The Only Lesson You Have Drawn From the Holocaust is that Genocide is Fine When Israel Does It
Why is it Anti-Semitic to Compare Israel to Nazi Germany?
Sent to: info@holocaustremembrance.com
Dear
Ms Meyer,
I’ve
lost count of the number of genocidal statements by Israeli leaders. Statements
worthy of Hitler and Himmler themselves.
Israel's defence that the meaning of 'Amalek' has been distorted by South Africa's legal team is, frankly, perverse.
— Owen Jones (@owenjonesjourno) January 12, 2024
The story of Amalek is the only example in the Scriptures in which God orders the Israelites to exterminate an entire nation.
Benjamin Netanyahu declared:
"You…
Netanyahu
began Gaza’s genocide by invoking
the memory of Amalek
“You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.”
That
memory being Samuel’s instruction
to Saul to
“attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.”
Or
Finance Minister Smotrich lamenting
that he could not starve all 2 million Gazans, even though it was the most ‘moral’ thing to do.
No-one
can seriously doubt that the above sentiments are those of Nazis yet according
to the intellectually bankrupt definition that you foster, to say so is ‘anti-Semitic’.
The
IHRA
definition of anti-Semitism has been used the world over by
racists and anti-Semites (Trump,
Bannon,
Braverman
etc) to brand criticism of Zionism and Israel as anti-Semitic.
Today,
in the midst of Gaza’s Genocide, the IHRA is being used in order to shield and
justify Israel’s war crimes. Your silence about what is happening in Gaza is no
surprise given that the IHRA was drawn up specifically to render Israel immune
from criticism.
The
IHRA
Anti-Semitism Definition states that
criticism of
Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as
antisemitic
but
Israel is not like any other country. What other country has occupied another
people’s land for over half a century? What other country has instituted a
system of Apartheid and ethnic cleansing? What other country continues to
destroy the villages and homes of the people it rules over in order to make way
for settlers?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MX27DnEek5o
American
Surgeon volunteers in Khan Younis hospital, Gaza
Your
role in legitimising genocide, Kathrin Meyer, is not surprising given that you
are part of the German State Academic Establishment. From Heidegger onwards,
German academics have always been
willing to lend a helping hand to the cause of genocide and colonial
barbarities. You follow in the footsteps of those who justified eugenics and
racial supremacy in the first half of the last century.
I
refer not just to Heidegger, the Nazi
Rector of Freiburg University but to people like Eugen Fischer, a
professor of medicine, eugenics and anthropology
as well as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology
and Rector of the Frederick
William University.
Fischer
served as a doctor
in the extermination camp of Shark Island, also known as Death Island, in
South-West Africa from 1906-7. He conducted medical
experiments on African prisoners. These included
sterilisation, injection of smallpox, typhus as well as tuberculosis.
“The numerous cases of mixed offspring upset the German colonial administration and the obsession with racial purity. Eugen Fischer studied 310 mixed-race children, calling them “Rehoboth bastards” of “lesser racial quality”. Fischer also subjected them to numerous racial tests such as head and body measurements, eye and hair examinations.
The
links between Germany’s African Holocaust and the Nazi Holocaust are clear and
obvious yet they are nowhere to be found on the IHRA’s website. A search for
the Namaqua
and Herero
peoples turns up nothing. This is not accidental. As a German state functionary
your job is not to help us understand the causes of the Nazi holocaust but to normalise
it for imperial purposes.
The
antecedents of the Nazi holocaust are not difficult to locate. In November 2017
Elizabeth Baer published a book “The Genocidal Gaze: From German
Southwest Africa to the Third Reich,” about the connections between
Germany’s first holocaust and the Nazi holocaust. As an article in the
Times of Israel explained ‘Genocide
of African tribes was Germany’s Holocaust dress rehearsal’.
Baer argued that a connection could be made between the two
genocides by analysing literary texts such as
a diary by
Nama revolutionary Henrik Witbooi, who kept a record while battling
colonization, to works by German author Uwe Timm, which include a novel about
the genocide in Southwest Africa and a memoir about his brother’s death
fighting for Hitler in World War II.
What Baer
defined as the “genocidal gaze” was
“the attitude
of German imperialists toward the indigenous people of German Southwest Africa
that is then perpetuated by the Nazis.”
