Well, there are some interesting arguments here—I compliment those thoughtful posters.

But the original question of Anne Frank here is what does it mean if the Arab world cuts off access to Anne Frank’s story, if it tries to paint it as a phony?

We see even here a poster claiming that part of the Diary was written with a writing implement not invented until 1951 and therefore the Diary is a fake!  But another poster tells us that the ballpoint was invented in the 19th Century,long before Anne Frank was born.  Draw your own conclusions.

And where are the usual denizens of “The Contingent”?  I’ll bet Robert won’t chime until this thread is near the bottom of the page or, better yet, off Page 1.

brewerstroupe, “The colonization of Palestine began at least a century after the practice had been abandoned by former colonizing powers. What is more, it continues to this day.”

The practice of colonizing to gain raw material and generate wealth from other countries, already inhabited by less thrifty people; or perhaps people with darker skins; or who simply want to run things their own way, has not ended. Neo-Liberals, and Neo-Conservatives now use different means and terminology, but the results are exactly the same.

Whether in Africa, Asia, Latin America, or the Mid-East, the colonization continues. Old Colonial Powers of Europe, [now operating as one cooperating unit]; their Eurocentric Children in North America; and let’s not forget China; and Russia; continue to steal everything they can and enslave other people using debt, as England did in the 18th and 19th Century; and military might, as Spain and Portugal did earlier.

The US in particular has armies stationed on every continent and bases in a large number of countries. Even when they leave, they soon return, as Panama and the Philippines are learning today.

The Tibetans consider themselves under ‘Colonial Rule’, it began in the 1950s. Georgia started a war with Russia last spring saying Russia was attempting to regain control of Georgian territory.

Anyone who assumes Colonialism went out of fashion in 1900 is denying reality. What in the hell is Iraq if not a new colony of ours. And why are Cuba and Iran on the shit list if it is not for daring to thumb their collective noses at their Masters of Old!

Yes, the Israelis are practicing their own version of moving the neighbors out. But, let’s not forget they learned from experts!

I think it was Franz Fanon, in “The Wretched of the Earth,” who noted that the violence imposed on people will be mirrored back by them at a later date.  He was talking about the native people who were violently invaded, attacked, colonized by western countries.  When those western countries are eventually thrown out, the effects of their violence remain in the country and often lead to generations of civil wars among various groups of the native inhabitants.

There were 100 million people killed during World War II, yet the only ones who seem to warrant reparations, free land, museums, days of observance, are the Jews.  Much of this is probably just a zionist effort to justify the theft of Palestinian lands. 

One-half of the people in Poland who were murdered were not Jewish, yet those people are rarely mentioned.  Indstead, all the non-Jewish people in Poland were considered “guilty.”  Hitler hated the Poles, Catholics as well as the Jews, and wanted them all dead.  He hated lots of people, murdered lots of people, not just the Jews.  But we don’t really teach about that.  10 million people in the Soviet Uinion were killed.  20 million Chinese people were killed during the war.  Where are the museums for them?  Where are their reparations? 

It’s like saying that the Israelis hate the Palestinians.  They do, for the most part.  But they hate all the Arabs.  The hatred is much bigger, not limited to just one group. 

It is apparent that the murder of Jews by Hitler, the violence inflicted on the Jews of Europe, is being mirrored back by the survivors who moved to the middle east and stole the Palestinian lands.  Look at the Kubbutz system, see how militaristic they were—mirroring the Germans.  Almost in admiration.  The attitude of many Jews towards the Palestinians and all Arabs is indistinguishable from the Nazi attitude towards the Jews.  Racism and hatred on both accounts.  Irrational on both accounts.  Used to justify genocide on both accounts.

And so it continues.  The Palestinians and Arabs, minding their own business, were invaded and had their lands and resources stolen by a variety of European groups, from England to France to various Jewish survivors of fascism.  What difference does it make to them who is invading and stealing and killing?  None at all.  So now they (the Palestinians and Arabs) mirror back the violence inflicted on them.

The entire zionist idea of moving a group of Europeans to the middle east, stealing land, and living as an isolated cell inside a non-European continent is one of the worst ideas I’ve ever seen.  Bad idea, bad outcome.

As the Israelis become more and more desperate in their efforts to artificially increase their population by importing suspect classes of people from anywhere they find them, and arming them all with automatic weapons, they probably will find their nation brought down from within. 

Soon Israel will be little more than another outpost for the Russian mob which, itself, should be called a mini-me of American gangs, the type of criminal control of a nation that arises when the government is corrupt and the people are seen as nothing more than victims to be used and plundered.

Then the Israelis will turn against themselves, have internal and civil wars, mirror back again the violence they experienced from the Nazis.  It is a multi-generational wave in the ocean, each generation passing on more suffering and violence. 

And the voices of the sane are ignored or silenced, the word “peace” is erased from the dictionery.

Actually the ball point pen was created in 1891 so what to make of that?

“As can be inferred from Said, one of the BEST ways to battle Israeli excesses is NOT to deny the Holocaust, but to accept it as fact and THEN argue it does not only NOT excuse Israel, it is the EXAMPLE of what she should not be doing.”

