A good NY Times story says the Steven-Spielberg-initiated Shoah Foundation in southern California has broadened its focus to include other victims of genocide, notably Rwandans. And there have been demurrals. Ian Lovett writes:
Menachem Z. Rosensaft, a vice president of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants who also teaches about law and genocide at Columbia Law School, said ....“My concern would be that we not blur the individual experiences of survivors of the Holocaust, or survivors of Rwanda, into one large blur. Every genocide is a separate act, and must be remembered and chronicled as such.”...
But even designating the atrocities in Rwanda or Cambodia as genocide can become a flashpoint in discussions about how the Holocaust should be remembered and commemorated.
Some historians argue that the Holocaust — in which the Nazis slaughtered 6 million Jews, many in gas chambers designed specifically for that purpose — was the only genocide in history, the only systematic effort to wipe an entire race of people from the earth. In Rwanda, around 800,000 people were killed during a few bloody months in 1994, many of them with weapons like machetes. Steven T. Katz, a professor of Judaic studies at Boston University, calls the killings in Rwanda “mass murder,” not genocide.
And while Professor Katz, too, supports scholarly efforts to document all cases of mass atrocities, he said the drift toward studying the Holocaust primarily alongside these other mass murders risks misunderstanding the Nazis’ attempt to eradicate the Jews from Europe as just one case of mass murder among many.
“With certain kinds of events, one needs to be able to say, this is new, or singular, or unprecedented,” he said.
Still, the trend to contextualize the Holocaust has continued. Some institutions, like the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, now address other genocides, and the Washington museum has set up a commission devoted to stopping future genocides
The attitude of people like Rosensaft and Katz is disgusting. For pete’s sakes, the murder of the Jews by the Nazis wasn’t even the only “systematic effort to wipe an entire race of people from the earth” that was going on by the Nazis at that time, let alone in history, and the attempted genocide of the Roma and Sinti people.
People like Rosensaft and Katz should be ashamed of themselves. The world rightly knows the word “Shoah.” It is, in part, because of people like Rosensaft and Katz, and their disgusting attitude, that the word, “Porajmos” is not as widely known.
Yes, every attempted genocide is different. That does not mean that any one is an attempted genocide and the others something different.
“Why should they? It is an undisputed fact that six million Jews were exterminated. The estimated number of Romani exterminated was as little as 200k to ‘only’ 1.5 million”
That’s basically the attitude which the holocaust industry has conditioned people to believe. That same conditioning has made even talking about it like this to be offensive. History classes spend more time talking about the holocaust as a strictly Jewish event than on WWII itself. They’ve made it so you can even visualize Hitler without thinking about it. They’ve built museums all over the country. It’s a billion dollar industry which justifies Israeli behavior and is used as a tool to evade criticism. It undermines and monopolizes all other mass-murder and genocidal events. Finkelstein is labeled a self-hater and a denier for writing a book about it even though he isn’t. He admits he had victims in his own family. He tells the truth about the exploitation of the event and those who benefit. His ‘crime’ is pissing off the industry. They have advocacy groups smearing him and anyone like him.
This is a problem. These disgusting attitudes that say ‘our genocide was better, ours was a real genocide and yours was a few people getting shot’… The exploitation…. Not mentioning the non-Jewish victims. How is no one seeing this? Do they ‘feel bad’ talking about it? Because these are no different than other extremist beliefs. It is relevent today, the Shalit deal is proof. One person more important than 1,000?
Thank you for mentioning the Roma and Sinti.
You’re welcome, edwin.
Roma singer, La Caíta, is standing on a hillside overlooking new housing, a place where she will probably never live. She sings a heartbreaking song, The Blackbird. ¡La Caíta! ¡Opré Roma!
link to youtube.com
My eyes were opened when I stumbled upon:
link to en.wikipedia.org
You must read this in order to understand what happened in WWII.
Disillusioned Israeli:
I have been studying the Second World War for 25 years and am very familiar with Generalplan Ost. I believe that you are correct in that this does put many things about that war in a proper context.
Rosensaft and Katz are peanuts compared to the army of people who attempt to shift WWII discourse solely to Jewish suffering. And their intentional neglecting or down playing of the atrocities committed during WWII against non-jews is utterly reprehensible.
While being interviewed on national t.v., filmmaker Oliver Stone set off a firestorm when he stated that the large majority of people are completely unaware that 20 MILLION people were killed in the USSR due to the profound effect the holocaust industry has on WWII discourse. You can find the clip on YouTube. Watch it
i’ve never heard of this before.
link to en.wikipedia.org
and this: Latgalians 100%
“800,000?! You call that a holocaust?! Call me back at 6 million”
That’s what it sounds like they are saying. Notice how they make no mention of the non-Jewish holocaust victims? Why not? There was roughly just as many non-Jewish victims. Just because they weren’t all one group is no excuse to make them a footnote, that is if they even are mentioned at all. These guys didn’t.
>> Some historians argue that the Holocaust … was the only genocide in history …
Really? The only one? EVER?
>> … the only systematic effort to wipe an entire race of people from the earth. …
>> … Professor Katz … said the drift toward studying the Holocaust primarily alongside these other mass murders risks misunderstanding the Nazis’ attempt to eradicate the Jews from Europe as just one case of mass murder among many.
