Showing posts with label Tamir Sorek. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tamir Sorek. Show all posts

4 April 2026

Israel is to the 21st Century what Nazi Germany was to the 20th Century – The Death Penalty Law for Palestinians is Just One More Sign of Zionism’s Sickness

From Ethnic Cleansing to Genocide, Apartheid to Extermination, Child Killing to Starvation, Torture & Rape, There is No War Crime Israel Doesn’t Excel In 



The Horrifying Torture of a One Year Old Baby by the 'most moral army in the world - Sky TV

Though one should note that the only complaint of Adam Langleben of the Jewish Labour Movement is the offence given to the Jewish religion. He has nothing to say about the Death Penalty for Palestinians legislation itself.

Even hardened Zionists and Genocide supporters have become uncomfortable at the pictures of Itamar Ben-Gvir and fellow Judeo-Nazis celebrating the passage of a law that reserves the death penalty for Palestinians whilst Jewish murderers are immune from even the mildest reprimand.


Under Labour Zionist governments only one law explicitly discriminated again Israel’s Palestinians – the Law of Return. All subsequent discrimination built upon that one law. Discrimination was indirect. Today the far-right is more explicit and also more honest.

Israel liar liar pants on fire


So we should thank Israel’s Judeo-Nazi Police Minister for making explicit that which was implicit. As the Times of Israel said

The law effectively enshrines capital punishment for Palestinians alone, as it explicitly excludes Israeli citizens or residents, and only Palestinians are tried in military courts. Israelis are tried in civilian courts.


Knesset Members voted 62-47 to mandate death by hanging as the punishment for Palestinians convicted of ‘terrorist’ acts by military courts. Judges can opt for life imprisonment under “special circumstances” which are undefined but otherwise the death penalty is mandatory and will be carried out within 90 days of sentencing without appeal.

Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beteinu, a secular far-right party that is not part of the government, voted in favour of the bill. The Ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism, which is part of the government was split. Its Degel HaTorah (Lithuanian non-Hasidic) faction voted in favour wheres its Agudat Yisrael (Hasidic) faction voted against.

Settler Attacks on Palestinian Homes – BBC

Unlike Israeli settlers who are tried in civilian courts Palestinians are tried in military courts where there is a 99.74% rate of conviction. Confessions under torture are admissible. Even the Nazi Peoples’ Courts had a higher rate of acquittal. In 1940 it was 7.3%, falling to around 5% until 1944, when it rose to almost 12% They were set up by Hitler to bypass the ordinary court system to try political offences.

'I want to kill more, more, more' - Israeli female soldier boasts of having killed 2 Palestinians


So we have a situation whereby even the Nazis treated its accused more fairly than Israel’s rubber stamp military courts.

West European countries issued a pro forma statement condemning the passage of the law, whilst doing nothing to countermand it such as sanctions. The Trump Administration didn’t even do that. Instead the State Department issued a statement saying that:


The United States respects Israel’s sovereign right to determine its own laws and penalties for individuals convicted of terrorism.” 

The Death Penalty Law for Palestinians reflects the fact that Jewish terrorism is not a crime in the eyes of the Israeli police and army which are often complicit in the attacks.

Burnt out Palestinian home after a settler attack

Mua’yyad Sha’ban of the Colonisation and Wall Resistance Commission (CWRC) stated that settlers had carried out 192 attacks in the first two weeks of March, resulting in the murder of 6 Palestinians. This is in addition to the murder of Palestinians by the military. However no settler or soldier has been punished for killing a Palestinian since 2020.

Israeli soldier throws bike into trash bin

In other words settlers have a license to kill Palestinians but if Palestinians strike back then they will be hanged as ‘terrorists’ and the US administration will support it.

This is not so different from Nazi Germany and before that Czarist Russia where authorities only intervened if Jews defended themselves. What happened to the Jews in Europe is now taking place in Greater Israel to the Palestinians. As Primo Levy was reputed to have remarked, the Palestinians are the Jews of Israel.

Settler attack in Tayasir 30 3 26

Israel has had a policy of extra judicial executions for the years. The law that has just been enacted will simply put what Israel has already been doing on a ‘legal’ footing. As the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights observed:

Extra-judicial execution is a policy which is not new or exclusively used since 2000. It is an old, bloody policy that had been implemented by the Israeli army against Palestinian civilians for decades.

