 An Arab organisation is to be put on trial in the Netherlands over its publication of a cartoon deemed offensive to Jews, prosecutors say. The cartoon, published by the Arab European League (AEL) on its website, questions the Holocaust. It said the decision to prosecute illustrated bias against Muslims. It said the same standards were not applied to the Dutch MP Geert Wilders, who made a film including cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Last month prosecutors said they would not put the far-right MP on trial for distributing the controversial Danish cartoons, which caused a storm of protest after their publication in 2005. However, he is still being investigated separately for inciting hatred against Muslims by making statements comparing Islam to Nazism. But Dutch prosecutors said the AEL cartoon was "discriminatory" and "offensive to Jews as a group... because it offends Jews on the basis of their race and/or religion". The cartoon shows two men standing near a pile of bones at "Auswitch" (sic). One says "I don't think they're Jews". The other replies: "We have to get to the six million somehow." Read more here,,,, Source: BBC News H/T: GH
 Hamas slammed the United Nations Sunday, saying the organization planned to teach Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip about the Holocaust, but the UN agency which runs schools in the enclave would not confirm any change, Reuters reported. Calling the Nazi genocide of the Jews "a lie invented by the Zionists," Hamas wrote in an open letter to a senior UN official that he should withdraw plans for a new history book in the UN schools. A spokesman for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which educates some 200,000 refugee children in Gaza, said the Holocaust was not on its current curriculum. He would not comment on Hamas's statement that it was about to change, Reuters said. Hamas said it believed UNRWA was about to start using a text for 13-year-olds that included a chapter on the Holocaust. In an open letter to local UNRWA chief John Ging, the movement's Popular Committees for Refugees said: "We refuse to let our children study a lie invented by the Zionists." UNRWA spokesman Adnan Abu Hasna said: "There is no mention of the Holocaust in the current syllabus." Asked if UNRWA planned to change that, he declined to comment. Hamas's official spokesman in Gaza, Sami Abu Zuhri, said he did not want to discuss the history of the Holocaust but said: "Regardless of the controversy, we oppose forcing the issue of the so-called Holocaust onto the syllabus, because it aims to reinforce acceptance of the occupation of Palestinian land." Source: JPost 
 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, left,
and 'Bild' newspaper chief editor, Kai Diekmann, right,
look at Auschwitz blueprints.August 27 BERLIN — Architectural plans for the Auschwitz death camp that were discovered in Berlin last year were handed over to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday for display at Israel's Holocaust memorial. The 29 sketches of the death camp built in Nazi-occupied Poland date as far back as 1941. They include detailed blueprints for living barracks, delousing facilities and crematoria, including gas chambers, and are considered important for understanding the genesis of the Nazi genocide. The sketches are initialed by the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, and Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess. "There are those who deny that the Holocaust happened," Netanyahu said. "Let them come to Jerusalem and look at these plans, these plans for the factory of death." The Axel Springer Verlag, publisher of the mass circulation Bild newspaper, obtained the plans from a private person who said he found them when cleaning out a flat in what was formerly East Berlin. The company and Germany's federal archive have confirmed blueprints' authenticity. Read more here ... Source: FoxNews
 Attempts in Europe to portray Israel as the modern incarnation of Nazi Germany were once the preserve of the extremists. Islamists, fascists and communists — each acting for reasons of their own — have employed the technique to portray the Jewish state as the epitome of political evil with which no compromise can be made and for whom total eradication is the only acceptable outcome. It is a sign of the times, however, that the Nazification of Israel as a technique of denigration has begun to invade the mainstream. In my forthcoming book — A State Beyond the Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel — I provide an entire section on the Nazi analogy as well as some opinion poll evidence on just how widespread its usage has become. A commentary in today’s Guardian by the prominent Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek offers a perfect illustration of how the technique is now employed.
Zizek, who has near iconic status among Europe’s liberal-Left, begins his piece with some familiar distortions about the eviction earlier this month of two Palestinian families from their homes in the east Jerusalem district of Sheikh Jarrah.
