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Dec. 2, 2008

Melanie Phillips: The Mumbai atrocity is a wake-up call for a frighteningly unprepared world

Stratfor Geopolitical Intelligence Report: Strategic Motivations for the Mumbai Attack

Dec. 1, 2008

Max Freidlander, as told to Jacklyn C. Wadler: India Inkings

Mark Steyn: Whodunit!?

Nov. 28, 2008

Rabbi Ahron Rapps: An evil seed that didn't have to be

Melanie Phillips: Carpe diem --- or can we all relax now?

Nov. 26, 2008

Michael Feldberg: Meet the Orthodox Jew who laid groundwork for scientific development of ordnance that undergirds America's current world leadership

Andrea Simantov: Shades of life

Nov. 25, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : Getting Emotional For Influence

The Kosher Gourmet by Ethel G. Hofman : Thanksiving feast!

Nov. 24, 2008

Rabbi S. Binyomin Ginsberg: 'I just Became a grandchild!'

Barry Rubin: Don't flatter your enemies, protect your friends

Nov. 21, 2008

Rabbi A. Henach Leibowitz: Money matters?

Caroline B. Glick: Civilization walks the plank

Nov. 20, 2008

Rabbi Avi Shafran: Bronfman's blindness

The Kosher Gourmet By Linda Gassenheimer: Portobellos add a hearty flavor to pasta with pesto

Nov, 19, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : Spread the wealth? Jewish tradition and income equality

Elliot B. Gertel: 'Mad Men': Tackling prejudices or reinforcing them?

Nov, 18, 2008

Dr. Debby Schwarz Hirschhorn: The End of the Age of Reason

Jonathan Tobin: Does Barack + Bibi = Disaster?

Nov, 17, 2008

Rabbi Yonason Goldson: The End of the Age of Reason

Diana West: Gulling Americans into making terror legit?

Nov, 14, 2008

Rabbi A. Henach Leibowitz: The Power of Spiritual Inertia

Caroline B. Glick: The perils ahead

Nov, 13, 2008

Stratfor Intelligence Briefing: How Bush and Obama together could change the Middle East dynamic

The Kosher Gourmet by JeanMarie Brownson: Sweet and savory, crispy and meltingly tender bestilla

Nov, 12, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : Tyrannical Co-Workers

Michael Doyle: High Court to consider today donated monuments that may have religious messages in public parks

Nov, 11, 2008

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.: Will Obama stop government officials considering institutionalizing financial jihad?

Jonathan Tobin: They Will Decide Their Own Fate

Nov, 10, 2008

Rabbi Avi Shafran: $8 billion, modern-day Tower of Babel being built?

Barry Rubin: A letter to the president-elect from a Middle East realist

Nov, 7, 2008

Rabbi Francis Nataf: Of Children and Immortality

Caroline B. Glick: Livni's Obama strategy

Nov, 6, 2008

Rabbi Yonason Goldson: How I tricked a classroom of apathetic students into grasping the fallacy of moral relativism

The Kosher Gourmet By Gina Kim: Tips for making the perfect soup --- includes recipes

Nov, 5, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist By Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Destitute Debtors

Bruce Weinstein: 'Religulos': Bad title,even worse movie

Nov, 4, 2008

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.: Treasury Dept. submits to Shariah law

Frida Ghitis: A surprise for Obama in the Middle East

Nov, 3, 2008

Jonathan Rosenblum: Who says Jews are Smart?

Jonathan Tobin: Was He Wrong About Everything?

March 22, 2007

J-Rhythms with Avraham Rosenblum: JWR's cutting-edge music program showcasing performers -- singers, song writers, musicians, and bands -- who learn and live the Torah lifestyle (OUR NEWEST IGODCAST !)

Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review August 1, 2005 / 25 Tammuz, 5765

Nazi echoes in the Gaza ‘disengagement’?

