Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois recently made a good tough speech on the Senate floor about torture, and he has taken enough flak for it so as to apologize. I don't know any more about the flak other than what is stated in the following article, but if what the article implies is true, it might call for more of a response from Jewish Americans at least. - WM
________________ http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0625-22.htm Published on Saturday, June 25, 2005 by CommonDreams.org 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. ### Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/VTJP/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
