|
ACTIONS
EVENTS
CALENDAR
BUY ISRAELI PRODUCTS
|
|
THE PROBLEM OF JEWISH
SELF-DEFENSE
An HIR series
Historical and Investigative Research - 17 Jan 2006
by Francisco Gil-White
http://www.hirhome.com/israel/leaders1.htm
copyright 2006
www.hirhome.com
|
¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ |
|
1 |
|
How the
mainstream Jewish |
|
leadership
failed the Jewish |
|
people in
World War II |
|
________________________________________________________ |
“I would
rather have my fellow Jews die in Germany…”[1]
Said on
the eve of the Nazi genocide
by “Reform
Rabbi Stephen Wise, the undisputed leader of
organized American Jewry”[19],
and “probably the most influential and
well-respected American Jew of his
generation”[24a],
in reply to British prime minister Neville
Chamberlain’s suggestion that Jewish
refugees from Hitler might settle in
Tanganyika.
Stephen Wise
got his wish.
________________________________________________________
Introduction
As George
Santayana famously said, “Those who cannot
remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
For the Jewish people, this means repeating
Catastrophe. Therefore, if you are a member
of the Jewish community, which has been
subjected to genocidal attacks for over 2000
years, the rational thing is to expect
another such attack and prepare for it, the
better to mount an effective self-defense and,
ideally, to prevent the next mass killing
altogether. You should study the past and
remember it, so that you can recognize the signs
that herald a new genocide and identify them
when they recur. Unfortunately, however, the
Jews are ill-equipped and ill-disposed to do
this: they find it difficult to think rationally
about their self defense. Jewish author Kenneth
Levin has recently made the latest addition to a
large literature that tries to understand this
general problem.[1a]
An example of
what I mean is that most Jews are unable to
recognize the signs indicating that their own
mainstream leaders are taking them down the path
to destruction, just as mainstream Jewish
leaders did the same prior to and during World
War II. Don't misunderstand me: it was the
German Nazis who were killing the Jews, and this
was obviously not the fault of the Jewish people
or of its leaders. But equally obviously, the
Jewish leadership prior to and during World War
II had an obligation to defend the Jewish
people, and it must be held accountable for how
it reacted before the threat of Jewish
extinction. But Jewish leaders have not been
held accountable. Stephen Wise, quoted
above, is -- absurdly -- considered a hero by
modern Jews, and “in the Jewish world, schools
and museums and streets are named after Wise.”[1b]
And yet Wise's role, as I will document below,
was to use his position of supreme authority in
the American Jewish community to sabotage the
most successful effort to rescue the desperate
European Jews, making it easier for the German
Nazis to murder in cold blood between 5 and 6
million innocent people, destroying a beautiful,
irreplaceable culture.
So why the Jewish
celebration of Stephen Wise?
One main reason
is that most ordinary Jews are unaware of what
Wise and Co. did prior to and during WWII to
sabotage the defense of the Jewish people. It is
irrational that Jews should not know this
history well, but it is true that some special
institutional difficulties exist: the same
mainstream leaders who betrayed the Jewish
people in WWII created the mainstream Jewish
organizations that hold sway over the Jewish
people today. Stephen Wise himself was
"president of both the American Jewish Congress
and the World Jewish Congress [which
organizations he created], and a key figure,
often chief officer, of perhaps a dozen other
organizations and institutes."[1c]
In consequence, the people running these
dominant organizations today have been careful
not to expose the performance of their
predecessors, in whose steps they are eagerly
following, once again endangering the Jewish
people in circumstances very similar to those
that announced the German Nazi Final Solution.
The connections between the past and current
leadership are clear.
The present
article is concerned with what happened in WWII.
Its sequel,
Part 2, will
examine how today's mainstream Jewish
leaders in the Diaspora are condemning the Jews
to repeat a horrific history. Part 3 will do the
same for today's Israeli leaders. Part 4 will
close the series by seeking to provide a
satisfying theory to explain why the Jews in
general find reasoning about their self-defense
so difficult, and why their leadership tends so
easily to betray the unfortunate Jewish people.
The point of this exercise is to prevent another
Catastrophe, for the Jewish people is once again
in mortal danger.
|
|
Rabbi
Stephen Wise |
|
A few words
about antisemitism
_______________________________
The topic of this article is
delicate, and the interest in this issue is easily
misinterpreted. So I begin with a few clarifications.
In a related article, I defined
antisemitism as follows:
“Antisemitism is a way of looking
at the world, a perspective, and it impairs reasoning by
insisting on the following sequence: first, suspend in the air
the anti-Jewish conclusion; then build in a helter-skelter rush
to the ground a scaffolding of ‘premises’; finally, never heed
how ridiculous the crookedly resulting, upside-down staircase
becomes.”[2]
For example, first, decide to
apologize for those who carried out the German Nazi Final
Solution; then, find a way to do it, no matter how ridiculous.
One such ridiculous maneuver, as Louis Rapoport explains, is
that “Enemies of the Jewish people lap up any evidence that some
Jews...may have prevented other Jews from being saved from the
Nazi exterminators.”[3]
Why do the antisemites imagine this works for them? Because they
employ it to produce the pseudo-argument that, since some of the
people who facilitated the extermination of the European Jews in
World War II were Jewish, “they were doing it to themselves,”
and hence, who are the Jews to complain about the gentiles who
murdered Jews in World War II?
What is the problem with this
'argument'?
Well, just imagine somebody
saying, about the suffering of the Chinese people during the
Cultural Revolution, that since the leaders of this outrage were
Chinese, “they were doing it to themselves.” They were? Of
course not. In this case everybody can see that a majority of
the Chinese were being made to suffer by a few Chinese:
nobody was doing anything to him or herself. But we live in
antisemitic cultures, and in consequence this sort of thing is
obvious only so long as we are not talking about Jews, so I am
going out of my way here to make certain things perfectly clear.
First, the ordinary Jews who
perished in the death camps are the same victims
regardless of who murdered them. What does this mean? That doing
justice to these victims requires laying the blame at the feet
of any and all who played a role in their deaths. The
Jewish identity of some who functioned as indirect executioners
can only compound the tragedy of the victims; what it cannot
logically do is excuse these Jewish leaders, much less excuse
the non-Jews who directly set the death machinery in
motion and kept it running.
This article addresses the
question of why some in the mainstream Jewish leadership during
World War II actively discouraged and sabotaged the
defense of the Jewish people. Not because it will excuse the
gentile criminals responsible for the Nazi Final Solution, but
because we cannot allow another such Catastrophe to take place,
and the only way to prevent history from repeating itself is to
understand it. The Jewish people will be attacked again: this is
guaranteed, for it happens virtually every century, and as I
write antisemitism is enjoying a dramatic renaissance all over
the world while the Jewish state is quickly ceding territory to
antisemitic terrorists pledged to the destruction of the Jewish
people. So the question is not whether another genocide will be
attempted -- it is being attempted as we speak. The
question, rather, is simply whether the Jews will be able and
willing to defend themselves effectively this time. Certainly,
they will not defend themselves effectively if they allow their
mainstream leadership, once again, to cooperate with their
executioners. So it matters greatly whether ordinary Jews
understand what happened in WWII, and this is the point of doing
the present investigation and making it public. |
•
The
only
way to prevent
history from
repeating itself
is to
understand
it.
• |
|
Did mainstream
American Jewish leaders help defend the Jews from genocide in
World War II?
_______________________________________
Long before October 1943
everybody knew that the Jewish people was being exterminated in
Nazi-occupied Europe.
“From the summer of 1941,
reports were reaching the West regularly, through diplomatic
and other channels, of large-scale massacres of Jews in
areas of eastern Europe under Nazi control. In May, 1942, a
message transmitted to the West through the Polish
Government-in-Exile in London contained a compilation, by
the Jewish Bund in Poland, of confirmed massacres. The Bund
estimated that 700,000 Jews had already been killed and
surmised that the Nazis had embarked on a campaign to
annihilate all the Jews of Europe.”[3a]
A January 1943 headline in the
New York Times announced, “Liquidation Day Set For France’s
Jews,”[4]
and another in February blared “Total Nazi
Executions Are Put at 3,400,000; Poland With 2,500,000 Victims,
Tops List,” followed by the explanation, in the body of the
article, that in Poland “1,000,000 Jews were said to have been
killed or permitted to die in concentration camps.”[5]
This was, of course, precisely what Adolf
Hitler had promised he would do in Mein Kampf and in his
speeches: annihilate the European Jewish population. And yet,
the Allies were doing worse than nothing to help stop the
genocide.[6]
In October of 1943, as related in
an article published by the David S. Wyman Institute for
Holocaust Studies, there was an effort in the United States to
change that.
“The date was October 6, 1943,
three days before Yom Kippur, and more than four hundred rabbis
had come to plead for U.S. government action to save Jews from
Hitler.
The march was the brainchild of
33-year-old Hillel Kook of Jerusalem, nephew of Abraham Isaac
Kook, the first chief rabbi of British Mandatory Palestine.
Kook, who used the pseudonym Peter Bergson, traveled to the
United States in 1940 to lobby for U.S. support for Jewish
immigration to Palestine and the creation of a Jewish state.
After news of the Nazi genocide reached the United States in
late 1942 and early 1943, Bergson established the Emergency
Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, a political
action committee that sought U.S. action to rescue Jewish
refugees.
Bergson understood the need for
dramatic tactics to publicize his cause. To alert the American
public about the Nazi massacres, the Bergson group sponsored a
theatrical pageant called ‘We Will Never Die,’ authored by
Academy Award-winning screenwriter Ben Hecht, which was viewed
by more than 40,000 people at Madison Square Garden and then in
other cities around the country. The Bergson activists also
sponsored
more than two hundred newspaper
advertisements
urging the United States government to rescue the refugees.”[7]
The identification of an
absurdity is something that should make any rational person
stop, for it is evidence that something important remains to be
properly understood. But I have not shown you one yet -- so far
this all makes sense. If the European Jews were being
exterminated, it was perfectly natural for Jews who were in
safety to try to do something about it. Jewish unity was equally
to be expected, and in fact the Bergson effort brought together
“an interesting array of hasidic rabbis side by side with rabbis
known as mitnagdim, the traditional theological critics of
Hasidism.” In other words, important differences were set aside
in the Bergson effort because the Jewish people was being
exterminated in Europe and unity was more important. The above
does not contain absurdities: the Bergson effort made perfect
sense.
No, the absurdity is here, in the
article’s next sentence:
“Bergson’s hard-hitting approach
rattled some mainstream American Jewish leaders, who feared that
loud protests might provoke antisemitism.”
Ponder that. What could be
the most extreme consequence of antisemitism? Why, an
anti-Jewish genocide. So what could “some mainstream American
Jewish leaders” fear might happen? The
Jewish people was already being exterminated.
There is a joke told of two Jews,
right before they are killed:
“Sam and Irving are facing the
firing squad. The executioner comes forward to place the
blindfold on them. Sam disdainfully and proudly refuses, tearing
the thing from his face. Irving turns to him and pleads: ‘Please
Sam, don’t make trouble!’”
The structure of this joke is
identical to what happened when Peter Bergson tried to pressure
the US government to save Jewish lives in Europe, causing “some
mainstream American Jewish leaders” to say to his protesting
rabbis: “Please, don’t make trouble.” The joke makes fun of a
pathology of reasoning but the extermination of the Jewish
people is not funny; if we do not want more exterminations of
the Jewish people, we must understand this pathology of
reasoning.
There is a promise in the above
joke, and in that promise is locked a hope of mine. The joke is
Jewish not only because it depicts Jews but because it is
told by Jews (it is quite famous, and I heard it first from
a Jewish friend). This is important, because by telling this
joke Jews demonstrate that they are -- at some level -- aware
that a certain pathology of reasoning makes their self-defense
difficult.[7a]
I have reason to hope, therefore, that a more careful reflection
may be possible for the Jewish people before it is too late
again. But we must move to a level of analysis considerably more
sophisticated than the passing joke. And then there must be
action.
Let us now return to the Wyman
Institute piece and look the full absurdity in the face:
“Bergson’s hard-hitting approach
rattled some mainstream American Jewish leaders, who feared that
loud protests might provoke antisemitism. …Yet there were also
pockets of sympathy for the Bergson group within the Jewish
leadership.”
Given that the death factories
from Auschwitz to Jasenovac were at that very minute busy
murdering millions of innocent Jews, and billowing with smoke,
where would you expect to find mere “pockets of sympathy” for
those protesting this outrage? In a mostly antisemitic
population. But the population in question here is “the Jewish
leadership.”
“[the Bergson march] was to be
the only rally in Washington on the rescue issue during the
entire period of the Holocaust [but t]he idea of Jews marching
through streets of the nation’s capital, promoting specifically
Jewish requests such as rescue, especially during wartime, was
anathema to mainstream Jewish leaders.”
The above does not make one
little bit of sense. Why is the idea of rescue odious
“especially during wartime”? Are people supposed to be rescued
in peacetime? And why is “the only rally [!] in Washington on
the rescue issue during the entire period of the Holocaust”
a “specifically
Jewish request”? It isn’t. This was a
crime against humanity.
You see, the problem is not
merely that the reaction of the Jewish leadership was absurd,
but that the author chronicling this reaction writes absurdly.
After all, given that the Jewish people was already being
exterminated, the right thing to do here was obvious. So how
could the request for rescue be “anathema” to mainstream Jewish
leaders? What in the world were they for, as Jewish
leaders, if they could not find it in themselves to oppose an
anti-Jewish genocide?
It is significant that the
author, Rafael Medoff, directs the David S. Wyman Institute for
Holocaust Studies, and also that he is one of the few people to
do significant research on the Bergson effort. If he finds it
difficult to write in a sensible manner, then it is unlikely
that the majority of the Jewish people can learn from their own
history. An institute of Holocaust studies should
straightforwardly refute the arguments that supported the
reasoning of Bergson's opponents, and which contributed to the
deaths of millions. This is what I am doing here. My task is not
difficult, because the issue is very clear, and the facts speak
very loudly. |
Hillel Kook
( alias Peter Bergson )
“a
kind of prince... a ladies man, a bon vivant... very
bright and ambitious, with British manners and a great name --
Kook
”
Eliahu Amikam,
quoted in Rapoport (1999:22)
Ben Hecht
“Ben
Hecht was Bergson's most important recruit... one of the most
talented people anywhere...a formidable playwright
”
Louis
Rapoport (1999:53) |
Why Peter
Bergson was obviously right and the “mainstream American
Jewish leaders” who opposed him, obviously wrong.
_____________________
The Americans whom Peter
Bergson tried to mobilize had a relatively good
ideology: they were learning to think in the
universalist terms of human rights, democracy, and
tolerance. The proof: these same ordinary Americans, led
by the descendants of slaves, both African and Jewish,
would soon learn to hold hands across a phony ‘racial’
barrier, producing the Civil Rights movement that
transformed the United States despite determined
resistance from the US ruling elite. Since the US ruling
elite was already antisemitic (see below), the way to
defend the Jews in World War II was obviously to
mobilize these ordinary Americans against the policies
of the US government, controlled by the US ruling elite.
“...in American society,
the rabid, hard-core anti-Semites incapable of
recognizing Jews as fellow human beings were distinctly
in the minority. For much of the country, anti-Jewish
sentiment was not so impervious to issues of human
suffering and human decency. ...American Jews...compromise[d]
appeals for rescue to a degree that underestimated the
surrounding society's capacity to respond positively.”[7b]
But Peter Bergson judged
the compassion and decency of Americans correctly, and
he did his best to mobilize them. In order to do so, as
we've seen above, Bergson resorted to “dramatic tactics”
including a “theatrical pageant...which was viewed by
more than 40,000 people at Madison Square Garden and
then in other cities around the country,” in addition to
sponsoring “more than two hundred newspaper
advertisements urging the United States government to
rescue the refugees.” The point of this strategy was to
make democracy work: to make it impossible for the US
ruling elite to ignore the wishes of ordinary Americans,
now made conscious of the plight of the European Jews,
and mobilized for their defense. In this way, the
Bergson group hoped to force the US government to do
something to help the European Jews who yet lived
(at that time, about 4 million).
There is no question that
this was an uphill battle, because “rabid, hard-core
anti-Semites incapable of recognizing Jews as fellow
human beings,” though rare among ordinary US citizens,
were in choking abundance in the halls of power. To see
the justice of this claim, the following list of
well-documented facts will more than suffice (skeptics
are encouraged to consult the footnotes, which will send
you to the hyperlinked documentation):
1) before the war, the US
ruling elite assisted the rise of the Nazi party and
ideology in Germany[8];
2) during the war, this
elite, which controlled the US government, not only
refused to do anything to help Hitler’s victims (which
is why the Bergson effort became necessary), but in fact
assisted Hitler’s Final Solution in various ways[9];
3) after the war ended,
the US ruling elite deployed the Marshall Plan to assist
the fascist countries that had plunged the world into
war and murdered so many millions of people in cold
blood (not only Jews, but also more than 20 million
Russians, millions of Poles, hundreds of thousands of
Serbs and Roma, and on and on…);
4) in addition, after the
war the US ruling elite absorbed in secret tens of
thousands of Nazi war criminals who were used to create
what became US Intelligence, covertly sponsoring the
rise to power of disguised fascists in post-war Europe[10];
and finally
5) the US ruling elite
assisted the 1948 British effort to destroy the new
state of Israel, which involved (among other things)
sending captured Nazi officers to lead the Arab armies
that publicly pledged themselves to exterminate the
Israeli Jews.[11]
It is the last point that
deserves our closest attention here.
