I don’t “take offence” at the comparison.
I just find it silly, over the top, and an indication that the person making it has no sense of history.
Nor do I think it is nearly as big a deal as you seem to. It is in fact not even the most significant thing happening in the ME - that “honour” goes to ISIS.
Ah, your sarcasm in the face of slaughter is well noted. Here is a link to what Israeli soldiers do for fun:
http://open.salon.com/blog/markinjapan/2014/08/05/why_israel_lies
Gaza is not a death camp, it is a concentration camp, a ghetto.
I’ve linked to an Auschwitz survivor who makes the comparison (I didn’t invent this position for myself, I got it from him, I agree with him) and linked to it.
You say I am hardening extremist positions on both sides by my arguing? Doubtful. Nobody in Israel or Washington gives a shit about my opinions. And if the Israeli’s positions are hardened, what are they going to do? Kill more boys, destroy more shelters? If I had the chance to speak out against the Nazis, I would not have tempered by criticism on the off-hand chance that they would be nice. Netanyahu is not going to suddenly make sure there is enough food in Gaza, or stop killing civilians. He is a monomaniacal monster.
Okay, you don’t take offense and you find it silly and you are not impressed with my sense of history.
And you don’t think it is a big deal in the context of the Middle East.
You note that ISIS is a huge problem, which it is.
You got one out of five right on current events. Good work, history “buff”.
Auschwitz survivors can be wrong just like the rest of us.
The moral issue? Hyperbole much? Even if everything you describe is perfectly accurate, this probably isn’t in the top 100 of world atrocities in the last few decades, much less “the moral issue of our time”.
Yep. Many Gazans are oppressed. Many of their rights are being violated. This can be true at the same time that it’s true that comparing Israel to the Nazis is asinine.
When you continue to babble like this, you continue to make it impossible for rational people to take you seriously. Calling me personally a fascist and a monster is just laughable. You sound like some 50’s McCarthyite calling people a Commie. As **Malthus **points out, the moral issue of the ME isn’t even the Israeli situation but the lunatics of the ISIS.
Following the Holocaust, there were people “blaming” the Jews because they “went like sheep to the slaughter” and didn’t fight back.
Now, people blame the Jews because they ARE fighting back. How DARE they go after Hamas for shooting missiles at Israeli civilians?
The moral seems to be: we Jews are going to be condemned no matter what we do, so screw the anti-semites and we’ll do what we need to do to protect ourselves. We’ver certainly learned – from the Holocaust, from the 1948 war, from the 1952 war, from the 1967 war, from the 1973 war… – that no one else will come to our aid. The world sits back and watches, until Israel makes significant gains into Arab territory, and then suddently the world calls for a cease-fire. No one was calling for a cease-fire when Hamas was shooting rockets into Israel, that had to wait until Israel dared to defend itself.
The comparison to Nazis and genocide is absurd. Israel is going after a terrorist organization, not after a race/religion/ethnicity.
I’m not blaming Jews here, I’m blaming Israelis. There is a clear difference. But nice try to conflate the two.
As for pointing to ISIS, that is an attempt to change the subject.
Israel is a fascist nation implementing fascist policies and oppressing the people of Gaza. It is not legal to bait little boys with taunts and then machine gun them. That is happening. It is not legal to bomb civilians to get to a few criminals. It is not legal to blockade a whole people and refuse to let them come and go as they please. Many people have asserted in this thread that this is not the same thing as the Warsaw Ghetto. Other than the intensity of the starvation and pace of the murders and the not yet murdering everyone at once (although there are of calls for just that in Israel), what is the difference? Fascist oppression and murder is fascist oppression and murder.
Yes, Auschwitz survivors can be wrong, but Dr. Meyer lays out his case at the two links I’ve provided, you all have asserted that he is wrong, you make no counter argument on the topic, you beg the question. You are begging in favor of fascist oppression.
The only people who have any practical chance of being heard in such a fashion as to change the Israeli government, either in who is elected, or policy (not a real possibility) are Israelis or Jews. There will be no checks on Israeli abuses voluntarily, or through quiet “let’s not criticize openly” channels. It just goes on and the Israeli policies stay the same and the people get murdered. If we, as people of Jewish heritage don’t speak out, like Dr. Meyer and Prof. Bauman and Prof. Cohen and the survivor’s and their heirs can’t get listened to are we just going to sit around …
http://ijsn.net/gaza/survivors_and_descendents-letter/
and be content because today they are not coming for us? Does the solemn vow of “Never Again” mean it is okay as long as “we” as people of Jewish heritage are never pursued again? It sure as hell isn’t okay with me that the U.S. Government is financing this.
