Winston Churchill – a Mass Murderer to whom history was very kind

In Winston Churchill, Hollywood Rewards a Mass Murderer

UPDATE
Out of over 2,400 posts in 10 years of this blog this post has received the highest number of hits ever - over 117,000 so far and climbing.  The second highest blog, at the beginning of the year was on Ahed Tamimi, the gaoled Palestinian child and the no. of hits was 104,000.  Clearly this post has struck a chord.

As a child I lived in Merthyr Tydfil, South Wales for a year.  One of the things that has stuck with me since that time was the hostility amongst Welsh working class people to Churchill as a result of his sending the troops and police into the valleys to help the coal owners defeat the striking miners, some of whom were shot.

But Churchill’s reputation was made primarily in imperial affairs. It is indisputable that Churchill was primarily responsible for the slaughter at Gallipolli in 1915.  Prior to that there was his period as Home Secretary when he took personal control of the Sydney Street siege in January 1911.   Two Latvian revolutionaries were holed up there and they were besieged by police and troops.  When the building caught fire he ordered the fire brigade not to put the flames out and allowed those inside to burn to death.  As Colonial Secretary he presided over Partition in Ireland and over the beginning of the Mandate in Palestine.  In Palestine he introduced the murderous Black and Tans who had seen bloody service in Ireland.

Churchill saw very early the potential of Zionism as an antidote to Communism amongst Jews

Adam Jones, editor of the Journal of Genocide Research, calls Churchill "a genuine genocidaire", noting that he called Indians a "foul race" and said that the British air force chief should "send some of his surplus bombers to destroy them."  [Jones, Adam (2016-12-16). "Chapter 2 State and Empire; War and Revolution". Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction. Routledge]

Whether it was sending in the army to protect the coal owners in Wales or presiding over the famine in Bengal in 1942, Churchill was a mass murderer.  Churchill’s whole career had been dedicated to the preservation of the Empire.  In January 1931 he resigned from the Conservative Shadow Cabinet over self-government for India.  Churchill was a died-in-the-wool supporter of the British Empire.

Churchill made his reputation in the second world war, primarily through his fighting speeches.  However his opposition to Hitler was not from an anti-fascist perspective.  He saw Hitler as a threat to British interests.  Initially he had welcomed Hitler as an anti-communist.  During the War Churchill was distinguished by his refusal to do anything to alleviate the position of the Jews including the bombing of Auschwitz and the railway lines leading up to it.  He was however a die hard Zionist and that is why Zionist supporters treat him kindly, despite his undoubted anti-Semitism. 

Striking up a familiar pose

During the war he advocated the mass bombing of German cities like Dresden and Nuremburg.  Thousands  died as a result yet the war itself was advanced.  These were undoubtedly war crimes.  When Greece was liberated he put the local Nazi collaborators back in power as his main goal was keeping the Greek Communists out of power.

His most famous tract Zionism and  Bolshevism was published in the Illustrated Sunday Herald on 8 February 1920.  Suffice to say that Churchill was not overfond of revolutionary Jews!  He wrote of the ‘International Jew’ as being responsible for all the ills his class suffered from, including the French Revolution!

Churchill enjoying himself at the Sydney Street siege

‘The adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared up among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race.... This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. ... It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century;...

There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews.. ...

Zionism offers the third sphere to the political conceptions of the Jewish race. In violent contrast to international communism, it presents to the Jew a national idea of a commanding character.’

Churchill like most of his class saw Zionism as an alternative to the attractions of revolution for Jews. Those who see that the origins of Zionism were progressive are very much mistaken. 

