Some of my best friends are Zionists – The Case of the Sunday Times Kevin Myers

I

Zionists defend anti-Semitic journalist because he is a devoted supporter of Israel

It used to be the case that anti-Semites used to deny their anti-Semitism by protesting that ‘some of my best friends are Jews’ .  This attitude was best exemplified by Himmler.  In a speech to leaders of the SS in Posen, Poland in October 1943 he declared:

And then they all come along, the eighty million good Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. Of course the others are swine, but this one is a first-class Jew.’ (some laughter) 

Himmler went on to describe the trials and tribulations of the SS:

‘Of all those who talk like this, not one has watched, not one has stood up to it. Most of you know what it means to see a hundred corpses lying together, five hundred, or a thousand. To have gone through this and yet – apart from a few exceptions, examples of human weakness – to have remained decent fellows, this is what has made us hard. This is a glorious page in our history that has never been written and shall never be written.’

This speech was recorded and used in evidence during the Nuremburg Trials.  

Zionist UK Media Watch forgives Murdoch's pro-Zionist Sunday Times

Today anti-Semites deny their anti-Semitism by proclaiming their devotion to Israel and Zionism. The Jewish Chronicle's editor, Stephen Pollard, exemplifies this practice.  

When speaking about Michal Kaminski, a prominent anti-Semitic politician and a leading member of Poland's far-Right Law and Justice Party, (as well as being Chair of the European Conservative and Reform Group in the European Parliament), Pollard exclaimed that: "Far from being an antisemite, Mr Kaminski is about as pro-Israeli an MEP as exists."

In other words if you support the Israeli state then you cannot be anti-Semitic.  This does of course have a certain logic to it, at least for Zionists.  If you believe that anti-Semitism equals anti-Zionism, then it follows that supporters of Israel and Zionism cannot be anti-Semites.  It is, as Tony Lerman described, an 'Alice in Wonderland' conclusion.

However it does ignore the fact that most of the far-Right in Europe - from France's Le Pen to Austria's Herr Strache - not forgetting our own British National Party and the EDL, manage to combined anti-Semitism and Zionism without any problem at all.  The Trump administration in the person of Steve Bannon of Breitbart also manages to combined  Zionism and anti-Semitism without any problems.

Pollard's defence of Kaminski was even too much for some Zionists, such as The Guardian's Jonathan Freedland. [Once no self-respecting politician would have gone near people such as Kaminski]. Kaminski denied wearing the Chrobry sword, the symbol of the far-Right anti-Semitic National Radical Camp Falanga.  Kaminski issued a categorical denial: “No, I never wear it. I don’t even know which symbol you are referring to' before admitting that he had in fact worn it!  The Chrobry sword was banned from being worn in Poland in 1933 because of its association with attacks on Jews.  

Ms Bikont believes Mr Kaminski helped inspire anti-Semitism in Jedwabne

A BBC Newsnight Report Digging up the truth about Michal Kaminiski quotes Maria Mazurczyk, a member in 2001 of the Committee to Defend the Good Name of Jedwabne, saying of Kaminski:

"I remember at the meeting he invited older people who remembered those times, those who had been driven out to Siberia, to say that they had not just been driven out because of the Russians, but above all because of their neighbours, the Jews."

Anna Bikont, a journalist with the leading Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza and author of 'The Crime and the Silence', described the atmosphere in Jedwabne where "there was such a lot of hate" against Jews.''  Although Kaminski was not there she believed he had helped inspire the deeply anti-Semitic atmosphere:

"Kaminski came to the place where an incredible crime was committed and he told not about the women, children, old people who died in this horrible manner, but he told about Jews who collaborated with Soviets and who killed Poles".

People gathered at Jedwabne memorial in 2001

Kaminski helped form in March 2001 the Committee to Defend the Good Name of Jedwabne. Most people would suggest that a good name was the last thing that Jedwabne possessed. In Jedwabne, a village in Western Poland, on July 10 1941 the inhabitants herded up to 1600 Jews, men, women and children, into a barn which was then set alight.  Not all inhabitants committed this atrocious crime but many did. 

