Zionists order Corbyn to follow John Vorster to Yad Vashem

This is interesting.  Having jumped through hoops to appease the UK's Zionist movement it turns out that Jeremy Corbyn may have disobeyed a direct order to indulge in a bit of holocaust hypocrisy at Israel's holocaust museum, Yad Vashem.  Here's The Guardian:

Jeremy Corbyn faced fresh criticism over his handling of antisemitism allegations after Labour’s sister party in Israel said it had had no reply to a letter its leader [Isaac Herzog] sent to him a month ago expressing dismay and inviting him to Jerusalem to see the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum.

Visits to Yad Vashem are something of a walk of shame given some of its past visitors.  Here's John Vorster, a one time president of apartheid era South Africa and a nazi internee during WWII:

The picture is from Yad Vashem's own website.

And apart from Israel's own leaders, Vorster isn't the only racist to have graced Yad Vashem with his presence.   Here's Poland's Michal Kaminski of the virulently nationalist, Civic Platform Party visited Yad Vashem too:

Here's Tony Greenstein on Kaminski:

Kaminski led the campaign against a national Polish apology for the burning alive of up to 900 Jews in Jedwabne by Poles in 1941 (see )  Kaminski was formerly a member of the fascist National Revival of Poland Party. 

Vorster and Kaminski are just the kind of people you might expect to turn up at the jewel in the Zionist crown.  That tribute to Jewish suffering that says that no-one else matters and Israel can do no wrong.

And so to Corbyn:

Herzog invited Corbyn to bring a delegation to Yad Vashem to witness that the last time the Jews were forcibly transported “it was not to Israel but to their deaths”. An Israeli Labour party official confirmed that it had “not had a reply” after rumours circulated in the Jewish community in London that no response had been received in Jerusalem or issued from London.

 So no answer from Corbyn so far so we can only hope that if he does ever answer he won't make that walk of shame.

But not content with implying that Corbyn has done something wrong, rather than the first thing he's done right since this whole orchestrated smear campaign began, Toby Helm (The Observer journo who wrote the piece) managed to take do something no self-respecting journalist should ever do.  He took a Zionist's words at face value.  Let's see that again:

the last time the Jews were forcibly transported “it was not to Israel but to their deaths”

Now that's just not true.  There have now been many instances of Jews being forced to go to Israel when they haven't wanted.  Even West Germany back in the 1980s handcuffed Soviet Jews and bundled them on to El Al planes bound for Israel.  Poland had an antisemitic campaign in the 1960s where an agreement with Golda Meir had Jews being forced to go to the Israel they didn't even approve of.  And with the collapse of the Soviet Union Jews who wished to go elsewhere once again found themselves being forced to go to Israel. For that unhappy episode, see 972 Mag.

Netanyahu the historian?

Apparently Bibi's dad was a historian. That's according to Anschel Pfeffer in today's Jewish Chronicle. Look:

According to Mr Netanyahu - whose father was a lauded historian - Hitler asked Al-Husseini: "What should I do with them [the Jews]?" He replied: "Burn them."

 I don't know if Netanyahu Senior was a zionist "historian" or a historian who happened to be a zionist but clearly Netanyahu Junior is no historian.

But then Aschel Pfeffer is no historian either.  Watch how he stumbles into no-shit-Sherlock territory:

Some commentators said that Mr Netanyahu's words revealed either that he sees the conflict between Israel and its immediate neighbours as a continuation of the Holocaust, or that he is prepared to manipulate history for political purposes.

Wow, there's an insight.  Zionist leaders play the holocaust card for political advantage.

Norman Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry is available in good bookshops, at least it was several years ago. It might of interest to wannabe historians like Netanyahu Junior and Anschel Pfeffer.

Playing the holocaust card

This is as egregious an example of playing the holocaust card that you will find.  I first saw it on Harry's Place where their dullest blogger, Gene, says:

the BBC audience and Galloway were deprived of the chance to hear New York City Councilman David G. Greenfield’s reaction to “pro-Palestine” activists interrupting the council’s commemoration of 1.1 million people killed in Auschwitz.

Included in the post is this YouTube clip:

Now what's very strange about the clip, which even the average Harry's Placer must have noticed, is that it doesn't show the disruption itself nor, of course, what had prompted it.

In case for some reason you don't or can't watch the clip, here's a bit of what he had to say, from the algemeiner:

“While we were discussing a resolution regarding the murder of 1.1 million human beings – I will point out that 90 percent of them were Jewish, but the other 10 percent, they were political dissidents, they were Jehovah’s Witnesses, they were gays, those were the people who were being killed together at Auschwitz-Birkenau,” Greenfield declared, “while we were discussing that, they had the chutzpah, the nerve, the temerity, to unfurl a Palestinian flag and yell at us.”