Churchill's Police confront the miners in South Wales

It was also during his period as Prime Minister that Britain engaged in the most horrific use of torture and concentration camps against the Mau Mau people in Kenya.  Victims included Hussein Onyango Obama, the grandfather of Barak Obama.  See Revealed: Britain's torture of Obama's grandfather and Sir Winston Churchill: Zionist hero

Tony Greenstein

In Winston Churchill, Hollywood Rewards a Mass Murderer

A statue of former British prime minister Winston Churchill is silhouetted in front of the Houses of Parliament in London in 2015., Luke MacGregor/Reuters

“History,” Winston Churchill said, “will be kind to me, for I intend to write it myself.” He needn’t have bothered. He was one of the great mass murderers of the 20th century, yet is the only one, unlike Hitler and Stalin, to have escaped historical odium in the West. He has been crowned with a Nobel Prize (for literature, no less), and now, an actor portraying him (Gary Oldman) has been awarded an Oscar.

As Hollywood confirms, Churchill’s reputation (as what Harold Evans has called “the British Lionheart on the ramparts of civilization”) rests almost entirely on his stirring rhetoric and his talent for a fine phrase during World War II. “We shall not flag nor fail. We shall go on to the end. … We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets. … We shall never surrender.” (The revisionist British historian John Charmley dismissed this as “sublime nonsense.”)

Words, in the end, are all that Churchill admirers can point to. His actions are another matter altogether.

Blenheim Palace where Churchill was born

During World War II, Churchill declared himself in favor of “terror bombing.” He wrote that he wanted “absolutely devastating, exterminating attacks by very heavy bombers.” Horrors such as the firebombing of Dresden were the result.

In the fight for Irish independence, Churchill, in his capacity as secretary of state for war and air, was one of the few British officials in favor of bombing Irish protesters, suggesting in 1920 that airplanes should use “machine-gun fire or bombs” to scatter them.

Dealing with unrest in Mesopotamia in 1921, as secretary of state for the colonies, Churchill acted as a war criminal: “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against the uncivilised tribes; it would spread a lively terror.” He ordered large-scale bombing of Mesopotamia, with an entire village wiped out in 45 minutes.

In Afghanistan, Churchill declared that the Pashtuns “needed to recognise the superiority of [the British] race” and that “all who resist will be killed without quarter.” He wrote: “We proceeded systematically, village by village, and we destroyed the houses, filled up the wells, blew down the towers, cut down the great shady trees, burned the crops and broke the reservoirs in punitive devastation. … Every tribesman caught was speared or cut down at once.”

In Kenya, Churchill either directed or was complicit in policies involving the forced relocation of local people from the fertile highlands to make way for white colonial settlers and the forcing of more than 150,000 people into concentration camps. Rape, castration, lit cigarettes on tender spots, and electric shocks were all used by the British authorities to torture Kenyans under Churchill’s rule.

But the principal victims of Winston Churchill were the Indians — “a beastly people with a beastly religion,” as he charmingly called them. He wanted to use chemical weapons in India but was shot down by his cabinet colleagues, whom he criticized for their “squeamishness,” declaring that “the objections of the India Office to the use of gas against natives are unreasonable.”

Churchill’s beatification as an apostle of freedom seems all the more preposterous given his 1941 declaration that the Atlantic Charter’s principles would not apply to India and the colored colonies. He refused to see people of color as entitled to the same rights as himself. “Gandhi-ism and all it stands for,” he declared, “will, sooner or later, have to be grappled with and finally crushed.”

In such matters, Churchill was the most reactionary of Englishmen, with views so extreme they cannot be excused as being reflective of their times. Even his own secretary of state for India, Leopold Amery, confessed that he could see very little difference between Churchill’s attitude and Adolf Hitler’s.

As a dedicated racist  Churchill was a strong believer in racial purity and selective breeding - eugenics

Thanks to Churchill, some 4 million Bengalis starved to death in a 1943 famine. Churchill ordered the diversion of food from starving Indian civilians to well-supplied British soldiers and even to top up European stockpiles in Greece and elsewhere. When reminded of the suffering of his Indian victims, his response was that the famine was their own fault, he said, for “breeding like rabbits.”

