On Mahmoud Abbas and the use of the term Holocaust

Yossi Schwartz, ISL the section of the RCIT in Israel/Occupied Palestine, 23.08.2022

Last week, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has provoked the Zionist outrage by his misuse of a Holocaust analogy during a press conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholtz. In response to a question on whether he would apologize for the 1972 Palestinian attack on Israeli athletes in Munich, he said: “From 1947 until today, Israel has committed 50 massacres in 50 Palestinian villages”, and then added, “50 slaughters; 50 Holocausts”. [1]

What is the difference between massacres and the Holocaust? It is a question of quantity that turns into quality. Holocaust is massive amount massacres that reach that level of destruction.

The Zionists and their supporters claim that the Jewish Holocaust is the worst crime in history: “The Holocaust has come to be viewed as the worst crime in the history of humanity. The industrialized murder of six million people continues to horrify the world. Few other events during the 20th century have left such a profound impact upon the world.With the Jews of Germany blamed for the defeat of World War I, they found themselves in a battle for survival as Nazism seduced their fellow citizens. As another global conflict arose, the very existence of the Jewish people was at stake. Stripped of their citizenship in Germany and hounded all over Europe, they would face a new nightmare at the concentration camps where millions would perish” [2]

This is not only wrong claim but racist because the Africans during the slave trade and the North American Indians suffered much worse. In addition the between 1933 and 1945 Sinti and Roma (“Gypsies”) suffered greatly as victims of Nazi persecution and genocide that reached the level of holocaust. Like in the case of the Jews building on long-held prejudices, the Nazi regime viewed Roma both as “asocials” (outside “normal” society) and as racial “inferiors” believed to threaten the biological purity and strength of the “superior Aryan” race. During World War II, the Nazis and their collaborators killed between 250,000 and 500,000 Romani and—25% to over 50% of the estimate of slightly fewer than 1 million Roma in Europe at the time.

The difference is that the European Jews are considered whites.

That Israel committed at least 50 massacres which are war crimes is a fact. Yet these massacres do not constitute Holocausts. Israel accuses Abbas of Holocaust denial and yet in the real world, while Abbas was mistaken by his reference to Palestinian suffering as a Holocaust, Israel that removed by ethnic cleansing 750000-900,000 Palestinians from their country in 1947-8 and hundreds of thousands after 1967 is a Nakba denier.

To demand from Abbas to apologize for the killing of 11 Israelis at the time Israel kills tens of people including 16 children in Gaza is by itself a racist demand.

It is very common for Israel to shout “Holocaust deniers” ,“Nazis” which serve her to hide its own horrible crimes.

Furthermore, in Hebrew the term Holocaust is Shoʾah (“Catastrophe”), in Yiddish Ḥurban (“Destruction”). The word used to describe the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 BCE and the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE. Shoʾah (“Catastrophe”) is the term preferred by Israelis and the French, most especially after Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 motion picture. Holocaust is a word derived from two Greek words meaning ‘burnt whole’. In 1895 the term Holocaust was used by the New York Times to describe the Ottoman massacre of Armenian Christians. In 1925 the journalist Melville Chater used the term to describe the burning and sacking of the city Smyrna in 1922 in the context of the Turkish genocide against the Armenians.

Thus the ethnic cleansing of 1947-8 is comparable to the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 BCE and the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE. In both cases the Jews were exiled. However, today the Zionists and their supporters attack anyone who use the term Holocaust to describe the massive genocide of other people.

Prior to the 1967 war various articles appeared in the West claiming that many wanted Nazis escaped to the Arab countries especially to Egypt where Nasser employed them in his propaganda against Israel. An example is the article Nazis in Cairo[3]

In the Zionist magazine Mosaic we find: “Examining the origins of the Six-Day War, Matthias Küntzel points to the anti-Semitic—and pro-Nazi—influences in Gamal Abdel Nasser’s formative years and the Egyptian president’s deeply held beliefs about the Jews.” [4]

It was not by chance that Egypt [after 1952] became the El Dorado of former Nazi war criminals and [current] anti-Semites” [5]

Mosaic also claimed and quoted without any source to prove the claim: “Nasser also denied [the Holocaust] both directly (“No one . . . takes seriously the lie about six-million Jews who were murdered”) and indirectly, by claiming that “Ben-Gurion . . . has killed as many Arabs as Hitler killed Jews.” . . . Nasser’s obsession with the Jewish state was a constant theme of his time in power.”

