Dirty Pro-Zionist Propaganda

This is Jewish Nazi Gaza Camp/Warsaw Ghetto

Auschwitz wasn’t any kind of positive learning experience, and the overwhelmingly majority of the Jews who had anything to do with the Holocaust learned nothing from it because they were killed by it. It wasn’t a learning experience and it wasn’t an experience which made people better, or more left-wing, or more anti-racist. There was no silver lining to the Holocaust. —David Hirsh

I am not going to say anything here for now about the current, awful round of Israel/Palestine conflict. I haven’t worked out my thoughts and feel too much anguish to be able to articulate a response. The denseness of the fog of this war – and the manifold untruths, fake pics, claims, counterclaims and viral lies circulating in the media and especially on social media – makes it hard to call what’s actually going on.

But something that I do want to comment on is the inappropriate comparisons people make in discussing the situation.

For instance, I’ve seen pro-Israelis claim Israel is experiencing a 9/11 24/7, because of Hamas rockets, and I’ve seen anti-Israelisclaim that Palestine is experiencing the same thing. Of course, the notion is ridiculous: 3000 people died in a single day in the September 2001 attack (not counting the rescue workers who died later as a result). 3000 is greater the death toll of the entire Second Intifada. Even Assad’s Ghouta chemical attack killed only half that number; even Syria is not experiencing a 9/11 every day.

But for me the most pernicious comparison is of Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto. Pernicious because the two events are utterly incomparable, and additionally offensive because it uses Jewish suffering against Jews.

Melvin Goodman, one of those ex-CIA paleocon wingnuts beloved of Counterpunch, wrote a stupid piece there comparing the two, for example noting that unemployment was a problem in the Ghetto, just like Gaza. Marginally smarter, Glenn Greenwald didn’t invoke Warsaw, but did compare Netanyahu to Goebbels, then disingenuously added that to compare two things isn’t to say they’re the same. A retired academic writing for MondoWeiss uses the Warsaw Ghetto because an Auschwitz comparison is not quite right; what’s going on in Gaza, thankfully, is “not exactly the same” as the actual death camps, but is comparable to the Ghetto.

Here’s some more examples:

What do these comparisons actually mean?The Twitter account RealTimeWWII, a project of history graduate Alwyn Collinson, has been tweeting the history of the Second World War as it unfolded on this day 72 years ago. It is now up to 1942: the Warsaw Ghetto. It makes for difficult reading.

In the Warsaw Ghetto, 400,000 Jews were forced into an area of 3.4 square km (1.3 square miles). Gaza is 139 square miles with a population of 1.8 million. The population density of Gaza is high: 13,069.1/sq mi, twice that of Tokyo (but much less than, say Manila’s 111,000, Chennai’s 67,000, Macau’s 55,000, or Paris’ 54,000). The population density of the Warsaw Ghetto was 307,692.In the Ghetto, nearly a quarter died of starvation and disease (that’s comparable to 450,000* Gazans). Of those that remained, most were taken to Treblinka and killed, along with 2000 Romani people and some million other Jews. 7000 Jews were taken from the Ghetto to the camp every day in the summer of 1942. Around 20,000 survived after less than three years.That is what genocide looks like. I don’t think that is what Gaza, however bad it gets, looks like. I understand your anguish about Gaza, but please don’t make this kind of comparison.

For pointing out that these comparisons are not on, here is the kind of response one gets:

*I got this number wildly wrong in the first version of this post.

Posted by bob