Day Ten: Holocaust as a New Jewish Secular Religion
When we, the tour group from the Interfaith Peace Builders, arrived at the door of the Yad Vashem compound, there were already large shoals of people gathered at the entrance building…a gaggle of young school kids, columns of Israeli military personnel, and a few gathering of tourists…but not a single kaffiyehed/burqa-covered Arabs or Muslim tourists and no Negro visitors except some Mizrahim Israeli soldiers in the army column. (Palestinian Arabs are forbidden to visit the place without a special permit.)
The Holocaust Museum located on the western slope of the Mount of Remembrance in Jerusalem built in 1953 and later expanded to many other memorial sites, and it is the second most-visited site after the Western Wall in the Old City.
Yad Vashem can be translated as “a place to memorialize” and the museum functions specifically as a Jewish people’s living memorial for those murdered in the Holocaust.
As in many countries around the world that establish the national shrine of their own as in the United States, Japan, N./S. Korea et al, in Israel from Ben Gurion/Menachem Begin to Yitzhak Rabin/Ariel Sharon and now Binyamin Netanyahu, almost all the Prime Ministers of Israel were a fear-monger-in-chief constantly reminding the Israeli Jews by showcasing the Yad Vashem that because of Holocaust Israel had the exclusive moral right to fight, maim, incarcerate, torture, expel or kill the Palestinian Arabs…that is, in Israel, people ‘relive’ the Holocaust everyday…as I introduced before in my diary, the Israeli panelists who attended the discussion with us just a night before had been implanted with a chip that programmed their brain how the Nazis made soap out of Jews body fat, Arabs are going to unite with Nazis coming to kill us and got nightmare every night during their kindergarten period.
(Incidentally, Simon Wiesenthal, a Jewish Nazi hunter, unceremoniously retracted his remarks on the soap manufacturing story before he kicked the bucket. And he was also an inventor of the phrase, “the Six Million”, a rhetorical stand-in for the Holocaust, according to Peter Novick in his book ‘The Holocaust in American Life’.)
The Holocaust has become an epitome/embodiment/personification/paradigm of the Israeli identity…and it has been used to justify criminal policies of Israeli State against the Palestinian Arabs.
And the Holocaust was also programmed/manufactured to promote the moral distinction for the Jewish self-aggrandizement that offer a new form of self-worshiping…it is through memorials, through trips to the death camp, and through indoctrination in the class room at school, the Holocaust became a new secular religion of the Jews whom the Jew worship himself.
The word, ‘holocaust’ was basically used by Americans starting from 1945 through 1960s as a referent to nuclear war after Soviet launched the Sputnik and their missiles could reach American cities…the Nazi ‘holocaust’ has not become ‘The Holocaust’ for almost two decades not only for Americans in general but also American Jewish elites/intellectuals in particular, because the political climate in the advent of the cold war in America was to embrace the Germany (West) under the arms of the US hegemony against the Soviet communism. (During this period, many former Nazi SS soldiers were able to gain entry to the US and South America and the American Jewish organizations turned the blind eyes on the Nazi Judeocide in order to conform to the US cold war policy.)
When the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) pummeled the Arabs in 1967 War and the State of Israel became a strategic asset/proxy for US power in the Middle East region, everything started to change…and after the 1973 war, the elevation of the Nazi Judeocide into ‘The Holocaust’ took off with great fanfare in the Jewish organizations in the US. (Same was true regarding the ‘Comfort women’ issues in S. Korea where for half a century until early 1990 there were absolutely no gaga over the matter by any S. Koreans including comfort women themselves because the military dictator Gen. Park CH, the late father of current President, received, usurped, and finagled compensation funds that was funded by their colonial Japanese masters. The issues have become a hammer to punish/degrade the former master.)
The ‘Holocaust’, uppercased, became the “Talk of Town” in the US and a definitive referent to the Jewish catastrophe and upgraded at the same time to the ideological weapon that has been made Jews a group of perpetual victim hood and used eventually to deflect the criminal policy of the Israel State on the Palestinian Arabs.