Madhusree Mukerjee’s searing account of Churchill’s role in the Bengal famine, “Churchill’s Secret War,” documents that while Indians starved, prices for foodgrains were inflated by British purchases and India’s own surplus grains were exported, while Australian ships laden with wheat were not allowed to unload their cargo at Calcutta (where the bodies of those who had died of starvation littered the streets). Instead, Churchill ordered that grain be shipped to storage depots in the Mediterranean and the Balkans to increase the buffer stocks for a possible future invasion of Greece and Yugoslavia. European warehouses filled up as Bengalis died.

This week’s Oscar rewards yet another hagiography of this odious man. To the Iraqis whom Churchill advocated gassing, the Greek protesters on the streets of Athens who were mowed down on Churchill’s orders in 1944, sundry Pashtuns and Irish, as well as to Indians like myself, it will always be a mystery why a few bombastic speeches have been enough to wash the bloodstains off Churchill’s racist hands.

Many of us will remember Churchill as a war criminal and an enemy of decency and humanity, a blinkered imperialist untroubled by the oppression of non-white peoples. Ultimately, his great failure — his long darkest hour — was his constant effort to deny us freedom.

Shashi Tharoor is author of “Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India.” He chairs the Indian Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee.

Not his finest hour: The dark side of Winston Churchill

by Johann Hari

Wednesday 27 October 2010

Winston Churchill is rightly remembered for leading Britain through her finest hour – but what if he also led the country through her most shameful hour? What if, in addition to rousing a nation to save the world from the Nazis, he fought for a raw white supremacism and a concentration camp network of his own? This question burns through Richard Toye's new history, Churchill's Empire, and is even seeping into the Oval Office.

George W Bush left a bust of Churchill near his desk in the White House, in an attempt to associate himself with the war leader's heroic stand against fascism. Barack Obama had it returned to Britain. It's not hard to guess why: his Kenyan grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was imprisoned without trial for two years and was tortured on Churchill's watch, for resisting Churchill's empire.

Can these clashing Churchills be reconciled? Do we live, at the same time, in the world he helped to save, and the world he helped to trash? Toye, one of Britain's smartest young historians, has tried to pick through these questions dispassionately – and he should lead us, at last and at least, to a more mature conversation about our greatest national icon.

Churchill was born in 1874 into a Britain that was washing the map pink, at the cost of washing distant nations blood red. Victoria had just been crowned Empress of India, and the scramble for Africa was only a few years away. At Harrow School and then Sandhurst, he was told a simple story: the superior white man was conquering the primitive, dark-skinned natives, and bringing them the benefits of civilisation. As soon as he could, Churchill charged off to take his part in "a lot of jolly little wars against barbarous peoples". In the Swat valley, now part of Pakistan, he experienced, fleetingly, a crack of doubt. He realised that the local population was fighting back because of "the presence of British troops in lands the local people considered their own," just as Britain would if she were invaded. But Churchill soon suppressed this thought, deciding instead they were merely deranged jihadists whose violence was explained by a "strong aboriginal propensity to kill".

He gladly took part in raids that laid waste to whole valleys, destroying houses and burning crops. He then sped off to help reconquer the Sudan, where he bragged that he personally shot at least three "savages".

The young Churchill charged through imperial atrocities, defending each in turn. When concentration camps were built in South Africa, for white Boers, he said they produced "the minimum of suffering". The death toll was almost 28,000, and when at least 115,000 black Africans were likewise swept into British camps, where 14,000 died, he wrote only of his "irritation that Kaffirs should be allowed to fire on white men". Later, he boasted of his experiences there: "That was before war degenerated. It was great fun galloping about."

Then as an MP he demanded a rolling programme of more conquests, based on his belief that "the Aryan stock is bound to triumph". There seems to have been an odd cognitive dissonance in his view of the "natives". In some of his private correspondence, he appears to really believe they are helpless children who will "willingly, naturally, gratefully include themselves within the golden circle of an ancient crown".

But when they defied this script, Churchill demanded they be crushed with extreme force. As Colonial Secretary in the 1920s, he unleashed the notorious Black and Tan thugs on Ireland's Catholic civilians, and when the Kurds rebelled against British rule, he said: "I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes...[It] would spread a lively terror."

