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Making Iran Into a Jewish Issue Is Fueling an Unhealthy Debate
The Continental Divide
RAILING: The Stop the Bomb alliance has summoned memories of the Holocaust to criticize the state-owned Austrian oil and
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More in Forward ForumWhen shareholders of the Austrian oil and gas company OMV met in Vienna May 14 for their annual meeting, they were met by a small group of noisy protesters from Stop the Bomb, a mostly Jewish alliance opposed to OMV’s business dealings with Iran. Just 10 days earlier, the alliance held a conference in the Austrian capital where it warned that Iran was seeking an atomic bomb to launch a second Holocaust against the Jewish people — and that companies like OMV were helping Tehran in its quest.
As of press time it looked like Stop the Bomb may actually achieve its aim, as OMV appears to be backing away from a controversial natural gas investment in Iran. But such victories may very well turn out to be Pyrrhic, because the anti-Iran alliance’s overheated rhetoric and tactics are threatening to impair broader Jewish causes.
Stop the Bomb was launched last year by the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde, the organized Jewish community in Vienna, and a few non-Jewish allies. It was formed to protest OMV’s plans to invest up to $30 billion in an Iranian gas field and to build a plant to liquefy natural gas in Iran and send it by ship to Europe.
The project, one of the biggest involving a European oil and gas company in Iran, had the support of the Austrian government, which is the largest shareholder in the company. The government lent its support to the deal primarily because it would reduce Europe’s unhealthy dependence on gas imports from Russia, which has proved to be an unpredictable trading partner. The same rationale has also driven OMV to pursue a separate European Union-backed plan to build a new pipeline from Austria to eastern Turkey that would bypass Russia but would eventually need Iranian natural gas in order to become economically viable.
Energy independence, however, appears to be the last thing on the mind of opponents of the deal.
Stop the Bomb — with some egging on by Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress — adopted what amounts to the nuclear warhead of all political debates: With slogans like “OMV — Murder and More” prominently displayed on its Web site, the alliance implicitly accused the company of picking up where the Nazis left off by doing business with Iran.
Such dire warnings, however, have been greeted with skepticism in Austria, even among those who have never hesitated to own up to the country’s complicity in the Holocaust. It is far from certain, they say, that investments like that of OMV will make the building of an Iranian bomb more probable, or that an end to the project would slow down Iran’s nuclear designs.
Furthermore, they do not believe that Iran’s nuclear designs are directed primarily against Israel, and they seriously doubt that a nuclear-armed Iran would be so foolish as to attack the one country that has both the will and capacity to retaliate. Despite his repeated rantings against Israel, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is viewed by very few Austrians as a modern-day Adolf Hitler. There are plenty of level-headed analysts who argue that Western involvement in Iran would help reformers and create incentives for Tehran to abandon its nuclear program.
So when Stop the Bomb started dropping implicit allusions to Auschwitz, even those Austrians who oppose the OMV deal got a bit resentful.
A conference the alliance held earlier this month drew little media coverage, and what little was reported dealt mostly with the provocative suggestion by Israeli historian Benny Morrris that Israel might use a nuclear strike to stop Iran from acquiring nukes. Whatever attention it did garner, it certainly did little to gain support for the anti-Iranian cause.
The tendency of Stop the Bomb and some other Jewish voices to focus on Tehran’s threat to Israel, and by extension to the Jewish people, has had the effect — least in the eyes of more than a few Europeans — of making a nuclear dispute between the United Nations and Iran into a regional squabble between two religiously motivated, aggressive and generally unpredictable powers.
Admittedly, Europeans are prone to adopt such views; few will forget the shocking 2003 public opinion poll that found Europeans viewed Israel as the biggest threat to world peace. But knowing that, it makes little sense to play up Israel’s military options when the goal is to influence European public policy. The involvement of Jewish functionaries in the cause also reinforces the misguided notion that all Jews support Israel, and are therefore responsible for all Israeli actions.
Fortunately, along with all the brash activists of Stop the Bomb there are other forces at work. Behind-the-scenes diplomacy by Washington and some European leaders, in particular German Chancellor Angela Merkel, has convinced OMV that it needs to put its Iranian plans on hold so long as the threat looms of broader international sanctions against Tehran.
The CEO of OMV, Wolfgang Ruttenstorfer, a man known for being cautious, has tried to keep the Iranian option open but has informally conceded that the time for such an investment is not right. Other European companies have recently come to the same conclusion. For once, it appears, the Bush administration has used its leverage effectively.
Yet even if tensions are reduced between Iran and the West, and European investments in the Iranian energy industry pick up again, there may be good arguments for an Austrian company to stay away. The Iranian deal would certainly be good business for OMV, but most of its profits would still come from elsewhere, and even without a nuclear program the regime is Tehran is not the kind of people the Austrian government ought to be getting too close to.
