Six Million, Seven Million, It Never Happened Anyway...

Marty Peretz in The New Reublic puts forward some interesting thoughts in Six Million, Seven Million, It Never Happened Anyway...

Working with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, a French Catholic priest named Father Patrice Desbois has been excavating grave sites in which masses of as yet uncounted and unidentified Jews who were shot by Nazis and local accomplices across the Ukraine during World War II. Desbois has already identified 800 such random cemeteries, and he estimates that there are possibly 1200 others in the Ukraine alone. This was reported in the Times of London and retold in Sunday's New York Post.

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... Desbois also seems to be animated to do a historical reckoning. The new discoveries, he suggests, means that many more than six million Jews were erased from life during the catastrophe.

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I understand that many oh, so calm and responsible gentiles--and some historically untouchable and unconnected Jews--think that Israel should not listen at all to what the the president of Iran threatens for the six million Jews who happen to live in the Jewish state. But we cannot afford the luxuries of deterrence theory.

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The fact is that World War II was not fought to protect Europe's Jews. Their calvary had begun already in 1933. And, even under F.D.R., no one thought that the bombing of the concentration camps was a fitting strategic purpose. So let me just speak for myself. I trust no one in authority in the West to interrupt what Chief-of-Staff General Mike Mullen envisions as a calamity in the making. The president's words are soothing. But they are not persuasive.