"Israel's Key Vulnerability" by Abiezer Coppe

Here is another post by guest poster Abiezer Coppe, Israel’s Key Vulnerability. I agree with several of his points here. First of all, armed resistance to Israel by the Palestinians is clearly futile. What’s the point? They are up against the 4th largest army on Earth with 200 nuclear weapons. These measly rockets are going to beat them how. On the ground, there’s no contest. The Palestinians got creamed in this last invasion of Gaza. I agree that it is absurd for Hamas to declare to a victory when they just got their ass handed to them in the worst way, but this is how Arabs are. An Arab will never admit he lost. Even if he gets creamed worse than Custer at Little Bighorn, it’s still a Great Victory for the Mighty Arabs. I also agree that Israel has violated its own UN Charter that it signed in order to be admitted to the UN, and as such, I think Israel ought to be thrown out of the UN on its butt. This will never happen, but it’s a nice fantasy. I can see Abe Foxman and the US editorial pages squirming and writhing like Linda Blair in the Exorcist right now. Boycotts of Israel are driving the world’s Jews and their media and government Gentile buddies into insane conniption fits, but it’s a great idea. It worked for South Africa. It’s important to note that South African anti-apartheid Blacks who have been to Palestine often say that the Israeli Apartheid regime under which the Palestinians live is worse than Apartheid South Africa. So if it was righteous to boycott South Africa, and I say it was, it is even more righteous to boycott Israel. The Jews usually say an Israeli boycott is outrageously anti-Semitic because we are not boycotting all the other asshole countries on Earth. Instead we are singling out one asshole country, Israel, and letting the other anal pores off the hook. It’s Intra-Asshole Country Discrimination and dammit, it’s just not fair! Equal protection for assholes! I really do not know what to make of this bizarre argument, except to ask if anyone ever used it against the South African campaign. To Israel, I say, yeah we’re singling out as one Asshole Country in a world full of Butt Nations. One Buttland at a time, please. We will get to the others later on. I’ve long been a supporter of Fritz Fanon. The only anti-Semite I have ever met who truly hated Nazism was a Leftist Fritz Fanonist who likened the Palestinian liberation struggle to the Algerian Civil War.