Voice rising, Greenfield contrasted Israel’s open society with the repressive regimes across the Middle East, before asserting, “What you saw here today was naked, blind antisemitism.”

Greenfield said that the demonstrators had unfurled the Palestinian flag out of anger that “Hitler had not finished the job. He only wiped out half of my family.”

He concluded: “Shame on them for disrespecting the most diverse democratically elected body in the United States of America, and that’s why we go to Israel.”

 But immediately after that bit was an explanation of what the disruption of council business was really all about:

The demonstrators immediate target was the trip to Israel which Councilman Greenfield referred to, planned for next year, and involving City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and 14 other Council members. Footage of the demonstrators showed them in a state of collective hysteria, showering abuse and hatred upon the council’s members. (See video below.)

Here's the clip:



and we're still none the wiser save for that little bit of honesty that seems to have slipped through the algemeiner's net.  The honesty, and inadvertant exposé of Councilman Greenman's dishonesty, was shortlived.  Read on:

Other councillors joined Greenfield in condemning the antisemitic disruption, which included the fringe group “Jewish Voice for Peace” among the participants.

Aha, now I have more that I can google to try to get to the bottom of this.  I eventually find the Jewish Voice for Peace site and their statement on the disruption:

JVP-NYC Statement on Jan 22nd City Council Disruption

Submitted by jvp-nyc on Mon, 01/26/2015 - 5:21pm

On January 22nd, members of Jewish Voice for Peace-NY participated in an act of civil disobedience organized by the Direct Action Front for Palestine inside of City Hall.  Our goal was to call attention to fifteen City Council members' upcoming delegation to Israel, a trip designed to whitewash Israel's occupation of and discrimination against Palestinians. During the political action, the City Council introduced a resolution commemorating the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.  A banner supporting our cause was dropped just as this resolution came to a vote; this timing was completely unintentional. JVP-NY regrets disrupting this vote, as we respect without qualification the solemnity of the Holocaust and honor all victims of genocide.  

We unequivocally stand by our opposition to an all-expenses-paid junket to Israel by a delegation of the NYC Council, sponsored by organizations that promote Islamophobic policies in the US and defend Israel's human rights abuses and violations of international law. 

Above all, JVP-NY is committed to opposing all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism. It is with those values in mind that we remember the victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and remain steadfast in our opposition to Israel's human rights abuses.

So the council was using the holocaust as a smokescreen for a junket to and a promotion of Israel and tacking on holocaust remembrance as an afterthought.  Nice people these official holocaust rememberers.

UPDATE: Within momemts of this post, Harry's Place has decided to come clean and play dirty over this Palestine solidarity protest.  Here's the HP update:

Update: The activists chose the moment of the Auschwitz commemoration toprotest a planned visit to Israel by several council members.

I wonder why HP chose their moment to come clean about what they must have known when they originally posted the post.  Of course,, they're still being as dishonest as you'd expect, There is no evidence to suggest that JVP chose their moment to coincide with the councillors' hypocritical resolution on the holocaust.  Nor is there any reason to suppose it.  HP has been caught in another lie to smear the critics of the racist war criminals of the State of Israel.

Whilst enduring the torture of reading Harry's Place I also check out the comments just to see if there is a spark of humanity there.  There usually isn't but I did notice some guy appealing for a hat-tip over drawing this Gene chap's attention to the speech in the clip.  Gene duly obliged, I wonder if he'll hat-tip whoever it was that drew his attention to the fact that his original post was utterly bogus.

Finally Abbas recognises Israel as Yad Vashem with an air force

Well Ha'aretz is excited about this new development:

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas released a special message on Sunday in Arabic and in English on the occasion of Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day, in which he decried the murder of Jews in the Holocaust as "the most heinous crime against humanity in modern history.

But what's it got to do with anything now?

Apparently it represents a bit of a turnaround for Abbas:

A number of senior Israeli officials, including Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and Strategic and Intelligence Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz, have declared over the past year that Abbas is anti-Semitic and a Holocaust denier. Their claims were based on Abbas' doctoral thesis from the University of Moscow, which asserted cooperation between elements in the Zionist Movement and Nazi Germany in the years before the Holocaust.

Abbas had since retracted these claims. In interviews he gave in recent years he maintained that he was not denying the Holocaust and that he recognizes the fact that six million Jews were killed during World War II.

They shouldn't do that conflation if they don't want people denying the holocaust.  So you see what they did?

