Palestinian leader goes to Auschwitz, lays wreath, gets lambasted by Hamas:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2012/0811/Palestinian-comments-on-Holocaust-underscore-internal-divides

In today's news on the Israel-Palestine front, a Palestinian leader went to Auschwitz, and laid a wreath at the grave of Holocaust victims. This is part of a tendency by the leaders of the PLO/Fatah wing of Palestinian nationalism these days to not only recognize the Holocaust but to extend further recognition to the past that actually has come to influence Israel as it sees itself. However I am not surprised at two tragic aspects of this story. First and foremost, Hamas chose the opportunity to engage in gratuitous dickery. This is to be expected from that movement, which only rose in the first place because Fatah's leaders were *that* corrupt to a point where *those guys* became preferable. O.o

The other was that Israelis objected to saying that the Holocaust included non-Jews. News flash, it really did include them. Russians, Poles, Gypsies, homosexuals, they all really did get swallowed up in Hitler's murder machine. The attempts by some Jewish historians to make the Holocaust into an all-Jewish event is a gross distortion of history. The Holocaust was just the most well-planned and lethal part of a far wider slate of murder that in its brevity and scale has no equivalent in human history. Denying it happened is utterly wrong, claiming Hitler only killed 6 million Jews is a-historical. The Nazis actually killed 22 million, the great bulk of their murders in the span between the Wannsee Conference and VE Day, but with large-scale massacres preceding the Wannsee Conference as well, such as Babi Yar. There were, however, no instances of Nazis targeting other groups like say, what happened to the Hungarian Jews. Which is why there is a reason to differentiate between the one set of genocidal slaughters and the other.

Your thoughts?

Comments

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

My thoughts are that each side would continue using history and twisting history to match their own interests, and cause the much desired and planned uproar they so much crave, for the purpose of scoring political points. In other words: same old, same old.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

True, but not in the same ways. At least some of the Palestinians in high places are at least shifting in their view of history to the more mature view that the atrocities that happened to one people do not lessen the severity of those that happened to others. This is definitely a step forward, as if people can't even accept what happened decades ago, how can we accept what happened now?

[pastorlenny.livejournal.com]

Oy vay! Again with the Holocaust! When are they going to get over it already? They're like the verkokteh schwartzes with their slavery. Enough already!

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Well, at least the likes of Fatah and the PLO aren't outright denying it. Hamas is, of course, but I don't think there's too much to expect from a movement like that in the first place where decency is concerned.

[dwer.livejournal.com]

*vey

[pastorlenny.livejournal.com]

אױ װײ

[telemann.livejournal.com]

The definition of "holocaust" as used by the some of the Israeli officials in your OP isn't new (i.e. just referring to only Jewish victims). According to The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust (http://www.amazon.com/Columbia-Holocaust-Professor-Donald-Niewyk/dp/0231112009), with this chapter giving an extensive survey of the word's usage and understanding. (http://books.google.ca/books?id=lpDTIUklB2MC&pg=PP1&dq=Niewyk,+Donald+L.+The+Columbia+Guide+to+the+Holocaust&sig=4igufxQHRCNrkjwRuMt1if_mf5M#v=onepage&q=Niewyk%2C%20Donald%20L.%20The%20Columbia%20Guide%20to%20the%20Holocaust&f=false) [ Page 46 if the link doesn't bring up the correct page ]

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Well, sure, but given the context of the Palestinian visit it's an interesting rhetorical parallel in any event. I hardly see how noting things like the Nazis starving 3 million Soviet POWs to death in 1941 detracts from Hitler's genocide of the Jews.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

Oh I don't know, maybe it's some fall out from the London games bruhaha. And the link I gave you gives specific reasons why some scholars consider the Jewish victims quite different from the Soviet POW deaths, and the other groups who were victims of the NAZI brutalities.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Yes, and I noted a reason for this in my own OP. So thanks for providing a link to back up what I said.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

That single reason you gave at the very end of the OP was so generalized it was useless. The link I provided goes into a lot further detail. So if you want to say that "backs up" your OP because Hitler hated (Hungarian) Jewish people, that's nothing really new. And to be blunt, I'm not sure what you're saying, because 3/4 of the post is why the term Holocaust isn't limited just to Jewish victims, and then you suggest in the last sentence there IS an important distinction.

