► Show Top 10 Hot Links

Posts Tagged ‘Adolf Hitler’

Hitler Finds Out About Brian Williams OOT

by Deplorable Macker ( 87 Comments › )
Filed under History, Media, OOT, Satire, World War II at February 15th, 2015 - 10:00 pm

HAT TIP: NewsBusters:


It’s Overnight Open Thread time!

Arabs and Muslims were not passive bystanders to the Holocaust; and we can do without the U.N.’s “International Holocaust Remembrance Day”

by Mojambo ( 215 Comments › )
Filed under Anti-semitism, History, Holocaust, World War II at January 29th, 2014 - 6:00 pm

Far from being passive observers, the Arabs were active supporters of the attempted genocide and the Ba’ath Party of Syria and Iraq was modeled after the National Socialists.

by Shimon Ohayon

In recent years many writers have attempted to grapple with the history of the Israeli-Arab conflict by trying to create a metaphor to demonstrate a shared injustice perpetrated both against Jews and Arabs.

The general theme is along the lines: “Suppose a man leaps out of a burning building… and lands on a bystander in the street below. Now make that burning building Europe and the luckless man the Palestinian Arabs. Is this a historical injustice?” This metaphor for the conflict was apparently created by writer Jeffrey Goldberg and has been approvingly cited by others, including by polemicist and author Christopher Hitchens.

Quite apart from the facts that the metaphor does not relate to the historical connection of the Jewish People to the Land of Israel, and that the ancient historical impulses for Zionism are unrelated to persecution, it also displays a stunning ignorance of history, especially surrounding the enduring trope that the Palestinians in particular and the Arab world in general were mere bystanders to the Nazi genocide.

This fabrication of history allows for a complete innocence on the parts of the Palestinian and Arab populations during the Holocaust. Nevertheless, the Arab stance toward Hitler and the Nazis has been firmly and historically established as an ally and supporter.

The Arab masses and leadership gleefully welcomed the Nazis taking power in 1933 and messages of support came from all over the Arab world, especially from the Palestinian Arab leader, Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, who was the first non-European to request admission to the Nazi party.

Husseini, who was to be arrested for his role in the bloody Arab Revolt 1936-9, had fled to Germany in 1941 and was immediately granted a special place among the Nazi hierarchy.

[……]
However, the Mufti’s ideology transcended words and directed his actions. In 1945, Yugoslavia sought to indict the Mufti as a war criminal for his role in recruiting 20,000 Muslim volunteers for the SS, who participated in the killing of Jews in Croatia and Hungary.

Adolf Eichmann’s deputy Dieter Wisliceny (subsequently executed as a war criminal) in his Nuremburg Trials testimony stated: “The Mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and adviser of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of this plan… He was one of Eichmann’s best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures.”

On a visit to Auschwitz, Husseini reportedly admonished the guards running the gas chambers to work more diligently. Throughout the war, he appeared regularly on German radio broadcasts to the Middle East, preaching his pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic message to the Arab masses back home.

Even the Mufti himself explained that the main reason for his close cooperation with the Nazis was their shared hatred of the Jews and their joint wish for their extermination.

[…….]

However, the affection, emulation and cooperation with the Nazis were not just found among the Arabs of Mandatory Palestine, they were replicated across the Arab world.

Many have suggested that the Ba’ath parties of Assad’s Syria and formerly in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq were strongly inspired by the Nazis. The most influential party that emulated the Nazis in the Arab world was “Young Egypt,” which was founded in October 1933.

The party had storm troopers, torch processions and literal translations of Nazi slogans – like “One folk, One party, One leader.”

Nazi anti-Semitism was replicated, with calls to boycott Jewish businesses and physical attacks on Jews.

Sami al-Joundi, one of the founders of the ruling Syrian Ba’ath Party, recalls: “We were racists. We admired the Nazis. We were immersed in reading Nazi literature and books… We were the first who thought of a translation of Mein Kampf. Anyone who lived in Damascus at that time was witness to the Arab inclination toward Nazism.”

There was of course the infamous pogrom in Iraq led by the pro-Nazi Rashid Ali al-Kaylani in 1941. Kaylani also asked of Hitler the right to “deal with Jews” in Arab states, a request that was granted. Apart from the secular pro-Nazi stance, there were many other religious Arab leaders who issued fatwas that the Arabs should assist and support the Nazis against the Allies.

