A Paralleling of Germany's Nazification of Christianity?

Did you know that in Nazi Germany, from 1939 to 1945, a special academy existed, the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life? It resulted from an effort, begun in the 1920s, to Nazify Christianity. It was established with the backing of eleven regional Protestant churches.

According to Prof. Susannah Heschel's research article, among other activities, a committee of the Institute produced a de-Judaized version of the New Testament, which was published by the Institute in 1940 with the title, Die Botschaft Gottes - God's Message. 

As Heschel notes:

"In it, all references to Jesus' Jewishness were eradicated, including his descent from Old Testament figures, mention of Jerusalem and the Temple, and any positive references to  Jews. For example, John 4:22, "Salvation comes from the Jews," was changed to the famous antisemitic slogan, "The Jews are our misfortune." Bethlehem was shifted to Galilee, reflecting Grundmann's claim, discussed below, that Jesus could not have been a racial Jew because the Galilee was populated by non-Jews."

There's an online exhibit informing about the Institute.

It was not a minor episode. Bishop Weidemann of Bremen issued a de-Judaized New Testament. and Reich Bishop Ludwig Miiller issued a "germanized" version of the Sermon on the Mount in 1936 to eliminate what he considered inappropriate Jewish moral teachings. The Die Botschaft Gottes was printed, in its first edition, in 100,000 copies as the demands of pre-publication from parish churches throughout the Reich was significant.

Richard Steigmann-Gall, reviewing the book, "The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945", realizes

"Christianity was part of the cultural framework of Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, the interesting point is that some people saw it as grounds to support participation in Nazism, whereas others saw it as grounds to resist. Conformity or resistance; intolerance or tolerance; Inquisition or charity? The religious texts stay the same, but what people have done with them always has varied greatly."

Listening to Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes and others and especially their attacks on Israel, on Christian Zionists and, in cases, on Jews and Judaism, should alert us to previous irregularities of Christians using their form of Christiantiy as a banner to wield politically. 

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Nazi Insinuations

For Gideon Levy, Zionism was like Nazism, sort of.

Photo: Flash90

He has a new column up defending, but, of course, Mahmoud Abbas.

Here's the lead in:

"Not one Israeli statesman today intends to apologize for the Nakba – not for the ethnic cleansing, nor for the exiling. But Abbas had no choice but to apologize for his Holocaust remark"

Let's count the ways Abbas needed to apologize:

a. The Mufti was a partner in the murder of Jews during the Holocaust with Hitler and a supporter of Nazi ideology (not to mention the killing of Jews in Eretz-Yisrael in the previous years).

b. Abbas' doctorate is a classic Holocaust denial and revisionism tract.

c. As I noted already, he has apologized previously for the same content but keeps on saying the same things.

But did Jews bomb Berlin cafes, Hamburg supermarkets or Bavarian beer halls in an effort to dislodge Germans from their property, land and possessions to "deserve" gas chambers? Did Zionists term Arabs ideologically as untermenschen?

There is no comparison. Even if Levy adds:

The fact that the Holocaust was much more horrific than the Nakba doesn’t legitimize denial of the other’s disaster, which is never-ending.

The Nakba is not the Holocaust.
But there was ethnic cleansing, of Jews by Arabs during 1920-1948, from hebron, Gaza, Shchem, Jenin, Jericho and Jerusalem. Jews were exiled from Jaffa.

But for Levy, Zionism is, well, sort of, Nazism.

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Hellish Heidegger

Selections from Heidegger in Black by reviewer Peter E. Gordon on the publication of the philospher's Black Notebooks (Schwarze Hefte 1931–1938; 1938/39; 1939–1941) 

...[Martin] Heidegger was one of the most influential thinkers of the modern era. He was also a convinced Nazi. During his brief term as rector at the University of Freiburg (1933–1934) he worked to advance the process of Gleichschaltung, or coordination, that brought the university into alignment with the official policies of the Third Reich...

...For Heidegger the “inner truth and greatness” of the Nazi movement lay in “the encounter between global technology and modern humanity” (a specification he secretly added to a 1935 lecture when it was published in 1953). These are not the words of a brutal realist; they belong to a philosopher whose “private National Socialism” proved ill-suited to the needs of the regime. But what is most disturbing in Heidegger’s case is not primarily what he did; it is what he thought about what he did...it turns out that Heidegger did not awaken from his philosophical-political fantasies. They only grew more extreme.

...To be sure, after 1934 Heidegger grew disenchanted with the Nazi movement, and devoted himself with greater energy to new philosophical concerns. But this was only because he felt that Nazism had betrayed its own promise, and had succumbed to the technological fate that afflicted the modern age overall. Meanwhile, his anti-Semitism turns out to have been far more pronounced than one might have imagined...

