Professor Steven Plaut is an excellent voice who has the ability to cut through the brain dead dross of Left.
The ‘Cycle of Violence’ Fantasy in the Middle East
Ernst Eduard vom Rath was a German diplomat representing the Third Reich in Paris in 1938. In November of that year he was shot and mortally wounded by a 17-year-old Polish Jewish youth, HerschelGrynszpan, who had been living in Germany. Vom Rath was 29 years old. Ironically, vom Rath had earlier expressed anti-Nazi sympathies, evidently based on the Nazi treatment of Jews, and was under Gestapo investigation at the time for being politically unreliable. He died of his wounds two days after being shot. Hitler used the assassination as an excuse to launch Kristallnacht, a pogrom against German Jews, shortly after the death. My father attended school with Grynszpan and knew him casually; Dad escaped to America by the time of the assassination.
Now try to imagine how the Western media would report World War II if they were using the exact same rules of journalism that they apply to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The assassination of vom Rath by a Jewish youth would be universally held up to illustrate that the German-Jewish conflict was a circle of violence, an ongoing bloody conflict whose roots are so old that no one remembers them, a conflict where each side claims it is retaliating for the violence that the other side perpetrated, a conflict whose causes are all blurred by eons of history. Sure the Germans were murdering Jews, but then there was the vom Rath assassination, proving the violence was two-directional, symmetric. Close investigation could probably find a few other examples of Jews using violence against Germans. Innocent lives are being lost on both sides. Such senseless tragedy. Why can’t both sides just live and let live?
