The Spectator Sport of Jew-Baiting

Excerpt from a holocaust article (subscription required) by Anthony Lipmann

I will think not just of the crematoria and the cattle trucks but of Darfur, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Jenin, Fallujah...This little band of 600 [concentration camp victims who are going to a reception hosted by the Queen] has a terrible responsibility — to live well in the name of those who did not live and to discourage the building of walls and bulldozing of villages. Even more than this, they — and all Jews — need to be the voice of conscience that will prevent Israel from adopting the mantle of oppressor, and to reject the label ‘anti-Semite’ for those who speak out against Israel’s policies in the occupied territories.

Whenever I read articles about Israel as the oppressor and how it greedily occupies territories, I am reminded of this poster from Protest Warrior



Melanie Phillips responds here

At any time this would be disgusting stuff. As a piece marking the liberation of Auschwitz, it is obscene. To imply that the Jews have turned into Nazis in the Middle East does two things. It tells a wicked lie about that tragic impasse, reversing who is victim and who is victimiser. It is the Palestinians who have a programme to eradicate the Jewish state and ethnically cleanse the Jews from the land, as the Arabs have been trying to do for the past 100 years. Israel is merely defending itself, and — notwithstanding abuses which should always be condemned and punished — with a restraint in the circumstances that no other country would ever match. To call them Nazis, and thus to accuse them of genocide, is beyond grotesque.

To back up this filth, Lipmann equates Auschwitz with Jenin and Falluja. Falluja? So the Americans too are Nazis, are they? As for Jenin, he is peddling the big lie that the Israelis perpetrated a massacre there — ignoring the fact that a mere 56 mainly armed Palestinians died in that incident along with no fewer than 23 Israeli soldiers. There was no massacre. This was a libel against Israel, which Lipmann is repeating. ...

It’s now a favourite trick of the media to set Jew against Jew on the issue of Israel, to get a Jew to accuse the Jews of Israel of being Nazis, and to accuse the Jew who protests at this infamy of waving the shroud of the Holocaust in order to sanitise the crimes of the Jews of Israel. So the Jew who tries to defend the Jewish people is felled by a double blow —one of them administered by co-religionists, who, while wrapping themselves in the sanctimony of past Jewish suffering, in turn legitimise further such attacks by reviling the victim and endorsing the attacker. What sport is here. And what a foul moral sickness.

[Hat tip: Little Green Footballs]