Have you had enough Nazi, or do you want some more?

I just want to put a marker on this clip from The Young Ones:

Günter Grass and Greville Janner: Compare and Contrast?

At least I think that's what today's Jewish Chronicle editorial has done without actually naming Greville Janner.  See this:

He was only a Nazi

Gunter Grass may have had literary merit but he was also a Nazi, having served proudly and freely as a member of the Waffen SS. This fact was simply swept aside as inconvenient by many of the arts establishment in their gushing tributes. The BBC’s arts editor, Will Gompertz, briefly referred to his Nazi past as having caused “controversy” before returning to Grass’ literary magnificence. Had he been found to have been a paedophile, one imagines the tone would have been rather different.[my emphasis - obviously]

Now if the JC had Lord Janner in mind then I can think of lots to contrast with Günter Grass and not a lot to compare but what on earth was the JC thinking?

Betar and their Brownshirts

I just had a rather silly twitter exchange with a supporter of Betar and Tottenham Hotspur Football Club.

See here:

@jewssf shame on you white feather cowards pic.twitter.com/akmCRIJ2au
— NFE THFC (@Nickfromenfield) May 15, 2014

Silly of me I know but I responded:

@Nickfromenfield Did you know Betar pioneered the brownshirt uniform "before that upstart Hitler" - according to Jabotinsky?
— Jews Sans Frontieres (@jewssf) May 15, 2014

Well it turns out that Nick from Enfield didn't know that because he responded to me thus:

@jewssf utter garbage you clown shame on you
— NFE THFC (@Nickfromenfield) May 15, 2014

I was out while this exchange was going on but I told him I'd come up with some evidence.

So here I am on the Betar website.  There's a whole page on Betar ideology and it turns out I made a little error.  Here's the relevant section:

The first convention of Betar (Vienna 1928) resolved that the Betar uniforms especially the brown shirts (which, by the way, were worn before one had heard of the German Nazi movement) should be made by Jewish weavers in Eretz Yisrael.

As it happens the Betar ideology, from the page I linked, is frighteningly similar to nazi ideology but then so was that ghastly speech by UK Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis I posted on recently.

And zionists want it declared antisemitic to compare them to the nazis.  They compare themselves to the nazis it's just some of their supporters just don't seem to know it.

Hirsh on Hitler

I noticed a bizarre post on Engage recently which was a write up of a speech Engage's Dr David Hirsh gave to 6th formers at the Jews' Free School.  The talk was titled The Left and Israel and the stand out bit was this:

The Nazis are usually thought of as right wing.  But in some ways, they were also similar to the left.  They were radical, they wanted profound change.  They didn't like nationalism, they had a global programme for changing the whole world.  They were hostile to British and American imperialism and democracy.  They put their big political ambitions before the ‘pursuit of happiness’.  Hitler claimed to be the universalist and he said it was the Jews who wrecked society for everybody by following only  their own selfish interests.

I missed a trick here and thought this simply compared to Hirsh's likening of Joseph Massad to David Duke but Discredited Andrew in the Hasbara Four-Step post noticed something worse:

This is nuttier and more disturbing though, he's actually partially rehabilitating Nazism in order to make the comparison. There should be a special reward for going that bit further and saying something unnecessarily mad. Bad hasbara awards 2013?

I suppose to try to determine what Hirsh actually means by "nationalism", as in "The Nazis.....didn't like nationalism", would be an exercise in futility.  He claims himself to not be a zionist but I'm not aware of his ever offering a definition of zionism beyond "Israeli nationalism".

Zio-Nazi comparisons update

I've only just seen a letter in yesterday's Independent responding to this nasty little one from the increasingly unhinged Professor Geoffrey Alderman:

The Palestine Mandate of 1922, read together with Article 80 of the UN Charter, confers on Jews the right of settlement in areas of that Mandate that subsequently fell under Jordanian control.

These areas of course include East Jerusalem and the West Bank. The government of Israel is therefore fully entitled – indeed obliged – to permit and facilitate Jewish settlement there.

Those who oppose this settlement need to reflect on whether they are not indeed, at least in some sense, "carrying on Hitler's work".

Professor Geoffrey Alderman

London NW9

And here's the response:

Professor Alderman (letters, 23 May) says that any opposition to Israeli settlements is "continuing Hitler's work". Nazi policies included Lebensraum (with forced evictions to make way for people of a specific ethnicity), ghettoisation, and withholding human rights based on race. I think the comparison to Nazism is gratuitous, offensive, and irrelevant. But if one is brazen enough to make it, one should at least think it through fully.

