Soccer Dad

Alternative universe in Delaware

Bassam Naeem writes in Hamas condemns the Holocaust

And at the same time as we unreservedly condemn the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis against the Jews of Europe, we categorically reject the exploitation of the Holocaust by the Zionists to justify their crimes and harness international acceptance of the campaign of ethnic cleansing and subjection they have been waging against us - to the point where in February the Israeli deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai threatened the people of Gaza with a "holocaust".

Within 24 hours, 61 Palestinians - more than half of them civilians and a quarter children - were killed in a series of air raids. Meanwhile, a horrible crime against humanity continues to be perpetrated against the people of Gaza: the two-year-old siege imposed after Hamas won the legislative elections in January 2006, which is causing great suffering. Due to severe shortages of medicines and food, scores of Palestinians have lost their lives.

There is some truth to what he wrote. Gen. Vilnai stupidly used rhetorical excess. And 61 Palestinians in Gaza were killed the next day by Israeli air strikes. (I have no idea if his percentages are accurate. Hamas terrorists do not wear uniforms in contravention of international law making it easy to have "dual purpose" martyrs. They may fire rockets or mortars at Israel in plain clothes and fulfill their roles as terrorists. But if Israel hits back and kills them, since they are not readily identified as combatants, it gives Hamas a chance to claim that civilians were killed.

Naeem also fails to tell you that the Israeli air strikes had been launched after a civilian in Sderot had been killed and a rocket had hit Ashkelon. In other words Israeli didn't simply invade Gaza, round up a bunch of Palestinians and throw them into gas chambers. Israel was striking back at identifiable military targets that were located in civilian areas. (Again in contravention of international law.)

I wouldn't normally respond to such garbage. But I had seen it on blog called Delaware Watch. Delaware Watch also highlighted this garbage from Naeem:

The Jews are for us the people of a sacred book who suffered persecution in European lands. Whenever they sought refuge, Muslim and Arab lands provided them with safe havens. It was in our midst that they enjoyed peace and prosperity; many of them held leading positions in Muslim countries.

Well yes there are Jews (or I believe a Jew) who serves in the Iranian parliament. He serves at the whim of his betters, who suffer his company, as a token.

The Muslim/Arab world, 60 years ago was home to about 850,000 Jews. Now fewer than 7700 remain. This is not one's usual definition of "safe haven."

Whatever Naeem writes in the unrefereed "comment is free" needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

The point of Delaware Watch's post is not simply that Hamas is a reasonable organization and that, therefore, Israel and the rest of the West ought to hold talks with Hamas. And of course, relying on this single op-ed, he draws these conclusion.

But the valuable work of Palestinian Media Watch shows that official Hamas television recently broadcast a program that claimed that Zionists were fully complicit in the Holocaust, as it was a plot to rid themselves of the weak and disabled. You don't have to dig too deeply to show that Naeem's arguments are bogus.

So too is his argument that Palestinians were, in no way, responsible for the Holocaust. The actual implementation maybe not, but the Palestinian leader at the time, the Mufti of Jerusalem, was preparing for a final solution of the Jews in what was then called Palestine. (Before the founding of the modern state of Israel, the term "Palestinians" referred to the Jews living in the territory.)

Husseini soon became an honored guest of the Nazi leadership and met on several occasions with Hitler. He personally lobbied the Führer against the plan to let Jews leave Hungary, fearing they would immigrate to Palestine. He also strongly intervened when Adolf Eichman tried to cut a deal with the British government to exchange German POWs for 5000 Jewish children who also could have fled to Palestine. The Mufti's protests with the SS were successful, as the children were sent to death camps in Poland instead. One German officer noted in his journals that the Mufti would liked to have seen the Jews "preferably all killed." On a visit to Auschwitz, he reportedly admonished the guards running the gas chambers to work more diligently. Throughout the war, he appeared regularly on German radio broadcasts to the Middle East, preaching his pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic message to the Arab masses back home.

During the Second World War in Yugoslavia, many Muslim clerics in Bosnia and Kosovo were willing accomplices in the genocide of the nation's Serbian, Jewish and Roma population. From 1941 until 1945, the Nazi-installed regime of Ante Pavelic in Croatia carried out some of the most horrific crimes of the Holocaust, killing over 800,000 Yugoslav citizens - 750,000 Serbs, 60,000 Jews and 26,000 Roma. In these crimes, they were helped by Muslim fundamentalists in Bosnia and Kosovo who were openly supported by the Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini. Husseini openly encouraged Muslims to join Nazi units that would be later implicated in genocide and crimes against humanity - the infamous Hanjar (or Handschar) 13th Waffen SS division.

If the Mufti didn't do more to kill Jews, it wasn't due to lack of effort. It was due to the Allies successfully repelling the Nazis in Africa, before they could reach Palestine.

I've spent more time on this than I should. It's shocking that reckless views such as those promulgated in Delaware Watch are, in any way, mainstream. If I didn't say it explicitly, let me say now: Hamas is not made up of a bunch of cuddly misunderstood clerics. It is made up of people dedicated - by word and deed - to the destruction of Israel. To pretend otherwise, one must be ignorant and ill-informed.

Israel.

Posted by SoccerDad at May 26, 2008 6:11 AM