The Essence of Evil:

I. The Holocaust, according to Hamas

(via Solomonia)

Jewish leaders planned the Holocaust to kill "disabled and handicapped" Jews to avoid having to care for them, according to a Hamas TV educational program. As much of the world prepared to commemorate Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, Hamas TV presented its latest sinister twist on Holocaust denial.

The Hamas TV educational program, broadcast last week, taught that the murder of Jews in the Holocaust was a Zionist plot with two goals:

1- To eliminate "disabled and handicapped" Jews by sending them to death camps, so they would not be a burden on the future state of Israel.

2- At the same time, the Holocaust served to make "the Jews seem persecuted" so they could "benefit from international sympathy."

Amin Dabur, head of the Palestinian "Center for Strategic Research" explained that "the Israeli Holocaust - the whole thing was a joke, and part of the perfect show that [Zionist leader and future Israeli prime minister] Ben Gurion put on." The "young energetic and able" were sent to Israel, while the handicapped were sent "so there would be a Holocaust."...

Video here

More Arab Holocaust denial, here

There is a cynical silver lining to this abomination. It looks like Hamas understands that the reality of the Holocaust cannot be denied. So they are trying to nullify its moral import in some other by claiming it was self-inflicted by the Jews. Not an original tactic, but then, when was the last time one heard an original thought coming from Hamas, or for that matter, the rest of the Palestinians?

Noah Pollak explains another aspect of this strange fulmination:

Much bewilderment and outrage has ensued. But actually this explanation makes perfect sense: Hamas is not only willing but in fact eager to make its people suffer and die in order to win the benefits of international sympathy. The suffering-to-benefits ratio is one of the most important calculations that informs Hamas’ relations with the world: when Palestinians die — it really doesn’t matter how — Israel is condemned and Palestinian suffering rushes to the forefront of international concern.

Amin Dabur, a Palestinian “expert” quoted in the television clip, says that “They were sent [by the Jews to die] so there would be a Holocaust, so Israel could ‘play’ it for world sympathy.” To western ears, this is crazy. But if your experience of the world is that of a member of Hamas, this explanation is eminently sensible

There is, actually, a medical term for this psychiatric disorder. It is called "Munchhausen syndrome", a mental disease in which those affected fake disease, illness, or psychological trauma in order to draw attention or sympathy to themselves. It is in a class of disorders known as factitious disorders which involve "illnesses" whose symptoms are either self-induced or falsified by the patient. It is also sometimes known as hospital addiction syndrome.

A variant of this disease is known as "Munchhausen Syndrome by Proxy":

Fabricated or Induced Illness is the formal name of a type of abuse in which a caregiver feigns or induces an illness in a person under their care, in order to attract attention, sympathy, or to fill other emotional needs.

I have always preferred to relate to this pathological need for pity from the Palestinians as a rhetorical fallacy.


II. On this day in history,

reminds us a DS Trot,

Hitler killed himself as the Russians surged toward his bunker.

These days he’d probably get some regretful blog posts about who the real war criminals were, why it was in the interests of the allies to make him look bad, and how tragic it was the “truth” had died with him.

Quotes from the comments:

Will: Although to be fair, the Yanks did take their fucking time about joining in on the whole ‘killing nazis’ thing - despite their “Lend-Lease” program (otherwise known as war-profiteering).

Thank fuck for Pearl harbour - they might never have bothered otherwise.

Hakmao:

The thesis completely ignores the importance of ideology in the Nazi state and the centrality of antisemism in that ideology–the Nazis believed they were fighting a war of survival against Jewish bolshevism and international finance, and that if UK/USA/France opposed them, it was only because they were controlled by Jewish ’string-pullers’ behind the scenes or crypto-Jews in positions of power (so-called ‘mimicry). The Nazis used the words Ausrottung (extermination) and Vernichtung (annihilation) to refer to their plans for the Jews. And (obviously) the package holiday gone wrong thesis–we couldn’t send them to Madagascar so we had to send them to a resort in Poland instead–is bollocks.

