slachtoffer en misdadiger zijn zo innig als
tijd via Santiago Alba Rico - 23.04.2002 10:49
Een ongelooflijk goed geschreven stuk over Semitites; in´t engels vertaald vanuit het spaans  http://www.Rebelion.org
ook een klein alineaatje over marocaanse prominentjes door deze, uw nederige uitenaanlezer
perpectimism
174538 You are sleeping,
you do not want to believe.... (english) karl 1:50am Sun
Apr 21 ´02 (Modified on 5:28am Sun Apr 21 ´02)
article#174538 as I read this, carefully, i experienced a
moment of clarity. IRREFUTABLE. Santiago Alba Rico
Rebelion.org April 19, 2002 MIDEAST WATCH
Translated by Francisco González I deny that Turkey
destroyed 3,200 villages, killed thousands of Kurds and
imprisoned men and women for transcribing their names
in Kurdish. I deny that the United States has caused the
death--directly or indirectly--of 25 million people (Korea,
Indochina, Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, Angola,
Panama, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia and a long etcetera.)
since the end of World War II. I deny that the Israelis
demolish homes, uproot olive trees, upturn ambulances,
shoot journalists, mutilate children, summarily execute
members of the resistance and are attempting to
exterminate four million Palestinians. I deny that the
Nazis persecuted, tortured and exterminated six million
Jews. Why do I say that? What I mean to say is: Why do
those who deny the Holocaust fall into well-deserved
disrepute, see their books prohibited and their utterances
denounced, must face isolation, ostracism or even
imprisonment--while those who deny or silence or justify
the crimes of Turkey, the US or Israel--to mention just a
few cases--find themselves promoted in their careers,
rewarded with an important public position or a daily
column in a big newspaper, flattered with special deluxe
editions and commendatory reviews, and generally
blessed, decorated and applauded? I declare that the
Nazis persecuted, tortured and exterminated six million
Jews. I also declare that Turkey, the US and Israel have
opened three new wounds on the aching side of
humanity. And I say that everyone of us should
acknowledge these facts, lest our own individual
penknives go delve also into those wounds. And I say that
those unable or unwilling to acknowledge all these things
simultaneously are not only guilty of moral
corruption--they become retrospective accomplices--and
worse-- to all the horrors of the Holocaust, and deserve
the punishment that Nuremberg reserved for
collaborators. We have condemned the wretched of the
world to move within the extremely narrow confines
between the following two alternatives: the temptation of
hatred and the temptation of supernatural goodness. We
admire the good slaves, and we even import their beliefs,
along with their coffee and their cocoa, so as to
spiritualize our digestions. And if we align ourselves a
little further to the left we even manage to
understand--though still denouncing their excesses--the
anger and resentment of the bad slaves. But Palestinians
are not allowed even that much. We allow Kosovars to
hate their Serb oppressors. We understand the Hutu may
hate the Tutsi, the Berbers may hate the Arabs, blacks
may hate whites. We allow perhaps for the Timorese and
the Kurds to hate their executioners. We allow, of course,
for the victims of terrorism to hate ETA and bin Laden
(and we allow in addition that this hatred be materialized
by thermobaric bombs and missiles). Palestinians are not
allowed any of this. If an Israeli soldier, castled behind
his armor, puts a Palestinian teenage boy on his knees,
ties his hands behind his back and breaks the bones in his
arms with the butt of his gun, the hatred of this
Palestinian constitutes an immensely more serious crime
(anti-Semitism!) than the actions of his aggressor. What’s
more, the hatred felt by the Palestinian justifies,
legitimates, purifies the behavior of the soldier. If the
word "Jew" means "victim," if only "Jew" means "victim",
if all the Jews--Primo Levi and Sharon, Ann Frank and
Rotschild--are equally victims, then "Jewish State" and
"Jewish Sword" and "Jewish Executioner" all mean
"victim"; and the victims of these victims are the
executioners. These days, unarmed Jewish tanks confront
children who have teeth; and defenseless airplanes
defend themselves against mothers who hide an ache
under their skirts; and completely unprotected
missiles--like the David of the Bible--aim at towering