That is the way to do it is to acknowledge in order not to repeat. A fine way of doing it if only those who hate Israel would put aside their venal impulses to be cruel and violent. Show side by side pictures from both and see what happens. They ignore Nietzsche‘s warning about becoming the monster that you fight. I would add learning the wrong things from that monster too as the most hard line Israeli Zionists have from their Christian oppressors in World War II. When children are molested or treated badly if they aren’t healed by therapy they become a molester or abuser of children themselves. We see that on a nation scale in many places. The killing and oppression and hatred must end. Life for a life, eye for an eye is leaving everyone twisted and malignant.

Montanawildhack, what of the other 6-8 million killed who weren’t Jews? Rarely are they mentioned and some in Israel won’t either as is here and by you. How about them? The homosexuals, communists, socialists and the few Christians who were against the Nazi policies and Romany and any occultists and many others too. [Triangles of violet, pink, black, green and brown, red stars along with the yellow Mogen David’s were used. Don’t forget.]

To Ardee,

I think here are you writing over some body who you think to know, this is never happened to me before, you are cutting here very deep in my feelings as an human and humanist, I never have used words as you are putting in my mouth about, its humanety who makes human live cheap, its not me who make human live cheap, but its people as you, who start to make human thinking cheap, and than think that they can kill people psychological on distant and still being anoniem, well dear mister Ardee this is , or only done by psychopats, for normal people its to cheap.

johannes, December 6 at 10:34 am #

To Ardee, 30 million, 20 million, If i reed this I must think ad the moment ongoing up heating of the earth, its about the same story, whats exact and what not.

************************

Yes indeed Johannes, I understand that, to you, life is cheap, as long as it isnt the life of those you know or with whom you share religion, citizenship or other traits.

To Ardee, 30 million, 20 million, If i reed this I must think ad the moment ongoing up heating of the earth, its about the same story, whats exact and what not.

That the rulers of Russia and lather the Sovjets, took an human live very cheap is tru, but that whole corner of Euroasian countrys wash an coming and going of tribes, people where cheap, they toke about 1 million of slaves pro year out of the Slaves tribes, for the small Asian countrys, the Akanazie tribes where nocked out and spread to the south and north Russia, and all the power wash build on blood, it wash realy eaten or being eaten, on the moment its interesting to follow the Chinees stile, they just drown other kind of people in an avalance of etnic Chinees people, you can not speek from murdering, but on the end its the same result.

Calculating the number of victims

Researchers before the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union attempting to count the number of people killed under Stalin’s regime produced estimates ranging from 3 to 60 million.[70] After the Soviet Union dissolved, evidence from the Soviet archives also became available, containing official records of the execution of approximately 800,000 prisoners under Stalin for either political or criminal offenses, around 1.7 million deaths in the Gulags and some 390,000 deaths during kulak forced resettlement – for a total of about 3 million officially recorded victims in these categories.[71]

The official Soviet archival records do not contain comprehensive figures for some categories of victims, such as the those of ethnic deportations or of German population transfers in the aftermath of WWII.[72] Other notable exclusions from NKVD data on repression deaths include the Katyn massacre, other killings in the newly occupied areas, and the mass shootings of Red Army personnel (deserters and so-called deserters) in 1941. Also, the official statistics on Gulag mortality exclude deaths of prisoners taking place shortly after their release but which resulted from the harsh treatment in the camps.[73] Some historians also believe the official archival figures of the categories that were recorded by Soviet authorities to be unreliable and incomplete.[74][75] In addition to failures regarding comprehensive recordings, as one additional example, Robert Gellately and Simon Sebag-Montefiore argue the many suspects beaten and tortured to death while in “investigative custody” were likely not to have been counted amongst the executed.[8][76]

Historians working after the Soviet Union’s dissolution have estimated victim totals ranging from approximately 4 million to nearly 10 million, not including those who died in famines.[77] Russian writer Vadim Erlikman, for example, makes the following estimates: executions, 1.5 million; gulags, 5 million; deportations, 1.7 million out of 7.5 million deported; and POWs and German civilians, 1 million – a total of about 9 million victims of repression.[78]

Some have also included deaths of 6 to 8 million people in the 1932–1933 famine as victims of Stalin’s repression. This categorization is controversial however, as historians differ as to whether the famine was a deliberate part of the campaign of repression against kulaks and others,[53] or simply an unintended consequence of the struggle over forced collectivization.[48][79][80]

Accordingly, if famine victims are included, a minimum of around 10 million deaths—6 million from famine and 4 million from other causes—are attributable to the regime,[81] with a number of recent historians suggesting a likely total of around 20 million, citing much higher victim totals from executions, gulags, deportations and other causes.[82] Adding 6–8 million famine victims to Erlikman’s estimates above, for example, would yield a total of between 15 and 17 million victims. Researcher Robert Conquest, meanwhile, has revised his original estimate of up to 30 million victims down to 20 million.[83] Others maintain that their earlier higher victim total estimates are correct.[84][85]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin

The only people who have suffered in the second world war where the Jews, if you reed this site you geth the idea that you forget the Gypsies, the Homo’s,in general all who where against and of no use for the Nazi’s.

Me father worked 1 year in the now BMW factory, making motors for the Messersmit, he told me that every morning in steat of a flag they hung a men, preferential Russian or east Europeên.

We lost four in our famelie, 2 died in camp Neuegamme, on knowen illness, 2 torpedowed in the Barentssea on ships in convoi to Moermansk Russia.

Some body is citating that Stalin killed 30 million of his people, thats an lie.

