 |
|
|
 |
Home > Newsletters
The Yale Initiative
for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism
Newsletter
Volume 1 No. 6
12 January 2007
YIISA SEMINAR SERIES ANTISEMITISM IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE
ON JANUARY 25 YIISA will host Professor Antony Polonsky, of Brandeis
University, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He will
be joined by Professor Jan Gross, of Princeton University, and
they will be speaking on "Polish Antisemitism after Auschwitz." We
will be holding this talk in Linsly-Chittenden Hall, 63 High Street at
the regular time, room to be determined.
On February 1 Yigal Carmon, President, Founder of the Middle East
Media Research Institute (MEMRI) "Arab/Muslim Antisemitism: Roots,
Components and Present States." The seminar will be held in
Linsly-Chittenden Hall, room 101, 63 High Street.
Please see the seminar
website for the Spring semester schedule. Please note that many of
our seminars this semester will be held in a larger room at Linsly-Chittenden.
YALE CAMPUS EVENTS
Wednesday, January 24 at 4:00.
Jews and Judaism under a Triumphant Christianity: Powerlessness
and Identity
Talk given by Professor Lee Levine (Hebrew University in Jerusalem,
and Harvard University)
Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall Street, room 208
Sponsored by the Judaic Studies Program
EVENTS WORLDWIDE
January 16: TEL AVIV - The International Advisory Board for Academic
Freedom will be holding a seminar at Bar Ilan University. Charles Small has
been invited to speak. The title of his talk will be
"Processes of Globalization: Its Impact on Contemporary Antisemitism
and Anti-Israel Sentiment."
January 17: Remembering Raoul Wallenberg: Holocaust Survivors Share Their
Stories, A World Wide Event
For the entire calendar of events, click
here
January 29: NEW YORK - The UN International Day of Commemoration in Memory
of the Victims of Holocaust
For events listing, click
here
February 1: NEW YORK - State of Anti-Semitism Lecture: Leslie H. Gelb on
Israel, Jews and United States Foreign Policy
For tickets and info click
here
YIISA TV, MOVIES
The
Libeling of a People Surges with a Vengeance
The New York Times Review on the PBS documentary "Anti-Semitism in
the 21st Century: The Resurgence"
A
Film Festival for a Jewish World that Spans the Globe
The New York Jewish Film Festival --January 10 and runs through
January 25. Click here for the article.
Discovering
Ann Frank
At first blush comparing the lives of youngsters in black, Latino,
and Cambodian ghettoes of Southern California to the fates of Holocaust
victims seems an almost indecent stretch, but it works surprisingly
well in the new film Freedom Writers.
YOUTUBE
David Aaronovitch Film aired on UK's Channel 5, "No Excuses
for Terror"
Click
here to watch
The Hamas View of Israel
"We Will Never Recognize Israel"
Click here to
watch
Brainwashed Kid
Click
here to watch
Gaza Imam
Click
here to watch
BOOK REVIEWS
New Book on Jewish Hatred
and anti-Semitism
"Neu - Alter Judenhass" (New, Old Jewish Hatred), by authors
Klaus Faber, Julius Schoeps, and Sacha Stawski. A review in European Jewish
Press about a new book launched in Germany covering the issue of anti-Semitism
in Islamic and Christian culture.
BOOK IN PDF: "Referral of Iranian President
Ahmadinejad on the charge of Incitement to Commit Genocide"
Principal Author: Justus Reid Weiner, Esq. Also
written by Meir Rosenne, Elie Wiesel, Dore Gold, Irit
Kohn, Eytan Bentsur, Dan Naveh
Click
here for booklet
ARTICLES OF INTEREST
Irwin Cotler: Bringing Ahmadinejad to Justice
(Ha'aretz) Irwin Cotler writes, "The outrage over Iran's hosting
of the Holocaust Denial conference has tended to overshadow what should
be a greater outrage: Iran's state-sanctioned incitement to commit
genocide."
Click
here for article
Sharansky: Link Anti-Semistism to Life in Israel
(JPost) A veteran warrior in the fight against anti-Semitism, former Likud
minister Natan Sharansky, accused the government of
"abandoning" the fight against anti-Semitism for the last year
and a half even as he congratulated it for resuming the battle this week.
