DIALOG.......................
You can't trust Jew-haters anymore
By Bradley Burston
HAARETZ
Wednesday, 22 February, 2006 (34 days to election day)
What kind of anti-Semites are these, anyway?
Just when you think you know where you stand with them, they change their story.
Exhibit A. As Holocaust deniers go, we thought David Irving was in a class by himself. He had it all. He was steadfast, imperious, virulently anti-Semitic in that effortlessly dismissive air that only a certain manner of Briton can bring off.
Exhibit B. As soul-sworn enemies of the modern-day Jews go, we had total faith in Iran.
And there's always Exhibit C., Hamas. It was barely two years ago that a Hamas suicide bomber said goodbye to his friends and family with a message that called us Jews the "sons of monkeys and pigs." Hamas leaders routinely vowed to scorch the earth beneath the Jews' feet, and to make their lives a living hell.
Then came this week.
Irving, leaving his adherents scratching their skinheads and whining Say It Ain't So, announced before God and Austria that, oops, it turns out that "I made a mistake when I said there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz."
Speaking to a Vienna court in fluent German, Irving said that after a change of heart he now acknowledged that "The Nazis did murder millions of Jews."
The presiding judge was having none of it, dismissing his professed as "mere lip service to the law."
Irving's error may have been in saving his best for the media. Tucking a copy of his book "Hitler?s War," prominently under his chin as press photographers snapped away, Irving got off one last one-liner:
"History is like a constantly changing tree."
Just how constantly, became apparent the next day. If Irving's sudden recantation wasn't disconcerting enough, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki visited Brussels to inform the European Parliament's foreign affairs committee that the Holocaust had, in fact, occurred.
"Our friends in Europe stress that such a crime has taken place and they have stated certain figures that were actually suffered," Mottaki said.
"We have no argument about that, but what we are saying here is to put right such a horrific event, why should the Muslims pay a price?"
But wait, another bombshell was in store. Mottaki then denied that Iran wanted to see Israel "wiped off the map," explaining that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had been misunderstood.
"Nobody can remove a country from the map. This is a misunderstanding in Europe of what our president mentioned," he told reporters after addressing the Parliament.
"How is it possible to remove a country from the map? He is talking about the regime. We do not legally recognize this regime," he said.
Which brings us to Hamas. For a generation the Islamic Resistance Movement spoke of the Jew, which is to say, all of us here from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, with a certain clinical slant. That is to say, the Jew was a malignancy in the otherwise pristine body of the Palestinian nation.
It is one of the miracles of democracy, that in electing Hamas in January, the Palestinian people promoted us overnight from tumor to neighbor.
With dizzying abruptness, one hardass Hamas leader after another has spoken of the prospect of future negotiations with Israel, and an acceptance - if mealy-mouthed - of the concept of an independent Palestine based on pre-1967 war borders rather than pre-1948.
What are we to conclude from this? When David Irving and Iran - squirming in the dock of the international court of public opinion - suddenly deny their Holocaust denial, has anything really changed?
If Hamas, pressed by circumstance to curry the favor of the West, manicures and polishes its ideology, should we take this as a sign of profound re-examination of anti-Semitic doctrines and long-held articles of faith?
Not yet. Not soon.
There's too much evidence to the contrary. And more every day.
The Iranians have yet to cancel the flagship of their Jew-hate juggernaut, the planned "scientific conference" aimed at deciding if there was ever a Nazi annihilation of the Jews.
Irving convinced the Austrian court only that his change of heart was barely skin deep.
Hamas, meanwhile, prevaricates as it seeks ways to avoid changing clauses in its charter worthy of, and perhaps lifted from, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
And just when you thought the UN had changed, you get the security guard from Jamaica. The one who gave an Israeli security guard a Nazi stiff-arm salute. The same one who drew swastikas in a United Nations log journal. For security guards.
And just when you thought the UN might take swift and decisive action against the guard, you get this:
UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said Tuesday that the guard who drew the swastikas was issued a letter of reprimand and was asked to attend sensitivity training.
There. At last. That's the UN we know and love. Not to say anti-Semites.