Hamas offers 10 year truce

DAMASCUS, Syria - The leader of Hamas said Monday that his Palestinian militant group would offer Israel a 10-year “hudna,” or truce, as implicit proof of recognition of Israel if it withdrew from all lands it seized in the 1967 Middle East War.

Khaled Mashaal told The Associated Press that he made the offer to former U.S. President Jimmy Carter in talks on Saturday. “We have offered a truce if Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders, a truce of 10 years as a proof of recognition,” Mashaal said.

In his comments Monday, Mashaal used the Arabic word “hudna,” meaning truce, which is more concrete than “tahdiya” — a period of calm — which Hamas often uses to describe a simple cease-fire.

“Hudna” implies a recognition of the other party’s existence.

Mashaal said Hamas would accept a Palestinian state limited to the lands Israel seized in 1967 — that is, the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem. But he said the group would never outright formally recognize Israel.

Carter comments
Earlier, Carter said that Hamas is prepared to accept the right of Israel to “live as a neighbor next door in peace.”

Carter said the group promised it wouldn’t undermine Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ efforts to reach a peace deal with Israel, as long as the Palestinian people approved it in a referendum.

In the past, Hamas officials have said they would establish a “peace in stages” if Israel were to withdraw to the borders it held before 1967. But it has been evasive about how it sees the final borders of a Palestinian state and has not abandoned its official call for Israel’s destruction.

There was no immediate reaction from Israel to Hamas’ truce offer.

Israel, which evacuated Gaza in 2005, has accepted the idea of a Palestinian state there and in much of the West Bank. But it has resisted Palestinian demands that it return to its 1967 frontiers.

In Washington, the State Department dismissed Carter’s assessment of his meetings, saying there was no indication Hamas wanted peace with Israel.

“What is clear to us is that there certainly is no change in Hamas’ position,” said deputy spokesman Tom Casey. “It does not recognize Israel’s right to exist, it has not eschewed or walked away from terrorism and violence, nor has it said it will honor any of the previous agreements that have been made with the Israeli government.”

Carter’s comments came after his much criticized meetings with the top Hamas leaders in Syria in last week.

Over the weekend, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said he decided not to meet with Carter in Israel because he does not wish to be seen as participating in any negotiations with Hamas.

Carter also urged Israel to engage in direct negotiations with the Islamic militant group, saying it was a “problem” that Israel and the United States refuse to meet with Hamas. Both governments consider it a terrorist organization.

‘Problem’ with Israel, U.S., Carter says
“The problem is not that I met with Hamas in Syria,” he said. “The problem is that Israel and the United States refuse to meet with someone who must be involved.”

“There’s no doubt that both the Arab world and Hamas will accept Israel’s right to exist in peace within 1967 borders,” he said.

In his comments Monday, Carter said Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking has “regressed” since a U.S.-hosted Mideast conference in Annapolis, Md., in November.

 

Israel has been negotiating directly with Abbas, who heads a moderate government based in the West Bank. Abbas lost control of the Gaza Strip last June, when Hamas violently seized control of that territory.

Carter said Hamas has promised to let a captured Israeli soldier send a letter to his parents, and said the militants “made clear to us that they would accept an interim cease-fire in the Gaza Strip.”

Clash of civilizations or simply democracy failing

In Hebrew

In English

In Arabic

When you actually speak to the people you find out what they truly want, its not what the media feeds you or what some blogger writes about, it is the people. So when you hear that a majority of Israeli’s want to have meetings with Hamas and a majority of Palestinians want to meet with the Israeli’s one would think that this would make the news, even influence their leadership.

When you read blogs from either side of the spectrum you feel as though peace is not achievable, these are the extremes. They represent the same fundamentalism that first brought on the world’s problems and do nothing to change it.

How can we as a nation advocate the spread of democracy in other countries when our own elected officials publicly declare that public polls mean nothing to them.