By Jeff Jacoby

Jeff Jacoby
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | A reader e-mails a link to a news item from Gaza, where some Jewish residents have "tattooed" their national ID numbers on their arms, Auschwitz-style — a bitter gesture of protest against their forthcoming expulsion. My correspondent's comment is blunt. "Misusing Holocaust language and imagery," she writes. "Utterly disgusting — makes me have less sympathy for them."

In just over two weeks, tens of thousands of Israeli troops are scheduled to carry out Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's "disengagement" — the forced evacuation of every Jewish resident in Gaza and parts of the West Bank. In a country deeply scarred by Holocaust memories, it was inevitable that the wholesale transfer of more than 9,000 Jews from communities where some of them have lived for decades would trigger angry — and anguished — comparisons to Nazism.

In the village of Elei Sinai, some residents plan to wear concentration-camp uniforms or yellow stars with the word "Jude" on the day they are expelled. A Likud Party faction opposed to disengagement calls it "an order the likes of which were last signed in German." A member of Israel's parliament set off a storm when he said, "Maybe we killed Eichmann for no reason, because he was also just following orders."

Such Nazi allusions have been sharply condemned. The Anti-Defamation League called them an "inexcusable perversion of history," and Yad Vashem, Israel's renowned Holocaust research institute, warned that they "damage the memory of the Shoah." Some of Sharon's allies on the left, oblivious to such niceties as freedom of speech, even proposed making the non-historical use of Holocaust terminology an offense punishable by up to seven years in prison.

Let's be clear: You don't have to support disengagement to agree that this Nazi-talk is grotesque. The Israeli army is not the Gestapo. The peaceful Jewish residents who will be forced from the homes and land they love are not being sent to gas chambers. Sharon's plan may be delusional — instead of enabling Israelis to "disengage" from Palestinian violence, it will bring them more of it, and in deadlier forms — but it isn't the Final Solution.

And yet . . .

And yet there is no getting around the fact that Israel is about to become the first modern, Western nation in more than 60 years to forcibly uproot a whole population — men, women, children, babies — solely because they are Jews. There is no getting around the fact that the forthcoming expulsions are rooted in the belief that any future Palestinian state must be Judenrein — emptied of its Jews. And while it goes without saying that Sharon and every member of his government abominate the Nazis and all they stood for, there is no getting around the fact that disengagement is meant to appease an enemy that has always regarded the genocidal hatred of Jews in a very different light.

Long before there were "occupied territories," Haj Amin El-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem and leader of Palestine's Arabs, urged Hitler to "solve the problem of the Jewish elements in Palestine and other Arab countries . . . by the same method that the question is now being settled in the Axis countries." When five Arab armies invaded the newborn Israel in 1948, the secretary-general of the Arab League vowed to wage "a war of extermination and a momentous massacre, which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades."

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More than half a century later, how much has changed? The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, is the author of a book denying the Holocaust and claiming that Zionists collaborated with the Nazis against the Jews of Europe. Palestinian Authority TV broadcasts poisonous diatribes, like one Friday sermon by Sheik Ibrahim Mudeiris. "The Jews are a virus resembling AIDS, from which the entire world suffers," he preached. "The Jews will not enjoy a life of tranquility under our rule, because they are treacherous by nature and have been throughout history."

Israel's withdrawal from Gaza changes nothing, the senior Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahard said recently. He told an Italian newspaper that Israel's existence would be unacceptable even if it were to retreat to the armistice lines of 1949. "In the end, Palestine . . . must become Muslim," he insisted. "And in the long term Israel will disappear from the face of the Earth."

The abandonment of Gaza and northern Samaria plays directly into the hands of the haters. The sight of Jewish troops expelling Jewish families from their homes and schools will do nothing to promote Arab-Israeli peace. It will reinforce instead the notion that any Jewish presence is intolerable on land the Arabs claim for themselves. And if that is an argument against Jewish life in Gaza, it is also an argument against Jewish life in Israel.

Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.

Jeff Jacoby is a Boston Globe columnist. Comment by clicking here.

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