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But it should be made clear that neither Hamas nor the Palestinian government in Gaza denies the Nazi Holocaust. The Holocaust was not only a crime against humanity but one of the most abhorrent crimes in modern history. We condemn it as we condemn every abuse of humanity and all forms of discrimination on the basis of religion, race, gender or nationality.

And at the same time as we unreservedly condemn the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis against the Jews of Europe, we categorically reject the exploitation of the Holocaust by the Zionists to justify their crimes and harness international acceptance of the campaign of ethnic cleansing and subjection they have been waging against us - to the point where in February the Israeli deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai threatened the people of Gaza with a "holocaust".

Within 24 hours, 61 Palestinians - more than half of them civilians and a quarter children - were killed in a series of air raids. Meanwhile, a horrible crime against humanity continues to be perpetrated against the people of Gaza: the two-year-old siege imposed after Hamas won the legislative elections in January 2006, which is causing great suffering. Due to severe shortages of medicines and food, scores of Palestinians have lost their lives.

It cannot be right that Europeans in general and the British in particular maintain a virtual silence toward what the Zionists are doing to the Palestinians, let alone supporting or justifying their oppressive policies, under the pretext of showing sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust.

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[ 12 May 2008: Message edited by: Frustrated Mess ]

Did you know that Israel has done nothing to stop RAW SEWAGE from entering the drinking water that Palestinian people used to be able to drink? In fact, Israel seems to care less.

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Originally posted by Frustrated Mess:

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/bassem_naeem/2008/05/hamas_condemns_the_holocaus t.html

[ 12 May 2008: Message edited by: Frustrated Mess ]

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I thought Hamas IS the Palestinian government in Gaza.

[ 13 May 2008: Message edited by: Joel_Goldenberg ]

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Originally posted by Stargazer:
Did you know that Israel has done nothing to stop RAW SEWAGE from entering the drinking water that Palestinian people used to be able to drink? In fact, Israel seems to care less.

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To be fair Canada does worse with how they treat some reserves.

That little sidebar aside.

Hamas should be commended for the statement.

What suprises me is that anyone needs to issue a statement condeming the Holocaust.

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Originally posted by Petsy:
Now we are praising Hamsa because they condemned the Holocaust?!! Wow how big of them!

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Originally posted by johnpauljones:
What suprises me is that anyone needs to issue a statement condeming the Holocaust.

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Ordinarily that's true, but sometimes when everyone suspects you of harbouring sinister motives, you have to stand up and proclaim your innocence.

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After almost a century of Zionist colonial and racist oppression, some Palestinians find it hard to imagine that some of their oppressors are the sons and daughters of those who were themselves oppressed and massacred.

Palestinians had nothing to do with the Holocaust but find themselves punished for someone else's crime. But we are well aware and warmly welcome the outspoken support for Palestinian rights by Israeli and Jewish human rights activists in Palestine and around the world.

We hope that journalists in the west will begin to adopt a more objective approach when covering events in Palestine. The Palestinian people are being killed by Israel's machine of destruction on a daily basis. Nevertheless, we still see a clear bias in favour of Israel in the western media.

The Europeans bear a direct responsibility for what is befalling the Palestinians today. Britain was the mandate authority that handed over Palestine to Israeli occupation. Nazi Germany perpetrated the most heinous crimes against Jews, forcing the survivors to migrate to Palestine in pursuit of safety. We, therefore, expect the Europeans to atone for their historic crimes by restoring some balance to the inhuman and one-sided international response to the tragedy of our people.

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Hamas has taken responsibility for firing a Grad missile which hit the Chutzot Ashkelon shopping center Wednesday afternoon.

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Gaza rocket hits Ashkelon mall; several people killed

By The Associated Press

A rocket fired from the Gaza Strip, apparently a Katyusha-type rocket, exploded in a shopping center in the southern city of Ashkelon on Wednesday, police said.

A rescue service spokesman Eli Bean said at least three people, including two babies were killed. Witnesses told various radio stations that the rocket caused considerable damage. Bean said at least two people were trapped under the rubble.
HAARETZ

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Originally posted by Slushy:

Condemn the Holocaust, then keep killing Jewish babies.