Kaminski, whom Pollard defended as a 'good friend of the Jews' proclaimed in an interview with Martin Bright of the Jewish Chronicle (9.10.09. that '“If you are asking the Polish nation to apologise for the crime made in Jedwabne, you would require from the whole Jewish nation to apologise for what some Jewish Communists did in Eastern Poland.”  

Just this one quote alone demonstrates Kaminski's anti-Semitism.  Over 90% of Polish Jews died in the holocaust.  Thousands were massacred by their Polish neighbours, even after 1945, yet Stephen Pollard, editor of the Jewish Chronicle has no problem defending an apologist for these pogromists.

The suggestion that the Jews collaborated with the Soviet troops is one of the standard justifications that Polish anti-Semites make for the pogroms and massacres of Jews.  After the Soviet troops had been driven out of Poland by the Nazis in June 1941, anti-Semites held that the Jews had collaborated with them and that they were responsible for the deportation of Polish non-Jews to Siberia. Kaminski not only led the opposition to the  national apology of Poland's President Kwasniewski but he also opposed the ceremony of remembrance in Jedwabne on July 10 2001, the 60th anniversary what happened in Jedwabne.
  
Kaminski's lies about Jewish involvement in deportations were a theme repeated by those who either denied or defended the massacre in Jedwabne (& similar massacres took place in surrounding villages like Radzilow).

But speaking of holocaust deniers, no one comes closer to this than the former Irish Sunday Times journalist Kevin Myers, who was sacked last weekend. As the Independent  and Jerusalem Post noted Myers had previously written that “There was no holocaust (or Holocaust, as my computer software insists) and six million Jews were not murdered by the Third Reich. These two statements of mine are irrefutable truths.”

It was therefore no surprise that in his column for the Irish edition of the Sunday Times, under the headline: “Sorry ladies, equal pay has to be earned,” Myers wrote: 

“I note that two of the best paid women presenters in the BBC – Claudia Winkleman and Vanessa Feltz, with whose, no doubt, sterling work I am tragically unacquainted – are Jewish. Good for them.

“Jews are not general noted for their insistence on selling their talent for the lowest possible price, which is the most useful measure there is of inveterate, lost-with-all-hands stupidity.”

You would think it obvious that Myers is a died-in-the-wool anti-Semite.  Surely our good friends the Zios are jumping up and down about this genuine, bona-fide, 24 carat anti-Semite?

The Zionist UKMedia Watch is hot on 'anti-Semitism' of the anti-Zionist variety

After all, there is no group which is as hot on ‘anti-Semitism’ as UK Media Watch, a division of the American McCarthyist group CAMERA.  When the Guardian published a letter of mine earlier this year praising the late Jewish MP Gerald Kaufman, they were outraged.  Their headline told it all:  ‘How the Guardian’s decision to publish extremist Tony Greenstein normalises antisemitism’.  They wrote that ‘Kaufman’s most insidious comments about Jews occured during a Commons debate on the war in Gaza in 2009, a speech alluded to by left-wing extremist Tony Greenstein in a letter published on March 3rd in the Guardian.’ 

Gerald Kaufman, Jewish MP and Father of the House of Commons was a wicked anti-Semite for comparing Israel to Nazi Germany

Even worse was Kaufman’s statement that the Israeli government uses non-Jewish guilt over the Holocaust  in order to justify their murder of Palestinians.  One would have thought this was a self-evident truth. Israel shamelessly exploits the Holocaust for political purposes. Indeed if it were not for the Holocaust then Israel would have been called to task for its racism years ago.

You would therefore assume that UKM would be down on Kevin Myers and the paper that printed his anti-Semitic comments like a ton of bricks.  Well I’m afraid you are wrong.  UKMedia Watch tweeted that it found the Times to be “generally good on issues of antisemitism.’  Naturally because Murdoch’s Times is also virulently pro-Zionist.

Zionism washes anti-Semitism whiter than white

The Zionist leaders of the Irish Jewish community were even worse.  The Jewish Chronicle reported that ‘Maurice Cohen, chair of the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland, insisted Mr Myers was not antisemitic, and had “inadvertently stumbled into an antisemitic trope”.’  Zionists love ‘tropes’ possibly because it rhymes with ‘dopes’ which is as good a description of them as any.