Gilad Atzmon - Freedom of Speech: the right to equate Gaza with Auschwitz

(A talk given on the First of March 2008 at Invitation to Learn’s weekend retreat) At the left, “Innocent” by Ben Heine

“They (the Palestinians) will bring upon themselves a bigger holocaust because we will use all our might to defend ourselves” (Matan Vilnai, Israeli Deputy Defence Minister, 29 February 2008)

It is clear beyond any doubt that the Israeli Deputy Defence Minister was far from being reluctant to equate Israel with Nazi Germany when revealing the genocidal future awaiting the Palestinian people, yet, for some reason, this is precisely what Western media outlets refrain from doing. In spite of the facts that are right in front of our eyes, in spite of the starvation in Gaza, in spite of an Israeli official admitting genocidal inclinations against the Palestinians, in spite of the mounting carnage and death, we are still afraid to admit that Gaza is a concentration camp and it is on the verge of becoming a deadly one. For some peculiar reason, many of us have yet to accept that as far as evil is concerned, Israel is the world champion in mercilessness and vengeance.

Liberty and Authority

In his invaluable text On Liberty, John Stuart Mill argued that struggle always takes place between the competing demands of liberty and authority. In other words, freedom and hegemony are set to battle each other. However, Western egalitarian liberal ideology is there to introduce a political alternative. It is there to nourish the myth that ‘authority’ and ‘freedom’ could be seen as two sides of the same coin.

Today, I will try to elaborate on the structural dynamic of liberal discourse and the different elements that are involved in maintaining the false image of ‘freedom’, ‘freedom of speech’ and ‘freedom of thought’. I will try to argue that it is our alleged ‘freedom’ that actually stops us from thinking freely and ethically. As you may notice I said ‘false image of freedom’ because I am totally convinced that, as far as Liberal discourse is concerned, freedom is nothing more than a mere image. In practice, there is no such a thing. The image of ‘freedom’ is there to fuel and maintain our righteous self-loving discourse so we can keep sending our soldiers to kill millions in the name of ‘democracy’.

Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Thought

I would like to introduce this with an elaboration of the distinction between ‘freedom of speech’ and ‘freedom of thought’.

Freedom of speech can be realised as one’s liberty to expresses one’s own thoughts.

Bearing in mind that humans are expressive creatures, there is no easy policing method to guarantee the silencing of the dissident voice. Since speaking is inherent to human nature, any exercise of litigation to do with the curtailing of such an elementary right is rather complicated: You ban one’s books? One would then spread leaflets in the streets. You confiscate one’s flyers? One would then agitate over the net. You cut one’s power, confiscate one’s computer? One may start to shout one’s head off. You chop off one’s tongue? One would then nod in approval when others are repeating one’s manifesto. You are then left with no other option but chopping one’s head off, but even then, all you do is make one into a martyr.

Two available methods are used by liberals to silence the dissident:

a. prohibition (financial penalty and imprisonment);

b. social exclusion.

However, it is crucial to mention that within the so-called liberal discourse, any attempt to ban an idea or a dissident voice is counter-effective, if anything it reflects badly on the liberal authority and the system. This is why liberals try to facilitate some rather sophisticated methods of censorship and thought policing that would involve very little authoritarian intervention. As we will see soon, in liberal society, censorship and thought policing is mostly self-imposed.

As much as it is difficult to curtail freedom of speech, suppressing freedom of thought is almost impossible.

Freedom of thought could be realised as the liberty to think, to feel, to dream, to remember, to forget, to forgive, to love and to hate.

As difficult as it may be to impose thought on others, it is almost unfeasible to stop people from seeing the truth for themselves. Yet, there are some methods to suppress and restrain intuitive thinking and ethical insight. I am obviously referring here to guilt.

Guilt, inflicted mostly via a set of axioms conveyed as ‘political correctness’, is the most effective method to keep society or any given discourse in a state of ‘self-policing’. It turns the so-called autonomous liberal subject into a subservient, self-moderated, obedient citizen. Yet, the authority is spared from making any intervention. It is the liberal subject who curtails oneself from accepting a set of fixed ideas that support the egalitarian image of freedom and ecumenical society.

