[Opinion] Letter to Ken Roth: Demonizing Israel by Exploiting the Holocaust
[Excerpt]
Your latest diatribe on Israel, published in Deutsche Welle (“Opinion: Reassessing the approach to Israel”), continues the deceitful assault on the legitimacy of Jewish self-determination. Following your practice for over twenty years, you deploy your father’s experience as a Jew in Nazi Germany (until 1938) as a shield against scrutiny and criticism. Artificially invoking the language of morality, universal human rights and international law, you continue to pervert these fundamental principles.
As a Jew and an Israeli, whose parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins also “experienced” the inhumanity of the Nazis (unlike your father, many did not survive), I find your exploitation of the Holocaust to be regrettable and worse. The use of Deutsche Welle, the state-owned German media platform funded by the federal tax budget, is particularly repugnant.
Under your leadership, Human Rights Watch (HRW) was at the forefront of the campaigns to weaken, isolate, and ultimately dismantle Israel as a Jewish state. The objects of your rage are not policies in the territories under Israeli jurisdiction since the 1967 war (the “occupation”); nor do you demonstrate any concern for Palestinians, whose leaders are corrupt dictators and terror leaders. Instead, under the label of human rights, your goal is to erase my country – where some 8 million Jews have made homes and chart our own destinies, like the citizens of 190 other independent countries.
