Wednesday, October 11, 2006
Leftists for a Second Holocaust, by Paul Bogdanor
http://www.jewishpress.com/page.do/19634/Leftists_For_A_Second_Holocaust.html
Leftists For A Second Holocaust
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By: Paul Bogdanor Wednesday, October 11, 2006
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"Before Israel dies, it must be humiliated and degraded. Allah willing,
before they die, they will experience humiliation and degradation every
day... Allah willing, we will make them lose their eyesight, we will make
them lose their brains."
. Khaled Mashal, Hamas leader
"The vote for Hamas was actually a vote for peace."
. John Pilger, left-wing journalist and filmmaker
It would be difficult to imagine a clearer expression of genocidal hatred
than the ideology of today.s jihadist armies. What is even harder to
accept is that these bloodthirsty killers, with their graphic incitement
to the massacre of millions of Jews, are admired and defended by legions
of intellectuals, journalists, agitators and demonstrators on the
anti-Zionist Left.
All sane observers understand that the official program of Hamas, if
implemented, would result in an epoch-making bloodbath. One broadcast by
Hamas activists announced: "My message to the loathed Jews is that there
is no god but Allah, we will chase you everywhere! We are a nation that
drinks blood, and we know that there is no blood better than the blood of
Jews."
But in the organs of the Israel-hating Left, we read that the Hamas
election victory is "the best news from the Middle East for a long time"
(The Guardian).We read that it is time "to reinforce Hamas resistance [to
Zionist ideology]" and its "ethical cry to the world" (CounterPunch).
The goal of "reinforcing Hamas resistance" is quite widely shared in the
anti-Zionist camp. Left-wing American activists in the International
Solidarity Movement openly admit to collaborating with Hamas and Islamic
Jihad. In the Israeli communist journal News From Within, Jennifer
Loewenstein, who is currently ensconced in Oxford University, urges that
"Hamas, its allies and solidarity activists abroad genuinely attempt to
make a difference." Editor Michel Warschawski anticipates that the Hamas
regime will bring about "Palestinian unity in fighting the Occupation.. It
may provide new hopes and new confidence."
As these writers know very well, the "resistance" that is to be
"reinforced" entails the calculated murder of small children, pregnant
women, the elderly and the disabled; the bombing of buses, cafes and
restaurants; and occasional attempts to demolish whole skyscrapers.
Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah.s Hizbullah is another jihadist faction much
admired by today.s left-wing anti-Zionists. Claiming responsibility for
massacres of Jewish civilians as far afield as South America, a Hizbullah
statement pledged "an open war until the elimination of Israel and until
the death of the last Jew on earth."
Yet Norman Finkelstein . author of The Holocaust Industry and other
classics in the field of Jewish anti-Semitism . can hardly find the words
to express his enthusiasm. "I truly honor [Hizbullah] for having inflicted
an exceptional and deserving defeat on their foreign occupiers," he once
exclaimed. "It.s another wonderful chapter in the long and painful
struggle for human emancipation and even liberty and certainly one that
every human being can take inspiration from."
During the recent war, Finkelstein echoed the sentiments of countless
leftists who marched to the slogan: "We are all Hizbullah."
In his visit to Lebanon earlier this year, Noam Chomsky justified
Hizbullah.s military arsenal as a "deterrent to potential aggression."
Lebanese commentators were quick to express their disgust, warning that
failure to disarm Hizbullah would lead to war . a prophesy that was
fulfilled shortly afterward.
Was it in spite of this prospect, or because of it, that Chomsky allowed
himself to be filmed greeting the terrorist commanders as long-lost
friends? Could any parodist capture the scene of the taxpayer-financed
American Jewish professor advising these murderers of Americans and Jews
that instead of surrendering their weapons they should "inform the public
and get them to understand your position" so that "they will put pressure
on the politicians" to capitulate?
Writing in the London Review of Books, Charles Glass was impressed by
Hizbullah.s ability to use rockets and suicide bombers "intelligently, in
conjunction with an uncompromising political programme." Critics promptly
drew his attention to the words of Sheikh Nasrallah: "If they [Jews] all
gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them
worldwide."
Such statements, replied Glass, "are in all likelihood fabrications."
Surely the "intelligent" masterminds of rocket barrages and suicide
bombings could not possibly embrace such an "uncompromising political
programme." After all, the editors of the Lebanese Daily Starwere anxious
to distance themselves from the journalist who had originally recorded
Nasrallah.s outburst.
