Despite Libelling Ken Loach over Perdition – the Zionists Do Not Want to Discuss their Record During the Holocaust or their Relations with the Nazis because it is 'anti-Semitic'
Channel 4
Debate on Perdition
Given my recent conviction
in a trial of Palestine Action activists and the possibility of being
imprisoned I wish to sell my remaining copies of Zionism
During the Holocaust as quickly as possible! I am therefore offering them for sale at cost price.
Prices from the bookshops and Amazon are 50% higher! For those interested
please contact me at tonygreenstein104@gmail.com
Secondly it is remarkable that the only criticism of my book from
the Zionists has come from ex-Jewish
Chronicle hack Jenni Frazer, now writing for Jewish News.
In a piece, written
over a year before my book came out and just after the Zionists had
successfully pressurised Crowdfunder to take down my crowdfunder, Frazer compared
me to Netanyahu:
One is an
egregious and avid Jewish antisemite, the Brighton-based Tony Greenstein. And
the other is the former Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Without reading a word of the book Frazer confidently writes
that ‘the book does honestly just sound
dreadful. …’ I guess it must be dreadful for Zionist propagandists (which
is what ‘journalists’ for the Zionist press are) to read the truth for once.
Frazer described how:
A martyred Greenstein blames
“the Zionist bookburners” for the demise of his Crowdfunder appeal, asking: “What is the difference between Joseph
Goebbels and the Zionist lobby? Answer: Goebbels burnt books after they were
printed. The Zionists try to burn the books before they are printed”. Gosh,
how witty…. ‘
[thanks Jenny that is almost
a compliment! - TG]
Anyone who is
the least bit tempted [to support the Crowdfunding Appeal] ought perhaps to
know that disgraced former MP Chris Williamson, who was suspended from Labour
over allegations of antisemitism (and then resigned from the party before he
was expelled) is an admirer of Greenstein’s and has urged people to donate.
I ought
perhaps to add… that in criticising Netanyahu I do not question his true and
lasting love of Israel. I just question his methodology. What he and Greenstein
have in common, I am afraid, is an overweening sense of self and rightness.
Neither is attractive.
Clearly Jenny thought that associating the ‘disgraced (in whose eyes?) MP Chris Williamson’ with my book would
prove detrimental.
I mention all this because the book has been selling
extremely well. The reviews have all been favourable and it is given a score of
4.8 out of 5 on Amazon.
40 years ago when Lenni Brenner brought out the first book on
Zionist-Nazi Collaboration, Zionism
During the Dictators, the Zionist propaganda machine got to work
and there was actually a debate in the pages of the Jewish Chronicle. Today the only debates in the JC are between right-wing and even
further right Zionists.
4 years later Ken Loach produced Perdition,
a play by Jim Allen. Perdition was based on a libel trial in Israel brought by
Rudolf Kasztner, the former leader of Hungarian Zionism, against a holocaust survivor
who accused him of collaboration. Kasztner had reached a deal with Eichmann for
a train out of Hungary for the Zionist elite. In return he and his followers
collaborated with the Nazis in the deportation of nearly half a million
Hungarian Jews.
The Kasztner Train
Kasztner failed in his action and Israel’s government fell as
a result. It is a trial that the Zionist movement doesn’t like to talk about
today because the facts of the case are so clear. Even many
Zionists now accept that Kasztner was a collaborator but that hasn’t
stopped the attacks against Ken Loach.
Why then have the Zionists, who normally don’t hesitate to
attack anything that upsets them, like the film ‘Oh Jeremy Corbyn – The Big Lie’
kept so quiet?
The obvious, indeed the only, reason is simply that the
Zionists got badly burned first time around by Brenner’s book and then Perdition. The evidence, not only of collaboration
with the Nazis but active efforts by the Zionists to prevent Jewish refugees
being rescued, is so great that this is a debate that they simply don’t want to
get into.
The Perdition affair
led to a heated debate
on Channel 4 which pitted Brenner, Alan and Marion Woolfson against 3 Zionist propagandists.
By common acclaim the Zionists lost and lost badly.
The usual Zionist response to allegations of collaboration with
the Nazis is, as their faithful pet Owen Jones repeats, that such accusations
are equivalent to saying that the Jews murdered themselves (see No,
Jews did not collaborate in their own genocide).
