Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis Denies Genocide in Gaza like a Holocaust Denier

According to Mirvis Most of Those who Died in the Holocaust weren’t Jewish! Has There Ever Been Such a Moral & Intellectual Lightweight Chief Rabbi? 

Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis' Genocidal Speech Urging Israel on to a Final Solution

Perhaps it’s because my own father was a rabbi that I have taken more than a slight interest in Britain’s racist Chief Rabbi. His ignorance is astounding, even for a rabbi.

I can remember when Israel Brodie, the then Chief Rabbi, came to my parent’s home in Coventry and the excitement in my family. Lots of rabbis came round but I must confess I was never much impressed, even as a child, by any of them. Perhaps the only one I liked was Stanley Cohen, who presided at Wallasey congregation (long since gone) since he stayed at my granny’s and turned the TV on himself on Saturday afternoon!  Orthodox Jews aren’t supposed to do that sort of thing. 

However I digress. It is surprising how seriously Lord Ephraim Mirvis is taken, despite his lack of any academic credentials apart from a BA from the Apartheid University of South Africa. Nonetheless Mirvis is an important player in the imperialist firmament  which is why he has been made a peer of the realm.

However it is also clear that Mirvis is nothing if not the shallowest and most stupid person to have become Chief Rabbi in a long time. Possibly that is because these days there’s not a lot of competition for the post.

The past Chief Rabbi but one, Immanuel Jakobovitz, had a PhD in Jewish Medical Ethics which he later wrote up into a book.  Like all his ilk he was a political reactionary and when the Church of England under Robert Runciman (a radical figure compared to the genocide. paedophile supporting Justin Welby) produced in 1985 a Report Faith in the City lambasting Thatcherite economics and its war on the poor, Jakobovitz replied with “From Doom to Hope”.

It was a reactionary tract that Thatcher loved. All that was needed was self-help as the Jewish immigrants had done. Not only was it a falsification of the Jewish fight against anti-Semitism and their involvement in trade unions but it downplayed the Black experience of racism to say nothing of Thatcher’s enrichment of the rich through privatisation and her attacks on the unions. Jakobovitz was a Thatcherite though he was a relative liberal when it came to Israel.

Douglas Murray's book argued the demographic consequences of muslim migration would destroy white, christian Europe. But it's Corbyn that @rabbisacks compares to Powell? pic.twitter.com/Fe24AHIbRR

— Michael Walker (@michaeljswalker) August 28, 2018

Mirvis’s predecessor Jonathan Sacks held a BA, MA and Ph.D. in philosophy. He authored 25 books, all of them instantly forgettable. He too was an out and out racist, a supporter of the settlers March of the Flags on Jerusalem Day when thousands of settler youth storm Arab East Jerusalem chanting such ditties as Death to the Arabs, May Your Villages Burn etc.

His knowledge of philosophy didn’t stop him recommending as one of the best books of 2017 the far-right Douglas Murray’s Strange Death of Europe which was an exposition of the fascist White Replacement Theory. In its full blown neo-Nazi version it is the Jews who are organising the replacement. Murray wrote of:

the problem in Europe of an existential tiredness and a feeling that perhaps for Europe the story has run out and a new story must be allowed to begin. Mass immigration – the replacement of large parts of the European populations by other people – is one way in which this new story has been imagined: a change, we seemed to think, was as good as a rest.

It is somewhat ironic that when Jeremy Corbyn called out two Zionist thugs, Richard Millett and Jonathan Hoffman, for not understanding English irony like the Palestinian speaker, he was accused by Sacks of echoing Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech.  Yet Murray described Powell as a ‘remarkable man’ who ‘got a lot more right than wrong’

Yet if Sacks was a flawed incontinent philosopher Mirvis makes no pretensions to possess anything in the way of deep thought.

What can one make of Mirvis’ statement to attendees of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance conference in Jerusalem that ‘I am Zionist because I am a Jew.’ Mirvis went on to dig himself deeper into a hole. “If you are anti-Zionist, you are anti-Jews and anti-Judaism.” Before adding that “Israel is not just the geo-political endeavour of the Jewish people, it is the center of Judaism. A strong Israel means a strong Jewish people.’

