Never again?

Yesterday as I was listening to the Irish news program 'Five Live', I was surprised to hear the impassioned tones of a fanatic rising above the usual steady metered commentary. The voice was from one Caroline Glick the deputy editor of the Jerusalem Post and she was eloquently outlining a case for annihilation of a significant part of Arabic world. The equivalent paper in Ireland could easily be the Irish Times, a much respected pillar within the unwieldy edifice that we rely on to inform us about the world events. As an editor Caroline has the power to alter, veto or print a substantial chunk of the paper's content - as a columnist for the paper, she purports to represent, or at least empathise with, the views and feelings of a majority of the Jewish population in Israel, and judging by the comments that she allows to be published she has a fair amount of support. Maybe she is used to hearing nothing but agreement in Israel, a shocking testimony to the depth of enmity between the Arabs and the Jews, but here on radio one, as most people cooked their dinner and listened, she provoked a cascade of horrified responses; it would not be to bold to say she shocked a nation.

She started her plea for genocide in a reasonable tone, suggesting that "Hezbollah's wanton aggression against Israel was a central campaign in their global jihad aimed at annihilating the Jewish state and defeating Western civilization." Scarcely pausing to justify this complex statement she almost glibly quipped, "using terror, the jihadists believe that they can destroy the confidence of citizens of free societies and so coerce them to bend to their will."

The harsh clarion call to arms against the evil Arab world left a chill in my bones, it is all too easy to incite this hatred against millions of people, for a Nation is easy to detest. The National Socialist Party of pre-war Germany incited just the same arguments for a genocide against a Nation - the Jews, they declared, were a global threat to the civilised white races; they followed this up with ideas on just how to provide a final solution. Caroline did the same, calling for "an Israeli victory against Hezbollah in Lebanon, and an Israeli and allied strike against Hezbollah's state sponsors Syria and Iran" before once again making her paranoia public: "if Israel is defeated, if we do not fight to victory over Hizbullah, the march of jihad will move forward with unprecedented force" For good measure she linked Palestine and Egypt this sinister plot.

What was this wanton aggression against Israel? When the minority and largely unpopular Hezbollah kidnapped two Jewish soldiers it was justification enough to attempt to incinerate thousands of non Hezbollah citizens and reason enough to call for a war of attrition, a war against all Arabs. Having firmly summoned the ghost of the holocaust she rounded on Olmert, the present leader in Israel. It was not enough it seemed to have destroyed half a country, she wanted to destroy more countries. Her voice rose a notch as she lambarded the 'soft left' as fools for suggesting peaceful methods of ending the conflict, and it climbed to a crescendo as she called for a righteous jihad of all western democracies to bomb the hell out Syria and Iran. Only by reducing these countries, she continued, to same state as southern Lebanon could a lasting peace be achieved.

Perhaps Glick is just an aberration in the body politic, a sad joke that we can afford to dismiss as misguided yet she also is a product of her age. She is an American who moved to Israel to represent her country politically, seems to thrive on war - she was 'embedded' in the US army as it invaded Iraq - and she served in the Israeli Defence Force before retiring to write about saving Israel. It seems, however hopeful this view is, she is not an isolated case. By far the majority of Israeli's applaud the total destruction of whole communities and the horrifying deaths and injuries inflicted on an innocent people. 'How can they be innocents,' she said, 'they support the Hezbollah." Her conclusion was not surprising: the 40 odd civilians who died in the Hezbollah rocket barrage was a far greater war crime than the 1000 civilians buried under the rubble of their towns by the Israeli Air Force. Not that she ever included the hundred or so Palestinians - trapped behind the eight meter high steel and concrete walls of an enclosure that makes the Warsaw Ghetto look quite comfortable - that Israel blew to bits over the same period.

I stopped cooking. Here was a powerful media figure, a pillar of Jewish society, calling for a mission of genocide against a whole people, regardless of which particular country they came from. Here, reflecting the views of a majority of Jews was a terrible echo the Nazi attempt to eradicate the Jewish nation. 'Shame on those," she concluded "who dare to say that Israel should be condemned defending itself." I recalled a similar tactic used by the Nazi's in those countries that they occupied. For villages that sponsored any attacks on the occupying forces, often in the form of kidnapping, were 'erased' in an effort to discourage such actions. The tactic did not work then, nor has it worked now. The Hezbollah has become the flag under which those desperate hundreds of thousands who have lost their homes and their livelihoods now gather. Every word of poison from the mouth of insane monsters such as Glick, serves only to deepen this divide, supporting the cause of repressive regimes such as that in Iran, adding to a partition that will take generations to heal and one that may lead to a war that will shake both the West and the East.