Israel & Gaza

Most people in the Western world spent at least some of their education being taught about the Holocaust. We know some of the details of the tragedy, some of the methods, and that 6,000,000 Jews were executed, their only crime; being Jewish. Yet today, just 60 years later, we allow odious men such as UN Human Rights Council members Richard Falk and Renee Zieglerto belittle the suffering of the Jewish people at the hands of the Nazis, by comparing it to the situation of the Palestinians in Gaza. They call Gaza a concentration camp, and the Israeli soldiers who protect the borders concentration camp guards. Frankly I do not see how one can make a comparison between the two, and I would ask anyone who supports their assertion these questions. Where are the gas chambers in Gaza? Where are the furnaces to incinerate the bodies of the millions of dead? Where are the starvation and the disease? Where are the Israeli scientists torturing Gazans in sadistic experiments? Where are the daily trainloads of Palestinians being brought to Gaza to be slaughtered? The answer, of course, to all of these questions is: “In Auschwitz, in Treblinka and in Buchenwald, but not in Gaza”. For these things were the hallmarks of the Holocaust, not the actions of Israel and its soldiers.
So here we find ourselves, just 60 years on, listening to sickening comparisons between the abomination of the Holocaust, and the blockade of the Palestinians in Gaza. And we must ask ourselves a question: Are we prepared to continue the belittling of the Holocaust until the horrors committed during it no longer mean anything to us? For there can be no doubt that, for every public figure who denies the Holocaust, or compares it to something which does not even approach the suffering of the Jews, the world detaches itself a little more from understanding the true inhumanity of the Nazis. This is doubly so for UN officials, representatives of a body created to protect the world from a repeat of the Nazi regime and their evil actions. Their words carry far more weight than normal people, because they represent the body designed to prevent a repeat of the Holocaust. “If even they belittle the Holocaust”, people will ask themselves, “perhaps the Holocaust wasn’t as bad as some people make it out to be”. Is this what the UN is hoping to achieve, for people to question the suffering of the Jews during the Holocaust? If you listen to some of its members it becomes clear that this assertion may not be so far-fetched. The President of your member state, Iran, has repeatedly denied the extent of the Holocaust, if not the existence of the event itself. Yet what has the UN done to censure him, and others like him? Nothing. His representative still sits in the General Assembly, safe in the knowledge that his leader can publicly say whatever he likes, so long, it seems, as it is aimed at the Jews.
The UN, then, has a decision to make. Does it agree with the assessments of Falk and Ziegler? Does it agree that Gaza today resembles a Nazi concentration camp? Or, does it see that there can be no comparison between the systematic extermination of the Jews in the concentration camps, and the blockade of the Palestinians in Gaza? If the answer is the latter Falk and Ziegler will be recognised as having attempted to belittle the suffering of the Jews during the Holocaust, removed from their positions and never allowed to represent the UN again. If the answer, however, is the former, then I begin to wonder what part the UN will play in the destruction of Israel.