Three-quarters of Dutch Jews
Deutsche Welle on the opening of the Amsterdam Holocaust Museum:
Israeli President Isaac Herzog attended the opening of the National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam on Sunday. The museum tells the stories of some of the 102,000 Jews who were deported from the Netherlands and murdered in Nazi camps during the Holocaust in World War II. Three-quarters of Dutch Jews were among the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis.
Who were the Nazis? Members of a genocidal political movement in Germany. DW is to the Nazis as the Washington Post is to slavery. That’s a crude comparison, but my point is that nationality is not the same as political or moral orientation. Netanyahu isn’t Israel, Germany isn’t Nazism, the Washington Post isn’t Trump. The opening of a Holocaust museum is not endorsement of war on Palestinian civilians.
Among the exhibits are a prominent photo of a boy walking past bodies at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after it was liberated, dress buttons excavated from the grounds of the Sobibor extermination camp, and walls covered with the texts of hundreds of laws discriminating against Jews enacted by the German occupiers of the Netherlands.
Enacted by the German occupiers but ordered by a much smaller set of people who had totalitarian control of the German state.
Dutch pro-Palestinian organization The Rights Forum called Herzog’s attendance “a slap in the face of the Palestinians who can only helplessly watch how Israel murders their loved ones and destroys their land.” More than 30,000 Palestinians have died in the war, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry.
Amnesty International put up detour signs around the museum to direct Herzog to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the nearby city of The Hague, where South Africa filed a case against Israel accusing it of genocide. Israel denies the allegations. A smaller pro-Israel group also gathered nearby with flags and photos of the hostages that were kidnapped by Hamas militants.
Police officers were present to deescalate tensions between the two demonstrations.
Good luck with that.
Did Amnesty really pull a stunt to misdirect the President of Israel on his way to a Holocaust museum? I’m sure they wouldn’t have done that for any other national leader: not Xi, not Putin, not KJU, not Biden, Macron, Charles III or even a passing Burmese general. It’s astonishing how far it has fallen in the last fifteen or twenty years: from impartial advocate for human rights to just another anti-semitic pressure group among so very many.
I assume not to misdirect but to taunt. Local officialdom would be in charge of where he went, so the signs wouldn’t cause him to go the wrong way, but they would express Amnesty’s disgusting views.
I don’t know. Is it really “disgusting” to compare Israeli policy to Apartheid? The indictment is pretty well crafted. One does not have to be antisemitic to question the Israeli state. As for the legitimate right to defends, well the racist European settler colonists of Rhodesia would point to their fate in Zimbabwe as wee, but nobody defends them?
Note that Iam NOT defending Hamas, either.. And as an old fart I am a skeptic of 90% of the protests, which are almost always useless and violent virtue signaling.