In a similar vein in May 2016, in an attack on Ken Livingston for having touched on the pro-Zionist policies of Hitler and the Nazis, Ephraim Mirvis had said of Zionism that ‘One can no more separate it from Judaism than separate the City of London from Great Britain.’ 

As I said Mirvis is a simple man not possessed of deep thought. Simple slogans are more his style. So let us try and unpack this.

Firstly his statement ‘I am a Zionist because I am a Jew’. This is clearly nonsensical. There are plenty more Christian Zionists than Jewish Zionists. Trump’s cabinet is full of them. Are they also Jewish? Clearly Zionism is a political not a religious phenomenon.

Far from a strong Israel meaning a strong Jewish people, whatever that means, it is Israel and its barbarism and apartheid treatment of Palestinians which is responsible for most anti-Semitism today. Israel is the curse of most Jewish people who don’t want to be tarred with the brush of genocide.

Nor is Israel the centre of Jews world-wide. Jerusalem is the religious centre of Judaism, as it is of Islam and Christianity. It has been for two millennium when there has been no Jewish State. A religion does not need a state to provide it with a centre.

Sir Edwin Montagu (left)

When Jewish Zionism came on the scene, its bitterest opponents were Jewish.  Its most ardent supporters were Christian. The only member of Lloyd George’s War Cabinet to oppose the Balfour Declaration was its only Jewish member Sir Edwin Montagu. It took till 1939 before the Board of Deputies of British Jews was captured by the Zionists.

When Zionism first appeared in Britain the Chief Rabbi of the time, Hermann Adler was vehemently opposed to it. In For Haredi Jews secular Zionism remains a religious heresy Giles Fraser wrote of:

The walled neighbourhood of Mea Shearim (which) is just a few minutes’ walk from the old city of Jerusalem. Built in 1874, it is home to Jerusalem’s Haredi or ultra-orthodox community...

Posters put up at the various entrances to the area demand modesty from visitors: long dresses and sleeves. Another poster declares: “No entry to Zionists”. Mea Shearim is home to some of the most fervently anti-Zionist Jews in the world.

As Fraser noted, in 1898 Adler’s predecessor and father, Naftali Hermann Adler, also opposed Zionism giving a sermon in which he condemned Zionism as usurping God’s role: “I look at this movement and worry with my heart, since I see it as opposed to the Torah of Hashem.”

If Mirvis is correct then two previous Chief Rabbis were not only not Jewish they were anti-Jewish. As Stuart Cohen wrote in English Zionists and Jews:

Opposition to Zionism was the only thing that united all Jewish religious groups, from Chief Rabbi Herman Adler and the Orthodox to the Reform movement. In 1902 no prominent rabbi responded to a call to form the religious Zionist Mizrahi group and a conference to launch Mizrahi in 1904 had to be abandoned for lack of support. Zionism was variously described as ‘a peril’, a ‘travesty of Judaism’ and ‘a restoration of primitiveness.’

In Germany when Hitler took power just 2% of German Jews were paid up Zionists. In Poland in the 1938 local elections, the last free elections in Poland, Polish Jews voted overwhelmingly for the anti-Zionist Bund. In Warsaw, of the 20 Jewish Council seats the Bund won 17 and the Zionists precisely one. The same was repeated all over Poland, which had over 3 million Jews. Overall in Poland in one-third of the towns the Bund achieved a majority Jewish vote. According to Mirvis the majority of Poland Jews were anti-Semites!

Indeed the majority of Jews who died in the holocaust were not Zionists.  So what Mirvis is saying is that most of those who died in the holocaust were not Jewish! Either that or they were anti-Semitic! This is the intellectual calibre of Britain’s Chief Rabbi.

Indeed not only Polish Jews but Germany’s and Britain’s Jews were all anti-Jewish because they weren’t Zionists according to the buffoon who is Britain’s Chief Rabbi.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that Mirvis is such an ardent Zionist. Mirvis grew up in Apartheid South Africa in a Jewish community that was ardently pro-Zionist and equally pro-Apartheid. It was not until the bitter end that the South Africa Jewish community discovered that they had been opposed to apartheid all along and embraced the Black Sheep of the community like Dennis Goldberg, someone who spent 22 years in prison having been sentenced to life at the 1964 Rivonia trial, for his membership of the ANC.