Zizek presents what was in fact an eviction due to non-payment of rent as merely one instance of a broader policy of ethnic cleansing — a policy which is reminiscent, he infers, of the way the Nazis treated the Jews. “The state of Israel is clearly engaged in a slow, invisible process, ignored by the media,” he says. “One day, the world will awake and discover that there is no more Palestinian West Bank, that the land is Palestinian-frei, and that we must accept the fact.” (My itallics) There is plenty to be said about Israeli settlement policy and much that can be criticised. But what possessed Zizek to use, and the Guardian to allow, the term “Palestinian-frei”?
It is obviously an inversion of the Nazi term Judenfrei, literally meaning free of Jews. (Linguists suggest that it is not as strong as the term Judenrein (cleansed of Jews) but its purpose and etymology is clear.) There is no repetition of the term. It is not dwelt upon. There is no great fanfare. It is just slipped casually into the narrative in a manner which suggests that its usage is considered by both author and newspaper as normal. And that, of course, goes to the heart of the problem. The denigration of the Jewish state in modern Europe has now become part of such an edifice of hatred and bigotry that there are no longer any taboos. It is now possible to say anything, literally anything, about Israel, however grotesque and defamatory, and to feel no shame, to invite no censure. No other state in the world is talked about in such a manner. And yes, it is anti-Semitism. And yes, it’s back. To read the full article, click here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/aug/18/west-bank-israel-settlers-palestinians Source: Robyn Shepherd Slavoj Zizek
The Guardian
Latest recipients of The Goebbels-Warner Award
 Who says Jews cannot behave like Nazis?A couple of days ago, one of MASH blog contributors, Susan P., posted the following article: " Calling Jews 'Nazis' may be criminalised." While I find it abhorrent to compare the Jews (or any other religious group for that matter) to the Nazis, this is a Free Speech issue. Comparing the Jews (in general) to Nazis should be ostracized, not criminalized. And, as reality shows, some of the Jews do behave like the Nazis. Today I posted an article by The Investigative Project, " Hizb ut-Tahrir: Shariah Takes Precedence over U.S. Constitution," on Facebook. Shortly thereafter, the article was reposted by another Facebook user, " Yehuda Israeli Pride." Yet another Facebook user, " Nick Deloite," made the following comment: " Nuke all muslim ..." The next comment by " Yehuda Israeli Pride" read: " Agreed!" Unfortunately, by the time I made the screenshot, " Yehuda Israeli Pride" had deleted his/her comment, so you're gonna have to take my word for it. It is safe to assume that both of the aforementioned Facebook users are Jewish since one has a Star of David on his/her account image plus the name " Yehuda Israeli Pride" and the other has an Israeli flag on his account image. So what do we have here? We have a case of two Jews calling for genocide of Muslims. Well, technically one is calling for the genocide and the other enthusiastically agrees. Do they exhibit Nazi-like behavior? Absolutely! Should I be criminalized or even ostracized for calling them Nazis? Are the Jews above reproach? I really don't think so. And I would like to see this abhorrent behavior condemned by other Jews! K.M.Update: Two prominent Jews, Reut Rory Cohen and Allyson Rowen Taylor have come out with condemnation of genocidal statements by Jewish bigots. I only wish that prominent Muslims were as willing to condemn genocidal statements emanating from Muslim bigots. Reut Rory Cohen
Allyson Rowen Taylor
Latest recipients of The MASH Award
 It's so weird how a country where multiculturalist tolerance is enforced via elaborate micro-fascism could slip into something that seems very much like a pogrom: Another anti-Semitic incident took place in a Canadian university Thursday when over 100 anti-Israel activists surrounded a campus building belonging to the Jewish student club 'Hillel' at York University, Toronto. The activists pounded on office doors while yelling out racial slurs. Campus security was forced to alert police to restore order and the latter demanded that the offices be shut down. An anti-Israel march is also scheduled for Friday, and 'Hillel' leaders have called on Jewish students to arrive with Israeli flags in order to show support for the country. But anti-Semitism also took its toll outside of the campus. A Jewish student reported receiving a phone call during which an unidentified person threatened his life and those of his family members if he were to continue his pro-Israeli activities in the university.Read more ... Source: Mere RhetoricYork University Campus Security
Latest recipient of The Dhimmi Award
 Dear Ms. Trine Lilleng,
You were an unknown Norwegian diplomat till this month.
No longer.
As first secretary in the Norwegian Embassy in Saudi Arabia, you recently sent out an email on your office account in which you declared: "The grandchildren of Holocaust survivors from World War II are doing to the Palestinians exactly what was done to them by Nazi Germany."
