Harry's Place

Fiyaz, thank you for your post. As a Jew who’s grandparents fled from Poland it has a resonance for me.

Yet, there were many, many others who stood up and with their conscience, took a stand against what the Nazis did. That distinction must be consistently made and the collective guilt of what took place in Europe six decades ago should not fall heavily on the shoulders of Poland. It was planned and executed by the Nazis.

Fiyaz, as Muslim I hope you won’t mind me posing this question to you and I would fully respect “no comment” since it is a thorny subject and I don’t really wish to place you in difficulties.

It derives from a piece at HP regarding comments at MPAC UK about The Holocaust where they repeat that “The Holocaust had nothing to do with Muslims and so why are Muslims suffereing because of it – ie Israel” its a common theme amongst Islamists and one which I challenge in other debating boards. http://www.mpacuk.org/os/content/view/5975/103/

It is a fact that Al-Husseini was the leaders of the Palestinians and also a pan-Arab Nationilist leader almost on par with a Nasser. He actively courted Hitler to be part of The Holocaust, he broadcast calls to kill Jews, he visited death camps and formed the Muslim Bosnian Handzar Division. He planned to introduce death camps in Palestine and ended-up a wanted Nazi War Criminal where he fled to Egypt who also recruited many Nazis fleeing from defeat. (my potted history derived from “The Case against Israel’s Enemies” by Alan Dershowitz but well sourced from the Internet documentation)

Do you concede that Muslims (and Palestinians) did have a role to play in The Holocaust (just as some Muslims protected Jews from it).

If they did then doesn’t it destroy the argument that The Holocaust is nothing to do with Muslims/Palestinians”?

It is estimated that about one-eighth of the current Polish population has some Jewish ancestry…….. it would have been almost demographically impossible to kill every single Jew in pre-war Poland…….. some went into hiding, some changed their faith and some assimilated. Some young Poles today are still discovering their family’s Jewish background.

“That distinction must be consistently made and the collective guilt of what took place in Europe six decades ago should not fall heavily on the shoulders of Poland.”

Really? On whose shoulders should this collective guilt fall? Why should it fall on Poland’s shoulders at all? Why should anyone who was not involved, who did not take part, who was not even born there, have any guilt for any action that took place?

Because we have seen this line of argument before and it does not lead to pretty places.

SMFS

My mother was on one of the trains from Lodz to Birkenau. She survived by miracle, and in 1948 came to Israel.
I do not blame any German or Pole living now for what happened before they were born, or when they were children.

I blame people who speak about “European Jews who decided they did not want to stay in Europe ” and go on to make comparisons between Jews-suffering-then and Palestinians-suffering-now, as if it is all the same,; I blame YOU of distorting history and perverting meanings and contexts.
You have no right to pontificate to any one.
And this is all I am going to say to you.

This is a moving account of your experience, Fiyaz. I’m touched that you were motivated to go, that you remain committed to finding out more about what happened to the Jews of Poland, and those of every Jewish community and that you wish to learn more.

I’m very surprised though at your underplaying the role played by mainstream Poles–not just those you label “collaborators” and the actual minute numbers, by contrast of those Poles who did anything of any sort to help Jews, and the relatively tiny numbers who were saved were no more than a few thousand out of a nation of many millions.

For every person who saves a life, it is as if they saved a whole world. So says the Jewish religious tradition. So each and every Pole who did try to help deserves honour and gratitude on the level as if they had indeed saved a whole world. Some paid for their humanity with their lives. That is why Yad Vashem has its “Avenue of the Righteous Gentiles” which commemorates those who did act in this way. I am very glad that they are honoured in this way.

Yad Vashem, though, does not recognise as “Righteous Gentiles” those who saved or hid Jews or forged passports for them because they were given money to do so by the desperate Jews they helped. Sometimes the sums of money they were given were huge. Nevertheless, if they saved lives, I believe they earned a right to be recognised. And of course, many of them argued that they wanted the pay for risking their lives–and some of them did pay with their lives. Saving a life or many lives is always a very great achievement, even if it comes with exploitation of the potential victims who were saved.

However, there are many, many historically reliable accounts that show that the number of Poles who took an active part in the roundups and the persecutions, or who actively celebrated and cheered when they saw the Jews persecuted beyond belief, slaughtered before their eyes, and taken away to the death that those Poles knew was coming to them when the Jews did not, is vast — it is the majority of the Polish population. A huge number of these Poles simply looted the houses and such property of the Jews as was not taken by the Germans, and made them their own. When tiny numbers of those Jews who did survive tried to return to their homes, the overwhelming majority were driven away and threatened. There are numerous documented instances of these Jews then being murdered by the Poles who feared they might have to give back the looted homes. One of my cousins, a woman who had survived the camps, was murdered this way in Kanczuga in 1946.

There were also those who took part in pogroms which murdered en masse Jews who returned to their villages.

Many millions of Poles were terrified bystanders. They rightly feared for their lives. If they were caught helping Jews, they faced almost certain death or at the very least fearsome punishments, which would often include the murder or removal of their children. I can understand what make them bystanders. Who can be sure they would have not acted in the same way? I would like to think I would in such a position have done something. But I can’t be sure because I’ve never had to face such a terror and I hope that none of us ever will. But at the end of the day, out of their very understandable fear, they stood by whilst their neighbours were persecuted, tortured, murdered and dispossessed. There are many people in Iran today who stand in such a position in relation to their neighbours, though they are of the same ethnic and religious group. They of all the people in the world today are closest to those of the Poles in Poland. An act of support or knowing concealing a person who has done no crime other than raising an entirely peaceful voice against a most brutal, lying and ruthless regime can result in hideous torture, death and the dispossession and arrest of their entire families. I wonder if you recognise the parallels.

What you have given here, Fiyaz, is a grossly distorted view of the role of the vast majority of the Poles in relation to the Jews under the German occupation. I would like to think that this is the result of historical ignorance, and that for some reason you have not read the main historically reliable histories of what happened and what the Poles did, as opposed to selective accounts written by apologists for the role of the Poles, the Soviet Union and even the Germans.

You also owe it to yourself if you are going to be committed to exploring the history of Poland in relation to its former Jewish population to exploring the history of Polish anti-semitism in all its depth, as well as such historical evidence as can be found for relationships of tolerance, as well as the rare evidence of genuine and warm appreciation historically by Poles for Jews and particularly for Jews, Judaism and Jewish culture. The role of the Polish Church in all this is something that will reward study.

However, before you do that, and in relation to the rosy picture of many, many Poles resisting the persecution of the Jews and of their being a small minority of collaborators, you will need, if you have not already done so to read the history of democratic Polish politics before World War II, when the newly restored nation first voted for its own representative parliament. You will need to look at the record of democratically elected majority parties which either had or voted for anti-semitic policies which pauperized religious Jews by insisting that all businesses had to open on Saturdays or Jewish religious holidays or close down. You will need to read how the Polish post Word War I democratically elected government refused to carry out the obligation laid on them to provide the full range of political rights and faciiities promised to the linguistic, religious and ethnic minorities of what became Poland, of which Yiddish-speaking Jews and Ukrainians were the main groups failed by the Poles.

You will also need to read the history of the Polish legislation, passed by the democratically elected parties of the Polish people in 1938 that proposed to strip Poles living for extended periods abroad of their Polish nationality. The vast majority of the Poles thus affected were Yiddish-speaking Jews, and it was done for the express purpose of ridding themselves of Yiddish speakers, as the debates and justifications of this law analysed by historians will show.
The notorious mass deportation by the Nazis of the Polish Jews of Germany which took place at the end of October 1938 was an action taken by the Nazis to ensure that they were not left with hundreds of thousands of hated stateless Polish Jews. My grandfather and uncle were amongst those taken–they were rounded up by the Gestapo in their Berlin home at 3:00am. My father escaped being rounded up by sheer luck and chance but had to spend the rest of his six months in Berlin in hiding.

And what did the Poles do about all these terrified and destitute Jews dumped by the Germans at their border? Why, their new law had come into force. They refused to take them in. They were left in a miserable camp in the no-man’s land between the borders. Did these Jews threaten them in any way or say that they wanted to drive the Poles out of Poland and make a Jewish state in Poland? Of course not. But, unless they could find relatives or friends from amongst the Poles prepared to take them in, they were left in misery at the border camp–till the war came and they were taken off to their deaths?

Are the Poles responsible for the evils the Nazis did? No. But they bear some responsibility for their attempts to strip the diaspora Polish-born Jews of their nationalities (my grandfather and uncle had proudly chosen Polish nationality after WWI, although they lived in Berlin–they could have taken Austrian or German nationality. They were both very proud to be Polish Jews. But in October 1938 it was only because they had cousins in Krakow who came out to help them that they were able to get away from the misery of the camp and live in the cousins’ house in Krakow.

The action of the Poles in leaving in misery, destitution and terror those Polish Jews who had become stateless through Polish legislation which was aimed at getting rid of them is an abiding shame, and absolutely inexcusable.
It comes out of a very long history of Polish anti-semitism besides which the help given to Jews by a tiny but noble minority ceases to have all but token significance. The Poles still have some difficulty in dealing with this dreadful history. I hope you do not.

So, Fiyaz, it seems that you do have much further learning to do.But perhaps it is wiser to make sure you are better informed before you post an article which seems so historically under-informed that one could suspect it’s biased in favour of a rosy view of the Poles.

And lastly, you conclude in your last sentence with the formula “as a Muslim”, which seems gratuitously introduced, and with no further explanation. You may not be aware that on Harry’s Place and other internet forums, Jews have come to recognise that this is a marker of false authenticity or representativeness which is not merited by the quaifications it would need.

I am a Jew. As it happens I am a proud Galitzianer (southern Polish) Jew whose father was born and lived till he was 22 in a shtetl there. As you may imagine, I have many, many relatives who were murdered (not perished, as if they were so much old rubber) by the German Nazis with the assistance of enthusiastic allies. I know also that many innocent Poles were persecuted, starved and murdered too. Some had their children stolen. But a great many of those Poles were not innocent in relation to the persecution of the Jews. There are very large numbers, historically authenticated, who betrayed Jews to the Nazi regime. They sadly vastly outnumber those who helped the Jews. In fact a number of bands of Jews were murdered by Polish Resistance fighters, and the majority of Polish resistance fighters did not help the Jews. That’s why the heroic fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto had only tiny numbers of arms at their disposal. The Poles who rose against the Nazis when duped by Stalin and the Soviets into doing so had many, many more arms. There was one specific Polish gentile organization for the aid of the Jews. It included many women amongst its numbers. It is rightly remembered by love and gratitude by Jewish people for its heroic and selfless acts. But they were but a tiny minority who had to do as much to hide their acts from their fellow Poles as they did from the Germans.

But if I wrote “as a Jew” it would not give me authority. Nor would my murdered relatives. I will therefore never use the phrase “as a Jew”, because it smacks of claiming something beyond being one individual who should not be taken to be in any way informative about Jewish opinion at large. I could write “as one, possibly unrepresentative Jew”. Or I could write, because I think I can demonstrate it beyond doubt, “like most Jews who know their own history and religious tradition”.

I write because I have taken the trouble to spend a great deal of time researching this history. That’s why I claim the authority to write in as challenging a spirit as I have of what you write here. And I currently do my best to learn of the range and the dominant and minority trends in Muslim opinion in this country and elsewhere. If you care to look up my Twitterfeed “judyk113′ you will see that I have greened my portrait. That of itself did not give me authority to write what I did above about the people of Iran, but I did feel that doing my best to follow both the official and the unofficial accounts of what came out of Iran after the election gives me at least the basis on which to claim some reliability for what I wrote.

So, Fiyaz, I’m just as suspicious and sceptical about anyone using the formulation “as a Muslim” as I am of someone saying “as a Jew”. It has all to often been a marker of quite a different agenda, and one based on attempts to pass off unrepresentative views as typical or as having an importance beyond their own speaker’s presence.

And one other piece of history intervenes in my response to your post. It is the history of the PLO under Arafat setting up some sort of ceremony where they would go and place wreaths at either Auschwitz or the site of the Warsaw Ghetto in mourning for the victims of the Holocaust. It was done at the time when they insisted that they had been made the victims of European guilt for the Holocaust, that European Jews have no connection to Israel or to Jerusalem. I am glad they did not as far as I am aware, invoke Islam in this ceremony, which utterly disgusted me, and I believe the vast majority of the Jews of the world. Of course they had and continue to have a retinue of some thousands of Jews (who would invariably invoke the As A Jew formula) who supported and continue to support those of them who wish to see an end to the State of Israel, and who wish to see all Jews removed from living in the occupied territories.

I hope, Fiyaz, you are sincere in your learning. But for the Jews of Islamic lands, most roads do not lead back to Poland. They lead back to the history of Jewish settlement and migration in those lands and in Israel, going back centuries. And although their relations with their Muslim neighbours were often cordial and rich, and were incomparably greater than those of Jews with the Christians of Europe, they nevertheless faced institutionalized discrimination and humiliation, and sometimes forcible exclusion expulsion and murderous attacks imposed by the Islamic laws under which they lived.

Never forget, indeed. It would be helpful to ensure first that we know every relevant thing we need to remember.

“That distinction must be consistently made and the collective guilt of what took place in Europe six decades ago should not fall heavily on the shoulders of Poland.”

I remember in the 60’s and 70’s some of my friends, when meeting a German, would ponder “I wonder what his/her father did during the war”.

There was a similar theme about buying Japanese cars and electrical products and I have an aversion to buying a BMW – although probably because of the pricks who drive them.

To some its an irrational prejudice and to others its rational.

