Should we ban ‘Nazi analogies’?

beatonthedonis’s comment 24 Jul 09, 12:43pm

The Nazis also exterminated 6 million people who weren’t Jewish (and millions more through open warfare) so should Nazi analogies be banned for communists, trade unionists, Slavs, Roma, freemasons, the disabled and homosexuals? Where does it end?

And I presume Israelis will stop making Nazi analogies against their opponents too, since comparing a stateless, occupied people with no advanced military hardware to the Nazi war machine is also preposterous, as is comparing it to a nation which hasn’t launched a military offensive on anybody for centuries.

I couldn’t give a fuck whether Israelis, or anybody else, are offended by my words. Dropping white phosphorous on children is offensive, and Nazi-like. Calling somebody names isn’t.

It’s not British fascists we should fear

beatonthedonis’s comment 12 Jun 09, 7:54pm

Jubilation1

I wasn’t implying that forcing school children to swear a pledge of allegiance is a positive thing. In fact, it has pretty fascistic overtones.

Harvey21

Do you think the indiginous population of North America, having been murdered and had their land stolen, should be forced to pledge allegiance to the American flag?

In your diatribe against Asian ghettos, you forgot to mention Golders Green and Stamford Hill. I’ve heard some of the schools there are 100% Jewish too.

What is the future for Europe’s Jews?

beatonthedonis’s comment 16 May 09, 11:53am

MAM

No it is not. Not only is unchecked immigration bringing in people who the author claims are unacculturated (which I disagree) but actually the schooling they get in Europe makes them even more opposed to Israel even if not anti-Semitic.

The author doesn’t claim that Muslim immigrants are unacculturated either. He was reporting the opinions of some French academics. And do you have any evidence of a school syllabus in Europe which makes children ‘opposed to Israel’?

European Jews would be insane to trust the kindness of their neighbours when anti-Semitism is once more acceptable in polite society. Zionism has not been more important since the 1950s.

So your solution to the problem of unchecked immigration to Europe by Muslims is unchecked immigration of European Jews, and resulting ethnic cleansing of the Arab population, to Palestine.

I suppose it has a sick logic.

Anti-semitism may be acceptable in your idea of polite society, but it isn’t in mine. If you mean that intellectuals have finally turned their back on the Zionist project, thanks in no small part to the honesty of some Jewish intellectuals, then you are probably right.

Watching children being bulldozed, shot, dismembered, eviscerated and incinerated for no reason other than to secure demographic and electoral advantage tends to focus minds.

 

The blood libel brought up to date

beatonthedonis’s comment 01 May 09, 12:57pm

Sabraguy

First, many Jews feel deeply offended by the her cynical portrayal of the Jewish experience. Second, her play will delight anti-semites everywhere.

Unless these ‘many Jews’ and ‘anti-semites’ have actually seen the play, they should feel and say nothing about it.

The Guardian should be ashamed of it’s greasy role in promoting a shoddy piece of theatrical propoganda, which is offensive to a large number of people and devoid of any artistic merit.

And I really hope you’ve seen the play, because otherwise your words are utterly worthless.

On the road and out of site

beatonthedonis’s comment 26 Apr 09, 2:13pm

b752i

The connection is that both communities have a history of oppression in Europe and were victims of the Holocaust, and both form ethnically and culturally diverse groupings.

Yet people feel it’s okay to say to people who call themselves Romany: ‘you’re not really Romany, because you don’t look like one, and you don’t act as I think a Romany acts, and your ancestry is diluted, and you have very little Romany DNA etc etc, but they wouldn’t think of saying the same things to Jewish people.

I have no problem with Jewish people defining themselves, though I do have a problem when they use that definition for no other reason than to dispossess others.

On the road and out of site

beatonthedonis’s comment 26 Apr 09, 1:17pm

b752i

I’m not sure these Israeli ‘Jews’ had much in common with the people in the camps:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6985808.stm

Well, not the people in striped uniforms, at any rate. But at least they improved the demographic balance, eh.

