Mick Hartley

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The Lessons of Kristallnacht

Paul Oestreicher writes in the Guardian on the legacy of Kristallnacht as we approach the 70th anniversary. He points out how it wasn't only the Nazis who didn't like Jews – "Antisemitism was not just a German aberration" - and, in the way of Guardian articles nowadays, ends up drawing the familiar comparison with Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians: "To create another victim people is to sow the seeds of another holocaust."

David Hirsh at Engage takes Oestreicher's piece apart:

There is a real struggle between Israel and the Palestinians – it is a nasty struggle over a small piece of land and it concerns a relatively small number of people. There are significant and important injustices perpetrated in this struggle and from many different directions. Israel, because it has state power, bears a great responsibility for finding the peace – a responsibility which it has not always taken sufficiently seriously. But this talk about Israel as Nazis is just nonsense and is particularly inappropriate when it is sold as the central lesson of Kristallnacht, which itself was an important moment in the campaign to murder European Jewry.

How is it possible to explain to a person who cannot see, why it is so vile to throw the epithet ‘Nazi’ at Jews?

A person who thinks that Nazi Germany is like Israel (or today’s Britain or EU or America, for that matter) appears not to understand what was particular about Nazism. It is actually a form of Holocaust denial: ‘Oh the Holocaust is not really such a big deal – it was rather like contemporary British immigration policy; it is nothing unique, it is rather like the struggle over land between Israel and Palestine.’

Worth reading in full.

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One response to “The Lessons of Kristallnacht”

  1. Alcuin Avatar
    Alcuin

    In 1918, Hajj Amin el-Husseini stated plainly to a Jewish co-worker (at the Jerusalem Governorate), I.A. Abbady,
    “This was and will remain an Arab land … the Zionists will be massacred to the last man … Nothing but the sword will decide the future of this country.”
    i.e. well before the creation of Israel, and even before the British Mandate. With attitudes like that, still rampant in the Arab media, mosques and schools, you cannot blame Israel for this conflict and there is little point in engaging with the Arabs at all. And as for Nazism, how about this from Carl Gustav Jung in 1939:
    “We do not know whether Hitler is going to found a new Islam. He is already on the way; he is like Muhammad. The emotion in Germany is Islamic; warlike and Islamic. They are all drunk with wild god. That can be the historic future.”
    Nazism did not die in 1945, and was not born in 1933. It was just a German mutation of militant Islam, which is alive, kicking and thriving. The similarities between the Koran and Mein Kampf are no coincidence, they are in direct lineage. If Hitler had prevailed in WW2, and without the USA he may well have done, we would have the European religion described in Katherine Burdekin’s Swastika Night, in which Hitler has replaced Mohammad as the “messenger” of God.
    As Karl Barth said in 1939: “It is impossible to understand National Socialism unless we see it in fact as a new Islam [emphasis in original], its myth as a new Allah, and Hitler as this new Allah’s Prophet.”
    http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2008/10/22/hitler-and-jihad-part-1/

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