Did the Holocaust really happen? This toxic question has been raised again of late, this time by an English bishop. Once ex-communicated, then-in communicated, now asked to ‘distance himself from his past views’, he has admitted that as many as 300,000 Jews were killed, but not the accepted figure – based on existing records – of 6 million. If required, also attesting to the realities of that era’s slaughter is the fact that 27 million Soviet citizens –mostly Russian and Ukrainian – were also killed by the Nazis.

The Holocaust of the Jews was one part of a monstrous whole. It happened, and there are survivors –now aging- left to tell the tale. Recently in my local church I sat next to a man who, as a young child in a small village in Greece saw a teenage boy shot and killed in front of a neighbor’s house by a German soldier. The teenager’s crime was concealing bread.

The metastasizing holocausts of the bloody 20^th century were not limited to the one usually spelled with a capital ‘H’. They crept from Africa to Asia and finally to Europe, beginning about the time of World War One. It was then that the Turks (and Kurds) killed 1.5 million Armenians to deprive them of their land and possessions, but the real ‘granddaddy’ of all holocausts came earlier. That towering evil was inflicted upon the peoples of the Congo –then called the Belgian Congo in those imperialist times- by King Leopold III of Belgium (1835-1909) to steal the natural wealth of a brutalized place.

The object of his (and his nation’s) desires were that most necessary and lucrative commodity –rubber. Sound familiar? It should. More recently rubber was one of the lures for us in Vietnam, something even President Eisenhower admitted. Let’s be honest, too –it’s always greed that stalks, ideology only mocks. The historically accurate, well documented figures on the Congo holocaust stand at 10 million. The king needed money –what king doesn’t- and the slaughter was profitable enough for him to build a golf course and a race track all for himself, to say nothing of that absolutely royal perk –a triumphal arch! Bullets win out over spears each and every time.

The last century ended with Hutus killing Tutsis in Rwanda from 1990 to 1993 –about 500,000 of them- while the world, including the United States, looked the other way. But holocausts –the killing of the defenseless by the powerful on a wholesale basis- didn’t end with the 20^th century. Though numerical debate as to what exactly constitutes a ‘holocaust’ bears merit, the deaths of 1,400 Palestinians by the Israelis during the December-January Israel-Gaza conflict can arguably draw consideration into this noxious category. In such matters there will of course always be excuses put forward–in this most recent case that the firing of those pesky, inaccurate rockets at illegal settlements planted on stolen, fertile Palestinian land in open contempt of all peace treaties signed was justified.

The reality this time around is grounded in official UN figures: since 2004 Palestinian rockets have killed a grand total of ten Israelis. All life is to be protected, of course, but the Israeli’s actions of January 2009 did seem to be just a bit out of proportion to the ills being addressed. No need for Talmudic scholars to debate the whys and wherefores of this many-decades-long, peripatetic, potential-to-become-a-genuine holocaust! It has yielded an enormous bounty of other people’s land.

But wouldn’t it really be fair for Washington –not Tel Aviv- to tax those expropriated lands? After all, we’re the ones who provide those free weapons Israel uses to grab them, and we could sure use the money right now!