24 May 2005 @ 18:25, by Bruce Kodish
A Belgian correspondent of mine shocked and educated me several years ago, when he said that the Israeli army stood in the same position toward the Arabs of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza as the Nazis stood in relation to the Jews in 1939.
He was not a radical leftist by any means but--as I have since gathered-- a rather typical mainstream European one. Educated, 'progressive' and grossly ignorant of the antisemitism he was spouting.
Despite my admonitions, he appeared impervious to the obvious differences between Israel's seige by the Arab world and the Nazi Juggernaut. He was unwilling to admit that he didn't sufficiently know the history either of 20th Century Europe or of the Middle East. He felt insulted with the implication that he had uncritically absorbed the assumptions of anti-Israeli propagandists.
He resisted my suggestion that his "Israel is an apartheidt state" rhetoric echoed the dehumanizing rhetoric of Nazi Jew-hatred.
It is indeed cruel irony, as French professor of Linguistics Georges Elia-Sarfati notes, to compare Israelis to Nazis:
"...by using the equation 'Zionism is fascism' the anti-Zionist has become a successor of Hitler's tradition. His slogan says Zionism and Israel are the movers of the absolute evil. It recycles what the Nazis said about the Jews. Racism dehumanizes a certain segment of humanity in order to justify its expulsion before its destruction. The latter is then covered up as a goal of public health." Sarfati explains: "In this way, language serves the perfect crime. That is why the anti-Zionist discourse hardly speaks about Zionism, but is very telling about anti-Zionists."
If I still corresponded with my Belgian friend, I would send him the following article:
"Language as a Tool against Jews and Israel: An Interview with Georges-Elia Sarfati"
|
|