That the Hollocaust excisted bien sure, but the Germans a sorry the Nazi’s killed on all sides and every where, but I think if you reed under all lies and propaganda talks, it is the Russian nation who have suffered the most and that including the Russian Jews,who where not stransported but killed sur place, and Russia has won the war for us, with as corner stone Stalin, sorry but this is the truth.
Stalin came from Georgia his grand mother wash an Askanazi Jew, whits people lived and still live in Georgiê.

Inherit the wind.

What you say regarding America, Canada, Australia etc. is perfectly valid. You neglected to mention my country, New Zealand to which it also applied.
Colonial projects all, begun in the eighteenth century or before, when such things were considered not simply moral but “white man’s burden”.

What you did not take into account is the fact that jurisprudence, politics and our understanding of human rights are fluid and evolving things.

By the advent of the twentieth century, colonialism had gone the way of slavery. We had simply woken up to the fact that it was an injustice, something that should no longer be done by civilized human beings.

Beginning in 1939, a supposedly “just” war was fought to prevent Germany from colonizing the Sudetenland and parts of Poland as you have noted. (I note also your acknowledgment of the prior claim of the Germans to the territories which tells me you are debating in good faith)

Serious work on the Israel project began a few years later.

There is little we can do for those indigenous people who died and were dispossessed a century and a half ago. What can be done for their descendents should be done and is being done in my country at least and I know that the New Zealand model has been adopted in Canada and that Australia spends about $60,000 per head on Aboriginals to, in some way, redress past injustice.

It is too little and it is too late.

Israel has done nothing to address the rights of the indigenous people of Palestine who still retain legal title to 90% of the land upon which their “State” stands except to deny that those rights exist and to invent the fiction that those people left voluntarily. This despite the fact that, under international law, voluntary departure does not extinguish property rights.

The colonization of Palestine began at least a century after the practice had been abandoned by former colonizing powers. What is more, it continues to this day.

In New Zealand, we have a court called the Waitangi Tribunal that hears every claim made by the indigenous people and has full authority to award compensation and costs.

Israel contends that no such claims exist.

That is the difference.

I do not advocate the “dismantling” of Israel. I share with Hamas the conviction that the people who were forced from their homes at gunpoint should either be allowed to return or be compensated for the loss of their property. Many would probably take the money and remain where they are. Likewise with the Jews who have usurped those same properties. Many might opt to take compensation and return to their state of origin. Those who remain and the returning Palestinians should form one state with universal franchise.

It happened in South Africa and it could happen in Palestine.

I have refrained from attacking the very obvious flaw in your argument which is that the evils of the past do not justify current evils in the interests of keeping the debate constructive and I thank you for your contribution which, although I disagree with it, I sense is sincerely offered.

I have no idea why you keep referring to Aramaic as “ancient Arabic”.  That is a useless ploy, as Aramaic is Aramaic, and it serves no purpose to describe it in relation to one of its later offshoots.

Arabic, primarily an Islamic, language from the 7th century CE did develop from Aramaic in the area of currently Jordan in the 4th century CE. 

With regard to Hebrew being an offshoot of anything, this is absolutely false also.  Hebrew existed next to Aramaic since the 7th century BC and only gradually became replaced over a period of centuries by Aramaic by the Jews.

With regard to Jews being Arabs, this is absurd also, as Jews are the sons of Jacob/Israel, son of Isaac, son of Abraham.  Arabs are the sons of Ishmael, son of Abraham.  They have a common ancestor, but Jews are Jews and Arabs are Arabs. 

Here is one of many histories of Aramaic/Hebrew which I have read lately. 

History
Early use
Aramaic, like Hebrew, is a Northwest Semitic language, and the two share many features. From the seventh century BCE, Aramaic became the lingua franca of the Middle East. It became the language of diplomacy and trade, but was not used by the Hebrew populace at this early date. As described in 2 Kings 18:26, Hezekiah, king of Judah, demands to negotiate with Assyrian ambassadors in Aramaic rather than Hebrew so that the common people would not understand.

Gradual adoption
During the sixth century BCE, the Babylonian captivity brought the working language of Mesopotamia much more into their daily life of ordinary Jews. Around 500 BCE, Darius I of Persia proclaimed that Aramaic would be the official language for the western half of his empire, and the Eastern Aramaic dialect of Babylon became the official standard. Documentary evidence shows the gradual shift from Hebrew to Aramaic:

1.Hebrew used as first language and in society, other, similar Canaanite languages known and understood.
2.Aramaic is used in international diplomacy and foreign trade.
3.Aramaic is used for communication between subjects and the imperial administration.
4.Aramaic gradually becomes the language of outer life (in the marketplace for example).
5.Aramaic gradually replaces Hebrew in the home, and the latter is used only in religious activity.
These phases took place over a fairly protracted period, and the rate of change varied depending on the place and social class in question: the use of one or other language was likely a social, political and religious barometer.

It is depressing how I am continually and deliberately mis-interpreted to fit the Israel-haters views.

It is further depressing how these people are unable to see any other circumstances as similar.  By their definition, Israel is an illegal occupation that displaced Palestinians and therefore should be erased.  Of course, the question of where will the 5 million Jews there go is unanswered except by a few who HOPE Arab dominance in the area will somehow be different than it is in all the other Arab nations in the area where Jews are, if they are allowed to even remain, 2nd or 3rd class citizens.

But the fundamental logic equally applied would call for the USA to be returned to the original inhabitants and abandoned, as well as Canada, Mexico, and most of South America. Australia, too would need to be returned to the natives. 