...the black notebooks may nonetheless help us to understand how a philosopher consumed with a question of such generality could come to see in the Third Reich a realization of his own ideas...he writes that Being has a “groundplan” but it is “not Idea, but mission.” The ground plan “does not detach itself into pure Spirit, but rather first opens and binds Blood and Soil [Blut und Boden] to a readiness for action and a capacity for realization and work.”... In a notorious speech from November 3, 1933, he admonished students: “Let not propositions and ‘ideas’ be the rules of your Being [Sein]. The Führer alone is the present and future German reality and its law.”

...The notebooks bespeak a growing alarm at the course of modern civilization and an emergent concern that Nazism, too, was afflicted. He warns of a new phenomenon: “the gigantic” or, more typically, “machination” (Machenschaft).
Machination was his preferred name for the technological force that Heidegger saw as dominating the modern world...however, Machenschaft is embroidered with a more specific meaning: in an entry (circa 1939) he denounces liberalism, pacifism, and “the rising power of Jewry.” The ascendency of the Jews belonged to “the metaphysics of the West” that helped to spread both “empty rationality” and “a capacity for calculation.” Elsewhere he wrote that “one of the most hidden forms of the gigantic and perhaps the oldest is the tenacious aptitude for calculating and profiteering and intermingling, upon which the worldlessness of Jewry is founded.”

Regarding such passages two points should be made. First, they are clearly instances of anti-Semitism (and at first glance rather banal). The allusion to the Jews’ “worldlessness” taps into an old belief that, having rejected Christ’s divinity, the Jews are condemned to homeless wandering. Heidegger also recycled the rather more modern myth that the Jews are gifted in finance (itself a reconstructed variant of the medieval commonplace linking Jews with usury).

...on the final page of a notebook from 1941 Heidegger writes that “the question concerning the role of world Jewry is not a racial but a metaphysical question.” According to Peter Trawny, the editor of the notebooks, such passages show that Heidegger subscribed to a highly unusual species of “ontological-historical” (seinsgeschichtliche) anti-Semitism. Lacking “worldhood,” the Jews became a philosophical category: an antitype to the artisanal innocence of being-in-the-world.

...By the summer of 1941, when the German army began its assault on the Soviet Union, Heidegger descended into gruesome suggestions of world conspiracy:

World Jewry, spurred on by the emigrants who have been let out of Germany, is ungraspable everywhere and doesn’t need to get involved in military action while continuing to unfurl its influence, whereas we are left to sacrifice the best blood of the best of our people.

...Heidegger conflated any and all modes of technology, as would become clear in his notorious postwar remark that “the manufacture of corpses in the gas chambers and the death camps” and “the motorized food industry” are “in essence the same.”

...the notebooks written after 1934 show that many of the political beliefs that first drew him to Nazism remained unchanged. Worse still, those beliefs continued to contaminate his philosophy...

P.S.  And while we are on the letter H:-

Hemingway’s Yiddish

In response to:
Who Was Ernest Hemingway? from the August 14, 2014 issue
To the Editors:
In my article on Hemingway’s letters [NYR, August 14], I referred to “yencing” as his private slang for the sexual act. It is in fact a Yiddishism (“yentzing”) that had migrated into underworld slang. Hemingway used the word in letters to friends who shared, he said, his hatred of “Kikes,” and he was perhaps unaware of its origin.
Edward MendelsonNew York City

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Why Haaretz is An Evil Newspaper

Here's an excerpt from the Haaretz interview with Israel's Refrom Judaism Executive Director Gilad Kariv.  Notice how the interviewer slips in the nasty question:

...there’s no point in using the prettified language of reconciliation here. There is a direct connection between the book “Torah Hamelech” and the recent lynch in Jerusalem. To get a group of youths to carry out such an attack on an Arab youth, it takes a good few years of dehumanization of the Arab. We started the month of Elul with a Molotov cocktail that burned an Arab family in the territories, and with an Arab young man lying in intensive care as a result of a pogrom.
    

The threshold is going up. All the time.

And here there is a planned, orchestrated, ideological effort that relies entirely on the distorted structuring of relations between religion and state in Israel, which gives these rabbis immunity, and budgets, and public positions and status. There is a grand project of dehumanization of whoever is not a Jew.

    

And of the other in general.

The Arab is number one, although now he has competition for that ranking − from the migrant worker. While we’re sitting here in this air-conditioned office, refugees and their little children are in tents in Ketziot.

    

Like the concentration camps Leibowitz prophesied.

