In 1988 Auschwitz Survivor, Yehuda Elkana, wrote that it was better to forget the Holocaust than to allow it to be used to strengthen Israel's virulent anti-Arab racism and nationalism
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“In Yad Vashem’s Hall of Names, images of the dead. Young soldiers troop in to share in the binding tragedy of the Jewish people. The state of Israel is now a regional power. For decades, it has occupied Palestinian territories. But some here will always see their nation through the prism of persecution and survival.”
all the guns in the Zionist armoury let fire. By stating the obvious, that Israeli identity is bound up with the Holocaust even whilst it is oppressing the Palestinian people, the Zionist guns began firing. Shh, you mustn’t mention the Holocaust in the same breath as the Palestinians.
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| Danny Cohen, the BBC's former Director of Television whinging about mentioning Palestinians and the Holocaust in the same breath |
Even more absurdly, despite the BBC’s cameras filming Israeli soldiers filing into Yad Vashem, the Zionist Holocaust Propaganda Museum, Danny Cohen, a former Director of BBC Television, said:
“The attempt to link the horrors of the Holocaust to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is deeply offensive and upsetting.
I guess it would probably offend, and possibly upset too, those war criminals who think it is acceptable to seize a 12 year old child from her bed in the early hours of the morning before blindfolding, beating and throwing her into a freezing, bug infested cell without food or water for sexually abusing her. Indeed it would be nice to think that they are offended, although I doubt it.
The Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, which only exists to defame supporters of the Palestinians and anti-Zionists, was the first to splutter its outrage.
“drawing comparisons between Israeli policy and the Nazis” is against what it called ‘the international definition of antisemitism’.
As far as I know there is no such definition. Perhaps they were referring to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance which gives as an illustration of anti-Semitism ‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.’ The CAA omit however the qualifying clause which says that this could be anti-Semitic ‘taking into account the overall context’. Strange that!
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| Professor Yehuda Elkana - author of 'Time to Forget' |
The IHRA itself is a good example of the Zionists’ hypocrisy. This ‘definition’ of anti-Semitism mentions Israel, which is a state not a person, in 7 of its 11 illustrations. Clearly it is the Zionists who use the Holocaust in order to protect Israel!
The Board of Deputies also complained and the far-Right Editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Stephen Pollard, screeched that he could not
‘recall a more foul – sickening, indeed – report by any journalist, either in print or broadcast.’
Pollard is not one to understate his case. However I can think of far more sickening reports such as the BBC interview with Benjamin Jones of the neo-Nazi Generation Identitywhen reporting on the murder of 50 Muslims in New Zealand last year. However racism from the neo-Nazi Right does not concern Pollard. His only worry is with ‘left anti-Semitism’.
The pretence that the Holocaust has nothing to do with Israeli Jewish identity and its treatment of the Palestinians is the purest hypocrisy. The Holocaust is the dominant metaphor in Israel and among Zionists. How many times have Zionist ideologues, like Trump’s Ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, called their opponents ‘kapos’ or ‘self-haters’. Kapos were the coerced orderlies of the Nazi camps. ‘Self hater’ is a term of abuse that the Nazis aimed at German anti-fascists.
As Daniel Blatman, the Chief Historian at the Warsaw Ghetto Museum, a Holocaust researcher at the Hebrew University wrote:
The Holocaust is a large component of Jewish Israelis’ national identity. It serves the right’s proto-fascist, racist, victim-centered discourse, meant to whitewash the ongoing crime against the Palestinians and to put the Christian world in a position of eternal apology.
If Danny Cohen and Pollard are correct then this is beyond foul or offensive. It is positively criminal!
The Holocaust – using memory as a political weapon
When Western leaders commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz 75 years ago we can be sure that their purpose is not preventing another Holocaust. Their aim is to incorporate the Holocaust into an ideology of racism and exclusion. The Holocaust is the ideal reason to go to war these days as the lessons of appeasement are wrongly applied to every act of aggression. Memory of the Holocaust has become an integral component of western imperialism. Every victim of imperialism has become another ‘new Hitler’.
