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Hatred of the Jews: More Than the Banality of Memory
Townhall.com ^ | January 31, 2014 | Suzanne Fields

Posted on 01/31/2014 4:57:52 PM PST by Kaslin

When the White House scribblers were putting the finishing touches on the State of the Union address, President Obama took a moment to commemorate memory. Monday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the 69th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the most notorious of Hitler's death camps. "Each year on this day," he said, "the world comes together to commemorate a barbaric crime unique in human history."

But not quite the whole world. Anti-Semitism thrives in the Middle East, where certain politicians vie to see who can say the ugliest things about Jews, and such sentiment is surging in Europe. Bloody pig's heads were sent to the Israeli embassy, the Jewish Museum and a synagogue in Rome on the Saturday before the commemoration. Several thousand Frenchmen gathered on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day in Paris, chanting "Jew go home," and gave the "quenelle salute" -- a variation of the Nazi heil created by a popular French comedian who has many imitators on the street and on the Internet.

Even Holocaust Remembrance Day has its critics, who argue that the expression of easy sentiments does little to reduce the rising tide of anti-Semitism and may, in fact, dumb down memory. Since the United Nations established International Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2005, anti-Semitic incidents have grown across Europe and the Middle East.

Nevertheless, important voices were raised this year in commemoration. United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon emphasized the purpose of the grim anniversary: "The United Nations was founded to prevent any such horrors happening again." Catherine Ashton, the foreign affairs chief of the European Union, said the occasion reminds everyone "to continue fighting prejudice and racism in our own time."

Lawmakers from the United States, Israel and Europe toured Auschwitz testifying to the cry, "Never again." Others died in the Holocaust, too, including homosexuals, gypsies and the racially "impure." But the commemoration reminded the world, killing 6 million men, women and children simply for being born a Jew was an attempt to extinguish a race.

Many victims of the Holocaust remain nameless today, and the text of a new commemorative book of 1,250 pages consists of one word, "Jew," repeated 6 million times. "That's how the Nazis viewed their victims," Phil Chernofsky, the book's creator, told the New York Times. "These are not individuals; these are not people. They are just 'a mass we have to exterminate.'" No one would have believed what happened to them (and some still don't) if there hadn't been liberating soldiers to see for themselves and survivors to speak of the atrocities after the Third Reich was dispatched to the trash bin of history. We remember for their sake -- and for our own.

One grim memory was retrieved with the recent discovery of the unpublished letters of Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, offering another footnote on the "banality of evil," in Hannah Arendt's descriptive phrase. In a letter to his wife, Himmler juxtaposes his visit to a death camp with a commonplace acknowledgement for her: "I am traveling to Auschwitz," he wrote. "Kisses, your Heini." Her affection was returned in an ironic characterization of their love: "I am so lucky to have such an evil good man, who loves his evil wife as much as she loves him."

It's another reminder of how glibly evil can be trivialized. Layers of the horror of the Holocaust continue to unfold as dedicated researchers discover new killing sites. Auschwitz remains the best-known symbol of the Nazi evil, having seen over a million deaths by the gassing of men, women and children. But historians have now documented that more than a third of the 6 million Jews were slain in their homes, forests, city streets, country roads and hidden quarries. Most of these murders took place behind the Iron Curtain, where even after the war, it was more difficult to speak up than in the West. As survivors age, these fading memories become a compelling source of history.

Anti-Semitism is an ancient hatred that seeks to camouflage its shame by calling itself "anti-Zionism." It's a transparent deception. The state of Israel was created by the United Nations in 1948 to enable Jews to return to a homeland as protection against the anti-Semitism that persisted in Europe through the 1930s.

