THE CENTURY OF THE HOLOCAUST

Dear Dr. Peter Kirsch

Please note the remarks on your article, especially adding the massacres that took place in Arab countries over and above what you mentioned.

We appreciate the efforts you put to document the massacres/holocausts committed by western colonialist powers, and raising the very important question: "Why are ONLY THE JEWISH PEOPLE memorialized and remembered so fondly in the West?" The answer is simple as I mentioned here below.

Sincerely
Adib S. Kawar

An uprooted Palestinian Arab

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THE CENTURY OF THE HOLOCAUST

by Peter Kirsch, MD, February 15, 2006
http://www.lewisnews.com/article.asp?ID=122389

Dear Friends

Here is a very good article about the massacres (holocausts) against a number of peoples of the world, which were committed during the 20th century. The author, Peter Kirsch, MD, asks at the end of his article: THE CENTURY OF THE HOLOCAUST, a number of questions that I pasted here as follows:

Why are ONLY THE PEOPLE memorialised and remembered so fondly in the West?

What about the Cambodians?
The Ukrainians?
The Russians?
The many nations of Europe?
The Laotians?
The Chinese?
The Africans?
The Latin Americans?
The Armenians?
The one hundred and forty million or more dead human beings throughout the twentieth century?

Are the Jewish people really
so SPECIAL?
so REMARKABLE?
so IMPORTANT?
so SUPERIOR?

that they alone amongst all nations are worthy of Memorials, Remembrance Days, special school lessons about the Jewish Six Million?

And if they are, can someone please tell me WHY?

Because they claim to be the chosen people of g-d who promised them other people's land to be invaded and its indigenous people be displaced and replaced by imported non-Semitic converted Jews. Some people believed this myth, and others found it in their colonialist interest to create a rogue state that will act as their long colonialist arm in the heart of the Arab land. (A.S.K.)

But before trying to answer these questions I would like to point out that Peter Kirsch failed to mention the massacres committed against Arab nationals during the twentieth century, namely:
The Palestinian holocaust, which was initiated since the first Zionist colonialist invader sat foot on the Palestinian soil in 1880 and which is still going on uninterrupted. A great number of massacres and ethnic cleansing were committed against Palestinian and other Arab nationals, during the wars Zionist waged against all Arab in and around Palestine, which include besides Palestine:

Egypt:

The Zionist state invaded Egypt in 1954 (together with France and the UK). The second during 1967. During these two invasions thousands of Egyptian Arab martyrs were massacred, Prisoners of war were killed after their surrender.

Syria:

was invaded in 1967 and the Golan Heights are still occupied. Besides the big number of martyrs who were murdered there are now about 500,000 thousands refugees from this occupied Arab land in Syria. The number of Syrian Arabs who are still living in their occupied land is only 15,000 people. The Zionist state "annexed" the Golan Heights and considers it a part of it. About 21 colonies were built on the stolen land; so besides the massacres committed, ethnic cleansing was practiced against the Arab inhabitants of the Golan Heights. The Zionist government tried to impose "Israeli citizenship" on those 15,000 Syrian Arabs but they refused to accept it.

Syrian territory, now under Israeli occupation, of about 1,250 km².
The Golan Heights are situated to the east of the Jordan River. Today the population of the Golan Heights is principally Jewish Israeli, after large numbers of locals fled the area in 1973. More than 100,000 locals fled to Syria (80,000) and Lebanon (20,000). The number of Jews moving into the Golan Heights is around 75,000 settlers who live in more than 30 Jewish-only settlements, illegal by international law. Altogether, the number of inhabitants today must exceed 200,000.
Golan Heights has been annexed by Israel, and is under Israeli law, but this is not internationally recognized.

HISTORY
1948: The Golan Heights becomes strategically important, as it is used as a base for artillery attacks on Israel, mostly during wars.
Moshe Dayan wrote in his memoirs that Zionist colonialist in the Holeh insisted that the IOF bombard the Syrian Heights so as the Syrian army to retaliate, and if they did not the bombardment will continue till the Syrians do, and the IOF to occupy the heights.
1967: The Golan Heights are occupied by Israel early in the Six-Day War.
1973: For a couple of days during the Yom Kippur War, the Golan Heights are recaptured by Syria.
1975: Syria gets an area around the town of Qunaytirah, as a result of US-led talks after the Yom Kippur War.
1981: The Golan Heights is officially annexed by Menachim Begin's government. The area is placed under Israeli law, and settlements are established. The annexation is not recognized by the internationa