I happen to think that there are countries in Europe where hatred of Jews still has a significant thread and, let us be frank, some fuel has been added by Muslim immigrants as detailed by European studies into antisemitism. The old antisemitism has fresh blood (or is it Coca Cola according to Yvonne Ridley)

I’m very surprised though at your underplaying the role played by mainstream Poles–not just those you label “collaborators” and the actual minute numbers, by contrast of those Poles who did anything of any sort to help Jews, and the relatively tiny numbers who were saved were no more than a few thousand out of a nation of many millions.

To put it mildly.

First of all, I wish to thank Fiyaz for the moving account and for his obvious wish to build necessary bridges of empathy and understanding between Jews and Muslims.

Secondly, a word about Poles, Jews and individual responsibility. The WWII account of Polish attitudes to Jews is mixed. Much heroism, much nastiness. We tend to forget that the main reason why Poland became the main killing ground of Jews all over Europe had to do mainly with the fact that this was the greatest concentration of Jews at the first place. The German occupation of Poland, even excluding “the Jewish question”, was cruel and severe at the extreme. Poles were treated as sub-human work-fodder, second in line only to Jews for life-destroying treatment. While Jews were industrially exterminated, the Poles were essentially worked to death, or that was the plan. Every whiff of dissent was punished by extreme measures. And every attempt to shelter Jews meant instant death to both the perpetrator and his family. Will you give a shelter to a fleeing Jewish child if the punishment is the death of your own children? The fact that there were those that did is a matter for wonder and ever-lasting, grateful memory.

Yet, there is still in Jewish communities, in Israel and elsewhere, a sense of deep resentment toward Poland, and I believe that it is justified. The resentment is about the sheer extent of anti-Semitism, much of it official and fully institutionalised, in Poland in the short period after it regained its independence and before its partition following the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. This was not done under cruel occupation, to the contrary. As soon as Poles gained their freedom, after two centuries of their country being partitioned and occupied by others, they proceeded to discriminate against their largest religious-sum-national minority. In a large measure Jews (many of them completely assimilated and feeling themselves Polish to the core) were excluded from Polish life, education, political and economic system, while several of leading political parties were openly anti-Semitic.

Those Polish Jews who survived remembered this hostility, one with which Poles still did not come to terms, and I believe that it feeds the perception of Poland in the Jewish world.

Judy! WOW!!!!

As it happens I am a proud Galitzianer

Thanks. That is the first time I have heard that word since my childhood. I think that is where my grandparents came from.

telavivit:
I blame people who speak about “European Jews who decided they did not want to stay in Europe ” and go on to make comparisons between Jews-suffering-then and Palestinians-suffering-now, as if it is all the same,; I blame YOU of distorting history and perverting meanings and contexts

I debate with some sick antisemites who are always regerring to “Euro-Jews” who Europe didn’t want, flooding into Israel, a place they have no connection with and then ethnically cleansing Palestinians using the lessons they were taught by The Holocaust.

I know the breed you mean and I’d gladly do them serious harm if I ever met them.

telavivit – “I blame people who speak about “European Jews who decided they did not want to stay in Europe ” and go on to make comparisons between Jews-suffering-then and Palestinians-suffering-now, as if it is all the same,; I blame YOU of distorting history and perverting meanings and contexts.”

I did indeed say that many European Jews decided they did not want to stay in Europe after the War. I made no judgement on the rights or wrongs of their motivations for doing that and it remains factually true. If you don’t like it there is not much I can do about it.

But I made no comparison I recall between the Jews’ suffering then and the Palestinians’ suffering now. No doubt you would prefer to respond in a self-righteous manner and so would like to believe I did but I don’t think I did.

I see no evidence of any distorted history at all. Nor have you offered any examples. As for perverting meanings and contexts, such a claim is so bizarre it is impossible to respond to. You mean I object to people claiming Churchill and Roosevelt took part in the Holocaust? Damn right.

Cliched pc garbage. Lodz was not “the last railway stopping off point before Jews, gypsies and homosexuals”. It was the final stopping off point for Jews.

And what is the point of the article ?

CookieCutter, a marriage between a Galitizianer and a Poilishe Yied would have been regarded as something of a mixed marriage. A marriage between a Galitzianer and a Litvak–oy, vey. Beyond mixed marriage. Es toig oif gitte kapores– a disaster. As for a Jekke– no way would they have wanted to marry one of the dreaded and despised Ostjuden. The Jekke parents would have cut their child off.

And by the way in SMFS you have someone whose attitudes are clearly underpinned by wholesale swallowing of the propaganda lies you summarize in your penultimate paragraph.

Es zoll leben die Galitzianer Yieden!

SMFS: There are really two possibilities, judging by your contribution to this and other threads, and in the spirit of generosity I’ll assume the lesser one: you are willing to believe, to advance your argument, in any convenient lie and obfuscation of the truth, to bend facts out of shape and refuse to accept anything that clashes with your preconceived views, no matter how much the truth stares you in the face. In this you are typical to many people debating issues that retain their emotional rawness even after 70 years, but this is not an excuse.

Neither Churchill nor Roosevelt “took part in the Holocaust” and I challenge you to find anybody that said this, in these words. Both, however, covered themselves in eternal shame in blocking all possible avenues of escape to European Jews and in refusing to do anything practical to disrupt the Holocaust machine, even after they knew perfectly well all the facts. It might be a matter of conjecture why they did so, it is a matter of record they they did so.

Absolutely, Ed Hall: The Lodz Ghetto’s inmates (if you can call them that) were Jews. Whether there were homosexuals there was a by-product. As to ‘gypsies’ – yes, in Auschwitz.

If anyone visits Poland today, the absence of Jews is tangible. From a state where over 3million of its population were Jewish to the few thousand now, the desolate shtetls exant and the synagogues used as banks and offices, you feel the void. However, by comparison to other European countries from where Jews were rounded up and taken to the extermination camps, at least there were pro-rata more Poles who aided the Jews than, especially, France and Holland.

The Dutch have always got away with their propaganda that they were ‘the good neighbours.’ Their collaboration with the Nazis meant that far more Jews per capita were killed from Holland than any other European country. The French too were hardly any better.

It’s pleasing to see that this article, as PC as it is, has been written by a Muslim who wanted to go to Poland and experience something akin to Jew-hatred (as you do when you go to Eastern Europe, even now). However, reading in the Jerusalem Post today an article about Hamas’ fury that The Holocaust ‘may be’ taught in Gazan schools by UNWRA and various comments on the site that Jews should ‘get over’ The Holocaust, I just wonder…

Thank you, Fiyaz, for an interesting piece.
I would like to expand a little on the following paragraph, which seems to me to be the crux of the matter.

‘(It is also a little known fact that the highest number of Righteous People that saved Jews were Poles. Within that number of Righteous People there were also Muslims). Also, it became clear to me that a distinction has to be made between what took place in Poland and those who perpetrated the crimes. Obviously, there would have been some collaborators in Poland who made the butchery possible. Yet, there were many, many others who stood up and with their conscience, took a stand against what the Nazis did. That distinction must be consistently made and the collective guilt of what took place in Europe six decades ago should not fall heavily on the shoulders of Poland. It was planned and executed by the Nazis.’

Europe has a lot of unfinished business as far as WW2 goes, and it seems to me that you have (possibly unintentionally) captured them in a nutshell. By categorising the events and apportioning blame (Nazis) or reward (Righteous people) you seem to me to be in danger of ignoring the main lessons which should have been learned from those events six decades ago.
I personally object to statements such as ‘Muslims (or Catholics or Protestants) saved Jews too’, not because they didn’t but because I believe that those people who did put their own lives on the line to help other human beings did so because of their humanity, not their religion. I believe that we need to recognise that humanity as an aspirational universal quality which should transcend any affiliation to religion or ethnic groupings.
Equally, I object to attempts at dismissing the perpetrators of those horrendous crimes as an entity which is long gone. Yes, it was the Nazis who planned and executed the Holocaust, but those Nazis were not aliens or monsters of which the world is now rid; they were ordinary human beings with wives and children just like us. And they could not have done what they did within a vacuum.
If we convince ourselves that we have confined Nazism to history we are denying the unpleasant but unavoidable truth that somewhere deep down within us all there is potentially both a Nazi and a Righteous person. Unless we recognise that unpleasant fact, we are in danger of repeating the mistakes of the past. So to distill the events of 1939 to 1945 into ‘goodies and baddies’, and naturally, because we are only human, to identify with the good side, seems to me to be a very precarious route down which to travel.
Human beings did both terrible and laudable things during WW2 and there was no difference between them but their own consciences. Those who retained their belief in humanity saved lives. Those who denied the humanity of others destroyed them.
70 years on we need urgently to look around us and identify those who are once more denying the humanity of others and stand firm against it in every way possible before we find ourselves living yet another nightmare which could have been prevented.

Exactly, Israelinurse. Well said.

And thanks to Fiyaz for this piece.

Also:

It’s pleasing to see that this article, as PC as it is, has been written by a Muslim who wanted to go to Poland and experience something akin to Jew-hatred (as you do when you go to Eastern Europe, even now). However, reading in the Jerusalem Post today an article about Hamas’ fury that The Holocaust ‘may be’ taught in Gazan schools by UNWRA and various comments on the site that Jews should ‘get over’ The Holocaust, I just wonder…

…?

What do you wonder? Don’t be shy.

Isrealinurse makes a vital point here, without which you can’t even start understanding this whole business. It was all about individuals exercising (or otherwise) their consciences.

I talked a great deal with people who researched individual Polish attitudes during the Holocaust, and it really all boiled down to the price tag individuals placed on their own humanity and conscience. And the bag, as one expect, is mixed, in particular when it comes to different institutions and political groupings. The one organisation (itself persecuted, in the underground) that consistently helped Jews (and supplied weapons to the Warsaw Ghetto rebels) was the Polish scout movement. The record of AK, the main underground organisation, was mixed. Amazingly, some members of ND, sickeningly anti-Semitic pre-war Polish nationalist party, saved Jews. And most awfully, the one group with the worst record were the underground communists. You see, the Party, to which they handed over their conscience, didn’t tell them to do so, so they didn’t…

Judy, my yiddish extends to words like “shissel” and that’s where it stops!

Romo -I lived in Amsterdam for six months many years ago. During my first week there an old Dutch man took me to one side and said this:
‘You will meet lots of people here who hid the Jews and helped them. You will meet lots of people who were in the Dutch resistance. You will never meet those who collaborated with the Nazis.’
I got the message.

And “Righteous People” threw out 800,000 Jews from The Yemen mostly and every other Arab country. In fact refugees from Arab countries during The Holocaust far outweigh the number of Jews of Nazi Germany who made it to Israel. You could argue that by expelling 800,000 Jews (or causing them to leave due to the obvious danger) so it gave Israel 800,000 potential people to fight the against the Arab attacks and ultimately saved and help create Israel.

You could argue that Israel was created BECAUSE of the Arab pogroms more than you could argue it was because of The Holocaust.

Just to say that the claim that the Palestinians played a large part in the Nazi Holocaust is Holocaust Revisionism and should not go unchallenged. It is beyond belief that this garbage continues to be recycled. The grand Mufti was a reactionary anti-semite. He was not a major player in the Nazi Holocaust and it is, as stated, Holocaust Revisionism to continue down this track. The Holocaust against the Jews was the greatest mass extermination in history and was planned, and carried out on European soil by Europeans. To bend and distort these historical facts for narrow political advantage (of whatever kind) is a disgrace.

Another myth BTW is that Israel was created BECAUSE of sympathy for The Holocaust post-war. Israel was created by a self-declaration of Independence in 1948, It was then recognised as a State by the UN. It was an independent state whether the UN, or anyone else recognised it.

Remember, the idea of transition from Mandate to State was already floated by Res 181 which created TWO states in order to satisfy the Arab/Jewish conflict. It was as MORE to appease the Arabs than Jews since the UK had already made sure that Jewish immigration was a trickle from The Holocaust. That didn’t create a a State of Israel since Res 181 required Arab acceptance of a State in order to make the Res. acceptable. SInce the Arabs rejected it then Res 181 was only a sign of intent and not a de facto creation of Israel.

I personally object to statements such as ‘Muslims (or Catholics or Protestants) saved Jews too’, not because they didn’t but because I believe that those people who did put their own lives on the line to help other human beings did so because of their humanity, not their religion. I believe that we need to recognise that humanity as an aspirational universal quality which should transcend any affiliation to religion or ethnic groupings.

I take your point, IsraeliNurse. But I think there is a need to emphasize the role of Muslims in rescuing Jews because of some of the comments that appear here almost daily. (And we routinely delete the very worst.)

What Judy and Israelinurse said.

2000 years of racial and religious hatred came to a “logical” conclusion in the nazi death camps.

Arguing about how many poles saved who and why is a waste of time. What matters is how human beings got themselves into such a mess to begin with – and how to get them out of this mess.

JohnG, it is good that you are plying such a valiant part fighting the distortion of the Holocaust on this thread. I just hope that you are playing an equally brave and valiant part each time the Israeli behavior is equated with that of the Nazis, or each time the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Arab countries is denied or belittled.

I thank Fiyaz for the moving account and for his obvious wish to build necessary bridges of empathy and understanding between Jews and Muslims. Gr8 work.

Gene -I do understand, I just have a problem with the fact that all too often we are too quick in my opinion to categorise people according to religious, political or ethnic groupings and far too slow at recognising universal human qualities, good or bad.
I don’t have lower expectations of Muslims as human beings than any other group, so it seems to me that to emphasise the Muslim rather than the human when referring to an act of kindness or heroism is more divisory than healing.
That, of course, works both ways. I equally do not give a damn about the religion of the person shooting rockets at me from Lebanon. It is their specific actions to which I object and against which I will defend myself, not their religion.