Meanwhile, in Europe, Western Poland was created by displacing Germans from East Prussia after WWII (contemporary with the foundation of Israel).  At the same time, Eastern Poles were displaced westward and that part of Poland added to the Soviet Union.

And let’s not forget Northern Ireland, occupied by the UK as a British province for over 400 years.  Scots were encouraged to emigrate there where they form the basis of the Irish Protestants…30 years ago an Irish Republican claimed to me they were interlopers illegally occupying Ireland and should leave.  Doesn’t that sound familiar?

Yet the haters of Israel all say these are “different”.  How?  Does the suffering of the Palestinians justify dismantling Israel? Why are THEY different than the Native Americans, the Germans, the Poles, the Irish and myriad others who came to terms with shifting political boundaries?

The APPROPRIATE question is how to force/convince Israel to withdraw the settlements, to allow the Palestinians to form a state, and to end the conflict between the peoples.

I also don’t see how the grandchildren of the Palestinians who chose not to live under Jews have any claim to land in Israel, or any claim that it’s their “homeland”.

I find the discussions about the Nazis “establishing” Israel to be disingenuous.  Hitler first looked to expel the Jews prior to killing them.  He looked at many “options”, like moving the world’s Jews to Madagascar as an isolated island where only Black people lived (sub-human to the Nazis and therefore dispensable).  When none of these “options” could be realized, he then set about exterminating the Jews calling it “the Final Solution”.  “Final Solution” implies there were other “solutions” explored and abandoned.

Excellent post, Brewerstroupe! Clearly the history leading up to the establishment of Israel is more complex than what people like to believe or commonly understand.

Judging from the posts here, Fisk’s piece has hit a nerve. While I am anti-Zionist, I am most definitely not anti-Jewish or anti anybody. In fact, far from hit. But I am really tired of “the holocaust” being put forward as a justification or rationale for the eradication of what was Palestine. Did the Jews suffer more at the hands of Hitler’s Germany than the Palestinians who have paid the price for the holocaust? Yes….But (and I repeat) it does not provide a license for throwing Palestinians off their land. How and why do we compare the suffering of one people with another? The holocaust was a huge crime, so was the slave trade, as was what was done to the Native Americans, and also what was/is being done the Palestinians.

“The Holocaust was a classic case of GENOCIDE—the attempt to wipe out an ethnic group.

The Transfer Agreement whereby Germany encouraged Jewish emigration to Palestine argues against a German policy of genocide, as do the training farms established to fit Jewish emigrants for life in the holy land:

“Of greater importance for Eichmann were the emissaries from Palestine, who would approach the Gestapo and the S.S. on their own initiative, without taking orders from either the German Zionists or the Jewish Agency for Palestine. They came in order to enlist help for the illegal immigration of Jews into British-ruled Palestine, and both the Gestapo and the S.S. were helpful. They negotiated with Eichmann in Vienna, and they reported that he was ‘polite,’ ‘not the shouting type,’ and that he even provided them with farms and facilities for setting up vocational training camps for prospective immigrants. (‘On one occasion, he expelled a group of nuns from a convent to provide a training farm for young Jews,’ and on another ‘a special train [was made available] and Nazi officials accompanied’ a group of emigrants, ostensibly headed for Zionist training farms in Yugoslavia, to see them safely across the border.)
—H. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Viking, New York, (1963), pp. 55-56; in the revised 1964 edition at pp. 60-61.

“It was not the first or the only case of attempted genocide, it is simply the most extensive on record.”

The Hindu Kush (80m) is generally cited as the most extensive, followed by Mao’s and Stalin’s little adventures.

None of this is meant to diminish anything. In one sense, the total amount of terror that can be experienced is that which one person can endure. A State or individual that inflicts it on one is equally guilty as if it were many. The crime is so heinous that multiplying it is meaningless. What would we do? Hang Stalin 30 million times?

The terror experienced by one Jewish woman suffering the murder of her husband/father/child and expulsion from her home in wartime Europe is total - beyond measure and cannot be atoned for. Likewise in the case of Palestinian women since 1947, a case that is ongoing and supported by many in the West. This is something we can and should do something about.

The very helpful newsletter in English—
“The Other Israel” is stopping its print edition but their articles will be online.
  Google   http://toibillboard.info

Also http://www.gush-shalom.org as mentioned below.

These and other organizational efforts to support reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians need and deserve support if any sustainable peace-making efforts are to continue there Narratives of personal experiences and incidents are heart-rending and great courage is being exerted by relatively few people on both sides.

  Also published in Los Angeles:  Tikkun Magazine
of a more general nature on problems of peacemaking.

Dave or whatever your name was…Aramaic **is** ancient Arabic, by definition.  Hebrew is an offshoot of ancient arabic made so by aristocratic elitist in the judah religion(now call Jewish religion).  There was, in fact, no such word as Jew until the 13th century after Christ.

  Hebrew was more of a dialect of ancient Arabic not a separate language the elitist element of judah were trying to separate themselves from the generally ancient arabic speaking masses of people by differentiating their language.  Arabic, ancient and modern, is **the** semitic language.  Jesus spoke nearly exclusively in ancient arabic and the bible was written in ancient arabic(aramaic).

Therefore, one could validly call modern Israel’s, Arabs.  But this can’t be allowed as we are being brainwashed by the defense industrial complex to hate Arabs so the defense crooks can steal countless trillions from our empty treasury.