From June 1940 to May 1943, the Nazis, their Vichy French collaborators and their Italian fascist allies applied in Arab lands many of the precursors to the Final Solution. These included not only “racial” laws depriving Jews of property, education, livelihood, residence and free movement, but also torture, slave labor, deportation and execution.

[……]
Robert Satloff has written extensively on the Arabs and the Holocaust and he found that much of the local Arab population willingly participated in this institutional Jew-hatred. One example Staloff provides is in an interview with a survivor from the concentration camp in Djelfa, in the Algerian desert. When asked whether the local Arabs who administered the camp were just following orders, he replied “Nobody told them to beat us all the time. Nobody told them to chain us together. Nobody told them to tie us naked to a post and beat us and to hang us by our arms and hose us down, to bury us in the sand so our heads should look up and bash our brains in and urinate on our heads…. No, they took this into their own hands and they enjoyed what they did.”

Satloff’s book Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Reach into Arab Lands chronicles much of the nature of the Holocaust in Arab Lands. He tries to show that there were Arabs who helped rescue and hide Jews during the Holocaust, but just like in Europe these examples are exceptions to a sadly more pervasive assistance or indifference to Jewish suffering and murder.

In Libya, many Jews were sent not only to local concentration camps but also to European camps like Bergen-Belsen and Biberach. In a film titled Goral Meshutaf (“Shared Fate”), some Tunisian eyewitnesses claim that the Nazis had begun building gas chambers there. If the Allies had not won the decisive battle at El Alamain, perhaps the fate of North African Jews would have been the same as befell European Jewry.

A willing or indifferent local population was an important ingredient in the destruction of European Jewry and it was certainly present amongst the Arabs of North Africa.

Many of the current leadership in the Middle East owe their power base to the emergence of their predecessors during those dark times. The Palestinians still revere Husseini and many of terrorist groups are named after groups he founded.

The myth that the Arabs were innocent bystanders to the Nazi Holocaust is unfortunately widely accepted at face value. It is about time that this capricious fallacy was exposed, not just out of respect to those Jews who suffered at the hands of the Nazis and their allies everywhere, but also to deconstruct the simplistic notions used to explain the history of the conflict, especially that the Arabs were not responsible for the suffering that resulted from their continued incalcitrance.

Read the rest – Exposing the myth of the Arab bystander to the Holocaust

Miss Glick questions International Solidarity because it gives the U.N. cover to continue with its anti-Semitic policies. I think she is right.

by Caroline Glick

On the surface, it is very moving to see half of the members of Knesset at Auschwitz marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

But in a larger sense, it is not at all clear why this is necessary.

The Jewish people have Yom HaShoah V’Hagevura, our own national day of mourning for the genocide of our people in Europe.

More importantly, we carry the legacy of the Holocaust inside of us.

Every day, at some level, we experience the ulcerative loss of a third of the Jewish people in the hell of Europe, because we feel the hollow absence of the victims.

The six million murdered have become 10 million descendants who were never born. And we miss them.

We remember them too, every day, when we look at our children and thank God we can protect them.

Israel does not need this extra Holocaust memorial day. And before we send another delegation of elected officials to Auschwitz next January 27, we need to ask whether this extra day serves any positive purpose.

In November 2005, Israel was one of the co-sponsors of the UN General Assembly resolution that made January 27, the day Auschwitz was liberated, International Holocaust Remembrance Day. At the time, Israeli politicians and American Jewish leaders extolled the resolution as signaling a new era of UN relations with the Jewish state.

They also proclaimed that the educational materials that would be disseminated worldwide under the auspices of International Holocaust Remembrance Day would make a significant contribution to the combat of anti-Semitism.

But eight years later none of this has happened.

To the contrary, the UN has escalated even further its official anti-Semitism through its diplomatic, cultural and educational aggression against the Jewish state.

Consider for instance that a week before its duly mandated International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the UN ushered in 2014 as the Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. The occasion was marked among other things, by the January 20 opening of a yearlong exhibit at the UN Headquarters in New York portraying Israelis as Nazis and Palestinians as Jews.

