[Vision2020] The 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht!

[Andreas Schou]

Isn't it interesting that someone totally unaffiliated with Christ Church
would return to smear the Church's least-favorite ex-member?
-- ACS

On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 10:05 AM, Sunil Ramalingam <
sunilramalingam at hotmail.com> wrote:

>  So many premises with which to disagree, so little time.
>
> Sunil
>
> ------------------------------
> From: privatejf35 at hotmail.com
> To: vision2020 at moscow.com
> Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2008 09:31:32 -0700
> Subject: [Vision2020] The 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht!
>
>
> Elie Wiesel noted that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speech at
> the recent United Nations General Assembly calling for the destruction of
> Israel demonstrates that the world has learned nothing from the Holocaust.
> The upcoming 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht on November 9 and 10 provides
> an occasion to grapple with the question of whether, in the current decade,
> the Jewish people are reliving the 1930s.
>
> To answer that one has to look at issues such as genocide and hate
> promotion, appeasement of totalitarians, Western leadership and so on. The
> correct answer must then be: "Yes, but only in certain aspects." The
> existence of the State of Israel is the main difference between the two
> decades. In the 1930s the Jews were an incoherent, leaderless group, with no
> tools to defend itself against enemies. Today there is a Jewish state, which
> is threatened by substantial parts of the Muslim world and others, but is
> not helpless.
>
> There is furthermore no country today like Nazi Germany with systematic
> state-promoted anti-Semitism and state-sponsored violence against its Jewish
> citizens. There is, however, an explicitly genocidal anti-Semitic power -
> Iran, which proclaims that it is out to annihilate the Jewish state and is
> developing an atom bomb to do so. Extermination policies have mutated as a
> result of technological development.
>
> There are few Jews within the borders of Iran. Its allies and the countries
> it might invade have even fewer. Iran aims mainly at Israelis. It
> instrumentalizes its own Jews for political purposes and was at the origin
> of the attack against Jews in Buenos Aires. In the 1930s Germany, ruled by
> Hitler, together with its future allies and the countries it would invade,
> had many millions of Jews within their borders, and they were an easy
> target. Today Israel can probably prevent attacks and certainly retaliate.
>
> Israel also has an ally in the United States, and other states are willing
> to support it to varying degrees. This is radically different from the
> structural disarray of the Jews in the 1930s and the unwillingness of any
> nation to help them. That became fully clear at the 1938 Evian Conference,
> where no major country was willing to commit to receiving Jewish refugees.
>
> While widespread anti-Semitism - disguised as anti-Israelism - has made a
> major comeback in this decade, it has not been turned anywhere into
> discriminatory legislation. Another major departure from the 1930s is that
> the radical improvement in international communications impacts on societies
> in so many ways that it is difficult to analyze which one is most important.
>
>
> YET OMINOUS similarities between the 1930s and now do exist. First of all,
> there is totalitarianism. Leading Holocaust scholar Prof. Yehuda Bauer has
> said, "In Islam there are major forces which are mentally prepared - given
> the power - to carry out genocide against all others... Islamic radicalism
> is the desire for a global utopia, to be achieved through violent means,
> which aims at global dominance. This is equally true for National Socialism
> and communism. Every universal utopia is murderous and every radical
> universal utopia produces radical murderers."
>
> As in the 1930s, Western leadership is weak and little aware of looming
> dangers. British prime minister Neville Chamberlain was reviled for his
> appeasement of Nazi Germany for decades. Nowadays a rehabilitation of
> Chamberlain is indirectly on its way, as more and more revisionist
> historians claim that World War II could have been avoided and that
> Churchill was a warmonger.
>
> Today, many in the West favor both external and internal appeasement of
> radical Muslims. In foreign policy, Europe is pushed toward appeasement
> because it possesses little military force. Domestically, it seeks to
> placate its resident Muslim extremists through proposals that Shari'a be
> allowed to operate within the framework of national legal systems.
>
> Some appeasement movements and motifs are the same as in the 1930s.
> Pacifists have frequently been of use to totalitarians. Moral relativists,
> fearing to be judgmental, are another type of appeasers. There is also a
> parallel between those in the 1930s in Western Europe who felt guilty about
> the severe conditions of the Versailles peace treaty regarding Germany and
> those who nowadays feel guilty toward the Third World for the sins of
> colonialism. Similarities also abound between those who were willing to
> sacrifice Czechoslovakia for an illusionary peace and those who want to
> pressure Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians on the false
> assumption that once this conflict is solved, Western relations with the
> Islamic world will improve permanently.
>
> ONE PHENOMENON that may be unique to our time is what can best be called
> "humanitarian racists." One finds many of these in NGOs, whose number has
> exploded in recent decades. Left-wing politics, the media and the academic
> world are also hotbeds of this poorly recognized form of racism.
> Humanitarian racists believe, to varying degrees, that only whites must be
> held accountable for their acts, whereas Third Worlders or non-whites are
> mainly victims. By diminishing non-whites' responsibility for their criminal
> deeds, one is in effect ranking them somewhere between "real" humans and
> animals, which live by their urges. The behavior of the NGO gathering at the
> 2001 UN Durban Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination and
> Xenophobia made humanitarian racism visible internationally.
>
> Humanitarian racism can often be discerned in the debate on the
> Palestinian-Israeli conflict, where it consists of systematically ignoring
> the criminal character of large parts of Palestinian society, such as its
> many promoters of genocide and its education of children to become "martyrs"
> through murdering Jews.
>
> In a globalized society, the forces of radical Islam, genocide promotion
> and appeasement of totalitarians are increasing - as are those in opposition
> to them. Their relative strengths will determine whether the similarity of
> our world to that of the 1930s will grow or decline.
>
> *The writer is chairman of the Board of Fellows of the Jerusalem Center
> for Public Affairs. *
>
> ------------------------------
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