Modern israelis speak a language that is a direct offshoot of ancient arabic thus making them Arabs. 

The Arabic country of Israel is illegally occupying the arabic nation/land/region of Palestine and repressing the arabic people therein.  Israel is creating suffering, generating thousands of new “Ann Franks” in Palestine.  No decent Judah(Jew) would do such a terrible thing especially in light of what Hitler did.  If anything it is the Israel government that is fanatical and militant and anti-semitic.

And don’t forget Israel was named Israel by atheistic Jews who employed acts of terrorism against Great Britain.  They called it Israel despite the clear objection by rabbis everywhere that doing so would be a clear act of blasphemy.  The Rabbis who supported the creation of a Jewish section of Palestine said it should be called the Jewish partition, not Israel.

Your view is manufactured by very careful brainwashing.  We need to stop allowing the most evil people to paint the pictures of our world and cut them off.  We need to empower people in Israel and other countries that have no ties with the defense industrial complex or benefits to gain of any kind.  There are plenty of good people in Israel and few people today realize that because of the success of the few evil men and women that have destroyed virtually anything good about Zionism in the eyes of the world.

I strongly say you should research and research.  Check out a Jewish run Israeli-based group—http://btselem.org and others like gush shalom.  The truth will set you free.  Don’t let them lie to you. The evil fanatics are them, the threat to the USA and other countries is not poor Arabs its rich crooks that have hijacked our nations and our minds.  KICK THEM OUT OF YOUR MIND.

Thong-girl, December 5 at 7:01 pm #

Are those who deny the Holocaust of Poland and Auschwitz any more anti-semitic than those who deny today the Holocaust of Palestine and Gaza?
**************************************************

More bullshit attempts to redefine away the Holocaust. The Holocaust was a classic case of GENOCIDE—the attempt to wipe out an ethnic group.  It was not the first or the only case of attempted genocide, it is simply the most extensive on record.  It is not the most successful—the Aztecs and Incas could vouch for that if they still existed—but the numbers slaughtered still defy comprehension, as does the genocide of the Armenians, the locals in Darfur, and the Rwandan genocide attempt.

To attempt to equate what has happened to the Palestinian people with genocide is to deliberately misuse the word to try to minimize what happened in the Nazi death camps.

It also trivializes the Palestinians’ struggle and the REAL level of atrocities they HAVE faced.  You can’t call the Israeli actions in Palestine and Gaza a “holocaust” or genocide because it Israel is not acting to wipe out the Palestinian people, and claims to the contrary are simply lies.

Nor have the Palestinian people faced anything like the horror going on today in Congo where an estimated 5 million people have been slaughtered.

I am not excusing Israeli excesses, nor am I denying Israel’s right of self-defense.  I am saying that Thong-girl and others’ assertion that there’s not any difference between the systematic attempt by Hitler to eradicate all Jews and IDF excesses in the Palestine and Gaza trivializes BOTH and is nothing more than waving the bloody flag.

Of course, TG is one who always responds emotionally and without fundamental logic.

Whatever leverage the Jews had for being so despised that there was a massive attempt from Western leaders to exterminate them, is gone, spent. Adios and bye bye.  They’ve been rewarded ten-fold for suffering such harsh fates from those who so deeply hated them and their belief system.  So, maybe it’s no surprise today why some overlook their segregated, endogamous, gene pool problems, their severe ridicule and treatment of others, their weakened phenotype.  But the massive plot engineered by the U.S. and Israel, with a dash of the Brits, maybe, and some handful of others, to simply take over these countries, as we’ve now done in every country in Central America, and of course Iraq and Afghanistan, is as plain as the big nose on your face Sir.  I doubt Mr. Robert Fisk missing much in this big world view and I doubt his interests are as parochial as the little patches of land he is talking about.  It is truly missing the forest for a scrub cactus.

Who is a Semite? Good question. I am Jewish - or Hitler would have labeled me such. I tend to be a bit touchy about ‘anti-Semitic’ remarks. In the mid-‘60s [pre ‘67 War] I was playing cards with a bunch of guys during lunch, and one of them made a nasty remark about Jews. I called him on it. He asked the Jordanian in the game to defend him. Sammy said “I thinks she’s right Ray, my mother’s Jewish.” I claimed him for the Jews - under their rules, if your Mother is Jewish so are you. [on the grounds that ‘it is a wise man who knows his own father…’] Sammy said the Muslims go by the Father’s religion, so he didn’t think he was Jewish. The point is that Jews and Palestinians are first cousins, both Semitic people, and the tragedy is the ongoing War of Annihilation between them.

Wounds are raw enough that expecting Israel’s neighbors to suddenly develop empathy for Jewish victims of a different annihilation is pretty unreasonable. We here in the US are a good example of this, very few of our Caucasian citizens show much empathy for the dire condition of American Indians, Blacks, Mexicans, Japanese, for any one else of a darker skin tone, unless they have money of course.

Enough money gives anyone a free pass into the exclusive Boardrooms and Clubs.

Everyone else is encouraged to take up residence in one of our multitude of Max Security Prisons, or sub-standard, overcrowded minority neighborhoods. Perhaps we should encourage out local schools to not only teach about Anne Frank, but also, Custer’s massacre of the Cheyenne, or the Trail of Tears, or the theft of half of Mexico and the extermination of most of the Mexican Indians living in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California. For fun, we could show movies and slides of the Japanese Internment of Japanese Americans on the West Coast, and some of the lynchings of Black Americans brought to this country in chains.

