PrintJuly 13, 2007
Blinded by hatred
At a historical moment when Iran threatens to wipe Israel off the map, Princeton University professor-emeritus Richard Falk is worried about a new Holocaust - against the Palestinians. He is quoted as saying:
"...is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not. The recent developments in Gaza are especially disturbing because they express so vividly a deliberate intention on the part of Israel and its allies to subject an entire human community to life-endangering conditions of utmost cruelty..."...To persist with such an approach under present circumstances is indeed genocidal, and risks destroying an entire Palestinian community that is an integral part of an ethnic whole. It is this prospect that makes appropriate the warning of a Palestinian holocaust in the making, and should remind the world of the famous post-Nazi pledge of 'never again.'
There's an old joke to the effect that some propositions are so ridiculous that only a moron or an intellectual would believe them. This is certainly an apposite situation. To conflate murderous factions of Palestinians killing each other for the privilege of wiping out Jews with the Nazi extermination of Jews requires a degree of abstraction from reality that few can match.
Professor Falk might begin by asking himself who has kept Palestinians confined in refugee camps for decades, unlike every other group of refugees in history? As many Jews were expelled from Arab countries as Arabs who on their own fled Israel in 1947. Far more Germans were expelled from Poland and the USSR after WW II. Neither of these groups were kept confined in refugee camps for generations.
Willful blindness like this on the part of a man who knows better can only be attributed to the darker regions of the mind or soul.
Hat tip: Ed Lasky