Yes. There is also a detention facility where dozens of African youths have been sitting for many months because no framework was found for them. We’ve negated their humanity, we’ve removed them from the circle of human beings whom we must treat with dignity. And then this fellow − You know, I don’t want to use such words in talking about Eli Yishai ...

 

For sure, there is no "direct connection" between the book, Torat HaMelech, and the youth who carried out the vicious attack on an Arab in Zion Square although since the trial hasn't begun, we really do not know much, neither I nor the Reform Rabbi.  A Rabbi, by the way, would steer clear of such an accusation, especially during the Ten Days of Penitence.

But "concentration camps"?

Yes, Kariv considers Lebowitz his teacher even though Leibowitz though this of the sect of Reform:

Yeshayahu Leibowitz had a harsh saying about you Reform Jews. He said: “It’s very nice and all, but it’s not religion.”
 

To ask him about Leibowitz would seem proper.  But not to repeat a calumny.  Goading and promoting Nazi comparisons is an evil discourse agenda.  Done so easily, so flippantly.  So carelously.

And the editor let it through.

^

 

PA Arab Pushes Nazi Propaganda

I've been alerted to this piece (kippa/tip=ChallahHuAkbar). It's by a senior Arab journalist from the Palestinian Authority territory and he stresses that protecting the Al-Aqsa Mosque from fanatic Zionist Jews is a vital responsibility of every Muslim.

Here are some excerpts:

Prominent Palestinian Journalist Urges Muslims to Protect Al-Aqsa Mosque

In an editorial in Al-Jazeerah website, Khalid Amayreh called on Muslims to protect Islam's holy places in the Holy Quds (Jerusalem).

"This week, supremacist millenarian Jews, led by fanatical Likud leader Moshe Feiglin tried to storm the Haram Sharif of Jerusalem. The Talmudic rioters held posters calling for the "purification of Temple Mount from the enemies of Israel."

Like other Jewish fanatics, Feiglin...advocates the establishment of a Talmudic theocracy covering British mandatory Palestine, extending from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean whereby non-Jews, e.g. Christians and Muslims, are treated as water-carriers and wood-hewers.

Those refusing enslavement by the "master race" or Chosen people would be expelled. In case they resisted, they would be banished or physically exterminated.

In the past, Jewish leaders didn't voice their genocidal designs as plainly as they are doing these days...Jewish leaders, especially those believing in the imminent advent of the Jewish Messiah or Redeemer, no longer hide their dream of world domination.

...Now, however, the Redeemer is caricatured as an irresistible pugnacious Jewish tyrant, an ardent Zionist and Jewish warrior-hero who wouldn't transcend the conventional mores and bounds of Jewish heroism. Hence, the redeemer's ultimate goal is not really world peace, but rather enabling Jews to enslave, control and rule the world from Jerusalem .
Even Christian evangelicals, Israel 's most ardent supporters in the West, are not excluded from the Jewish wrath.

Jesus is called "the Hitler of Bethlehem" and Chesronot Shas, one of the most virulently anti-Christian Talmudic texts, is sold in public libraries in West Jerusalem. If you visit the Steimatzky library, you would find the Mein Kamph-booklet there.

In other words, Jewish millenarianism...is about but worldly power, a sort of a Jewish Third Reich lasting hundreds of years.

Hence, Jewish Messianism as taught and practiced by the likes of Moshe Feiglin and other terrorists of Gush Emunim...is effectively comparable to German Nazism.

Just take the word "German" out and replace it with the word "Jewish," and you will have Jewish Messianism or redeemism, pure and simple.

This vicious, virulent and genocidal vision lies behind the most recent attempted storming of the Aqsa Mosque of Jerusalem, a shrine of paramount sacredness for hundreds of millions of people...

Peace?
Coexistence?
Compromise?

Not with this guy.

^

Arabs as Nazis?

Go to MEMRI's Special Dispatch No. 4450 to see Palestinians in Lebanon Shown Saluting Nazi/Hizbullah Style on January 24, 2012 and aired on Palestinian Authority TV.

To view this clip on MEMRI TV, visit http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/3285.htm

^

Isalm Suffers from a Swastika

Found at an upset anarchist's site:

Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit/Souciant Magazine. Published by kind permission of Souciant.

I wonder what the Grand Mufti Al-Amin El-Husseini would have said?

^

Another J Street Serious Humor Item

J Street Hails Efforts by 44 Members of Congress to Protect Israel through Continued US Assistance to Palestinian Authority

Remember, the PA head, Salam Fayyad, called Newt Gingrich a 'Nazi ideologist'.