James Ingram

London SE1

It's funny how some zionists jump through hoops to accuse others of trivialising the holocaust and yet when one of their own commits the offence we don't hear a peep out of them.

Righteous among the nazis?

When are nazis righteous?  When they support Israel of course.  This is from Newsweek:

To the casual observer, the visiting Europeans at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial in the hills above Jerusalem, looked like any other foreign delegation. In the Garden of the Righteous Among Nations, where Gentiles who protected Jews are honored, they laid a wreath and posed for a photo before signing the visitors’ book with the solemn promise: “We will want to make sure that ‘never again’ really means never again.”

But these were no ordinary travelers with Zionist sympathies. Rather, on this trip to Israel were a Belgian politician known for his contacts with SS veterans, an Austrian with neo-Nazi ties, and a Swede whose political party has deep roots in Swedish fascism—unlikely visitors to pay their respects at Yad Vashem, perhaps, unless one considers the political currents in Israel and Europe, and the adage that one’s enemy’s enemy is one’s friend.

Seems like only yesterday there were people arguing that it's antisemitic to compare Israel to the nazis.

The return of Israel's Mengele squad

I remember reading about this in a magazine called Return back in the 1990's and it was referring to the 80s but here's an article in Ha'aretz wondering how the perennial victims of the Israeli army can refer to themselves as nazis. The article starts quite well, marvelling at the fact that when it came to light, for example, that a unit of the Israeli army was describing itself as the "Mengele Squad", the instinct of state officials wasn't to concern themselves with their victims but to send the boys to Yad Vashem!

In 1989, a few years after Leibowitz spoke of Judeo-Nazis and about a year after the start of the first intifada, the country was shaken by a report by Avi Benayahu (the current IDF spokesman ) in the now-defunct left-wing newspaper Al Hamishmar. According to the article, a group of Israeli soldiers stationed in Ramallah had styled themselves the "Mengele squad." Again the IDF and the Nazis were intertwined, this time not by a philosopher and well-known provocateur but by the soldiers themselves.

In a turbulent Knesset debate on the issue, MKs expressed dismay at the chutzpah of a few "wild weeds" who, according to their commanding officer, had not displayed excessive brutality toward the local Arab inhabitants. All in all, it was just an armored infantry unit, which in wartime accompanied tanks into battle, but in periods of calm and during the intifada was helping fight the Palestinian uprising without undue enthusiasm (according to the company commander ).

The army reacted with fury. Because the identity of the one who leaked the story to the press was not discovered (and has not been discovered to this day ), the whole unit was subjected to an educational seminar and pedagogic punishment in the form of a tour and lecture at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.

Nothing was done about the rumors of beatings and lootings of Arabs and the everyday abuse of the local population; but telling the press about it was considered unconscionable. One soldier in the unit, who now works in marketing, says without sarcasm, "All that happened was that a few soldiers decided to call themselves the 'Mengele squad,' to set themselves apart from the others - a kind of branding."

Ok, so much for the Mengele squad. See this:

"The battalion knew we were a company of 'killers,'" the officer - the son of Holocaust survivors - related. "We were for an aggressive solution. We tried to shoot using all means, we injected gas into schools from which stones were thrown at us. In the battalion we were known as the 'Auschwitz company' or the 'Demjanjuks' because we made such extensive use of gas."

Now the back-peddling begins:

Two years later, Ari Shavit published impressions from a 12-day stint of reserve duty at the Ansar detention facility on the Gaza shore. The column's thesis was ahead of its time. Ansar, he noted, is "the best and most enlightened facility among the detention camps that were established since the eruption of the intifada. Ketziot and Fara are far worse; only Megiddo prison is said to compete with it in terms of humanism."

But Shavit went on to boldly reveal the explicit associations that struck him during his service in the humane camp that housed more than a thousand inmates: "The facility has 12 watchtowers. Some of the soldiers are shocked at the resemblance between these towers and other towers, which they learned about in their childhood. In fact, the shock is purely emotional and lacks any factual basis. After all, the watchtowers that appeared in Europe in the 1930s, for example, were mostly made of heavy European wood, whereas the towers of the Gaza shore facility are made of light Israeli metal, manufactured by a factory in Tiberias."

Wow! Now there's a significant difference between Israel and nazi-Germany. They make their watchtowers out of different stuff!

But still the zio-nazi comparisons come:

"When R. sees a column of prisoners approaching, led by the barrels of the M-16s of his buddies in the unit," Shavit wrote, "he says in a totally quiet, businesslike tone, 'Now the Aktion is starting.'

