Shut Up About Ahmedinijad Already!

Yesterday was Holocaust Remembrance Day here in Israel. It seemed like current geopolitical threats were on the minds of Israel's leaders more than the genocide perpetrated by Nazis 65 years ago. I didn't listen to any of the speeches, but from the quotes I've read it seems like every single one of them mentioned Mahmoud Ahmedinijad, his Holocaust denial and the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons: President Shimon Peres, Prime Minister Netanyahu, Vice Prime Minister Sylvan Shalom and Knesset Speaker Rubi Rivlin are just a few examples.

My dear leaders, shut the fuck up! Yes, Ahmedinijad is a Holocaust denying, nuke-building son of a bitch who would like nothing more than to annihilate Israel. This is definitely a problem we have to deal with, but it shouldn't be exaggerated either. If you're whining hysterically in public, you're probably not really getting things done behind the scenes diplomatically.

Also, who the hell is Ahmedinijad to take over all of our discussions of the Holocaust? Sure, his speech at Durbin II on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day didn't help, but there are more important things to learn from the Holocaust, like how we should treat Holocaust survivors or the new survivors of the genocide in Darfur who now live in Israel as refugees.

How about asking ourselves whether "never again" only applies to Jews. The answer should be an unequivocal no. "Never again" should apply to all peoples and the genocides that have occurred before and after the Holocaust should also be addressed without minimizing the horrors of the Nazis, who ran the most efficient, meticulous, calculated and well-planned, as well as largest scale, genocide of all time. We should especially bring attention to the genocides taking place right now and the lack of international effort to stop them.


Maybe in August, around the 64th anniversaries of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, if Ahmedinijad is re-elected president of Iran and the Obama administration doesn't seem successful in thwarting Iran's nuclear ambitions, Israel's leaders will speak about this favorite subject of theirs again.

Hamas: Holocaust Planned By Jews

Hamas: Jews planned the Holocaust
By HAVIV RETTIG, The Jerusalem Post

Jewish leaders concocted the mass murder of handicapped Jews in order to keep from having to support them, and this murder is what the Jews term "the Holocaust," according to a documentary special that aired on April 18 on Hamas's Al Aqsa television station.

Palestinian Media Watch located and translated the contents of the footage, which it uploaded to YouTube under the headline "Hamas: Jews planned Holocaust."



According to the documentary's narrator, Israel's first prime minister David Ben Gurion decided that Jewish "disabled and handicapped are a burden to the state," after which "the Satanic Jews" - the film cuts to a picture of a hassidic Jew - "thought up an evil plot to be rid of the burden of disabled and handicapped" - the film then cuts to piles of emaciated corpses - "in twisted criminal ways."

"This is official Hamas TV," explained PMW director Itamar Marcus. "It's owned and totally controlled by the Hamas leadership in Gaza, and it goes out by satellite to the whole Arab-speaking world."

The program dealt primarily with the Holocaust, but included comparisons to the Palestinian situation, calling the massacres in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps a "holocaust" and blaming Israel for a "Palestinian holocaust."

"They [the Jews] were the first to invent the methods of evil and oppression," explains the documentary's narrator, cutting to scenes of Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan and Ben Gurion. The film claimed Jewish leaders blamed the Nazis for their own massacre of Jews "so the Jews would seem persecuted and try to benefit from international sympathy."

The film offers an "expert" - Amin Dabur, head of the "Center for Strategic Research" - who explains that "the Israeli Holocaust, the whole thing was a joke and part of the perfect show that Ben Gurion put on."

There is some tension in the film between blaming the Jews for the massacre of Jews, and denying the massacre took place. According to Dabur, Ben Gurion was interested in sending "strong and energetic youth [for Israel], while all the rest - the disabled, the handicapped, and people with special needs, they were sent [to die] - if it can be proven historically" - a reference to a claim heard often on Hamas television, from Iranian leaders and elsewhere in the Muslim world that the Holocaust has yet to be proven historically.

Continues Dabur: "They were sent [by the Jews to die] so there would be a Holocaust, so Israel could 'play' it for world sympathy."