And I'm not sure why you ask for "thoughts" in the OP, and the implied question in a comment to me with "I hardly see how noting things like the Nazis starving ..." and then cap off your last comment the way you did, when you asked for more detailed information, which I gave you. My only point was to provide a bit of context for the way the term has been understood because your post makes it sound the Israeli's disagreement with the Palestinian widening of the term is a recent thing (regardless if that was intentional or not). I just wanted to give some specialists' information on the subject.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

It's not generalized nor is it useless. The reference to herding the entire Jewish population of Hungary the Nazis discovered (at least, as there were some survivors) is in reference to the Nazis doing that only to Jews. Slavs and their other victims "survived" as East-Workers as opposed to being simply executed toward the end of the war, being worked to death in the slow version, where Jews were simply exterminated wholesale regardless. My statement about the refusal of certain Israelis to accept the term had to do with the general misconception that only Jews were slain by Hitler, it's much wider than Israelis alone. The other reason I didn't go into too much detail in that last sentence is I've already done a couple of posts on that topic and didn't think repeating the same statements a third time would be a good idea. I did one post asking about why the Jewish resistance to the Holocaust was neglected, that I learned much from, and I did one about how Hitler's slate of victims was much broader. So.....

[di-glossia.livejournal.com]

It doesn't detract, but it certainly adds to the idea that the Holocaust included far more than the murder of six million Jews. The NSDAP discriminated against and actively sought to kill Soviet POWs (due to racial origin), as well as Poles, homosexuals, the disabled, certain religious groups, and the Sinti and Roma peoples. The NSDAP sought to kill those who were inferior, degenerate, or otherwise unfit to live in German society. To make the Holocaust out to be a singularly Jewish tragedy invalidates the suffering and deaths of other targeted groups.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

And it's worth reflecting here that in six months in 1941 the Nazis did starve to death 3 million Soviet POWs. They actively sought this with quite some effect. And this is the six months when the Holocaust was limited to the actions of the death squads such as at Babi Yar...

[di-glossia.livejournal.com]

I think it a tragedy that any Israeli would contend that the Holocaust targeted only the Jewish people, when, in truth, the Jewish people only made up less than half to more than a third of all killed. Unfortunately, many still define the Holocaust as the murder of six million European Jews and do not include other victims of the NSDAP. In that respect, I agree with Abdel-Shafi: the Holocaust was a crime against humanity at large, not a uniquely Jewish tragedy. The whole of WWII should be studied and all 60 million deaths should be regarded as tragic, with all civilian deaths seen as equally horrific.

[skull-bearer.livejournal.com]

I think we do have to make a distinction between civilians killed in times of war, and a systematic, top-down decision to massacre people of a particular racial background. While both are very bad, no question, they require different approaches if we are to ubnderstand what set them off, and, mpore importantly, how to stop it from happening again. There are few similarities between the Wannsee conference and the decision to bomb Dresden.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

What of the Soviet POWs? Those were hardly civilians killed in time of war, and the Nazi decision to starve them to death to the tune of 3 million played a major role in why the average soldier in the Red Army no longer made a pretense of surrender and fought to the death knowing that even if he didn't get shot by the NKVD that his only fate in Nazi hands would be death. Too, the Nazis did have the Generalplan Ost concept for things like slaughtering everyone in Moscow and Leningrad, replacing the former with an artificial reservoir and dismantling the latter altogether.

[di-glossia.livejournal.com]

If you say so. There is nothing in my mind less horrific about British bombers deliberately targeting German civilians (a practice condemned by Allied American bombers, who chose to target strategic factories, harbors, hangars, and the like), the Canicatti and Biscari massacres by Americans, the American mutilation of Japanese war dead (including numerous instances of decorative use of skulls, making necklaces of teeth, and cutting ears and noses off the dead), the mass rape and murder of Germans by the Soviet Union, and the Wannsee conference.