Accompanying your text were photos, with an emphasis on children, seeking to juxtapose the Holocaust with the recent Israeli military operation in Gaza.
Clearly, you are miscast in your role as a diplomat, all the more so of a nation that has sought to play a mediating role in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
In fact, you're desperately in need of some education.
Let's begin with your current posting. You've been in Riyadh since 2007.
If you're so anguished by human rights violations, perhaps you could have begun by devoting some of your attention - and email blasts - to what surrounds you.
Or were your eyes diplomatically shut?
Have you failed to notice the many legal executions, including beheadings, going on in your assigned country?
Have you ignored the often abysmal treatment of foreign workers, many from Asia, who also happen to be disproportionately counted among the victims of Saudi capital punishment?
Have you neglected the gender apartheid that surrounds you? Did you ever look out of your car to notice that Saudi women are proscribed from driving, and that's hardly the worst of it?
Have you checked the skyline of Riyadh or Jeddah lately to count the number of church spires or other non-Muslim houses of worship?
Have you bothered to inquire about the fate of homosexuals?
Okay, you were AWOL on those issues. Maybe you just didn't want to offend your hosts by speaking the truth, or maybe you're suffering from that diplomatic disease known as "localitis" or "clientitis."
But surely a woman like you, with such capacity for empathy for those in far-away places, and especially for children in danger, couldn't remain silent about other human rights transgressions, could she?
After all, could an individual so deeply moved by the plight of Palestinians in Gaza remain silent about what a New York Times columnist earlier this month described as "hell on earth" - Zimbabwe? Could a person so anguished by the fate of Palestinian children stay mum about a country where a girl's life expectancy at birth is 34, much less than half that of her Norwegian counterpart, and where the health care sector has vaporized, all thanks to the one-man rule of Robert Mugabe?
Could such a dedicated humanist possibly avert her eyes from the deadliest conflict since the Second World War, which has killed over five million people, many of them children, in the Congo in the past decade - not to mention the documented and widespread use of torture, rape, and arbitrary detention?
An observer of such acute sensitivity could hardly hold her tongue while Afghan girls attempting to go to school have been doused with acid by those who wish to deny young women access to education, reminiscent of the five years of Taliban rule, could she?
In neighboring Pakistan, where you served in the Norwegian embassy for three years, the beleaguered human rights community must have been fortunate to have such an impassioned voice for all that's wrong in this failing state. Or was that voice, perhaps, on mute?
The children of Sderot, the Israeli town near the Gaza border, have been in desperate need of just such a spokesperson as you for the past eight years.
After all, their town has been in the crosshairs of literally thousands of missiles and mortars fired from Gaza. Those Israeli children live with all the signs of trauma, knowing that, with only 15 seconds warning, they could be hit at any time in their schools, their parks, or their beds. Yet, during my visit there last week, for some reason, those children and their parents had yet to hear you speak out for them. What a pity!
And the children of Iran could use your help as well. According to human rights groups, Iran has no compunction about executing children or those who were children when their crimes were allegedly committed.
Oh, and by the way, your compassionate help would also undoubtedly be welcomed by others under the gun in Iran, including women's rights activists, union organizers, student protesters, independent journalists, reformist politicians, and religious minorities. And let's not forget, once again, the children of Israel, who, according to the Iranian president, don't have a right to live.
But wait! A Google search about you reveals nothing, not a single word, regarding your views on Zimbabwe, Congo, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sderot, or Iran. Or, for that matter, Burma, Darfur, Syria. Shall I go on?
Only Israel, faced with those who wish to destroy it, manages to prompt your impassioned correspondence and righteous indignation. Why?
No less, your stunning lack of education extends beyond the contemporary world to 20th century history, specifically the Holocaust.
Your invocation of the Holocaust to describe what's taken place in Gaza is, frankly, nothing short of obscene.
Your claim that the grandchildren of the survivors are doing to the Palestinians exactly what was done to them goes beyond any norm of decency, much less honesty.
Approve or disapprove of the Israeli military operation, but there is no basis whatsoever for such a comparison.
When Israel entered Gaza in a war of self-defense in 1967, the population was 360,000. After Israel withdrew totally from Gaza in 2005, it was estimated at 1.4 million.