Click
here for article
France: Resolution of Mideast Conflict Will Not End Global Terror
(Israel Today) An official report published recently by the French
government says that resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
will not bring an end to the threat of global terrorism.
Click
here for article
To view/purchase the report in French, click
here
Emory University Planning Holocaust Site in Arabic
(JPost) Emory University is planning on translating Professor's Deborah
Lipstadt's website-- Holocaust Denial on Trial (www.hdot.org)--
in Arabic, Farsi, and other languages common to countries where antisemitic
views are widespread.
Click
here for article
Why They Deny the Holocaust? On Top of Nearly Constant anti-Semitic
Propaganda, Much of the World Hasn't Even Heard of It
(Los Angeles Times) An LA Times Op-Ed by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali
immigrant who served in the parliament in the Netherlands.
Click
here for op- ed
The Second Holocaust Will Not be Like the First
An Op-Ed by Benny Morris published in the German daily Die Welt.
Click here
for article in German
(Go to the end of this newsletter for English version.)
Iran's Reformists Slam Government's Nuclear Policy
(Reuters - UK) Iranian reformist parliamentarians slam Ahmedinejad's government
for failing to prevent United Nations sanctions.
Click
here for article
Netanyahu to Address Britain on Iran
(JPost) Opposition leader Natanyahu will travel to London in two
weeks to address parliament and call for Britain to take measures to
charge Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with incitement to commit
genocide.
Click
here for article
Expert: Clash over Iran Nukes Inevitable
(JPost) Although a diplomatic solution to Iran's nuclear program
is preferable, a clash between the West and the Islamic Republic on
the issue in the coming years is inevitable, an Israeli expert on Iranian
affairs said.
Click here for article
Iran: Hitler Was a Jew
(YNet) Just when you thought the Iranian leadership could stoop no further,
MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute) reported that a top advisor
to Iranian president Ahmadinejad claimed in an interview that Nazi leader
Adolf Hitler's parents were both Jewish and that Hitler himself was one
of the founders of the State of Israel.
Click
here for article
Anti-Zionists and the Impossible Peace
(Globe and Mail - Toronto) A web exclusive comment by David Matas
in Toronto's Globe and Mail.
Click
here for editorial
Bahrain Revokes Athlete's Passport after Israel Run
(Reuters - UK) Bahrain has revoked the citizenship of a Kenyan-born
athlete after he took part in the Tiberias marathon in Israel (which
he won).
Click
here for report
Spanish Bishops Fear Rebirth of Islamic Kingdom
(Independent - UK) Spanish bishops fear an ambitious plan to recreate
the city of Cordoba -- the heart of the ancient Islamic Kingdom of
al-Andalus-- as a pilgrimage site for Muslims throughout Europe.
Click
here for report
A Mideast Pawn, A Father's Agony
(New York Times) Noam Shalit is the father of Cpl. Gilad Shalit,
who was captured in June by Palestinian militants in a cross-border
raid and trundled into the Gaza Strip. "We keep saying 'time works
against us'," Mr. Shalit said.
Click
her for article
Don't Play with Maps
(New York Times) An Op-Ed in the New York Times by Dennis Ross,
former envoy to the Middle East in the Clinton Administration, about
the controversy over the two maps used in Carter's book, "Palestine
Peace Not Apartheid."
Click
here for article
Carter Center Advisors Quit to Protest Book
(New York Times) Fourteen of Atlanta's business and civic leaders
resigned from the Carter Center's advisory board on Thursday to protest
former President Carter's recent criticisms of Israeli and American
Jewish political power.
Click
here for article
Report: London Mosque's DVDs Predict Mass Extermination of Jews
(European Jewish Press) Dispatches, an investigative series on
UK's Channel 4, will air an episode this Monday on the DVDs of
"hate" preachers being sold at the London Central Mosque shop.
The station says its revelations come after a 12-month investigation
into hate-preaching and extremism in Britain's Muslim religious institutions.
