Insults replace logic in reation to Hamas war

Jonah Goldberg:

'GO back to the oven! You need a big oven, that's what you need!"

This is what one young woman thought passed for acceptable discourse during an anti-Israel rally last week in (of all places) Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Other chants were similarly unlovely. Watch it on YouTube if you like.

But why bother? The Fort Lauderdale outburst is just one window on the up- side-down world of Israel hatred. Across the Islamic world, and in too many points West, it's considered a penetrating and poignant insight to call Zionists the "new Nazis." For instance, in Sunday's Gulf News, Mohammad Abdullah al Mutawa, a sociology professor at United Arab Emirates University, wrote an essay titled "Zionists are the new Nazis." He began: "Today, the whole world stands as a witness to the fact that the Nazi Holocaust was a mere lie, which was devised by the Zionists to blackmail humanity."

At a Saturday protest in New York against Israel's military assault on Gaza, some carried signs that read: "Israel: The Fourth Reich," "Holocaust by Holocaust Survivors," "Stop Israel's Holocaust," "Holocaust in Gaza" and "Stop the Zionist Genocide in Gaza."

Type "Israel" and "Nazi" into any news search engine and you'll be rewarded, or punished, with a bounty of such statements from just the last week or so. Gaza is the new Auschwitz, the Israeli Defense Forces are SS troops . . . I find myself tempted to simply write "et cetera" because it's all so familiar by now. But to do that is to dismiss, and therefore accept, such grotesqueries as trivialities, when in fact such charges are deeply revealing - just not about Israel.

First, let us note that if supposedly all-powerful Israel is dedicated to exterminating the Palestinians, it's doing a bad job. The Palestinian population has only grown since 1948. More Arab citizens live in Israel proper today than did in all of Palestine the year Israel was founded.

Perhaps one reason Israel fails at genocide is that it isn't interested in it? That would explain why Israel warned thousands of Gazans by cell phone to leave homes near Hamas rocket stockpiles. And why, even amid all-out war, it offers aid to enemy civilians. It would even illuminate the otherwise mysterious clamor from Israelis for a viable "peace partner."

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Meanwhile, calls for the complete extermination of Israel are routine. The Hamas charter, invoking the fraudulent "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" as justification, demands Israel's destruction. Hamas exists solely because it is dedicated to the complete obliteration of the "Zionist entity." Remove that "principle" and Hamas is meaningless.

A sick mixture of Holocaust envy and Holocaust denial is the defining spirit of Hamas. Indeed, Holocaust denial passes for a scholarly pursuit not just in Gaza but throughout much of the Arab and Muslim world.

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Ethnic hatred and religious bigotry can warp reason well beyond the powers of logic. That explains much of the anti Israel nonsense coming out of the Middle East. In the US, the anti war pukes have never been strong on logic and they usually just use mindless chants and rhymes to convey the depths of their ignorance.

I must admit that I never cease to be amazed at the hatred some hold for Jews. My own experience with Jewish friends over a life time has always been very positive and I cannot imagine hating them. I still remember my surprise when I learned about the holocaust while reading William Shryer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich while I was in high school. I just could not imagine that kind of hatred toward some of the nicest people I have ever known.