Attempting to “eradicate the Jews from Europe” is not the same as efforts “to wipe an entire race of people
off the mapfrom the earth.”Does this mean the Holocaust represents “just” another horrific episode of man’s mass-murderous inhumanity toward man? No, sir! It is “The bestest damned genocide ever!” (TM) – a badge of honour, a source of pride, and a scar of shame which can only be healed by the “manliness” of terrorism, ethnic cleansing (“currently not necessary”) and the establishment of a religion-supremacist state!
And don’t you forget it! :-)
Was what the Hebrews did to the Amalekites genocide, or not?
Until I came to England I never realized that my family members killed by Nazis were worse sort of victims – their deaths, while regrettable, did not approach in importance the deaths of Jewish people from Eastern Europe.
When Germans entered Polish Towns they rounded up intellectuals, lecturers, leaders and politicians using pre – prepared lists. These were first inmates of the first camps.
Then their continued killing Polish citizen, of variety of religions, for anything from singing protest songs, doing anything without permit, to military resistance against occupier.
I refuse to forget their suffering.
they rounded up intellectuals, lecturers, leaders and politicians using pre – prepared lists.
i’m sorry eva. i’m sorry it happened and sorry it’s gone largely unrecognized and sorry for your personal loss.
The Third Reich openly declared the Catholic Church to be an enemy of Germany. Catholic -and Protestant- clergy were the first targets of the invasion of Poland. Hitler spoke freely of disassembling the Vatican. Nearly 5 million Catholics were killed under the Nazi regime. I wonder how Mr. Katz would classify those efforts and results….
>> I wonder how Mr. Katz would classify those efforts and results….
“Good, but not good enough!”, perhaps?
Good article on the forgotten victims of the Third Reich.
link to holocaustforgotten.com
“I refuse to forget their suffering.”
So do I …over 75 million dead…… and to listen to the Holocaust people you would think it was all about the Jews only. One reason why I support more investigations into the German dead camps and the holocuast…lots of forgotten people.
As far as I can see the attempt to separate the Jewish holocaust from other holocaust is once again the idea that Jews are worth more than non Jews.
Frankly, mass murder is mass murder, a person is a person and a dead person is a dead person, period.
In Rwanda Hutus and Tutsis were forced to use ID cards which specified an ethnic group. Skin color was a general physical trait that was typically used in “ethnic” identification. The lighter-colored Rwandans were typically Tutsi, the minority group, while the darker-skinned Rwandans were typically Hutu, the majority group in Rwanda. It was the Hutu government in power that “planned” the genocide of the Tutsis.
If planning to wipe out a ethnic group isn’t genocide what is? What does it matter if it’s half the Jews or a third of the Tutsis–it is what it is.
I’d say the Hutu government put the Germans to shame in the efficiency of their killing….800,000 in 100 days. If it had kept on they would have killed 2.6 million in one year alone.
The more I see of this effort to stuff down the world’s throat that Jewish deaths should be elevated above all others the more revolting I find the whole holocaust
“industry. Which is a shame because survivors and those who lost family deserve some sympathy..but it’s enough already……the ‘special and only’ is a turn off and people are sick of it.
If the holocaust poobabs want to discuss their Jewish holocaust fine, let them go to their cubicles and discuss it….but they have no business trying to say what is and isn’t a genocide where it regards other groups and particularly have no business trying to lessen or minimize the importance of other mass murders and holocaust.
While your heart is in the right place, you have your understanding of Rwanda inverted, as do most. It is the result of another effective propaganda campaign. The conventional “recollection” of that sad episode in history is that the Hutu majority carried out an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Tutsi minority and that the United States, at worst, stood idly by. The absolute inverse is in fact what happened.
Rwanda was a Hutu majority nation, however, it had a multi-ethnic coalitional democratic government headed by Juvenal Habyarimana. Habyarimana’s government was faced with an insurgent Tutsi movement from Uganda, the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF). The RPF, led by Paul Kagame, assassinated President Habyarimana on April 6, 1994 and subsequently invaded Rwanda declaring open war on the Hutu majority. Paul Kagame had trained in the United States and the RPF invaded Rwanda with the full backing -financially and militarily (equipment, arms)- of the United States. The well-equipped Tutsi insurgents quickly overran the Rwanda military and the genocidal wave that followed claimed nearly a million victims. 80% of the deaths were in fact Hutus, the majority ethnicity. Paul Kagame’s RPF took control of Rwanda in this foreign invasion, having carried out massive war crimes and crimes against humanity. Paul Kagame, war criminal, is now the President of Rwanda.
So, while the official western narrative is that the Hutu’s carried out a genocidal assault on the Tutsi minority, miraculously the Tutsis came out on top, now holding power under Paul Kagame. If this were the truth it would be the first case of an overwhelming minority surviving genocide and actually defeating the majority and claiming power. The truth is that this was a well-planned, well-equipped invasion by Tutsi insurgents who pushed back the Hutu military enough to carry out an ethnic cleansing campaign against the helpless Hutu civilian populations. The United States will gladly take the heat for having “stood haplessly by in the face of a Hutu slaughter of the Tutsi” while the truth of its implicit hand in actually enabling and funding the Tutsi slaughter of Hutus is erased from the collective consciousness of western educators and intellectuals.