Israeli Police Violently Break Up Anti Genocide protests in Arab TOWN

Adalah, the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, wrote that:

Politicians and senior police officers have also openly called for the extra-judicial killing of suspects, and have urged civilians to carry guns in statements that effectively endorse the extra-judicial execution of Palestinians. 

It quoted Jerusalem District Police Commander Moshe Edri as saying:

Anyone who stabs Jews or hurts innocent people is due to be killed.

Note that the Police Commander was not concerned about anyone stabbing non-Jews.

Try as they might to deny it, the Zionists were the favourite Jews of the Nazis - as even Zionist historian Lucy Dawidowicz proves

There are those who decry the comparison between Israel and Nazi Germany yet the similarities are striking. The level of racism against Palestinians in Israel is far higher than the level of anti-Semitism in Germany which was largely confined to the Nazi party. See for example Ian Kershaw’s "Popular Opinion and Political Dissent": whose central thesis was that the German public's reaction to the persecution of Jews was characterized by "indifference" rather than fanatical hatred.

Although it is played down today, Hitler came to power despite, not because of his anti-Semitism and unlike the far-right in Israel, which command a clear majority in the Knesset of about 80 seats, the Nazi party never gained more than 37% of the German electorate in a free election (July 1932).

David Bankier concluded that most of the German public:

“did not attribute to antisemitism the importance that it had in the eyes of the National Socialist Party, and placed it in a secondary place in its order of priorities....

The decreased hopes of victory and the fear of the retaliation of the Jews or the Allies led many ordinary Germans to distance themselves from the propaganda, and particularly from the subject of the Jews. The attempts of the Nazis to incite antisemitic feelings did not only fail to calm the fears of the public but actually increased them, and thus the more the information about the mass extermination filtered through the more the public wished to be less involved in the Final Solution.

The level of racism in Israel against Arabs is staggeringly high. According to Dahlia Schendlin, a survey conducted by Professor Tamir Sorek of Pennsylvania State University examined "eliminatory" attitudes among Jewish Israelis and their theological roots.

It found that 82% of Israeli Jews supported the transfer of Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip to other countries. 56% supported the expulsion of Arab citizens of Israel. When asked whether they agreed with the idea that the IDF,

when conquering an enemy city, should act in a manner similar to the way the Israelites acted when they conquered Jericho under the leadership of Joshua, namely, to kill all its inhabitants? 

nearly half, 47 percent, agreed. Polls such as these have been remarkably consistent over the years.

An opinion poll (27.3.07) found that over half the Jewish population believed that marriage to an Arab was ‘national treason’. Note that they didn’t oppose inter-marriage on religious but racial and national grounds. Many religions historically, whether Jewish or Catholic, have frowned upon inter-marriage. This is religious chauvinism not racism but when that becomes the policy of a state then that is racism. It becomes a quest for racial purity.

Over 75% of participants did not approve of apartment buildings being shared between Arabs and Jews. 60% said they would not allow an Arab to visit their home. About 40% agreed that “Arabs should have their right to vote for Knesset revoked”. Over half agreed that Israel should encourage its Arab citizens to emigrate from the country and a similar percentage said they would not want to work under the direct management of an Arab. 55% said “Arabs and Jews should be separated at entertainment sites”. 31% said they felt hatred, while 50% said they felt fear in the company of an Arab.

The Nazi concept of Lebensraum 'Living Space' is Alive & Well in Israel

Over 56% of participants said they believed that Israel’s Arab citizens posed both a security and a demographic threat to the country, in other words that the Arab presence in a Jewish state caused them to fear that one day there might be more Arabs than Jews. When asked what they thought of Arab culture, over 37%replied, “The Arab culture is inferior.”

YNet described how the annual 2006 Democracy Index found that 62% of Israelis wanted the government to encourage Arabs to leave the country.

Only 14% of respondents said ties between Arabs and Jews are good, while 29% said a Jewish majority is required for decisions of crucial national significance.

