Michael Oren writes in his TNR piece, "Deep Denial [of the Holocaust]":
Many factors contributed to the Holocaust–European anti-Semitism, mass murder technologies, and Allied indifference–but none more elemental than the Jews’ inability to defend themselves. Israel and its citizen Defense Forces represent the most palpable means for redressing that incapacity.
Accordingly, denying the Holocaust not only deprives Israel of its raison d’être, but, more nefariously still, it invalidates the Jews’ need to defend themselves.
Asks a friend: Wasn’t President Obama lambasted right after his Cairo speech for
saying something quite similar to the second paragraph above? But when Oren says it, it’s somehow different? Am I missing something? David Frum said it: the Holocaust has nothing to do with the foundation of Israel.
In rebuking Holocaust denial, Mr Obama himself denied something: the millennial Jewish connection to the land of Israel. Yes, the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history of persecution. But a homeland that was merely a place of refuge could have been located anywhere…[unpersuasive religious statements follow]… :This resettlement was legally recognised in the treaties and commitments that followed the first world war, not the second. By emphasising the Holocaust as the proximate justification for Israel’s creation, Mr Obama perhaps inadvertently acceded to a key tenet of anti-Zionism. Here for example is the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad…
And where’s the ADL regarding this statement from Oren (also in TNR)?
"The Goldstone Report goes further than Ahmadinejad and the Holocaust deniers by stripping the Jews not only of the ability and the need but of the right to defend themselves. If a country can be pummeled by thousands of rockets and still not be justified in protecting its inhabitants, then at issue is not the methods by which that country survives but whether it can survive at all. But more insidiously, the report does not only hamstring Israel; it portrays the Jews as the deliberate murderers of innocents–as Nazis. And a Nazi state not only lacks the need and right to defend itself; it must rather be destroyed.
The ADL criticized Sen. Durbin — and many others — for mentioning the Holocaust and the Nazis to score political points. Abe Foxman stated,
All politicians, regardless of party affiliation or political persuasion, must realize that there is a point when inapt comparisons to the Holocaust become odious, especially when used to make a political point or advance a certain agenda. While there is no taboo against invoking the lessons and memory of the Holocaust, inappropriate comparisons to the Nazis only serve to trivialize genocide and insult the memory of the six million.
But when Michael Oren tries to score cheap political points he’s actually invoking "the lessons and memory of the Holocaust" because the ADL happens to agree? Or is it just that they like Oren and can’t bring themselves to call him out because they think it would undercut their own arguments against Goldstone’s report? Sure seems like a double standard to me.