After we clean up our own murder scenes and do pennance for our crimes, then we can consider lecturing others about their lack of empathy…

Are those who deny the Holocaust of Poland and Auschwitz any more anti-semitic than those who deny today the Holocaust of Palestine and Gaza?

DaveZx3

“attempts to exterminate their race, in addition to modern declarations to annihilaate them, certainly must go a long way in making them act”

What is not explained is that the attempts to annihilate the Mayans, Incas, Ukrainians, Armenians, Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Irish, Aboriginals et al, not to mention the enslavement of 8 - 10 million Africans (half of whom died during transport), has not made the descendants of those people act in similar vein.

Persecution is not an experience unique to one race or religion and there are, in my view, no valid excuses for it. Certainly none that should persist across generations.

“It’s difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality . .”—from The Diary.
  The irony of Hezbollah’s objection is excrutiating in view of this quotation.  How the ideals, dreams and cherished hopes of the Palestinians must now rise within them, only to be crushed etc. etc.!
  And yet not crushed, never crushed even after 60+ years. 
  But here’s the question:  Is violence the only way, the best way, to “keep hope alive”? Is the choice really “Death by Violence A” versus “Death by Violence B”?  Or can humans find a way to step outside of the cage of violence and learn to settle their problems in the open spaces that widen only in an environment of mutual respect and understanding? 
  That is the question being presented to all people every day.  It is the growing edge of this century. By comparison, the discoveries of water on the moon, life on Mars, the crash of atoms in a huge “super- collider” under the Alps are nothing of any importance whatsoever.

Inherit.
“Now the bastards are even claiming that Anne Frank’s diary is a forgery”.

I am not sure who you mean by “the bastards”. I am not offering any opinion as to the veracity of the claim. My point is that the Lebanese, who recently had hundreds of children killed in Israeli attacks (which are ongoing thanks to cluster bombs) are unlikely to see the relevance of the Anne Frank narrative to their school curriculum. The controversy offers them an excuse for eliminating it which they have understandably taken advantage of.

I see nothing sinister or difficult to understand about this. I doubt that the biographies of children killed in the Dresden bombing are included in Israeli school curricula.

The image of a Lebanese mother, after burying a child or two among the ruins of her home, reading The diary of Anne Frank to her remaining brood in a refugee tent is somehow unrealistic I feel.

The Onion satirizes this point.

The invasions of 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996 and 2006 involving episodes such as Qana, Sabra and Shatila have erased Lebanese sympathy for the Jewish WWII experience.

I feel you are going over the top a bit with this:
“So..there was not holocaust, no Anne Frank diary”

The Holocaust narrative does not rely on Anne Frank’s diary. On the contrary, revisionists assert that deaths in the camps were more attributable to Typhus than gas, a thesis that the diary supports to some degree. I don’t think the Holocaust narrative would be damaged in any way if the Frank story had never existed.

War itself and the “bastards” who create it are the culprits here. As to who “they” are, I have always found that the boots of soldiers give a rough clue. If they are standing on their own soil, they are usually not the attackers.

Oh, spare me.  If Anne Frank could see the way the heirs of WWII American GIs tolerate the abuse inflicted upon them by the relative handful of sadists who make up their own Congress, she’d die again—this time willingly, of grief.  Or revulsion.

Fisk should have wrote an article about how in Germany people are sent to PRISON for questioning the 6 million figure of the halocaust… Yes, you can be sent to prison for saying 3 million Jews were killed and not 6 million….  I’m not denying Jews were killed by the Nazis but just not 6 million…. 

Nor were they the only people to suffer during WWII, believe it or not..  My uncle Clare was gut shot by the Germans at Normandy and died in agony…. My dad and his brother fought in North Africa, Sicily and Italy for 3 years!! Their only ticket home was victory or death…. Lots of fun…

The halocaust is a business-plain and simple…. The Halocaust Museum in DC is a travesty!!  That museum should be devoted to the Africans brought here as slaves and the American Indians.. (Can I get an “Amen” from my black and red brothers!)

Evil is Evil people and to rate it on a scale of 1 to 10 is Insane… Hitler was no different than Nepoleon or Alexander the Great or George Washington or HW Bush or W Bush or Obama!!!!!!  Look in the mirror America!!! We are the Nazis NOW!!! 

Have a Happy Holiday!!

ITW

A topic certain to raise the hackles of those on both sides of this complex and mutually destructive issue.

I would question one or two things you noted, and ignore those who use every opportunity to conflate the actions of a govt ( Israeli) with the existence of a religion ( Hebrew).

You noted:

Aren’t Jews going to rally around Israel out of pure self-defense as more and more lies are told about Jews, and the old lies (like the “Blood Libel” using a gentile child’s blood to make the passover matzoh) are recycled and presented as “fact”?

Obviously there are Jews everywhere who see Israel in a special light, as do the anti Semites who focus in on the predominately Jewish population instead of viewing and discussing Israel’s actions as one would the actions of any govt anywhere.

Just as obvious is the fact that attacks on Jews rather than on the actions of the Israeli govt. would force many to rush to the defense of that nations right to exist. But we should not lose sight of the fact that increasing numbers of Jews, both within and without Israel rise up to condemn Israeli policies towards Palestinians.