This is as absurd as saying that to speak of
Quisling is to suggest that all Norwegians collaborated in their own
occupation. Quisling represented a tiny minority of Norway's population and
likewise the Zionists were a tiny minority of the German Jewish population.
Everywhere in the Jewish world the Zionists were in a minority.
No one is suggesting that the Jews collaborated with
the Nazis but that the Zionist leadership did. Once again people like Owen
Jones conflate Zionist with being Jewish and then go on to blame us for their
own anti-Semitism!The fact that only 2%
of German Jews were Zionists in 1933 escape these apologists for Apartheid.
But the record is very clear. As Ben Gurion told the
Executive of Mapai (forerunner of the Israeli Labor Party) on 9 December 1938:
If I knew that it would be possible to save
all the children in Germanyby bringing them over to England, and only half of them by
transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the
second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but
also the history of the People of Israel.[1]
Jewish synagogue set alight during the Kristallnacht pogrom
This was in the context of the Kristallnacht pogrom
of November 9-10 1938 which shocked the world. The British Government agreed to
let 10,000 German Jewish children into Britain and the Zionists bitterly
opposed it.
According to Zionist ‘logic’ if refugees from Nazi
Germany could be saved by going to any country other than Palestine then they
would simply recreate anti-Semitism there. In his founding pamphlet, The Jewish State Theodor Herzl had
written that the Jews:
…naturally move to those places where we are not
persecuted and there our presence produces persecution…. The unfortunate Jews
are now carrying Anti-Semitism into England; they have already introduced it
into America.
If countries other than Palestine could save the Jews then
what was the point of having a Jewish state?It is hard to argue with this logic.
Victor Orban, anti-Semitic Hungarian Prime Minister tours Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust Propaganda Museum like so many other anti-Semites and neo-Nazis before him
My book makes a number of points about the Zionist record
before, during and after the holocaust.
i.Until
the Holocaust, which was seen as the defeat of the Jewish diaspora, Zionism was
in a minority in every Jewish community.
ii.From
its inception the Zionist movement agreed with the anti-Semites that Jews did
not belong in the countries of their birth. They also understood that without anti-Semitism there
wouldn’t be enough Jewish immigrants to make a future Jewish state viable.
iii.That
anti-Semites, not least the Nazis, frequently quotedfrom Zionist writings to ‘prove’ that the
Jews were an alien element.
iv.That
the Zionists uniquely amongst German Jews were pleased at the accession to
power of the Nazis.
v.That
the Zionist leadership in Palestine and internationally saw only opportunities
for their movement to grow with the Nazis taking power in Germany.
The International Jewish Boycott Campaign That the Zionists Fiercely Opposed
vi.Whereas
the vast majority of Jews sought the overthrow of the Nazis through a Boycott
campaign, the Zionists sought to establish relations with the Nazis to their
mutual benefit.
vii.That throughout the war the Zionists
opposed any scheme to rescue Jewish refugees from Nazi occupied Europe whose
destination was not Palestine.
viii.That after the establishment of the
State of Israel nothing changed. From the neo-Nazi Junta in Argentina to the
Azov Battalion in Ukraine, Israel has been happy to supply weapons and training
to anti-Semitic regimes and forces.
ix.That
Zionism begins from the assumption that Jews are aliens in every country bar
Israel and its goal is the ‘ingathering of the exiles’.The term ‘exile’ in itself means that Jews
living outside Israel are aliens.
When I published my book I took a decision to leave out one
chapter on Cruel Zionism. I have
decided to make it available to people here.
It describes the efforts of the State of Israelto destabilise the position of Jewsin the Arab lands after 1948.Israel needed a Jewish working class and the European Ashkenazis
preferred the Oriental or Arab Jews of the Middle East to be that working class.
Also they sought new immigrants in order to make the state demographically
viable and they therefore set about ensuring that the position of Jews in the
Arab world was made untenable.
I copy below links to all the reviews, podcasts and
interviews I’ve done in connection with the book. There are a number of
Amazonreviews, all positive! I’ve also
included one reader’s comment too.
Al Hiwar TV - Tony Greenstein speaks about his
book Zionism During the Holocaust
The Struggle - Rescue of Jews was NOT
the Zionist Priority During the Holocaust
Rudolf Vrba, the anti-Zionist Jewish hero who escaped from Auschwitz to bring news of the extermination plans to Hungary's Jews in the Auschwitz Protocols. The Hungarian Zionist leader, Kasztner, suppressed them.
