I don't really know what to say about this. It seems like pretty inflamatory speech, and granted I am at the mercy of a KY public school education, but is it a bit much to say that no one cared about the Holocaust? And hasn't the U.S. backed Israel since its inception? I'll be the first to admit that I am poorly informed on the historical nature of the Holocaust, I'm just posting this to get other peoples reactions.




Sharon: ‘No one cared’ about Holocaust
Israeli leader says lesson is Jews can only rely on themselvesThe Associated Press
Updated: 11:57 a.m. ET Jan. 26, 2005JERUSALEM - In a speech marking the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Wednesday that the world “didn’t lift a finger” to stop the Holocaust.



Sharon said Jews learned a lesson from the genocide that they can only rely on themselves.

In unusually harsh remarks to parliament, Sharon noted that when the Nazis began deporting Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz in large numbers in 1944, Allied forces did not bomb the railroad tracks leading to the death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. Sharon said that over a period of several weeks, more than 600,000 Jews from Hungary were killed in Auschwitz.

“The sad and terrible conclusion is that no one cared that Jews were being killed,” Sharon said.

“At the time of the most terrible test, friends and benefactors didn’t lift a finger,” he said. “This is the Jewish lesson of the Holocaust.”

“The state of Israel has learned this lesson, and since its founding, it has defended itself and its residents, and provides safety to Jews everywhere. We know that we can only rely on ourselves,” he said.

For this reason, Israel as the Jewish state must always remain strong, Sharon said.

“We must always remember that this is the only place in the world in which we, the Jews, have the right and the power to defend ourselves with our own strength,” Sharon said. “This we will never surrender.”

Even 60 years after Auschwitz was liberated, anti-Semitism still exists throughout the world, Sharon said.

Doesn't the US give more financial aid to Israel than any other country?

What's harsh about this? It's the truth, no one helped them even when they knew what was happening.

it's so true. I don't see how it's a harsh statement at all--it's the nature of the world, to turn away in the face of crisis, and then afterwards we erect monuments and regale the survivors. It happened with the Holocaust. With Rwanda, it's happening now with Sudan. I'm not up on my history lessons either, but I don't think the reason for WWII was to stop the persecution of the Jews.

I think there are two points Sharon is trying to make (in the limited excerpts we have here to work with). The first is that Jews have learned that they can't rely on anyone else to protect them. This I think is correct. While the US may back Israel financially, Israel pursues it's own policies that are designed to protect themselves from enemies on all sides. I often don't agree with the policies, but Israel acts like a rogue nation sometimes because they feel alone in the world, and justifiably so.

The second point is that nobody cared that the Jews were being slaughtered during the Holocaust. This I don't agree with. I have seen more conflicting evidence regarding who knew what when about the Holocaust that I no longer trust any of it. In my heart, I don't believe that anyone outside of the Nazi inner circles really knew what was going on in the death camps. Even if it was known, I don't think anyone understood the scale, and certainly did not have enough military intel to be able to bomb specific railroads to save the Hungarian Jews as Sharon is claiming.

--PunkDavid

he's kind of right, but he's still a nutcase, murdering piece of shit.

Even so, (and I do think you're right), isn't hearing that people are being herded, en masse, into camps because the gov't disagrees with thier religion enough reason to act? I mean, it wasn't for their protection, certainly that was known.

well, here people were being herded into camps because the government didn't agree with their ethnicity. What do you expect?

I'd be a bit wary that Sharon may be attempting to construe this into a political statement regarding Israel.

Honestly, all kinds of people had been herded into camps under the Nazis for years. It was only in the later years of the war that they started being exterminated en masse. By that time, we were fighting a full-blown total war against the Germans, and I really don't know how much more could have been done. If the Allies had specific knowledge of the death camps, much of the slaughter might have been averted, but it was simply not the highest priorirty for the war effort, and I can understand that.

--PunkDavid

*Master of teh Obvious*

--PunkDavid

Yeah yeah. I felt that some comment had to be made, though.

I don't expect anything different. see the first post I made. for a country that thrived on the institution of slavery for some couple hundred years, I can't say Japanese internment surprises me. but it's not like anyone was running to help them out. I'm just pointing out a general lack of action on the world's part when it comes to things like that.

ahh yep.

The fact is, genocide continues unabated in much of the third world today. The Sudan, Rowanda and Cambodia are just a few examples of wide-spread genocide on a massive scale that occurred since the liberation of Auschwitz. The hypocritical thing is, because they occurred in the third world, no one, including Israel, gives a shit. So what's the point?