Abbas' doctoral thesis from the University of Moscow.....asserted cooperation between elements in the Zionist Movement and Nazi Germany in the years before the Holocaust

Asserting the very well documented fact that the zionist movement, that is the mainstream of the zionist movement, collaborated with the nazis before and during the holocaust, and after, given that some zionists went on to testify for nazis at Nuremberg, is not the same as denying that the holocaust happened.

So what was Abbas's thesis?  That the holocaust didn't happen? or that it did happen and zionists collaborated?

What does it matter anyway what Abbas is forced to say now or what he used to say?  It seems like only yesterday that Ha'aretz was saying that "Israel should be more than Yad Vashem with an air force".  Apparently they don't believe their own position on this.

French Holocaust Rescuers Boycott Zionist Holocaust Memorial Event

This is from The Forward:

PARIS — A French organization that saved Jews during the Holocaust has declined to attend a commemoration because it was organized by pro-Israel Jews.

The Marseille branch of CIMADE, a French Protestant group established in 1939, declined to attend the region’s main memorial ceremony for Jewish Holocaust victims because of the pro-Israel attitude of CRIF, the umbrella group representing French Jewish communities, which organized the event together with the municipality.

The values that led CIMADE to save Jews make the group “equally committed to oppose the colonial, discriminatory and bellicose policy of Israel with regards to the Palestinians,” CIMADE regional deputies Françoise Rocheteau and Jean-Pierre Cavalie wrote in a letter to the local CRIF branch on Dec. 21. It also said CIMADE was determined to fight “apartheid.”

The letter, which was published online on Feb. 11 by a group which promotes a boycott of Israel, was a reply to an invitation extended by CRIF to CIMADE to attend the 70th commemoration on Jan. 20 of the deportation and subsequent murder of thousands of local Jews.

Marseille had a Jewish population of 39,000 in 1939, according to Beit Hatfutsot, the Museum of the Jewish People. Only 10,000 remained after the Holocaust. CIMADE organized “vital relief and later resistance” in connection with the murders, according to Yad Vashem, and helped smuggle Jews to safety. Yad Vashem named Madeleine Barot, who headed CIMADE during the Holocaust, a Righteous among the Nations in 1988. She passed away seven years later.

“We understand our positions may appear unacceptable, making us unwelcome at your commemoration,” the CIMADE representatives wrote. “We cannot keep silent on our convictions but do not wish to cause a scandal.”

It's interesting that they're trying a softly softly approach.  I wonder if CRIF will appreciate that. 

Is this a purim thing? holocaust beauty contest

No it can't be a purim thing, it's too early or too late.  But what can explain the advent of a holocaust survivors beauty contest?

Against all racism

Here's an encouraging article arising out of what was certainly a vicious attack on a yeshiva student in Kiev, Ukraine.  It's by a Rabbi, Rabbi Brant, from his blog, Shalom Rav, and it draws on an article in the Forward. Here are some chunks:

Alexander “Aron” Goncharov left the hostel of Kiev’s Brodsky Synagogue on the second night of Passover and never returned. Yeshiva authorities found him the next day in hospital, barely alive after suffering massive head wounds.  A few days later, Goncharov was flown to a Tel Aviv hospital for emergency treatment and was put in a medically induced coma. When he awoke one week later, he said that his attackers had yelled “Yid” as they beat him. 

Not surprisingly, the Israeli establishment was quick to make political hay out of the incident

I like that "not surprisingly".  The Forward article almost invokes the holocaust industry:

Israel’s chief rabbi Yona Metzger visited Goncharov on Holocaust Remembrance Day, underlining his new status as a symbol of contemporary anti-Semitism. Goncharov told Metzger that he hoped to immigrate to Israel, calling it “the safest place for Jews.”

But....here's Rabbi Brant again: 

While some attributed it to anti-Semitism, others flatly denied it:

“It has nothing to do with anti-Semitism,” said Yaakov Dov Bleich, rabbi of Kiev’s Podol Synagogue and one of several rabbis who claim the mantle of chief rabbi of Ukraine. “The fact he was taken to Israel will probably stop any [police] investigation in its tracks.”

and

Vyacheslav Likhachev, a researcher focused on racism, said there was little evidence that the attack was anti-Semitic. Likhachev, who has studied anti-Semitism in Ukraine for the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress for 10 years, told the Forward that anti-Semitic incidents have fallen in Ukraine in recent years…

“I don’t want to say there is no Nazi violence in Ukraine,” Likhachev hastened to say. But he said that Africans and Asians suffer much more than Jews. In an article published soon after the attack, Likhachev noted that on the same night Goncharov was injured, an African student was severely beaten. He said that the following week, a court case opened into a “racist pogrom” which resulted in four students from India, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan being seriously injured.

