It is a sort of madness because almost none of them were born during the holocaust and most of them were born here anyway or like Vic born in South Africa and other places.

The joke with Vic is that he claims he left South Africa because of apartheid, moved to Israel in 1984 and then left because he wanted to be in an English speaking country. He doesn’t even get the irony.

What makes it even worse is that the jews that did come after WW11 had largely been in Palestine anyway, Peres is Polish and most of them are not survivors of the holocaust.

Finkelsteins book “The Holocaust Industry” and Giles MacDonogh’s “After the Reich” make it clear that nowhere near 6 million jews were killed and in fact MacDonogh points out time and again that most of the victims were common criminals or Polish catholics.

He also points out that 65% of jews escaped before the death camps ever got started.

Over it. The world is over it.

The following extract comes from Wikipedia – the report itself makes fascinating reading:

“In 1991, Clark accused the administration of President George H. W. Bush and “others to be named” of “crimes against peace, war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” for its conduct of the Gulf War against Iraq and the ensuing sanctions”

Source: War Crimes: A Report on United States War Crimes Against Iraq to the Commission of Inquiry for the International War Crimes Tribunal, by Ramsey Clark and others

Israel says the Holocaust should never be forgotten, but expects the world to forget Israel’s holocaust against the Palestinians even as Israeli cluster bombs and phosphorous shells are exploding in Gaza.

The Warsaw Ghetto was an atrocity. Nazi concentration camps were atrocities. But Gaza is worse because it is the very people who claim to be the victims of the first who are now committing the outrages of the second.

Israel uses Nazi dispossession and slaughter of the Jews to justify Israeli dispossession and slaughter of the Palestinians. Israel dictates what the rest of the world should learn from history, but itself takes only one lesson from the European holocaust – the efficiency with which it was done.

Israel is ruthlessly employing Nazi methods against the Palestinian people. Israel has concentrated 1.5 million innocent victims into the Gaza strip and is systematically murdering them.

The Palestinians have done nothing to deserve their persecution and slaughter by Israel. The great misfortune of the Palestinians, their only crime, was to have been the existing inhabitants of land the Zionist movement wanted.

You can’t have it both ways. If you condemn one atrocity, you must condemn all atrocities. If you punish one war crime, you must punish all war crimes. And if you remember the Holocaust, you must weep to see it happening again in Gaza.

Popular tribunals are certainly one way of bringing about some sort of justice in relation to recent events in Gaza. There are of course many precedents for such tribunals, especially when national/international justice forums fail to rein in unilateralist states. The people’s inquiry into the Australian government’s treatment of asylum seekers resulted in the report, published by Scribe, Human Rights Overboard. One of the authors, Linda Briskman , tells me of the enormous amount of energy , money and commitment required to get such tribunals off the ground, but the results are certainly wroth it. Similarly, the international tribunal conducted by Arundhati Roy and others into the illegal invasion of Iraq has been equally fruitful in bringing to public notice the self interested (and brutal) actions of powerful states. The problem with both tribunals is that they had few teeth and were largely about putting on record terrible injustices as well as adding to public calls for more formal processes of justice. My hope is that the international institutions that are taking hold of what happened in Gaza put in place processes that lead to some formal outcomes – prosecutions, reparations, reconstruction, compensation etc. In my view, Israel’s actions in Gaza, in addition its long standing unilateralism and monotonous dismissal of UN resolutions etc presents a major challenge to those international bodies charged with protecting human rights and ensuing international rule of law. It is utterly morally unacceptable that the Jewish state can continue in this way without any serious attempt to finally bring it to account for its actions. Antony, I commend you and others who have the courage to highlight the great injustices that have been done to the Palestinian people. Justice will one day prevail.