1. Gatestone Institute (http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org)
Dutch Officials Demonize Israelis, 17 November 2014
by Timon Dias
(http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4868/dutch-officials-demonize-israelis)
The truth is that there has never been an Israeli genocide against Palestinians, and that Israel has done everything in its power apart from not going to war at all -- that is, apart from surrendering -- to spare innocent lives, including the lives of people trying to destroy it.
Israel simply became a safe haven for a persecuted religious minority who sought statehood after having concluded that no state could guarantee their safety except for a Jewish state.
That Israel is not even any kind of player in this Muslim Sunni-Shia "ISIS War" apparently did not occur to Wijenberg.
As is so often true when vilifying Israel, "Israel" is, at bottom, most likely just a transparent fig-leaf for again vilifying "Jews."
An increasingly popular argument, when certain Dutch officials and Muslim commentators discuss Islamic State [IS] jihadists from Europe, is that these jihadists are really no different from European Jews who choose to serve in the Israel Defense Forces [IDF].
In The Netherlands this trend seems to have started when an op-ed, entitled, "Jihad for Israel," written for Al-Jazeera by Columbia University PhD. candidate Hanine Hassan, was translated into Dutch for the website "Wij Blijven Hier," which means "We Are Here To Stay." The website is hugely popular among Dutch youths from a Muslim background.
The main thesis of the op-ed was that serving in the IDF should be as punishable as joining IS, as the IDF, too, is a genocidal regime, just like IS.
The truth is that there has never been an Israeli genocide against Palestinians, neither systematic nor acute, and that Israel has done everything in its power apart from not going to war at all -- that is, apart from surrendering -- to spare innocent lives, including the lives of the people trying to destroy it. This argument falls on deaf ears among many Muslims, as well as on those of the youths who support them.
Sadly, it was not long before more prominent and mainstream Dutch figures began expressing similar thoughts. Pieter Broertjes, Labour Party mayor of the Dutch city and "media capital" Hilversum, said during a radio interview, when asked what to do about Dutch Muslims travelling to foreign battlegrounds: "They are adults. Dutch citizens went to Israel to fight the British, we didn't stop them either."
After his remarks produced a backlash, Broertjes's spokesperson formally apologized, but not Broertjes himself, although he did comment on his self-described "clumsy" comparison during later interviews.
A few months earlier, his Labour Party colleague, Yasmina Haifi, championed the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion, by stating (with a straight face): "ISIS has nothing to do with Islam. It is part of a plan by Zionists who are deliberately trying to blacken Islam's name" -- in other words, part of the supposed "Zionist conspiracy."
Jan Wijenberg, a former Dutch Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and Yemen among other places, and known for his fierce anti-Israeli stance, wrote an op-ed that took the comparison even further: "The IS goal is to establish a utopian religious state, just as the Zionists have done."
Although religion does have a prominent place in Israeli society and politics, most of its citizens are not Orthodox. Zionism started out as a secular project and has never aspired to be a religious utopia, let alone an expansionist one. Jews normally do not even try to convert people; to many, the notion would be like someone trying to "convert," say, to being Japanese. The entire process of conversion to Judaism is long and laborious, perhaps so that only the most dedicated will succeed.
During the European wholesale round-ups and slaughter of the 1930s and 1940s, Israel simply became a safe haven for a persecuted religious minority who sought statehood after having concluded that no state could guarantee their safety, except for a Jewish state. The most appropriate location for this Jewish state turned out to be the strip of land to which Jews had fled after escaping Egyptian slavery; in which Jerusalem, for nearly three thousand years, became the only center of their longings and their prayers -- "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill…" Psalms137:5 -- and which has sheltered a sizeable population of Jews continuously, despite countless attempts to disperse them, from the time of Augustinian and Herod, through ancient Rome, and, evidently, up to the very present.
Wijenberg continued his op-ed by stating that the only way to de-radicalize Western Muslim youths is by severing all ties with the Israeli state: "Political parties that don't fully denounce Israel," he said, "exclude Muslims as full-fledged members of society. When they [Dutch political parties] combat and condemn the religiously motivated, highly criminal Zionist project, fighting against IS would be more acceptable and IS would be less attractive."
That Israel is not even any kind of player in this Muslim Sunni-Shia "ISIS War" apparently did not occur to Wijenberg. His earlier publications exclusively focus on vilifying Israel. Unsurprisingly, he was a board member of the civil initiative "Sloop de Muur," which means "Destroy the Wall." The wall to which he refers is Israel's defensive security barrier, built only after constant terrorist attacks, in order to protect Israelis -- including Muslim and Christian Israelis -- from terrorists. The barrier (it is mostly a fence; only a small fraction of it is actually a wall) has reduced the number of terrorist attacks by 90%, and saved countless lives -- apparently to Wijenberg's disappointment.