Millions are still exposed daily to rants and raves that blame Israel for all the world's ills. David Nirenberg, in "Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition," which describes the problem, suggests that such prejudice, if harnessed to military power, could be as deadly for the Jews as it ever was in the 1930s. Iran, which boasts that it will destroy Israel, now enjoys an easier yoke of sanctions and continues to pursue nuclear weapons. "Never again!" sounds as much a prayer as a cry of defiance.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial; Israel
KEYWORDS: antisemitism; antizionism; france; holocaust; israel; jews; judaism
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1 posted on 01/31/2014 4:57:52 PM PST by Kaslin
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To: Kaslin

If the racist Buckwheat had his druthers, he’d personally feed white babies into the furnace just like the Nazis. We have, in Ameirca today, the most racist neo-Nazi POS ever in our White House.

Get ready.


2 posted on 01/31/2014 5:09:28 PM PST by sergeantdave
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To: sergeantdave

Never should have offed Jesus. Big mistake.


3 posted on 01/31/2014 5:36:07 PM PST by Misterioso (A man's ego is the fountainhead of human progress. --- Ayn Rand)
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To: Kaslin

Always keep in mind that there have been genocides
since the beginning of time, but this was the first
INDUSTRALIZED one. That is the scary part, technology
has advanced since then. One notes the Germans were
limited to 3x5 cards and paper, imagine them with
computers, which is why Obama’s threat is so much
greater.


4 posted on 01/31/2014 5:45:48 PM PST by tet68 ( " We would not die in that man's company, that fears his fellowship to die with us...." Henry V.)
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To: Misterioso

People have wanted the Jews to vanish off the face of the earth before Jesus ever existed and even in the absence of Islam and Christianity would be targeting Jews for extinction regardless.


5 posted on 01/31/2014 5:52:10 PM PST by freedom462
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To: Misterioso

As long as there are Jews in the world, there will be millions who think the planet is better off without them regardless of current cultural and political mindsets.


6 posted on 01/31/2014 5:53:07 PM PST by freedom462
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To: Misterioso

The Romans offed Jesus.


7 posted on 01/31/2014 5:53:33 PM PST by SatinDoll (A NATURAL BORN CITIZEN IS BORN IN THE USA OF USA CITIZEN PARENTS)
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To: Misterioso; KC_Lion; Jewbacca

[ Never should have offed Jesus. Big mistake. ]

What the hell are you smoking?

Seriously, would it have been better if Jesus died of old age for our sins?

And it was the Romans that actually carried out the murder of Jesus by plunging the spear in his chest....

Imagine if Jesus died of OLD age for our sins:

.....And so Jesus in his deathbed old and frail uttered “Forgive them father for I am senile and old and my bowels have failed me...”

And thus Peter the only remaining living apostle hobbled over with his cane firmly gripped in his weathered knobby hand and said thereunto the lord “Whaaaat???? I didn’t hear you, could you say that again? “

Seriously, any Christian who whines about “The Jews Killing Jesus” has forgotten about the whole point of Jesus DYING for you SINS ON THE CROSS!!!!

It is a seriously cheap crappy shot to constantly take at our Jewish friends, unless you can find me a Jew that WAS alive then who is STILL alive today, then maybe you can go bitch at them, but they would have to be older than Methuselah.

Blaming the Jews for killing Jesus is like “Community Agitators” asking for slavery reparations, get over it it has passed. Or should we start prosecuting the children of today for the sins of their ancestors????


8 posted on 01/31/2014 5:54:58 PM PST by GraceG
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To: SatinDoll

ha...... the Romans were the instrument of the Jewish establishment

Recall if you will that Jesus was the King of the Jews

Palm Sunday was a political event that scared the crap out of them


9 posted on 01/31/2014 5:56:35 PM PST by bert ((K.E. N.P. N.C. +12 ..... History is a process, not an event)
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To: freedom462

Rabbi Manis Friedman, a famous Jewish teacher, once observed that perhaps Jews really aren’t hated more than other distinctive minorities, it’s just that other distinctive minorities are persecuted and then in fact disappear, while Jews always survive to be persecuted by the next dominant culture that will eventually take its turn at disappearing.


