They have, in fact, been slaves for centuries. What were they when Moses lead them out of Egypt? Somehow I doubt Pharaoh was paying them $5.15 an hour.

Tyranny is tyranny, regardless of its justification. Unlike the French, who simply returned to a land that had been taken from them within living memory (I should also add that the French today don't make religious homogeneity a prerequisite for citizenship,) the Zionists actually attempted to assert a claim over a land they hadn't had sovereignty over for well over a thousand years! It *is* tyranny to force people to violate their own religious practices (Ariel Sharon's crap with the Dome of the Rock), to impose your religious code on a population against its will (stores being criminalized for remaining open on the Sabbath), to demolish other people's land for the sake of a religiously justified manifest destiny and it is tyranny to suppress legitimate freedom of speech. (Imprisoning camera men for filming the Israeli police's abuses of power.) I've had Israeli friends hospitalized after shock grenades, fired from police cannons, exploded at their feet. Their only crime was peaceful demonstration. This is not comparable to anything the french did after WWII, and I'm having quite a visceral reaction to that comparison.

Moreover, it's really hard to talk about cataclysmic relativity when you've actually been *in* the occupied territories and had a street boy chasing you for 20 minutes begging not for money but for a bottle of water. (Yes, this did actually happen to me. Look: sincerity!)

The Holocaust does not eclipse everything. Worse things have happened like:

Stalin's Purges (between 20 and 50 million dead. Giving Old Joe the benefit of the doubt, that's *at least* well over three times the number of jews killed in the holocaust, and more than twice the number of holocaust victims altogether.)

The plague

The conquistadors. (Whole civilizations, languages and peoples destroyed.)

Many many others.

I'm an atheist, the son of a Russian emigree to the US and a black man from Baltimore. Or maybe I'm a wild Zulu. Anyway, I'm not a Jew.

Many of the Ashkenazim in Israel are the children and grandchildren of holocaust survivors or at least Jews who were turned into a disenfranchised underclass in their home countries. The irony is that they are doing the same thing to the Arabs whose land they now inhabit. whence: "the son of the slave is a tyrant." For example, Tel Aviv university is built on the ruins of a demolished village. The tactics used in the british mandate by such zionist groups as Lehi and Irgun (which, incidentally, was the first organization ever to systematically employ car-bombs) are chillingly remeniscent of the terror tactics of the early days of German anti-semitism.

What does sincerity have to do with the merits/demerits of poetry?

Oh, and I'm male.

I do need to spell it out for you, don't I: Nazi Germany= suffered from roughly the same motivations driving Israel's policy of apartheid.

Decades away in a desert
Beneath the Davidian sun
Where the Jew who has built them a Ghetto
Is glad to hold a gun

And the settler has the harvest
Hauled in by Arab men
And reads “If I forget thee
O Jerusalem...”


Please, for god's sake, READ THE THING.

And another thing, my personal experience and/or lack thereof have *nothing* to do with what is and isn't appropriate for me to write about, as if art had anything to do with sincerity. (For the record, I'm 20, so I'm obviously not a Holocaust survivor.) You needn't assume that I'm trying for outright confessionalism.

You don't like the subject and/or the comparisons made. Fine. That has little to do with the actual artistry of the poem.

And, by the way, Poland isn't in Germany.

Please tell me you don't actually think this is a Holocaust poem. If you do, then read it again, by which I mean actually pass your eyes over each stanza.