BUENOS AIRES’S LESSON
Editorial
Jerusalem Post, March 15, 2012
On March 17, 1992, at 2:42 p.m., a pickup truck loaded with explosives driven by “Abu Yasser,” an Argentinean man who had converted to Islam, smashed into the front of the Israeli Embassy on the corner of Arroyo and Suipacha streets in Buenos Aires. In the ensuing blast, 29 people were killed [and 242 wounded], including four Israelis. Most of the victims were Argentine civilians, many of them children. Until the 1994 AMIA [Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina] bombing, [which killed 85 people and injured more than 300], it was the deadliest attack on an Israeli diplomatic mission.
In a statement claiming responsibility for the bombing, Islamic Jihad, an organization that receives funding and training from Iran, praised Abu Yasser who “pounded like a bolt of lighting on a terrorist Zionist base in Argentina, obliterating it in a split second.” Islamic Jihad went on to vow that the “open-ended war” against the “criminal Israeli enemy” would not cease until Israel was “wiped out of existence.”
Buenos Aires’s Jewish community will mark the 20th anniversary of the attack this weekend with a ceremony, a rock concert and a “Today I Turn 20” ad campaign that will focus on people who could have been killed in the attack but weren’t.
Unfortunately, a recent spate of developments involving Iran serves to punctuate how little has changed in the two decades since the Buenos Aires attack. As Argentina’s Jews commemorate a tragic incident of the past, a coalition of terrorist forces spread across the globe and linked to Iran is working hard to generate more Jewish tragedies.
Just this week, Azerbaijan’s security forces arrested 22 people suspected of plotting to attack the Israeli and American embassies in Baku. Suspects trained, funded and armed by Iranian intelligence allegedly also planned to target the Jewish Agency’s offices and other Jewish organizations. Also this week, India officially confirmed what Israel has been saying from the beginning—that Iran was behind last month’s attack on the Israeli Embassy in New Delhi. Indian police issued an arrest warrant for three Iranians suspected of being connected to the attack.
Meanwhile, Malaysian authorities, at the request of Thailand, are moving to extradite to Bangkok an Iranian man suspected of being involved in a bomb plot that was to target Israeli diplomats in Bangkok. Masoud Sedaghatzadeh was arrested at Kuala Lumpur’s international airport on February 15, a day after a bomb unintentionally went off in a Bangkok apartment. Two other Iranians, including a man whose legs were blown when he tried to hurl a bomb at Thai police, have also been arrested.
[In Israel], the same Iranian-backed, trained and funded Islamic Jihad responsible for the 1992 bombing in Buenos Aires has been the driving force behind the barrage of more than 300 projectiles—including Kassam and Grad rockets—fired at towns in the South since [last] Friday.
The Islamic Republic has been spearheading international terrorism for decades. Adding urgency to this terrorist threat is Iran’s steady march toward the attainment of nuclear weapons. We dare not imagine Iranian-sponsored terrorist activities backed up by the threat of a nuclear Armageddon.
Already in 1993, just a year after the Buenos Aires attack, prime minister Yitzhak Rabin warned of the existential threat presented by Iran’s nuclear program. Successive Israeli governments and American Jewish organizations have advocated painful sanctions against Tehran. But as Iran continued to support terrorism while, in parallel, investing in its nuclear program, the international community refrained until just recently from applying painful sanctions or taking other steps against Iran, in part to avoid damaging efforts toward “engagement.”
However, after years of procrastination based on the false hope that Iran’s leaders would somehow change their ways, the tide finally seems to be changing. Standing side-by-side with British Prime Minister David Cameron at the White House, US President Barack Obama warned Iran Wednesday that the window of opportunity for a diplomatic solution was “shrinking.” “Meet your international obligations or face the consequences,” he said.
In the 20 years since the bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, Iran’s mullahs have made it abundantly clear that they are a threat to Western civilization that must be stopped. We pray that the international community has finally internalized this message. If not, Israel will be forced to act alone.
REMEMBERING THE MASSACRE
Giulio Meotti
Jerusalem Post, March 14, 2012
There is no better time than the first anniversary of the Itamar massacre [March 11] to call for a halt to the demonization of “the settlers,” the thousands of Jews who live beyond the “Green Line” and their reduction to second-class citizenship. They are Jews who live in constant uncertainty, having no idea whether they will keep the homes for which they have worked hard and risked much. The manner in which these Israeli citizens are being portrayed is disconcerting. It will be remembered as a seminal case in the history of blood libels.