Israel’s Key Vulnerability

Abiezer Coppe

Israel has once more sent out a message to the Islamic and Arab world with its onslaught on Gaza that the struggle for the Middle East will be uncompromisingly bloody and violent. It was the same message in the summer of 2006 with the invasion of the Lebanon, with the Qana massacre of 1996, with the invasion and the 18 year occupation of the Lebanon in 1982 to 2000, and all the way back to 1948. For those who abjure violence in their personal lives, and for those, like me, who have never carried or used a gun, the boycott campaign is an important tool of nonviolent struggle against the Occupation of the West Bank, and the racist polity within the ever shifting borders of Israel, the borderless state in Occupied Palestine. I admire Hamas’ and Hezbollah’s armed resistance against overwhelming force, but it should be by now clear after sixty one years that by itself armed resistance to Zionism will not lead to its overthrow. The most these organisations can do to Israel is harass, with as much impact as a wasp stinging a human being. This in itself is not negligible. The main effect of the missiles launched over Israel’s border is psychological terror, and occasional fatalities, against which the fourth most powerful military machine in the world is powerless. Psychological terror may discourage new Jewish immigrants from arriving in Israel, and that is to the good. However such tactics do not even elicit a pause from Israel’s political leadership, Right and Left, in the ongoing war on the Palestinians, the Zionist project of clearing the land of Arabs, and the continued illegal settlement by Jews of the Palestine’s West Bank. Clearly Hamas and other resistance organizations are quite powerless by themselves to stop Zionism in its tracks. In a defensive struggle the Shi’ite organization Hezbollah did succeed in throwing the IDF out of Lebanon in the year 2000, and successfully frustrated Israel’s attempt to reoccupy the Southern Lebanon in 2006. Israeli expansionism was thus contained. At no point in the last sixty one years have Arab armies succeeded in crossing Israel’s 1967 borders, or even in invading the annexed West Bank. Israel’s wars, including that of 1948, have been fought on the territory of other countries. The Yom Kippur War of 1973, although a partial defeat for the Arabs, did eventually lead to the return of the Sinai to Egypt (under American pressure) during the Carter administration. The regional military balance has been shifting in Israel’s favour for the last sixty years (Mayer 2008). Talk of Hamas’ “victory” in Gaza in 2009 is in my view self-deluding and misplaced. An unopposed massacre of over 1400 civilians is not a victory. I do not want to see the Palestinian resistance reduced to the equivalent of the Native American “ghost dances” of the 1880s, as the last resistance of the aboriginal inhabitants of Palestine is vanquished. I do not think for a moment that this will happen, because the Palestinian Diaspora now numbers more than 7 million, but the weakness of the opposition to the Zionist colonisation of Palestine within Israel is very concerning, and a helping hand from an international citizens’ boycott of Israeli goods and services is its chief, but not its only hope. Arab resistance and Arab demography are other reasons to hope. Armed resistance to military occupation, as enshrined in the UN charter, is legal: Israel itself is of doubtful legality, as outlined below. As the infamous Irgun terrorist Menachem Begin and future Israeli Prime Minister remarked the day after the UN vote on the partition of Palestine in November 1947: “The Partition of Palestine is illegal. It will never be recognized…Jerusalem was and will forever be our capital. Eretz Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And forever.” Israel has not accepted a single UN resolution on Palestine from Day One, and its founding act as a state was a massive and violent process of ethnic cleansing, illegal in International Law. The current prime minster of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, is a direct descendant of the brand of Zionism represented by Begin. In order to be accepted as a member state in the United Nations, in 1949, Israel was required to endorse General Assembly Resolution 194, which recognizes the right of return of the Palestinian refugees and commits itself to the return of all “the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours” (700,000 in total at the time), to its sovereign territory. Israel accepted, was made a member state and immediately after announced it had no intention of implementing the UN resolution. Israel thus announced its illegitimacy as a member state of the UN. The Security Council, dominated by the imperialist states of the West, and in particular the UK, which helped to implant Israel in the Middle East in the first place, went along for the ride, as did the Soviet Union. Israel’s key vulnerability lies in its being a trading state with a highly skilled workforce but few natural resources. The boycott of Israeli products, coupled with divestment in Israeli companies and a cultural embargo has to be a key way of supporting the Islamic and secular Palestinian resistance (PFLP), as well as a way of applying pressure to the Zionist establishment to moderate its penchant for atrocities, encouraging dissent within Israel and the deepening of existing fissures within Israeli society. If an international boycott can be linked to the issue of Return for the Palestinians and the cancellation of the Jewish Right of Return, an uncontroversial strategic goal in support of the Palestinians can be flagged up for the movement. In January 2009 479 Israeli citizens signed a document called A Call From Israeli Citizens calling for the boycott of Israeli products, divestment from and sanctions against Israel as the only way forward to begin the Civil-ization (in both senses – demilitarisation as well – Occupied Palestine to become a civilian society once again rather than a garrison state) of the Zionist military machine and stop the ongoing war on the Palestinian population. In the 1980s Meron Benvenisti, an Israeli writer and ex-deputy mayor of Jerusalem, ran the West Bank Data Project, which analyzed the interaction of the Israeli and Palestinian economies in the Occupation. The resulting study concluded that the West Bank had effectively been annexed by Israel, not merely occupied (Benvenisti 1995). As pre-1967 Israel was also an annexation by military force, accompanied by some strong arming of Truman and the infant United Nations by Zionist elements in the American Jewish community, the term “Occupied Palestine” correctly refers to the whole of the land between the river Jordan and the sea. Any other designation fudges the evidence, which suggests that the military occupation of the West Bank will remain until the post-1948 colonial regime itself is either brought down or collapses under the weight of its own internal contradictions, to be replaced by a non-colonial political order and the re-establishment of political and economic equality between Arab and Jew. Before 1967 Palestinian civilians of Israel also lived under a military occupation, and were in a similar position politically to those of the West Bank and Gaza now. The Palestinian American writer Rashid Khalidi uses the term helot (a term from the Greek language of Ancient Greece to designate an indeterminate status between that of a slave and that of a citizen) to designate the position of Palestinian civilians who have neither the civil rights nor the political opportunity to influence the behaviour of the state that dominates and controls their lives in endlessly demeaning and demoralising ways. Palestinian terror in the form of suicide bombing, a response of the powerless to the removal of liberty and civil rights and the ongoing illegal confiscation of land for Jewish settlements, first arose in Palestine in 1994, the year in which the grotesquely unjust Oslo Peace Process faltered. In the same year, the Jewish physician and the extremist Kach Party member Baruch Goldstein, who now has a shrine in his honour drawing hundreds of tourists and supporters, murdered 29 Muslims at prayer and wounded a further 150 at the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron. Israeli Jews who view suicide bombing as a peculiarly Palestinian or Islamic pathology should recall the biblical story of Samson, the first recorded suicide attacker, and ask themselves under what extreme conditions of dispossession and oppression, and under what conditions of political despair, would they themselves consider such an act to be an attractive course of action. Those who do not like equality before the law and citizenship for all will leave, just as the Algerian French did together with some of the pieds noirs in 1962, helping to solve the problem of housing some of the Palestinian refugees from Occupied Palestine at a stroke. Frantz Fanon’s two most important books, Black Skin, White Masks, and The Wretched of the Earth, have now been translated into Hebrew as of 2004. I am sure that they have been available in Arabic for a long time, but the political culture of the Hebrews is backward and inward looking, which is to be expected in a colonial state. Were the champion of the Algerian liberation struggle Fanon alive today (he would be 82 years old) he would certainly support the Palestinians. It is our privilege and  duty as free citizens of the international community to do the same by supporting the boycott of Israeli goods. Dorothy Naor, a 77 year old Jewish Israeli with whom I have been in email contact since the invasion of Gaza, is a signatory to the aforementioned boycott document A Call From Israeli Citizens, has been an Israeli resident of Occupied Palestine since 1958, immigrating from the USA. Her activism starts from the premise that the occupation of Palestine, of which she is part as an American Jew, began in 1948, and can be reversed. She is one of a very small minority of historically conscious Israeli Jews. Reversing a colonial occupation, which in this case does not mean throwing the colonists out, is an enormously ambitious project, but it can be done, and the worldwide tide of protest and action is rising.

