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The readers of the Boston Globe sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn, for their paper sways dizzily from dhimmitude to anti-dhimmitude -- attempting to be even-handed, I guess. When evening quickens faintly in the street, wakening the appetites of life in some and to others bringing the Boston Globe, mount the steps and ring the bell, turning wearily, as one would turn to nod good-bye to Hugh Fitzgerald, if the street were time and he at the end of the street, and tell Cousin Harriet to take solace in this piece: "Muslims and the Holocaust," by Cathy Young in the Globe, with thanks to Scaramouche:
RECENTLY IN England, four Muslim-staffed committees appointed to advise Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Cabinet on issues related to Islam have come up with a recommendation: Get rid of an official event viewed as offensive to Muslims. What event would that be? A celebration of the Crusades, perhaps? No, Holocaust Memorial Day.In the words of one committee member, ''The very name Holocaust Memorial Day sounds too exclusive to many young Muslims. It sends out the wrong signals: that the lives of one people are to be remembered more than others."
That ''one people," of course, are the Jews.
The committees aren't exactly proposing that the Holocaust commemoration be scrapped outright. They want it to be folded into a ''Genocide Memorial Day" that will also include such crimes as the slaughter of the Tutsis in Rwanda and the massacres of Bosnian Muslims by the Milosevic regime.
Unfortunately, even against the bloody backdrop of the 20th century, there are strong reasons to regard the Nazi extermination of the Jews as a unique atrocity. It was the first, and so far the only time that, as Cornell University historian Stephen Katz put it in his 1994 book ''The Holocaust in Historical Context," that ''a state set out, as a matter of intentional principle and actualized policy, to annihilate physically every man, woman, and child belonging to a specific people."
But the problem with the proposal goes far deeper. The other ''genocides" for which they want recognition include the Israeli killings of Palestinians.
Clearly, Palestinians have suffered under the occupation. Over 4,000 have been killed since the renewal of violence five years ago. Some of these dead were completely innocent victims; others were fighters, violent protesters, or suicide bombers. (Nearly 1,000 Israelis have died as well.) This death toll is tragic; but to call it ''genocide" is to cheapen the word.
This is inadequate. It is true that some were fighters, violent protesters, and suicide bombers. It is also true that some were innocent victims. But the number of those innocents was inflated by the Palestinian Arabs themselves, by their deliberate practice of staging attacks from civilian areas, so that when the Israelis retaliated they would kill civilians -- and thus provide useful propaganda.
But in any case, read it all.
Posted by Robert at September 19, 2005 8:30 AM
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Robert---
If you feel the need to employ The Boston Evening Transcript again, try the anecdote about the Harvard entomologist correctly identifying its flapping pages in "Speak Memory" -- it's a much funnier use of that most Boston-Brahmin of papers, the S. S. Pierce of papers, than anything thought up by that humorless son of a St. Louis furrier whom you insist on liking.
Posted by: Hugh![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/nav-commenters.gif)
at September 19, 2005 9:17 AM
Catherine Young, a contributing editor at REASON Magazine, for some unfathomable reason managed to be hired by the Op/Ed editors at The Boston Globe. Unfathomable, because she is perfectly sensible, and has not panned out, I am sure, in the way that those intensely female-aware female editors who control that page expected she would -- with something like their opinions and their take on the world. They were relying on her womanness, possibly a kind of "neutral" voice that they thought would end up expressing their views -- and hasn't. Ooops. Won't make that mistake again. For Young turned out to be just a little too -- well, a little too much a voice of REASON, and not merely the "voice of a woman." So she is one of those who manages to balance such incurably misleading commentators on the world asthe now-retired but still odiously Israel-bashing H. D. S. Greenway (who never referred to, in all of his years of heading the Globe's Middle East Bureau in Jerusalem, the matter of Islam, and seemed a year ago genuinely surprised to learn that the Copts were having any difficulties in Egypt -- Peroncel-Hugoz Greenway isn't), and the outside contributors from sophisticiated Europe we are all supposed to enjoy, such as Jonathan Powers and earlier, William Pfaff -- both of them absolutely predictable in their views of Islam (positive), America (negative), Israel(unspeakable).
Young is asymptotically approaching the truth about Islam, but as Robert notes above, not fast enough, and not close enough, for some of us. And it is clear she hasn't yet gone to the texts, but I suspect she will. REASON Magazine is connected to people such as the Humanist Society (which rings quaintly), and the Humanists are the kind of people whose once-newfangled skepticism about religion now seems to some so old-fashioned. Still, in the context of the Globe, where the Israel-bashing H.D.S. Greenway comes out of his bow-tied, Chinese-vased retirement once a week to spread his venom, and over on the editorial page (which isn't bad sometimes) that cluck-clucking over the sensible remarks of Romney about mosque-monitoring (which should be taken note of by those for whom a candidate's attitude toward Islam is the single most important determinant of their support), Young is a welcome addition. She also knows Russian and the Soviet Union, two points in her favor. She has to tread warily, no doubt. And hasn't yet focussed as much as she should on the teachings and history of Islam. But let her read a few books by Bat Ye'or, and Ibn Warraq's "Why I Am Not a Muslim" and his essay on Islam and Fascism, and she will be up to speed, and smuggling more and more of the truth in. And The Globe would be far worse than it is, without her.
