I. The year was 1942. The man who was instrumental in the Nazi genocide was Reinhardt Heydrich. The evil Heydrich was assassinated, one of the few top level Nazis to be eliminated in this manner.

The Nazis were determined to avenge this assassination, so an innocent Czechoslovakian town was destroyed. Every man in Lidice, 192, was brutally murdered. All of the women in the town were sent to the Ravensbruck concentration camp.

82 innocent children of all ages were killed by gas, with only 16 kids ultimately surviving. The Nazi jackboots used tanks and heavy weapons to destroy all the buildings; they changed the flow of the river, and altered the surrounding countryside so the landscape was unrecognizable.

Lidice became a symbol of Nazi barbarism. Much was written about it and its Jewish victims. A lengthy poem in the popular magazine Saturday Evening Post was published called: "The Murder of Lidice."

I know this because I read the poem to my high school class.

II. The year was 2001. A far right-wing Israeli minister, Rehavem Zeevi, was successfully assassinated by vengeful Palestinian freedom fighters on October 17th.

Having prepared for 6 months, using all types of provocation against the Palestinians, the Neo-Nazi Israeli Defense Force launched a full-scale attack on the 14,000 Palestinians living in the Jenin Refugee Camp on April 3, 2001 - the most massive offensive by the IDF Neo-Nazis since that immediate conflict began September of 2000.

There were days on end of sustained Neo-Nazi IDF (American supplied) helicopter missiles and tank cannon fire. Jenin residents fled from house to house trying to evade the deadly barrage; others could not escape because of the tanks covering the streets, and were ruthlessly killed.

Helicopters launched missiles indiscriminately on April 6, killing civilians, among which were a woman and a 4 year old child.

These were not military targets, but targets of Israeli terrorist opportunity.

Palestinian homes were bulldozed flat. In the Hawashin District the destruction was brutal beyond normal military action, with all buildings and dwellings flattened. In the camp itself, 140 multi-family residences were completely demolished, with another 200 complexes made unsafe, or uninhabitable.

Critical utilities for Palestinian families - water, electric power, sewage facilities - the basic necessities for civilized life were destroyed. These infamous actions by Ariel Sharon's Neo-Nazi IDF have been characterized by many as being indefensible war crimes.

The Israeli thugs killed without compunction; unarmed men, women, children, even an elderly Palestinian in a wheel chair.

The cowardly thugs used Palestinians as human shields, both men and women in the line of fire, resting their rifles on the shoulders of the hapless people so that they would be protected by Palestinian bodies, while able to shoot at other Palestinians.

And even though the media, the Red Cross, other humanitarian agencies, were deliberately kept from reporting on the scene by the Israelis, there was still enough data gathered to estimate a Palestinian death toll of over 300 - a figure denied by Israel, but held as being too low by the Jenin residents. In fact, reports have come in that stated the Israelis had removed hundreds of bodies for secret burial in mass graves.

So, this is what it comes to: In 1942 it was the arrogant and merciless Nazi thugs and jackboots who murdered Lidice and its people; now, some 59 years later, it was the arrogant and merciless Neo-Nazi Israeli Defense Force thugs and jackboots who murdered Jenin and its people.

When will those who appear to justify these Israeli crimes, George Bush, Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, Condaleeza Rice, and others in the American administration, and in congress, wake up to the fact that this is a genocide taking place, and that those in the US, and the world, who seemingly condone Butcher Sharon's slaughter of Palestinians are just as guilty as those committing the Murder of Jenin.