^

Salam Fayyad: Gingrich's 'Nazi ideology'

From Ma'an News Agency:

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad also urged Gingrich to open a history book.   "Even the most extremist settlers of Israel wouldn’t talk in such a ridiculous way," Fayyad told reporters on Saturday.  Such remarks would be better suited for a politician adhering to "a Nazi ideology, a source of suffering for humanity, and the Jews topped the list of victims” of that ideology, he added.

That last part was not reported by any major news outlet.

Why?

^

Today Is Partition Plan Day. But Yesterday?

Yesterday was Mufti-Hitler Day.

For more info -

There are also good history books

Matthias Küntzel: Djihad et haine des Juifs : Le lien troublant entre islamisme et nazisme à la racine du terrorisme international

Martin Cüppers, Klaus-Michael Mallmann -
Croissant fertile et croix gammée : Le Troisième Reich, les Arabes et la Palestine

Jeffrey Herf -
Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World

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Goebbels Had A Secretary

Did the Nazis actually order the round-up of Jews for purposes of elimination?

Ask Goebbels' secretayr:-

She took down every word that Goebbels uttered, both his private correspondence and his official orders, including those ordering round-ups of Jews in Berlin to please Hitler that the capital was becoming 'Jew-free'.

But

'I didn't know about the Holocaust. I was a stupid, politically uninterested little sausage of simple means. I only learned about the Jewish extermination programme after the war. Goebbels never mentioned it in his correspondence.

Is she, too, a denier?

^

Yossi Sarid's Nazi Terminology

Yossi Sarid is so 'clever'.

It's not nice to use loaded, Nazi-like terminology.

So he does but says, well, we're all doing it:

Suddenly we are short of space here in Israel, which has become full to capacity and needs lebensraum. Every cultured person knows that this is a despicable German concept, banned from use because of the associations it brings up. Still, people are starting to use it, if not outright then with a clear implication: We are short of land, we are short of air, let us breathe in this country.

Of course, Yeshayahu Leibowitz and Israel Shahak used it way back, employing "Judeo-Nazi and also nazification.

Filth.

^

Discussing Terror, Nazism, Islam

Islam, Nazism and anti-Semitism caught here:

At Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, stands an exhibit that is for some more unsettling than the replicas of the Warsaw Ghetto or the canisters of Zyklon B gas used at Auschwitz and Treblinka. Next to blown-up photographs of emaciated corpses from the death camps there is a picture of the grand mufti of Palestine, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, reviewing an honor guard of the Muslim division of the Waffen SS that fought the Serbs and antifascist partisans. The display includes a cable to Hajj Amin from Heinrich Himmler, dated November 2, 1943: “The National Socialist Party has inscribed on its flag ‘the extermination of world Jewry.’ Our party sympathizes with the fight of the Arabs, especially the Arabs of Palestine, against the foreign Jew.” There is also a quote from a broadcast the mufti gave over Berlin radio on March 1, 1944: “Arabs, rise as one man and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This is the command of God, history and religion.”

As the Israeli historian Tom Segev suggests, “the visitor is left to conclude that there is much in common between the Nazis’ plan to destroy the Jews and the Arabs’ enmity to Israel.” Paul Berman’s new book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, makes the connection even more explicit. Although defeated in Europe, the virus of Nazism is, in his view, vigorously present in the Arab-Islamic world, with Hajj Amin the primary source of this infection. Instead of being tried as a war criminal, Hajj Amin was allowed to leave France in 1946, after escaping from Germany via Switzerland. A trial, Berman suggests, might have “sparked a little self-reflection about the confusions and self-contradictions within Islam” on matters Jewish, comparable to the postwar “self-reflections” that took place inside the Roman Catholic Church.

Isn't Tom Segev a bit of a stuck-up pretend intellectual there?

But it is the reviewer in this NYReview of Books article, Malise Ruthven, that is really into pretend in his attempted take down of Berman despite his use of Islamofascism already in 1990:

...Berman makes the preposterous claim that most of the Islamist organizations with terrorist reputations are descended from al-Banna’s Muslim Brotherhood, either directly, like Hamas, or schismatically, like al-Qaeda. Berman attacks Ramadan’s claim to represent nonviolent values—for not owning up to his grandfather’s engagement in violence, and for not addressing his admiration for Hitler and reverence for the grand mufti: “On the topics of the SS, the Holocaust, Hitler, and the Nuremberg trials, someone reading Ramadan’s account of the mufti and the mufti’s debt to al-Banna would learn nothing at all.”

And he goes further on the issue of Yesha:

Berman locates the “entire tragedy” of Palestinian Arabs, who have come to look upon their struggle with Zionism as a religious affair, in the idea of “violence as a sacred principle.” This development must indeed be seen as tragic, given that conflicts rooted in religious absolutisms tend to be less susceptible to negotiated settlements than conflicts defined in purely secular terms.

