Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Truth, History and Integrity

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Truth, History and Integrity

    WorldNews
    March 14 2010

    Truth, History and Integrity

    by Gilad Atzmon
    WorldNews.com,Sun 14 Mar 2010


    Back in 2007 the notorious American Jewish right-wing organization,
    the ADL (Anti-Defamation League) announced that it recognised the
    events in which an estimated 1.5 million Armenians were massacred as
    "genocide." The ADL's national director, Abraham Foxman, insisted that
    he made the decision after discussing the matter with 'historians'.
    For some reason he failed to mention who the historians were, nor did
    he refer to their credibility or field of scholarship. However, Foxman
    also consulted with one holocaust survivor who supported the decision.
    It was Elie Wiesel, not known for being a leading world expert on the
    Armenian ordeal.

    The idea of a Zionist organization being genuinely concerned, or even
    slightly moved, by other people's suffering could truly be a
    monumental transforming moment in Jewish history. However, this week
    we learned that the ADL is once again engaged in the dilemma of
    Armenian suffering. It is not convinced anymore that the Armenians
    suffered that much. It is now lobbying the American congress not to
    recognize the killings of Armenians as 'genocide'. This week saw the
    ADL "speaking out against Congressional acknowledgment of the Armenian
    Genocide, and is, instead, advocating Turkey's call for a historical
    commission to study the events."


    How is it that an event that took place a century ago is causing such
    a furor? One day it is generally classified as 'genocide', the next,
    it is demoted to an ordinary instance of one man killing another. Was
    it an 'historical document' that, out of nowhere, popped out on Abe
    Foxman's desk? Are there some new factual revelations that led to such
    a dramatic historical shift? l don't think so.


    The ADL's behaviour is a glimpse into the notion of Jewish history and
    the Jewish understanding of the past. For the nationalist and
    political Jew, history is a pragmatic tale, it is an elastic account.
    It is foreign to any scientific or academic method. Jewish history
    transcends itself beyond factuality, truthfulness or correspondence
    rules with any given vision of reality. It also repels integrity or
    ethics. It by far prefers total submission, instead of creative and
    critical thinking. Jewish history is a phantasmic tale that is there
    to make the Jews happy and the Goyim behave themselves. It is there to
    serve the interests of one tribe and that tribe only. In practice,
    from a Jewish perspective, the decision whether there was an Armenian
    genocide or not is subject to Jewish interests: is it good for the
    Jews or is it good for Israel.


    Interestingly enough, history is not a particularly 'Jewish thing'. It
    is an established fact that not a single Jewish historical text has
    been written between the 1st century (Josephus Flavius) and early 19th
    century (Isaak Markus Jost). For almost 2 thousand years Jews were not
    interested in their own or anyone else's past, at least not enough to
    chronicle it. As a matter of convenience, an adequate scrutiny of the
    past was never a primary concern within the Rabbinical tradition. One
    of the reasons is probably that there was no need for such a
    methodical effort. For the Jew who lived during ancient times and the
    Middle Ages, there was enough in the Bible to answer the most relevant
    questions to do with day-to-day life, Jewish meaning and fate. As
    Israeli historian Shlomo Sand puts it, "a secular chronological time
    was foreign to the 'Diaspora time' that was shaped by the anticipation
    for the coming of the Messiah."


    However, in the mid 19th century, in the light of secularisation,
    urbanisation, emancipation and due to the decreasing authority of the
    Rabbinical leaders, an emerging need of an alternative cause rose
    amongst the awakening European Jews. All of a sudden, the emancipated
    Jew had to decide who he was and where he came from. He also started
    to speculate what his role might be within the rapidly opening Western
    society.


    This is where Jewish history in its modern form was invented. This is
    also where Judaism was transformed from a world religion into a 'land
    registry' with some clearly devastating racially orientated and
    expansionist implications. As we know, Shlomo Sand's account of the
    'Jewish Nation' as a fictional invention is yet to be challenged
    academically. However, the dismissal of factuality or commitment to
    truthfulness is actually symptomatic of any form of contemporary
    Jewish collective ideology and identity politics. The ADL's treatment
    of the Armenian topic is just one example. The Zionist's dismissal of
    a Palestinian past and heritage is just another example. But in fact
    any Jewish collective vision of the past is inherently Judeo-centric
    and oblivious to any academic or scientific procedure.


    When I was Young


    When I was young and naive I regarded history as a serious academic
    matter. As I understood it, history had something to do with truth
    seeking, documents, chronology and facts. I was convinced that history
    aimed to convey a sensible account of the past based on methodical
    research. I also believed that it was premised on the assumption that
    understanding the past may throw some light over our present and even
    help us to shape a prospect of a better future. I grew up in the
    Jewish state and it took me quite a while to understand that the
    Jewish historical narrative is very different. In the Jewish
    intellectual ghetto, one decides what the future ought to be, then one
    constructs 'a past' accordingly. Interestingly enough, this exact
    method is also prevalent amongst Marxists. They shape the past so it
    fits nicely into their vision of the future. As the old Russian joke
    says, "when the facts do not conform with the Marxist ideology, the
    Communist social scientists amend the facts (rather than revise the
    theory)".


