I stumbled upon this article today. It speaks to the strange phenomenon which I and others have noted about the chosen way of German liberals to expiate for the guilt of their crushing past.


All the while, the debate on the Middle East, conducted by few major
voices, was accompanied by the bass tone of the German past, impossible to
ignore. But like a broken record, it's stuck on "Never again Auschwitz" – widely
acknowledged to be an empty phrase that can be filled with anything at all.
Leftist German pacifists, who have designed their lives to be the anti-thesis of
their Nazi fathers' or grandfathers', demonstrate (as in Berlin in July) "side
by side" with Arabs yelling "death to the Jews"! But nobody sees a scandal * in
that.

How come Germans "pacifists" are trying to unroll the damage their past had inflicted on the Jewish people by joining and supporting so whole-heartedly and mindlessly their enemies? Isn't there a barely subconscious desire here, that if only Jews were shown to be as ruthless and brutal as Nazis, then the guilt over their genocide might be alleviated? Isn't it an attempt to cancel out the guilt by posing the Jews as morally mutant as their annihilators and therefore ignorable? And how do they deal with the affection Hizzbulla and Hamas demonstrate for Hitler? How does that fact sit in with Germans' acceptance of the evil that Nazism was?

How can't they see the parallel between Haj Amin Al-Husseini's friendship with Hitler, predicated upon their common desire to see Jews disappear, and their own friendship with the ideological offspring of Husseini, predicated on a desire to see the Jewish state disappear?

There is a danse macabre taking place. Poor poor Germans, collapsing under the weight of all that guilt. They really cannot forgive the Jews for the Holocaust.

Crazy world.

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* Scandal: 1581, "discredit caused by irreligious conduct," from M.Fr. scandale, from L.L. scandalum "cause for offense, stumbling block, temptation," from Gk. skandalon "stumbling block," originally "trap with a springing device," from PIE *skand- "jump" (see scan; cf. also slander). Attested from c.1225, but the modern word is a reborrowing. Meaning "malicious gossip" is from 1596; sense of "person whose conduct is a disgrace" is from 1634. Scandalize (1489) originally meant "make a public scandal of;" sense of "shock by doing something improper" first recorded 1647. Scandal sheet "sensational newspaper" is from 1939.