Let us not allow that to happen…
O.K. I’m a victim of newspaper reports.LOL
I will accept your superior knowledge on this.
Let’s call it mutual genocide.
Common misconception, American.
The propaganda behind the false-narrative of a Hutu genocide of the minority Tutsi is almost as engraved in the American psyche of beltway pundits, journalists and politicians as is the perception that Israel is a moral, cultural and strategic ally fighting for its survival surrounded by the Arab hordes hellbent on its destruction. To your credit, you’ve taken the time to see through the BS of the latter. As for the former, since that conflict is “resolved” the propaganda surrounding it is more a matter of protecting the historical perpetrators than it is to allow sustained continuance of injustice, as is the case in Palestine. I’d say that if you had to choose one of the two to be enlightened on, you’ve made the correct, more imperative choice.
“it is more a matter of protecting the historical perpetrators …”
Got it…..since it’s over why punish the guilty…right? Typical.
EXILED- I’m glad you brought this up. The news media always present these situations as local affairs involving long simmering animosities. They almost never highlight Western involvement, one Western power arming and supporting one side for strategic reasons, another Western power arming and supporting the other side in what is, in effect, a neocolonial struggle, the locals proxies for the great powers. They die while some Western power profits, all the while pontificating about First World peace and harmony, Western enlightenment, etc.
Very well put, Keith.
I don’t know if the above account of what happened in Rwanda is right or not, but I am at liberty to find out. I can challenge the official story without fear of censorship or violence. If I write it up on my website, I don’t have to avoid visiting Germany. This is because of racial discrimination.
So between Darfur and Rwanda, American Jews have found good pet projects to portray themselves as humanitarians while ignoring what Israel continues to do in their name.
How utterly predicable.
Same old ,same old. We are the “Chosen Nation”, our deaths counts for more.
If you don’t agree you are either an anti-Semite, or a self-hating Jew.
Tertium non datur.
Good initiative.
Several things :
1 ) “mass murder” and “genocide” are not mutually exclusive categories. Obviously, a genocide IS a particular form of mass murder. So, to call the Rwandan (or Congo, or whatever else) massacre a “mass murder” does not preclude it from being a genocide. Simple, but…
There is no ambiguity as to whether or not this applies in the Rwandan case as well.
2 ) There is nothing wrong with using words such as “Holocaust” and “Shoah”, and the words do conjure up the horror of the events quite well (burnt offering, great devourer, etc.), but they tend to amplify the religious nature of the systematic massacres, giving it an almost supernatural or mystical origin, as if humans were incapable of committing such acts, and needed some sort of outside intervention in order to accomplish their grisly goals. But the simple fact is that we are, indeed, capable of such things if certain conditions are met. This is an observation about human nature that we need to confront, and not explain it away with some kind of irrational, larger than life, divine (or devilish) logic. This is why I think that Raul Hilberg’s title, “The Destruction of the European Jews” is apt, as it puts the focus back on the actual events and the banal, and not so banal, human agency.
The conclusion – and this is why it’s so important – is that if THEY were capable of doing such things, WE ARE TOO.
“Judeocide” could be another appropriate word.
““Judeocide” could be another appropriate word.”
So is there an ‘extra’ appropriate word for the Rwandan, Cambodian, Armenian and etc. genocides also?
Why not ? The Roma have “Porrajmos”, like I said above, “the devouring” – Jews have “HaShoah”, “catastrophe” – Palestinians have the “nakba” ; every nation or ethnic/cultural/language group can have its own name for the particular events.
The question as to why one word or narrative becomes dominant over the others is a separate question altogether.
For example, you would have a hard time getting Americans to admit that the destruction of rural Cambodia was a genocide, even though that is what it essentially was. Likewise with Native Americans.
There’s a good video by the author of “American Holocaust”, I’ll put it up here when I find it.
Yes do….I would like to see it.
“For example, you would have a hard time getting Americans to admit that the destruction of rural Cambodia was a genocide”
I suspect this is because they think that if the killers and the killed are of the same ethnic group (Cambodian-on-Cambodian), it can’t be motivated by racial hatred and thus does not count as genocide. The legal definition doesn’t require a racial motivation, of course, but they don’t know that.
(Actually, it was mostly urban intellectuals, Buddhist clergy, and ethnic minorities that were killed. Rural Cambodians had a better chance of survival.
And where are the “Killing Fields” museums and memorials being built?)
Actually, I was referring to the Nixon – Kissinger bombing campaign, not Pol Pot :
link to walrusmagazine.com
link to yale.edu
That one?
First you’ll have to convince people that it happened.
American Holocaust: The Destruction of America’s Native Peoples :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qra6pcn4AOE
“any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
And I have to say that I think that this is bad law. A wide variety of completely different activities are bundled together into a single category solely on the basis of intent.
To make things worse, they are all lumped under a term which implies “killing”, even though actual killing is not involved in most of them!