What is astonishing, however, is the absence of any recognition on the part of Berman that the same corrosive religious and ideological processes have been at work on the Israeli side, and that armed settlers, inspired by the Torah and funded in some cases by evangelical Christian sympathizers, have mounted terrorist actions against Palestinian civilians along with illegal appropriations of territory and water. Yigal Amir, who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, claimed rabbinical sanction for his act; while Baruch Goldstein, who in 1994 massacred twenty-nine Muslim worshipers in Hebron, is revered as a hero and martyr by Israeli zealots.

Well, being able to get to two in his count of "Jewish terrorists" is an accomplishment. And perhaps there were a few more. But can that be compared to the construct and activity of the Arab society? Is Ruthven's reading correct and unprejudiced?

He balances out one "sacred violence" which is massive, culturally (and not only religiously) ingrained and has resulted in 90 years of terror directed almost exclusively against civilians against an insignificant violence that was mostly defensive and reactive. And that is an immoral approach and intellectually bankrupt.

Actually, it is astonishing.


And it gets worse. Ruthven seeks to protect the Swiss-norn grandson of the Moslem Brotherhood founder, Hasan al-Banna, Tariq Ramadan, by asserting an equivalency between Arab terror and that of the Irgun and Lechi:

Berman, who claims that Ramadan reveres Qaradawi, makes no reference to Ramadan’s condemnation of terror. For him the Brotherhood’s violence is primordial, a manifestation of its totalitarian inclinations, although he chooses the word “fascist” for being more suggestively pungent.

Berman never suggests that this term can be sharply double-edged. After Yitzhak Rabin signed the Oslo Accords with Yasser Arafat in 1993, demonstrators belonging to the Likud party, currently governing in Israel, held up effigies of the prime minister dressed in Nazi uniform [the work of a GSS agent provocateur]. In December 1948, after the massacre of some 240 Palestinians [no massacre; and no 240] in the village of Deir Yassin by irregulars of the Irgun Zvi Leumi (IZL) led by Menahem Begin, a future Israeli prime minister, a number of prominent Jews, including Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt, wrote to The New York Times protesting against Begin’s forthcoming visit to America and accusing his Herut party of having “the unmistakable stamp of a Fascist party for whom terrorism (against Jews, Arabs, and British alike), and misrepresentation are means, and a ‘Leader State’ is the goal.” [so what? they were wrong]

In due course the IZL was absorbed into the Haganah (now the Israel Defense Forces) and Begin’s Freedom Party—Herut—now forms part of the Likud. While some of Israel’s more vociferous critics will argue that a “fascist” predisposition toward violence exists, a more generous reading would be that what Ramadan calls “state terror” (evidenced by a policy of disproportionality [??!] in response to Hamas provocations [??!]) is the outcome of calculations that are strategic, tactical, and rational [Hamas terror is rational?](which does not mean to say that they are not dangerously misguided or counterproductive).

In the Israeli political process the extremist tendencies exhibited by the IZL and the Stern Gang—its irregular cobelligerents—have been subjected to the rigors of democratic politics. Berman, however, will not grant that the Brotherhood or its offshoots are capable of a comparable evolution in response to changing circumstances.

Hamas, is he saying, can become democratic?

Okay, here's the punchline: Ruthven, British, of aristocratic stock (his brother is an Earl), is Cairo-born and an Arabist. Does that explain it?

- - -

Paris? Try Beirut and the Palestinian Authority for Nazi Salutes

Did you know of Paris Hilton that

Half of her family is Jewish

This came out after her picture, supposedly giving the Nazi salute appeared:



Of course, if the media would give half the attention to the propensioty of the Hezbollah and the Pals. for giving the Nazi salute, the world would be more safe rather than more silly.






Of course, they had someone to learn from, the Mufti:



Could Paris have picked up her silliness from British royalty, Prince Harry?


- - -

Tfu, tfu on Tutu

Omri of Mere Rhetoric highlights Desmond Tutu's perversion of history, whereby the Reverend asserts:

...the Palestinians and the Arabs are paying "penance" for the Holocaust...But who pays the penance? The penance is being paid by the Arabs, by the Palestinians. I once met a German ambassador who said Germany is guilty of two wrongs. One was what they did to the Jews. And now the suffering of the Palestinians." Israel is mistaken to think it can achieve security through force, he said. "The lesson that Israel must learn from the Holocaust is that it can never get security through fences, walls and guns," Tutu said.

Two points.

