ARE WE UNDERSTANDING THE LESSONS OF THE HOLOCAUST?

‘Never again’

When Netanyahu declares that “Never Again” will we allow the hand of evil to sever the life of our people, he is warning: Doomed are those who try.
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The bookseller Barnes & Nobel lists 8,194 Holocaust titles. Amazon stocks 2,049 Holocaust memoirs. Type in the word “Holocaust” on Google and you’ll get about 17 million hits. Not counting Jewish museums with permanent Holocaust-related exhibits, there are 30 museums and memorials devoted exclusively to the Shoah – in the US alone. Many European and American cities maintain monuments to the victims of the Holocaust. Schoolchildren throughout the Western world learn about the Holocaust. Hundreds of movies have the Holocaust as their main theme.

Following Israel’s lead, the US commemorates the Shoah on the 27th day of the Hebrew month of Nisan (April 11/12 this year). Since 2001, Britain has been marking Holocaust Memorial Day on January 27 to coincide with the day Auschwitz was liberated. And in 2005, the UN General Assembly (without a formal vote) also selected January 27 as the day the world remembers the Holocaust.

In short, the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored industrial-scale annihilation of European Jewry by Hitler-led Germany is adequately memorialized.

YET THE ignorant are a hardy lot. A 2008 survey found that 13 percent of Canadians between 18 and 24 did not know what the Holocaust was. A similar percentage of British youngsters thought Hitler was the chap who discovered gravity. A survey conducted by the American Jewish Committee in 2005 revealed that most Americans did not know that Auschwitz, Dachau and Treblinka were concentration camps. Yet only 41% (and 35% of British respondents) strongly disagreed with the statement: “Jews are exploiting the memory of the Nazi extermination of the Jews for their own purposes.”

In Poland, only 13% disagreed strongly.

We can hazard to guess what the louts who this week desecrated Jewish gravestones at the main cemetery in Strasbourg, France believe.

BUT perhaps more troubling than ignorance, insensitivity or enduring prejudice is how some of the enlightened have redefined the Holocaust to give it a more universal – less parochial – meaning.

On the occasion of Holocaust Memorial Day, a leading British clergyman scripted a few perfunctory words about Elie Wiesel before moving on to the “many hundreds of thousands of … survivors of the many other genocidal events of the 20th and 21st centuries.” He also used the occasion to call for greater sensitivity toward asylum seekers. Our London correspondent, Jonny Paul, reported that the national Holocaust commemoration at the landmark Guildhall focused on remembering the Holocaust – as well as subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and the ongoing atrocities in Darfur.

On the matter of genocide, one-upmanship is both futile and morally repugnant. What matters to Zionists is that the Shoah be understood not as a universalistic metaphor, but as the culmination of long-centuries of murderous persecution under both Christian and Muslim civilizations. We do not want this manifest truth obscured by a whirlwind of sentiment – no matter how valid – that has nothing to do with the murder of our six million brethren.

AYATOLLAH Ali Khamenei’s message for Holocaust Memorial Day was to forecast that the day would definitely come when the national home of the Jewish people would be destroyed. Iran is the driving engine behind 21st century Holocaust-denial.

Of course, Israel’s legitimacy is not rooted in the Holocaust, but in the Jews’ ancient connection to the land of Israel. Still, such a chilling genocidal “forecast” reprises the January 30, 1939 “prophecy” Hitler made: that “a world war” would result in “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!”

Regrettably, the many Holocaust memorials, museums, books and movies have failed to ensure that the Shoah is correctly understood as the outcome of Jewish weakness and statelessness. Six million Jews would not have been lost had our people regained sovereignty in this land before Hitler came to power.

Yet having shed our powerlessness for sovereignty, this country nevertheless became “the Jew among nations.” Outside the realm of theology and metaphysics, we are frankly at a loss to understand why Jew-hatred and anti-Israelism continue to thrive.