Since 2005, anti-Semitism has risen throughout Europe, as have levels of anti-Semitism among Europhilic Americans.

Jews throughout Europe feel under assault, and unprotected. The situation is so bad that Jews don’t even bother reporting most of the anti-Semitic attacks they suffer.

The more closely we consider events the more clearly we see that ironically and obscenely, Holocaust memorializing in Europe is enabling anti-Semitism.

Europeans use the focus on the Holocaust to pretend that European anti-Semitism began with the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933 and ended with their defeat 12 years later. In truth, the Nazis’ rise to power was a natural consequence of 1,600 years of European Jew hatred.

From the time of Roman Emperor Constantine, persecution, expulsion and massacre of Jews was the norm, not the exception, in European life.

Hitler and his colleagues were adored not despite their hatred of Jews and their organization of German politics around the dehumanization of Jewish people. They were supported by the Germans, and by the majority of the people in the European lands they conquered because of their anti-Semitism and their dehumanization of Jews.

This Jew hatred did not die in Auschwitz.

As Ruth Wisse explained in August 2010, political anti-Semitism was resuscitated immediately after the war ended with the establishment of the Arab League. The League’s sole purpose was to reorganize anti-Semitic politics around denying the Jewish people their legal right to establish a sovereign state in their homeland.

In other words, with the establishment of the League in March 1945, the just-ended physical annihilation of European Jewry was replaced by the campaign to deny Jews political freedom and independence in our land.

Rather than combat this affront to international law and to the Charter of the United Nations, Europe, along with the rest of the world, sought to appease, and so facilitated and encouraged Arab anti-Jewish aggression.

When in 1948, in breach of the UN Charter the Arabs invaded the nascent State of Israel, they were not punished for their illegal action. And in the intervening 65 years, the Arabs’ refusal to recognize or live at peace with the UN member state similarly has gone unpunished.

Even worse, instead of censuring the Arabs for their immoral and illegal behavior, the UN has adopted their venomous anti-Jewish agenda as its own.

It bears noting that Wisse presented her position at a conference sponsored by Yale University’s Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism.

[……]

YIISA ’s conference was so successful in highlighting the central position anti-Semitism plays in global politics today that many participants optimistically believed it would serve as the catalyst, finally, for a serious reckoning by American and European academia with the scourge of anti-Semitism that was not eradicated – or even seriously dealt with – after the Holocaust.

But alas, it was not to be. Angered by the conference’s success, Arab donors, PLO officials and Europhilic academics demanded that Yale close YIISA .

Ten months later, Yale closed YIISA .

YIISA ’s successor, the unaffiliated Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, just published a five-volume set of the papers presented at the conference.

YIISA ’s closure was one more indicator of anti-Semitism’s profound and enduring influence on our daily lives.

[……]

In Europe, and increasingly in Europhilic sectors of American society, anti-Semitism is not combated or even seriously studied because most Europeans and their American admirers don’t have a problem with anti-Semitism.

[…..]

The Arab transposition of political Jew hatred from Europe to Israel provided the Europeans with a new post-war political framework to attack Jews. And with it, they continue to blame Jews for everything from the price of oil to Islamic terrorism while slandering the descendants of their grandparents’ victims with blood libels against Israel.

In this rancid environment, rather than serving to combat Jew hatred, International Holocaust Remembrance Day inadvertently enables it. By bowing their heads in honor of dead Jews for five minutes every January 27, the Europeans get to pretend that the Holocaust was exogenous, as opposed to organic to, and still very much a part of European civilization.

Modern Zionism was conceived as having two objectives – to enable the Jews to protect ourselves from anti-Semites; and to end anti-Semitism by normalizing Jews as a nation among the nations. But as Wisse notes, like the Jews in exilic communities, the Jewish state cannot end other people’s hatred of Jews, because we didn’t cause it. Only the anti-Semites, through their own moral reckoning with their anti-Semitic past and present, can do that.

In light of the Europeans’ continued refusal to undertake such a moral reckoning, far from combating anti-Semitism, International Holocaust Remembrance Day serves as a cover for it. Israel and the Jewish people should not let the Holocaust serve as a fig leaf for their continuing, and growing, hatred.