Germany’s
colonial era lasted for 30 years and ending with its defeat in World War I. Genocide
in South-West Africa killed 80 percent of the Herero and 50% of the Nama. Thousands
of Hereros and Namas were imprisoned in concentration camps, where the majority
died. “[In] many respects, it seemed a precursor to
the Holocaust” Baer said. “I could
see the parallels.”
The Nazi concept
of lebensraum or living space was developed in 1897 by Freidrich Ratzel
while the Germans were fighting native resistance in what is now Namibia. The
Times of Israel described how
Infamous German Lothar
von Trotha defeated the Herero ... in 1904
and the Germans campaigned mercilessly toward an endlosung — or final
solution — “a way to eradicate indigenous
people,” according to Baer.
Memorial on Shark Island to the Victims of German Imperialism
Final
Solution was of course the term used by the Nazis to indicate the methods necessary
for a solution of the ‘Jewish Question’.
Von Trotha’s army forced the
survivors of Waterberg — tens of thousands of men, women and children — into
the Omaheke Desert, dooming them to death from thirst and starvation. They also
created konzentrationslager, or
concentration camps... They also founded what Baer calls “the first death camp,
a prototype for Auschwitz” — Shark Island, where “people were subject to rape,
medical experimentation, no shelter, no food, in cages on the beach.”
The
colony’s imperial administrator, Heinrich Goring, was the father of Hermann
Goring, Hitler’s Deputy. Dr. Eugen Fischer performed experiments
on indigenous people, sending their severed heads back to Germany. Fischer
went on to train the Nazi SS doctors including Josef Mengele who performed
similar experiments at Auschwitz.
Baer was
quoted as saying that:
“the genocide in Africa was a
kind of dress rehearsal. So much of what the Germans did there, the Nazis did
subsequently in the methods, the ideology, of the Holocaust.
As
you say in your Linked
In bio ‘I am
passionate about empowering governments and civil society to reflect on their
history to inform policy.’ That certainly is
one way of putting it, but when it comes to German history you are remarkably
reticent.
This can hardly be an oversight. It is clearly relevant given that Germany is supplying 30% of the weapons that Israel is using to commit genocide in Gaza. Last year, the German government authorized arms exports worth a total of €326.5 ($355.3 million) to Israel.
The truth is that there hasn’t been a holocaust that
the German state... hasn’t smiled upon
Yet
you seem to have missed this in your ‘educational’ efforts. The truth is that
there hasn’t been a holocaust that the German state and its academic
functionaries, of which you are one, haven’t smiled upon.
Germany
was also involved in the Armenian holocaust. In Armenia German military
advisors signed
some of the orders that led to Ottoman deportations of Armenians, a major
component of the genocide. In World War I over 25,000 soldiers and 800 officers
of the Imperial German Army were sent to the Middle East to fight alongside the
Ottoman Army, with German commanders serving in the Ottoman high command and
general staff.
According to Vahakn
Dadrian’s German Responsibility in the
Armenian Genocide the Turkish denial of Armenian genocide served as a shield for Nazi Germany. Two German generals Bronsart and
Boettrich served as members of the military mission in Turkey.
Bronsart, in particular,
knew in advance about the real purpose of the mass Armenian deportation and did
nothing to prevent the mass execution. He even scolded the German Vice consul
for wanting to help the Armenians.
A German document of May
4, 1916, which the German state did its best to disappear, indicated that the
annihilation of the Armenians was ordered by the Germans (p.160-163)
Three prominent officials
served in both the Turkish Army and then in Nazi Germany. They included Franz von
Papen, who was the Chief of General Staff of the IV Turkish Army in World War
I, and served as Hitler’s Vice Chancellor and President of Prussia and Konstantin von Neurath, who served as
Hitler’s first Foreign Minister and who was convicted of war crimes at
Nuremberg. Dadrian wrote that:
"what
stands out in that evidence is a central feature of German complicity, namely,
the willingness of a number of German officials, civilian and military, to aid
and abet the Turks in their drive to liquidate the Armenians" (p.186).
Dadrian argued that full
disclosure and knowledge of the Armenian genocide could perhaps have prevented
the Jewish holocaust of World War II. Yet there is no mention of the Armenian
holocaust on the IHRA’s website. A strange omission is it not?
