The Jerusalem Post reports that the Israelis are doing their best to use the Holocaust to force Germany to cut off ties with Iran:
In talks between Israeli and German diplomats, the former will use German historical responsibility towards the state of Israel as a tool to move the German government into action...it is not uncommon to hear Israeli officials saying to their German counterparts: "Germany, gas, Iran, Ahmadinejad - what will people think, how will it look? Are these the morals that German exports are based on? Have you already forgotten the past?"
Actually Germany has a much newer history of killing people with poison gas -- Germany was the major supplier of Saddam's chemical weapons industry. There's Iranian blood on the hands of Germans. Germany's giving away of submarines to Israel, to be used for nuclear weapons launches against Iran can't be overlooked either.
See, there's a reason why there's a Holocaust Industry - it serves as a never-ending source of political capital for Israel to draw upon and brow-beat others with. In general, the theme of little Israel facing a sea of "implacable hostility" has served a convenient propaganda purpose for Israel but is simply not supported by the historical facts. See for example Ilan Pappe or Avi Shlaim's books on the matter.
Ahmadinejad warneds that Germany was allowing Holocaust Guilt to determine their policies with Iran (and that the Palestinians shouldn't be made to suffer for the Holocaust either) -- but he's hardly the only one. Arnold Toynbee suggested that British Christians had sympathy for Zionist aspirations because (in part) of a sense of guilt stemming from subconscious anti-Semitism. Truman apparently considered the creation of Israel in part as a reaction to the guilt factor resulting from the Holocaust.(1) Holocaust-guilt has been relied upon by pro-Israeli lobbyists to promote US support for Israel.(2) George Ball(3) and more recently Michael Scheuer(5) have both opined that the Holocaust, and more specifically 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 practices with respect to the Palestinians.(6)
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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) Book Title: The Passionate Attachment: America's
Involvement with Israel, 1947 to Present.
4.
http://www.defenddemocracy.org/in_the_media/in_the_media_show.htm?doc_id=267237
5. 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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