If true, that would be a shocking indictment of their own professional
standards, given that in the space of a year they had published no fewer
than 170 reports by the employee whose veracity they supposedly did not
trust. But Glass would no more share this consideration with his readers
than he would mention the anti-Semitic bloodlust of Al-Manar, or the
Shiite scholar Amal Saad-Ghorayeb.s carefully documented conclusion that
for Hizbullah, "the Israeli Jew becomes a legitimate target for
extermination. And it also legitimizes attacks on non-Israeli Jews."
Even so, Charles Glass can hardly compete with his more flamboyant radical
colleagues in his enthusiasm for terrorists and suicide bombers. For the
widely read columnist and documentary maker John Pilger . who ascribes
Britain.s Middle East policy to the nefarious machinations of a single
Jewish businessman . Hizbullah embodies "resistance to rapacious
power.humanity at its noblest."
For the political firebrand George Galloway, Hizbullah terrorists are
"martyrs and heroes," while Sheikh Nasrallah.s "name rings in joy around
the world." The sickening list of leftist apologists for Nazi-style
Jew-haters seems almost endless.
While the jihadists of Hamas and Hizbullah dream of a second Holocaust,
the ayatollahs of Iran are pursuing the means to achieve it.
Representative of the "moderates" in the Iranian regime is former
president Rafsanjani, who predicts that "the use of a nuclear bomb in
Israel will leave nothing on the ground, whereas it will only damage the
world of Islam." The "extremists," as everyone knows, take their cue from
President Ahmadinejad, with his assurance that "the Zionist regime is
headed toward annihilation."
But few tyrants are so depraved that radical leftists will not leap to
their defense. Virginia Tilley, academic proponent of the "one-state
solution" to the "problem" of Israel.s continued existence, believes that
Ahmadinejad.s words promise the sort of "profound political change" that
is "necessary to creating a just peace."
Doubtless relying on her professional knowledge of Iranian dialects, she
maintains that Ahmadinejad.s threat to "wipe Israel off the map" is
correctly translated as a hope that the Zionist regime will "vanish from
the page of time" . the "just peace" of her imagination. She also contends
that Ahmadinejad is not really a Holocaust denier, given that "skepticism"
about the "Holocaust narrative" arises quite naturally if the "narrative"
is used in support of Israel.
Noam Chomsky offers further insights. In his mental universe, "Israel and
the United States are both threatening Iran with destruction [emphasis
added]." The ayatollahs would be "crazy" if they did not develop nuclear
weapons to counter the military threat from the West.
The British communist intellectual Alex Callinicos is also certain of the
correct ideological approach: "If Bush attacks Iran tomorrow, which side
are you on?" he asks. "I would be on Iran.s but . as Lenin put it . I
would refuse to paint Ahmadinejad in communist colours; in other words, I
would be for an Iranian victory despite his anti-Semitic rantings."
Perhaps, in the annals of political lunacy, historians will eventually
discover a 1930.s leftist who was insisting on the duty of all
revolutionaries to side with the Nazi regime, while cautioning that Hitler
was not a communist and that a Nazi victory would be desirable in spite of
his policies toward the Jews, not because of them.
If it seems that these are the isolated opinions of a few individuals,
albeit figures of some prominence, it is worth pointing out that Britain.s
Stop the War Coalition has informed Iranian refugees that they will not be
allowed to speak since the movement "cannot allow any statement against
the Islamic regime in Iran from the platform."
Although left-wing extremists refuse to tolerate Iranian critics of the
Iranian regime, respectable universities are quite happy to offer a
platform for meetings organized by the most bigoted spokesmen of that very
regime. In July I had the memorable experience of attending such a
conference at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.
The event had two main sponsors. The first was the Islamic Human Rights
Commission, described by journalist Melanie Phillips as "the most
conspicuous promoter of Khomeini jihadism in the UK." Its advisory board
includes the likes of Mohammed al-Massari, a Saudi exile with Al Qaeda
sympathies whose website implores Allah "grant his mujaheddin victory"
over "the Jews, the Americans and the apostates."
The second sponsor was the NEDA Institute, an Iranian body whose main
function seems to be the dissemination of "research" that denies the
Holocaust.
The theme of the conference was the need to do away with Zionism. A
newsletter distributed at the entrance applauded Ayatollah Khomeini.s
"arguments" for the destruction of Israel. Speakers included three
Marxist-Leninist writers (Uri Davis, Michel Warschawski and John Rose) and
a notorious left-wing American Jew (Jeffrey Blankfort). Apparently they
were only too happy to offer their intellectual services to the advocates
of a second Holocaust.