Click here for article
World Obsessed with Israel, says Alan Dershowitz
(YNet) Harvard Professor addresses the international community's
obsessive focus on the State of Israel for causing global inaction
over the genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, and
the slaughter currently taking place in Darfur.
Click
here for article
FROM THE ARCHIVE
And the World is Silent BEN-DROR YEMINI (MAARIV)
Muslims are murdered all over the world and the finger is pointed
at Israel more times than not. But genocide and Zionism have nothing
in common. There is no greater libel in the world today, writes Ben-Dror
Yemini.
Click here
for article
The Pew Global Attitudes Project
(Pew Charitable Trusts) Pew Survey on Islamic Extremism, How Muslims
and Westerners See Each Other, Views of Religious Groups, Banning Head
Scarves, and Muslim Countries Attitudes towards Jews.
Click
here for report
QUOTES
“Israel is 100 percent committed to the international effort to achieve
a diplomatic solution and supports the full and expeditious implementation
of UN resolution 1737.”Mark Regev, spokesman for the
Israeli Foreign Ministry, denying a report from London’s Sunday Times which
claimed that Israel is preparing a nuclear attack against Iran’s uranium-enrichment
sites. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini, speaking at
a weekly briefing with reporters, said in response to the Sunday Times report
that any “attacker would quickly regret their act.” In
November, Iran test-fired a Shahab-3 ballistic missile capable of traveling
2,000 kilometres, a range that would put Israel's major cities within reach. (National
Post, Jan. 8)
“We have Israelis retaliating to terrorist attacks. We've got a security
vacuum as a result of the military conflict between Hamas and Fatah in the
Palestinian territories... The Israelis have every right to defend their citizens,
and so without some sense of context or reference, this sort of one-sided statement
does not contribute to the effort to promote peace and security and stability
in the region. On the contrary, it makes people think that the United Nations
can't view this issue objectively.”Acting U.S. Ambassador to
the UN Alejandro Wolff, criticizing an Indonesian draft UN statement
as “an unbalanced snapshot of the situation.” (International
Herald Tribune, January 9)
“Chinese culture became a part of our family's tradition.
It is my first memory from my childhood in Israel. We maintain a
profound love for the Chinese people.”Israeli Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert, in an interview with China's Xinhua
news agency, describing his connection to the Asian state. Olmert's
parents belonged to a Jewish community that fled persecution in Russia
and re-settled in the northern Chinese city of Harbin almost a century
ago. Mordechai and Bella Olmert were ardent Zionists who eventually
moved to the then-British Mandate Palestine and helped found Israel.
Harbin boasted Asia's largest synagogue and a Jewish community that
grew to more than 20,000 in the 1920s. Olmert's parents spoke Mandarin
and according to family lore, Mordechai's last words on his deathbed
were in the Chinese dialect. One of Olmert's grandfathers, Yosef,
is buried in Harbin. (Reuters, Jan. 9).
SHORT TAKES
U.S. FORCES DEFEAT AL QAEDA IN SOMALIA(Mogadishu,
Somalia) A senior al Qaeda suspect wanted for bombing U.S. embassies
in East Africa was killed in a U.S. air strike, a Somali official said
today. Fazul Abdullah Mohammed was wanted for purportedly planning
the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that
killed 225 people. He is also suspected of arranging the car bombing
of an Israeli beach resort in Kenya, and the near simultaneous attempt
to shoot down an Israeli airliner in 2002. Ten Kenyans and three Israelis
were killed in the blast at the hotel. The report of Fazul’s
death, if confirmed, would mean the end of an eight-year hunt for a
top target of the U.S. war on terrorism. U.S. forces have been carrying
out air strikes in Southern Somalia for the past three days, assisting
Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia to oust the Taliban-like Islamic
Court’s regime. Mustef Yunis Culusow, a former Islamist
leader who abandoned the movement days ago, said its once-powerful
Islamist leaders were now trapped. “The leaders know they’re
finished,” Culusow said. “They’ve basically told
the young fighters they can go, it’s over, and that anyone who
stays behind should be resigned to die.” (Washington Times;
Globe and Mail, Jan. 10)
ISRAEL: HEZBOLLAH IS REARMING(Jerusalem) Israel’s
military intelligence chief, Major General Amos Yadlin, said
that Hezbollah was rearming itself after last summer’s war
with Israel and that the UN peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon
was doing nothing to stop it. “Hezbollah has almost totally
rebuilt its arsenal of rockets and arms. The traffic of arms from
Iran and Syria destined fro Hezbollah is continuing,” Yadlin
told Army Radio. He also said that dozens of al Qaeda operatives
had arrived in Lebanon. (NYT, Jan. 10)
HAMAS-FATAH VIOLENCE CONTINUES(Jerusalem) Violence
erupted last Thursday when a Hamas militia surrounded the house of
a Fatah commander, killing him and his bodyguards and seriously wounding
his wife and brother. Three days later five Hamas operatives were kidnapped
by Fatah loyalists in the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Lahiya.
