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panikowskyExcellent article by Melanie Phillips from GB'S Daily Mail
(Copied here in full for my own and your convenience)
In the run-up to the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, pieces are naturally popping up about the Holocaust. The Spectator has such a piece -- and uses the opportunity to accuse the Jews of turning into Nazis.
The article is by Anthony Lipmann, an Anglican who did not know he had been born a Jew until he was 16 and whose mother had been in Auschwitz. Having described how she would barely talk about the experience, and introduced us to his own tortured soul -- racked with guilt about how he might have behaved, etc -- he then unleashes this:
'"What would I have done?" I ask myself. "What should I be doing now? What am I doing for those being persecuted today — among them the Palestinians, who are suffering at the hands of Jews? But for a turn of fate, could I have been a Nazi too?" '
He then tells us he is sure that 'we Jews must excise hate' and that:
'I will think not just of the crematoria and the cattle trucks but of Darfur, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Jenin, Fallujah...This little band of 600 [concentration camp victims who are going to a reception hosted by the Queen] has a terrible responsibility — to live well in the name of those who did not live and to discourage the building of walls and bulldozing of villages. Even more than this, they — and all Jews — need to be the voice of conscience that will prevent Israel from adopting the mantle of oppressor, and to reject the label ‘anti-Semite’ for those who speak out against Israel’s policies in the occupied territories.'
At any time this would be disgusting stuff. As a piece marking the liberation of Auschwitz, it is obscene. To imply that the Jews have turned into Nazis in the Middle East does two things. It tells a wicked lie about that tragic impasse, reversing who is victim and who is victimiser. It is the Palestinians who have a programme to eradicate the Jewish state and ethnically cleanse the Jews from the land, as the Arabs have been trying to do for the past 100 years. Israel is merely defending itself, and -- notwithstanding abuses which should always be condemned and punished -- with a restraint in the circumstances that no other country would ever match. To call them Nazis, and thus to accuse them of genocide, is beyond grotesque.
To back up this filth, Lipmann equates Auschwitz with Jenin and Falluja. Falluja? So the Americans too are Nazis, are they? As for Jenin, he is peddling the big lie that the Israelis perpetrated a massacre there -- ignoring the fact that a mere 56 mainly armed Palestinians died in that incident along with no fewer than 23 Israeli soldiers. There was no massacre. This was a libel against Israel, which Lipmann is repeating.
'The voice of conscience'? Please! How, pray, is Lipmann exercising his tender conscience by condemning Israel as an 'oppressor' for seeking to defend its citizens from being murdered? Would his 'conscience' be served by encouraging the Israelis to turn the other cheek, perhaps? Or to go passively into the slaughter, as in Auschwitz? How is he managing to 'excise hate' by condemning not the irrational and obsessive libels being hurled at Israel, but instead those who detect the ancient hatred of the Jews in the endless disproportion and distortion and misrepresentations and double standards and lies in these attacks, in the historically all-too redolent language of 'punishment' and 'revenge' used whenever Israel fights back against mass murder?
And of course the second thing Lipmann does through this travesty is to minimise the Holocaust itself and the crimes of the actual Nazis. and thus to betray the memory of those who died.
Which brings us back to the Spectator. What kind of hatred of the Jews resides at that magazine, that they see fit to print this stuff? No doubt they would wave Lipmann's Jewish ancestry as a shield to protect themselves from accusations of anti-Jewish prejudice (which Lipmann tells us, in this context, doesn't exist). Sorry, that one won't wash. I don’t presume to guess at Lipmann’s motives for writing as he does. But Jewish history is littered with Jews who, for one reason or another, have either sided with the persecutors of their people or have even set the prejudice ball rolling themselves. Call it a pathology, if you like. I’m sure the psychiatric profession could have a field day.
But whatever its explanation, it sure provides a mighty convenient camouflage for the haters of Israel and the Jews. For it's now a favourite trick of the media to set Jew against Jew on the issue of Israel, to get a Jew to accuse the Jews of Israel of being Nazis, and to accuse the Jew who protests at this infamy of waving the shroud of the Holocaust in order to sanitise the crimes of the Jews of Israel. So the Jew who tries to defend the Jewish people is felled by a double blow —one of them administered by co-religionists, who, while wrapping themselves in the sanctimony of past Jewish suffering, in turn legitimise further such attacks by reviling the victim and endorsing the attacker. What sport is here. And what a foul moral sickness.
