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Clemens Heni

Were Germans innocent civilians during WWII?

On October 7, 2023, an unprecedented massacre against Jews occurred, not seen since the Shoah and Babi Yar.

1200 Jews and Israelis were butchered in a way no one could ever imagine after the Holocaust. Hamas and the Palestinians had the intention to shock Israel, as we now know from findings of the IDF in Gaza. It was the intention to kill the entire Jewish People, just like the Germans intended to kill all Jews during the Holocaust and World War II.

Today, though, Israel exists. Oct. 7 was not the beginning of a new Holocaust. But it feels like one, because the intention of Muslims and the Hamas was exactly the same like the German intention 85 years ago.

Shockingly, the Jewish state failed to protect its citizens and this will be dealt with after the War, because there are people responsible for that failure. We always thought Israel is the one and only place where Jews can live freely and secure, despite Intifadas and rocket alerts for decades – but a massacre on Israeli land was not thinkable.

But the main problem is Islamic antisemitism and its billions of fans worldwide. Academia is a main field of antisemitism, it has been a main playground for all kind of antisemitic resentment in recent decades. Those German and Western academics who promoted the antisemitic BDS movement, including those who fight the German Parliament’s resolution against BDS, were enabler of Hamas and the events of Oct. 7. Most German and Western NGOs, activists or media always made a distinction between the military wing of Hamas and the political party of Hamas, as if antisemitic words do not kill. Hamas has always been an antisemitic terror organization and was never interested in building a Palestinian state side by side with Israel. Most Arabs were never interested in the two state solution since they rejected the UN Resolution 181 in November 1947 and started war against the Jewish state in the making.

Of course, Israel made political mistakes in recent decades as well, and religious extremists also live in the Westbank among settlers. But that is not the topic right now. The right-wing extremist government under Bibi is always not the topic right now.

In this short comment, I just want to focus on those who cry foul when Jews and the IDF defend Israel, like the hundreds of thousands of people today in London. Every single participant supports the slaughter of Jews by his or her participation. But they are not alone, French President Macron, who suggested Israel that he is on the Jewish side – as a President of France, what a joke!! -, now shows his real (French) face and calls for a ceasefire.

Would he have called to the Americans and British to have a ceasefire like in May 1944, weeks before D-Day? Would he called the poor German ‘civilians’ victims of allied bombings? Would he?

The Nazi Party and the German population wanted to kill all European Jews. There were no innocent civilians, as the community of the people (“Volksgemeinschaft” in German) was entirely antisemitic.

Recently, at a rally in southern Germany to remember the nights of pogroms on November 9, 1938, a speaker made clear how German ideology works these days. He is against Hamas and to some extent he sees the need of the IDF to fight this war. But more importantly he stressed the fact that at the end of the day, his hometown (Heilbronn, north of Stuttgart) was destroyed by allied bombers during the Second World War. As if that was not the consequence of Nazi Germany’s Holocaust and the Second World War, he rather portrayed his poor countrymen and -women as victims. He knows that all of them had no problem with the burning of the local synagogue, but he is unable to realize that the bombing – like the bombing of Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne, Stuttgart, Frankfurt etc. – was important for ending the War. The allies, including British bombers, had most often military targets, but civilian casualties were unavoidable, because these military targets were part of the towns they attacked. And of course, the allies wanted to fight the German public as well, as they knew very well that antisemitism and anti-Western ideology was widespread among the entire population.

Hamas wants to kill all Israeli Jews and Jews worldwide. They do not have the means to do so, but they have Iran and with a nuclear arsenal that antisemitic dream could become reality, even if hundreds of millions of Iranians and Arabs would be killed in retaliation by Israel and the US. As they love death and embrace to become martyrs, such a scenario is not shocking for the Iranian regime (for the Iranian street it is!) nor for the Arab street (for the Arab regimes it might be, though).

Those women and men who did nothing to end the rule of Hamas since 2007, are not civilians. Children are civilians, but their parents are not and their cynical behavior to remain in areas under attack shows their complete lack of empathy. If they do not care if they are killed, they show their Islamist ideology. But children are victims of these parents.

The IDF does everything to prevent civilian victims – which is incredible difficult in Gaza in particular, but in Muslim jihadist areas in general.

Even those academics, politicians and activists who did not embrace the slaughter of Jews on Oct. 7, 2023, but now call for ceasefire should ask themselves: would they have urged the allies in May 1944 or any other time, to stop bombing Germany, in order to give Germans the possibility to hide even more weapons or industrial infrastructure etc.?

There is outrage about unavoidable ‘civilian’ casualties in Gaza in London, Berlin, Paris, New York City, but no outrage at all about the kidnapping of over 240 Jews in to Gaza by people who butchered other family members of friends of those kidnapped in a way, no animal would ever treat anyone.

What we are seeing in London today or in New York, Berlin, Paris and all other places on earth in recent days and weeks is the celebration of a Holocaust like mass murder on Oct. 7.

Did we ever had Holocaust supporting rallies in Germany? With tens of thousands of people? Did London ever witness Pro-Holocaust rallies with hundreds of thousands of people, celebrating the Nazis and the Shoah?

Never.

But today’s Nazis, Palestinian Muslim antisemites, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the like, are celebrated and supported on streets in Western countries and around the world. Iran publicly celebrates the massacre and is then invited today to Saudi-Barbaria to a summit of Arab and Muslim countries. The Mullah regime in Teheran is both denying the Holocaust and celebrating the Nazi like massacre of Oct. 7, 2023.

Academically spoken, that is a combination of secondary antisemitism and rejection of Holocaust memory and of the memory of Oct. 7, 2023 on the one hand, and Islamist and anti-Zionist antisemitism on the other. We see the flexibility of the “longest hatred” (Robert S. Wistrich (1945-2015)).

Some cry “Palestine, from the river to the sea” (although that antisemitic slogan might become illegal in Germany), others call for a ceasefire. Tens of thousands of killed people in any kind of war in Africa or currently in Ukraine do not translate in calls for a ceasefire. On the contrary, Western countries, the US and the EU support the war in Ukraine with billions and billions of Dollars and Euros, no calls for a ceasefire in Ukraine anywhere.

Russia supports the jihadist regime in Teheran and in Gaza, Turkey now calls into question the entire existence of Israel, which is no wonder taken the disgusting personality and ideology of Erdogan. His followers mainly in Germany and Europe celebrate him and the massacre of Oct. 7.

Germany does neither stop its diplomatic relations with Iran, nor with Turkey or Saudi-Arabia. As if their diplomatic relations with these barbarian countries did change anything in the last 40+ years.

As we all knew and predicted, the window of opportunity for the IDF is closing.

The world likes the killing of Jews and protects the killers. Antisemitism is on an all-time high since 1945. And that was exactly what Hamas wanted with the unprecedented massacre of babies, children, women and men. They anticipated that the pro-BDS world would be grateful for that day and post-colonial academics and activists now book paragliding events for their allies, friends and family.

Holocaust denial and neo-Nazis are outdated. Today, celebrating the Holocaust like massacre of Oct. 7, 2023 is “in”. And all those supposedly left-wing campuses around the US, and Europe are not left-wing, they are right-wing extremists and ordinary antisemites like neo-Nazis are.

 

About the Author
Dr Clemens Heni is director of The Berlin International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (BICSA)