• 5.1-6.0 million Jews, including 3.0-3.5 million Polish Jews[9]
  
• 1.8 -1.9 million Gentile Poles (includes all those killed in executions or those that died in prisons, labor, and concentration camps, as well as civilians killed in the 1939 invasion and the 1944 Warsaw Uprising)[10]
  
• 200,000-800,000 Roma & Sinti
  
• 200,000-300,000 people with disabilities
  
• 10,000-25,000 homosexual men
  
• 2,000 Jehovah's Witnesses

Most of the world cheered in 1992 to 'celebrate' the beginning of the demise of Europe's rape of the Americas and systematic genocide of its people.

We had to watch 'specials' on TV.

Can you imagine that with the holocaust?

The irony is - Columbus was not the first - the Vikings were or maybe even the Chinese.

So let's segue into another subject. And see if I get labelled again.

From Daily Kos.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/1/19/114321/175#16

Hard to believe, but the Jerusalem Post is reporting that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) are ready to attack Iran's nuclear facilities:

    IAF [i.e., Israeli Air Force] pilots have completed their mission training and fighter jets have been prepared for an Israeli attack on Iran, the British Sunday Times reported.

More after the fold . . .

    * Steven D's diary :: ::
*

    The article reported that "the elite 69 strategic F-15 I squadron" had been equipped with weapons that will be tested in combat for the first time, and that two missile submarines were on standby: one in the Persian Gulf and the second in Haifa Bay.

    The Times also said that special IDF forces would be helicoptered into Iran to take out targets that could not be destroyed in an air strike. [...]

    Col. [res] Ze'ev Raz, the former IAF pilot who led the Osirak mission, was quoted by the Times as saying, "What we now have is a lot of targets, which makes the operation much more difficult."

    Raz believes an aerial assault on Iran's nuclear facilities is possible. There are many things that the IAF has done over the past few years that the public is not aware of, and it has made many important advances in mid-air refueling. Israel can strike the Iranian nuclear program, Raz said on Israel's Channel 1 TV's Politika program last week.

Here's the link to the Sunday Times article cited by the Jerusalem Post's story.   Here's what the Sunday Times' report has to say about Israel's readiness to proceed with this attack:

    Before the massive stroke that left him in a coma, Sharon had declared: "Israel will not accept a nuclear weapon equipped Iran." He had quietly ordered the Israeli Defence Forces to be ready to launch airstrikes against nuclear sites in the Islamic republic if necessary.

    "The whole issue is now with the Americans," said an Israeli defence source. "Once we get the green light, we're ready." [...]

    Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the right-wing Likud party, has backed the destruction of Iranian nuclear facilities, although Olmert's Kadima party looks the more likely election winner.

    At the Hatzerim air base on the edge of the Negev desert, the elite 69 strategic F-15 I squadron is ready to attack. Months of preparations have been completed and the young pilots have finished training for the long-haul flights that will be necessary to reach Iran and back without refuelling.

The point about denying genocides, imho, is that (though we may be forgetful, and in some cases countries and peoples may be happy to forget), the principal case where there is an outright, organized effort to deny, or reduce, or relativize, a genocide concerns that of the European Jews. I'm referring to the movement known as "revisionism" or more properly "negationism". The overall tendency of negationism is antisemitic in that it promotes the notion of a Jewish plot to publicize, exaggerate, or (for the extremos) downright fabricate the history of the genocide. Secondly, it's a movement which favours the racist extreme right by inducing a state of confusion in people's minds as to the ultra-right's past crimes, thus disculpating the racist/fascist elements today and encouraging them to be more extremist and have the "courage" of their "convictions".

Europeans may be sensitive to this because we see the emergence of extreme-right parties and groups, of skinheads and neo-Nazis, things we thought we would never see again. And to be sensitive to how the genocide of the Jews is discussed does not imply insensitivity to other genocides and massacres, including those perpetrated by the Nazis on other groups than the Jews.

On the Congo, though the topic was not specifically genocide, here's a comment I made in a diary by Richard Drayton some time back.