The Little Zionist

Blade and I were in a taxi to Cambridge station very early in the morning as I was on my way to Israel. The taxi driver was hideous, and not at all like my righteous Liverpudlians mentioned below. He attempted to make smalltalk as Cambridge taxi drivers sometimes do. He asked where we were going. Blade foolishly told him I was flying to the holy land - to palestine. It then transpired that he too had been to the holy land - to palestine. Blade and I thought this somewhat odd, something Blade expressed by subtly poking me in the side and squeezing my hand. As if I had not noticed this oddness of this man’s visit. We asked for further details and learned that the hideous man had run out of money when travelling ‘around europe’ and ended up in the holy land - in palestine. He said he had an awful time there, and was kind enough to dispense some advice about how best to make my visit bearable. I will list the advice in easily-degistible bullet-points below*:

1. Arabs offer the best hospitality in the world - especially coffee.
2. Israelis are arrogant people.
3. Israelis will not look after you, they will only look after their own.
4. Israelis are oppressing the palestinian [sic] people.
5. Stick to the Arab areas and you will be fine.

*This advice can be made more generally applicable by inserting the word ‘Jew’ where ‘Israeli’ appears.

Blade expressed his incredulity, and mild excitement at meeting a real-life antisemite, in the same way as described above. I did not tip the man.

Blade and I had just docked in Bilbao, having come to the end of a hideous 36-hour ordeal on board a large, lower-class ferry. I was hanging around the reception desk of the vessel wearing Blade’s Israeli Airforce hoody, and trying to look offensive, when I noticed a man whom I assumed to be northerner, wearing some nylon shorts. We disembarked without showing anyone our passports, and with the Liverpudlian following us. The northerner then offered us a lift with him and his brother, whose parents have moved to Spain, and to whom they were driving. They dropped us outside our five-star hotel. I left Blade’s 2003 rowing jacket in the car. I was more upset about this than he. So in the car we conversed on various matters. Blade told the nice men that he wanted to be a teacher in order not to make them feel bad about their relative stupidity. I told them that I did French, and English, thinking this to be a rather inoffensive combination as would be studied by asinine girls from the north. Blade later told me I was wrong on this point. The younger of the brothers said that he was in the army fighting in Afghanistan, and this pleased me very much. I said that my cousin was also there shooting the savage Taleban, and we bonded. He spotted my hoody, and asked me if I was in the Israeli airforce (this was before I had told him about my studying French and English). I said that no I was not, and that I had the hoody because I had bought it as a souvenir, and because the Israeli Airforce is the best in the world. His only point of contention was the superiority of the British in this area. This, again, pleased me very much. We made a few small jokes about F16s and mohemmedans, and, again, bonded. This was a very heartening conversation. These people have not been perverted by the scourge of moral relativism, because they do not know what it is. They prefer to talk about aeroplanes and guns than Edward Said. They are excluded from the post-al-aqsa tide of anti-semitism, that I shall very originally observe, has swept along islamo-facsists as well as ‘intellectuals’. This is very good, and I entered my Bilbao hotel happy.

I’ve just been sent this link. Thank God we still control the rest of the media.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Zionist

Since this story remains bizzarely underreported, here is a link for anyone who is silly enough not to read Melanie Phillips

clever mad Mel

BBC - Mayor is suspended over Nazi jibe

Funny how these little fascists always seem to align themselves with ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom of speech’ these days. Ken Livingstone reckons that the decision to suspend him from office for four weeks “strikes at the heart of democracy.” It wasn’t Livingstone’s comparison of a Jewish journalist to a concentration camp guard, but his refusal to see anything wrong with the remark, that landed him the four week suspension. He stands by his comment, claiming that “he was expressing his honestly-held political view of Associated Newspapers, but he had not meant to offend the Jewish community.” This seems rather odd to me. I know the horror of the Holocaust is being eroded daily by abusive comparisons to Israelis, and the hijacking of Holocaust memorial day etc. etc. etc., but surely it has not been so stripped of meaning that comparisons with Evening Standard journalists are now seen as legitimate and “honest”.

As David Irving is tried, convicted and sentenced, European libertarians cry out in outrage and horror as Muslims in the Arab world and in Europe use violence to try to control what can be published in Europe. Others exclaim at the perceived irony; the ‘left’ laud freedom of speech as a pure and transcendent value, an inherent right enshrined in our liberal democracies, and at the same time, Irving is incarcerated for making (what they admit to be repugnant) speeches.

Although to some, the timing of this aptly exposes Europe’s hypocrisy, surely we must be a little more careful in comparing the two ‘crimes’ in question. The Jyllands-Posten cartoonists satirised the abuse and politicisation of Islam. Their depiction of the prophet has caused great offence and hurt to some Muslims. However, the cartoonists trained their sights on what is undoubtedly a legitimate target; in fashioning itself into a political force, Islamic fundamentalism must accept that it will become the subject of political satire - and of polemic and rational criticism. Political Islam has no right to demand the reverence and protection from satire and abuse that some may feel should be offered to religion. The greatest irony in my eyes is not Europe’s ‘double standards’, but the fact that the hurt and offence generated by the cartoons has been augmented and manipulated; it, too, has been politicised and used to attack western goverments - to deepen the alienation felt by European Muslims, to increase the antipathy felt by many in the Arab world, and as part of an assault on western democratic values.

