When you banned me from speaking at Delft what you were doing was perpetuating the myth that Jews support Genocide
in Gaza –that is anti-Semitic – Jews are not your moral alibi or your colonial
pets
Nazi Propaganda Portrayed Jewish Men as Sexual Predators - Zionist Students Have been Allowed to do the same at Delft - on the grounds of 'freedom of speech' unlike anti-Zionism
When
the authorities at Delft University banned me from speaking on 28 October, I
wrote an Open Letter to its Rector, Professor Timothy van der Hagen. Because the
silent Rector, like the
silent intellectual, has chosen not to say anything, I thought I would help
him with a second letter.
Meanwhile
students at Delft have produced this wonderful Instagram
Video highlighting sections of my speech.
The Curt Memo Banning My Meeting
As people
will know from my previous
blog I defied the ban and spoke on campus anyway to an audience of 100.
Given that they literally had a few hours notice, the attendance was
remarkable. Delft authorities did not seem inclined to disgrace themselves any
further, having behaved as if they were a police-state university, and left us
alone. I can only assume that they realised that banning free speech is the
hallmark of a university under fascism.
When the Zionist
Student Association showed
a filmScreams of Silence which
falsely alleged that the Palestinian resistance on October 7 had indulged in a
mass orgy of rape, despite the lack of any evidence, Delft authorities defended
its showing on the grounds of ‘freedom of expression’.
However
the right of Palestinian students to invite a Jewish anti-Zionist did not come
under freedom of expression. The reason given was that
The views of
the invited speaker goes against the values that TU Delft stands for: an open
and inclusive community where everyone feels safe.
It’s
strange how some views are deemed a threat to people’s ‘safety’ whereas others
come under the rubric of ‘freedom of speech’ I am sure Professor van der Hagen
will be more than able to demonstratehis talent for verbal gymnastics when explaining the differential
treatment of Zionists and anti-Zionists.
Israel is destroying every hospital in Northern Gaza and Starving the Population Just Like the Nazis did in the Ghettos of Poland
Perhaps
the real reason for my ban was Delft not wanting their ties with the Israeli universities
and the military-industrial complex that is engaged in genocide to be questioned
or held up to scrutiny.
Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda against Jews is similar to that of Zionist students exercising 'free speech' at Delft
One
can only conclude from this that the safety of Palestinian and Muslim students
is of no concern to this racist university. Allegations of rape have been the
standard weapon of white and anti-Jewish racists historically – it was the justification
for lynching and murder and the demonization of Jewish men in Nazi Germany.
To
Professor Van der Hagen racist incitement, because that is what the film is really
about, is covered by free speech but allowing a Jewish opponent of Zionism threatens
peoples’ safety. The hypocrisy of this genocide complicit university is there
for all to see.
Even the Nazis left the Jewish Hospital in Berlin alone and it survived until Berlin was liberated in May 1945 - not so in Gaza where Israel is destroying the health sector
The
justification
of a Zionist student Bensignor for showing the film was that “when women say that they’re raped, I
believe them.” So does he believe the hundreds of Palestinian women raped
by the Israeli military? Or the victims of mass torture? Or is it only some victims
that he believes?
But it wasn’t women who made the accusations
of rape. It was Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli propaganda, for the sole reason
of justifying genocide in Gaza. Any ‘witnesses’ subsequently corralled can be
treated with a pinch of salt. There are
no victims and there is no forensic evidence. The New York Times article on
which this film is based Screams
Without Words has been widely discredited.
The main victim’s family, Gail Abdush denied she had been raped.
I
have therefore penned a second letter to Rector Magnificus as he likes to be called.Let us see whether or not he will behave like
his 1940 pro-Nazi counterpart and keep his silence.
To
judge by its weaponisation of the holocaust in its war propaganda, people would
be forgiven for thinking that during the holocaust the Zionist movement worked
relentlessly to try and rescue Jews from Hitler’s clutches. Yet the reverse is
the case.
Rudolf Vrba Interviewed by Claude Lanzmann
During
the holocaust the Zionists did not want to know about what was happening in Europe.