10 posted on 01/31/2014 5:58:30 PM PST by jjotto ("Ya could look it up!")
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To: GraceG
Seriously, any Christian who whines about “The Jews Killing Jesus” has forgotten about the whole point of Jesus DYING for you SINS ON THE CROSS!!!! It is a seriously cheap crappy shot to constantly take at our Jewish friends

Applause Grace, Pure Applause , I dub you "khassidey FReepers."

The Righteous among FReepers.

11 posted on 01/31/2014 6:09:46 PM PST by KC_Lion (Build the America you want to live in at your address, and keep looking up.- Sarah Palin)
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To: GraceG
And it was the Romans that actually carried out the murder of Jesus by plunging the spear in his chest....

No. He laid down His life when He was done with his mission, not because someone pierced Him with a spear. The spearing occurred after His death (John 19:34).

12 posted on 01/31/2014 6:10:25 PM PST by 17th Miss Regt
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To: Misterioso; SkyDancer; GraceG; MestaMachine; SJackson; Jack Hydrazine; Jewbacca
I doubt Very Seriously that HaShem saw Hitler as a Method of punishment for us Jews.

Evil was at work in this world and still is.

13 posted on 01/31/2014 6:11:57 PM PST by KC_Lion (Build the America you want to live in at your address, and keep looking up.- Sarah Palin)
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To: tet68

The Nazis did use very primitive computers (punch card technology) sold to them by IBM.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust


14 posted on 01/31/2014 6:17:44 PM PST by Jack Hydrazine (Pubbies = national collectivists; Dems = international collectivists; me = independent conservative)
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To: KC_Lion

Amalek is alive and well in America and around the world.


15 posted on 01/31/2014 6:20:33 PM PST by Jack Hydrazine (Pubbies = national collectivists; Dems = international collectivists; me = independent conservative)
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To: bert
Wrong again...the "Jews" in charge were the paid butboys of the Roman occupiers. The Romans were in charge of the city...not the other way around.

Jesus was a Jew..and only a Jew, who became more popular after his death. The Romans didn't like that much. To add insult to injury..after the Romans offed Jesus, they used his death to start a religion that they could control the sheeple with and spread the word that the Jews killed Jesus to willing little believers like you.

Tricky cold and calculating killing machine, those Romans. Now go and apologize for the brutes once more, and like it.

16 posted on 01/31/2014 6:22:12 PM PST by Earthdweller (Harvard won the election again...so what's the problem.......? Embrace a ruler today.)
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To: Earthdweller

That is the dogma, well stated


17 posted on 01/31/2014 6:24:15 PM PST by bert ((K.E. N.P. N.C. +12 ..... History is a process, not an event)
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To: bert

...Gee, don’t you have an Israeli Apartheid Week demonstration to go to, or a couple of more chapters of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion to read?


18 posted on 01/31/2014 6:24:43 PM PST by Kriggerel ("All great truths are hard and bitter, but lies... are sweeter than wild honey" (Ragnar Redbeard))
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To: Jack Hydrazine; GraceG
Interesting, However, I would have to research that more, I mean the Japanese used Firestone tires for their Zero Fights in the first half of the war.

It's Like Pinning Hitler Rants over the Phone on Alexander Graham Bell.

19 posted on 01/31/2014 6:25:06 PM PST by KC_Lion (Build the America you want to live in at your address, and keep looking up.- Sarah Palin)
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To: KC_Lion

The founder of IBM was a follower of Hitler.

IBM and the Nazis
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yefdIdLIf1Q

Hitler’s American Business Partners
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMKnH2BlkBA

IBM and the Holocaust
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gNXfrMR_Lw

IBM and The Holocaust - the story of IBM’s strategic alliance with Nazi Germany
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hhuEADoWEQ


20 posted on 01/31/2014 6:29:31 PM PST by Jack Hydrazine (Pubbies = national collectivists; Dems = international collectivists; me = independent conservative)
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