"Golan Heights

Lebanon:

Lebanon was invaded by Zionist forces twice in 1978 and 1982. South Lebanon was occupied from 1978 to 2000 when the Lebanese Resistance drove the Zionist occupation forces out of the occupied Lebanese territories with the exception of the Shibaa farms and other plots of land. Only during the 1982 invasion at least 20,000 Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian were murdered by IOF. These occupation forces caused tremendous destruction during the invasion, which included besides private homes all over the occupied area tremendous damage against the infra structure: Electricity plants, roads, bridges and public buildings. The occupation forces brought with them archeologist who dug out archeological treasures and stole them. Even after the IOF were driven out air, land and sea assaults are still being waged daily against Lebanon, people are kidnapped, and martyrs are falling......

The Lebanese resistance drove the Zionist forces out of the occupied Lebanese territories. Only during the 1982 invasion at least 20,000 Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian were murdered by IOF. These occupation forces caused tremendous destruction during the invasion, which reached up to the capital Beirut that was severely bombarded and destroyed. Destruction included besides private homes all over the occupied area by the modern Mongols, tremendous damage against the infra structure: Electricity plants, roads, bridges and public buildings. The occupation forces brought with them archeologist who dug out archeological treasures and stole them. Even after the IOF were driven out air, land and sea assaults are still being waged daily against Lebanon, people are kidnapped, and martyrs are falling......"

All Palestinian refugee camps between Beirut and the soutern border were practically demolished and thousands of Palestinians were murdered. The most famous massacre in Palestinian refugee camps was the Sabra and Shatila. The IOF ordered the Lebanese Fascist militias to do the dirty job as planed by Arial Sharon and under his personal supervision. He was the Zionist "defense minister" at the time.


Lybia:

26 of October coincides with the anniversary of what the Libyans call the Black Day’, on this day in 1911 the Italian fascist invaders shipped thousands of Libyan men, women and children to some small and remote Italian islands. No one knows anything about their fate! Up to this very day, the Italian authorities have refused to furnish the full list of these Libyan victims to the Government and People of Libya. Libya holds an annual Day of Mourning.

All occupation is abhorrent and the Italian one was not an exception: almost one million Libyans died during the Italian occupation from 1911 to 1944!
Like most of the peoples of the Third World, the Libyans have suffered, and are still suffering, great injustices from the Western powers. The history of the Libyan people is a history of blood, tears and broken bones. The people of Libya have been terrorised and victimised for many decades by the various European powers. With the tacit approval of the British and French governments, Italy declared war on Libya on September 12, 1911, under the excuse that the Ottoman Turks — who were then ruling Libya were subject to insults and maltreatment for which they were in danger! On September 17, 1911, the Italians invaded Tripoli and Benghazi. The Italians expected that their invasion of Libya would be easily accomplished. But, to their horror, their aggression was courageously and strongly resisted by the Libyan people. For 20 terrible years Arab Libyan resistance fighters and guerrillas fought against Italian fascists with sweat and blood. The courage of the Libyan martyrs was epitomised by a very old man Sheikh Omar al Mukhtar. A true hero.

Omar Mukhtar upon his capture in September 1931.

Omar Mukhtar, the 'fierce and frightening warrior on his way to the gallows'.
notice the chains and the escort- what does it remind you of?

The Italian aggression and terrorism against Libya was extremely brutal. Thousands of innocent men, women and children were killed. Their homes were burnt down, their crops destroyed, their wells filled with cement, and copies of their Koran stepped upon. Many women were raped. Thousands of other Libyans were detained in concentration camps in the hot desert. Their properties were confiscated. Others perished under the most repressive conditions. Furthermore, the Italians, had laid about 170,000 landmines all over the country. These landmines have killed and are continuing to kill and maim many Libyans. Italy has refused to furnish maps showing where these landmines were laid. When Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist dictator, was carrying on his terrorism against the Libyan people, he was highly praised by British, French and American politicians, business leaders and the press.

*For instance, on a visit to Mussolini in 1927, Winston Churchill told journalists that Italian fascism “has rendered a service to the whole world.”

Algeria:

Algeria was colonized and considered as a part of France by the French for long decades Actually between 1830 and July 3rd 1962, that is for 132 years.

The first significant French colonial military foray into Africa occurred in Algeria in 1830. The French king at the time, Charles X, sent his army to occupy the town of Algiers in response to the dey of Algiers striking and calling the French consul names. The invasion eventually led to the announcement in 1848 that Algeria was part of the republic of France, making Algeria the first French colony. This led to the eventual creation of one of the largest and longest lasting colonial empires in history.