Of course, it's easy to dismiss any criticism of these actions as anachronistic. Didn't everybody think that way then? One of the most striking findings of Toye's research is that they really didn't: even at the time, Churchill was seen as at the most brutal and brutish end of the British imperialist spectrum. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin was warned by Cabinet colleagues not to appoint him because his views were so antedeluvian. Even his startled doctor, Lord Moran, said of other races: "Winston thinks only of the colour of their skin."

Many of his colleagues thought Churchill was driven by a deep loathing of democracy for anyone other than the British and a tiny clique of supposedly superior races. This was clearest in his attitude to India. When Mahatma Gandhi launched his campaign of peaceful resistance, Churchill raged that he "ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back." As the resistance swelled, he announced: "I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion." This hatred killed. To give just one, major, example, in 1943 a famine broke out in Bengal, caused – as the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has proved – by the imperial policies of the British. Up to 3 million people starved to death while British officials begged Churchill to direct food supplies to the region. He bluntly refused. He raged that it was their own fault for "breeding like rabbits". At other times, he said the plague was "merrily" culling the population.

Skeletal, half-dead people were streaming into the cities and dying on the streets, but Churchill – to the astonishment of his staff – had only jeers for them. This rather undermines the claims that Churchill's imperialism was motivated only by an altruistic desire to elevate the putatively lower races.

Hussein Onyango Obama is unusual among Churchill's victims only in one respect: his story has been rescued from the slipstream of history, because his grandson ended up as President of the US. Churchill believed that Kenya's fertile highlands should be the preserve of the white settlers, and approved the clearing out of the local "blackamoors". He saw the local Kikuyu as "brutish children". When they rebelled under Churchill's post-war premiership, some 150,000 of them were forced at gunpoint into detention camps – later dubbed "Britain's gulag" by Pulitzer-prize winning historian, Professor Caroline Elkins. She studied the detention camps for five years for her remarkable book Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya, explains the tactics adopted under Churchill to crush the local drive for independence. "Electric shock was widely used, as well as cigarettes and fire," she writes. "The screening teams whipped, shot, burned, and mutilated Mau Mau suspects." Hussein Onyango Obama never truly recovered from the torture he endured.

Many of the wounds Churchill inflicted have still not healed: you can find them on the front pages any day of the week. He is the man who invented Iraq, locking together three conflicting peoples behind arbitrary borders that have been bleeding ever since. He is the Colonial Secretary who offered the Over-Promised Land to both the Jews and the Arabs – although he seems to have privately felt racist contempt for both. He jeered at the Palestinians as "barbaric hoards who ate little but camel dung," while he was appalled that the Israelis "take it for granted that the local population will be cleared out to suit their convenience".

True, occasionally Churchill did become queasy about some of the most extreme acts of the Empire. He fretted at the slaughter of women and children, and cavilled at the Amritsar massacre of 1919. Toye tries to present these doubts as evidence of moderation – yet they almost never seem to have led Churchill to change his actions. If you are determined to rule people by force against their will, you can hardly be surprised when atrocities occur. Rule Britannia would inexorably produce a Cruel Britannia.

So how can the two be reconciled? Was Churchill's moral opposition to Nazism a charade, masking the fact he was merely trying to defend the British Empire from a rival?

The US civil rights leader Richard B. Moore, quoted by Toye, said it was "a rare and fortunate coincidence" that at that moment "the vital interests of the British Empire [coincided] with those of the great overwhelming majority of mankind". But this might be too soft in its praise. If Churchill had only been interested in saving the Empire, he could probably have cut a deal with Hitler. No: he had a deeper repugnance for Nazism than that. He may have been a thug, but he knew a greater thug when he saw one – and we may owe our freedom today to this wrinkle in history.