Three of them were released after about an hour, but the two others
continued to be held. The Hamas operatives were driving near the house
of a Fatah leader when gunmen stopped their car, seized them, and then
torched the vehicle, Hamas said. Prior to the kidnappings, Fatah gunmen
went on a rampage throughout the city Sunday night, destroying several
businesses, charities and cars belonging to Hamas figures and supporters.
(NYT, Jan. 6; Jer. Post, Jan. 8)
GAZA’S CYBER CAFÉS AND MUSIC STORES AT RISK(Gaza
City) A new group in Gaza, calling itself the Swords of Islamic
Righteousness, has declared war on any business, or Palestinian, it
considers immoral. Among its targets: Internet cafés, for providing
access to online porn; CD shops, for playing racy pop music; and pharmacies,
for peddling drugs it deems recreational. For most Palestinians, Swords
of Islamic Righteousness ranks somewhere near the Taliban in its extreme
interpretation of Islam. The group claims to have thrown acid on unveiled
women studying in Gaza’s Islamic University and has promised
to ensure the honor of all Palestinian women. “If people don’t
listen, we’ll take further steps,” the terrorists warned
in a letter they circulated in Gaza’s busiest business districts.
(Globe and Mail, Jan. 9)
IRANIAN CENSORSHIP SPREADS TO WEB(Tehran) Iranian
thought police recently finished blocking access to possible channels
of communication with the “vile West,” including the New
York Times website, the video clip site YouTube, and the free
encyclopedia site, Wikipedia. Iranian internet providers were
also ordered to narrow the bandwidth to 128 kb/sec to prevent Internet
telephone communication (VoIP) and prevent people from downloading
files. (Omedia.org, Jan. 10)
U.S. BLOCKS TRANSACTIONS WITH MAJOR IRANIAN BANK(Washington)
The United States, moving to raise pressure on Iran, on Jan. 9 barred
American financial institutions from doing business with a major
Iranian bank after concluding that it had been involved in illicit
weapons programs. The move against Bank Sepah, announced by
the Treasury Department, also affected North Korea, which American
officials said had used the bank to facilitate payments to a North
Korean group that exports missile technologies. (New York
Times, Jan. 10)
GERMANY WANTS HOLOCAUST DENIAL BANNED IN EU(Berlin)
Germany, during its current presidency of the EU, wants to make denying
the Holocaust punishable by law in every member-state, Justice Minister Brigitte
Zypries said Jan. 8. Previous attempts to unify legal standards
for Holocaust denial and other xenophobic attacks were blocked by
Italy, but the new Italian government of Prime Minister Romano
Prodi has dropped its opposition. Austria, Belgium, France,
Germany and Spain are among the EU members that already have laws
against denying the slaughter of six million Jews by the Nazis during
WWII. (National Post, Jan. 9)
JEWS BLAMED FOR POLISH ARCHBISHOP’S DEMISE(Warsaw) Stanislaw
Wielgus, the new archbishop of Warsaw, resigned Sunday at a ceremony
at St. John’s Cathedral that was to mark his installation. Documents
in Polish newspapers have revealed that Wielgus collaborated with the
Communist-era secret police, a collaboration he initially denied but
finally admitted. Following the surprise resignation, fights
broke out between the bishop’s backers and detractors outside
of St. Johns. Some of the supporters shouted that Jews were trying
to destroy the church. (JTA, Jan. 8)
Please note that the quotes and short takes appeared in
the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research (CIJR) newsletter.
THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION "THE SECOND HOLOCAUST"
The following is the original text in English provided by Benny Morris.
-------------------------------------
The Second Holocaust Will Not Be Like the First
By Benny Morris
The Nazis, of course, industrialized mass murder. But still, the perpetrators
had one-on-one contact with the victims. They may have dehumanized them,
over months and years of appalling debasement and in their minds, before
the actual killing. But, still, they were in eye- and ear-contact, sometimes
in tactile contact, with their victims. The Germans, along with their
non-German helpers, had to round up the men, women and children from
their houses and drag and beat them through the streets and mow them
down in nearby woods or push and pack them on cattle cars and transport
them to the camps, where 'Work makes Free', separate the able-bodied
from the completely useless and lure them into 'shower' halls and pour
in the gas and then take out, or oversee the extraction of, the bodies
and prepare the 'showers' for the next batch.
The second Holocaust will be quite different.
One bright morning, in five or ten years' time, perhaps during a regional crisis,
perhaps out of the blue, a day or a year or five years after Iran's acquisition
of the Bomb, the mullahs in Qom will covoke in secret session, under a portrait
of the steely-eyed Ayatollah Khomeini, and give President Ahmedinejad, by then
in his second or third term, the go ahead. The orders will go out and the Shihab
III and IV missiles will take off for Tel Aviv, Beersheba, Haifa, and Jerusalem,
and probably some military sites, including Israel's half dozen air and (reported)
nuclear missile bases. Some of the Shihabs will be nuclear-tipped, perhaps
even with multiple warheads. Others will be dupes, packed merely with biological
or chemical agents, or old newspapers, to draw off or confuse Israel's anti-missile
batteries and Home Guard units.
With a country the size and shape of Israel (an elongated
8,000 square miles), probably four or five hits will suffice: No more Israel.
A million or more Israelis, in the greater Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem areas,
will die immediately. Millions will be seriously irradiated. Israel has about
seven million inhabitants. No Iranian will see or touch an Israeli. It will
be quite impersonal.
Some of the dead will inevitably be Arab. 1.3 million of
Israel's citizens are Arab and another 3.5 million additional Arabs live in
the semi-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Jerusalem, Tel Aviv-Jaffa and Haifa
have substantial Arab minorities. And there are large Arab concentrations immediately
around Jerusalem (in Ramallah-El Bireh, Bir Zeit, Bethlehem), and outside Haifa.
Here, too, many will die, immediately or by and by.
It is doubtful whether such a mass killing of fellow Muslims
will trouble Ahmedinejad and the mullahs. The Iranians don't especially like
Arabs, especially Sunni Arabs, with whom they have intermittently warred for
centuries. And they have an especial contempt for the (Sunni) Palestinians,
who, after all, though initially outnumbering the Jews by more than 10 to 1,
failed during the long conflict to prevent the Jews from establishing their
state or taking over all of Palestine. Besides, the Iranian leadership sees
the destruction of Israel as a supreme divine command, as a herald of the Second
Coming, and the Muslims dispatched collaterally as so many shuhada (martyrs)
in the noble cause. Anyway, the Palestinians, many of them dispersed around
the globe, will survive as a people, as will the greater Arab Nation, of which
they are part. And surely, to be rid of the Jewish state, the Arabs should
be willing to make some sacrifices. In the cosmic balance sheet, it will be
worth the candle.
A question may nevertheless arise in the Iranian councils:
What about Jerusalem? After all, the city contains Islam's third holiest shrines
(after Mecca and Medina), Al Aksa Mosque and the Mosque of Omar. But Ali Khamenei,
the supreme spiritual leader, and Ahmedinejad most likely would reply much
as they would to the wider question regarding the destruction and radioactive
pollution of Palestine as a whole: The city, like the land, by God's grace,
in twenty or fifty years' time, will recover. And it will be restored to Islam
(and the Arabs). And the deeper pollution will have been eradicated.
