Monday, February 2, 2009
Irwin Cotler: Diminishing the Holocaust
...The point is that whatever one's perspective on the Gaza conflict, the comparison between Israel's action against Hamas - a terrorist group sworn to destroy Israel - and the Nazi Holocaust is as false as it is obscene. I say this not as a proponent of Israel, but as a voice for Holocaust remembrance.
Drawing false parallels between the Gaza conflict and Nazi Germany is an affront not only to the living Holocaust survivors and their children and grandchildren, but also to the 6 million deceased. These men, women and children, innocents all - died not in any "war" or "conflict;" they perished in a deliberate eliminationist horror in which, as Elie Wiesel put it, "not all victims were Jews but all Jews were victims."
They were victims of a carefully orchestrated infrastructure of death created with the sole purpose of annihilating a people. As the world stood by and refused even refuge to fleeing Jews, Nazi officials met 70 years ago to plan how the Nazi military machine, combined with scientific acumen, could be mobilized to "exterminate" the Jewish population most efficiently and effectively. The root cause of Nazi aggression was racist hate; its chief facilitator was international acquiescence.
When the Holocaust is misconstrued and trivialized, and its name invoked in the face of all kinds of suffering, its lessons become obscured, its teachings become ambiguous, and its invocation becomes political. Indeed, the political consequence, if not the intent, of this scurrilous indictment is clear: If Israel is a Nazi state it has no right to exist - in fact, there is an obligation to dismantle this Nazi state and delegitimize its supporters...
Let's go through it again. First of all, when you compare Israel's actions to a Nazi state, you are either ignorant or evil. Either you don't know what's going on in the Middle East today, or you don't know what went on in Nazi Germany over 60 years ago. Or, you do know, but you lie and exaggerate anyway. That's Holocaust denial by either ignorance or malice. And why do so many people seem to relish comparing Israelis to Nazis, when they studiously avoid the comparison elsewhere (even where the analogy bears some relation to reality)? Because Israel is the Jewish State and the chance to calls Jews Nazis is just too much of a disgrace for some people to resist indulging in it. That's antisemitism.