giants of dignity and decency. Such stupefying disparity,
such manifest inequality between a defenseless war
technology and a superior dignity, a superior reason, is
referred to by the most moderate newspapers--and the
most daring politicians--as “combats.” Saramago’s
“nonsense” The Holocaust, like the death of Christ, took
place at specific time in History, but it assumes a kind of
metaphysical hyper reality outside of History, always
synchronic, which, like the traumatic eternity of certain
neuroses, prevents one from acknowledging that events
continue to happen, that we continue doing things, and
that we are responsible for what we do. The original
wound of the “Jewish State”, like the original trauma of
the neurotic, blames the universe without interruption;
and if the universe finds it at fault, then the “Jewish
State” blames the universe for its own sense of guilt: one
cannot charge a grief so vast with so small a crime, not
without becoming guilty of an aggression that is already
the virtual repetition of the brutal original scene. The
fault of those who remind the neurotic that he, too, may
be guilty, is called “insensitivity”. The fault of those who
remind the “Jewish State” that it also can be guilty, is
called “anti-Semitism”. Before the Holocaust, no
affliction occurred (excluding perhaps the enslavement of
the Hebrews by the Pharaoh) from which to extract any
lessons. After the Holocaust, all crimes are forgivable,
except any pretense to rival “Jewish” grief. The very
sound of a grievous moan may be deemed
“anti-Semitic.” The photograph of Mohamed Dorra
embracing the dead body of his son is an instrument of
the conspiracy against the “chosen people”. Shocked by
the already well-known statements of Saramago,
Menahem Peri said he felt outraged: "Only if we were
sending today six million Arabs to the gas chambers
would he have the right to make such a comparison." Do
we get it? What Peri is saying is that, as long as we keep
under six million, it’s okay. Under that figure, our
innocence is guaranteed: we will never be Nazis, and
therefore we will never be “bad,” and anyone who dares
denounce our modest bloodbath--as Saramago did--falls
into “moral blindness” and “anti-Semitic hatred.” Peri
may rest assured: there are only four million Palestinians
in Palestine. If his defenseless tanks managed to kill half
of them in this campaign, they would reduce the basis for
such outlandish comparisons even further. The smaller
the number of Palestinians that are left, the more
removed we will be from the shadow of Nazism. And
when only one of them is left standing--alone and
defeated on his own gigantic and exactly human pair of
legs--the act of putting him on his knees, tying his hands
behind his back, and breaking his arms with the butt our
gun will be the proof and the cause of our incontestable
goodness. The day we can no longer kill anyone, no
“anti-Semite” will be able to accuse us of cruelty.
Comparisons are, indeed, odious. Amos Oz, a fine writer
and an apocryphal leftist, also expressed his reaction to
Saramago’s “nonsense” with a typical Freudian
projection: "The Israeli occupation is unfair, but
comparing it with the crimes of the Nazis would be like
comparing Saramago with Stalin". I remember having
read the anecdote of a man who goes to church to
confess his sins: "Father, I have been unfair: I slit my
father’s throat, I raped my mother and I poisoned my
brothers". "Why son"--said the priest with a
shudder--“That’s murder!" Bombing schools and
hospitals--is that "unfair"? Uprooting 120,000 olive trees,
bulldozing or blowing up 3,750 residential units and
expelling 40,000 people in one year--is that "unfair"?
Stealing 3669 square kilometers of land--is that
“unfair”? Shooting children in the head, executing
unarmed men in alleyways, depriving the civilian
population of water, food and electricity--is that
“unfair”? Is it unfair to brand the arms of people, to lock
them in detention camps, to prevent ambulances from
reaching their destination, to erase the names of
Palestinian villages, to blow up the Registrar’s building
in Ramallah, to assault churches, to burn mosques, to
urinate in the children’s rooms? Does Amos Oz think that
the suicide bomber who sets off a bomb in a Tel Aviv
restaurant is “unfair”? A treaty may be unfair; and there
may be unfair sentences; and it will certainly be unfair
that the horrors of the occupation remain unpunished.