This much we do know: Not even a superpower can guarantee, absolutely, the security of its citizenry. But when our prime minister declares that “Never Again” will we allow the hand of evil to sever the life of our people, he is warning: Doomed are those who try.

Iran & the bomb -- the predictions have been wrong for years

Crying wolf on Iran


Tel Aviv [is] orchestrating a campaign to portray Teheran as a regime hell-bent on starting a nuclear war in the volatile Middle East.

- Iran's Press TV, January 26, reporting that Russia and China continue to oppose sanctions



Only the mullahs know if Iran is "hell-bent" on starting a nuclear war. Jerusalem opposes Iran's quest for atomic weapons not only for what the regime might do, but because of what it is - religiously fanatical, violently autocratic and dangerously myopic.

Israelis worry about the rational decision-making capabilities of leaders imbued with apocalyptic visions; men who dementedly deny the destruction of six million Jews during the Shoah even as they cold-bloodedly promise to wipe the Jewish state off the map.

We take these threats at face value.

Israel opposes an Iranian bomb because from Lebanon and Gaza to Yemen and Afghanistan, Teheran is a destabilizing power. The mullahs have created a terror network that extends from the Middle East and Africa to South America. Nuclear weapons would make this belligerent clique even more dangerous, prodding Arab countries into seeking atomic weapons to counter Persian imperialism.

A REPORT in this week's Der Spiegel, evidently based on German intelligence sources, has ratcheted-up fears that Iran could "produce a primitive, truck-sized version of the bomb this year," and could deploy a nuclear warhead "sometime between 2012 and 2014."

These assessments were reportedly garnered by experts after analyzing a mysterious laptop smuggled out of Iran years ago; debriefings of Ali Reza Asgari, Iran's former deputy defense minister, who reportedly defected in 2007; and further debriefings of Shahram Amiri, an Iranian nuclear scientist, who may have defected during a pilgrimage to Mecca in June 2009. Der Spiegel also raised the possibility that Iran tested a detonating mechanism more than six years ago using non-nuclear materials.

Paradoxically, ongoing speculation about when Iran will go nuclear - often generated by leaks from parties whose agendas are not known - has done little to galvanize the international community toward blocking the mullahs.

In fact, the rampant speculation leaves an impression that intelligence agencies are clueless about Iran's true capabilities, while simultaneously implying that it's forever "too late" to stop Iran's inexorable lurch for the bomb.

THE Islamic Republic probably began pursuing a nuclear weapon in 1984 during its war with Iraq. By 1992, the CIA judged that Iran would have a bomb within eight years. In 1993, CIA director James Woolsey changed that to 8-10 years. In 1996, then-premier Shimon Peres said Iran would likely go nuclear in four years. The following year, MK Ephraim Sneh, who has strong ties to the defense establishment, reiterated that Israel had only a few years before time ran out on stopping a nuclear Iran.

In 2003, a Knesset committee was told Iran would have the materials needed to build a bomb by 2005. But in 2005, the Mossad forecast Iran would actually need a few more years. In 2006, IDF intelligence forecast Iran could go nuclear by 2010. Now there is credible speculation that Iran will soon be poised to put the finishing touches on a bomb but will stop just sort of manufacturing the actual devices.

The Doomsday Clock of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is now set at six minutes to midnight. Bizarrely, on January 14, the Bulletin adjusted its clock backwards, encouraged by what it said was the Obama administration's "pragmatic, problem-solving approach" toward Iran. We'd be surprised if the White House shared this rosy outlook.

Evidently, no one knows when "worse will come to worst" and the mullahs will declare they've got the bomb. Teheran's progress may have been delayed by clandestine intelligence operations. But where Iran is heading is disturbingly plain for all to see.

Yet with remarkable shortsightedness Russia and China are blocking UN sanctions. This leaves the US and principled European countries to go it alone. A moral minority could - for a start - block lines of credit to Iran's central bank and to banks that do business with it; target the corporate and personal assets of the Revolutionary Guard, and stop insuring tankers sailing to Iranian ports. And President Barack Obama could work more assiduously for regime change.