This, in turn, led to the great irony of Churchill's life. In resisting the Nazis, he produced some of the richest prose-poetry in defence of freedom and democracy ever written. It was a cheque he didn't want black or Asian people to cash – but they refused to accept that the Bank of Justice was empty. As the Ghanaian nationalist Kwame Nkrumah wrote: "All the fair, brave words spoken about freedom that had been broadcast to the four corners of the earth took seed and grew where they had not been intended." Churchill lived to see democrats across Britain's dominions and colonies – from nationalist leader Aung San in Burma to Jawarlal Nehru in India – use his own intoxicating words against him.

Ultimately, the words of the great and glorious Churchill who resisted dictatorship overwhelmed the works of the cruel and cramped Churchill who tried to impose it on the darker-skinned peoples of the world. The fact that we now live in a world where a free and independent India is a superpower eclipsing Britain, and a grandson of the "savages" is the most powerful man in the world, is a repudiation of Churchill at his ugliest – and a sweet, ironic victory for Churchill at his best.

See also Winston Churchill

Ha'aretz Compares Israel’s Policy of Expelling Black African Asylum Seekers to Eichmann's Expulsion of the Jews of Vienna in 1938-9

According to the Zionists' Fake (IHRA) Definition of Anti-Semitism this article in Ha’aretz is Anti-Semitic

At the present time the Israeli government, with the full support of the Israeli Labour Party, is doing its best to physically expel all its estimated 40,000 Black African asylum seekers, most of whom are from Sudan and Eritrea.  B.Michael in Israel's sole liberal daily, Ha'aretz makes the comparison between this and Adolf Eichman's policy in 1938 Austria where, between March 1938, when Hitler invaded till December 1939, Austria's Jewish population was reduced from 192,000 to 57,000.

One of the 11 examples of ‘anti-Semitism’ according to the bogus International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ is ‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis’.  Not only is anti-Semitism out of control in the Labour Party but it would appear that Israel, especially its liberal press, is suffering from an epidemic!

B.Michael in his normally pungent and satirical style, compares the policy of Adolf Eichmann towards the Jews of Vienna to Israel's policy of forcing out Black African asylum seekers.  Eichmann's policy of impoverishing, terrorising and stripping Jews of their rights was considered a massive success at the time in forcing the Jews out of Austria.  Israel is only just learning how to accomplish the same feat.  Israel’s refugee population of 60,000 has already been reduced by 10,000-15,000 through a combination of tactics such as imprisonment in the desert camp at Holot, depriving them of the right to work, pogroms and racist attacks.

Israel has learnt well, as B.Michael says, from the Jews traditional enemies.  Just as the anti-Semites used every trick in the book to force out Jews so Netanyahu does the same to Black non-Jews.  But we shouldn't just blame Netanyahu. The Israeli Labour Party and its new, even more right-wing leader Avi Gabbay, is fully behind Netanyahu’s stance.  The refugees from Eritrea are bogus, no matter that every international body and human rights agency says that Eritrea is one of the worst police states in the world.

Unlike the Israeli Labour Party, Netanyahu is quite honest - it doesn't matter if the refugees are fleeing persecution - they are not Jewish

What is the crime that these refugees have committed that Israel is seeking to force them out and deport them to 3^rd world countries such as Rwanda, a breach of international law in itself?  Well there are two crimes that these refugees have committed.  Not only are they not Jewish in a Jewish state but they are also Black.  Faced with this double criminality, Israel really has no choice to act if it is to preserve itself as a Jewish state. This is why a Jewish State cannot be other than a racist state.  It isn't like England, a Christian state only in so far as the head of state is head of the Church of England.  It isn't even like the Islamic state of Iran where although the law is derived from the Sharia, the 20,000 or so Jews in Iran don't suffer any civic penalties as a result.

Is Israel being racist by forcing out these refugees?  According to its own criteria it’s just seeking to preserve its racial or ethnic purity.  Indeed just accusing the Israeli state of racism is itself anti-Semitic because the IHRA definition also states that 'claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour' is anti-Semitic.

David Sheen's video is particularly shocking in that it shows how members of the Israeli government, including its present 'Culture' Minister Miri Regev deliberately fanned the fires of racism and enabled a pogrom to take place against the Africans of Tel Aviv.