However, at this point I see the necessity to suggest that in spite of the liberal claim for peace seeking, liberal societies in general and the Anglo-American ones in particular are currently involved in crimes against humanity on a genocidal scale. Consequently, the more horrid the West is becoming, the greater is the gap between ‘freedom of thought’ and ‘freedom of speech’.

This gap can easily evolve into a cognitive dissonance that in many cases mature into some severe form of apathy. It is said that ‘all it takes for evil to flourish is for good people to do nothing’. This summarizes perfectly well the apathetic negligence of the Western masses. Not many care much about the genocide in Iraq that is committed in our name or the mass murder in Palestine that is committed with the support of our governments. Why are we apathetic? Because when we want to stand up and say what we feel, when we want to celebrate our alleged freedom and to equate Gaza with Auschwitz, or Baghdad with Dresden, something inside us stops us from doing so. It is not the Government, legislation or any other form of authority, it is rather a small and highly effective self-inflicted ‘guilt microchip’ acting as policing regulator in the name of ‘political correctness’.

I will now try to follow the historical and philosophical evolution that leads us from the liberal-egalitarian-utopia to the current ethical and intellectual self-castration disaster.

The Harm Principle

John Stuart Mill, the founder of modern liberal thinking, tells us that any doctrine should be allowed the light of day no matter how immoral it may seem to everyone else. This is obviously the ultimate expression of liberal thinking. It ascribes absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects, practical or speculative, scientific, ethical, political, religious or theological.

Though Mill endorsed the fullest form of liberty of expression, he suggested a limitation attached to freedom set by the prevention of ‘harm to others’. It is obviously very difficult to defend freedom of speech once it leads to the invasion of the rights of others. The question to ask is therefore, “what types of speech may cause harm?” Mill distinguishes between legitimate and illegitimate harm. According to Mill, only when speech causes a direct and clear violation of rights, can it be limited. But then, what kind of speech may cause such violation?

Feminists, for instance, have been maintaining that pornography degrades, endangers, and harms the lives of women. Another difficult case is hate speech. Most European liberal democracies have limitations on hate speech. Yet, it is debatable whether a ban of pornography or hate speech can be supported by the harm principle as articulated by Mill. One would obviously have to prove that such speech or imagery violates rights, directly and in the first instance.

Consequently, Mill’s harm principle is criticised for being too narrow as well as too broad. It is too narrow for failing to defend the right of the marginal. It is too broad because when interpreted extensively, it may lead to a potential abolishment of almost every political, religious or socially orientated speech.

The Offence Principle and Free Speech

Bearing in mind the shortcomings of the ‘harm principle’, it didn’t take long before an ‘offence principle’ had been called into play. The offence principle can be articulated as follows:

‘One’s freedom of expression should not be interfered with unless it causes an offence to others.’

The basic reasoning behind the ‘offence principle’ is trivial. It is there to defend the rights of the marginal and the weak. It is there to amend the hole created by the far-too-broad harm principle.

The offence principle is obviously pretty effective in curtailing pornography and hate speech. As in the case of violent pornography, strictly speaking, the offence that is caused by a Nazi march through a Jewish neighbourhood cannot be avoided and must be addressed.

However, the offence principle can be criticized for setting the bar far too low. Theoretically speaking, everyone can be ‘offended’ by anything.