I'm not sure how you 'stumble' into anti-Semitism or any form of racism.  You either are or you are not anti-Semitic.  Perhaps its permanently dark in the South of Ireland, such that columnists are forever stumbling into one error or another.  

Of course there is another explanation.  Besides being a rank anti-Semite, Kevin Myers is also a fervent Zionist.  His belief that Jews are grasping, money grubbing, never knowingly under-paid sits well with his support for Israel.  According to Cohen though, it is all down to Myers having ‘ a particular curmudgeonly, cranky, idiosyncratic style.’

Of course Myers is not the only non-Jewish Zionist who has stumbled into ‘anti-Semitic tropes’.  There is Arthur J Balfour, a passionate Zionist who in 1905 introduced, as Prime Minister, the Aliens Act whose aim was to keep Jews fleeing the Czarist pogroms out of Britain.  In the Introduction to the History of Zionism by Nahum Sokolow, who later became President of the Zionist Organisation, Balfour made his anti-Semitism clear when speaking about Zionism:

"For as I read its meaning it is, among other things, a serious endeavour to mitigate the age-long miseries created for Western civilisation by the presence in its midst of a body which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb. Surely, for this if for no other reason it should receive our support."

Balfour told Chaim Weizmann that he shared the “anti-Semitic postulates” of Cosima Wagner, who would become one of the first patrons of Adolf Hitler. Balfour did not believe that Jews could be assimilated into Gentile British society but he was happy to send them to Palestine.

Another strong supporter of Zionism, in whose Cabinet Balfour was Foreign Secretary, was Prime Minister David Lloyd George.  He described Herbert Samuel, who was Home Secretary and who went on to be the first British High Commissioner in Palestine as “a greedy, ambitious and grasping Jew with all the worst characteristics of his race.”

Indeed it is hard to think of a non-Jewish Zionist who wasn’t an anti-Semite.  From Edouard Drumont to Eichmann non-Jewish anti-Semites have nearly all been avid supporters of Zionism.   

It is no surprise that Frank Coughlan, a columnist in The Irish Independent should provide the answer to the mystery why UKMediaWatch,  Maurice Cohen of the Irish Jewish Representative Council and assorted Zionists believes that Kevin Myers has been much misunderstood.  Coughlan, who described the critics of Myers as ‘the haters’ ( a strange way to describe opponents of a myogynist and anti-Semite) explained thus:

It is ironic, for instance, that the anti-Semitic paragraphs that have surely finished his career came from the same pen that has defended Israeli foreign policy more consistently and eloquently than any other Irish journalist.

In November 2011, he wrote a waspish piece on the Irish left and its obsessive hatred of the Jewish homeland, a theme he has returned to again and again. The very same left that has now turned on him for being anti-Semitic.

'a year later, a headline had him stating emphatically that the only thing Africa had ever given the world was Aids.'- Frank Myers

After all, the poor misunderstood little Zionist was racist and abusive to everyone.  Coughlan writes that:  ‘‘More controversially again, a year later, a headline had him stating emphatically that the only thing Africa had ever given the world was Aids.’

Racist?  Perish the thought.  He was simply ‘Deliberately provocative’ even when ‘he picked at some tender scabs, particularly the treasured myths of romantic republicans.  Countess Markievicz, whom he thought mad, bad and dangerous to know, was caught in the crossfire a number of times.’

The Countess of Markievicz, for those who do not know, was a dissident member of the British aristocracy who supported Irish Republicanism.  She was ‘an Irish Sinn Féin and Fianna Fáil politician, revolutionary nationalist, suffragette and socialist.’ who was the first woman elected to the House of Commons, though she did not take her seat and was also the second woman to hold a cabinet position in the world (Minister for Labour in the Irish Republic, 1919–1922)

Being a combination of Republican, socialist and suffragette the good Countess probably represented the trinity of evil as far as Myers was concerned!

In many ways Myers was an ideal journalist for the Murdoch press.  They will be hard pressed to find a replacement bigot.