They had one goal and one goal only – to build their genocidal ‘Jewish’ state.Indeed they did their best to obstruct the
rescue efforts of others if the destination was not Palestine. That is why I
wrote my book, Zionism During the Holocaust,
to set the record straight.
You
don’t have to take my word for it. Just read the last chapter of Shabtai
Teveth’s official biography of Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel,
which is entitled Disaster Means
Strength. The disaster of the holocaust meant strength for the Zionists.
As
Zionist historian Noah Lucas observed:
As
the European holocaust erupted, Ben-Gurionsaw it as a decisive opportunity for Zionism... Ben-Gurion above all others
sensed the tremendous possibilities inherent in the dynamic of the chaos and
carnage in Europe…. In conditions of peace,… Zionism could not move the masses
of world Jewry. The forces unleashed by Hitlerin all
their horror must be harnessed to the advantage of Zionism. ... By the end of
1942… the struggle for a Jewish state became the primary concern of the
movement. [A Modern History of Israel, pp. 187/8]
In
November 1935 Ben-Gurion explained that:
To the
disaster of German Jewrywe must offer a Zionist response, namely, we
must convert the disaster into a source for the upbuilding of Palestine.
In
October 1941 as the holocaust was raging Ben-Gurion wrote:
Disaster is
strength if channelled to a productive course.
The whole trick of Zionism is that it knows how to channel our disaster, not
into despondency or degradation, as is the case in the Diaspora, but
into a source of creativity and exploitation. 29F [Shabtai Teveth, The Burning Ground 1886-1948, p. 853]
Tony Greenstein offers an excoriating account of how Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland falsified the historical record in his biography of Rudolph Vrba, the first Jew to escape Auschwitz.
One might wonder why Vrba's incredible story has been buried for decades, given how…
In 1935 the Nazis
introduced the Nuremberg Laws, which Gerald Reitlinger described as ‘‘the
most murderous legislative instrument known to European history’. It
turned German Jews from citizens into subjects. Only the Zionists
welcomed the laws. Zionist ExecutivePresident, Menahem Ussishkin, was effusive:
There is something positive in
their [German Jewry’s] tragedy... and that is that Hitleroppressed them as a race and not as a
religion. Had he done the latter, half the Jews in Germanywould simply have converted to Christianity.
German
Zionist leader Joachim Prinzexplained that:
(The Jews) have
been drawn out of the last secret recesses of christening and mixed marriages.
We are not unhappy about it... The theory of assimilationhas collapsed…. We want to replace
assimilation by something new: the
declaration of belonging to the Jewish nation and the Jewish race. A state,
built according to the principle of purity of the nation and race can only be
honoured and respected by a Jew who declares
his belonging to his own kind.'Wir Juden' Berlin 1934, p.154 https://tinyurl.com/yxqvmaq5
The
Zionists alone amongst Jews saw the advent of the Nazis as something positive. Berl
Katznelson, a founder of
Mapaiand editor of the Histadrut paper Davar,as well as Ben-Gurion’s effective
deputy, saw ‘an opportunity to build and
flourish like none we have ever had or ever will have.’[Francis Nicosia, Zionism & Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany,
p. 91]
When
Hitler became Chancellor of Germany on January 30 1933 most Jews reacted
instinctively by boycotting everything German. Not so the Zionists. They were
eager to trade with the Nazis to build their ‘Jewish’ state and in August 1933
they reached a trading agreement with them, Ha’avara.
When
the last major Jewish community in Europe was under threat, after the Nazi
invasion of Hungary on March 19, 1944, the Zionists suppressed the Vrba-Wetzler
Report which, exposed Auschwitz, not as a labour camp but an extermination camp.
But first a little background.
On
April 10 Rudolf Vrba and his friend Alfred Wetzler escaped from Auschwitz with
the purpose of warning Hungarian Jews what was in store for them. They had
heard SS men talking about looking forward to Hungarian salami, the food that the
deportees would bring with them. On April 24 after a perilous journey they
reached Slovakia and set down what they knew to the Jewish Council there.