Since then, advancing/sanctifying ‘The Holocaust’ issues has become a full-fledged business (the Shoah business) in the American Jewish communities of ADL, Simon Wiesenthal Center, Fox News, AIPAC, etcetera…critics of Israel are denigrated as ‘anti-Semites’ and if the critic happens to be a Jew, he or she ends up as a ‘self-hating Jew’, claiming that Israel, Zionism and Jewish identity are a unity.
World being held hostage by the Zionist Jews forever
Day Eleven: A Profile of the Self-Hating Jews
Here, I would like to introduce three typical ‘Self-hating Jews’…the late philosopher, an outspoken public intellectual, university professor/ an Israeli-born Jewish jazz saxophonist, a political activist/a formidable debater, a tenure-denied Professor, an unabashed radical/gadfly, who mince no words in critiquing the Nazi-like policies of the Jewish State of Israel, because you’d never have a chance to hear about them through the Western corporate (mainstream) media in your life time.
(1) Yeshayahu Leibowitz, the late Israeli polymath/professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem was the first to claim that Holocaust has become the new Jewish religion…and he made the Holocaust-inflected statement saying that there are ‘Judeo-Nazis’ in the State of Israel that administer the torture on the Palestinian detainees and deprive the civil and political rights of Arabs.
Leibowitz was well known in Israel for his provocative utterances on the political situation…he was very much critical on the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza after 1967 War suggesting that partition of land is rather moral and rational resolution of the Palestinian territories than the military occupation. He also called upon the Israeli soldiers to refuse to serve in the Lebanon War in 1982.
Professor Leibowitz did not deny that he is unambiguously a Zionist in a sense that it means national independence for the Jewish people in its own country. He also emphasized that Zionism is not a philosophy or ethical theory, but a political program for the political independence of Jewish people.
When he was asked what can guarantee the Jewish people’s existence, he answered ‘nothing can guarantee it, including the state of Israel, because a state is framework, not a substance.’
He also stated that the state is not qualified to decide who’s a Jew or not, saying that ‘no state is in a position to define moral values unless it is a totalitarian one, as it has Nazi or fascist tendency dictating principles and way of thinking, belief or proper values.’
He warned the Israeli youngsters that neither nationalism nor patriotism is the supreme value and they might end up as a Nazi, reminding them on Adolph Eichmann case…he quotes an Austro-German thinker: “the people have only one dangerous enemy and it is his or her own government.”
He finalized his argument saying that the very notion of ‘Greater Israel’ leads Jews to disaster…if we cannot reach a compromise with Arabs and the only possible compromise is partition, someday Israel will perish.
Leibowitz was a philosopher for all seasons…he has very negative views of Christianity that the very concept of a “Judeo-Christian heritage” is a square circle. A synthesis or symbiosis is impossible; Christianity is for Leibowitz the adversary of Judaism. In his view, “Christianity is the heir who does not want to admit that the testator is still alive.”
Judaism and Christianity cannot coexist, because Christianity claims that it is true Judaism, and is interested in the liquidation of Judaism as the religion of Torah and mitzvot.
(2) One of the late professor’s admirers, Gilad Atzmon, has furnished the Professor’s argument by saying that the Holocaust is far more than historical narratives and it contains most of the essential religious elements: it has its priests (Elie Wiesel, Simon Wiesenthal, etc), prophets (Shimon Peres, Binyamin Netanyahu). And it has its commandments and dogmas (‘Never Again’, ‘Six Million’). It has its rituals (Memorial days, Pilgrimage to Auschwitz). It established an esoteric symbolic order (Kapo, chimney, gas chamber). It has its shrines/temples (Yad Vashem, Holocaust Museum around the world).
It is more powerful than historical narratives…powerful enough to prosecute Holocaust deniers, even though the fact that ‘the historical narratives do not need to be protected by any special law for a defense of its truth.’
