US Sentator Tom Lantos has resorted to using 'holocaust guilt' to justify the mistreatment and torture of detainees at Guantanamo:
Dutch lawmakers who visited the Guantanamo Bay military prison this week said they were offended by a testy exchange in Washington with a senior congressional Democrat.The lawmakers said that Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told them that "Europe was not as outraged by Auschwitz as by Guantanamo Bay."
Lantos, a Holocaust survivor, was responding to arguments that the United States should shut down the prison, located on a U.S. naval base in Cuba, the lawmakers said. Mariko Peter, a member of the Dutch Green Party, who began the exchange with Lantos, said she took notes of the remarks. . .
"You have to help us, because if it was not for us you would now be a province of Nazi Germany," Lantos said, according to the Dutch lawmakers.
"The comments killed the debate," said Harry van Bommel, a member of the Socialist Party. "It was insulting and counterproductive." (Dutch Lawmakers Offended by Rep. Lantos , Associated Press Saturday, October 27, 2007)
In using the holocaust guilt issue, Lantos is simply resorting to more of the usual abuse of the Holocaust to justify the state policy of aggression and murder.
For example, Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor who has made a hobby out of smearing and silencing critics of Israel, has written that ethnic cleaning (he calls it "transfer") of the Palestinians from their country is justified since ethnic cleansing really isn't all that bad, and when applied to Palestinians it should be views as a form of "affirmative action" in favor of Jews. He also justifies it by claiming that all Palestinians are responsible for the Holocaust anyway, since "they" supposedly collaborated with Nazis, and so according Dershowitz, many "decent people" believe that the Palestinians as a whole should acquiesce to their own "transfer" and should just go die elsewhere quitely. I kid you not - this is exactly what Dershowitz has written in his book, "The Case for Israel".
Indeed, that Holocaust guilt is used by Israel to justify its treatment of Palestinians and blackmail the support of US/EU is not new and has been long recognized as a fact:
The historian Arnold Toynbee suggested that British Christians had sympathy for Zionist aspirations because of a sense of guilt stemming from subconscious anti-Semitism. Truman apparently favored the creation of Israel in part as a reaction to the guilt factor resulting from the Holocaust.(1) Pro-Israeli lobbyists in the US actively use Holocaust-guilt to promote US support for Israel.(2) The American stateman and diplomat, George Ball(3) and more recently Michael Scheuer have both stated that the Holocaust, and the Holocaust museums in the US, have been used to promote loyalty and support for the state of Israel -- and others share this view and that the memorialization of the Holocaust has been turned into a supplement to loyalty to Israel and a rationalization of Israeli genocide of the Palestinians.(4) (and yes, the word genocide is precisely accurate.)
What else is holocaust-guilt useful for? Well for example, holocaust guilt is useful in covering up the dual-loyalty of the pro-Israeli lobbyists and activists. This is what Michael Lind to say in his essay entitled "The Israel Lobby" back in 2002 (before Walt & Mearsheimer's article with the same title came out)
Ethnocentric political Zionism as the basis of Jewish identity is more appealing to many former leftist and liberal Jews in the US than the adoption of a stringent Orthodox Jewish lifestyle. But making political Zionism the basis of Jewishness imposes a stark dual loyalty, as Stephen Steinlight argues in the essay I have quoted. "I'll confess it, at least: like thousands of other typical Jewish kids of my generation, I was reared as a Jewish nationalist, even a quasi-separatist. Every summer for two months, for ten formative years during my childhood and adolescence, I attended Jewish summer camp. There, each morning, I saluted a foreign flag, dressed in a uniform reflecting its colours, sang a foreign national anthem, learned a foreign language, learned foreign folk songs and dances, and was taught that Israel was the true homeland. Emigration to Israel was considered the highest virtue... Of course we also saluted the American and Canadian flags and sang those anthems, usually with real feeling, but it was clear where our primary loyalty was meant to reside... That America has tolerated this dual loyalty-we get a free pass, I suspect, largely over Christian guilt about the Holocaust-makes it no less a reality."
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Footnotes:
1. Securing the Covenant: United States-Israel Relations after the Cold
War, by Bernard Reich; Praeger Publishers, 1995, p. 9
2. Foreign Policy and Ethnic Interest Groups: American and Canadian
Jews Lobby for Israel by David Howard Goldberg; Greenwood Press, 1990, p.
24
3. CSPAN Booknotes Transcript Air date: May 23, 1993, Author: George
Ball (and Douglas Ball) Title: The Passionate Attachment: America's
Involvement with Israel, 1947 to Present.
4. Never Too Late to Remember: The Politics behind New York City's
Holocaust Museum, by Rochelle G. Saidel; Holmes & Meier, 1996 pp 29-30.
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