The Jewish Lobbies and the Liberal Discourse

There is no doubt that the vast utilization of the offence principle ascribes a lot of political power to some marginal lobbies in general and Jewish lobbies in particular. Counting on the premise of the ‘offence principle’, Jewish nationalist ethnic activists claim to be offended by any form of criticism of the Jewish state and Zionism. But in fact it goes further, in practice it isn’t just criticism of Zionism and Israel which we are asked to avoid. Jewish leftists insist that we must avoid any discussion having to do with the Jewish national project, Jewish identity and even Jewish history. In short, with the vast support of the offence principle, Jewish ethnic leaders both on the left and right have succeeded in demolishing the possibility of any criticism of Jewish identity and politics. Employing the offence principle, Jewish lobbies right, left and centre, have managed to practically silence any possible criticism of Israel and its crimes against the Palestinians. More worryingly, Jewish leftist political activists and intellectuals outrageously demand to avoid any criticism of the Jewish Lobby in the USA and in Britain.

As we can see, the ‘offence Principle’ regulates and even serves some notorious Zionist as well as Jewish leftist political lobbies at the heart of the so-called liberal democratic West. In practice we are terrorized into submission by a group of gatekeepers who limit our freedom via an elastic dynamic operator that is there to suppress our thoughts before they mature into an ethical insight. Manipulation set by political correctness is the nourishing ground of our shattering cognitive dissonance. This is exactly where freedom of expression doesn’t agree with freedom of the thought.

Auschwitz Versus Gaza in the light of Political Correctness

We tend to agree that marginal discourses should be protected by the offence principle, so the marginal subject maintains his unique voice. We obviously agree also that such an approach must be applicable to the manifold of Jewish marginal discourses (religious, nationalist, Trotskyite, etc.). Seemingly, Jewish political lobbies want far more than just that, they insist upon delegitmising any intellectual reference to current Jewish political lobbying and global Zionism. As if this is not enough, any reference to modern Jewish history is prohibited unless kosherly approved by a ‘Zionist’ authority. As bizarre as it may be, the Jewish Holocaust has now been intellectually set as a meta-historical event. It is an event in the past that won’t allow any historical, ideological, theological or sociological scrutiny.
Bearing in mind the offence principle, Jews are entitled to argue that any form of speculation regarding their past suffering is “offensive and hurtful”. Yet, one may demand some explanations. How is it that historical research that may lead to some different visions of past events that occurred six and a half decades ago offends those who live amongst us today? Clearly, it is not an easy task to suggest a rational answer to such a query.

Plainly, historical research shouldn’t cause harm or an offence to the contemporary Jew or any other human subject around. Unless of course, the Holocaust itself is utilized against the Palestinians or those who are accused as being the ‘enemies of Israel’. As we learn from Matan Vilnai recently, the Jewish State wouldn’t refrain from bringing a Shoah on the Palestinian people. The Israelis and their supporters do not stop themselves from putting the holocaust into rhetorical usage. Yet, the Jewish lobbies around the world would do their very best to stop the rest of us from grasping what Shoah may mean. They would use their ultimate powers to stop us from utilizing the holocaust as a critical tool of Israeli barbarism.

As one may predict by now, in order to censor historical research into Jewish history and a further understanding of current Israeli evil, political correctness is called into play. Political correctness is there to stop us from seeing and expressing the obvious. Political correctness is there to stop us realising that truth and historical truth in particular is an elastic notion. Yet, you may wonder what exactly political correctness is.

Political correctness, for those who failed to understand it, is basically a political stand that doesn’t allow political criticism. Political correctness is a stand that cannot be fully justified in rational, philosophical or political terms. It is implanted as a set of axioms at the heart of the liberal discourse. It operates as a self -imposed silencing regulator powered by self-inflicted guilt.

Political correctness is in fact the crudest assault on freedom of speech, freedom of thought and human liberty, yet, manipulatively, it conveys itself as the ultimate embodiment of freedom.

Hence, I would argue as forcefully as I can that political correctness is the bitterest enemy of human liberty and those who regulate those social axioms and plant them in our discourse are the gravest enemies of humanity.

I would argue as forcefully as I can that since the Palestinians are facing Nazi-like State terrorism, the holocaust narrative and its meaning belongs to them at least as much as it belongs to the Jews or anyone else.