These citizens have been called “leeches,” “snakes,” “vicious,” “primitives,” “medieval,” “obscurantists,” “corrupt” and “parasites.” They are the target for the arrows of Israel haters, both domestic and foreign. The media paint them as being separate from Klal Yisrael. Their villages are branded “illegal” and in the end they find that they themselves have become “illegal beings.” Pariahs. Vilified as a needless burden on the defense budget. They have been chosen as Israel’s scapegoats, the ever-guilty, the Jewish state’s Jews.
Their houses have been demolished, their children traumatized, their businesses ruined.… Their human and democratic rights are often trampled underfoot and disregarded.… A sinister equivalence has been created between their caravans in the wilderness and suicide bombers, [thereby] turn[ing] their houses into something more urgent to dismantle than the Iranian bomb.
[But in reality], they are the Israelis who choose their place of residence by what’s best for the country, rather than where it’s more comfortable or stylish to live. They are normal people, just persevering and tough, who see themselves as part of a work in progress: Israel. Their lives are a living statement: this is home and for this land we are ready to fight and lay down our lives.… Their commitment is not just to themselves but to the land and people of Israel.…
The memory of friends and relatives who paid with their lives is almost everywhere around their towns.… People in the West ignore the amount of blood spilled in their communities. Overwhelmingly, the Western media and intellectuals ignored and downplayed the terrorist atrocities suffered by the “settlers.” They are like the early pioneers who drained the swamps and fought malaria as they built the foundations of Israel’s land. They are the builders.
Mordechai and Shalom Lapid, who literally gave their lives to build Kiryat Arba and Elon Moreh, are like the four families who in 1891 made their way from Russia to take home in Hadera. Their bodies served as Israel’s frontline, like in 1948, when the heroic resistance of isolated settlements—Mishmar Ha’emek, Ramat Yohanan, Negba and Yad Mordechai—held back the invading Arab armies from attacking the heartland of the newly formed and beleaguered Jewish state.…
I know a settler woman who lives in Hebron’s Tel Rumeida neighborhood, which became a round-the-clock target of shooting and sniper fire. She and her husband have six children.… They arouse hostility for the same reasons Jews throughout history have been reviled—an unwillingness to compromise on issues of Jewish principle. He is studying to become a rabbi and he is a caretaker of the historic graves of Ruth and Yishai which lie next to his home. His wife is studying about children with disabilities. This stubborn woman, like Ruth Fogel of Itamar, is a living, wonderful reminder to the world of what a Jew is.
ISRAEL AND THE PLIGHT OF MIDEAST CHRISTIANS
Michael Oren
Wall Street Journal, March 9, 2012
The church in Bethlehem had survived more than 1,000 years, through wars and conquests, but its future now seemed in jeopardy. Spray-painted all over its ancient stone walls were the Arabic letters for Hamas. The year was 1994 and the city was about to pass from Israeli to Palestinian control. I was meeting with the church’s clergy as an Israeli government adviser on inter-religious affairs. They were despondent but too frightened to file a complaint. The same Hamas thugs who had desecrated their sanctuary were liable to take their lives.
The trauma of those priests is now commonplace among Middle Eastern Christians. Their share of the region’s population has plunged from 20% a century ago to less than 5% today and falling. In Egypt, 200,000 Coptic Christians fled their homes last year after beatings and massacres by Muslim extremist mobs. Since 2003, 70 Iraqi churches have been burned and nearly a thousand Christians killed in Baghdad alone, causing more than half of this million-member community to flee. Conversion to Christianity is a capital offense in Iran, where last month Pastor Yousef Nadarkhani was sentenced to death. Saudi Arabia outlaws private Christian prayer.
As 800,000 Jews were once expelled from Arab countries, so are Christians being forced from lands they’ve inhabited for centuries.
The only place in the Middle East where Christians aren’t endangered but flourishing is Israel. Since Israel’s founding in 1948, its Christian communities (including Russian and Greek Orthodox, Catholics, Armenians and Protestants) have expanded more than 1,000%. Christians are prominent in all aspects of Israeli life, serving in the Knesset, the Foreign Ministry and on the Supreme Court. They are exempt from military service, but thousands have volunteered and been sworn in on special New Testaments printed in Hebrew. Israeli Arab Christians are on average more affluent than Israeli Jews and better-educated.…
In contrast to elsewhere in the Middle East where hatred of Christians is ignored or encouraged, Israel remains committed to its Declaration of Independence pledge to “ensure the complete equality of all its citizens irrespective of religion.” It guarantees free access to all Christian holy places, which are under the exclusive aegis of Christian clergy. When Muslims tried to erect a mosque near the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth, the Israeli government interceded to preserve the sanctity of the shrine.
