[Peace-discuss] Letter in today's N-G: Germany isn't at war with Jews

[David Green]

Germany isn't at war with Jews
Sunday January 11, 2009
Reporting in most media and in The News-Gazette about the Warsaw Ghetto conflict does not adequately take account of the following:
 
– That the Jewish resistance places rocket launchers in schools, weapons stores in synagogues, and militants in populations centers. The tragedy in Warsaw, according to the Nazi SS, was precipitated first by Jewish resistance mortar fire from the school. The Germans fired back at the source of the mortar fire. Why would any civilized government place its citizens at such risk, using them as human shields?
 
– That Germany telephones houses that are targets 30 minutes before attacking, giving the residents time to leave. 
 
– That Germany sends to Warsaw hundreds of tons of humanitarian aid as well as aid from international agencies in the form of food staples and medical supplies.
 
– That it was the Jewish resistance that broke the cease-fire, and has launched more than 8,000 missiles and rockets into the rest of occupied Warsaw in the period since 1943. As Franklin Roosevelt has said, if anyone was shooting at the house where his daughters slept, he would do something about it. So would I.
 
– That this war is not between the Germans and Jews but is between Germany and the Jewish resistance resistance fighters. Moreover, an understanding of the Warsaw Ghetto should not be confused with extraneous issues such as concentration camps. Please, one issue  at a time.
 
As Joseph Goebbels said long ago, "This war will end when they love their children more than they hate us."
 
(editor's note: subsequent to this letter, Goebbels' wife put their five children to death in their sleep with cyanide, before the couple killed themselves, falling dead into each others' loving arms).
 
EDWARD M. BRUNER
Urbana
 
 
 
Comment by DG: Bruner is a retired anthropologist. There has since the founding of this discipline always been a problem with intellectualized racism vis a vis native populations (Franz Boas, the primary critic of this twisted thinking, also happened to be Jewish). At the U of I we had Oscar Sanchez, who coined the term "culture of poverty" that, however it was intended, became a staple of emerging neoconservative critiques of efforts in the 1960s to fight poverty--that is, it can't be done, because poverty is ingrained in the culture and heads of the poor, especially the Black poor.
 
Bruner would seem to fit this mold. The last statement is classic colonialist racism masquerading as fake compassion, false pity, however you want to put it. The pathetic little sub-humans, so different from us. It's often used in Zionist discourse as an alternative to more overt hatred, which isn't fashonable in educated circles, expressed only by the settler fanatics whom the more respectable claim to oppose. I would prefer a more honest Death to Arabs. It's smarmy corollary is the common assertion (also traced to Meir, I believe) that Israelis would be able to forgive the Palestinians for murdering Jewish children, but would not be able to forgive them for forcing them murder Palestinian children. I'm truly not making this stuff up--more than any other form of propaganda, Zionist propaganda is shamelessly sentimental and self-gratifying). If it's not hate speech, it's worse, because it attempts to humanize the speaker who is rationalizing the
 violence. It's the most grotesque form of cold-blooded rationalization, and the most enraging.  But it's nothing new that rationalizations for hatred rely on the alleged hatred by the victims of the perpetrators in order to justify the perpetrators' behavior.
 
Rabbi Norman Klein actually used this quip about Palestinian parents in his sermon during a Rosh Hashonah morning service a few years back, to a packed house. I was so upset that I had to leave the room. Was I the only one upset? I don't really know. Klein really believes, I'm absolutely certain, that this is a way of a Jew showing the he values Palestinian life. We are compassionate people who are forced to kill the less compassionate people in self defense. At bottom this is called exceptionalism. When we kill people, it's different. We are forced to kill out of self-defense, and we do it with compassion. The Israeli expression for this is "shoot and cry." It's been much ridiculed and satirized by Israeli critics of their country's culture of brutality.
 
Eichmann is famous for not hating Jews. That's what the banality of evil is all about, according to Hannah Arendt.  As sub-humans, they were not worth hatred, perhaps only pity. Fry them. As miserable sub-humans, they are better off dead than alive, and Germans are simply doing them and all of humanity a favor. During the Vietnam War, it was claimed that because Asians views life in terms of millenia rather than generations, they were more willing to sacrifice their lives for the greater cause--not just the right to determine their own lives.
 
Can you imagine saying to a grieving Palestinian mother who has lost a child that it's her own fault, because she hates Israelis more than she loves  her own child? Can you imagine anything  more hateful, hurtful, insensitive, enraging? Can you imagine saying this to any mother who has had a child killed? This is the in-bred perversity of what on our campus is called "Jewish Culture and Society." Do they need any more reasons to hate Israel, and the Americans who justify Israeli actions?
 
I guess hate speech is only what the local Jewish intelligentsia finds on UPTV. Throughout that silly business, I was disgusted that nobdy would simply point out that if people like Klein, Lee Melhado, Paul Weichsel, etc. want to understand hate speech, then all they need do is to take note of their own rhetoric. The whole affair was pure political theater, a ritual that has to be performed in this society on a regular basis, for some Jews to assure themselves that at bottom they are victims both here and abroad; Privileged white people defer to this for a number of reason, not the least of which is that given Jews are privileged and white, maybe non-Jews can think of themselves as victims too.
 
What a disgusting and vulgar display of inhumanity.
 
DG