Love for Life

Anti-Semitism. Don't settle for imitations.
William Blum
The Anti-Empire Report

"The cleanliness of this people, moral and otherwise, I must say, is a
point in itself. By their very exterior you could tell that these were
no lovers of water, and, to your distress, you often knew it with your
eyes closed. ... Added to this, there was their unclean dress and
their generally unheroic appearance. ... Was there any form of filth
or profligacy, particularly in cultural life, without at least one Jew
involved in it? ... nine tenths of all literary filth, artistic trash,
and theatrical idiocy can be set to the account of a people ... a
people under whose parasitism the whole of honest humanity is
suffering, today more than ever: the Jews." -Now who can be the author
of such abominable anti-semitism?

a)Hasan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah in Lebanon;
b)John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of "The Israel Lobby and
U.S. Foreign Policy"; c)Osama bin Laden; d)Jimmy Carter; e)Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, President of Iran; f)Norman Finkelstein, author of "The
Holocaust Industry".

Each one has been condemned as anti-Semitic. Are you having a problem
deciding?
Oh, excuse me, I forgot one -- g)Adolf Hitler.[1] Does that make it
easier? I'll bet some of you were thinking it must have been Ahmadinejad.

The Webster's Dictionary defines "anti-Semite" as "One who
discriminates against or is hostile to or prejudiced against Jews."
Notice that Israel is not mentioned.

The next time a critic of Israeli policies is labeled "anti-semitic"
think of this definition, think of Adolf's charming way of putting it,
then closely examine what the accused has actually said or written.

It may, however, be past the time for such a rational, intellectual
pursuit; ultra-heated polarization reigns supreme with anything
concerning the Middle East, particularly Israel.

In March, at a conference of the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee (AIPAC) in Washington, one of the speakers, an American
"Christian Zionist", asserted: "It is 1938, Iran is Germany and
Ahmadinejad is the new Hitler." The audience responded with a standing
ovation, one of seven for his talk.[2]

Then, in May, former Israeli Prime-Minister and current Likud leader
Benjamin Netanyahu declared that "It's 1938 and Iran is Germany. And
Iran is racing to arm itself with atomic bombs. ... [While
Ahmadinejad] denies the Holocaust he is preparing another Holocaust
for the Jewish state."[3]

Not to be outdone in semi-hysterical propaganda, Israel's president,
Shimon Peres, has compared an Iranian nuclear bomb to a "flying
concentration camp".[4]

So why hasn't Iran at least started its holocaust by killing or
throwing into concentration camps its own Jews, an estimated 30,000 in
number? These are Iranian Jews who have representation in Parliament
and who have been free for many years to emigrate to Israel but have
chosen not to do so.

For your further apocalyptic enjoyment here are a couple more of
Zionism's finest envoys speaking about Iran. Former Speaker of the
House in the US Congress, Newt Gingrich: "Three nuclear weapons is a
second Holocaust. We have enemies who are quite explicit in their
desire to destroy us. They say it publicly, on television, on Web
sites. [They are] fully as determined as Nazi Germany, more determined
than the Soviet Union, and these enemies will kill us the first chance
they get."[5]

And Norman Podhoretz, leading neo-conservative editor of Commentary
magazine, in an article entitled "The Case for Bombing Iran": "Like
Hitler, [Ahmadinejad] is a revolutionary whose objective is to
overturn the going international system and to replace it in the
fullness of time with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the
religio-political culture of Islamofascism. ... The plain and brutal
truth is that if Iran is to be prevented from developing a nuclear
arsenal, there is no alternative to the actual use of military force
-- any more than there was an alternative to force if Hitler was to be
stopped in 1938."[6]

Though so often condemned, Hitler actually arrived at a number of very
perceptive insights into how the world worked. One of them was this:
"The great masses of the people in the very bottom of their hearts
tend to be corrupted rather than consciously and purposely evil ...
therefore, in view of the primitive simplicity of their minds, they
more easily fall a victim to a big lie than to a little one, since
they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies
that were too big."[7]

Ahmadinejad arrived in New York September 24 to address the United
Nations. At Columbia University he was introduced by the school's
president as a man who appeared to lack "intellectual courage", had a
"fanatical mindset", and may be "astonishingly undereducated".[8] How
many people in the audience, I wonder, looked around to see where
George W. was sitting.

"If I were the president of a university, I would not have invited
him. He's a holocaust denier," said Hillary Clinton, once again
fearlessly challenging the Bush administration's propaganda.[9]

The above is but a small sample of the hatred and anger spewed forth
against Ahmadinejad for several years now. A number of people on the
American left, who should know better, have joined this chorus. I
therefore would like to repeat, and update, part of something I wrote
in this report last December, which was entitled "Designer Monsters".