Wijenberg did not, of course, object to any other security barriers, such as the 1800-mile fence between India and Pakistan; the security barrier between Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan; the 1118-mile barrier between Saudi Arabia and Yemen; the moveable concrete barrier through Baghdad or the proposed 1500-mile barrier between Afghanistan and Pakistan. It appears that to individuals who hate Israel, the answer to many sociological problems can always be: Less Israel -- no matter how far-fetched the "logic."
Although both Broertjes and Wijenberg referred to Israelis -- or Haifi to Zionists -- it seems clear they were not referring to Muslim or Christian Israelis, but only to the Jewish ones. After all, no non-Jewish Dutch citizens went to Israel to fight the British and by a "religious utopia" Wijenberg referred to a Jewish religious utopia. As is so often true when vilifying Israel, "Israel" is, at bottom, most likely just a transparent fig-leaf for again vilifying "Jews."
2.Japan Times（http://www.japantimes.co.jp）
Adolf Eichman: a murderer’s warped idealism, 17 November 2014
by George Will
Western reflection about human nature and the politics of the human condition began with the sunburst of ancient Greece 2,500 years ago, but lurched into a new phase 70 years ago with the liberation of the Nazi extermination camps. The Holocaust is the dark sun into which humanity should stare, lest troubling lessons be lost through an intellectual shrug about “the unfathomable.”
Now comes an English translation of a 2011 German book that refutes a 1963 book and rebukes those who refuse to see the Holocaust as proof of the power of the most dangerous things — ideas that denigrate reason. The German philosopher Bettina Stangneth’s “Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer” responds to Hannah Arendt’s extraordinarily and perversely influential “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.”
Although, or perhaps because, Arendt was a philosopher, in her report on Israel’s trial of Adolf Eichmann, the organizer of industrialized murder, she accepted the facade Eichmann presented to those who could, and in 1962 would, hang him: He was a little “cog” in a bureaucratic machine. He said he merely “passed on” orders and “oversaw” compliance. Arendt agreed.
She called Eichmann “terribly and terrifyingly normal,” lacking “criminal motives,” “a buffoon,” “a typical functionary” who was “banal” rather than “demonic” because he was not “deep,” being essentially without “ideology.” Arendt considered Eichmann “thoughtless,” partly because, with a parochialism to which some intellectuals are prone, she could not accept the existence of a coherent and motivating ideological framework that rejected, root and branch, the universality of reason, and hence of human dignity.
It was odd for Arendt to suppose that the pride Eichmann took in his deportations — especially of the more than 430,000 Hungarian Jews when the war was already lost and even Heinrich Himmler, hoping for leniency, was urging it for the Jews — was merely pride in managerial virtuosity. Arendt, however, did not have, as Stangneth has had, access to more than 1,300 pages of Eichmann’s writings and taped musings among Argentina’s portion of the Nazi diaspora, before Israeli agents kidnapped him in 1960.
Eichmann was proudly prominent in preparations for the “final solution” even before the Wannsee Conference (Jan. 20, 1942) formalized it. “His name,” Stangneth notes, “appeared in David Ben-Gurion’s diary only three months after the start of the war” in September 1939. On Oct. 24, 1941, a newspaper published by German exiles in London identified Eichmann as leader of a “campaign” of “mass murder.”
“I was an idealist,” he told his fellow exiles, and he was. In obedience to the “morality of the Fatherland that dwells within,” aka the “voice of blood,” his anti-Semitism was radical because it was ideological. Denying that all individuals are created equal entailed affirming the irremediable incompatibility of groups, which necessitated a struggle to settle subordination and extermination.
“There are,” Eichmann wrote, “a number of moralities.” But because thinking is national, no morality is universal. Only war is universal as the arbiter of survival. So, Stangneth writes, “Only thinking based on ethnicity offers a chance of final victory in the battle of all living things.”
Eichmann, a premature post-modernist, had a philosophy to end philosophizing. To him, Stangneth says, “philosophy in the classical sense, as the search for transcultural categories” was absurd. She says his ideology was “the fundamental authorization for his actions.”
In 1996, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust” argued that Germany was saturated with “eliminationist anti-Semitism” that produced much voluntary participation in genocide. This made Hitler a mere product and trigger of cultural latency.
But in 1992, Christopher Browning in “Ordinary Men,” a study of middle-aged German conscripts who became willing mass-murderers, had noted that the murders of millions of Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge and tens of millions of Chinese by Mao’s Cultural Revolution could not be explained by centuries of conditioning by a single idea.
Martin Amis’ new novel “The Zone of Interest” — set in Auschwitz, it is a study of moral vertigo — contains a lapidary afterword in which Amis abjures “epistemological rejection,” the idea that an explanation of Hitler and his enthusiasts is impossible. An explanation begins with Eichmann’s explanation of himself, rendered in Argentina.
Before he donned his miniaturizing mask in Jerusalem, Eichmann proclaimed that he did what he did in the service of idealism. This supposedly “thoughtless” man’s devotion to ideas was such that, Stangneth says, he “was still composing his last lines when they came to take him to the gallows.”
・Email: georgewill@washpost.com. © 2014, Washington Post Writers Group
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