And there's more:

N., a forceful, unsentimental Likudnik, complains to anyone who is ready to listen about what makes this place look like a concentration camp."

Indeed, there were grounds for complaint. Among those brought to the camp were children of 15 or 16 who were bruised and battered, and the doctor at the clinic didn't just treat the reservists' eye infections: "On some occasions he was asked to repair what an enthusiastic interrogator had done to the limbs of a suspect."

Remember this is at the prison, sorry, "facility" where, "only Megiddo prison is said to compete with it in terms of humanism."

Ok, that's the shooting, or limb smashing, or gassing, what about the crying?

On the day the Muqata, Yasser Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah, was captured, Chayut was an officer in the Nahal paramilitary brigade. He and his soldiers were ordered to maintain quiet and order at the site. He saw a group of Palestinian children and smiled at them, but even though he was a simpatico fellow and handsome, too, the children broke into a run, apart from one girl, who froze in her tracks. Her terrified look was the basis for the disillusionment that led him to write the book.

"As for what that girl took from me," he writes, "that is something I understood long afterward. She took from me the belief that absolute evil exists in this world, and the belief that I was avenging it and fighting against it. For that girl, I embodied absolute evil. True, I was not as cruel as the evil I imbibed, was raised on and matured with. I did not have to reach the level of its sophistication and intensification in order to grasp my role in her life [...] Since then I have been left without my Holocaust, and since then everything in my life has assumed a new meaning: belongingness is blurred, pride is lacking, belief is faltering, contrition is heightening, forgiveness is being born."

Forgiveness? Of whom? For what?

Stay, it gets worse:

It's hard to be both victim and victimizer at the same time. The evacuation of a large number of civilians, more than 4,000, including women and children, before a bombing run by the IDF, with the aim of preventing casualties, was dubbed "Schindler's list."

"Of course you know that it's clearly not the same thing, because you are not a Nazi and you do not kill them," says a soldier who took part in Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. He adds, "You also don't do it from hatred or anything. You even do it for their benefit, so they won't be hurt by the bombing. But it's impossible not to compare, there's no way not to think about it."

And worse again:

According to Rosenthal, it is not the occupation that is responsible for Holocaust references in the army, but the experience of loss in the first phase of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which brought back to the Israelis the sense of Jewish helplessness. The desperate shouts of the trapped soldiers that were heard over the army's radio network suddenly sounded like the screams that might have been uttered in the gas chambers.

Can anyone really believe that the reason for holocaust terminology being used so casually in struggles of 1987 and 2000 are down to something that happened in 1973 recalling a time a when Jews really were victims?

Still, when we consider that the zionists in Europe are trying to have comparisons of Israel to the nazis made illegal, it's useful to point out that the comparisons, as unsound as they might be, are being made in Israel by Israelis themselves.

Jonathan Hoffman: an apology

Many thanks to an anonymous contributor calling themselves "zionist thug" in the comments to an earlier post for drawing my attention to this astonishing apology by Jonathan Hoffman, a Co-Vice Chair of the UK's Zionist Federation, in his Jewish Chronicle hosted blog:

On my Jewish Chronicle blog I described a photograph taken on 14 August 2010 at the pro-Ahava demonstration as "fraudulent". I also wrote "That photo was 'Photoshopped' -- and it is bloody obvious that it was 'Photoshopped' I do not discuss but I do identify lies and fraudulent Photoshopped photos."

These statements were entirely without foundation and I had made no attempt to check their accuracy. I accept that the photo was absolutely genuine and had not been tampered with in any way. The photographer, David Hoffman, is a well known and respected photojournalist and I apologise to him unreservedly for my hasty and unfounded comments and for the distress and embarrassment caused.

Now what photograph would that be? Could it be the one that appears quite prominently on Tony Greenstein's blog? This one:



Or are there other pictures that the Co-Vice Chair of the Zionist Federation takes issue with?

Ben Gurion saves the remnant but which remnant?

Why are both Israel and Germany withholding papers relating to the Eichmann case from public view? I don't know. But Shraga Elam thinks he knows and maybe he does.

Anti-White nazis?

Here's Max Blumenthal asking "who are the nazis?"