On
or about April 29 Rudolf Kasztner, the leader of Hungarian Zionism, paid his
monthly visit to Bratislava and was given a copy. What did he do?Spread the word far and wide?On the contrary he took them to Eichmann,
told him of them and agreed in negotiations that in exchange for a train out of
Hungary to safety for 1684 Zionist and rich Jews, Kasztner would not only
suppress the news of Auschwitz but positively misinform the Jews who were
getting on the deportations trains.
Kasztner's Train for the elite
Of
this there is no doubt. When Malchiel Greenwald called Kasztner a collaborator
in Israel in 1953, he was sued by the Israeli state for libel by Kasztner. But
it didn’t turn out as expected. Jews who had survived Auschwitz testified to
Kasztner’s treachery. When David Roznerwas asked why Kasztnerwould have been killed if he had set foot in
Koloszvár, his home town,after the war, he replied, ‘Because he was the man who misled the Jews
to believe in the good intentions of the Germans.’ [Ben Hecht, Perfidy p. 109].
It
later turned out that Kasztner had gone to Nuremberg to give evidence that exonerated
some of Eichmann’s worst butchers like Hermann Krumey and Dieter Wisliceny. Not
surprisingly Rudolf Vrba, who had done his best to ensure that the Vrba-Wetzler
Report was distributed to other people, laid the blame at Kasztner’s door and
that of the Zionist movement. The response of the Zionist historians was to
erase Kasztner from historical memory.
In
the Israeli school syllabus and holocaust texts there was no mention made of
the two Jewish escapees or even the fact that there had been Jews who escaped
from Auschwitz.
Vrba’s
memoirs, I Cannot Forgive, were
printed everywhere but in Israel. No mention was made of Vrba or Wetzler’s name
in Yad Vashem, the obscene holocaust propaganda museum in Jerusalem where
assorted fascists, neo-Nazis and racists now visit to pay their homage to the
Israeli state.
In
articles and publications the names of Vrba and Wetzler were never mentioned –
they were ‘two Jewish chaps’ or ‘two Jewish prisoners’. In the words of
Ruth Linn, an Israeli Professor of Education from Haifa University, who
happened, by chance, to meet Vrba at the University of British Columbia,
‘The problem was that none of the
escapers had even a ‘minimal layer of Zionist veneer.’ [Ruth Linn, Escaping
Auschwitz, a Culture of Forgetting p. 85].
Like
Marek Edelman, the last Commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Vrba was
eliminated from the history books and by the holocaust industry because he
didn’t fit into the Zionist narrative. Linn wrote that
Like Vrba,
Edelmannever ‘ascended’ to Israel,
refusing to become the ‘dead and obedient hero who could be molded along with
the political order of that time…. extremely inconvenient for the creation of a
heroic Zionist condensing and compensating myth… Israel was not their home.’ Linn, pp. 6, 87.
As
people may remember, over 2 months ago I wrote, for Electronic Intifada
and my own blog, what Jonathan
Cook called an excoriating
review of Jonathan Freedland’s The Escape
Artist, a biography of Vrba. Freedland’s book was a cheap imitation
thriller of Vrba’s own memoirs, I Cannot
Forgive. It was dishonest in its justification of Vrba’s silencing.
I
decided, at this time of genocide, that it would be appropriate to organise a
webinar on the subject of Rewriting the Holocaust and we have an excellent
panel of speakers. Stephen Kapos is well known to people as a child survivor of
Budapest under the Nazis. Tom Suarez has written two amazingly researched books
and Haim Bresheeth, from Jewish Network for Palestine is a long time
Israeli-Jewish activist who has just been arrested whilst speaking at a
demonstration outside the Israeli Embassy, as I was a month ago.
The
days when Israel and the Zionists had a monopoly over the holocaust are gone.
The holocaust in Gaza demonstrates that Zionism has not learnt any lessons from
the Nazi holocaust. On the contrary the Zionists believe that the Nazi
holocaust entitles them to commit their own holocaust, a view that the German
State also holds.