Joan Rivers gets away with calling for death to all of them and the public is largely silent. Except for the “silly idiots” who condemn her.
And what is worse is that all the usual defenders are compared to years past, so quiet and measured and circumspect. It’s nice to see all the restraint in what a mere five years ago would have got me called an Anti-Semite all up and down this board. That is because you don’t really believe it anymore. It is a big deal. I was taught morality by Christians and Jews, but I was taught to be contentious more by my Jewish relatives. Silence in the face of evil is a grave moral failing.
Who have we as Americans become? When we say that God created us all equal, are we secretly smirking at the bullshit, or willfully blind? When we say everyone is entitled to equal protection under the laws, are we laughing at the fools who believe it and just don’t care? When we say that everyone has the right to vote, do we put up barriers to voting to make sure the sub-humans don’t vote, or think it isn’t such a big deal?
When we had the opportunity in WWII to denounce the Nazis for their atrocities against the Jews were we silent for fear that speaking up for the Jews would turn the public against the Jews?
You have all sworn, “Never again”. So, are you against http://open.salon.com/blog/markinjapan/2014/08/05/why_israel_lies and willing to openly ask your representatives to be openly against it, or are you worried about being called an Anti-Semite? Are you in favor of it, like Joan Rivers? Or are you silent? Or is it okay because it is better to be on the dishing out rather than the receiving end of crimes against humanity.
Do you feel better now, The Second Stone?
Because Godwinizing a thread or a world conflict isn’t much of an argument. Or a way to get people to listen to you.
The folks at Merriam-Webster define sarcasm as "the use of words that mean the opposite of what you really want to say especially in order to insult someone, to show irritation, or to be funny’.
I meant exactly what I said.
Perhaps you mistook disgust for sarcasm. They have the same number of letters.
No. It seems like some people are fascist creeps when approaching the Gaza problem.
Again, I’m sure that kind of thinking makes you feel much better about yourself. Personally it seems to me that many people are nasty, uneducated, sanctimonious, jerks with all credibility of a nineteen year old taking his first polysci class when discussing this issue. It’s why I don’t tend to discuss the conflict with many people as it is usually not worth my time.
How I think about myself isn’t relevant to the discussion, and that isn’t even a good attempt at an ad hominem. You certainly do come off as demonstrating it isn’t worth your time and that you think people who disagree with you are uneducated sanctimonious jerks. If that is the best you can do to show that Dr. Meyer and the others are mistaken, perhaps you should come to the conclusion that you have said quite a bit about yourself and nothing about the problem, which, by the way is thousands of innocent people being indiscriminately slaughtered which is so offensive that the subject of the OP returned an honor from Israel for saving a Jew from the Nazis.
Maybe I’ve just come to the quite rational conclusion that people who can’t tell the difference between the Nazis and the Israelis are indeed jerks and barely worthy of anything but mockery and derision. Other people in this thread have also come to the same conclusion. You are clearly desperately trying to get people to take your thoughts on this issue seriously. You might want to think long and hard about why no one seems to be doing so.
Maybe your conclusion isn’t rational at all, but completely self-serving. Here you are, in an argument with someone you consider desperate, a jerk and worthy of mockery and derision.
Then you commit the ad populum argument, saying everyone agrees with you. Counting the people participating in the thread, that leaves you ignoring about a third of the participants.
There you have it. You admit you ignore criticism of Israel. What Israel does is okay with you.
And what they have done is well documented.
I long ago rejected the the racist doctrine that Palestinian people did not have the right to grow up where they were born, raise their families and participate in the government and be a free people.
I was taught that calling a whole race of people sub-human, taking their freedom, their property, their right to come and go, their enfranchisement and when some of them fought back, their lives and the lives of the people around them not fighting back was fascism and evil and wrong. It still is.
Until people like you open your eyes to the monsters you have become by “ignoring much of the world’s criticism” the fascism will continue.
Israel takes these people’s freedom and lives, and the fascists in this thread think the only item to complain bitterly about is comparing Israel to the Nazis. I agree with Dr. Meyer that Israel is a fascist and racist nation comparable with Nazis.
And if you, LavenderBlue, object or are offended at the comparison, I dismiss that as hypocritical and trivial in comparison to the crimes of the perpetrator, Israel, which has left families bereft of their children and freedom. Your hurts by the Germans, are no excuse for your support of crimes by Israel. Your rationality is, by your own words, the result of “ignoring” the hurt inflicted on other people.
