They will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.Did you spot it? That's right, the word shoah is still in Hebrew. The English equivalent would be disaster or calamity.
The Guardian (and many others) have decided that a better way of translating the word would be holocaust with a capital H, which allows them to run headlines like: Israeli minister warns of Holocaust for Gaza if violence continues.
But there's a difference between 'a shoah' and 'the Shoah', just like there's a difference between 'a white house' and 'the White House'; the Israeli minister was warning Hamas that they are courting disaster, he wasn't threatening them with genocide.
Brett at Harry's Place made the same point a couple of days ago:
[T]his is based on a very unfortunate mistranslation. By way of illustration, one might say that a German advertising campaign using the word "blitz" (which simply means 'lightning') might not go down well in London.Indeed. Though I imagine, in that case, the Guardian's translation from the German would be word perfect. What The Sun would make of it is a different matter.