Israel’s memorial built on desecration

beatonthedonis’s comment 20 Apr 09, 6:54pm

I walked around Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau this afternoon.

Maybe I’m emotionally and morally bankrupt. Maybe I just wasn’t brought up right; but the lesson I took from my visit wasn’t that it was okay to continually humiliate, harrass, ethnically cleanse, appropriate from, summarily kill, bomb, scorch, eviscerate and bulldoze other human beings.

And I certainly didn’t learn it was okay to cheer these activities from the sidelines.

Maybe if this museum of tolerance manages to impart similar lessons to people who like to swagger atop of other people’s misery, it will be worth the short-term pain caused to the Muslim community.

A forlorn hope, I fear.

Is exclusion the best policy?

beatonthedonis’s comment 19 Mar 09, 6:56pm

execceo

Nearly one million people were ethnically cleansed from Western Palestine by Zionists, mostly from Europe, and had their land and homes stolen.

They don’t lay claim to Jordan, because their land and homes weren’t in Jordan. They are in Israel.

And the theft still goes on to this day.

Those people now have millions of descendants.

They don’t care about abstract percentages, they want their land and homes back. At the very least, they want recognition of the theft, compensation and the chance to form their own country in the remnants of what was stolen.

Now we know that Israeli soldiers were deliberatley killing Gazan civilians, it is time to ban any foreigners who supported the Gaza invasion from entering the UK.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article5939611.ece

Peace is my primary option

beatonthedonis’s comment 28 Jan 09, 10:31am

GeoffreyAlderman

You see no contradiction in invoking international law to call for Hamas – an authority that Israel has never recognised and has constantly undermined – and giving carte blanche for the continued construction of West Bank settlements, which every government on earth considers illegal under international law, except the Israeli one?

Jews have the right to dwell anywhere in these areas.

Under Talmudic law, or international law? Which is the higher authority? If Talmudic law is prevalent, then apparently Hamas have every right to lanch pre-emptive, disproportionate attacks against Israel – by your very own words.

Or does Talmudic law only give Jews the right to launch pre-emptive, disproportionate attacks?

If Jews have the right to settle anywhere in this area, under international law, then Palestinians have the right to return to live anywhere in Israel – all six million of them.

If you consider Talmudic law, and Jews, to be ultra vires when it comes to international law, then say so. But don’t then expect Hamas, or anybody else, to abide by international law, either.

Standing against a tide of hatred

beatonthedonis’s comment 16 Jan 09, 11:20am

OldBagPuss

Paul Kaye’s piece was a very touching and humane take on current events, from somebody who has all-too first hand experience of them, unlike Wurtzel’s ignorant, baneful drivel.

The vast majority of anti-zionists are from an anti-racist egalitarian tradition – a tradition which stood up for Jews in the 1930s and even in the early days of the birth of Israel, until the facts of ethnic cleansing, occupation and oppression became common knowledge, thanks in no small part to Jewish historians and intellectuals.

Accusations of anti-semitism are a useful canard in order to attempt to silence opposition to the slaughter of women and children.

But they’re not working anymore.

Holy war is not the answer

beatonthedonis’s comment 16 Jan 09, 1:28am

Sarka

I didn’t say I welcome Muslim identification with the Palestinian cause, I said that if any Jew around the world is entitled to identify with the Israeli cause, then any Muslim is entitled to identify with the Palestinians.

I’d suggest that neither is welcome, but if Jews in America are going to raise large amounts of money and create a lobby with considerable influence in favour of Israel, when it was the nascent Israeli state that began the process of ethnic cleansing and appropriation against a people who had nothing to do with the Holocaust, and it is Israel which posesses the F16s and nuclear weapons, then to begrudge the Palestinians support from wherever it comes, seems churlish.

You seem to inhabit this weird moral world where crimes against humanity today are justified by crimes against humanity yesterday. Many of the mass ethnic cleansings which occurred in Central and Eastern Europe in the aftermath of WW2 were conducted by Stalin’s Red Army – hardly a worthy exemplar of moral international relations.

