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Salient. Official Newspaper of the Victoria University Students' Association. Vol 41 No. 7. April 10 1978

Editorial

page 2

Editorial

Zionism has always been a difficult concept for many people to grasp. Noone has forgotten the holocaust of the Second World War when 6 million Jews were killed by a facist regime bent on complete extermination, and history is full of examples of discrimination against the Jewish people.

A television programme last week brought this opression vividly to light again. Using Nazi documentary footage and other records which the Third Reich meticulously assembled, it graphically portrayed the systematic way in which Hitler attempted to rid first Poland, then Russia and the whole of Europe of Judaism.

But this programme had some serious faults. German Fascism was not just anti-sematism. Behind the latter theory lay the concept of the master race. The Nazis believed that the Aryan race was superior to all others. From this it followed that they had superior rights to all others: superior rights to own property and land, to breed, to exist.

They were the chosen people, God was on their side, and given all this it was the just and natural corollary that they should appropriate the land and the means of living of those that surrounded them. There is nothing in fascism which is necessarily anti-Jew, or anti-black. For people who recognise the wrongs of nazism it is important to understand the conditions which give rise to those wrongs and the theories which support them. Fascism must be recognised wherever it exists. To go no further than identifying it with a particular manifestation (eg. Nazi anti-sematism) is to allow it to appear unchecked in another form. So where does Zionism fit in? Compare the attributes of nazism described above with the way the Zionist state of Israel was established and has expanded. 400,000 Palestinians were driven from their homeland in 1947/1948. They have not been granted a special country.

No people has the right to place itself above another. That they have had to suffer the same does not excuse their actions, but merely indicates that they accept the principle. Salient does not accept that principle. It has consistently opposed the oppression of peoples, and especially where that oppression assumes the form of open fascism, racism or sexism.

Some people criticise the paper for lack of objectivity. What does this mean? In our terms objectivity is gained by an analysis of a given situation taking account of all the factors which materially affect it.

Impartiality, which is what the daily press is sometimes credited with, is supposed to be the presentation of information without analysis. It is an admirable idea but manifestly unrelated to the real world. Everybody has a value system, and that value system will always affect the way one views the world and describes it. One of the fundamental differences between Salient and the daily press is that they deny this while we do not.

It follows from this that we can only be open in our analysis, explaining why we oppose something or why we support it. Getting back to Zionism, Salient has been criticised for presenting "only one side of the story". While this is not true (Ambassador Yaachov Morris himself wrote a long article for us late last year) we do freely acknowledge that we have taken a a consistent stand against Zionism.

Is this democratic? some may ask. If it is our democratic duty to encourage fascism, then the answer is yes. If it is not our democratic function to take a critical stance towards things then the answer could also be yes. But Salient has a different understanding of the term.