Although the US voted in
1947 in favor of partitioning the former British Mandate
for ‘Palestine’ into an Arab and a Jewish state, it did
so only because the Soviet Union had loudly endorsed
this project, placing US president Harry Truman in an
impossible position.[12]
So Truman ordered his ambassador at the UN to vote in
favor of partition, over the objections of the entire US
Department of State. This very lukewarm US ‘support’ for
the state of Israel would not last long. When the Arab
armies -- led by the German Nazi war criminals whom the
obliging British government sent -- attempted to
exterminate the Israeli Jews the next year, the US
government did a 180-degree turn and announced that it
no longer recognized the state of Israel, moreover
slapping an arms embargo on the Israelis to sabotage
their defense.[12]
The US citizenry didn’t
like that.
According to the New York
City police, 250,000 US citizens exploded onto the
streets of New York in a massive protest against the
policies of their own and the British government. They
came from 100 cities and 14 states, and they marched and
rallied to defend the Jewish people. This was a protest
the likes of which the city of New York had not seen
before, and hasn’t since. And the effect was to force
the US government to back down, because no such display
of popular will can be ignored.[13]
From how ordinary
Americans dramatically defended the Jews in 1948 it is
obvious that speaking against an ongoing attempt to
exterminate the Jewish people does not produce
antisemitism in ordinary Americans. Why? Because an
ongoing attempt to exterminate the Jewish people is
precisely what the war of 1948 was. I remind you,
however, that according to Rafael Medoff, the worry of
“mainstream American Jewish leaders” in October 1943 was
that the Bergson effort would supposedly provoke
antisemitism! If the “mainstream American Jewish
leaders” really believed that, then they suffered from
an extreme pathology of reasoning, because a) the
European Jews were already being exterminated, b) the US
ruling elite was already antisemitic and moreover
cooperating with the Final Solution, and c) the workers
-- Bergson’s target -- could clearly be mobilized to
defend the Jews, as was dramatically demonstrated just a
few years later, in 1948.
And Bergson gave his own
demonstration at the time, which is the most important
point here:
“In 1944, around 500,000
Americans, most of them gentiles [i.e. non-Jews], joined
the ‘Bergson Group’s’ struggle for rescuing Jews and the
establishment of a Jewish State in free Palestine.”[14a]
Should we be surprised
that Bergson got this many Americans to join his
pressure group? No. Kenneth Levin writes that, at the
time, “a Gallup poll revealed that 70 percent of
Americans supported temporary havens on American
territory” for the desperate European Jews. And yet,
Levin says, the “major American Jewish organizations did
not aggressively lobby for their establishment, largely,
still, out of fears of an anti-Semitic backlash.”[14b]
But this is absurd. Why would there be an antisemitic
backlash if what 70% of Americans wanted done was in
fact done, and when this was the obvious and
compassionate thing to do? But it was not ordinary
Americans, as we shall see below, that these mainstream
Jewish leaders were afraid of upsetting.
Despite active opposition
from mainstream Jewish leaders, this is what Peter
Bergson's mostly non-Jewish pressure group achieved:
“In 1943 [the Bergson
group] convinced Congress to kill recommendations of
State Department Arabist Harold Hoskins which would have
ruled Palestine off limits to further Jewish
immigration. In January 1944 they motivated Treasury
Secretary Henry Morgenthau [Jewish] to press Roosevelt
to create a War Refugee Board and recommended Ira
Hirschmann, the man responsible for saving thousands of
lives, to work in the Balkans.”[14]
As Louis Rapoport, who
has produced the most extensive documentation of the
Bergson effort, correctly says,
“The record of their achievements
refutes those who claim that ‘nothing could be done.’ Something
was done, and a great deal more could have been achieved
had the establishment Zionist and Jewish organizations not
concentrated so much of their efforts on destroying the ‘Bergson
group’. . .”[15]
It is important to
understand the enormity of Peter Bergson's achievement.
The American non-Jews he was trying to mobilize were
simultaneously witnessing the spectacle of a propaganda
campaign, by mainstream Jewish leaders, against
Peter Bergson. This is the sort of thing that naturally
destroyed the morale of many US citizens and made them
think, “Well, if the Jews are not defending themselves,
why should I?” And yet despite all this Bergson
succeeded in mobilizing enough gentile (non-Jewish) US
citizens to change certain official policies, and he
managed to create an official rescue effort, however
limited, that saved perhaps 200,000 lives. Just imagine
if he had been supported rather than opposed by the
mainstream Jewish leadership!
Peter Bergson was
right: The Jews were not
helpless, and what they needed to do was defend
themselves.
Here is an example of
what might have been: If the mainstream American Jewish
leadership had rallied behind Bergson, and mobilized
their considerable organizational resources, even bigger
crowds of gentiles would have joined to defend the
Jewish people, and then the US government might have
been convinced to bomb the death camps and/or the
railroads leading to the death camps, which would have
seriously inconvenienced the effort to extinguish the
European Jewish population. As it happens, the US
and Britain refused to do this, despite the fact that it
was very easy for them to do, and despite the repeated
desperate pleas, so the extermination of the Jewish
people continued apace until the very, very end of the
war, in 1945.[15a]
Among Jewish leaders
Peter Bergson was in the minority. In order to
understand the formidable forces that Jewish patriots
such as Bergson were taking on, I next ask the following
relevant questions:
1) How passionate were
“mainstream American Jewish leaders” in their opposition
to Peter Bergson?
2) Why did the
“mainstream American Jewish leaders” oppose themselves
to Peter Bergson and to other rescue efforts on behalf
of the European Jews?
3) How similar to
“mainstream American Jewish leaders” were mainstream
Jewish leaders elsewhere?
|
•
The way to
defend
the Jews in World War II was obviously to mobilize
ordinary Americans against the
policies of the US
government.
•
Harry Truman
Henry Morgenthau |
|
How passionate were
“mainstream American Jewish leaders” in their opposition to
Peter Bergson?
____________________________________________
They were passionate all right.
“During the era, Zionist leaders
like Rabbi [Stephen] Wise and Nahum Goldmann told the State
Department that Kook/Bergson was as big a threat as Hitler to
the well-being of American Jewry.”[16]
Adolf Hitler was carrying out the
systematic extermination of an entire people and culture: the
Eastern Jewish ‘Yiddish’ universe, a world full of complex
humor, advanced political and religious ideas, rich literature,
and lots of kind-hearted, peaceful people. Example: Peter
Bergson’s brother, from a family of Lithuanian Jews, would not
cry revenge after surviving an entirely unprovoked racist
attack; instead he would become a doctor, saving lives
explicitly in order to thank God for his narrow escape.[17]
The Eastern Jews were not an abstraction.
They were individuals, who laughed and joked around and
got drunk and danced, who thought, invented, and wrote, who
kissed their children or parents goodnight, who wondered whether
their loves would be returned, who got together once a week to
celebrate, and pray, and who said ‘Peace’ to each other every
time they greeted or parted company. This people was taken away
from us. It was a part of us -- a good part -- and it was
destroyed, which is why we call it a ‘crime against humanity,’
because it was a sin against us. And the
man committing the crime that cannot really be named, gouging
out this piece of us forever -- that man was Adolf Hitler. But
the mainstream Jewish leaders Rabbi Stephen Wise and Nahum
Goldmann told the US State Department that Peter Bergson, who
wanted to save as many of these people as he could, was like
Adolf Hitler. It is unclear from this alone whether they spoke
out of insanity or hypocrisy, but it certainly establishes that
Stephen Wise and Nahum Goldmann felt a white-hot hatred for
Peter Bergson.
Enlightenment begins with the
honest absorption of this simple fact.
More enlightenment comes from
extending the insight to see if it is consistent with other
things that happen also to be true. For example, we may consider
that Bergson was the political leader of the Irgun, a Jewish
underground army in British Mandate ‘Palestine.’ The ideology of
the Irgun was that all Jews were equal, and that the Irgun
should represent and defend them all.
“The Irgunists felt that they
were saving the Jewish family, and it did not matter at that
point in history if an uncle was never going to milk a cow on
the kibbutz, or that he was lazy or drank too much. He had every
right to get out of the cauldron of Europe and to be brought to
Palestine. They could not tell him that ‘your credentials aren’t
good enough to be a New Jew; go back to Poland.’ Yet that was
the openly stated position of many mainstream Zionists -- even
after the war had begun...”[18]
There had been pogroms
(i.e. unprovoked, anti-Jewish racist attacks, involving pillage
and murder) everywhere in Eastern Europe, and the annihilation
of the Jewish people was being promised by Adolf Hitler in his
speeches if war broke out, and then it did begin when the war
broke out. So the Irgun believed that you could not pick and
choose: every Jew had a right to live in safety.
This was the ideology of the Irgun, of which
Peter Bergson was the political leader.
By contrast,
“Reform Rabbi Stephen Wise, the
undisputed leader of organized American Jewry, called [Vladimir
Zeev] Jabotinsky a ‘traitor’ for preaching evacuation of over a
million eastern Jews. ...Furthermore, Wise claimed, the
Jabotinsky movement was guilty of bringing unselected,
‘unsuitable’ Jews to Palestine. As the United Palestine Appeal’s
director Henry Montor [an ally of Wise] wrote, ‘No responsible
person has ever said that Palestine could hold all the millions
of Jews who need shelter.’ Montor condemned those who ignored
the ‘need’ for selecting Jews ‘worthy’ of settling in Palestine:
‘I think it is fair to point out that many who have been brought
into Palestine by the Revisionists [sic] have been prostitutes
and criminals.”[19]
Lots of consistency here.
First, Stephen Wise, who felt a
white-hot hatred for Bergson, also hated Jabotinsky, and
Jabotinsky, it turns out, had the same ideology as Bergson’s
Irgun: he considered that all Jews were equal, and therefore all
deserved to live in safety. Since Wise and Co. slandered
supposedly low-quality Jews unworthy of a state as “prostitutes
and criminals,” we have an irony, because Wise and Co. were the
ones accusing Jabotinsky’s Revisionists, who believed that all
Jews were equal, of supposedly being ‘fascists’ -- kind of like
how Wise and Co. compared Peter Bergson to Adolf Hitler.
“Labor Zionist activist Marie
Syrkin denounced Revisionism as comparable to 'German or Italian
fascism,' and Stephen Wise's son James, editor of the monthly
journal Opinion, criticized what he considered the
'fascist tendencies' of the Revisionist movement. ...Stephen
Wise denounced [Revisionism as]...'Fascism in Yiddish or
Hebrew.' [Yet] Jabotinsky in fact denounced totalitarianism and
championed liberal democracy...”[19a]
Also not coincidentally,
Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Party was loosely allied with the Irgun,
and Bergson and Jabotinsky had a very good relationship.
Neither is it coincidence that
Peter Bergson, on his mother’s side, was a prince of the
relatively small Lubavitch movement, which interestingly is a
form of Orthodox Judaism that nevertheless has always advocated
the national union of all Jews (reform, atheist,
whatever), without distinction or prejudice.[20]
These days, one can more easily find
Jewish patriots in the Lubavitch movement than elsewhere.
Finally, it is not coincidence
that the opponents of Peter Bergson’s Irgun, in British Mandate
‘Palestine’ as in the US, were the mainstream Jewish
leaders; the Irgun was relatively small.
This does not exhaust the
consistencies, for it turns out that Rabbi Stephen Wise opposed
saving Jewish lives in many different contexts, despite the fact
that he was, among Jewish leaders, the first to have
confirmation, in 1942, that the European Jews would be
exterminated.[24a]
For example, before the situation
became hopeless, “when British prime minister [Neville]
Chamberlain suggested that Jewish refugees from Hitler go to the
former German colony of Tanganyika” Stephen Wise had a “scornful
rejoinder”: “I would rather have my fellow Jews die in Germany
than live in lands which bear the imprint of yesterday’s
occupation by Germany.”[21]
I can hardly imagine anything more absurd: Wise expressed his
supposed opposition to Nazi Germany by proudly offering the
German Jews up for Hitler to slaughter! Needless to say, he was
not thereby offering himself. Louis Rapoport quotes the
above statement by Wise, and on the same page writes, “it is
inconceivable and clearly slanderous to say that American Jewish
leaders were opposed to saving European Jews.” But I doubt that
Rapoport would be ruling out this interpretation if it had been
a gentile thus replying to Chamberlain, which underscores the
sheer extremity of Wise’s position, however interpreted.
In the summer of 1939, as
immigration opportunities everywhere were being denied to the
desperate Jews of Europe on the eve of war, the S.S. Saint
Louis, a Hamburg-American Line ship, sailed for American
shores full of Jewish passengers who had, with great difficulty,
legally obtained visas for the United States. This ship was
turned away by the US authorities, partly thanks to Stephen
Wise.
“A few American journalists and
clergymen called it one of the most shameful episodes in the
history of the so-called ‘haven for the oppressed,’ the United
States. ...It appears in retrospect that the St. Louis
was a test case for the Nazis. It confirmed their theory that
the democracies were unconcerned about the fate of the Jews, and
it therefore advanced the prospects for a ‘Final Solution’ to
the ‘Jewish problem.’ The American Joint Distribution
Committee...did finally succeed in finding refuge in various
European countries for the passengers of that ship, but most of
them would eventually perish in Hitler’s death camps.
Organized American Jews, led by
Rabbi Wise, had not only let down the St. Louis
passengers, but they also failed to press for passage of the
Wagner bill, which had called for the admission of 20,000
‘German’ refugee children. The term ‘German’ was used instead of
‘Jewish’ in the draft of the bill because of the prevailing
aversion to bringing Jews to America, led, among others, by the
anti-Semitic ‘tobacco senator’ Robert Reynolds of North
Carolina. ...The cautious attitude of American Jewish leaders
guaranteed that the bill would be defeated when it came before
Congress that fateful May.”[22]
After the war broke out, Peter
Bergson’s Irgun demonstrated that they could save lives but the
mainstream Jewish leaders were more interested in opposing them.
“...an Irgun ship guided by
Jabotinsky’s son, Eri, brought over 2000 refugees down the
Danube route to Palestine, underscoring the fact that even with
war raging, it was still possible to get Jews out, even from
territories under Nazi control… Since the day after the war
broke out six months earlier, the Irgun had sent fourteen barely
seaworthy ships out of Europe; but the mainstream Zionist
movement continued to attack their efforts.”[23]
There seems to have been nothing
Stephen Wise would shrink from when it came to attacking Peter
Bergson. He was, for example, friends with Edgar Hoover, and
starting in April 25, 1941, he began asking for interviews with
FBI agents. Rapoport asks, “Did Stephen Wise provide the FBI
with information on Peter Bergson?” We cannot know, because to
this day the information on this remains classified, but this is
not a wild hypothesis, given that a) Wise was telling the State
Department that Bergson was like Hitler, b) he was opposing
Bergson in every way, and c) he considered Bergson a threat to
his political position, which depended on his relationship with
people such as Hoover and Roosevelt (see below). What we do know
is that the FBI was not acting speedily enough to please Wise,
because he complained about it.[24]
It is true that, in public,
Stephen Wise denounced Hitler's genocide, but so did Roosevelt,
and talk is cheap. So the question is:
Why so much opposition to Peter
Bergson, who after all meant to save Jewish lives? |
Nahum Goldmann
Adolf Hitler
Vladimir Zeev
Jabotinsky
“For
Hillel Kook and his friends...
Jabotinsky was a larger-than-life figure, ‘the greatest Jew
since Moses’...
”
Louis
Rapoport (1999:24) |
Why did the
“mainstream American Jewish leaders” oppose themselves to
Peter Bergson and to other rescue efforts on behalf of the
European Jews?
______________________________________
Louis Rapoport says that, in
the United States, “The Jewish leaders feared that they
would be suspected of ‘double loyalty’” if they defended the
Jews.[24b]
Double loyalty? Madness. The Jewish people was being
exterminated; compassion by Jewish leaders towards Hitler's
Jewish victims cannot be construed as ‘double loyalty.’ The
refusal of these leaders to act, and their sabotage of those
who did defend the European Jews, was disloyalty
to the Jewish people, and loyalty to the antisemites.
Indeed, on the same page Rapoport says:
“[Rabbi Stephen] Wise,
faced by the fierce opposition of the Jew-hating
American right, was determined to keep a low profile,
and he urged other Jewish leaders to do the same.”
Moral cowardice. Even if
these Jewish leaders were right that they would have been
accused of ‘double loyalty’ for defending their European
brethren, the right thing to do was still to fight to save
Hitler's victims with all their energies. This is morally
obvious.