The end of the Second World War was supposed to herald a new age of self-determination and the substitution of imperialism and colonisation with the rule of international law. Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, its oppression of Arab inhabitants to the benefit of Russian, American, British, Australian, South African, and a host of settlers from other parts of the world, tramples over this legacy.

The shelling of the UN Headquarters in Gaza with white phosphorous is more than symbolic.

Holy war is not the answer

beatonthedonis’s comment 15 Jan 09, 4:05am

The Shermanator

Jews are more than a religious group. Being Jewish means being part of a distinct ethnicity with a distinct history, unique cultures and customs and even unique genetic diseases.

Sub-Mengelean bollocks.

Some Jews are black Africans, other Jews are blond, blue-eyed Europeans, others come from India, and many are of Arabic descent. Their ethnicities, histories, cultures and customs are as diverse as the countries they come from.

There are no genetic diseases unique to Jews.

Geoffrey Alderman v David Goldberg

beatonthedonis’s comment 12 Jan 09, 5:22pm

Geoffrey Alderman

The fact that this military invasion, launched in the knowledge that hundreds of civilians would be killed, was designed to win Kadima the upcoming election casts a rather ironic light upon your justification of killiing every Hamas voter.

There is a political concensus in Israel that this offensive is justified, so maybe Hamas should use your interpretation of the Torah to pre-emptively kill any Israeli who votes for the main parties.

The stated aims of Zionism required the ethnic cleansing and/or subjugation of millions of people through violence, so maybe Hamas could use your interpretaion to pre-emptively kill anybody who believes in the stated aims of Zionism.

An eye for an eye and soon the whole world is blind.

A quote from somebody who wasn’t a spiritual and intellectual pygmy.

Not in my name

beatonthedonis’s comment 09 Jan 09, 3:37pm

Thankfully, the people whom the perpetrators of this horror pretend to protect – the global Jewish community – counts among their number many of the best educated, most intellectually honest, free thinking, corageous and humane people on Earth.

And the blood-thirsty, fascistic sheep who willingly lap up everything the State of Israel says and does will call them self-hating Jews and anti-semites.

Israel and the west will pay a price for Gaza’s bloodbath

beatonthedonis’s comment 08 Jan 09, 3:16pm

abritincanada

The deaths of non combatants (and who knows if a Palistinian is one as the fighters deliberately diguise themselves by wearingg civilian garb)

Well, here’s a clue: if they are shorter than three feet and still breast-feed, they are probably not Hamas fighters. And if they are 80 years old, wear a headscarf and a dress, they are probably not Hamas fighters. And if they are cowering for shelter in a clearly-marked UN school, they are probably not Hamas fighters.

Bus as the Israeli defence minister said on the BBC: “So what?”

On another point:

if the firing of homemade rockets and the deaths of less than 20 people in eight years is comparable to the deaths of several hundred at the hands of laser-guided munitions in one week, then Gaza can be compared to the Warsaw Ghetto.

BeatonTheDonis

27 Aug 08, 11:10am

Contributor

JWiseman

The Zionist project began decades before the Holocaust, as anybody with a cursory knowledge of Middle Eastern history knows. Had the Jews of Europe been ensconced in Palastine, they may have escaped the death camps, but that counterfactual assertion rests on the assumption that pre-Hitler, millions of Jews would have abandoned their homes, their businesses and the countries their families had spent generations living in, to move to a hot dusty place in the Middle East.

The fact remains, the establishment of Israel necessitated the ethnic cleansing and expropriation of hundred of thousands of innocent people. Not only has Israel not apologised and made reparations to the victims of that ethnic cleansing and expropriation, it has not even acknowledged it, and it continues to colonise the little remaining land left to those victims with Americans and Russians, it butchers civilian women and children with the most advanced weaponry and sixth largest army in the world and leaves million sof people in the same limbo Jews have found themsleves in for centuries.

I have no truck with religion, but if Judaism is the kind of ideology which permits the oppression of somebody smaller than you, just because somebody bigger than you oppressed you previosuly, then, frankly, it is a worthless ideology. I think that is part of what Seth is driving at.