Part Six: Controlling the Narrative: Using the Holocaust to justify genocide
Introduction: As this is posted, police in the UK are refusing to give permission for a rally for Palestine on January 18th, which was asked to start in front of the BBC headquarters. The police said it would create accumulative insecurity for a nearby synagogue (about 500 metres away) as there had been two other demonstrations beginning at the BBC headquarters in the last year. Also the Chief Rabbi in the UK has said that the demonstrations are making Jewish people feel unsafe. The Chief Rabbi has been an enthusiastic advocate for the actions of the Israel in the current slaughter and genocide. Even though these demonstrations have been attended by many Jewish people and formal Jewish organizations, openly expressing their dismay at the actions of Israel, the Chief Rabbi is trying to make it look like all Jewish people are feeling unsafe and insecure because of those who disagree with Israel’s actions. This a pathetic excuse that is now being used to suppress fundamental democratic rights in the U.K. The following article explores how the holocaust is also used to suppress democracy and freedom and how it is used to justify the criminal actions of Israel.
The Jewish holocaust is the story of the horror of how Jews and also Romani peoples, Blacks and others were put into concentration work camps in Germany and Poland during WW2 with millions dying as a result. It was one of the vilest moments of human history of how one group of people treats another. This was a genocide, which is the deliberate attempt to annihilate another people. But, unfortunately it is only one of many genocides and holocausts in human history and yet now, it has been elevated to the most important and the worst holocaust in human history. So much so, that it is now against the law to question even some of the evidence of what exactly happened there. It has now moved from being a historical event to become a mythology and as American Jewish historian, Normal Finkelstein has described, a “Holocaust Industry.” He wrote this in his 2000 book, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering.
What Finkelstein and others describe is how the Holocaust has been used now to rationalize and justify every atrocity, human rights crime, murder, expropriation of land and now genocide by the Zionist state. The State of Israel cannot be condemned because of the Holocaust. No other event in history compares to this and therefore it essentially must become a state religion, which is what has happened. Like other religions in history, to challenge any part of it is an act of heresy. In the past, people were killed for being heretics. Now, people in many European countries are put in prison for even daring to question ANY aspect of it. This doesn’t mean denying the holocaust or openly stating anti-Semitic tropes in a public place but to simply question any aspect of it, for example, exactly how many people died in the holocaust. It is illegal to say it is anything less than 6 million.
In this article, it describes how a German woman was repeatedly put in prison when she was in her 80’s and 90’s for questioning the six million figure and if there were gas chambers at Auschwitz. As the article describes, these were thought crimes. She could challenge and say whatever she wanted about any other historical holocaust and slaughter but not the Jewish one. There are now 17 Europeans countries, including Israel and Canada, that make Holocaust denial a punishable offence. In Germany, hundreds of people have been imprisoned over the years for saying anything that challenges the state sanctioned narrative.
One of other most terrible genocides in history was the Armenian genocide, when 1-2 million people were killed by Turkish forces as they were evicted from their own country. They died from murder, starvation and disease. It is one of the most documented holocausts in relative modern history and yet the State of Israel does not recognize it as a genocide. (see Yossi Melman, “Israel’s Refusal to Recognize the Armenian Genocide is Indefensible,” Foreign Policy, 4/29/2019). How strange that a country that experienced a genocide wont’ recognize another country’s genocide, as if would detract from the exclusivity of their own.
The American journalist, Diana Johnstone, in her book Circle of Darkness, describes the way in which “holocaust denialism” has been used in recent years to demonize anyone as anti-Semitic who questions Israel and who questions any part of the history based on the holocaust. To quote from her book as taken from the following article I wrote last year:
“The journalist Diana Johnstone, in her book, Circle in the Darkness, discusses this when describing how in France, a law was passed in July 1990, called “Gayssot Law,” after a French academic questioned one fact of the gas chambers in the concentration camps. This led to a “vigorous” debate about Freedom of Speech, which even involved Noam Chomsky, who defended the academic’s right to freedom of expression even if he did not agree with it. Johnstone knew Chomsky, and wondered at the time, whether Chomsky’s decision to defend the individual was the best use of his energy, as it brought a ton of opprobrium on him and did it really matter as the fact of the deaths of millions of Jews was not being disputed. The law though, defined as a crime any challenge to existence of crimes against humanity as defined in Article 6 (c) of the Statute of the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal.”