References

Mayer, Arno J. 2008. Plowshares Into Swords: From Zionism to Israel. London, New York: Verso Books. Benvenisti, Meron. 1995. Intimate Enemies, Jews and Arabs in a Shared Land. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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27 thoughts on “"Israel's Key Vulnerability" by Abiezer Coppe”

  1. Paul, I feel sorry that no one has commented on your article yet and since I read it three times (twice before it was posted here), I will make a comment.
    While boycotting Israel is probably morally correct, it certainly will have no effect because it will just mean that America and other western powers will have to increase aid to Israel. This aid will come out of the taxpayer’s pocket. America will never let Israel decline economically and lose it’s staunchest ally in the middle east.

  2. I wonder if the Palestinians can get their land back if the Holocaust can be shown to be a lie? None of this would have happended if they hadn’t fabricated so much of history.

  3. Emmanuel Goldstein: So you’re saying the Palestinians will *never* get their land back, because you would have to make stuff up for it to happen?

  4. LOL, there are tons of Holocaust Deniers on this site. This place is like Holocaust Denier Central.
    I don’t know why really. Maybe because I refuse to censor them. Although they are disgusting, I also think they are hilarious. I can’t stop laughing when I read Holocaust Deniers, they are so funny. Come to think of it, anti-Semites are often funny too. Lots of assholes are pretty funny, even if they are wrong.

  5. What’s weird about the Holocaust Deniers is they actually have these excellent arguments that sound totally convincing unless you have really done your homework, as almost no one has. I have had to go running to Nizkor more than a few times and throw the latest Denier stuff at them in order for them to straighten it out for me. Nizkor is an organization set up to counter the lies of the Deniers.
    Problem is that a lot of the lies are quite complex and in some cases, the evidence is somewhat thin (the biggest extermination camps of all were razed to the ground and planted with a forest), plus the Nazis were trying to cover it up the whole time. But they have done an incredible amount of homework and have managed to counter most if not all of their lies.

  6. The psychiatrist Frantz Fanon believed that the Algerian revolution would be therapy for the colonized Algerian people. We now know that he was wrong because the horribly violent civil war of the 90s showed that Algeria had not become a healthy society.

  7. I am convinced that Holocaust Deniers actually believe these lies. That is the weird part. It’s also clear that their goal is to rehabilitate Nazism in order to do it again! And do it right this time, ie, finish the job and kill ALL the Jews.

  8. One of the recurrent deniers’ stories is that there were no gas chambers, and that Zyklon B was only ever used to kill lice.
    Now I have actually seen the gas chambers at Maidanek Concentration Camp in Eastern Poland, while it was still a Communist country. They looked as if they could have been used for killing people, or were they just used for de-lousing? Were they fake? I doubt it.
    The later makes the Nazi genocides seems almost cozy…
    One of the problems for the gas chambers story seems to be the lack of documentation, and the unreliability of eyewitness reports. Can any help with this lacuna. Mayer, in Why Did the heavens Not Darken, mentions the lack of documentation, for example, but he does not go to deny that gas chambers for the purposes of extermination existed.