Mirvis is well aware of the deep racism of Israeli rabbis yet he has never spoken out to condemn it - quite the contrary he approves of it

When Mirvis left South Africa it was natural that he would go to Apartheid Israel and live on a settlement in the West Bank. Mirvis received his rabbinical training in the yeshiva of Har Etzion in the settlement of Alon Shvut. He trained among the most bigoted racists and seemingly didn’t notice that the settlement was established on stolen Palestinian land. And no one is more racist than the West Bank’s religious settlers.  The chief rabbi of the settlers’ rabbinical Council, Dov Lior, is famous for his statement that a Jewish fingernail is worth more than a thousand non-Jewish lives.

So it was natural that Mirvis should joined his predecessor Jonathan Sacks and thousands of far-Right settlers on the 2017 Jerusalem Day ‘March of Flags’. Mirvis had no hesitation in joining those who desire nothing more than the expulsion or death of the Palestinians.

Haaretz’s Bradley Burston described the March as:

an annual, gender-segregated extreme-right, pro-occupation religious carnival of hatred, marking the anniversary of Israel's capture of Jerusalem by humiliating the city's Palestinian Muslims....

marchers vandalized shops in Jerusalem's Muslim Quarter, chanted "Death to Arabs" and "The (Jewish) Temple Will Be Built, the (Al Aqsa) Mosque will be Burned Down," shattered windows and door locks, and poured glue into the locks of shops forced to close for fear of further damage.’... And they repeated Samson's prayer in Judges 16:28: "May I avenge (the loss of) my two eyes with one act of vengeance against the Palestinians – may their name be blotted out!"

Clearly Mirvis felt at home as Sacks  extended a “personal invitation” to Diaspora Jews to join him “leading” the March of the Flags on Jerusalem Day and “dancing with our brave [Israeli Defence Force] soldiers” in the settler enclave inside Hebron.

Haaretz Anna Roiser pleaded with Sacks not to attend, saying:

one of the world’s most respected rabbis sends a message of normalization and acceptance of the occupation...  Many Jews in the Diaspora work hard to emphasize that being Jewish is not synonymous with supporting the Israeli government, and that supporting Israel’s right to exist is not synonymous with supporting the occupation. Rabbi Sacks’ actions risk undermining these messages.

Sacks and Mirvis ignored the pleas of liberal Zionists such as Anna Roiser and Nina-Morris Evans, who wrote a blog Chief Rabbi and Lord Sacks should not back this march, with contempt. Sacks and Mirvis marched in unison. But to be fair to him Mirvis finds it difficult to oppose any form of racism bar ‘anti-Semitism’.

Mirvis finds it difficult to oppose Zionist anti-Semitism too. Although he withdrew from a  conference on ‘anti-Semitism’ organised by Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli, earlier this year, because they had invited so many anti-Semites  to attend (there is of course a certain logic in this – who better to invite than those who are experts in the subject!] he did this very reluctantly and without ever condemning this gathering of Europe’s far-right.

Most neo-Nazis today, like Richard Spencer, are in full support of Zionism

Those who were invited included Jordan Bardella, President of the far-right French National Rally party founded by Holocaust denier Jean-Marie Le Pen; Marion Marechal, a far-right French member of the European Parliament and Le Pen’s granddaughter; Hermann Tertsch, a far-right Spanish member of the European Parliament; Charlie Weimers of the far-right Sweden Democrats party and Kinga Gál, of Hungary’s Fidesz party were also invited guests.

But whereas Mirvis is reluctant to condemn outright fascist anti-Semites and Jew haters when it comes to Jeremy Corbyn there was no such hesitation. In 2019, two weeks before the general election, his infamous Times article was published. Casting aside the unwritten convention of chief rabbis abstaining from party politics, Mirvis all but instructed the faithful that the leader of the opposition was unfit for office and told people not to vote Labour. He wrote:

The claims that the [Labour] party is “doing everything” it reasonably can to tackle anti-Jewish racism and that it has “investigated every single case”, are a mendacious fiction....