Readers Comments
I just wanted to say how glad I am that you have written your book on Zionism
during the holocaust - and glad too that I have read it. Every
page. Including most of the index and bibliography thank you very much,
and not forgetting the fantastic photos, especially of Vrba and Edelman.
I am ashamed to admit how much of the history was unknown to me (not all of
it!), and there was not room in your book to address all of my ignorance, but
you have set down the markers, laid out the case to answer (cases) and I do
thank you for erring on the side of brevity and concision.
(One final point - trivial I know, against what you have accomplished - but
thank you also for putting the footnote numbers in bold! I have not seen
that done before. It is very helpful! I hope it catches on.)
Kind regards
John C
[1]Gelber,
‘Zionist policy and the Fate of European Jewry,’ Yad Vashem Studies
(1939-42) p. 199; see also Segev, The
Seventh Million, p. 28; Teveth p. 855; Piterberg p. 99.
Zionism During the Holocaustdescribes the background to the Kasztner Trial & Perdition which was the pretext for the Deselection of Jamie
Driscoll as Mayor for North Tyne
Roger Waters Rebuts the Zionist Lies About the Wall Being Fascist
The false accusations of anti-Semitism
have not gone away now Corbyn is no longer leader. Keir Starmer, in what is
clearly a libelous
letter, has defamed Roger Waters and accused him of ‘spreading deeply troubling anti-Semitism’. Starmer has also shown
himself out to be the repressive little shit that he is by calling for the cancellation
of Roger Water’s gigs.
As Skwawkbox puts
it ‘Roger Waters has money. Let’s
hope he sues the arse out of Starmer’s trousers.’ There is nothing too
despicable for Starmer to put his name to it. But when it came to the murder last
week of 2 year old Muhammed Tamimi by Israeli soldiers who shot him in the
head, Starmer said nothing. No matter what Israel does it is untouchable. The
Labour Party today is led by a despicable racist and liar.
As I wrote in any
essay over 30 years ago, ‘anti-Semitism’ is the false antiracism of the Right
and so it is proving. Indeed to be accused of ‘anti-Semitism’ today is to be
accused of anti-racism!
Last week Jamie Driscoll, the Mayor for
North of Tyne, was deselected
by a Labour NEC panel. No reason was given.
Called the ‘last Corbynista in power’
Driscoll told
the Guardian that he was not given any reason for being blocked from standing,
but suspected it was “because I would
have won” and because “my political positions
have fallen out of favour with the current party leadership”.
Driscoll’s ‘crime’ was believing serial liar
Starmer when he made 10
pledges in order to become leader, in particular Pledge No. 5 which said
Public services should be in public hands, not making
profits for shareholders. Support common ownership of rail, mail, energy and
water; end outsourcing in our NHS, local government and justice system
Starmer, whose campaign was secretly
funded by rich
Zionists, believed not a word of it but was happy to make pledges he had no
intention of keeping.
anonymous
sources have linked it to Mr Driscoll once appearing on a panel with film
director Ken Loach, who has himself been kicked out of the Labour party for
supporting a proscribed organisation.
Luke Akehurst defend Israeli snipers opening fire on unarmed demonstrators in Gaza in 2018, killing 234 including 49 children
This was confirmed
by far-right Labour NEC member Luke Akehurst, who is the Director of We Believe in Israel. In 2019 Akehurst defended
Israel using snipers to murder and maim thousands of unarmed Gazans, including
over 50 children, who demanded the right of return to their original homes in
Palestine.
On his Twitter
thread Akehurst made it very clear
why Loach, Britain’s most distinguished film producer, a veteran socialist who
has produced award winning films such as Kes,
The Wind that Shakes the Barley and I Daniel Blake, was nonetheless
anti-Semitic. Akehurst who is non-Jewish felt confident to speak
about what the ‘Jewish community’ felt:
He seems absolutely oblivious to
the role Ken Loach has played over many decades in the debate about
antisemitism or the extent to which the Jewish community find association with
Loach abhorrent and offensive.
What Akehurst was referring to was the
Zionist leadership of British Jews. What
had particularly outraged them and Akehurst was Loach’s role in the production
of Jim Allen’s play Perdition.
Akehurst cited in his support an article by David
Cesarani, a Zionist historian, ‘Perdition
– Stage-managed anti-Semitism?’,. I
am going to analyse what Cesarani says in this article and explain why it is
flawed.