But in any case Peter Bergson
was demonstrating that, even at face value, Wise's supposed
argument for abandoning the European Jews was an utter
fallacy. For that very minute, after witnessing an assertive
defense of the European Jews by a Jewish leader in the
United States, a great many ordinary US citizens were
finding their consciences stirred, and they developed an
ardent desire to join the fight: as we saw above, 500,000 US
citizens, mostly non-Jews, joined Bergson's pressure
movement and forced the US government to take action,
however belatedly and reluctantly. And US citizens would
again demonstrate their basic goodness in 1948 when 250,000
of them marched in New York in passionate defense of the
Jews (see above). A third demonstration was given during the
Civil Rights movement. This should not be surprising; quite
unlike the US ruling elite, ordinary working- and
middle-class Americans tend to have, comparatively speaking,
a very good ideology -- they are some of the best people in
the world.
It does not appear, at any
rate, that Stephen Wise and Co. were considering the views
of ordinary US citizens at all. Louis Rapoport explains:
“. . .the established Jewish
organizations were fossilized and often led by
self-righteous, unenlightened men concerned mainly with the
prestige of office.”[25]
In other words, Wise and
other mainstream Jewish leaders were worried that they
had something to lose if they rocked the boat. Wise’s
position of power and influence in the Jewish community
depended on keeping the antisemitic gentiles who ran the
United States happy. Louis Rapoport gives a picture of Wise
as totally subservient to Roosevelt, who treated Wise with
contempt:
“President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, whom Wise called ‘Boss’ or ‘Chief,’ regarded the
rabbi as pompous and a pest, and once wrote to him, ‘...you
care more for personal publicity than for good government.’
FDR delighted in teasing ‘Stevey,’ who acted like an awed
courtier whenever he visited the White House. But the
results of this absurd relationship would help compound the
tragedy of the Jews of Europe. Even his admirers concede
that Wise’s loyalty to Roosevelt ‘blinded his judgment,’ and
his reliance on FDR would have ‘terrible results.’”[26]
Naturally it would have
terrible results, because the immigration policy of the US,
with Roosevelt’s personal and explicit authority, was
designed not merely to deny entry to desperate Jews, but to
make sure they ended up trapped in Europe, where
Hitler would find them.[27]
Loyalty to Roosevelt meant loyalty to
this.
Though loyalty to Roosevelt
and other antisemites running the US government was enough
to produce opposition to Peter Bergson in the mainstream
Jewish leaders, they had other reasons too.
“[Nahum] Goldmann [Stephen
Wise’s Richelieu, according to Rapoport], a sworn enemy of
Jabotinsky and the nationalistic Jewish movement, wanted
total control of world Jewry concentrated in his hands, and
said so unabashedly. The World Jewish Congress, which he had
set up with Wise, was ‘the single address’ in his mind.”[28]
The Revisionist/Irgun
attempts to rescue Jews would naturally raise the prestige
of the Revisionist/Irgun movement in the Diaspora, and would
populate the future state of Israel with Jews who had a
reason to thank the Revisionist/Irgun movement, which would
undermine the political position of mainstream Zionists such
as Rabbi Stephen Wise and Nahum Goldmann. Louis Rapoport
makes explicit reference to this issue as well:
“For years, Rabbi Wise was
engaged in a bitter struggle for power with the more
activist Zionists led by Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver and
Emanuel Neumann, whose militancy would be constantly spurred
by the growing appeal of the Bergson group.”[29]
One clear expression of how
Stephen Wise cared only about his own power is as follows:
“In the United States, Rabbi
Stephen Wise issued a statement to the press in November
1939, condemning ‘the activities of independent
organizations seeking to duplicate or parallel the work of
the Jewish Agency.’ Wise ignored the fact that at that time
the Jewish Agency’s own activities were extremely limited.”[30]
War had already broken out
(Hitler invaded Poland on 1 September 1939), and some people
not under Stephen Wise’s authority were trying desperately
to save as many Jewish lives as they could. Wise really
didn’t like that. The extent to which he didn’t may be
measured by the colossal absurdity of his statement: if the
Jewish Agency had been busy saving Jewish lives, how could
it be a bad thing to duplicate its activities? This would
have meant more Jewish lives saved! And yet, the Jewish
Agency (represented for several years in New York by Wise’s
ally and Bergson’s enemy Nahum Goldmann) was mostly not
saving Jewish lives. Obviously, what really mattered to
Stephen Wise was making sure that no Jewish political
activity took place except under the aegis of his own
organizations, the better to concentrate his power. The
reason he called those groups that were saving Jewish
lives “independent organizations” is that they were
independent of his authority.
I have focused on Stephen
Wise because he was so important, but the problem was a
general one: most Jews in positions of power in the US
allied with the antisemites, not with the Jews, and even
Jews in power who did act for rescue did so belatedly and
timidly. For example, Secretary of the Treasury Henry
Morgenthau, who was instrumental in the creation of the War
Refugee Board that saved some 200,000 Jewish lives,
nevertheless cannot be called an enthusiastic Jewish
patriot.
"...it is noteworthy that
even Morgenthau, although aware for much of the previous
year of State Department obstructionism and although
obviously concerned for the fate of Europe's Jews, hesitated
to confront the president. He acted only after months of
urging by key figures on his staff (Josiah DuBois, Randolph
Paul, John Pehle, Ansel Luxford) and by Oscar Cox of the
Lend-Lease Administration, all of them non-Jews, and only
after being presented by his staff with their 'Report to the
Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the
Murder of the Jews.'"[30a]
And yet Morgenthau was a vast
improvement over most other Jews in positions of power in the
United States.
"Samuel Rosenman, special
counsel to the president and an advisor on Jewish matters,
worked consistently against the president's taking steps
that would have abetted rescue. When the Bergson group
organized a delegation of Orthodox rabbis to visit
Washington and lobby Congress and the administration for
intervention, Rosenman tried to block the visit and then
encouraged Roosevelt in his decision not to meet with the
rabbis. When the WRB [the War Refugee Board, which Bergson's
pressure group finally forced the Roosevelt administration
to create] pressed the White House for a more explicit
statement threatening war-crimes prosecutions against those
involved in the slaughter of the Jews, Rosenman worked to
quash the effort and subsequently to water down the
statement, placing less emphasis on crimes against the Jews.
(The statement he diluted had been approved by three Cabinet
departments and had even gained State Department support).
Rosenman also fought Morgenthau on the creation of the WRB."[30b]
The situation in Congress was
not better:
"Of Jews in Congress at the
time, [historian] David Wyman writes, 'Only Emmanuel Celler
persistently urged government rescue actions... Sol Bloom
[as Wyman documents] sided with the State Department
throughout.' Bloom was chairman of the House Foreign Affairs
Committee and in a particularly good position to exert some
pressure to promote rescue. But he appears to have been most
concerned with overcoming whatever prejudice there might be
toward him as a Jew, especially in the State Department, by
demonstrating his capacity to rise above 'particularlist'
issues like the fate of European Jewry."[30c]
These Jewish leaders were
careful not to upset the antisemites who had allowed them to
rise to positions of power, and moreover they “feared that
the Bergson group’s growing popularity might usurp their own
positions of prominence in the Jewish community.”[31]
It is important to
state without mincing any words what these mainstream
American Jewish leaders achieved while nursing their own
egos and advancing their criminally narrow personal
political interests: they gave
Adolf Hitler courage.
As James Carroll says,
“As late as 1938, in a
furious public rebuttal by Hitler to the world leaders who
had denounced the Kristallnacht pogroms, his decidedly
unfinal solution to the Jewish problem was still ‘Jews
out!,’ not ‘Jews dead!’ His proposal, at that point,
was...the expulsion of all Jews from the lands controlled by
the Reich. Jews were offered immediate exit visas -- but
exit to where? The same world leaders, notably Neville
Chamberlain and Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had denounced the
anti-Jewish violence of the Nazis declined to receive Jews
as refugees... Crucial to [the Final Solution] building to a
point of no return was Hitler’s discovery (late) of the
political indifference of the democracies to the fate of the
Jews...”[32]
Of course, most members of
the ruling elites in the US and Britain were not really
indifferent -- they were antisemitic. Still, Jews would have
been received in these countries if there had been internal
pressure to rescue the Jewish people, precisely because they
were democracies, however imperfect (Peter Bergson’s
objective would be, precisely, to generate such internal
pressure). But the turning away of the St. Louis,
which returned to Europe in June 1939, only two months
before Adolf Hitler invaded Poland, demonstrated that even
Jews with legally obtained visas would not be received in
the US. This ‘victory’ of Rabbi Stephen Wise over his Jewish
opponents “confirmed [the Nazis in] their theory that the
democracies were unconcerned about the fate of the Jews, and
it therefore advanced the prospects for a ‘Final Solution’
to the ‘Jewish problem.’”
A rocket scientist is
not required to conclude this: You
do not gain compassion from a racist murderer if you don’t
defend yourself, and moreover encourage bystanders not to
defend you. What you achieve with this is that you encourage
the racist murderer.
|
•
Compassion
by Jewish leaders towards Hitler’s Jewish victims cannot be
construed as ‘double loyalty.’
•
Franklin Delano
Roosevelt
“FDR
delighted in teasing ‘Stevey,’ who acted like an awed courtier
whenever he visited the White House.
”
Louis
Rapoport (1999:61)
Rabbi Abba Hillel
Silver |
|
How similar to
“mainstream American Jewish leaders” were mainstream Jewish
leaders elsewhere?
____________________________________________
I am sorry to report that there
are plenty of examples of mainstream Jewish leaders elsewhere
behaving much in the same way that mainstream American Jewish
leaders did. I will focus on the case of the Jewish leadership
in Britain for the following reasons:
1) like the US, Britain never
became Nazi-occupied;
2) like the US, Britain was a
democracy;
3) although the British
leadership, like the American leadership, was mostly antisemitic,
and though the British Foreign Office, like the US State
Department, did its very best to sabotage the rescue of Jews, a
clear opportunity to save thousands of Jewish lives was
sabotaged by the mainstream Jewish leaders in London; and
5) this has now been well
documented.
Above James Carroll says that,
before the Nazis settled on the Final Solution, “Jews were
offered immediate exit visas -- but exit to where?” Recently,
historian Frank Shapiro has produced ground-breaking research
that has answered this question: Northern Rhodesia (modern
Zambia, with its capital in Lusaka). The refutation of the
common belief that ‘there was no place to go’ has come late
because the relevant documents in Britain were kept classified
for more than fifty years. He writes:
“Throughout the world a
politically brutal and inhumane picture had emerged: The free
western countries were swiftly closing their gates to any form
of mass Jewish immigration... Palestine, which was the natural
and legitimate solution -- as defined under international law in
the terms of the mandate granted to Britain by the League of
Nations -- was now put strictly out of bounds. When war broke
out in September 1939, it was too late to seek a negotiated
solution for these millions of people. By then the Jews were
well and truly locked within the graveyard of Europe. Their fate
had been sealed.”
But there was a place Jews
could go to:
“The mosaic of evidence confirms
that vast numbers of Jewish refugees could have been saved and
allowed to settle in Northern Rhodesia.”[33]
The main players pushing to make
possible a large-scale settlement plan for Jewish refugees in
Northern Rhodesia, a protectorate of the British Crown, were 1)
Reverend Cohen of the Bulawayo Hebrew Congregation in Southern
Rhodesia, 2) J.E. (Chirupula) Stephenson, a gentile and
prominent British colonist in Rhodesia, whom Shapiro considers a
saint, and who with remarkable energy did absolutely everything
in his power to save Jewish lives, and 3) the Colonial Secretary
Malcolm McDonald, who -- apparently in an effort to distract
from the fact that he wasn't letting any Jewish refugees enter
British Mandate 'Palestine' -- was ready to act on the Northern
Rhodesian scheme even if it meant upsetting both the Governor of
Rhodesia (a subordinate of McDonald’s) and a faction of British
colonists in Rhodesia who were antisemites. (As it turns out,
however, most of the prominent Northern Rhodesian colonists who
initially opposed mass Jewish immigration ended up in support
when the situation of the European Jews became desperate.[34])
[INSERTED NOTE (4 April
2006): Malcolm McDonald was responsible for the British
White Paper of 1939, which was a dramatically anti-Jewish
measure that prevented desperate Jews from taking refuge in
the most obvious place: British Mandate Palestine, where the
Jews had an internationally recognized right under the
League of Nations to create a national home.[34a]
So this needs to be kept in mind when McDonald's enthusiasm
for the Rhodesian scheme is evaluated. It is likely that
McDonald was merely trying to produce a political appearance
of concern, there to counter the (deserved!) appearance of
British callousness toward the Jews. In any case, the desire
to produce this political appearance could have been
exploited by Jewish leaders in Britain to save Jewish lives.
-- FGW]
There were ups and downs, plans
were proposed, revised, then aborted, then new plans proposed,
and so forth. However, as the situation in Europe became ever
more desperate, a plan for mass settlement of Jewish refugees in
Northern Rhodesia was eventually very seriously contemplated
thanks mainly to Cohen, Stephenson, and McDonald, and then it
was approved. This would have allowed perhaps as many as
3000 Jews to take refuge in Northern Rhodesia, which was much
less than what was obviously possible, and consequently much
less than what Reverend Cohen and ‘Chirupula’ Stephenson had
been passionately advocating, but still better than what was
being offered anywhere else.
But the mainstream Jewish
leadership in Britain discouraged Malcolm McDonald, and kept the
Northern Rhodesia option secret from the desperate European
Jews.
Frank Shapiro explains who was in
charge:
“Until the 1930s, the lay
leadership of Britain’s Jewish community remained the
prerogative of an exclusive cadre of personalities of well
established, anglicized [Jewish] families, such as Anthony de
Rothschild, Neville Laski, Sir Robert Waley Cohen, Sir Osmond
D’Avigdor-Goldsmid, Lord Bearsted, Sir Herbert Samuel, and Simon
Marks, who provided traditional, paternalistic-style guidance.
. . .[After offering to defray
all costs of asylum seekers, freeing the British government of
all responsibility,] control over the category of refugees
admitted became the responsibility of the voluntary
organizations which became centralized in the Emigration
(Planning) Committee of the Council of German Jewry, whose
chairman was Anthony de Rothschild and Professor Bentwich its
director. This committee was to be the primary organization
dealing with Jewish refugee settlement in Britain’s overseas
colonies [because they were not being admitted into Britain!].”[35]
On June 10, 1939, a Mission
headed by Sir James Dunnett and appointed to study the
feasibility of a mass settlement scheme for Jewish refugees in
Northern Rhodesia completed its inquiries. The Mission concluded
with the most ambitious official recommendation, which was quite
modest compared to what was in fact possible, but at any rate
much better than nothing: 440 families (Eastern European Jewish
families were large, so these might have been as many as 3000
people).
“It would have been expected that
with the publication of the Mission’s findings favoring the
settlement of some four hundred refugee families, Rothschild’s
Emigration (Planning) Committee would have immediately struck
while the iron was hot and malleable, and transported the
agreed-upon quota into Northern Rhodesia as fast as possible.
Unfortunately, this was not to be. The idea of the report’s
findings bothered Anthony de Rothschild, who expressed the wish
to keep the findings under wraps for the time being.”[36]
For the time being.
This was June 1939, and the
invasion of Poland, which began the World War and sealed the
fate of Europe’s Jews when Hitler overran the continent, was
only two and a half months away.
Colonial Secretary Malcolm
McDonald was prepared to order the Governor of Northern
Rhodesia, his subordinate, to accept the refugees, overriding
any local opposition. In a statement prepared for McDonald’s
confrontation with Sir John Maybin, the Governor, and quoted by
Shapiro, the London bureaucrats expressed that:
“HMG [Her Majesty’s Government]
would in all probability find themselves compelled to overrule
the views of the Governor and of his Legislative Council,
assuming that those views continued to be unfavorable to
large-scale settlement.”[37]
But the body supposedly created
to save Jewish lives, and presided by the mainstream Jewish
leader Anthony de Rothschild, would not give its endorsement.
“However, the Emigration
(Planning) Committee jettisoned the Mission’s plan and had no
intention of implementing it. In their discussion on the
Mission’s findings, rather than working out a concrete
settlement plan, the members of Rothschild’s committee
deliberated how to hide the positive intentions; how to keep the
report hushed up, and what the likely reactions would be to any
publication.”[38]
[emphasis original]
And they worried they might be
attacked for this, which reveals consciousness of guilt:
“One of the leading Emigration
(Planning) Committee members, Lord Hailey, . . .was particularly
worried about how to deal with the potential accusations against
the Emigration (Planning) Committee if they did not publish the
report.”[39]
The method of procrastination
became the assertion that other schemes (schemes that,
needless to say, came to nothing) should be considered first.
