From the The Jerusalem Post | Blogs | The Warped Mirror
Posted by Petra Marquardt-Bigman
Before President Bush left Israel last Friday to continue his trip to several countries in the region, he visited Yad Vashem.
In the international press, this visit was widely described as “an emotional tour of Israel’s Holocaust memorial”, and reports highlighted that Bush “stopped in front of an aerial photo of Auschwitz [...] and told his secretary of state that the US should have bombed the death camp to stop the extermination of Jews there”.
Bush described Yad Vashem as “a sobering reminder that evil exists, and a call that when evil exists we must resist it.”
Whether it would have been indeed feasible to bomb Auschwitz is still a controversial question; but what is striking to note in the context of our own times is that, as one expert explained, the Jewish leadership “was afraid to ask publicly for the Allies to bomb the death camps, believing that would turn the conflict into a war for the Jews”.
This can hardly fail to bring to mind that fantasies about wars being fought “for the Jews” have remained quite popular – whether among respected academics, pundits and commentators who worry about the “Israel Lobby”, or among the wider public that shares such concerns.
And when it comes to the Middle East, it is of course entirely acceptable to assert that there “was no war that broke out anywhere without their fingerprints on it” – and in the context of the Hamas Charter’s Article Twenty-Two there is no need to ask whose “fingerprints” it is all about.
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