Today even the far-Right pays homage to the Holocaust and Zionism, from Tommy Robinson to neo-Nazi Richard Spencer (Spencer favours ‘de-Judifying’ the Holocaust)!
Eitay Mack, an Israeli human rights attorney, compared Yad Vashem, to a ‘Laundromat, washing out the sins of the various dictators and anti-Semites who pass through its doors these days’. Blatman also made the same comparison writing that Yad Vashem
has functioned as a hard-working laundromat, striving to bleach out the sins of every anti-Semitic, fascist, racist or simply murderously thuggish leader or politician like Hungary’s Viktor Orban, the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterteand Italy’s Matteo Salvini.
My heart breaks when I see my colleagues, honest and faithful researchers of the Holocaust, giving tours of this historic museum, apparently under compulsion, to the evildoers the Israeli government sends to Yad Vashem to receive absolution in the name of Holocaust victims in exchange for adding a pro-Israel vote at international institutions.
Holocaust Memorial Day
In 2001, 56 years after Auschwitz, war criminal Tony Blair, instituted Holocaust Memorial Day. New Labour had at the same time been waging war against ‘bogus asylum seekers’. 80 years earlier, the Daily Mail was also campaigning against the admittance of ‘bogus’ refugees, Jews from Nazi Germany. None of which prevented it from launching the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign against Jeremy Corbyn.
‘I have yet to hear a single teenager come back from Auschwitz and say that we mustn’t abuse others the way we were abused.... The message is always the opposite. Gaza is permitted because of Auschwitz.’Gideon Levy
Blair’s friend Bill Clinton was another hypocrite. On a visit to Rwanda in March 1998, Clinton expressed regret for failing to
fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which [Rwandans] were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror.
Joyce Leader, the U.S. Embassy’s deputy chief of mission in Kigali at the time, told a meeting in 2014 that
“We had a very good sense of what was taking place. It was clear that a systematic killing of Tutsi was taking place in neighborhoods.”
Timothy Longman, associate professor of political science at Boston University, remarked that:
When President Bill Clinton flew to Rwanda in 1998 (in a trip in which he never left the airfield), he claimed that he simply didn’t know what was happening in Rwanda. We now have further evidence that Clinton’s claims were false. It is not that the U.S. government didn’t know what was happening in Rwanda. The truth is that we didn’t care.
Which was the British government’s position during the WW2. Anthony Eden, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, opposed issuing a warning to the Germans in 1944 as to the consequences of continuing the extermination of the Jews. Eden told the Americans that such a declaration would be to the Jews’ disadvantage but like Blair and Clinton, he too was lying. The real reason Eden told the War Cabinet’s Refugee Committee, was that such a declaration ‘is likely to be redoubled pressure upon us for measures of rescue.’ [Meier Sompolinsky, The British Government and the Holocaust, pp. 128-129]
In other words Eden feared the consequences of the Nazis not murdering their victims.
On April 22nd, 1993, one year prior to the Rwandan genocide, Clinton opened the Washington Holocaust Museum with these words:
this museum is not for the dead alone, nor even for the survivors... it is perhaps most of all for those of us who were not there at all. To learn the lessons, to deepen our memories and our humanity, and to transmit these lessons from generation to generation....
The evil represented in this museum is incontestable.... So we must stop the fabricators of history and the bullies as well. Left unchallenged, they would still prey upon the powerless; and we must not permit that to happen again.
Which demonstrates not only that words are cheap but that establishing Holocaust museums has nothing to do with preventing genocide.
What happened in the Nazi Holocaust was repeated in Rwanda and Cambodia and the West’s response was identical each time. Not only did the USA do nothing to halt the genocide but French troops actively aided them. Chris McGreal recalled:
The French army turned its back on many others, including the French embassy's Tutsi staff, who were mostly abandoned to their deaths despite desperate pleas to diplomats they had worked with for years. The French soldiers did rescue some Rwandans. They took the assassinated president's wife (a notorious anti-Tutsi extremist in her own right), and various Hutu politicians who helped organise the genocide. They also remembered the French embassy dog, which was carefully loaded on to an army lorry while a Tutsi man who ran up to beg for help was turned away.
