Good News: "Perpetrators Of The Holocaust Accept Israel's Right To Exist"

I am interested in seeing the survival of a humane and not a thuggish Jewish state in the Middle East. I am interested in finding ways of coming to grips with the fact that the perpetrators of the Holocaust and those who halted it accept Israel’s right to exist, but in the region in which it does exist, no one accepts its right to exist. That’s the problem we must overcome.

Chas Freeman

On the issue of Israel's 'thuggishness' James Kirchick asks:

Let us, for analytic purposes, take at face value Freeman’s characteristic of Israel as a “thuggish” state. What, then, does that make Saudi Arabia, the monarchy to which Freeman was posted as Ambassador and where he developed a severe state of clientitis? The state where gays are beheaded, women are banned from driving, and the practice of Christianity is outlawed? Surely, rational people can agree that the things the Saudi monarchy does to keep itself in power are more “thuggish” than the Israeli occupation. Certainly, “thuggish” and stronger epithets can also be used to describe Ba’athist Syria, or Jordan, where torture is routine. Why is it only the perceived transgressions of Israel that rile men like Chas Freeman and the Israel-obsessives at the American Conservative?

Myself, I'm wondering what Freeman is getting at by claiming that "the perpetrators of the Holocaust and those who halted it accept Israel’s right to exist"--just how many Nazi officals are alive today? By perpetrators, could he just be referring to Germany today?

Well, at least he did not call them thugs.

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