I would argue as forcefully as I can that if the Palestinians are indeed the last victims of Hitler, then the holocaust and its meaning do belong to them more than anyone else.

Bearing all that in mind, equating Gaza with Auschwitz is the right and only way forwards. Questioning the holocaust and its meaning is what liberation of humanity means today and in the near future.

PeacePalestine

Palestinian Ambassador to US speaks at Cornell

 

Afif Safieh, the Palestinian ambassador to the United States, spoke Wednesday night at Cornell University about the need for the U.S. to have a stronger diplomatic presence in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.Half a world away, peace talks were collapsing this week after retaliatory Israeli rocket attacks killed more than 100 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

“We would be your consenting victims if America decided to wage peace on us,” he joked, in a speech that mixed humor with serious pleas for increased efforts by America to resolve the ongoing Middle Eastern conflict once and for all.

Safieh was introduced by Cornell University President David Skorton, who described him as a “frank and engaging advocate of Palestinian points of view.”

“He has long been known as one of the most eloquent spokespersons for the Palestinian peoples,” Skorton said. “He has condemned terrorism and sought common ground with Jewish organizations.”

Safieh spoke extensively about his own experience with the conflict; why his political party, Fatah, failed to control the Gaza Strip; and the need for Israel to stop encroaching on his society’s rightful territory.

The ambassador described himself as a proponent of “popular, non-violent resistance,” and called it the only way to both neutralize the Israeli military and mobilize the Palestinian population. But he also condemned the United States for failing to intervene in a meaningful way.

“Americans need to make decisive diplomacy,” he said. “The superpower of the world deals with Israel with all the political power of Liechtenstein.”

President Bush has said he would like to have a peace plan in place before he leaves office in January 2009, but the collapse of talks this week have set back U.S. diplomatic efforts.

Safieh, a Christian born in Jerusalem in 1950, was educated in Paris and served in various roles with the Palestine Liberation Organization until 1990, when he was appointed as the official delegate to the United Kingdom, and then in 1995 to the Vatican.

In October 2005 he was appointed to serve as a representative of the PLO to the United States in Washington.

During his talk, held at Cornell’s Statler Auditorium, Safieh criticized the terrorist attacks of Hamas, the controlling party in Gaza, but said that Israeli actions on the ground were also responsible for the lack of a lasting peace.

“I believe it is the Israelis’ priority to acquire as much of our geography as possible, with as little of our demography as possible,” he said.

He said that although many Palestinians, including himself, are in favor of a two-state solution, Hamas’ refusal to negotiate “has created a three-state solution” between Israel and the two Palestinian territories, Gaza Strip and the West Bank, controlled by different political parties — Hamas and his party, Fatah, respectively.

Safieh also spoke at length about the economic effect the Israeli occupation has had on his society. He bemoaned the decline of higher education in his society, and described how the 600 military checkpoints surrounding the Gaza Strip resulted in a loss of more than eight million work hours each day.

“After 60 years of diaspora and 40 years of military occupation, the checkpoints are plunging our society into economic decline,” he said.

Several times during his speech, Safieh compared the plight of the Palestinian people to that of the Jewish people after World War II and the Holocaust.

“We have become the Jews of the Israelis,” he said, “and I believe the two-state solution is the way out.”

At the conclusion of his brief talk, Safieh and Skorton opened up the floor to more than a half-hour of questioning.

Safieh avoided a question related to his own party’s relevance in Palestinian society, chastised a student questioner for focusing on Israeli casualties in the face of overwhelming Palestinian dead, and said he thought certain Israeli officials should be tried for war crimes. He also rebuked a claim by a student that Palestinian textbooks advocated hate. At all times, though, the dialogue remained relatively civil.

After the talk, Nora Cohen, a Jewish resident of Ithaca who was born in Egypt, said she thought Safieh should not focus so much on international intervention.

“I wish that some of the Arab countries could get together to make peace,” she said. “The U.S. cannot make peace. I do not think that we should get involved, but I know peace can be made.”