Naturally, this gave Malcolm McDonald’s Colonial Office the
cover it needed to do nothing, and so
“. . .the Colonial Office went
along with Rothschild’s Committee’s rejection and took the view
now taken by the Committee, namely that all considerations of
the Mission’s Report were to be shelved until information
regarding British Guiana was forthcoming.”[40]
Your capacity for shock has not
yet been exhausted. Faced with the disaster of the hushing of
the Mission’s Report,
“At the end of July 1939,
‘Chirupula’ Stephenson wrote directly to Rothschild offering a
business deal regarding his own [Rhodesian] farm as a means to
rehabilitate the refugees. Wishing to retire, he offered the
Emigration (Planning) Committee his farm for sale, whereby he
would become Life Director in an ensuing established limited
company. According to Stephenson, the farm comprising some
12,500 acres could support 1,250 men and women growing crops for
export. His message was passed on to the Emigration (Planning)
Committee and almost three weeks passed before Stephenson
received an answer: ‘the Committee decided that for the time
being no measures will be taken in regard to refugee settlement
in Northern Rhodesia.’”
For the time being.
The invasion of Poland would happen in
another week.
Perhaps the most amazing thing
about this story lies in a point that Frank Shapiro goes out of
his way to document and impress upon the reader: although there
was a lot of official back and forth about the mass settlement
scheme, while this was going on,
not one Jew who tried to
enter Northern Rhodesia, with or without a visa, was denied
entry. Every Jew who
found out about this made it in. But the Emigration (Planning)
Committee, which body knew this perfectly well, did not
publicize this fact either.
The documents relevant to this
case remained classified for more than fifty years: more
evidence of consciousness of guilt.
Is the current Jewish leadership
different? The next piece in this series will document that it
is not. But casting here just a brief glance into the future,
notice one deadly connection between the past and the present.
As we've seen above, “the Emigration (Planning) Committee,”
which body prevented at least 3000 Jewish lives from finding
save haven in Northern Rhodesia, “[was] headed by such eminent
personalities as...Lord [Herbert] Samuel...” This Herbert Samuel
had been the High Commissioner for Palestine, and he presided
over the elevation of Hajj Amin al Husseini as Mufti of
Jerusalem, after Hajj Amin demonstrated that he could
organize anti-Jewish terrorist riots in British Mandate
'Palestine'!
Hajj Amin al Husseini went on to organize
bigger anti-Jewish terrorist riots with the budget and authority
that Herbert Samuel gave him, and when the World War
exploded he became one of the main leaders of Adolf Hitler's
Final Solution in Europe. Later, he also mentored Yasser Arafat,
and grandfathered Fatah, Arafat's organization.[41]
This would be the
same Yasser Arafat and the same Fatah that current mainstream
Jewish leaders have labored energetically to empower inside the
Jewish state. |
Modern Zambia
( formerly, Northern
Rhodesia )
•
Not one
Jew who tried to enter Northern Rhodesia, with or without a
visa, was denied entry.
•
Herbert Samuel |
| |
|
________________________________________________________
Footnotes and Further Reading
________________________________________________________
“HOW DID THE ‘PALESTINIAN MOVEMENT’
EMERGE? The British sponsored it. Then
the German Nazis, and the US.”;
Historical and Investigative Research;
13 June 2006; by Francisco Gil-White.
http://www.hirhome.com/israel/pal_mov4.htm
Some of this material was originally
published here:
“Anti-Semitism, Misinformation, And The
Whitewashing Of The Palestinian
Leadership”; Israel National News; May
26, '03 / 24 Iyar 5763; by Francisco J.
Gil-White
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/article.php3?id=2405
|
|
|
¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ |
|
2 |
|
How
mainstream Diaspora Jewish |
|
leaders are
failing the Jewish people |
|
today |
|
________________________________________________________ |
“Edgar Bronfman, President of the World
Jewish Congress, ...suggested the [Jewish]
settlements [in the West Bank and Gaza] were
the key obstacle to peace and echoed [Hebrew
University] professor [Ze’ev] Sternhell in
advising the Palestinians that they would be
wise to focus their terror attacks on
settlers.”
SOURCE:
Levin, K. 2005. The Oslo syndrome:
Delusions of a people under siege.
Hanover, NH: Smith and Kraus. (p.493)
Hertzberg
Bronfman
Foxman
AIPAC
Others
________________________________________________________
Introduction
The
simplest way to explain why the European Jews
were exterminated in World War II is like this:
at the time, the conditions were just right to
produce an extermination of the European Jews.
But this explanation is too simple to be useful,
so we must specify, at least minimally, what
those conditions were that produced the Shoah
(Holocaust). I believe the main conditions are
five:
1) A group with an
antisemitic and genocidal ideology, the German
Nazis, controlled a great many resources,
whereas the Jews were in a weak position
relative to this power.
2) A great many people
came to believe, absurdly, as a result of
massive propaganda, that they were in mortal
danger from ‘the Jews,’ and that they therefore
needed to defend themselves from ‘the Jews.’
Many ordinary people, in consequence, either did
not oppose, or else cooperated with, the Nazi
power directly in charge of the Final Solution.
3) The democracies also
did not oppose, or else they cooperated with,
the progress of antisemitism and then the Final
Solution.
4) Incredibly, many
mainstream Jewish leaders preached to the Jews
that they should not defend themselves, and they
also sabotaged the efforts of those Jews who did
mount a defense (see
Part 1).
5) Incredibly, many
ordinary Jews chose to ignore the obvious signs
that they would be exterminated, heeding their
leaders’ calls not to defend themselves, or else
choosing to defend themselves when it was much
too late.
Between five and six
million Jews perished in one of the worst human
disasters in recorded history because the above
five conditions simultaneously manifested
themselves.
Now, one may
legitimately complain that the above is not very
satisfying. One should want to know,
after all, why the above five conditions came
about -- at least if one is interested in making
sense of history. However, the minimal and very
general explanation of the Shoah contained in
the above five conditions has a virtue: it
provides a simple checklist by which we can
predict that another such massive Catastrophe is
about to take place. In other words, if we are
agreed that the above five conditions are
broadly responsible for many millions of Jews
dying in the mid-twentieth century, then we are
entitled to expect that millions of Jews will
again perish if and when the above five
conditions recur. And so, if we are neither
antisemites, nor imbeciles, nor moral cowards,
we can work to prevent the next
Catastrophe if we see that the above five
conditions are once again being brought about.
HIR has published much
material supporting the view that the first
three conditions are manifesting themselves
today (consult the footnote).[1]
The present series on the problem of Jewish
self-defense is concerned with documenting that
conditions four and five are also manifesting
themselves.
I have divided Jewish
leaders into the following four useful
categories:
Part 1.
Diaspora Jewish organizations during WWII
Part 2.
Diaspora Jewish
leaders today.
Part 3.
Israeli leaders
today.
Part
4.
Israeli leaders in WWII (coming...)
Beyond this, in
Parts 5 and 6,
I will examine the problems ordinary Jews have
with self-defense, and the reasons why they
allow themselves, with disastrous results, to be
led by such people.
|
|
________________________________________________________
| A | Jewish leaders
in the Diaspora
________________________________________________________
Jewish leaders in the Diaspora are not
better today than they were in World War II. A full
documentation of their activities would keep us here forever, so
I will focus on a number of prominent examples that will be
sufficient to make my case.
Arthur Hertzberg
_______________
In
Part 1 we have seen that Reform
Rabbi Stephen Wise -- the most important American Jewish leader
of his day -- was terribly destructive to the effort to rescue
the desperate European Jews. As we also saw, most Jews are
completely ignorant of this history, which helps explain
what otherwise would be a colossal absurdity: the fact that they
celebrate the memory of Stephen Wise and name synagogues and
streets after him.
But why so much ignorance about something
so important? Here is a clue:
“At one time or another, and often
simultaneously, Stephen Wise was president or chairman of a
bewildering number of organizations, among them: the American
Jewish Congress, which he founded; the Zionist Organization of
America; the United Palestine Appeal; the World Jewish Congress,
which he co-founded with Nahum Goldmann; and the American Jewish
Conference, an umbrella group of dozens of US Jewish and Zionist
organizations.”[2]
In other words, the organizations that are
dominant in the Jewish mainstream today -- the ones that, by
educating the new generations of Jews about what happened in
World War II, might be helping protect the Jewish people from
the next massive attack -- were created by Stephen Wise and his
colleagues. What follows? That these organizations will prefer
that their shameful past not be properly understood, and hence
will not educate the Jewish people.
Consider what happened in 1981. In that
year, there was an effort to change the dangerous and absurd
state of Jewish ignorance about the role of the American Jewish
leadership in sabotaging the defense of the Jews during WWII. A
semi-official commission would study this chapter in history and
inform the public. Holocaust survivor Jack Eisner is who came up
with this idea, and he was going to provide the financing, but
in the end he didn’t because, according to him, the people
involved in the commission were going to “whitewash the truth”
rather than make it transparent.
Should this be surprising? I don’t think
so.
“Among the members [of the proposed
commission] were Hon. Elizabeth Holtzman, Rabbi Arthur
Hertzberg, Hon. Philip Klutznick, Mrs. Charlotte Jacobson, Dr.
Bruno Bettleheim, Dr. Martin Peretz, Judge Simon Rifkind, Rabbi
Arthur Schneier, Rabbi Marc Tannenbaum and Mr. Sol Chaikin.”[3]
I will not indict every member of the
above proposed commission; for example, Martin Peretz is an
opponent of the Oslo Process and a critic of the current Jewish
leadership: he at least sounds like a Jewish patriot.[4]
But someone like Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg does give cause for
concern. You see, this mainstream Jewish leader has been
“president of both the American Jewish Policy Foundation and the
American Jewish Congress, [and] vice president of the World
Jewish Congress.”[5]
In other words, he has been a leader of the very organizations
that were created by Stephen Wise and Nahum Goldmann.
Given that institutions survive the
passage of time when the people in them recruit ideological
bedfellows as replacements, it is not unreasonable to expect
that Arthur Hertzberg will turn out to be like Wise and Goldmann,
particularly when Hertzberg is given to bemoaning in print the
supposed “scarcity of men such as Stephen Wise.”[6]
With this in the background we may put on the table a hypothesis
to explain why Jack Eisner protested that the commission he was
to fund, and which contained Arthur Hertzberg, would “whitewash
the truth” rather than expose it: Jack Eisner realized that
Arthur Hertzberg would attempt a cover up.
I shall now support this hypothesis by
taking a closer look at Arthur Hertzberg.
In 1979 Arthur Hertzberg came out with
a book titled Being Jewish in America (1979). Julius
Weinberg, who read it and reviewed it, understood the author’s
political position to be as follows:
“Hertzberg proposes that the Jewish
community of this country [the United States] should have an
equal voice in the political decisions to be made by the state
of Israel -- including Israel’s foreign policy.”[7]
And Hertzberg’s paternalistic attitude,
Weinberg wryly observed, extended not merely to Israelis but to
all Jews, for in Hertzberg’s opinion Jews are “no longer to be
trusted to know what is in their own best interests, but are in
need of enlightened mentors to guide their ideas and actions.”
And who might these “enlightened mentors” be? Why, the leaders
of the World Jewish Congress, including Hertzberg’s own exalted
self.
The above pretensions were precisely those
of Goldmann and Wise, Hertzberg’s forerunners in the World
Jewish Congress. As we saw in
Part 1,
“[Nahum] Goldmann wanted total control of
world Jewry concentrated in his hands, and said so unabashedly.
The World Jewish Congress, which he had set up with [Stephen]
Wise, was ‘the single address’ in his mind.”[8]
In other words, Nahum Goldmann wanted the
World Jewish Congress, a Diaspora organization, to decide
matters for Jews everywhere, including Israel. So in his
megalomaniac pretensions and general contempt for Jews,
Hertzberg is just like his predecessors.
But this is not where the
similarities end.
As we saw in
Part 1, Goldmann and Wise did
not defend the persecuted Jews; instead, they sabotaged Peter
Bergson (Hillel Kook), who was defending the persecuted
Jews. So Goldmann and Wise were interested only in their own
power. Arthur Hertzberg has likewise continued this World Jewish
Congress tradition of criminal disregard for the security of the
Jewish people, advancing his “equal voice” in the service of
sabotaging the defense of Israel.
Consider that for Hertzberg, as Julius
Weinberg explains, “it is Israel rather than the Arab countries
surrounding it that has to prove its benign intentions to the
world.” Isn’t that remarkable? These would be the same Arab
countries that have launched wars against Israel with the
proudly and publicly announced purpose of exterminating the
Israeli Jews.[9]
So why does Hertzberg tell us that the Israelis are the
ones who have to prove their benign intentions to the world?
They haven’t attacked anybody, let alone called for
exterminating anyone.
That was 1979, but Hertzberg has been
consistent. On 19 September, 2003, The Jerusalem Post
reported,
“In America, historian of Zionism Rabbi
Arthur Hertzberg, like philanthropists Edgar Bronfman and Marvin
Lender, has also chosen sides by appealing to President George
W. Bush to put sanctions on Israel and to view Israel and the PA
[the ‘Palestinian Authority,’ run by the PLO] as equivalents.”[10]
Hertzberg “has...chosen sides”: he sides
with the PLO. Rather passionately, I might add: he wants US
sanctions on Israel. And Hertzberg’s statements, mind you,
were made right as the PLO was murdering scores of innocent
Israelis at the height of the Second Intifada.
Now, when we see Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg
lobbying for the Jewish state to be considered equivalent
to an organization, the PLO, whose controlling core Al Fatah was
created by a leader of Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution with the
purpose of continuing the extermination of the Jewish people,[11]
how shall we characterize this? Would the word antisemitism
be too strong? (But one can find Rabbi Hertzberg introduced
as “a man of impeccable liberal credentials,” so this is how you
earn your ‘liberal credentials’ these days: attacking the Jews.[12])
Of course, Hertzberg sells his position
as supposed compassion for the West Bank and Gaza Arabs (i.e.
the so-called ‘Palestinians’), and various sources will echo
this: for example, Wikipedia refers to his “outspoken criticism
of the policies of Israel toward the Palestinians.”[13]
But this is absurd. It is the PLO that has been
oppressing the West Bank and Gaza Arabs, not Israel.[14]
The serious problems for these Arabs began when, partly as a
result of pressure coming from Hertzberg’s World Jewish Congress
(more on this below), the PLO was imposed on the Arabs as
‘government.’ Since then, not only has the PLO been murdering
innocent Israeli civilians, but it has also been murdering
innocent West Bank and Gaza Arabs, sometimes executing them
merely for selling land to a Jew, or for opposing the killings
of Jews, when it is not murdering them for opposing the PLO on
other grounds.[15]
The Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza were treated infinitely
better when the Israeli government was directly administering
these territories,[16]
so genuine compassion for these Arabs would require Hertzberg to
be a vocal opponent of the PLO, not Israel.
What is the political effect of this
spectacle -- of Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg on the world stage
behaving as if he has a rather special animosity against the
Jewish state? Well, considering that the man has been “president
of both the American Jewish Policy Foundation and the American
Jewish Congress, [and] vice president of the World Jewish
Congress,” the effect on ordinary people (Jewish and non-Jewish
alike), who are poorly informed, is to make them think: “Gee, if
a leader of something calling itself the ‘World Jewish Congress’
says that Israel is the bad guy, then it must be -- because, how
can Israel be the good guy if even the Jewish leadership attacks
it?” As we saw in
Part 1, in World War II Rabbi Stephen Wise had a similar
effect on many people who otherwise would have defended the
Jews: he confused and demoralized them. It is impossible to know
exactly how many lives were lost this way, but given that Peter
Bergson’s movement managed to save some 200,000 people
despite Wise’s repeated acts of sabotage, as we saw in
Part 1, the cost could be a few million.
More consistency: Since Rabbi Stephen
Wise was the enemy of Peter Bergson (Hillel Kook), who was a
founder of the Irgun Tzvai Leumi Jewish army, and who did his
utmost to save Jewish lives in Europe while Wise sabotaged his
every move, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Arthur
Hertzberg was an enemy of the late Israeli prime minister
Menachem Begin, a former leader of the Irgun, and like Bergson a
Jewish patriot.[17]
When you put all this together, it is
kind of obvious, isn’t it, that Arthur Hertzberg will not want
the actions of Stephen Wise examined or publicized because, if
this happens, a lot of people might notice that Arthur
Hertzberg, Stephen Wise’s heir, is behaving very much like
Stephen Wise, who betrayed the Jewish people when they most
needed him. So this seems quite sufficient to explain the fact
that Jack Eisner, who was to fund Arthur Hertzberg’s work
reporting on Stephen Wise’s role, should have complained that
Hertzberg’s commission was going to “whitewash the truth” (by
the way, some of the other members of the proposed commission
were also cause for concern[18]).
And because Eisner’s effort fell apart, what we have on the
response of American Jewish leaders to the Shoah is just the
belated work, in the last few years, of a couple of historians.[19] |
Rabbi Arthur
Hertzberg
“Hertzberg
proposes that the Jewish community of this country [the United
States] should have an equal voice in the political decisions to
be made by the state of Israel -- including Israel’s foreign
policy.
”
Julius
Weinberg (1979)
•
What is the
political effect of this spectacle -- of Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg
on the world stage behaving as if he has a rather special
animosity against the Jewish state?
