Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: compare Islamic terrorism to the Holocaust is to deny the Holocaust

Holocaust denial begins at home
Bradley Burston
The photograph is arresting. Names, rank on rank of names, tens of
thousands of names of victims of the World War II Nazi Holocaust,
engraved on a tall black monolith on a memorial in Miami Beach. And
then one name added at the bottom, added this week, to mark Yom
Hashoa, the Holocaust remembrance day: Daniel Pearl.
I grieved and grieve the death of Daniel Pearl, murdered with hideous
brutality five years ago, executed, his radical Islamist captors
indicated, for having been an American and a Jew. He was a gifted,
unusually humane journalist and an estimable human being. He deserves
to be remembered and mourned as such.
But not this way.
"Daniel really died for basically one reason, and basically the same
reason 6 million others did, and that was for the crime of being a
Jew." said Norman Braman of the Holocaust memorial committee in Miami,
adding that organizers of the commemoration felt it appropriate to
place Pearl's name on the wall.
"There wasn't one individual that was in opposition,"
Perhaps there should have been.
My heart goes out to Daniel Pearl's widow Mariane, his son Adam, born
three months after the murder, and to Judea and Ruth Pearl, Daniel's
parents. I can certainly understand Judea Pearl when the Miami Herald
asked him about the memorial. "Of course he was not a victim of the
Holocaust," he said. Still, he said, "the same forces that killed my
grandparents in Auschwitz, the forces of hatred, are still operating
in our world in the 21st century - and Danny is one of the victims."
During the Sunday commemoration, Judea Pearl told participants, "The
forces of barbarity and evil are still active in our world. The
Holocaust didn't finish in 1945."
Daniel Pearl deserves to be remembered fully and appropriately for how
he lived and how he died. But his name should not have been added to
the wall.
The killing of Daniel Pearl was an act of authentic evil, an
expression of unspeakable hatred and cruelty. It was a tragedy and a
heinous crime.
The forces operating were forces of hatred. They deserve to be hunted
down and removed from this world. But they are not the Nazis, and
their crimes are not the crimes of the Holocaust.
We are outraged, and should be, when the actions of Israel are
compared to those of the Nazis. We declare, and are right to do so,
that the Holocaust was an event without parallel in human history. We
believe, with morality on our side, that to compare the Holocaust to
contemporary events, to use the Holocaust to further a political
agenda or shore up a cause, is to cheapen the significance of the
Holocaust.
To compare Islamic terrorism to the Holocaust, even when the intention
is acting in defense of the Jewish people, is, in effect, to deny the
Holocaust.
Take it from us, over here. We have spent so much passion and
conscience comparing our Islamist enemies to the Nazis, that we have
managed to blind ourselves to the grievous act of Holocaust denial
that we have committed on our own.
It has taken us 60 years to develop this blindness, to accustom
ourselves to it, to so pervert the memory of the Holocaust that we can
deny its victims their right to something approaching normal life.
After all, what if there were a nation which denied the Holocaust so
effectively that its bureaucrats could look needy concentration camp
survivors in the eye and deny them - year after year after year -
compensation payments Germany had sent to that country expressly to
alleviate the plight of the survivors?
What if that nation denied the Holocaust with such success that
hundreds of thousands of aging survivors lived there as full citizens,
yet one of every three eked out lives in poverty, unable to afford
proper food, shelter, heating and medical care.
What if that nation denied the Holocaust to the extent that some
desperate German-born survivors managed to receive adequate assistance
and health care only by returning to live in Germany.
What if a succession of prime ministers of that nation denied the
Holocaust by failing to redress the situation, even if they were made
fully aware of it?
Jewish organizations across the world would denounce that government
as obscenely insensitive, an insult to the memory of the six million
who perished in the Nazi genocide.
Unless the perpetrators were us.
We have pledged, as Jews in America and Israel both, never to forget
the Holocaust.
In the process, what we have clearly forgotten, is how to remember it.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/848985.html

 
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/848985.html
Che senso ha uno stato israeliano che nega una vita dignitosa a quei
pochi rimasti tra coloro che si salvarono dalla Shoah? Per chi è stato
fondato Israele? Non c'è qualcosa di osceno in tutto ciò?