Read the rest – International Holocaust Remembrance Day’s fatal flaw

 

What we can learn from the twentieth century’s greatest diplomatic disaster – the Munich conference

by Mojambo ( 152 Comments › )
Filed under Afghanistan, France, Germany, History, Iran, Iraq, Islam, Japan, John Kerry, Nazism, Syria, UK, World War II at January 16th, 2014 - 5:00 pm

As the author states, democracy was introduced into Japan and Germany at the point of a gun after those two nations were utterly devastated and had to submit to foreign occupations. No such thing has ever happened to any Islamic nation.  “Nation building” in Iraq and Afghanistan never had a chance in hell of succeeding. The analogies to Munich 1938 are interesting but often misleading.

by Bruce Thornton

During the recent foreign policy crises over Syria’s use of chemical weapons and the Obama administration’s negotiations with Iran, the Munich analogy was heard from both sides of the political spectrum. Arguing for airstrikes against Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, Secretary of State John Kerry warned that the nation faced a “Munich moment.” A few months later, numerous critics of Barack Obama’s diplomatic discussions with Iran evoked Neville Chamberlain’s naïve negotiations with Adolph Hitler. “This wretched deal,” Middle East historian Daniel Pipes said, “offers one of those rare occasions when comparison with Neville Chamberlain in Munich in 1938 is valid.” The widespread resort to the Munich analogy raises the question: When, if ever, are historical analogies useful for understanding present circumstances?

  what economic recovery
Photo credit: Anna Newman

Since the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans, one important purpose of describing historical events was to provide models for posterity. Around 395 B.C., Thucydides wrote that his history was for “those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it.” [……..]

Both historians believed the past could inform and instruct the present because they assumed that human nature would remain constant in its passions, weaknesses, and interests despite changes in the political, social, or technological environment. As Thucydides writes of the horrors of revolution and civil war, “The sufferings . . . were many and terrible, such as have occurred and always will occur as long as the nature of mankind remains the same; though in severer or milder form, and varying in their symptoms, according to the variety of the particular cases.”  [………]

In contrast, the modern idea of progress––the notion that greater knowledge of human motivation and behavior, and more sophisticated technology, are changing and improving human nature––suggests that events of the past have little utility in describing the present, and so every historical analogy is at some level false. The differences between two events separated by time and different levels of intellectual and technological sophistication will necessarily outweigh any usefulness. [……]

An example of a historical analogy that failed because it neglected important differences was one popular among those supporting the Bush Doctrine during the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Bush Doctrine was embodied in the president’s 2005 inaugural speech: “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.” Promoting democracy and political freedom in the Middle East was believed to be the way to eliminate the political, social, and economic dysfunctions that presumably breed Islamic terrorism. Supporters of this view frequently invoked the transformation of Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union from aggressive tyrannies into peaceful democracies to argue for nation building in the Muslim Middle East.

Natan Sharansky, a former Soviet dissident and political prisoner, used this analogy in his 2004 book The Case for Democracy, which was an important influence on President Bush’s thinking. Yet in citing the examples of Russia, Germany, and Japan as proof that democracy could take root in any cultural soil, including in Iraq and Afghanistan, Sharansky overlooked some key differences. Under Soviet communism, a highly religious Russian people were subjected to an atheist regime radically at odds with the beliefs of the masses. Communism could only promise material goods, and when it serially failed to do so, it collapsed. As for Germany and Japan, both countries were devastated by World War II, their cities and industries destroyed, the ruins standing as stark reminders of the folly of the political ideologies that wreaked such havoc. Both countries were occupied for years by the victors, who had the power and scope to build a new political order enforced by the occupying troops. As political philosopher Michael Mandelbaum reminds us, in Germany and Japan, democracy was introduced at gunpoint.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, neither of these important conditions existed when U.S. forces invaded. The leaders of these countries are Muslim, thus establishing an important connection with the mass of their people. Unlike Nazism and communism, which were political fads, Islam is the faith of 1.5 billion people, and boasts a proud, fourteen-centuries-long history of success and conquest. For millions of pious Muslims, the answer to their modern difficulties lies not in embracing a foreign political system like democracy, but in returning to the purity of faith that created one of the world’s greatest empires. Moreover, no Muslim country has suffered the dramatic physical destruction that Germany and Japan did, which would illuminate the costs of Islam’s failure to adapt to the modern world. Finally, such analogies downplay the complex social and economic values, habits, and attitudes––many contrary to traditional Islamic doctrine––that are the preconditions for a truly democratic regime.

