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YAHWEH!

Why The Holocaust? Pt. 5

 

 

But if you turn away, and forsake my statutes and my commandments which I have set before you, and shall go and serve other elohim, and worship them; then will I pluck them up by the roots out of my land which I have given them; and this house, which I have hallowed for my name, will I cast out of my sight, and I will make it a proverb and a byword among all peoples.  And this house, which is so high, every one that pass  by it shall be astonished, and shall say, Why has Yahweh done this to this land, and to this house? And they shall answer, Because they forsook Yahweh, the Elohim of their fathers, who brought them forth out of the land of Egypt, and laid hold on other elohim, and worshipped them, and served them: therefore has he brought all this evil upon them. 2 Chronicles 7:19-ff

 

During this series, the cause for judgment has been put forth.  The arguments showing the Holocaust was judgment from on high, you have read in parts 1-4.  The arguments against the Holocaust being judgment from Yahweh, are specious at best. Whenever Israel sinned in the history of this world, a price was exacted by Father Yahweh.  Unless they repented, judgment fell.  The history of Israel is replete with examples of blessings for Torah observance and curses for failure to obey in totality.  Did I just choose individuals to quote from that agreed with my point of view during this series? No!  I selected these people because they agreed with the Holy Word of Abba Yahweh. They understood His pronouncements/warnings for transgressing Torah Law.  Almighty Yahweh is extremely serious concerning His word.  These scholars recognized His judgments for Torah violations.  

 

If they shall confess their iniquity, and the iniquity of their fathers, with their trespass which they trespassed against me, and that also they have walked contrary to me; And that I also have walked contrary to them, and have brought them into the land of their enemies; if then their uncircumcised hearts be humbled, and they then accept of the punishment of their iniquity: Then will I remember my covenant with Jacob, and also my covenant with Isaac, and also my covenant with Abraham will I remember; and I will remember the land. Leviticus 26:40-45

 

The history of Israel presents this fact:  Israel and Judah have failed to confess their iniquity.  They have failed to even acknowledge they have sinned.  They have rejected any punishment for their iniquity.  Israel, Judah in general want to place the blame squarely upon the Eternal One, the Creator-Yahweh!  How can that be? 

 

We find an example of blame shifting in Genesis 3.  The serpent caused Eve to doubt.  Eve is deceived through the craftiness of the serpent.  Eve violated Yahweh's commandment concerning the tree, and partakes of the forbidden fruit.  She finds it to be good and then offers it to her husband Adam.  Adam eats, their eyes are opened...

 

Yahweh finds out.  He questions them concerning their violation.  The blame shifting begins.  The woman you gave me...  The serpent beguiled/tricked me... Does either one say I have sinned?  They shift the blame elsewhere...

 

So it is with the Holocaust.  The blame was shifted on everything and everyone, or so it seems.   What was the actual cause?  SIN!  Was everyone involved with the Holocaust evil?  No, I don't believe that!  There are stories of miraculous deliverances during this dark time.  Many people miraculously escaped the death sentence and were delivered.  Many escaped to live another day.  Was this coincidence?  No!  Almighty Yahweh knew exactly what he was doing.  Consider the life of Job!  Satan could only do certain things to Job.  Satan was allowed by Yahweh to go only so far.  There was a limit to the extent Satan could try Job.

 

Writers of the Holocaust era have a predilection towards a tendentious point of view; even when presented with irrefutable evidence as to cause. Anything contrary to their writings concerning the events prior to Shoah, will be condemned or negated. I include some valid irrefutable evidence now!  The following quotes will be taken from the book, Is The Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocides. Edited by Alan Rosenbaum.

 

 In the Foreword

 by Israel W. Chaney:

 

"This book is so daring, I now add, that in my opinion it includes several chap-
ters and substantial sections of chapters that should never have been accepted for
publication by a responsible editor save for his intention to show the difficult truth
of the jingoistic/ideological wars (above and beyond a healthy diversity of ideas and
emphases) that are going on in Holocaust and genocide studies.
For, along with the
devotion and scholarly skills of an increasing number of researchers unearthing
more knowledge of the Holocaust and other genocides, there is a disquieting pat-
tern of claims of the “incomparable uniqueness” of the Holocaust and a good deal
of political power used in many places in academia, museums, and communities
to back up these claims by pushing down and out nonadherents."


What is he saying here?  Anyone whose conclusions as to cause and events concerning the Holocaust, that stand out against, or is in opposition to their own predisposed view, will be rejected.  You are  nonadherents to the concord of acceptable views.  I will give you an example of what I'm saying.


