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Sixty years after the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, a new poll released by the University of Bielefeld shows that 62% of Germans are sick of being reminded about the Holocaust.
And an even larger majority say that Israel is “waging a war of extermination” against the Palestinians.
Print | | Digg | Stumble | delicious | Tweet | Technorati | Reddit | Yahoo | GoogleSome 62% of the 3,000 people questioned by researchers from the University of Bielefeld agreed they were “sick of all the harping on about German crimes against the Jews”.
Most said they wished to consign their country’s Nazi past to the history books. Well over half also thought there were too many foreigners living in Germany.
The poll horrified Lord Janner, a spokesman for British survivors of Auschwitz. “It’s appalling,” he said. “It raises fears that the current generation are not ready to pass on the history and lessons learnt from those events to their children.”
Political analysts believe the findings reflect a growing feeling among younger Germans that they have atoned sufficiently for their grandparents’ crimes and now have the right to bury the past. Their attitude has been fuelled in part by books and documentaries showing the destruction caused by Allied second world war bombing raids.
“This trend began with revisionist historians telling Germans they were really the victims of the war rather than its perpetrators,” said Abraham Cooper, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
The poll also highlights anti-Israeli feeling in Germany. More than two-thirds said they believed that Israel was waging “a war of extermination” against the Palestinians.
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If Jews should stop complaining about the Holocaust, I guess that means Palestinians should stop bitchin' about '48, huh? You realize, in the four years of the current intifada, roughly .09% of the Palestinian people (about 7,000 out of 10,000,000) have been killed. In the four years of the Holocaust, 60% of the European Jewish community (6,000,000 out of 10,000,000) were killed. If Israel is waging a war of extermination, it sure ain't doing a good job. Not to mention, the Jews weren't attacking civilians by blowing themselves up on public thoroughfares, nor was their leadership calling for the utter destruction of the German people. Ethnically cleansing the West Bank to make room for Jewish settlements and committing genocide aren't even remotely the same thing, you know. Neither of them are just or approrpiate, for sure. But to mistake one for the other is foolish. Tomorrow, I'm going to the West Bank with Jews and Arabs to plant olive trees in the path of the separation barrier to — at the very least — slow down its construction. Tomorrow, you'll be sitting there blogging about why Jews are evil. Kudos.
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