Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Americans Have Learned the Wrong Lesson from the Holocaust
Preface: Martin Luther King, Jr. suggested we judge people by the content of their character, and not by some superficial characteristic. I whole-heartedly agree.
Some Jewish people work tirelessly for the good of humanity, while others are murderers who would inflict grave harm on others. The same spectrum - by the way - is true of Arabs, of people from India, of whites in the U.S. and England, of all peoples. Humanity ranges from noble and selfless to lower than any animal - more than any other species - and this is true of all peoples.
Loving or hating someone based on their race or ethnicity makes no sense.Why do so many Americans - especially politicians and media talking heads - believe that criticizing Israel is wrong, no matter what it does (see this and this)?
I think the main reason is that the wrong lessons have been drawn from the Holocaust . . or at least the wrong lessons are pushed on the American people.
Specifically, the lessons touted by the elites are:
(1) The Jewish people were given a homeland to protect Jews from persecution; and
(2) We must allow the Israelis to use all means necessary to protect that homeland.Let's take a deeper look at these claims.License to Kill
It is a common pattern among individuals and societies that the victim becomes the bully.
Does an individual bully's background of being a victim justify his later violence? No, it doesn't. The same is true of peoples and nations.
The United Nations - which lent legitimacy to the creation of Israel - has passed dozens and dozens of resolutions criticizing Israel for unlawful behavior. In other words, the very organization which legitimized Israel's creation is saying that the nation is not following the international rule of law.
Israel has committed war crimes, false flag terror, and horrendous violence against the Palestinians and other Arab peoples. As sympathetic as I am to the persecution of the Jewish people - see below- the bullying behavior is not justified.
The "never again" lesson which most people take from the Holocaust is that Israel must do anything and everything to protect itself. But by committing war crimes, false flag terrorism, and other barbarous acts, and by violating one UN resolution after another, Israel has become just like all other ruthless oppressors throughout history. The ends do not justify the means, any more than Stalin's murder of millions of innocent Russians was justified in the name of creating some crazy communist workers' "utopia".
Why Was Israel Placed in the Middle East?
Americans are told that the state of Israel was placed in Palestine because it was the original homeland.
Certainly, the Jewish people deserve to have a safe place, where they will not be persecuted.
But a state could have been set up for them anywhere in the world. It could have been located on an island, or on the North Pole, or in the jungles of Brazil, or the Sahara desert. The allies could have bought some other area from a willing seller. Why Palestine?
Without the permission from or payment to the Palestinian people - Israel was sited on their land.
If Israel was, indeed, sited in Palestine because the Western powers believed that to be the ancestral homeland of the Jewish religion, that would actually have been the use of military might to promote a particular religion. Specifically, if America, Britain and the other Western powers that agreed to the creation of Israel sited it in Palestine because they were sympathetic to the Judeo-Christian religions and not of the Muslims who lived in Palestine, then that is religious war (and a violation of the separation of church and state in American decision-making as to foreign affairs).
But I believe there was another reason that the Western powers sited Israel in Palestine: to gain a foothold to the oil resources in the Middle East. The historical record is clear: America and England knew how important oil was, and were determined to gain access to it.
What better way than to locate an ally there and arm them to the teeth?The Right Lessons from the Holocaust
So what are the right lessons which we should take from the holocaust?
Well, the Nazis succeeded because:
- Bush's grandfather literally helped Hitler rise to power
- So did many large U.S. corporations
So the first lesson we should learn is that history is very different from what the propaganda machine would have us believe. America helped the Nazis, and yet pretended we were just the "rescuers". That's not what really happened.
Second, the Nazis used false flag attacks at Gleiwitz and the Reichstag to whip their people into a state of terror and sheepish obedience. We must remember that age-old ploy, and guard against its use by our own governments. "Never again" must apply to false flag attacks.
Finally, we should remember that the agendas of entire nations are sometimes hijacked by those with ulterior motives.
For example, most Americans confuse Zionism and Judaism. But many devout Jews are against Zionism, and Zionists can be Christian as well as Jewish. Those who say that criticizing Zionism is anti-semitic are misleading people for their own ulterior motives which have nothing to do with ensuring the safety of the Jewish people. Israeli Zionists are no more true to the cultural heritage of the Jewish people than Neocons are to the conservative tradition.
1 comment:
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GW - Very well stated. Do you come up with all this on your own? If so you need your own radio program.
ReplyDeleteBTW - I got redacted at usa today for trying to make a similar argument about Zionism.