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a man seemingly custom-made for the White House
in its endless quest for enemies with whom to scare Congress, the
American people, and the world, in order to justify the unseemly
behavior of the empire. The Iranian president, we are told, has
declared that he wants to "wipe Israel off the map". He has said that
"the Holocaust is a myth". He held a conference in Iran for "Holocaust
deniers". And his government passed a new law requiring Jews to wear a
yellow insignia, à la the Nazis. On top of all that, he's aiming to
build nuclear bombs, one of which would surely be aimed at Israel.
What right-thinking person would not be scared by such a man?

However, like with all such designer monsters made bigger than life
during the Cold War and since by Washington, the truth about
Ahmadinejad is a bit more complicated. According to people who know
Farsi, the Iranian leader has never said anything about "wiping Israel
off the map". In his October 29, 2005 speech, when he reportedly first
made the remark, the word "map" does not even appear. According to the
translation of Juan Cole, American professor of Modern Middle East and
South Asian History, Ahmadinejad said that "the regime occupying
Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time." His remark, said Cole,
"does not imply military action or killing anyone at all"[10], which
of course is what would make the remark sound threatening.

At the December 2006 conference in Teheran ("Review of the Holocaust:
Global Vision"), the Iranian president said: "The Zionist regime will
be wiped out soon, the same way the Soviet Union was, and humanity
will achieve freedom."[11] Obviously, the man is not calling for any
kind of violent attack upon Israel, for the dissolution of the Soviet
Union took place peacefully.

Moreover, in June 2006, subsequent to Ahmadinejad's controversial
speech, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, stated: "We
have no problem with the world. We are not a threat whatsoever to the
world, and the world knows it. We will never start a war. We have no
intention of going to war with any state."[12]

As for the Holocaust myth, I have yet to read or hear words from
Ahmadinejad saying simply, clearly, unambiguously, and unequivocally
that he thinks that what we know as the Holocaust never happened. He
has instead commented about the peculiarity and injustice of a
Holocaust which took place in Europe resulting in a state for the Jews
in the Middle East instead of in Europe. Why are the Palestinians
paying a price for a German crime? he asks. He argues that Israel and
the United States have exploited the memory of the Holocaust for their
own purposes. And he wonders about the accuracy of the number of Jews
-- six million -- allegedly killed in the Holocaust, as have many
other people of all political stripes, including Holocaust survivors
like Italian author Primo Levi. (The much publicized World War One
atrocities which turned out to be false made the public very skeptical
of the Holocaust claims for a long time after World War Two.)
Ahmadinejad further asks why European researchers have been imprisoned
for questioning certain details about the Holocaust.
Which of this deserves to be labeled "Holocaust denial"?

The conference gave a platform to various points of view, including
six members of Jews United Against Zionism, at least two of whom were
rabbis. One was Ahron Cohen, from London, who declared: "There is no
doubt whatsoever, that during World War 2 there developed a terrible
and catastrophic policy and action of genocide perpetrated by Nazi
Germany against the Jewish People." He also said that "the Zionists
make a great issue of the Holocaust in order to further their
illegitimate philosophy and aims," indicating as well that the figure
of six million Jewish victims is debatable. The other rabbi was Moshe
David Weiss, who told the delegates: "We don't want to deny the
killing of Jews in World War II, but Zionists have given much higher
figures for how many people were killed. They have used the Holocaust
as a device to justify their oppression." His group rejects the
creation of Israel on the grounds that it violates Jewish religious
law in that a Jewish state can't exist until the return of the Messiah
.[13]

Another speaker was Shiraz Dossa, professor of political science at
St. Francis Xavier University in Canada. In an interview after the
conference, he described himself as an anti-imperialist and an admirer
of Noam Chomsky, and said that he "was invited because of my expertise
as a scholar in the German-Jewish area, as well as my studies in the
Holocaust. ... I have nothing to do with Holocaust denial, not at
all." His talk, he said, was "about the war on terrorism, and how the
Holocaust plays into it. ... There was no pressure at all to say
anything, and people there had different views."[14]

Clearly, the conference -- which the White House called "an affront to
the entire civilized world"[15] -- was not set up to be a forum for
people to deny that the Holocaust literally never took place at all.

As to the yellow star story of May 2006 -- that was a complete
fabrication by a prominent Iranian-American neo-conservative author,
Amir Taheri.

