Monday, December 27, 2010

Who Will Remember the Palestinians?

Bill Levinson

The Palestinians are, by Arab design, an open wound in Israel’s body that the Arabs and their left-wing enablers deliberately keep open to bleed Israel dry no matter how many years it takes. Israel needs to close this wound by removing a good two out of three Palestinians from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with the minority that is willing and able to live in peace being allowed and even encouraged to remain. Most of the world already falsely accuses Israel of ethnic cleansing and other atrocities. If the world is going to punish you unjustly for something you didn’t do, you may as well do that something and it is past time for Israel to take off the gloves. Ethnic cleansing or even genocide is a crime against humanity only if you end up on the losing side. Hitler was unfortunately right when he said, “Who remembers the Armenians?” and it is telling that Abraham Foxman’s Anti-Defamation League, a group that should have been foremost in the exposure and denunciation of genocide, recently did its best to get the world to forget the Armenians. This shows that expulsion of the Palestinians should be practical; more importantly, expulsion or deportation of an ethnic group to protect one’s citizens against an ongoing litany of mindless violence from the group in question is not a crime against humanity or anybody else, just as it is not a crime to disable or even kill another human being to stop him from killing you or somebody for whose safety you are responsible.

In his book What about Germany?, Lochner offered the following English translation of the document then in his possession:

Genghis Khan led millions of women and children to slaughter—with premeditation and a happy heart. History sees in him solely the founder of a state. It’s a matter of indifference to me what a weak western European civilization will say about me. I have issued the command—and I’ll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad—that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formation in readiness—for the present only in the East—with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space (Lebensraum) which we need. Who, after all, speaks to-day of the annihilation of the Armenians?

Well, Abraham Foxman of the ADL certainly did not want Congress to speak of the annihilation of the Armenians lest it offend Israel’s “ally” Turkey. (How did that work out for you, Abe?) There are meanwhile statues of Genghis Khan in modern Mongolia, so the unpleasant truth is that mass murder and even genocide are crimes against humanity only if you lose. The Nazis were punished at Nuremberg only because they were on the losing side. General Tomoyuki Yamashita was executed because of atrocities some of his soldiers committed without his approval or even his knowledge, but Soviet generals who allowed their men to rape German women were never held accountable–nor was the Soviet Union ever held accountable for its unprovoked invasions of Poland and Finland.

To put matters in perspective, the Nazis murdered about 10 million people because of who they were (Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, homosexuals) or what they believed (Jehovah’s Witnesses, White Rose Society). Joseph Stalin murdered seven million people because of who they were (Ukrainians, Poles) and more than ten million others because of what they believed, and he was never called to account for his crimes because he was on the winning side. A new Russian textbook, in fact, seeks to justify Stalin’s killings. Mao Tse Tung meanwhile killed 20 million or so Chinese, and nothing happened to him as a result.

More recently, Cambodian mass murderer Pol Pot died of old age, while Idi Amin Dada reputedly died of venereal disease as opposed to the hangman’s rope. North Korea recently murdered South Koreans with a blatant act of war, and the United Nations did nothing because China wanted it to do nothing. Iran routinely stones people, mostly women, to death for crimes such as “adultery” (which includes being a rape victim) and “world opinion” says nothing and does even less. Iran also kidnapped three American citizens in a blatant act of war, and released one (Sarah Shourd) only after receiving half a million dollars in ransom: the modus operandi of the Barbary Pirates. Russia on the other hand just applied Rule 303 to Somali pirates who attacked a Russian ship, and the world did not say much about that either. That is a hint to Israel on how it should handle terrorists.

Even more recently, it was revealed that Henry Kissinger said “”And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.” Why should this come as a shock or a surprise? The sainted Franklin Delano Roosevelt (God the Father to the National “Jewish” “Democratic” Council) did not think it an American concern when the Soviet Union starved seven million Ukrainians to death, and he himself put Japanese-American citizens into concentration camps. Little was said and less was done when Saddam Hussein used poison gas against the Kurds. How did the world community “punish” Iran for hanging Baha’i s and stoning women to death? It gave Iran a seat on the United Nations’ Human Rights Council. Libya also suffered no consequences for holding several Bulgarian nurses hostage and threatening to shoot them.

As of this very day, Mainland China’s perversion of medical science–specifically the blood typing of political prisoners to facilitate the harvesting of their organs for China’s rulers and perhaps anybody who has enough money to buy a transplant organ–is as bad as anything the Nazi “doctor” Joseph Mengele ever did. China is a member of the UN Security Council, and again the world says very little and does even less.

If the Arabs succeed in wiping Israel off the map, they will not be punished by any Nuremberg court or any other agency; the only punishment they fear involves the consequences of failure. These consequences were not sufficiently severe in 1948, 1956, or 1967 to act as a deterrent. The other side of this coin is, however, that Israel can probably get away with simply removing the Palestinians in a relatively humane matter.

As an example, Israel could pack the Palestinians onto ships with whatever they can carry on their backs plus some money in the currency of whatever country to which they are to be sent. A “reverse Gaza flotilla” could drop them off in Turkey, which seems to like them and would doubtlessly be happy to accept a couple of hundred thousand of them. Saudi Arabia should be more than willing to extend Arab hospitality to another few hundred thousand fellow Muslims, and so on. This would remove the open sore that Israel’s enemies are currently using to bleed it dry, and are using an excuse for violence against Israel–much as Hitler used the Sudeten Germans to justify his attacks on Czechoslovakia.

The bottom line is that the Athenians’ observation in Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue is correct: “You know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” The fact that everybody knows about Athens while very few know about the Melians is yet another example of Hitler’s observation about the Armenians. Or, as a German proverb puts it, you must be either the hammer or the anvil; if you don’t do the beating, you will be beaten.

It is past time for Israel to become the hammer so it will no longer be the anvil. Israel must use its physical power to do what it can to protect its safety and security; the Palestinians, having chosen collectively to take the path of violence and hatred, will have to suffer what they must. If Israel fails in the basic duty of a sovereign state to protect its citizens and its own existence, a future Adolf Hitler may say, “Who remembers Israel?” and he will be just as correct as the original Hitler was about the Armenians. It is better that future historians say instead, “Who remembers the Palestinians?”

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