It used to be the case that Jews experienced pogroms in Eastern Europe.  It is Israel's unique achievement to turn Jews into pogromists.

The last of the three articles from Ha’aretz here is about a Kenyan Jew Kimani who was deported the moment he set foot on Israeli soil.  Normally people who have converted to Judaism, are admitted under the racist Law of Return.  That includes conversions carried out by the Conservative, Liberal or Reform strands of Judaism.  Ultra Orthodox rabbis have been trying to change this to only Orthodox conversions for years but they haven’t succeeded because this would cut off the vast majority of American Jewry at a stroke.  However Kenya’s small Black African Jews have far less political clout and unlike American Jews they are not White.

Of course there are some people who will say that none of this is racist but then there are some people who deny the Holocaust and even people who say the Earth is flat.

Tony Greenstein

Opinion The Sick Historical Precedent for Israel's Asylum-seeker Expulsion Push

Israel's push to expel 45,000 African asylum seekers and migrants borrows from Eichmann's 1938 playbook for expelling Austria's Jews

B. Michael Jan 11, 2018 11:03 AM

African asylum seekers at Israel's Saharonim detention center. Ilan Assayag

Sometimes even history’s sense of humor exceeds the boundaries of good taste. This time it’s no joke; it’s not even irony or sarcasm. It’s just a bitter, sardonic spit in the face.

On March 13, 1938, Austria was annexed to the Nazi Reich amid cheers and excitement. Slightly more than five months later, on August 26, 1938 the Central Bureau for Jewish Emigration (the Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung) was opened, headed by a talented executive named Adolf Eichmann.

Its objective was to organize and expedite the expulsion of Jews from Austria. It bears remembering that in 1938, before the war, the Final Solution and the death camps, the Nazis “merely” wanted to purify the Reich of the stinking Jews swarming in it.

Eichmann, a disciplined and diligent manager, developed an efficient system for accelerating emigration: forbidding Jews to work, rescinding their rights, discriminatory and humiliating laws, confiscation of property, taxes, boycotts, exclusion, monetary incentives, turning a blind eye to acts by the racist rabble and of course, threats of imprisonment for those who refused to leave.

And it worked.

 Demonstrators for and against expulsion of asylum seekers at a Tel Aviv protest, January 9, 2018. The sign says: "The rehabilitation of south Tel Aviv begins with the expulsion of the infiltrators." Moti Milrod 

Within around three months Eichmann’s immigration authority expelled 45,000 Jews. Many others abandoned everything and fled for their lives, without availing themselves of Adolf’s services.

Most of those who remained were murdered.

The state founded by those fugitives now also has an immigration authority. It, too, is essentially an expulsion authority. It deals with exporting members of inferior races and religions. Recently it has been assigned the weighty task of expelling 45,000 burdensome blacks. They are burdensome because they aren’t white, and also a bit because they aren’t Jews.

Holot internment camp in the Negev desert

They are non-Jews and blacks, which is really too much.

For years the Israeli expulsion network has been using against them the entire arsenal of abuses that proved itself in Eichmann’s office – forbidding them to work, denying them rights, passing discriminatory and humiliating laws, taxes, boycotts, exclusion, monetary incentives, turning a blind eye to the acts of the racist rabble and of course, threats of imprisonment for those who refuse to leave.

But it’s not working so well. Blacks, it turns out, are like crabgrass. They aren’t easy to uproot. There was no choice but to ceremoniously announce an “operation.”

The Population, Immigration and Border Authority is also seeking to hire workers; expulsion workers. Help wanted ads were published in newspapers, and one of the prerequisites is “experience in this field of endeavor.” There are lots of Jews with related experience, but most of them experienced it as expellees, not as expellers, and that’s not what’s required.

Nor is there any point in approaching veterans of the Nakba – when more than 700,000 Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes during the War of Independence. They’ll deny it ever happened. It seems, therefore, that the best list of those with “experience” can be found in Yad Vashem. The immigration authority ought to look there.

