Naive Racism - Islamophobia and the next Holocaust

Today I received this viral email. I apologise for reproducing it in full, but there are so many issues contained in it, that you do need to read the whole thing. After you've read it I will argue that this sort of anti-Islamic vitriol is precisely why there was a holocaust in the first place. Read and be very afraid.




Europe Died at Auschwitz ..

The following is a copy of an article written by Spanish writer Sebastian Vilar Rodriguez and published in a Spanish newspaper on Jan. 15, 2008. It doesn't take much imagination to extrapolate the message to the rest of Europe - and possibly to the rest of the world.

REMEMBER AS YOU READ -- IT WAS WRITTEN IN A SPANISH NEWSPAPER

Date: Tue. 15 January 2008

ALL EUROPEAN LIFE DIED IN AUSCHWITZ....... By Sebastian Vilar Rodrigez

I walked down the street in Barcelona , and suddenly discovered a terrible truth - Europe died in Auschwitz ... We killed six million Jews and replaced them with 20 million Muslims. In Auschwitz we burned a culture, thought, creativity, talent. We destroyed the chosen people, truly chosen, because they produced great and wonderful people who changed the world.

The contribution of this people is felt in all areas of life: science, art, international trade, and above all, as the conscience of the world. These are the people we burned.

And under the pretense of tolerance, and because we wanted to prove to ourselves that we were cured of the disease of racism, we opened our gates to 20 million Muslims, who brought us stupidity and ignorance, religious extremism and lack of tolerance, crime and poverty, due to an unwillingness to work and support their families with pride.

They have blown up our trains and turned our beautiful Spanish cities into the third world, drowning in filth and crime.

Shut up in the apartments they receive free from the government, they plan the murder and destruction of their naive hosts.

And thus, in our misery, we have exchanged culture for fanatical hatred, creative skill for destructive skill, intelligence for backwardness and superstition.

We have exchanged the pursuit of peace of the Jews of Europe and their talent for a better future for their children, their determined clinging to life because life is holy, for those who pursue death, for people consumed by the desire for death for themselves and others, for our children and theirs.

What a terrible mistake was made by miserable Europe ...

***********************************
The Global Islamic population is approximately 1,200,000,000; that is ONE BILLION TWO HUNDRED MILLION or 20% of the world's population. They have received the following Nobel Prizes:

Literature:

1988 - Najib Mahfooz

Peace:

1978 - Mohamed Anwar El-Sadat

1990 - Elias James Corey

1994 - Yaser Arafat:

1999 - Ahmed Zewai

Economics:

(zero)


Physics:

(zero)


Medicine:

1960 - Peter Brian Medawar

1998 - Ferid Mourad


TOTAL: 7 SEVEN


The Global Jewish population is approximately 14,000,000; that is FOURTEEN MILLION or about 0.02% of the world's population. They have received the following Nobel Prizes:


Literature:

1910 - Paul Heyse

1927 - Henri Bergson

1958 - Boris Pasternak

1966 - Shmuel Yosef Agnon

1966 - Nelly Sachs

1976 - Saul Bellow

1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer

1981 - Elias Canetti

1987 - Joseph Brodsky

1991 - Nadine Gordimer World


Peace:

1911 - Alfred Fried

1911 - Tobias Michael Carel Asser

1968 - Rene Cassin

1973 - Henry Kissinger

1978 - Menachem Begin

1986 - Elie Wiesel

1994 - Shimon Peres

1994 - Yitzhak Rabin


Physics:

1905 - Adolph Von Baeyer

1906 - Henri Moissan

1907 - Albert Abraham Michelson

1908 - Gabriel Lippmann

1910 - Otto Wallach

1915 - Richard Willstaetter

1918 - Fritz Haber

1921 - Albert Einstein

1922 - Niels Bohr

1925 - James Franck

1925 - Gustav Hertz

1943 - Gustav Stern

1943 - George Charles de Hevesy

1944 - Isidor Issac Rabi

1952 - Felix Bloch

1954 - Max Born

1958 - Igor Tamm

1959 - Emilio Segre

1960 - Donald A. Glaser

1961 - Robert Hofstadter

1961 - Melvin Calvin

1962 - Lev Davidovich Landau

1962 - Max Ferdinand Perutz

1965 - Richard Phillips Feynman

1965 - Julian Schwinger

1969 - Murray Gell-Mann

1971 - Dennis Gabor

1972 - William Howard Stein

1973 - Brian David Josephson

1975 - Benjamin Mottleson

1976 - Burton Richter

1977 - Ilya Prigogine

1978 - Arno Allan Penzias

1978 - Peter L Kapitza

1979 - Stephen Weinberg

1979 - Sheldon Glashow

1979 - Herbert Charles Brown

1980 - Paul Berg

1980 - Walter Gilbert

1981 - Roald Hoffmann

1982 - Aaron Klug

1985 - Albert A. Hauptman

1985 - Jerome Karle

1986 - Dudley R. Herschbach

1988 - Robert Huber

1988 - Leon Lederman

1988 - Melvin Schwartz

1988 - Jack Steinberger

1989 - Sidney Altman

1990 - Jerome Friedman

1992 - Rudolph Marcus

1995 - Martin Perl

2000 - Alan J. Heeger


Economics:

1970 - Paul Anthony Samuelson

1971 - Simon Kuznets

1972 - Kenneth Joseph Arrow

1975 - Leonid Kantorovich

1976 - Milton Friedman

1978 - Herbert A. Simon

1980 - Lawrence Robert Klein

1985 - Franco Modigliani

1987 - Robert M. Solow

1990 - Harry Markowitz

1990 - Merton Miller

1992 - Gary Becker

1993 - Robert Fogel


Medicine:

1908 - Elie Metchnikoff

1908 - Paul Erlich

1914 - Robert Barany

1922 - Otto Meyerhof

1930 - Karl Landsteiner

1931 - Otto Warburg

1936 - Otto Loewi

1944 - Joseph Erlanger

1944 - Herbert Spencer Gasser

1945 - Ernst Boris Chain

1946 - Hermann Joseph Muller

1950 - Tadeus Reichstein

1952 - Selman Abraham Waksman

1953 - Hans Krebs

1953 - Fritz Albert Lipmann

1958 - Joshua Lederberg

1959 - Arthur Kornberg

1964 - Konrad Bloch

1965 - Francois Jacob

1965 - Andre Lwoff

1967 - George Wald

1968 - Marshall W. Nirenberg

1969 - Salvador Luria

1970 - Julius Axelrod

1970 - Sir Bernard Katz

1972 - Gerald Maurice Edelman

1975 - Howard Martin Temin

1976 - Baruch S. Blumberg

1977 - Roselyn Sussman Yalow

1978 - Daniel Nathans

1980 - Baruj Benacerraf

1984 - Cesar Milstein

1985 - Michael Stuart Brown

1985 - Joseph L. Goldstein

1986 - Stanley Cohen [& Rita Levi-Montalcini]

1988 - Gertrude Elion

1989 - Harold Varmus

1991 - Erwin Neher

1991 - Bert Sakmann

1993 - Richard J. Roberts

1993 - Phillip Sharp

1994 - Alfred Gilman

1995 - Edward B. Lewis

1996- Lu RoseIacovino


TOTAL: 129!

The Jews are NOT promoting brain washing children in military training camps, teaching them how to blow themselves up and cause maximum deaths of Jews and other non Muslims. The Jews don't hijack planes, nor kill athletes at the Olympics, or blow themselves up in German restaurants. There is NOT one single Jew who has destroyed a church. There is NOT a single Jew who protests by killing people.

The Jews don't traffic slaves, nor have leaders calling for Jihad and death to all the Infidels.

Perhaps the world's Muslims should consider investing more in standard education and less in blaming the Jews for all their problems.

Muslims must ask 'what can they do for humankind' before they demand that humankind respects them.

Regardless of your feelings about the crisis between Israel and the Palestinians and Arab neighbours, even if you believe there is more culpability on Israel's part, the following two sentences really say it all:

"If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel." Benjamin Netanyahu

General Eisenhower warned us it is a matter of history that when the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, General Dwight Eisenhower, found the victims of the death camps he ordered all possible photographs to be taken, and for the German people from surrounding villages to be ushered through the camps and even made to bury the dead.

He did this because he said in words to this effect:

'Get it all on record now - get the films - get the witnesses - because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened'

Recently, the UK debated whether to remove The Holocaust from its school curriculum because it 'offends' the Muslim population which claims it never occurred. It is not removed as yet. However, this is a frightening portent of the fear that is gripping the world and how easily each country is giving into it.

It is now more than 60 years after the Second World War in Europe ended. This e-mail is being sent as a memorial chain, in memory of the, 6 million Jews, 20 million Russians, 10 million Christians, and 1,900 Catholic priests who were 'murdered, raped, burned, starved, beaten, experimented on and
humiliated' while the German people looked the other way.

Now, more than ever, with Iran, among others, claiming the Holocaust to be 'a myth,' it is imperative to make sure the world never forgets.

This e-mail is intended to reach 400 million people. Be a link in the memorial chain and help distribute this around the world.

How many years will it be before the attack on the World Trade Centre 'NEVER HAPPENED' because it offends some Muslim in the United States?

Do not just delete this message; it will take only a minute to pass this along.

My Response:

Firstly the positives. Yes, yes, yes, protect the facts and teach every kid about the holocaust.

