No, Israelis are not Nazis. But it's time we talked of war crimes
by Robert Fisk
Oh how - when it comes to the realities of history - the Muslims of the
Middle East exhaust my patience. After years of explaining to Arab friends
that the Jewish Holocaust - the systematic, planned murder of six million
Jews by the Nazis, is an indisputable fact - I am still met with a state of
willing disbelief.
And now, this week, the preposterous President Mahmoud Ahmadinajad of Iran
opens up his own country to obloquy and shame by holding a supposedly
impartial "conference" on the Jewish Holocaust to repeat the lies of the
racists who, if they did not direct their hatred towards Jews, would most
assuredly turn venomously against those other Semites, the Arabs of the
Middle East.
How, I always ask, can you expect the West to understand and accept the
ethnic cleansing of 750,000 men, women and children from Palestine in 1948
when you will not try to comprehend the enormity done the Jews of Europe?
And, here, of course, is the wretched irony of the whole affair. For what
the Muslims of the Middle East should be doing is pointing out to the world
that they were not responsible for the Jewish Holocaust, that, horrific and
evil though it was, it is a shameful, outrageous injustice that they, the
Palestinians, should suffer for something they had no part in and - even
more disgusting - that they should be treated as if they have. But, no,
Ahmadinajad has neither the brains nor the honesty to grasp this simple,
vital equation. . . .
As for the West's reaction to Ahmadinajad's antics, Lord Blair of Kut
al-Amara was "shocked" into disbelief while Israeli Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert responded with more eloquent contempt. Strangely, no one recalled
that, the holocaust deniers of recent years - deniers of the Turkish
genocide of 1.5 million Armenian Christians in 1915, that is - include Lord
Blair, who originally tried to prevent Armenians from participating in
Britain's Holocaust Day and the then Israeli foreign minister, Shimon Peres,
who told Turks that their massacre of the victims of the 20th century's
first Holocaust did not constitute a genocide.
I've no doubt Ahmadinajad - equally conscious of Iran's precious
relationship with Turkey - would gutlessly fail to honour the Armenian
Holocaust in Tehran. Who would have thought that the governments of Britain,
Israel and Iran had so much in common?