•
Menachem Begin |
Edgar
Bronfman, Sr.
__________________
The same year, 1981, that Arthur
Hertzberg was sabotaging the effort to understand what Wise and
Co. did during World War II, Edgar Bronfman, president of the
World Jewish Congress (so, Hertzberg’s boss), was working very
hard to endorse US President Ronald Reagan’s radically
anti-Israel policies, which had for goal the creation of a PLO
state in the West Bank.[20]
In 1982, Bronfman was at it again, using his perch as president
of the World Jewish Congress to endorse Ronald Reagan’s plan for
Middle East ‘peace.’ Reagan was using Bronfman as a ‘Jewish
diplomat,’ as if all Jews were the same and the World Jewish
Congress spoke for them all, including citizens of Israel.
American newspapers dutifully carried the headline “Jewish
Leader OKs Reagan Peace Plan.”[21]
But Bronfman did not speak for the
Israeli Jews:
“the Israeli government. . .unanimously
and totally rejected the American initiative.”[22]
The Israeli prime minister at the time was
Menachem Begin, the former leader of the Irgun’s military wing.
So there are no surprises here. Edgar
Bronfman, like Stephen Wise and Nahum Goldmann before him, has
been busy giving cover to the US government for its anti-Jewish
policies. His support for Reagan’s anti-Israeli policies in the
early 80s was extreme.[23]
Bronfman did the same in the mid-80s,
when again as president of the World Jewish Congress, he acted
as an informal diplomat for Shimon Peres, at the time Israel’s
prime minister. The diplomacy Bronfman conducted (mind you,
Bronfman is not an Israeli citizen) was meant to do an
end-run around Yitzhak Shamir from the opposition party, who was
the actual foreign minister. And the point of this diplomacy,
according to some reports, was to give away the strategic Golan
Heights to the Syrians![24]
At the same time, Peres sent leaders of the American Jewish
Congress, another organization founded by Stephen Wise, to be
his private diplomats to Arab leaders with whom he wanted to
legitimize the PLO as a political player.[25]
Peres and Bronfman finally achieved their goals with the
so-called Oslo ‘Peace’ Process, which empowered the PLO inside
the Jewish state.
It apparently has not bothered Edgar
Bronfman that Al Fatah, the controlling core of the PLO, was
grandfathered by Hajj Amin al Husseini, responsible for one
terrorist wave after another against innocent Jews in British
Mandate ‘Palestine,’ and later one of the main architects of
Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution in Europe. Hajj Amin also mentored
Yasser Arafat.[26]
And Bronfman, like Hertzberg, has been
consistent throughout. In the year 2003,
“Edgar Bronfman, President of the World
Jewish Congress, ...suggested the [Jewish] settlements [in the
West Bank and Gaza] were the key obstacle to peace and echoed
[Hebrew University] professor [Ze’ev] Sternhell in advising the
Palestinians that they would be wise to focus their terror
attacks on settlers.”[27]
When we see Edgar Bronfman advocating the
murder of innocent Jews in order to advance the political goals
of the PLO, an antisemitic terrorist organization with genocidal
goals, and which traces its origin to Adolf Hitler’s Final
Solution, how shall we characterize this? Is the word
antisemitism too strong?
This time, at least, “Jewish outrage
forced [Bronfman] to apologize.”[28]
Jewish outrage of this sort is healthy -- more of it may yet
save the Jewish people. |
Edgar Bronfman
|
|
Abraham Foxman
________________
If you go to the website of the famous
Anti-Defamation League (ADL), you will see a quotation from the
ADL Charter of 1913 that states:
“The immediate object of the
[Anti-Defamation] League is to stop, by appeals to reason and
conscience and, if necessary, by appeals to law, the defamation
of the Jewish people.”[29]
The leader of the ADL is a man by name
Abraham Foxman. It is more than a bit surprising, given that the
ADL mission is supposedly to defend the Jews from antisemitism,
that it should be so easy to find Abraham Foxman defending
antisemites, and in particular antisemites who attack Israel.
For example, in October 2003 there was a
bit of an eruption in the US House of Representatives when it
was revealed that the Ford Foundation was financing openly
antisemitic groups among the West Bank and Gaza Arabs.[30]
An organization that is supposed to protect the Jews from
antisemitism should have been spearheading the demands for a
federal investigation into the Ford Foundation, but what the
ADL’s Abraham Foxman did instead was protest these
demands:
“Abraham Foxman, national director of the
Anti-Defamation League told the Forward that it is too soon to
call for a congressional investigation: ‘This is an institution
that’s been around for a long time. They’ve established a
credible reputation...’”[31]
The Ford Foundation has indeed “been
around for a long time,” as it was created by Henry Ford in
1936. This is the same Henry Ford who popularized Nazi
propaganda all over the world with his Dearborn Independent,
an antisemitic publication that sought to convince Westerners
that ‘the Jews’ in secret controlled everything with the purpose
of destroying non-Jews, causing such a hysteria in the Western
World that it made Adolf Hitler’s genocide possible. Henry Ford
was such a big Nazi that Hitler not only gave him the highest
decoration conferred by the Nazi state on foreigners, but in
addition kept a life-size portrait of Ford in his office and was
fond of saying that the American automaker was his inspiration.
These and other facts about Henry Ford, plus the fact that the
Ford Foundation has been advancing Nazi-like policies and
attacking Jews throughout its entire history, are trivial to
document, and HIR has produced one such documentation here:
http://www.hirhome.com/israel/ford.htm
But instead of making this public, Abraham
Foxman, the leader of the ADL, jumps to the Ford Foundation’s
defense the minute somebody calls for an investigation, and
tells everybody that we shouldn’t be investigating them because
“they’ve established a credible reputation.” Isn’t this behavior
inconsistent with the avowed purpose of the ADL, which is
to fight antisemitism?
The above defense of the Ford Foundation
is not out of character for Abraham Foxman. It is not difficult
to find this man apologizing for, and giving cover to, the PLO.
For example, when Arafat was caught calling for jihad
after the so-called Oslo ‘peace’ process had already begun,
Abraham Foxman covered for him by supporting Arafat’s oxymoronic
expression “jihad for peace,” helping confuse the Western
public.
“Speaking to an Anti-Defamation League
delegation in Gaza, Arafat said his use of the word ‘jihad’ in
his speeches not only meant a holy war involving fighting, but
also can be used in terms of peace.
‘We asked the chairman to engage as much
as possible in words of understanding and reconciliation,’ said
ADL National Director Abraham Foxman.
‘The chairman talked in terms of the jihad
for peace so that the word jihad as we know it can be converted
into the jihad of peace.’”[32]
Jihad means ‘Holy War’ -- the slaughter of
infidels, as historian Bat Ye’or has documented in detail.[33]
But if anybody is suspicious that a Jewish historian may have
distorted the meaning of ‘jihad,’ then we can ask the King of
Saudi Arabia what the modern meaning of ‘jihad’ may be.
This will be quite relevant to Yasser Arafat’s own use of the
word because Saudi Arabia has been a major sponsor of the PLO.
As reported in the British daily The Evening Standard:
“In 1980, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia gave a
clear definition: ‘What is meant by jihad is a united,
comprehensive, integrated Arab-Islamic confrontation in which we
place all our resources and our spiritual, cultural, political,
material and military potential in a long and untiring ‘Holy
War’ against Israel, of course, who else?’”[34]
If Abraham Foxman’s excuse here will be
that he doesn’t know this elementary thing -- the meaning of the
word ‘jihad’ for Muslim enemies of the Jewish state -- then he
should be fired, because it is the job of the leader of the ADL
to know such things. If he does know this, then how shall
we characterize the fact that Foxman apologizes for the
anti-Jewish terrorist Yasser Arafat when he calls for “a long
and untiring ‘Holy War’ against Israel”? Would antisemitism
be too strong a word?
The ADL has been quite consistent in
helping clean up the image of the PLO. As Kenneth Levin points
out,
“Yasser Arafat, from his entry into the
territories [of the West Bank and Gaza] in 1994, orchestrated a
campaign of defamation and vilification against Israelis and
Jews. He promoted in PA schoolbooks and media, over which he
always maintained tight control, denigration of Jewish belief,
classic anti-Semitic caricatures of Jews, claims of Jewish
perfidy and godlessness, blood libels against Jews, assertions
that Jews have no historical connection with the land of Israel,
denial of any Jewish religious ties to the Temple Mount, denial
of the Holocaust, and much else in the same vein. Yet the ADL’s
response was ambiguous at best. In the fall of 1998 it published
a report on anti-Semitic statements proffered by the Palestinian
Authority over the previous year, and at various times it would
put out press releases urging Arafat to change his ways. For
example, one such release in November, 1998, called upon Arafat
to remove anti-Semitism from official PA airwaves. Yet Arafat’s
anti-Jewish campaign did not keep the head of the ADL, Abraham
Foxman, from leading American Jewish delegations in pilgrimages
to the PA chairman or proffering Arafat ‘gifts of Jewish art.’”[35]
And I must add what Kenneth Levin left
out: Yasser Arafat also broadcast, on Palestinian Authority
Television, sermons by mullahs who screamed at the viewing
Arabs: “blessings to whoever put a belt of explosives on his
body or on his sons’ and plunged into the midst of the Jews
crying: ‘Allah Akbar, praise to Allah!’”[36]
But Abraham Foxman is apparently not overly troubled by this,
and this naturally has an effect on the public: when one of the
most visible Jews supposedly in charge of fighting antisemitism
is found apologizing for the PLO, what poorly informed people
conclude is that the PLO must be kosher. This is
especially true given that, for example, Abraham Foxman goes out
of his way to pronounce the PLO’s textbooks kosher
(acceptable to Jews):
“At a meeting in Ramallah in September
2000, Foxman presented Arafat with a letter regarding recently
introduced PA school texts...prais[ing] them for excluding ‘the
anti-Israel and anti-Semitic passages prevalent in previous
textbooks and curricular material.’ But, in fact, ...the new
books denigrate Jews and Judaism and continue to teach that all
of Israel rightly belongs to the Arabs.”[37]
As if all this were not enough, Abraham
Foxman can also be found apologizing for the Vatican’s
antisemitism.[38]
Unbelievable. |
Abraham Foxman
“This
is an institution [Ford Foundation] that's been around for a
long time. They've established a credible reputation...
”
Abraham
Foxman
•
How shall we
characterize the fact that Foxman apologizes for the anti-Jewish
terrorist Yasser Arafat when he calls for jihad?
•
|
|
AIPAC (American Israel Public
Affairs Committee)
___________________________________________
AIPAC is the most visible component of
what people call the ‘Jewish lobby’ in the United States. A
Google search on the ‘Jewish lobby’ or on AIPAC will quickly
convince you that quite a lot of people believe this lobby to be
terribly powerful, and to have great influence on what US
foreign policy becomes. The same people matter-of-factly assume
that what the ‘Jewish lobby’ does is produce pro-Israel US
foreign policy. This is false. AIPAC in fact promotes pro-PLO
US foreign policy, as the following HIR investigation has
shown:
http://www.hirhome.com/israel/aipac.htm
In fact, the AIPAC
leadership took such a strong pro-PLO turn when the Oslo process
was jump-started that many rank-and-file members and
contributors became disillusioned. As Kenneth Levin explains,
“...while some in the professional echelon
of the organization seemed not only to embrace the Oslo agenda
[the purpose of which was to bring the terrorist PLO inside the
Jewish state] but to do so with conviction and aplomb, there
were members of the lay leadership, the highest level of AIPAC’s
financial supporters, who were unhappy with the organization’s
stance, and many longtime contributors were so put off by
AIPAC’s pro-Oslo activities that they withdrew their support.”[39]
What kinds of people will work with
“conviction and aplomb” to assist the goals of an organization,
the PLO, whose controlling core, Al Fatah, was created by a
leader of the Final Solution to continue the extermination of
the Jewish people? Wouldn’t such people have to be
antisemites? But these are the leaders of AIPAC.
The leaders of AIPAC cannot claim
ignorance of what the PLO really is, because AIPAC boasts loudly
that the millions of dollars that concerned Jews have
contributed over the years are supposedly spent doing all sorts
of very careful research on the Arab-Israeli conflict,[40]
and because the origins of the PLO are not difficult to
document.[41] |
•
The leaders
of
AIPAC
cannot claim
ignorance of what
the PLO
really is.
•
|
The broad
picture
________________
I think I have given enough focused
examples, but I nevertheless want to make it clear that the
above American Jewish leaders just considered are in no way
exceptions. Rather, they are the norm. So I will here give you a
quick panoramic view, relying on Kenneth Levin, who, in his book
The Oslo Syndrome, has already surveyed this landscape.
Kenneth Levin begins his chapter
entitled ‘American Jews and Oslo’ with the following quotation
plus explanation:
“Arafat is not going to be happy
with that.
Sara Ehrman, board member of Americans for
Peace Now, complaining that dovish American Jewish leaders had
failed to press Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to treat
Israel, led at the time by Ehud Barak, more harshly in order to
extract additional Oslo-related concessions. (August 1999)”[42]
So, the Jewish leaders of Americans for
Peace Now were worried that Yasser Arafat would be unhappy with
American Jewish leaders for not obtaining sufficient political
benefits for Yasser Arafat -- an antisemitic terrorist pledged
to the destruction of the Jewish state. This beggars
description, and yet it is standard for this American Jewish
organization. In its earlier incarnation, which was called
American Friends for Peace Now, “the group had published an ad
in The New York Times essentially characterizing Israel
as the impediment to Middle East Peace,” so the organization
engages in anti-Israeli propaganda.[43]
And what is standard for Americans for Peace Now is also the
approach of many other American Jewish organizations. In fact,
“Leadership of both Americans for Peace
Now and its predecessor organization overlapped with the
leadership of such groups as the Jewish Peace Lobby and CONAME
[Committee on New Alternatives in the Middle East, founded by
Noam Chomsky] (which had lobbied against US arms shipments to
Israel during the Yom Kippur War)”[44]
I hope you are doing a double take: an
American Jewish organization, CONAME, led by the well-known
Jewish intellectual Noam Chomsky, opposed US assistance to
Israel in the Yom Kippur war. This was a war of aggression by
the Arab states against Israel: “The War began with a surprise
joint attack by Egypt and Syria.”[45]
And yet Noam Chomsky’s CONAME apparently didn’t think the
Israelis had a right to defend themselves.
In addition,
“Gail Pressberg, for a time president of
APN [Americans for Peace Now] and then director of APN’s Center
for Israeli Peace and Security, had a long history of
involvement with anti-Israel organizations and events, including
some marked by frank antisemitism, and in her earlier career had
not notably demonstrated any concern for Israel’s security.
Pressberg’s Israel-related activities have been documented by
Rael Jean Isaac. In the late 1970s, as director of the American
Friends Service Committee’s Middle East ‘Peace Education’
program, Pressberg had organized anti-Israel conferences and
called for a halt to US arms shipments to Israel. Pressberg had
also signed ads making wildly untrue and defamatory claims about
Israeli actions in Lebanon, opposing relocation of the US
Embassy to Jerusalem, and demanding Israel’s return to its
pre-1967 borders. From the 1970s onward, she was a consistent
promoter and apologist for the PLO. When, in September, 1986,
terrorists killed twenty-one Turkish Jews at a Sabbath prayer in
their Istanbul synagogue, Pressberg characterized the slaughter
as due to ‘the humiliation and dispossession felt by the
Palestinians’ and used the occasion to urge again US
negotiations with the PLO.”[46]
How shall we characterize a person who
apologizes for the slaughter of innocent Jews in Turkey,
followed by an argument that this slaughter should produce a
reward for an antisemitic terrorist organization pledged to the
destruction of the Jewish state? Would antisemite be too
strong a word?
But there is more.
“The Jewish Peace Lobby after 1993
consistently argued that Israel would have to offer the
Palestinians more and that peace would ensue once Israel had
made concessions along the lines the Lobby demanded, including
the division of Jerusalem. It persisted in lobbying Congress for
support for its stances.
Leaders of the New Israel Fund continued
to direct most of the Fund’s resources to groups in Israel
advocating Arab views and opposing and challenging [Israeli]
government positions. In 1997 the Smithsonian Institution
planned a lecture series on ‘Israel at 50’ and agreed to have
the New Israel Fund formulate the program. The scheduled list of
speakers consisted overwhelmingly of critics of Israel, such as
Azmi Bishara, an Arab member of the Knesset who had recently
paid homage at the grave of an Islamic Jihad murderer of
Israelis...”[47]
And more:
“[the] Israel Policy Forum (IPF), [was]
created in 1993 at the behest of Israel’s Labor-Meretz coalition
government [Shimon Peres’ outfit] and placed under the
leadership of a former APN [Americans for Peace Now] president,
Jonathan Jacoby, who had earlier in his career signed a New
York Times ad accusing Israel of ‘state terrorism.’
