On the Jewish Question
GELERNTER, DAVID
On the Jewish Question A conversation across generations. BY DAVID GELERNTER The statements below of Goering, Ribben-trop, Rosenberg, Frank, Frick, Hoess, Shirach, Sauckel, and Streicher in and...
...Ribbentrop: "After all, I was working for an anti-Semitic Government...
...Hoess: "It fitted in with all that had been preached to me for years...
...Ribbentrop reported that "Some of his best friends were Jews...
...Shirach: "Why did our elders betray us...
...They begged their mothers, screaming: 'Mother, please, water, water!'" Filip Mueller describing transports arriving at Auschwitz, in Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah...
...We can compare what is happening in Palestine to what happened in Auschwitz...
...Jewish memorials in Berlin were defaced...
...We don't know, because most of the world is silent...
...Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres, on the suicide-murderers...
...Hoess: "Maybe it was not quite right...
...Rosenberg "admitted to having used 'very strong words' about the Jews . . . but all of that propaganda was not to be taken literally...
...World Conference Against Racism, Durban, South Africa, August 2001...
...It is a rotten shame, the whole thing...
...But I have never myself been anti-Semitic...
...it existed for hundreds of years...
...God made them yours...
...Stay in any five-star hotel anywhere from Jordan to Iran, and you can buy the infamous forgery 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion.'" Susan Sachs, New York Times, 5/27/02...
...an Israeli soldier presenting his mother with a bottle of Palestinian blood in the Jordanian paper Al-Dustour . . ." Melissa Radler, Jerusalem Post, 5/10/02...
...Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary, 1947...
...As people reached the crematorium, they saw every-thing—this horribly violent scene...
...Hoess: "Maybe it was not quite right...
...A woman wearing a star-of-David necklace was attacked...
...Their women are yours to take, legitimately...
...Too late...
...Hillel Halkin, Commentary, 2/02...
...These extremist elements murdered my partner Yitzhak Rabin...
...condemned Israel as a 'racist, apartheid state' guilty of 'acts of genocide' and 'ethnic cleansing...
...The women's hair was packed in bales for commercial use...
...Who knows how things will develop in 50-100years...
...Shirach: "My wife had seen how Jews were being dragged out of their homes, and being an outspoken idealist, she asked the Fuehrer whether he knew about such disgraceful action...
...The Talmud is full of such things...
...Machine guns...
...I had no idea that it would lead to extermination in any literal sense...
...Frick "never had been an anti-Semite," he said, "never had hated the Jews...
...And besides, it was something already taken for granted that the Jews were to blame for everything...
...Hitler should have finished the job"—placard at a demonstration, U.N...
...BY DAVID GELERNTER The statements below of Goering, Ribben-trop, Rosenberg, Frank, Frick, Hoess, Shirach, Sauckel, and Streicher in and out of court during the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial are quoted verbatim from G.M...
...Ribbentrop was foreign minister...
...The whole area was ringed with SS...
...Jose Saramago, Portuguese Nobel laureate in literature, 3/25/02...
...Jose Saramago, Nobel laureate: "We can compare what is happening in Palestine to what happened in Auschwitz...
...it never even occurred to us...
...I saw how the Jews were pushing themselves into all spheres of German life...
...Daniel Bernard, the French ambassador to England, recently referred to Israel at a London dinner party as 'a shitty little country' and then denied being anti-Semitic...
...Streicher "had spoken about exterminating the Jews but hadn't meant it literally...
...Dogs barked...
...In the month of March, we lost the lives of more than 126 persons...
...Item: "A selection of cartoons from the Arab press that shows Prime Minister Ariel Sharon gleefully eating Palestinian children in the Palestinian Al-Quds daily . . ." Streicher: "Why, it's all in the Talmud...
...News items: "In Germany, two orthodox Jews were beaten...
...Sachs, New York Times, 5/27/02...
...Hoess was commandant of Auschwitz...
...At the University of California, Berkeley, the "Hillel society building was defaced with anti-Semitic graffiti, and the city's largest synagogue has received a stream of threats, including one in which a telephone caller said that all Jews should be 'annihilated' and 'holocausted.'" Schoenfeld, Commentary, 6/02...
...Frank was governor of Nazi Poland...
