Letter to Nadine Stresson, ACLU
Professor Stresson;
Let me introduce myself. My name is John Fisher and I recently finished my MS in Criminal Justice and am working on my second Master’s in Political Science. I am a member of Alpha Phi Sigma. Further, I am a Graduate Teaching Assistant. Oh yeah, I am also a Jew. Today, I covered class for another ACLU lawyer/professor, who had me show a panel discussion entitled That Delicate Balance II: Our Bill of Rights, the First Amendment and Hate Speech. This panel was moderated by Arthur Miller. Some of the participants were Supreme Court Justice Scalia, Judge Robert Bork, Congressmen Hyde, and Judge Jones, members of the media, academia, and you. However in this video you did misspeak and this statement was offensive to me. I felt that I had to address this issue with you.
The scenario that was put forth by Arthur Miller was that the Aryan Truth was having a rally at Midville State University auditorium. The leader of the group stood up to the podium and started talking. Eight people in the second row stood and unfurled a banner that stated that the leader was a racist, sexist, general jerk. The panel decided that they were allowed to continue their protest of the speaker but had to move away from their location. Then the scenario continued to the leader starting to talk about the holocaust not being factual, and a myth. Another group of people stood up and started reading the names of the Jews that were killed at the Auschwitz Concentration camp. You (the defender of civil liberties) stated that these people were not allowed to do this that it was disruptive and that these people could have a pro-Zionism meeting later. First, why in your mind can the non-Jewish students protest the Aryan Truth where the Jews are prohibited from doing so? Second, you implied that Zionism was a result of the Holocaust. I find both of these impressions offensive.
The creation of Israel may have been justified by what happened to the Jews during Hitler’s final solution; however, Zionism was not a creation of the holocaust. The word "Zionism" itself derived from the word "Zion" (Hebrew: ציון, Tziyyon), one of the names of Jerusalem, as mentioned in the Bible. It was coined as a term for Jewish nationalism by Austrian Jewish publisher Nathan Birnbaum in his journal Self Emancipation in 1890. However the desire of Zionism started in 70 AD. In modern history there had been several Jewish thinkers such as Moses Hess whose 1862 work Rome and Jerusalem; The Last National Question argued for the Jews to settle in Palestine as a means of settling the national question. Hess proposed a socialist state in which the Jews would become agrarianised through a process of "redemption of the soil" which would transform the Jewish community into a true nation in that Jews would occupy the productive layers of society rather than being an intermediary non-productive merchant class which is how he perceived European Jews. Hess, along with later thinkers such as Nahum Syrkin and Ber Borochov, is considered a founder of Socialist Zionism and Labor Zionism and one of the intellectual forebears of the kibbutz movement. The holocaust was what facilitated the justification of the world to grant this desire of the Jews which they had been striving for almost 100 years. For over 40 years, Zionism has had a monopoly on the history of the Holocaust and its interpretation. The Holocaust has been used to prove the historical necessity of Zionism; which argues that if there had been a Jewish state in 1939, then there would have been no Holocaust. The Holocaust is portrayed as a consequence, not of the social, political and economic factors that led to the rise of fascism in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, but of the 'national homelessness' of Jews. The Zionist movement used the plight of European Jewry in order to batter open the gates of Palestine.
The Holocaust was the murder of 13 million people, Jews, “political prisoners”, Homosexuals, Gypsies, prisoners of war, Russians, Poles, Catholic priests, Jehovah's Witnesses and others were more or less systematically murdered as the Holocaust continued. By the end of the war, as many as 6 million of these people had been killed, along with between 5 and 6 million Jews. If the ACLU operated in Nazi occupied Europe during the 1940s they would be a target of the Nazi death machine as well. Does the focus on the Jewishness of the Holocaust take away from or minimize the suffering of the millions of non-Jews who were persecuted? Do the Jews, unintentionally perhaps, try to keep all the suffering for themselves? No. On the other hand, does the Holocaust have a particularly crucial and central Jewish element, even though millions of others died? Simply put, the answer is yes. The Holocaust, from its conception to its implementation had a distinctly Jewish aspect to it and, arguably without this Jewish aspect, there would have been no Holocaust. Most of the non-Jewish people would not have been killed because the killing machinery would not have been put into operation. Although linked in order to open the gates of Israel as a national homeland these two things are separate entities.
The students that were reading the names of the dead at Auschwitz were not promoting or supporting the creation of Israel. They were protesting the speaker’s comments against the Holocaust. Reading the names of the people that were killed during the holocaust allowed for people to protest and refute what Aryan Truth was trying to say in the auditorium and should not be restrained. Once you silence the voice of the protestor it opens the way for the Government to shut down the ACLU itself, especially in their protests against the Bush administration wire tapping.