This was 20 years ago. Today the situation is that much worse. Zionism has embarked on a one-way journey which, left to its own devices, will end up in further genocide and further ethnic cleansing. The role of liberal Zionists is to prettify and justify what is happening in the name of ‘the only Jewish state in the world’, the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ and other self-serving, meaningless tropes.

Why has Zionism and Israel morphed into a 21st century version of Nazi Germany? It is because a ‘Jewish’ ethno-nationalist state was based on race, not religion. It was not intended to be a theocracy but an ethnocracy, although it may also end up as a theocracy. The one thing that Israel won’t become is a democratic state of its citizens. Being a Jewish state precludes that.

This is why, from the very start of the Israeli state, the Zionist militias ‘cleansed most of the areas they controlled of its Palestinians. Without that there could not have been a Jewish majority state. The Nakba was a precondition for the formation of their ‘Jewish’ state and everything since has flowed from that.

The Useless words of British Diplomacy - Since Israel's Government is Sponsoring the Settler Terror What is Needed is Sanctions & No More Arms Shipments

Today the Palestinians are not willing to vacate Palestine which is why Zionism has turned to terror, pogroms, violence and genocide. The same was true of Nazi Germany. From 1933 to 1939 the policy of the German state was one of ethnic cleansing. It was only when this became impossible that the Nazis turned to genocide.

Israel and anti Arab incitement –Mosques

What we are seeing in the West Bank, with the settler pogroms, is another stage in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. I have little doubt that if these pogroms are unsuccessful in stimulating an exodus of the Palestinians then the Zionists will increasingly turn to genocide there too.

Israel has derived enormous political advantages from the Nazi holocaust which at the time they consciously played down. The Zionist leaders used the Nazi holocaust to maximum advantage in order to demonise the Arabs as anti-Semites. This ruse has been increasingly hard to maintain as the spotlight has turned on their actions.

Elli Valley Captures the Victim-Perpetrator Syndrome of Israeli society

As Idith Zertal, an Israeli New Historian wrote in her book The Politics of Nationhood

‘The transference of the holocaust situation on to the Middle East reality… not only created a false sense of the imminent danger of mass destruction. It also immensely distorted the image of the holocaust, dwarfing the magnitude of the atrocities committed by the Nazis, trivializing the unique agony of the victims and the survivors, and utterly demonizing the Arabs and their leaders.

Meir Kahane (Centre) voting in the Knesset

Ben Gvir comes from the tradition of Meir Kahane, the rabbi who was the leader of Kach. In 1984 he was elected to the Knesset. The other Zionist parties immediately boycotted him and walked out of the Knesset whenever he spoke.

Kahane was elected on a programme calling for the expulsion of Israeli Arabs and the deportation of the Palestinians in the West Bank. He called for five year prison sentences for Arab men who had sexual relations with women, which was straight out of the Nuremberg Laws.

However Kahane, who was an embarrassment to the Zionists then, has been proved right in terms of Zionism. Kahane had no time for those who spoke of Israel as a Jewish-Democratic state. He said, quite correctly, that Israel could be a Jewish State or a Democratic State but it could not be both. It was the hypocritical ‘left’ Zionists who maintained that Israel could be both Jewish and democratic when the essence of a Jewish state was that Jews not Palestinians had the power.

Today virtually the whole political scene in Israel has been Kahanised and Kahane lives on in Itamar Ben Gvir, the Police Minister who had on his wall until recently a picture of the mass murderer Baruch Goldstein, who opened up with an automatic weapon killing 29 worshippers in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron.

It should therefore be no surprise that Ben Gvir’s proposal for a racially selective death penalty commanded a majority in the Knesset.

The Dehumanisation of the Palestinians and the murder of their children

All forms of racism dehumanise their victims. But some societies dehumanise them so completely that ethnic cleansing and genocide is the logical outcome.

This is as true of Israel as it was of Nazi Germany. There have been many examples of this in the Gaza genocide but one particular characteristic of it is the dehumanisation of Palestinian children.

Zionist rabbis in Israel have emphasised that the extermination of the Palestinians will only be complete if their children are also killed.

In 2009 a book Torat Hamelech was published by two Chabad Rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur with an introduction by Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh. It was a guide to how to legally kill non-Jews according to Jewish religious law, Halachah.