In the days leading up to Israeli Apartheid Week’s opening event at Columbia University, leading anti-Muslim blogger Pam Geller posted an image of an SS officer with the name of one of the event’s speakers, Ben White, emblazoned on his uniform. (The image recalled placards held by far-right settlers depicting Yitzhak Rabin in an SS uniform just days before he was assassinated.) Geller was among the crowd at the Columbia event, making sure to catch White’s eye as he walked to the podium to speak. He told me that she mouthed to him, “You’re a Nazi.” The day after the event, Geller posted another characteristically juvenile screed describing White as “Nazi boy.” There is little reason to engage a figure like Geller on the merits of her deranged characterizations. And it would be unfair to ascribe crude views like hers to the established pro-Israel groups working to discredit Israeli Apartheid Week. Their tactics are slightly more sophisticated, even if they have also demonstrated a reluctance to engage White and other participants on the facts about Israel’s systematic dispossession of the Palestinians....

Geller’s attacks on White are worth discussing only in light of their irony. She is, after all, a fervent supporter of a British fascist group comprised of soccer hooligans and skinhead thugs who have delivered sig heil salutes en masse at their rallies while also displaying Israeli flags — a most bizarre melange. Geller’s endorsement of the shadowy fascist group, called the English Defense League, highlights the reorganization of the British far-right around an anti-Muslim, pro-Zionist platform designed to cultivate alliances with influential online fanatics like her.

A "a most bizarre melange"? Not really.

Israel issues habeus corpses (sic) against its fascist allies

Tony Greenstein has spotted that the zionists' hypocrisy over the real antisemitism that it has always colluded with, isn't confined to its bogus memorialising of the holocaust. It has now been extended to the Jewish victims of Israel's friends in the old Argentinian Galtieri regime. Tony's post is headed Argentina – Proof that Israel is no Refuge from Anti-Semitism:

Post 1945 there was one regime that murdered Jews because they were Jews and in particular because they were left-wing Jews. In Argentina between 1976 and 1983 3,000 of the Disappeared Ones were Jewish, 10% of those murdered by the fascists. Yet there was not one word of protest from Israel. Quite the contrary. It would seem that Israel was actually advising these torturers on 'counter-insurgency'.

And here's Ha'aretz:

The Knesset yesterday unanimously approved a decision demanding that Argentina extradite to Israel those Argentina colonels and generals involved in mass killings during the country's military dictatorship from 1976-1983 so that they can be put on trial. Just 19 MKs were present for the debate.

MK Yossi Sarid (Meretz) proposed [I think that should be "opposed"] the move, saying that it was a "hypocritical discussion since all the facts have long been known and the government of Israel never once lifted a finger and cooperated with the Argentine murders because of their interest in arms deals."

The Knesset's decision, which takes the form of a declaration, follows reports that 40 former officers of the military junta were arrested in Argentina on Sunday on the orders of the new president, Nestor Kirchner, who said that he is prepared to extradite them to Spain.

The Knesset also called for mass graves to be opened to identify Jewish victims of the regime and bring them for burial to Israel.

So now the victims of zionist-fascist collusion are dead, Israel wants to know them. I remember reading somewhere that, in spite of the well documented collaboration of zionists with the nazis from Hitler's rise to power to the tail end of the holocaust, Ben Gurion wanted to give Israeli citizenship to the holocaust dead when the State of Israel was established. Plus ça change!

New Labour capitulates to fascism

Jack Straw, the UK's Minister for Justice, has said that he is willing to share a televised platform with the fascist British National Party's leader, Nick Griffin. Here's The Guardian:

British National Party leader Nick Griffin is to take part in a televised debate with Justice Secretary Jack Straw on BBC1's Question Time, it has been confirmed.

The announcement came after Mr Straw became the first senior Labour politician to say that he was willing to appear on the show with Mr Griffin.

The BBC have confirmed the two men are among the panellists booked for a recording of the show, hosted by David Dimbleby, in London on October 22.

The BBC sparked controversy earlier this month when it announced that it would be willing to feature representatives of the BNP on Question Time after the party won two seats in the European Parliament in elections in June.

Labour reviewed its long-standing approach of refusing to share a platform with the far-right BNP and Gordon Brown made clear he was ready to allow a minister to take on Mr Griffin, now an MEP for the North West of England.

But Cabinet ministers such as Peter Hain and Alan Johnson said they would not go on Question Time if the BNP leader was invited.

Mr Straw told BBC1's The Politics Show North-West edition: "Wherever we have had BNP problems in my area and when we have fought them hard, we've pulled back and won the seats back. And that's what we have to do. We've got to make the argument for people and I am delighted to do so."

Delighted? Not as delighted as the publicity hungry fascists.