 

 The following quote can be found in this same book.  In the chapter entitled The Politics of Genocide Scholarship,  we find;

 

"Before turning to the specific arguments of the Jewish uniqueness proponents, however, something must be said about the ad hominem impugning of motives that almost inevitably is encountered by those who choose to dispute the so-called uniqueness assertion. Indeed, anyone who even raises questions about the alleged uniqueness of the Jewish experience in the Holocaust is, by virtue of that fact alone, immediately in danger of being labeled an anti-semite. For example, when President Jimmy Carter once gave a speech commemorating the victims of the Holocaust he mentioned the fact that others besides Jews had died. Because Carter did not limit his commemorative statement to the deaths of Jews, Yehuda Bauer, a professor of Jewish history at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, accused him of attempting to “de-Judaize” the Holocaust, an action, Bauer wrote, that was nothing less than “an unconscious reflection of anti-semitic attitudes.” To Bauer, the simple acknowledgment of the suffering of others constituted Jew-hating.


But on this matter, Deborah Lipstadt, professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University and the author of what probably is the most popular book on this topic, holds a place of particular distinction. Lipstadt regards as her enemy anyone who expresses doubt about the utter singularity in all of human history of Jewish suffering at the hands of the Nazis, an enemy situated intellectually and ideologically at one place or another along a posited anti-semitic continuum stretching from those she calls Holocaust “deniers” to those she labels Holocaust “relativists.” In Professor Lipstadt’s considered opinion, a “denier” is someone who flatly rejects the very historical existence of the Holocaust, whereas a “relativist” is someone who recognizes that the mass killing of Jews in Hitler’s Germany occurred and was a hideous act of genocide yet who also considers the Holocaust to be, in her words, one among “an array of other conflagrations in which innocents were massacred.”


In other words, you are to be considered in the same general category—as an anti-semite, as a creator of “immoral equivalencies’ as someone trying “to help the Germans embrace their past”—if you are either a neo-Nazi or a comparative historian. For, to Lipstadt, even someone who has no doubt regarding the ghastly horrors of Jewish suffering and death under Hitler—but who has the temerity to dissent from her insistence regarding the unquestionable uniqueness of the Jewish experience—is, in her phrase, merely a not yet denier. And “not yet” denial, she writes, is “the equivalent of David Duke without his robes.” In short, if you disagree with Deborah Lipstadt that the Jewish suffering in the Holocaust was unique, you are, by definition—and like David Duke—a crypto-Nazi.’ Needless to say, such intellectual thuggery usually has its intended chilling effect on further discussion."
 

Now concerning the uniqueness aspect.  In part 2 of this series I listed the worst genocides of the 20th Century.  Was the Holocaust unique and different than other genocides?  Read the following and then decide. 

 

"In fact, the entire process of seeking grounds for Jewish victim uniqueness is one of smoke and mirrors. Uniqueness advocates begin by defining genocide (or the Holocaust or the Shoah) in terms of what they already believe to be experiences undergone only by Jews. After much laborious research it is then “discovered”—mirabile dictu—that the Jewish experience was unique. If, however, critics point out after a time that those experiences were not in fact unique, other allegedly unique experiences are invented and proclaimed. If not numbers killed, then how about percentage of population destroyed? If not efficiency or method of killing employed, how about perpetrator intentionality? Ultimately, as we have seen, such insistent efforts extend to the point of frivolousness, as one after another supposedly significant criterion is found to have been either nonexistent or shared by others.


Of course, those other groups could, if they so chose, do precisely the same thing. It might well and logically be asserted by American Indians, for instance, that for the word “genocide” to be properly applicable in describing mass destruction in which there were at least some survivors, a minimum of, say, 90 percent of the victim group would have to be wiped out. Is this an arbitrary criterion? Perhaps, although it could certainly be argued that short of total extermination (the only “pure” definition of genocide) 90 percent is a reasonable and round figure that identifies real genocide and prohibits the indiscriminate use of the word in comparatively “insignificant” cases of mass killing—say, the roughly 65 percent mortality rate suffered by European Jews during the Holocaust.
Were it pointed out that this figure is self-serving, since by its standard only American Indians and some other indigenous peoples would be characterized as victims of genocide, it would be easy to demonstrate that the 90 percent criterion is no more self-serving—and no more arbitrary—than those criteria put forward over the years (and time after time found wanting) by advocates of Jewish uniqueness. But in fact both cases are examples of cultural egotism driving scholarship before it. As Stephen Jay Gould has described its equivalent in the work of would-be scholars on another topic:


“They began with conclusions, peered through their facts, and came back in a circle to the same conclusions: a matter of “advocacy masquerading as objectivity.” The fact that Gould was writing of nineteenth-century scientists bent on proving the superiority of their race over others just makes the citation more apt, as we shall see momentarily.


