Tuesday, May 14, 2019

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.

5 comments:

Sam L. said...

I wonder how long it will take American Jews to realize that the Dems actually do hate them, and how much longer it will take the Jews to leave the Dems for ever.

Anonymous said...

The belief that Israel was founded by and for Holocaust survivors is a strange narrative. It means the seven Arab armies who declared war on Israel in the 1948 war of independence were beaten by the emaciated Jews who had just crawled out half dead from European concentration camps. That must be humiliating, and also confusing, because the only Palestinian army was Jewish. It’s almost like it was a supernatural miracle.

/Esther

trigger warning said...

Well, this is a first for me. WSJ headline:

"Buddhist Mobs Target Muslims in Sri Lanka"

The Peaceful Religion™ targets the Religion of Peace™.

Why can't we all just COEXIST?
:-D

Anonymous said...

I expect many of these young lefties are unaware that the large majority of Israeli land was,

1) Already owned by indigenous Jews. (Very small proportion)

2) Purchased from the Ottoman Empire.

3) Settled because there was no one else laying claim to it at the time. (Uninhabited desert).

4) Purchased from Palestinian Arabs who thought they were selling worthless scrub. (When the new owners made a success of it the Arab vendors wanted it back as theirs.)

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

Lefties all believe people have a right to their ancestral, ethnic homelands. Except Jews. Always, always, always... except the Jews. Yep, “Zionism is racism.” Other peoples have their right to ethnic, religious and territorial self-determination. It’s natural, and expected. No racism to see there. Fight the power.

And then Lefties believe aggrieved people can just move wherever they want in the world and should be welcomed and embraced. No borders. Be all you can be — a citizen of the world. No understanding of the human person and his/her needs to belong. People should be able to do whatever they want to do and believe whatever they want to believe. Except white people, conservatives, and... Jews.

Remember when Nazis and KKK types were allowed to march through American city centers? That was accepted as a bold stand for the sanctity of the First Amendment. All our civics teachers (and our children’s civics teachers) and lawyers and judges and politicians told us it was important. Not anymore. Now it’s all about Charlottesville, which means it’s all about politicization of what we were always told was... the right thing to do. Huh. Wonder why.

Along with this Sullivan situation at Harvard, we have the Left’s hard move to naked emotionalism. It’s always been emotional, but now it’s totalitarian. We are supposedly OBLIGATED to provide safe spaces, protecting our most elite (and supposedly most cognitively brilliant and talented) university students from their fears of what might happen if...

These are fantasies that have been turned into supposedly learned policy regarding what MUST (always MUST) happen to combat human evils. It’s really an imaginary version of “Minority Report.” There is actually no technology to predict guilt — guilt is just assumed. And the demands are always “non-negotiable.” It’s profoundly antisocial behavior. And the university’s supposedly learned leadership always caves, while inviting PLO Lefties to speak. That’s what it means to be “open-minded” in today’s university.

Those #&%$ing evil Jews who want their own homeland. How dare they. #&%$ them. #&%$ Trump. #&%$ America.

These are America’s leaders of the future. People who can’t work out their own emotional issues. Great critics posing as high priests and priestesses of critical thought. Not a whit of creativity. Just anger, rage and slothful non-thinking.

We have so much to look forward to.