Zionazi agreement

It's that word again, zionazi. What's all this about? Well it's nothing new actually. It's an article in the Jerusalem Post by Edwin Black (more in a bit) about the first known instance of zionist collaboration with the nazis, the transfer or ha'avara agreement. See this intro to the article:

On the afternoon of August 7, 1933, at 76 Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin, on a day when well-dressed Jews in Germany could not step into the street without fear, when laboring kibbutzniks in Palestine proudly swept the midday perspiration from their foreheads, when anxious German businessmen worried the next telegram would cancel yet another order for increasingly unsellable Reich goods, when Nazi organizers throughout Europe gleefully reviewed statistics on Jewish populations and Jewish assets within their midst, when Polish blackshirts viciously beat Jews in town squares, when ordinary jobless Germans wondered where they could find enough money for the next meal, when young Jewish boys in German schools were forced to stand painfully before their classmates as examples of detestable vermin, when defiant Jews across America and England raised their fists in anger proliferating their punishing anti-German boycott, when Jewish Palestinian exporters wondered nervously whether their biggest customer, Germany, would retaliate, when thousands of homeless German Jews existed as refugees and some in concentration camps, when the prospects for Jewry in Europe seemed over, on this fateful day in the first summer of the Hitler regime, an official delegation of four German and Palestinian Zionists and one independent Palestinian businessman were ushered into an Economics Ministry conference room. The Jews had been authorized by a combine of Jewish and Zionist bodies to negotiate with the Third Reich.

Ok so they negotiated. Then what?

And so it was done. The Transfer Agreement was created. There was no hard-copy contract with names penned at the bottom. The agreement was actually an official Reich decree, 54/33, issued three days later, on August 10, by the Reich Economics Ministry. The decree authorized the Zionists to create two transfer clearinghouses, one under the supervision of the German Zionist Federation in Berlin, one under the supervision of Anglo-Palestine's trust company in Palestine. The office in Tel Aviv was called Haavara Trust and Transfer Office Ltd. Often called Haavara Ltd. for short, this corporation was organized under the Palestinian commercial code and operated by business managers. Its stock was wholly owned by the Anglo-Palestine Bank, which was later renamed Bank Leumi.

Haavara, the Hebrew word for transfer, quickly became a synonym for transfer.

The bargain was this: Jews could leave Germany before being pauperized, and take some of their assets with them in the form of new German goods which the Zionist movement would then sell in Palestine and eventually throughout much of the world market.

I don't think that was all there was to the deal. I think in order to maximise their take, Jews had to go to Palestine. If this is the case then many Jews may have been trapped in Germany because they couldn't make a life in Palestine and they couldn't go elsewhere because of their asset situation.

Here's Lenni Brenner in Zionism in the Age of the Dictators:

The debate over the Zionist-Nazi pact continued angrily until 1935. The Ha’avara rapidly grew to become a substantial banking and trading house with 137 specialists in its Jerusalem office at the height of its activities. The regulations were always changing in response to Nazi pressure, but in essence the agreement was always the same: German Jews could put money into a bank inside Germany, which was then used to buy exports which were sold outside Germany, usually but not exclusively in Palestine. When the émigrés finally arrived in Palestine, they would receive payment for the goods that they had previously purchased after they had finally been sold. Fiscal ingenuity extended Ha’avara’s operations in many directions, but throughout its operation its attraction to German Jews remained the same: it was the least painful way of shipping Jewish wealth out of Germany. However, the Nazis determined the rules, and they naturally got worse with time; by 1938 the average user was losing at least 30 per cent and even 50 per cent of his money. Nevertheless, this was still three times, and eventually five times, better than the losses endured by Jews whose money went to any other destination.

Here's a supposedly neutral position from Wikipedia:

The Haavara Agreement was highly controversial. While it helped persecuted Jews emigrate from Germany, it provided a major market for German goods in Palestine. This helped Germany's weak economy at a time when many Jews were boycotting the country's goods. The following is a passage from an anti-Haavara circulated pamphlet in Palestine.

Until When Will the Yishuv Support Hitler? BOYCOTT Hitler's Products! BOYCOTT German Movies! Ivri! Remember What the German Did to Your Brother

There are two issues here really. One is to consider how much harm the boycott would have done to the Hitler regime and did the agreement help or hinder an optimal number of Jews fleeing Hitler?

Oh yes, here's that more on Edwin Black that I promised earlier. Here's the final paragraph of his article:

A few coldly realistic Zionist leaders in an office on Wilhelmstrasse were willing to make those decisions. It helped save a people. It helped create a state. Nonetheless, 25 years after the book was published and more than 75 years after the deal was negotiated, the nagging questions still haunts all those who confront the Transfer Agreement. Was it madness? Or was it genius?