Hitler to a party meeting on 6 April, 1920:

We don’t want to be the emotional anti-Semites who seek to create a mood for pogroms. Rather, we are driven by a pitiless and fierce determination to attack the evil at its roots and to exterminate it root and branch. Every means is justified to reach our goal, even if it means we have to make a pact with the devil.

In a speech to the Reichstag on 30 January 1939 Hitler declared:

I have very often in my lifetime been a prophet and have been mostly derided. At the time of my struggle for power it was in the first instance the Jewish people who only greeted with laughter my prophecies that I would someday take over the leadership of the state and of the entire people of Germany and then, among other things, also bring the Jewish problem to its solution. I believe that this hollow laughter of Jewry in Germany has already stuck in its throat. I want today to be a prophet again: if international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, but the annihilation (Vernichtung) of the Jewish race in Europe!

That’s your trifecta right there–international baking, communism, Jewry.

Now I will wash my keyboard.


III. Jews with and without understanding

Norm tries to understand

They're Jews and they're not gonna be celebrating Israel's 60th birthday. Oh, they find it understandable that others are celebrating - understandable 'in the context of centuries of persecution culminating in the Holocaust'. Which, you might think, would mean they can understand it. But by the end of their letter, all of five paragraphs later, you could be forgiven for the impression that they no longer do find it understandable why others should want to celebrate. For they, you see, cannot celebrate. This is not surprising given that the intervening paragraphs tell you only one kind of thing about Israel - in which the centuries of persecution no longer figure, in which Israel has no achievements to its credit, and in which the country has never faced any threat from anyone, and its citizens have never been subject to hostility, including of a lethal kind. These are Jews who at once understand and do not. Jews with mics. You might prefer to read about these Jews with bikes (click on 'continue without registering').

Of course I cannot understand these Jews. Their position does seem to nullify itself. They encapsulate Jewish millennial suffering of expulsions, pogroms and genocide in 11 bland words, but generously allot 285 words to Palestinian suffering (the third and fourth generation refugees).

The initial premise of these "Jews with mics" was that they are better Jews, because they have universal compassion while those not-so-good Jews only care about other Jews. That means that they morally are a cut above not just other Jews, but the rest of all humanity, they are the very essence of just as the Torah designated the Jew: chosen!

But is their premise correct, judging from their latest attempt at manifesting their righteous chosenness? 11 words for Jewish suffering, 285 for Palestinian suffering is a ratio of 1:26.

Let's assume that their compassion is finite quantity, as it seems to be (since they do not appear to care much for any other suffering that happens in the world); one part allowed for acknowledging Jewish suffering over two thousands years of exile, while 26 parts go Palestinians (for 60 years of so-called exile).

This is a very poor quality of universal compassion. Almost pristine exclusivity is given to Palestinian suffering. That hardly indicates universalism, or Jewish values, when you choose, as a chosen Jew, to put all your compassionate eggs into one rather tattered basket full of holes. To me it looks like opportunism, the kind of thought, that seeks to makes capital out of a situation with the main aim being to gain some benefit, standing, instead of truly winning people over to a principled position or improving understanding.

What they do is not assert an independent, dissenting, spirit of enquiry, but rather they conform to the latest fashionable political meme, which has become all the rage in the British chattering classes. They are not free-standing elements in a bas-relief, projected sharply against a homogeneous background of comfortable orthodoxy. They are part and parcel of that very monochromatic background. They are not the bright seraphim of moral outrage and courage, they are rhinoceros.

The utility of such rhinocerian compassion has been well recorded in history. See I and II for reminders.

A minority group has "arrived" only when it has the right to produce some fools and scoundrels without the entire group paying for it. ~Carl T. Rowan

IV. Never again The video

inspired by Ben Caspit's article: "We Will Not Capitulate"