Just to say that the claim that the Palestinians played a large part in the Nazi Holocaust is Holocaust Revisionism and should not go unchallenged. It is beyond belief that this garbage continues to be recycled.

Calm down, johng. Who said they played a “large” part, anyway? Nobody (on this thread). It was stated that the Mufti played a part. And surely it would be “Revisionism” – i.e. simply contrary to fact – to deny this.

Romo -I lived in Amsterdam for six months many years ago. During my first week there an old Dutch man took me to one side and said this:
‘You will meet lots of people here who hid the Jews and helped them. You will meet lots of people who were in the Dutch resistance. You will never meet those who collaborated with the Nazis.’
I got the message.

Israelinurse, you’re most unlikely to find a single Nazi in Germany or Austria, let alone a surviving soldier who admits to his part in either shooting, mocking, looting, beating up or otherwise contributing to the Holocaust. Not one of the elderly you’re likely to meet (were you to choose to visit) will admit to having been one of those totally ecstatic cheering crowds who packed the streets and the rally halls to SiegHeil scream their eternal adoration to Hitler, and chant the anti-semitic slogans that my mother heard so often in Berlin.

However, Claude Lanzmann had little difficulty getting Poles to make all sorts of anti-semitic statements about the Jews deserving what they got, getting what they were destined for because of Jesus etc etc. in a film he made thirty or more years after the war. Radio Maria which broadcasts openly anti-semitic stuff is a popular radio station.

By and large there is a huge and decisive change in the attitudes of the young in both countries. I’m pleased about that. But amongst the elderly–still what it was. And by the way, after the war, the Polish anti-semitism morphed into “the Jews control the Communist Party”.

When I visited Auschwitz with my then synagogue some years ago, we had two Polish guides. One was a thoughtful, very sensitive man who clearly understood the feelings of the people like me, so many of whose relatives had been murdered there, and who spoke with great restraint and balance on the record of the Poles who had been inmates of Auschwitz (who were usually machine gunned rather than gassed–shown more honour) and those who had attempted to surround the site with crosses and make it an unmistakeably and primarily a Polish martyrs’ shrine.

The other was a woman who explained that the ghetto of Kasimir which the Jews were forced to live in was provided out of kindness and solicitude by the King to keep the Jews safe. Even were that true, just exactly who did the Jews be walled up to keep them safe from?

Just to say that the claim that the Palestinians played a large part in the Nazi Holocaust is Holocaust Revisionism and should not go unchallenged.

Here is where you went wrong – and downhill after that.

Absolutely no-one says that Al Husseini or teh Palestinians played a “large part”. They played a significant enough part thatthey can’t say that The Holocaust had NOTHING to do with them (or other Muslims). It clearly did.

To bend and distort these historical facts for narrow political advantage (of whatever kind) is a disgrace.

Why are you so uncomfortable with a stone-cold fact? Maybe you are an Israel-denier. Its a disgrace that people like MPAC UK and various Palestinian/Muslim spokespeople keep claiming that Israel was created because of European guilt over The Holocaust and that Palestinians/Arabs/Muslim had nothing to do with it. They DID have something to do with it and some of them haven’t given up either.

Europe has a lot of unfinished business as far as WW2 goes, and it seems to me that you have (possibly unintentionally) captured them in a nutshell.

[The grand Mufti] “was not a major player in the Nazi Holocaust”

That´s an own goal.

Perhaps, johng, now that you’re here on the thread in the name of fighting Holocaust Denial, you’d care to condemn this out-and-out Holocaust denial as “a lie invented by the zionists”, a statement made by a Hamas official condemning plans to teach Gaza children about the Holocaust.

Hamas said it believed UNRWA was about to start using a text for 13-year-olds that included a chapter on the Holocaust.

In an open letter to local UNRWA chief John Ging, the movement’s Popular Committees for Refugees said: “We refuse to let our children study a lie invented by the Zionists.”

UNRWA spokesman Adnan Abu Hasna said: “There is no mention of the Holocaust in the current syllabus.” Asked if UNRWA planned to change that, he declined to comment.

In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, run by the Western-backed Palestinian Authority of President Mahmoud Abbas, teachers said there was no official guidance on teaching about the Holocaust.

Israelis are angered by denial of the Holocaust among some in the Middle East, notably lately by leaders in Iran, who provide support for Hamas. Abbas, who has engaged in negotiation with Israel, has had to distance himself from his own 1980s doctoral thesis, which cast doubt on the scale of the Holocaust.

Then there’s the even neater bit of casuistry by the Hamas official spokesman who refuses to come down either way on the subject of Holocaust Denial because he claims that teaching about it comes with inevitable baggage about acceptance of the occupation of Palestinian land>

Hamas’s official spokesman in Gaza, Sami Abu Zuhri, said he did not want to discuss the history of the Holocaust but said:

“Regardless of the controversy, we oppose forcing the issue of the so-called Holocaust onto the syllabus, because it aims to reinforce acceptance of the occupation of Palestinian land.”

Well, johng, what’s your take on that statement?

Sure, the Palestinians weren’t responsible for the Holocaust. But their leader Husseini actively pressed the Nazis to have the local “contract’ to carry out the Final Solution in then-Palestine. And he kept going on and on about that.

Now, what about the plight of the Jewish refugees before the war. All the nations shut them out with the exception of Shanghai and the tens of thousands that let them in to countries like the UK and the US. Millions were left. They were kept out of then-Palestine not because of British opposition but because of Arab Palestinian opposition. Couldn’t they have softened their hearts to let another few thousand children in? Where were the Palestinian humanitarians pleading for some of the Jews who wanted to come there at least given temporary or transit residence? But their rhetoric was quite the opposite — ferocious opposition.

There were also plenty of Brits and US folk who ferociously argued against Jews being let into their countries. The Jews will take over our jobs, our homes, our businesses–we’ll be swamped and pushed out by these foreigners. That didn’t stop the British government from at least showing a little bit of mercy, whilst pandering to their racists who proclaimed that the Jews were out to control and take over their country.

And if you look at the National Archives, you can find files and files full of little letters from poor, unsophisticated people who wrote individual letters offering to take Jewish refugees into their homes, however little they had. Begging the government to increase the numbers allowed in so they could help to save these Jews. Did you know the British government insisted that no news should leak out of those hundreds writing in offers?

So why do the Palestinians just keep washing their hands of the role they could have played in giving shelter to the refugees. We are all critical of all those nations who shut their doors to the desperate Jews–”None of our business. If we let them in they’ll take over. Too much unemployment. Letting Jews in will cause anti-semitism”

Why do people like you so unctuously justify these attitudes on the part of the Palestinian Arabs, when the poor of Cuba and Shanghai were able to welcome them out of the storm?

They weren’t just bystanders. They insisted the gates were barred and they campaigned furiously against each and every Jew entering.

A shameful record. And one that makes all the posturing about “we were made to pay for the Holocaust, which was nothing to do with us” just so much cant.

Husseini. The closed doors. The threats, the campaigns, the attacks. The lack of any real evidence of a few who could say– but we are prosperous, we could take a few children into our home. You know, like David Attenborough’s and Margaret Thatcher’s parents did. Any Trotskyists who did the same? And urged other Trots to join them?

I hope you’re still reading, Fiyaz. It shows how much reading and learning is still to be done. And not just about Poland. And what part do you think the Islamic world could have done in helping to rescue more of those refugees–the ones at the Polish border–the children stuck on the border in the Kindertransport train that was on its way to England when war broke out on 3rd September? All were subsequently murdered. And do you agree that all those who did survive Auschwitz and Poland should have been forced to return to those countries when they could not bear to stay there? Should we force all our Iranian refugees to return to Iran if the government falls? Should we force the Iraqis we took on to go back to Iraq now?

There is zero evidence that the grand mufti played any significant role in the holocaust. he was a nasty anti-semitic shit who probably didn’t regret it happened, but arguments made suggesting that this equates with being a significant actor risks taking the blame off of the people who actually organised it. This is clear in the quite ludicrous claims that he ‘founded’ or ‘organised’ an SS division for example. He took part in a broadcast lauding the idea. He did not found or organise it. The SS did. In terms of the divisions that WAS organised, it plays a very small part in the war (although one can be sure that it was a nasty one) and then ends up mutinying and having to be disbanded. The SS were exploiting the recent history of the Balkans were Muslims had been squeezed between other competing nationalities much as they were in the last troubles. In terms of reconstructing the actual record two kinds of propaganda (particularly on the net) intefere. The one is the kind of nutjobs who think its expediate to try and argue that Israel’s current conflict is somehow continuous with the fight against the Nazies, largely located on the fringes of the Israeli right. The other are Serb chauvinists who have their own reasons for wanting to argue the same.

And no I don’t play down the deportation of Jews from their homes in the middle east but neither do I believe the equation of that particular history with the history of the particular history of Palestinian dispossession (something which was always rejected by the Israeli peace camp) is particularly helpful either. Both of these claims are being made with renewed stridency in the blogsphere and this seems to be part of the ideological atmosphere associated with the recent election and the return of the far right to the mainstream of Israeli politics.

“The Holocaust against the Jews was the greatest mass extermination in history and was planned, and carried out on European soil by Europeans”

It was only luck what prevented that the Holocaust reached Arab lands. Just a few more months, and the Jews imprissoned in concentration camps in North Africa would have been exterminated (maybe shipped to Europe, or maybe directly in gas chambers in Libia, Tuniz or Algeria).
These concentration camps were built by Vichy france and by the Nazis, but they were staffed by Arabs, who delighted in torturing Jewish detainees.
This doesn’t mean that there weren’t Arabs who rescued Jews in North Africa, but there were also Europeans who did so.
The problem, Johng, is that the Holocaust is not only European. It was also Arab, to the extent that the Nazi machinery functioned in Arab lands as it functioned in conquered European countries.
You want to exonerate completely the Arabs from the Holocaust, but you can’t, because the facts are there.
Read: “Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands” by Robert Satloff, and stop peddling your Arabist propaganda.

It is estimated that about one-eighth of the current Polish population has some Jewish ancestry…….. it would have been almost demographically impossible to kill every single Jew in pre-war Poland…….. some went into hiding, some changed their faith and some assimilated. Some young Poles today are still discovering their family’s Jewish background.

That’s very true. There is a revival of sorts taking place in Krakow, a city that is just chock full of Jewish buildings, sites and artifacts. It’s really quite an amazing city.

Arabs collaborated in the Holocaust in North Africa:
They stole Jewish properties from Jewish prisoners, tortured prisoners in the camps, raped abandoned Jewish women, and they would have helped ship the Jews in cattle wagons, but the allies won the war in Africa earlier, and prevented this development (although they left the collaborator Vichy officials in their functions in North Africa, and they continued to oppress the Jews).

There is zero evidence that the grand mufti played any significant role in the holocaust. he was a nasty anti-semitic shit who probably didn’t regret it happened

Didn’t regret it happened? Well, you are showing your hand as an apologist for the leader of Palestinian political pro-Nazism. He made broadcasts of behalf of the Nazis, and, like Lord Haw Haw he made propaganda broadcasts actively urging the Arab and Islamic world to support Hitler. You don’t have to have a personal body count to play an important role in the Holocaust. Even Hitler never murdered anyone.

His active campaigning throughout the thirties not just to keep refugee Jews out of then Palestine, but to incite and help organize the murderous groups that fought the ones to campaign, and to use that to threaten with more fire and sword the British if they dared to let more Jews in — he played a real role in locking the door, when there was no need to.

He was a cheerleader for the Holocaust once it got going. And over and over again he urged to have the lead role in carrying out its execution if the Germans could do him a favour and conquer the Middle east.

He would not have hesitated to play the largest possible role if he’d only been given the chance.

Where were the Palestinians who said– but there is room for both groups, which there was then, and still is now.

Good luck with your apologism for a disgusting blot on the face of history–and for all those who followed him and did not speak out against him– he did not lack followers amongst the Arabs of both then Palestine and elsewhere in the Middle East. And who would have joyfully lined up behind him to help him carry out the task he so much wanted.

I’m not interested in totally exonerating anyone. But I am suspicious of attempts to argue that the Nazi Holocaust was in any sense an Arab affair or that Arabs played a significant part in it. And I’m suspicious of it, not only because I think it is ideologically motivated but because with the far right in Europe in the ascendent I don’t think its a good idea (of course its never a good idea) to bend and distort, in particular, the history of that period in this way. It essentially relativises the Holocaust to matters quite unconnected. The Nazi program of extermination was unique in history and that uniqueness had much to do with the nature of European politics and society. There are many in Europe who would like to forget that history. They should not be allowed to do so. And yes its a bad thing that the Nazi Holocaust is not taught in Palestinian schools. But this does not mean that the Israel-Palestine conflict is a re-run of the second world war.

And again the ridiculous attempt to argue that those who oppose such distortions of history are “apologists” for the grand mufti reflects simply the ideological atmosphere referred to. He was not a significant actor in the Nazi Holocaust, he wasn’t even (the nazies understood this much to his chagrin) much of a significant actor in Arab Nationalist circles by this time. Much of his activity was designed to bolster his reputation with the Germans in relationship to this sphere of activity. He failed in this and he also failed in winning hegenomy within Palestinian and Arab circles. Significantly he was never pursued by the Israeli government despite being within easy reach in both Beirut and Cairo. This may not be conveniant for those who see this debate as an occassion for contemporary polemic, but then history often isn’t conveniant.

“I’m not interested in totally exonerating anyone. But I am suspicious of attempts to argue that the Nazi Holocaust was in any sense an Arab affair or that Arabs played a significant part in it. And I’m suspicious of it, not only because I think it is ideologically motivated but because with the far right in Europe in the ascendent I don’t think its a good idea… ”

johng, what is important is not what you consider politically convenient, what is important is that there were concentration camps for Jews in Arab lands and that Arabs staffed them. If you and me are going to accused the Ukranians for their collaboration with the Nazis, it is just and correct that we do the same with the Arabs, no matter how much you want to clean up their act for your own political interests.

I repeat: a few more months or a failed Allied offensive and the Jews in North Africa would have been exterminated by the Nazis and by the French and Arab collaborators. It was only a question of time.

I see, JohnG, that you didn’t address (yet?) my points. Do you emphasize the uniqueness of the Holocaust when Israel is compared with the Nazis?

Significantly he was never pursued by the Israeli government despite being within easy reach in both Beirut and Cairo.

Oh, for goodness sake! The third in line in the Jewish Department of RSHA (after Adolph Eichmann and Dieter Visilecny) was Alois Brunner. Since late 1940ties and until his death (of natural causes), (too) many years later, he resided in Damascus, earning his crust as the Adviser on Jewish Affairs to Syrian Government. And no, he was never taken out by a Mossad hit squad. And yes, it tells us something about the Syrian regime and its attitude to the Holocaust.

johng — you are attacking claims that nobody made. Nobody (here on this thread) claimed that

the Israel-Palestine conflict is a re-run of the second world war.

BTW, johng, as much as you protest that it is not politically convenient to tell the truth, when this truth shows the Arabs in a bad light, it is never the proper time to defend the Jews. You have to be very brave to do that. You are not.

CookieCutter: You are half-right. Israel was created because of the Holocaust, AND the Holocaust never happened. Or something like that. After all, we have been talking about “1984″.

JohnG: the idea that mentioning the historically documented links between the Mufti and the Nazis “risks taking the blame off of the people who actually organised [the Holocaust]” is ludicrous in the extreme. Are you suggesting that anyone is blaming the Mufti for the Holocaust and exonerating Eichmann? That is what your absurd thesis comes to.
You blame other posters for having an agenda when they mention the Mufti. This is super-rich, given your agenda vis-a-vis Israel which you have expounded with barefaced lack of shame on many past threads.

What an enigmatic thread, and if I might contribute a suggestion:

Please do try and read Samuel Kassow’s Who will Write Our History, it is a fascinating book, it covers pre-WW2 Poland and the relationship between Poles, Jews, changing events, pressures, political conflicts and all that led to the creation of the Oymeg Shabes.

Kassow is an excellent historian, he writes a readable and scholarly book.

PS: I would ignore any incoherent mutterings from SWPers, such as JohnG, they invariably know now’t about history and care about it even less.

The Mufti was not an instrument of the Holocaust because there was not enough time for him to be so but he was responsible for many innocent lives lost and planned to be at the helm when his Nazi allies swept south as expected and handed the Jews to his monstrous clutches. He was instrumental in the killing of children when opposing a deal which would have allowed them to go free in exchange for `German nationals. He lauded Hitler with the unctuous solicitude that defined him when grovelling, as much as the murderous contempt he showed to his victims when dominant. In Egypt after the war he organised violent resistance against the Jews of Palestine and left the indelible stain that marks his successors as brutally as it did him. It was only the march of history that denied him his hoped for prominence in the Holocaust which he thought could be just as efficiently continued with his own ovens.

RE: “A marriage between a Galitizianer and a Poilishe Yied would have been regarded as something of a mixed marriage.”

Like so much of what you wrote, that is, to say the least, a huge exaggeration. My mom is a Poilishe Yied, and my dad is a Galitzianer. (Incidentally, I wouldn’t dream of referring to myself as a Polish Jew, proud or otherwise, since I’m not, having been born in Canada.) My parents speak yiddish with exactly the same accent and expression. So did my two grandfathers, both of whom survived the war. They all referred to themselves as Polish Jews, and the Galizianer aspect was only occasionally referred to, and then as a joke (the Galizianers are considered more emotional and maybe more shifty; the retort from the Galizianer side was that Galicia was way better off economically and in terms of modernity because it had been part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, whereas the poor polish jews had been under the Russian boot.

I think Judy’s facts regarding Polish attitudes toward Jews before and during WWII is generally accurate, though I would take issue with its severe tone. I used to hear the same tone from my parents, but about 15 years ago, for unknown reasons, they began to mellow a bit on the Poles. No they don’t love them now, but they certainly don’t blame them for the Holocaust (Judy didn’t either), and they really don’t like hearing their fellow survivors go on about how “the poles were worse than the Germans,” etc.

I guess if i have a serious beef with Judy’s comment it boils down to this: there is a quality among some Jewish people to shine a bright light on every nook and cranny of their enemies’ attitudes, misdeeds and crimes (and I have no problem with that), without shining a similar spotlight on the actions of their own. I can understand why: it’s a lot easier, emotionally and psychologically, to dissect the actions of your foes. I too have taken issue with, say, Ukrainians who go on and on about how hard done by they were but don’[t have a clue about how their own anti-semitic behaviour. But I wouldn’t spend dozens of paragraphs lecturing a muslim guy trying to come to terms with Holocaust/Jews/Poland that he wasn’t hard enough on the Poles. It’s time for that to stop already.

As for the gent who called the original post PC garbage: You’re an idiot, full stop.

“Also, it became clear to me that a distinction has to be made between what took place in Poland and those who perpetrated the crimes. Obviously, there would have been some collaborators in Poland who made the butchery possible. Yet, there were many, many others who stood up and with their conscience, took a stand against what the Nazis did.”

You are rewriting history.

Most Poles did not help Jews. In my extended family of about 500 people only two survived, my father from the Polish Lithuanian border and my mother from Central Poland.

While few directly helped the Nazis, most Poles were antisemitic and wanted to get rid of the bulk of Jews living there. They saw them as foreigners and intruders.

I am surprised that Harry’s Place would allow such historical revisionist posts to appear on their web site.

Shame on you.

He was not “instrumental” in anything to do with the Holocaust. The idea that the Nazies needed his say so is ridiculous. And yes I do emphasis that the crimes committed by Israel against the Palestians are not to be compared to the Holocaust. Repeatedly actually. And yes its true that many of the Arab regimes harboured fleeing Nazies. And yes that reflects reactionary attitudes of those regimes.

I should have mentioned that my dad came from western galicia (near Krakow). It is quite possible that the distinction between “Polish” jews and Galizianers from Ukraine or eastern Poland was much greater; perhaps even the Yiddish was different.

Also would like to add something about Yiddish: When I hear Polish Yiddish (which unfortunately i rarely do now), i can of course understand everything, as I was brought up bilingually. If you can get your hands on any recording by Dzigan (or Dzigan and Schumacher), you’ll hear classic standard Polish Yiddish (and you’ll also laugh your head off if you understand them).

For me, other Yiddish dialects (Litvack, Romanian, Hungarian etc.) are not nearly as easy to understand.

The masthead of the 1930’s Palestinian Arab Muslim newspaper Al Lahab (the flame), aligned with the al Husseini camp was directly adopted from the Nazis. The masthead read: “One Fatherland, One Volk, One Leader”.

Palestinian Arab newspapers, both Muslim and Christian owned, initially (i.e. at the start of the 1930’s), were very enthusiastic about Nazi organizations like the Hitler Youth and felt that Arab youth organizations (a key concern for Palestinian Arab newspapers) should be modeled along similar ideological lines and structure.

However, (excluding Al Lahab), the romance between most Arab Palestinian newspapers and fascism began to sour a bit as a result of reports about Muslim deaths at the hands of Mussolini’s troops in Abyssinia. Mussolini was widely criticized in the Palestinian Arab press for Italy’s conduct in Africa following reports of this kind.

Hitler on the other hand continued to enjoy a relatively criticism-free ride in the Arab Palestinian press throughout much of the 1930’s and especially during what is referred to as the Arab Revolt between 1936-1939. This was partially because of Nazi monetary assistance to financially struggling Arab Palestinian newspapers and journalists aligned with, or willing to work for the al-Husseini camp out of economic desperation — partially because ‘the enemy (Hitler) of my enemy (Britain) is my friend’ and partially out of genuine admiration and enthusiasm for Nazi and fascist blood and soil ideology and its implementation of order.

However, once the Arab Revolt began to peter out, with Haj Amin and his key advisors fleeing for Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and the Seychelles and with the winds of another great war quickly approaching, the Palestinian Arab press for the most part began to argue that Arabs ought to now put their support behind Britain and her allies against the Axis powers.

Paradoxically, despite this new found enthusiasm for a British and allied victory over the Nazis, it did not in anyway lessen or dampen the high regard which most of the Palestinian Arab press held for Haj Amin al Husseini and his top advisors now in exile, despite the latter’s well known close relationship and identification with the Nazis.

Following the outbreak of WW2 and throughout most of its duration, the Palestinian Arab press adopted a relatively silent posture toward politics especially compared with the heyday and flourishing of the Palestinian Arab press in the 1930’s.

johng might be interested to learn that during the 1930’s heyday of the Palestinian Arab press, the one leader and political system on the world stage for whom the Palestinian Arab press almost without exception reserved most of its consistent and severest vitriol, apart from the enmity towards Jews/Zionists in the Yishuv and the British and far greater than any criticism directed at Mussolini for his role in Abyssinia, was Stalin and Socialism/Communism.

Well I wouldn’t be interested to learn this only because most on the left are perfectly familiar with it. But thanks for an interesting post.

For the first time I agree with John G that the role of Muslims in WWII was minor and minimal and should not be used for propaganda purposes.

I also agree with his statement that “to bend and distort … historical facts for narrow political advantage (of whatever kind) is a disgrace.” He should remember his own words as the country whose history is most distorted is Israel, and that the distortion comes from folks who share his anti-Israel animus.

Fiyaz, Judy, SOS – excellent comments.

RE: “So why do the Palestinians just keep washing their hands of the role they could have played in giving shelter to the refugees. We are all critical of all those nations who shut their doors to the desperate Jews–”None of our business. If we let them in they’ll take over. Too much unemployment. Letting Jews in will cause anti-semitism”
Why do people like you so unctuously justify these attitudes on the part of the Palestinian Arabs, when the poor of Cuba and Shanghai were able to welcome them out of the storm?

Im sorry this is outrageous, and an excellent example of what i was talking about in an earlier post. To seriously criticize the Palestinian Arabs during WWII of not being sensitive toward Jewish refugees at the same time as they are in basically a war situation with the Jews already in Palestine, is way over the top. If, say, the Jordanians decided to cull their Palestinian population from 60% to 30%, would Israel take in the refugees? Come on get real. Whatever your views on the Arab/Israeli/Palestinian situation, it has to be admitted that Palestinians during the war had better reasons to keep Jews out than did anybody else.

This is not to excuse the Mufti. He was a major anti-semite, prick, Hitler supporter etc etc etc. So, no doubt, were many Palestinian arabs at the time. But at least they were in a conflict with jews about something real — land — at the time. What excuse did other nations have for turning away Jewish refugees?

I personally object to statements such as ‘Muslims (or Catholics or Protestants) saved Jews too’, not because they didn’t but because I believe that those people who did put their own lives on the line to help other human beings did so because of their humanity, not their religion.

I agree, though I find it hard to rule out that many took these risks because their religious world-view told them it was the right thing to do.

Their collaboration with the Nazis meant that far more Jews per capita were killed from Holland than any other European country.

The Dutch don’t have the record they once thought they did and the Netherlands has been going through a painful process of reevaluation of their war experience, as those who’ve been to the Hollandsche Schouwburg, the Verzetsmuseum Amsterdam, read De Aanslag or seen Zwart Boek might recognize. It is by no means all ‘goed’ and ‘fout’ as it was even ten years ago.

However, I don’t believe that the proportion of Jews killed is an exact reckoner as to how anti-semitic the people were. The Netherlands is urban, industrial, flat, and very well-developed with excellent transport links. In those days the Dutch were organised in everything they did by religion. The industrial process of gathering people and murdering them is relatively easy compared to say Norway.

Another myth BTW is that Israel was created BECAUSE of sympathy for The Holocaust post-war.

The more often this wretched myth is dismantled the better for all of us.

And again the ridiculous attempt to argue that those who oppose such distortions of history are “apologists” for the grand mufti reflects simply the ideological atmosphere referred to. He was not a significant actor in the Nazi Holocaust, he wasn’t even (the nazies understood this much to his chagrin) much of a significant actor in Arab Nationalist circles by this time.

Failing to gain hegemony is not the same as being insignificant. Can you tell us what the Al-Husseini had to do with the Higher Arab Executive and what role they (and his family) had in the Arab response to the UN Partition Plan and the subsequent war against Israeli independence?

Vildechaye:

The Jewish community in Palestine was subject to pogroms and persecution well before the first European Zionists started making aliyah in the latter half of the 1800s, so I’m not sure how “understandable” the anti-Jewish hostilities you reference during the 1930s really are.

Obviously this is a difficult question. There is no doubt that there is a long and troubling history of anti-semitism in Poland. It is a historical fact that post-war Poland was unfriendly to Jews, and a strain of anti-semitism still exists in Poland.

That being said, while I can respect Judy’s perspective on this, I think Poland gets treated unfairly when it comes to the Shoah. As a newly restored nation awakening in the horrible inter-war years, Poland had to deal with severe economic dislocation, German and Russian aggression and a complicated ethnic mosaic of Poles, Germans, Ukrainians and Jews. Its politics never really had a chance to stabilize, but one of the most important inter-war figures, Pilsudski, formed alliances with Jewish parties and leaders.

As for the war itself, Poland fought longer and harder, and at greater national cost, than any other nation. Given the competition, this is no mean accomplishment. Battle of Britain? Poles flew to defend the UK with great success. North Africa? Tobruk. Italy? Monte Cassino. France? Falaise gap. Netherlands? Arnhem. Eastern Front? There were Polish units in the Red Army (although many had cause later to regret their allegiance). The wizard war? Enigma.

