Israel Matzav: Why the Holocaust still matters

Why the Holocaust still matters

Writing at the New Republic, Michael Oren, Israel's ambassador to the United States, takes several Israeli pundits to task for criticizing Prime Minister Netanyahu's discussion of the Holocaust during his speech in the United Nations General Assembly.

But in concentrating on the prime minister's preamble, critics overlook the deeper connections between the Holocaust and his subsequent themes. Recognizing the murder of six million Jews more than six decades ago is, in fact, vital for understanding the supreme dangers posed to six million Jews in Israel today by a nuclear Iran and by the Goldstone Report. Reasserting the factuality of the Holocaust is a prerequisite for peace.

Many factors contributed to the Holocaust--European anti-Semitism, mass murder technologies, and Allied indifference--but none more elemental than the Jews' inability to defend themselves. Israel and its citizen Defense Forces represent the most palpable means for redressing that incapacity.

Accordingly, denying the Holocaust not only deprives Israel of its raison d'être, but, more nefariously still, it invalidates the Jews' need to defend themselves. So, the Iranian leader proceeds to arm Hamas and Hezbollah and produce nuclear weapons while claiming that the Jews of Israel--like those of 1940s Europe--have nothing to fear. But Ahmadinejad does not stop short at merely deeming the Holocaust a "fairy tale;" rather, he portrays Israel as a Nazi state--guilty of perpetrating the very offenses against the Palestinians that the Nazis never did to the Jews.

Where Ahmadinejad leaves off, the Goldstone Report, or, as it is officially called, the “United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict,” persists.

...

The Goldstone Report goes further than Ahmadinejad and the Holocaust deniers by stripping the Jews not only of the ability and the need but of the right to defend themselves. If a country can be pummeled by thousands of rockets and still not be justified in protecting its inhabitants, then at issue is not the methods by which that country survives but whether it can survive at all. But more insidiously, the report does not only hamstring Israel; it portrays the Jews as the deliberate murderers of innocents--as Nazis. And a Nazi state not only lacks the need and right to defend itself; it must rather be destroyed.

Useful idiot MJ Rosenberg slams Oren.

Reading Oren, one would never know that 1,387 Palestinians (including 320 children) were killed compared to nine Israeli soldiers. Nowhere does he discuss the testimony of the Israeli soldiers who have told Goldstone, as well as Israeli groups investigating the conduct of the war, that the Israeli army repeatedly made no distinction between combatants and innocents.

No, all Oren wants to do is shoot the messenger - the distinguished South African jurist, Richard Goldstone, himself Jewish - for having produced a report that "goes further than Ahmadinejad and the Holocaust deniers by stripping the Jews not only of the ability and the need but of the right to defend themselves."

What, in heaven's name, does Goldstone have to do with Ahmadinejad? Nothing.

The numbers that Rosenberg cites are completely unverified and the number of 'Palestinians' killed as compared with the number of Israelis is irrelevant. It is not a 'war crime' to kill more of the enemy than the enemy kills of you. As to those Israeli soldiers who testified before Goldstone, they are from the group Breaking the Silence, and their testimony - which was also given in Israel - has been totally discredited as hearsay.

Goldstone has everything to do with Ahmadinejad. Ahmadinejad finances Hamas and Hezbullah, who would just as soon murder MJ Rosenberg as murder Carl in Jerusalem. But fools like Rosenberg are so caught up in their Leftist sound bytes that they are incapable of seeing that.

Israel Matzav: Why the Holocaust still matters