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None of this stopped the French government from trying to blame the victims of the Rwandan genocide for their own deaths, despite the fact that France was the only state which had troops on the ground during the genocide. Far from trying to halt the genocide, French troops actively protected the Interahamwe murderers.
None of this has prevented President Macron from declaring that anti-Zionism is a form of anti-Semitism. A decision endorsed by the French parliament. Every racist and reactionary politician now opposes ‘anti-Semitism’ when Israel is the issue.
But if the hypocrisy and deceit of Western leaders is their trade mark then today in Israel and elsewhere the dead of the past have become the ideal cover for the West’s war mongering
The Need to Forget
In 1988 Professor Yehuda Elkana, Rector of the Central University of Europe in Budapest, (which Hungary’s anti-Semitic Prime Minister Orban forced out of the country) issued a famous Declaration in Ha’aretz ‘The Need to Forget’. Elkana was not only a distinguished academic he was one of the few child survivors of Auschwitz. He had been abandoned in November 1944 with his parents in one of the last transports. As his obituary noted:
‘In today's Labour Party Elkana would be expelled for antisemitism’
Elkana experienced profound unease with the way in which the Holocaust was being manipulated by governments of Right and Left to craft an atavistic Jewish national identity.
It is a measure of the poverty of intellect. the intimidation and contempt for freedom of speech in the Labour Party today that anyone saying such a thing would be expelled for ‘anti-Semitism’. Elkana spoke of
a particular interpretation of the lessons of the Holocaust and the readiness to believe that the whole world is against us, and that we are the eternal victim. In this ancient belief,... I see the tragic and paradoxical victory of Hitler. Two nations, metaphorically speaking, emerged from the ashes of Auschwitz: a minority who assert, "this must never happen again," and a frightened and haunted majority who assert, "this must never happen to us again."
Elkana described how
The very existence of democracy is endangered when the memory of the dead participates actively in the democratic process. Fascist regimes understood this very well and acted on it.
I was always opposed to Holocaust Memorial Day because the idea of the State commemorating the victims of the Holocaust or any other act of genocide strikes me as obscene. It is inevitably going to end up using the Holocaust as an ideological prop for its own racism.
The British state that deports Black British citizens to the Caribbean and which wages a colonial war in Iraq considers itself fit to commemorate the dead of the Holocaust and pronounce on anti-Semitism. Elkana quoted Thomas Jefferson, who wrote that democracy and worship of the past are incompatible.
Is it seriously suggested that the Israeli state, which armed and trained the death squads of Guatemala as they murdered up to 200,000 Mayan Indians, is fit to commemorate the Jewish dead of the Holocaust? Why does a state which has armed and equipped the death squads of El Salvador, the Argentinian Junta (which murdered up to 3,000 Jews) and Pinochet, to say nothing about Apartheid South Africa, have anything to say about the lessons of the Holocaust?
Would we accept lessons on anti-racism from the BNP? Or take guidance on care for the elderly from Dr Harold Shipman? Perhaps we should employ the Yorkshire Ripper to advise on tackling domestic violence? Israel may call itself the Jewish state but if it can’t even support the Holocaust survivors who it has exploited since the beginning of the State what it says about the Holocaust should be ignored.
How can the Israeli state, which today arms the Burmese Junta as it commits genocide against the Rohinga people have any right to lecture other people on the lessons of the Holocaust?
It is hard to think of a state that abuses, tortures and massacres its own people (bar Syria and Iran) that doesn’t receive help from Israel.
When Israel allowed Vladimir Putin to speak at its World Holocaust Forum propaganda event on January 23rdat Yad Vashem whilst refusing to allow Poland’s President Andrzej Duda to speak, the whole ceremony became embroiled in a war about which country was the worst collaborator with Nazi Germany – Russia for signing a pact with Hitler in August 1939 or Poland for the anti-Semitism of much of its population before and during the war.
Netanyahu used the Forum, which was supposedly about the Jewish Holocaust dead, to urge the world to wage war against Iran. Can one think of any greater desecration of the memory of the Holocaust victims than to use them as the pretext for another war?