Would that the Jewish population under Nazi rule had quadrupled!
When Israel entered Gaza in 1967, life expectancy for women was 46. When it left Gaza, it was 73.
Shall we even bother to discuss life expectancy for Jews under Nazi occupation?
The Second World War in Europe lasted from September 1, 1939 to May 8, 1945 - 68 months in all. That means an average monthly extermination rate of nearly 90,000 Jews.
Compare that to the total number of victims in Gaza over three weeks - roughly guesstimated at more or less 1,000 - and recall that the majority were armed fighters committed to Israel's destruction, who used civilians, including children, as human shields, mosques as arms depots, and hospitals as sanctuaries.
Believe me, Ms. Lilleng, if the "grandchildren of the Holocaust survivors" had wanted to do exactly what the Nazis did to their grandparents, they would have unleashed their full air, land, and sea power. They would have thrown the Israel Defense Forces' ethical guidelines to the wind, kicked out the UN and Red Cross personnel on the ground, stopped humanitarian transports of food, fuel, and medicine, prevented media reporting, and left absolutely nothing - and no one - standing.
Unless, of course, they needed slave labor, in which case they would have carted off the able-bodied to work in Auschwitz replicas until they dropped. Or material for ghoulish medical experimentation, in which case, in the spirit of Mengele, they would have kept Palestinian twins alive temporarily.
But Israel didn't do any of these things. It's a peace-seeking democracy dedicated to the rule of law - unlike so many of the countries whose horrific sins you blithely choose to overlook.
What are we to make of your selective moral outrage and rank hypocrisy?
You ought to take a look in the mirror and ask yourself why Israel, and only Israel, makes your blood boil and leads you to speak out, even at the risk of grossly distorting both reality and history.
The answer, Ms. Lilleng, should be painfully obvious. Source: JP / David Harris Blog
 By Phyllis Chesler Today, we have grown used to seeing Palestinian and Hamas supporters goose-step, Nazi-style, shoot out their arms as they deliver the Hitlerian “Sieg Heil” salute. They also chant and scream: “Jews to the ovens,” “Hitler did not kill enough of you,” “Jews to the gas chambers.” This is raw, rank, Jew-hatred or anti-Semitism; that much is clear. But we are also faced with a major paradox. These same Palestinian and Hamas supporters routinely hold signs that accuse Israel of being a “Nazi” state. To them, Gaza is “Auschwitz,” and the Israelis have “occupied” it with “genocidal” intentions. Of course this is not factually true. According to my colleague, Dr. Barry Rubin: “In 1939, there were seven million Jews in continental Europe. At the end of the Holocaust, only one million Jews survived. There are currently 1.2 million Palestinians in Gaza. At the end of the 2009 war, 1,199,000 Palestinians are still there. The percentage of Jewish civilians killed by Germans and their allies was 86 percent. The percentage of Gazan Palestinians killed by Israelis is 0.1 percent. The number of Jewish civilians deliberately killed by Nazis and their allies is 6,000,000. The number of Palestinian civilians deliberately killed by Israelis=0.” (Please see below for his additional comparisons). Read more ...Source: Pajamas Media
 Jason Koutsoukis in yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald reports on the brutality of Hamas towards Gaza's citizens
PALESTINIAN civilians living in Gaza during the three-week war with Israel have spoken of Hamas's attempt to hijack ambulances. Mohammed Shriteh, 30, is an ambulance driver registered with and trained by the Palestinian Red Crescent Society. "Mostly the war was not as fast or as chaotic as I expected. We would co-ordinate with the Israelis before we pick up patients, because they have all our names, and our IDs, so they would not shoot at us."
Shriteh said the more immediate threat was from Hamas, who would lure the ambulances into the heart of a battle to transport fighters to safety.
"You hear when they are coming. People ring to tell you. So we had to get in all the ambulances and make the illusion of an emergency and only come back when they had gone."
Eyad al-Bayary, 32, lost his job as a senior nurse at the Shifa Hospital because he is closely identified with Fatah.
Since the ceasefire was declared on January 17, Hamas has begun to systematically take revenge on anyone believed to have collaborated with Israel before the war. According to rumour, a number of alleged collaborators have already been executed.
Taher al-Nono, the Hamas Government's spokesman in Gaza, told the Herald that 175 people had been arrested so far on suspicion of collaborating.