Ruth
Linn, whose book, Escaping
Auschwitz – A Culture of Silence exposed the machinations of Yehuda Bauer
and the other establishment Zionist holocaust historians. I invited her to join
the panel and initially she accepted. However Ruth Linn is a Zionist and she
got cold feet about speaking with anti-Zionists. However you should read Linn’s
Who’s afraid of the man who
escaped from Auschwitz?
According to Rector Professor Timothy van der Hagen’s Lackey I Posed a Threat to Delft’s ‘open and inclusive’ community unlike Lockheed Martin’s Admiral James O Ellis
The Student Magazine at Delft's Report of My Visit!
The Rector’s anonymous lackey was curt, short and to the point
‘The views of the invited speaker goes against the values that TU Delft stands for: an open and inclusive community where everyone feels safe.’
There was of course no explanation. The Rector’s lackey merely referred to the guidelines for demonstrations on the TU Delft Campus and the Code of Conduct. ‘gatherings on the TU Delft premises in which these values are violated are not permitted.’
Tony Greenstein speaking on the steps of the library at Delft University
There was of course no explanation as to which parts of the Code had been infringed nor why. This is how bureaucracies work. I was banned for being a Jewish anti-Zionist. We could of course guess that my presence was as welcome at a university liked Delft as a ham sandwich in a synagogue! But this is mere speculation.
Admiral James O Ellis, a warmonger extraordinaire is welcomed to Delft by its Administration
Two weeks before I spoke Admiral James O Ellis, who was on the Board of Lockheed Martin (2004-2024) was invited to speak at Delft. Lockheed Martin is one of the largest arms companies in the world, whose fighter aircraft have been prominent in the shredding of children in Gaza and in committing genocide.
Tony Greenstein speaking on the steps of the library at Delft University
Ellis was also President and CEO of the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations until May 2012 and Commander of the US Strategic Command. One of the key ghouls in the US Empire, which has been responsible for the overthrow of elected governments and the invasion of countries, as well as the waging of war in the Middle East.
Tony Greenstein speaking on the steps of the library at Delft University
Ellis was considered a suitable speaker whose presence was quite compatible with the ‘values’ of their code of conduct. Clearly the code of conduct which I was held to be in potential breach of had nothing to say about warmongers and supporters of genocide.
Tony Greenstein speaking on the steps of the library at Delft University
I was only travelling to The Netherlands because an old friend, Sue Blackwell, who had been prominent in the launch of the Academic Boycott in Britain in 2005, was getting married to Egbert Harmsen. Both are involved in The Netherlands BDS. I let it be known that I was happy to speak to meetings while I was there and one was arranged at Delft University of Technology, the largest technical university in the country, ranked no. 49 in the world’s rankings.
Activists in the Palestine Collective at Delft therefore faced a dilemma, whether or not to go ahead. Understandably some were worried about attempts to victimise them but in the end it was decided that I would speak on the steps of their impressive library and that is what I did to a crowd of about 100 students.
Tony Greenstein speaking on the steps of the library at Delft University
In his profile the Rector of Delft, Professor van Der Hagen, stated:
The most important task of TU Delft is to make a contribution towards building a better society.
I felt sure that despite being professor nuclear physics he had a broad mind and would countermand his flunkeys. It was not to be.
When I learnt that I was banned from speaking I decided to write Hagen an Open Letter which students distributed around campus. I’ve always believed in going to the organ grinder rather than the monkey.
I explained that there was a genocide taking place in Gaza with the murder of 16,000+ children about which Israeli soldiers have boasted. I also explained that the Netherlands has a long history of colonial war crimes and in banning speakers exposing Israel’s war crimes, in which his university is intimately involved, given its collaboration with Israeli universities, he wasn’t setting a good precedent.
I pointed out that I had recently brought out a book Zionism During the Holocaustwhich explains the relationship of the Zionist movement towards anti-Semitism and the Nazis during the holocaust.
It is this which Delft’s thought police are trying to suppress. Genocide in Gaza does not come from nowhere. Zionism has always been a movement of racial supremacy.