Well, yes. I’m taking the definition as spelled out in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide at the UNGA, 1948. Raphael Lemkin (lawyer) was instrumental in getting this to happen, and is named in the video I posted above.
You’re right that the definition doesn’t necessarily involve murder, but I don’t think that’s a reason for totally invalidating it. Taking the logic to its extreme, if you think about it, a national or ethnic group can indeed be destroyed by other means – that is, if its language, customs, territory, history are eliminated, it effectively ceases to exist, even if there is no outright killing involved, though I do agree this is a stretch.
If you look closely, though, every part of this definition does in fact involve some kind of disruption of family ties or hereditary lines (ex. “transferring children of the group to another group”), or destruction of a community – it’s possible to do this without murdering everyone. So, mass murder could be a form of genocide, but genocide does NOT have to be a form of mass murder (correction of what I said above).
This does make sense if you look at the definition of geno-, “people” – and the many ways there are to define “people” – as far as attributing any kind of intention to murderous acts, and that’s why intention is important, at least in my mind. Mass murder without any systematic plan is not necessarily genocide, as genocide implies some kind of targeting of a specifically defined group of people, therefore an intention, a plan is a prerequisite.
But maybe this is like asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin…
One of the problems I have with this definition of genocide is that, by using the “-cide” ending, it implies that destruction of a “group” or “community” is a form of killing. Clearly it isn’t.
Whether the West Brisbane Cheesecake Photography club disbands voluntarily or under pressure from the Lord Mayor, no-one necessarily dies. No-one is killed. It is not a “-cide” in the way that homicide is a cide.
Disbanding a group – even by the nasty means included in the definition – simply is not as bad as mass murder. And yet the definition suggests that it is.
No matter the intent, mass murder is worse than these non-killing forms of genocide.
Each of those activities is wrong in itself. I do not see what difference the intent to get rid of the group makes.
I want to take over a chunk of land for a uranium mine, and so carry out those sort of activities to get control of the land. My intention is not to destroy the tribes, even though I do. My neighbour does the same sort of thing, with the intention of destroying the tribes. We both deliberately carried out those sort of activitites. We both had evil motives. Why is he worse than me?
Well, actually, it is a form of killing if you define “killing” as an “end” of an ethnic group – it ceases to exist. Homicide would be something different altogether, as it is the “end” of a human being, and not an ethnic group – i.e., murder. I think you have distinguish between a group of people and an individual, and how their “end” implies two very different things.
And no-one necessarily cares either…
There is another distinction to make, and that is between what is considered a voluntarily cohesive group (the West Brisbane Cheesecake Photography club), which was brought about by the active choice of several individuals, and which can cease to exist by their own volition, and the involuntarily cohesive group, which exists by virtue of birth into a certain cultural, language environment, etc. One can simply choose to no longer be a part of the cheesecake Photography club, but a cultural, lingustic group can’t simply be disowned so easily because one is born into it. One cannot “choose” to simply cease being a member of the Basque community, for example – so, the destruction of this community has to be brought about by an outside, hostile, force, as there is no other way to really do it.
I’m not sure one is “worse” than the other. You say “we both had evil motives” – but your motives were not at all the same – one was to simply kill, and the other was to gain control of mines, or a certain territory, or to flesh out some kind of grand strategy at the expense of the local population (as in the American Manifest Destiny, Nazi planned expansion to the east [lebensraum], South African colonization, Zionist appropriation of territory, etc.).
In one case, outright murder is the goal, with no other pretense, and in the other case, one might do without murdering the indigenous population if they would simply “comply and get out of the way”…
It could be argued that no indigenous population is simply going to “get out of the way” without a fight, and therefore to seize any land or rescources is going to involve some kind of struggle, violence, and therefore murder, so, the distinction is purely academic.
Think of the scenario in which there is a nuclear war initiated by either the United States, Israel, or Russia… in which 1 billion die in “collateral damage” but were not the intended targets. Is this a genocide or not? Does the random destruction of 1 billion individuals comport with genocide?
In the end, if you look at the definition above, every part of it does actually specify some kind of physical, bodily harm to individuals of some specified group, or preventing its physical continuation.
“Well, actually, it is a form of killing if you define “killing” as an “end” of an ethnic group – it ceases to exist.”
But that is to confuse the metaphorical with the literal.
When a person is killed, a stream of consciousness ceases to be associated with a particular body. An ethnic group does not have a body or a stream of consciousness associated with it. The group can end without the streams of consciousness leaving the bodies of the members. No real killing is involved, so it is misleading to imply that metaphorical killing is morally equivalent to real killing.
“One cannot “choose” to simply cease being a member of the Basque community,”
Of course one can. Simply move to Denmark, stop speaking Basque or caring about Basque affairs, and study dentistry. People do this sort of thing all the time, though not all of them become Danish dentists.
“your motives were not at all the same – one was to simply kill, and the other was to gain control of mines”
No, I said we carried out the same sort of activities, and I thought from the context it was clear that I meant the “non-killing” activities.
Neither of us objects to the former members of that group continuing to live. I want profits. He wants to disband the ethnic group. We are both very unpleasant characters, and I do not see that our intent makes a moral difference between us.