In the early morning hours of All Saints' Day, November 1, 1954, guerrillas of the National Liberation Front (Front de Libération Nationale -- FLN) launched attacks in various parts of Algeria against military installations, police posts, warehouses, communications facilities, and public utilities. From Cairo, the FLN broadcast a proclamation calling on Algerian Arabs to join in a national struggle for the "restoration of the Algerian state, sovereign, democratic, and social, within the framework of the principles of Islam." The French minister of interior, socialist François Mitterrand, responded sharply that "the only possible negotiation is war." It was the reaction of Premier Pierre Mendès-France that set the tone of French policy for the next five years. On November 12, he declared in the National Assembly: "One does not compromise when it comes to defending the internal peace of the nation, the unity and integrity of the Republic. The Algerian departments are part of the French Republic. They have been French for a long time, and they are irrevocably French... Between them and metropolitan France there can be no conceivable secession."

In the three years (1957-60) during which the regroupement program was followed, the war uprooted more than 2 million Algerians were uprooted, who were forced to relocate in French concentration camps or to flee to Morocco, Tunisia, and into the Algerian hinterland, where many thousands died of starvation, disease, and exposure. Additional pro-French colaborators were killed when the FLN settled accounts after independence.

The FLN estimated in 1962 that nearly eight years of revolution had cost 300,000 dead from war-related causes. Algerian sources later put the figure at approximately 1.5 million martyrs, while French officials estimated it at 350,000. The actual figure of war dead may be far higher than the original FLN and official French estimates, even if it does not reach the 1 million adopted by the Algerian government. Uncounted thousands of Algerian Arab civilians lost their lives in French army ratissages, bombing raids, and vigilante reprisals.

Of course we have to mention the massacres that took place over and above these Arab countries: Morocco, Tunis, Egypt, Sudan, Iraq, and the Arabian peninsula states: The Yemen and the Arabian Gulf states.

The Palestinian HOLOCAUST

As for Palestine, the whole land of Palestine is still stolen and what ever movables that were on it were stolen too. More than 500 Arab towns and villages were completely demolished. Now there are more Palestinian Arabs in the "shatat" diaspora than in historic Palestine. The numbers of Palestinian Arabs who were massacred by Zionists with the help of the British occupation forces before 1948 are beyond counting.

So in brief Zionists stole the land of Palestine, ethnic cleansed it, and stole all movable and non movable properties, and caused the death of tens of thousands martyrs.

I don't see a reason why the Palestinian holocaust was not mentioned by Dr. Peter Kirsch, even though his pointing out these massacres and crimes against humanity were brought out and condemned.

The Palestinian holocaust with the exception of few others is unique, because more than half of the Palestinian Arab population was ethnic cleansed and their land was confiscated/stolen.

We appreciate Dr. Peter Kirsch's efforts to bring out to the light all these massacres and crimes against humanity, but we don't see a reason why the Palestinian holocaust as well as all the above mentioned Arab holocausts were not, even though he condemned them and asked for the reason saying

Are the Jewish people really
so SPECIAL?
so REMARKABLE?
so IMPORTANT?
so SUPERIOR?

Can Someone Venture an Answer to the Questions Posed at the End of this Article?

THE CENTURY OF THE HOLOCAUST

by Peter Kirsch, MD, february 15, 2006
http://www.lewisnews.com/article.asp?ID=122389

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word ³holocaust as follows:

1) A sacrifice wholly consumed by fire;
2) A complete or large-scale sacrifice;
3) A complete or wholesale destruction, esp. by fire; a great slaughter or massacre;
4) spec. The (period of the) mass murder of the Jews (or transf. of other groups) by the Nazis in the war of 1939 ­ 45.

Palestinian Arabs were transferred by Zionist in the years 1947/1948 & 1967 and in other occasions, this should also mean a Palestinian holocaust.

On the basis of these definitions, the 20th century qualifies eminently as the century of the holocaust. Let us take a look at a few of the major events of that 100-year span.

1) The Anglo-Boer War (1899 ­ 1902) in South Africa (in which the British, at great cost to both sides, seized the gold and diamond fields from the Boers) was significant in that it led to the invention of the concentration camp designed especially for women and children ­ an all-British idea which was subsequently developed by the National Socialists in Germany. In these concentration camps was an early holocaust of the century ­ the death of thirty thousand women and children from starvation, typhoid and measles. In proportion to later holocausts, the numbers don¹t sound very impressive, but they constituted a significant proportion of the Boer population at the time.