The first, as I have expanded on several times at this blog, the Arabs of Mandate Palestine and specifically the Mufti, bear a direct responsibility for the Holocaust. Not only for what they did (the Mufti broadcast radio propaganda for Hitelr, raised a battalion for the Waffen SS and intervened to halt rescue attempts for Jewish children) but for their political pressure on Great Britain during the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939 which caused Gt. Britain to issue the 1939 White Paper which doomed European Jewry.

The second, the furtherance of this corrupt idea that since Germany did what it did to the Jews, the Jews are doing what the Nazis did to Arabs, is a perversion of history and implies that Arabs can do to Jews what the Nazis did to them. And this is what is going on in European capitals, like in Sweden, for example.

In any case, I thought this would be a proper observation, from Yehuda Avner's article, to be included in his forthcoming book:

...The head of the delegation, Frank Lautenburg...asked if the prime minister would care to elaborate on...that the prime minister had had a serious quarrel with the German chancellor, and that, as a consequence, relations between the two countries were strained.

BEGIN...leaned across the table from the front edge of his chair and gazed into Lautenburg's eyes with great earnestness. "It is true, Frank," he said. "I reprimanded Helmut Schmidt in public."

"What had he done? What had he said?"

"He had gone to Saudi Arabia, and he had said in a public statement that Germany had obligations to various peoples, among them the Palestinians, but he made no mention of the Jews.

"I was beside myself with astonishment. Could it be, I said to myself, that he, of all people, had failed to make mention of Germany's obligation to the Jews - and in Saudi Arabia, of all places? So, yes, I told him what I thought of him in public."

"And how did he respond?"

"He demanded an apology, but I refused. I publicly told him that he had shown arrogance and callous disregard of the Jews exterminated by his people in World War II. And I counseled him to take an example from his predecessor, Chancellor Willy Brandt. I told him to do what Brandt did: to go to Warsaw. I told him to go to the site where the Jewish ghetto once stood.

"Go down on your knees, Mr. Schmidt, I told him. Go down on you knees and beg forgiveness of the Jewish people for what your countrymen perpetrated under the Nazi regime against my people, at a time when you, Mr. Schmidt, remained steadfast to the personal oath you had given to Adolf Hitler, as a soldier in the Wehrmacht."

And here's the official version:-

I will not apologize to Mr. Schmidt, either publicly or privately, whatever the conditions he puts.

Mr. Schmidt traveled to Saudi Arabia some time ago. During and after his visit he made some incredible statements, astonishing from every point of view, and particularly so from the standpoint of the head of government of a nation which bears historic responsibility for the extermination of six million Jews, amongst them a million and a half little children. Mr. Schmidt mentioned Auschwitz and said that he acknowledges the obligation of Germany towards a number of peoples - but the Jewish people was not listed amongst them. Mr. Schmidt spoke of Germany's obligation towards the Palestinians and said not a word of Germany's obligation towards the Jewish people.

In reaction to all those statements I said in a speech that according to a report I got, Mr. Schmidt, as a lieutenant in Hitler's army, was among the viewers of a film showing the hanging by piano wire of German officers who had rebelled against the National Socialist regime.

My friend, Dr. Gideon Hausner, Chairman of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Committee, pointed out to me that Lieutenant Schmidt had not participated in the screening of the above film, but he had been invited to and participated in a trial presided over by the infamous Nazi judge Freisler.

I chose to rely upon the information given me by Dr. Hausner, and, accordingly, I informed Bundestag member, Mr. Blumenfeld, that I will not hesitate to admit the error concerning the film. However, participation in the above mentioned Nazi trial is of itself a most grave event in the biography of one of the tens of thousands of German officers during the Holocaust.

I will not apologize to Mr. Schmidt. Rather, I counsel him, speaking as a free man who fought for the continued existence and the liberation of the Jewish people, that he take an example from his predecessor Mr. Brandt, visit Warsaw, go to the site where the Jewish ghetto once stood, go down on his knees and ask the forgiveness of the Jewish people and of all nations loving justice and liberty for what his countrymen perpetrated under the National Socialist regime against my people at the time when Mr. Schmidt remained faithful to the personal oath he had given to Adolf Hitler as a soldier and officer in his army.

More here.

Intelligence-Frei

Here's how Slavoj Zizek, international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities and a Hegelian-Marxist philosopher, Lacanian psychoanalyst, left-wing sociologist, and cultural critic (see here) (szizek@yahoo.com) describes the event two weeks ago at Shimon HaTzaddik neighborhood in Jerusalem:

On 2 August 2009, after cordoning off part of the Arab neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in east Jerusalem, Israeli police evicted two Palestinian families (more than 50 people) from their homes; Jewish settlers immediately moved into the emptied houses. Although Israeli police cited a ruling by the country's supreme court, the evicted Arab families had been living there for more than 50 years.