Cesarani was an ideologically driven
historian and his best book, Final Solution,
came out after he died at the age of 58. It is true that Cesarani wrongly
branded Perdition as anti-Semitic.
However he also regretted his attempt to censor it. This kind of nuance is too
much to comprehend for the likes of Akehurst who is a propagandist.
Cesarani wrote
in the Jewish Chronicle (3.7.87.) after the Perdition controversy:
Was it worth all
the fuss?... Had the play gone on it would have been seen by around 2,000
people…. We need to master the art of exposing and debunking, instead of
instantly branding antagonists as anti-Semites…
Note those words: ‘instantly branding antagonists as
anti-Semites’. That’s what happened and it rebounded because most people
weren’t convinced by the ritual accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ and the more
they looked the more they asked their own questions.
Professor Robert Wistrich of Tel Aviv
University, a right-wing Zionist historian, albeit an honest one (a rare breed)
went even further and condemned ‘as unwise’ the attacks on the play as
anti-Semitic. Wistrich held that ‘the
entire Jewish leadership of that generation – including the Zionists – failed
the test of the times.’
Wistrich
conceded that ‘the major priority of the
Zionist movement at the time was indeed building Palestine’ and that the
Holocaust took second place. He accepted that ‘a reasonable case’ could be made that Zionists did not fight
anti-Semitism before 1939 ‘with the
appropriate vigour’ and further
‘that
some Zionists wanted to develop a ‘special relationship’ with the Nazis…. To
deny these points… is not only stupid but unnecessary.’ [Wistrich, Between Redemption & Perdition: Modern
Antisemitism and Jewish Identity, p. 244. Routledge 1990]
In Final solution (p.96)Cesarani
confirmed what Ken Livingstone had said writing that:
‘The efforts of the Gestapo are oriented to promoting Zionism as much as possible and lending support to its
efforts to promote emigration.’
Was Cesarani
correct that Perdition was ‘Stage-managed
anti-Semitism?
Cesarani’s article
can be found in Jewish Socialist No. 9 in Spring 1987. It is littered with
mistakes and hyperbole. Attempts to find conspiracy theories where there are
none. Waffle instead of analysis.
Cesarani described the judge, Benjamin Halevi, as ‘unsympathetic’. Initially that was not
true. It was as the evidence mounted up that Halevi became unsympathetic.
Cesarani started off by saying of the Kasztner case
in Israel, in which a holocaust survivor Malchiel Greenwald was sued for libel
by Kasztner, a prominent member of the governing Israeli Labour Party and
former leader of Hungarian Zionism that:
‘Although
he won the case technically the court awarded derogatory damages and Kasztner
was forced to appeal, without success. He was assassinated before a court
finally cleared his name’.
Clearly Cesarani knew nothing about the trial. There
were four allegations against Kasztner:
(a) collaboration with the Nazis;
(b) preparing the ground for murder of Hungary’s Jews;
(c) sharing the monies and valuables looted from
Hungary’s Jews with Becher
(d) saving a war criminal (Becher) from punishment after the war.
Far from winning the
case technically, Halevi found that charges (a) (b) and (d) were proven. Only
(c) was not proven. There was no technical victory in the lower court. It was
in the Supreme Court that Kasztner won a technical victory in that it was held
that in a libel trial you must win on all counts, not just 3 of them.
But even then, the
decision to uphold the appeal was by 4-1, not a unanimous verdict and one of
the four, Justice Goiten, refused to exonerate Kasztner.
The Supreme Court did not clear Kasztner. They upheld all the
facts found by the lower court and unanimously
found that charge (d) was proven as Kasztner had lied about having given
testimony to the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal in favour of Kurt Becher,
Himmler’s personal emissary in Hungary and a war criminal.
It later transpired that
Kasztner had given testimony in favour of 6 Nazi war criminals including
Hermann Krumey and Dieter Wisliceny who were responsible for the deportation of
Jews from Slovakia, Greece, Poland and the atrocity at Lidice. Krumey was
Eichmann’s second in command in Hungary and in charge of the deportations.
They had the blood of millions on their hands
yet Kasztner testified for them. The decision to appeal was so controversial
that it caused the fall of the second Israeli government of Moshe Shertok.
Kasztner was assassinated
by agents of Israel’s Shin Bet (internal security police) to shut him up.