2) Contemporaneous with the Anglo-Boer War was the Spanish-American War of 1898 ­1902 in which some three or four hundred American soldiers were killed and 270 000 Filipinos died of wounds, disease or starvation. What both these wars of aggression had in common was, of course, greed.

3) Between 1914 and 1918, the First World War killed thirteen million soldiers and seventeen million civilians ­ indeed a holocaust which could have pleased only a Malthusian. During this period, to add to the slaughter, was the Turkish/Ottoman massacre of 1.5 million Armenians in about 1915 ­ yet another holocaust to blot the pages of that century.

4) In the early years of the USSR under Lenin (1917 ­ 1923) it is estimated that about seven million people died during the civil war, either from starvation or military action. I should note here that numbers vary from five to ten million, depending on whose figures one accepts, so I have given an average. We can skip a few years to the late 1920s and early 1930s, when Josef Stalin collectivised the kulaks of the USSR, killing millions of them either by the sword or by disease and starvation throughout Russia and Siberia. In 1932-1933, Stalin also summarily appropriated all the grain in Ukraine and had this essential foodstuff transported to Russia or sold abroad for much-needed foreign goods. The result of this was mass starvation in Ukraine and the death of approximately five to seven million Ukrainians ­ a period and a holocaust known in Ukraine as the Holodomor.

5) It was only about three years later that Stalin began the great purges of 1936 ­ 1938, the Yezhovshchina, in which it is believed that about eight million Soviet citizens died either by execution or by disease and inanition in Siberia.

6) World War Two. The numbers of deaths vary slightly, but a generally acceptable figure is fifty-six million military and civilian dead. This is doubtless the greatest holocaust in history. As a footnote to it, we can mention that amongst the casualties were three gratuitous massacres ­ the devastation of Dresden by Sir Arthur (³Bomber²) Harris who killed between 40 and 70 000 civilians when the city posed no military threat to the Allies and refugees were streaming into it, fleeing from the advancing Russians; and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and then Nagasaki ordered by President Truman one month after Emperor Hirohito of Japan had made a personal appeal to him for peace negotiations. The combined death toll of these two bombs was between two and three hundred thousand (immediate and short-term).

7) In the Asian theatre, the Japanese were responsible for the death of approximately five million people in China, Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines, Burma, Malaya, Singapore and other East Asian countries.

THUS BY 1945, EVEN BEFORE MID-CENTURY, WE CAN REPORT A HOLOCAUST OF 120 MILLION PEOPLE.

Exact figures are difficult to obtain and vary widely from one authority to another, so generally I have averaged them out in an attempt to get a fairly balanced count.

8) In the late 1940s, in the Mao v. Chiang Chinese civil war, untold, unknown millions of Chinese were slaughtered. The estimates vary and an accurate count is probably impossible. In 1966, Mao, egged on by his lovely wife, initiated the Cultural Revolution in China, which led to a few more million dead ­ exact numbers unknown. Meanwhile, there was the Korean ³Police Action² as Harry Truman nicely phrased it ­ a vicious civil war between North and South Korea which were in fact puppets of the USSR and the USA. Another few million dead Koreans ­ we don¹t know exactly how many, but do know exactly how many white folk (Americans, Brits etc) were killed. Hardly had that slaughter been calmed when the French were badly beaten in Vietnam at Dien Bien Phu and the US gladly took over from them in due course. The tragic irony of that unnecessary conflict is that it needn¹t have happened at all and would not have, had Secretary of State John Foster Dulles not walked out of peace negotiations. It also could have ended in 1968, but this is not the place to discuss the idiocy of Robert McNamara and his Pentagon cronies before and after the Tet offensive. The Vietnam war gave rise to a new term ­escalation ­ which proved to be apt, as Kissinger, President Nixon¹s pro-consul to the world, extended the war into Laos and Cambodia, where, in the killing fields, an estimated two to three million people were massacred while back in Vietnam itself the US continued to devastate the country and kill off about three million Vietnamese.

9) Meanwhile, down in Indonesia, great danger presented itself to the United States ­ there was a chance that a government hostile to the US might take power, so in 1965, the US sent troops and military materiel to ensure that Suharto, their blood-stained friend, would be the dictator of the country. There was a holocaust of about half a million civilians.