It also justified the killing Palestinian children. Torat Hamelech argued that:

1.          children may be killed if it is believed they will "grow up to harm us".

2.          Harming the children of a "wicked leader" is permissible if it exerts enough pressure on that leader to stop fighting.

3.          Harming innocents, including infants, is allowed if their "presence and their killing is actually beneficial and helpful" to the war effort.

4.        ‘Ruthless acts’ of revenge to create a "correct element of fear" among enemies.

The book said that “The prohibition ‘Thou Shalt Not Murder” applies only “to a Jew who kills a Jew”. This is because non-Jews are “uncompassionate by nature” and attacks on them “curb their evil inclination,” while babies and children of Israel’s enemies may be killed since “it is clear that they will grow to harm us.”

Israel's Judeo-Nazi Rabbi Dov Lior

The book was endorsed by dozens of Israeli rabbis including Sephardic Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yosef and his son Ya’akov Yosef, who were both influential in Shas, a Sephardic party in Netanyahu’s coalition as well as the most influential rabbi of all, Dov Lior.

Dov Lior is famous for having said that

“There is no such thing as enemy civilians in war time. The law of our Torah is to have mercy on our soldiers and to save them … A thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew’s fingernail.”

Dov Lior is the spiritual mentor of Itamar Ben Gvir. This is an example of how Israeli rabbis act as the ideological and religious enablers of Israel’s neo-Nazi politicians. Today in Israel, and to a large extent outside Israel, the Jewish religion has become a religion of genocide.

If an Arab cleric were to publish such a book he would suffer the same fate as Raed Salah, who was demonised by Zionist groups in this country. Salah denied that his comments at a demonstration even applied to Jews but was gaoled for ‘incitement to racial hatred’. But when it came to the rabis who wrote Torat HaMelech, the Attorney General refused to prosecute and Israel’s High Court said ‘there was no basis’ for such a prosecution.

Limor son Hamelech - who dressed up as an Executioner for Purim (right) with settler leader Daniella Weiss

In Israel the laws against racial incitement are only applied to non-Jews. Jews can say whatever they wish.

In the current genocide in Gaza Orthodox Rabbis have played a key role in legitimising the murder of Palestinian civilians including children.

Prime amongst them was Rabbi Eliyahu Mali, head of the Shirat Moshe yeshiva in Jaffa, who called during a conference on 8 March for the Israeli army to kill ‘all residents of Gaza’. When asked whether this included babies he said:

“Those who create the terrorists” should also be killed, in reference to Palestinian women. Despite these genocidal remarks Israel’s police recommended dropping the case. Elderly people were also legitimate targets, according to Mali.

"There is no such thing called innocent creature. By the way, the elderly man is capable of carrying a rifle and shooting. Therefore, the Torah is very clear in the ruling."

And who was it who placed Israel’s racist rabbis in a position of power in Israel if not David Ben-Gurion, its Labour Zionist Prime Minister. As Adam Shatz wrote in his review of Tom Segev’s biography, Ben-Gurion

gave the Orthodox rabbinate considerable authority over religious affairs.... the rabbis were given the power to define who was and wasn’t a Jew, and which marriages would be recognised. (His own feeling was that Jewish women shouldn’t be allowed to marry Arab men ‘because as I see it an Arab is still not on the human level that I would want for a man who marries a Jewish woman.’)


We see the Nazi behaviour of the Israeli military in Lebanon today. The IDF has decreed that Shi’ite Muslims cannot live in the south of Lebanon.

Some have taken shelter with Christians in neighbouring villages. This has resulted in the Israeli military going into Christian villages, searching for them and warning Christians of dire consequences if they harbour Muslims.

Lying Ruth Justifies Murder of Journalists

Such behaviour was reminiscent of the Gestapo who warned non-Jews of the consequences of sheltering Jews.

The law reserving the death penalty for Palestinians has its roots in the ‘socialist’ Zionism that European social democrats embraced. Ben Gvir and Netanyahu did not come out of nowhere. Labour Zionism gave birth to the monstrosity that is the Israeli state today.