It is a failure of culture. It is a failure of leadership. A new poison – sanctioned from the top – has taken root in the Labour Party.

Many members of the Jewish community can hardly believe that this is the same party that they called their political home for more than a century. It can no longer claim to be the party of equality and anti-racism.

You would have to be even more stupid than the average Zionist not to take the hint.

The false ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign in the Labour Party laid the basis for the support of Starmer, Lammy and Nandy for the current genocide in Gaza.  The Editor of the Jewish Chronicle, the far right Stephen Pollard wrote:

there is just one fundamental issue for the vast majority of our community – doing what we can to stop Jeremy Corbyn becoming PM.

If Mirvis was seriously concerned about anti-Semitism in political parties then he would have asked why the Conservative Party’s MEPs supported the anti-Semitic Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in a no confidence vote in the European parliament.  The reason of course was that Orban may be anti-Semitic but he is also the best friend of Israel.

Likewise he could have asked why Tory MEP’s sat in the same political group (ECR) in the European parliament as fascists and anti-Semites.

If Mirvis had been bold he might have mentioned Boris Johnson’s anti-Semitic comments in his novel ’72 Virgins’. Leaving aside Johnson’s racist comments about ‘Watermelon smiles’, ‘piccaninnies’ and ‘letterboxes’. Johnson wrote:

Maybe there was some kind of fiddling of the figures by the oligarchs who ran the TV stations (and who were mainly, as some lost no time in pointing out, of Jewish origin)

There was ‘the Jewish cabal who run the American media complex’. Even the Jewish Chronicle mentioned how 72 Virgins had

‘described a Jewish character as an unethical businessman with a large nose, who exploits immigrant workers and black women’.

Ephraim Mirvis’s attack on Corbyn had nothing to do with anti-Semitism. In 2016 he spoke out in favour of Norman Tebbit’s ‘cricket test’. The ‘cricket test’ was a device to show that the ‘real home’ of Britain’s Asian population is not in England but India and Pakistan because they cheered for the latters’ cricket teams.

If the same test were applied to British Jews then it would show that many of them belong in Israel!  Which is what the Zionists desire of course.

What made the Labour ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign so effective is the fact that Corbyn, instead of standing up to it from the start and saying that Labour did not have an anti-Semitism problem and that the allegations against it were malicious and without foundation, bought into the narrative. Everytime Corbyn apologised he proved his critics were correct.

Ephraim Mirvis, like his predecessor Jonathan Sacks, is a Zionist in religious garb. Zionism was a secular movement. Herzl’s Deputy Max Nordau was quite explicit that Zionism was a question of race not religion. To Nordau the Jews were ‘a race of accursed beggars.’

Even Colin Shindler, an ardent Zionist advocate and Professor of Israel Studies at SOAS admitted that in Britain:

Orthodoxy also had little time for Zionism. The Kamenitzer Maggid, a brilliant speaker for the Federation of Synagogues, regarded Herzl as a second Shabtai Zevi, the false messiah of the 17th century. Even the Lubavitcher Rebbe of the time announced that religion had been substituted by nationalism. "The Zionists," he argued, "had cast off the yoke of the Torah and mitzvot."

As the Times of Israel reported, the head of the Satmar Hassidic sect Rabbi Aaron Teitelbaum

‘accused his followers of increasingly admiring Israel for its military and political accomplishments, imploring them to maintain the Hasidic group’s hardline anti-Zionism.

Addressing thousands of Satmar members at Long Island’s Nassau Coliseum, Rabbi Aaron Teitelbaum lamented what he called a “tremendous and terrible spiritual decline” among his followers. …

 “We must yell gevalt, gevalt! To where have we come?” he declared. “We have no part in Zionism. We have no part in their wars. We have no part in the State of Israel.”

The Satmar, one of the largest Hasidic groups in the world, is staunchly anti-Zionist and does not recognize the State of Israel, maintaining a Jewish state should not exist until the Messiah appears.

“We’ll continue to fight God’s war against Zionism and all its aspects,” Teitelbaum said. Rabbis like Sacks and Mirvis have prostituted themselves to a nationalist heresy.

Tony Greenstein