10) In 1975 ­ 1978, the number of dead under the Pol Pot regime was between 1.6 and 1.8 million ­ about one-fifth of the population. This doesn¹t include those millions already killed by Kissinger.

11) During that same period, approximately 100 000 civilians were murdered in East Timor ­ about 24% of the East Timorese population.

12) Probably the biggest killing field of the lot was the continent of Africa from Sudan to the borders of Zambia, and from Eritrea to West Africa. Countless millions were slaughtered or starved to death by sundry warlords and dictators ­ the syphilitic Idi Amin, the megalomanic Mobutu Sese Seko (one of whose close business associates for some time was the Reverend Pat Robertson who recently recommended ­ on two separate occasions - the assassination of President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela), the attack by Rwanda and Uganda on the Democratic Republic of the Congo (3.8 million dead), the ongoing disturbances in Darfur (400 000 dead) the civil war between the Hutus and the Tutsis, the madman Robert Mugabeٹ the list is long and tiresome. I think it is fruitless even to attempt to count the number of Africans slaughtered in the last fifty or so years. The numbers are probably in the tens of millions.

The author forgot the Algerian hocaust, the Algerian war of independence during which one million martyrs fell on the hands of the French colonialists, it is known as "the revolution of the one million martyrs."

By comparison, the Balkan massacres of the 1990s were numerically minor, while the Bush/Clinton/BushII/Blair murder of over a million Iraqis between about 1991 and the present, is a significant testimony to Anglo-American blood-lust (or is it just lust for oil?). Saddam Hussein murdered approximately 300 000 of his citizens ­ far fewer than the killers named above. And then we have estimates that over a million Iraqis and Iranians were killed in the long-drawn-out war between the two countries in the 1980s.

I have added up the numbers given above and present them with the caveat that they are not accurate but approximate and very conservative.

A BARE MINIMUM OF ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY MILLION HUMAN BEINGS WERE SLAUGHTERED DURING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.

The death toll during the Chinese civil war and the cultural revolution, as well as the number of dead in various parts of sub-Saharan Africa are unreliable and are not included. There are also disputes about the death tolls in South Asia. I have no reliable figures on the number of dead in the India-Pakistan dispute and have omitted the relatively minor number of victims in the Balkans and Central America. All these figures probably add up to tens of millions, but WE ALREADY HAVE ENOUGH BLOOD DRIPPING FROM THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.

Now, in that century of holocausts in which at least one hundred and forty million human beings were killed, amongst that number were approximately six million Jewish people (the official number accepted by World Jewry with few exceptions such as Professor Norman Finkelstein whose parents were Nazi victims).

The term ³holocaust² as generally understood today was first used by Elie Wiesel in his imaginative autobiography first published in Yiddish (³Und Die Welt hot Geshvign², 1956) and then in French, (³La Nuit,² 1958). He used the term in the sense given under 3) in the Oxford Dictionary: mass immolation by fire, reporting that people were placed on the edge of flaming pits and then pushed into them. Interestingly enough, he does not once mention gas chambers in this book. Since the end of the second world war, the multiple holocausts of the last century have remained un-capitalised, with one exception ­ the Jewish Holocaust.

Now some Western countries, led by the USA, have Jewish Holocaust Memorials, Jewish Holocaust Remembrance Days, Jewish Holocaust Laws (it¹s forbidden by law in some countries even to question the fact that six million Jews were Holocausted). The politicians in these same countries make pre-election pilgrimages to the Jewish State to garner the Jewish vote. The children in these countries have classes in school devoted to the Jewish Holocaust. I am told that in some American schools, the children sing the Israeli national anthem. Many universities have programs in what are called Holocaust Studies.

So I ask myself questions:

Why are ONLY THE JEWISH PEOPLE memorialised and remembered so fondly in the West?

What about the Cambodians?
The Ukrainians?
The Russians?
The many nations of Europe?
The Laotians?
The Chinese?
The Africans?
The Latin Americans?
The Armenians?
The one hundred and forty million or more dead human beings throughout the twentieth century?

Are the Jewish people really
so SPECIAL?
so REMARKABLE?
so IMPORTANT?
soٹ SUPERIOR?

that they alone amongst all nations are worthy of Memorials, Remembrance Days, special school lessons about the Jewish Six Million?

And if they are, can someone please tell meٹ

WHY?

I hope that I was able to answer this question, and appreciate if somebody else can be more specific.

Adib S. Kawar

An uprooted Palestinian Arab