The Night Of Shattering Glass
It's been almost seven decades since Kristallnacht. Today is the sixty-ninth anniversary. Hilda Pierce remembers:
In Paris, on Nov. 7, 1938, a 17-year-old boy, Herschel Grynszpan, distraught over the treatment of his German Jewish parents in Poland, shot and killed the German minor official Herr von Rath. That was the excuse for Kristallnacht two days later.
Thousands of people participated in this horrendous carnage, an organized massacre dictated by Berlin. Not just hoodlums, but ordinary middle-class men and women, neighbors, former friends, smashed windows, looted Jewish shops, burned synagogues, tortured and beat senseless thousands of Jews and the rest sent to concentration camps. In my Vienna, the bloodshed was even greater; hundreds of Jews committed suicide. There it happened on Nov. 9. Austrians had one great regret, that so much needless damage was inflicted on property.
Crystal Night was the beginning of the Holocaust. It sowed the seeds for the Second World War. Had Hitler been stopped at that time, the war and genocide might have been avoided. All these valuable people, Jews who had contributed so much to the world in science, art, music, mores and medicine, could have continued giving their invaluable gifts to mankind.
Sadly, though, many in modern Europe seem to have forgotten:
Take the much-abused term “neoconservatives,” which has become code for the Jews who have supposedly suborned America in Israel’s interests. In the Guardian, Geoffrey Wheatcroft lamented the fact that Conservative Party leader David Cameron had fallen under the spell of neoconservatives’ “ardent support for the Iraq war, for the US and for Israel,” and urged Cameron to ensure that British foreign policy was no longer based on the interest of “another country”—Israel. In the Times, Simon Jenkins supported the notion that “a small group of neo-conservatives contrived to take the greatest nation on Earth to war and kill thousands of people” and that these “traitors to the American conservative tradition,” whose “first commitment was to the defence of Israel,” had achieved a “seizure of Washington (and London) after 9/11.” According to this familiar thesis, the Jews covertly exercise their extraordinary power to advance their own interests and harm the rest of mankind.
Gee, that somehow seems familiar.
But of course, it's much worse:
The British media uncritically regurgitate Palestinian propaganda even when it is demonstrably false. In April 2002, many outlets labeled Israel’s assault on the refugee camp in Jenin a “massacre” with thousands dead; in fact, some 52 Palestinian men had died (of whom the great majority were terrorists), along with 23 Israeli soldiers. In last year’s Lebanon war, the media propagated manifestly false Hezbollah claims of Israeli massacres that later proved to have been staged.
During the same war, the Guardian published a cartoon depicting a huge fist, armed with brass knuckles shaped like Stars of David, hammering a bloody child while a wasp representing Hezbollah buzzed around ineffectually. The image suggested that Israel was a gigantic oppressor, slaughtering children in brutal overreaction to Hezbollah, a minor irritant. It was reminiscent of an earlier cartoon in the Independent that showed a monstrous Ariel Sharon biting the head off a Palestinian baby, which won first prize in the British Political Cartoon Society’s annual competition for 2003. By showing Jews killing children, both cartoons employed the imagery of the blood libel—the medieval European calumny that sparked many massacres of Jews by claiming that they murdered Gentile children and used their blood for religious rituals.
No anti-semitism here folks. Move along...
Posted by Rand Simberg at November 09, 2007 01:57 PM