There is a journalist in London, quite a well-known figure and author of several books, who once began an article in a leading magazine with the sentence, “Now is the time for all good men to come to the destruction of Israel.” This is exactly what the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad likes to repeat whenever he gets the chance. At a literary occasion this week, I happened to run into this English journalist, and the very next day, by coincidence, I was invited to a press showing of La Rafle, or The Round Up, a French feature film dramatizing the German campaign to destroy the Jews in wartime France.
If our journalist and the ayatollahs had their way, then there would be more atrocious scenes of the kind shown in this very sobering film. Of course one cannot help wondering what the would-be Iranian mass-murderers owe emotionally or ideologically to the actual European mass-murderers of the Second World War.
For a long time the French have been unable or unwilling to face their collaboration with the occupying Nazis. Marcel Ophuls’ pioneering film Le Chagrin et la Pitié was for years virtually boycotted. The films Au revoir les Enfants and Lucien Lacombe broke the taboo, and French historians at last began to research occupation and collaboration. The Round Up is based on the reality of the first mass arrest of Jews in Paris in July 1942. The Germans did not have the manpower or the desk-work intelligence for this, but relied on the French authorities, the police and the transport systems, to do it for them. The Vichy politicians, Marshal Pétain and Prime Minister Laval, are depicted in this film as the deliberate accomplices in crime that they were. Jean Leguay was a civil servant who organized the eventual deportations to Auschwitz, and he too is portrayed here truthfully. He’s the sole Frenchman ever accused of crimes against humanity, but he managed to escape justice. When I interviewed him for my book Paris in the Third Reich he was still trying to excuse and justify himself.
Annette Monod was a heroic and devoted nurse, a Protestant assigned by the Red Cross to help the Jews. Her eye-witness account of that July round up and deportation is a moving document in itself, and serves as the peg for the film — Melanie Laurent impersonates her beautifully and the well-known actor Jean Reno magisterially plays the part of the Jewish doctor with whom she works. In the film, as in real life, children were separated from their parents, and deported by themselves, some too young to know their names. This horror could not be hidden completely. Pastor Boegner, head of the Protestant church, protested to Laval who knowingly lied that the children were to be agricultural workers in Poland. Boegner left a rebuke which should be remembered, “Je lui parlais meurtre, il me répondait jardinage,” that is, “I was speaking to him of murder, he answered about gardening.”
And here they go again, speaking as though the destruction of this whole people were a perfectly normal process that anyone might anticipate.
In a world drowning in anti-Semitism, distorted, revisionist history that is beguiling masses of populations, and general lunacy especially from the MSM, I get so encouraged to read articles like this from National Review.
Thank you for speaking truth even in this little movie review. And for speaking up for the Jewish people, again.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe English writer who longs for the destruction of the Jews should be shunned. If Great Britain were a decent country, he would be a pariah. Instead, I imagine that he is celebrated for his anti-Semitism and hatred.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMaybe if Pryce-Jones named him/her, we could. Googling "Now is the time for all good men to come to the destruction of Israel." I get 8 hits and they all begin with "...once began an article in a leading magazine with the sentence". Strange.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI bet it was never said. Could be wrong though.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThis is an outrageous slur against the Iranians.
Although they have called for an end to the state of Israel, this has been explicitly cast as a peaceful transition akin to the downfall of the Soviet Union or the end of Apartheid South Africa.
If the Iranian regime wished to murder Jews, it would start at home - Iran has the second-largest Jewish community in the Middle East, after Israel itself. It's time that we woke up. Our problem is not Iran. It is Saudi Arabia.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWhen Ahmadinejad spoke before a 2006 conference of Holocaust deniers and said that Israel would be "wiped out", what was his meaning? Was he speaking politically? If so, why did he choose that particular venue? He arranged the conference, so I would assume that he knew what it was about. Was he just joshing?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseDefending the Iranian government as peaceful is delusional. Who arms Syria, controls Lebanon by proxy, arms militants, and assassinates regime enemies worldwide? Whose mullahs decree that it is "the religous duty of all Muslims to kill Israeli children?" Please.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseJames in London is a perfect example of the antisemitism of the intellectually lazy. James seems to think that ending Israel will be a peaceful affair as if the Arab world will allow 5 million Jews to peacefully exist as equals in a bi-national state. As if the ongoing expulsion of "Palestinian" Christians by Muslim Arabs is not occurring.
