Lies Damned Lies and CiF

This is a guest post by Margie in Tel Aviv

Take a look at this comment below from the Rachel Shabi thread yesterday.

The DissidentStockbroker, whose words always seem to be typed after rather too liquid a lunch, is at pains here to distance the idea of the Holocaust from the province of Hamas. For those like me, who were ignorant of the import of the Highland clearances, I looked it up in the internet (knowledge is always useful) and found the following entry in Wikipedia:

The Highland Clearances (Scottish Gaelic: Fuadach nan Gàidheal, the expulsion of the Gael) were forced displacements of the population of the Scottish Highlands during the 18th and 19th centuries. They led to mass emigration to the sea coast, the Scottish Lowlands and the North American colonies. The clearances were part of a process of agricultural change throughout the United Kingdom, but were particularly notorious due to the late timing, the lack of legal protection for year-by-year tenants under Scottish law, the abruptness of the change from the traditional clan system and the brutality of many evictions.

In other words, the befuddled stockbroker considers that the Holocaust is as distant from the children of Hamas as the tsoris of the highlanders two hundred years ago, are to the Chinese.

But is this true?

Is there no connection at all between Hamas and the Holocaust? We’ve all seen the claims of the Hamas supporters that the Gaza strip resembles the Warsaw Ghetto and those claims that say that the Gazans are in a concentration camp. (All laughable, as if the bleeding hearts of the world had been supplying the Warsaw Ghetto with money and weapons and as if those who blockaded them were giving them water purification plants and supplying fuel and medicines, taking desperately ill people for expert medical attention.) All these are allusions to the Holocaust and without knowing what it is, these claims lose their point. Let us say however that these are not Hamas’ claims but those of their fervent and mistaken admirers.

In order to know what Hamas itself thinks of the matter let us look at the Hamas Charter, which tells us all about their aims and desires, their ideology, as distinct from their actions. Under the heading: “Social Mutual Responsibility” we find the following:

The Islamic spirit is what should prevail in every Moslem society. The society that confronts a vicious enemy which acts in a way similar to Nazism, making no differentiation between man and woman, between children and old people – such a society is entitled to this Islamic spirit. Our enemy relies on the methods of collective punishment. He has deprived people of their homeland and properties, pursued them in their places of exile and gathering, breaking bones, shooting at women, children and old people, with or without a reason. The enemy has opened detention camps where thousands and thousands of people are thrown and kept under sub-human conditions. Added to this, are the demolition of houses, rendering children orphans, meting cruel sentences against thousands of young people, and causing them to spend the best years of their lives in the dungeons of prisons.

In their Nazi treatment, the Jews made no exception for women or children. Their policy of striking fear in the heart is meant for all. They attack people where their breadwinning is concerned, extorting their money and threatening their honour. They deal with people as if they were the worst war criminals. Deportation from the homeland is a kind of murder.

To counter these deeds, it is necessary that social mutual responsibility should prevail among the people. The enemy should be faced by the people as a single body which if one member of it should complain, the rest of the body would respond by feeling the same pains. [emphasis added]

In effect Hamas has taken over the concept of the Holocaust and applied it to themselves, as if they were the Jews and the Jews were the Nazis.

How could they teach their children that the plight that they complain of was indeed suffered by those whose cruelty they complain of? How can they tell their children that they are frauds, pretending to the woes of others in order to exploit that same other?

DissidentStockbroker, you are right, Hamas don’t ‘leave it out’ out of racism, but out of shame that it is impossible to acknowledge the reality of the Holocaust when their pretence is so criminal.