More lists, please
Are acts of salvation, courage and deliverance meaningful only if the saved are Jews, asks Mulham Assir*
With his latest movie, Munich, successfully marketed as "controversial", Steven Spielberg's name is much in the news lately. Calming any fears that the acclaimed director might test Hollywood's unswerving support of Israel, the mainstream American media remind their readers every time that he is, after all, the man who made the "widely acclaimed" movie Schindler's List. An unquestioned accomplishment of Zionism because it perpetuates the Holocaust theme as background to any discussion about Israel, Schindler's List attained another Zionist objective that no one to my knowledge has mentioned so far.
The message the movie pounds into the viewer's consciousness is the concept of the "righteous gentile". Those who have seen Schindler's List will certainly remember what amounted to a summation at the end: if only Schindler had saved more Jews. If only there had been more righteous gentiles like Schindler to save more Jews. Millions of gentiles died for the same reasons and most in similar circumstances, but that is another matter, not of concern to the movie.
What is a righteous gentile? The Jerusalem Museum Yad Vashem, the mother of all Holocaust museums, came up with the concept in 1963 and created the honour, bestowed by a special committee on candidates that qualified. Most were already dead by the time of induction into the hall of gentile righteousness, but that is understandable. Isn't that the case with Catholic beatification as well? After all, dead heroes are less likely to engender future controversies and maintenance is a lot cheaper.
In fact, there is a non-profit organisation in the United States, the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, which has certified about 1,500 living righteous gentiles on behalf of whom it accepts donations from large corporations. The money goes to maintain the organisation, pay its own salaries, organise "holocaust education" and also to give some modest stipends to those righteous gentiles who are in need of financial assistance. Everybody gains -- even the corporations, acquiring, one presumes, an unofficial but useful "righteous" status.
Needless to say, gentiles who risked or lost their lives saving other gentiles from the same fate need not apply. Not if they tried to save any of the German "left-wing" intellectuals, German "degenerate artists", "inferior" Germans destined for euthanasia, the anti-Nazi clergy, the nuns and priests who opposed fascism and offered sanctuary to the hunted, not if they saved any of the many designated groups the Nazis deported to labour camps before they even started deporting the Jews, not if they saved any Gypsies. Well, nobody really worried too much about the Gypsies, then or now. They have no lobby.
Yet a perfectly legitimate question to ask is this: if righteousness as a human virtue is subject to Zionist apartheid, and separated by religion, let's see the other lists. Where is the list of righteous Jews who saved gentiles before and during World War II in the Soviet Union and the Ukraine, and after the war behind the Iron Curtain? The now accessible governmental archives of the former Soviet Union, especially those of the secret police, offer a good place to start the research.
Jews formed a very large percentage of the mid- and high-echelon officers of the CEKA, GRU, NKVD and KGB between 1917 and the early 1970s. Surely many, or at least some, even a very few, of those high-placed Jews took pity on their former neighbours, or friends or even on total strangers who happened to be Jews, and saved them from deportation to the Siberian gulags and almost certain death. There must have been at least one little Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Czech, Romanian Anne Frank who was hidden, together with her family, by a righteous Jew in his attic to save them imprisonment, torture or execution as "enemies of the people," "agents of imperialism," during those long dark decades of horror. Documents publicly available suggest that the righteous Jews were not much in evidence during those times when good deeds would have been easier for them to enact from their position of power:
Yoram Sheftel, an Israeli attorney, who visited the Simferopol, Ukraine, KGB headquarters in 1990 observed: "On the right-hand wall was a stone memorial plaque engraved with the names of about 30 KGB men from Simferopol who had fallen in the Great Patriotic War, as the Soviets call World War II. I was shocked and angry as I read the names: the first was Polonski and the last Levinstein, and all those between were ones like Zalmonowitz, Geller and Kagan -- all Jews. The best of Jewish youth in Russia, the cradle of Zionism, had sold itself and its soul to the Red Devil."
Righteousness seems to have been inversely proportional with the ease with which it could have been exercised. And what about righteous Jews today in Israel? Tens of thousands of Israelis have been participants in the ethnic cleansing, imprisonment, torture and killing of Palestinians and none yet has stood in the path of a bulldozer, like Rachel Corrie, to stop its advance. However, voices of dissent are heard, like that of Ari Shavit, who himself observes how timid the opposition is: "Ten thousand (if not 15,000, if not 20,000) Israelis have done their work faithfully -- have opened the heavy iron doors of the isolation cell and then closed it, have led the man from the interrogation chamber to the clinic, from the clinic back to the interrogation chamber. They have looked close up at people shitting in terror, pissing in fear. And not one among them has begun a hunger strike in front of the house of the prime minister. Not one among them that I know of has said: This will not happen. Not in a Jewish state."
The righteous Jews in Israel, if we lower the requirements for qualification, seem to be those few who lament the lack of righteousness around them. According to writer Norman Finkelstein, reviewing the case of a Gazan brutally beaten to death by Israeli soldiers, Israeli lawyer Avigdor Feldman said: "The illegality in the territories is total. Everyone -- regardless of echelon, regardless of disagreement on every other conceivable topic -- is of a mind on one matter: the value of an Arab's life is equal to zero."
Voices like those of Norman Finkelstein in the US are drowned out by Zionist insults and accusations of being "self-hating Jews". It is clear that the need for a revised list of righteous Jews is becoming increasingly urgent. In fact, there is an even greater need for the creation of a number of lists; lists which would honour righteous people regardless of religion, nationality, skin colour; lists of righteous vegetarians, righteous right- and left-handed people, and many more categories. When we exhaust all possible compartmentalisations we should merge the lists, purge them of duplications and retain a single list: Righteous People.
The same process might be applied to holocaust museums: we need lots more of them to dedicate to the Native Americans, the African Americans, the Armenians, the Iron Curtain nations, the Palestinians, the Vietnamese, quite a number to former African colonies, and so on. All these should also merge and become one, perhaps under a banner such as The Museum of Man's Inhumanity to Man. I hope it will come to pass, but it is not likely to happen before we have agreed that every human life is precious, and no one is more "special" than anyone else.
* The writer is a Lebanese political commentator.
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-- Michael Pugliese