Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, demonstrated political naiveté when replying to an intimidating question, “As a Palestinian leader, did he plan to apologize to Israel and Germany for the 1972 Munich Olympics 1972 attack by Black September ahead of its 50th anniversary next month?” Something chilling in memorializing a terrorist attack, making it unique among the thousands of terrorist attacks committed on helpless people, many of them done by the Zionists and the Israeli government.
Not knowing the question was being used to provoke and use him to publicize apartheid Israel as a constant victim, President Abbas responded, “From 1947 to the present day, Israel has committed 50 massacres in Palestinian villages and cities, in Deir Yassin, Tantura, Kafr Qasim and many others, 50 massacres, 50 Holocausts.” Nothing incorrect in what he was saying and in using holocaust as a metaphor, stressing that, to those who have been massacred, a holocaust has no limits in size. Nor did his words diminish the Word war II holocaust.
President Abbas failed to realize he was faced by a provocateur, who wanted to be provoked so he could raise the stakes, and that he was surrounded by racists who are determined to have the word holocaust reserved for their own use — Zionists, who daily convince the world that the World War II atrocities have a unique presence among all other atrocities and the German Federal Republic that subordinates other atrocities committed by Nazi Germany. The contrived uniqueness gives Zionists the right to cripple anyone who bothers them and enables Germany to claim superior morality by atoning for the sins of vanquished antecedents.
A more astute political leader would have responded to this “Why do you beat your wife?” type of question by stating the question had no relevance to the present meeting and neither he nor the Palestinian government condoned or had any role in the event.
German Chancellor, Olaf Schulz, the real culprit in this situation, demonstrated the continuous German obsequious attitude to the Zionist cause with inflammatory remarks. He wrote on Twitter, “The (Palestinian) leader would have gained sympathy if he had apologized for the terrorist attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics 1972. Accusing Israel of ‘50 Holocausts’ instead is the most disgusting speech ever heard in the German Chancellery.”
By not immediately intervening to prevent further ugly conversation and not shielding his guest from insults, the German Chancellor permitted the Zionists to twist everything to their advantage while he heightened the attack with careless remarks. Olaf Schulz’s remarks may be among the most disgusting ever uttered by a world leader. Demonstrations before German embassies should demand his immediate replacement. Off to a nursing home for this crippled politician.
The calculated controversy demonstrates the clever strategy that Israel has used to perpetrate its genocide on the Palestinians, distinguishing harm to Jewish people, no matter how insignificant, from all other harms and, by use of the unique words anti-Semitism and holocaust, giving that harm more significance. Constant repetition of these words provokes a Pavlovian response in a significant number of numbed people, whose “knee-jerk” reaction is. “We must protect the defenseless Israeli Jews from these vile attacks.”
Combatting the weaponiziation of these words — anti-Semitism and holocaust — is a necessary challenge for combatting apartheid Israel’s horrific oppression of the Palestinian people. Due to the lightning rod attributes of the words, the approach has been unduly careful and, by this manner, has achieved nothing. Time to shout out the truths: “Anti-Semitism is a manufactured word that has no context; anti-Judaism is the preferred word. Until the World War II atrocities, Jews suffered much less discrimination than other minorities, many of whom, such as the Cathars, Carthaginians, Hereros, Aborigines, and hundreds of tribes in the Americas, Africa and Asia have been almost completely wiped out and are not available to testify to the discrimination. Much of what is labelled as “anti-Semitism “ is the frequent discrimination against a minority (Jews in this case) provoked by economic, cultural, and social rivalries, religious intolerance, suspicions, or just being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. The recently contrived and infantile labeling of discrimination of Jews as “the world’s oldest and ongoing discrimination,” as if that is a contest and is important, is contradicted by the continuous prejudice against women, homosexuals, Armenians, Assyrians, Samaritans, Nubians, and others, only a few of mass brutalities, from ancient times until today. Jews suffered minimal discrimination in the United States, magnitudes less than other groups, and today, much, much less than Arabs, Muslims, and Asians. Three quarters of the Anti-Defamation League statistics on anti-Semitism are vandalism —tumbling of graveyard monuments, telephone calls of intended bombings, and depictions of Swastikas by teen-aged juvenile delinquents, who are not expressing anything against others and are only expressing frustration with their lives. Serious crimes against Jews cannot be underestimated and need attention but are infinitesimal compared to the wanton destruction of Palestinian life and property by Israel’s Jewish settlers and magnitudes less than the Islamophobic hate crimes committed annually against Arabs and Muslims in the United States.
Are the three years of the World War II holocaust more horrific and unique than the centuries of slaughter of the native tribes in the western hemisphere and the unendurable slavery of the African peoples, and not just in the United States, but throughout the world? The excessive attention to discrimination of Jews and to the World War II holocaust is due to one word ? racism. The irony of the constant attention to the holocaust is that it is a racist expression, singling out one ethnicity in deference to others, while posing as anti-racist.
Israel cannot be defeated on the battlefield and its ultimate success in stealing all Palestinian lands and reducing the Palestinians to vassalage depends on convincing the world that it is a protector of the Jews, who are in constant danger, continually subjected to anti-Semitism and another possible holocaust. After each serious Israeli transgression on Palestinian life, Zionist followers bring to life the departed of the holocaust and resurrect age-old anti-Semitism charges, which are reinforced by new charges of antipathy to Jewish progress and endangerment of their lives. This manipulation shifts the talk from the Israeli destructive action against the Palestinians to a construct of spurious actions by a hostile world against Zionism. Capturing each generation to sympathize with the Zionist apartheid and oppressive causes is a constant objective of the Zionist agenda. Centuries-old harms, irrelevant to today, are presented as happenings of a close yesterday.
Oppression of the Palestinians will not be halted before the public relations stunts, which disgustingly use the dead from the holocaust and the sufferings of those subjected to criminal anti-Jewish criminal actions to cloak the oppression, are exposed and have no effect. Bringing Israel to task for its crimes demands revealing the nefarious use of the holocaust and spurious charges of anti-Semitism that attempt (and succeed) to shield Israel from criticism. Before the exposure is accomplished, nothing else will succeed in liberating the Palestinians from Israel’s genocidal actions.