Hitler also Felt Stronger at the Height of His Nazi Atrocities

There is a very brief news story captioned “Netanyahu Stronger than Ever Since Oct. 7 According to New Polls,” which appeared in the Jerusalem Post of Friday, April 19, 2024. The aforesaid news story makes for fascinating reading, if also because it says remarkably nothing different from the kind of weird and bizarre but predictable popularity garnered by German Chancellor Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party of the Third Reich in the late 1930s and the very early 1940s, that is, at the very height of the Nazi atrocities that became globally known as the Holocaust against German Jewry, in particular, and the European Jewry in general.

Now, what this means is that we have to be concerned about the ironic popularity of the strategic and the downright barbaric use of highly organized force and violence self-righteously gussied up and deviously paraded as a convenient and even a strategically savvy instrument of resolving that which has been proven time and again to be most definitively resolvable via the peaceful use of diplomacy. We are not the least bit deceived by the fact that even as the Portuguese-born Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN), Mr. Antonio Guterres, who is also a former Prime Minister of Portugal, observed not very long ago, the widely alleged October 7, 2023 Hamas-orchestrated massive attack on the Jewish State of Israel was not a complete act of happenstance that literally occurred out of the blue, as it were.

Rather, to hear Mr. Guterres tell it, it constituted a part of an innumerable catalogue of wanton and deadly atrocities orchestrated by the politically hardline and hardnosed likes of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud Coalition government, going back at least some 75 years or just under a century, involving the brazen shortchanging of the inalienable universal human and civil rights of the Indigenous Palestinian People, with the criminal complicity of the white-supremacist principals of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), led by the United States of America, Britain, France, among several others.

Indeed, even as an authoritative New York Times report noted in the wake of the October 7 Hamas-orchestrated anti-Israel assault that resulted in the deaths of some 1,200 Israeli citizens and residents – originally misreported to be at least 1,400 deaths – the Netanyahu government had been alerted by Israeli intelligence agency officials, including the foremost Israeli national intelligence establishment led by an experienced woman director, for approximately a year before the actual event occurred, which covered a considerable portion of the southern border of Israel with the Hamas-dominated Gaza Strip, so-called, and the West Bank.

Now, some of us continue to wonder why the necessary stringent measures had not been taken by the Likud Coalition Government to avert this most catastrophic event well ahead of time or schedule. For this writer, though, gender may very well have played a significant role in the apparent decision by Prime Minister Netanyahu and his globally maligned associates of radical Zionists to ignore the official warning given by the female-headed Israeli national intelligence establishment. It has been widely known for quite a long time how the traditional and the historical role of women in conservative Jewish society has almost always been treated with far less serious regard than that of this decidedly patriarchal or heavily male-dominated society.

But, of course, there could also have been another side to this decision by the Netanyahu regime to have apparently disregarded what eventually turned out to have been dead-accurate and even authoritative intelligence alert, including but not necessarily limited to cultivated complacency based on guaranteed NATO – and American military support, eternally at the ready, should Israel come under any formidable form of threat or external hostility from any of its Arab neighbors. The preceding case scenario may also very well have been further boosted by the fact that a criminally indicted hawkish Mr. Netanyahu, standing trial at the time of the Hamas-orchestrated and highly coordinated attack, might have been looking for a prime opportunity to distract national and even international spotlight away from his longstanding and widely alleged corruption and other related forms of serious political misdeeds or shenanigans.

But there is also a problem here about which all peace-loving and progressive-minded individuals ought to be very concerned with here; and it is the fact that Israel’s NATO and, for the most part, Western Allies continue to literally bury their heads in the proverbial sand by pretending as if the estimated massacre of some 40,000 Palestinian Arabs by the Netanyahu-supervised and/or commanded Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) is, somehow, of much too little significance to be properly characterized as a Veritable Act of Genocide. Matters were also not the least bit meliorated when, recently, the Biden-appointed US Secretary of Defense, Gen. Lloyd Austin (Ret.), appeared in Congress and rather strangely, in an answer to a question posed to him by a Congressional Representative, rather despicably claimed that he had absolutely no evidence, whatsoever, pointing to the fact of whether any forensically credible evidence existed indicating that, indeed, even as much of the civilized world has been seriously questioning the officially purported objective of the Netanyahu government’s massive and wanton assault on largely defenseless Gaza-resident Palestinian citizens as one that was strictly more of a retaliatory campaign than raw and downright genocide.

Now, if the relentless assault and the systematic massacre of at least some 40,000 Palestinians by the Netanyahu regime, as of this writing, is merely the civic equivalent of a Sunday’s Walk or Stroll in the Park, as Gen. Austin, a bona fide African-American Citizen of the United States, recently sought to cavalierly portray the same to the United States Congress recently, then there is, of course, absolutely no common method or means by which a Veritable Act of Genocide of a typical nature, such as is presently raging on the Gaza Strip is to be reckoned. Then, perhaps, the leadership of the Global Community may very well need to immediately begin revising its moral and ideological concept of what truly constitutes an Act of Genocide, vis-à-vis the Nazi Holocaust, for just one example. Or is this, too, just a simple matter of precisely whose figurative or metaphorical horses or oxen are being so callously and unconscionably gored, as it were?

That the massive and the horrendous slaughter of the Palestinians well appears to have politically strengthened the hand of a perennially besieged Prime Minister Netanyahu, ought to come as absolutely no fortuitous news at all. You see, Dear Reader, very likely German Chancellor Adolf Hitler may also very well have garnered a groundswell of support and popularity at the height of his very “Scientific Massacre” of the European Jewry, whom the mustachioed modern-day barbarian envisaged as rats and vermin to be casually exterminated from civilized German and European society. Among the Akan-speaking semitic people of Ghana from whom this writer hails, there is a common wise saying that runs as follows: “The same paddle that was used to punish Jack today, is also certain to be used in whipping Jill tomorrow in turn.”

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]