It is certainly true that Iran has the largest Jewish population in the Middle East outside of Israel. That is to say 25,000 Jews live as third-class "citizens" subjected to dhimmitude, a code of subjugation that makes Jim Crow look progressive. External Link
Finally, James should take a good look at how South Africa is following the path of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe. There certainly are refugees he could speak with. But he won't because he is just another intellectually bankrupt liberal or Politically Correct "conservative" who lives off the left-wing agitprop of the BBC.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseOne fact I often recall when I think about Iran's connections to the Nazi anti-semitic murderers of old is the very name of the country. Till the 1930s, Iran was known as Persia. It became Iran in 1935. Iran is, you guessed it, Persian for Aryan. How telling that a country that denominated itself by the title Aryan in the 1930s is now committed to the destruction of the Jews.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseCharles,
The whole Persia changed its name to Iran in some weird sympathy for the NAZIs is silly and historically incorrect. The use of Iran, and its derivatives, long pre-dated Nazi Germany. In fact it predates Germany as a nation by well over a thousand years. Persia is a latin corruption of P/Fars, which never signified all the people of Iran.
Having said all that today's Iran seeks the total destruction of Israel and its people.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseRidiculous.
"Aryan" meaning "noble" has been the self-designation of the Iranian [same root, spellings vary when translated and transliterated]people since the most ancient times, and some variation of "Iran" has always been their name in their own language for the land they held, though at times it has been part of someone else's dominions under another name. Tom is of course correct that Persia was originally the Greek version of the home province of the core Iranian people and dynasty that created the first "Persian" Empire, and the classical legacy of Greece and Rome kept that name alive in the West ever after.
All the "Persian" government did in the 1930s was to ask that international institutions, telegraphic and postal governing bodies, and countries engaging officially with Iran henceforth refer to the country by its native name. As an adjunct, the Persian government stopped using the Persian name for itself in international dealings, a practice in which it had long acquiesced.
This is somewhat excpetional- most countries have multiple names in foreign languages and don't get shirty about it, since they do the same for other countries in turn. But there is the occasional desire to rectify a perceived, if mild insult. Also, this particular move struck the Iranians as an aspect of their national modernization and coming out on the international scene. It may seem stroppy when Espana never objects to be called Spain, and so forth, but there it is.
In a comparable move, Turkey in that era asked that international entities and foreign countries cease referring to Istanbul as Constantinople, and Turkish authorities also ceased to do so. Strictly speaking, the city's name in Turkish had been Istanbul since the conquest of 1453, and indeed the Turks had called it that even when it WAS a Greek city called Constantinople.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseJames is too much. Indeed, "Although they have called for an end to the state of Israel, this has been explicitly cast as a peaceful transition akin to the downfall of the Soviet Union or the end of Apartheid South Africa." Of course, A-jad has cast his planned genocide as a "peaceful transition." And you are foolish enough or bigoted enough to believe it!!! Then you compare Israel with "Apartheid South Africa." You do have a gourmet's taste for lies, James.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThis perspective can be well supplemented by a notice given to the film work of Pierre Sauvage, whose "Weapons of the Spirit" documents the activities of the Christian people in a small town against the Nazis to protect many thousands of Jews. Too bad Amazon only lists a VHS version. It's a great story!
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseJames in London: obviously you need a refresher course in 20th century history. You say Iran wants a peaceful transition to end the state of Israel. Your statement makes the false assumption that Israel has stolen land from the so-called Palestinians and is currently occupying it illegally.
To make this somewhat brief. There is no nationality group known as Palestinians. Yasser Arafat made them up in the 1960s when he decided he wanted to become king of a Middle-eastern country. Oh yeah, he also invented the supposedly thousands of years old land of Palestine as being these so-called Palestinians' homeland.
The truth? Palestinians are Arabs that the Arab countries surrounding Israel refused to give refuge to in 1947-48 when Israel became a nation (by UN vote, by the way). These Arabs had been frightened off property families may have owned for many years legally under British or Turkish rule, by Arab leaders who assured them the Arab nations surrounding Israel would make a quick end to the new state of Israel, extinction of the Jews being the goal, still, just not in Europe. Then all those Arabs fleeing land in the new state of Israel would be able to come back and move into their homes.
Surprise, Israel won the war in 1948. But the refugees were stuck and not one Arab country would allow them in. Pretty smart of Arafat to put this tragedy to good use, eh?
The really sad fact in today's 21st century information age is the lies have been told for so long and now it is often in print on the internet that throughout the Arab, Muslim, Islamic and anti-Semitic world these lies are perpetrated as truth. So today's UN feels remorse in not giving the so-called Palestinians back thier homeland more quickly.
But there is hope for you, James. Keep Reading NRO - you'll get a good dose of truth, and correct history, often enough your thinking might actually come clear.
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