And if the sentence is death? "We will respect the decision."
The commander of one al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade unit, who used the name Abu Ibrahim, said he would never accept peace or negotiation, even if it might lead to the creation of a Palestinian state.
Ynetnews.com reports that Hamas may have inflated the death toll in Gaza:
ITALIAN newspaper Corriere della Sera reported Thursday that a doctor working in Gaza's Shifa Hospital claimed that Hamas has intentionally inflated the number of casualties resulting from Israel's Operation Cast Lead.
"The number of deceased stands at no more than 500 to 600. Most of them are youths between the ages of 17 to 23 who were recruited to the ranks of Hamas, who sent them to the slaughter," according to the newspaper article. The doctor wished to remain unidentified, out of fear for his life.
A Tal al-Hawa resident told the newspaper's reporter: "Armed Hamas men sought out a good position for provoking the Israelis. There were mostly teenagers, aged 16 or 17, and armed. They couldn't do a thing against a tank or a jet. They knew they are much weaker, but they fired at our houses so that they could blame Israel for war crimes."
The reporter for the Italian newspaper also quoted reporters in the Strip who told of Hamas's exaggerated figures, "We have already said to Hamas commanders: why do you insist on inflating the number of victims?"
These same reporters mentioned that the truth that will come out is likely to be similar to what occurred in Operation Defensive Shield in Jenin. "Then, there was first talk of 1500 deaths. But then it turned out that there were only 54, 45 of which were armed men," the Palestinian reporters told the Italian newspaper.
Denis Maceoin in The Jerusalem Post:
WATCH those films of Hamas gunmen dragging screaming children along with them to act as human shields, watch how they fire from behind the little ones, knowing no Israeli soldier will fire back. And even as they put their own children's lives at risk, they shout to high heaven that the Israelis are Nazis and the Jews are child-killers. Hamas has become proficient at resurrecting the blood libel, just as its fighters use the Nazi salute, just as their predecessor in the 1930s and '40s, Haj Amin al-Husseini, conferred with Hitler about building death camps in Palestine and raised a division of SS troops in Bosnia to fight for the Reich.
It is all self-contradictory: The Left supports gay rights, yet attacks the only country in the Middle East, where gay rights are enshrined in law. Hamas makes death the punishment for being gay, but "we are all Hamas now".
Iran hangs gays, but it is praised as an agent of anti-imperialism, and allowed to get on with its job of stoning women and executing dissidents and members of religious minorities.
If British Prime Minister Gordon Brown swore to wipe France from the face of the earth, he would become a pariah among nations. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatens to do that to Israel and is invited to speak to the UN General Assembly. Israel guarantees civil liberties to all its citizens, Jew or Arab alike, but it is dubbed an apartheid state; Hamas, ever the bully, kills its opponents and denies the rest the most basic rights, but we march on behalf of Hamas. Source: The Australian
David Burchell | January 12, 2009
UNTIL our own times, few civilisations showed much emotional interest in distant peoples.
Medieval Europeans were titillated by reports of dog-headed men and other far-off monstrosities, but chiefly because they provoked interesting thought experiments (what's human and what's not?). Medieval Muslims were so incurious about the Europeans, they called them all Franks, or Frenchmen, and distinguished them by body smell.
The Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire made much out of the human toll of a catastrophic earthquake in Lisbon, because he believed it proved his arguments for the non-existence of God. There's no evidence he shed any tears.
It's we, the emotional sophisticates of the modern West, who invented the idea of global empathy. On our large-screen televisions we're joined up momentarily with the suffering faces of far-distant innocents, the better to make sense of the sorrows of the world. That's why, when the stories came in last week about the emaciated children discovered beside their dead mothers in a shelled house in Gaza, we immediately visualised the scene in our mind's eye. And our hearts felt a stab, as if these were our own children. Neither geographical distance nor paucity of factual detail is any longer a barrier to our capacity to feel.
Global empathy is one of those illegitimate children of the imperial experience whose origins we like to forget.
In the days of the British Empire, Australians greeted reports of distant massacres of British soldiery with a new urgency, as if we too were witness to the Indian Mutiny or overrun by African tribesmen at Mafeking. Even today, the same impulse appears to unite the sympathy of pious Muslims everywhere -- towards suffering peoples of their own kind. After the catastrophe of World War I, however, a new generation of critical intellectuals turned the tables on imperial sympathising, rerouting all that emotional energy towards the victims of European colonialism.
