Ron Rosenbaum - How the End Begins

Herf’s book is further evidence of how it is not unrealistic for the Jews of Israel to hear Hitler’s voice echo on the airwaves today, because in a sense they are hearing Hitler’s ventriloquy. The Mufti set the exterminationist tone of the hatred not just of Israel but of all Jews everywhere. The evil incitements to genocide that are echoed today in the airwaves that bombard parents raising children in Israel are echoes of Hitler and cannot help but influence Israel’s nuclear decision makers.

Israelis tell me the use of the phrase “second Holocaust” has become normalized there. When I asked the co-author of the Israel Defense Forces’ code of ethics, Moshe Halbertal, whether he thought the secondness of a second Holocaust would be a factor in Israeli’s military posture, he shrugged and said, “Of course.” [202]

Historians such as Michael Oren have noted [203]that the phrase “second Holocaust” had already been used by ordinary Israeli citizens during the run-up to the 1967 Six Day War to describe the threat to the Jewish state’s existence and that of the Jewish people who would perish with it. In that war, the Israelis launched preemptive invasions of Egypt and Syria—though, technically, under international law, the first act of war was the Egyptian blockade of the Straits of Tiran, completing a nooselike encirclement of Israel by cutting off its southernmost port. Preemption, then, is part of their history.

In 2007, Israeli historian Benny Morris published an essay entitled “The Second Holocaust Will Not Be Like the First,” which focused on one way the nuclear destruction of the state of Israel will differ in its nature and timeframe from Hitler’s Holocaust. [204]

“The second holocaust will not be like the first,” he wrote. “The Nazis, of course, industrialized mass murder. But still, the perpetrators had one-on-one contact with the victims. They may have dehumanized them over months and years of appalling debasement and in their minds, before the actual killing. But, still, they were in eye and ear contact, sometimes in tactile contact, with their victims. The Germans, along with their non-German helpers, had to round up the men, women and children from their houses and drag and beat them through the streets and mow them down in nearby woods or push and pack them into cattle cars and transport them to the camps where [they had to] lure them into ‘shower’ halls and pour in the gas and then take out, or oversee the extraction of, the bodies.”

He argues that a second Holocaust will by contrast more likely be launched at a distance. “One bright morning, in five or 10 years, perhaps during a regional crisis, perhaps out of the blue, a day or a year or five years after Iran’s acquisition of the Bomb, the mullahs in Qom will convene in secret session, under a portrait of the steely-eyed Ayatollah Khomeini, and give President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, by then in his second or third term, the go-ahead. The orders will go out and the Shehab III and IV missiles will take off for Tel Aviv, Beersheba, Haifa and Jerusalem, and probably some military sites, including Israel’s half dozen air and (reported) nuclear missile bases. Some of the Shehabs will be nuclear-tipped, perhaps even with multiple warheads. Others will be dupes, packed merely with biological or chemical agents, or old newspapers, to draw off or confuse Israel’s anti-missile batteries and Home Front Command units.

“With a country the size and shape of Israel (an elongated 20,000 square kilometers), probably four or five hits will suffice: No more Israel. A million or more Israelis in the greater Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem areas will die immediately. Millions will be seriously irradiated. Israel has about seven million inhabitants. No Iranian will see or touch an Israeli. It will be quite impersonal.” The implication is that push-button impersonality will make the second Holocaust easier to carry out, the work of an instant.

Another key difference about a second Holocaust, when it happens (I suppose I should say “if”) is that this one will have been predicted, proclaimed, joyfully heralded in advance by the perpetrators and imams in every nation in the region, announcements made available in Hebrew by the valuable Middle East Media Research Institute transcriptions and translations of Arabic language broadcasts. [205]When it comes to Israel, there is an incessant, open incitement to genocide, as opposed to the secretive if not entirely secret execution of Hitler’s Final Solution. Those who seek the extermination of the Jews today have no hesitation in calling for just that in as public and specific a way possible. And so we have a leading Islamist preacher and broadcaster on Al Jazeera, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, praying to Allah to kill the Jews, “Oh Allah, Count their numbers and kill them down to the very last one.” [206]

And then there is the founding charter of Hamas, [207]the ruling party in Gaza, a movement that is regarded by many as merely a somewhat extreme Palestinian rights group. Yet the very charter of its existence follows the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual leader by citing a hadith (a non-Quranic, proverbial remark of Muhammad that can nonetheless carry great weight) that calls for the hunting down and killing of all Jews: not just Israeli Jews or West Bank Jewish settlers, not just Zionists or self-proclaimed anti-Zionists, but all Jews. For Hamas, there is no shyness about a second Holocaust: its platform exceeds Hitler’s in Jew hatred, and it cites in its charter such staples of Western anti-Semitism distributed by the Nazis as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Supreme Leader of Iran Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is also clear about inflicting a second Holocaust. [208]“Israel is a cancerous tumor,” he says. Yes, he is speaking about Israel, not Jews, and yes, he is using a metaphor. But medical metaphors have a bad history. Hitler used them all the time, also likening Jews to a cancer. The implications of the Supreme Leader’s cancer metaphor, his Hitler trope, are clear: Jews are the cancer cells in the cancerous tumor. How does one excise a “cancerous lesion”? We have heard the “moderate” former Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani speaking glowingly as early as 2001 of a future “nuclear exchange” between Iran and Israel, which would leave “nothing on the ground” in the state of Israel, nothing presumably but a human stain.

The point is, Hitler carried out the Final Solution but was fearful of publicizing it. He never set foot in a death camp, never allowed his signature, so far as we know, on an extermination order. We only have reports of him giving oral orders. He thought the world would be horrified if it found out about the industrialized mass murder. He thought it would be bad for his image. Seriously! As it turns out, when the news began to emerge, the world was not concerned enough to make more than empty gestures. Hitler overestimated the world’s conscience.

By contrast many radical Islamists in positions of state and spiritual authority boast of their exterminationist intentions. They want the world to know it. They want the Jews to know it, and the world does nothing about it and tells those concerned, those targeted, don’t be affected by it, it’s “only rhetoric.” Or as most Israelis complete the thought: “Just like Hitler’s threats were ‘only rhetoric.’”

The world will lament the fate of the Tutsis in Rwanda, say, and pretend that those who incite genocide don’t really mean it until they do it and then it’s too late. And when the world does decide that rhetoric matters—that incitement to genocide could be a crime—it ignores the incitement to a second genocide of the Jews. Yet international law has recognized that rhetoric can kill. That is one reason that one of the few criminal convictions to emerge from the Rwandan genocide was related to that of a radio station, Radio Mille Collines. Its key personnel were prosecuted [209]and convicted of “inciting to genocide” by the International Criminal Court under a provision of the Rome Treaty on Preventing Genocide [210]—Article 25 (30) (e) to be precise. The radio station hate mongers were convicted for allowing “the genocide planners” to use the station’s airwaves to “broadcast murderous instructions directly to the people.” It is instructive in two ways: incitement to genocide is now an internationally recognized, successfully prosecutable crime. It does not require the genocide be consummated. The idea is that if you prosecute incitement, execution will be less likely.