Under occupation, Poland suffered from a deliberate attempt to eliminate the intellectual leadership of the country affecting Poles of all ethnic background. While given the horrible conditions in Prague, Belarussia and the Ukraine its difficult to say the Nazis treated the general Polish population uniquely harshly, it is eminently reasonable to point out that the Nazi treatment of Poland makes the various Western European occupation regimes seem like a summer holiday.

There were no Polish Waffen SS formations. There were no Polish hiwis embedded in the Wehrmacht. Armia Krajowa began an underground war in 1939 and never stopped. Were there individual collaborators? Of course there were, there always are. But the magnitude of collaboration was much, much lower than in other nations (this admittedly perhaps has more to do with the obviousness of Nazi intentions towards the Poles than any unique national virtue — the early delusions of Petain or Ukrainian nationalists were simply not tenable in Poland).

Given the above, it seems rather harsh to single out Poland and discuss them in the same breath as the Nazis when it comes to the Shoah. Polish jews fought alongside their countrymen throughout the war, inside and outside of Poland, to defeat the Nazis. Should we not remember them and the units and cause they fought for, rather than blur the rather core distinction between absolute and unique evil and simple human frailties?

Well very little is the answer. He was allowed to take command of his own detachment but every single one of the Arab regimes were concerned to marginalise him, not because of his anti-semitism, but because he claimed to represent the Palestinians. They were far more concerned about the relative power of the various post-war regimes. He simply was not a big player in the post-war period and the Arab regimes were as concerned to marginalise him as they were to marginalise the Palestinians. Which is the main reason why Palestinians were ambivulent about him despite the fact that he had little input or presence in the re-constitution of Palestinian politics after the Arab rising of the late 1930s when quite different forces from the old notables he represented came to dominate. This was only deepened after the war by the development of new kinds of politics in the refugee camps.

Well I wouldn’t be interested to learn this only because most on the left are perfectly familiar with it.

Yes of course johng, you find it unproblematic to speak on behalf of what “most on the left” are supposedly familiar with regarding the history of the Palestinian Arab press during the years between the World Wars, but you also speak for a party that couldn’t mobilize support from even a sliver of the left in the UK.

But thanks for an interesting post.

Your welcome.

I don’t claim to speak on behalf of the left. I simply know what they say. It is not the case that most people think the Palestinian national movement in the 1920s and 30s, or indeed the wider Arab nationalist movement, were friendly towards the Communist Party, the Soviet Union or indeed any other left. Largely because they were not.

johng, the Arabs, Muslims of The Middle East and Palestinians all played a significant role in The Holocaust. Al Husseini was a wanted Nazi War criminal. Try and suggest someone of teh status of Nazi War Criminal is NOT a significant player.

You’ve lost this argument several times and its only beligerent stupidity that makes you keep going around in circles.

Last year David Bentley played a significant part in Spurs season but he only made about ten starts out of a possible fifty.

JohnG’s and the SWP’s inability to engage with the modern historiography is all too conspicuous, one example:

“STUTTGART, GERMANY – The Nazis made plans to conduct a Holocaust of Jews living in Palestine during the Second World War, according to German historians who have examined secret archives.

The Nazis stationed a unit of ruthless troops in the Greek capital Athens with the task of landing in Palestine and murdering about 500,000 European Jews who had taken refuge there, the historians at the University of Stuttgart said Wednesday. But it never deployed.

…
Mallmann and Cueppers said the Nazis had planned to exploit Arab friendship for their plans.

“The most important collaborator with the Nazis and an absolute Arab anti-Semite was Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem,” they said in the book. He was a prime example of how Arabs and Nazis became friends out of a hatred of Jews. “

http://www.expatica.com/de/news/local_news/nazis-planned-holocaust-in-palestine-historians-29259.html

m sorry this is outrageous, and an excellent example of what i was talking about in an earlier post. To seriously criticize the Palestinian Arabs during WWII of not being sensitive toward Jewish refugees at the same time as they are in basically a war situation with the Jews already in Palestine, is way over the top. If, say, the Jordanians decided to cull their Palestinian population from 60% to 30%, would Israel take in the refugees? Come on get real. Whatever your views on the Arab/Israeli/Palestinian situation, it has to be admitted that Palestinians during the war had better reasons to keep Jews out than did anybody else.

If the Jordanians started massacring Palestinians, yes, I do think Israel would take the refugees in, exactly as it took Fatah men in when Hamas started up a massacre. Had that been on a larger scale, Israel would not have stood by while they were massacred.

Sadly, vildechaye, you seem to share the same zero-sum thinking as the Arabs of the day. No. they didn’t have “better reasons to keep the Jews out”. Had the Arab armies not chosen to attack the new state of Israel in 1948, there would have been no refugees. The Arabs would have gone living exactly where they were. Israel would have been tiny compared with what it is now.
There was and still is plenty of room.

I have a nice little book dated 1946 called Palestine Land of Promise. It’s written by a Walter Clay Lowdermilk–Assistant Chief of the US Soil Conservation Service. Foreword by Sir John Russell, President of the International Society of Soil Science. Neither was Jewish It set out to answer the question. “How have the Jews reclaimed the soil of Palestine? How many can Palestine absorb?

One of the things it shows from international (not Jewish) statistics is that in the 30s, the health, food productivity and life expectancy of Arab people in villages near any new Jewish settlement started and continued to rise, as they copied the new settlements’ methods and received help from them. It has pictures of what I would have thought completely uncultivable rock-lands taken on by the settlers of those days, and the same shown a few years later bearing good crops.

Please stop just propagating the dead-end thinking of them or us. If the Palestinians had actually stood back and thought about what was benefiting them, they would have welcomed Jewish immigrants. They could only have been expected to go on screaming blood and fire and opposing any further immigration? It’s political leadership that has a choice between riding lamebrain anger, fear and prejudice (Hitler, Husseini, Griffin) and working hard at trying to help people work towards partnership based on mutual economic benefit (the founders of the EU, Major, Blair & Co on Ireland, the behind the scenes negotiations that got the ANC and the SA govt together, even the ones who got Mugabe and Tsvangirai together.

There were many educated Arabs who could have made a difference. But of course Husseini and his thugs helped to silence them. And the later Arab and then PLO leadership had a stellar track record of murdering anyone who didn’t stand behind the endless “not an inch” “liquidate the zionist entity” lines.

I certainly refuse to accept that nothing better could have been expected of them. Whatever my views, those choices did them much more harm than anything the most expansionist zionists could have done. The Arab armies did the invading. Had they not–no refugees, no “Nakba” The “Nakba” happened as a consequence of the day they set those armies on the move. And of course they were sent out with just the exterminatory rhetoric (and intentions and expectations) that Husseini had pumped out for years.

Modernity quotes an article stating the Nazi plans to exterminate Jews in the Middle East which they would have done. He then mentions that the Mufti was an ally of the Nazies. Its quite possible (who knows) that the Mufti would have collaberated in such an operation. One suspects though that if the Nazies had taken power in the Middle East they would have also murdered anyone who was an Arab Nationalist, whether they were anti-semitic or not. The Mufti was in allied hands after the second world war and then released. Again, he did not play any significant role in the Nazi holocaust despite being an anti-semitic reactionary who colllaberated with the Nazies. And I don’t see how I can “lose” an argument about this when what I say is completely uncontroversial and accepted by any serious historian of the subject. No-one claims that “the Arabs” played a significant role in the Nazi Holocaust.

About Poland: After the war, there were pogroms (Kielce in 1946) under the Communists and later on, Polish Jews, those few that survived or returned, were expelled or fled from Poland altogether. Ironically, now that there are basically no Jews at all in Poland, there is a revival in Poland of interest in things Jewish, like, for instance, klezmer music.

A bit of research on Dershowitz and Al -Husseini reveals that the Left is upset at the use by Lieberman of a picture of Al Husseini with Nazi salute and Lieberman’s claim, supported by Dershowitz that the Palestinians through Al -Husseini had a role in The Holocaust.

They are in serious denial because it takes away one of their axioms that Israel was created BECAUSE of The Holocaust. To show that the Palestinians were complicit implies that they have Nazi principles at their core history. This fits in with the stated aims of wishing to destroy Israel and kill Jews.

If you take away the core Nazi-supporting history then you can continue to blame Israel and not Jew-hatred by Arabs and Muslims in that area.

I suspect that ius where johng is coming from.

“As for the war itself, Poland fought longer and harder, and at greater national cost, than any other nation.”

One-third of Belarus’s population died in the second world war, and the Polish resistance was inept and had no real support. Not only that, but Poles effectively deprived the 3 million Jews. Given the near universal collaboration with the nazis when it came to the Holocaust, and helped themselves to their property after the war, and vandalised and destroyed anything not worth taking. The Polish spit on the graves of the Jewish victims every time you count them among your national dead. The fact that they continue to portray yourselves as poor innocent victims of the nazis and communists show that they are easily the most shameless people in europe, if not the world.

“Its quite possible (who knows) that the Mufti would have collaberated in such an operation. “

Who knows, what marvelous English understatement, how to belittle the views of scholars in the field without really saying it.

Perhaps, JohnG, you’d like to write a research paper in a field of study which you are obviously a novice, along the lines of “Dear Dr. Mallmann, you are wrong, cos, signed the SWP”

I somehow doubt he will find it convincing.

If you had read the article, you would have noticed that Dr. Mallmann and Dr. Cueppers spent *three* years researching the German archives, whilst you have spent none, and would probably have a problem even physically finding them.

So given a choice between:

1) specialist German historians and their scholarly work vs. 2) your barely literate jumble of nonsense

I think most people would tend towards believing 1)

The Mufti was in allied hands after the second world war and then released. Again, he did not play any significant role in the Nazi holocaust despite being an anti-semitic reactionary who colllaberated with the Nazies. And I don’t see how I can “lose” an argument about this when what I say is completely uncontroversial and accepted by any serious historian of the subject. No-one claims that “the Arabs” played a significant role in the Nazi Holocaust.

johng, you are an ignorant fucking liar!

http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~jkatz/husseini.html

http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_mandate_grand_mufti.php

He was NOT released by the allies. He escaped to France and then on to Egypt where he remained until he died.

While in Baghdad, Syria al-Husseini aided the pro-Nazi revolt of 1941. He then spent the rest of World War II as Hitler’s special guest in Berlin, advocating the extermination of Jews in radio broadcasts back to the Middle East and recruiting Balkan Muslims for infamous SS “mountain divisions” that tried to wipe out Jewish communities throughout the region.

At the Nuremberg Trials, Eichmann’s deputy Dieter Wisliceny (subsequently executed as a war criminal) testified:

The Mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and adviser of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of this plan. … He was one of Eichmann’s best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures. I heard him say, accompanied by Eichmann, he had visited incognito the gas chamber of Auschwitz.

With the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945, the Mufti moved to Egypt where he was received as a national hero. After the war al-Husseini was indicted by Yugoslavia for war crimes, but escaped prosecution. The Mufti was never tried because the Allies were afraid of the storm in the Arab world if the hero of Arab nationalism was treated as a war criminal.

Nazi War Criminal, urged an acceleration of The Holocaust, broadcast to Arabs to kill Jews, hero of Arab nationalism.

Your constant denial sickens most decent people here.

Well the belief that the reason why there was a national conflict between Arab and Jew in Palestine was because of “Jew-hatred” as opposed to a national conflict, is both a historical misjudgement and a barrier to any sort of sensible peace deal. Its also a theme of right wing Israeli nationalist propaganda and has nothing whatsoever to do with historical reality. Its of a piece with claims that Palestinians are just propaganda and that the only basis for a conflict is not any real national claims just irrational hatred of Israel. In other words it is by definition impossible to negotiate with Palestinians. I’m not of the view that Israel was the product of the Holocaust and don’t know anyone on the left who believes this (although it is of course true that in the post-war period revelations about the Holocaust would have made many sympathetic to Zionism, for perfectly understandable reasons). The struggle between Arab and Jew in Palestine was the product of an earlier period and has little to with the Holocaust (and of course most who perished in the Holocaust knew almost nothing about that conflict anyway). The use of the famous photograph by an Israeli embassy official recently is of a piece with the report that Netenyahu stated that demands to restrict settlement were equivilant to demands for a “Judenfrei” west bank, a use of language already criticised in a post on this site. Its the same thing. Simply part of an attempt to delegitimate Palestinian claims in advance of possible negotiations and nothing to do with either the Holocaust or indeed history. The roots of the conflict in the Middle East have nothing to do with the Holocaust and everything to do with disputed national claims.

The SWP has a habit of excusing anti-Jewish racism when it suits it (see the SWP’s courtship of Gilad Aztmon), so this is just another attempt by JohnG to follow in that path.

vilde

For the first time I agree with John G that the role of Muslims in WWII was minor and minimal and should not be used for propaganda purposes.

I disagree.

1. As Satloff’s book documents, hundreds of thousands of Jews suffered under Muslim collaboration with fascism. Their suffering was not minor. As posted by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/focus/antisemitism/voices/pdf/20061123/english_chapter_4.pdf

2. Muslim persecution of Jews during WW2 – including plans to extend the Einsatzgruppen genocide to the Mideast – are part of a conitnuous pattern of vicious, semi-apartheid anti-Semitism covering 14 centuries.

there is a quality among some Jewish people to shine a bright light on every nook and cranny of their enemies’ attitudes, misdeeds and crimes (and I have no problem with that), without shining a similar spotlight on the actions of their own.

This is not only false, but an anti-Semitic statement.

From the prophets of ancient times, to Saul of Tarsus, to Marx and modern Jewry, Jews have if anything been much too self-critical, often unwittingly supplying the ammunition for their own persecution.