Srikant Iyer, a graduate student from India studying at Cornell, said being involved in a dialogue with Safieh about the conflict was like being physically involved with history.

“There are a lot of human atrocities going on there,” he said, “and I think Israel, which seems to be the major force, need to recognize that human beings matter a lot more than personal investments.”

White Man’s Burden and Manifest Destiny

Vanity Fair has a lovely article explaining that Dubya and (his favorite Uncle Tom) Condi Rice were responsible to Hamas taking over Gaza. The Bush administration has been waging a dirty war. The United States has been attempting to create a Palestinian civil war and its backfiring.

Vanity Fair has obtained confidential documents, since corroborated by sources in the U.S. and Palestine, which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by Dahlan, and armed with new weapons supplied at America’s behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power

But the secret plan backfired, resulting in a further setback for American foreign policy under Bush. Instead of driving its enemies out of power, the U.S.-backed Fatah fighters inadvertently provoked Hamas to seize total control of Gaza

Some sources call the scheme “Iran-contra 2.0,” recalling that Abrams was convicted (and later pardoned) for withholding information from Congress during the original Iran-contra scandal under President Reagan. There are echoes of other past misadventures as well: the C.I.A.’s 1953 ouster of an elected prime minister in Iran, which set the stage for the 1979 Islamic revolution there; the aborted 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, which gave Fidel Castro an excuse to solidify his hold on Cuba; and the contemporary tragedy in Iraq.

Arafat died in November 2004, and Abbas, his replacement as Fatah leader, was elected president in January 2005. Elections for the Palestinian parliament, known officially as the Legislative Council, were originally set for July 2005, but later postponed by Abbas until January 2006.

Dahlan says he warned his friends in the Bush administration that Fatah still wasn’t ready for elections in January. Decades of self-preservationist rule by Arafat had turned the party into a symbol of corruption and inefficiency—a perception Hamas found it easy to exploit. Splits within Fatah weakened its position further: in many places, a single Hamas candidate ran against several from Fatah.

“Everyone was against the elections,” Dahlan says. Everyone except Bush. “Bush decided, ‘I need an election. I want elections in the Palestinian Authority.’ Everyone is following him in the American administration, and everyone is nagging Abbas, telling him, ‘The president wants elections.’ Fine. For what purpose?”

The elections went forward as scheduled. On January 25, Hamas won 56 percent of the seats in the Legislative Council.

Is it only a democracy when your side wins? What is it about the West that requires them to meddle in the affairs of others? I have no doubt that the Australians and “American” over at “Tizona” will have some commentary about how both I and Vanity fair are communist anti-semites. But the issue is why people like them feel the need to meddle in the affairs of others.

Lets look at the track record of western interference in the world

1953 we overthrow a democracy in Iran. This leads to 1979 revolution and Iran becoming an “enemy.”

1961 we have the Bay of Pigs fiasco and instead of getting rid of a non threatening leader we consolidate power under Castro

1980’s we arm and train the Mujahadeen and the Taliban to fight against the Russians and place them in power when they win. I wonder how that turned out.

In the 1980’s we arm Saddam Hussein to fight the mistakes we made in Iran. Saddam eventually invades Kuwait and gasses civilians.

Oh we have done well haven’t we. Even now we continue to elect idiots to office who claim democratically elected officials are dictators (Ahmedinajad). Before the U.S. campaign against him his ratings were worse than Bush’s, but now? Now he is popular and could see re-election in his future.

Hamas was democratically elected in an election forced by and monitored by the United States. Hamas was willing to moderate as well.

Some analysts argued that Hamas had a substantial moderate wing that could be strengthened if America coaxed it into the peace process. Notable Israelis—such as Ephraim Halevy, the former head of the Mossad intelligence agency—shared this view. But if America paused to consider giving Hamas the benefit of the doubt, the moment was “milliseconds long,” says a senior State Department official.