  9. Maimonides had an interesting take on the truth. He divided it into two categories, “true beliefs” and “necessary beliefs”. An example of a “necessary belief” is that God does get pissed off. In fact real pissed off! Maimonides was cool with his fellow Jews anthropomorphizing God, because Maimonides felt that it would improve the social order if Jews, who attributed this passion to God refrained from sinning.
    I accept that Jews were killed during the war. That’s a shame. However when European nations emphasize the Holocaust it destroys European social order. It cause Europeans to despair and think that they are uniquely horrible, and that there culture and heritage should no longer be preserved.
    Holocaust remembrance makes Jews vengeful, and exonerates them from their leaders misbehavior.
    We really have no way of knowing how many Jews were killed during the holocaust any more then we know how many Ukrainians were killed in the Holdomor, or for that matter the Armenian genocide. What we do know however is that victims always want to increase the body count, so they can play the chords or world sympathy.
    Given Maimonides view that the real truth is less important, then promoting social order, I think that de-emphasizing the Holocaust, would allow Europeans to realize that they are not such bad people, and that western civilizations just might have something worth preserving, also it deprives vengeful Jewish leaders their fig leaf.
    One should also remember that Jewish leaders believe that every generation has their own Amalek’s (Exodus 17) “The Lord will have war with Amalek from generation to generation” Obviously Germans were a generational Amalek, and the proscribed remedy for dealing with Amalek’s is (Deuteronomy 25) … you shall blot out the memory of the Amalek from under heaven; you shall not forget”
    The raison d’etre of Holocaust Belaborment is not to prevent future occurrences, as evidenced by Israeli policies, so much as to gain moral authority. Which takes me back to Maimonides insistence that societal order is necessary, and having a society feel like shit about itself is not conducive to good order, there fore it is necessary to de-emphasize the Holocaust. Some do it by denial, some do it by scholarly research. Truth has little relevance for many of the parties involved. My concern is not for truth, but for society. So I say I don’t think things where quite as bad as others say.
    Even were the numbers as bad or worse, individual Germans should not hold themselves to blame. They did not finance a one nutted load mouth corporals rise to power. Nor are they responsible for the Bolsheviks, who Hitler was created to counter. Germans are as much victims of Anglo American imperial policies as were the Jews. It’s a tradgedy that any of them died, but if necessary truths or necessary lies are required to expunge European civilization of its guilt then so be it.

  10. Odd that it’s got onto this, when the question I left hanging at the end of the article was that of decolonisation, i.e. how does Israel cease being a racist state and become a state of all its citizens, the biggest contribution Israel could make toward lessening anti-Jewish feeling worldwide?
    Israel thrives on anti-Jewish feeling, and exacerbates it, because people are not smart enough to distinguish between pro-Israel Jews and all Jews. Neither are Jews smart enough to realise that Zionism threatens Judaism and Jews, as Albert Einstein noted already in 1938. Rather than keeping Israel at a respectful distance, or shunning it altogether, too many Jews rush to embrace a mere state as an insignia of Jewish identity, a very dangerous thing to do given the nature of the Israeli state.
    Add to this the toxic stew of anti-Jewish feeling in the Arab world, which is quite capable of perpetrating another genocide against the Jews (whoops! did I say something forbidden?) and it is almost impossible to speak calmly and objectively of this subject without being described as an “Arab lover”, pace Olive. How to undo the hatreds? Pace Tad, I did not say that Israel is “like Iran”. Iran still has 25,000 Jews, but 80% of them have moved to Israel, which is very likely more congenial to Jewish existence than Iran.
    But it is clear that there is no proper separation of Rabbinate and State in Israel. If the Church of England had the influence in politics that Rabbis have in Israel, I would say we were a veiled theocracy. Iran is far worse, of course. Not a healthy state of affairs, a veiled theocracy. A mature state has a secular separation of powers. Like France.
    The first thing that have to go in Israel would be Aliyah, or the Jewish Right of Return, the original cause of the conflict, it is as plain as day, with the Palestinians. Zionists like Ah’ad Ha’am (Asher Ginzburg) were saying so as early as 1913. The falling Jewish immigration to Israel (21,000 in 2006), the low Jewish birth rate coupled with the high Palestinian birth rate (one of the highest in the world) and the emigration of Israeli Jews to other countries (the USA has nearly half a million Jews either from Israel or of Israeli descent) are all hopeful signs for the eventual normalisation of Israel.
    Israel’s days as a colonial refuge are clearly numbered. But it is likely to continue in some form as a nation state with a majority Jewish population. I really have no objection to this. I like Jews. What I dislike is the racism of Israel and its supporters, however they try to disguise it.
    Even Jews are not all that interested in making refuge anymore in the colonial entity. They might feel differently if Israel were just a normal country, with normal relations with its ethnic and religious minorities. Meanwhile Jews worldwide continue to have two countries, while the Roma, also major league victims of the Nazi genocides, don’t even have one. Kind of unfair, doncha think?
    I find it really objectionable.
    But this – ending Aliyah – is inconceivable without Israel first ceasing to be part of the American Imperium. And how is that to happen? I don’t know.
    That was an interesting post, from quite outside my usual categories of thinking. I had a German girlfriend once. She came to live in England to escape Holocaust guilt, and she wasn’t even born then! But her dad was a retired medical doctor, and he had worked for the Nazis, but in what capacity she didn’t know, because he wouldn’t talk about it.
    I don’t like the term Holocaust = totally burnt), Shoah (which subliminally suggests Israel was the solution) even less. The only expression I will accept is Nazi genocides. 12.1 million people were involved according to one article I read. Less than half of them were Jews, considerably less than half around 5.1 million according to Raul Hilberg in The Destruction of the European Jews, or 80% of Europe’s Jews. Even Hilberg’s figure remains a (very careful and unbiased by his ethnic belonging as a Jew) estimate. I doubt the figure of 6 million that is bandied about. The most careful Jewish scholar of the destruction of the European Jews came up with 5.1 million, so 43% of the total.
    Jews have so colonised Holocaust discourse that we never hear about the other 57% of victims of the Nazi genocides. How come? Who were they?
    The second biggest category of people (or possibly the first? heretical thought?) involved in the Nazi genocides were Slavs. 3 million Poles to start with. I wonder if numerically there were not even more Slavs deliberately killed by the Nazis than Jews, leaving aside the 27 million Russians who died fighting the Wehrmacht from Stalingrad back to the gates of Berlin.
    I’m tired of Holocaust Theology and the Holocaust Church. I want the truth. Does anyone have a breakdown? It would be healthy to get a balanced picture, and link the phenomenon to a particular social formation and historical period, starting with the abuse of Germany by the victorious allies
    after WWI in the Versailles Treaty. I’m not anti-German or pro-Jewish. I want a balanced, phenomenological account.
    What was the responsibility of the huge German Communist Party, for example, in thrall to the Comintern’s ultra-leftist Third Period, for the defeat of Weimar democracy? The Communists regarded the Social Democrats as “Social Fascists”, and shunned their most important ally in the fight against the rise of the NSDAP. Were the vagaries of the Comintern’s Third Period somehow related to the rise of the rogue racist state of Israel?

