Going for Lidice, in Israel
In June 1942 British-trained Czecho-Slovak paratroopers in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia managed to spot and terminate a high Nazi official named Reinhard Heydrich as, somewhat overconfidently, he was motoring through the city of Prague.
In reprisal for the killing of that one man, and for some reason choosing to vent their fury on Lidice, a small town 20 miles from Prague, the Germans promply rounded up all the townspeople, summarily executed 173 of all the men and the boys older than 15, packed the 184 women off to concentration camps, sent 88 children to another camp where a few were picked to be "aryanized" while all the rest were gassed as soon as they got there, and the town's infrastructure was completely reduced to nothing more than a bare field.
Though Lidice was the most famous and perhaps the most extreme example, these mass reprisals were a common practice of the Nazis. The most popular formula that one heard about was to kill 10 of the invaded citizens to each one death inflicted on the German invaders, and the extra-added ferocity of the Germans in Heydrich's case must have been because he appeared to have been something of a Nazi poster boy.
Just a few months earlier, in January, the German higher-ups had picked Heydrich to ramrod a conference held in a Berlin suburb called Wannsee, wherein the policy was drawn up and soon implemented for what became known as the "Final Solution" to the most efficient method of the mass incarceration and removal from this life of millions of Jewish people that had fallen into German hands through their numerous invasions all over Europe during World War II.
Today the Palestinians in the Middle East have long run afoul of a set of invaders called "the Israelis," who have adopted many of the tactics of their spiritual ancestors, the Germans of the 1930's and '40's, the most recent of which is the application of something approaching the Lidice ratio in retaliation for rocket attacks by the Palestinians that cause scarcely more damage than the fireworks set off here in peaceful rural Virginia every July 4th. Thus the current ratio in and around Gaza is 125 Palestinian deaths inflicted by the Israelis with their 800 tons of bombs dropped so far, in retaliation for 0 Israeli deaths (that is, zero, none, zilch) inflicted by the obviously non-lethal Palestinian rockets. 125 to 0!
--Numbers like that (for instance we have not gone into the highly unbalanced number of Palestinians that have been incarcerated by the Israelis vs the number of Israelis that have been detained by Palestinians, and that's just one of many such situations) make it easy to think that if there were an actual just and merciful God observing this, as it stands now the Israelis are deeply into deserving and some day receiving a Judgment of Nuremberg delivered on them that would rival what the Germans experienced because of their wholesale use of the Lidice Syndrome and other such crimes. The Germans of three-quarters of a century ago, believing that they would be in full possession of the future, never expected to be brought to justice for these acts, and today's Israelis have clearly inherited the same attitude, as shown by their endless mistreatment of the Palestinians.
It makes one wonder what is being taught in the math and ethics departments of all those highly vaunted schools in Tel Aviv and other such places. Surely there must be wholesale condemnation of practices like this in the Torah, if nowhere else.
"But hey!" as cruel people like to say in the depths of their misdeeds, as if it is the irrefutable justification for everything heinous that they do, "who's counting?"
In reprisal for the killing of that one man, and for some reason choosing to vent their fury on Lidice, a small town 20 miles from Prague, the Germans promply rounded up all the townspeople, summarily executed 173 of all the men and the boys older than 15, packed the 184 women off to concentration camps, sent 88 children to another camp where a few were picked to be "aryanized" while all the rest were gassed as soon as they got there, and the town's infrastructure was completely reduced to nothing more than a bare field.
Though Lidice was the most famous and perhaps the most extreme example, these mass reprisals were a common practice of the Nazis. The most popular formula that one heard about was to kill 10 of the invaded citizens to each one death inflicted on the German invaders, and the extra-added ferocity of the Germans in Heydrich's case must have been because he appeared to have been something of a Nazi poster boy.
Just a few months earlier, in January, the German higher-ups had picked Heydrich to ramrod a conference held in a Berlin suburb called Wannsee, wherein the policy was drawn up and soon implemented for what became known as the "Final Solution" to the most efficient method of the mass incarceration and removal from this life of millions of Jewish people that had fallen into German hands through their numerous invasions all over Europe during World War II.
Today the Palestinians in the Middle East have long run afoul of a set of invaders called "the Israelis," who have adopted many of the tactics of their spiritual ancestors, the Germans of the 1930's and '40's, the most recent of which is the application of something approaching the Lidice ratio in retaliation for rocket attacks by the Palestinians that cause scarcely more damage than the fireworks set off here in peaceful rural Virginia every July 4th. Thus the current ratio in and around Gaza is 125 Palestinian deaths inflicted by the Israelis with their 800 tons of bombs dropped so far, in retaliation for 0 Israeli deaths (that is, zero, none, zilch) inflicted by the obviously non-lethal Palestinian rockets. 125 to 0!
--Numbers like that (for instance we have not gone into the highly unbalanced number of Palestinians that have been incarcerated by the Israelis vs the number of Israelis that have been detained by Palestinians, and that's just one of many such situations) make it easy to think that if there were an actual just and merciful God observing this, as it stands now the Israelis are deeply into deserving and some day receiving a Judgment of Nuremberg delivered on them that would rival what the Germans experienced because of their wholesale use of the Lidice Syndrome and other such crimes. The Germans of three-quarters of a century ago, believing that they would be in full possession of the future, never expected to be brought to justice for these acts, and today's Israelis have clearly inherited the same attitude, as shown by their endless mistreatment of the Palestinians.
It makes one wonder what is being taught in the math and ethics departments of all those highly vaunted schools in Tel Aviv and other such places. Surely there must be wholesale condemnation of practices like this in the Torah, if nowhere else.
"But hey!" as cruel people like to say in the depths of their misdeeds, as if it is the irrefutable justification for everything heinous that they do, "who's counting?"
posted by Carl (aka Sofarsogoo) | 1:33 AM
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