Cesarani said that Perdition‘raised the agonizing dilemmas confronting Jewish leaders in Nazi
Europe: should, could they have done more to resist’ and cites Hannah
Arendt in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem (which
the Zionists excoriated as ‘anti-Semitic’) ‘where
she accused the Jewish leadership of incompetence.’ What Arendt actually
said was:
Wherever
Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost
without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another,
with the Nazis… The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been
unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery
but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half
and six million people. (p.125)
Cesarani was wrong. Arendt was not alleging
incompetence.
Nonetheless Cesarani conceded that German Zionism ‘echoed German volkish rhetoric about blood
and soil’ suggesting that this ideological symmetry with Nazi views on the
Jews was ‘exploited by Zionists in
Germany after 1933 to get concessions from the Nazis in order to expedite
Jewish emigration to Palestine.’ This too was untrue.
German Zionism exploited its ideological agreement
with the Nazis, that Jews did not belong in Germany and that they were aliens,
in order to operate legally under the Nazi regime. They were unconcerned about the
emigration of most German Jews and indeed the Ha’avara
trade agreement with the Nazis made it harder for most Jews to emigrate.
The Zionists helped destroy the Boycott of Nazi
Germany and thus stabilise the Nazi regime. Elie Wiesel, a survivor of
Auschwitz wrote:
‘Surely, Jewish Palestine... needed money to finance
its development, but this brazen pragmatism went against the political philosophy
of a majority of world Jewry. There developed a growing perception that instead
of supporting and strengthening the boycott, Palestine was, in fact, sabotaging
it.’ (Review: ‘The Land That Broke Its Promise : The Seventh Million: The Israelis and
the Holocaust,’ LA Times, 23.5.93.)
Ha’avara
broke the Boycott of Nazi Germany. That was why the
Nazis agreed to it. It came to the rescue of the Nazi regime when it was weakest.
At no time did the Zionist movement join the international campaign against
Nazi Germany. As soon as the Nazis came to power the Zionist movement sought to
exploit it for the purposes of building a ‘Jewish state.’
The
Investor’s Review of 5 August 1933 reported that ‘authoritative opinion is that Hitlerism
will come to a sanguinary end before the New Year.’ (‘Hitler hard up’, JC
11.8.33.)
Cesarani wrote in his book Final solution (pp. 81-2)
that those who doubted the viability of the regime ‘were not engaged in wishful thinking’ and that it was beset by
enemies coupled with a chronic balance of payments deficit. Israeli historian
Yf’aat Weiss wrote
(The Transfer Agreement and the Boycott Movement, p. 20)
The Zionist movement found itself in a
profound conflict between transfer and boycott and, in the broad sense, between
the needs of the Yishuv and the sentiments of the Jewish people.
Edwin
Black, author of the definitive history of Ha’avara, wrote (p.253)
the Nazi party and the Zionist Organization shared a
common stake in the recovery of Germany. If the Hitler economy fell,
both sides would be ruined.
Ha’avara may have saved Hitler from being overthrown.(p. xiii) Black speculated
that some Zionists ‘wondered if the
Transfer Agreement’s aborting the nascent boycott of German goods had precluded
any chance of the anti-Nazi crusade succeeding.’
The Zionists’ main argument is that accusations of collaboration with the
Nazis is like blaming the Jews for their own murder. We should remember that
just 2% of Germany’s half million Jews were Zionists. Zionists were a freak sideshow in the German
Jewish community. They were seen as Hitler
Juden with their volkish ideology.
Alfred
Rosenberg, the Nazi Party’s main theoretician who was hanged at Nuremberg,
wrote in 1919 that
‘Zionism must be vigorously supported in order to
encourage a significant number of German Jews to leave for Palestine or other destinations.’
Francis
Nicosia wrote in [The Third Reich and
the Palestine Question, (p. 25)] that Rosenberg‘intended
to use Zionism as a legal justification for depriving German
Jews of their civil rights’ and ‘eventually the Jewish presence in Germany.’
Cesarani said that Lenni Brenner, the author of Zionism in the Age of the Dictators and Jim Allen (he doesn’t mention
Ken Loach) attributes to the Zionists only half-hearted, rescue attempts
because they only wanted ‘racially pure’ and strong Jews in Palestine. But this
is not true.
The Zionist movement during the Holocaust was uninterested in any rescue
attempts that did not involve Palestine because they believed that if the
plight of Europe’s Jews could be solved without recourse to Palestine what was
the point of a Jewish state? They
preferred their death to their rescue in countries other than Palestine. This
is not conjecture. David Ben-Gurion, the
Chair of the Jewish Agency and Israel’s first Prime Minister opposed the Kindertransport when Britain agreed to immigration
of 10,000 German Jewish children.