Iran is one of those cases where the wolf really is at the door... even if the boy cried prematurely.

THE CONNECTION BETWEEN ANTI-SEMITISM & ANTI-ISRAELISM

From Crete with hate

The Etz Hayim Synagogue on Crete was struck by arsonists on January 5 and again - more devastatingly- on January 16. Over the weekend, Greek police arrested four men described as bouncers and waiters for perpetrating the attacks, saying they were motivated by a dislike of Jews.

Attacks against Jews and Jewish institutions are up throughout Europe, attributable, say experts, to fury by extremist rightists, leftists and Muslims over last year's war against Hamas in Gaza.

As the Coordination Forum for Countering Anti-Semitism - which comprises Israeli government offices, the Jewish Agency and Diaspora organizations - reported, the uptick in attacks reflects a further blurring of boundaries between Israel, Zionism and Judaism.

The BBC's Malcolm Brabant cited Etz Hayim's director, listed elsewhere as Nikolas Stavroulakis, as saying the attackers had not done their homework: The synagogue is a multi-faith institution which includes Muslim and Christian members and "many of the Jews who worship there are opposed to Israel's settler program and frequent incursions into Gaza."

Stavroulakis has devoted himself to memorializing Jewish life on the island, which dates back to biblical days. Today about 10 Jews live there. Yet Stavroulakis's comments reveal a certain naiveté - as if dissociating from Israeli policies, or embracing non-Zionist, even anti-Zionist positions, would inoculate a Jewish person or institution against anti-Semitic battering.

WITH President Shimon Peres scheduled to address the German parliament Wednesday for International Holocaust Memorial Day, and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu concurrently in Poland to mark the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, this is a good time to consider the distinctions between those who revile Jews; those who oppose the right of Jews to self-determination by denying Jewish peoplehood; and those who oppose particular Israeli policies.

In the West, vulgar Jew-hatred and Holocaust-denial meet with strong censure in the public square. No reputable voices would condone attacks on synagogues or holding Jews to standards gentiles are not expected to meet.

On the other hand, urbane anti-Israelism is all-too often treated as justifiable - even chic. While some of Israel's foes in academia, diplomacy and the punditocracy put their cards on the table, others hypocritically hide behind abstract assertions of support for Israel's right to exist and to self-defense based on preposterously impractical criteria. Thus anti-Israelism flirts with anti-Semitism when the Jewish state is held to a yardstick no other country is expected to meet on the grounds that "after all, you call yourselves the 'chosen people.'"

No one questions whether right-wing louts who burn Jewish houses of worship, beat up people who "look Jewish" or desecrate Holocaust memorials are anti-Semites. But those who reject the right of the Jewish people to self-determination, or who deny that Jews are a people, engage in a more subtle form of contempt. That some practitioners of anti-Israelism are themselves of Jewish ancestry matters not a whit. Anti-Israelism is further characterized by calls to boycott the Jewish state (aping the Arab League-instigated embargo which began decades before the first West Bank settlement was erected) and by the cynical manipulation of symbols and semantics - such as "apartheid," "genocide," and "Nazi" - to delegitimize Israel.

In these endeavors, ostensibly progressives are the strange bedfellows of fanatics and reactionaries - Hamas, Hizbullah, Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood.

WHAT ABOUT those who simply object to particular Israeli policies?

The late US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said famously that he could not define "hard-core pornography" but "I know it when I see it."

Similarly, Israelis have a knack for distinguishing between genuine friends who earnestly oppose this or that policy, and others who profess closeness yet whose counsel, if heeded, would place the country in mortal jeopardy.

Israelis engage in strident debates over settlements, religion and socioeconomic issues. We hardly expect outsiders - whether Jewish or not - to unthinkingly embrace government policies as a sign of fidelity. To suggest otherwise is simply disingenuous.