There may be good arguments, or there may not; an open discussion is certainly in order. Austria, just like the rest of Europe, clearly needs a reasoned debate how to balance its need for energy security with the dangers of a nuclear-armed Iran.
Just as clear, though, is this: Turning this issue into a replay of the Holocaust — and OMV into a modern-day IG Farben — will not move the discussion forward one bit.
Eric Frey is managing editor of the Vienna daily Der Standard.
Comments
Sounds like a very "healthy" debate. It is an antisemitic libel to paint Israel (and not only Iran) as a, "religiously motivated, aggressive and generally unpredictable power." Iran poses an existential threat to the Jewish state of Israel and therefore to Jews everywhere.
Fearing antisemites is not a reason to fail to confront them. Frey wants to avoid the "misguided notion that all Jews support Israel." Who are the self-hating sick Jews who do not?
Sounds like a very "healthy" debate. It is an antisemitic libel to paint Israel (and not only Iran) as a, "religiously motivated, aggressive and generally unpredictable power." Iran poses an existential threat to the Jewish state of Israel and therefore to Jews everywhere.
Fearing antisemites is not a reason to fail to confront them. Frey wants to avoid the "misguided notion that all Jews support Israel." Who are the self-hating sick Jews who do not?
What does a plant to liquefy natural gas in Iran have to do with nuclear bombs or nuclear energy? What is real is that the world needs LNG sources; and the lack of them will put pressures on economies -- the kind of pressures which ultimately create a basis for war.
Iran is entitled to sell its resources and to produce whatever marketable products it can from those resources. Granted, the possibility of a nuclear bomb aimed at Israel is horrifying -- but the possibility that Israel would see it and stop it means Iranians would have to be suicidal ... far more suicidal than those idiots with al Qaeda who kill themselves and other Islamics in some stupid effort to wage Jihad against people who are a quarter or half a world away.
If Iran wishes to self-destruct, why not let it? Why not encourage it? If they want to follow nuclear for peaceful means -- as our President Bush seems to promote -- let them. It is just a means of producing nuclear waste and contaminating their nation; it is just another means of self-destruction; it is just a means of creating pools of nuclear waste that make excellent targets which, when exploded, contaminate the area and kill the people, close by. Let Iranians be stupid. Their having radioactive watse is far more dangerous for them than it is for Israel.
It's a neat trick to site an Austrian issue so as to avoid hitting home onto home-grown psychotics like Abe Foxman and his Judeo-madness. All the while, given the sensational slandering of the Jewish community one reads in the FORWARD lately, you would think that Murdock took over the FORWARD. It seems devoted to painting as "news" Judeo-sleaze. True, a newspaper should tell "the" story, ANY story that is news. But half-baked stories that need not go where the reporting takes them and with no immediate relevance are not "all the news that's fit to print." Don't get me wrong, I want Judeo-madness exposed so that Judeo-wisdom can prevail. But with screwballs like Foxman or the "Ziofascist" neocons making a bad impression in home news, stories about Olmert that are all insinuation, no new evidence, are only grist for the mill of anti-Semites-- the real kind, not those so slandered by the screwballs named above who seem to think crying "anti-Semite" can replace their Viagra.
Take Foxman for example. This loud mouth motzaball suddenly decided he wants to be seen as a "mensch." So he took the job of ADL head to attention seek by yelling crazy things, thinking that he stops people from what they are doing, leaving them to wonder: "what the hell....?" as he captures their attention. He seems to think that proves he has real balls. So he writes, for example, that anti-Semites all hate Jews because they are jealous that Jews are God's chosen people. Heading an organization that is named "anti-Defamation" and supposedly fights for universal inclusion, he, at a meeting of "World Jewish Students" in Jerusalem at the Dayan Center a few years ago, asked to be forgiven for doing so little for Zionism but ADL was ssssooooooo busy fighting against "assimilation"-- that is, Jews being integrated in American society!!!!! Yet this mad man is allowed to go from induced public seizure to induced public seizure as a funds raising gimmick.
Then there's the Holocaust Industry wherein everything in the world is referenced back to a warped view of the Holocaust for profit. Then there's another crazy web-site, Horowitz's FRONT-PAGE, that seems to know only one thing: yell "fire" in crowded places. He and I both were at the University of California campus in Berkley when a Communist New Yorker, Betina Aptheker, stopped what Mario Savio called "the odious wheels and gears of the university" in the name of free speech and meaningful dialogue. Well, Betina beat UC's Regents (she being a New Yorker it was no contest). And once she got free speech, she joined and Cal Conservative for Political Action to create real "meaningful dialogue" instead of Communist Revolution. Mario Savio died as a physics professor, so he could not so fully devote himself to politics. Horowitz, on the other hand, devoted his chubby old age to fighting against dialogue by branding as anti-Semite anyone opposed to Likudnik nonsense.