Tony Greenstein

See

‘War crime’: Global condemnation as Israeli ministers celebrate death penalty law targeting Palestinian prisoners

Israel’s death penalty law marks a new phase in its dehumanisation of Palestinians

Posted by at 7 comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

19 March 2026

Open Letter to a Holocaust Denier - The Reverend Lord Biggar, Oxford’s Regius Professor Emeritus of Moral and Pastoral Theology

Those Who Deny the Holocaust in Gaza are No Different to those Who Deny the Nazi Holocaust


The truth about the British Empire and slavery: Mehdi Hasan and Nigel Biggar | Head to Head

I first came across Tory Peer and author of In Defence of War, the Revd. Lord Biggar, when a friend, Adam Waterhouse, sent me a link to an article he had written. Adam’s article was in response to an article Biggar had written, Israel’s acts are not ‘genocidal.’ Biggar had been replying to an article by the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell which spoke of Israel’s actions in Gaza as ‘genocidal acts’.

The Archbishop had visited the West Bank and he was quoted as saying that after his visit the previous week “It gives me no joy whatsoever to use these words,” but that he had been left wondering, “What other words do you use” to describe the situation in the West Bank?

What’s happening in the West Bank is not what happened in South Africa, but you’re left thinking: what other language do I use to describe such a two-tier system, where one group of people is so persistently and systematically denied their human rights and having to live a parallel life? What is happening is deliberate and systematic, persistent, and intentional, and its impact is devastating.

You may wonder why Nigel Biggar even felt the need to respond to the Archbishop’s mild words. We have the horrors of Gaza: the starvation of children, the bombing of hospitals and schools, the Flour Massacre and the shooting of people collecting food, the mass murder of innocent civilians and the genocidal statements of Israeli leaders, to say nothing of the open apartheid in the West Bank, yet the only thing that aroused the ire of our Professor of Morality was the description of what is happening in Gaza 'Genocide'. 


Israeli officials' rhetoric fuelling Gaza genocide through dehumanisation and incitement: B’Tselem

One can only assume that Biggar was doing his best to prevent any expression of solidarity by the Church of England with the Palestinians of Gaza. Not that there had been much anyway. Until he resigned for his role in covering up child abuse in the Church of England, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby had not only refused to condemn the genocide but had all but supported it.

Biggar is not a historian but an academic engaged in historical revisionism and moral relativism. He is no different from those who downplay the magnitude of the Nazi holocaust.

Although Biggar dresses up his arguments in the clothes of moral theology his mission is political, the rehabilitation of the reputation of the British Empire and its offspring, Israel.

That is why he defends the actions of Israel and minimises the genocide in Gaza. In this he is given enthusiastic support by the same Tory press which turned a blind eye to Hitler's anti-Semitism in the 30s.

Zionism was the product of the late colonial era. He could hardly exculpate British colonialism whilst condemning its bastard child, Israel. That is the impulse which drives Biggar and he is not averse to resorting to every verbal and rhetorical trick in pursuit of that goal even if he plays fast and loose with facts.

The reason why I have penned an Open Letter to Biggar is two fold. Firstly Adam Waterhouse was too polite by half when tackling as devious and dishonest a character as Biggar. Politeness is not one of my faults!

Secondly there are many questions that Adam did not ask concerning Biggar’s motive in writing his turgid essay.

To:  nigel.biggar@theology.ox.ac.uk, biggarn@parliament.uk, @NigelBiggar  

Open Letter to the Rev. Lord Biggar

Dear Lord Biggar,

You are the Regius Professor Emeritus of Moral and Pastoral Theology. It is a grand title for such an immoral, (or is it amoral?) man. You are the King’s Professor no less.

I puzzle over what kind of morality and theology leads a person to deny that a genocide is taking place when the evidence to the contrary is so overwhelming?

You state, in the Church Times of 28 November 2025, that Israel’s acts are not ‘genocidal’ in response to the Archbishop of York’s declaration that Israel is committing ‘genocidal acts’. 

Israel bombs school in Gaza killing children and parents under the pretext that they were Hamas

What was it that went through your mind when you read Archbishop Cottrell’s article that impelled you to write in defence of Israel’s genocide? What emotion was it that led you to defend a state that has bombed refugee camps, tent encampments and burnt and buried children alive? A state which has destroyed hospitals and schools, murdered doctors and first responders?

