Eli Valley’s Cartoon Highlights How Today’s Christian Fascists, neo-Nazis and Zionists have no sense of irony
The insult ‘kapo’ was first popularisedby Trump’s Ambassador to Israel, David Friedman. In fact he used it, not against Jewish anti-Zionists but against the liberal American Zionist group, J-Street.
Yesterday I was sent a brilliant cartoon from Jewish Currents, a paper of the American Jewish left in which he satirises those who shout ‘kapo’ whilst separating children from their parents in Trump’s concentration camps on the border. Referring to those Jews who serve Trump faithfully, like arch-Zionist Sheldon Adelson and Stephen Miller, he observed that “kapo” doesn’t begin to plumb the depths of their betrayal.’
Zionists, like most racists, don’t do irony because if they did they would suffer the self-destruction of their own identity as they began to appreciate that if anyone approximates to collaborators, which is the essence of the charge, it is they.
I don’t mean by that just the trade agreement between Nazi Germany and the Zionist movement in 1933, Ha'avara, which broke the International Jewish Boycott of Nazi Germany.
Nor do I mean the betrayal of half a million Hungarian Jews in 1944 by the representative of Hungarian Zionism Rudolph Kasztner, whereby the Auschwitz Protocols, which revealed the existence and purpose of Auschwitz, were deliberately suppressed in order to preserve an agreement between the Zionist leaders and Eichmann.
After all Zionist collaboration with anti-Semitism was explained by the founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl when, at the height of the Dreyfus Affair he confided to his Diaries that:
In Paris... I achieved a freer attitude towards anti-Semitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon. Above all, I recognise the emptiness and futility of trying to 'combat' anti-Semitism.
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| The memorial to the murdered Jews of Pittsburgh |
Zionism ‘pardoned’ anti-Semitism because it agreed that Jews don’t belong in non-Jewish society. Zionism believes that Jews, all Jews, should emigrate to Israel, their ‘real home’. In the wake of the Pittsburgh massacre, Avi Gabbay, leader of the Israeli Labour Party toldthe Jews of America that their place was in Israel, which is what their murderer Robert Burstow also believed.
Back in 1933, as Jews prepared to campaign against the newly installed Nazi government Berl Katznelson, Ben Gurion’s deputy, founder of Mapai and editor of Davar, saw the rise of Hitler as “an opportunity to build and flourish like none we have ever had or ever will have”. [Zionism and Nazi Germany, Francis Nicosia, p.91]
Zionism opposed ‘refugeeism’ the saving of Jews for its own sake. Their ‘logic’ was that there was no point in Jews going to any country other than Palestine because that would merely stimulate fresh anti-Semitism. Hence why Ben Gurion and the Jewish Agency opposed the Kindertransport which saved 10,000 Jewish children in the wake of Kristalnacht: Ben Gurion told Mapai that
If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the People of Israel. [Shabtai Teveth, the Burning Ground, p.855]
I mentioned irony. What could be more ironic than those who belong to a movement that collaborated with Nazis and anti-Semites calling their opponents collaborators?
The kapos were themselves prisoners who were destined for extermination. They had no control over their situation and their collaboration, if that is what it was, was forced. Who knows what any of us would do in such a situation? The Jewish Agency was under no such compulsion yet it willingly collaborated lobbying the Gestapo not to allow Jewish emigration to countries other than Palestine.
Being called a kapo by Zionists reminds me of Britain First holding a demonstrationoutside Didsbury mosque and chanting ‘racist scum off our streets.’ Today we have the spectacle of racists calling their opponents collaborators with racism. Of course it makes no sense when the racists portray themselves as anti-racists however the National Front and BNP used to try and portray themselves as defending Whites against Black racism.
One of the ironies of the Zionist use of 'kapos' is that it is a frequent occurrence for Zionists to desire that their Jewish opponents had perished in the Holocaust. Aurora Levins Morales, a Black Jewish woman in New York, speaks of 'The Jews who write to tell me that I should have died in a Nazi concentration camp before living to denounce the crimes of Israel.' [On Anti-semitism, JVP, p.107, Haymarket Books, 2017]
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| James Dyer's Christian forefathers 80 years ago would have been opposing the entry of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany |
I mention this because a particularly vile Christian Zionist, James Dyer, who is part of the EDL loving Sussex Friends of Israel, which is attempting to disrupt Brighton PSC stall, accused me of being a kap. My retort was that if I was a kapo be must be a Nazi! I suspect he didn’t understand why.
Dyer is part of the fundamentalist Christian support for Zionism which is based on the ‘End Times’, which is the belief that Christians will be summoned to Heaven by Christ at the Rapture. This occurs before a "Great Tribulation" prophesied in Matthew 24–25; Mark 13 and Luke 21. The Tribulation is described in the book of Revelation.
As part of this scenario those Jews who don’t convert to Christianity will be die at the battle of Armageddon as part of the second coming. The most famous advocate of this is President of Christians United for Israel, John Hagee, who also believesthat Hitler was an agent of God sent to drive the Jews to Israel! This led John McCain when standing against Obama to turn down Hagee’s sponsorship. Hagee was nonetheless one of two Protestant Pastors invitedto preside over the opening of the American embassy in Jerusalem. Who better to have than someone who believes that Hitler did god’s work.
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| The Biblical 'return' of the Jews to Palestine justifies any and all human rights abuses |
Indeed they were more than ironic given the history of Christian anti-Semitism. In Germany itself the German Evangelical Church installed in 1933 the pro-Nazi Bishop Ludwig Muller as Reich Bishop. In Slovakia it was the Catholic priest Father Tiso who presided over the first deportations to Auschwitz.
It is therefore no surprise that today the successors of Muller and Tiso are to be found supporting the Zionists and decrying any notion of Palestinian rights. It is even less of a surprise that they assuage their consciences with the taunt of ‘Kapo’.