But the occupation... the occupation is not unfair: the
occupation is a crime. And anyone who does not see it
that way is, without a doubt, closer to Hitler and Stalin
than to Saramago. The comparison that Saramago made
is exact to the letter (notice that he carefully says “in
spirit”) and has had the unfortunate result of calling
attention to the Holocaust once again, to the detriment of
the Occupation. Everything is being presented as though
the kinship between Israel and Nazism must be proven
first in order for us to be allowed to condemn the actions
of Israel, as if, unless this affinity can be demonstrated,
the Israelis could be allowed to humiliate, steal and
murder without ever losing their innocence. But we will
not let you maintain your innocence. You are not Nazis,
that’s true: you are a bunch of vulgar, heartless butchers,
slayers of old people, child killers, filthy humiliators of
women, land thieves, looters of shanty homes,
unprincipled bullies, moral idiots, arrogant colonizing
beasts attempting to enlarge your country by belittling
your (all) humanity. But we will not let you keep your
innocence. You will at least lose that in your massacre of
these giants: you are degrading yourselves to the exact
extent of your crimes. You may win, but you will not
convince us of your purity. You will keep the land and the
water of your victims, but we will not forgive you. You
may be invulnerable, but you will no longer give us any
lessons. You will strut up and down the desert of all
values, meeting no resistance, but you will be small,
vulgar, worthless, like all those who build their worldly
greatness on their moral impotence. Israel (let us leave
the Jews alone) is no longer the name of a people; it is
the name of an exterminating angel, the cipher of a
crime, the temperature of an ideology. And if you don’t
make haste to correct yourselves, if you don’t think it
over in a hurry and change the direction of your steps,
you will end up erasing the memory of the Holocaust,
which memory the rest of us will have to keep alive
against you. One day, when people wish to exaggerate,
describe the essence of an outrage, name the most
execrable behavior, or vent with an insult the pain of an
injustice, they will no longer say “Nazi” but “Israeli”.
And that, in effect, would not be just either. A few days
ago, propped on the soapbox of his little column in a
national newspaper, an ex-communist quoted Sartre in
order to intimidate the “anti-Semites” that are trying to
save lives in Palestine. The news I have regarding Sartre
is much more recent. Sartre wrote today, just a moment
ago, the following words that he published in 1961, at
the height of the Algerian war: "First we must confront a
surprising spectacle: the striptease of our humanism. Here
it is, naked, and not at all pretty to behold; it was just a
deceiving ideology, the exquisite justification for looting.
Its tender turns of phrase and its preciosity justified our
aggression. How pretty it is to preach non-violence!:
Neither victims nor executioners! Oh come on now! If you
are not victims--when the government you have elected
and the army in which your younger brothers have served,
have initiated a “genocide” with no trace of hesitation
or remorse--then you are undoubtedly executioners. You
should understand this once and for all: if violence has
just started; if exploitation and oppression never existed
on the face of the earth, then maybe the much-vaunted
“non-violence” could put an end to the dispute. But if
the entire regime, and even its ideas about non-violence,
are conditioned by a thousand-year-old oppression, your
passivity is useless except to alienate you on the side of
the oppressors". There are victims and there are
oppressors. And those who deny, those who silence, those
who lie, those who make excuses, those who qualify
things--from their column or from their government--have
chosen the side of the oppressors. "After Auschwitz we are
all Jews," Sartre wrote. But the neurotic who reminds us
of this quote from his bulletproof newspaper forgets that
Sartre was a sane man, a man who did not live with the
original trauma but in the course of history, who knew that
after Auschwitz rivers of blood have still been spilled,
continue to be spilled; a man before whose eyes things
continued to unfold. Which is why he also wrote, in 1961:
"We are all Algerians". And in 1967: "We are all
Vietnamese". And in 1975: "We are all Timorese". A
sane man who today, 7 April 2002, while Sharon has
closed the Palestinian camps and cities so as to be able