Many times these were done based on race, such as the Soviet Union's murder of Finnish POWs, women, and children or the aforementioned mutilation of Japanese war dead by the Americans. You're right that the reasons were different as the perpetrators of these crimes were often acting out of dehumanization and revenge, but civilians in WWII were often deliberately killed out of such reasons as boredom, revenge, racial hatred, and sheer, human malice. The NSDAP targeted the Jewish people due to class and wealth differences, racial hatred, xenophobia, and revenge (for class and wealth differences). It's the basic difference between genocide and war atrocities That does not make the deaths any less gruesome, horrible, or wrong.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

At the very least nuance and tact would be required, though both have been relative weaknesses of both Fatah and Hamas IMHO.

[skull-bearer.livejournal.com]

With the other groups in the Holocaust, I would say that there generally is a difference, most of the non-Jews cited were not targetted for racial reasons (they were targetted for other equally bullshitty reasons, but hey), and there was no movement to wipe them out as a distinct group (in the case of gay people and disabled people because there was no real distinct group). The only exception to this is the situation of the Sinti and Roma, who were targetted as a racial group and slated for extermination in a similar fashion to the Jewish people. It's less covered mostly because; most of the 'Nuremberg laws' concerning Gypsies were on the books long before the Germans took powers, because most of the massacres of the Gypsy populations were done by mass shootings which are harder to trace than places like Auschwitz, and finally because there was no real census of the Gypsy people in the areas the Nazis targetted for a before and after number is pretty much impossible to decide on.

That being said, Jewish historians can get unintentionally hilarious in trying to disprove the Devouring (Gypsy term for the Holcoaust of the Gypsy people), special Golden Fail award goes to a Professor Katz, who went so far out of his way to prove the Devouring was not a genocide that he accidentally disproved the Holocaust. There's a man who deserves to be gnawed on by rabid ferrets.

Anyway, good on the Palestinian leadership, I like the new 'let's be the sane people in this argument' trend they've been moving in.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Generalplan Ost might lead one to question whether or not Slavs weren't targeted for racial reasons, as would the Nazis starving to death 3 million POWs. Not to mention the Nazi Hunger Plan and their tendencies to large-scale slave levies of Slavic peoples. Of course Generalplan Ost required the Nazis to cube the circle of defeating the USSR on the battlefield in the sense of destroying it altogether, which Nazi Germany never had the plan to do, while the Holocaust and Pojaramos had no such limitation on their priorities relative to the war. As the Hungarian case illustrated.

[peamasii.livejournal.com]

Good point, and I'm sure that had there been any substantial groups of Muslims or Arabs living in Europe during the first half of the 20th century they too would have been an ethnic cleansing target. It's notable that while the vast majority of Jews killed in the holocaust were from Poland and Ukraine (maybe 4 or 5 times as many as the German Jews), the survivors from those nations received infinitely less compensation and attention post-WWI when compared to survivors from Germany or France.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

They actually were targets of cleansings in some parts of Europe, and there was also that mutually agreed upon by the Great Powers expulsion in the Treaty of Lausanne that Greek nationalists keep trying and failing to turn into a Greek Genocide. And yes, that is interesting, but then the Eastern Boc in general didn't do a lot to compensate Holocaust survivors in Eastern Bloc territory while things like the Kielce Pogrom showed that the Germans were just instigators of already-existing tendencies to violence, and not alone in them. Kielce in fact was one of the major motivators of the last Jewish wave of migration to Israel that touched off the Israeli War of Independence....

[peamasii.livejournal.com]

Yes, also because during the cold war there was no recognition of the holocaust in the official soviet bloc. As much as Stalin and his successors made an official policy to denounce nazism, it was not because of the jewish holocaust but because of the nazi antithesis to communism.