But nothing compares with the neocons, who, after the CIA stopped funding them, devoted themselves to pushing "World War IV" as a substitute for the Cold War so that we keep spending on strategic weapons as much as we did during the Cold War. For this kind of fear-mongering propaganda they were handsomely remunerated. Then, rich old American Jews (or are they Israeli-- they can't seem to make up their minds!) who sought "Likudism" as a substitute for sexual climax put up immense amounts of cash to buy up at 5 cents on the dollar the old defunked Wall Street sponsored professional anti-Communist operations that were originally created to promote heating up the Cold War and call for defense spending on nuclear arms in order to turn them into war mongering "think tanks." To cash in, the hand full of neocons became Zionazis advocating killing Arabs. They even bought themselves a presidential administration and guided America into a catastrophic war in Iraq that was worse than 9/11 for American families. One neocon made a coalition with Jesus freaks and voila: we have gris for the "WORLD JEWISH CONSPIRACY" mill all over the globe. I had never seen Jews as morally despised by so many people without an anti-Semitic bone in their bodies as I see now.
I tried to tell these people that there is no WORLD JEWISH CONSPIRACY and that they should think bigger and realize that there is an INTERPLANETARY JEWISH CONSPIRACY based on Jupiter. As proof I sight the lettering on the UFOs. But still, for some reason, they still think that Foxman, Horowitz and the neocons make a far better case for an evil WORLD JEWISH CONSPIRACY. They cite when Fukuyama, a satellite of the neocons, wondered how it is that the neocons demand that Americans die to impose "democracy" only on the Middle East, the mad psychiatrist Krauthammer called him-- in print-- an "anti-Semite"....one of their own satellites!!!!
I tell all this because I know Europe well and am confident-- as a fellow goy-- that the continent will never again repeat the madness and horror of the Holocaust. So while I cringe at that paranoid psycho, the Israeli Yo'er's, who chose to live in Europe instead of Israel, bemoans Arab takeover of Europe; her term is "Eurabia." so, as in her case, I know that the worst that can happen to Jews in Europe is to be laughed at.
But in America, THAT'S A DIFFERENT STORY. There, the soldiers fighting the neocon's World War IV "for Democracy," imposed from the barrel of a gun on the so-called "Islamo-Fascists" (again, the neocons' term-- what else do you expect from former Commies!) are on average five years older than in Vietnam and are all VOLUNTEERS because there is no longer a draft. Consequently, most are moms and dads and when they die they leave behind many widows and orphans, not just their own grieving parents. Yet, the neocons screaming for expansion of "World War IV" are all war profiteers that never served nor ever would, either in the US of the Israeli armies.
America is getting deeper and deeper in BUSHIT, cheered on by the neocons on the rim, collecting their remittances by the word for their advocacy-- SOME OF THESE ARE KNOWN TO IN THE MEANTIME NEGOTIATE BUSINESS DEALS WITH THE "ENEMY"!!!
Alas, viciously attacked as "self-hating Jews," the mass majority of Jews that oppose the neocons are intimidated into silence while the neocons claim to be the "voice of American Jewry." So, as things go from acute to critical, those millions of "dumb goyim" Americans fooled by the neocons are congealing into a blob of rage. That rage, the Republican Party is trying to turn into HATE of the very Democratic Party to which most Jews belong so it can do the impossible: take power in Wash DC in November 2008.
But pretty soon, Americans will be saying: wait a minute, THESE JEWS ARE NOT ONLY CALLING FOR INCREASING OUR AID TO ISRAEL BY A FACTOR OF TEN BUT ALSO FOR BOMBING THE VERY COUNTRIES THAT PROVIDE US OUR OIL!
YOU SEE, THOSE "DUMB GOYIM" DID NOT LIVE THE HOLOCAUST EXPERIENCE AS EUROPE DID. They might, therefore, lack the learned inhibition to avoid a repeat. A "nation of sheep" that follow out of fear might just turn into a "nation of wolves" that in rage repeat the mistake of others. And if they are driven to it, they will be too insane to realize that only a small obscure cabal is responsible for all this-- NOT THE JEWISH PEOPLE-- who really en masse opposed it all through.
Today's Evangelical Crusade sure smells a lot like the old Crusade that shed so much blood. So don't waste your time with relatively benign events in Austria, talk about the suicide pact of a few madmen in America who represent no one but the equally mad cash cows that fund them.