He argues that the Holocaust is actually engraved within the Jewish discourse and spirit…to be a Jew is to see the other as a threat rather than as a neighbor/brother…to be a Jew is to be on a constant alert…it is the Jews who believe in themselves, in their own power, in their uniqueness, in their sophistication, in their ability to take over the nation, in their ability to save themselves.
He has compared the Jewish ideology to that of the Hitler and described the Israeli policy toward the Palestinians as genocidal/Judeo-Nazi tactics.
Atzmon writes, “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 accept that the Holocaust narrative, in its current form, doesn’t make any historical sense.”
On the charges of anti-Semitism, he categorize it as ‘a common Zionist silence apparatus’, declaring that ‘anti-Semitism is an empty signifier. No one can be an anti-Semite…you are either a racist which I am not or have an ideological disagreement with Zionism which I have. I have got nothing against the Jewish people. I am anti-Jewish, not anti-Jews”.
His final verdict: “The occupation is not the problem; it is just a symptom of the problem. The Jewish state is a problem and it is a serious problem. The Jewish Lobby is an even greater problem and it is a global one. And as it seems, even the Jewish Left a la Norm Chomsky is also a grave problem. At the very least it has been an obstacle that prevented the Palestinians from grasping the real context of their struggle.”
(3) Here comes Professor Norman Finkelstein, the most erudite/acerbic/no-mince-words detractor against the Jewish State of Israel and an enfant terrible of Holocaust studies eviscerating the ‘Holocaust Industry’ from the bowls of Holocaust self-dramatizers/hucksters like Elie Wiesel/Simon Wiesenthal/ Abe Foxman…he accused the Holocaust industry of becoming an outright extortion racket, and Jewish elites and organizations like AJC, ADL, and Simon Wiesenthal Center branded all detraction/opposition to their policy as a new anti-Semitism.
Finkelstein himself is a Jew whose parents survived the Nazi slaughter in Auschwitz and he discovered that those Jewish organizations were using blackmail to enrich themselves on the back of the concentration camp survivors…and invoking The Holocaust to de-legitimize all criticism of Jews/the State of Israel and lording it over those least able to defend themselves…the Palestinian Arabs. The Holocaust remembrance is actually an official, propagandistic indoctrination…a churning out of Zionist shibboleths (Never Forgive, Never Forget, Never Again) is not at all an understanding of the past but a manipulation of the present.
Consequently, the Nazi holocaust became The Holocaust.
Professor Finkelstein argued that there is a central dogma underpin the Holocaust framework…Zionists believe that the Holocaust is a ‘unique historical event without parallel in human history…it’s so unique that you cannot compare Hiroshima with Auschwitz…it’s such incomparably and incomprehensibly unique that whatever the US has done to blacks, Native Americans, Vietnamese or others pales in comparison to the Holocaust.
Therefore, the uniqueness of The Holocaust is ‘moral capital’ that Jews must claim sovereignty over this valuable property, in which Jews were given a right to consider themselves specially threatened and worthy of whatever efforts were necessary for survival as if the State of Israel can evoke the specter of The Holocaust in developing the Nuclear weapons.
Finkelstein also claimed empathically that there is a motive behind the Zionist claims of the widespread Holocaust denial in a society that has been saturated with the Holocaust museums, books, curricula, films and TV programs…he believes that very few people around the world, let alone America, are deniers and that the idea of denial has been promoted by hucksters from the Holocaust Industry.
As his intellectual hero, Professor Noam Chomsky once warned him that American Zionists are going to destroy his career, Finkelstein was denied his tenure at the university when he attacked Joan Peters book ‘Time Immemorial’ and the plagiarism of Professor Alan Dershowitz…and also he was dubbed as a ‘closet Zionist’ from the Palestinians who support the BDS Movement, when he raised that one of the goals of BDS Movement is untenable, because its demand of the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes is the challenge to the legitimacy of a Jewish State of Israel.
Finkelstein has become both a pariah lecturer in the American academy and a soft Zionist in the Palestinian activist community.
One thing appears to be common among those above-mentioned ‘self-hating’ Jews…they have signed away their future career forever.
Mr. Dale Han is one of the frequent contributors for The 4th Media.