On 9 December 1938 Ben Gurion explained that:
If I knew that it would be possible to save
all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only
half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would
opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these
children, but also the history of the People of Israel. (Yoav Gelber, ‘Zionist
policy and the Fate of European Jewry,’ Yad Vashem Studies (1939-42) p.
199; Tom Segev, The Seventh Million,
p. 28).
It was this, not racial purity that was at the heart
of Zionist opposition to rescue schemes that did not involve Palestine.
Cesarani resorts to making accusations of conspiracy. He
held it was anti-Semitic to accuse Kasztner of buying his and other Zionist
activists lives with the price of silence over the holocaust, but that is
precisely what he did when he or his deputy Joel Brand reached an agreement in late
April/early May with either Eichmann or Krumey for a train out of Germany for
the Zionist elite in exchange for silence over the destination of the deportation
trains. That was precisely the
charge made after the war by the survivors of the Hungarian holocaust when they
testified in the Kasztner trial.
Why was Cesarani’s appalling article printed in the
Jewish Socialist? Probably because the
most influential member of the Jewish Socialists Group, David Rosenberg, was a
friend of Cesarani. This article, with its generalised accusations of
anti-Jewish conspiracies, was the kind of stuff that was being printed in the
conservative press at the time.
Cesarani took offence at the accusation of betrayal
but this was not Ken Loach’s or Jim Allen’s theme, but that of the Hungarian holocaust
survivors at Kasztner’s libel trial.
Zionism was a quisling movement that betrayed Europe’s Jews. That was why in
Poland the Zionist movement grew weaker. In the last free elections in Poland
in 1938 the anti-Zionist Bund won 17 out of Warsaw’s 20 Jewish Council seats.
The same was true all over Poland. As Isaac Deutscher wrote [Non-Jewish Jew]:
To the Jewish workers anti-Semitism seemed
to triumph in Zionism, which
recognised the legitimacy and the validity of the old cry ‘Jews get out!' The
Zionists were agreeing to get out.
Cesarani complained that Jim Allen and Ken Loach
responded to criticism of the play as anti-Semitic by saying that all the
heroes are Jews. ‘But what sort of Jews are they’ writes Cesarani ‘They are anti-Zionist or communist.’ That
was precisely what was wrong with Perdition
as far as Cesarani was concerned. It
told the truth!
Ken Loach, in a letter to the Guardian, before the paper became
Freedlandised wrote:
The writer Eric
Fried, many of whose family were murdered by the Nazis, wrote: "I am envious I have not written [this
play] myself ... To accuse the play of faking history or anti-Jewish bias is
monstrous. Perdition should be staged wherever possible."
Ironically Paul Bogdanor, a far-right Zionist. set out
to rebut the charge that Kasztner was a collaborator. During his research he
came to the opposite conclusion. In Kasztner’s Crime. Bogdanor accused Kasztner of being a Gestapo agent! Far
from being spotless white as Cesarani and his apologists in the JSG would have
you believe, Kasztner was indeed the
Nazi collaborator that anti-Zionists had all along maintained.
Bogdanor, a Zionist fanatic, then wove a tale that
Kasztner acted as an individual rather than a representative of the Zionist
movement. However this is historically untenable. Kasztner represented the
Jewish Agency when he went to Nuremberg to give testimony in favour of Nazi war
criminals. Indeed they paid his expenses. His accuser in the Palestine Office
in Budapest, Moshe Krausz, was dismissed after making a complaint against
Kasztner to the Jewish Agency.
The reason I have devoted a blog to resurrecting the
1987 play Perdition is because the
controversy is now being resurrected to prove that Ken Loach is anti-Semitic. Zionism
relies on recycling lies hoping people will forget the truth. This play was in
no way anti-Jewish. It was anti-Zionist and it accurately portrayed the Zionist
movement as having collaborated with the
Nazis in the extermination of nearly half a million Hungarian Jews.
Below is what I wrote
in my recent book, Zionism During the
Holocaust, on the Perdition Affair. To understand the background, viz. the
holocaust in Hungary, you will have to buy the book though! If you
wish to do this please contact me at tonygreenstein104@gmail.com
Tony Greenstein
Perdition
An
article that appeared in Ha’aretz
less than four weeks after the German surrender asked: ‘Did the Jews also have a hand in the horrible bloodshed committed
against our nation?’ [1]
It was sentiments such as these that led to the staging of Perdition.