And here's the blurb about the writer at the foot of the article:

The writer is the award-winning best-selling author of IBM and the Holocaust, and his first book, The Transfer Agreement, has now been rereleased in a 25th anniversary edition (Dialog Press), with an afterword by Abraham Foxman. www.edwinblack.com

And the last word goes to Abe Foxman. Now there's a plot spoiler if ever there was one.

Is it fair to compare Dershowitz to a Nazi crackpot?

I know I'm going to hurt the feelings of Jonathan Freedland. But I can live with that.

This is from Alan Dershowitz:

The truth is that the Palestinian leadership, supported by the Palestinian masses, played a significant role in Hitler's Holocaust....Husseini's significant contributions to the Holocaust were multi-fold: first, he pleaded with Hitler to exterminate European Jewry and advised the Nazis on how to do so; second, he visited Auschwitz and urged Eichmann and Himmler to accelerate the pace of the mass murder; third, he personally stopped 4,000 children, accompanied by 500 adults, from leaving Europe and had them sent to Auschwitz and gassed; fourth, he prevented another two thousand Jews from leaving Romania for Palestine and one thousand from leaving Hungary for Palestine, who were subsequently sent to death camps; fifth, he organized the killing of 12,600 Bosnian Jews by Muslims, whom he recruited to the Waffen-SS Nazi-Bosnian division. (Dershowitz in Der Jerusalem Stuermer)

This is from a "racist, white supremacist and anti-Jewish" Adolf-worshipping website:

Jews were responsible for getting the US to enter WWI on the side of Britain, which they did in exchange for the promise of a "Jewish homeland" in Palestine, which Britain then controlled. This promise was rendered in the form of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, supposedly written by British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to the chief representative of the Jewish community in Britain and head of the famous banking family, Lord Rothschild, but actually written collectively by major Jewish world leaders. ... Beyond this, the Jews may have had a hand in actually beginning WWI, inasmuch as the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, which set off the war, was carried out by men which two sources I am now unable to locate claimed were Jews..(The Birdman)

Similar arguments, similar racist agenda, similar playing fast and loose with evidence (see also this and this Tom Segev Times article and especially this chez Lenin (including the fabulous comments section which makes up for the graduate seminar about the Mufti that Dershowitz never attended)). But the Nazi at least qualifies his filth with phrases such as "may have a hand," whereas the Zionist presents substance-free allegations as solid facts. And the Nazi, unlike the Zionist, doesn't have the nerve to say explicitly that his grotesquely exaggerated villains were "supported by the masses." It is an indictment of the moment we're in that a respectable Zionist apologist with a Harvard chair would pay even less heed to accurate sourcing and rules of evidence than a white supremacist crackpot. The final difference, the Nazi fabulist is an object of scorn and ridicule, as he should be. The equally vile Dershowitz, as the sycophantic letter of Hampshire College President Ralph Hexter describes him, is in "high esteem."

Major Jewish organizations invited Dershowitz to speak at the U.N. in may 2009, about antisemitism and in commemoration of the holocaust, no less. He delivered a hatefest based on his stock in trade fabrications and insinuations. Then these very Jewish organizations lose their marbles because some dare see a similarity between Zionists and Nazis. Here's an idea. If you don't want to be likened to Nazis, don't invite an advocate of Nazi-like policies and a purveyor of Nazi-like scholarshit to speak at your events! If you don't want to legitimize abusing the memory of the Jewish victims of the holocaust, don't be the first in line to piss on their graves! Have some decency!

Revisiting the chosen people

Here's a rather naive article in yesterday's Ha'aretz by Shulamit Aloni about Israel's lurch from something acceptable to something unacceptable:

Not very long ago, during Rabbi Meir Kahane's racist rantings, the late writer and journalist Amos Elon gave me a copy of a letter Lord Rothschild sent to Herzl in August 1902. In the letter, Rothschild explains why he refuses to support the establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel. He writes that he "should view with horror the establishment of a Jewish colony pure and simple; such a colony would be Imperium Imperio; it would be a Ghetto with the prejudice of the Ghetto; it would be a small petty Jewish state, orthodox and illiberal, excluding the Gentile and the Christian."

Nevertheless, and despite phenomena like Kahane, the hope prevailed here over the years that Rothschild's harsh vision would prove false

Really? Whose hope? Maybe it was false propaganda that prevailed.

Anyway, let's read on, well skip a bit and then read on:

Most regrettably and disgracefully, everything that Lord Rothschild predicted is coming to pass in our time. In our blackest dreams and in the hardest times since the struggle to establish the state, we never imagined that those who call themselves disciples of Ze'ev Jabotinsky would impose terror and fear here using deranged racist legislation. We never imagined that they would use the destruction of the court system to try to prevent any possibility of achieving social justice and a humane attitude. This is something essential in every democratic society toward every man, woman and child, irrespective of origin, race, religion and sex.

