Hallway to Hell II

And to think I was upset yesterday. This morning produced a different flier, which I had been told about, but failed to find between classes – one that asserts that “Israel has successfully turned the world’s largest prison into the world’s largest concentration camp.”

To begin with, ignoring the conception of Palestine as a prison, the concept of a territory that constitutes a mere part of a country that itself constitutes somewhere around 0.15% of the total land mass of the Middle East as the largest of anything is laughable; but to compare the 1,300 the flier has listed dead in Palestine to the 16,000+ dead in Somalia and the 450,000+ dead in Darfur (just to name two of the more frequently cited ongoing crimes against humanity) – particularly given the role Hamas has played in provoking the IDF into action and keeping Palestinian citizens in the line of fire – is wildly opportunistic and thoroughly reprehensible.

Further, the comparison to a concentration camp is simply appalling. As I’ve written before, I maintain that Nazi imagery is off-limits for use in analogy, regardless of the subject or context; the reasons that the comparison is invalid are, I hope, sufficiently self-evident that they need not be enumerated. I’ll leave it at saying that only once in the long, tortured, and ugly history of mankind have one set of people built enclosed pens that served the express purpose of holding and exterminating another set of people. I suppose it’s that lingering strain of faith in people that would lead me to hope that even the authors of a flier like this could at least feign respect, but I guess this is what I should expect from the people who responded to Yoni Weinberg’s reference to the horrors of the Holocaust at an ASUC Senate meeting on November 19 with venomous, unrestrained laughter.

* * *

As I was walking Telegraph Ave. this afternoon wearing a green t-shirt bearing the insignia of the IDF, the bitterness of the reactions I drew out of people – in body language, guttural noises, and even less ambiguous English – was surprising, even to me. Nor did it come from the usual suspects (fat white guys in keffiyehs, Terry O’Brien, etc.): I drew the marked disdain of no fewer than 10 strangers doing nothing more than walking 3 blocks down the street with what was intended as a harmless expression on my face. One chick told me flat-out that I “should be ashamed of [my]self.”

You almost can’t even get angry at a place where it’s the dude looking for a place to get himself some food, and not the asshole laughing at the Holocaust, who ought to be ashamed of himself.

Almost.