This was the generation that took Gandhi, that eminently Western non-Westerner, as its moral hero. But there were few enough Gandhis in the moral history of the 20th century. And so that generation's offspring switched their sympathies to new, more troubling heroes, from Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh to Yasser Arafat. In the process, empathy became, in effect, the handmaiden of ideology. We learned to bestow empathy on those we approved of in our political fantasies, and to withhold empathy, with determined efficiency, from those we did not. We became gymnasts of the heart.
And so the '60s generation wept bitter tears for that young girl, half-alight with napalm, who ran naked down that Vietnamese road. But the curious economy of empathy required them to avert their eyes from the massacre of civilians by the Viet Cong or the barbaric behaviour of North Vietnamese prison guards. Just as, today, we weep bitter tears for those hapless prisoners of war at Guantanamo Bay even as we withhold them from the wretched political inmates of Cuba's Guantanamo Provincial Prison, a few hundred metres away.
The same complicated moral logic was on evidence in The Netherlands last week when two high-profile Dutch political figures assumed leadership of a demonstration against Israel's invasion of Gaza. Harry van Bommel, a former schoolteacher, serves as Socialist Opposition spokesman on international affairs. Gretta Duisenberg, once a flamboyant socialite, is the socially conscious wife of the former Dutch central bank chief. Each has spoken at great length about the Palestinians' plight. (According to Duisenberg, Israeli rule in Gaza is worse than wartime Nazi rule in Holland.)
And each looked thoroughly comfortable in their skins as they led the crowd in chants of that old party tune, "Intifada, intifada, Palestinian state!" Even as, in the background, their fellow demonstrators could clearly be heard singing the more uninhibited political ditty: "Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas!" And so here they were together: the warm heart of the global conscience and the icy blood of Hamas, united within the same pulsing breast.
For the discriminating empathist, Israel presents special problems as an enemy. After all, it's hard for someone who trades in the currency of sympathy to deny any moral capital whatsoever to a state founded as a refuge for one of the most persecuted peoples on the planet.
The easiest solution to this dilemma is not to ignore the past, but rather to reconfigure it for your own purposes. Hence those familiar formulas, which hardly merit sober political analysis: Zionism equals fascism; Israel equals Nazi Germany; Gaza is a concentration camp; the Palestinians are the new Jews. Indeed, these aren't political slogans in the normal sense. They're a ritual language of degradation, employed to place your defiled opponents beyond the empathetic pale.
When empathy isn't serving as ideology's handmaiden, it puts in overtime as its usher. And while the present wave of sympathy towards the inhabitants of Gaza is no doubt sincerely felt, in some quarters it's also serving to usher in an altogether more pragmatic political calculation. For some time now many Western supporters of the Palestinian cause have been discreetly shifting their political allegiance away from Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority -- whom they mistrust as Western collaborators -- and towards that superlative foe of Western interests, Hamas.
So Britain's The Guardian last week editorialised in favour of reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah, to be engineered by withholding EU funds from the West Bank until Fatah submits. The alternative, the paper thundered, was a Fatah "satrap" (that old imperial imagery again!) under Israeli dominion.
And editorialists everywhere have been talking about Hamas's military wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, as if they were now the acknowledged spokespeople for Palestinian interests.
Yet, without lubrication from our discriminating tears, this change in political sympathies might be a little hard to swallow. After all, this is the same Hamas whose websites extol the divine achievements of its suicide bombers and whose children's TV exhorts a new generation of martyrs shaped in the same incandescent image. On Hamas's Friday-night TV sermons, the imam likes to recall the perfidy of the Jews towards Mohammed 1300 years ago: a broken pact that, as readers of Ibn Ishaq's biography will know, obliged the prophet to behead an entire Jewish tribe with his sword. Hamas, demonstrably, does not trouble itself much with the politics of empathy beyond the confines of its own kind.
And so, having elevated empathy to a universal faculty, it seems we've come full circle.