to bomb them without being bothered by anyone: "We
are all Palestinians". If Jew means victim, then the Jews
of today are the Palestinians. If Jew means something
else, if it means the inalienable essence and particularity
of a chosen people, the specific substance of a race or a
culture, then nobody can demand human beings to
experience their particular pain, to condemn the ones
who gassed them and become “Jews” every time it
becomes necessary to combat their oppressors anew. But
“Jew” means victim; it is one of the many--too
many--synonyms that our shrunken bloody century has
produced to refer to victims. Eichmann and Barbie were
not tried for crimes against “Judaism”; they were tried
for Crimes against Humanity. That is why all the
victims--and only the victims--are Jews (as well as
Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, Saharaouis, Kurds,
Argentineans, Tzotziles, Mapuches, Ecuadorians...). That
is why Sharon is not a Jew; there is not one single Jew in
the Government of Israel, and very few among its citizens
(but let me mention here the names of some brave
"anti-Semite" Israeli Jews whom I respectfully salute: the
pacifists of Gush Shalom, Uri Avneri, the journalist Amira
Hass, the 357 refusenik reservists, Assaf Oron, the Women
in Black and so many others who are victims in their own
country of the marginalization and oppression of the
majority). We are all Jews, and Jews are the patrimony of
everyone, except for Israel and its supporters; except for
the cowardly, servile European Union; except for the
corrupt, dictatorial Arab regimes that wrap themselves in
the Palestinian flag while repressing demonstrators in
Cairo, Tunis and Amman. Not only Saramago: even
Wafá Idris, a murderous suicide-bomber, has a higher
moral authority to speak about the Holocaust than Amos
Oz or Menahem Peri. And that’s why, while the F-16’s
destroy the historic center of Nablus and the tanks prevent
the wounded from being picked up, we should cry out:
“Jews of the world, unite!”. Unite, Jews, against the
government of Israel; unite against imperialism and
global war, unite against all the assassins, the liars, the
negationists, the indifferent, the opportunists, the corrupt,
the exploiters--even if they are not Nazis. Refounding
Israel Israelis must understand what an urgent task it is to
refound or re-establish the State of Israel on completely
new bases, away from the “benefits” of the Holocaust
and the hysterical, mystical, expansionist nationalism of
Zionism, which has built an ideological Fatherland on
the manipulation of its own pain and the multiplication
of that of its neighbors. From the very start, the movement
created by Theodor Herzl in 1897 was governed by
Reason of State and by the necessity to privilege the
construction of a Jewish State above all other
considerations of a political or moral nature. The Nazis
alone are less entitled to play with the Jewish tragedy of
the Shoah. Between August 1933 and the beginning of
World War II in 1939, with the Nuremberg Laws in effect,
after the Crystal Night, the Zionist National Agency
maintained official economic relations with Hitler’s
government, within the framework of the so called
Haavara Agreement, which allowed the Zionists to attract
great Jewish fortunes to Palestine, giving the German
industry an escape way for its exports, which were subject
to an international boycott. On 7 December 1938, Ben
Gurion declines the offer made by Britain to take in a few
thousand Jewish children from Austria and Germany: "If I
was given the choice between saving all the Jewish
children from Germany by taking them to Britain, or
saving only half of them by taking them to Eretz-Israel, I
would choose the latter. Because we must consider not
only the life of these children, but also the history of the
Jewish people". On 11 November, 1940, the Jewish
refugees sheltered in the Patria, a ship at anchor in the
port of Haifa, are refused permission to go ashore in
Palestine, and they are offered instead the option of
going to the Mauritius Islands. The Jewish National
Agency puts pressure on the British government,
unsuccessfully, and on the 25th of the same month an
explosion kills 240 refugees and 12 policemen in an
operation masterminded by Eliahu Golomb, personal
friend and right arm of Ben Gurion. In 1943, while
gassing goes on in Treblinka, Sobibor and Auschwitz, the
American Zionist Congress decides to give priority to the
creation of a Jewish State in Palestine once the war is
over, over the immediate salvation of the European Jews.