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Slushy Slushy Slushy. One day you will learn how babble works if you are hear long enough

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Originally posted by Slushy:

Condemn the Holocaust, then keep killing Jewish babies.

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Jewish babies? Why, is Ashkelon a Jewish-only city?

From AP:

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Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement on its Web site.

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[ 14 May 2008: Message edited by: unionist ]

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Originally posted by johnpauljones:
Slushy Slushy Slushy. One day you will learn how babble works if you are hear long enough

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I wouldn't hold my breath if I were him.

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Originally posted by Petsy:
According to AP, Hamas is "committed to Israel's destruction". Pretty clear if you ask me. So what would Babblers have Israel do exactly? Oh I know it should pull out of Gaza! Oh wait it already has...hmmmm

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Hamas' Al-Aqsa TV aired a documentary on April 18 claiming that Jews planned and perpetrated the Holocaust in order to rid the nation of the "burden" of the weak and disabled

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If you understand Arabic, you can hear them making the claim, and see the images used, here.

While the Guardian's Hamas spokesperson says that Al Aqsa "often" does not represent the views of Hamas, when the station was founded, a Hamas representative said:

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Fathi Hamad, the director of the board of Al Aqsa TV, as well as a candidate in the January parliamentary elections, said, "Every free country has a range of media outlets which express unique viewpoints. It's only fitting that the Islamic movement, Hamas, should have a TV station where we can explain our hopes, our Islamic culture, and counter the widespread and incorrect stereotyping of struggle and resistance as terrorism.

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http://hiedge.org/English/Views/2006/01/article08.shtml

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One recent approach, which seems to be part of the wider attempt to isolate the elected Palestinian leadership, is to portray Hamas and the population of the Gaza strip as motivated by anti-Jewish sentiment, rather than a hostility to Zionist occupation and domination of our land. A recent front page article in the International Herald Tribune followed this line, as did an article for Cif about an item broadcast on the al-Aqsa satellite TV channnel about the Nazi Holocaust.

In fact, the al-Aqsa Channel is an independent media institution that often does not express the views of the Palestinian government headed by Ismail Haniyeh or of the Hamas movement. The channel regularly gives Palestinians of different convictions the chance to express views that are not shared by the Palestinian government or the Hamas movement. In the case of the opinion expressed on al-Aqsa TV by Amin Dabbur, it is his alone and he is solely responsible for it.

It is rather surprising to us that so little attention, if any, is given by the western media to what is regularly broadcast or written in the Israeli media by politicians and writers demanding the total uprooting or "transfer" of the Palestinian people from their land.

The Israeli media and pro-Israel western press are full of views that deny or seek to excuse well-established facts of history including the Nakba of 1948 and the massacres perpetrated then by the Haganah, the Irgun and LEHI with the objective of forcing a mass dispossession of the Palestinians.

But it should be made clear that neither Hamas nor the Palestinian government in Gaza denies the Nazi Holocaust. The Holocaust was not only a crime against humanity but one of the most abhorrent crimes in modern history. We condemn it as we condemn every abuse of humanity and all forms of discrimination on the basis of religion, race, gender or nationality.

And at the same time as we unreservedly condemn the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis against the Jews of Europe, we categorically reject the exploitation of the Holocaust by the Zionists to justify their crimes and harness international acceptance of the campaign of ethnic cleansing and subjection they have been waging against us - to the point where in February the Israeli deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai threatened the people of Gaza with a "holocaust".

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Originally posted by Petsy:
Great post Jeff!

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Silly post, actually. And CNN is responsible for everything that Anne Coulter says on its TV show. But this kind of join the dots association game one of Jeff's favourites.

[ 14 May 2008: Message edited by: Cueball ]

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Originally posted by Slushy:

But that's just it, isn't it? The world pressures Israel to vacate Gaza. Israel is told that this will create an opening for dialog, for peace, harmony and understanding. Fair enough. But the reality is that as soon as Israeli troops departed rockets were launched towards civilian areas inside Israel. These are facts.

