Below is speech delivered by Gaza Defense Committee activist Ophelia Haragli, at a March 2 protest in Sydney against former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman, who was on a speaking tour of Australia. Gillerman told the Sydney Morning Herald on February 16 that "Israeli troops should get a medal" for their massacre of 1300 civilians in Gaza earlier this year. The protest was organised by the Gaza Defence Committee http://www.gazadefencecommittee.org
I was recently in Melbourne for the university orientation weeks to show a DVD and to promote awareness and justice campaigns for Gaza on campuses.
I was disgustingly and repeatedly told by Zionists there that they would continue to support the killing of babies as long as Israel was able to achieve its target.
I was also verbally attacked by Zionists who told me that I could call it a genocide or a blood bath, but that drawing any parallels between Gaza and Germany had to stop immediately!
In opposition to these Zionists, other Jews passionately told me that the visualisation of the atrocities in Gaza brought to life the heinous atrocities verbalised by their grandparents who had survived the holocaust.
Today, Gillerman not only stands here to affirm his support for Israel's terror attacks on Palestinian civilians. This subhuman with no conscience has gone even further by praising and commending these Israeli Zionist war-mongers for this great crime against humanity — this 21st century holocaust.
Doesn't the siege on Gaza — likened to an open-air concentration camp in one of the most densely populated places in the world — come under the banner of mass destruction and loss of life?
Isn't the Zionist Israeli ethnic cleansing regime, which mass murdered Palestinians, state-sponsored?
Isn't the use of white phosphorus raining fire down like rasping tendrils on the Palestinians in Gaza considered a war crime.
Isn't the illegal use of depleted uranium, forbidden arms and white phosphorus along with air-strikes, tanks and on-the-ground assassinations of civilian Palestinians considered an unprecedented phenomenon of human destruction?
Yes. Yes. And Yes.
So on what grounds does Gillerman believe the Israeli Defense Force should be given a medal?
In 1943, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto violently resisted the Nazis and at Treblinka the Jewish inmates staged a revolt after seven brutal years of torture, persecution and death.
The Palestinian people are fighting not seven years but 61 years of the massacring of their people with that same will not to die but to protect themselves.
If we absurdly call the helpless and desperate civilian Palestinian victims in Gaza, people resisting death in an open-air concentration camp, "terrorists" then we absurdly call the Jews of Warsaw and Treblinka "terrorists" too for resisting the same fate of death, disease and destruction more than 60 years ago.
In the year 2009, more than 60 years after the holocaust, we are still mortified by Hitler's Nazi regime and its abhorrent results.
Yet our consciences seem to have fallen asleep and we know this because the Zionist Israelis are today able to ethnically cleanse Palestinians, commit genocide, commit war crimes and create a holocaust in Gaza while world leaders stand by and ignore these heinous crimes and breaches of international conventions.
In a speech in August 1939 at his Obersaltzberg Headquarters, Hitler said his aim was to "kill without pity or mercy all men, women and children of Polish descent or language. Only in this way can we obtain the living space we need … "
Haven't Zionist Israeli's been killing without mercy the men, women and children of Palestinian descent? Isn't their aim to obtain the living space they need by occupying more and more of Palestine, through state-sponsored mass murder as time goes on?
There are undeniable similarities between the Zionist Israeli policy and Hitler's Nazi policy.
The difference is the perverse technique of annihilation and that the worldwide policy of anti-terrorism has provided a blanket for Zionist Israel to persecute our Palestinian brothers and sisters as Hitler had previously persecuted our Jewish brothers and sisters.
We can not ever justify, support or give credit to the Zionists that committed these atrocities against mankind in Gaza in the same way that we cannot ever justify, support or give credit to the Nazis who committed atrocities against mankind in Germany.
What Gillerman and Zionists are saying is not only perverse, vicious and unconscionable; it is as perverse, vicious and unconscionable as allowing someone to say that the Nazis deserved a medal for the holocaust against the Jews.