I pointed out that my book carries blurbs from Ilan Pappe, Professor of Middle East History at Exeter University; Richard Falk Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Professor of Global Law at Queen Mary College, London; Moshe Machover, Emeritus Professor at King’s College, London as well as Ken Loach, twice winner of the Palme d’Or. All the aforementioned academics are Jewish and two of them are Israeli.
I felt sure that the good professor would take note and rescind my banning. I also pointed out that famous Jews such as Einstein, Hannah Arendt and Sigmund Freud had opposed the nationalist madness of Zionism in their time and warned of the consequences.
Tony Greenstein speaking on the steps of the library at Delft University
I also pointed out that contrary to the usual jibe of ‘anti-Semitism’ which is directed against opponents of Zionism, it is the anti-Semites themselves who are the best friends of Zionism. Indeed it was leading Nazis who were most fulsome in support of Zionism, because they both shared the belief that Jews did not belong in Germany. I quoted Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi Party’s theoretician, who was hanged as a war criminal at Nuremberg, who wrote in 1919 that
‘Zionism must be vigorously supported in order to encourage a significant number of German Jews to leave for Palestine or other destinations’
Mientje Meijer - the leader of the sewing girls strike
I pointed out that in Netherlands during the Nazi occupation, 75% of the Jewish population was exterminated. This was despite the fact that in February 1941 Dutch workers staged the Amsterdam General Strike, the only strike in Nazi occupied Europe against the deportations. The working class of The Netherlands was magnificent but not so the Dutch state. The strike was savagely repressed with 389 being deported to Mauthausen concentration camp where most died.
Dutch Nazi Collaborators from the NSB
The Dutch state, the Blue Police and its academic functionaries, collaborated extensively with the Nazi occupiers. The Dutch civil service produced an identity card which was almost impossible to forge making the life of Jews in hiding extremely difficult. The Dutch State adopted the Aryan Paragraph which deprived Dutch Jews of citizenship and allowed the deportations to be legally carried out. Jewish Supreme Court judge Lodewijk Visser was removed without protest from fellow judges from the Court by the Nazis.
In The Netherlands the Nazis set up a Jewish Council, the Joodsche Raad, under David Cohen, a leading Zionist official and Abraham Asscher. They assiduously compiled lists on Jews to be deported and carried out the Nazi instructions faithfully.
After the war Willy Lages, Commander of the German Security Police, was asked ‘How was the Jewish Council used?’ to which he replied, ‘In every possible way.’ To the question ‘Did you find them easy to work with?’ he responded, ‘Very easy, indeed.’
By way of contrast in France, where the Communists led the resistance and organised the rescue of Jewish children in particular, 75% of the Jews were saved. In Belgium half the Jews were saved. In both of these countries the Judenrat were forcibly prevented from operating and in Belgium its leader Robert Holcinger was executed by the resistance. Tragically the Joodsche Raad was not terrorised.
The Rector of Delft Professor Timothy van der Hagen
I explained all this to Rector van der Hagen but to no avail. I pointed out that his own University, Delft had a magnificent record.
Its students were the first to protest and strike on 25 November 1940 against the Nazi order 1940 barring the employment of 6 Jewish professors. When Professor Joseph Jitta was barred from giving his final lecture, the students decided to boycott his replacement. But as this report explains
‘While the Rector tried to prevent the strike the next day, the lecture hall seats on 25 November were virtually empty.’
It seems that the current Rector at Delft has a predecessor who did everything in his power to prevent solidarity by the students with a Jewish professor. The parallels go even further. His worthy predecessor did all he could to bar Jews from Delft’s campus and Prof. Hagan has approved the banning of a Jewish anti-Zionist.
A plaque to Frans van Hasselt, a Delft student murdered by the Nazis in Buchenwald - the present Rector has ignored the history of the anti-Nazi struggle at Delft in favour of wining and dining arms merchants
Most Jews in Europe before the holocaust were anti-Zionist. One of the reasons that the Zionists say little about Anne Frank is because in her diaries she didn’t dream of going to Palestine but living in a free Netherlands.
