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The Holocaust Remembrance Day is especially sad this year. This remembrance is not only about the Jewish people, but more broadly, it has been a reminder of man’s inhumanity to man and a call to moral vigilance and “Never Again”.
But here and now, before our very eyes and as the world watches, man’s inhumanity to man is being perpetrated once again by Israel in Gaza and in the West Bank as the President of the United States calls for “cleansing” Gaza and a final solution to the Palestine question.
How cynical is it that the very people who bore the brunt of the Holocaust are now the instrument of a holocaust upon Palestine and the Palestinian people! And how cynical is it that the United States, the foremost country of liberty and freedom, aides and abets ethnic cleansing and final solutions!!
On this day, Holocaust Remembrance Day, let us remember also how the memory of the pain and suffering of the Jewish people has been twisted and desecrated by weaponizing the Holocaust to justify the annihilation of the Palestinian people.
Habib Hammam
Drawing an equivalence between the systematic murder of 6 million jews by the Nazis and the current situation in Gaza is intellectually lazy and morally unacceptable.
ReplyDeleteGenocide in Gaza is just the latest episode in a series of Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians since the creation of Israel by displacing 750,000 Palestinians. Since then targeted killing of Palestinians, evicting them from their centuries old homes, killing children, women, bombing refugees camps, hospitals, schools, etc. has become routine practice. To bring to light these practices of IDF is not intellectual laziness. Sooner or later Jews around the world may become the most hated people in this planet. You cannot gain respect with your guns on the neck of innocent children.
DeleteDo not - repeat, do not - equate the policies and actions of the State of Israel with "Jews around the world". Very many of us oppose those policies and actions, and have done so for decades.
DeleteAnd, in addition, you may wish to consider the role of all those Governments who have long enabled the policies and actions of the State of Israel through massive subsidies and supplies of arms, rather than holding Israel to international standards of law and justice.
DeleteThank you Habib, for calling the genocide in Gaza and now in the West Bank for what is really is. As an admirer of Jewish talents and the humanism ingrained in the teachings of the great prophet for Justice, Moses, I cannot tolerate the mass murder being committed with impunity by those who dare call themselves followers of this great prophet. Even the former President Carter condemned what he called apartheid in Palestine. Soon the tide of public opinion will turn into a storm to end this obscene carnage. Baquer
ReplyDelete“How cynical is it that the very people who bore the brunt of the Holocaust are now the instrument of a holocaust upon Palestine and the Palestinian people!” - so true and an enigma of humankind.
ReplyDeleteDo not - repeat, do not - equate the policies and actions of the State of Israel with
Deletethe people who bore the brunt of the Holocaust. Very many of us oppose those policies and actions, and have done so for decades.
Fully agree with you, Richard.
DeleteOne of the strongest voices in politics is that of US Senator Bernie Sanders, the son of Jewish immigrant parents from Poland. He vehemently opposed armament shipment to Israel by the Biden Administration and demanded humanitarian aid in Gaza. Power players/enablers and Israel should be forced to comply with international standards of law and justice.
Genocide is the deliberate killing of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. It's ethnic cleansing. It happened in Germany when Nazi's systematically slaughtered 6 million Jews––it happened in Bosnia, Rwanda, Bangladesh (former East Pakistan) . . . currently happening in Gaza . . . Russian aggression in Ukraine is also considered a deliberate annihilation process of Ukrainian identity . . . the pain, trauma and suffering of the impacted are similar. As humanitarian Aid workers we condemn all killings––there is no scope to compare whose pain is greater or lesser.
ReplyDelete