What Was Different About the Holocaust?

For those who would disparage the uniqueness of the Holocaust, Jeff Jacoby explains what's different about it.

The destruction of European Jewry stands alone because it was not a means to any end. The "Final Solution" was an end in itself. Jews were not murdered by the millions in the context of a struggle for power or land or wealth. There was no political or economic rationale for wiping out the Jews; they had nothing the Nazis coveted, and Germany gained nothing by their deaths. There was only the monomaniacal ideology of eliminationist antisemitism -- the determination to track down and kill anyone born of Jewish ancestry. "It was precisely this -- the fact of being born -- that was the mortal sin, to be punished by death," the historian Yehuda Bauer has observed. "That had never happened at any time -- or anywhere -- before."

Jews were satanic, Hitler said -- the seed and prototype of the Judeo-Christian values to which the National Socialist revolution was so violently opposed. Their very existence was a threat to the Nazi creed of Aryan power, blood, and soil. Consequently, they had to be physically destroyed. Not segregated, not expelled, not forced to convert or assimilate. Destroyed.

...

Hitler has been dead for 66 years, but in the ongoing campaign against the Jewish state, Hitlerism thrives. "Its geographic center of gravity has moved to the Middle East," writes Robert Wistrich, the foremost modern scholar of antisemitism, "but the tone and content of the rhetoric, along with the manifest will to exterminate the Jews, are virtually identical to German Nazism. . . . Radical Islamists of every stripe openly proclaim at every opportunity that the eradication of Israel is a divine commandment, the will of God, and a necessary prologue to the liberation of mankind."

Read it all.

Labels: Adolph Hitler, anti-Semitism, Holocaust, Jeff Jacoby

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 3:27 PM

University Students Charged with Bullying

Two St Andrews University students have appeared in court following allegations they indulged in anti-semitic behaviour.

Samuel Colchester and Paul Donnachie are charged with fondling their genitals before rubbing their hands on a flag of Israel. It is claimed they were intending to cause "alarm or distress" to Jewish man Chanan Roziel Reitblat.

Colchester (20), of Andrew Melville Hall, and 18-year-old Donnachie, of McIntosh Hall, both deny the allegations.

Colchester and Donnachie face a charge alleging that, on March 12 at a building owned by the university in Links Crescent, they acted in a racially aggravated manner intended to cause alarm or distress to Mr Reitblat.

The charge states they placed their hands inside their trousers and on to their genitals before rubbing them on to a flag of Israel. It is also alleged they made comments of an offensive nature within Mr Reitblat's presence, contrary to the Criminal Law Act.

An alternative charge states the pair behaved in a threatening or abusive manner likely to cause a reasonable person to suffer fear or alarm by acting in the manner described, contrary to the Criminal Justice Act.

Donnachie's reactions on his Facebook page:

IHH Turkey and the Flotilla

IHH says...

Posted: 23 Apr 2011 06:01 PM PDT
From Turkey's IHH:

As has been reflected in the media, it has been decided that the Israeli security forces and intelligence agencies are to begin a new wave of assassinations. The resolution was made under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu and taken in the meeting in which leaders of security forces participated. This is not surprising to anyone as one of the infringements of human rights by Israel is the assassination of others.

Vittorio Arrigoni was murdered in Gaza merely because he remained in Gaza with the slogan “Remain Human”.... It was announced by video that he had been kidnapped by a group called Sahabi ibn Salama on 14 April. A few hours after the broadcast of the video he was found strangled to death in an abandoned house. Vittorio Arrigoni’s mother, the mayor of a region near Milan, refused to have his body sent through Israel, demanding that it to be sent through Egypt. The name of Vittorio Arrigoni was included on the Israeli death list and was identified as a target for the Israeli Air and Defense Forces.

Juliano Mer-Khamis was the child of a Palestinian father and a Jewish mother; he was an actor and a peace activist. He lost his life as the victim of a murder in the entrance of the Freedom Theater, which he managed, in the Janin Camp. Mer-Khamis’ name is known as an opponent of the Israeli policies in Palestine.

It is another sad fact that there a great number of threats are being sent by a large number of people, said to be Jews in Israel and Turkey, via Facebook, other social network websites and e-mail. They are attempting to prevent the Freedom Flotilla from setting out with a number of different scenarios, asking constant questions about the Flotilla, many times stating that “punishment is down to us”, “you will pay”, “this is not just a matter of convoys and flotillas, you will pay the price for messing with Israel”, “there will be more deaths” and other similar threats.

