Haaretz
Kislev 25, 5767
All too often, wickedness wears the robes of
God's work.
All too often, evildoers work in the guise of God's
messengers.
The worst of them are the most sincere, those who
believe with perfect faith in the righteousness of the iniquity they
preach.
Therefore, may the Lord have mercy on the soul of the
rabbis who came to Tehran for this week's Tehran festival of Holocaust
denial, in order to kiss the cheek and shake the hand of Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad.
May the Lord have mercy on members of the
ultra-Orthodox Neturei Karta community in Jerusalem, who wrote in wall
posters that appeared in the city's Mea Shearim neighborhood on
Monday:
"It is known to everyone that the hand of the Zionists was
in the murder of millions of Jews in the days of holocaust and rage, both
by provoking the fury of the despotic Germans, and by interfering with all
manner of rescues."
And may the Lord have mercy on the soul of
Yisrael Hirsch of Neturei Karta, who said this week that "This is not a
conference for denial of the Holocaust."
"The Holocaust happened
because of the Zionists. They wanted it."
May the Lord have mercy
on all of them.
Jews will not. Jews should not.
Neturei
Karta, Aramaic for Guardians of the City, has long been a
publicity-chasing fringe, the lunatic uncle in the family tree of Haredi
Judaism. Their activities have ranged from cozying up to the late Yasser
Arafat to shouting "Whore!" at religious Jewish girls in Bet Shemesh who
are not ultra-Orthodox.
In attending the Holocaust conference this
week, Neturei Karta went overnight from embarrassment to
abomination.
Neturei Karta will tell you that it is emphatically
not a group that denies the Holocaust. And, in fact, Neturei Karta Rabbi
Aharon Cohen of Britain told the conference that "there is no doubt
whatsoever, that during World War II there developed a terrible and
catastrophic policy and action of genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany the
Jewish People, confirmed by innumerable eyewitness survivors and fully
documented again and again."
But the consummate betrayal embodied
in their very participation in the event, coupled with their effusive
shows of affection for Ahmadinejad, shores up the suspicion that, while
they do not deny the Holocaust of the 20th century, they are in profound
denial of the possibility of a Holocaust to come.
Neturei Karta can
spin it any way it pleases. By licking the boots of the Iranian president,
however, the rabbis effectively endorsed Ahmedinejad's vision of the
erasure of Israel.
"The Zionist regime will be wiped out soon the
same way the Soviet Union was, and humanity will achieve freedom,"
Ahmadinejad told conference participants on Tuesday.
He went on to
urge elections among "Jews, Christians and Muslims so the population of
Palestine can select their government and destiny for themselves in a
democratic manner."
Asked to comment on the belief that
Ahmadinejad's true aim is the extermination of the Jewish state, Hirsch
said this week that it just wasn't so.
Ahmadinejad "says
explicitly that he does not want to annihilate Israel," Hirsch told
Yedioth Ahronoth. "He wants the Zionist state to cease to exist. That
doesn't mean killing everyone who's here. Just as Communism passed from
the world and the people there still exist, the same thing here: Zionism
will disappear and the people will remain."
Back in Tehran,
Neturei Karta's Yisrael Weiss took up the drumbeat in a media interview.
"It is the work of Satan that Zionists are able to convince the world that
they represent Jews and Judaism, and everybody who speaks against it is
anti-Semitic," Weiss said.
The rabbis said they were at the
conference to prove that there is an alternative voice on the issue of the
Holocaust, and that theirs is the authentic viewpoint of Orthodox
Judaism.
What they did manage to prove was that if God works in
mysterious ways, Satan can get Neturei Karta to do his work for him.
In recent days, there has been private talk in rabbinic circles
about boycotting or excommunicating Neturei Karta members for attending
the conference.
But there is no point in excommunicating them. By
their actions they have more than excommunicated themselves.
Let
them go. And when Ahmedinejad's missiles hit Mea Shearim, Yisrael Hirsch
and his poster-machers can pray that the warheads will distinguish between
anti-Zionists and the rest of us.
If I were in their place, I would
pray real hard.