Now we're willing to authorise any kind of exotic political creed, with any kind of consequences, so long as it promises to rid us of the spectre of those distant children in distress. Source: The Australian
 By Ron Rosenbaum I find the current situation deeply sorrowful, harrowing. There is one aspect of it that I think needs clarification, a clarification that will help thinking about the situation as a whole, and that is the analogies between Hitler, the Nazis and Hamas. So, as the author of Explaining Hitler, having spent some time studying the subject, I thought I would point out a few differences. The Hamas founding covenant explicitly calls for the extermination of all Jews. Hitler never made total extermination an official plank of the the Nazi party platform. (see Holocaust scholar Omar Bartov’s article in the February 2, 2004 issue of The New Republic. He points to the extermiationist 7th article of the founding Hamas covenanat which cites the Hadith (saying of the prophet). Here is a translation of the Hadith in a deeply disturbing summary of Hamas’ exterminationist anti-semitism by the Brown University scholar Andrew Bostom: “The Prophet, Allah’s prayer and peace be upon him, says: “The hour of judgment shall not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, so that the Jews hide behind trees and stones, and each tree and stone will say: ‘Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him,’ except for the Gharqad tree, for it is the tree of the Jews.” (Sahih Muslim, Book 41, Number 6985) In other words, Hamas is not committed merely to the political goal of expelling Jews from the land of Israel but to what they believe is a sacred religious goal of exterminating all Jews everywhere behind every tree in creation. (I’m not pinning any hopes on “the Gharqad tree”). I’d suggest those who deceive themselves into believing Hamas is just another Palestinian rights group, maybe a little on the extreme side, read the whole Bostom article. The exterminationist anti-semitism of Hamas is more excessive than Hitler’s. So that’s one difference. Hitler made efforts to conceal the purpose of the death camps and distanced himself from them, avoided written as opposed to oral orders for the Final Solution. Not because he felt any shame about them, but because he felt knowledge of the death camps might be counter-productive to the Nazis political goals. Hamas makes no effort to conceal the fact that it wants to kill Jewish civilians, not just combatants, but women and children - all Jews (it’s in the charter, remember) - because Hamas feels this will make them more popular. Read more ...Source: Pajamas Media
 December 18, 2008 | Alan M. Dershowitz
Imagine the UN appointing David Duke to report on how Blacks are victimizing whites, or Hugo Chavez to report on American foreign policy, or Mohammad Ahmadinejad to investigate whether the Holocaust occurred.
Well the UN has done something comparable by appointing Richard Falk as its supposedly impartial “rapporteur” on Israeli actions in the Palestinian territories. For those of you who don’t know who Richard Falk is, he is a notorious crackpot who believes that the United States is hiding the truth about 9/11, implying that our government has “complicity” in that terrorist attack and that it’s role “taints the legitimacy of the American government” which he has characterized as “fascist.” His rants have become fodder for conspiracy nuts all over the world who claim that America and Israel orchestrated the attacks.
More relevant to his role in the Middle East, Falk, a retired professor, wrote—before he even began his job—that it is not an “irresponsible overstatement” to accuse Israel of perpetrating a “criminalized” Nazi Holocaust on the Palestinian people. This from a hard-leftist whose relative silence with regard to real genocides committed by communist nations such as Cambodia, and Arab nations such as Sudan, speaks volumes.
In making his comparison between Nazi Germany and democratic Israel, Falk ignored the Hamas rockets directed against Israeli citizens and the suicide bombs employed by Palestinian terrorists to blow up school buses, discos and religious ceremonies. Any comparison between Israeli efforts to defend its citizens from terrorism on the one hand, and the Nazi Holocaust on the other hand, is obscene and ignorant—unless one does not really believe that the Nazis murdered millions of Jews or unless one bizarrely believes that Israel has murdered million of Palestinians in gas chambers!
Even if one believes that the Israeli military has overreacted to terrorist provocations, there is surely a difference between military actions taken in self defense, and the systematic policy of the Nazis to murder every Jewish man, woman and child living in Europe, though the Jews posed no danger to Germany. The Nazis even ingathered Jews from the far flung corners of Europe in order to gas them in Auschwitz and other murder camps. Despite these enormous differences, it has become conventional for anti-Israel extremists to compare the Jewish state of Israel to the Nazi government that came close to murdering all the Jews of Europe. That is why this allegedly false comparison is the province of anti-Semites, assorted nuts of the hard right and the hard left, and haters such as Richard Falk.
