all else is baloney.

5ds

The holocaust should be remembered. If you read Burg, or talk to him, he does not imply in any way that the holocaust should be forgotten, or worse, ridiculed.

Respect that it is sensitive, a still-hurting sore.

Gideon Levy wrote an article on Holocaust Remberance Day today.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1079368.html

Gideon Levy / The Holocaust and Israeli occupation cannot be compared
By Gideon Levy
Tags: israel news

The Israeli soldiers played backgammon in their tent as a Palestinian ambulance stood waiting, its red lights flashing.

The sight of the ambulance, holding an agonized woman, was not enough to cause any of the soldiers to take a break from their game.

Levy's comparisson to the racist attitude in pre-war Germany with Israel are also misleading. Germany was not at war. Jews were not killing Germans. Jews were not bombing Germans. Jews were not wearing suicide belts. The Jews in Germany did nothing to the German people.

As long as people remember the 20th century at all, I don't think you need to worry about people forgetting the Holocaust.

The more I have studied 20th century European history, though, the more cynical I have become towards the non-historical uses of Holocaust rememberance. The Communists eagerly used it to hide their own evils and punish often fictious right-wing "collaborators." Some of them enjoyed high positions in post-USSR governments.

The Gaza PR disaster sparked a new rash of Holocaust-related news, often played up to a degree that invited cynicism.

1. The Times ran a front page article on a Nazi who had died in Egypt in the 1990's.

2. The Pope's lifting of excommunication on the Society of Pope Pius X (which included an eccentric anti-semitic bishop) became a worldwide Catholic bash-fest among Jewish commentators, with the predictable ugly slurs against the Pope and Pius XII.

3. The wretched Demjanjuk (who was extradited to Israel in the '80s and spent years on death row before having the charges thrown out by the Israeli supreme court) is in the process of being extradited to Germany.

4. New blueprints for the gas-chambers suddenly discovered in Germany, put on display in Berlin, reported in the Times…except that they were actually plans for delousing chambers, not new at all, and well known to archivists.

At my synagogue, we light ten candles (6+4) for the innocents who died in the Shoah. The service is very moving and appropriate. I also have Hilberg and Browning's work on my bookshelf. There's a big difference between history and respectful rememberance, and propaganda or outright idolatry.

"I'm sorry, but I don't want to be an Emperor – that's not my business. I don't want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone, if possible — Jew, gentile, black man, white. We all want to help one another; human beings are like that. We want to live by each other's happiness, not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another. In this world there's room for everyone and the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone…."

ENTIRE ADDRESS TEXT & VIDEO – link to americanrhetoric.com

This scene takes place behind the Hollywoodland (later Hollywood) sign to which they had ridden bicycles. Chaplin is played by Robert Downey Jr. and Fairbanks is played by Kevin Kline.

Douglas Fairbanks: "Charles, you're a foreigner; you're still an outsider. You've never understood this country."

Charlie Chaplin: "It's a good country underneath, Doug."

Douglas Fairbanks: "No, it's a good country on *top*. Underneath, that's what starts showing when we're scared."

MY COMMENT: Apply those lines to the period following 9/11 – the torture, the wiretaps etc.

SOURCE – link to imdb.com