FROM the first pogrom in 38 BCE to the liberation of Auschwitz, haters have as a rule been candid about their motivations. In the 21st century, however, anti-Israelism has given our foes a pretext to obfuscate their motives. But we Israelis see them for what they are - morally no better than the hooligans who set the Etz Haim Synagogue ablaze.

"Where was God" conundrum

{DEAR READERS -- I AM TAKING OFF A WEEK OR SO. PLEASE CHECK BACK JAN 25th...THANKS!)
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Making sense of Haiti


It's not all that often that the front pages of Israel's newspapers and the lead stories on the nightly news programs all devote themselves to a catastrophic event on the other side of the world. Sixty years-plus of conflict have narrowed the range of news ordinary Israelis tend to be drawn to.

When we do focus on troubles abroad, we invariably look for a parochial angle, in this case the fate of a number of missing Israelis in earthquake-devastated Haiti. That's human nature; every country is obsessing about the safety of its nationals caught up in the catastrophe.

Israel is rushing a field hospital, doctors and medical equipment to the stricken island and a team of experts to assess how else we can effectively help. American Jewry has sprung into action through the Jewish Federations of North America partnering with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee; the American Jewish World Service is also mobilizing.

Like many spiritual leaders, Rabbi Barry Cohen of Temple B'nai Israel in Oklahoma City is telling his congregants to give charity: "God instructed us not to stand by idly while our neighbor bleeds."

AS THE initial shock wears off and aid begins to arrive, people are reflecting more generally on the apparent randomness of the misfortune and asking why bad things happen to good people. In the instance of Haiti, the issue really becomes why bad things happen to those already mired in misery. In a country where half the population is illiterate and where per capita income is $3.60 a day.

"Every time Haiti takes one half-step forward, something like this happens. It's so unfair. Why does this happen to Haiti over and over again?" asked The Rev. Lauren Stanley, an Episcopal missionary.

One prominent fundamentalist pastor - even as he raised funds for disaster relief - had a ready answer for Stanley: The people of Haiti turned away from God and made a pact with devil and have been punished ever since.

Mainstream Jewish theology, in contrast, abjures trying to read God's mind. Rabbi Emanuel Feldman, former editor of Tradition magazine, cautions rabbis not to use their Shabbat sermons to offer glib theological "reasons" for why the Haiti disaster occurred - as if they have a direct line to the Almighty. God's actions, many Jewish thinkers would argue, are simply unfathomable to the limited human mind.

And yet we feel impelled to search on. From time immemorial, humans have tried to find spiritual meaning for personal loss and the tragic consequences of natural and man-made cataclysms. While some will say this quest is a prescription for banality, there is an unquenchable thirst for ideas that try to make sense of it all.

The top New York Times nonfiction bestseller this week is Have a Little Faith by Mitch Albom. Book dealers are also featuring The Case for God by Karen Armstrong, a former Catholic nun, and The Evolution of God, by Robert Wright, who makes the subtle argument that when people define God more by His compassionate - than other - attributes, humanity is drawn closer to some underlying truth about the divine.

Perhaps the most evocative popular treatment of the "Where was God" conundrum came in Paul Young's The Shack, a Christian novel about a father grieving over the murder of his daughter, who is granted the opportunity to challenge God (in the form of the Trinity). The book sold over 7 million copies in 2009.

FOR SOME, the process of probing why bad things happen is a salve in itself - a case of the journey being as important as the destination.

It's a process that's taken some Jews to mysticism. In the Kabbala we find the suggestion that bad things happen because God has pulled back from the world - tzimtzum - to make room for the finite. And in The Disappearance of God, Richard Elliott Friedman suggests that while God gradually vanishes in the narrative from Genesis to Second Chronicles, the intended endgame is a divine-human reunion.

Reflecting on such ideas can be consoling as we watch the horrible images coming from Haiti. Meanwhile, however, the survivors need tangible help repairing their broken world.