BE ON THE RIGHT, AS IN SYNONYMOUS WITH CORRECT, SIDE OF HISTORY.
In two weeks’ from tomorrow, it will be 80 years since the Second World War came to an end. From the European Theatre, I remember reading about how six-year-old Niklas Frank recalled his mother’s horror at seeing piles of corpses and a photo of her husband and his father and saying that if what the newspaper said was real, it did not bode well for him. And it didn’t. A year later, his father went to the gallows. 15 years later, Mossad abducted Adolf Eichmann and flew him to Israel, and the following year, he was hanged.
Perhaps due to racism, attitudes in Australia, the USA and Canada, and even the UK, towards the Japanese were those of anger. William Lyon Mackenzie-King even expressed relief that the atomic bombs had been used on the Japanese and not the Germans. While nobody can deny that the atrocities of the Thai-Burma Railway and ill-treatment of POWs required justice, the attitudes towards the Japanese were worse in that some Australians, Americans, Canadians, British and Dutch recognised good Germans, they were much more reluctant to acknowledge good Japanese. And by good, I mean those who defied the Nazis and the Kempeitai in Japan.
Fast-forward to today, and France, Canada and the UK have said that they will support a two-state resolution for Palestine. If that brings peace to the Middle East, it does NOT absolve Netanyahu and members of his cabinet from responsibility for war crimes. And the actions of starving (Harry Truman made reference to starving POWs in his “justification” for dropping the atomic bombs on Japan) innocent people in Gaza and saying, “Aid trucks are coming,” and opening fire on unarmed civilians wanting food supplies is a war crime.
Anti-Semitism cannot be justified, and anti-Semitism needs to be referred to in the context of Nazi war crimes not an attempt to silence critics of Israel, but feelings of anger and revulsion for what the Nazis did to the Jews during the Holocaust need to be directed towards the IDF, Netanyahu and his cabinet, not excused because of what happened in World War Two.
As Texas sang, in “I Don’t Want A Lover,” “Sensitive story, when it’s me who’s in the wrong,” and yes, that’s true, but when the victim becomes the oppressor of someone else, consistency needs to be applied.