And, finally, as for restricting use of the word “holocaust” to references having to do with the experience of Jews under the Nazis, that copyright was filed at least three centuries too late. Although “The Holocaust:’ in what has become conventional usage, clearly applies exclusively to the genocide that was perpetrated by the Nazis against their various victims, “holocaust” in more general parlance, as a term to describe mass destruction or slaughter, belongs to anyone who cares to use it. It is a very old word, after all, and as the Oxford English Dictionary points out, apart from previous uses that may have been applied to violent assaults on specific peoples, it was used in this way by Milton in the seventeenth century as well as by Ireland’s Bishop George Berkeley in 1732—to describe the Druids’ brutal treatment of free-thinkers.


III
And yet, the Jewish experience in the Holocaust was unique. In certain ways. Just as the Armenian genocide was. Just as the genocide against the Gypsies was. Just as the many genocides against the native peoples of the New World were. And just as, more recently, the genocides in Cambodia, East Tinior, Bosnia, Rwanda, and elsewhere have been—despite the fact that Steven Katz, ever obsessed with his Jewish uniqueness idee fixe, crassly has dismissed the killing in Bosnia as a mere “population transfer supported by violence” and has described the massive slaughter of up to a million people in Rwanda as “not genocidal” but simply a struggle for “tribal domination.”


Some of these horrendous purges killed more people than others. Some killed higher percentages of people than others. Some were carried out with highly advanced death technology harnessed to coldly bureaucratic planning. Others resulted from crude weapons of war, purposeful mass starvation, enslavement, and forced labor. Some were proudly announced by their perpetrators. The intentions of other mass killers were never publicly made known or have been lost to history. There are, of course, numerous other ways in which individual genocides differed, and on this or that specific point many of them no doubt have been “unique.” For no two events, even though they commonly may be acknowledged to fall within a single large classification, are ever precisely alike." Ibid pgs. 272-73
 


 

I submit to you dear reader, that every holocaust, genocide, has it's own uniqueness attached.  To claim that only the Jewish people are worthy of such a claim of title is ludicrous.  The word holocaust has origins prior to WW 2.  Also, the Jewish people did not suffer genocide per se.  There were survivors of this judgment.  

 


 

 

Pirkei Avos (ch. 5) tells us to "Go through and through the Torah because everything is in it, and through it you shall see."

 

Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28 contain the blessings and the curses for obedience and disobedience.  When once entered, the covenant relationship between Abba Yahweh and mankind cannot be broken.  To even claim yourself to be Jews/Jewish declares this covenant relationship. 

 

There are many passages declaring judgments on apostate Israel in the Sacred Word of Yahweh.  One such passage is Psalm 102.  This Psalm is divided into parts.  The first part describes affliction. Verses 1-12 can be used to describe what happened to the Jewish people during WW 2.

 

 Hear my prayer, O Yahweh, And let my cry come to you.


 Hide not your face from me in the day of my distress: Incline your ear to me; In the day when I call answer me speedily.

(Isaiah 59:1-3)


 For my days consume away like smoke, And my bones are burned as a firebrand.

(This describes the crematoriums)


 My heart is smitten like grass, and withered; For I forget to eat my bread.

(Sorrow due to being rejected, overwhelmed)


 By reason of the voice of my groaning My bones cleave to my flesh.

(Starvation, pain)


 I am like a pelican of the wilderness; I am become as an owl of the waste places.

(Deserted, cut-off, alone)


 I watch, and am become like a sparrow; That is alone upon the house-top.

(Rejected by Yahweh and other Nations)


 Mine enemies reproach me all the day; They that are mad against me do curse by me.

(Surrounded by the hate filled Nazis)

 
 For I have eaten ashes like bread, And mingled my drink with weeping,
 Because of your indignation and your wrath: For you hast taken me up, and cast me away.

(The crematoriums spewed out ashes of humans that were burned into the air.  They breathed in these ashes.  Some were even forced to eat the burned remains of those burned and turned into ash.)

My days are like a shadow that declines; And I am withered like grass.

(Severe starvation, length of days removed.)

 

The rest of the Psalm describes in detail the coming events as does the whole of Abba's Word.  Everything is contained within the Bible.  The whole story of the human race has been defined for us by a loving Father.


 

 

Yours in Messiah Yahshua,  Hawke

 

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