One of IPF’s early efforts, intended to
convey to the American public and American leaders an impression
of wide American Jewish enthusiasm for Oslo, was its sponsorship
of a poll that ostensibly showed 87 percent of American Jews
supporting the ‘peace process.’ The poll was grossly skewed in
the framing of its questions, as, for example, in its asking:
‘As you may be aware, Israel agreed to recognize the PLO as the
official representative of the Palestinian people after the PLO
renounced terrorism, removed the clauses from its charter which
called for the destruction of Israel, and formally recognized
Israel’s right to exist. Do you approve or disapprove of the
Israeli government’s decision to recognize the PLO as the
official representative of the Palestinian people?’ Not
surprisingly, 82 percent approved. The poll did not ask, for
example: ‘Do you trust the PLO’s renunciation of terror?’ Also,
it was, of course, dishonest in its assertion that the PLO
charter had been changed.”[48]
Another American Jewish group, project
Nishma,
“lobbied Congress in support of the
[pro-PLO] Labor-Meretz agenda and sought to depict that agenda
as enjoying wide American Jewish grassroots backing, with the
skeptics among American Jews being a minority. Once more, those
who challenged Labor-Meretz policies were smeared as opponents
of peace. In 1997, Project Nishma merged with Israel Policy
Forum.”[49]
Then there is the Center for Middle East
Peace and Economic Cooperation, founded in 1989 by American
Jewish entrepreneur Daniel S. Abraham.
“In December, 1996, during the premiership
of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Center held a conference that was
billed as a ‘Retrospective on the Peace Process’ but proved to
be mainly, according to media reports, a sustained attack on the
Netanyahu government. Guest speakers included PA [Palestinian
Authority] general secretary Ahmed Abdul Rahman, former
Secretary of State James Baker [who earlier had forced Israel to
accept the PLO inside the Jewish state[50]],
and columnist Thomas Friedman [a major critic of Israel, and
Jewish]. Rahman excoriated Israel and its policies and insisted
there were no Palestinian violations of Oslo. On the issue of
Arafat’s agreement in several of the Oslo accords to change the
Palestinian charter and its calls for Israel’s destruction,
Rahman said, ‘We don’t want a new charter.’ Baker urged greater
pressure on Netanyahu and suggested the United States had to get
tougher on Israel. Friedman similarly advocated the
administration forcing Israel to be more forthcoming and praised
Baker and former Secretary of State Kissinger for having
aggressively pressed Israel while they were in office.
Most of the other speakers as well focused
their remarks on criticizing the Netanyahu government or Israel
in general. Interestingly, the speaker apparently most willing
to address Arab shortcomings vis-à-vis peacemaking was the
Jordanian ambassador.
...the Center’s founder, S. Daniel
Abraham, a frequent visitor to the [Syrian capital of] Damascus,
became something of an apologist for [Syrian dictator and
antisemite] Hafez al-Assad. In an interview in July, 1997,
Abraham declared that Assad ‘wants to make peace with Israel...’
[and]...went on to observe, ‘Not all dictators are terrible
people, and not all dictatorships are terrible forms in which to
live.’ He added that most Jews in Syria live freely and ‘there
was no anti-Semitism to speak of’; this after the great majority
of Syrian Jews had fled the country and Secretary of State
Warren Christopher had some months earlier protested ‘an
anti-Semitic article published in the semi-official Syrian
Times.’ A 1999 ad by the Center proclaimed, ‘President Assad
has scrupulously kept all of his commitments in earlier
disengagement accords with Israel. He possesses both the will
and the ability to make peace with Israel and implement it
throughout Syria.’ In contrast to his warm feelings for Assad,
Abraham is reported to have asked President Clinton, ‘Do you
really think Netanyahu wants peace.’”[51]
How shall we characterize Daniel S.
Abraham. Is antisemite too strong a word?
I shall stop my review of American Jewish
leaders here. As overwhelming as the above may seem, I have
given you nothing more than a light taste. The pattern is clear.
How about Jewish leaders elsewhere in the
Diaspora? They are not as important as American Jewish leaders,
but they tend to behave similarly. As an example, we may
consider the famous French Jewish philosopher Bernard Henri Lévy,
who worked overtime to clean up the image of Alija Izetbegovic,
an Islamist terrorist and antisemite who apparently allied with
the Nazis during WWII, and who revived the Nazi SS Handzar
division during the civil wars in Bosnia, in the 1990s, when he
led a campaign of terror and genocide against the Bosnian Serbs,
and against any Bosnian Muslims who did not agree with him. HIR
has documented the activities of Bernard Henri Lévy in the
following piece.
http://www.hirhome.com/yugo/ihralija2.htm
And the following piece
documents how the leaders of some American Jewish organizations
falsely accused the Serbs and defended Izetbegovic.
http://www.hirhome.com/yugo/ihralija3.htm
Now, nobody defended the Jews more
bravely in WWII than the Serbs,[52]
so some Serbs have come to believe that, in the civil wars that
took place in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, they were betrayed by
‘the Jews.’ This is false. Most Jews -- due to the
unfortunately dismal state of education about the Holocaust in
the Jewish community -- are not even cognizant of what happened
in Yugoslavia during WWII. And those Jews who demonized the
Serbs in the 1990s were primarily some prominent leaders in the
Jewish community, such as Bernard Henri Lévy -- i.e. not ‘the
Jews.’
Those Jews who defended the Bosnian
Islamists against the Serbs, were -- absurdly -- defending the
legacy of Hajj Amin al Husseini, who created the SS Handzar
division and organized the mass slaughters of Serbs, Jews, and
Roma (Gypsies) in WWII Yugoslavia, and who also mentored Yasser
Arafat, moreover creating Al Fatah, Arafat’s organization, and
the controlling core in the PLO.[11]
Not coincidentally, those Jews who have promoted anti-Serb
propaganda tend to be precisely the same Jews who defend Hajj
Amin's heirs, the antisemitic PLO terrorists, against the Jewish
state. Bernard Henri Lévy is a case in point. He accuses that
criticism of Israel is too strong, but, all the same, in a trip
to Israel, pretending that the suffering of the West Bank and
Gaza Arabs is the fault of Israel rather than of the PLO, he
declared:
"And if there is indifference here
[in Israel] to the Palestinian suffering, it means Israeli
society has problems with its memory. This is to be a
terrible Jew."[52a]
But the one defending Nazis in
Bosnia is Bernard Henri Lévy, so he is the one with
memory problems. |
Sara Ehrman
“Arafat
is not going to
be happy
with that
”
Noam Chomsky
Gail Pressberg
Daniel S. Abraham
Thomas Friedman
Bernard Henri Lévy
“The
only hope, [Lévy] said, was in the birth of modern, secular
Islam, which is what he had found and admired in Bosnia.
”
Vanity Fair (
2003 )
|
|
________________________________________________________
| B | Jewish
officials in the US government
________________________________________________________
Jewish officials in the US government are
hardly better than Jewish leaders in non-governmental Diaspora
Jewish organizations. Much more could be written than what I
will here present, but what follows is more than enough because
I have chosen to focus on those US officials responsible for
crafting US policy towards the Jewish state.
In the year 1994, The Jerusalem Post
wrote:
“...the trio that implements Middle East
policy at the State Department [are] State Department planning
director Dennis Ross, …and his two chief assistants, Dr. Daniel
Kurtzer and Aaron Miller...”[53]
Ross, Kurtzer, and Miller -- all three of
them are Jews. This is the sort of thing that people with a
certain kind of ideology will love to point out. For example,
Alfred Lilienthal, who expressed his passionate opposition to
the idea of a Jewish state in 1949,[54]
immediately after the German Nazis, and then also a number of
allied Arab states, had attempted to exterminate the Jews,[55]
also makes the following complaint: “it is simply ridiculous
that all American officials involved with U.S. mediation in
Middle East peace are Jewish.”[56]
(Alfred Lilienthal, by the way, says he is Jewish).
But the only question that matters is
whether staffing such State Department positions with Jews in
fact results in an unduly pro-Israel US foreign policy.
To answer this question, consider that
it was in the year 1994 that the The Jerusalem Post made
the above observation about Ross, Kurtzer, and Miller. Well, it
was also the year 1994 when -- thanks to US government
threats against Israel about what would happen if the
Israelis did not accept this -- the PLO was brought to
govern the West Bank and Gaza Arabs.[57]
When the US began this remarkable bully diplomacy to force the
PLO on the Israelis (which process was, in true Orwellian
fashion, subsequently baptized the ‘Oslo Peace Process’),
the terrorist PLO was actually languishing in Tunisian exile and
had been essentially defeated back in 1982.[59]
It was US pressure that allowed this organization to rise
again from the ashes and nestle itself inside the Jewish state,
from which position it has been easily murdering quite a few
innocent Israelis, while extorting and murdering many innocents
in the Arab population which it rules.[60]
We are speaking, as mentioned before, of an organization whose
controlling core, Al Fatah, traces its roots to Adolf Hitler’s
Final Solution.[58]
The Jewish US officials
in charge of forcing the PLO on Israel had to know
precisely what they were doing because they have the resources
of a vast intelligence service, and because documenting what the
real intentions of the PLO were was not exactly difficult.
“In 1974, when much of the world was
promoting Arab-Israeli negotiations in the wake of the Yom
Kippur War, Yasser Arafat, leader of Fatah and of the PLO,
formulated what he called the ‘Plan of Phases.’ The plan
declared that the Palestinian Arabs would seek to acquire
territory by negotiations and would then use that territory as a
launching pad for military pursuit of Israel’s annihilation.
With this agenda as backdrop, Arafat offered to enter into
negotiations with Israel.”[61]
Consistent with this, in 1994, when the
Oslo ‘Peace’ Process was being jump started, Yasser Arafat
explained to a Muslim audience what the point of Oslo would be:
jihad.
“A tape-recording has surfaced of PLO
leader Yasser Arafat speaking to Moslem followers… Mr Arafat was
exhorting his followers to prosecute a ‘jihad ... to liberate
Jerusalem’. Mr Arafat does not deny the tape’s authenticity…
[His followers] would have taken it to mean that the peace
process was just a stratagem: a Trojan Horse which should now be
exploited with maximum violence.”[62]
And again consistent with this, shortly
before he died in 2001, Yasser Arafat’s right-hand man Faisal
Husseini himself used the expression ‘Trojan Horse’ to
characterize the ‘peace’ process.:
“...Faisal Husseini, the top PLO official
in Jerusalem...[was] quoted as likening the Oslo accords to a
‘Trojan horse.’ ...the weekly Al-Arabi quotes Husseini as
calling the Oslo accords ‘just a temporary procedure, or just a
step towards something bigger…the liberation of all historical
Palestine from the (Jordan) river to the (Mediterranean) sea,
even if this means that the conflict will last for another
thousand years or for many generations.’”[63]
Finally, there is the fact that Mahmoud
Abbas, the new PLO chief, appears to be the very intellectual
force behind Arafat’s ‘Plan of Phases’ as (a) he authored an
entire study concerning how the Israelis could be prepared for
slaughter by promising them peace,[64]
(b) the media refers to him as the “architect” of Oslo,[65]
and c) it is in fact his signature, and not Yasser
Arafat’s, on the Oslo agreement.[66]
Since this is the current leader of the PLO, we have perfect
consistency: the PLO has always and only meant to destroy
Israel.
So, we can point to the fact that, in
the year 1994, the three people making US foreign policy in the
Middle East -- Dennis Ross, Daniel Kurtzer, and Aaron Miller --
are Jewish, as if this amounted to an analysis of US foreign
policy; or...we can point to the fact that in 1994, US
foreign policy in the Middle East is in fact to twist
Israel’s arm in order (a) to revive the PLO (a defeated Nazi
organization that desires land only as a platform towards the
destruction of Israel), and (b) to give the PLO both proximity
to its Jewish targets and power inside the Jewish state by
making it the ‘government’ over the Arab population of the West
Bank and Gaza.
Or..., as I am required to do,
given the topic of this article, I can point to both the
Jewish identity of those crafting this policy, and to the
policy itself, remarking that once again we have powerful Jews
attacking the Jewish people. There really is a pattern,
here. And -- I remind you -- Ross, Kurtzer, and Miller did
everything they did knowingly, because if anybody has the
motivation and means to discover the true intentions of the PLO
it is the Middle East specialists at the top of the world
superpower’s foreign ministry.
And how shall we describe the behavior of
Dennis Ross, Daniel Kurtzer, and Aaron Miller? Would
antisemitism be too strong a word?
In the case of Aaron Miller, there is also
Seeds of Peace to consider. This is an organization that claims
to be training the next generation of peacemaking leaders on
both the Israeli and Arab sides by bringing teenagers of these
populations to its camp in Maine, USA, and teaching them to
dialogue with each other. The US government funds Seeds of Peace
and, along with the Establishment media, goes quite out of its
way to promote Seeds of Peace as a supposedly benevolent force.
Kenneth Levin takes a different view:
“As reported in the Jerusalem Post
in January, 2000, ‘A recent film called ‘Peace of Mind,’
produced by Seeds of Peace and intended for theater and
television screenings around the world, casts doubt on the
organization’s motives. It is so tilted in favor of Palestinian
arguments, so unquestioningly sympathetic to Palestinian
grievances, that it becomes a propaganda instrument rather than
an ode to young friendship.
The film, in explicating the Arab-Israeli
conflict as background to the students’ encounters at the camp,
presents a doctored and bogus past and a similarly distorted
present. While the film states that it was produced by the Arab
and Israeli campers, three of the four Israeli students featured
in it wrote to Seeds of Peace to protest its bias and to assert
that ‘we did not make the movie, as the movie claims... The
movie was only shot in part by us, and most of our footage,
including its most significant statements from our point of
view, were discarded.’
The mind set of the camnp’s organizers was
further revealed in an incident recounted by the father of one
of the camp’s Israeli students in a letter to the Jerusalem
Post. ‘One morning, the camp assembly was told by the
founder, John Wallach, that that morning a Palestinian had run
down two Israelis and killed them and that he was subsequently
killed. He asked for a moment of silence for the Israelis and
the Palestinian. The Jewish campers immediately objected and
refused to stand for the Palestinian. Apparently no one could
explain to Mr. Wallach [who said he was Jewish until the day he
died] that there is no moral equivalence between terrorists and
their victims.’”[67]
HIR has documented that the main purpose
of Seeds of Peace is to empower violent antisemites on the Arab
side, dressing them up in the convenient camouflage of ‘peace.’
The current President of Seeds of Peace
is...Aaron Miller, the same man who helped craft the entire Oslo
‘Peace’ Process that is now destroying Israel.
The behavior of Jews today who have
important positions in the US government is a repeat of what we
saw, in
Part 1, was the behavior of most Jewish US government
officials during WWII: they sabotage the defense of the Jewish
people. |
Dennis Ross
Daniel Kurtzer
Aaron David Miller
•
...once
again we have powerful Jews attacking the Jewish people. There
really is a pattern, here.
•
|
________________________________________________________
Footnotes and Further Reading
________________________________________________________
To read more on Hajj Amin's role,
read:
“HOW DID THE ‘PALESTINIAN
MOVEMENT’ EMERGE? The British
sponsored it. Then the German
Nazis, and the US.”; Historical
and Investigative Research; 13
June 2006; by Francisco
Gil-White.
http://www.hirhome.com/israel/pal_mov4.htm
Some
of this material was originally
published here:
“Anti-Semitism, Misinformation,
And The Whitewashing Of The
Palestinian Leadership”; Israel
National News; May 26, '03 / 24
Iyar 5763; by Francisco J.
Gil-White
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/article.php3?id=2405
To read more about Hajj Amin al
Husseini, visit:
“HOW DID THE ‘PALESTINIAN
MOVEMENT’ EMERGE? The British
sponsored it. Then the German
Nazis, and the US.”; Historical
and Investigative Research; 13
June 2006; by Francisco
Gil-White.
http://www.hirhome.com/israel/pal_mov4.htm
Some
of this material was originally
published here:
“Anti-Semitism, Misinformation,
And The Whitewashing Of The
Palestinian Leadership”; Israel
National News; May 26, '03 / 24
Iyar 5763; by Francisco J.
Gil-White
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/article.php3?id=2405
[32]
Arafat to ADL: I’ll urge PNC to
alter Charter, The Jerusalem Post,
November 19, 1995, Sunday, NEWS; Pg.
2, 296 words, Elli Wohlgelernter
“HOW DID THE ‘PALESTINIAN
MOVEMENT’ EMERGE? The British
sponsored it. Then the German
Nazis, and the US.”; Historical
and Investigative Research; 13
June 2006; by Francisco
Gil-White.
http://www.hirhome.com/israel/pal_mov4.htm
Some
of this material was originally
published here:
“Anti-Semitism, Misinformation,
And The Whitewashing Of The
Palestinian Leadership”; Israel
National News; May 26, '03 / 24
Iyar 5763; by Francisco J.
Gil-White
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/article.php3?id=2405
To read more about Hajj Amin al
Husseini, visit:
“HOW DID THE ‘PALESTINIAN
MOVEMENT’ EMERGE? The British
sponsored it. Then the German
Nazis, and the US.”; Historical
and Investigative Research; 13
June 2006; by Francisco
Gil-White.
http://www.hirhome.com/israel/pal_mov4.htm
Some
of this material was originally
published here:
“Anti-Semitism, Misinformation,
And The Whitewashing Of The
Palestinian Leadership”; Israel
National News; May 26, '03 / 24
Iyar 5763; by Francisco J.
