In the wake of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's comments about Israel and the Holocaust, condemnation has been rightly loud and pointed. Denunciations have rung out from the usual capitals, and the European Union has waded in with threatened sanctions. Most observers are citing his remarks as an indication of the alarming drift Iran has taken away from moderation back to the fundamentalist zeal that marked the original revolution in 1980.
But in the hoopla surrounding Ahmadinejad's speech people are carefully avoiding commenting on the parts that could strike a nerve among the Western nations that are so quick to condemn his comments. Everybody has been eager to talk about his denial of the Holocaust, but the rest of the speech is barely mentioned.
In it he asks the West, why if they were the ones guilty of committing crimes against the Jewish people, they have not paid the price in land? Why, he asks are the Palestinians bearing the burden of Western atonement?
I'm not defending his comments about the myth of the Holocaust, or his arguments about the land that's been designated as Israel by the U. N. But he has certainly torn at the scab of the barely healed over wound of the treatment Jews received by the West in the days leading up to and during World War Two.
In spite of the fact that as early as 1933 people were aware of the existence of the concentration camps, and the laws in Nazi Germany stripping Jewish people of all rights and privileges. In spite of Kristallnacht in 1938 (a concentrated attack on Jewish businesses, synagogues and homes throughout Germany and Austria over the course of one night), and the high profile immigration of such people like Albert Einstein and Bertol Brecht, a blind eye and a deaf ear were turned to the crimes and the pleas for opening boarders to refugees.
Canada, the United States, and Great Britain all refused to take in any more people than they would in a normal year. Anti-Semitism was still rife in these predominantly Anglo-Saxon countries, and even sympathetic people like Franklin Roosevelt had his hands tied by an isolationist congress that was unwilling to get involved in what they viewed as another countries internal problems.
Article comments
1 - Ruvy in Jerusalem
Kol haKavod, Gypsyman! Even a blind pig will find an acorn and the acorn of truth carried by the Iranian leader is very uncomfortable for Europeans to face.
Europeans, from what I've seen, are willing to keep their own anti-Jewish attitudes to platitudes about sympathy for Arabs and quietly nodding their heads in approval when Arabs attack Jews - anywhere on the planet. They prefer that the Moslems actually do the attsacking and get their hands dirty with the anti-Jewish acts.
But Europeans hate us just as much as they ever did. Read the Haftarah for this Sabbath. It is the prediction of Ovadia that Edom would be judged by G-d. Edom is viewed as the ancestor if Romulus, and thus of Rome. Jewish scholars view Edom to be Europe. Ovadia warns of the judgment that will face Europe, for the Europeans were and are just as evil as the ancient Edomites.
2 - Benjamin
I'm not Jewish or anti-jew. I was raised Christian by my parents and learned some about Jewish history. I think nobody has the right to claim land as their own. Although, many countries have comitted atrocities against Jews, other countries have expirienced similar situations. There is so much hate in the middle east. Like the saying goes, "Can't we all just get along?" Is that an imposible task? Is an oil war really nessessary? Why can't Isreal take responsability for their own hate against other nations too? Every nation has a past of violence. The youth realize it's time for a change, but governments are too caught up in their own money greed and power that the people who they protect already lost faith in their leaders. The truth is that, we the people are want to rid the world of corrupt governments and establish peace in the world. But how?