“every part of it does actually specify some kind of physical, bodily harm to individuals of some specified group,”
But these are differing levels of harm.
“or preventing its physical continuation.”
Insofar as a group can be said to have physical continuation, it is not clear that preventing that continuation is wrong at all. The method used may be wrong if they inflict harm or infringe rights, but the wrongness is in the method.
If I kill all the French because I need their bodies as food for my fish farm and they happen to be handy, why should this be legally different from killing them all because I hate them?
They are just as dead either way.
Suppose I explain to the French that they will all live fuller, happier, lives if they do not have children. I happen to be correct about this, and they believe me, stop having children, and live fuller, happier, lives. Eventually they have all died of old age, and French are no more. The empty territory of France becomes part of Tasmania.
What wrong have I done?
My motive was genocidal, but should I be called before a court for having such a motive? If so, we should also prosecute missionaries for their “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a … religious group”.
My point is that the various activities listed in the law are wrong in themselves. Calling them “genocide” adds nothing but confusion. And, however immoral genocidal motives may be, invoking them does not change the wrongness of the acts.
So I think the law is a bad law.
That’s a cops’ definition of genocide, written by the United Nations, designed to catch anyone they want to – which is what happened to ex-Yugoslavian leaders. “In whole or in part” is so broad, its nonsense. On the other hand, the holocaust industry’s definition is too narrow. ‘Intent’ isn’t necessary. The Tasmanian aborigines were completely wiped out without a ‘final solution’ order signed by Queen Victoria.
On the other hand, something can be ‘genocide’ if the intent is to destroy a ‘race’ even if the targeted group are ethnically diverse. The Ukrainian ‘holodomor’ was as destructive as the Judeocide, but it was not genocidal, despite attempts to give it that status. The Chinese communists’ purges exceeded the Nazi holocaust in scale, but they weren’t genocidal either. The Red Army in 1945 carried out ethnic cleansing, but not genocide.
The definition shouldn’t be so precise as to include complete extermination in reality or intent, but neither should it be so broad as to mean simply killing a bunch of people. The Serb militias didn’t carry out ‘genocide’; they weren’t attacking a separate ethnic group, and they weren’t trying to destroy the groups they were attacking. The Nazis clearly did try to carry out genocide of the Jews. Israel wants to ‘destroy’ the Palestinian people, without necessarily killing every last one. I think this fits into my definition of genocide – it includes ‘destroy’ and has something to do with ‘race’.
I should have been a lawyer.
Some good points from both of you, and I do agree that this can get into disagreements about semantics and spiral out of control discussing trivial details, and that the actual results of any actions should be of paramount interest, and not the intentions. More generally, though, ou cannot totally divorce any intentions from the consequences of any act, and in criminal law there is a reason that intent matters.
Think of someone who drives down a one way street the wrong way, and accidentally kills a pedestrian – he/she is breaking the law, and the result is that the person ceases to live, but the intention was not to kill the pedestrian – should we give this the same name as someone who purposefully mows down someone in the street? They probably won’t receive the same sentence.
It’s also true that ANY genocide (or criminal, terror, state terror, war, etc;) can be justified in some way as being “necessary” for carrying out certain plans, and this is indeed what the perpetrators always do, invoking some higher purpose, some sort of grand plan which sets wheels in motion and necessitates the “breaking of some eggs to make an omelette” (think Arendt’s “banality of evil”, or Benny Morris’ justification of ethnic cleansing).
RoHa :
As far as confusing the ‘metaphorical’ and the ‘literal’, well, yes, but this is what language does. Words can never completely describe any physical reality, it’s always approximative. The problem with words is that if you dig deep enough, their meanings can become pretty unclear and ambiguous. This seems to me to be one of the primary difficulties in the legal sphere. Agree with much of what you said, though.
jayn0t :
Yes, you’re right.
“More generally, though, ou cannot totally divorce any intentions from the consequences of any act, and in criminal law there is a reason that intent matters.
Think of someone who drives down a one way street the wrong way, and accidentally kills a pedestrian – he/she is breaking the law, and the result is that the person ceases to live, but the intention was not to kill the pedestrian – should we give this the same name as someone who purposefully mows down someone in the street? They probably won’t receive the same sentence.”
The key point here is that intent is used to decide whether the action was deliberate or not.
But consider this.
I deliberately punch Phil on the nose because he refused to publish one of my more brilliant posts.*
I am found guilty of assault.
I deliberately punch Phil on the nose because he’s a Jew and I’m a fully-paid-up card-carrying anti-Semite.
Should I be found guilty of any other crime than assault, and, if so, why?
Phil’s nose suffers the same amount of damage in either case. Why does my motive change the case? It certainly won’t provide much mitigation in either case. (Unless the judge is also a frustrated poster.)
(*Not that most of them aren’t.)
Years ago, I had a neighbor who was an Israeli Jew, moved to USA as an academic and perhaps (sometime) as a citizen and my wife (Palestinian) and I became very good friends with her (as long as we kept away from “the subject”).
