Labour Party Former Mayor Under Fire Over Facebook Post Saying Hitler Killed Six Million Zionists

[Ken Burch]

73. Yes, Jewish people have gone through horrific treatment. All indefensible. All shameful.

And inflicted overwhelmingly at the hands of people of European gentile heritage. We're fine with European gentiles suffering for that. We're be fine with having to atone for that in our own countries and our own lives.

That would be fair, just, and appropriate.

But Palestinian Arabs had nothing to do with that history of European, British, and North American-inflicted suffering(the Dispersal, which was the work of the late Roman Empire, the establishment of the ghettos, the Inquisition, the pogroms, The Immigration Act of 1924, the Holocaust) and it was never fair to invoke that Anglo-American European history of antisemitic evil to justify the dispossession of Palestinian Arabs, a group who had nothing to do with all of that oppression, persecution and slaughter, a group who could have done nothing to prevent it.

It's one thing for Jewish people today to ask all the descendants of the historic perpetrators of lethal European antisemitism to work to wipe out all vestiges of that toxic form of hate and to atone for all that OUR ancestors did to nurture and spread it.

You SHOULD ask that.

But it's simply perverse to insist, as apologists for the Likudniks do, that the only possible way we can work towards achiev ing either of those goals is by unquestioningly defending the oppression of a group of people who, while they are far from saints, had nothing to do with that history of oppression, a group who were largely powerless bystanders when all of that was happening in the world up until 1945.

It should be the Germans, the Poles, the Russians, the British, the French, the Canadians and the Americans facing collective punishment and, if need be, dispossession, not the Palestinians. Punish the people who actually committed and benefited from the crime.