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 Runcie (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