  11. I find the Nizkor site very shabby, dishonest and short of evidence and sources. Sorry, but I see no reason to take their word for it.
    ” Mayer, in Why Did the heavens Not Darken, mentions the lack of documentation, for example, but he does not go to deny that gas chambers for the purposes of extermination existed. ”
    Phew, that’s a relief – I was worried that he might be the sort of person who had trouble believing in things for which no evidence can be found.
    Well said, Cursed – a hell of a lot of Germans ended up in concentration camps. Once Hitler had power, to express dissent even with close friends and family risked imprisonment or death. No such threat hangs over the jews of America or Europe; sorry Paul but maybe there’s a reason that people confuse all jews with zionist jews – there are so few that aren’t. There was that poll that showed 84% ( ?) of US jews support a jewish state (i.e. a racist state) in Israel. All but a handful of rabbis, and ALL the jewish secular organisations, political action campaigns etc support jewish supremacist aims. In the UK, Paul may remember the police claiming that 60,000 showed up at a rally to support Israel around the time of the Jenin massacre ( so maybe half that, as they double the figures for right demos, and half them for left ones). I tend to disagree with Gilad Atzmon about these ‘ jews for this’, jews against that’ groups, when its related to Israel. It would be really reassuring to see that huge percentages (preferably a large majority), so jews SHOULD join them in their millions – but they don’t; THAT’S the problem! How many are signed up to these groups? Hundreds? A few thousand? Compared to the millions actively supporting the zionist cause! I’ve turned up to PSC rallies in Trafalgar Square for 10 years – miserable affairs with sometimes as few as 200 people, and always raining . Sure there are jews there – but they mostly seem to be sent by the jewish chronicle to check out hints of ‘antisemitism’, judging by their constant shrill brayings of outrage which often make it hard to hear the speakers, many of whom are ‘ jews for this against that’ whining about antisemitism and terrorism.
    Have a look at the first article in Today’s Counterpunch, by Paul Craig Roberts EXCERPT: ”
    On October 16, 2004, President George W. Bush signed the Israel Lobby’s bill, the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act. This legislation requires the US Department of State to monitor anti-semitism world wide.
    To monitor anti-semitism, it has to be defined. What is the definition? Basically, as defined by the Israel Lobby and Abe Foxman, it boils down to any criticism of Israel or Jews.
    Rahm Israel Emanuel hasn’t been mopping floors at the White House.
    As soon as he gets the Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009 passed, it will become a crime for any American to tell the truth about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and theft of their lands.
    It will be a crime for Christians to acknowledge the New Testament’s account of Jews demanding the crucifixion of Jesus.
    It will be a crime to report the extraordinary influence of the Israel Lobby on the White House and Congress, such as the AIPAC-written resolutions praising Israel for its war crimes against the Palestinians in Gaza that were endorsed by 100 per cent of the US Senate and 99 per cent of the House of Representatives, while the rest of the world condemned Israel for its barbarity.
    It will be a crime to doubt the Holocaust.
    It will become a crime to note the disproportionate representation of Jews in the media, finance, and foreign policy. ”
    SAY IT WHILE YOU STILL CAN, BOYS!