Israel abounds with such sites (Capernaum, the Hill of the Beatitudes, the birth place of St. John the Baptist) but the state constitutes only part of the Holy Land. The rest, according to Jewish and Christian tradition, is in Gaza and the West Bank. Christians in those areas suffer the same plight as their co-religionists throughout the region.
Since the Hamas takeover of Gaza in 2007, half the Christian community has fled. Christmas decorations and public displays of crucifixes are forbidden. In a December 2010 broadcast, Hamas officials exhorted Muslims to slaughter their Christian neighbors. Rami Ayad, owner of Gaza’s only Christian bookstore, was murdered, his store reduced to ash. This is the same Hamas with which the Palestinian Authority of the West Bank recently signed a unity pact.
Little wonder, then, that the West Bank is also hemorrhaging Christians. Once 15% of the population, they now make up less than 2%. Some have attributed the flight to Israeli policies that allegedly deny Christians economic opportunities, stunt demographic growth, and impede access to the holy sites of Jerusalem. In fact, most West Bank Christians live in cities such as Nablus, Jericho and Ramallah, which are under Palestinian Authority control. All those cities have experienced marked economic growth and sharp population increase—among Muslims.
Israel, in spite of its need to safeguard its borders from terrorists, allows holiday access to Jerusalem’s churches to Christians from both the West Bank and Gaza. In Jerusalem, the number of Arabs—among them Christians—has tripled since the city’s reunification by Israel in 1967.
There must be another reason, then, for the West Bank’s Christian exodus. The answer lies in Bethlehem. Under Israeli auspices, the city’s Christian population grew by 57%. But under the Palestinian Authority since 1995, those numbers have plummeted. Palestinian gunmen seized Christian homes…and then occupied the Church of the Nativity, looting it and using it as a latrine. Today, Christians comprise a mere one-fifth of their holy city’s population.
The extinction of the Middle East’s Christian communities is an injustice of historic magnitude. Yet Israel provides an example of how this trend can not only be prevented but reversed. With the respect and appreciation that they receive in the Jewish state, the Christians of Muslim countries could not only survive but thrive.
(Mr. Oren is Israel’s ambassador to the United States.)
SAYING NO TO ‘DOUBLE GENOCIDE’
Danny Ben-Moshe
Jerusalem Post, March 12, 2012
The Israel-South Africa Chamber of Commerce is hosting as Guest of Honor Lithuanian Foreign Minister Audronius Azubalis at a gala dinner. Given the current Lithuanian government’s policies towards the Holocaust, it is a bizarre choice.
More than 20 years into their post-Soviet eras, Lithuania and other East European nations are understandably and appropriately seeking international acknowledgment for the suffering inflicted on them by the Soviet regime. However, rather than commemorating this in its own right, Lithuania has led the campaign to tie this recognition in with the Holocaust, in a policy known as Double Genocide. By so doing, the recognition they seek for their own suffering under the Soviets ipso facto becomes a policy that distorts and downgrades the Holocaust, and undermines and threatens its memory.
Double Genocide, as this term makes clear, contends that Europe experienced two genocides, the Soviet and the Nazi, and herein lies the first major problem with this policy. To obtain the recognition the Lithuanians deserve they are elevating their oppression into genocide. If the East European experience under the Soviets was the same or similar to the Jewish experience under the Nazis, as Double Genocide contends, then we start to lose the true nature, meaning and uniqueness of the Holocaust.
Beyond the danger posed by the theoretical construct of Double Genocide, we are also able to see the further negative impact it has on memory by the way it is practiced. In the Lithuanian case, this entails turning the supposed Lithuanian “genocide” into the greater of the “two genocides” and as such dwarfs the actual genocide in a country where more Jews were wiped out in terms of percentage than in any other country in Europe: around 95 percent.
Evidence of the elevation of the Lithuanian “genocide” and the concomitant dwarfing of the Holocaust is provided in the national Genocide Museum in Vilnius where three floors are dedicated to Lithuania’s “genocide” at the hands of the Soviets and there is one token room about the Holocaust. So not only does something that is not genocide become genocide, in the process it dwarfs if not conceals the actual genocide.
