Holocaust Memorial Day Meeting Friday January 27 6.30 p.m. - all Welcome

 It’s Time To Reclaim the Memory of ALL Those Who Died in the Nazi Holocaust from Zionism and the Supporters of Israeli Apartheid

Please Register Here

https://tinyurl.com/3nmpruyd

Stephen Kapos, Holocaust Survivor, in conversation.

Friday 27^th March is Holocaust Memorial Day and the Socialist Labour Network is holding a meeting to remember and commemorate ALL the victims of the Nazi Holocaust.

Not only did 6 million Jews die during the Nazi Holocaust but so too did 1 million Roma Gypsies, half a million Disabled, over 3 million Russian POWs and up to 3 million Poles as well as millions of Russian civilians who the Nazis decided should not be kept alive.

But to the Zionists only the Jews were victims of the Holocaust. The Jewish Virtual Library wrote, quoting Yad Vashem

By the 1950s, the English term Holocaust came to be employed as the term for the murder of the Jews in Europe by the Nazis. Although the term is sometimes used with reference to the murder of other groups by the Nazis, strictly speaking, those groups do not belong under the heading of the Holocaust, nor are they included in the generally accepted statistic of six million victims of the Holocaust.

According to Yehuda Bauer, the principal Zionist holocaust historian,

The problem… is not that non-Jews were not victims [of the Nazis]; they were. It is that Wiesenthal’s arbitrarily chosen tally of non-Jewish victims diminishes the centrality to the Nazi ideology of systematically wiping any trace of the Jewish people from the planet.

In fact, he said, the term “genocide” could accurately be applied to the 2 million to 3 million Poles murdered and millions more enslaved by the Nazis. But the mass murder of the Poles, Roma and others should not come under the rubric “Holocaust,” a term that Holocaust historians generally dislike because of its religious connotations but nonetheless have accepted as describing only the annihilation that the Nazis hoped to visit on the Jews.

“All Jews of the world had to be annihilated,” Bauer said. “That was the intent. There was never an idea in Nazi minds to murder all the Russians

As my book explains the uniqueness of the fate of the Jews compared to anyone else is central to Zionist distortion of holocaust history and underpins the racial nationalism of Zionism. It selects Jews out of all other victims as unique.

Bauer is in any case wrong. It was not part of Nazi ideology that all Jews had to be annihilated. Up to 1941 the Nazis wanted to expel not annihilate the Jews of Europe. Annihilation came with war when deportation was no longer an option.

The Warsaw Ghetto burning after the Nazis set it alight

Bauer argued, in a debate with Sybil Milton, that the Roma were not victims of the holocaust because they were singled out by the Nazis because of their wandering, asocial and criminal lifestyle. Milton’s reply was withering:

Defining an entire ethnic group as anti-social and criminal is a classic example of racism. I do not know why Mr. Bauer does not understand this.

Idith Zertal, Professor of History at the Hebrew University, wrote in Israel’s Holocaust – The Politics of Nationhood that there hasn’t been a war involving Israel ‘that has not been perceived, defined, and conceptualized in terms of the Holocaust.’ Israel has mobilised the Holocaust ‘in the service of Israeli politics.’

 ‘The transference of the holocaust situation on to the Middle East reality… not only created a false sense of the imminent danger of mass destruction. It also immensely distorted the image of the holocaust, dwarfed the magnitude of the atrocities committed by the Nazis, trivializing the unique agony of the victims and the survivors, and utterly demonizing the Arabs and their leaders.

Zionism’s leaders have sought to equate Palestinian hostility to Zionism with the Nazis’ hatred of the Jews. Socialist Labour Network Yad Vashem Sybil Milton, Benjamin Netanyahu went even further. In a speech to the World Zionist Organisation Congress in 2015 he blamed the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj al Amin Husseini, (who the Zionists and British   High Commissioner Sir Herbert Samuel appointed in 1921) for the Holocaust. Netanyahu  exonerated Hitler in the process.

When Israel laid siege to Beirut, Prime Minister Menachem Begin compared Yasser Arafat to Hitler in his bunker. In 2008 Defence Minister Matan Vilnai threatened to give ‘Gaza a taste of the 'shoah’. Abba Eban compared the Green Line between Israel and the West Bank as the ‘Auschwitz borders’.

Israel and its Holocaust propaganda museum Yad Vashem specialises in escorting fascists and Hitler admirers such as Bolsonaro and Duterte, Presidents of Brazil and the Philippines, around it, to say nothing of welcoming South Africa Prime Minister John Vorster in 1976. Vorster had been interned during the war for Nazi sympathies.