  12. http://www.geocities.com/~Patrin/truth_and_memory.htm
    Interesting on Jewish exclusivism and the Nazi genocides.
    http://www.digitalsurvivors.com/archives/democidenazi.php
    Review of a new book on nazi democide and mass murder, estimated killings of civilians 20,946,000 plus, Jews 23% of total.
    Lafayette Sennacherib – can Zyklon B be used for de-lousing or is it too toxic?
    I find Roger Garaudy’s The Mythical Foundations of Israeli Policy very good. And he was heavily fined for defamation of the Jewish people. The Iranian state paid the fine, and so he must be a Jew hater. He is a French Muslim, converted from Catholicism, to boot. I read his book and it is not remotely anti-semitic.

  13. I forgot to finish a sentence in the above. In case it isn’t obvious (and anyone cares) it should read :
    ‘ It would be really reassuring to see that huge percentages (preferably a large majority)publicly disassociated themselves from zionism, so jews SHOULD join them in their millions…’

  14. Lafayette thanks I’ll have a look at Paul Craig Roberts’ article. Nothing scares me. We shall win. The sad thing is, for the Israeli Zionists, is that although the huge majority of Jews in the world support the Jewish state, the huge majority of Jews don’t have the guts to go and live there. Some years Israeli Jewish emigration exceeds Jewish immigration to Israel, though this is kept very quiet. The Jewish birth rate is notoriously low. Ergo, Israel’s days as a Jewish state are numbered.
    Come on Olive, I want some input! Do you deserve to have two countries? Are you that special? What’s the deal? Why haven’t you moved to Israel?

  15. Wikipedia entry on Nazi racial policy:
    “A Russian historian Vadim Erlikman has detailed Soviet losses totaling 26.5 million war related deaths. Military losses of 10.6 million include 7.6 million killed or missing in action and 2.6 million POW dead, plus 400,000 paramilitary and Soviet partisan losses.
    Civilian deaths totaled 15.9 million which included 1.5 million from military actions; 7.1 million victims of Nazi genocide and reprisals; 1.8 million deported to Germany for forced labor; and 5.5 million famine and disease deaths.
    Additional famine deaths which totaled 1 million during 1946-47 are not included here. The official Polish government report of war losses prepared in 1947 reported 6,028,000 war victims out of a population of 27,007,000 ethnic Poles and Jews; this report excluded ethnic Ukrainian and Belarusian losses.”
    7.1 million Slav victims of Nazi genocide! How many of them were Jews? It may be that the Slavs were numerically the largest group of Nazi genocide victims.

  16. The problem with the gas chambers is the bastards tried to destroy them! But we still have the blueprints. Also, some fat middle aged guy with a working class job – I think a Canadian – got mad at Holocaust Deniers a while back and did some research on his own. He went to one of those concentration camps and I think he actually found the outlets that they used and proved that it was a gas chamber.
    He also proved some other conundrum whereby Deniers said you could not pack X number of humans in X small of a space. He built a container and packed his family into it. If you go to Nizkor and ask around they can probably tell you about him. I think he even published his findings in a journal.
    I used to know some of those Nizkor guys when we all used to post back on alt.revisionism back in the day. If you want and you have a Usenet reader, or just go to Google groups, find alt.revisionism and post any questions you want there. There’s a problem in that they assume that anyone with any questions is automatically a Denier or an asshole. The group is also full of a bunch of neo-Nazi deniers and some just garden variety anti-Semites.
    Some of Deniers are really smart and really funny! If you like sick humor. One guy’s name was Gassen Burnham. Took me a long time to figure that one out. He’s an asshole, but he was smart as a whip and funny as Hell. I made friends with the Deniers (Why not? I have too many enemies as it is.)
    The group is kind of perverse because the Deniers are really nice guys (at least they were to me) and the Jews and the anti-revisionists were mostly a bunch of really nasty shits. Always calling me “racist”, “bigot”, “denier”. The Jews are all Zionists too, so that complicates things.
    It’s a pretty sad day when the Nazis are nicer than the Jews but hey.