Posting links to sites that come out with falsehoods of the kind which suggest that the grand mufti was the initiator of the Holocaust (indeed a claim which is pretty close to the kind of mad nonsense associated with Holocaust Denial) is simply an indication of the kind of manic ideological propaganda which is an insult to anyone serious about commemorating the Holocaust. It is a great shame that the original post has been distorted by this disgraceful rubbish. It is also an insult to those who died in the Holocaust.

JohnG is a bit ignorant.

The Mufti was one of the instigators and planners of the EinsatzKommando Agypten, the genocide squad assembled in Athens awaiting German victory in the Mideast to begin a plan of murdering all of the Mideast’s Jews, with the active collaboration of Mideast Arabs an explicit part of the plan.

http://ibloga.blogspot.com/2009/06/einsatzkommando-agypten.html

The article quoted actually states:

“Clarity on this issue is important: By virtually all accounts, the mass of Arabs neither participated in nor actively supported the anti-Jewish campaign that European Fascists brought to North Africa. The preoccupation of most Arabs was survival; for those of the political class, the emerging challenge to colonial rule was a much greater concern than contributing to the persecution of Jews”

Nlsxungat — Belarus (and the Ukraine) indeed suffered tremendously at the hands of the Nazis, and also produced many partisans who fought heroically against them. That is a historical fact and I thank you for highlighting it.

Your other statements are simply wrong. Armia Krajowa was neither inept or lacking in support. It was able to maintain a campaign of sabotage and disruption throughout the war and provided valuable intelligence to the Western allies. While ultimately unsuccessful, it was also able to mount large scale operations like the Warsaw uprising (which by its scale completely disproves your ludicrous argument that the AK lacked popular support). In size and tenacity, its only comparison as a resistance movement outside of Soviet territory was Tito’s movement in Yugoslavia. You betray your ignorance, Sir.

At the same time, exiled Poles served with distinction alongside British and American forces in the West in large numbers. Their numbers included thousands who had made an almost unimaginable journey from Soviet gulags to North Africa to fight the Nazis. Sikorski and Anders, Tobruk and Monte Cassino. Their numbers also included Polish jews, as the stars of David on Polish military cemeteries in Italy starkly demonstrate.

Please explain to me how a nation which is invaded by Hitler and then stabbed in the back by Stalin while its allies look on and do nothing (although it is sadly probably true that neither the UK or France was in a position to offer material support) is not an innocent victim of the Nazis and Communists.

Think of England is sadly correct that there were atrocities committed after the war against jews. These should not be forgotten, and neither should the nasty “anti-Zionist” campaigns under Gomulka’s communist regime. But to claim that Poles “universally” collaborated with the Nazis in connection with the holocaust or that Poland, rather than the Nazis “effectively deprived” (sic) 3 million jews is simply untrue. Some did, but I would point out the French and the Dutch, among others, also had those who were willing to aid in the extermination and did so under far less onerous conditions than those that Poland suffered.

I would point out that Poland’s internal debate on these matters only really started in 1989. Given that it took until the late sixties for Germany’s (wholly admirable) process of coming to terms with the war to really get going, and France took even longer to recognize the sins of Vichy, I would be optimistic that a fair, rounded picture of events will gradually emerge that will fully take into account what a tremendous loss to Poland and the world the holocaust was, the crimes and atrocities connected to it and the long and tragic history of Polish anti-semitism. I would also point out that Poland is having this debate, rather than shutting it off by government order. C.f. Belarus and Russia.

Philo-Semite,

“JohnG is a bit ignorant.”

Indeed, but he is a professional intellectual as well!!

No matter what you write he doesn’t read it. JohnG’s not interested in history, just the SWP’s revisionist version and the sanitizing of anti-Jewish racism in that political cause.

Given that I was disagreeing with an article claiming that the Grand Mufti was the instigator of the Nazi Holocaust in Europe and linked to by someone pretending to be indignant about my supposed distortion of the fact, the belief that the Mufti was the ‘instigator’ of a plan which did not happen (the idea that he ‘instigated’ or took part in this having precious little real evidence to back it up incidently) I fail to see how this article would count against me, even in the unlikely event that there was a shred of evidence to back it up. But, sorry folks, as I said this reminds me of trying to argue with Holocaust Deniers, and I gave that up a while back. So you can go back to fantasies about how the Arabs instigated the Nazi Holocaust (its amazing how quickly that one surfaced).

“1) specialist German historians and their scholarly work vs. 2) your barely literate jumble of nonsense
I think most people would tend towards believing 1)”

Absolutely.

How convenient Israel is for the little band of malignant tendency Leftists, they can be what they are without having to wear the historical insignia, they can say the same old things without using the word “Jew” and they can spew their hatred while hiding behind the cloak of Humanitarianism, yes indeed what a lucky break these hate filled insignificant little people had in the post war years.

“He then mentions that the Mufti was an ally of the Nazies. Its quite possible (who knows) that the Mufti would have collaberated in such an operation. ”

What a little man you are, I bet you will participate in the anti-semitic hate march on Sunday September 13, Hmm (who knows) maybe you won’t.

But as it was with the mufti and the nazi’s, you probably will collaborate with the neo-Islamofascists because that’s what you socialist workers do isn’t it, socialist workers, national socialist workers, stalinist comrades, maoists, take your pick, you just can’t help yourselves can you.

johng:And yes its true that many of the Arab regimes harboured fleeing Nazies. And yes that reflects reactionary attitudes of those regimes.

hasan pristinaThe Dutch don’t have the record they once thought they did and the Netherlands has been going through a painful process of reevaluation of their war experience…

Is there a specific threshold of reactionary, racist, xenophobic violence and incitement to violence in a society, that I’m not aware of, that rewards a bill of clean conscience to the immediately succeeding generations of that society’s citizens, academics, journalists, authors, pundits, blog comment box and entertainment celebrity experts, so that they are ethically spared a painful process of reevaluation, let alone a serious public discussion of an episode that appears to be within, or nearly within living memory of organized populist and popular hatred campaigns that incited violence and resulted in mass murder, mortal fear and unthinkably degrading humiliations?

Given that I was disagreeing with an article claiming that the Grand Mufti was the instigator of the Nazi Holocaust in Europe and linked to by someone pretending to be indignant about my supposed distortion of the fact, the belief that the Mufti was the ‘instigator’ of a plan which did not happen (the idea that he ‘instigated’ or took part in this having precious little real evidence to back it up incidently) I fail to see how this article would count against me, even in the unlikely event that there was a shred of evidence to back it up. But, sorry folks, as I said this reminds me of trying to argue with Holocaust Deniers, and I gave that up a while back. So you can go back to fantasies about how the Arabs instigated the Nazi Holocaust (its amazing how quickly that one surfaced).

Add, fucking deranged mental midget who hallucinates things that haven’t been written.

Absolutely NO-ONE has said that the antisemite Husseini was RESPONSIBLE for The Holocaust or that Arabs “instigated The Holocaust”. Perhaps you’d like to quote from the posts here that have stated that.

You are a serial abuser of Straw Men in constructing faux points and then getting indignant at the suggestion.

You seem to have the memory of a goldfish because its is YOU who wrote the phrases you insist that others have written.

I realise too that you know this and now you want the secondary buzz of getting people all angry and abusing you. As you read so you are masturbating your ego and self-loathing IMHO.

Something none of us have pointed out is that of course Husseini didn’t just support Hitler around the Middle East.

Husseini was a cheerleader for the Nazis to win. His broadcasts were aimed at rustling up support for the Nazis to defeat the Allies. That’s those British forces (and those of the allied nations) risking their lives and going through hell. Husseini didn’t just want the Jews dead. He wanted the Allied soldiers dead too, so that he could get the Jews killed.

I wonder, johng, whether you had parents or grandparents fighting in the forces in World War II? Husseini would have rejoiced had they been killed, along with their comrades.

I think the British were less than thrilled with the attitude and actions of the Arab leadership under Husseini and they had to spend a great deal of energy countering what he stood for and fostered.

The impact of the Nazis and the Holocaust on the Arab/Palestinian conflict was to have the Arabs take on the discourse and the propaganda methods of the Nazis, with its emphasis on the need to murder all the Jews.
Hussein broadcasting for the Nazis in 1944:

‘Arabs, rise as one man and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history, and religion. This saves your honor. God is with you

All that stuff about driving them into the sea. And the newspapers publishing the most vile anti-semitic cartoons. Then, as the client-state initiatives of the post war Stalinist state got going, there was Soviet anti-zionism which was also deeply embedded with eliminationism for the Jews and third-world victimology for the Arabs and subsequently the PLO. And it was the Soviets, not in fact the PLO that started the Jews=Nazis, zionism=racism equations and made sure it was built into the required language of the PLO–they were trained in Moscow.

So, johng, a word regarding the concentration camps for Jews in North Africa?

RE: This is not only false, but an anti-Semitic statement.

Oh great, so now i’m accused of anti-semitic statements. fuck off.

The article you linked to cited Eichmann’s deputy:

“The Mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry”

(as clear an example of someone using this argument to get off as one could possibly imagine) and goes on to try and build this case. It is deranged and disgusting nonsense (hardly surprising since it originates in the special pleading of Eichmann’s deputy). It also attempts to make claims that the SS regiment which the Mufti made a broadcast in support of after it was set up by the SS, played a role in the Holocaust. Again there is no evidence for this whatsoever. This is not to say that this can be ruled out (who could do that about any SS division) but that most of the historical material has them engaged in anti-partisan warfare before they finally mutinied.

The bizarre rants which try and suggest that Arab nationalism is just ‘victimology’ and that this has its origins in Nazi propaganda (before a quick volte face which see’s it all as an import of Soviet anti-semitism) represent a kind of strange combination of the US right (both in terms with the obsession with victimology and the incessent equation of fascism with communism) and, yes I’m sorry to say, the kind of inane logic chopping one normally comes across in rabid anti-semitic literature.

Again, none of this has the slightest thing to do with the Nazi Holocaust or its lessons, and if this is the standard of discussion of the conflict in the middle east, its perhaps just best to keep the Nazi Holocaust out of it. Its disgraceful.

RE: Vildechaye: The Jewish community in Palestine was subject to pogroms and persecution well before the first European Zionists started making aliyah in the latter half of the 1800s, so I’m not sure how “understandable” the anti-Jewish hostilities you reference during the 1930s really are.

Lynne, I’m afraid we’ll have to agree to disagree. While i’m sure there was anti-jewish sentiment in Palestine before the advent of Zionism (after all there was anti-jewish sentiment everywhere at that time), it doesnt alter the fact that the Arabs of Palestine saw Zionism as a movement to usurp their land, egged on, no doubt, by the Mufti etc. And when two different groups agitate over the same land, hostile sentiment is “understandable,” doesn’t make it right. Don’t get me wrong, i’m not defending Arab excesses like Hebron and the riots etc., but this clearly is not anti-semitism like that in Europe.

RE: From the prophets of ancient times, to Saul of Tarsus, to Marx and modern Jewry, Jews have if anything been much too self-critical, often unwittingly supplying the ammunition for their own persecution.

Now that i’m over my anger at being called anti-semitic, let me take a more reasonable shot at this idiotic statement by philo-semite. When i said what i said, it was in relation to the comments made in here, and not by self-critical Jews. It’s ironic that you would use those examples in this web site, as Saul of Tarsus, and certainly Karl Marx, would be the equivalent of the “As a jew” or “jews for Justice” of their time. They are extremely “self” critical, and people like you rightly criticize them for it. But for you to use their forebears as examples of how self-critical Jews are makes no sense. You might just as well have been pointing to Newman, Atzmon etc. as examples of self-critical Jews. But that wouldn’t suit very well would it?

The article you linked to cited Eichmann’s deputy:

as clear an example of someone using this argument to get off as one could possibly imagine) and goes on to try and build this case.

Ah, so Eichmann’s deputy is one of the posters here? I suggest you remonstrate with Eichmann’s deputy for making such a scurrilous remark based on personal insight and experience of Hitler’s guest for three years.

Again, none of this has the slightest thing to do with the Nazi Holocaust or its lessons, and if this is the standard of discussion of the conflict in the middle east, its perhaps just best to keep the Nazi Holocaust out of it. Its disgraceful.

We can’t because some of the Arabs, Palestinians and Muslims were active participants in The Holocaust. Yet, THEY claim that Israel was created BECAUSE of The Holocaust and they had nothing to do with it. They did!

So, its relevant to record their self-infliction by taking an active part in The Holocaust and encouraging/supporting it.

Don’t you agree?

non-JohnGs,

We really should ignore JohnG’s mutterings, because that’s all they are.

No matter what you write NOTHING gets thru to him.

JohnG will make false statements (“The Mufti was in allied hands after the second world war and then released. “ or “I was disagreeing with an article claiming that the Grand Mufti was the instigator of the Nazi Holocaust in Europe”)

And when you correct him, he’ll neither acknowledge or accept it, as he doesn’t read the words of others with any care.

JohnG is not interested in history or a dialogue on these topics. He’s just pushing SWP propaganda in a clumsy fashion, monologue style.

Ignore him. He’s worse than a troll.

To recap:-

Some Arabs, Muslims and Palestinians were full partners of Hitler in The Holocaust. Willing and enthusiastic conscripts to the cause doing what they could to ensure the slaughter of Jews. Al-Husseini a right-hand man of Hitler, a guest of his for three years because he could command and direct the efforts of Arabs in helping to fight the Allies. Al-Husseini stayed close to Hitler so as to solicit help in constructing death camps for Jews in Palestine and across the Arab countries. He proved his credentials by broadcasts to Arab countries urging them to kill Jews and so making sure he presented himself as aligned to the Nazi principles.

johng, any inaccuracies there?

