Jewish chauvinist Jeffrey Goldberg has undertaken a further declension of the Nakba, putting it not just in quotations, but lower-case. Take it away, Jeff:
Jeet Heer writes to ask: Quick question: why is Nakba in quotes in your recent post? Do you think that the Nakba didn’t happen?
[Goldberg, I presume] The war that gave Jews freedom in their ancient homeland three years after the Holocaust was not a "catastrophe," which is what "nakba" means in Arabic. Did the war result in misery and displacement for a great number of Arabs? Yes. Did it result in misery and displacement for a great number of Jews as well? Yes….
Was the misery of the Jews who were displaced from Arab countries brought about by the decision of Arab leaders? Also yes. The difference between these competing miseries is that the Arabs who professed brotherhood with their displaced cousins did nothing to help them. The Jews who professed brotherhood with their displaced cousins resettled them in Israel.
So, no, the "nakba" didn’t happen. The return of a persecuted people to its ancient homeland is what happened. And a series of disastrous mistakes some made by the returned Jews, most made by the Arabs, resulted in what Arabs refer to as a catastrophe, a catastrophe which, of course, could have … etc.
What really so damn scary about this, is that this is exactly what it sounded like when Nazi Germans spoke fondly of their “lebensraum” in Poland. It’s really quite sickening.
(Yes, yes, Godwin’s law, but you know what? I call it where I see it.)
Lebensraum (German, ‘living-space’) NAZI political doctrine claiming a need to acquire more territory in order to accommodate the expanding German nation. First introduced as a political concept in the 1870s, the concept was given patriotic significance by HITLER and GOEBBELS. The corollary to ‘Lebensraum’ was the ‘Drang nach Osten’ (German, ‘drive to the East’), which claimed large areas of eastern Europe for the THIRD REICH to enable the so-called Nazi master race to subjugate and colonize the Slavic peoples.
“Lebensraum.” A Dictionary of World History. 2000. Encyclopedia.com. 15 Oct. 2009 .
I bet Daniel Pipes would agree with Jeffrey Goldberg on denying NAKBA – but he is not in favor of Iranian president Dr. ahmadinejad’s qustioning of the number “Six Million Died” (the figure posted in front of Poland’s Holocaust Museum read “2.5 Million Died”. In this ZOG world – a bigot Zionist can deny anthing which doesn’t serve the interests of Israel or Zionism – but non-Zionist, Jew, Christian, Muslims and Hindus don’t have similar ‘freedom of speech’.
“Freedom of Press” for whom
link to rehmat1.wordpress.com
The double standard is breathtaking in its audacity, one has to say.
The Auschwitz Museum says less than that, Rehmat. It was 1.3 million, including all ethnicities.
link to en.auschwitz.org.pl
Anothe Zionist belittles the history of another documented genocide:
lies, damn lies, and Armenian Deaths. Try doing the same thing with the Holocaust and see if you can get HuffPo to publish you.
Ha! They closed comments for Fein’s article. When I was in Armenia, I was told it was 3 million. I saw the stunning photos taken by the German officer at their museum there. They were taken with a 20 x 24 in camera, the kind that’s on a pedestal and requires you to put a black cloth over your head. I forget the name. The photo negs therefore reproduce to 4′ x 6′ easily, just like 35 mm enlarges to 4″ x 6″ easily.
The photos were shocking. SHOCKING. There were pictures of the Armenians, sometimes clothed, sometimes not, digging their own graves. The Turkish soldiers stood on the ground above with rifles and would shoot the Armenians in their ready-made grave so that no one had to throw them in.
Here is a site that has some of the photos I saw in 4′ x 6′ size. Click on them to enlarge them. I actually saw a holocaust site that had the temerity to use some of these photos as Holocaust photos. The horror.
link to ourararat.com
No less than Henry Morgenthau Sr called it “an extermination of a people” in his 1916 letter to President Wilson in his capacity as US Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. The word ‘genocide’ hadn’t been invented yet. This letter is in the London Times archive.
Perhaps what Fein doesn’t want discovered is that the Young Turks, the instigators, were Doenmeh Jews, and so was Ataturk.
So what is the purpose of memorializing the Armenian genocide MRW? What is the purpose of memorializing any genocide, except to provide a podium to launch the next war?
The Nakba and Israeli Independence are usually seen as two bodies: which a law of physics tells us cannot occupy the same space. Those who celebrate Israeli Independence Day cannot tolerate the sadness that the occasion evokes in those who mourn and thus commemorate Nakba day. Those who mourn and commemorate Nakba day see nothing to celebrate about Israeli Independence. Jeffrey Goldberg provides the rationale for those who celebrate Israeli independence. If only the Palestinians had had the foresight or insight to appreciate the inevitablity of Jewish independence and had acted based upon that foresight/insight the Nakba could have been avoided and since they lacked that foresight/ insight he spells Nakba “nakba”.
It is difficult to celebrate Israeli independence these days without hearing about a group of rabbis who mix in the sourness of the Nakba to negate the sweetness of independence. To avoid this negation some find it necessary to spell Nakba “nakba”.
This web site is dominated by those who negate Israeli independence and find nothing to celebrate. The inability to see anything to celebrate is a mirror image of Jeff Goldberg’s inability to see anything valid to mourn.
Even in the utopia of one state there will still remain the dead and the lost years of refugee camps and exile.
Even in the more realistic two state solution there will remain bitterness of a continued exile. Even then it will require wisdom and superhuman strength to be able to acknowledge the pain or joy of the other.
First thing’s first.
“The Nakba and Israeli Independence are usually seen as two bodies: which a law of physics tells us cannot occupy the same space.”
“A Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) is a state of matter of a dilute gas of weakly interacting bosons confined in an external potential and cooled to temperatures very near to absolute zero (0 K, −273.15 °C, or −459.67 °F). Under such conditions, a large fraction of the bosons collapse into the lowest quantum state of the external potential, and all wave functions overlap each other, at which point quantum effects become apparent on a macroscopic scale…
Bose–Einstein condensation is a quantum phenomenon in dilute trapped gases of weakly interacting bosonic atoms at extremely low temperatures, where a large number of atoms occupy the lowest quantum state of the trapping potential.”
link to en.wikipedia.org
Second, you can’t mutually exclude to things which are the same event. Israeli independence — the assertion of a manufactured “Jewish” nationality — was predicated upon the establishment of an artificial Jewish majority over 78% of Palestine — i.e. ethnic cleansing, or the Nakba as it is called. Neither event exists without the other.
When (or if) the Israeli/Palestinian conflict comes to some reasonably just conclusion, then it will be easier to look back at the whole history of Zionism as a mixture of good and evil. Americans still struggle with this in our history–was Jefferson the apostle of freedom or a hypocritical slaveowner who did what he could to crush the Haitian revolution (according to Gary Wills)? Both, actually.
And was America a haven for oppressed people from overseas (including Jews, at least part of the time) or was it an imperialist power that stole and ethnically cleansed its way to greatness? Both.
“[...]Don’t forget what you’re celebrating, and that’s the fact that a bunch of slave-owning, aristocratic, white males didn’t want to pay their taxes. “
It is possible to be severely critical of your country’s history, of its founding myth, and of what it did to other nations – and still accept your country as a given, to consider it home, even to be proud of it. However, it requires certain levels of maturity and self-confidence as well as a robust attachment to universal human values. Goldberg and his claqueurs, as fanatical nationalists, cannot live up to these standards.