As late as 1944, the notorious terrorist Izhak Shamir,
Prime Minister of Israel during the Madrid conference in
1991, was negotiating with the German army--which by
then was facing serious problems--the delivery of some
trucks for troop transportation (or was it prisoner transportation?) on condition that
they be used only on the Russian front. That is Zionism. In the
late seventies and early eighties, the Israeli government was
training the death squads in Bolivia and Guatemala (250,000
dead) in clandestine operations whose mediator was... Klaus
Barbie, a conspicuous Nazi who was later tried and sentenced in
Lyon for crimes against Humanity. And the tale goes on, against
all the illusions created by neurosis. Only two months ago, on 25
January 2002, Amir Oren, the military commentator for Ha´eretz
(an Israeli newspaper) wrote: "In order to adequately prepare us
for the next stage, one of the commanding officers of the Israeli
army in the (occupied) territories, recently said that it is justifiable,
even vital, to extract lessons from every possible source. If the
mission involves the occupation of a densely populated territory,
or the Kasbah in Nablus, and the commanding officer’s goal is
to try and accomplish its mission without casualties on either side,
then he will need to analyze and assimilate the lessons of
previous battles, and this includes--no matter how horrible it may
sound--the lesson of how the German army operated in the
Warsaw ghetto." Two months later, in Ramallah, Jenin, Tulkarem,
Nablus, we can measure the full extent of the benefit that the
Israeli army was able to derive from this lesson. Comparisons are
odious when it is Saramago who makes them and they involve
denouncing a crime, but when it comes to planning the crime,
then they are "justifiable and even vital". Keeping our silence We
cannot keep silent if we wish to preserve our sanity at the very
least. Just before I finish, let me quote Sartre again, one of the
sanest and most intelligent men, one of the true great figures in a
century of acquiescing dwarfs and rhetorical fluffs. This is how he
addressed the French while the Algerians were getting ready to
bury one million dead victims of--as some say about Israel--the
only democracy in Northern Africa: "It is not good, my countrymen
and women, you who are aware of all the crimes committed in
our name, it is really not good that you are not telling a word
about this to anyone, not even to your own souls, out of fear that
you may have to pass judgement on yourselves. In the beginning
you did not know--I want to believe that you didn’t. Then you
hesitated; and now you know, but you remain silent. Eight years
of silence are degrading. But it was all in vain: right now, the
blinding sun of torture is at the high noon position, flooding the
entire country with its light, and there is no laughter that sounds
good under that light, no face that can put on enough makeup to
hide its anger or its fright, no act that fails to betray our
repugnance and our complicity. It suffices nowadays for two
Frenchmen to run into each other, and a corpse gets right
between them. France used to be the name of a country. We
should be careful lest it becomes, in 1961, the name of a
neurosis". Where he says "eight years" lets substitute "thirty-five";
where he says France, let’s write Israel or--it doesn’t matter--the
world. Israel could manage to become a country, but it prefers to
be a neurosis; the world could manage to become a planet ("an
infinite unity of reciprocities", says Sartre) but it prefers to be a
psicopathy. Will we heal? Humanity, like psychoanalysts, must
deal with--must continue to deal with--the Holocaust. But history,
Law, people... they must deal with the pain of everyday, they
must seek accountability for each new atrocity, must try to prevent
the future bloodbaths. They must occupy themselves with the
Occupation. It does not matter if the Israelis aren’t Nazis: they
are the murderers; and it does not matter if the Palestinians
aren’t Jews: they are the victims. Neurosis does not distinguish
past from present, reality from fiction, war from peace, the guilty
from the innocent. Healing means drawing those lines,
reestablishing borders, establishing rules. Without that minimum
of sanity, it will not be worth it for the world to continue after the
next war. >>>>Think about it. add your own comments
============= what is with you peepull doesnt allow doing
(english) piet 2:59am Sun Apr 21 ´02 comment#174544 a regular
homo maroccan columnist in holland gives an honest account of
his discouragement over last week´s 20 thousand heads strong
propalestina protest. He ´fears for his country´ (instead of actively
emulating the succesfull neighbourhood father project rite here in
A´dam and participating. He only watched part of it cause it was
in his way and cites a huge maroccan who found it to cold to
participate. Conclusion he projects desillusion with his own
apathy on the country. This last weekend some jewfella is
allowed to preach doom and gloom complete with giant
mushroomcloudcartoon speculating (placing bets?) on telaviv as
possible ´locale´ rather than fess up about his stubborn refusal to
radically rethink stuff. Arabs seem no better judging from the
cyberistan.org/islamic site where you will look in vain for any
beleaf in my sense of the word; no mention of greenery at all in
fact. =========== Santiago! (english) Harq al-Ada 5:28am Sun
Apr 21 ´02 comment#174562 Santigo: as a fellow human
being---I SALUTE YOU!
ps: cartoon via palestinian news center
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