaust
to implant paranoia in their children.”
In innumerable speeches and interviews (the words
quoted here are from interviews on the websites “Intifada: The Voice of
Palestine” and the “Electronic Intifada”), he charges Israel with all of
the sins that are now part of the standard package of anti-Zionist
accusations: the carrying out of willful massacres, ethnic cleansing,
racist and apartheid policies, and other “blood and soil” nationalistic
actions (“just like the Nazis”). He is so convinced of Israeli
wickedness that he can “write up an endless list of similarities between
Nazi Germany and Israel.” And what if other Jews object to his
smearing the Jewish state with the Nazi brush? Meyer considers it a
“high honor” to be put in the company of Jimmy Carter, Noam Chomsky,
Norman Finkelstein and other prominent opponents of Israel and even
jokingly says that he is “very proud” to be called an anti-Semite.
Hedy Epstein, who has also signed on to the Guardian
statement, likes garnering public attention as a “survivor,” although
whether she is one is debatable. Like Meyer, she was born in Germany in
1924, but she left the country in 1939 on a Kindertransport and spent
the war years in Great Britain. Since coming to America in 1948, she has
thrown herself into political activism, often on behalf of such
celebrated Palestinian causes as the 2008 “freedom flotillas” that were
meant to challenge the Israeli blockade of Gaza, the “Gaza Freedom
March” in Cairo in 2009, and various anti-Israel activities on the West
Bank and elsewhere sponsored by the radical International Solidarity
Movement.
...
It’s hardly new that there are Jews who lend their
endorsement to causes that prove harmful for most other Jews. There is a
long history of such betrayal and the damage it has caused within
Jewish communities, so what we are seeing today has an unhappy lineage
that dates back over many centuries. One thing, however, is new:
The endorsement of the most reckless charges against
Israel — e.g., Israelis are like Nazis and are carrying out a genocide
against Palestinians — by members of a people who themselves were
victims of the twentieth century’s most determined attempt at genocide
is unprecedented and can be hugely harmful unless it is seen for what it
is: an unseemly exercise in the spread of propagandistic lies.
Labels: anti-Zionism, Gaza, Hamas, Hedy Epstein, Holocaust survivors
Why Jews and Israelis demonize Israel
Jews have demonized other Jews for ages. The prophet Isaiah warned about that some 2,500 years ago. In the modern age, Israel's biggest and most damaging critics tend to be Jews and Israelis.
Why do they do it? Melanie Phillips takes a look.
Why do they do this? Why, especially since they themselves are Jews and Israelis? Many reasons suggest themselves, ranging from the craven desire for access to a fashionable society itself riddled with this prejudice, through naivety, ignorance of Judaism and history not to mention sheer benighted stupidity, by way of a bitterly warped psychopathology all the way to the closed ideological thought system of the left for which Israel is doubly damned – as a western nation and a Jewish western nation.
The part played by these Jews in the global bullying of Israel, and the tacit or explicit support they are thus lending to those whose aim is the extermination of the Jewish state, cannot be overstated. For those in the wider world who want Israel destroyed not only use the bogus arguments of these Jewish Israel-bashers but also use their Jewishness as a human shield, to insulate themselves against the charge of Jew-hatred.
How can there be anything bigoted about these arguments, they say, if Jews and Israelis are themselves using them? Very easily, actually; throughout the long centuries of Jewish persecution, the terrible fact is that Jews themselves have always been prominent in such murderous campaigns. The Judeophobic malice of today’s left, indeed, which can be traced back to the French Revolution, was supplied with rocket fuel by Karl Marx whose own Jewish ancestry managed to morph into virulent hatred of Judaism and the Jewish people.
Within Israel itself, the demonisation of their own country by Israeli academics has to be seen to be believed – not least for the free rein they are usually given to debauch the role of a university and substitute lies and propaganda for facts and knowledge. If anyone challenges them, they start screaming that they are being demonised. Not surprisingly, a steady stream of them find their way onto the campuses of Britain, where the already Judeophobic atmosphere supplies them with an unlimited supply of the oxygen of hatred. The IsraCampus website is doing sterling work recording this systematic corruption of the academy by Jewish academics both within Israel and abroad. It is a deeply tragic and unique phenomenon.
Read the whole thing. And if you don't recognize the grandmotherly looking lady at the top of this post, go
here to find out about her.