Well, yes, they had been living there but never owned the buildings and had stopped paying rent decades ago.

Even in Yugoslavia they'd had been thrown out ages ago.

But he dialects himself out of this fairly straightforward and simple situation and takes things into Nazi terminology:

Palestinians often use the problematic cliché of the Gaza strip as "the greatest concentration camp in the world". However, in the past year, this designation has come dangerously close to truth. This is the fundamental reality that makes all abstract "prayers for peace" obscene and hypocritical. The state of Israel is clearly engaged in a slow, invisible process, ignored by the media; one day, the world will awake and discover that there is no more Palestinian West Bank, that the land is Palestinian-frei, and that we must accept the fact.

Gosh, are crematoria next? Railway boxcars? Medical experiments? Removing gold from teeth?

Does he get off on using such language? What primordial urge of hate causes a professor of philosophy to go to such extremes?

Where is his intelligence?


(Kippah tip: Yosef Hartuv)

RETRACTION OF - "Haaretz: Netanyahu's Gov't A Nazi 1000-Year Reich"

After reconsidering, and following comments my friends sent me, I am retracting the implication I assumed regarding the political cartoon drawn by Eran Volkovsky for David Grossman's article on the front page of Haaretz on Wednesday, "Netanyahu's message is there will be no peace":




That's Benny Begin (of all people!) saying to Bibi Netanyahu:

"Well, that leaves us 999 years and 362 days".

That is a clear and unmistakable reference to Hitler's 1000-year Third Reich, the 'Drittes Reich'. In other words, after Netanyahu's speech, their government has that much time left, minus the three days since the speech at Bar-Ilan.

It didn't appear in the English-language edition. I can't find it at the Haaretz web site, nor anywhere else.

This is ugly, self-hating Jewish antisemitism. It's sick.

Volkovsky is vicious. In the past, he's drawn Bibi leading Avigdor Lieberman, as a dog, on a leash.

Here's the Haaretz logo, the caricature and the top part of Grossman's article:



UPDATE

A good friend suggests I am wrong and that the 1000 years reference is to this:-

Senior Palestinian Authority negotiator Saeb Erekat rejected Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's speech on Israeli-PA diplomacy Sunday night. Dr. Erekat said, "Netanyahu will have to wait 1,000 years for someone to agree to talk to him."

Welcome/Wilkommen to Israel's Home-grown Nazi Propaganda

A bit strong that headline.

Well, make your own judgment.

Here's the satirical photo that adorns this morning's Maariv Weekend Political Section, page 23:



That's Minister for Foreign Affairs Avigdor Lieberman, if you have difficulty recognizing him.

His portrait is adorned with a red lipstick overlay with the words, in German, meine Liebe!, my love/mydear one, in Gothic script.

It's the creation of one "Lahav", e-mail: bigeyes.express@gmail.com.

Now, I know that the left in Israel considers Lieberman a fascist.

And I know that his name is "Lieberman".

But to draw overt attention, via the German Gothic element, to Nazi reminisces or, perhaps, Hansen homoerotic memories (*) of Berlin? That was his only creative graphic choice?

After all, Lieberman is Moldavian. Lahav couldn't have found a more relevant model? He just had to link up with the German/Nazi association, eh?

But he's alright, that Lahav, he won't have to flee Israel like Hansen needed to flee Germany.

==========================================

(*)

In 1932, Max Hansen satirised Adolf Hitler as homosexual with his song "War'n Sie schon mal in mich verliebt?" (Did you ever fall in love with me?). The Youtube.

Lyrics of War’n sie schon mal in mich verliebt:

Wenn man frech ist schimpfen d’Leut
über diese Dreistigkeit,
auch wenn man bescheiden ist,
man nicht zu beneiden ist,
ich sag alles grad heraus,
da mach ich mir gar nichts d’raus,
wenn ich eine schöne Frau seh
rutscht mir’s raus:

War’n Sie schon mal in mich verliebt,
das ist das schönste was es gibt,
haben Sie schon mal von mir geträumt,
da haben Sie wirklich was versäumt.
Ich bin nicht groß, ich bin nicht klein,
ich paß grad so in alles rein,
ich bin nicht g’scheit, ich bin nicht dumm,
das spricht sich jetzt schon langsam rum,
bei mir haben Sie nichts zu riskier’n,
wie wär’s denn,
woll’n Sie’s nicht einmal mit mir probiern?

John Hari Goes Semantically Nazi

John Hari writes:

Israel is about to make a misjudgement as disastrous – and deadly – as the attack on Gaza. In a few days, it looks as if it could elect Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister once again.

