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  • After so many bombings, there is little moral high ground in the Mid

    After so many bombings, there is little moral high ground in the Middle East

    Sunday Herald - 16 July 2006

    Ian Bell

    YOU can still find historians prepared to dispute the fact of Adolf
    Hitler. What did he really know about genocide, they will ask, in
    terribly reasonable voices, and when did he really, evidentially,
    know it? My answer tends towards the simple. Long before his
    Holocaust, Adolf asked a question of his own. "Who will remember the
    Armenians?" he said.

    The creep wasn't kidding. One-and-a-half million perished in 1915
    because no-one among the Great Powers cared much, if they cared at
    all. Hitler regarded the silence as a licence for his programme. If
    no-one minds about the wholesale Turkish eradication of a nation,
    Adolf reasoned, who will then care about a million, or three million,
    or six million despised Jews?

    I turned down a dinner-party invitation, once upon a time, just because
    David Irving was on the guest list. That was easy. More complicated
    was the assumption, taken for granted among those decent Edinburgh
    dinner-party folk, that I might wish to "argue" Holocaust-denial
    . Perhaps - for such is a middle-class life - I needed an opportunity
    to "debate", or to "put him straight". Where I come from, there are
    other options.

    Who will then remember the Armenians? In March of 1921, in Berlin,
    a kid named Soghomon Thelirian approached one Mehmed Talaat from
    behind, on a busy street, and put a bullet into the Turk's skull.
    That gentleman, recently his government's interior minister, had
    just resolved "the Armenian problem". Talaat was promenading through
    douce Charlottenburg with 1.5 million souls on his conscience when
    Soghomon did him in, simply - according to contemporary reports -
    "to avenge the death of my family".

    Where I come from, it counts as an option. Yet had I been Armenian or
    Jewish, though I lack that honour, would I ever have stopped wondering
    about the nature of revenge? Or rather, would I ever be able to cease
    to wonder? How many millions? How many engulfing waves of grief? How
    many eyes for eyes, teeth for teeth? How can amends ever be made? Bear
    in mind that when Soghomon assassinated the Turk the word "genocide"
    had yet to be invented. And this: who will remember the Palestinians?

    When Hitler's dead are remembered, some Jews prefer the word
    "Shoah" to holocaust. It translates, as best as I can gather, as
    "ritual burning". It has the sense, to my ear, of sacrifice, of death
    sanctified. The world grasps its significance, even while those who
    would deny the truth of Hitler's astounding carnage go on peddling
    their lies. The gas chambers and the ovens sent up plumes of sorrow
    that will never disperse. Yet still there are some who choose to doubt.

    Where is the documentary evidence of Adolf's intentions? Where is
    the piece of paper, with his signature, giving the order? That line
    is a favourite. In Turkey, even today, official acknowledgement of
    the Armenian genocide amounts to nothing more, as a matter of state
    policy, than the claim that there were "crimes on both sides". In
    some parts of the Arab world, meanwhile, Hitler still has his fans.

    People still read The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion as though a
    forgery concocted by Tsarist secret police amounts to documentary
    evidence. In Iran, a democratically-elected president talks of wiping
    Israel off the map for that, too, is "policy".

    When the scales are balanced, all moral weight rests with the
    murdered. Part of Turkey's reluctance to face responsibility for the
    Armenians stems, it is said, from a fear of reparations. How many
    millions, how many billions, might have to be paid to achieve some
    sort of settlement? Germany's democracy has been paying vast sums to
    Jews for a very long time, after all, in an effort to answer that same
    impossible question. Something is owed and the world, its rational
    portion at least, knows as much.

    In the years since it declared itself an independent republic -
    May 14, 1948 - the state of Israel has demanded a moral authority
    unique in history. The point of its entire existence has rested on
    a single statement: never again. We, they say, will never again be
    massacred. We will not be eradicated. Surrounded by despicable regimes
    dedicated to its destruction, the only real democracy in the region,
    Israel has stood witness to the fate of the six million.

    So here comes the weightiest question I can shoulder: are the citizens
    of Israel these days themselves complicit in genocide? And am I,
    or is anyone, entitled to ask the question?

    All the news from what was once known as the Holy Land is bad. By
    the time you read this, things will undoubtedly have gone from bad to
    very much worse. Because of a single captured boy soldier, Gaza has
    been reduced to near-starvation. Because one "operation" creates the
    logic for a second, Lebanon is under siege. Two Israelis are prisoners,
    but as I write, 50 Lebanese are dead and the bombs are still falling.

    By no possible yardstick is any of this proportionate. Israel has
    used a single incident to stamp its military authority, yet again,
    over the Middle East. Yet they ask us, in so many words, what else
    we could possibly expect. Palestine's Hamas government will not even
    acknowledge Israel's right to exist. In Lebanon, Hezbollah persists
    in launching missiles at Israeli civilians. The death cult of the
    teenage suicide bomber, the child dedicated to killing children,
    continues. What, asks Israel, is "proportionate", exactly?

    It won't do. Even an ocean of hatred does not excuse the fact Israel
    is these days treating Palestinians as Jews once were treated.

    Yet if I say so, one consequence is guaranteed: someone, doubtless
    Israeli or American, will accuse me of anti-Semitism. If I meanwhile
    add that the threat to Israel's very existence is all too real,
    another group, often styling itself as "left", will call me a
    Zionist lackey. On both sides there is an attempt, well-organised
    and well-funded, to close down all debate.

    These days, born-again American conservatives are Israel's most vocal
    allies. On the European left, meanwhile, arguments over Zionism can
    be stripped down, far too easily, to a barely-coded version of the
    old anti-Semitic garbage. At one remove the legacy of the Holocaust
    is traded like a kind of moral currency. At another, the suffering
    of the Palestinians is exploited by theocratic thugs who have done
    nothing useful or real, ever, for those people.

    Can you criticise Israel without insulting the victims of genocide?
    Not according to some of those I have outraged in years gone by. Can
    you meanwhile support the Palestinians without subscribing to each and
    every piece of Islamist nonsense? Such a position is inadmissible,
    it seems, in some circles. Instead, apparently, you are required
    to become the sort of walking farce who cannot tell the difference
    between political thought and Big Brother.

    Given the madhouse that is the Middle East, it is presumptuous to
    propose "solutions". Instead, we should reclaim some language. We
    should say that the atrocity auctions - who did what to whom and when
    - must end. We should state, once and for all, that Hitler's murders
    did not grant Israel an eternal, irrevocable moral licence. This is
    a real rogue state, complete with actual weapons of mass destruction,
    and it should be treated as such.

    While we're at it, nevertheless, we should also add that Hamas,
    democratically-elected or not, has no legitimacy if it remains
    dedicated to the eradication of a nation, that Iran must remain a
    pariah if wiping Israel off the map is its democratic choice. In
    the process, predictably enough, we will please no-one. That much
    I guarantee.

    Who will remember the Palestinians? In Israel's calculation, it seems
    those who might ask don't matter. To mention the Nazis in such a
    context is to risk the gravest insult imaginable, but the echoes of
    the past are real and they are inescapable.

    If we ignore them, moreover, we also insult Hitler's victims. The
    Holocaust established a moral standard for us all, but it bound Israel,
    first and foremost, to a duty. In Gaza, in Lebanon, that duty is
    being held in contempt. We should be able to say so.

    Instead, if experience is anything to go by, e-mail abuse will
    follow. Both sides will invoke their martyrs and both will claim
    justice as a reason for their actions. Honour satisfied, the killing
    will then resume. All I hope is that neither tribe mentions a
    loving god.

    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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