    When I was young, I didn't think that history was a matter of
    political decisions or agreements between a rabid Zionist lobby and
    its favorite holocaust survivor. I regarded historians as scholars who
    engaged in adequate research following some strict procedures. When I
    was young I even considered becoming an historian.


    When I was young and naive I was also somehow convinced that what they
    told us about our 'collective' Jewish past really happened. I believed
    it all, the Kingdom of David, Massada, and then the Holocaust: the
    soap, the lampshade*, the death march, the six million.


    As it happened, it took me many years to understand that the
    Holocaust, the core belief of the contemporary Jewish faith, was not
    at all an historical narrative for historical narratives do not need
    the protection of the law and politicians. It took me years to grasp
    that my great-grandmother wasn't made into 'soap' or a 'lampshade'*.
    She probably perished out of exhaustion, typhus or maybe even by mass
    shooting. This was indeed bad and tragic enough, however not that
    different from the fate of many millions of Ukrainians who learned
    what communism meant for real. "Some of the worst mass murderers in
    history were Jews" writes Zionist Sever Plocker on the Israeli Ynet
    disclosing the Holodomor and Jewish involvement in this colossal
    crime, probably the greatest crime of the 20th century. The fate of my
    great-grandmother was not any different from hundreds of thousands of
    German civilians who died in an orchestrated indiscriminate bombing,
    because they were Germans. Similarly, people in Hiroshima died just
    because they were Japanese. 1 million Vietnamese died just because
    they were Vietnamese and 1.3 million Iraqis died because they were
    Iraqis. In short the tragic circumstances of my great grandmother
    wasn't that special after all.


    It Doesn't make sense


    It took me years to accept that the Holocaust narrative, in its
    current form, doesn't make any historical sense. Here is just one
    little anecdote to elaborate on:


    If, for instance, the Nazis wanted the Jews out of their Reich
    (Judenrein - free of Jews), or even dead, as the Zionist narrative
    insists, how come they marched hundreds of thousands of them back into
    the Reich at the end of the war? I have been concerned with this
    simple question for more than a while. I eventually launched into an
    historical research of the topic and happened to learn from Israeli
    holocaust historian professor Israel Gutman that Jewish prisoners
    actually joined the march voluntarily. Here is a testimony taken from
    Gutman's book:


    "One of my friends and relatives in the camp came to me on the night
    of the evacuation and offered a common hiding place somewhere on the
    way from the camp to the factory. ...The intention was to leave the
    camp with one of the convoys and to escape near the gate, using the
    darkness we thought to go a little far from the camp. The temptation
    was very strong. And yet, after I considered it all I then decided to
    join (the march) with all the other inmates and to share their fate"
    (Israel Gutman [editor], People and Ashes: Book Auschwitz - Birkenau,
    Merhavia 1957).


    I am left puzzled here, if the Nazis ran a death factory in
    Auschwitz-Birkenau, why would the Jewish prisoners join them at the
    end of the war? Why didn't the Jews wait for their Red liberators?


    I think that 65 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, we must be
    entitled to start to ask the necessary questions. We should ask for
    some conclusive historical evidence and arguments rather than follow a
    religious narrative that is sustained by political pressure and laws.
    We should strip the holocaust of its Judeo-centric exceptional status
    and treat it as an historical chapter that belongs to a certain time
    and place.


    65 years after the liberation of Auschwitz we should reclaim our
    history and ask why? Why were the Jews hated? Why did European people
    stand up against their next door neighbours? Why are the Jews hated in
    the Middle East, surely they had a chance to open a new page in their
    troubled history? If they genuinely planned to do so, as the early
    Zionists claimed, why did they fail? Why did America tighten its
    immigration laws amid the growing danger to European Jews? We should
    also ask for what purpose do the holocaust denial laws serve? What is
    the holocaust religion there to conceal? As long as we fail to ask
    questions, we will be subjected to Zionists and their Neocons agents'
    plots. We will continue killing in the name of Jewish suffering. We
    will maintain our complicity in Western imperialist crimes against
    humanity.


    As devastating as it may be, at a certain moment in time, a horrible
    chapter was given an exceptionally meta-historical status. Its
    'factuality' was sealed by draconian laws and its reasoning was
    secured by social and political settings. The Holocaust became the new
    Western religion. Unfortunately, it is the most sinister religion
    known to man. It is a license to kill, to flatten, no nuke, to wipe,
    to rape, to loot and to ethnically cleanse. It made vengeance and
    revenge into a Western value. However, far more concerning is the fact
    that it robs humanity of its heritage, it is there to stop us from
    looking into our past with dignity. Holocaust religion robs humanity
    of its humanism. For the sake of peace and future generations, the
    holocaust must be stripped of its exceptional status immediately. It
    must be subjected to thorough historical scrutiny. Truth and truth
    seeking is an elementary human experience. It must prevail.




    *During WWII and after it was widely believed that soaps and
    lampshades were being mass produced from the bodies of Jewish victims.
    In recent years the Israeli Holocaust museum admitted that there was
    no truth in any of those accusations.

    http://cgi.wn.com/?action=display&am p;article - 498825&template=worldnews/paidnews.txt&ind ex=recent
Working...
X