Auschwitz Survivor Hajo Mayer Banned by Scottish State Holocaust Body

As the letter below from Scottish PSC says, it is truly shocking – but not at all surprising – that the ‘official’ i.e. government sponsored State Holocaust Remembrance Group has decided not to publish the events at which Hajo Meyer, a survivor of the Auschwitz death camp is speaking.

What is Hajo's offence? Drawing parallels between his own experiences at the hands of the Nazis and the experiences of the Palestinians at the sharp end of Zionist racism - the 'Death to Arab' slogan regularly chanted by Israeli mobs and the Yisrael Beteinu party of Avigdor Lieberman. The Holocaust is supposed to stand as a justification for the Israeli state, whatever it does.

For years now the Holocaust has been turned away from a lesson against racism and fascism and the evils represented by them, and into an ideological justification of the Israeli state. That was the essential purpose behind the holocaust remembrance day in the first place. Its role was not to remember the dead and draw universal lessons against the dangers of fascism and racism. On the contrary, Zionism drew the exact opposite lessons. Racism against Jews could only be prevented by Jews congregating in their own state, immune from the influence or effect of non-Jews.

Of course it hasn’t turned out that way. The activities of Israel, and its brutally racist and at times genocidal oppression of the Palestinians, has been justified by reference to the holocaust, as if the extermination of millions of Jews sanitises the expulsion, massacre and dispossession of the Palestinians.

This is the single biggest cause of the phenomenon of holocaust denial.

Scottish PSC organised a tour by Hajo Meyer and the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust has seen fit not to publicise it, thereby proving, if proof were required, that the purpose of these holocaust commemorations is not to remember the dead but to justify the killing of still more innocents.

Protest this shameful behaviour by e-mailing the HMD at enquiries@hmd. org.uk and copying it to Scottish PSC and where possible going to a meeting at which Hajo speaks.

To deliberately use the murder and trauma that millions of European Jews experienced in order to prettify the actions of the Israeli State, demonstrates the real contempt that the victims of the Holocaust are held in by Zionism. All the old stories, whereby the survivors of the camps were greeted in Israel with taunts of 'soap' and seen as cannon fodder in the 1947-9 War are borne out by decisions such as that of the HMD.

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And when one notes that the reparation payments made by Germany in respect of the survivors were literally stolen by the Jewish Claims Conference, which spent millions of dollars in expenses and lawyers' fees, and when millions more were stolen by the Israeli state, which to this day keeps the survivors in a state of poverty and ill health, demonstrates the utter cynicism of Zionist bodies which cry crocodile tears over the Holocaust but refuse to accept that what happened has any universal application.

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Tony Greenstein

HMD Trust refuses to publicise meeting with Auschwitz survivor
Monday, 18 January 2010 08:06

To: Holocaust Memorial Day Trust

18 January 2010

The UN’s Judge Goldstone added his voice recently to the condemnations of Israel’s massacres in Gaza and ongoing violations of human rights across the whole of Palestine. Those who remain silent concerning those crimes are sending a dangerous signal to Israel that it can indeed kill with impunity. We fear that Israel is planning fresh massacres.The commemoration of the Nazi Holocaust can and should be an opportunity to reflect on all examples of state-directed mass murder and to intensify our commitment to end them. We deplore the decision the UK Government-sponsored Holocaust Memorial Day Trust website to commemorate mass killings selectively, and to exclude reference to the mass killings in Iraq, Afghanistan and, recently, Palestine.It is truly shocking that the official HMD website is censoring all publicity for the 2010 Holocaust commemoration meetings where Hajo Meyer, a survivor of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, will speak of his experiences and call for solidarity with the besieged and violated people of Gaza.

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We call upon the HMD website to immediately publicise these important events: otherwise the impression will spread that the memory of the Holocaust is being selectively used to further an agenda in support of British and Israeli militarism.

See interview with Hajo Meyer on Electronic Intifada

enquiries@hmd.

Below is a letter which I have sent to the misnamed Holocaust Memorial Day

Dear Holocaust Memorial Day

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I have only just learnt of your shameful decision to ban all mention of or publicity for the meetings that Hajo Meyer is speaking at during Holocaust Memorial Week. The meetings are organised by Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign and the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network.

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Hajo Meyer is an Auschwitz survivor, but it would seem that his message is not one that you wish to hear, because he draws parallels between the racism and dehumanisation which he experienced and that which Palestinians suffer today. The parallels may not be exact, there may not be extermination camps in Israel, but comparisons are rarely exact. But when mobs regularly chant ‘Death to the Arabs’ and when ‘Transfer’ i.e. expulsion is an accepted topic of political discussion then one realises that there are, unfortunately, all too many comparisons to be made between the treatment of Jews in Germany prior to 1941 and the treatment of Palestinians today in Israel.
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The question that should be asked is on what basis can you defend a decision not to publicise Hajo Meyer’s speaking engagements? Is there only one approved version of the Holocaust now acceptable to official state bodies like the Holocaust Memorial Trust? Do you not see a contradiction between official state history and the indoctrination of the German state? Perhaps you are unaware that in Israel too all universities have Departments of History and Departments of Jewish History, as if Jews were separate from the rest of humanity.

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One might ask what you afraid of but then that is all too obvious. You wish the slogan ‘Never Again’ to mean ‘Never Again to the Jews’ rather than seeing it as having a universal application, regardless of who are the perpetrators and the victims. Because of course, given the right set of circumstances, Jews too can become racist.

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Your behaviour parallels that of the Israeli State. It is a State which has never hesitated to compare the Palestinians with the Nazis, culminating in the grotesque comparison of Menachem Begin, at the time of the siege of Beirut in 1982, between Hitler in his bunker and Yassir Arafat. Israel has steadfastly refused all recognition of the role of anti-Zionists and non-Zionists in combating the Nazis. Given that Zionism was little more than a middle-class cult in most of Europe, and was decisively defeated in the last free elections in Poland by the anti-Zionist Bund, this exclusion and erasure of the role of anti-Zionist Jews is nothing more than a rewriting of history. It is no wonder that the Zionist treatment of Rudolf Vrba, whose escape with Alfred Wetzler alerted the world to Auschwitz and the threat to Hungarian Jewry, was cited by Robert Faurisson, a noted holocaust denier, as evidence that Auschwitz was a fabrication.

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Your behaviour is reminiscent of Israel’s attitude to Marek Edelman, the last Commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Fighting Organisation, ZOB. Marek Edelman, who died recently, was given the highest recognition by the Polish state and his funeral was a State commemoration, attended by the Polish President. Equally unsurprising, the ‘Jewish’ State Israel never forgave Edelman for comparing the resistance fighters of the Palestinians to those of the Warsaw Ghetto. In behaviour not unlike your own, they were unable to send a representative of the ‘Jewish’ State to his funeral, a decision even some of the most ardent of Zionists find shameful, but clearly not yourselves.

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Edelman’s comparisons must have been galling, even though they were true. To the bitter end Israel’s holocaust establishment campaigned to ensure that no Israeli university recognised him. This paralleled the behaviour of the same band of falsifiers at Yad Vashem, who had done their best to prevent Rudolf Vrba being given an honorary doctorate by an Israeli university.
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The offence of Vrba and Edelman was that they were anti-Zionists. They refused to keep silent about the record of the Zionist movement during the holocaust, when it actively suppressed at times news of what was happening in Hitler’s hell and its behaviour since. Hajo Meyer and Scottish PSC should be greatly honoured and encouraged by your petty and spiteful move which will, as these things always do, garner far more publicity than would otherwise have been the case.

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Yours truly,
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Tony Greenstein