Legitimate criticism is not anti-Semitism

Wednesday I wrote an article comparing the rhetoric in current usage in Israel today with the rhetoric of the Nazi propaganda machine in the 1930s and 1940s. I have since (predictably) been accused of anti-Semitism, among other charges.

At a glance I find it interesting that criticism of this article – and everyone is welcome to criticise, by the way… I criticise others myself, so it’s par for the course – has been polarised between two opposite extremes. It’s not just Israeli sympathisers who label me racist for criticising the actions of the Israeli military in Gaza. Holocaust deniers have separately accused me of misrepresenting the intentions of the (presumably benevolent) Nazi government of Germany, and of reproducing “what the victorious Jewish propaganda machine has been feeding the world”.

Let’s take these opposite reactions one by one. I find it strange that there are still people who believe that the Jews somehow ‘won’ the Second World War, and as victors were in a position to re-write its history. Even without taking the Holocaust itself into consideration, there is evidence – accepted even by Holocaust deniers – that the Jewish populations of Nazi-controlled territories were ghettoised and held in internment camps, and that many died as a direct result of the inhumane conditions in which they were kept. Some died even after the camps they were held in were liberated in 1945. And we’ve all seen irrefutable evidence in the form of photos and footage of emaciated, atrophic and dehumanised internees huddled behind barbed wire fences.

Norman Lowell himself, who in a sense epitomises Holocaust denial in Malta, admitted all this when interviewed on local TV a few years ago. The main differences between his view of what happened and the accepted version of nearly all historians concerns the precise number of fatalities, and the exact circumstance of their deaths. Holocaust deniers argue that the death toll was far lower than the figure of six million; and that they were not systematically exterminated, but died as a result of the appalling conditions in which they were incarcerated.

Exactly how this is supposed to make everything hunky dory is a mystery that has befuddled me ever since. So the Nazis didn’t kill Jews in gas chambers; they merely allowed them to die of starvation, deprivation and disease in prison camps. Changes the whole picture, huh? I think not.

Even if it did, I for one do not accept for a moment that stories of the Holocaust were invented by Zionist activists to maximise their profit from World War II (which is what the conspiracy theory will ultimately have us all believe). Apart from the overwhelming evidence to the contrary – which I don’t have space to go into here in any great detail – there is the small matter of the sheer improbability of how six million deaths could have somehow been fabricated, without anyone ever noticing.

The enormity of this claim requires enormity of proof; yet the ‘proof’ that has so far been supplied is all entirely circumstantial. For the most part it involves fanciful notions that the crematoria in Auschwitz and elsewhere were used for the purposes of cremating people who had already died of natural causes… without a shred of documentary evidence to back this up. Nor does this interpretation explain why the administrators of these concentration camps were so confident that such large facilities for corpse-disposal would be required in the first place.

Above all it does not explain the abundance of documentary evidence that the Nazis did indeed plan to murder the entire Jewish population, and executed this plan wherever possible. Most of the evidence presented at the Nuremburg trials was collected from records left behind by the Third Reich itself. And oddly enough, the surviving perpetrators did not themselves deny the Holocaust, even though they had every interest to do so (not least, to save their own skin). This is from the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum… and please note that if the source is too biased for you, all the testimony mentioned here was thoroughly documented during the trials themselves.

“Three key perpetrators gave evidence directly related to the Holocaust: Hermann Göring, the highest official of the Nazi state tried at Nuremberg, testified openly and frankly about the persecution of German Jews from the rise of the Nazi party to power in 1933 until the outbreak of war in 1939; Otto Ohlendorf testified directly about his unit, Einsatzgruppe D, killing 90,000 Jews in the southern Ukraine in 1941; and the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoess, testified frankly about the gassing of more than a million Jews at the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing centre during the war. All three claimed that they carried out the legitimate orders of the state.”

Yet 70 years later we have people who were not even born at the time, and who have no interest in this matter at all other than to discredit history for their own political purposes, trying to convince us that the architects of the Holocaust had no idea what they were talking about when they frankly admitted murdering millions of Jews between 1933 and 1945.

I’ll leave you to decide whom to believe. Quite frankly I’ve wasted enough time on this type of criticism already.

The second line of criticism is not quite so easy to dismiss, because it draws on an eminently human knee-jerk response to any form of criticism, which is both dishonest and misleading. On one level it seeks to redirect blame by playing the part of the victim and not the aggressor. On another it seeks to deflect discussion away from the real issue - i.e., a large-scale extermination of people, around 80% of them civilians – by intimidating anyone who complains about it.