To judge from Ahmedinejad's continuous reference to Palestine
and the need to destroy Israel, and his denial of the first Holocaust, he is
a man obsessed. He shares this with the mullahs: All were brought up on the
teachings of Khomeini, a prolific anti-Semite who often fulminated against
'the Little Satan'. To judge from Ahmedinejad's organisation of the Holocaust
cartoons competition and the (current) Holocaust denial conference, the Iranian
president's hatreds are deep (and, of course, shameless).
He is willing to gamble - the future of Iran or even of
the whole Muslim Middle East in exchange for Israel's destruction. No doubt
he believes that Allah, somehow, will protect Iran from an Israeli nuclear
response or an American counterstrike. Allah aside, he may well believe that
his missiles will so pulverize the Jewish state, knock out its leadership and
its land-based nuclear bases, and demoralize or confuse its nuclear-armed submarine
commanders that it will be unable to respond. And, with his deep contempt for
the weak-kneed West, he is unlikely to take seriously the threat of American
nuclear retaliation.
Or he may well take into account a counter-strike and simply,
irrationally (to our way of thinking), be willing to pay the price. As his
mentor, Khomeini, put it in a speech in Qom in 1980: 'We do not worship Iran,
we worship Allah … I say, let this land [Iran] burn. I say let this
land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant …' For these
worshipers at the cult of death, even the sacrifice of the homeland is acceptable
if the outcome is the demise of Israel.
Israel's deputy defense minister, Ephraim Sneh, has suggested
that Iran doesn't even have to use the Bomb to destroy Israel. Simply, the
nuclearization of Iran will so overawe and depress Israelis that they will
lose hope and gradually flee emigrate, and potential foreign investors and
immigrants will shy away from the mortally threatened Jewish State. These,
together, will bring about the State's demise. But my feeling is that Ahmedinejad
and his allies lack the patience for such a drawn-out denouement; they seek
Israel's annihilation in the here and now, in the immediate future, in their
lifetime. They won't want to leave anything up to the vagaries of history.
As with the first, the second Holocaust will have been preceded by decades
of preparation of hearts and minds, by Iranian and Arab leaders, Western
intellectuals and media outlets. Different messages have gone out to
different audiences - but all have (objectively) served the same goal,
the demonization of Israel. Muslims the world over have been taught:
'The Zionists\the Jews are the embodiment of evil' and 'Israel must be
destroyed.' And Westeners, more subtly, were instructed: 'Israel is a
racist oppressor state' and 'Israel, in this age of multi-culturalism,
is an anachronism and superfluous'. Generations of Muslims and at least
a generation of Westerners have been brought up on these catechisms.
The build-up to the second Holocaust (which, incidentally,
in the end, will probably claim roughly the same number of lives as did the
first) has seen an international community fragmented and driven by separate,
selfish appetites - Russia and China obsessed with Muslim markets; France,
with Arab oil - and the United States driven by the debacle in Iraq into a
deep isolationism. Iran has been left free to pursue its nuclear destiny and
Israel and Iran, to face off alone.
But an ultimately isolated Israel will prove
unequal to the task, like a rabbit caught in the headlights of an onrushing
car. Last summer, led by a party hack of a prime minister and a small-time
trade unionist as defense minister, and deploying an army trained for quelling
incompetent and poorly-armed Palestinians gangs in the occupied territories
and overly concerned about both sustaining and inflicting casualties, Israel
failed in a 34-day mini-war against a small Iran-backed guerrilla army of Lebanese
fundamentalists (albeit highly motivated, well-trained and well-armed). That
mini-war thoroughly demoralized the Israeli political and military leaderships.
Since then, the ministers and generals, like their
counterparts in the West, have looked on glumly as Hizbullah's patrons have
been arming with doomsday weapons. Perversely, the Israeli leaders may even
have been happy with Western pressures urging restraint. Most likely they deeply
wished to believe Western assurances that somebody, somehow - the UN, G-7 -
would pull the radioactive chestnuts out of the fire. There are even those
who fell for the outlandish idea that a regime-change in Teheran, driven by
a reputedly secular middle class, would ultimately stymie the mad mullahs.