I once asked her what she considered to be a holocaust. She said, it was any situation in which a large number of people were being relentlessly hunted down for death by a powerful government. The issue, for her, as I recall, was not the deaths but the FEAR of those living and hoping to escape or dreading capture. She included Cambodia as a “holocaust”. She had escaped death in Europe as a child by being farmed out to a Catholic family, as I recall.
Well, she’s right.
Racial suprematism, the notion that “Me and my people must be more important than others”, does not get any less repulsive just because a Jewish person believes in it. Katz et al should be ashamed of themselves.
Never Again
To Anyone
And Not by My Hand/Voice
That is the spirit of Spielberg’s effort. A good one.
It is also the spirit of MANY Jewish service groups’ concern for Darfur, Rwanda, Balkans. That concern was dissed here (and by editors), not encouraged, not urged to be expanded more broadly, but contemptuously dissed.
I think you’re trying to put a spin on it.
They were dissed for contextualizing the spirit as second class next to the holocaust. The author is dissed for not mentioning non-Jewish holocaust victims.
Reminds me of Kanye…. “Yo, Taylor, I’m really happy for you. Imma let you finish. But Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time.”
“Yo, Armenia, I acknowledge your genocide. Imma give you recognition. But the holocaust was the worst genocide of all time”
To anyone? Are you sure about that Richard?
Read back Charron, on Phil’s and Adam’s comments about the various Darfur issues relative to Israel.
In the context of their relentless condemnation of everything Israeli, and every expression of compassion that does not include Palestine, they carelessly and malevolently STOP good work.
Richard Witty said:
link to mondoweiss.net
Dick then goes on to compare his approval of the rapes, massacres, general terror that induced the mass exodus and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people to eating meat.
Who are you kidding, Witty? We all know you’re a racist, a hypocrite, and a liar.
Actually Cliff, I am Jewish, spiritual.
I take seriously the sentiment of “all my relations”, which I regard as the most politically and morally progressive of any theme possible.
“All my relations” is about your actual life.
It is the basis of sympathy for Palestinian indigenous life.
It is also the basis of sympathy for Jewish communal life.
Your spirituality means nothing. You are a Zionist partisan who supports ethnic cleansing and apartheid.
Why didn’t you express any outrage over the injured French consul and his family? His wife who suffered a miscarriage?
Why did you only respond with criticism of Phil/Adam’s lack of condemnation of Hamas rockets – WHICH BTW had no place in the thread, since we were talking about the ISRAELI AIR STRIKE that INJURED A FRENCH CONSUL AND HIS FAMILY.
“It is also the spirit of MANY Jewish service groups’ concern for Darfur, Rwanda, Balkans. That concern was dissed here (and by editors), not encouraged, not urged to be expanded more broadly, but contemptuously dissed.”
I suspect the dissing was towards those groups that show concern for other atrocities and not for Palestinian victims of Israel. There’s a passage in “To Kill A Mockingbird”, which maybe a lot of us read as a child, where one of the white people expresses concern over German anti-semitism (this is in the 1930′s) and then turns around and says something derogatory about blacks in Alabama and the whites who think they should have rights. That’s the sort of thing Phil disses.
The holocaust has become a bad joke. There is only one side and that side is completely stupid, please forgive my French.
The Holocaust is only this: “6 Million Jews where killed by the Nazis in extermination camps, an that must not happen again.”
That’s it! That’s the Holocaust! A single phrase. That’s all that it’s allowed in most of the world.
The Why? The How? The who? Are taboo subjects.
The Holocaust has no meaning, it’s just a stupid propaganda campaign made to demonize most of the world and to protect a minority.
Sorry for those that got affected by it, but that’s the truth. The Holocaust got stolen from the victims. It could have been a great lesson, but it is just propaganda.
“The Holocaust got stolen from the victims. It could have been a great lesson, but it is just propaganda”
Eventually I hope the Jewish community will come to recognize this as others have been saying for years (like Finkelstein). They’re the only ones who can stop it from being exploited. Exploited for various purposes… to cover up Zionist crimes.. to evade criticism… to monopolize suffering and genocide…. among other things. Germany still pays reparations to Israel.
Holocaust became the well-profitable Industry, (like the title of famous N. Finkelstein’s book )as well as a religion/cult with its own dogmas, gurus, believers, practices, books, holidays ,shrines, traditions etc.
So for some people has this symbolic, spiritual, almost transcendental meaning, for some very concrete, tangible, material , profitable ,visible sense.
The Industry makes sure that the religion/cult part is alive, beacuse that’s what brings them profits. They feed off each other.
A perfect symbiotic relationship.
Here we go again.
link to washingtonpost.com
”US Holocaust Survivors want to sue European Insurers for 20 billion.”
Jezz, I thought they had already sued everyone. The problem I have with these continuing law suits is there is no doubt a lot of fraud involved. But for starters 20 billion for 100,00 US holocuast survivors is 2 Million each…and I seriously, seriously doubt the Jews of Europe, most of who were middle class or less, could afford or carried 2 million in life insurance in 1939. That would be like carrying a 20 million dollar insurance policy today. And the guy leading this law suit claim stakes it on his seeing his father put quarters into jars for the insurance collector to pick up every month. I am all for anyone getting what they are owed from insurance companies but I have seen too much of ‘survivors’ being paid off to avoid bad PR law suits. I don’t know about 1939 but insurance companies these days exclude deaths from war or acts of war for one thing.