Posted by: Hugh at September 19, 2005 9:19 AM
Re: the number of Palestinians killed in Intifada II, it goes far beyond the IDF killing non-combatants because the terrorist deliberately set up shop in their midsts. The dead include everything from Palestinians murdered by Palestinians because they were "collaborators" to the suicide bombers themselves. Last summer, Hamas had the gall to list as a martyr as teenaged boy who was killed by terrorists trying to launch rockets at Israeli targets from the family farm. The "4,000" is a gross exageration, whereas Israel's losses are entirely unarmed civilians.
Posted by: waterdragon52 at September 19, 2005 11:45 AM
Quote: This death toll is tragic; but to call it ''genocide" is to cheapen the word.
World has no qualms abt labelling 2002 Gujarat Riots in which 1000 Muslims died as Genocide.
Posted by: Vikrant_Camberleykar at September 19, 2005 1:03 PM
Genocide?
Only one word to say.
Armenian 1915
Sorry that's 2 words.
at September 19, 2005 2:10 PM
Young's article also reveals the nagging, persistence necessity of evoking analogies with other religions in speaking about Islam. One could write about Catholocism, for instance, and not experience a sensation, a twitch, a knock to one's thoughts, that compelled a comparison, a reference, an analogy with another religion. But that seems impossible with Islam. No critical commentary, no argument can go with the required, "of course in Christianity..." or worse the generalization "as with any religion..."
Do folks remember their dreary critical thinking textbooks, which now employ cartoons to lengthen attention spans? Even the worst at reasoning should remember that generalizations and analogies are never easy and usually bad. How about just talking about one thing, Islam? Islam and only Islam. It deserves not only a spotlight in discussion but microphones, recording equipment, cameras: let's talk about Islam and only Islam, and let's get it everywhere on film, on tape, on record for all to see and hear; it seems that only in this way will the world begin to believe its lying eyes.
Posted by: JTF at September 19, 2005 2:16 PM
Ms. Young concludes her editorial:
Nor is it to say that Islam is inherently intolerant: All religions and ethnic groups have their bigots and haters. For a variety of reasons, the bigotry and hate in Islam are perilously close to the mainstream.
It's amusing (and aggravating) to watch Western observers inching closer and closer with their cautious baby steps to that perilous precipice they continue to refuse to face, that Islam itself is the deadly problem. How long will they continue to inch forward, by increments so minute they will like Zeno's arrow never reach the mark? There seem to be 1,001 ways to twist that horrible Datum, that Islam itself is the deadly problem, into pretzels of logic and interpretation that only continue to keep us, paradoxically perilously far from, precisely by being perilously close to, that Non-Cigar Islam.
Hugh noted:
Young is asymptotically approaching the truth about Islam, but as Robert notes above, not fast enough, and not close enough, for some of us.
Speaking of asymptotes, I quote Lawrence (just substitute "Muslim" for "Arab" while reading):
This people doesn't go beyond primary colors, especially white and black: it ever sees the world following a straight line. A people filled with certitude, despising doubt -- that modern crown of thorns of the Western man. An Arab isn't capable of comprehending our metaphysical difficulties, the questions that we pose for ourselves. The Arab knows not but that which is true, and that which is not,that which one believes, and that which one doesn't: all our hesitations, our reservations, are foreign to them. It is not only the Arabs' view that abides in the black-and-white; it is also their interior equipment. Their thoughts pass with the greatest facility from one extreme to the other. They move spontaneously among superlatives. Sometimes, the greatest inconsistencies seem, by them, to be seized EN BLOC. They exclude all compromise and follow the logic of their ideas to the absurd conclusion, without seen anything incompatible among their opposed conclusions. Their serene judgment oscillates with sangfroid from asymptote to asymptote so imperturbably that they seem hardly conscious of their vertiginous leap from the one to the other.
Let's just hope we don't wait until more asymptotically alacritous Muslims close the gap for our retarded cognition with yet more suicidal collisions, from civilization to civilization, of mass destruction, such a small step for a lunatic Muslim, but still, unfortunately, a giant leap for the rest of Mankind.
at September 19, 2005 3:35 PM
---
Unfortunately, even against the bloody backdrop of the 20th century, there are strong reasons to regard the Nazi extermination of the Jews as a unique atrocity. It was the first, and so far the only time that, as Cornell University historian Stephen Katz put it in his 1994 book ''The Holocaust in Historical Context," that ''a state set out, as a matter of intentional principle and actualized policy, to annihilate physically every man, woman, and child belonging to a specific people."
---
I've heard it suggested that the main reason the Nazis thought they could get away with exterminating the Jews is because the Turks had already got away with exterminating the Armenians. The events are too similar for coincidence - death camps, gassing, killing by injections, burning the bodies, etc. The Turks set an example which the Nazis simply followed.
at September 19, 2005 6:17 PM
Armenia
East Timor
Darfur and South Sudan
There now, does the Ummah feel cozy or should we add a few more examples to the list?
Posted by: Chatillon at September 21, 2005 12:00 PM
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