A SENIOR CLERIC IN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND HAS MADE A COMPLETE FOOL OF HIMSELF BY COMPARING THE ORDINATION OF WOMEN BISHOPS TO THE NAZI INVASION.
Julian Kossoff
Daily Telegraph
November 3rd, 2010
UK
Julian Kossoff is a senior editor for Telegraph.co.uk. He is an
award-winning journalist who has written extensively on race and
religion.
Wallace Benn compared the ordination of women bishops to the Nazi
invasion A senior cleric in the Church of England has made a complete
fool of himself by comparing the ordination of women bishops to the
Nazi invasion.
The Right Rev Wallace Benn, the Bishop of Lewes, told the Reform
conference of conservative Anglicans: “I feel very much increasingly
that we’re in January of 1939. We need to be aware that there is real
serious warfare just round the corner.”
Oh dear. What a wilfully stupid thing to say. However, he is not
alone. There is a long line of campaigners who appropriate the Nazi
period, and the Holocaust specifically, to demonise the opposition.
Animal rights activists, for example, frequently use Holocaust imagery
to promote their causes. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
(PETA) once ran a campaign entitled “Holocaust on Your Plate”.
However, it is along the fault line of the Arab-Israeli conflict that
the cheapening of the Holocaust becomes sinister.
“Gaza is like the Warsaw Ghetto” or “Gaza is a just a big concentration
camp”, friends of the Palestinian people cry, immediately discrediting
themselves with such puerile, cheap slogans (The logic is simple and
seductive, as subverting the Holocaust undermines the most resonant
moral and historical pillar for Israel’s existence).
It is bad history, very bad, and trashes the sacred memory of the
dead while destroying any opportunity for meaningful debate. The aim
to inflict emotional pain with such cruelty can only be classified
as anti-Semitism.
Whilst anti-Zionism’s attempt to hijack the Holocaust is enraging,
Jewish voices can also shockingly misuse its memory.
Jewish fellow travellers of anti-Zionism are often too quick to do
“a Rushdie” and bandy about these tacky analogies, knowing full
well they are poking a profound, historic wound. But their tasteless
comparisons are mirrored by Right-wing Jewish commentators who equate
Hamas with Hitler and slander peace-makers as appeasers.
Indeed, among the young Jewish zealots being ejected from illegal
settlements in Gaza and the West Bank, the favourite insult to their
fellow Israelis sent to extricate them is to spit in their face
and shriek “Nazi”. Indeed, I am regularly called a “kapo” (a Jewish
collaborator with the Nazis) by one contributor to Telegraph Blogs
for daring to question some of Israel’s policies.
The end of the line in this emotive exaggeration and disingenuous
bombast is the religious Jewish guilt-trip on fellow Jews who chose
freely to assimilate, accusing them of committing “a new Holocaust.”
Only a handful of events stand comparison. The Armenian genocide, Pol
Pot’s Cambodia, the Rwandan atrocities, the Atlantic slave trade, the
blotting out of the Inca and Aztec cultures, the near-annihilation of
Native Americans and Australian Aborigines and, indeed, the millions
killed in Stalin’s famines all cry out in the paradigm of unspeakable
horrors.
But the Holocaust, the application of industrial techniques to
mass murder and the creation of death factories to “process” entire
communities (including 1.5 million children), remains a unique event.
That’s why it should never be disrespected by point-scoring politicos,
rabble-rousing rabbis or even babbling bishops.
From: A. Papazian