I propose a new rule for civil discourse in a civilized society: anyone who compares what the Nazis did to the Jews of Europe during the Holocaust with what the Israelis are doing with regard to the Palestinians, has disqualified from being taken seriously on any issue relating to Jews, Israel or the Middle East. Such people have a right to express their obscene and barbaric views, just as anti-Semites are entitled to express views denying the Holocaust. But they should be treated as pariahs by all decent people who believe in nuanced and calibrated consideration of complex and divisive issues.
Comparison between the Holocaust and Israel is simply beyond the pale of reasoned discourse. It belongs to that genre of hate speech that includes claims that blacks are racially inferior, that women enjoy being raped and that all gays are pedophiles. No one who holds such views should ever be appointed to a position of trust and responsibility that requires fair judgment and an ability to distinguish truth from falsity—especially with regard to the Middle East. Richard Falk belongs in this category of bigoted crackpots. That he was selected by the United Nations to assess the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians tells us more about the United Nations than it does about Israel.
Whether Israel was right or wrong, as a matter of principle or tactics, in excluding Falk from entering its borders, one can certainly understand why the Jewish state would refuse to cooperate with a rapporteur whose objectivity has been compromised by his bigotry.
What I am proposing in no way undercuts freedom of speech. Bigots and crackpots are free to set up soapboxes anywhere they choose, and everyone is free to accept or reject their ideas in the marketplace. Freedom of speech does not treat all ideas equally. Those that are rejected in the marketplace are still free to compete—as Holocaust denial, racist and sexist speech are competing today—but some ideas are so hateful, so demonstrably false, so ill-motivated and so bigoted that they belong in the trash bin of history. Encouraging decent people to toss those ideas into that waste bin is an important exercise of freedom of speech.
So let Richard Falk spew his hate-speech on the internet or other private soapboxes, but do not let his bigotry, anymore than that of David Duke, to receive the imprimatur and funding of the United Nations. Source: Hudson New York
London (PTI): The British defence secretary has compared the Taliban and al-Qaeda to the Nazis, saying that the "fanatics" are challenging the way of life in a manner similar to Adolf Hitler's paratroopers. Terming the military campaign in Afghanistan as a "vital national security mission", John Hutton said it is a like the war to defeat Hitler. "It is a struggle against fanatics that may not challenge our borders but challenges our way of life in the same way the Nazis did," Hutton told The Times newspaper in an interview today. However, he added that forces in Afghanistan were standing in defence of British values like they did during World War II, the British daily said. The troops are guarding mainly the southern province, which has witnessed some of the worst Taliban attacks. Hutton's comments have shown Britains's wish to add more troops in Afghanistan where a war against Taliban has already led to the death of 134 British soldiers, The Times said. Read more ...Source: PTI
 By EMERSON VERMAAT November 10, 2008 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Seventy years ago, on November 9, 1938, the Nazis burnt down synagogues and smashed windows of Jewish shops. It was the notorious "Night of Broken Glass" ("Kristallnacht"). Nearly one hundred Jews were murdered, about 25,000 Jews were deported to concentration camps. There was a commemoration service in Berlin's grand synagogue on November 9, 2008. In her speech German Chancellor Angela Merkel issued a strong warning against resurgent anti-Semitism in Europe: "We cannot be silent, we cannot be indifferent when Jewish cemetries are desecrated and rabbis are insulted on the street. This year alone there were some 800 anti-Semitic incidents." In most cases, those who were responsible for these incidents were Neo Nazis and radicalized Muslim immigrants. What must also worry us today are the many alliances between Neo Nazis and Muslim extremists or "Islamists." One of these Muslim extremists is Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In May 2006, Ahmadinejad wrote a personal letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel denouncing "the wicked victors of World War II." (Merkel ignored Ahmadinejad's ignominious letter, of course.) At a press conference in April 2006, Ahmadinejad even claimed that Iranians and Germans were both part of a common "Aryan race." In December 2006, Iran's president invited Neo Nazis to Tehran to attend a conference on how "to review the global vision of the Holocaust." Neo Nazi Holocaust deniers from all over the world participated in the conference. Read more ...Source: PipeLine News
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An Arab organisation is to be put on trial in the Netherlands over its publication of a cartoon deemed offensive to Jews, prosecutors say. 
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