Reply #71: The term "animal like warmongering general" is yours, not mine [View All]

[Ken Burch]

Don't put words in my mouth like that. As I said, I know nothing of the specific general you live near.

Whatever you call it, Gaza DID receive massive bombing. The term for that is irrelevant. The people of Gaza don't consider what happened to be only minor damage. Why shouldn't I believe THEM? They were the victims of it. The word used to describe the bombing doesn't matter.

It is despicable that Holocaust survivors were left in the DP camps. But again, THAT was the responsibility of European Christians, not the Arab population of Palestine. ONLY those who caused the Holocaust or persecuted its survivors can fairly have that event invoked to justify their treatment. All Arabs were innocent of any role in that event. This is an important thing to remember, since Hitler's monstrous deeds were used, again and again, to justify everything the Israeli government did in the name of "security". They were used to silence debate on what that government did and to cast dark aspersions on anyone who questioned any of it.

And must I remind you that, when it mattered, DURING World War II, the Jewish communities of the Arab countries and of Iran were completely unscathed. Those countries NEVER cooperated with Hitler on his deadly project(which is a hell of a lot more than France, or the UK or even, on bad days, the United States could say, since all of those countries denied or at least severely restricted the availability of sanctuary to the Jewish refugees from Europe when they were begging for their lives). And this at a time when it would have been easy for those countries to just put those communities on freighters headed for Marseilles or(after Mussolini stopped protecting Italian Jews)an Italian port and sent them to their deaths. The wartime king of Morocco has been nominated by the Moroccan Mizrahi community in Israel to be the first Arab enshrined in the "righteous of the nations" section of Yad Vashem. THIS history is why you can assume that Arabs are not going to revive Hitler's work. It's only European Christians who are capable of creating something like Auschwitz. Arabs and Muslims would never lower themselves to such a despicable thing...no matter what they feel about Zionism. The fact that Iran, with the most visibly ugly leadership of any Arab country, hasn't done much of anything to those Jews who still live there bears this out. Arabs and Muslims are not utopian saints, but it's time to admit that they aren't subhuman monsters either. And it's ALSO time to admit that they aren't pathologically capable of ever really making peace with Israel-remember, to actually have a peace deal, there MUST be the assumption that it's at least possible for your enemy to agree to REALLY and TRULY end the war. If you assume that they never can, than you're not going to do anything that could actually ever LEAD to peace.

So it is totally inappropriate to invoke the Holocaust as a justification for anything the Israeli government does to Palestinians today. Palestinians are NOT the successors to the Nazis, and no other Arab state ever deserved that accusation either(and it was a bit of rhetorical slander that people like Ben-Gurion, who KNEW it was a lie, resorted to again and again in the post-1948 period).

Finally, Israel's leaders might have considered, if they actually ever WANTED peace with the neighboring countries, that no country makes peace with a country that habitually insults it, dehumanizes it(as Israeli propaganda has done for decades in insisting that Arabs are somehow pathologically incapable of behaving as civilized people, that Arab culture is inherently inferior to the culture of Israel, a country that presented itself as bringing "European civilization" to a backward region)and in general arguing Arabs and Muslims are incapable of reforming a societies and democratizing them on their own terms(assumptions that the events in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere in the region have now totally discredited). The whole "why can't they be as good as we are?" thing was always going to prevent peace, and the arrogance of that tone should be apologized for.