I also accept that peaceful methods and lifestyles should always take precedence over violent ones - although we enter a moral maze once those who advocate peaceful solutions then use violence to enforce it (preemptive strike on Iran? Afghanistan? WW2?). Is there not an argument that letting Iran have a nuclear arsenal makes the prospect for peace in the region more likely, not less? Why would Iran ever attack Israel, or want to defend itself, unless it thought (rightly as it happens) that Israel is a credible threat to its own people? Doesn't making Israel less of a threat defuse the potential for escalation? The author's suggestion that Jews never use violence to solve their problems wouldn't go down well in Gaza or with the families of the people killed and maimed by Jewish terrorist bombings in the run up to the formation of the state of Israel. But I don't want to weigh one set of loathsome violent acts against another. Just to remark that Jews aren't saints either.

So what about using violence to have prevented WW2 and the holocaust itself? Back in the early 1930s, should the world have taken tough early strike action to prevent Hitler from making the progress he did? And it's in answering this question that the fallacy and dangers of the above email become obvious. What happened first which escalated into WW2? Was it the nazis starting to do their stuff, or was it earlier than that when people were encouraged to believe that one race was better than another? Didn't that create the nazis and their maniacal mission for Aryan purity in the first place?

Hitler and his chums exploited an idea popular in Central and Eastern Europe throughout the centuries that Jews were parasitic untermensche. There was widespread poverty and unemployment, especially after WW1, together with highly polarised wealth structures where the contrasts between rich and poor led to deep social divides. It was therefore a fertile landscape to blame easily identifiable groups for this suffering, much as we blame the bankers today for our economic tribulations. Unfortunately, once again Jews do seem to be heading for similar finger-pointing problems in that they apparently have a preponderance of wealth making skills. I'm not sure if this is fact (and maybe in suggesting it, I am guilty of the same racist claptrap the author expunges) but I bet the number of bankers who are Jewish is significantly disproportionate to their percentage of the population (or did messrs Goldman, Sachs, Lehman and Sterns change their names just to appear Jewish?). Maybe there really is a combination of inbred nature and cultural nurture that encourages intellectual pursuit, especially commercial, over the physical. Perhaps this is a formula to admire, but the more successful it is, the more it invites envy and fear. But there is festering envy and then there's getting off your arse to compete. Hitler's solution was to level the playing field by harnessing popular sentiment to redistribute wealth instead of enhancing the ability of the poor to achieve it by using the wealthy as an inspiration rather than a target. 'Taking it' is easier than 'making it', especially when you've persuaded a population that the people who've got it are the reason you haven't, and they're lesser beings anyway, so everyone benefits from their removal, especially when you and your family feel threatened and desperate. It also helps that they look a little different from you, so there's less danger of you or yours being wrongly identified as one of them.

This philosophy entered popular credence so that when the 'final solution' was enacted, the expediters believed they were eradicating people who were contaminating their society - which is PRECISELY what the email above is trying to make you believe about Muslims! It's suggesting that Muslims, not Islam, have no value. That they do not deserve to be part of our society.

There is so much wrong with this, that it's hard to know where to start. But the biggest problem is the way the writer develops credibility by exploiting selected facts, and falsehoods, to exemplify what it purports to be an untermensche reality. It suggests that Muslim nature and Islamic nurture are inferior to Jew's, and potentially dangerous for all of us. At its heart is the notion that one race is better than another because of spurious and misleading statistical evidence. I am pretty certain that the Nobel Prize Committee never ask or announce 'what religion' their awards are being given to. So the writer of this email must have simply guessed from the names. Highly scientific. Better informed people can easily counter the litany of pluses for Jews and negatives for Muslims by observing that, for example, the world's mathematics is based on Western Arabic Numerals or that vast swathes of our planet's cultural richness and diversity can be traced to Moorish influences. Or what about Muslims providing far greater proportions of their wealth to help the less fortunate in their societies compared to the British, for example. Muslim art, ceramics, dance, music, architecture, poetry etc. Not everything worthwhile is awarded a Nobel prize. As a Jew who enjoys his food, I can't say our cuisine is particularly worth popping out for, and there's only so much Hava Nagina you can listen to in a sitting.

Readers of my blog will know that I am atheist and therefore argue strongly that teaching mythology and fairy-tales as fact restricts the search for answers to universal mysteries as well as conditioning immature minds about so called 'truths' that have not been proven. However, we would be making a severe mistake if we supported the idea that one misguided 'truth' is any better or worse than another - unless, and this is important, a delusional faith encourages the subjugation or even eradication of humans (as certain Jewish laws demand, by the way). But encouraging hatred and fear for such irrationality instead of employing determined reason, education and persuasion through respect and argument, is fundamentally and massively wrong. It leads to the horrendous idea that when all else fails, if you can't change an idea, kill the brain it's in.

So the writer's strategy to commemorate one holocaust is ironically and tragically the reason it happened in the first place.