“In the long list of what constitutes a Crime Against Humanity, she makes the point that the law has only really been used to the alleged denial of gas chambers in Auschwitz, and where people can be sued if any comment is made that implies denial. Her more important point though is what she sees as the ideological function of the law. To quote: “it legally establishes the Holocaust as a sacred event above ordinary human history – not so much the event as a whole (as nobody questions the persecution and murder of Jews by the Nazis) but specifically the use of homicidal gas chambers. Instead of Holocaust, the French have adopted the term Shoah, with even more religious connotations. In all of history, this is the only version of events which is protected by law from revision or even questioning. This amounts to a religious dogma. It distinguishes the massacre of Jews during World War 2 as belonging to a category apart from other genocides, which is perfectly appropriate for the Jewish religion, but which clashes drastically with French “laicite”, meaning the absence of government support for any religion. The Shoah is celebrated officially and unofficially, not only in the annual Shoah commemoration but almost constantly in school rooms, trips to Auschwitz, radio and television programs, books and films. It has de facto replaced Christianity, which indeed had succumbed to laicite over a century ago, as the state religion. It has its martyrs and saints, its holy scripture, its rituals, its pilgrimages, everything that Christianity had except redemption…… The proof that a doctrine is a religion is when any questioning of it is regarded as heresy. Any challenge to the Shoah faith is blasphemy and can be punished.”
This description of the role of the holocaust or Shoah is a form of secular religion, and this has been a deliberate strategy imposed upon mostly Western countries by Jewish and Zionist interests as another way to control the narrative against any criticism of Israel, in particular now since the genocide in Gaza.
And to quote further from the article I wrote:
“For some defenders of Israel, the same law applies now to Gaza. No criticism of Israel is acceptable, especially if non-Jewish. As Mamet would state, nearly everybody is anti- Semitic and as the same article in Unherd by Jacob Howland explores, any criticism is simply unthinkable given the history of the holocaust and as is quoted, “The worst moral and artistic crime that can be committed in producing a work dedicated to the Holocaust is to consider the Holocaust as past.” The article further makes the theological, Manichean argument of good v. evil and in this way, justifies Israel’s response as well as Israel’s right to take whatever action it needs to take a result of what has happened.
The article in Unherd further states: “There is something absurd about the demand that Israel exercise proportionality in the face of Evil. As Douglas Murray has observed, that would mean that “Israel should try to locate a music festival in Gaza and rape precisely the number of women that Hamas raped… kill precisely the number of young people that Hamas killed.… [They should] go door to door and kill precisely the correct number of babies that Hamas killed.”
“The revulsion this suggestion elicits in decent human beings underscores the literal impossibility of reckoning with Evil. If Good is transcendent, Evil is negatively transcendent, exceeding measurement as it exceeds explanation. To try to measure or explain either Good or Evil is like trying to capture mathematical infinity in a finite sequence of numerals. It simply cannot be done.”
“We must not forget this when we hear “reasonable” people at the UN, The New York Times or the US State Department urge Israel not to go too far in its attempt to eradicate Hamas, or when they condemn the country — as is inevitable — for having done so. Such judgments pose as clarity, but are in fact moral and intellectual obfuscation. They can only encourage antisemites everywhere, and give Hezbollah and other agents of Iran’s theological tyranny a pretext for opening up more fronts in their effort to effect a Final Solution: to finish, once and for all, the work of the Holocaust.”
“Indeed, Hamas and its Islamist allies are counting on exactly this. They have set a trap for Israel, baited by their Evil. They want the IDF to grind Gaza to a pulp. They hope that publicising images of suffering in Gaza (including fake ones, if past performance is any indication) will stimulate world outcry and justify a wider war — one that Israel may not be able to win. This violence might seem to be “useful,” but if so, it is useful only in the cause of Evil.”
If we are to speak of Evil at all — and now is no time for decent people to be silent — we cannot rely on ordinary frameworks of evaluation. The only language that can hope to do justice to Evil is theological. Perhaps all that can be said of Hamas and the worldwide gang of Islamists is that their crimes and plans are Satanic: absolutely and completely demonic.
This was printed in a reputable online journal, which also led me to cancel my subscription. This is unadulterated madness, twisted, insane paranoia, but it is important to note the last two sentences: “The only language that can hope to do justice to Evil is Theological. Perhaps all that can be said of Hamas and the worldwide gang of Islamists is that their crimes and plans are Satanic: absolutely and completely demonic.”
In fact, for all the wrong reasons, Jacob Howland is in fact touching on something here - the theological basis for Israel’s actions and the evolving theological basis for Zionism itself. This is covered more in the final part of this eight part series exploring Zionism v. the world. The argument many are making when criticizing Israel and Zionism is that fundamental tenets of Jewish law and theology make Jews more important than non-Jews and that the Zionist cause (the right to the land and the subjugation of native people) is given its moral legitimacy by religious Judaism which believes in Jewish supremacy. It is not racial as such but theological ideology, a form of religious fanaticism which now justifies the slaughter and genocide of the Palestinians and the desire to conquer yet more lands in the Middle East for the Jewish people. By supporting this extremist ideology, the West is now complicit in this goal.