Glorifying Hitler will not help Gaza!

Are we so inhumane that we cannot feel the pain of Hitler’s victims? That we must elevate a butcher to a martyr?

The death toll of the latest Israeli military operation in Palestinian Gaza has soared to 121 Palestinians. These Palestinians aren’t the ‘terrorists’ Israel is aiming to target; one of Israel’s airstrikes hit an NGO working for handicapped Palestinians, killing three handicapped patients and a nurse.

While, of course, Israel will justify this latest crime by claiming it only ‘retaliates’ for the 680 rockets it says have been fired from Gaza. In fact, in a new level of incredibly twisted politics, the British prime minister, David Cameron, and US president, Barack Obama, have made statements of irrevocable support of the Israeli operation, with Venezuela and Scotland being the only two countries in the West to have publicly condemned Israel’s actions.

International organisations as prominent as the Arab League and the United Nations have been completely ignored in their pleas to stop the violence by Israel and the West, although if the same UN were to publish a report on human rights abuses in Iran the United States would suddenly start pushing the Islamic republic to comply with this realistically weak organisation’s demands.

Of course, all these countries forget that the crisis in Gaza has made emotional waves across Muslim communities globally, and the Muslim ‘retaliation’ would not only be wider and larger than the mere explosive rockets being fired into border Israeli towns, but also more dangerous for all of us.

In a heroic display of unity, multiple Muslim countries that have access to Gaza have pledged assistance in various ways. Malaysia is sending 40 doctors as much-needed medical aid for the 920 injured, the United Arab Emirates has pledged 100 million Dirhams for Gaza and Egypt is currently assisting desperate Palestinians to escape into Egyptian territory.

Meanwhile on Facebook, many Pakistanis are busy glorifying Hitler, the only European it appears Pakistan is satisfied with. Not because Hitler somehow created the ideal Islamic caliphate, strangely enough. It’s because Hitler killed Jews, “and would have killed them all” if he had won the Second World War.

Of course, we can all conveniently forget that Hitler’s Holocaust was the primary reason Jews were uprooted from Europe and were forced to find solace in a homeland they had never been in for hundreds of years. We can also conveniently forget that Hitler killed 11 million human beings, of which six million were Jews. His Nazi ideology didn’t rise to safeguard the interests of Islam or Palestinians in the 1940s, as some of us want to believe; his ideology wanted Aryans to be the only surviving race in the world and establish racial purity.

That meant killing everyone who wasn’t an Aryan – a perfect Aryan. Russians, Chinese and African workers, the disabled and the mentally challenged, Turks and Mongols, homosexuals and communists were all among those gassed in Nazi concentration camps. While yes, we South Asians and our Persian brethren were lucky enough to be classified as ‘Aryans’, our Arab and Malay community, the largest Muslim racial group, were part of Hitler’s ‘vermin’.

Even a large part of modern Pakistan would have been exterminated, as only ethnic Tajiks were given the Aryan blessing by the Nazis while the rest of the northern people, including the Pakhtuns, would’ve been dead today.

All of us cringe at the devastating list of the dead in Gaza with their names and ages revealed by Al Jazeera. Are we so inhumane that we cannot feel the same for Hitler’s victims? That we must elevate a butcher to a martyr? What about the two Bosnian women who helped Jews escape Europe from Hitler’s clutches because of their blood? What about the Turkish diplomat in Rhodes who tried to save 5000 non-Aryans from extinction, only to see his pregnant wife, Mihrinissa, die in Nazi retaliation?

It is a shame that while the rest of the Muslim world compares Israel’s actions against Palestinians to Hitler’s against the Jews, all we, as citizens of the first model Islamic state, seem to be doing is glorifying the very same actions in an even worse depth and shaming the very conscience of Islam in front of the world.

It is a shame that we are praising the man who today inspires neo-Nazi attacks against Muslims across Europe. If it is truly Hitler’s actions that are to be praised in the Pakistani perspective of things, then we should wear our media label of being international terrorists with pride.

And remember my fellow countrymen – liking Nazi statuses isn’t going to ease the suffering of Palestine. As much as we fume about the rich Gulf Arabs and too liberal Malaysia and Turkey, don’t forget that they’ve done more for Gaza than your profile picture ever will.