I could support suing for ‘records’ from the insurers if the claimants don’t have any policies to offer as proof and if the records are there paying their claim. …but this paying off holocaust survivors on their say so alone or on their remembering jars of quarters just because they are holocuast survivors, if they even really are, is ridiculous. It’s just more holocaust blackmail and get rich schemes for some Jews in too many cases.
Can I sue the German government for the mental distress that my parents suffered during WW2? Can I sue them for my bad teeth which are partly the result of food rationing?
My grandfather wittnessed terrible atrocites done by Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in 1943/44.
Things that were done to many thousands people ( 40,000-60,000) are even hard too describe due to its inhuman cruelty and savage nature.
Here is a link that tells about it in more details, because I get too upset even thinking about it.
link to en.wikipedia.org
Luckily, he and his small family, survived and right after the war, they had to move thousands of miles to live in the west of Poland.
They received NOTHING for leaving their home,land, for witnessing terrrible atrocities. I still remeber the solemn/sad face of my grandfather, when he occasionaly mentioned about this horrible, unpunished crime.
His eyes were still re-living those times, when the evil ruled the earth with all its might.
When I read or hear about it, I start to doubt human nature.
And I’ll repeat this one.
“Holocaust survivors have asked US Congress to let them sue France’s state-owned SNCF railway over its role in World War II deportations to Nazi death camps.”
link to abc.net.au
“Ms Firestone says in the United States, half of all survivors live below the poverty line, unable to meet their basic needs.”
So all that money paid by the Germans, and all that other money ripped off from the Swiss banks, went to…?
Why do people even argue over these words? That’s what they are…. words
Who cares whether it is called a genocide, a massacre, a mass murder, etc. Innocent people were systematically murdered because of who they were and people are arguing over which deaths were more important. When the Armenians and Assyrians were collectively considered traitors, they were terrorized and hunted down. Survivors were forced to flee. When people say “the holocaust was worse and had a higher death toll” they are cruelly insulting the memory of those who died.
Genocides and massacres over perceived differences have gone on since humans lived in caves, especially after religion was invented. Christians were massacred by Romans and much later on when the empire was Catholic it was Christians massacring non-Christians which peaked in the dark ages and Inquisition.
Now the Zionists are massacring Palestinians. Yes I think that 63 years of terror, occupation, lies, demoralization, murder, theft of property, destruction of property, and forced evacuation is a genocide. Ariel Sharon is responsible for mascaraing an entire refugee camp. The resistance is rational, even if violent. The Zionists are now the ones guilty of collectively punishing an entire people including many children. Never again at the expense of others. How ironic. Speaking of ironic, I was reading about the holocaust out of curiosity and one unrelated name caught my eye. Folke Bernadotte. I didn’t know he played a significant role in rescuing concentration camp victims. Only to be later murder by Zionists terrorists on the orders of a then-future prime minister of Israel. There is no saving Zionism, sorry…
Final comment. I think it takes a certain amount of chutzpa and insensitivity for a rich American Jew to promote focusing on the Nazi Holocaust, while simultaneously ignoring the genocide of the native Americans, and the suffering of the Black American slaves. The Indians and the Blacks are far more integral to US history than European Jews. Also, in view of the relatively low social status of American Blacks and Indians, much of it a direct consequence of US history and ongoing US racism, I am troubled by this ongoing attempt by some Jews, the most successful ethnic group in the US, to continue to promote themselves as the ultimate victims. Furthermore, it is quite obvious that the phrase “never again” is not intended as a universal statement, rather, it is meant as a tribal rallying cry to justify all manner of Zionist depredations.
It is bizarre that Americans are paying billions for the Jews and their State when we don’t actually owe them anything at all and were in no way responsible for them in WWII……and yet we’ve paid nothing for black slavery which we are responsible for. I keep hearing Wasserman saying we have a “moral obligation to the Jews”…for what?..is my question.
Total con game on Americans and nothing but political corruption keeps it going.
The world is messed up. Christopher Columbus doesn’t deserve a holiday because when the natives he made into slaves didn’t return any gold, he had their arms chopped off and they bled to death. When you learn about the trail of tears and other atrocities affecting native Americans that merely scratches the surface. When people laugh about slavery reparations, it is no laughing matter when Germany pays reparations to Israel.
“Contextualizing the Holocaust” is a morally ambivalent (ambiguous?) headline. If the byline was David Irving, I’d be concerned. If the byline was by Timothy Snyder I would not be concerned. Since currently I dwell in this comments section where the attitude towards Jews may be closer to innocent than to David Irving, but certainly not always all that innocent, I consider it a questionable headline to use for this audience.
I heard Timothy Snyder, who wrote “Bloodlands” at Yivo seven or so weeks ago. He felt that it was a significant and lamentable lapse by historians that the fact that a multitude of Ukranians were killed through starvation on the same turf that less than ten years later saw the genocidal effects of Operation Barbarossa went unmentioned and unstudied by most historians.