He said he ignores “much of the world’s criticism”, which is reasonable… because much of the world’s criticism of Israel is bigoted nonsense. Hopefully, you also ignore “much of the world’s criticism”.
Not all of it is nonsense, of course – much of it is legitimate. But much of it is utter crap.
I also oppose these things. These sorts of things are very bad. Fascism is bad. Israel is not fascist, but fascism is bad. Israel has done some bad things. Israel is not fascist. The bad things Israel has done deserve criticism.
Unless you’re very gullible, you probably also ignore much of the world’s criticism of Israel. It doesn’t make you a monster – it makes you a rational person. Not ignoring much of the world’s criticism of Israel is irrational.
In this case, Dr. Meyer is incorrect. The Nazis murdered 6 million – their goal was to eliminate an entire people from the earth. Israel has not murdered millions, and their goal is not to eliminate an entire people from the earth.
Only people that have murdered millions, and had a goal to eliminate an entire people from the earth, are comparable to Nazis.
You don’t appear to be a rational arbiter of relative wrongness. Your statements are, in general, non-factual.
Reasonable criticism of Israel is fine. Ludicrous and insane comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany aren’t. I’m very sorry you seem unable to tell the difference between the two.
And if one wants to see racist that calls people sub-human, you might want to read the Palestinian media and the Covenant of Hamas a covenant that has never been denounced by Hamas.
Here:
Gosh. Somehow I’m reminded of something. Wait. It will come to me. I got it! Yes, they sound like Nazis. This sure sounds like Nazi propaganda doesn’t it? And monsters and fascists, too, right?
Look The Second Stone,
I am a reasonable person. I’m all for a two state solution. I don’t support the Haredim or quite a number of things Israel does. I’ve been yelled at by five rabbis for marrying a non-Jew. I think the Palestinians have a legitimate grievance, although not as big a one as they seem to think. One of my Hebrew school teachers was kicked out of her long-standing home in an Arab country by anti-Semitic Islamic actions and I don’t see her teaching her kids to bomb places in Yemen. But do you have slightest inkling that your shrill and ridiculous exaggerations don’t exactly make for either decent or accurate commentary on this issue?
I always wondered what the hell beef Hamas has against the Rotary Clubs or the Lions. 
No, he is correct. The Nazis were evil with respect to Jews prior to The Final Solution of murdering 6 million Jews in death camps starting 1942. If your standard of fascism is that it isn’t really fascism until you start operating death camps rather than concentration camps and ghettos then you need to make sure you have a good crimes against humanity lawyer to parse the fine details and raise distinctions of degree. Gaza isn’t a death camp. It is a ghetto subject to armed militants running it like a mafia, subject to malnourishment on a severe level, where people are not free to come and go, where the people in real military control let it overrun like Lord of the Flies. The Nazis were Nazi evil prior to the death camps, and the death camps were just one natural extension of their evil.
Walling it off, pretending it is a free fire zone, another planet, a proto state, a state or whatever is treating its people as not part of the elite. That is all despicable. Killing a bunch of people every once in a while makes it a worse fascism.
Your definition of oppression amounts to as long as we are not systematically exterminating people, we aren’t fascists. Oppressing people based on race and as a matter of law in the name of the state is fascism.
I have to ask…how is retaliating against people shooting missiles at you even remotely similar to the Holocaust?
In the common use of language today, comparisons to the Nazis are comparisons to the Holocaust and death camps. They’re not comparisons to much more common sorts of evil, like belligerent aggression, police state stuff, ethnic oppression, etc. If you want to compare someone to the non-Holocaust, non-death camp crimes of the Nazis, pick a different group to compare them to. There are many, many to choose from. The actions of Israel that deserve real criticism are (depressingly) so common in recent history that there are literally dozens of other countries and regimes to legitimately compare them to.
Fascism is fascism, and doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with death camps, ghettoes, etc. “Israel is fascist” is no more a legitimate criticism than “Israel is communist”.
It’s not fascism. That doesn’t mean it’s not bad, but there are plenty of ways to kill people and treat them badly without being fascist. The Soviets did it quite frequently, for example. If you want to be treated seriously, then stop using words like “fascist” incorrectly.
No, that’s not fascism. You need better than a 5th grade understanding of history to make real criticisms of either side in this conflict. Further, Israel isn’t oppressing people based on race – it’s based on geography. Gazans aren’t a race or an ethnicity – they’re the people who live in Gaza. And yes, Gazans are being oppressed. Israel should stop oppressing the Gazans.