  17. Paul – I’ve never read any of the ‘affirmers’ dispute that Zyklon B was used for de-lousing.
    THANK YOU for that piece by Ward Churchill. It’s one of the best things I’ve read on the ‘holocaust’ – THAT is the true story. Ward Churchill is one of my favourite writers. He himself has had his suffering downplayed or ignored; I note that when it comes to leftist discussions of the casualties of ziocon academic withchunts, his name is consistently left out for some reason. The main reason for his targeting is assumed to be his essay ‘ On the Justice of Roosting Chickens’, but I’m sure the worldview expressed in the piece you linked to is a big part of it too, and I suspect is a reason the ‘left’ might have reservations about him – uncritical holocaust worship is unfortunately still too prevalent on the ‘left’.
    I think Churchill is a little unfair on Butz and Faurisson, however; I wonder if he’s read them. Robert (Lindsay) says these people are all nazis, but I disagree; overtly at least they’re at worst naive nationalists, not unlike the American paleoconservatives. They do tend to extend their critique into areas where it’s not tenable, on average showing a tendency to give the benefit of the doubt (even where there is none) to exonerate the German army for crimes beyond the inevitable brutality of an all-out war, therefore often denying the REAL holocaust Ward Churchill so eloquently defines. They do tend to see the invasion of Russia as defensive – defensive against the oppression of Germany by the British Empire ( which was real) and against the threat of a Bolshevik takeover or invasion ( which was not real, but which at the time there was every reason to believe). I tend to see (some at least) them as naive patriots reacting to the demonising of the German people, and this is often how they present themselves. I feel that outside of their area of focus they tend to be ill read, and so their political positions (if they express any) are just a mish mash put together from the misinformation in the mass media. Ward Churchill also shows this trait with his remark about Stalin’s ‘deliberate holocaust’ in the Ukraine – this is completely discredited. Check the archives here – Robert writes on the ‘Holodomor’ occasionally, and I throw in my little bit sometimes.
    But withing their usual area of focus, I feel the revisionists may be onto something, the sloppiness of their own scholarship notwithstanding – the numbers of jewish dead and the mass-gassings ( see Carlo Mattogno and Germar Rudolf). I haven’t the energy, or any real wish to be honest, to get into a discussion of this just now, but just let me say that I think the revisionists at least do us a service by pointing out the weakness of the evidence and the arbitrariness of the conclusions in some areas. And I feel they may really be onto something as regards the question of mass-gassings, and that this IS important because it’s a lynch-pin of the claim of uniqueness – ‘no other people suffered such a methodical, industrial extermination’. I think the jailing of Germar Rudolf (and I don’t like his politics) is a shocking indictment of our culture.
    Norman Finkelstein, in ‘the Holocaust Industry’, states that the literature on the holocaust is (my words) by and large crap, emotionally-manipulative tearjerkers containing no real scholarship, with the exception of Raul Hilberg. I go to Amazon, search ‘holocaust’ (the most widely known historical event of all time) and sure enough books come up – Bauer, Dawidowicz, Lipstadt… all the gang. Thanks to the wonders of Amazon, one can ‘look inside’ and see that these people don’t actually write about the holocaust; they write about the history of European antisemitism, jewish history etc – invariably the actual holocaust is dealt with in a handful of pages.
    That leaves Hilberg, whose massive and expensive book few have read. You might find the following interesting; it’s an excerpt from Jurgen Graf’s booklength critique of Hilberg ( which you can download free online if you google it) ‘ Giant With Feet of Clay’ – I can’t vouch for the truth of what he says:
    “Someone who has struggled through the 283
    pages of the first volume has not yet encountered the subject for which Hilberg has named his work. The first 123 pages of the second volume, namely
    pages 287 to 410 (DEJ, v. 1, pages 271-390), are devoted to the Mobile Killing Operations; this concerns the mass killings behind the eastern
    front. No fewer than 515 pages (pp. 411 to 926; DEJ, v. 2, pages 391-860) deal with the deportations of Jews from areas controlled by Germany or her
    allies. With respect to the deportations, the facts are largely undisputed. That which makes the Holocaust so spectacular and bestial in the
    popular imagination, namely the industrialized slaughter in extermination camps, first shows its face on page 927; this is the beginning of the chapter
    on Killing Center Operations (DEJ, v. 3, pages 861-990). Yet the reader must persevere for another hundred pages until the subject finally comes
    around to the Killing Operations; in the previous five subchapters Origins, Organisation, Personnel and Maintenance, Labor Utilization,Medical and finally Confiscations in the Annihilation Centers were discussed. Remarkably, the subchapter Killing Operations is only nineteen (!!!) pages long (DEJ: 18); on page 1046 (DEJ, p. 979), the subject has already moved on to Liquidation of the Killing Centers and the End of the Destruction Process.
    The third volume of 290 pages is devoted entirely to Consequences, Reflections, Aftereffects and Further Developments before the Appendix closes the work; the latter contains Hilberg’s data on Jewish
    population losses. (in DEJ, volume 3 contains the chapter on Killing Center
    Operations) I summarize:
    123 pages of the 1,351 page standard work on the Holocaust (DEJ, 120 pages of 1232 pages) deal with the killings behind the eastern front, which has received less attention both in the scholarly
    and in the popular literature, and which, if we are to go by Hilberg’s victim counts, are also numerically less significant than the claimed mass killings in extermination camps. A total of 19 pages out of 1,351 (DEJ, 18 pages of 1232) are devoted to the central fixture of the Holocaust, the practical course
    of the claimed mass killings in gas chambers (plus there are eleven more pages on the related question of the Liquidation of
    the Killing Centers).
    The entire first and the greater part of the second volume (in particular,the 515 pages on the deportations; in DEJ, most of the first volume and all the second volume containing 470 pages on deportations)have no direct bearing on the subject for which Hilberg has named his work, namely The Destruction of the European Jews. In the third volume, only the population statistics are applicable
    to our subject. Already at this point it can be seen that the Hilberg work does not contain what the title promises. Of course, this makes the work of the critic
    easier in that it permits him to concentrate on a relatively small part of this large work and dispense with the rest with a few comments.”