One of the University’s students, Frans van Hasselt, who inspired the strike with a rousing speech, was arrested by the Nazis the following April. He was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp where he died.
Dutch fascist leader Geert Wilders is welcome at Delft
I also asked Van Der Hagen whether in view of the ban on me he would also ban Geert Wilders from campus. But I guess not as it would appear that it is only Jewish anti-Zionists and supporters of the Palestinians, not fascists who are banned.
I also explained to Professor Hagen that the Nazis began with ethnic cleansing and ended with genocide and that is now the path that the Israeli state is taking with the complicity of the Dutch State.
I quoted Heinrich Heine who once remarked that ‘those who burn books will in the end burn people.’ It turned out to be prophetic and I offered to send him a copy of my book in order that he might have the opportunity of burning it.
I ended my letter by thanking Rector Magnificus Van der Hagen for what he and his flunkeys had done.
If I had been allowed to speak on campus perhaps 50 people would have heard me. As a result of your actions hundreds if not thousands will.
On Monday morning I arrived early on campus to meet with the organisers and have lunch. At close to 1 pm the meeting began on the steps of the library since we had been barred from any meeting rooms. About 100 students stopped to listen to this hastily organised meeting, literally at one day’s notice. I was introduced by Sue Blackwell who also finished the meeting. I took questions from anyone who wanted to ask one. Unfortunately so far only half an hour of the meeting has been caught on film though more may be available later on.
Tony Greenstein speaking from the steps of Delf's library
I also sold over 20 of my books to students who were interested in learning the history of the holocaust that is not taught in the Dutch or Western education systems. How the Zionists, who never hesistate to use the Jewish holocaust against the Palestinians and their supporters, were a quisling movement who betrayed the Jews of Europe.
I ended my speech to the students by saying that although Israel claims it inherits the memory of the Jews who died in the holocaust in reality it inherits the memory of those who killed them. That today, just as in the past, it is the anti-Semites above all who love Israel – from Geert Wilders in The Netherlands, to Marine Le Pen in France to Germany’s Alternative for Germany.
After the meeting two Jewish Zionist students came up to me. They didn’t seem particularly afraid for their safety and asked me the usual Zionist talking points – why there were no Arab democracies and about the collaboration of the Mufti of Jerusalem with Hitler. My response was simply that US imperialism which backs Israel has done its best to ensure that democracy doesn’t exist in the Middle East as their main interest is oil. Israel has helped them in that task. As for the Mufti, well he was appointed by Britain’s Zionist High Commissioner Sir Herbert Samuel in 1921 despite coming fourth in elections.
It wasn’t the Palestinians who elected him but the British and the Zionists! Nonetheless it was a common feature of the struggle against colonialism that the resistance adopts the position of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ although in fact thousands of Palestinians did serve in the British army during the war, unlike the Zionists who until near the end abstained from the war effort.
I also asked how it was that the Zionist terror organisation, the Stern Gang made not one, but two offers of military co-operation to the Nazis? One of their leaders, Yitzhak Shamir twice became Prime Minister of Israel and today the pro-Nazi leader, Yair Stern, is honoured in Israel. Postage stamps in his honour, streets are named after him. There is even a town, Kochav Yair.
However this meeting was important because it said that come hell or high water we will not allow the Dutch state and its academic servants, who collaborated so willingly with the Nazis during the war, to prevent our right to speak out. I have made it clear that I am happy to come back and speak if the students wish me to and to speak at other universities in The Netherlands too.
What the determination of the students at Delft proved was that the enemies of free speech on Palestine will back off when they are confronted because they have no arguments. They refer to codes of conduct and peoples’ safety all the while entertaining US Generals and Admirals and others who profit from death and destruction. Our message should be that
The racists and the imperialists will not silence us
My thanks go out to the students at Delft University and all those who helped make this meeting a success. Now let Professor van der Hagen live up to his words about making the world a better place by cutting his ties with Israel’s complicit universities and its military-industrial complex. Actions speak louder than words.
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