But even more to the point, the Iranian program presented
an infinitely complex challenge for a country with Israel's limited conventional
military resources. Taking their cue from the successful Israel Air Force's
destruction in 1981 of Iraq's Osiraq nuclear reactor, the Iranians duplicated
and dispersed their facilities and buried them deep underground (and the Iranian
targets are about twice as far from Israel as was Baghdad). Taking out with
conventional weapons the known Iranian facilities would take an American-size
air force working round-the-clock for more than a month. At best, Israel's
air force, commandos and navy could hope to hit only some of the components
of the Iranian project. But, in the end, it would remain substantially intact
- and the Iranians even more determined (if that were possible) to reach the
Bomb as soon as possible. (It would also, without doubt, immediately result
in a world-embracing Islamist terrorist campaign against Israel (and possibly
its Western allies) and, of course, near-universal vilification. Orchestrated
by Ahmedinejad, all would clamor that the Iranian program had been geared to
peaceful purposes.). At best, an Israeli conventional strike could delay the
Iranians by a year or two.
In short order, therefore, the incompetent leadership
in Jerusalem would soon confront a doomsday scenario, either after launching
their marginally effective conventional offensive or in its stead, of launching
a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the Iranian nuclear program, some of whose
components were in or near major cities. Would they have the stomach for this?
Would their determination to save Israel extend to pre-emptively killing millions
of Iranians and, in effect, destroying Iran?
This dilemma had long ago been accurately defined by a wise general:
Israel's nuclear armory was unusable. It could only be used 'too early or 'too
late.' There would never be a "right" time. Use it 'too early,' meaning
before Iran acquired similar weapons, and Israel would be cast in the role
of international pariah, a target of universal Muslim assault, without a friend
in the world; 'too late' would mean using its nuclear weapons after the Iranians
had struck. What purpose would that serve?
So Israel's leaders will grit their teeth and hope that
somehow things will turn out for the best. Perhaps, after acquiring the Bomb,
the Iranians will behave 'rationally'?
But the Iranians are driven by a higher logic. And they will launch their
rockets. And, as with the first Holocaust, the international community
will do nothing. It will all be over, for Israel, in a few minutes -
not like in the 1940s, when the world had five long years in which to
wring its hands and do nothing. After the Shihabs fall, the world will
send rescue ships and medical aid for the lightly charred. It will not
nuke Iran. For what purpose and at what cost? An American nuclear response
would lastingly alienate the whole of the Muslim world, deepening and
universalizing the ongoing clash of civilizations. And, of course, it
would not bring Israel back. (Would hanging a serial muderer bring back
his victims?) So what would be the point?
Still, the second Holocaust will be different in the sense that Ahmedinejad
will not actually see and touch those he so wishes dead
(and, one may speculate, this might cause him disappointment as, in his
years of service in Iranian death squads in Europe, he may have acquired
a taste for actual blood). And, indeed, there will be no scenes like
the following, quoted in Daniel Mendelsohn's recent 'The Lost, A Search
for Six of Six Million,' in which is described the second Nazi Aktion
in Bolechow, Poland, in September 1942:
'A terrible episode happened with Mrs. Grynberg. The Ukrainians
and Germans, who had broken into her house, found her giving birth. The weeping
and entreaties of bystanders didn't help and she was taken from her home in
a nightshirt and dragged into the square in front of the town hall. There … she
was dragged onto a dumpster in the yard of the town hall with a crowd of Ukraininans
present, who cracked jokes and jeered and watched the pain of childbirth and
she gave birth to a child. The child was immediately torn from her arms along
with its umbilical cord and thrown - It was trampled by the crowd and she was
stood on her feet as blood poured out of her with bleeding bits hanging and
she stood that way for a few hours by the wall of the town hall, afterwards
she went with all the others to the train station where they loaded her into
a carriage in a train to Belzec [extermination camp].'
In the next Holocaust there will be no such heart-rending scenes, of
perpetrators and victims mired in blood (though, to judge from pictures
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the physical effects of nuclear explosions
can be fairly unpleasant).
But it will be a Holocaust nonetheless.
|
|