He also said that comparing one genocide or mass murder to another is what historians do, although the nomenclature of genocide, he felt, did not begin to describe the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis.
On a different note I wonder if it is out of line to ask Phil Weiss, “Who were your closest relatives murdered by the Nazis?” Sometimes I feel that Norman Finkelstein and Menachem Rosensaft, let alone Elie Weisel were too close to the “fire” to entirely earn my trust on the issue to be cool, calm and collected on the issue. On the other hand at least in this comments section, I feel that certain people are or were too far from the “fire” to really know what the fuck they are talking about and I was wondering whether you might share with us the closeness of the relatives who were lost in the genocide.
unknown relatives, wondering. unknown offspring of my great grandfathers brothers and sisters. my grandfathers both came over at turn of century.
An American Jewish story only. (Representative of many.)
NOT an Israeli Jewish story. NOT a European Jewish story. (A high majority of Israeli Jews your age had direct relatives killed, parents, siblings, aunts/uncles, first cousins).
So basically, you’re taking the Witty route and making it out that no one is more qualified to talk about this then you, WJ? Cute.
>> Sometimes I feel that Norman Finkelstein and Menachem Rosensaft, let alone Elie Weisel were too close to the “fire” to entirely earn my trust on the issue to be cool, calm and collected on the issue. On the other hand at least in this comments section, I feel that certain people are or were too far from the “fire” to really know what the fuck they are talking about …
Since you are able to judge who is too far from, or who is too close to, the “fire”, I can only assume that you are at precisely the right distance from it. Would you please be so kind as to explain what that distance is, and what other, if any, criteria make a person qualified either to earn your trust or “to really know what the fuck they are talking about”? Thank you.
eljay- You are the perfect person to comment regarding people who don’t really know what the fuck they are talking about regarding the Shoah. First what national group do you consider yourself a member of? The American people? What was the biggest “recent” trauma endured by the American people? I would say, the Civil War. Where does someone whose primary suffering the last 150 years was a war where the vast majority of the victims were soldiers, get to start criticizing someone who belongs to a collective that suffered a genocide 70 years ago. I haven’t heard one person on here say, I am an Armenian, a Rwandan, a Cambodian and this is what I have suffered and how my family has adjusted to it or not adjusted to it over time. Nope, not once have i read that here. Just a bunch of assholes who say, my uncle fought in the war and this is supposed to be the same as suffering from a genocide. It is not logical or historical knowledge that is lacking when I say “don’t know what the fuck they are talking about” it is emotional understanding and unless you are hiding some familial history, you’ve shown zero emotional intelligence on this issue.
Of course the suffering of the Palestinians puts them in a position to complain about the distance and irrelevance of Jewish suffering to the Jewish versus Arab conflict on the relevant piece of territory, but that’s not what you do. You just stamp around with pointy shoes like you’ve been appointed by God himself to set the Jews straight. You and a few others. (If I mistook you for some other person with a similar handle, I apologize, but I’m pretty sure, it’s you I have in mind.)
>> eljay- You are the perfect person to comment regarding people who don’t really know what the fuck they are talking about regarding the Shoah.
Cool. :-)
>> First what national group do you consider yourself a member of?
My parents were European (Croatian and Italian), but I’m first-generation Canadian and I identify as a Canadian.
>> Where does someone whose primary suffering the last 150 years was a war where the vast majority of the victims were soldiers, get to start criticizing someone who belongs to a collective that suffered a genocide 70 years ago.
Are you serious? So you belong to a “collective” that suffered horrible violence 70 years ago, so what? As RW – one of your collective points out – “the PRESENT is what matters”. So how does your belonging to a group that suffered:
1. Give you the moral right to minimize the suffering of all other groups in all of history?
2. Permit hard-core supremacist elements of your “collective” to commit atrocities against others, and permit you and other members of your “collective” to justify, excuse, support and even praise those atrocities?
>> It is not logical or historical knowledge that is lacking … you’ve shown zero emotional intelligence on this issue.
Ah, so “emotional intelligence” makes one type of suffering worse than all other types of suffering in all of history. Interesting. And it permits people in your “collective” to justify terrorism, ethnic cleansing and an ON-GOING occupation. Seems to me the world could do with a lot less “emotional intelligence” and a lot more justice, morality and accountability.
>> You just stamp around with pointy shoes like you’ve been appointed by God himself to set the Jews straight.
1. I don’t own any pointy shoes.
2. I don’t believe in any gawds.
3. I don’t think “the Jews” need straightening.
I hope you found your little burst of righteous indignation cathartic. Please feel free to resume cheering your emotionally-intelligent “co-collectivists” as they continue with their acts of immorality and injustice. :-)
“Still, the trend to contextualize the Holocaust has continued. Some institutions, like the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, now address other genocides, and the Washington museum has set up a commission devoted to stopping future genocides”. How reassuring!
It makes it sound as if parts of the holocaust industry can be gradually reformed into doing something useful. But when the ADL under pressure said the Armenian massacre of 1915 onward was genocide, it was a tactical ploy. The concern of these institutions is Jewish power. They are political bodies, not research institutes trying to find out the truth. No, they are not interested in ‘stopping future genocides’. On the contrary!