The Little Zionist

Here’s a link to The Observer’s interview with David Irving

David Irving is currently in an Austrian prison awaiting trial for Holocaust denial. In this interview he cuts a bizarre figure, described variously as ‘historian’, ‘boy scout’, and ‘neo-Nazi’. The interview leaves one with the image of a fantasist, an antisemite and a supreme ego. Personally, I detect a few echoes of the Galloway about him… “he sometimes throws all pretence of being a serious scholar away for a publicity stunt.” “Perhaps his last costume will be that of the court jester.” … We can only hope.

“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.

I found this on Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch site. On first reading I was confused, now I am rather uneasy. The guy who wrote it just seems to take too much pleasure and amusement from what he’s writing. I am worried that I’ve completely misunderstood, and am just not getting the joke.

Here’s the link

Some advice to anyone requesting audiobooks, or audiopoems, whatever. My T. S. Eliot has arrived, late and dishevelled and accompanied by a group of ‘artists’ calling themselves ‘Spleen’. Sadly, somewhere between Amazon marketplace and my pigeonhole, Eliot appears to have been kidnapped, and forced to read his poems to the strains of horrible death/thrash/speed metal music, and some kind of dance beat.
I did not stop to read what was on the CD, as I hurried to push it into my computer, eager to get my fix of modernist despair. Had I been calmer, I may have stopped and read: ‘Vocals: T. S. Eliot, Everything else: Spleen’. Itunes, sensibly refused to play the horrible thing, but MSN Music actually recognised it.
Ahh. The horror, the horror…

I must confess that I am taking very much pleasure in Mr. Galloway’s self-inflicted humiliation, and (hopefully) imminent downfall. Here is a link to a picture of his pretending to be a cat, and sipping milk from some actress’ hand. Oh, if only I had a television.

I read this and it made me sad…

Death Toll Rises to 345 in Hajj Stampede

The annual hajj stampede story is usually not on topic for this site. However, the fact that the British sent an observer to Saudi Arabia this year to study how the Saudis manage to control hajj crowds so well makes this a prime Dhimmi Watch item.

Do you think that Jawaid Akhtar, assistant chief constable with West Yorkshire Police (WYP), is thinking today that he wasted his time studying Saudi crowd control techniques? Somehow I doubt that he is.

Now, I won’t bother adding a link, as this is the whole article. 345 people die and a few sarcastic lines are the response provided by Dhimmi Watch, the blog section of Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch website. As far as I can see this post serves no purpose; it does not amuse, or provide information, or do anything other than make a disgusting joke. How can you claim the moral highground in the battle against anti-west, anti-Israel terrorists, and take pleasure or amusement from what happened in Mina? This is morally equivalent to the Schadenfreude exhibited by many Palestinians when Ariel Sharon was taken ill.

Sometimes I read Melanie Phillips and think she is too conservative even for me..

From her diary (11th Jan.)

I’m all for civil partnerships. I do, though, worry what the psycholgical implications of being brought up by a same-sex couple would be for a child. But on the whole I’m all for it. It seems ludicrous to me to deny people in committed relationships the rights that are exended to others in similar committed relationships. So anyway, I was a bit upset when I read the first lines of her 11th January article on this subject; Mrs Phillips claims to have found “Further evidence that the Civil Partnerships Act, which bestows the contractual and legal benefits of marriage on same-sex couples, is part of an agenda to destroy marriage altogether”. Paranoid, I thought. Perhaps she had earned her moniker Mad Mel. It seems, however, that she’s not some paranoid fantasist…

register offices have been instructed to purge the words ‘marriage’ and ‘wedding’ from signs inside their buildings. They are being forced to remove signs directing couples and guests to ‘marriage’ or ‘wedding suites’. References to marriage will be retained only where they are a legal requirement

My faith in Mrs Phillips: restored. My faith in the government’s Women and Equality Unit: certainly knocked, if not shaken. I mean damage done to the ailing institution of marriage aside, it is just a bit silly. I’m very glad that political correctness stops people going around saying ‘ dirty Arabs’, and telling me I really ought to be learning to sew and getting married and knocked up, er, i mean pregnant. But, God, why can’t everybody just be sensible. And get along.

