This is how they Rewrite History - the Daily Mail Excised from the Life of Auschwitz Survivor Esther Béjarano her Support for the Palestinians

 German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas paid tribute to Esther Béjarano’s Fight Against Anti-Semitism – Whilst voting to describe BDS, which she also supported, as anti-Semitic

Esther Bejarano as a teenager

Esther Bejarano and the Microphone Mafia

If you want to learn about the life of Esther Béjarano then there’s no point in turning to Wikipedia, The Times of Israel or German news outlet DW.com  still less the Daily Mail. Although it has to be said that they are all an improvement on the Guardian which doesn’t seem to have realised that Esther died early Saturday morning.

The Independent is typical of the coverage of Esther’s life. It reported that ‘Bejarano emigrated to Israel after World War II but returned to Germany with her husband in 1960.’ Presumably it didn’t occur to ask why Esther should return to the country which nearly murdered her. Perhaps she fancied a change of scenery?

For an understanding of Esther Béjarano’s life after 1945 we have to turn to an interview over two years ago in the Palestinian Electronic Intifada. All the obituaries focus on the fact that Esther survived Auschwitz by playing in the orchestra which all those going to the gas chambers heard as they arrived in Auschwitz.

Of course what the Mail didn't say was that Esther Bejarano emigrated from Israel because she couldn't stand its racism

Auschwitz however was not the totality of Esther’s life. To deliberately excise a part of someone’s life because it doesn’t fit with an establishment narrative about ‘anti-Semitism’ demonstrates why the mainstream media is institutionally dishonest.

Esther described in Adri Nieuwh’s interview Why Auschwitz survivor Esther Bejarano supports BDS how, despite being a holocaust survivor, she has been called an anti-Semite for supporting the Palestinians.

It should make even the stupidest Zionist sit up and ask how it is that the false ‘anti-Semitism’ narrative ends up calling holocaust survivors who universalise the lessons of the holocaust, ‘anti-Semitic’.

Birkenau, where the gas chambers were situated and Esther played the accordion

Esther also called Israel’s government ‘fascist’. In her interview we learn that because she was classified as a mischlinge ‘mixed race’ (she had a Christian grandfather) she was transferred to the women’ concentration camps of Ravensbruck and thus survived.

Esther spent 15 years in Israel, marrying Nissim Bejarano, a truck driver. She tells how “My husband and I could not stand Israeli politics. It was a catastrophe. Life was difficult because we did not agree with the terrible things that were done to the Palestinians.”

Israel “fought against them, threw the Palestinians out. They didn’t leave on their own, they were forced to leave. We just could not stand that.” Esther fought in Israel’s War of Independence so this is not speculation.

In 1960 she and her husband left Israel for Germany. “It was very difficult because it was the country of the perpetrators.” What is surprising is that none of this appears in our prostitute press, which falsified the news to fit its political agenda. Esther described how in Germany

“They also have called me an anti-Semite. I always say I am against the inhuman policies towards the Palestinians, and against war. With war you cannot achieve peace. Then they frame me as an anti-Semite.”

“It is a scandal because the terrible policies of Israel need to be clarified,”.

Referring to Israel’s former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the current Finance Minister Avigdor Lieberman, Bejarano says,

“They are fascists. It is a fascist government. I have no other name for it.”

The space to debate BDS – boycott, divestment and sanctions – activism is very limited in Germany.

“Whether it [BDS] helps, that’s another issue. For many people here it is out of the question,”

 “But I say, if it helps to put anything in the way of the terrible [Israeli] policies, then I am for it. Because I have experienced what fascism is.”

 “In Germany, and many other countries, one does not distinguish between Judaism and Zionism. They think Israel, Zionism and Judaism are all the same.”

“It’s all lumped together and that’s where anti-Semitism comes from,”

“And the harshest thing is that the Germans now, to cleanse themselves so to speak, say the new anti-Semitism comes from the Muslims.”

Esther puts her finger on why the German capitalist class and its politicians are so eager to label opponents of Israel and Zionism as anti-Semitic. Given the record of complicity in the holocaust and the Nazi dictatorship by Germany industry – Siemens, Krupps, Bosch, IG Farben – the German Establishment is only too happy to use support for Israel to expiate its guilt whilst pointing the fingers at the victims of Israeli aggression.

Esther Béjarano’s goes on to explain why so many young Israelis leave the country.

“They [young Israelis] simply cannot live in Israel anymore. That is why so many have moved to Berlin.”

Germany's Bundestag voted to describe BDS as 'antisemitic' and therefore according to them Esther was antisemitic too

The Daily Mail had an Obituary on Esther Béjarano. It told readers how ‘'German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas called Esther Bejarano 'an important voice in the fight against racism and antisemitism' without telling us that Herr Maas also supported the resolution of Germany’s Bundestag (parliament) which passed a motion on 17^th May 2019 calling BDS ‘anti-Semitic’.

Heiko Mass, Germany's Foreign Minister

It follows therefore that Herr Mass was calling Esther Béjarano an anti-Semite whilst at the same time saying that she was a fighter against anti-Semitism! These are the knots that the supporters of Israel and Zionism tie themselves up in when they label anti-racists, anti-fascists and anti-Zionists as anti-Semitic.

However when I first read the Daily Mail’s Obituary by Kate Dennet I was prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps Kate was simply as ignorant as the rest of the Mail’s ‘journalists’. So I made a short contribution to the Comments underneath. I wrote:

'German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas called Esther Bejarano 'an important voice in the fight against racism and antisemitism' but Herr Maas also called her an anti-Semite.  Maas voted for a resolution in Germany's parliament that said that the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel was anti-Semitic.

Esther was a strong supporter of the Palestinians.  She supported BDS.

Esther had been called an anti-Semite for speaking out against Israel’s inhumane treatment of Palestinians observing that 'the Germans now, to cleanse themselves so to speak, say the new anti-Semitism comes from the Muslims.”

The real lesson of Esther's life is that one should oppose all forms of racism, not anti-Semitism selectively.

An anti-fascist friend of mine also wrote a Comment on her. Both of our contributions were moderated out of existence. What I had written did not accord with the lies that the Mail and other papers perpetuate, viz. that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. To point out that Esther was both an opponent of fascism and anti-Semitism and Zionism was too much for the liars who run the paper that supported Hitler before the war. Although my first comment was worded diplomatically, my next comments were anything but diplomatic:

How pathetic. You have censored my comment and that of xxx. Why? Because I paid tribute to her (Esther’s) support 4 the Palestinians and xxx paid tribute to her anti-racist and anti-fascist activism.  All 3 causes the Daily Mail doesn't approve of.  So you have deliberately omitted detail's of Esther's life which conflicts with the Daily Mail's own bigotry.

I understand. After all how does a paper that had Katie Hopkins as a columnist also print an obituary of an anti-fascist and anti-Zionist who by its definition is antisemitic?  By eliminating part of her life & pretending she was really 'like us' rather than being someone who detested everything that the Mail stands for.

After all if Esther had tried to escape to the UK as a child the Mail would have been foaming at the mouth at the very thought given that it waged a campaign to PREVENT Jewish immigrants coming in prior to 1939. And of course we should not forget Lord Rothermere, the Mail's Hitler owning proprietor

How the Daily Mail Supported Hitler During the 1930s

I followed up my 2 previous comments with an explanation of how, when Hitler took power in Germany, there was no more avid supporter of his than – the Daily Mail! I wrote, in a series of comments (the Mail assumes that their readers are stupid and confines them to about 200 words).

It is no wonder that comments are 'moderated' on the Mail. You didn't want people to discuss Esther Bejarano's life. You wanted people to say 'amen' and RIP and for the Mail to bask in the reflected glory of Esther's life long fight against racism and anti-Semitism, even though the Mail - bigoted and racist as it is,- stands for everything she opposed.

Esther was an anti-Zionist, a communist, a fighter who drew the lesson from the Holocaust that all racism was wrong. For you Zionism, racism against the Palestinians, is the lesson you draw from the Holocaust.  In other words Hitler's anti-Semitism justifies Israeli Apartheid and the ‘death to the Arabs’ demonstrations that successive Israeli governments have fostered. 

The Daily Mail has moved from supporting Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts and Hitler to ardent Zionism. There is of course no contradiction in this. The Nazis too supported Zionism, even though it is heretical – as Ken Livingstone found out – to mention this fact today. 

As Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazis’ main theoretician wrote in 1919:

‘Zionism must be vigorously supported in order to encourage a significant number of German Jews to leave for Palestine or other destinations.’

Rosenberg went on to say that the Nazis: 

‘intended to use Zionism as a legal justification for depriving German Jews of their civil rights ’ and ‘eventually the Jewish presence in Germany.’

You can find both these quotes in Francis Nicosia’s The Third Reich and the Palestine Question. In May 1935 Schwarze Korps, the paper of the SS, wrote:

‘the Zionists adhere to a strict racial position and by emigrating to Palestine they are helping to build their own Jewish state.... The assimilation-minded Jews deny their race and insist on their loyalty to Germany or claim to be Christians because they have been baptised in order to subvert National Socialist principles.’

Today it is the far Right and anti-Semitic politicians from Germany’s AfD, Tommy Robinson, Trump, Bannon and Orban who combine anti-Semitism with support for Zionism.  So it is perfectly understandable that you can't allow the facts of Esther's political life to contradict the editorial line of the Mail. Of course your readers will be kept in ignorance basking in their own prejudices. But then that was always the secret of the Mail’s ‘journalism’.

If Esther Bejarano had tried to escape to England then she would have come face to face with articles such as the following:

"The way stateless Jews from Germany are pouring in from every port of this country is becoming an outrage:  the number of aliens entering the country through back door - a problem to which the Daily Mail has repeatedly pointed "  Daily Mail, 20 August 1938.

Or if we go back further to the beginning of the 20th century we will read that Jewish immigrants from Russia: [Daily Mail 3 February 1900]

" fought, they jostled to the foremost places at the gangways. When the Relief Committee passed by they hid their gold and fawned and whined in broken English asked for money for their train fare." Daily Mail, 3rd February 1900.

Throughout the 1930’s the Mail and its owner Lord Rothermere supported Hitler and our home grown National Socialists. In January 1934 appeared the famous ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’ article on the Mail’s front page. 

There was no greater supporter of Hitler than the Mail’s owner, Viscount Rothermere. In an article NAZI YOUTH IN CONTROL for the Daily News in Perth on Monday 4 September 1933 Rothermere wrote: 

‘Of all the historic changes in our time, the transformation of Germany under Hitler has been the swiftest, most complete, and most momentous. This nation of 65 millions stands behind him united as it never was before.

... I urge all British young men and women to study closely the progress of this Nazi regime in Germany. They must not be misled by the misrepresentations of its opponents.

  They have started a clamorous campaign of denunciation against what they call 'Nazi atrocities,' which, as anyone who visits Germany quickly discovers for himself, consists merely of a few isolated acts of violence....

JEWISH OFFICIALS IN KEY POSITIONS

'THE German nation, moreover, was rapidly falling under the control of its alien elements. In the last days of the pre-Hitler regime there were 20 times as many Jewish Government officials in Germany as had existed before the war. Israelites of international attachments were insinuating themselves into key positions in the German administrative machine. Three German Ministries only had direct relations with the Press, but in each case the official responsible for conveying news and interpreting policy to the public was a Jew.

It is from such abuses that Hitler has freed Germany.

It would be both futile and unfair to resent this revival of German spirit. Each nation has the right to make the most of its own resources. ...

The world's greatest need today is realism. Hitler is a realist. He has saved his country from the ineffectual leadership of hesitating, half-hearted politicians.

It is no surprise that the Daily Mail feels the need to rewrite history given its own history.  When the Mail and the Tory papers, none of whom were interested in Hitler’s anti-Semitism before 1939, condemn ‘anti-Semitism’ today we should not be surprised that they have difficulty understanding the difference between anti-Semitism and opposition to racism. 

Tony Greenstein

When the Daily 'Hate' Mail Supported Hitler

Racist for over a century against immigrants and those fleeing oppression

Ralph Miliband

The controversy over the Mail's anti-Semitism began over the attack on Ed Miliband's father, Ralph Miliband, whom I once debated and knew from the Socialist Society.  The idea that he 'hated' Britain is of course rubbish, but no doubt, like any socialist he hated the Britain of speculators, toffs, Cameroonians and privilege.  In other words, ruling class Britain complete with its prejudices and bias.  It is noticeable that in all her witterings, Melanie Phillips would have something to say about the newspaper which supported   the anti-Semitic British Union of Fascists.  You might be fooled into thinking that the Daily Mail had an anti-fascist record as it attacks its opponents on the left as ‘fascists’. However the truth is a lot stranger. 

To dismiss the Miliband charges first.  The fact that the article was written by Geoffrey Levy, who is Jewish, is irrelevant.  Jews are as susceptible to the Mail Shilling as any one else.  It is what he wrote that is important and this was a vicious attack on a Marxist Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany, served in the navy, but who hated the class nature of Britain and its iniquities, such as the fact that a tax-exile in France can try and sully the reputation of the late Ralph Miliband.  It neatly conflates the fact of being Jewish and a refugee is to make one an 'enemy'.  So yes, the article was anti-Semitic and Levy is a collaborator of the Zionist brand.
　

Rothermere and friend

Rothermere supported the attempt to build fascism in Britain

In Nazi Youth in Control [Daily News 4.9.33] Lord Rothermere, the owner of the Daily ‘Hate’ Mail wrote that

‘I WRITE from a new country on the map of Europe. Its name is Naziland. Of all the historic changes in our time, the transformation of Germany under Hitler has been the swiftest, most complete,’ which is certainly one way of putting it.

Rothermere waxed lyrical about the attractions and support of German people for Hitler, ‘forgetting’ to mention that the total vote for the Communist KPD and SPD in the last free elections in November 1932, was greater than that for the Nazis.

'Something far more significant than a new Government has arisen among the Germans. There has been a sudden expansion of their national spirit like that which took place in England under Queen Elizabeth. Youth has taken command. On a visit, which I am paying to Northern Germany I find-, the signs of the new Hitler spirit as manifest in the most out of-the-way villages as in the largest cities.'

Like most ruling class apologists for Hitler (most were members of the Anglo-German Fellowship) Rothermere considered the reports about Nazi brutality were figments of the imagination:

‘They have started a clamorous campaign of denunciation against what they call 'Nazi atrocities,' which, as anyone who visits Germany quickly discovers for him self, consists merely of a few isolated acts of violence.’

Rothermere made light of fascist violence against the workers of Italy under Mussolini, thousands of whom were butchered, comparing it to a nursery governess:

‘The administration of a few doses of castor oil to Communist adversaries.’  Perhaps in his visit he could have taken in the concentration camps of Dachau and Sachsenhausen.

But it in his naked anti-Semitism, whereby he justified Hitler, that Rothermere showed his true contempt: Under the title

JEWISH OFFICIALS IN KEY POSITIONS
'THE German nation, moreover, was rapidly falling under the control of its alien elements. In the last days of the pre-Hitler regime there were 20 times as many Jewish Government officials in Germany as had existed before the war. Israelites of international attachments were insinuating themselves into key positions in the German administrative machine. Three German Ministries only had direct relations with the Press, but in each case the official responsible for conveying news and interpreting policy to the public was a Jew. . It is from such abuses that Hitler has freed Germany.'

To Rothermere Hitler’s actions were to prevent Jewish ‘abuses’. They were of course entirely justified as there was in effect a Jewish conspiracy to take over the German Civil Service. What Rothermere omits to mention is the successive waves of legislation, beginning with the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service in April 1933 which de-Jewified the Civil Service (essay compare this with the Judaisation of the Galilee and other parts of Israel).

In other words Rothermere was quite prepared to justify anti-Semitism as the price of smashing communism and the labour movement. In this he was not alone. In his two-volume book on fascism, Robert Black quotes Lloyd George thus:

‘If the powers that be succeeded in overthrowing Nazism in Germany, what would follow? Not a Conservative-Socialist regime (SPD) nor a Liberal regime, but extreme Communism... A Communist Germany would be intimately more formidable than a Communist Russia.’ [Robert Black, p. 417, Fascism in Germany, pp. 296/297, Steyne Publications, 1975.
Nor was this attitude to anti-Semitism confined to non-Jews. Chaim Weizmann, President of the (World) Zionist Organisation and first President of the State of Israel wrote of Major Evans-Gordon MP, founder of the anti-Semitic British Brothers League, which campaigned against the admission of Jewish refugees from Czarist Russia that:

‘"Looking back now, I think our people were rather hard on him." And why? Because:

The Aliens Bill in England and the movement which grew up around it were natural phenomenon which might have been foreseen.’ To the Zionists anti-Semitism was a ‘natural phenomenon’ which could not be fought and this of course explains the collaboration with anti-Semitism including the Nazis (especially in the 1933-1939 period).

The Daily Mail is Zionist now (& sometimes anti-Semitic) but it reserves its venom for more recent immigrants

Of course today the pro-Zionist Daily ‘Hate’ Mail has transferred its venom onto Black and Asian immigrants but it is useful to remind ourselves what they said about the Russian Jews fleeing the pogroms in Russia in 1900 and Hitler in 1930:

The Mail not only denied the 'atrocity stories' Hitler but it opposed letting into Britain Jewish refugees

"The way stateless Jews from Germany are pouring in from every port of this country is becoming an outrage: the number of aliens entering the country through back door - a problem to which the Daily Mail has repeatedly pointed"

Indeed the Daily ‘Hate’ Mail did indeed warn of the Jewish peril. Throughout the 1930’s it and Lord Rothermere supported Hitler. In January 1934 appeared the famous ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’ article on the Mail’s front page. It was only after the BUF debacle at Olympia in July 1934 that the Mail began withdrawing its support.

The Mail's famous headline 'Hurrah for the Blackshirts' -  an attempt to build a native fascist organisation

Daily Mail, 20 August 1938.

Or go back further "They fought, they jostled to the foremost places at the gangways. When the Relief Committee passed by they hid their gold and fawned and whined in broken English asked for money for their train fare." Daily Mail, 3^rd February 1900.