Gil-White
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/article.php3?id=2405
|
|
|
¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ |
|
3 |
|
What is the
problem with the Israeli |
|
ruling
elite? Is it stupidity? Or is it |
|
something
else? |
|
________________________________________________________ |
“…The [Israeli]
government’s policy of hiding incriminating
information about [the PLO's Yasser] Arafat
from the public was dramatically if
indirectly illustrated by an episode in 1994
[the year that the Oslo 'peace' process was
jump-started] when Shimon Peres, conversing
with Arafat at the Erez checkpoint and
apparently unaware that his comments were
being recorded by a French filmmaker,
threatened to reveal to the media Arafat’s
flouting of his Oslo obligations. Peres did
not go into detail about Arafat’s violations
but did regard them as serious enough that
their revelation would be a ‘catastrophe’
for Arafat and would, among its
consequences, ‘kill the Palestinian story in
the American Congress.’”
SOURCE:
Levin, K. 2005. The Oslo syndrome:
Delusions of a people under siege.
Hanover, NH: Smith and Kraus. (p.xi)
________________________________________________________
Table of
Contents
( hyperlinked
<
)
<
Introduction
<
The
Oslo process, from the point of view of the PLO
<
Did
Israeli leaders understand that the PLO always
meant to exterminate the Israeli Jews?
<
Shimon Peres
<
Other
Israeli leaders
<
The
Israeli ruling elite has covered up the German
Nazi origins of the PLO
<
Final
remarks
________________________________________________________
|
Introduction
There appears to be a
growing consensus among friends of Israel,
especially in the wake of Israel’s war with
Hezbollah, that Israeli leaders have been
radically endangering the security of the Jewish
state with their ‘peace’ policies. Within this
consensus, however, there is a controversy as to
why. One hypothesis says that Israeli leaders,
for many years, have been uniformly and
dramatically stupid. This view is popular among
Jewish patriots, who (a) seem to find it natural
that pathological stupidity should be abundant
among Jewish leaders, and (b) possess Buddhist
patience as they wait for their mentally
challenged leaders to come to their senses. An
alternative hypothesis says that the mental
powers of Israeli leaders are fine -- simply,
they are corrupt traitors.
No hypothesis is correct just because we like
it, or because it agrees with our prejudices, or
because the alternative is too scary. A
scientist must provisionally accept or reject a
hypothesis on the basis of the current balance
of material evidence that either supports or
undermines it. What I will do below is
contribute a brief analysis of evidence speaking
to this particular controversy: Are Israeli
leaders idiots or traitors?
Since, in the last 20 years, the most important
policies relevant to Israeli security have been
those connected with the Oslo so-called ‘peace’
process and its offshoots (‘Road Map,’
‘Disengagement,’ ‘Convergence’), the most
important issues to consider are the following:
1) What has the PLO (Palestine Liberation
Organization) been trying to achieve through
Oslo?;
2) How aware have Israeli leaders been of the
PLO’s intentions?; and
3) What have Israeli leaders done with their
knowledge of PLO intentions?
Once the evidence has been examined, we will see
that the answers to the above questions are the
following:
1) The PLO has always and to this day meant to
exterminate the Israeli Jews;
2) Israeli leaders have always been perfectly
aware of this; and
3) Israeli leaders have sought to convince the
Israeli public otherwise, covering up for the
PLO and representing it as a ‘partner for
peace.’ The point of this has been to convince
Israelis to accept the PLO inside the Jewish
state as the government of the Arab population
living in the West Bank and Gaza.
This does not support the ‘stupidity’
hypothesis.
If the ‘treason’ hypothesis is correct, then it
will mean that a pattern witnessed in World War
II -- when many mainstream Jewish leaders
betrayed their fellow Jews even as the European
Jewish population was being exterminated -- is
repeating itself (see
Part 1).[1]
If ordinary Jews do not now
quickly defend themselves from their current
leadership, millions of innocent Jews will die
again.
Time has run out.
|
“Is it possible for
one country A to cause another country B to assist its own
enemies and commit commit suicide? Yes, so long as certain
conditions obtain.
By "committing suicide" I mean that since the people who compose
the organs of state feel duty-bound to carry out the orders of
their superiors, what is needed, mechanically, is for country A
to corrupt the political leadership and the media of country B.
If this is attained, then country A, through the corrupted
political leaders and media in country B, can cause the organs
of state in country B to assist the enemies of country B.
A scenario where this would be maximally easy is one where
country B is very small and has lots of enemies, whereas country
A is very large – at the limit, a superpower (e.g. the United
States). A superpower will certainly have the wherewithal to
corrupt the leadership and the media of a small country, in
which case it can make that leadership surrender Gaza and the
West Bank to terrorists who never stop firing at its civilians,
and whose ideology is the total extermination of those
civilians.
”
T.B.N. Nansit
|
|
The Oslo process, from the
point of view of the PLO
_____________________________________________
In The Oslo
Syndrome, historian Kenneth Levin writes:
“Shortly after signing the Declaration of Principles and the
famous handshake between [PLO leader Yasser] Arafat and [Israeli
prime minister] Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn, Arafat
was declaring to his Palestinian constituency over Jordanian
television that Oslo was to be understood in terms of the
[PLO’s] Palestine National Council’s 1974 decision. This was a
reference to the so-called Plan of Phases, according to which
the Palestine Liberation Organization [PLO] would acquire
whatever territory it could by negotiations, then use that land
as a base for pursuing its ultimate goal of Israel’s
annihilation.” [2]
The words
“Israel’s annihilation” are not synonymous with
‘negotiation to obtain a
PLO state’; their meaning
is closer to ‘the murder
of every Jew now living in Israel.’
And in fact the PLO constitution calls for the extermination of
the Jewish people.[3]
So Yasser Arafat’s so-called Plan of
Phases -- his entire approach to the Oslo accords -- looks like
a ‘Trojan Horse’ strategy.
The expression
‘Trojan Horse’ is taken from the ancient Greek work The Iliad.
In this story, a large coalition of Greeks attack the city of
Troy just because the wife of a Greek king had eloped with a
Trojan prince. After ten whole years of unremitting bloodshed,
the Greeks get tired of not being able to pierce Troy’s
defenses, so they invent a ruse: they build a huge wooden horse
and leave it on the beach as an apparent gift to the victorious
Trojan defenders, then pretend to leave in their ships. In
reality, the Greeks have parked their ships in a nearby bay,
where they wait for Odysseus, Achilles, and a few other Greek
soldiers squirreled inside the hollow horse to let them in while
Troy sleeps. As planned, after the hopelessly gullible Trojans
bring into their city the wooden horse, the Greeks inside it
creep out under cover of dark, murder the guards, open the city
gates to their brethren, and then every Trojan man, woman, and
child is slaughtered. The city is burned to the ground.
Now compare: In
1948, after the Arabs rejected a legal UN vote to create an Arab
and a Jewish state in what had been British Mandate ‘Palestine,’
the Arabs announced that, rather than live peacefully side by
side, they much preferred to exterminate the Jews in the Middle
East. Azzam Pasha, Secretary General of the Arab League, proudly
announced:
“This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre
which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the
Crusades.”[4]
This was, mind
you, immediately after the Holocaust.
And this was
only the first of many genocidal attacks launched by the Arab
neighbors of Israel (see
here for a review).[5]
Each attack was launched because the previous one had failed to
annihilate Israel, so after a while the repeated failure started
to wear on the Arabs, just as the Greeks had also become annoyed
at their inability to destroy Troy. Thus, after many years of
failed genocidal attacks launched with conventional armies
against Israel’s borders, the Arabs decided, after the defeat
they suffered in the 1973 Yom Kippur war, to do like the Greeks
and employ a ruse to get the genocidal soldiers inside Israel’s
walls: this ruse was Yasser Arafat’s 1974 ‘Plan of Phases.’
The idea was
simple: like the Greeks, appear to concede defeat, and make a
gift in exchange for an invitation into the Jewish state. The
gift was the promise of peace. Once inside, however, the PLO
would use its power over the Arab population living there to
indoctrinate it into the most hateful and violent anti-Jewish
ideology, proceeding thereafter with the mass killing.[6]
This Plan of Phases, thanks to US pressure, became the
Oslo ‘peace’ process.[7]
In 2001, a top
PLO official candidly explained the strategy to the Arab press
by making an explicit comparison to The Iliad:
“...Faisal Husseini, the top PLO official in Jerusalem...[was]
quoted as likening the Oslo accords to a ‘Trojan horse.’ ...the
weekly Al-Arabi quotes Husseini as calling the Oslo accords
‘just a temporary procedure, or just a step towards something
bigger…the liberation of all historical Palestine from the
(Jordan) river to the (Mediterranean) sea, even if this means
that the conflict will last for another thousand years or for
many generations.’”[8]
But Faisal
Husseini’s recent explanation was not really needed. As
mentioned above, Arafat made his Plan of Phases known to his
fellow Arabs in 1974, long before the PLO was brought
into the Jewish state. And, as we learn above, Arafat repeated
the PLO's intent to his followers in 1993, over Jordanian
television, and immediately after the White House ceremony
in which Oslo was agreed to: the Oslo process, Arafat explained,
would be his Plan of Phases. |
Yitzhak Rabin
Oslo handshake
( White House lawn )
Yasser Arafat
•
The idea was
simple:
promise peace in exchange for an invitation into the Jewish
state to govern the Arab population living there. Then,
kill the Jews.
•
|
|
Did Israeli leaders
understand that the PLO always meant to exterminate the Israeli
Jews?
____________________________
It is true that
Arafat did not loudly explain his Plan of Phases to the Western
press, but to his Arab audiences. However, Israel has an
intelligence service naturally equipped with speakers of Arabic
who monitor the statements Israel’s Arab enemies make in their
native language. This means that, of course, Israeli leaders
had to know about Arafat’s Plan of Phases as soon as it was
promulgated. They also had to know what Arafat was saying on
Jordanian television even as he was ‘agreeing’ to Oslo.
But even should
anybody argue that Israel’s famed intelligence service is in
fact so pathetically inept that nobody in it ever thought to
monitor what the antisemitic Arabs say in Arabic, this will not
work as an excuse because Arafat’s intentions occasionally did
surface in the Western press, in English. For example,
there is Faisal Husseini’s statement above, which appeared in
the Western press. Less recently, right as the Oslo ‘peace’
process -- meant to bring the PLO into Israel -- was getting
under way (1994), the Evening Standard (London) reported
on a speech by Arafat in which he straightforwardly explained
his ‘Trojan Horse’ view of the Oslo process to his followers.[9]
So Israeli leaders obviously knew what the PLO’s intentions
were. And yet they never informed the Israeli public, defending
instead the claim that the PLO had changed, and that by inviting
the PLO into the Jewish state they were supposedly protecting
the security of ordinary Israelis!
Not only that.
My reader should keep foremost in his or her mind that, in
bringing the PLO into the Jewish state, Israeli leaders
revived the PLO. How so? They revived it because this
antisemitic terrorist organization had already been defeated,
and was languishing far away from Israel, in Tunisian exile,
when Oslo began.[10]
This point is crucial.
Now, I have
found that many -- perhaps most -- Jewish patriots, when they
are confronted with the above, feel a quite insistent -- even
passionate -- urge to interpret all this as stupidity on the
part of Israeli politicians. In my view this kind of innocence
reveals that Jews suffer from pathologies of reasoning that
impair their ability to think clearly about their self defense,
and which make it easier for antisemites to kill large numbers
of Jews. In order to defend the Jewish people we must therefore
expose these pathologies of reasoning. One way to do this is to
put the geopolitical problems that Jews face in personal
terms. Why? Because the fog of propaganda that surrounds the
geopolitical problem is absent in the problem's translation to
the personal level, so it is easier to think about.
Thus, consider
the following thought experiment. John Doe knows (crucial
point) that a criminal has promised to murder John’s family as
soon as he can get into John’s home. But what does John do? He
gives said criminal the house keys. After his family has been
murdered, what will happen to John? Naturally, he will either be
quickly convicted for conspiring to murder his wife and
children, or else he will be quickly declared insane. What is
certain is that no court will accept the argument that John --
in earnest stupidity -- believed this was the best way to
protect his family. Why? Because nobody, quite simply, is
that stupid.
The only way to
argue that Israeli leaders somehow meant well when they
brought the PLO -- an
organization pledged to murder every Jew -- to become
the government over the Arabs in the Jewish state, is therefore
to insist that Israeli leaders didn’t understand what the
PLO meant to do. I have already shown above that this cannot be
defended, given how dramatic and consistent Arafat’s very public
explanations of his intentions. But this point cannot be
emphasized too much, so consider the following:
“Allusions to the [‘Trojan Horse’] Plan of Phases became a
staple in Arafat’s addresses in Arabic, with more than a dozen
such references within a few weeks of the White House ceremony
[the ceremony that officially inaugurated the Oslo process!]. So
also were Arafat’s comparisons of Oslo to Mohammed’s dealings
with the Quraysh, a tribe on the Arabian peninsula. Mohammed
negotiated a treaty with the Quraysh in 628, but two years
later, when his forces had grown stronger, he attacked and
defeated them. Likewise featured in Arafat’s speeches during
this time were calls to Jihad, or holy war, against Israel.
Arafat’s arrival in the territories, in July, 1994, and his
assumption of control over Palestinian schools and an expanded
Palestinian media system were marked by the promoting of these
and related themes in Palestinian school curricula and media.
Palestinian children were taught that all of ‘Palestine’ from
the Jordan to the Mediterranean -- that is, the West Bank, Gaza,
and all of Israel -- belongs to them and is holy Islamic land.
Jews have no historic connections to the land and no legal claim
to any of it but are merely evil usurpers. Palestinian children
were also to learn that it is not only their right but their
obligation to dedicate themselves to Israel’s destruction.
Arafat-controlled Palestinian television, including children’s
television, and other Palestinian media outlets promoted the
same claims and the same agenda.”[11]
To get a sense
for how extreme the Jew-killing propaganda of the PLO, consider
only that Friday sermons transmitted by Palestinian Authority TV
will do such things as shame Arabs who have not yet strapped a
bomb around their own child and sent him to go blow himself up
in the middle of Jewish men, women, and children.[12]
If you live in
the West it is of course relatively difficult to become aware of
this, as it hardly ever surfaces in the Western press, but the
Israeli government and media, naturally, have always
known precisely what is going on in the PLO’s media. So what
have they done with this information? They have covered it up,
lest the Israeli public and Diaspora Jews oppose the Oslo
process that has progressively empowered the PLO inside the
Jewish state.
“The Labor-Meretz coalition government was typically silent on
the anti-Israel indoctrination. At the same time, the Israeli
media...enthusiastically supportive of the Oslo accords,
supported this silence by suppressing coverage of Arafat’s
incitement-laden speeches and of the prominence of the same
themes in Palestinian schools and media. Indeed, a kind of
underground system evolved to monitor hate-mongering in
Palestinian school texts and media in the absence of coverage by
the Israeli government and mainstream Israeli news outlets.”[13]
A cover up
suggests malice, not stupidity.
Also, against
the view that the Israeli ruling elite is stupid, there is the
additional problem that, immediately after Yasser Arafat was
brought from Tunis and installed in the West Bank and Gaza,
terrorism against innocent Israelis quintupled.[14]
Since Arafat’s promise had been that, if brought into Israel,
terrorism would end (for which promise he was given the Nobel
Peace Prize![15]),
the automatic sharp rise in terrorism against innocent Israelis
should have put an immediate end to the Oslo process. After all,
this is what Israeli leaders Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres had
famously and explicitly promised the Israelis: that if terrorism
did not go away, the Oslo process would swiftly die.
But rather than
abort the Oslo process when the violence increased five-fold
upon Arafat’s arrival, the Israeli and Western governments and
media protested that the ‘other’ terrorist organizations, Hamas
and Islamic Jihad, supposedly not allied with Arafat, were to
blame for this violence. (In fact, HIR has shown that Hamas and
Islamic Jihad have always worked in close cooperation with the
PLO to kill Jews and any Arabs opposed to such killings[16]).
In the face of ongoing terrorism, the Israeli and Western
governments and media accused anybody opposed to more Oslo
concessions to the PLO of supposedly playing right into the
terrorist attempt to ‘ruin the peace process.’ In this way
anybody critical of Oslo was loudly equated by the Israeli
government and media with the Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists
as an ‘enemy of peace,’ whereas the PLO itself was consistently
represented as the supposed ‘partner for peace.’ With this cover
story, the Israeli government and media defended the rush to
give the PLO more and more power as a strategy, supposedly, to
give Arafat the tools to control the violence. A sharp increase
in terrorism thus became the ‘rationale’ to push for giving
Arafat more power more quickly!
