A Calm Feeling about the Holocaust

Nothing very new here. A Democratic Congressperson utters some blatantly anti-Semitic remarks. Republicans denounce her. Democrats rush to defend her… on the grounds that her remarks were taken out of context.

You see, it’s the context that matters and only the context.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib said this:

There’s, you know, there’s a kind of a calming feeling, I always tell folks, when I think of the Holocaust and the tragedy of the Holocaust, and the fact that it was my ancestors — Palestinians — who lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity, their existence, in many ways, had been wiped out. . . . I mean, just all of it was in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post-the Holocaust, post-the tragedy and the horrific persecution of Jews across the world at that time.

You see, she said that she had a calming feeling when thinking about the Holocaust. It seems clear enough. And yet, Tlaib’s Democratic supporters want us to put it in context… the context being that some of her ancestors lost their land in order to give Jews a homeland.

And what precisely does she find calming about the fact that her ancestors lost their land? Clearly, she said what she said. It makes no sense to say that she felt calm that her ancestors were displaced after the war.

She did not say that Palestinian leaders, beginning with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who aligned himself with Hitler and wished Hitler good luck in exterminating Jews. Keep in mind, Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestinian Jew hatred, was his nephew.

So, the Palestinians allied themselves with Nazi Germany in World War II and, guess what, they lost. It’s about time that they got over it. In truth, the Palestinian reaction and the Arab reaction to the founding of the state of Israel were to declare war against the Jewish state. And to invade it. And to attempt to destroy it. True enough, some Arab nations have now figured out that Israel is the solution, not the problem, but Tlaib understands nothing if she believes that Palestinians lost and continue to lose because the world wanted to give Jews a safe haven.

As for losing their human dignity, Palestinians have been engaging in a terror campaign against Israel for decades now. Do you really think that that has restored a measure of their dignity? Or will they only recover their “dignity” when they drive all the Jews into the sea? Tlaib believes in a one state solution and the one state solution involves destroying Israel.

Beyond the fact that Jews were there well before any Muslims inhabited the place, Tlaib’s sense of history is absurdly warped. See Lahav Harkov’s article in The New York Post:

Tlaib used the horrors of the Holocaust to delegitimize Israel. In fact, in the same podcast, Tlaib called for the dissolution of the Jewish state via a one-state solution.

For starters, she casually peddled the commonplace lie that Israel was established only because of the Holocaust.

Last Wednesday was Israel’s Memorial Day for fallen soldiers and victims of terror. Israeli television broadcast all the names — 23,741. The litany begins with Avraham Shlomo Zalman Tzoref, who was murdered by Arabs opposing his work for the Jewish community in Jerusalem.

That was in 1851. The Holocaust took place nearly a century later.

Jews returned to Zion, another name for Jerusalem, before the term “Zionism” was coined in 1885 to mean support for a Jewish state in the historic Jewish homeland. The first major uptick in Jewish return started in 1882. All well before the Holocaust.

In 1917, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour declared that his government “view[s] with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” The League of Nations, a precursor to the United Nations, gave the British a temporary mandate to govern Palestine, and under that mandate, the Jewish community formed its own self-governing body in 1922.

Not only did Jews want their own state, then, but their efforts received an imprimatur from the international community well before the Holocaust.

And naturally, Tlaib and her supporters have been claiming that her words are being twisted. In truth, there is no truth to the claim. To promote her as a champion of Israel is so stupid that only a Democrat could believe it. She has still not explained why she gets a calming feeling when she thinks of the Holocaust. But, qualifiers aside, she did say it and she has notably been an enemy of Israel and a conspicuous Jew hater ever since she arrived in Congress… and probably before it. No inconsistency there.

In case you forgot, when Palestinian terrorists fired hundreds of rockets into Israel, President Trump and Congressional Republicans expressed solidarity with Israel. Not a single Democratic presidential candidate did the same. Better yet, commentators in the Saudi press sided with Israel. It tells us something about today's Democratic Party.