Ahmadinejad, however, is partly to blame for his predicament. When
asked directly about the Holocaust and other controversial matters he
usually declines to give explicit answers of "yes" or "no". I
interpret this as his prideful refusal to accede to the wishes of what
he regards as a hostile Western interviewer asking hostile questions.
The Iranian president is also in the habit of prefacing certain
remarks with "Even if the Holocaust happened ... ", a rhetorical
device we all use in argument and discussion, but one which can not
help but reinforce the doubts people have about his views. However,
when Ahmadinejad himself asks, as he often has, "Why should the
Palestinians have to pay for something that happened in Europe?" he
does not get a clear answer.

In any event, in the question and answer session following his talk at
Columbia, the Iranian president said: "I'm not saying that it [the
Holocaust] didn't happen at all. This is not the judgment that I'm
passing here."

That should put the matter to rest. But of course it won't. Two days
later, September 26, a bill (H. R. 3675) was introduced in Congress
"To prohibit Federal grants to or contracts with Columbia University",
to punish the school for inviting Ahmadinejad to speak. The bill's
first "finding" states that "Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has
called for the destruction of the State of Israel, a critical ally of
the United States."

That same day, comedian Jay Leno had great fun ridiculing Ahmadinejad
for denying that the Holocaust ever happened "despite all the
eye-witness accounts".

How long before the first linking of Iran with 9-11? Or has that
already happened? How long before democracy and freedom bombs begin to
fall upon the heads of the Iranian people? All the charges of
anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, along with other disinformation,
are of course designed to culminate in this new crime against humanity.

I wonder, in discussing these matters, if I'm running the risk of once
again being called "anti-Semitic" by some Internet readers. No one is
safe from such charges these days. It should be noted that Hugo
Chavez, president of Venezuela, was accused last year of anti-semitic
behavior by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency of New York and the Simon
Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, important members of the Israel
lobby. The accusation was based on a highly egregious out-of-context
reading of some remarks by Chavez.[16] One doesn't have to be
particularly conspiracy minded to think that this was done in
collusion with Bush administration officials. As the Reagan
administration in 1983 flung charges of anti-Semitism against the
Sandinista government of Nicaragua, led by Daniel Ortega, who heads it
again today.[17] Stay tuned. Daniel, watch out.

One final thought. On the Democratic Party's failure to stand up to
the Bush fascist tide. Here, from the first-person account of a German
living under Hitler in the 1930s, his observation about the leading
German political party, the Social Democrats, the Democratic Party of
its time: The Social Democrats, he wrote, "had fought the election
campaign of 1933 in a dreadfully humiliating way, chasing after the
Nazi slogans and emphasizing that they were 'also nationalist'. ... In
May, a month before they were finally dissolved, the Social Democratic
faction in the Reichstag had unanimously expressed their confidence in
Hitler and joined in the singing of the 'Horst Wessel Song,' the Nazi
anthem. (The official parliamentary report noted: 'Unending applause
and cheers, in the house and the galleries. The Reichschancellor
[Hitler] turns to the Social Democratic faction and applauds.')"[18]

¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤

NOTES

[1] Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf" (Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1971,
original version 1925), Vol. 1, chapter 2, pp 57-8; chapter 4, p.150

[2] The Forward (Jewish newspaper in New York), March 16, 2007
http://www.forward.com/articles/pastor-hailed-bibi-dissed-pollard-reject...

[3] Haaretz.com (Israeli newspaper),
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/787766.html

[4] Ibid.

[5] The Jerusalem Post, January 23, 2007

[6] Commentary Magazine (New York), June 2007

[7] "Mein Kampf", op. cit., Vol. 1, chapter 10, p.231

[8] Washington Post, September 25, 2007, p.1

[9] Washington Post, September 25, 2007, p.6

[10] Informed Comment, Cole's blog, May 3, 2006
www.juancole.com/2006/05/hitchens-hacker-and-hitchens.html
For a word-by-word breakdown of Ahmadinejad's remark, in Farsi and
English, see: Global Research, January 20, 2007,
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=NOR20070...

[11] Associated Press, December 12, 2006

[12] Letter to Washington Post from M.A. Mohammadi, Press Officer,
Iranian Mission to the United Nations, June 12, 2006

[13] nkusa.org/activities/Speeches/2006Iran-ACohen.cfm;
Telegraph.co.uk, article by Alex Spillius, December 13, 2006;
Associated Press, December 12, 2006

[14] Globe and Mail (Toronto), December 13, 2006

[15] Associated Press, December 12, 2006

[16] Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, www.fair.org/index.php?page=2805

[17] Holly Sklar, "Washington's War On Nicaragua" (1988), p.243

[18] Sebastian Haffner, "Defying Hitler" (English edition, New York,
2000), pp.130-1

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