Heidegger

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

>On 27/05/2006, at 10:11 AM, Anthony Crifasi wrote:
>
>>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).
>
>Hi Anthony,
>
>Revelations? I have no idea how you reach this conclusion unless you
>provide me with an argument to follow. But from what I do follow of
>your revelatory logic you seem to be of the opinion that the fact
>that ‘only’ about 100 people were murdered at Deir Yassin

First, why did you clip out the part of my reply in which I cited a source
which was not merely my “opinion,” but a comprehensive study by an *Arab*
university on the West Bank? If you are going to continue your habit of
clipping out the parts of my posts which contain evidence and arguments that
already answered the objections in your replies, please tell me now, so that
I can weigh my time accordingly.

Secondly, it is not difficult to see the logic of why the falsity of a
popular casualty count would call into question the characterization of
“massacre.”

>with the
>massacre being exaggerated by the terrorist perpetrators of this war
>crime for propaganda purposes, as in the ethnic cleansing of Arabs,

Please tell me where the evidence I gave indicates that the purpose was
“ethnic cleansing.” You know very well what the situation was: the main road
leading to Jerusalem was being blockaded, the result being that Jerusalem
was starving. Jewish forces were trying to retake the road by securing towns
along its length, including Deir Yassin.

>this means that Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt amongst others are
>all “innocently ignorant” when it comes to understanding and
>identifying fascism when they see it.

Again, unlike us, they did not have the opportunity to see the following
things:

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.

Given that they did not get to see these things, it is quite understandable
that their conclusion was one-sided. But neither I nor you have that excuse
today.

>I would say that’s a rather strange conclusion to come to concerning
>the author of “The Origins of Totalitarianism” and the anti-Nazi
>grandfather of the atom bomb, especially considering you hold
>Albert’s opinion in such high esteem when it concerns the Vatican.

Einstein, being a victim of Nazi anti-semitism himself, had personal
experience of who was and was not resisting the Nazis in his circles. He SAW
that, which was why he said what he said about the Vatican. He did not see
the things I cite above, because all those relevations came after his death.
That is why it is not in the least inconsistent for me (which, of course,
was the implication you were sending) to make the distinction I made between
his two opinions.

Is that logic clear enough?

>Morris on the other hand is of the opinion that Ben Gurion had a
>policy of ethnic cleansing by whatever means necessary, and that this
>was merely a consequence of the volatile situation at hand. The state
>of Israel could never have formed and prospered without the
>Palestinian diaspora, and the ongoing legacy of violent exclusion is
>simply that self-same historical necessity. In fact Morris contends
>that Ben Gurion failed and did not go far enough, and he sees this
>historical failure in the ongoing troubles.
>
>Now for me the moral question here is something to consider after the
>historical facts of the matter, our history is what throws us into
>the breach and the situation is what constrains our practical
>choices. In a sense history is amoral, even as it sets up the present
>within which we can make ethical choices about how to react. Benny
>Morris also contends that while the choices for Israeli Jews are
>awful he can see no real final solution to the Palestinian question
>until all Israeli Palestinians are expelled and the two states are
>formed. In this case ones moral choices come down to the pragmatic
>choice between the lives of ones family and what is realistically
>possible on the ground.
>
>Now we can disagree with his ethics, or not, but I do understand in a
>way where Morris is coming from. What I’m interested in is the common
>thread here as regards the outline of certain pragmatic relations of
>power that are brought out in extreme circumstances such as in Weimar
>Germany, WW2 and its holocausts, the 1948 war and the current war on
>terror.
>
>I’m not interested in tarring Israel with the brush of fascism unless
>we also recognise the same historical potential within our own modern
>industrial democracies, European or American. I don’t think any one
>nation has had a monopoly on the totalitarian impulse, whether they
>be Roman, Mongol, Ottoman or British imperialists. Quite the
>opposite, I think the Nazi’s were democratic industrial capitalists
>like the rest of us and that Nazism was just one extreme form of our
>same technological modernity, perhaps an exemplary form for some.

In our discussions over the past few years, I have given you ample
evidence - both factical and philosophical - for the distinctions which you
refuse once again to make here.

Posted on Sunday, May 28th, 2006 at 6:45 pm
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