More recently, people are invoking the Munich analogy to describe the Syria and Iran crises. But these critics of Obama’s foreign policy misunderstand the Munich negotiations and their context. The Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens, arguing that Obama’s agreement with Iran is worse than the English and French betrayal of Czechoslovakia, based his assessment on his belief that “neither Neville Chamberlain nor [French prime minister] Édouard Daladier had the public support or military wherewithal to stand up to Hitler in September 1938. Britain had just 384,000 men in its regular army; the first Spitfire aircraft only entered RAF service that summer. ‘Peace for our time’ it was not, but at least appeasement bought the West a year to rearm.”

Stephens, however, is missing an important historical detail that calls into question this interpretation. France in fact did have the “military wherewithal” to fight the Germans. The Maginot line had 860,000 soldiers manning it––nearly six times the number of Germans on the unfinished “Western Wall” of defensive fortifications facing the French—and another 400,000 troops elsewhere in France. Any move east by the French would have presented Germany with a two-front war it was not prepared to fight. Nor would Czechoslovakia have been an easy foe for Hitler. As Churchill wrote in The Gathering Storm, the Czechs had “a million and a half men armed behind the strongest fortress line in Europe [in the mountainous Sudetenland on Germany’s eastern border] and equipped by a highly organized and powerful industrial machine,” including the Skoda works, “the second most important arsenal in Central Europe.” Finally, the web of military agreements among England, France, Poland, and the Soviet Union was dependent on England backing France, which would not fight otherwise, and without the French, the Poles and the Soviets would not fight either. Had England lived up to its commitment to France, Hitler would have faced a two-front war against the overwhelming combined military superiority of the Allies. And he would have lost.

The lessons of Munich, and its value as a historical analogy, have nothing to do with a material calculation. Rather, the capitulation of the British and the French illustrates the perennial truth that conflict is about morale. On that point Stephens is correct when he writes that Chamberlain and Daladier did not have “public support,” and he emphasizes the role of morale in foreign policy. A people who have lost the confidence in the goodness of their way of life will not be saved by the material superiority of arms or money. And, as Munich also shows, that failure of nerve will not be mitigated by diplomatic negotiations. Talking to an enemy bent on aggression will only buy him time for achieving his aims. Thus Munich exposes the fallacy of diplomatic engagement that periodically has compromised Western foreign policy. Rather than a means of avoiding the unavoidable brutal costs of conflict, diplomatic words often create the illusion of action, while in reality avoiding the necessary military deeds. For diplomacy to work, the enemy must believe that his opponent will use punishing force to back up the agreement.

This truth gives force to the Munich analogy when applied to diplomacy with Iran. Hitler correctly judged that what he called the “little worms” of Munich, France and England, would not use such force, and were only looking for a politically palatable way to avoid a war. Similarly today, the mullahs in Iran are confident that America will not use force to stop the nuclear weapons program. Iran’s leaders are shrewd enough to understand that the Obama administration needs a diplomatic fig leaf to hide its capitulation to their nuclear ambitions, given his doubts about the rightness of America’s global dominance, and the war-weariness evident among the American people.  [……..]

The weakening faith in American goodness that afflicts millions of Americans, and the use of diplomacy to camouflage that failure of nerve and provide political cover for the leaders charged with protecting our security and interests, are a reprise of England and France’s sacrifice of Czechoslovakia in 1938. That similarity and the lessons it can teach about the dangers of the collapse of national morale and the risky reliance on words rather than deeds are what continue to make Munich a useful historical analogy.

Read the rest – The lessons of Munich

 

ERB Season 3 OOT

by Deplorable Macker ( 3 Comments › )
Filed under Entertainment, Humor, OOT at October 7th, 2013 - 10:00 pm

ANNNNNND! It kicks off with the usual suspects!


Enough with the slicin’ & dicin’! Time for The Overnight Open Thread!