Outlaw History #14

Tuesday, November 23, 2004

Radek Sikorski interviews Paul Wolfowitz in FrontPage magazine today (23 November). Sikorski is director of the New Atlantic Initiative at the American Enterprise Institute. Paul Wolfowitz is Paul Wolfowitz.

There is a mind-set shared by the Sikorskis and Wolfowitzs that suggests how we morally justify the US alliance with Israel, the war against Iraq, and why so much of the Muslim world is frustrated and angry with Americans.

First, Sikorski. “You recently went to Warsaw where your family came from [Wolfowitz was born in New York; his father, a mathematician, was from Warsaw but emigrated during Poland's brief interwar independence]. You went to the Umschlagplatz, from where the German Nazis transported Jews to Treblinka for gassing, including perhaps members of your own family. How did that affect you?”

Sikorski, then, no matter his station with the prestigious American Enterprise Institute, still believes the German WMD (gas chamber) fraud. The original story was that some 800,000 Jews were gassed and buried at Treblinka, then dug up and cremated and buried again. It is well known where the ash-burial took place. After half a century no one has bothered to go to Treblinka with a shovel and dig around a bit. But then, why ruin a good story if you profit from it – politically, culturally, financially?

I write about the “hero” of Treblinka, Yankiel Wiernik, in Break His Bones. Yankiel wrote in his memoirs, “I sacrificed all those nearest and dearest to me. I myself took them to the execution site. I built their death chambers for them. I led millions of human beings to their doom.” After publishing this excrement in 1944, in Brooklyn, Yankiel removed himself to Israel to bask in the light of respectability and “survivor” sainthood. Meanwhile.

Wolfowitz had the grace to say, honestly, which is considered bad form with regard to such matters, that he had reacted to his visit to the Umschlagplatz: “Less dramatically than people like to say. While the Holocaust is unique in the way the Germans performed it, in an industrial fashion, there have been other genocides.”

When Wolfowitz references “the way the Holocaust is unique in the way the Germans performed it, in an industrial fashion,” we understand that he, too, believes the German WMD (gas chamber) fraud exactly in the way that American high school students are taught to believe it.

We are left to imagine how this uninformed (I choose to trust that Wolfowitz is not willfully ignoring revisionist work on the gas chamber fraud) view of what happened between Germans and Jews during World War II influences how he morally justifies the creation of a Jewish state on Muslim land in the Middle East, the ensuing US alliance with Israel, and the war against Iraq which helps to secure Israel as a homeland for Jews, in the short run.

Sikorski asks: “Do you think the Holocaust still colours America's attitude to the Middle East and Israel?” Wolfowitz evades the question with this long, rambling reply:

“What Saddam did in Iraq was certainly genocide – not as systematic as Hitler's, not as fundamentally racist as Hitler's, but absolutely horrible. And for various reasons, the world looked the other way. Jan Nowak made an observation about this: when he went back later to the archives and saw the notes of his conversations in London and Washington in the early 1940s, the subject of the extermination of Jews wasn't mentioned, even though he had emphasized it. I said, 'What do you attribute it to?' He replied, 'wartime inconvenience.' It was an uncomfortable fact and people didn't want to know, just as they didn't want to know about Srebrenica. When the memorial at Srebrenica was dedicated, some said 'if only we had known.' Well, the world knew. The world knew for three years and still the Bosnians were not armed and the conflict was not dealt with. In this sense Iraq is more like Serbia.”

Forgetting this evasive or perhaps “forgetful” rambling – though I do not believe Wolfowitz is the “forgetful” sort – it is obvious that the Holocaust story “colours” America's attitude to the Middle East and Israel. Without the German WMD fraud there would be no Israel. And that's just for starters. Without Israel, there would be no rising tide of violence between Muslims and Americans.

The German WMD fraud is especially important to Palestinians and Israelis, who are dying most directly for it. I understand the unwillingness of Jews, Israeli or whomever, to not look at the story. It has meant everything to them.

The unwillingness of Arabs living in America, however, to challenge the German WMD fraud is beyond me. It is that fraud, precisely, that morally justifies everything that is happening in Palestine. Justifies it to the Israelis, and justifies it to the US Congress, which funds it all. Of course, it is not easy for any of us to go against the professorial class, and the taboo they support to silence debate about the fraud. No reason the rest of us should expect Arabs to do what we ourselves are not willing to do.