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[ 14 May 2008: Message edited by: Frustrated Mess ]

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Originally posted by Petsy:
So are you claiming that Jeff is wrong?

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He pretends to think that because Anne Coulter is on CNN, and CNN is not responsible for her views, therefore Hamas is not responsible for the views expressed on its own tv channel.

Actually, if CNN broadcast a half-hour programme saying that the Jews had themselves planned the Holocaust to get rid of the infirm, it would say quite a lot, and all negative, about CNN.

Hamas can't own a station, announce that exists to distribute Hamas's views, broadcast holocaust-denial, and then say that it's all a matter of free speech.

You will not find students in Chinese Universities, or Indian High Schools studying the Holocaust as a section of their regular course study. They will not be viewing twice monthly pictures of people being bulldozed into graves at New Belsen. They will not be seeing any of the fictionalized accounts of the Wansee conference, from which no agenda or notes have been retrieved. They will not be seeing the issue raised daily in the paper, so they can take an interest in the facts, and discover them. Most people over the world have their own stories of bloody attrocities, such as the Japanese occupation of China, the British occupation Burma, or the Dutch occupation of Indonesia, and were it not the case the Holocaust interupted the sublime lives of some European folks, very likely this would be just another of the unaccounted for massacre in the history of "mans inhumanity to man."

And "so it goes" to quote Kurt Vonegut from his spellbinding book on his own experience of massacre as experienced in Dresden in April 1945". "So it goes", many times over.

Mein Kampf is a hot seller in India Jedd -- think about it. In fact the BJP ruled schoolboard in Gujarat managed to publish a school textbook in which a review of Hitler's regieme failed to mention the Holocaust, in favour of talking about how he brought the country together, and made the trains run on time. It would be nice, in my view, if the Holocaust were studied all over the world, to the extent that it is here, along with countless other massacres, but alas it is not. But even here today, it is current to argue that the attack upon natives of North America was not a genocide, but a "war" in which one side lost, and discussed in this manner in texts, in the press and on TV.

And where is the outrage? You ignorance is as grand as any I have seen come out of an Arab mouth. In fact, the level of understanding and knowledge about the facts and history of the world at large, outside of the immediate purview, represented by that presse release expresses a far profounder extracultural knowledge on behalf of Hamas than you appear to possess, in any context.

You are so myopic that you actually believe that the Hitlers plot to kill off the Slavs after he was done with the Jews, is a plot made up to detract from the story of the Holocaust. But, despite the huge body of evidence that exists, and the fact that this is the mainstream historical analysis of the great majority of accredited historians of the period, you consider this point worthy of debating, in a manner not unlike the crackpot on the offending TV show. According to you its "fair comment." But when the shoe is on the other foot, its unforgivable "historical revisionist denial."

The fact that it is current in some circles in Arab world to alledge that it is a rumour, while other argue against this having studied it in more depth. Remarkable, considering that it is to them, "a long time ago, on a planet far away" and hardly the stories of their fathers, mothers, granfathers, and grandmas. This kind of debate is quite normal and natural among people who have no real direct experience of events. Now Jedd, the miracle is that in fact some Arab folks ended up talking about, and studying something for which they bore no general responsibility, and ended up studying it enough to come to a conclusion about its veracity, though there is very little organic motive for them to do so.

Can you explain why that would be?

[ 14 May 2008: Message edited by: Cueball ]

Deliberately and systematically.

[ 14 May 2008: Message edited by: Cueball ]

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The March of the Living then proceeds to Israel, where it ends a week later at the Siamese twins: Memorial Day (for fallen soldiers) and Independence Day, successively. The ideological messages are built in: the alternative to Auschwitz is to live and die (and kill) for Israel. "They" wanted to kill us in Auschwitz just as "they" want to kill us in Israel; "they," the goyim (gentiles), hate us everywhere, and we are always innocent victims. Arabs and Nazis are all the same. It's not the occupation, not Israel's refusal to make peace, not even a particular political setting that can be rationally analyzed: it's eternal, unchanging anti-Semitism. It's live or let live. Doubting Israel's righteousness is like doubting the Holocaust. Criticizing Israel is supporting the Nazis. Much like the hate-mail I get.

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