This operation to deport refugees is a co—production of Interior Minister Arye Dery and Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan. They’ve allotted two years to the mission of expelling 45,000 shvartzes. How shameful! Eichman and his team at the Central Bureau for Jewish Emigration expelled 45,000 Jews in a few months. Dery, Erdan and their team at the Central Bureau for the Emigration of Shvartzes need two years to expel an equal number of people. Oy vey, look how we fall short. We obviously still have a lot to learn from them. But we can at least say that we’re moving in the right direction.

Only Ms. History looks at us from above, with a malicious smile on her face as she sees the persecuted become the persecutor, the refugee become the expeller, the uprooted become the uprooter, the oppressed become the oppressor, the beaten become the beater, the trampled become the trampler. “It’s true,” she whispers to herself, “I really am repeating myself. But I find this role reversal exceedingly funny.”

I don’t find it funny at all. My parents were expelled from Vienna. My country is desecrating their memory.

B. Michael

Haaretz Contributor

The UN refugee agency calls on Israel to stop deportation campaign targeting asylum seekers, offers help incoming up with 'alternative solutions'

Haaretz and Ilan Lior Jan 09, 2018 6:25 

Multiple African asylum seekers who were forcefully deported from Israel suffered abuse, detention and torture after they were made to take hazardous journeys when they were sent away from the Jewish state, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said in a rare statement released Tuesday.

The UN refugee agency's statement, which quoted a speech by agency spokesperson William Spindler, noted that the agency conducted research into the subject and highlighted 80 individual cases of people who risked their lives after they were relocated by Israel and then had to make hazardous journeys to Europe through Libya.

According to the world body, its staff conducted interviews with the asylum seekers in question to better understand their plight. "Feeling they had no other choice, they travelled many hundreds of kilometers through conflict zones in South Sudan, Sudan and Libya after being relocated by Israel," the statement recounted the difficult experiences of the asylum seekers as they were told to UN staff who interviewed them in Italy.

The interviews took place between November 2015 and December 2017 in reception centers and informal encampments around Rome. All the interviewees are adult men, and some are reported to have family members still living in Israel. They all came into the Jewish state via the Sinai area, and the UN statement said that "in every case they reported torture, mistreatment and extortion before reaching Israel." 

The statement went on to say that the men suffered "abuse, torture and extortion before risking their lives once again by crossing the Mediterranean to Italy" after Israel had sent them away.

The refugees also reportedly told UN staff that they were transferred from Israel to countries in Africa with very little money to support them later on their way, and that when they arrived they faced minimal accommodation and limited aid. "They reported feeling unsafe many experienced extortion and detention," the statement stressed.  

The statement also lamented the fact that while Israel has become a temporary shelter for tens of thousands of asylum seekers, "since Israel took over refugee status determination from UNHRC in 2009, only ten Eritreans and one Sudanese have been recognized as refugees."

The agency called on Israel to halt its planned deportation of thousands of asylum seekers, namely those who fled to Israel from Eritrea and Sudan and are now slated to be sent back to the African continent.

The UNHCR "is seriously concerned over Israel's plans announced on January 1st to forcibly relocate Eritreans and Sudanese to countries in Africa or have them face indefinite detention," the statement said. "At a time when UNHCR and partners in the international community are engaged in emergency evacuations from Libya, forced relocation to countries that do not offer effective protection and the onward movement of these people to Libya and Europe is particularly worrisome."

The agency extended an offer to help Israel in finding other possible ways to handle the situation, saying that it "stands ready to work with Israel to find alternative solutions for the protection needs of asylum seekers, in line with international standards. This includes resettlement out of Israel, as has happened previously."

Last week, Israel's Population, Immigration and Border Authority announced that it was launching its campaign to begin ridding Israel of its African asylum seekers, declaring that many Eritrean and Sudanese nationals will have to leave the country within the coming months or be incarcerated indefinitely.

There are some 35,000 Eritrean and Sudanese natives living in Israel, who have another 5,000 children who were born here. The overwhelming majority of the adults have temporary visas that they must renew every three months. The next time many of them come to renew their visas, they will be told it is the last renewal and that they will have to leave before the visa expires. The authority will propose that they either return to their countries of origin, or leave for Uganda or Rwanda.