Labels: Hedy Epstein, Melanie Phillips, self-hating Jews
Not a Holocaust survivor, just a disgrace
I hesitated and therefore held my fire rather than going full force after 87-year old
Hedy Epstein.
A Soldier's Mother let her have it.
Had there been an Israel when your family was taken to Auschwitz, Israel would have saved them – as we have saved Jews all over the world. No, we are not going to be victims ever again, nor are we interested in making the Palestinians victims.
We have offered peace time and time again, only to be met with violence. You are not interested in the 14,000 rockets fired at Israel, that’s fine. Clearly, you only use your earlier association with the Jewish people to get yourself headlines and attention. You use your label as “survivor” to betray those who died, while you were blessed enough to survive.
Read it all.
Labels: flotilla of fools, Hedy Epstein, Holocaust survivors
Who is trying to kill whom?
I follow Josh Trevino on Twitter. I have never met him in person. I know almost nothing about him other than the fact that a couple of friends (Soccer Dad and Noah Pollak) also follow him and I think Noah actually knows him. I just thought some of his tweets that I saw looked interesting, so I followed him. While writing this post, I looked up
this biography. Perhaps in response to this post, he'll send me a resume.
When I saw the tweet above, I thought it was a bit tongue in cheek. At least until
this evening, I thought this flotilla would result in less violence than the last one. I retweeted the tweet.
Trevino's tweet has apparently caused some
controversy around the blogosphere (Hat Tip:
Memeorandum). And some of that controversy needs to be set straight.
As boatloads of American humanitarianofascists, including Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein, and the Obamishly hued novelist/poet Alice Walker, steam toward Gaza, one proud GOP operative, Josh Trevino, assures Israel:
Dear IDF: If you end up shooting any Americans on the new Gaza flotilla -- well, most Americans are cool with that. Including me.
That's what I call thinking out of the box. I mean, hey, when American citizens get all uppity about human rights--ask a foreign power to murder them.
...
But then, I guess Mr. Trevino doesn't deserve all the credit for giving Israel's Likud government the go ahead to slaughter American citizens. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and I assume her boss, is giving the IDF a wink as well:
There will be construction materials entering Gaza and we think that it’s not helpful for there to be flotillas that try to provoke actions by entering into Israeli waters and creating a situation in which the Israelis have the right to defend themselves.
So there you go, IDF. You have the right to shoot 86-year-old Heda Epstein in order to defend your borders from uppity humanitarianofascists bearing food, medicine, and embarrassment.
Let's get a few things straight. A Holocaust survivor is someone who lived through the Holocaust in an affected country. It's not just someone who was alive when the Holocaust happened. Hedy Epstein - who loves to
promote herself as a Holocaust survivor - is not one. She is no more a Holocaust survivor than my 83-year old father who lived through the Holocaust in Boston, Massachusetts. She
left Germany in May 1939 - before the war or the Holocaust started - on the
Kindertransport, and spent the war in England. When you hear "Holocaust survivor," you envision those gaunt kids who were in the concentration camps at the end of the war. She's not one of them. There were 10,000 kids just like her. They are not Holocaust survivors any more than the thousands of Jews who fled Germany and other affected countries during the 1930's. That makes her a much less sympathetic figure, doesn't it?
The people on those boats are committing an act of war. Yes, including Hedy Epstein and Alice Walker and that moron Medea Benjamin. They're not wearing uniforms, they're not part of an army, but by trying to run a legal naval blockade (and
even the UN now says it's legal), they are committing an act of war. They are military combatants, and they may be treated accordingly.
This is what Secretary of State Clinton - who knows and understands the rules - keeps having the State Department tell them. If they are combatants who are attacking a US ally, there is nothing the US can or will do to protect them. Nor should it.
Josh Trevino's tweet was probably tongue in cheek. This post is not. It doesn't matter what they're carrying on those boats because what those boats seek to do is to open up a shipping lane to Gaza through which large scale weaponry - which could not or would not be shipped over land from Israel or Egypt - can be imported in the future. The point of these boats isn't the cargo - it's for the boats to get through. And Israel will not allow that to happen at any cost. Including at the cost of a bunch of American citizens (30% Jewish unfortunately) who have turned themselves into hostile combatants.
Labels: flotilla of fools, Gaza plenty, Hedy Epstein, Josh Trevino, naval blockade