This playing the victim; presenting people with a false choice between Holocaust or Israeli ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians; biting the fingers off the hand that feeds our SUVs; calling for ten times as many billions of dollars for Israel while droning on and on about how corrupt is Israel-- all as if FORWARD is cheap tabloid print-- all these things are stalking the fire that none of us can stop. Let's recall how much good a Jew named Betina did by NOT behaving like the Communist she was and-- instead of turning her student revolution victory into totalitarian revolution turned it into meaningful dialogue-- waking America from its 1950s anti-intellectual Dark Ages. The New Left fomented debate and dialogue instead of hatred, blame and violence. As a result, we survived our "defeat" in Vietnam without punching ourselves in the face.
Jewish interests now are no different from what they were in the 1960s: MEANINGFUL DIALOGUE is still the Jewish Community's greatest gift to today's America. Make all this cast of insane characters I sited above enter into meaningful dialogue. People will then realize that they are nothing more than well payed agents provocateurs. But do nothing, sit on your hands silently pretending that as Jews you owe it to the ex-Red Jews to be quiet, and you will be responsible for the stampede of those who never learned from history.
Daniel E. Teodoru
Kol hacavod to the Israelistishe Kultursgemeinde for standing up to OMV and other Austrian firms who place profit above ethics and decency. I remember as a child in Brooklyn hearing my fathers friends saying that the problems of Jews in Germany were the problems of those Jews, and we who emigrated to America should not get involved so as not to upset the Goyim. Your reporter's comments brought that back to mind. Every time Jews cringe, they invite spit. Everytime they stand up and fight back, they command rspect. Those Jews who still live in fear need only come home. Here my grandson soldiers will shield them.
"Turning this issue into a replay of the Holocaust..." Okay, that should be a straightforward sign that groups like "Stop the Bomb" are, in my judgment, doing nothing less than exploiting the Nazi Holocaust for political purposes -- which is totally vile and disgusting -- and quite possibly endangering the Jewish people by firmly tying the more hawkish voices of the Israeli political sphere to Jews everywhere.
India is also seeking natural gas ties with Iran; should New Delhi also be brought before the spotlight with The Holocaust as a political weapon, which (again) is just obscene exploitation of history's most horrific atrocity against humanity. Critics often level that Tehran does not need nuclear energy, because it already has enough oil; so does Saudi Arabia, but the Saudis are also pursuing nuclear energy -- and there is no need to spell out their designs for Jews, but they're US allies so it's fine.
I do not know, in all honesty, what is worse: using the Nazi Holocaust for political purposes, or putting the Jewish people in real danger in the here and now by letting lunatics like these "Stop the Bomb" people speak for Jews, particularly American Jews (like me).
Thank you to the Forward for publishing this article. Somehow we must find a way to engage with these activists' deep sense of threat without misusing the past in a way that shuts down discussion.
Investing in Iran's oil industry will nothing to further her nuclear programme. Hydro-carbons and nucleonics are seperate issues. If European firms invest in Iran's oil fields, this will benefit the Iranian economy and also the world economy by reducing the general level of oil prices. Also, the increase of Persian welfare is essentially good, because a more prosperous nation will turn its back to demagogues like Ahmedinejad and support liberals. I think this news is just another indication of uselessness of USA/Israeli containment policy toward Iran. As these countries pressurizes Iran, Iran accelerates her nuclear programme to acquire a credible nuclear deterrent. It seems a clasiccal case of security dilemma articulated in international relations theories.
Turning this controversy as solely an Israel vs Iran matter, is a distortion that is not only inaccurate but in the long run damaging to both Jewish and Israeli interests.
Unfortunately but true the world would rather oil flowing to all countries, Then worry about the future of the State of israel, whether or not it survives meand nothing to them. i would go as far as saying that they would prefer to see the complete annihilation of the Jewish State, her people all perish, and if by chance some individual surve the second holocast, to again be scattered around the world, and that is oc course if some countries would accept them. However that scenario will not happen, what will take place if Iran will launch rockets against Israel, will be a catastrphe not only fro Iran, but for those surrounding countries who wish to support Iran in their so called holocast adventure against the Jewish People. Israel and the Jews today are not the same people as in 1933, What Hitler did to the jewish people will never be forgotten, however the free world at that time could have done moe, the USA, Canada, Australia were so vast that they could have accomodated all those unfortunate Jews, although they chose not to come in and be their saviours, ie in reality they admired what hiter was doing, because they didn't have the Frazzos (Guts) to do the same. In other words you the whole world were just as guilty for the crimes of humanity that the German's and their allies committed. Most of the Arabs supported the the Axis powers and are not without guilt too. They were also murdering jews as the 2nd world war continued. Israel and Israel alone is today the defenders of the whole jewish people, as you in your countries ie. England, France, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Austria, etc. etc. don't seem to able to defend the jewish community against anti-semitism, and islamic hatred directed against all the jewish communities in most of europe.
Interesting how the content of the article contradicts the writer's conclusion.