First Israel Deported a Convert From Kenya. Now Birthright Might Cancel an Entire Trip for African Jews

Plan to bring 40 Ugandan converts on an Israel tour is at risk amid fears the participants wouldn't be allowed in, officials at the Jewish Agency and world Conservative movement say

Judy Maltz Jan 04, 2018

Plans to bring a first-ever group of Ugandan Jews to Israel on a Birthright trip are in jeopardy following the recent deportation of a member of their community.

The group of 40 Ugandans had been scheduled to arrive in Israel in late May on the free 10-day trip available to young Jewish adults from around the world. But Birthright officials are now concerned the group may be turned away upon arrival, just as 31-year-old Yehudah Kimani was, because the immigration authorities do not consider them Jewish.

The trip has been in the planning for two years.

The prospective participants all belong to the Abayudaya community, which has been practicing Judaism for more than 100 years. Its members, however, only underwent formal conversions over the past 15 years, most of them under the supervision of Conservative rabbis.

In late December, Kimani, who hails from Kenya but lived for a year among the Abayudaya while converting, was detained upon entering Israel and deported the following morning, even though he had a valid tourist visa.

On Wednesday, at a special session of the Knesset Committee for Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora Affairs, an Interior Ministry official defended the decision to deport Kimani and insisted he was not Jewish despite his conversion.

According to officials at the Jewish Agency and world Conservative movement, following Kimani’s deportation, Birthright notified them of its intention to cancel the trip from Uganda, fearing a similar fiasco when the group arrived. Marom Olami, the young adult division of the world Conservative movement, has helped arrange details of the itinerary.

According to the officials, the Jewish Agency and world Conservative movement persuaded Birthright to refrain from any drastic moves at this point. Birthright officials responded that they would consider moving forward with the trip if two conditions were fulfilled: only Ugandans who converted after 2009 would be allowed to participate, and every participant would obtain prior approval from the Interior Ministry.

In response to a request for comment on Thursday, Birthright said: "Birthright Israel has received a request to bring a group of Jewish young adults from Uganda and is currently examining it."

The Abayudaya community is estimated to number between 1,500 and 2,000 members. Most were converted in 2002, before a smaller wave in 2008.

Only in 2009, however, did they join the world Conservative movement, and for that reason, the Jewish Agency only recognized the Abayudaya as an official Jewish community from that year. The assumption is that anyone who was converted after 2009 will have a better chance of entering Israel. (Kimani, however, was converted in 2010, and that did not prevent him from being deported.)

Yehudah Kimani blows the shofar with his son. Courtesy of Francis Kimani

The status of the Abayudaya community has been under discussion between the Conservative movement, the Jewish Agency and the Interior Ministry for the past five years. The ministry still does not recognize members of the community as Jewish and, in response to queries over the years, has said it is still studying the matter. The ministry has the final say on who gets recognized as a Jew in Israel and who is allowed to enter the country.

Asiimwe Rabbin, a 28-year-old member of the community, applied last year to immigrate to Israel under the Law of Return after visiting the country. Anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent or a Jewish spouse, or anyone who has converted in a recognized Jewish community (regardless of the affiliation) is eligible to immigrate under the Law of Return.

Last week, Rabbin received a letter from the Jewish Agency notifying him that, for the meantime, his request had been rejected because the Interior Ministry had still not recognized the Abayudaya community as Jewish. Any decision on the matter, the letter warned, “can take several years.”

Jewish Agency representatives met last week with Interior Ministry officials hoping to obtain guarantees that the Birthright group from Uganda would be welcomed into Israel. No agreement of substance came out of the discussion, and a follow-up meeting has been scheduled for next week.

Birthright has brought more than 500,000 participants to Israel from 67 countries since its inception in 1999. Several members of the Abayudaya community have taken part in other programs in Israel in recent years, but this would be the first time such a large group was coming.