Maybe that is the problem with Western Society, they don’t think. Are we really that disillusioned by Manifest Destiny, must the “anglo-saxon” race invade and “civilize” all nations?  Oh those poor savages, we must convert the heathens.

And to my friends in Australia, I’m sure the Aborigenes love what you have done for them. Poverty, drug addiction, the systematic kidnapping of children to “westernize” them.

HILLARY CLINTON IS AN ANTI-SEMITE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE WHO WILL EAT YOUR CHILDREN!!!!!!!

 Hillary must be a terrorist sympathizer! I mean look at how she is dressed? I wonder if she went to a madrassa in afghanorabiastan. I bet she was behind 9/11 and the USS Cole. She hate Israel and is a an anti-semite, the nazi!!!

 (Lets see if this works)

Palestinians should seek reparations from Germany

By Khalid Amayreh in the West Bank

In the early months of the Aqsa intifada against the Israeli occupation, an Israeli officer in the Nablus region told dozens of handcuffed and blindfolded Palestinian detainees that “we are treating you like the Nazis treated us, and maybe when you are free from our grip, you will find another people whom you will treat the same way we are treating you.”

These were not facetious remarks. That officer was actually displaying definitive symptoms of a chronic collective psychosis permeating through the Israeli Jewish society. It is this collective mental sickness that make Israelis commit the most heinous crimes without feeling the slightest shred of guilt.

Didn’t Dan Halutz, the former Israeli air-force commander and later chief of staff boast that he slept well at night and felt no compunctions after he ordered an F-16 fighter warplane to drop a one-ton bomb on a residential apartment building in downtown Gaza , killing sixteen sleeping people, including 11 children.

In truth, there is an umbilical relationship between the holocaust and Israel’s nefarious behavior toward the Palestinians. In the final analysis, the Palestinians are the victims’ victims as the late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said put it.

In fact, one would not cross into the realm of the absurd by arguing that had Jews not been victims of the holocaust, the Palestinians would most likely have not been victimized by Jews in such a diabolical manner and for that long.

In a certain sense, one can say with very little exaggeration that it was Nazi Germany that created Israel. Yes, Zionism predated the holocaust; but it was the holocaust that gave Zionism the ultimate argument for Jewish statehood.

Not only that, the holocaust proved to be, even today, the ultimate blocker of any meaningful objections to Israeli criminality against the peoples of the Middle East. This explains why and how Israel, which can be viewed, more or less, as an incarnation of Nazi Germany, is treated by the world community as above the laws governing the rest of the world.

Moreover, Israelis continue to evoke the holocaust to justify their harsh repression of Palestinians. Even calls by Jewish settlers for “sending the Arabs to the oven” (which any visitor to Hebron can see scrawled on the walls at the Jewish settler enclave in the city) are justified by the holocaust. Every criticism of Israeli criminality and supremacy, every legitimate objection to the wanton repression meted out to the Palestinian, every criticism of the marauding settlers is always met with the holocaust mantra.! In short, every Palestinian, man, woman, and child, is made to suffer and die because of the holocaust.

Today, every conscripted Israeli soldier, especially those serving in the West Bank, is made to visit the Yad va Chem holocaust museum in Jerusalem right before he or she is deployed to Palestinian population centers to repress and torment these helpless people who had nothing to do with the holocaust.

And one doesn’t have to be a great psychologist to connect the dots and understand the real ghoulish implications of associating the Nazis, the tormentors of the Jews, with the Palestinian, the victims of Zionism

For most Israeli soldiers, the mental message is unmistakable. The Palestinians are today’s Nazis…and by killing and brutalizing them in the harshest of manners, the Jews are only preventing the recurrence of another holocaust. Some Israelis feel that by savaging the Palestinians they are actually avenging the holocaust vicariously, which gives them immense psychological satisfaction.

In their subconscious thinking, many Israeli Jews actually admire the Nazis and their brutality. This is why some of these soldiers and officers often seek to emulate Nazi brutality and project it on Palestinians, since for them might is always right.