...He was silent...
...Item: "An article in the respected French left-wing weekly Le Nouvel Observateur reporting, straight-faced, a long-disproved slander to the effect that soldiers of the Israel Defense Force rape Palestinian women so that their families will then murder them to redeem the family honor . . ." Halkin, Commentary, 2/02...
...True, [Sharon] uses all the weapons prohibited by international law...
...Why didn't anybody tell us that Ford had repudiated The International Jew and that the Protocols of Zion was a forgery...
...A cultural milestone in European history: "We can compare what is happening in Palestine to what happened in Auschwitz...
...The author, a lecturer at King Faisal University in Dammam, Saudi Arabia, called this medieval fiction a 'well-established fact.'" Sachs, New York Times, 5/27/02...
...The use of Nazi imagery, the newspaper caricatures of Jews with fangs and exaggerated hook noses, even the Arab textbooks with their descriptions of Jews as evil world conspirators—all of that, Arab leaders often insist, reflects a dislike for Israelis and Zionism but not for Jews and Judaism...
...Rosenberg was chief Nazi philosopher and minister for the east...
...Rosenberg: "I don't know...
...Streicher: "I didn't create the problem...
...True he uses depleted uranium, true he uses toxic gases...
...Hoess: "We just never heard anything else...
...They should be shot dead.'" Gabriel Schoenfeld, Commentary, 6/02...
...I'd rather not talk about it, or even think about it...
...Hoess: "Don't you see, we SS men were not supposed to think about these things...
...Why don't you enslave their women?'" Schoenfeld, Commentary, 6/02...
...Shirach was head of the Hitler Youth...
...I never believed that Israel had the right to exist at all,' [Tom] Paulin [professor at Oxford] told the Egyptian al-Ahram weekly in April, and Jews from Brooklyn who have settled in the West Bank 'are Nazis, racists...
...Filip Mueller on Auschwitz, in Shoah...
...called for the establishment of a war crimes tribunal to bring to justice those responsible for these 'crimes against humanity.'" Ina Friedman, Jerusalem Report, 4/8/02...
...Goering: "Don't worry—the time will come when the world will think differently about all this, and the German people will see things differently too...
...Sauckel was labor chief...
...Shirach: "I don't think there will ever be anti-Semitism in the world again, after this horrible example...
...Goering was Reich marshal...
...Yasser Arafat on Al Jazeera (3/29), in the Jerusalem Post, 4/10/02...
...Surely most of the world abhors and abominates this flood of Jew-hatred and Jewish state-hatred...
...The Saudi daily Al Riyadh "accused Jews of consuming the blood of Christian and Muslim children during the holiday of Purim...
...A synagogue was spray-painted with the words, 'Six Million Is Not Enough...
...Wyatt recounts being told by a liberal member of the House of Lords, 'the Jews have been asking for it, and now, thank God, we can say what we think at last.'" Halkin, Commentary, 2/02...
...A Saudi cleric enjoined his Muslim brothers 'not to have any mercy or compassion on the Jews, their blood, their money, their flesh...
...The gas took about ten to fifteen minutes to kill...
...Frick was interior minister...
...Goering: "Ach, those mass murders...
...The Durban Forum "branded Zionism as racism...
...Wrote one commentator in the Suddeutsche Zeitung: 'It's been a long time since the hatred of Jews—once disguised as anti-Zionism—has been as socially acceptable in Germany as it is today...
...Schoenfeld, Commentary, 6/02...
...It was not just newspapers like the Stuermer but it was everything we ever heard...
...David Gelernter is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Hoess: "It only started to occur to me after the collapse that maybe it was not quite right...
...The most horrible thing was when the doors of the gas chambers were opened"—Filip Mueller on Auschwitz, in Shoah...
...Streicher was editor of the Nazi weekly Der Stuermer— the Storm Trooper...
...PLO.'" Sauckel: "I want to tell you that I know absolutely nothing of these things, and I certainly had absolutely nothing to do with it...
...Yasser Arafat (3/29), in the Jerusalem Post, 4/10/02...
...Testimony of Hoess: "Those capable of working were sent to the labor details, and the rest, including most women and all young children, were sent to the extermination chambers immediately...
Vol. 7 • June 2002 • No. 38
