How can there be any common ground?

I have a favor to ask.  Just for a moment let's set aside the ongoing terrorism, rocket attacks and overt incitement being sanctioned, financed and carried out by all official branches of Palestinian leadership... including both Fatah and Hamas. 

I know that's a lot to ask... but those who insist we must find a way to find common ground with the Palestinians point out that it is necessary to talk peace especially in its absence.

So we'll put the daily attempts to dehumanize, maim and kill innocent Israelis aside for a moment.  Not forgotten, mind you... just off to the side where it can't interfere with the topic at hand.

Today's topic - quite appropriately - is the Holocaust. 

Once upon a time the word 'Holocaust' was self-explanatory and carried tremendous weight and meaning.  It was mentioned in hushed tones and was always understood to mean the murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis during WWII.

Sadly, the lexicon of the holocaust (e.g. Nazi, genocide, massacre, ghetto, storm troopers, etc.), has been co-opted by the people with whom we are told we must make peace at any cost. 

These peace partners gleefully use these holocaust terms as cheap insults to suggest that Israel is perpetrating a campaign of Nazi-like genocide on the Palestinian people... and then without a trace of irony go on to claim that the Nazi genocide never really occurred.

P.A. President Mahmoud Abbas himself wrote his doctoral thesis on Holocaust denial.  It was entitled "The Secret Connection between the Nazis and the Leaders of the Zionist Movement" and is chock full of scholarship such as the following excerpt:

"It seems that the interest of the Zionist movement, however, is to inflate this figure [of Holocaust deaths] so that their gains will be greater. This led them to emphasize this figure [six million] in order to gain the solidarity of international public opinion with Zionism. Many scholars have debated the figure of six million and reached stunning conclusions—fixing the number of Jewish victims at only a few hundred thousand."

His thesis has since been published in book form and widely distributed throughout the Arab world, and not surprisingly has found quite a receptive audience.  He has since claimed that he didn't mean to argue specific numbers for the holocaust, but when the entire thesis is about alleged collusion between the Nazis and their victims and he has never backed way from this, there is more to fault than simple numbers.  And remember... this is the 'moderate' with who Israel is supposed to find some common ground upon which we can both create a home.

Then there is Hamas.

In preparation for Holocaust Remembrance Day which is being observed today in Israel, Hamas commissioned a television program that also claims collusion between the Nazis and the pre-state Jewish leadership.... albeit on an even gastlier scale.

The program claims that David Ben Gurion arranged for the Nazis to murder the weak and handicapped Jews of Europe while allowing only the strong and healthy ones to come to Palestine.  The goal was to remove the burden of these weak co-religionists from the embryonic Jewish State, and at the same time garner helpful sympathy from the world.

This from the Jerusalem Post:

The documentary's narrator [says] Israel's first prime minister David Ben Gurion decided that Jewish "disabled and handicapped are a burden to the state," after which "the Satanic Jews" - the film cuts to a picture of a hassidic Jew - "thought up an evil plot to be rid of the burden of disabled and handicapped" - the film then cuts to piles of emaciated corpses - "in twisted criminal ways."

This program is nothing less than state-sponsored anti-Semitism and incitement, and was broadcast throughout the region. Yet we are supposed to sit at the table with these people and discuss truces?

I ask you, how is it that we are supposed to find common ground with people that not only deny us the right to live... but who ridicule and deny our suffering and death? 

Citations and sources can be found here