Doesn't that last part sound like the IHH is trying to incite anti-semitism in Turkey? The Turkish version is a bit clearer: "Israel and especially Turkish Jews are sending threatening messages..."

But there is good news. The IHH didn't refer to the IDF as the "Israeli Occupation Forces." Which proves, of course, that they are moderate.

(h/t Kramerica)

Time for Jews to Boycott Switzerland

court in Bern, Switzerland has overruled a decision by Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) to refuse to put anti-Israel posters in the main train station in Zurich.

In 2009, members of the Palestine Solidarity Action group hung posters with the words “Israel established with violence on Palestinian land. The injustice demands resistance” in the main transportation hub. Additional posters contained the message: “61 years Israel, 61 years of injustice.”

The posters remained on display for three days, however after SBB management became aware of their content, it had them removed.

According to the Bern court decision, the SBB ban on the posters violates the free-speech rights of the pro-Palestinian group.

The SBB argued that it maintains a policy prohibiting advertisements and messages addressing “explosive foreign policy themes.”

While the posters could be construed to call for violence against the Jewish state – and a rejection of the existence of Israel – the Bern court stated there is no indication for a call to violence.

There's no indicatino of a call to violence - until it just 'naturally' happens. What could go wrong?

Labels: Swiss anti-Semitism, Swiss Federal Railways

posted by Carl in Jerusalem

Zionism, Hamas Style

Hamas 'foreign minister' Mahmoud al-Zahar gave a speech in Khan Yunis over the weekend in which he explained his ideas about anti-Zionism.

The Jews will soon be expelled from Palestine that same way they were kicked out by France, Britain, Belgium, Russia and Germany, Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar said over the weekend.

“The only nation that received the Jews after they were expelled was the Islamic nation, which protected them and looked after them,” Zahar said in a speech in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip over the weekend.

“But they have no place here amongst us because of their crimes. They will soon be expelled from here and we will pray at the Aqsa Mosque [in Jerusalem].”

Zahar claimed that Jews were expelled in the past “because they betrayed, stole and corrupted these countries.”

Zahar called for unity with Fatah as representatives of the two parties prepare to hold another round of reconciliation talks in the Syrian capital of Damascus this week.

“Let’s join ranks and speak in one voice,” Zahar said in his appeal to Fatah. “Together, with blood, we could liberate our lands and holy sites. You have tasted the bitterness of arbitrary negotiations.” He said that Hamas was making “big efforts” to ensure the success of reconciliation talks with Fatah.

Anyone still want to argue that there's a difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism?

Labels: Hamas 'foreign minister' Mahmoud al-Zahar gave a speech in Khan Yunis over the weekend in which he explained his ideas about anti-Zionism.

The Jews will soon be expelled from Palestine that same way they were kicked out by France, Britain, Belgium, Russia and Germany, Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar said over the weekend.

“The only nation that received the Jews after they were expelled was the Islamic nation, which protected them and looked after them,” Zahar said in a speech in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip over the weekend.

“But they have no place here amongst us because of their crimes. They will soon be expelled from here and we will pray at the Aqsa Mosque [in Jerusalem].”

Zahar claimed that Jews were expelled in the past “because they betrayed, stole and corrupted these countries.”

Zahar called for unity with Fatah as representatives of the two parties prepare to hold another round of reconciliation talks in the Syrian capital of Damascus this week.

“Let’s join ranks and speak in one voice,” Zahar said in his appeal to Fatah. “Together, with blood, we could liberate our lands and holy sites. You have tasted the bitterness of arbitrary negotiations.” He said that Hamas was making “big efforts” to ensure the success of reconciliation talks with Fatah.

Anyone still want to argue that there's a difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism?

posted by Carl in Jerusalem

Jewish School Tagged by Swastikas on Mercer Island

While the political and media elites obsess and wring their hands over imaginary "islamophobia" in order to impose sharia-like restrictions on free speech, and build giant mosques on the hallowed Ground Zero, real hate goes largely unnoticed. Gas chambers ...........

Jewish school tagged with swastikas on Mercer Island hat tip cat

MERCER ISLAND, Wash. - The only Jewish high school in Washington state was defaced Thursday night with anti-Semitic graffiti that included swastikas and references to gas chambers.