Ok, so what's brought this undemocratic situation on?

For 42 years we have been occupying, oppressing and stealing lands that are not ours. To be free in our land do we need to become thieving Cossacks, uprooters of trees, burners of fields and harassers of women, the elderly and the very young? "We have this land, we have it," goes the song, but what should have been said is "We have the power, we have it, we have the money, we have it, and we are allowed, we are," to starve an entire population, imprison it and annihilate it using air strikes, cluster bombs and white phosphorous. Because we are the lords of the land and God has chosen us to rule. For the shame of it.

Aha, there's the bit that grabbed my attention; the chosen people bit. And I wondered, would this have the two Davids crawling out of the woodwork howling hysterical protests?

But for Aloni it's the occupation which is the villain of the piece not the zionist doctrine of chosenness. But then, what's this:

"A unique people," wrote David Ben-Gurion. Alas, for that uniqueness. Instead of a Jewish and democratic state they have delivered us a Jewish state controlled by religious fanaticism, one that maintains the purity of the race. They have delivered a democracy in the most primitive sense - not the preservation of democratic values but rule by the demos, the populace that is dictating the transformation of Israel into a totalitarian ethnocracy.

I think Ben Gurion might have said that stuff way before the occupation but let's get back to blaming the occupation then we might persuade people to confine Jewish supremacy to most of Palestine instead of all of it:

Hooray for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman - they are eradicating everything we built, everything we dreamed about and everything we fought for.

No they are not. They represent the logical outcome of precisely what zionists fought for: a state that legislates for Jewish chosenness.

Lieberman commemorates Nakba Day

One of the more overt racists in the Israeli government commemorated the Nakba by proposing that any Palestinians commemorating it should go to prison for 3 years. Here's Ha'aretz:

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman's party wants to ban Israeli Arabs from marking the anniversary of what they term "the Catastrophe" or Nakba, when in 1948 some 700,000 Arabs lost their homes in the war that led to the establishment of the state of Israel.

The ultranationalist Yisrael Beitenu party said it would propose legislation next week for a ban on the practice and a jail term of up to three years for violators.

"The draft law is intended to strengthen unity in the state of Israel and to ban marking Independence Day as a day of mourning," said party spokesman Tal Nahum.

The initiative could fuel racial tensions stoked by Lieberman's February election campaign call to make voting or the holding of public office in Israel contingent on pledging loyalty to the Jewish state.

Look familiar?

Well, does it look familiar? I don't mean does this depiction of Gaza remind anyone of the nazis rounding up Jews in Warsaw. Far be it from me to breach the US State Department's and European Union Monitoring Committee's bogus guidelines on antisemitism. Who needs that aggravation?



Nope, what it is is, I downloaded the picture and then my pc crashed and, you know when Firefox asks you if you want to restore your session but you don't want to in case it caused the crash in the first place? Yes? Well I didn't restore the session and I can't find the website which I got the pic from.

So, without breaching hasbara guidelines on antisemitism, does anyone know the origin of the picture? You know, who drew it, where it first appeared, that sort of thing.

Thanks!

Waltzing with Adolf

One of the pleasures of writing against Zionism is that I get sent some smelly stuff from people who assume you must share their bigotry if you oppose Israel.

So this time I got a publication called World View News Service edited by someone called Umm Yakoub (who might be as far as I know the nom de plumme of an Aryan *** or even a Hasbara agent.)

Said Umm Yakoub sent to her readership an article from the lovable "The New Sturmer," a work of another mystery man who claims to be a "patriotic Norse" who defends "the right of people to learn the real truth about their racial kindred" and sells copies of "Mein Kampf".

The article is about about the firebombing of Dresden. The firebombing of Dresden was a terrible crime, but that doesn't prevent the author for packing his article with enough brown stuff to fill a manhole. The most interesting tidbit is the opinion of our author on resistance.

While the governments and the successors of these war-time governments are still combing the geriatric wards of the Allied countries for German soldiers and their comrades-in- arms who might or might not have shot some Jewish Marxist saboteur fleeing a concentration camp, or returning fire against those who attacked them from behind bushes, rocks and bridge embankments wearing civilian clothes, think about the crime of Dresden.