I can’t tell you how few Jews I know can say anything positive about that bastard Netanyahu, but if HE represents that last barricade against the extinction of all Jews, he will be supported just as the ayatollahs are in Iran.

The extinction of all Jews is not the question, that sentiment arises after sixty years of what I determine to be a holocaust-like policy towards its Palestinian neighbors, those ousted by Israel at the inception of that state. Supporting a butcher like Netanyahu is, in my opinion, an unacceptable response to calls for humanity in Israeli policies.

Part of the problem of addressing the excesses and even atrocities by the IDF is that in the Arab world, it’s clear that truth and fiction like the blood libel cannot be separated.

As can be inferred from Said, one of the BEST ways to battle Israeli excesses is NOT to deny the Holocaust, but to accept it as fact and THEN argue it does not only NOT excuse Israel, it is the EXAMPLE of what she should not be doing.

I completely agree with this assessment but I do understand that sixty years of genocidal actions might make the entire Arab world a bit testy, dontcha think?

GoyToy, December 5 at 7:00 am

Though I can’t condone any atrocities that may have been committed by the state of Israel, I do have a feeling that it is hard to understand how they must feel having gone through that horror of the WWII era.

I think that experience, plus other earlier attempts to exterminate their race, in addition to modern declarations to annihilaate them, certainly must go a long way in making them act unlike one would hope they would act.  They are literally sitting on the time bomb of WWIII, scheduled for the Jezreel valley some time in the not too distant future, according to many. 

I, for one, am unable to make judgements on them for these reasons.

ANNE FRANK,

      Is made from an nice young girl, hiding somewhere in Amsterdam, hiding for the eternal evil spirit, she is made in to an modern Jean d’Arc, only becouse she wash usefull for the sick Zionist power builders.

My generation of young children growing up in the very human city of Amsterdam, where wash on the daily base absolute no difference between the people,
where we all had to go tru this traumatic period of hidding and killing, and we had not so much notion of the whole thing what wash happening around us.

Thats why I have a feeling of discomfort and uneasyness, by the all the time again and again to misuse this small dead girl, as an politicize subject, have mercy with the dead.

Isn’t Fisk asking too much of Arabs/Palestinian in wanting them to appreciate and acknowledge Jewish suffering when Zionist Jews today occupy Palestinian land and treat Palestinians as sub-human?

Was the holocaust the responsibility of Arabs/Palestinians or does the responsibility for that lie on Europeans?

Just asking, OK?

Muscleboy, December 5 at 3:49 am

“The bible was written largely in ancient ARABIC not Hebrew. Hebrew is a dialect of ancient Arabic, a manufactured offshoot, of a kind”.

I think you are confusing Arabic with Aramaic. 

Aramaic is one of the Semitic languages, including also Arabic, Hebrew, Ethiopic, and Akkadian. It is particularly closely related to Hebrew, and was written in a variety of alphabetic scripts. What is usually called “Hebrew” script is actually an Aramaic script.  Arabic is completely separate from Aramaic and Hebrew. 

Almost the entire Old Testament was written in Hebrew except for a few chapters which were written in Aramaic.  Aramaic became the common language spoken in Israel in Jesus’ time.

Now the bastards are even claiming that Anne Frank’s diary is a forgery.

So..there was not holocaust, no Anne Frank diary, and I guess no persecution of Jews throughout the last 2000 years, since the Roman conquest.

Next they’ll tell us the Spanish Inquisition didn’t burn Jews, that Spain and England only expelled Jews because they were all criminals, and so on.

Doesn’t ANYBODY realize that Jews react to this the same way Iranians react to American exaggerations of Reagan and Bush? By backing the government of Iran no matter HOW awful it is?  Even the intellectuals and students of Iran back the ayatollahs when they believe their nation and people are being lied about, DESPITE hating their leaders.

Aren’t Jews going to rally around Israel out of pure self-defense as more and more lies are told about Jews, and the old lies (like the “Blood Libel” using a gentile child’s blood to make the passover matzoh) are recycled and presented as “fact”?

I can’t tell you how few Jews I know can say anything positive about that bastard Netanyahu, but if HE represents that last barricade against the extinction of all Jews, he will be supported just as the ayatollahs are in Iran.

Part of the problem of addressing the excesses and even atrocities by the IDF is that in the Arab world, it’s clear that truth and fiction like the blood libel cannot be separated.

As can be inferred from Said, one of the BEST ways to battle Israeli excesses is NOT to deny the Holocaust, but to accept it as fact and THEN argue it does not only NOT excuse Israel, it is the EXAMPLE of what she should not be doing.

But, of course, that would mean that Israel’s existence would be tacitly implicit in that idea and that is exactly what gets Arab leaders assassinated.

A Semite, by definition, is one who speaks a Semitic language. Arabic is the modern version of THE Semitic language, it is the core Semitic language and therefore Arabs are the core Semites. The bible was written largely in ancient ARABIC not Hebrew. Hebrew is a dialect of ancient Arabic, a manufactured offshoot, of a kind.

The word anti-semitic is used increasingly to describe anyone that doesn’t agree with the polices of israel in one fashion or the other.  I reject the word. Jerry Seinfeld made the point with his anti-dentite story line.  It’s rubbish.

If someone disagrees or dislikes what you do or dislikes you because of what you do they don’t have a disease.

I have many great Jewish friends and they all agree with me.  What is attempted to be done by using the word antisemitic is simply pretend that someone that disagrees with ultranationalist zionism and related things has a disease.  No the fact is people can and should disagree with much of what has become Zionism and they do not have a disease and they certainly are not anti-semitic ESPECIALLY if they ARE SEMITES!