On whether the the Holocaust is a ‘legitimate target’, I am incredibly uneasy. This is the most horrific event in our history. It is fact. And it is still scarred deeply into the psyches of its survivors, as well into the collective psyche of the people it tried to exterminate. I am in theory opposed to any state-imposed limits on freedom of expression, but my disgust at David Irving’s views - at the fact that he shamelessly and thoughtlessly tells the survivors of Hitler’s concentration camps that they are liars - makes me wish he could be locked up forever, or at least until he finds some compassion for those whose horrific memories he desecrates. But I will try to keep my response more rational.

Although I feel repulsed by Irving and his views, I cannot escape the knowledge that every historical event is a legitimate target of debate. I am no libertarian, to be sure; I believe, like any rational human being, that personal freedom does not only entail, but is made possible by social responsibilites, and I know that in order to grant each person the greatest possible measure of his rights and freedoms, some of these responsibilities must be imposed by the state. However, it is futile for the state to resist these antisemites with laws that can be used against us. It is not up to the state to impose resposibilities in this case, because in doing so they must impose seemingly hypocritical laws that leave our society open to attack by fundamentalist Islam, and leave history open to attack by those whose intransigence could lead to events that we must debate becoming taboo. The responsibility for responding to people like Irving - to those who try to legitimate antisemitism - falls squarely with us - with rational individuals. Rational people must drown Irving’s views in a tide of information and debate, rather than allow this repugnant, right-wing racist to be defended in the name of free speech.

To a true libertarian, personal freedom is the standard by which society is judged. Perhaps a better way of seeing things is that the better a society functions, the more freedom it is able to grant to its citizens. If we take our responsibilities seriously on this matter, then Europe’s goverments will not feel such great need to promulgate laws which are obliquely harmful, in order to impose social resposibilities that the individual should willingly shoulder.

“Holocaust is a greek translation of the Hebrew word ” עולה ” (`ola). `ola is a very specific term describing a type of burnt offering. When an animal was sacrificed in this way absolutely every part had to be burnt. For obvious reasons there has been some controversy about the application of the term to the Nazi genocide, and ” שואה ” (sho’a) is preferred by some. “Holocaust” was first used to refer to the Nazi genocide, in The News Chronicle on 5th December 1942 (”Holocaust…Nothing else in Hitler’s record is comparable to his treatment of the Jews…The word has gone forth that..the Jewish peoples are to be exterminated”). Although the OED shows that “holocaust” is attested in various English sources from 1526, the term was certainly appropriated from 1942 onwards, to describe almost exclusively, Hitler’s systematic extermination of Jews and other people “unworthy of life” (Karl Binding). Whether used as a proper noun or not, “holocaust” cannot fail to conjure images of the gas chambers, of carefully organised lists of those who are to be slaughtered.

I cannot believe that such a systematic extermination of any group could occur in Europe again, but in the light of the vicious anti-semitism that is coming out of many Arab countries - countries arming themselves with suicide bombers and perhaps even nuclear weapons, countries whose rhetoric is more anti-Jew than it is anti-Israeli policy - surely we should be doing out utmost to protect the power invested in the word. Anti-Israel rhetoric has done much to undermine its force; as the Palestinians declare an Israeli holocaust against them, and we in Europe tolerate - even accept - this linguistic distortion, we come closer to forgetting the horror of the Final Solution. Over the next few decades the remaining Holocaust survivors will die, and now more than ever before, we must destroy any attempts to erode our collective memory of the Holocaust. We must not let the clear moral distinction between bloody massacres, wars, occupations and genocides, and the calculated programme of systematic and scientific extermination of those deemed (by supposedly rational scientific discourse), subhuman. There is clearly something much more disturbing, sickening and incomprehensible about this kind of meticulous extermination, than about anything else in our history.
Surely this is all obvious. I was slightly uneasy, then, to receive this email, which was sent out (on behalf of Cambridge University Students’ Union - CUSU) to all the undergradutes in my college:

“This year, on the 27th January, we will be marking the 6th HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY, the 61st anniversary of the liberation of the former Nazi concentration and extermination camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, in 1945. Many groups were affected by the Nazi Holocaust, including disabled people, religious and ethnic minorities, and the LGBT community, all of whom are part of our student body. As students who embrace multiculturalism, and have the power to make a difference, it is imperative that we all unite to remember the events of the past, both the Holocaust and subsequent atrocities and genocides such as those in Rwanda, Cambodia, and currently in Sudan. CUSU will be remembering the most shocking times of the 20th Century with a number of commemoratory events.

“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good people do nothing.” - Edmund Burke

CUSU ANTI-RACISM CAMPAIGN”

This is so glaringly obvious that it barely worth my saying: there is not moral equivalance between the Holocaust and the “subsequent atrocities and genocides”, and the phrasing of this email implies that there is. The idiot who send this out is either malicious or incredibly stupid. Either way she is desperately irresponsible. Perhaps Burke should have added qualification to his remark: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good people (who are also not complete idiots) do nothing.” may have been better.