Likhachev went on to point out that while Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych publicly condemned the attack on Goncharov, he “did not deem it necessary to make a statement on these crimes.”

Got that? Many racist attacks and yet the only attack to get a presidential mention is one that might not have been racially aggrevated. And of course for Israel claims to be against antisemitism, it was Israel's intervention that appears to have put the kibosh on a proper investigation.  Perhaps they were worried that it would out not to have been an antisemitic attack.

Anyway, here is Rabbi Brant's conclusion:

And this for me is the rub: whether or not this was an act of anti-Semitic violence, what should be our response? For me the answer is clear: it is not to let anti-Jewish actions to drive us from our homes. And it is not to insist that Jews will only truly be safe if they retreat into a nation-state ghetto of their own making.

Rather, we must understand Jew-hatred as no different from any other form of prejudice.  And if we do agree that this is the case, then it would behoove us to find common cause with all minorities targeted with racism.

Yup, that would be my conclusion too.

Norm on Norm

Someone told me about the New Statesman interview of Norman Finkelstein but I only remembered just now when I strayed onto the blog of Norman Geras called Normblog.  I think Norman Geras is one of many former marxists turned zionist and liberal interventionist and he is now often to be found among the pack hunting down critics of Israel and of western wars.  Finkelstein is well known as a critic of Israel and his book The Holocaust Industry, which, among other things, accuses zionists of exploiting the holocaust for political gain and the Claims Conference of exploiting it for financial gain, had a ragbag of zionists accusing him of denying the holocaust though he does nothing of the kind.

Here's what he says in the NS interview:

In your view, Israel has appropriated the Holocaust. Could a non-Jew have said that?
There is no way a non-Jew could say what I did in The Holocaust Industry without being labelled a Holocaust denier. I am labelled a Holocaust denier, too. Nobody disputes that my parents were in the Warsaw Ghetto from 1939 to 1943. If I were denying the Holocaust, I would have to be certifiably insane.

Well I'm sure he has detractors who are more than happy to accuse him of being "certifiably insane" but I wonder if they're so done with the bogus allegations of holocaust denial they're resorting to plain silliness. Which brings us back to Norman Geras and his post on the interview:

Asked here whether he believes in God, Norman Finkelstein says:

No. When I was a young man, my mother said to me, "You can't be a communist without being a militant atheist." So I had to be a militant atheist because I wanted to be a communist.

This is unsound reasoning. Let's give Finkelstein the benefit of the doubt and assume that he followed his mom's dictum, not just because it was she who said this to him, but because he had independent grounds for believing that what she said was true. If we don't give him the benefit of that doubt, then he was accepting the truth of the statement merely on her authority - not a good principle, especially not for a militant atheist, since one of the things atheists dislike about organized religion is the religious tendency to appeal to the authority of sacred texts and suchlike, regardless of relevant reasons and evidence.

So then, if we assume that Finkelstein found his own way to the supposed truth of his mother's claim, it is clear that he must have lost his way. It isn't true that one can't be a communist without being a militant atheist. Communism is a principle of social organization and can be adhered to (or not) with or without a belief in God. There have been religious communists. The point is even clearer if we consider agnostics. Why someone who is uncertain about the existence of God couldn't be devoted to communist principles in politics... well, of course they could be.

For that post, based on what appears to have been a jokey anecdote relating to Finkelstein's upbringing, Geras thanks "AL". Apparently he needed help to pull that together.

Now Professor Geras is a leading Eustonista and something of a darling of neo-con and zionist bloggers. Many boast of how they feature in his profiles of like-minded bloggers. So to have him stoop to such a ridiculous post simply to remind his readers, by way of a dog whistle, that "we" (that is, they) don't like Norman Finkelstein and that "we" (that is, they) will only appear to take him (that is, Finkelstein) seriously when he (that is, Finkelstein) appears to be joking. This, I think, is another recent example of things looking up for critics of the State of Israel.

We are all Norman Finkelstein

Here's a Der Spiegel article that shows that holocaust survivors, their descendants and even Germans are waking up to the shenanigans of what Norman Finkelstein was the first to call the Holocaust Industry:

Through the sale of property Nazis stole from Jews in eastern Germany that was later signed over to the organization, the Jewish Claims Conference [JCC] has made a profit of about 1.5 billion euros. But not all of that money has been given to Holocaust survivors. Criticism of the powerful organization is growing in Israel and many are calling for greater transparency....

Around the globe, the descendants of Holocaust victims feel unfairly treated by the JCC, an umbrella association for Jewish organizations. They accuse it of hoarding compensation and restitution funds instead of distributing them to victims.

According to the article, "The JCC's critics include the Israeli government and parliament" so we really are all Professor Finkelstein.