By Robert Fisk
OH how – when it comes to the realities of history – the Muslims of the
And now, last week, the preposterous President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran opens up his own country to obloquy and shame by holding a supposedly impartial “conference” on the Jewish Holocaust to repeat the lies of the racists who, if they did not direct their hatred towards Jews, would most assuredly turn venomously against those other Semites, the Arabs of the Middle East.
How, I always ask, can you expect the West to understand and accept the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 men, women and children from
And, here, of course, is the wretched irony of the whole affair. For what the Muslims of the Middle East should be doing is pointing out to the world that they were not responsible for the Jewish Holocaust, that, horrific and evil though it was, it is a shameful, outrageous injustice that they, the Palestinians, should suffer for something they had no part in and – even more disgusting – that they should be treated as if they have. But, no, Ahmadinejad has neither the brains nor the honesty to grasp this simple, vital equation.
True, the Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem shook hands with Hitler. I met his only surviving wartime Palestinian comrade before he died and it is perfectly true that the intemperate, devious Had al-Husseini made some vile anti-Jewish wartime speeches in German, in one of which he advised the Nazis to close Jewish refugee exit routes to Palestine and deport Jews eastwards (why east, I wonder?) and helped to raise a Muslim SS unit in Bosnia. I have copies of his speeches and his photograph hangs in the
When the Israeli army was advancing on
That courageous Israeli writer Uri Avnery wrote an open letter to Begin. “Mr Prime Minister,” he began, “Hitler is dead.” But this did not stop Ariel Sharon from trying the same trick in 1989. He said that, by talking to the US State Department, Arafat was “like Hitler, who also wanted so much to negotiate with the Allies in the second half of the Second World War”,
Needless to say, any comparison between the behaviour of German troops in the Second World War and Israeli soldiers today (with their constantly betrayed claim to “purity of arms”) is denounced as anti-Semitic. Generally, I believe that is the correct reaction.
Israelis are not committing mass rape, murder or installing gas chambers for the Palestinians.
But the acts of Israeli troops are not always so easy to divorce from such insane parallels. During the Sabra and Chatila massacres – when
The Israeli novelist A B Yehoshua observed that, even if his country's soldiers had not known what was happening, “then this would be the same lack of knowledge of the Germans who stood outside Buchenwald and Treblinka and did not know what was happening”.
After the killings of Jenin, an Israeli officer suggested to his men, according to the Israeli Press, that, with close quarter fighting, they might study the tactics of Nazi troops in
And I have to say – indeed, it needs to be said – that, after the countless Lebanese civilian refugees ruthlessly cut down on the roads of Lebanon by the Israeli air force in 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996 and again this summer, how can one avoid being reminded of the Luftwaffe attacks on the equally helpless French refugees of 1940? Many thousands of Lebanese have been killed in this way over the past 25 years.
And please spare me the nonsense about “human shields”. What about the marked ambulance of women and children rocketed by a low-flying Israeli helicopter in 1996? Or the refugee convoy whose women and children were torn to pieces by an equally low-flying Israeli air force helicopter as they fled along the roads after being ordered to leave their homes by the Israelis?
No, Israelis are not Nazis. But it's time we talked of war crimes unless they stop these attacks on refugees. The Arabs are entitled to talk the same way. They should. But they must stop lying about Jewish history – and take a lesson, perhaps, from the Israeli historians who tell the truth about the savagery which attended
As for the West's reaction to Ahmadinejad's antics, Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara was “shocked” into disbelief, while Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert responded with more eloquent contempt.
Strangely, no-one recalled that the Holocaust deniers of recent years – deniers of the Turkish genocide of 1.5 million Armenian Christians in 1915, that is – include Lord Blair, who originally tried to prevent Armenians from participating in
I've no doubt Ahmadinejad – equally conscious of
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