Yet there is another dimension and consequence of Double Genocide that is equally if not more sinister, and perhaps is part of the political motive which explains why it is occurring. By emphasizing their own suffering Lithuanians avoid accepting their own culpability for unprecedented participation in the actual murder of the country’s 600-year-old Jewish community. Once again, this is evident in the Genocide Museum where the fighters against the Soviets, the white armbanders of the Lithuanian Activist Front, are lauded as heroes. The role of the same heroes as the killers of Jews is completely neglected. Ultimately there is a thin line between the obfuscation that is Double Genocide and the outright lie that is denial.
The manifestation and consequences of Double Genocide take on even more sinister proportions when, in practice, they provide a context to explain the genocide of the country’s Jews. In the worst traditions of anti-Semitism, the Lithuanian Activist Front that led the genocide of Litvak Jewry saw Jews and Communists as one. Therefore, if the Jews are regarded in the public mindset as being responsible for the Lithuanian suffering then what happened to the Jews once the Soviets left in 1941 is understandable: Communists (Jews) killed Lithuanians and then the Communists (Jews) got killed. In practice, then, Double Genocide is not just about distorting the Holocaust, it is effectively about rationalizing and even justifying it.
To truly understand Double Genocide we have to look into the reality on the ground in Lithuania to appreciate that it is a central element in a double game. It is a game where the Foreign Minister can smile beguilingly with Jewish groups in Tel Aviv, when down the road in Rehovot 90-year-old Rachel Margolis is afraid to return to Vilnius for fear of arrest as part of the government’s war crimes campaign against Jewish Holocaust survivor partisans.
We know it is a double game because while the government cites plaques put up to acknowledge what happened to Jews in Lithuania under the Nazis, they simultaneously laud organizations like the Lithuanian Activist Front without a critical word about their role in wiping out Lithuanian Jewry.
It is a double game when Lithuanian embassies around world sponsor Jewish events, while at home the Foreign Minister perpetuates classical anti-Semitic myths by ominously blaming Jews for seeking foreign citizenship laws to claim assets.
We see the double game when the government says it is illegal to deny the Holocaust in Lithuania, but the same law makes it a criminal offense to dispute the notion of double genocide. And on and on the double game goes.
There is a fundamental question about whether Double Genocide is a genuine but misguided policy in the pursuit of recognition, or whether it represents something more pernicious. That can only be answered by looking at the big picture of what is occurring in policy and practice in Lithuania.
Whatever the answer to this moot point it seems incredible that the Foreign Minister, whose response to the 70 Year Declaration on the Final Solution Conference at Wannsee was to quip, “It isn’t possible to find differences between Hitler and Stalin except in their moustache: Hitler’s was smaller,” is received as a Guest of Honor by any Jewish group, let alone a Litvak-based organization, which thereby desecrates the memory of Litvaks whose genocide is obfuscated by Double Genocide and the double game.
This is not a case of one people claiming to have been greater victims than another. Every loss is a tragedy. This is not a competition of numbers, scale or nature of suffering and loss. Rather, it is about the truth behind the numbers, scale and nature of suffering and loss, so that all losses can be genuinely acknowledged and remembered, all of which is the necessary foundation for reconciliation.
The following letter to the editor, written by CIJR’s Publications Chairman,
appeared in the Jerusalem Post on March 15, 2012.
Sir,—Simon Goldberg’s article “Why safeguard a tortured history?” (Comment & Features, March 12) is very eloquently written. Unfortunately, however, by universalizing the Holocaust—comparing it to Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur, for example—Goldberg contradicts his main point: that the Holocaust not be forgotten or treated like any other historical event.
The Holocaust is distinctive precisely because it was a Jewish tragedy—the Jewish people was systematically targeted for genocide. In this respect, survivors are irreplaceable not only because they witnessed events first-hand, but also because they are living testimony to this uniqueness. Without them, we can expect the accelerated manipulation of Holocaust memory into a “collective” lesson, a process already underway throughout the world.
It may indeed be that the “cost of treating the Holocaust like any other historical event is too steep for humanity to bear.” More important, however, it is too steep for the Jewish people to bear. This, first and foremost, is the Holocaust’s lesson. And so it must always remain.
Charles Bybelezer, Montreal