We see this reaction all the time in all sorts of other contexts, too. Criticism of the atrocities committed by Isis is dismissed by some quarters as ‘Islamophobia’… as though one has to be viscerally inimical towards Muslims in general to express horror or dismay when Christian, Shia or Sunni populations are massacred in unthinkable ways by a murderous, fanatical Muslim sect.

Even here in Malta, where we have been sheltered from these realities, it is all too often that legitimate concerns about immigration are dismissed as ‘racism’ or ‘xenophobia’.

What all these responses have in common is that they simply do not address the legitimacy of the complaint that is being raised in each individual circumstance. In fact, the statement that criticism of Israel is ‘anti-Semitic’ does not even begin to answer the claims it seeks to dispel: it ignores altogether the question of whether Israel is using grossly disproportionate force to counter a threat that is already under its control.

Whether the person making this claim is ‘anti-Semitic’ or otherwise is actually irrelevant. Accusing such people – myself including, for that is what I believe also – of hatred towards the Jewish race is not only a non-sequitur, but also a rather transparent deviation tactic. It sidesteps the multifarious problems associated with this conflict by imputing malicious intentions to anyone who does not buy into one’s own version of events. That is a recognised logical fallacy that goes by the name of ‘ad hominem’… in other words, schoolyard name-calling.

And it’s not very clever name-calling, either. When people protested against South African apartheid in the 1980s, it didn’t mean that they were racist against South Africa’s white population. It simply meant that they recognised an injustice where it was being perpetrated, and said so.

The same applies manifestly to the prevailing situation in Gaza today. One can, of course, sympathise with the exasperation of having to deal with a seemingly interminable stream of rocket-fire into one’s own territory. But it becomes impossible to extend that sympathy to a justification of the retaliatory murder of hundreds of civilians, including women, children, the elderly and the infirm. It becomes utterly ridiculous when the same argument is also extended to justify the shelling of UN-controlled safe havens, including two schools, at a time when thousands of civilians are seeking refuge therein because they have nowhere else to go. And yet none of the comments alleging that I am ‘anti-Semitic’ for pointing this out offer any response to the central argument – made not just by myself, but by thousands of other people – that all this constitutes a war crime, and that… yes, war crimes can be compared, even at the distance of 70 years.

That this constitutes a war crime is not, by the way, my own interpretation. War crimes are defined by such conventions as Geneva and The Hague, and at the risk of oversimplification, they include: “murdering, mistreating, or deporting civilian residents of an occupied territory to slave labour camps; murdering or mistreating prisoners of war or civilian internees; forcing protected persons to serve in the forces of a hostile power; killing hostages; killing or punishing spies or other persons convicted of war crimes without a fair trial; wantonly destroying cities, towns, villages, or any object not warranted by military necessity” (Wikipedia entry, ‘War crimes’).

The first and the last of those definitions is very clearly applicable to the shelling of civilian targets in Gaza. I fail to see how anyone can plausibly argue otherwise. The second could also apply if we accept the premise that Gaza is, effectively, an internment camp thanks to an air, sea and land blockade that has been defined by the United Nations as ‘illegal’. There is evidence that the fourth (killing spies) applies more to Hamas than to Israel. So I must be racist against Palestinians, too, because I believe they should likewise be tried for any war crimes committed in this conflict.

And of course the United Nations must also be an officially anti-Semitic organisation. In response to the shelling of two UN schools by Israeli forces this week, UN secretary-general Ban Ki Moon said that “nothing is more shameful than attacking sleeping children” (a dreadful example of racism directed at the world’s Jewish population, don’t you think?) Separately the equally ‘anti-Semitic’ UN deputy secretary general, Jan Eliasson, quoted from the Geneva Convention, which unequivocally prohibits attacks on schools and hospitals.

The inescapable truth is that both these people are simply calling a spade by its proper name. Israel’s response to the threat of Hamas rockets – which have so far killed three Israeli civilians, to Gaza’s 800+ – has indeed been grossly disproportionate; its indiscriminate shelling of civilian targets is manifestly illegal and abhorrent; and this is all greatly exacerbated by the fact that Palestinian civilians don’t have any alternative but to expose themselves to the risk of death and injury because there is clearly no such thing as a ‘safe haven’ in that entire 362 square-kilometre strip.

This is the reality in Gaza today, and no amount of name-calling will change it.