lunes, agosto 25, 2014

Yep, Holocaust Survivors can be Wrong too. Terribly, terribly wrong.

Recently I had the sad experience to read an open signed letter where 40 Holocaust survivors and hundreds of Holocaust survivor's descendants (as if they had any right to use their ancestor's memories, but oh well) denouncing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza and asking for academic, cultural and economic boycott of the Jewish State, as stated below:

As Jewish survivors and descendants of survivors and victims of the Nazi genocide we unequivocally condemn the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza and the ongoing occupation and colonization of historic Palestine. We further condemn the United States for providing Israel with the funding to carry out the attack, and Western states more generally for using their diplomatic muscle to protect Israel from condemnation. Genocide begins with the silence of the world.

We are alarmed by the extreme, racist dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli society, which has reached a fever-pitch. In Israel, politicians and pundits in The Times of Israel and The Jerusalem Post have called openly for genocide of Palestinians and right-wing Israelis are adopting Neo-Nazi insignia.

Furthermore, we are disgusted and outraged by Elie Wiesel’s abuse of our history in these pages to justify the unjustifiable: Israel’s wholesale effort to destroy Gaza and the murder of more than 2,000 Palestinians, including many hundreds of children. Nothing can justify bombing UN shelters, homes, hospitals and universities. Nothing can justify depriving people of electricity and water.
 We must raise our collective voices and use our collective power to bring about an end to all forms of racism, including the ongoing genocide of Palestinian people. We call for an immediate end to the siege against and blockade of Gaza. We call for the full economic, cultural and academic boycott of Israel. “Never again” must mean NEVER AGAIN FOR ANYONE!

This letter was done in response to Elie Wiesel's comparison of Hamas to Nazi ideology, and the fact that both have sacrificed children to feed their fanaticism. He calls for Hamas to end their "child sacrifice" and join all civilized people in the reaching of understanding and the building of a future without a quick martyrdom for Allah. However it seems that these signatories missed the point.

The hypocrisy found in this letter should be widely documented. First, they generalize the whole of Israel as racist evil scum, calling for boycotts that would hurt all Israelis and not just the racist ones. They give a link to a certain site that gives all op-eds and articles calling for genocide in Gaza. These include articles from the far-Right Arutz Sheva in Israel, or from people of the Right-Winged Jerusalem Post and Times of Israel, two of which were taken down due to criticism from Israeli readers, one of those twice.


No Der Stürmer or Völkischer Beobachter articles were ever criticized by their own editors for their radicalism or their antisemitic diatribes. But in Israel, a democratic country, an article such as "When Genocide is Permisible" by a Yochanan Gordon was not only taken down by the newspaper, but condemned by the same newspaper editors who have taken it down, using the following terms:

"This blog post, which was described by our Ops & Blogs editor as both damnable and ignorant, blatantly breached The Times of Israel’s editorial guidelines.
We have discontinued the writer’s blog.
The Times of Israel maintains an open blog platform: Once we have accepted bloggers, we allow them to post their own items. This trust has rarely been abused. We are angry and appalled that it was in this case, and will take steps to prevent a recurrence.
We will not countenance blog posts that incite to violence or criminal acts."

This not only doesn't sound Nazi, but it's a clear anti-Racist statement that condemns the incitement to genocide, violence and murder as a criminal act - something very far from anything the letter implies. This of course was ignored by the signatories of the above mentioned letter, who in their utmost hypocrisy condemn Elie Wiesel for expressing an opinion being a Holocaust survivor, while at the same time doing the exact same thing as a response. He just described the reality on the ground, the values behind Hamas' insanity, and used his own life experience for it. Here, they just exclaim that he was wrong for "justifying the unjustifiable", something he of course didn't.

The sad thing is that Elie Wiesel didn't attack Palestinians who are suffering the war waged between Israel and Hamas - on the contrary, he understands them to be human beings that deserve a better future than what Hamas is offering them. He's just condemning Hamas for the very much proved actions that violate almost all humanitarian law in the books, starting with the use of human shields, followed by the use of hospitals and educational facilities forcibly for military purposes, the use of ambulances for transport, and the hiding in civilian areas while becoming combatants without uniforms, inviting shelling to kill innocent children.

This ignoring the fact that Hamas has already executed dozens of people officially (not to say hundreds unofficially by "house arrest" in a house that was to be bombarded by Israel), or the use of child labor for the construction of tunnels in a manner never seen since the 19th Century coal mines in Great Britain.

Condemning Hamas isn't a pro-Israeli action. Hamas isn't the "resistance movement" that would "liberate historic Palestine", using the letter's wording. It's an organization that did a mockery out of Human Rights, and perverted its respect by their enemies for their own psychotic political ends. And therefore, Wiesel's condemnation of Hamas should not be offensive to anyone who isn't an insane anti-Israeli bigot without any care for the human lives that have been sacrificed due to their very existence as a political agent in Gaza. No civilized person in this planet can defend Hamas without making it clear that they're defending probably one of the most degenerate, prejudicial, racist, violent and misogynistic regimes on Earth.

It was in October 1944 when the Nazis came with the devise of using fanatic children and elderly to stop the already unstoppable Soviet advance into German territory with the infamous Volkssturm, that had their most important battle in Berlin, on April 1945. The use of 13 year-old children and 60 year-old men was a terrible military idea, but Goebbels created it as part of his Totalkrieg propaganda, the notion where the endless masses that went to fight the "Soviet hordes" to the very end would somehow, if not save Germany, at least weight a heavy toll on the allies. Hitler himself had other plans: the destruction of Germany with his destruction in his famous Nero Decree, which luckily was disobeyed by his minister Albert Speer. 

The notions behind these Nazi actions were based on precisely what Elie Wiesel describes Hamas to be: a death cult. The glorification of death and sacrifice for their fanatic life-less ideology is the enemy of everything humanity holds dear. Everything that allows us to achieve a minimal amount of dignity is vilified by Hamas, as it was by the Nazis. Everything humanity created should bow down, in the eyes of Hamas, to the eternal will of God and for their fanatical pursuit. And by everything, it includes innocent children who are to be fed to the tofet of war for their own propaganda tools - exactly as Goebbels did with his Volkssturm. This is what Wiesel was getting at, and this is what this letter omits, in detriment to humanity.

The difference between these Holocaust survivors who signed this letter, and Elie Wiesel is that the latter is correct, and the firsts are either hypocrites or, hopefully, just misinformed. What I do know is this: the supposed ambiguity for condemning Hamas is repugnant, and is in fact a veiled support for their thesis. There's no middle ground with Hamas, because Hamas doesn't have a middle ground with their enemies either. Either one supports or is against them. This doesn't mean one has to support Israel or not. But this does mean that one doesn't get to attack an anti-Hamas ad and pretend they're for human rights and against genocide. Because what they described Israel to be, with their fallacies and generalizations, is false. Sadly, their descriptions fit Hamas as a glove, and that is why Elie Wiesel is right, and they are so terribly wrong.