Never again means nothing

Norman Finkelstein speaking at an Islamophobia conference in Istanbul, December:

It might also be noted that the U.S. and Israel typically invoke the memory of the Nazi holocaust for the purpose not of averting the horrors of war but to justify inflicting them. Whenever the United States and Israel prepare to attack Muslims it is almost always the case that the leaders will be compared to Hitler. In the 1950s-1960s Nasser was compared to Hitler, in the 1990s and again in the 2000s Hussein was compared to Hitler. Now Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran are being compared to Hitler. Those who oppose the illegal war plans of the U.S. and Israel are accused of being like the appeasers of Hitler. It is hard to conceive a more cynical exploitation of the suffering of Jews during World War II than its use to justify murderous wars of aggression.

It should finally be said that before the so-called West deplores Holocaust denial in the Muslim world, it should take a closer look at itself.

The U.S.-imposed economic sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s were responsible for the deaths of many hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children. Respected United Nations officials called these sanctions genocidal, yet U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said that the “price is worth it.” She did worse than deny genocide; she justified it.

In the 1980s during the U.S.-backed wars in Central America, tens of thousands of Guatemalans, Salvadorans and Nicaraguans were killed. The Truth Commission of Guatemala called it a genocide. But in bestselling books nowadays it is said that these murderous wars are a model for how to defeat the insurgents in Iraq. Is this the meaning of Never Again?

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