I am writing this letter because of the
open support in Israel for the annihilation of the Palestinians. As you know that
was also the policy of the Hitler government in respect of Gypsies, Jews and
others. Yet despite you wanting people to learn from history you are actively supporting
and justifying Israel’s holocaust in Gaza.
There are many examples of Israel’s
exterminationist mindset. The most
popular car bumper sticker
in Israel today is ‘finish them’. The host of the most popular English language
podcast in Israel ‘Two
nice Jewish boys’, Eytan
Weinstein, is quoted
as saying:
“If
you gave me a button to just erase Gaza, every single living being in Gaza
would no longer be living tomorrow. I would press it in a second.”
Weinstein
claimed that “most Israelis” would do
the same. His co-host Naor Meningher added that they would also want to wipe
out Palestinians in “the territories”.
Nor are
these ‘2 nice Jewish boys’ alone Defence Minister Yoav Gallant began the attack
on Gaza by describing the Palestinians as ‘human animals’ the very phrase Himmler used about the Jews on October 4 in a talk
to SS Generals when justifying the Final Solution.
There is no doubt that the Israeli state
has now entered its genocidal phase and that the Palestinians are in danger of
extermination. Most people have no difficulty in making a comparison between
what the Nazis did and what Israel is doing today.
Yet
none of the above appears on the IHRA website. You state in your ‘Founding
Principles’ that your mission, is
to
remember the Holocaust, educate future generations on the tragic events of the
past and strengthen governmental cooperation to work towards a world without
genocide.
How
can you do this if you erase from memory the German involvement in the Armenian
holocaust and Germany’s holocaust in SW Africa?
It
would seem that your mission is altogether more sinister. It is to provide the
ideological underpinning for Germany’s support for Israel’s exterminationist
policies today. Even worse you are legitimising false accusations of
‘anti-Semitism’ directed against anyone who dares questions those policies.
Eugen Fischer - the Link Between German Colonialism and Nazism
The
IHRA is built on fraud. As Jamie Stern-Weiner explained in his report
‘THE POLITICS OF A DEFINITION - How the
IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism Is Being Misrepresented.
In
the foreword Avi Shlaim, Emeritus Professor of International Relations at
Oxford University, wrote that
What
is touted as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working
Definition of Antisemitism is not a definition, has little to do with
antisemitism, and was neither written nor endorsed by IHRA....
Scholars
and legal experts have convincingly argued that IHRA’s definition is
incoherent, vague, vulnerable to political abuse, and not fit for purpose. It
fails even to meet the most elementary requirement of a definition, which is to
define. The decisive role of pro-Israel advocacy groups in drafting and
promoting the definition has also been established.
This
remarkable report... also breaks important new ground. Expert criticism and
political controversy have focused on a list of 11 highly problematic examples
of purportedly antisemitic statements and behaviours. Seven of these 11
examples relate to Israel. ...
The
report shows that IHRA’s decision-making body, the Plenary, in fact decided to
exclude all of these examples from its definition. The IHRA definition includes
no examples. If there is widespread confusion about this, it is because
champions of the examples... have systematically and methodically
misrepresented the Plenary’s decision.
The
examples, falsely represented as part of the IHRA definition, have been used to
delegitimise and censor legitimate criticism of Israel and, more broadly, to
curtail free speech on Israel. This shields Israel from accountability for its
serious human rights abuses...
...
The sad truth is that these [IHRA] officials have been complicit in a
deliberate effort to conflate criticism of Israeli policies with antisemitism.
IHRA’s core mandate...
Jamie
Stern-Weiner’s report demonstrates in irrefutable detail how a definition
intended to protect Jews against antisemitism was twisted to protect the State
of Israel against valid criticisms that have nothing to do with anti-Jewish
racism
The 10th illustration of the definition that your organisation propagates
states that ‘contemporary examples of
antisemitism’ include
Ø
Drawing comparisons of
contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
Naturally,
not wanting to be accused of ‘anti-Semitism’ I thought I should seek your
advice as to why calling for the extermination of Palestinians is any different
from calling for the extermination of Jews? I would be grateful for your advice
in this respect and look forward to hearing from you.
Yours
sincerely,
Tony
Greenstein
