by Scot Darnell
Daily Lobo Columnist
The words, "That shitty little country, Israel" were spoken by the French Ambassador to England in December 2001.
The words, "Don't you see the resemblance between Sharon, Hitler and Milosevic? Don't you see a parallel between Nazism and Zionism?" were printed in a Saudi Arabian newspaper in April 2002.
Another Saudi government paper, also dated April 2002, said, "as long as Israel commits new burnings, in the new era of Hitleric Zionism." An Egyptian government newspaper, Al Akhbar, had in it an article last year that said, "The entire matter [Holocaust], as many French and British scientists and researchers have proven, is nothing more than a huge Israeli plot aimed at extorting the German government. . .in light of this imaginary tale, [I] complain to Hitler, saying to him from the bottom of my heart, 'If only you had done it, brother, if only it had really happened, so that the whole world could sigh in relief [without] their evil and sin."
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An American political cartoon from the Tribune Media Services recently showed an Israeli plane flying into two twin Palestinian towers, equating Israel to the Sept. 11 terrorists. A European political cartoon (from Spain, more specifically) recently depicted four museums, with the first three having signs on them that respectively read, "Museum of the Jewish/Bosnian/Chechen Holocaust." The fourth read, "Future Museum of the Palestinian Holocaust."
A Syrian newspaper recently published a political cartoon where an Israeli soldier was standing by a Nazi soldier with a list of the crimes that each man's army has committed around their necks. The Nazi's list doesn't go past the soldier's knees and the Israeli's list unfurls for what seems to be forever on the ground in front of him.
I could list examples like these for the next seven days straight and not run out of proof that today's world - from America to Europe to the Middle East - is falling back into the same trap of anti-Semitism that led to 6 million dead Jews in the Holocaust. I want to make sure no one skimmed over the number I just relayed, so I'll say it again; 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust and for no other reason than that the world we lived in wouldn't take a stand against the anti-Semitism that intensified to systematic genocide in the 1930s and 1940s.
Today, in every corner of the world, we can find more and more people forgetting the horrors of the Holocaust - the inhumanity of its events - and instead denying that it ever took place (to them, I say: did 6 million people just disappear?), or undermining it by comparing it to other unfortunate situations in the world, such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
No one will argue that the Palestinian people exist in rather adverse conditions and it's definitely unfortunate. But what's worse is that a majority of the world is using the Jewish people as a scapegoat for the problems once again.
Let's get one thing straight: the targeting, persecution and discrimination that Jews have historically faced dates back thousands of years; it's like no other prejudice this world has ever seen. And after the Holocaust, when the world stood by as the Jewish people were decimated, it became even more evident that they needed their own homeland, and allies to protect their sovereignty. Most of them wanted their homeland in Palestine and in fact plans for the homeland had been in the works for many years - it was the only fair place to put them. It was where the Jews used to live, so many years ago, and thus there exists viable and ample justification for having the homeland in that region, as opposed to any other area of the world, in which the establishment of a homeland would have been arbitrary and more controversial.
Since then, there has been continual warring in the region; and to that, I say: what can we expect from a people who have been oppressed for thousands of years, especially when they can easily see that they exist in a ring of Jew-hating nations always willing to grasp at the opportunity to weaken and hurt them. It seems the Jewish people are fed up with the incessant persecution and discrimination that is doled out to them for no good reason and from every corner of the world; it's about time and long overdue.
If you were placed in a pit of lions with a large shotgun, knowing that if you put your gun down, they'd swallow you, wouldn't you not put your gun down and wouldn't you shoot them if, through violent and political means, they threatened your sovereign existence?
Anti-Semitism is far from dead and is being embraced by citizens of the world to a greater degree each day. Their denials and irrational comparisons of Jewish persecution undermine the hate that bred the greatest tragedy in earth's history; if the Holocaust continues to be forgotten and trivialized, I have no doubt it will occur once again.
Anti-Semitism crept up on the Jews and turned violent the first time; it has the potential to do so once more. For the Jews, that's how it's always been and not many seem to care.