By the most conservative estimate, when your article appeared, 70,100 people had been murdered by Israel in Gaza yet you reduce it to 44,000. Why?

According to a study published in The Lancet, some 83,000 had died by January 2025. If this is true then over 118,000 had died by the time your article appeared.

According to Stuart Casey Maslen, head of the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights, Gaza’s population had declined by more than 10%, which would suggest roughly 200,000 people had died by February 2026.

In your article you do your best to minimise the number of dead. Morally you are no different from deniers of the Nazi holocaust who also did their best to minimise the number of those killed. You say that ‘the large number of civilian casualties alone — maybe around 44,000 — is not sufficient evidence’ of genocide. Is this what the morality of pastoral Christian theology amounts to?

The definition of genocide owes nothing to numbers. The death of 8,000 at Srbenica was held to be a genocide. ‘Genocide’ refers to the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. The question is whether Israel had the necessary intent and did it commit any of the acts that constitute genocide, viz. 

Ø    Killing members of or Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group

Ø    Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction, in whole or in part

Ø    Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group

Ø    Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

Apart from the last category it is clear that the acts of the Israeli state are clearly acts of genocide. It is also clear that you have no expertise in genocide, history or any relevant academic discipline.

Raz Segal, an Israeli and Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies does have that expertise. Segal wrote:

Israelis are explicit and unashamed about their genocidal intent because they have imagined and prosecuted a war against people who they see as colonised “savages”.

A survey by Professor Tamir Sorek of Pennsylvania State University showed that 82% of Israeli Jews supported the expulsion of the Palestinians of Gaza and 47% agreed that

when conquering an enemy city, the Israel Defense Forces should act as the Israelites did in Jericho under Joshua's command – killing all its inhabitants.

56% supported the expulsion of Palestinian citizens of Israel. The statements of intent to commit genocide by Israel's leaders are too many to count.

You question why Archbishop Cottrell ‘thinks that his view should carry weight’ when he ‘is an expert neither in the ethics of war nor in Middle Eastern affairs’. But this applies even more so to you, the author of a book In Defence of War?

You also criticise the Genocide Convention because it ‘fails to distinguish the morally different ways in which a people can be “destroyed”.’ For most people there is nothing moral in destroying a people.

You compare the Allies killing of thousands of French and Italian civilians in the fight against the Nazis with Israel’s ‘war against Hamas’. But there is no  comparison. 

Hamas is a resistance organisation waging a guerrilla war against the world’s fourth most powerful army. The Nazis had an army consisting of armed soldiers complete with tanks and aircraft. So too does Israel. It is the IDF not Hamas which is comparable to the Nazis.

It is also noticeable that you avoid mentioning the word ‘Palestinians’. To you they are ‘Arabs’. This too is part of a genocidal mentality whereby indigenous people are invisible.

What is clear is that your morality is not politically neutral. You say that

THERE is no doubt that Hamas intended to kill indiscriminately on 7 October 2023, because we know that they deliberately hunted down the old, the young, and the infant.’

Hamas mass rape a ‘hoax’ and ‘fake news’, says University of Sydney professor

But there is doubt. Israel has waged a war of atrocity propaganda. The first lies were the 40 beheaded babies hoax. Then there was the mass rape hoax. Hamas’ principal aim was to capture Israeli hostages in order to exchange them for Palestinian hostages.

Whereas you attributed to Hamas the worst of motives, you went out of your way to excuse the actions of the Israeli army. You wrote that:

In contrast, the fact that the Israeli military have targeted buildings where they know civilians are present is no proof that they intend to kill them; for it may be that their intended targets are Hamas sites, to which, tragically, civilians are located dangerously close.

So when Israel bombs and attacks hospitals it is because they are Hamas sites? And ambulances? Universities? What about schools?  How about reservoirs and water treatment plants? Was Hamas hiding out in them too? How about the Trades Union Centre? Are bakeries and kindergartens also Hamas bases.

I know that you are an expert in moral theology, but that begs the question of whether moral theology is a genuine academic discipline or an invented and imagined subject. It is entirely subjective and without any means of independent verification.

