Common Dreams, ME
June 25 2005

No Apologies, Senator Durbin
by Sheldon Drobny

Senator Durbin is the Senior Senator from Illinois, my home state. I
am also a first generation Jewish American whose parents narrowly
escaped the Holocaust. I have lost aunts, uncles and cousins as a
result of that travesty. However, that fact does not give me the
license to own the experience or the so-called `franchise.’ The
devastation caused by World War II was a human tragedy causing the
deaths of about 50,000,000 people worldwide. Yesterday, June 22nd was
the 64th anniversary of the German attack upon the Soviet Union
commonly called Operation Barbarosa. Most Americans are unaware that
the Soviet Union lost approximately 25,000,000 people in what they
call The Great Patriotic War. By comparison, the United States lost
approximately 300,000 military deaths in both the European and
Pacific wars. Millions of Chinese, Germans and Japanese also died.
American bombing of Japanese cities caused the death of over
1,000,000 civilians including the questionable dropping of 2 atomic
bombs.
The brutalities of that war occurred on both sides because that is
what happens in a wartime environment. I have always said that the
other combatants in World War II were lucky that there was a
Hitler/Nazi regime otherwise Japan especially would have been the
prime focus of the Nuremberg type trials. Japan committed horrible
genocidal atrocities against the Chinese. As a matter of fact,
civilian bombing was excluded as an indictable war crime otherwise
the United States and Great Britain would have been subject to such
offenses. The Turkish genocide against the Armenians in 1915 is
unknown to many people today. The Turks killed over 1,000,000
Armenians and Hitler used that to convince his cronies that the
genocide of the Jews would not be remembered by the world. I would
suggest that the movie Ararat is worthy of viewing. The movie gives
one a better perspective of the Armenian genocide.

Inhumanity, torture, genocide, and intolerance are the major
casualties of any war including the war in Iraq. The most common
metaphor for that kind of cruelty is the word Nazi. It is a commonly
used word by many politicians on all sides to reflect the kinds of
cruelties that come from armed conflict. The use of the word Nazi or
the name Hitler has never been any more than a metaphor for that kind
of cruelty and torture. It is as generic as any other description of
intolerance and cruelty.

Senator Durbin would never accuse our soldiers of being Nazis nor
would he have ever defamed the 6,000,000 Jews that died in the
Holocaust. Just as holocaust is a generic word, it is now capitalized
to reflect the World War II phenomenon. But could we not describe the
Armenian massacre as a holocaust without disparaging the memory of
the 6,000,000 Jews that died in the Nazi genocide? Yet, Christian
fundamentalists who constantly exploit the Jewish Holocaust for their
advantage soundly criticized Durbin. The hypocrisy of Christian
extreme fundamentalism is that it is the very teachings of the
Passion stories of the New Testament that created 2,000 years of
Christian anti-Judaism which culminated in the Nazi version of
pseudo-Darwinian anti-Semitism. Many on the extreme Right claim that
the Third Reich was not a theocracy. The fact is that the
constitution of the Third Reich did have only one legal religion
named in it. It was called The National Reich Church and it exploited
the inherent anti-Judaism of the Passion stories. The actual word
hypocrite is defined in The New Testament in Matthew 7: `Thou
hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eyes.’ `The man
who finds fault with another for sin, while he is more guilty, is a
hypocrite.’

Seventy to eighty percent of American Jews vote Democratic. I believe
that most of that percentage had no problem with the quotes used by
Senator Durbin. I would bet that the Jews that were offended by his
remarks came from the highly political minority of Jews who stand
beside these Christian fundamentalists. They make the same mistake
that the German Jews made in the 1930s when they believed that their
native country would not turn against them. That is a lesson in
history that these American Jews may have forgotten.

Sheldon Drobny is Co-founder Air America Radio.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress