Heidegger

—– Original Message —–
From: “Malcolm Riddoch”

> On 26/05/2006, at 9:19 AM, Anthony Crifasi wrote:
>
>> I feel a great
>> affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the
>> courage and
>> persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am
>> forced
>> thus to confess that what I once despised I now praise
>> unreservedly. (Albert
>> Einstein, quoted in Time Magazine, December 23, 1940, p. 38)
>
> Yes, the history of the Catholic Church during WW2 is a tangled one
> and its elders trod a very delicate path. But since you quote Albert
> I’d be interested to know what you make of his and Arendt’s, amongst
> others, complete denunciation of Menachem Begin’s Freedom Party and
> fascist Zionism at the beginnings of the state of Israel. They were
> very clear that this was a nationalist movement with an ideology akin
> to Nazism and in an open letter to the New York Times in 1948 state:
>
> “Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the
> emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the ‘Freedom
> Party’ (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its
> organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the
> Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and
> following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing,
> chauvinist organization in Palestine”.
>
> They specifically singled out the Deir Yassin massacre, which is part
> of current day Palestinian lore concerning the ethnic cleansing that
> accompanied the war, and their conclusions were damning:

Einstein and Arendt did not have the benefit of knowing certain things that
we know today, such as:

1. Bir Zeit University, a prominent *Arab* university on the West Bank,
published a comprehensive study in 1987 of the history of Deir Yassin which
cut the popularized number of civilian casualities by more than half.

2. The same study stated that the number of civilian casualities was
inflated “in order to frighten Palestinian residents into leaving their
villages and cities without resistance.” This corresponds with the explicit
testimony of the original source for the inflated number, a Jewish commander
(Raanan) who has said, “I told the reporters that 254 were killed so that a
big figure would be published, and so that Arabs would panic.”

3. The editor of the Palestine Broadcasting Service’s Arabic news in 1948,
Hazem Nusseibeh, has admitted that he and Palestinian leader Hussein Khalidi
agreed to fabricated atrocity claims about Deir Yassin in order to convince
Arab armies to come fight in Palestine.

4. The recent discovery of the actual report filed by the Jewish
intelligence officer Meir Pe’il, the eyewitness who gave credibility to the
account of a massacre, shows that by his own account, he arrived many hours
after the battle, and was therefore not an eyewitness after all - a fact
admitted by your own source, Benny Morris.

Einstein and Arendt did not have the benefit of knowing such things. We do.

> Have you read for instance any of Benny Morris’ histories of the
> conflict? While he is an avowed Zionist historian his surgical
> dismemberment of his nation’s mythology makes for very interesting
> reading. Be advised I’m not interested in making blanket moral
> judgements on Israel today, my own nation has an imperial colonial
> history of displacement, nor am I interested in reducing this to a
> question of ethnicity, but I am interested in following through the
> modern relations of power that seem to cross ethnic/cultural/
> political differences and in particular with regards to the question
> concerning Nazism/machination.

The above listed revelations, although not answering all the questions
surrounding Deir Yassin, do show that any immediate comparison to Nazi
atrocities is due either to innocent ignorance at the time (as was the case
with Einstein), or outright agenda (as is often the case today with Deir
Yassin is cited).

Posted on Saturday, May 27th, 2006 at 2:15 am
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