  18. I posted my last post before I’d read Robert’s above it.
    ‘Gassen Burnham’ LOL.

  19. Ok, I know this Garaudy. I don’t think he’s an anti-Semite. He’s just a lunatic. Like all the Deniers.
    As a matter of fact, the Nizkor crowd has a long response to the delousing argument for Zyklon-B.
    They do tend to see the invasion of Russia as defensive
    Operation Barbarossa revisionism is de facto Nazism.
    I haven’t the energy, or any real wish to be honest, to get into a discussion of this just now, but just let me say that I think the revisionists at least do us a service by pointing out the weakness of the evidence and the arbitrariness of the conclusions in some areas.
    No. The revisionists do us a service by pointing out possible errors in Holocaust scholarship and forcing us to dot every i and cross every t and explain everything. Hilberg himself says this.
    Norman Finkelstein, in ‘the Holocaust Industry’, states that the literature on the holocaust is (my words) by and large crap, emotionally-manipulative tearjerkers containing no real scholarship, with the exception of Raul Hilberg.
    He’s so wrong though. There’s tons of great scholarship. I don’t know about Lipstadt, but if you go to her site, there are transcripts of the Nazi Irving’s trial and there is testimony of various historians that answers all of your questions.
    Gilbert is good, Dawidowicz is good, they are all good, really, except idiots like Elie the Weasel.

  20. Robert – the Irving trial transcripts ( I take it you don’t mean the Austrian judgement which led him to be jailed) are available online. I’ve read part of them. It wasn’t about holocaust denial, and hardly touched on the holocaust. It was a libel case, BROUGHT BY IRVING against Lipstadt for claiming that his work was not entirely scrupulous. He shouldn’t have brought the case ( probably no historian should bring such a case), because Lipstadt’s team, including British Third Reich expert Richard J. Evans, showed clearly that he trimmed the facts (albeit in small and delicate ways) consistently in favour of this ‘thesis’ that Hitler was ‘ not the most enthusiastic advocate’ of whatever was done to the jews in the East. That doesn’t really do Irving justice, because his position can, and has been, easily caricatured as ‘ Hitler was a nice guy really; it was others who got up to that stuff behind his back’. He’s subtler than that, but ultimately dishonestly indulgent of wishful thinking, tending consistently to err in favour of his own vision of ‘ a nicer Hitler’. Irving, though, has never written on the holocaust, and makes it plain that he hasn’t studied it, and so anything he says on the matter is as non-professional reacting as a private citizen to the work of others. He has occasionally passed comment in interviews, sometimes sympathetic to some of the revisionists, sometimes not – I don’t think he should be witch-hunted for that.
    I’ve read Evans’ book on the Irving trial, ‘Telling Lies About Hitler’. I have to confess that I approached it skeptically, wanting to be unimpressed; that was my reaction to the ‘witch-hunt’ feel of the whole business – in fact, Lipstadt to her credit expressed similar distaste for the whole business and open disapproval for Irving being jailed in the other, Austrian case. But I have to admit that Evans is a very fair, sane, eloquent and scrupulous writer, and I was won over. Evans made a pretty good case that Irving’s previous substantial reputation as a historian was largely undeserved, as his work, from the beginning, had been consistently unprofessional – Irving HAD done a lot of original research, of real value to other historians, but the work he himself based on it was sloppy.
    So there you go – an interesting case, but it doesn’t really touch on ‘revisionist matters’.

  21. Whenever any people consider themselves to be the “chosen ones” (Israeli Jews, Aryan-duped Germans, xenophobic French, Neo-Con Americans, chauvinistic fundamentalist Japanese, Islamo-Fascists, et al) there is no rational approach to dealing with them because they operate totally from irrationality. History proves again and again that cultural irrationality is only conquered by severely crushing means, and I suppose that in time we will either see Israel annihilate all of its enemies or its enemies will annihilate Israel. I personally cannot see any other option on the horizon given the zealotry of all opposing factions in that theater.
    Jeffrey Van Middlebrook

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