The Curmudgeon

YOU'LL COME FOR THE CURSES. YOU'LL STAY FOR THE MUDGEONRY.

Thursday, December 15, 2005

Myths, Mandates and Poison Gas

President Ahmadinejad of Iran continues his historiographic contributions by claiming that the west has "invented a myth that Jews were massacred and place this above God, religions and the prophets". This is ridiculous, of course. The Holocaust is a useful enough excuse, but I doubt that many of our leaders are interested in making a fetish out of it. Should they ever feel the need to kill a few million more Muslims, placing the Holocaust above religion might get in the way of popular assent.

President Ahmadinejad also claimed that "if someone were to deny the myth of the Jews' massacre, all the Zionist mouthpieces and the governments subservient to the Zionists scream against the person as much as they can." This does the Zionist mouthpieces an injustice. It does not take a denial of the Holocaust to get them screaming. A denial of Israel's right to do as it pleases to the Palestinians, or to bomb whom it pleases in the Middle East, is generally more than enough.

President Ahmadinejad, with that strange lack of logic which characterises so many non-Western supporters of nuclear deterrence, asked why the Palestinians should pay the price for European crimes. "Give a part of your own land in Europe, the US, Canada or Alaska to them so that the Jews can establish their country," he said, apparently unaware of the Biblical authority for Israel's location. It was, of course, the word of God that Balfour had in mind when, shocked by Nazi atrocities on Kristallnacht, he made his famous Declaration in 1917.

In 1919, Winston Churchill, the man who won the war against anti-semitism, declared himself "strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes"; and three years later, in recognition of his moral authority, the League of Nations endorsed Britain's mandate in Palestine. Because of Jewish suffering in the Nazi death camps, Article 2 of the mandate stated that the administration would "secure the establishment of the Jewish national home". The same article provided for the safeguarding of the "civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine", which in 1967 were unilaterally terminated by Israel as a result of Arab aggression and Palestinian terrorism.

President Ahmadinejad really ought to acquaint himself with the facts before indulging in these outbursts.

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