So, Umm Yakoub thinks that the Arab right of resistance can best be defended by recycling bigoted articles urging sympathy to occupation soldiers shooting resisting partisans or political activists who fled a concentration camp. See, the Hizbullah deputy Ali Ammar who dared to compare his party's resistance to the (mostly communist) resistance to the Nazis in France got it all wrong. It's the poor occupation soldiers who are the real victims!

Go figure.

"Ugly racism" in Israel

That would be as opposed to the beautiful racism without which the State of Israel wouldn't exist. Cop this from Ynet:

Ugly racism in Ashkelon: R., a real estate agent from Ashkelon, arrived at a building in one of the southern city's neighborhoods recently with a couple of new immigrants, and was shocked to discover that the place has a policy of not selling apartments to Ethiopians.

A thorough investigation revealed that this policy is shared by all of the building's tenants, and perhaps the residents of additional buildings in the area as well – most of them of Russian descent. In a conversation the real estate agent had with A., the owner of one of the building's apartments, A. asked about the potential buyers. When he heard that they were Ethiopian immigrants, he replied, "Out of the question… This is unacceptable in my apartment.

"Excuse me, but there are no Ethiopians in this area at all, and there won't be any. This is our policy. I have no problem with them living somewhere else… Anyone can come, but not Ethiopians. This is how it is in the entire building, at least I hope it is, in order to preserve the apartment's value and the building's value."

In another conversation, A. repeated his stance, adding, "We’ve kept this rule of not selling to Ethiopians for 16 years. I can't speak for the entire house, but this is how I feel… It immediately drops the apartment's value… Although I'll be leaving the building, their apartments drop 30% in value… I'm no expert in the details, but the price goes down if Ethiopians come.

"I don’t care who lives here, I'm not racist. But when I leave the building where I have lived for the past 16 years, the rest of the tenants will look at me as a traitor because I sold to Ethiopians. I don’t want to ruin my relations with my friends."

A. went on to explain, "It just happened that there are no Ethiopians in the houses around us. A quarter of the apartments have been sold in our building. There are no Ethiopians at all, and almost everyone is Russian.... It's not a written rule, but there is such a decision that it drops the apartment's value.

"This isn't a racist issue, this is reality, which proves that it drops the apartments' prices. Why? That question should be directed to those who don’t want to pay. It's not my call, it's the fact on the ground. People call me at the apartment and they almost always ask, 'Do you have Ethiopians in the building?' It matters to some people, that's all."

It reminds me of a joke I was told about Rehavam Ze'evi. He was the founder of Moledet, the party that had "transfer" ie the expulsion of all of the Palestinians, as its main policy. Well the joke says that when he died the education department issued a directive to Jewish school teachers to teach the children the "legacy of Ze'evi" in a positive way. So one day a teacher told her children how there was this great Israeli politician, they nicknamed him Gandhi, who had this idea of getting rid of all of the Arabs from "Israel". Well, this kid, he says, "Miss, that's great! Getting rid of all the Arabs. That's great. When can we do that to the Ethiopians?" The teacher said "don't be so racist in my class!"

Kahane chai!

That means "Kahane lives" and it is the name of a split from Meir Kahane's Kach Party after the man himself died. Israel was always being hypocritical banning him from the Knesset for his racism given Israel's reliance on ethnic cleansing to maintain its Jewish majority but here's an article in Ha'aretz from Gideon Levy suggesting that Israel has become more racist than ever now:

Rabbi Meir Kahane can rest in peace: His doctrine has won. Twenty years after his Knesset list was disqualified and 18 years after he was murdered, Kahanism has become legitimate in public discourse. If there is something that typifies Israel's current murky, hollow election campaign, which ends the day after tomorrow, it is the transformation of racism and nationalism into accepted values.

If Kahane were alive and running for the 18th Knesset, not only would his list not be banned, it would win many votes, as Yisrael Beiteinu is expected to do. The prohibited has become permitted, the ostracized is now accepted, the destestable has become the talented - that's the slippery slope down which Israeli society has skidded over the past two decades.

There's no need to refer to Haaretz's startling revelation that Yisrael Beiteinu chairman Avigdor Lieberman was a member of Kahane's Kach party in his youth: This campaign's dark horse was and is a Kahanist. The differences between Kach and Yisrael Beiteinu are minuscule, not fundamental and certainly not a matter of morality. The differences are in tactical nuances: Lieberman calls for a fascist "test of loyalty" as a condition for granting citizenship to Israel's Arabs, while Kahane called for the unconditional annulment of their citizenship. One racist (Lieberman) calls for their transfer to the Palestinian state, the other (Kahane) called for their deportation.

I'm sorry Gideon, you seem like an earnest chap. But I just can't see how this differs from zionism as we know it.