LOL!!!

Some commenters here have implied (or said) that the Polish aggression against the Jews (or their inaction) was a response to the Nazis; that they were in fear of the Nazis, etc., and no doubt some of that is true. HOWEVER, the record of Bulgaria’s actions toward the Jews during the war demonstrates that you cannot shift all the blame onto the Nazis. Bulgaria was a Nazi ally during the war; about 50000 of its citizens were Jews. When the Germans informed the Bulgarians that by May 1943 all Jews were to be deported, the government, including much of the Parliament, the King and the Orthodox Patriarch all opposed the Nazis. The result was that no Bulgarian Jews were deported or killed.

One thinks that during the time they were in power, the Nazis were unopposable, but that was not the case. Nor were they consistent in their policies. Look at Klemperer (Thou Shalt Bear Witness), a German Jew who lived publicly and visibly in Dresden throughout the entire Nazi period. This diaries were published a few years ago. The Danes also opposed the Nazis and, I believe, did not suffer.

The Nazis, bad as they were, also unleashed local forces, tapping into long standing anti-Semitism in Poland (and in France). I don’t believe the Nazis forced the Poles into greater spasms of anti-Semitism against their will; the record of the Bulgarians shows that you didn’t have to go along with them.

Many European countries came under the invasion sphere of Nazi Germany and were conscripted/co-opted to support Nazi hatred of Jews. In some cases they came under Nazi rule/control.

Al-Husseini, on behalf of the Arabs volunteered!

Big difference johng (who’s probably had enough!)

Frankly, vilde sounds like the typical anti-Semitic Arab.

JohnG

This article includes an estmate of two million Arab collaborators in the Holocaust:
http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/focus/antisemitism/voices/pdf/20061123/english_chapter_4.pdf

Poland has been a bit more honest than JohnG and the Arab world. Its IPN (National Historical Institute) announced it has begun earnest research into two dozen instances of Polish villages murdering their own Jewish residents, beginning with Jedwabne.

vildechaye: the problem is that attacks on Jews by Arabs go back to the beginning of Islam. The only difference between now and the past is that the Jews fight back and are, militarily at least, the top dog in the area (economically as well), ruining 1400 years of assumptions by Muslims of the natural order of things.

Judy I’m not arguing with you on the facts; as I said in a previous posting in this thread, i agree with most of your facts, they are historically well grounded. I do think, however, that you expect too much from the Palestinians if you fault them for not accepting Jewish refugees like Cuba and Shanghai did. I also think it’s a bit naive and paternalistic to expect the natives to welcome the arrivals benevolently. After all, north america is much bigger than Israel, there was plenty of room for both aboriginal people and Europeans, and look what happened there. What you’re saying may make sense when written in words, but it flies against human nature. I blame the Palestinians for many things then and now, but not for not throwing a welcome mat out for Jewish refugees during 1939-1945. We’ll have to agree to disagree.

Philo-Semite: I don’t take kindly to being called an anti-semite by a semi-literate moron who doesn’t take the time to actually read my posts. I might just as easily call you an anti-semite, but since i have no way of knowing one way or the other, I’ll just call you a fucked up, ignorant pratt — I have plenty of evidence for that already.

Mention should be made that the Husseinis’ worst crime against humanity was their violent suppression of more moderate Palestinian rivals (such as the educated Nuseeibeh family) who might, given the chance, have been far more disposed to peaceful co-existence with the Jews.

Regarding Poland: Its President made formal apology to the Jews for Jedwabne. It is quite possible, as Poland matures into an open, modern society, that it will – like the USA and New Zealand and other countries – come to recognise and feel remorse for its past mis-treatment of minorities.

Reluctant as I am to come to JohnG’s help (and my reluctance stems from my doubt whether he is equally vocal and explicit in his condemnation of the nasty “Zionism = Nazism” equation or in his most welcome view of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict as a national one among his SWP colleagues), I will.

The Mufti was as nasty a piece of work as they come and in the Arab world there were others equally bad – Rashid Ali al Qiliani comes to mind. His nationalism was suffused by wretched, crude anti-Semitism and yes, this has contaminated much of the Palestinian body politic to this very day. But the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is (and always was) a national one, a fight between two national groups over the same piece of land. There are those trying to attach to it different, false tags. JohnG’s colleagues claim that it is an anti-imperialist fight, between Jewish usurping colonialists and Palestinian freedom fighters. Other “supporters” of Palestinians claim that the latter are being made to pay the price for the Holocaust (or, alternatively, that the Holocaust never happened – or, in the case of Ahmedinajad, both) and that the West somehow “placed” the Jews in Palestine as an atonement for Auschwitz. Yet others claim that this is an outcome of some sort of primordial, unreasoned hate, whether of Jews or of Islam. Yet others have their god whispering in their ear, whether in Arabic or Hebrew or Urdu or English in a Texan twang, that the land belongs divenely to this or that group of people.

All this is complete rubbish. This is a fight between two nations, with their own aspirations, dreams, nightmares, narratives and capability for good and evil. And, as usual, when you have this sort of fight, there is more evil and less good, what do you, for goodness sake, expect?

In a grown-up world I would expected everybody concerned with this (or any other conflict) to condemn others less and look critically at themselves more. But this is not a grown-up world.

Bulgaria Vs. Poland is like apples and oranges. Bulgaria was an ally of Germany and had its own govt. (which bravely stood up to the Nazis and saved Jews). Poland, on the other hand was a conquered country, with a “gouvernement general” run by a german. If poles “stood up” to the Nazis, they were killed, end of story.

So, apples to blueberries.

The result was that no Bulgarian Jews were deported or killed.

This is not exactly true. Bulgaria rushed to send 14,000 Jews from Macedonia/Thrace to the gas.

Vilde: You made a generic claim that Jews are insufficiently self-critical. It is not only obsviously false but is bigoted and encourages bigotry. QED

First of all Jewish immigration to Palestine did not require either a welcoming mat or veto from “Palestinians”. (I guess you mean the Arab ones.) It was none of their business. Palestine was The Jewish National home and Jews had every right to be there.

Second, the conflict is NOT about two competing nationalist ideals but one of traditional Muslim hatred of Jews deriving from Mohammed’s time. Yes, it is a one-sided hatred.

The Arab National Homes were created in The Lebanon, Syria and Jordan with no rights for Jews. The Jewish National Home was created in Palestine with rights for Jews and Arabs – but with the intention that the Jews established the elements needed to run Palestine as if it were a nascent state.

If poles “stood up” to the Nazis, they were killed, end of story.

That’s too general a statement. There was quite a bit of random-ness in the German reaction. However, it is true that protecting Jews was more risky for Poles than for many other countries. If that’s your point, I agree.

Bulgaria was an ally of Germany and had its own govt. (which bravely stood up to the Nazis and saved Jews).

It’s not so quite simple. Bulgaria was indeed an ally (and thus as you imply did generally have more freedom of action than the Poles) – but Bulgaria still sent thousands of Jews to the gas from the Greek territories it administered as part of “greater Bulgaria.”

Think of England — The difference between Bulgaria and Poland is that, as you point out, Bulgaria was a Nazi ally. There was an existing government that was in a position to take a stand and had some bargaining power (the same thing applied in Hungary until Horthy was deposed and the vile Arrow Cross came to power). Bulgaria also had a much, much smaller jewish population than nations to the north and was not slated as an area for German settlement. Eliminating the Polish jewish population was a core goal of the Nazi plan for Europe after the Wannsee conference.

From the start, the Germans planned to isolate Polish jews and turn the rest of the Polish workers into an uneducated class of slave laborers. The Germans directly governed Poland and deliberately set out to eliminate any and all potential Polish leaders (thus the purge of Polish universities). There was no Polish government that could take a stand like that taken by the Bulgarian government, and any organized attempt to non-violently resist Nazi policies would have immediately led to mass executions (the Danes could get away with this since Nazi racial theories placed them far above slavic untermenschen). The situations are not comparable at all.

The only group that conceivably could have done something on a broad scale was the Polish resistance movement. While they did make some efforts to help, with the benefit of hindsight and free of the terror of the Gestapo it can be argued that they could/should have done much more. This is an understandable position to take. But it should be put in context — Armia Krajowa viewed itself as an army waging an existential struggle for the survival of the Polish nation, and prioritized its efforts towards hurting the Nazi war effort as whole and preparing for open guerrilla warfare. Given what we know know, its seems selfish for the AK not to have, for example, given weapons and open support to the Warsaw ghetto uprising. But at the time, they were husbanding their weapons and manpower for their own military action, which was not ready. Of course, events would prove that their weapons were still not sufficient when it was eventually launched in August 1944, more than a year and half after the ghetto uprising.

No serious person would deny the reality of Polish anti-semitism then and (sadly) now. Polish anti-semitism exacerbated the magnitude of the Holocaust, just as anti-semitism in many European countries did. This should not be forgotten and Poland (among others) needs to come to terms with it.

That being said, it seems bizarre to single out Poland and the Poles of all the nations in Europe when they were the first to fight the Nazis, were placed under an occupation much harsher than that experienced in Western Europe and continued to fight in exile and underground to the last. Poland shares a shameful history of anti-semitism with many nations in Eastern Europe. It shares its history of active, effective and continuous non-communist struggle against Nazism with only, perhaps, the Czechs amongst these nations.

“The Nazis, bad as they were, also unleashed local forces, tapping into long standing anti-Semitism in Poland (and in France). ”

The irony in France is that the French form of anti-semitism saved French Jews but not non-French born Jews living in France. In other words, the French administration (or what was left of it) had the right to do with its Jews as it wanted. The foreign born ones (like my relatives) were shipped out (76,000). The French born ones were discriminated against and persecuted but most survived -somewhere in the region of 200,000. And some of that, particularly in areas where the Resistance was strong, was down to locals protecting them, giving them alternative identities (as with my long distant ex-girlfriend’s father).

Frankly, vilde sounds like the typical anti-Semitic Arab.

-Philo-Semite, to vildechaye

In the heavily contested field of the most spectacularly stupid and nasty statements ever on HP, this one is a contender.

What girondistnyc said…

Too much of this discussion, perhaps understandably, consists of people offloading their strong emotions (and everybody with a bit of humanity should have strong emotions on this issue) and often prejudices. But life is more nuanced than this, doesn’t fit easily into preconceived moulds and, in last analysis, history should be based on facts, not on emotions.

The more we learn about the Holocaust, the more we understand the horror and the evil unleashed across Europe, and the more we understand how the reaction of ordinary people – from the “ordinary killers” (in Browning’s words) of the Order Police battalions to the ordinary people who have risked their lives to save Jews – determined the outcome. The picture is mixed, everywhere. But what is clear, for goodness sake, is who were the perpetrators and who unleashed this horror. And, with the many ghosts in their history’s cupboard, these were not the Poles. These were the Germans.

girondistnyc: Thanks for those points. They make sense (about Bulgaria vs Poland). I agree, singling out Poland makes little sense; there were so many bad actors with more than enough blame to go around.

SOM true – other than that it wasn’t simply ‘the Germans’. It was some/many/most but not all Germans.

Thanks for the support, habibi. Much love.

Echoing Muffin’s latter point, What We Knew by Johnson and Reuband is rather revealing on how much people knew, in Germany, of the disappearance/slaughter of Jews in and across Europe.

see also Engelmann; And Peukert too. I made a radio programme in Cologne about boys (blokes in their seventies when I interviewed them) who had run-in fights with the Hitler Youth. Several of their friends were hanged in public.

Michael, two points…

Firstly yes, not all the Germans. But it behoves us to remember that (unlike in Stalin’s Soviet Union) nobody in Hitler’s Germany (at least until the Atentat) was forced to murder. Browning documents in detail how soldiers and officers refused to take part in the shooting of Jews – and were transferred to other units. No punishment, no damage to promotion… All murder in Hitler’s Germany, except from July 1944, was purely by choice.

Secondly, by these “boys” you probably mean the Kampfbund. They indeed had run-in fights with the Hitler Jugend and with the SA. One of their leaders, one Simon Koch, managed to flee in 1933 to Palestine. He is known to older among our Israeli readers as Shimon Avidan, the commander of Givati Brigade and of the Southern Front in Israeli War of Independence.

Funny thing, history…

Fair play to vildechaye, he ain’t no antisemite, quite the opposite,

No, I meant the Edelweisspiraten.

Do forgive me, but have you ever heard of Dr. Hans-Wilhelm Münch ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_M%C3%BCnch

This is not exactly true. Bulgaria rushed to send 14,000 Jews from Macedonia/Thrace to the gas.

Inaccurate, as usual. According to Sir Martin Gilbert, a total of 7,248 were seized in Bulgarian-occupied Macedonia and in 3,997 in Bulgarian-occupied Thrace, all hunted down on 4 March 1943 by the Germans. This makes a total of 11,241.

To be fair, in the Albanian Muslim thread he has posted this link to his story from here written by a certain Carl Savich.
In the heavily contested field of the most spectacularly stupid and nasty statements ever on HP, this one is a contender.