(Copied here in full for my own and your convenience)
The Spectator sport of Jew-baiting
In the run-up to the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, pieces are naturally popping up about the Holocaust. The Spectator has such a piece -- and uses the opportunity to accuse the Jews of turning into Nazis.
The article is by Anthony Lipmann, an Anglican who did not know he had been born a Jew until he was 16 and whose mother had been in Auschwitz. Having described how she would barely talk about the experience, and introduced us to his own tortured soul -- racked with guilt about how he might have behaved, etc -- he then unleashes this:
'"What would I have done?" I ask myself. "What should I be doing now? What am I doing for those being persecuted today — among them the Palestinians, who are suffering at the hands of Jews? But for a turn of fate, could I have been a Nazi too?" '
He then tells us he is sure that 'we Jews must excise hate' and that:
'I will think not just of the crematoria and the cattle trucks but of Darfur, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Jenin, Fallujah...This little band of 600 [concentration camp victims who are going to a reception hosted by the Queen] has a terrible responsibility — to live well in the name of those who did not live and to discourage the building of walls and bulldozing of villages. Even more than this, they — and all Jews — need to be the voice of conscience that will prevent Israel from adopting the mantle of oppressor, and to reject the label ‘anti-Semite’ for those who speak out against Israel’s policies in the occupied territories.'
At any time this would be disgusting stuff. As a piece marking the liberation of Auschwitz, it is obscene. To imply that the Jews have turned into Nazis in the Middle East does two things. It tells a wicked lie about that tragic impasse, reversing who is victim and who is victimiser. It is the Palestinians who have a programme to eradicate the Jewish state and ethnically cleanse the Jews from the land, as the Arabs have been trying to do for the past 100 years. Israel is merely defending itself, and -- notwithstanding abuses which should always be condemned and punished -- with a restraint in the circumstances that no other country would ever match. To call them Nazis, and thus to accuse them of genocide, is beyond grotesque.
To back up this filth, Lipmann equates Auschwitz with Jenin and Falluja. Falluja? So the Americans too are Nazis, are they? As for Jenin, he is peddling the big lie that the Israelis perpetrated a massacre there -- ignoring the fact that a mere 56 mainly armed Palestinians died in that incident along with no fewer than 23 Israeli soldiers. There was no massacre. This was a libel against Israel, which Lipmann is repeating.
'The voice of conscience'? Please! How, pray, is Lipmann exercising his tender conscience by condemning Israel as an 'oppressor' for seeking to defend its citizens from being murdered? Would his 'conscience' be served by encouraging the Israelis to turn the other cheek, perhaps? Or to go passively into the slaughter, as in Auschwitz? How is he managing to 'excise hate' by condemning not the irrational and obsessive libels being hurled at Israel, but instead those who detect the ancient hatred of the Jews in the endless disproportion and distortion and misrepresentations and double standards and lies in these attacks, in the historically all-too redolent language of 'punishment' and 'revenge' used whenever Israel fights back against mass murder?
And of course the second thing Lipmann does through this travesty is to minimise the Holocaust itself and the crimes of the actual Nazis. and thus to betray the memory of those who died.
Which brings us back to the Spectator. What kind of hatred of the Jews resides at that magazine, that they see fit to print this stuff? No doubt they would wave Lipmann's Jewish ancestry as a shield to protect themselves from accusations of anti-Jewish prejudice (which Lipmann tells us, in this context, doesn't exist). Sorry, that one won't wash. I don’t presume to guess at Lipmann’s motives for writing as he does. But Jewish history is littered with Jews who, for one reason or another, have either sided with the persecutors of their people or have even set the prejudice ball rolling themselves. Call it a pathology, if you like. I’m sure the psychiatric profession could have a field day.
But whatever its explanation, it sure provides a mighty convenient camouflage for the haters of Israel and the Jews. For it's now a favourite trick of the media to set Jew against Jew on the issue of Israel, to get a Jew to accuse the Jews of Israel of being Nazis, and to accuse the Jew who protests at this infamy of waving the shroud of the Holocaust in order to sanitise the crimes of the Jews of Israel. So the Jew who tries to defend the Jewish people is felled by a double blow —one of them administered by co-religionists, who, while wrapping themselves in the sanctimony of past Jewish suffering, in turn legitimise further such attacks by reviling the victim and endorsing the attacker. What sport is here. And what a foul moral sickness.