Everything you have said could justify any and everything that the Nazis did. Your morality seems to depend on which side you take.  Are there any universal principles that can be distilled from your writings?

You say that ‘the Nazi death camps are the paradigm of genocide’. But are they? One of the main characteristics of Genocide is that there is no paradigm except perhaps the presence of colonialism/imperialism/nationalism.

The death of between 12 and 15 million Africans as a result of slavery might also be considered paradigmatic but your main concern when it comes to colonial slavery is to oppose reparations by indulging in whatabouttery in your book The Tyranny of Imagined Guilt.

As Professor Alan Lester writes:

‘Whataboutery seems to me a very fragile ethical edifice upon which to build an anti-reparative argument.

It seems that ethics have no place in your moral theology. Lester writes that you

accuse(s) reparations activists of “the reckless, dismissive brushing aside of concerns about the truth.” One wonders if he was looking in the mirror.

For you there seems to be only one genocide, the Jewish holocaust. Contrary to Zionist propaganda it was no more unique than any other genocide.

Was the Genocide in the Congo  where amputations and the skinning alive of the 10 million Africans were perpetrated, less cruel or paradigmatic? 

Was the Herero/Nama genocide in SW Africa to be disregarded when it was based on the same principles of racial supremacy and even involved some of the same actors who perpetrated the Nazi holocaust, such as Eugen Fischer?

The Nazi genocide of Jews has become an imperialist narrative, shorn of its political and social  roots, as the main rationale for everything that Israel does. It is no surprise that you do not deploy your ‘moral’ arguments against reparations for slavery against the reparations that were paid by the Germans to Israel.

I can only assume that the real reason for your anguish is that as a Christian Zionist you are prepared to justify any atrocity and any war crime that Israel commits because without the ‘return’ of the Jews to the Holy Land Christ will not be returning. In other words the ends justify the means.

When I saw you in the debate hosted by Mehdi Hassan you brought to mind Percy Shelley’s Masque of Anarchy, written in the wake of the massacre at Peterloo in 1819:

I met Murder on the way—

He had a mask like Castlereagh -

Very smooth he looked, yet grim;

Seven blood-hounds followed him.

You are also the author of Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, which attempts to provide a defence of the British Empire. In your own words it is ‘Empire Without Apology’.

Although you conceded in the debate hosted by Mehdi Hassan that the Empire contained ‘‘elements of racism’ you see the Empire as not having been ‘essentially racist’. On balance it was a force for good.

It is no surprise that you were ennobled by Kemi Badenoch who like most Black people in the Tory Party goes out of her way to prove that she’s politically White. Badenoch is the Black Face of White Supremacism. It is no surprise that she has been called a coconut by Black anti-racists.

Kenan Malik, in his review of your book describes how, in 1919, the architect of British support for Zionism, Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour,

dismissed the idea that the new League of Nations should adopt a statement about equality, insisting it unimaginable “that a man from central Africa could be regarded as the equal of a European or an American”

This is the racism that led to Britain’s support of Zionism.

Your real function as an academic was to provide the religious and ideological underpinnings for the new imperialism that we are seeing play out in the wars in the Middle East today. Your academic discipline, Moral Theology, is little more than a religious justification of imperialism and its work. It is political chicanery dressed up in academic jargon.

Virtually every human rights organisation in the world recognises that what has occurred in Gaza is genocide. Organisations as disparate as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Israel’s B’tselem and the UN’s own Commission of Inquiry. The Association of Genocide Scholars voted by 86% to describe what was happening in Gaza as a genocide.

Perhaps you would like to inform people just what your own qualifications are that enables you to contradict not only every human rights organisation but the testimony of doctors like Dr Mark Perlmutter. In an interview Perlmutter described how, when volunteering at the European hospital of Khan Younis in southern Gaza he "saw two children that were shot twice". He added: "No child gets shot twice by mistake."

Virtually every doctor who has volunteered in Gaza has the same story. Israel is using children as target practice. Does this not tell you something about what has happened in Gaza or does your allegiance to the Tory Party and mammon preclude this?

It seems to me that a far better title for you to use would be the Professor of an Immoral Theology, not forgetting the Regius bit of course!

Tony Greenstein 

Posted by at 6 comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)