The Seattle Times reports that the walls of the Northwest Yeshiva High School on Mercer Island were vandalized with orange, blue and gray paint, and had arrows labeled "this way to the gas chambers."

Rabbi Bernie Fox, the head of the school, says synagogues are frequently tagged during Yom Kippur, the Jewish holiday that begins Friday evening.

School officials and police are reviewing security tape.

Fox says they will try to clear the paint before Friday's service.

Erev yom.

The Anti-Semitic Economist

The Economist is notoriously anti-Israel. Now they prove that - like so many other anti-Israel critics - they are also anti-Semites. For if they were not anti-Semites, they could not have done this:

[Sayyid] Qutb was hanged in 1966 by the Egyptian government of Gamal Abdel Nasser after the customary torture. He had been the intellectual leader of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood and a man of copious literary output. One of his efforts was called "Our Struggle with the Jews." It is a work of unabashed, breathtakingly stupid anti-Semitism, one of the reasons the New York Review of Books recently characterized Qutb's views "as extreme as Hitler's." About all this, the Economist is oddly, ominously and unforgivably silent.

This is both puzzling and troublesome. After all, it's not as if Qutb was some minor figure. He is, as a secondary headline on the Economist review says, "the father of Islamic fundamentalism," and it is impossible to read anything about him that does not attest to his immense contemporary importance. Nor was Qutb's anti-Semitism some sort of juvenile madness, expressed in the hormonal certainty of youth and later recanted as both certainty and hairline receded. It was, instead, the creation of his middle age and was published in the early 1950s. In other words, his essay is a post-Holocaust work, written in full knowledge of what anti-Semitism had just accomplished. The mass murder of Europe's Jews didn't give him the slightest pause. Qutb was undaunted.

But so, apparently, are some others who write about him. In his recent and well-received book, "The Arabs," Eugene Rogan of Oxford University gives Qutb his due "as one of the most influential Islamic reformers of the [20th] century" but does not mention his anti-Semitism or, for that matter, his raging hatred of America. Like the Sept. 11 terrorists, Qutb spent some time in America -- Greeley, Colo.; Washington, D.C.; and Palo Alto, Calif. -- learning to loathe Americans. He was particularly revolted by its overly sexualized women. Imagine if he had been to New York!

The Economist's review is stunning in its omission. Can it be that a mere 65 years after the fires of Auschwitz were banked, anti-Semitism has been relegated to a trivial, personal matter, like a preference for blondes -- something not worth mentioning? Yet, Qutb is not like Richard Wagner, whose anti-Semitism was repellent but did not in the least affect his music. Qutb's Jew-hatred was not incidental to his work. While not quite central, it has nevertheless proved important, having been adopted along with his other ideas by Hamas. Qutb blames Jews for almost everything: "atheistic materialism," "animalistic sexuality," "the destruction of the family" and, of course, an incessant war against Islam itself.

Read the whole thing. Richard Cohen seems to be awakening to reality.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem

Decoy Jews

Dear G-d in heaven, look what it has come to.

Dutch police use 'decoy Jews' to stop anti-Semitic attacks Telegraph hat tip Urban Infidel

Dutch police are to use "decoy Jews", by dressing law enforcers in Jewish religious dress such as skullcaps, in an effort to catch anti-Semitic attackers.

Photo: GETTY IMAGES

Lodewijk Asscher, Amsterdam's mayor, has ordered the new decoy strategy to cut the number of verbal and physical attacks on Jews, amid fears that anti-Semitic "hate crime" is on the rise.

"Jews in at least six Amsterdam neighbourhoods often cannot cross the street wearing a skullcap without being insulted, spat at or even attacked," according to local reports.

Police in the Dutch city of Gouda have claimed the use of officers disguised as apparently frail old age pensioners has helped cut street crime.

"If we receive several reports of street robbery in a certain location, we send out the granny. That soon quietens things down," said a spokesman.

Secret television recordings by the Jewish broadcasting company, Joodse Omroep, broadcast at the weekend, have shocked Amsterdam, a city which prides itself on liberalism and which is home to the Anne Frank museum.

The footage showed young men, often of Muslim immigrant origin, shouting and making Nazi salutes at a rabbi when he visited different areas of the Dutch capital.

In Conflict Always Side with the Civilized Man

The killing flotilla has become the rallying cry for the global jihadists who are hell-bent on fulfilling the express command to kill the Jews, as prescribed over and over in Islamic teaching. Remember: Muhammad, the Islamic prophet, said that the end times would only come when Muslims started mass-murdering Jews: “The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews.”