In The Oslo
Syndrome, historian Kenneth Levin writes:
“The Israeli government’s response to the ongoing violence, and
to Arafat’s failure to fulfill his Oslo obligations vis-à-vis
terrorism and his, instead, lending support to the terrorist
organizations, was muted at best and frequently even protective
of Arafat ...The Peace Movement’s supporters in the government,
the dominant voices in [Israeli prime minister Yitzhak] Rabin’s
coalition, had an answer to such questions: more Israeli
concessions. …the more terror, the more the government urged a
speeding of the ‘peace process.’”[17] |
•
In bringing
the PLO into the Jewish state,
Israeli leaders revived
the PLO.
•
•
Anybody
critical of Oslo was loudly equated by the Israeli government
and media with the Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists as an
‘enemy of peace.’
•
|
|
Shimon Peres
_____________
To deepen our
understanding of the Israeli ruling elite, it is useful to take
a close look at one Israeli politician in particular: Shimon
Peres.
Kenneth Levin
writes:
“…The government’s policy of hiding incriminating information
about Arafat from the public was dramatically if indirectly
illustrated by an episode in 1994 [the year that the Oslo
process was jump-started] when Shimon Peres, conversing with
Arafat at the Erez checkpoint and apparently unaware that his
comments were being recorded by a French filmmaker, threatened
to reveal to the media Arafat’s flouting of his Oslo
obligations. Peres did not go into detail about Arafat’s
violations but did regard them as serious enough that their
revelation would be a ‘catastrophe’ for Arafat and would, among
its consequences, ‘kill the Palestinian story in the American
Congress.’”[18]
This is evidence
that Shimon Peres -- in full knowledge of the facts -- has been
covering up Arafat’s terrorism. It is not evidence of
stupidity.
Who is this
Shimon Peres? He is the great architect of the Oslo process.
It is
illuminating briefly to review his career because you will see
that a certain pattern emerges (I will help out by using
italics). Since 1969, Shimon Peres has been a top minister in
key positions in the Israeli government, almost uninterruptedly.
In 1969 he was appointed Minister of Absorption and in 1970
Minister of Transportation and Communications. In 1974, after a
period as Information Minister, he was appointed Minister of
Defense (by Yitzhak Rabin). In 1977 he succeeded Rabin as Prime
Minister and Labor party leader after the latter resigned. Later
that year, Peres led the Labor Party to its first ever
electoral defeat when Menachem Begin won the premiership for
Likud. Peres led his Labor party to another defeat in
1981, but since his party won more seats than any other in 1984,
a coalition government resulted with Peres as prime minister and
Yitzhak Shamir of Likud as foreign minister. After two years,
they traded places, so Peres became foreign minister in 1986.
Peres led his party to another defeat in 1988. But once
again there was a coalition government, and Peres served as Vice
Premier and Minister of Finance. He left the government in 1990
and was again defeated at the polls in 1992, this time in
the Labor primary elections, by Yitzhak Rabin, but Peres became
Rabin’s foreign minister when the latter became prime minister,
and then succeeded him as prime minister after Rabin’s
assassination in 1995. Peres was defeated in the next
election by Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996. In 1997 Ehud Barak
replaced Peres as Labor party leader, and upon becoming prime
minister, Barak appointed Peres to the post of minister for
regional development. In 2000 Peres lost his bid to be
elected Israeli President (ceremonial head of state) to
Moshe Katsav from Likud. When Ariel Sharon became prime minister
in 2001, Peres was appointed his foreign minister. He left
office briefly in 2003 but then became Sharon’s foreign minister
again in 2004.
As
HIR has shown, Shimon Peres was already working hard at
undermining the security of the Jewish state in the 1980s,[20]
and as we see above, he has had sufficient power in Israel’s
government all these years to push through the Oslo process that
brought the PLO into the Jewish state -- quite despite the fact
that “Peres has never won a national election.”[19]
Something is clearly rotten behind the scenes.
How does Shimon
Peres feel about his fellow Israelis?
“Shimon Peres...declared with regard to public attitudes and
government policy, ‘A leader must be like a bus driver...He
cannot turn his head all the time to see how the passengers
feel.’”[21]
Shimon Peres’
metaphor of leadership is ill-chosen, for a bus driver can
hardly take his passengers wherever he thinks they should
go when a majority of these are complaining that they paid for a
ticket to a different destination. Never elected to office,
Shimon Peres obviously thinks like an autocrat: only his views
matter. In light of his preferred policies, perhaps Peres should
have said that he is a train conductor (rushing his
unwilling passengers to what he insists will be a ‘work’ camp). |
Shimon Peres
“A
leader must be like a bus driver... He cannot turn his head all
the time to see how the passengers feel.
”
|
|
Other Israeli leaders
__________________
It is important
to point out that the corruption in the Israeli leadership is
hardly limited to Shimon Peres and his Labor party.
It was, after
all, Yitzhak Shamir from Likud who, under threat from the
United States, first assented to the Madrid so-called ‘peace’
talks that became the platform for the Oslo process.[22]
After this,
Yitzhak Rabin from Labor, steered by the true controller, his
foreign minister Shimon Peres, famously brought the PLO into
Israel.
But a majority
of Israeli Jews then reacted rationally to the increased
terrorism that followed the entrance of the PLO into Israel and
chose Benjamin Netanyahu -- on a platform that breathed fire
against the Oslo accords -- over Shimon Peres in the election
that followed Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination. But despite that,
when Benjamin Netanyahu became prime minister, he turned around
and, under US pressure, pushed forward the Oslo process with
even more energy than his predecessors.[23]
When Ehud Barak
-- like Shimon Peres, a Laborite -- was elected afterwards, he
rushed to give Arafat and the Syrians everything they wanted,
but Arafat, and the Syrian Assad, rejected the offers because
their entire political careers are built on the promise of
destroying Israel, so they find it easier to stay in power by
refusing any diplomatic moves that might create the impression
they have recognized the state of Israel.[24]
Under a barrage
of Arafat-sponsored terrorism, a majority of Israeli Jews once
again reacted rationally and elected Ariel Sharon on his
promises to oppose Oslo. Like Yitzhak Shamir and Benjamin
Netanyahu, Sharon was from Likud. But likewise -- under US
pressure -- Sharon turned around and embraced Oslo policies more
fiercely than anybody, cleansing the Jews out of Gaza (and parts
of the West Bank), and giving away this territory to the
terrorists, asking in exchange for...nothing at all![25]
Sharon’s heir, Ehud Olmert, from the party that Ariel Sharon
recently founded, Kadima, was likewise rushing to cleanse
remaining Jews from the West Bank (thus completing the total
capitulation of Israel to its terrorist enemies) when the war
with Hezbollah interrupted him.
Obviously, then,
the problem is hardly limited to Shimon Peres and the Labor
party. Every Israeli government since the early 1990s has
advanced the PLO’s agenda against the interests -- and against
the wishes, expressed at the polls -- of ordinary Israelis. |
Yitzhak Shamir
Benjamin Netanyahu
Ehud Barak
Ariel Sharon |
|
The Israeli ruling elite has
covered up the German Nazi origins of the PLO
________________
In all this, I
have not mentioned yet the most dramatic piece of information
kept from the Israeli public by the Israeli ruling elite. I
saved the worst for last.
It turns out
that
Al Fatah, the controlling core of the PLO, was created by Hajj
Amin al Husseini, who was as important as Adolf Eichman as an
architect of Adolf Hitler’s German Nazi extermination of the
European Jews (before that, Hajj Amin had been murdering very
large numbers of innocent Jews with terrorist attacks in British
Mandate ‘Palestine,’ and it is precisely this expertise that
made him so attractive to the German Nazis).[26]
Again, Israel has an intelligence service, and it spends
millions of shekels a year on it, and Israeli spies are supposed
to be investigating the background of the PLO, so it is
inconceivable that in all these years they could not document
something that I was able to document in two weeks (consult the
above footnote).
But suppose that
-- still -- you wanted desperately to believe the hypothesis
that Israeli leaders were not aware of this easily documented
fact, and thus unwittingly brought the continuation of the
Holocaust into the Jewish state in total innocence. Even under
this hypothesis, it is still impossible to believe that the
Israeli government has been innocent of Al Fatah’s Nazi
background since 26 May 2003. Why? Because on that day
Israel National News (Arutz Sheva) published my first
article documenting the Nazi history of Al Fatah,[27]
and the Israeli government keeps very close tabs on what
Israel National News publishes.
To get a sense
for how closely the Israeli government monitors Israel
National News, consider only that, for publishing the truth
that defends Israel, this media company has been viciously --
and I do mean viciously -- persecuted by the Israeli government.
To the point that its radio component, Israel National Radio,
had to put its equipment on a ship and broadcast from outside
Israel’s territorial waters because it was barred from doing so
inside Israel. I know this sounds absurd, but it is true, and
you may read about that here:
http://www.hirhome.com/israel/inr_interview.htm
It is obvious,
therefore, that since May 2003, the Israeli government cannot
claim to be unaware that the PLO is a continuation of Adolf
Hitler’s Final Solution, particularly given that a scandal
erupted when I was fired from the University of Pennsylvania for
publishing this very documentation in Israel National News,
and given that this scandal was covered in the Philadelphia
Inquirer, FOX TV, and Israel National News, among
other places.[28]
This kind of thing happened to many
European academics who defended the Jews in the prelude to WWII,
and it has been happening to many pro-Jewish academics today
(the canary in the coal mine has expired, and the explosion is
coming).[29]
No matter. Ariel
Sharon pushed through his Unilateral Disengagement from Gaza
after I published the documentation on Al Fatah’s Nazi
background in Israel and was fired from the University of
Pennsylvania for doing so. (By the way, most Israelis are
entirely unaware that their country is being turned over to an
extension of the German Nazi Final Solution, and that the ground
is quickly being prepared for the next great genocide of the
Jewish people; if you are an Israeli, or have friends in Israel,
one thing you can do is
share this information.)
Now, once the
corruption of the Israeli elites is understood, it is no longer
surprising that an article attacking Israel and defending her
terrorist enemies (with blatant fabrications of history) should
have been published -- in the middle of Israel’s defensive war
against the genocidal Hezbollah! -- in a major Israeli newspaper
(see
here).[30]
Particularly when you consider that the newspaper in question,
Ha’aretz, is the “newspaper of Israel’s elites and the
most ideologically driven of the nation’s nongovernmental
media.”[31]
And especially when you consider that the author of this
Ha’aretz article,
Gideon Levy, is the former personal aide and spokesperson for
Shimon Peres, chief architect of Oslo.[32]
Neither is it
surprising, once this context is understood, that the current
Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, who failed to defend the
Israelis in this latest war between Israel and Hezbollah, has
now said that “Israel would be willing to discuss the disputed
Shebaa Farms if Lebanon disarms Hizbullah.”[33]
What is Shebaa Farms? It is a territory in the Golan Heights
(lost by Syria after it launched a genocidal war against Israel
in 1967[34])
that never belonged to Lebanon, and in fact the UN has
already ruled on this question.[35]
Moreover, a publicly available Pentagon study concluded that
Israel will commit suicide if it returns Golan Heights territory
to its genocidal enemies.[36]
If Ehud Olmert gives Shebaa Farms to Lebanon, he is really
giving it to Hezbollah’s and Lebanon’s master, Syria, and
what he is giving Syria is a weapon it can use in its next
genocidal war against Israel. So Olmert is rewarding Syria for
using Hezbollah to murder innocent Israelis. Of course, it
should go without saying that Lebanon -- a country that does not
exist (for it is really an extension of Syria) -- will not
disarm Hezbollah; but it is a safe bet that, if he can, Olmert
will pretend this did happen so that he can give away --
through ‘Lebanon’ -- a piece of the strategic Golan Heights to
the antisemitic and genocidal Syrian regime.
Ehud Olmert
hardly behaves like the prime minister of Israel -- he behaves
like Syria’s hired gun.
But we’ve been
here before: former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak offered
the Syrians not only the Golan Heights, but even territory in
the Galilee that had always been Israeli! The only reason
this didn’t happen is that the Syrian ruler Hafez Assad refused
Barak’s offer because any deal with Israel would have made him
immediately unpopular with his genocidal Syrian subjects.[24]
And Barak’s policies toward Syria, mind you, were not
significantly different from those of Likud’s Netanyahu right
before him, who himself “largely followed his immediate [Labor]
predecessors’ policies, seeking to reach accommodation with
Syria based on Israel’s essentially ceding the entire Golan
Heights,” and who likewise “followed his Labor predecessors in
allowing Syria -- for the sake of keeping illusory possibilities
of an agreement ‘alive’ -- to continue to prosecute its proxy
war against Israeli forces in Lebanon [through Hezbollah] at no
cost.”[37]
Ehud Olmert will
naturally not stop at giving away Shebaa Farms. As reported on 9
September,
“Israel’s foreign minister said yesterday it was time the Jewish
state talked to the Palestinians, adding no conditions should be
put on meeting President Mahmoud Abbas.”[38]
No conditions
should be put on meeting President Mahmoud Abbas, of Al
Fatah,
whose organization was created by the top co-architect of the
German Nazi Final Solution, and is therefore
constitutionally pledged to exterminate the Israeli Jews.[39]
Is this Israel’s foreign minister, or the PLO’s foreign
minister?
Really: Who is
Ehud Olmert working for? The question is sharpened when you
consider that:
“[The Israeli] ambassador to Germany Shimon Stein is pleased
that Germany has agreed to consider Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s
request that it send peace-keeping troops to Lebanon.”[38]
Isn’t this
perfectly consistent with everything else that Ehud Olmert does?
It is. Especially when you take into account that, in 1956, the
US installed in West Germany
as the German BND -- the German equivalent of the CIA --
a group of Nazi war criminals that the US had been
protecting (and using).[40]
(The CIA itself had earlier been created by absorbing tens of
thousands of Nazi war criminals, as documented in 1988 by
historian Christopher Simpson.[41]) |
Hajj Amin al
Husseini
Adolf Hitler
•
Since May
2003,
the Israeli government cannot claim to be unaware that the PLO
is a continuation of Adolf Hitler’s
Final Solution
•
Ehud Olmert
“Israel
would be willing to discuss the disputed Shebaa Farms if Lebanon
disarms Hizbullah.
”
Mahmoud Abbas
( a.k.a. Abu Mazen ) |
|
Final remarks
____________
The above
evidence supports the hypothesis that many in the Israeli ruling
elite have been corrupted by the forces that wish to destroy the
Jewish people. If so, this would hardly be the first time, and
therefore if the hypothesis appears surprising this merely
betrays ignorance of history. The phenomenon of “renegade” Jews
(as the First and Second Books of Maccabees call
them) allying with the powerful antisemitic enemies of the
Jewish movement is one of the most stable, recurrent features of
Western History.
In the ancient
Mediterranean, plenty of ‘Hellenizing’ (pro-Greek) Jews in the
Jewish ruling elite allied with the Seleucid Greeks who
attempted to obliterate Judaism in the land of Judah, and who
committed one mass slaughter of innocent Jews after another, in
addition to sundry cruelties a great deal worse than murder.[42]
Then there were Jews -- once again Hellenizing Jews in the
ruling elite -- who allied with the Roman effort to exterminate
the Jewish people in the first and second centuries (the most
famous case is that of ‘historian’ Flavius Josephus, from a
rich, priestly Jewish family, who assisted the Roman generals
Vespasian and Titus in the genocidal ‘First Jewish War,’ and
then wrote much propaganda to excuse the Roman outrage.)[43]
More recently we have the example of the mainstream Jewish
leaders during WWII in the United States and Britain, who tended
to be ‘assimilated’ Jews toward the secular end of Jewish piety
and practice, and who were well-connected with the antisemitic
power structures in their home countries. These well-placed
Jewish leaders -- during the Holocaust -- allied with the
powerful antisemites whom they had befriended, and worked to
sabotage the efforts of Hillel Kook (alias Peter Bergson) and
his mostly Orthodox Jewish and righteous Gentile (i.e.
non-Jewish) allies, who were trying to rescue the desperate
European Jewish population (see
Part 1).[44]
And even more recently we have the astonishing attacks against
the Jewish state by all manner of prominent mainstream Jewish
leaders in the Diaspora (see
Part 2).[45]
In this context, why should we be surprised that the largely and
fiercely secular Israeli ruling elite is betraying ordinary
Israelis? But we are surprised because we do not study history,
and so, as George Santayana famously said, we are condemned to
repeat it.
Anybody who
insists, however, despite all the above, that what really
propels current Israeli leaders is not treason but the most
astonishing stupidity ever witnessed, will still have to reach
the same conclusion regarding what, in practical terms,
is necessary for the survival of the Jewish state. Why? Because
this kind of stupidity is criminal, and will result in another
anti-Jewish genocide, so the Israeli ruling elite must be kicked
out of power.
The next
question is: Why don’t ordinary Israelis and Diaspora Jews
effectively defend themselves from their own leaders?
HIR will soon
attempt to answer this question.
|
Flavius Josephus
Notify me of new HIR pieces!
 |
________________________________________________________
Footnotes and Further Reading
________________________________________________________
| |
