Mick Hartley

A powerful piece from Dominic Lawson in today's Sunday Times = Adolf Eichmann was genocidal. Hamas is too. Israel, no:

By sheer coincidence, a fortnight after Hamas launched its massacres on the Jewish inhabitants of southern Israel, the BBC screened The Devil’s Confession: The Lost Eichmann Tapes. This two-part programme allowed us to hear the voice of the organisational mastermind behind Adolf Hitler’s plan to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe: Adolf Eichmann was recorded in Argentina by an admirer before he was captured by Mossad agents and brought to trial in Jerusalem.

“Had we killed [all] 10.3 million Jews, then I would be satisfied and would say, ‘Good, we exterminated an enemy,’” Eichmann says. In effect he is expressing regret for not completing the task. Later he tells his interlocutor, Willem Sassen, a Dutch journalist and former SS officer: “We have done what we could.”

Hamas was doing what it could, too, even to the extent of personally incinerating babies (after shooting them). One of the perpetrators was recorded calling home, in exultation: “Dad, I’m talking from a Jewish woman’s phone. I killed her and her husband. I killed ten with my own hands. Dad, ten with my own hands. Mum, your son’s a hero.”

A “hero” because this was in accordance with the original charter of Hamas, much of which repeats exactly the sort of European antisemitic conspiracy theories that motivated Eichmann, but with a distinctly Islamist twist: it proclaims the words of the Hadith, that “the day of judgment will not come until Muslims fight Jews and kill them. Then the Jews will hide behind trees and rocks, and the trees and rocks will cry out, ‘O Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me; come and kill him.’”

Fast-forward to one of the rallies in the UK organised by those protesting for the rights of Palestinians (a completely legitimate activity in itself). A female demonstrator in Birmingham last week, in the midst of the crowd, is waving a placard that reads: “Now do you understand why the trees and the rocks will have to speak?” Perhaps the police would have considered this as having a purely horticultural meaning. It is actually a call to kill Jews, for being Jews.

Yet at such gatherings, and in academia, and even at the United Nations, the charge of “genocide” is now being levelled only at Israel — not just because of what its forces are doing in Gaza as they seek to “destroy Hamas” but because of its very existence. Thousands of British “scholars” — as they describe themselves — students and activists, from 120 universities and colleges, have signed a statement referring repeatedly to Israel’s “genocidal” campaign in Gaza. These “scholars”, who include a number of professors and even a dean (of the school of architecture at the Royal College of Art) proclaim: “We write from the location of British imperial complicity, beginning with the 1917 Balfour declaration” (that was the British commitment to a homeland within Palestine for the Jewish people, subsequently mandated by the UN in 1947).

Their (very long) statement contains not a single reference to the massacre carried out by Hamas. I suppose one should be grateful that it was not praised as an example of glorious resistance to what the document refers to as “Israel’s entrenched regime of apartheid and racial domination”.

And last week, in a letter to Volker Turk, the UN’s high commissioner of human rights, the director of that body’s New York office, Craig Mokhiber, protested to his boss: “Once again, we are seeing a genocide unfolding before our eyes … [the] settler colonial project in Palestine has entered its final phase, towards the expedited destruction of the last remnants of indigenous Palestinian life in Palestine.”

Mokhiber refers to “pogroms” perpetuated by “Israelis”. Bear in mind that the word “pogrom” was coined to describe the organised massacre of Jews in Russia and eastern Europe in the 19th century, and you can see this is an expert example of what we now call trolling — as is the habitual use of “genocide” in this context. Both are designed to switch the burden of historical guilt away from murderous antisemites and onto (in many cases) the families of Holocaust survivors. Although people of Mokhiber’s views never recognise that over half the Jewish population of Israel, known as Mizrahi, are the descendants of Jews from Arab lands, forced out of those countries amid terrible riots after the UN’s recognition of the new state of Israel….