This article, by Dave Rich, was originally posted on Harry’s Place:
Opposition in Britain to Israel’s recent assault on Hamas in Gaza saw the allegation that Israel is in some way analogous to Nazi Germany become a central plank of anti-Zionist propaganda. Yet there is no serious similarity, in scale, intentions or outcome, between the Nazi destruction of European Jewry and Israeli policy in Gaza; which begs the question why it has become such a popular idea, when it causes deep offence to so many Jews.
The Nazi comparison wasn’t just something that appeared on the fringes of anti-Israel activity during this period. George Galloway MP, addressing the crowd at one anti-Israel demonstration in London, had this to say:
“In April and May of 1943, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto were surrounded by barbed wire fences, by the occupiers of Poland, and they faced a choice, in the words of the song of the partisans: ‘They could die on their knees or they could live forever’. And they chose to rise up against their occupier, to use their bodies as weapons, to dig tunnels, to fight, not to die in ones and twos of hunger and typhus, but to die as free men and women. Today, the Palestinian people in Gaza are the new Warsaw Ghetto, and those who are murdering them are the equivalent of those who murdered the Jews in Warsaw in 1943.”
At the recent London Conference for Combating Antisemitism, parliamentarians from 40 countries signed the London Declaration. By signing this important document, the participants commit themselves to working towards a number of intitatives that will help fight antisemitism.
John Mann MP has put down an Early Day Motion promoting the London Declaration and opposing antisemitism. Write to your MP and ask them to sign EDM 829!
For our guide to EDMs, click here
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Berating Jews with their own history, disinheriting them of pity, as though pity is negotiable or has a sell-by date, is the latest species of Holocaust denial, infinitely more subtle than the David Irving version with its clunking body counts and quibbles over gas-chamber capability and chimney sizes. Instead of saying the Holocaust didn’t happen, the modern sophisticated denier accepts the event in all its terrible enormity, only to accuse the Jews of trying to profit from it, either in the form of moral blackmail or downright territorial theft. According to this thinking, the Jews have betrayed the Holocaust and become unworthy of it, the true heirs to their suffering being the Palestinians. Thus, here and there throughout the world this year, Holocaust day was temporarily annulled or boycotted on account of Gaza, dead Jews being found guilty of the sins of live ones.
Jeremy Newmark notices the first comment on the article’s webpage (image below).
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