Based
on the Kasztner Trial, Perdition was the subject of a ferocious Zionist
campaign to ban it. It was due to be shown at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs
in January 1987. After pressure was put on its artistic director Max
Stafford-Clarke, it was cancelled because ‘it
would cause distress to members of the [Jewish] community.’[2]
In other words it would have upset Britain’s powerful Zionist lobby.
Martin
Gilbert and David Cesarani supported this campaign, claiming that Perdition
was historically inaccurate.[3]
But when Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses was published, the British
Establishment and its tame press cried ‘free
speech’. It was irrelevant that
Rushdie’s book distressed many Muslims. When Charlie Hebdo mocked the Prophet
Muhammad, free speech was again prioritised. The double standards were all too
clear.
Jim
Allen, who wrote the play, gave some indication of the tactics used when
describing how Stephen Roth of the Zionist Federatopm told Stafford-Clarke that
he could imperil the Royal Court’s funding by contacting friends in New York
and London. One London producer was told that ‘I own nine theatres, my friend owns six. Put the play on and you’re
finished.’[4]
Ken Loach wrote:
Perdition was stopped by
public abuse and private manipulation organized by a political tendency,
Zionism, that will not acknowledge its past because of the light it sheds on
the present.[5]
According
to Cesarani the play ‘purported to reveal
a gigantic conspiracy by powerful Jews (to) … mercilessly sacrifice(d) fellow
Jews.’ It did no such thing. It revealed the true record of the Zionist movement.[6]
However
the ban backfired and Perdition was shown at Conway Hall for six nights
as well as at the Edinburgh Festival fringe.[7]
It was the subject of letters and articles for weeks in the mass media and set
off a far wider debate over Zionism and its role during the Holocaust.
The
controversy in The Guardian’s letter columns continued for over two
months. For The Times the issue was ‘the
right to travesty the past and to slander a nation.’ The idea that there is
only one version of history and that any others are a ‘travesty’ or that nations can be ‘slandered’ is indicative of the pernicious standards of Perdition’s
critics.[8]
The
genie was out of the bottle. Both Cesarani, who described Perdition as a
‘calumny’,[9]
and playwright Arnold Wesker, came to regret the Zionist campaign.[10]
Professor
Robert Wistrich of Tel Aviv University, an ardent Zionist ideologue condemned ‘as unwise’ the attacks on the play as
anti-Semitic. Wistrich held that ‘the
entire Jewish leadership of that generation – including the Zionists – failed
the test of the times.’ Wistrich conceded that ‘the major priority of the Zionist movement at the time was indeed
building Palestine’ and that the Holocaust took second place. He accepted
that ‘a reasonable case’ could be
made that Zionists did not fight anti-Semitism before 1939 ‘with the appropriate vigour’ and further
‘that some Zionists wanted to develop a
‘special relationship’ with the Nazis…. To deny these points… is not only
stupid but unnecessary.’[11]
Professor Wistrich was one of that rare breed, an honest Zionist.
Channel
4 staged a debate between Lenni Brenner, Marion Woolfson and Jim Allen and their
opponents led by Churchill biographer Martin Gilbert, Stephen Roth of the
Institute of Jewish Affairs and Rabbi Hugo Gryn. Gryn confessed he was ‘deeply depressed by the discussion’.[12]
The Zionists had argued for censorship to hide their inability to substantiate
their claims that Perdition was historically inaccurate.
I
interviewed Jim Allen.[13]
At the time his wife was dying with cancer and the PerditionAffair was not something he wanted to
devote his time to. Jim Allen, who had written Days of Hope, Big Flame and other TV plays, was one of Britain’s
finest socialist playwrights. All through his life he had stood on the side of
the working class and the oppressed. The attacks on him as anti-Semitic by
establishment toadies like Martin Gilbert were nauseating. Perdition was
attacked for what it didn’t say. According to Bernard Levin in The Times,
Ben-Gurion ‘smiled on the Holocaust’.
Roger Waters & Cancel Culture
Roger Waters Sets the Record Straight
There
has been a vile campaign by the Zionists and its Establishment echoes, like Starmer
to cancel Roger Waters. All those who favour free speech when it comes to
genuine racists want to cancel an anti-fascist and anti-racist performer on the
grounds that he is ‘anti-Semitic’. The real reason the Jewish Chronicle wants
him banned is Palestine not fascism.