Nothing gives more encouragement to holocaust deniers than the Zionist attempt to use the holocaust to sanitise Israel’s war crimes. Israel has used the murder of 6 million Jews to intimidate the opponents of Zionism, including Jewish opponents.

For Zionism the Holocaust is unique, a Jewish-only affair. Drawing universal lessons from the Holocaust meant the ‘plunder of [Jewish] moral capital’ according to the American Jewish Committee. Gerhard Riegner of the World Jewish Congress declared that

‘Auschwitz was not only a national memory belonging to the Jewish people… it was also an important political asset.’

The question most often asked is how is it that Jewish people, who have themselves been victims of fascism and racism, can now do to others what they themselves experienced. My answer has always been that any group of people, given the right set of circumstances, are capable of racism, murder and ethnic cleansing.

It is time to call a halt to Israel’s defiling of the name of the Holocaust victims. As my new book Zionism During the Holocaust explains, during the Holocaust the Zionist movement was not interested in what was happening in Europe.  Indeed it actively fought rescue attempts for Jewish refugees that weren’t directed at Palestine.

In a speech David Ben Gurion gave on 9 December 1938 regarding the Kindertransport scheme which rescued 10,000 Jewish children:

If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the People of Israel.

Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, explained his thinking in a memo to the Zionist Executive of 17 December 1938:

If the Jews are faced with a choice between the refugee problem and rescuing Jews from concentration camps on the one hand, and aid for the national museum in Palestine on the other, the Jewish sense of pity will prevail and our people's entire strength will be directed at aid for the refugees in the various countries. Zionism will vanish from the agenda and indeed not only world public opinion in England and America but also from Jewish public opinion. We are risking Zionism's very existence if we allow the refugee problem to be separated from the Palestine problem.

Rudolf Kasztner, the leader of Hungarian Zionism, was the most notorious Zionist collaborator with the Nazis

In other words whenever rescue of Jewish refugees was raised it must be immediately linked to the question of Palestine. On more than one occasion, this resulted in the collapse of rescue schemes. As historian Christopher Sykes wrote about the 1938 Evian Conference which Roosevelt called to try and deal with the Jewish refugee situation:

From the start they [the Zionists] regarded the whole enterprise with hostile indifference... If the 31 nations had done their duty and shown hospitality to those in dire need then the pressure on the National Home and the heightened enthusiasm of Jews with Palestine would both have been relaxed. This was the last thing that the Zionist leaders wished for…. Even in the more terrible days ahead they made no secret of the fact, even when talking to Gentiles, that they did not want Jewish settlements outside Palestine to be successful... The Zionists wanted to do something more for Jews than merely help them to escape danger…. that such was the basic Zionist idea is not a matter of opinion but a fact abundantly provable by evidence... [my emphasis - Crossroads to Israel]

On Friday we have a wonderful line-up of speakers including two Jewish holocaust survivors, Suzanne Weiss and Stephen Kapos.

Suzanne Weiss

Suzanne Weiss was born to immigrant Jews in Paris in 1941 and targeted for death by the Nazis. Suzanne was hidden by a French farm family between 1943 and 1945. After losing her parents in the war, Suzanne was adopted by a New York family in 1950.

Suzanne has been active throughout her life in a variety of social justice movements. She has spoken on the Holocaust and her support for Palestinian freedom to faith communities, community and activist groups, and high school and university gatherings.

Suzanne’s memoir, Holocaust to Resistance: My Journey, was published by Fernwood in October 2019.

Stephen Kapos was a small child when the Nazis came to Budapest. His early life was spent hiding from the Arrow Cross, the Hungarian Fascists who would round up Jews and shoot them into the Danube. Separated from both his parents during the Siege of Budapest, Stephen was hidden in children's homes on false papers. His father was on the Kasztner train and ended up in Bergen Belsen and Tieresenstadt. Because of his early experience of extreme racism, Stephen is an activist for the Palestinian cause.

Dr Adrian Marsh

Dr Adrian Marsh is a Researcher in Romani Studies at the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul (SRII).  

Ali Abunimah has been described as a ‘Lightning Rod of the Boycott Israel Movement’. He is also the Founding Editor of the much-loved Electronic Intifada, the premier Palestinian web site.

Tony Greenstein is a long-time Jewish anti-Zionist and Palestine solidarity activist. He has just brought out a new book Zionism  During the Holocaust.

Please come to the meeting and help make it a success. By coming you help ensure that the days when the Zionists used the holocaust as a weapon against the Palestinians have come to an end. Coming to hear the wonderful line up of speakers is a basic act of solidarity.

Tony Greenstein