Would the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto have been eager to teach their children about Germany's shame at Versailles? Would we demand they did or claim they've sabotaged their cause because someone said they wouldn't?
That is a sickening comparison. There is no way that what happened at Versailles is compable to what happened in Auschwitz or Belsen or Dachau. Shmae on you for making that comparision.
It is one thing to colour an entire people from a statement made by one guy, but to compound it by entirley ignoring the context of the realities is quite another. I'm not in such a generous mood and, really, Ken should have known better.
I said that the respnsibility for the statement lay with Hamas, not the entire Palestinian people. There's a huge difference, and you know if, FM.
I'm questioning why one Palestinian speaker is responsible for "sabotaging" the aspirations of the entire Palestinian people. He wrote the thread title so he should be prepared to defend it or ask that it be changed.
This man was speaking as part of the Hamas leadership. This gave his words official weight. And it gave the Israelis the chance to attack Hamas as Holocaust deniers and to use this(unfairly, yet effectively)as an implicit argument for why the Occupation is justified.
Were I to have accepted the argument that what this man said didn't matter, it would have meant I was accepting the argument that Churban denial doesn't matter.
Denying this event, or even looking like they are denying it, is the worst possible mistake the Hamas leadership could make. It gives the Israeli propaganda machine a huge gift. It's not comparable to demanding that FN's be taught about the suffering of theri European conquerors, because nothing as bad as that happened to any other groups in Europe. It's carelessness and it's unnecssary carelessness. And it's not solidarity to say that mistakes like this don't matter. True solidarity is saying "because I support your cause deeply, I'll speak up when I see someone doing something to damage it". That's not being a bad cop and it's not giving aid and comfort to the oppressor. And everyone here knows it.
This is the area that the leaders of the Palestinian resistance and their supporters have to be more careful about than any other, because this mistake does more damage than any other.