This is a man calling for the violent re-occupation of Gaza to "liquidate" its elected government.

Of course, being an extreme radical progressive liberal leftwinger, and dumb, he was 'borrowing' from Haaretz's Gideon Levy, who wrote:

In his remarks at the Herzliya Conference this week Netanyahu said Israel halted the Gaza operation too soon and should have liquidated the Hamas regime in Gaza. After all, we are experts at liquidation. In 1987 Likud liquidated the Peres-Hussein London Agreement, which would have handed control of the West Bank over to Jordan's King Hussein - a solution that any right-thinking person longs for today. In its stead, we got Yasser Arafat, with whom an agreement could have been reached, but Netanyahu chose to liquidate this option as well. Instead of Arafat, we got Hamas, and after Netanyahu "liquidates" it as well, we will get Islamic Jihad and, after that, Al-Qaida.

Now, I heard Netanyahu in Hebrew and he used the verb למוטט which simply means to "knock down" or "to cause to collapse" (see here).

So, why should Levy use Nazi semantics and Hari follow suit?

Could they hate Netanyahu that much?

Sure.

After all, aren't they crazy? For them, Nazism is a weapon to use especially directed at Jews.


P.S. His email is j.hari@independent.co.uk

Islam and Nazism - Fiction?

In a book review of a French book, the reviewer Leslie S. Lebl tells a tale of " Le village de l’Allemand: ou le journal des frères Schiller", a novel that links Islamism to Nazism.


Extracts:-

...Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal’s Le village de l’Allemand (The Village of the German) [is] a plainspoken masterpiece that boldly uncovers the affinities between Nazism and Islamism...The German of the title is a former SS officer who serves in a number of extermination camps during World War II. After the war, he is smuggled out of Germany to Istanbul and then Cairo. From there, the Egyptian government dispatches him to Algeria during its war of independence in the 1950s. His job: to support the insurrection by training Front de Libération Nationale fighters. He subsequently settles down in a remote village, where he soon becomes the highly respected sheikh.

...Clues among the dead sheikh’s possessions lead Rachel on an increasingly agonizing search to reconstruct his father’s life in places like Auschwitz. Devastated by what he learns about the Holocaust, the son commits suicide to atone for his father’s sins.



The second son, Malrich (from “Malek” and “Ulrich”), is a creature of the banlieues, French suburbs that have become violent Muslim ghettos. His common sense has already helped him reject an attempt by the local Islamist imam to recruit him, but he continues to drift along with little hope for the future, among friends with similarly bleak prospects. Malrich learns about his father by reading the diary that Rachel has left behind. His reaction is to fight back—not against the Nazis, who are in any case long dead, but against the Islamists, whom he sees as essentially of the same ilk.

Malrich realizes that the Islamists are immeasurably more determined, stronger, and better organized than he and his little band of friends...

...The novel is rooted in reality. During his travels in Algeria, Sansal came across an actual village de l’allemand by accident. He then researched the headman’s story, learning along the way that it wasn’t unusual. An estimated 2,000 former Nazis settled in Egypt after World War II. They included Johannes von Leers, formerly Goebbels’s favorite propagandist of annihilation, who under Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser was responsible for anti-Jewish propaganda. Other former Nazis organized police forces or, like Sansal’s headman, served as military trainers.

The sons’ ignorance of the Holocaust is similarly based on sad truths of history. Sansal, in an interview with the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur, stresses that the Holocaust is never mentioned in Algeria: “The fact is that never, until today, has Algerian television shown a film or a documentary on the subject, never has an official breathed a word about it nor, as far as I know, has an intellectual written on the theme.”...

...The intertwining of the hatred that once led to extermination of the Jews and the potential of radical Islam is the book’s deliberate theme. According to Sansal, “the border between Islamism and Nazism is very slim.” Or as Malrich comments: “When I see what the Islamists do here and elsewhere, I tell myself that they will exceed the Nazis if one day they come to power.”...The Islamic governments in power in Algeria and elsewhere, Sansal suggests, have much in common with Nazism, starting with the police states they operate. In his magazine interview, Sansal says that Algeria’s own children consider it an “open-air prison” or a “concentration camp.” Algerian youth, he says, have a slogan: “Mourir ailleurs plutôt que vivre ici” (“Die elsewhere rather than live here”). In his view, Islam has already suffered heavy blows from both Islamism and Arab nationalism, blows from which it will be extremely difficult to recover.

, a former career foreign service officer with the Department of State, is principal of Lebl Associates and a nonresident senior fellow of the Atlantic Council of the United States. She is the author of the monograph Advancing U.S. Interests with the European Union. The translations are hers.