In an article in NYT we find: “While the secret lives of Nazis in countries like Argentina and Paraguay captured the popular imagination in books and films like the Odessa File and the Boys From Brazil, the Heim case casts light on the often overlooked history of their flight to the Middle East.Until political winds shifted, ex-Nazis were welcomed in Egypt in the years after World War II, helping in particular with military technology” [6]

“Israel offered as proof that Austrian-born Heim, a former concentration camp doctor accused of carrying out gruesome, deadly experiments on Jewish prisoners, died in Cairo.”

Yet according to the NBC:There is no indication that Heim played any role with the Egyptian government.”

“Instead, it appears he has lived a quiet life in downtown Cairo since the early 1960s. A later convert to Islam, he bought sweets for friends from a famed confectionery and was known for playing pingpong and taking long walks for exercise” [7]

On the other hand, in 1967, the Polish culture minister, Kazimierz Rusinek, declared that “it is no secret, that many Nazi criminals serve the Israeli state and live in its territory. I cannot give you a precise number, but I’m certain that more than [one] thousand professionals of the Nazi Wehrmacht serve as military advisers to the Israeli Army.” [8]

Was this claim simple Stalinist propaganda? “Later, reporters, not all of them hostile to Israel, mentioned specifically one name: Otto Skorzeny, Hitler’s favorite commando leader. Did Skorzeny, in fact, cooperate with the Mossad in the 1960s, and for how long? And if so, why? Why did Israeli intelligence leaders, some of them Holocaust survivors, agree to bond with him? That was the question that the drab-looking Mossad envelope was supposed to answer” [9]

 “The first time that Israel made such a decision was in 1949, when Mamad, the Foreign Ministry’s intelligence service and the predecessor of the Mossad, recruited the Nazi Walther Rauff, one of the vilest Holocaust perpetrators then alive and the inventor of the “gas vans,” mobile gas chambers in which thousands of Jewish men, women and children were choked to death.” [10]

For years we have heard that Iran is a fascist state: “The rhetoric about the so-called “War on Terror” has led us down the wrong path for 20 years. Terrorism is a tactic. We are not at war with terror. Similarly, our fight is not against radical or extreme Islam. When it comes to the Middle East, particularly Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, it is imperative that we understand the true nature of the threat. We are fighting Islamic Fascism—the political idea in which state actors or nonstate actors are using Islam to rule people through the use of violence” [11]

In the real world, Israel is connected with neo-Nazis in Europe. We find in the liberal daily Haaretz: “Israel Hayom was up in arms this week. In an interview with a Swedish daily, Israel’s new ambassador to Sweden had stated the obvious: Israel is shunning the Sweden Democrats, a far-right party with fascist and neo-Nazi roots that is still associated with similar positions. But for the Israeli Hebrew-language daily, this was a “controversial statement.” Why? Here is the wonderful explanation the paper gave: “In the past, the Sweden Democrats did adopt far-right positions, including sympathy for fascism and Nazism. However, in recent years it has become a staunch supporter of Israel.” [12]

Indeed, every pro-Nazi politician who supports the crimes of the Zionist state and comes to visit Israel is taken to visit Yad Vashem (The Jewish Holocaust Museum).

Down with the Zionist apartheid and all its supporters!

For a Palestine red and free from the river to the sea!

Endnotes:

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/8/18/palestinian-misuse-and-zionist-abuse-of-the-holocaust

[2] Stephen McGrann: The Holocaust: Understanding the Worst Crime in History Kindle Edition

[3] Max Melamet (1967) The John Birch society, Patterns of Prejudice, 1:3, 12-14,

[4] https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/uncategorized/2017/03/nassers-anti-semitic-war-against-israel/

[5] Ibid

[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/04/news/04iht-germany.19935220.html

[7] https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna29058048

[8] https://newlinesmag.com/review/the-nazi-fugitives-hired-by-israel/

[9] Ibid

[10] Ibid

[11] https://providencemag.com/2020/01/defeat-islamic-fascism-iran-turkey-delegitimize-ideology/

[12] https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2021-10-29/ty-article-opinion/.premium/neo-nazis-as-long-as-theyre-friends-of-israel/0000017f-dc38-d856-a37f-fdf8653d0000

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