Water’s parody
of a fascist has been part of The Wall performance since 1980. It is now held
to be itself a fascist production. His moronic critics would no doubt have
called Charlie Chaplin’s The
Great Dictator a fascist play too. Waters demolishes the liars in
the video above. He also said
he had:
"attracted bad faith attacks from
those who want to smear and silence me because they disagree with my political
views and moral principles".
"The
elements of my performance that have been questioned are quite clearly a
statement in opposition to fascism, injustice, and bigotry in all its
forms,"
The State
Department’s press briefing on Monday showed the new mood in Washington:
reporters repeatedly raised Israel policy as problematic.
Roger Waters’s advocacy for Palestine shook the briefing room, as a
reporter questioned
why Deborah Lipstadt, the junk holocaust historian, had echoed
the smear that Waters’s performance of “The Wall” was an example of Jew hatred,
and failed to see that it is actually a denunciation of fascism akin to Charlie
Chaplin’s parody of Hitler as “the great dictator.”
Lipstadt,
the State Department’s envoy to “monitor and combat antisemitism,” issued her
comment on Waters’s performances on
May 24:
“I wholeheartedly concur with
[the EU Commission on antisemitism’s] condemnation of Roger Waters and his
despicable Holocaust distortion.”
Lipstadt
retweeted the European commission’s comment:
“Roger Waters gig in Berlin.
Is there anything more antisemitic than using Anne Frank as a prop on a German
stage while prancing around in a Nazi uniform attacking Jews?”
This is an incredible distortion of what happened. I don’t know if you’re
familiar with The Wall, which is possibly the most classic rock opera in rock
and roll history. So– unrelenting denunciation of fascism and racism, one of
the songs in it features him as mocking a demagogue like Charlie Chaplin did,
and talking to the crowd and saying, “Are
there any queers, are there any Jews, are there any blacks in the audience
tonight? Get them up against the wall.” And then he gets a machine gun and
mows them down.
It’s an obvious attack on fascism, and yet your ambassador is denouncing
it and pretending that Roger Waters, presumably because he defends Palestinian
rights as well as other people’s rights, is an example of anti-Semitism. Are
you going to distance yourself from this, or are you going to back down on
this?
Sam
Husseini asks why a Biden envoy is accusing Roger Waters of antisemitism by
singing from the rock opera, “The Wall.” June 5, 2023, screenshot.
Vedant Patel of the State Department said he wasn’t familiar with “The
Wall” and hadn’t seen Lipstadt’s tweet, so he wouldn’t weigh in. Husseini said
that the comment is very much State Department business.
This is her portfolio… She is
beyond parody distorting anti-Semitism and criticism of Israel. He [Waters]
used Anne Frank’s name as a list of people, of martyrs, who he reveres. It’s an
incredible distortion. I think it’s imperative if the State Department isn’t
going to wholeheartedly dispense with any pretense about anti-Semitism being an
actual problem and only use it as a way of denouncing people who stand up for
Palestinian rights, you’ve got to do something.
Patel said that was “absolutely not
our approach” to antisemitism. And Husseini said, “Well, prove it.” Matt Lee of the Associated Press also said State
needed to answer for Lipstadt’s comment.
It is a situation where we’re talking about a British musician giving a
concert in Germany, it doesn’t really have anything to do with the U.S., but
the fact of the matter is, is that she did weigh in on it. So it’s a legitimate
question.
Waters
explained
on May 26 that the depiction of an “unhinged fascist demagogue” has been an anti-fascist feature of The
Wall since 1980.
The elements of my
performance that have been questioned are quite clearly a statement in
opposition to fascism, injustice, and bigotry in all its forms. Attempts to
portray those elements as something else are disingenuous and politically
motivated. The depiction of an unhinged fascist demagogue has been a feature of
my shows since Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” in 1980.
I have spent my entire life
speaking out against authoritarianism and oppression wherever I see it. When I
was a child after the war, the name of Anne Frank was often spoken in our
house, she became a permanent reminder of what happens when fascism is left
unchecked. My parents fought the Nazis in World War II, with my father paying
the ultimate price.
[1] Segev,
The Seventh Million, p. 181 citing
‘The Jews among the war criminals’ Ha’aretz,
3.6.45. p .2
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