Let me introduce myself. My name is John Fisher and I recently finished my MS in Criminal Justice and am working on my second Master’s in Political Science. I am a member of Alpha Phi Sigma. Further, I am a Graduate Teaching Assistant. Oh yeah, I am also a Jew. Today, I covered class for another ACLU lawyer/professor, who had me show a panel discussion entitled That Delicate Balance II: Our Bill of Rights, the First Amendment and Hate Speech. This panel was moderated by Arthur Miller. Some of the participants were Supreme Court Justice Scalia, Judge Robert Bork, Congressmen Hyde, and Judge Jones, members of the media, academia, and you. However in this video you did misspeak and this statement was offensive to me. I felt that I had to address this issue with you.
The scenario that was put forth by Arthur Miller was that the Aryan Truth was having a rally at Midville State University auditorium. The leader of the group stood up to the podium and started talking. Eight people in the second row stood and unfurled a banner that stated that the leader was a racist, sexist, general jerk. The panel decided that they were allowed to continue their protest of the speaker but had to move away from their location. Then the scenario continued to the leader starting to talk about the holocaust not being factual, and a myth. Another group of people stood up and started reading the names of the Jews that were killed at the Auschwitz Concentration camp. You (the defender of civil liberties) stated that these people were not allowed to do this that it was disruptive and that these people could have a pro-Zionism meeting later. First, why in your mind can the non-Jewish students protest the Aryan Truth where the Jews are prohibited from doing so? Second, you implied that Zionism was a result of the Holocaust. I find both of these impressions offensive.
The creation of Israel may have been justified by what happened to the Jews during Hitler’s final solution; however, Zionism was not a creation of the holocaust. The word "Zionism" itself derived from the word "Zion" (Hebrew: ציון, Tziyyon), one of the names of Jerusalem, as mentioned in the Bible. It was coined as a term for Jewish nationalism by Austrian Jewish publisher Nathan Birnbaum in his journal Self Emancipation in 1890. However the desire of Zionism started in 70 AD. In modern history there had been several Jewish thinkers such as Moses Hess whose 1862 work Rome and Jerusalem; The Last National Question argued for the Jews to settle in Palestine as a means of settling the national question. Hess proposed a socialist state in which the Jews would become agrarianised through a process of "redemption of the soil" which would transform the Jewish community into a true nation in that Jews would occupy the productive layers of society rather than being an intermediary non-productive merchant class which is how he perceived European Jews. Hess, along with later thinkers such as Nahum Syrkin and Ber Borochov, is considered a founder of Socialist Zionism and Labor Zionism and one of the intellectual forebears of the kibbutz movement. The holocaust was what facilitated the justification of the world to grant this desire of the Jews which they had been striving for almost 100 years. For over 40 years, Zionism has had a monopoly on the history of the Holocaust and its interpretation. The Holocaust has been used to prove the historical necessity of Zionism; which argues that if there had been a Jewish state in 1939, then there would have been no Holocaust. The Holocaust is portrayed as a consequence, not of the social, political and economic factors that led to the rise of fascism in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, but of the 'national homelessness' of Jews. The Zionist movement used the plight of European Jewry in order to batter open the gates of Palestine.
The Holocaust was the murder of 13 million people, Jews, “political prisoners”, Homosexuals, Gypsies, prisoners of war, Russians, Poles, Catholic priests, Jehovah's Witnesses and others were more or less systematically murdered as the Holocaust continued. By the end of the war, as many as 6 million of these people had been killed, along with between 5 and 6 million Jews. If the ACLU operated in Nazi occupied Europe during the 1940s they would be a target of the Nazi death machine as well. Does the focus on the Jewishness of the Holocaust take away from or minimize the suffering of the millions of non-Jews who were persecuted? Do the Jews, unintentionally perhaps, try to keep all the suffering for themselves? No. On the other hand, does the Holocaust have a particularly crucial and central Jewish element, even though millions of others died? Simply put, the answer is yes. The Holocaust, from its conception to its implementation had a distinctly Jewish aspect to it and, arguably without this Jewish aspect, there would have been no Holocaust. Most of the non-Jewish people would not have been killed because the killing machinery would not have been put into operation. Although linked in order to open the gates of Israel as a national homeland these two things are separate entities.
The students that were reading the names of the dead at Auschwitz were not promoting or supporting the creation of Israel. They were protesting the speaker’s comments against the Holocaust. Reading the names of the people that were killed during the holocaust allowed for people to protest and refute what Aryan Truth was trying to say in the auditorium and should not be restrained. Once you silence the voice of the protestor it opens the way for the Government to shut down the ACLU itself, especially in their protests against the Bush administration wire tapping.
posted by fish at 9:55 AM
2 comments