The only suffering in Gaza is not being caused by Israel. It is coming at the hands of the barbarians, Hamas. The first paragraph of the Hamas Charter, by the way, calls for the destruction of the Jewish state. Mere details, I know.

So if the Flotilla incident and the outrage that has followed it is not about humanitarian aid, much less about “occupied” land, then what is it about? This is about jihad. This is about Islamic supremacism and annihilating the Jews. 56 ginormous Muslim countries, one tiny Jewish state, and they are in a constant bloodthirsty frenzy over it.

The level of anti-Semitism in my email box and in the comments at my website AtlasShrugs.com since the killing flotilla story broke is full blown out of control. Evil has been unleashed. Pure evil. As Turkey’s Islamic supremacist Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said about Israel’s act of self-defense against the killing flotilla: “Today is the beginning of a new age. Things will never be the same again.”

This is not about borders or land or aid. This is about good vs. evil. Stand against this latest libel against the Jews. You saw the video. You saw the vicious jihadis attack. This is the war against the West. Even if you are not Jewish or give a fig about Israel, in any war between the civilized man and the savage, always side with the civilized man.

Pamela Geller, Atlas Shrugs

Victimization of Jewish Families in Germany

We have come so far again. In Berlin — and certainly not just there –German Jews are again being bullied and harassed for their faith. This time the persecution is coming from an antisemitic Muslim mob that is being permitted to spread itself unhindered around our country, under the protective hand of the Red/Green multiculti charlatans. And in the absence of ruse, they feel entitled to carry out any act of insolence.

From the Berlin police report:

Due to suspicion of agitation of the people, the police are investigating into youth whose identities are still unknown. The father of a family registered a complaint around 6:50 in the evening that a number of youth and children of Turkish and Arab origin were throwing snowballs at the windows of his apartment. When the complaint was received, the father remarked that his whole family had been bullied and offended for some time because of their Jewish faith. The children and youth who supposedly before have thrown stones also come from either the same neighborhood or school as the victimized children.

65 years after Auschwitz, and the quiet persecution of the Jews is yet again common practice. Ever and often, one hears of Jewish children exiting schools in general, especially in heavily Muslim regions, because the teachers are incapable of protecting them from the aggressions of the antisemitic immigrants who are stirred up against the Jews by mosques, families, and Arab/Turkish TV and radio shows shown among them. Press reports about this are rare because they would place the generally desired image of the good immigrant on a dangerously slippery slope. Furthermore, Islamic antisemitism is being shared by broad cross-sections of the German left. Our photo shows a member of IG-Metall (imprint on the cap) at an anti-Israel demonstration in Düsseldorf, where Jews and Nazis were treated as equals. Such is the political climate in Germany, where the Muslim mob feels they are entitled to harass and insult Jews.

(Translation of German PI-article by Anders Denken)Politically Incorrect

Violence is Its Own Reward

Many Progressives have a strange and convoluted approach to Israeli foreign policy. Somehow, they manage to link Israeli motives to American ones and then demonstrate that such aims can only arrive to a negative conclusion. The latest demonstration of this is today's article byIra Chernus, The Wages of Fear in Israel and the U.S.. Posted in Tomdispatch.com.

“When people criticize Zionists they mean Jews; you are talking anti-Semitism." Dr. Martin Luther King said shortly before his death. Many Muslims substitute Zionist for Jew, because they wish to avoid being labeled as opposed to the Jewish human being's right to exist. They claim they attack political [Zionist] Jews and not human beings who happen to be of the Jewish faith. This distinction is lost when a bus is demolished or Yeshiva students are gunned down.

Chernus argues the Israelis and the Americans share an unreasoning fear. Since both possess a huge advantage in conventional weapons, he claims they are in a good position to wage peace. The Americans have lost three land wars in Asia as hostilities continue without an indication of wisdom from any of the parties involved. From 1967 Israelis have learned that victory in warfare does not guarantee peace. The treaties with Egypt [1978] and Jordan [1988] occurred only after the leadership of those nations agreed that violence avails nothing.

The Israeli wall-building, blockades, settlements construction and unilateral withdrawals have had little - if any - effect on the prospects for peace. As long as Palestinians hold out for a military victory, the clouds of war will not drift away.