Netanyahu also called for‘concrete actions, sanctions against the international court, its officials, its prosecutors, everyone.” Their crime? Having the temerity to consider investigating Israel for war crimes! Netanyahu calledit “pure anti-Semitism”
As even the legal advisor to Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs noted, the idea for the Court aroseover 50 years ago in the wake of the Nazi atrocities in the Second World War. It speaks volumes that Israel is now proposing sanctions against the ICC.
The commemorations in Jerusalem are only part of a wider Holocaust cult which sees thousands of young Israelis travel every year to Auschwitz. Of course it is a good idea for people to see and learn from the horrors of Auschwitz and the other Nazi camps. However the purpose of sending Israeli youngsters to see Auschwitz is not in order to instil anti-racism, quite the contrary. As Elkana wrote:
What is the child supposed to do with these memories? Many of the pictures of those horrors are apt to be interpreted as a call to hate.
And in Israel today it is amongst the young that one finds the most virulent expressions of hatred. In 2007, the Association for Civil Rights in Israelreported that 75% of Jewish youths said Arabs were less intelligent and less clean than Jews. All the old anti-Semitic stereotypes. Hitler refered to the Jews’ lack of cleanliness, ‘water shy’ in Mein Kampf, p.42).
Almost half of young Israelis (48%) said Israeli Arabs should not have Knesset representation or the right to vote. This is why Elkana concluded that:
For our part, we must learn to forget! Today I see no more important political and educational task for the leaders of this nation than to take their stand on the side of life, to dedicate themselves to creating our future, and not to be preoccupied from morning tonight, with symbols, ceremonies, and lessons of the Holocaust. They must uproot the domination of that historical "remember!" over our lives
What is the purpose of remembering the dead of the Holocaust if not to warn future generations of the evils of racism? Yet in Israel Holocaust memory does the exact opposite. It reinforces the most ugly forms of racism. The same is true of Western states who on the one hand are content to penalise those who rescue refugees from the waters of the Mediterranean and yet shed crocodile tears over Jews who perished in the Holocaust because they could not find refuge.
Ha’aretz’s Gideon Levy best summed up why State Holocaust Worship can only reinforces racism. In an article On This Holocaust Remembrance Day, Let Us ForgetLevy wrote:
I have yet to hear a single teenager come back from Auschwitz and say that we mustn’t abuse others the way we were abused. There has yet to be a school whose pupils came back from Birkenau straight to the Gaza border, saw the barbed-wire fence and said, Never again. The message is always the opposite. Gaza is permitted because of Auschwitz.
That is why the more liberal Israeli high schools are endingtrips to Auschwitz because they recognise that they are fuelling the rise of racist nationalism.
As Israeli historian, Professor Edith Zertal noted in Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, whilst Zionism nationalised the Holocaust, ‘it excluded the direct bearers of this memory – some quarter of a million Holocaust survivors who had immigrated to Israel.’ The impoverishment of the Holocaust survivors who live in Israel, one-third of whom live in poverty despite the billions of dollars Israel received from Germany in reparations, is a scandal. (Israel Is Waiting for Its Holocaust Survivors to Die.) Israel is devoted to exploiting the memory of the Holocaust but ignores its victims.
It is inevitable that Israel, an ethno-nationalist for whom racism is part of its DNA, will use the Holocaust to justify its present practices. This is equally true of those western states who use the Holocaust as part of their own ideological legitimation.
If the Holocaust is to be remembered it should be by those who were affected or their relatives. It is absurd for the State to commemorate victims of racism given that western states are, without exception, racist themselves.
Ha’aretz, Gideon Levy, Auschwitz, Holocaust Memorial Day, Gaza, Holocaust Olga Guerin, Danny Cohen, anti-Semitism, Yad Vashem, CAA, BBC, Palestinians, IHRA, Daniel Blatman, Eitay Mack, Board of Deputies, Stephen Pollard, Jewish Chronicle, David Friedman, Generation Identity, Benjamin Jones, Tommy Robinson, Joyce Leader, Bill Clinton, Duterte, Pinochet, Pinochet, Argentinian Junta, Timothy Longman, Daily Mail, Rwanda, Chris McGreal, Anthony Eden, Washington Holocaust Museum, Yehuda Elkana, Putin, Andrzej Duda,