The Jews run the risk of another genocide
Il Giornale, 27 January 2011
We can no longer celebrate Holocaust Remembrance Day simply by remembering, albeit from the depths of our hearts and with the greatest of goodwill. This Holocaust Remembrance Day must be lived in a fighting spirit. The illusion that the history of the world is marching in progress deluded us into believing that “never again” is not just a hope but a statement of fact. But it is indeed a very tough battle. The UN, born from the ashes of the Shoah, was, first and foremost, set up to guarantee that genocide policies or instigation to genocide would have been prohibited by international law. This is provided for in the UN conventions against genocide. But as a matter of fact, we have seen what has happened in Cambodia, in Darfur, in Rwanda... We have witnessed genocide attempts in Tibet and in Bosnia... As far as instigation is concerned, it has become par for the course, and all that is actually needed would be an international court prepared to pass fair sentences. But nobody lifts a finger.
Twice during my work as a journalist in the Middle East, I collected my gas mask, just like everyone else, from one of the centers designated for this purpose. In 1991, I took refuge in a safe room prepared in the house. In 2003 I converted a walk-in cupboard in my own house into a safe room by applying nylon sheeting and sticking adhesive tape around the door. My husband and I kitted ourselves out with plastic overalls able to withstand chemical or biological attacks, so that we could go out and cover the news. In fact, in 1991 Israel was attacked by Saddam’s missiles killing and injuring civilians; in 2003 the American attack on Saddam did not give him the time to respond. But the masks, then redistributed for fear of exterminating attacks with odorless, colorless gas that burns the skin and destroys the lungs with botulinum toxin or with anthrax, add to the unflagging efforts to build shelters for every house, school and hospital. Israel uninterruptedly patents new accident and emergency services, new mass evacuation systems, it sets up rapid medical and paramedical chains, it equips the hospitals with spacious anti-atomic underground bunkers. The population carries out drills in the event – unique in the world – of mass destruction, i.e. a new extermination of the Jews, as threatened in block capitals on the television, in the newspapers, on the Internet, and at the General Assembly of the UN, which failed to utter a cheep in response.
The postman delivers to each family in the Jewish State, as part of its routine mail, updated brochures that describe the possibility of missile and atomic attack, complete with photos of carefree mothers, fathers and children. The Jewish State is bled dry by the costs of military defense, of strategic defense systems. It is appalling to write this on Holocaust Remembrance Day, after so many have passed since the threat to the very existence of Israel virtually became a platitude. «The Zionist regime is a rotten, dried tree that will be eliminated by one storm» «the Jews stink»; «As the Imam said, Israel should be erased from the map»; «After the Second World War, the Jews founded an artificial, false and sham state»; «They must know that their end is imminent»; «Among the Jews there have always been people who have slain God’s prophets and who have opposed justice and integrity. Throughout history, this religious group has inflicted unspeakable damage on the human race, and it has plotted against other nations and other ethnic groups in order to engender cruelty, malice and wickedness»; «And if a Jew hides behind a tree or a rock, the tree or rock will call out “O son of Islam come and kill the Jew who is hiding behind me”».
These obscene statements, often made along with affirmations denying the very existence of the Shoah were uttered by the leaders, imams, terrorist militants, take your pick, who in Iran are making their way relentlessly towards the atomic bomb and who have equipped themselves with Shahab missiles that have a range of between 1300 and 2000 kilometers; who, like the Lebanese Hezbollah, have the ballistic power of 60,000 missiles of all ranges, that have been delivered to them by Syria and Iran; who, like Hamas in Gaza, in addition to arrays of suicide terrorists, are amassing ever more sophisticated weapons capable of reaching Tel Aviv.
We are trying, by keeping the memory of the survivors sacrosanct, to refocus attention on the fact that at the origin of the extermination of the Jews there is a psychological and propagandistic structure that delegitimizes the very existence of the Jews. The attack directed at Israel is increasingly more well-structured with the same elements, the same accusations of conspiracy, of thirst for blood, of insatiable desire for power and for money that led to and encouraged the genocide of the Jews, describing them as sub-humans, unfit to live.
It is by now simply impossible to maintain that the attack on Israel is connected to criticism of its politics when attacks on European Jews in 2009 exceeded those perpetrated on the eve of the Second World War. Anti-Semitism has not grown due to criticism of the State of Israel. It is the delegitimization of the State of Israel that has grown due to and along with anti-Semitism, which is fomented more and more by Islamic fundamentalism. And this too is difficult for us to denounce. But this is the task of those who can still see, in their mind's eye, the image of the child in the Warsaw Ghetto with his hands raised. “Never again”! Do you want it never to happen again? You are going to have to work for it.