It must be stressed that the genocidal fanaticism of Hamas and Hizbullah
and their Iranian sponsors differs in no significant respect from that of
Al Qaeda. In the words of bin Laden: "We are sure of our victory against
the Americans and the Jews as promised by the Prophet: Judgment day shall
not come until the Muslim fights the Jew, where the Jew will hide behind
trees and stones, and the tree and the stone will speak and say, .Muslim,
behind me is a Jew. Come and kill him.. "
What is truly incredible is that some radical leftists are so consumed
with hatred that they are prepared to make excuses for these mass
murderers as well. Only three months after the 9/11 massacres,
CounterPunch published a revealing interview with Norman Finkelstein:
"It.s payback time for the Americans," he gloated, adding that "we deserve
the problem on our hands because some things bin Laden says are true."
Finkelstein kept a studied silence about the implication of these thoughts
for his fellow Jews.
Another line of argument was suggested by Noam Chomsky: "It.s entirely
possible," he hypothesized, "that bin Laden.s telling the truth when he
says that he didn.t know about the [9/11] operation," and in any case bin
Laden was "courageously fighting oppressors, who are quite real," although
regrettably his crimes were "extremely harmful" to the Palestinian cause.
Not content with these observations, Chomsky traveled to Pakistan, where
he hastened to assist Al Qaeda.s recruitment efforts by informing his
audiences that the Bush administration was planning to impose mass
starvation on neighboring Afghanistan.
The gold standard in collaboration with genocidal anti-Semites was
undoubtedly set by the radical lawyer Lynne Stewart, convicted last year
of providing material support for the terrorism of Sheikh Omar Abdul
Rahman. The so-called "Blind Sheikh" was linked to the jihadist cell that
tried to massacre 250,000 people in the 1993 World Trade Center attack.
The bombers expected that most of the victims would be Jews.
Stewart.s actions on behalf of her imprisoned client included refusing to
disclaim a fatwa inciting Muslims "to fight the Jews and to kill them
wherever they are."
It is of no small significance that Stewart is acclaimed as a martyr by
her comrades at the National Lawyers Guild and the Center for
Constitutional Rights, not to mention far-left media such as Z Magazine,
CounterPunch and Democracy Now.
In Britain, where I live, the anti-Zionist Left has broken all records in
its promotion of Jew-killers. So deep is the malaise that a major national
newspaper, The Guardian, has seen fit to open its opinion pages to the
jihadists and their admirers. One fanatic (Faisal Bodi) managed to insert
a series of columns proclaiming that "Israel simply has no right to exist"
and that "martyr-bombers" are "heroes defending the things we hold
sacred."
Other op-ed contributors have included a well-known Hamas ideologue,
official leaders of Hamas, and a member of Hizbullah.s executive
committee. Neither these outrages nor The Guardian.s countless libels of
Israel and "Zionist" Jews have evoked the slightest dissent from its
politically correct readership.
The British Left.s infatuation with jihadists has even produced a new
political party. In 2004, the country.s leading Marxist-Leninist and
Islamic extremist groups announced the formation of RESPECT: The Unity
Coalition, which now functions as a national megaphone for anti-Semites,
Holocaust deniers and would-be destroyers of Israel.
But is this development any more surprising than the public political
romance between Ken Livingstone, the leftist mayor of London, and Sheikh
Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Middle East hatemonger who demands the mass
slaughter of Jews? Or the insistence of the world-famous journalist Robert
Fisk that the Bush administration is controlled by "the Perles and the
Wolfowitzes and the Cohens," and that "I.m amazed that Muslims have been
so restrained"?
The enthusiasm of today.s radical leftists for the genocidal anti-Semites
of the far right is not without precedent. The opening of communist
archives revealed that for decades the Soviet bloc had tried to
destabilize West Germany by financing neo-Nazi violence. To embarrass its
rivals on the other side of the Berlin Wall, the Stasi created movements
such as the "Veterans of the Waffen-SS" and financed a campaign by the
"German Imperial Party" to "justify the need for exterminating the Jews."
These examples can be multiplied. It is tempting to conclude, with
Ecclesiastes, that there is nothing new under the sun.
There is, however, an important difference. Yesterday.s communists
sponsored Nazis in the hope of discrediting their enemies. Today.s
ultra-leftists think that their alliance with Nazis brings credit to
themselves.
Paul Bogdanor is co-editor, with Edward Alexander, of The Jewish Divide
Over Israel: Accusers and Defenders (Transaction, 2006). For more
information about the role of radical leftists in promoting terrorism and
mass murder, visit www.paulbogdanor.com/left.html.
2. Who says Olmert is sitting on his butt and doing nothing about our
hostages?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/10/10/wisrael10.xml