Most of the people of Israel were NOT Semites they didn’t speak the language they spoke Slavic, Germanic and other language families. 

I was just merely making a point that the devil is in the details and the meanings of words and events do matter and the continued use of these improper words is serving no good cause.  They are used as a tool of repression and control.

I took the liberty of copying this from La Prensa. The Cuban Film festival which started yesterday is honoring Anne Frank in its children’s portion. I thought it was an interesting juxtaposition… [Ignore any awkward translations, that is what I do when I notice them]

>>>  After 80 years of her birth, the young Jew, who wrote about horrors of the Nazism during the World War II in her diary, will be honor by Cuban children and teenagers in the International Festival that Havana Film Festival calls every year.

Researchers, directors and cinema specialists will take part in the forum, which will tackle new technologies, languages and forms of expression.

The audiovisual exhibition includes full-length films, animated films and documentaries from that region and other European countries like Norway, Poland, Spain and Portugal.

Children could also enjoy 20 films in competing in that category and a Belgian cartoons season.

International Forum of the Childhood and its Audiovisual Universe was created in 1988 and promotes critical debates about resources used for films to that public.<<<
La Prensa, December, 2009

Muscleboy, December 5 at 12:58 am

“Hezbollah is a Semite run organization, just in case you didn’t know”

Wrong.  Hezbollah is anti-semitic in the conventional, but misleading, sense of the word. 

Semite (sons of Shem, son of Noah)is far too broad and ill-defined to be used in the context of who or what runs Hezbollah.  It is like saying Hezbollah is run by people from the middle east,  not untrue, but not useful either.

I am currently reading Fisk’s The Great War for Civilisation:The Conquest of the Middle East which I heartily recommend as a coherent and comprehensive treatment. Sometimes I find his more recent articles a little hard to decipher however.
I am not sure what point he is making here unless it is simply a sly dig at Hizbollah. My understanding is that Hizbollah’s objection to this book stems more from the controversy surrounding its authenticity which has been bubbling away for decades:

In 1980, Otto (Frank) sued two Germans, Ernst Romer and Edgar Geiss, for distributing literature denouncing the diary as a forgery. The trial produced a study by official German handwriting experts that determined everything in the diary was written by the same person. The person that wrote the diaries had used a ballpoint pen throughout. Unfortunately for Herr Frank, the ballpoint pen was not available until 1951 whereas Anne was known to have died of typhus in 1944.

Because of the lawsuit in a German court, the German state forensic bureau, the Bundes Kriminal Amt [BKA] forensically examined the manuscript, which at that point in time consisted of three hardbound notebooks and 324 loose pages bound in a fourth notebook, with special forensic equipment.

The results of tests, performed at the BKA laboratories, showed that “significant” portions of the work, especially the fourth volume, were written with a ballpoint pen. Since ballpoint pens were not available before 1951, the BKA concluded those sections must have been added subsequently.

In the end, BKA clearly determined that none of the diary handwriting matched known examples of Anne’s handwriting. The German magazine, Der Spiegel, published an account of this report alleging that (a) some editing postdated 1951; (b) an earlier expert had held that all the writing in the journal was by the same hand; and thus (c) the entire diary was a postwar fake.

The BKA information, at the urgent request of the Jewish community, was redacted at the time but later inadvertently released to researchers in the United States.

http://www.mathaba.net/0_index.shtml?x=614599

One trouble with violence is that it has to be “extinguished” by explanation or justification—by denial or by confession, by admission of guilt, by punishment of perpetrators, by making laws to prevent reoccurence. By giving “reasons” why it was “justiable, necessary, inevitable”, to “get even” or to “keep us secure” whoever “us” is at the moment.
  Because violence requires so much post-traumatic attention, it causes massive long-lasting psychological damages on the part of both victim and perpetrator, and the longer those damages are not recognized, reconciled and healed, the more fiercely they persist. It is utterly impossible to deny it, to say it never happened, I didn’t do it.
  People sustain the damage caused by violence in order to continue living—either by confessing or by attempting to deny it.  A common method of justification is to say:  Yeah, I know I violated, but it was because I was violated, or the violation I received was worse than the violation I perpetrated, or violence is the only way I can get even or make my point.
  The world by this time in history is carrying such a load of accumulated, unreconciled violence, and adding more every day, that the entire human race is violence-prone, and on the edge of accepting violence as “inevitable.”  When someone dares to say that violence is NOT inevitable—in fact, that it is a curable disease, can be avoided, can be prevented, can be mitigated, modified, controlled, one is in danger of being thought a quaint idiot. 
  As long as this is true, the human race will become more and more suicidal.  The way out is up. Anne’s diary may be denied, censored, burned but her injured, struggling spirit is immortal till the last human being denies it.  And even then . . . . there will be a memory of it in the wind, the trees, the sky, the flight of the falcon, the inchoate memories of human generosity and patience.

Hezbollah is a Semite run organization, just in case you didn’t know.

At the time of the creation of Israel virtually 100 percent of rabbis globally were opposed to calling it Israel.  Stop changing history. 

The only valid answer is Love and that means an utter halt to all forms of mistreatment of Palestinians including occupation.  Love will win our future for us, not fascistic, self-centered, evil.

Dig for Truth: http://www.btselem.org