In Gaza the shoah goes on / Don't panic, Israel to use nukes not gas chambers! / Israel's shoah business all over the web / Israel threatens "holocaust" against Palestinians
Don't panic, Israel to use nukes not gas chambers!
Seasoned zionist watchers will know that hasbara (propaganda) has been elevated to a full blown tenet of the zionist ideology of Israel's supporters. I'm sure all, certainly most, nations have their founding myths, but Israel's are an artform, a science even, whereas other nations tend to settle for folk-lore. But this "shoah" remark by Israel's deputy defence minister, Matan Vilnai, has so sent the hasbara machine into overdrive that it seems to have crashed.
Engage very smartly swept in to demand the resignation of Vilnai for undermining the smear that comparing Israel to the nazis is antisemitic. But there had to be some zionists who would do what zionists do best, denial and projection. Here's Melanie Phillips in the Spectator complaining that to render "shoah" as "holocaust" represents the "Mother of all mistranslations
Reuters translated the Hebrew word ‘shoah’ as ‘holocaust’. But ‘shoah’ merely means disaster. In Hebrew, the word ‘shoah’ is never used to mean ‘holocaust’ or ‘genocide’ because of the acute historical resonance. The word ‘Hashoah’ alone means ‘the Holocaust’ and ‘retzach am’ means ‘genocide’. The well-known Hebrew construction used by Vilnai used merely means ‘bringing disaster on themselves’.
But of course, "ha" is simply "the". "Ha-shoah" no matter how it is rendered in Hebrew, is "the holocaust" whereas "shoah" is simply "holocaust". Needless to say, Melanie Phillips didn't give any examples of this more casual, less definite, use of "shoah".
Just as well really, for that we have to turn to the comments of the panic post onEngage or the comments to the rather more skimpy post on the more openly zionist,Simply Jews where a commenter called Noga of the Contentious Centrist blog explains the many many ways in which the word "shoah" is used in Israel:
Shoah means disaster. And it usually comes with its own special verb: "Le-hamit shoah", to bring upon someone or something a disaster. Hebrew speakers use it to describe a nuclear disaster (shoah garinit), among other usages. The Holocaust, when brought up to by Hebrew speakers is always, always, always referred to as "Ha-Shoah", THE Shoah, to differentiate from any other shoah.
Thank goodness Noga has cleared that one up. Israel intends to nuke Gaza, not gas its population. Phew!
// posted by Levi9909 @ 8:44:00 AM Comments (4) | Trackback (0)
Friday, February 29, 2008
Israel's shoah business all over the web
Unlucky little Israel. Yet again a leading Israeli has likened Israel to the nazis, in other words, once again, Israel, by a combination of its structure and its behaviour, has likened itself to the nazis. In know I covered this in my previous post but the person who sent me the story from the Guardian about Israeli deputy defence minister, Matan Vilnai, threatening the Palestinians of Gaza with a holocaust said that he had read the same story in Der Spiegel, but Der Spiegel didn't carry the h-word at all. No surprises there given Germany's post war appeasement of Israel. Then Ellis Sharpposted a comment saying that the BBC has run with the h-word, then dropped it, then picked it up again with an explanation of what the poor misunderstood minister actually meant.
“Speaking on Israel Army Radio, Mr Vilnai said if Palestinians increased rocket fire, they will bring upon themselves what he called a "shoah" - a Hebrew word for catastrophe, and for the Nazi Holocaust. The BBC's Katya Adler in Jerusalem says many of Mr Vilnai's colleagues have quickly distanced themselves from his comments and also tried to downplay them saying he did not mean genocide.”
I then googled "vilnai shoah" only without the quotes, and the first time, 1,360 sites came up. Maybe two minutes later, 1,370. The top one was the UK's Daily Mirror.
The Mirror article is very similar to the Guardian one except where the Guardian had 32 Palestinians dead in the last two days, the Mirror had 33:
Israeli air strikes have killed at least 33 Gazans, including five children, in the past two days, and Israeli leaders said cross-border rocket fire may leave the Jewish state with little choice but to launch a broader military offensive.
But my main point here, apart from the genocidal nature of the State of Israel and its zionist ideology, is the way the hasbara flock have clearly tried to get at the story and in spite of that, it is all over the web. Of course it's terrifying news, but the good news is that Israel and its apologists can't seem to control the flow of information any more.
There is of course the other little issue that if Israel ever does embark on a final solution type solution to its Palestinian "problem" no one will be able to say that they didn't know.
PS - I just went back to google to get the url for the search "vilnai shoah" and the search now yields 1,440 sites.
// posted by Levi9909 @ 5:29:00 PM Comments (6) | Trackback (0)
Israel threatens "holocaust" against Palestinians
About time too. Israel has been carrying on a creeping, sometimes galloping, genocidal campaign against the Palestinians for many a decade. It has been likened to the nazis by at least one of its own ministers before now. And of course there was the Israel commander who told his troops to learn how the nazis destroyed the Warsaw Ghetto so that they too could learn how to destroy a ghetto. Now, according to the Guardian, we have an Israeli minister threatening to inflict a holocaust on the Gaza population. See this:
"The more Qassam [rocket] fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves," Matan Vilnai, Israel's deputy defence minister, told army radio.
Shoah is the Hebrew word normally reserved to refer to the Jewish Holocaust. It is rarely used in Israel outside discussions of the Nazi extermination of Jews during the second world war, and many Israelis are loath to countenance its use to describe other events.
I was never keen on holocaust uniqueness arguments but the zionists have really blown it this time.
I thought I remembered a letter by Ilan Pappe to the Guardian, saying that the Gaza "disengagement" was a ploy to get Jewish settlers out of the way so that Israel could have a good crack at the native population. I've searched the Guardian site but I can't find it. I also thought that I remembered a bunch of zionists, all of whom (naturally) support, they said, a two state solution, writing to complain that Pappe was exaggerating, scaremongering or some such. I tried google and faired better. See this from Ilan Pappe on the Electronic Intifada site:
The Lebanon war provided the fog for a while, covering the war crimes in the Gaza Strip. But the policies rage on even after the conclusion of the cease-fire up in the north. It seems that the frustrated and defeated Israeli army is even more determined to enlarge the killing fields in the Gaza Strip. There are no politicians who are able or willing to stop the generals. A daily killing of up to 10 civilians is going to leave few thousands dead each year. This is of course different from genociding a million people in one campaign -- the only inhibition Israel is willing to undertake in the name of the Holocaust memory. But if you double the killing you raise the number to horrific proportions and more importantly you may force a mass eviction in the end of the day outside the Strip -- either in the name of human aid, international intervention or the people's own desire to escape the inferno. But if the Palestinian steadfastness is going to be the response, and there is no reason to doubt that this will the Gazan reaction then the massive killing would continue and increase.
Prophetic and scary stuff written on 2 Sept 2006.
But now can we liken Israel to the nazis? We really are running out of descriptions.