Moral blindness

This brings us to post-war Germany and its moral surrender to Zionist blackmail. For nearly sixty years now, Germany has been trying to atone for the holocaust by enabling Israel to commit another holocaust against the Palestinians, never mind that it is a holocaust without gas chambers.

Germany from Konrad Adnauer to Angel Merkel behaved toward Israel in a manner that callously and completely disregarded the monumental oppression meted out by Israel to the Palestinian people.

Germans in general and the German political elite in particular passively watched Israel commit every conceivable crime against the helpless Palestinians, but turned their faces away for fear of displeasing their powerful former victims who came to be in control of powerful nations, such the United States.

Germany was always afraid and reluctant to call the spade a spade, especially when the spade happened to be in Jewish hands, lest it be reminded of the brutal ugliness of its recent past.

Germany, an economic and political giant, but obviously a moral dwarf, actually not only kept silent in the face of Israeli crimes all these years. Germany gave Israel the technical wherewithal to murder Palestinian children. Germany also gave Israel, reportedly free of charge, state-of-the art submarines capable of carrying nuclear warheads.

I don’t know when Germany will wake up from its long moral slumber and deliver itself from the sinister stranglehold of Zionism.

Is it not the time Germany realizes that the holocaust was diabolical in itself, , not necessarily because its victims were primarily Jewish? Would a holocaust against any other ethnic or religious group have been less diabolical? Would Germany have behaved differently had the holocaust targeted non-Jews? Are Germans absorbed so much in the holocaust because of its moral enormity or just because of the post-war Jewish power?

Such questions are vital and relevant since they can eventually contribute to liberating Germans from this haunting moral dilemma whereby they are morally bound to help their former victims savage, murder and brutalize another helpless people that had nothing to do with the holocaust, a people whose sole crime is their weakness and helplessness and determination to be free.

It is probably useless to appeal to the political establishment in Germany, which like its equally evil sister in the United States, is not based on morality but sheer immediate political expediency.

Non the less, one is encouraged by certain recent indications that Germany might finally be getting sober from decades of moral blindness and criminal indifference toward the Palestinians, its ultimate victims.

According to media report, a group of German intellectuals have called on Berlin to change the holocaust-rooted blind support of Israel, arguing correctly that the creation of the Jewish state turned the Palestinians into victims of the Nazi holocaust as well.

The intellectuals, who include 25 prominent figures, argued that it was the holocaust which Germany perpetrated that brought about the suffering that has persisted in the Middle East for the last six decades and has at the present become unbearable.

Furthermore, these intellectuals argued that “without the holocaust of the Jews, Israel wouldn’t see itself as entitled, or forced to ride over the human rights of the Palestinians and the inhabitants of Lebanon.

Of course, the language used here is extremely mild since what Israel has been doing in Palestine and Lebanon goes far beyond merely riding over Palestinian and Lebanese human rights.

Israel is effectively committing genocide. For example, the dropping of 2-3 million cluster bomblets over populated areas in southern Lebanon is par excellance a genocidal act of the highest order since 2-3 cluster bomblets are sufficient to kill 2-3 million children. The same can be said about the ongoing blockade of Gaza which is killing innocent Palestinians in the hundreds.

Reparations

In light of the proven umbilical relationship between the holocaust and the ongoing Palestinian plight, one can say that the Palestinian people have a legitimate moral right to demand holocaust reparations from Germany.

The Palestinians nearly lost everything. And every Palestinian under the sun has a story of suffering. This writer for example lost three paternal uncles to Zionist bullets on a single day. And up to this day, there has been no acknowledgment of guilt, no compensation, nothing from Israel.

I know such talk is likely to raise many eyebrows in Germany. However, if Germans have the moral courage to look deep into their souls, they undoubtedly will discover that the Palestinians are more than justified in seeking adequate and just reparations from Germany for the enormous calamities Nazi Germany had inflicted on us.