While hanging around the Experimental Psychology library looking for interesting reading material last term, I found a pile of blue ‘Psychologist’ magazines about 3 months past their sell-by date. I picked up one in order to avoid doing any of my work; you cannot resist the opportunity for some instant edification when it is packaged so shinily and bluely. Sadly, I realised that the magazine’s articles ran the full gammut of rubbishness, just a lot of discursive tosh for the psychlogy student. So, standing strong in my quest not to conjugate any Hebrew verbs, I turned my attention from the pursuit of edification, to the pursuit of puerile entertainment.
Once I’d finished reading about the evolution of couple therapy, I read a psychologist’s response to the public’s reaction to the July bombings. It seems that fear, obviously the most immediate reaction, produces a desire to regain some control of the situation. This is in turn translated into avoidance or anger (an emotion that is apprently easier to deal with and control). So you either get on your bike, or defiantely head for your local tube station the next morning. To me this all seems pretty obvious, and hardly worth couching in the pseudo-scientific terms favoured by the ‘CJ’ who signed his initials at the end of this article.
CJ did put forward some interesting information, though; a study by Dr. Jennifer Lerner, a social psychologist at Carnegie Mellon universtiy in the US, showed that both the anger and fear responses were easily intensified. The anger response by, for example, watching a video of Arabs in Iraq celebrating the attacks. The intensification of anger was shown to trigger a more optimistic outlook, and a decrease in feelings of fear and wariness.
The study concluded, fairly predictably, that taking participants who were already judged to be reacting with fear, and showing them a video warning about the dangers of a possible anthrax attack made them even more scared.
If the media wants to produce the kind of courage - or bravado - that makes the public ride the tube the day after an attack, its power to do so is clear. This kind of defiant response is what disarms terrorists; if we really are not afraid, then we can deny them the effectiveness of their human weapons, and we can formulate our response to terrorism rationally.
The obvious responsilities born by a media that can so manipulate our feelings aside, there is a crucially important judgement call to be made when covering terrorist attacks in a country so unused to them. Fearlessness, when faced with a second attack, can wilt into fear. Politicians claiming that we must carry on with our lives, and defy the terrorists are essentially saying that they have the situation under control. As soon as there is a second attack, the public’s confidence in this control and in their leaders’ judgements can be shattered, leading to more widespread fear. In order to disarm terrorists, we do need to carry on as normal, and words such as Ken Livingstone’s ‘Whatever you do, however many you kill, you will fail’, can play an important role in inspiring the public to do so. However, we must be so careful that this bravado does not work against those who preach it, and shatter into fear the next time we are attacked. As for me, I think my anger response was pretty much set in stone from the minute I heard the news.

Another thing about these French.

France divided over how to cast its colonial past
A controversial law on history education reveals deep societal fault lines.
By Peter Ford | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

PARIS – Hardly had the fires died down in the Paris suburbs, as the November rioting by immigrant youths petered out, than the flames of another conflict fed by France’s colonial past began to sweep through the political landscape here.

This time they are metaphorical. But the passionate debate under way over whether French history teachers should stress positive aspects of colonialism is generating almost as much heat. The argument reveals the same ambivalence among French politicians about their country’s former empire and its peoples which also fuels much of the immigrants’ alienation. It has also raised questions about whether a democracy can have an “official history.”

The controversy “very much speaks to what is happening in France today,” says Nancy Green, who teaches immigration history at the School for Higher Social Science Studies in Paris.

“Questions of memory keep popping up,” setting competing groups’ recollections against one another, she explains. “It’s hard to tell when they’ll be sufficiently digested” into a commonly accepted version of history.

The trouble started last February, when lawmakers from the conservative ruling party quietly slipped a clause into a bill requiring schools to “recognize in particular the positive character of the French overseas presence, notably in North Africa.”

History teachers protested, and in November the opposition Socialists, whose leader François Hollande said had voted for it “inadvertently,” tried and failed to overturn it in Parliament.

Diplomatic pandemonium ensued. Algeria suspended negotiations on a friendship treaty with France that was meant to seal the two countries’ final reconciliation. Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy cancelled a trip to France’s Caribbean island possessions when local leaders said they would not meet him. And fierce arguments broke out at home both about the nature of French colonial rule and about whether politicians should tell schools how to teach history.

This is the whole article. It is not that long.

I am certainly no historian, but I don’t see how limiting debate on this subject is helpful. Surely the process of sorting through different sources of information and participating in some kind of debate is more rewarding and useful than being fed only a “commonly accepted version of history”. I don’t see how encouraging access to a range of information and opinions is dangerous. Even the most bigotted and racist propaganda can, in the context of enough truthful information, be seen for what it is. I think the French government is right to challenge teaching that does not provide sufficient breadth of information, and if the government is reacting to a supression of information on the positive aspects of colonialism, then I think they are acting admirably. If, however, they are trying to distort opinion in order to kindle some kind of nationalistic feeling or affection for France in their rioting immigrant youth, or to assuage the collective colonial guilt of their ‘white French’ population, then they are acting dishonestly. Perhaps I am being naive, but I think that reasonable people, given enough impartial information and engaged in honest and truly open debate, are capable of forming their own moral judgements. The only way of disarming the racists and propagandists who distribute disinformation, is through teaching people the critical and analytical skills to judge the information they are given, and through encouraging the human inclination to argue, question and debate. As long as people are given freedom of information and of thought, then they will be able to make their own moral judgements, and as a result will have more meaningful and strongly-held opinions.

Soon I will be at the heart of the international Zionist conspiracy. This summer I will be working at the Israeli embassy in London