You should see some of the ones he’s posted on the Albanian Muslim thread

So Cookie cutter the argument is now that Hussayni volunteered “on behalf of the Arab world” and this makes the (much, much more minimal) collaberation that did take place (in the Arab world? Palestinians), WORSE then that which took place in Europe (including the Vichey regime?). Ignored in all this is the simple fact that the entire Arab world was at the time either directly or indirectly under the rule of either the allies or the axis, and had been for a considerable period of historical time. The attempt to argue that Arabs were somehow worse collaberators with fascism then Europeans, is so clearly simply a bizarre attempt to link present struggles with Palestinian national aspirations to the Nazies that it hardly bears thinking about. Incidently, in terms of modernities jibe, its worth citing that whilst its true that the Mufti escaped from the allies, they refused to indict him as a war criminal. Whether this was tactical or not in relationship to the Arab world, the attempt to concoct some kind of fantasy that Arabs were more Nazi then Europeans is not only historically absurd, it is clearly ideologically bending history to the current needs (as percieved by wingbats) of the struggle against the Palestinians. It is therefore, as I pointed out, absolutely disgraceful. In particular what is disturbing is the cavelier way in which actual historical detail is blurred (for example the frequently cited and utterly false claim that the Mufti ‘founded the SS regiment’ or that there is available evidence demonstrating that they took part in the Holocaust etc) almost as if these details don’t matter. These details should be sacred, and not simply disapear in a mad internet free for all concocted by a wierd mixture of far right Zionist and Serbian websites, lathered over with claims about the roots of the conflict lying in Islamic anti-semitism for through the ages. Does no-one see the irony of this in a discussion of the Nazi Holocaust?

And the idea that Eichmann’s subordinates testimony was based on his ‘personal experiance’ with Hitler (so you are suggesting that it is true? You are suggesting that the grand mufti of jerusalem was the instigator of the the extermination of European Jews? Have you any idea how mad this is?)…give me a bloody break.

Interesting piece, Fiyaz. Thanks.

Don’t really see why there is quite the level of inquisition towards Fiyz on the thread that there is, but hey.

Also don’t see why a few people are talking about cliched PC garbage in quite such an aggressive manner. It is an historical fact that – though Jews constituted the vast bulk of those murdered during the Holocaust – Gypsies, homosexuals and Leftists and Liberals were also systematically murdered.

Collective responsibility is an interesting one. Certainly, anyone who was alive at the time and who didn’t resist the industrial murder of Jews could be said to be in some way partly responsible. (And that’s most people, of course. Unsurprisingly.)

Today is a more interesting question. Can you in any way meaningfully talk about responsibility passing to a nation or a body politic whose members are not the same as those who committed such horrendous crimes? I’m not sure. My natural inclination would be to oppose the idea of historical guilt, but then, were I to be German, I am fairly sure I would not be capable of a sense of patriotism. (Which is to ignore Poland entirely, of course.)

Posting links to sites that come out with falsehoods of the kind which suggest that the grand mufti was the initiator of the Holocaust (indeed a claim which is pretty close to the kind of mad nonsense associated with Holocaust Denial) is simply an indication of the kind of manic ideological propaganda which is an insult to anyone serious about commemorating the Holocaust…

Well it’s part of an important question, the nature of Arab attitudes toward Jews, using history as evidence.. And in the case of the Mufti of Jerusalem, it’s part of a more specific and still very relevant question, the nature of the Palestinian’s elite political classes ideology, and intentions concerning Jews and therfore concerning Israel.

Unfortunately as outlandish as the attitudes portrayed are, there is so much evidence of extreme, even genocidal attitudes toward Jews around the middle east that these claims are not, as you claim “mad nonsense.” It does not make one mad to record a history of madness. I could call your attitude “antisemitism denial” and “antisemitism revisionism”

I would say that the difference between German antisemitism and Arab/Islamic antisemitism is that the German antisemitism was more sugar coated and therefore more effective.

When Arabs such as Yemenis called for the extermination of the Jews, they did so openly, loudly and honestly, a fact that gave the Jews warning and the ability to escape.

I have read calls for genocide in modern Arab newspapers, so I find the claims that these calls also existed in the 30’s, more open in the Arab world than in Germany credible, because that is still the case now.

In the heavily contested field of the most spectacularly stupid and nasty statements ever on HP, this one is a contender.

I’ve yet to see many statements on HP which aren’t “spectacularly stupid [or] nasty” including your own.

Frankly, vilde sounds like the typical anti-Semitic Arab.
As out of character as it is for him, I agree, for instance:

Don’t get me wrong, i’m not defending Arab excesses like Hebron and the riots etc., but this clearly is not anti-semitism like that in Europe.

Who knew that some ethnic hatred, some attempts at ethnic cleansing the completely innocent were “understandable” and “not anti-semitism like that in Europe”?

I suppose that to vildechaye, recent pogroms of Christians in Nigeria, where whole neighborhoods were leveled (and of course people killed and driven out) on the most laughable of premises* is something he would find “understandable” …

In my mind the difference between the German instance is not the nature of mass hatred or of genocidal intent, but merely of industrial organization, and institutional effectiveness. All over the world people dream of exterminating their neighbors, the only difference is that the Germans made a modern rational study of how to be effective at it.

*[this last one was somehow based on rumored Christian involvement an innocent cartoon in Bangladesh that was of course drawn by a Muslim].

Pace Hasan Irving, the numbers given for deported Macedonian and Thracian Jews vary from 7.000 to 14.000. What does not vary, however, are the accounts of collaboration of Albanians in campaigns of deportation and extermination.

Viz.:

http://www.maknews.com/html/articles/savich/savich4.html
Over 7,000 Macedonians Jews were killed during the Holocaust in Macedonia, 1941-1944, rounded up and deported by German, Bulgarian, and Albanian forces.

During the Italian occupation, the Albanian nationalist Balli Kombetar (BK, National Union) was formed, a militant and radical Greater Albania movement based in the Greater Albania ideology established with the 1878 Albanian League of Prizren, that sought the extermination and deportation of the non-Albanian populations of Kosovo-Metohija, Western Macedonia, Montenegro, Southern Serbia, and Chameria in Greece. The Serbian Orthodox, Macedonian Orthodox, Roma, and Jewish populations were the targets for elimination/deportation of the Greater Albania ideology/movement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Bulgaria
Approximately 14,000, including nearly all the Jews of Bulgarian-occupied Macedonia and Thrace, were arrested by Bulgarian authorities and deported through Bulgaria, transferred to German control and then shipped to Treblinka for extermination.

Say, Vildechaye (whose unbelievably generic claim that Jews aren’t sufficiently self-critical shows s/he’s rarely read Haaretz or the Nation) and Hasan Irving (whose denial of Albanian collaboration in both Kosovo and Macedonia also beggars belief) ought to get together.

Together, you two might publish an article claiming that the 590+ Kosovar Jews Albania sent to their deaths, deserved it because they were not sufficiently self-critical. Perhaps you can even have the article recommended by Ovadia Yosef and NK’s Ahron Cohen, who also believe Jews deserved to die because they were not sufficiently self-critical. Together, all four of you would have a grand old time together.

Philo-Semite,

Have you ever read any Lenny Bruce?

Such as ‘How to make friends and influence people’?

Is there some reason that you are deliberately going out of your way to antagonise otherwise good and decent people?

Frankly I don’t understand you, it is utterly counterproductive as none of the people you attacked are either Holocaust deniers or antisemites.

We are all liable to have some disagreements but it would serve you better, if you read people’s posts a bit more charitably, restrained your aggression and didn’t have such an attitude.

Both hasan prishtina and vildechaye are good people and do not deserve your unwarranted animosity.

Modernity, I think Philo-Semite stopped at Toby Young.

i’m not defending Arab excesses like Hebron and the riots etc., but this clearly is not anti-semitism like that in Europe.

Indeed not. In Hebron, the Arab rioters gouged Jews’ eyes out:
http://jewishrefugees.blogspot.com/2009/08/lessons-of-hebron-massacre-for.html

Modernity

Both hasan prishtina and vildechaye are good people

Not by the guide of their postings here.

Hasan Prishtina sounds like a run-of-the-mill Holocaust revisionist, whitewashing his country’s history of fascism and collaboration. If every country claiming “we protected our Jews” had really done so, then how did the Shoah occur?

Vildechaye sounds like a bit of an anti-Semite, denying (as Josh Scholar pointed out) the severity of Arab anti-Semitism and blaming the Jews for being insufficiently self-critical. Vildechaye seems never to have heard of the prophets or of Saul of Tarsus or of Jesus or of Marx. Or, if you prefer modern secularists, read Haaretz or the Nation. If anything, one could argue the Jews are too self-criticial for their own good.

In any case, Vildechaye’s stereotyping of the Jews is revolting.

Modernity, you ought to check out Ivan’s comment on the Albanian thread. Apparently, Hasan has been playing fast and loose with the truth here for a long time.

I think people are being fooled by surface appearances.

To make it clear, in my mind there is no essential difference between what the Germans attempted and what the Hutus attempted.

A child killed in a gas chamber is equal to a child killed with a machete.

Similarly a government authority who organizes a genocide with modern organization and tools is not different from a Religious authority who organizes a genocide or ethnic cleansing using traditional institutions.

People like vildechaye are missing the fact that our system of labeling the world is arbitrary, and that it’s useful to look beneath the labels to see if the dynamics of the situation are equivalent.

So Cookie cutter the argument is now that Hussayni volunteered “on behalf of the Arab world” and this makes the (much, much more minimal) collaberation that did take place (in the Arab world? Palestinians), WORSE then that which took place in Europe (including the Vichey regime?).

Oh Yes, MUCH worse than invaded countries who had little choice – except for resistance.

Yes, Al-Husseini, on behalf of the Araba World VOLUNTEERED to become a player in The Holocaust. He was under no Nazi pressure to do so.

And the idea that Eichmann’s subordinates testimony was based on his ‘personal experiance’ with Hitler (so you are suggesting that it is true? You are suggesting that the grand mufti of jerusalem was the instigator of the the extermination of European Jews? Have you any idea how mad this is?)…give me a bloody break

I suggest that you need cognitive psychotherapy help. You are projecting your own beliefs into an argument and then arguing your own denial. You have a cognitive dissonance where you hallucinate things that haven’t been written and project into absurdities just so you can keep finding a reason to make posts.

“Instigator” means someone who starts something. In a sense he was an ‘instigator’ in the idea that Jews had to be killed, even before Hitler, but by the time he started his love affair with Hitler the plans for The Holocaust were already set. So, he wasn’t an instigator of The Holocaust, just one of its biggest supporters and someone who would have done it in Palestine first.

Nowehere did anyone write that Al Husseini was an “instigator” of The Holocaust.

Judy

“However, there are many, many historically reliable accounts that show that the number of Poles who took an active part in the roundups and the persecutions”

In principle, the modern Polish IPN (National Historical Institute) is doing conscientious research into such occurrences in two dozen towns.

SOM

“In a large measure Jews … were excluded from Polish life, education, political and economic system”

As just one example, by law Jews and Ukrainians had to sit at the back of uni classrooms.

Nowehere did anyone write that Al Husseini was an “instigator” of The Holocaust.

I have read that he suggested the final solution to the Fuhrer. If it is true that Arab media was as full of calls to exterminate the Jews then as it is now, that claim is unfortunately, not insane.

I first went back to Germany in 1968 as a girl of sixteen. I say “went back” but it was my first time really in Germany; I grew up among German Jewish refugees, and Germany, when I arrived, seemed entirely familiar. The people looked like my family and friends, they sounded like them, the food we ate was the same as at home, etc. It was very odd. I felt at home, and yet, I felt vaguely uneasy a lot of the time.

I was recently in Germany with my husband and children. This time was much better – forty years later most of the old people, the ones who were alive and old enough to be active in the war, were gone. I don’t blame anyone for the Shoah who didn’t help carry it out, and these days that is the vast majority of Germans.

Demjanjuk, however, I would be glad to see boiled alive in oil.

CookieCutter’s comments are accurate.

Nowehere did anyone write that Al Husseini was an “instigator” of The Holocaust.

He did help plan the Einsatzgruppe Agypten which was to implement genocide in the Mideast.

He also, incidentally, played a major role in the pro-Nazi, anti-British Iraqi coup and the farhud which followed.

Heard the most amazing latest Russian account of the history of the start of WWII on BBCR4 Today programme at 7:50 this morning, matches the old days of Soviet-fabricated anti-zionist fantasies of Nazi-zionist collaboration which was then taken up and recycled by the PLO and their cheerleaders John Games’ beloved SWP via Lennie Brenner.

This morning’s Putinesque version included:

The Munich pact was a UK-Nazi conspiracy (details not supplied)
Poland invaded Czechoslovakia.

More here.

Money quote:

“Earlier this year, the Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev, set up a body with the Orwellian title of the Commission to Prevent the Falsification of History to the Detriment of Russia’s Interests, which could lead to prosecutions of people who seek to “rewrite history”

and even more mind-boggling:

As the war anniversary has approached, Moscow has ratcheted up the rhetoric. On Sunday, President Medvedev said in a television interview that it was a “complete lie” to say that Stalin bore any responsibility for the war. Natalia Narochnitskaya, a Kremlin-friendly historian and member of the new commission, accused Poland of trying to paint itself as an “innocent victim”. Actually, she claimed, for a full six months before the outbreak of war Poland was negotiating with Adolf Hitler to invade the Soviet Union. In Warsaw, such claims are denounced as outrageous lies.

This is all the inheritance of the commitment to “committed” history “aligned with liberation struggles” which has produced the grotesque versions of events that John Game, SMfS and others repeatedly try to offer as historical reality. This is the equivalent of the Israel=Nazi equivalences and the “stolen land/genocide/dispossession of the Palestinians” myths. The same grotesque inversions, in the name of covering up the so-called victims’ roles as perpetrators.

This is the sort of approach to history that gives Ilan Pappe an honoured place as an historian and a Chair at Exeter University.

In one way,I’m rather glad that Putin’s chosen to do it. It makes it much clearer what relationship marxist histories bear to reality, and what methods they use.

Footnote.
While googling about history I found out, if the information is accurate – it seems highly likely – that Hitler intended to exterminate the entire Polish population. He said he had too much on his hands at the time, and that the extermination of Poles would take 20 or so years.They were a subhuman species. I think the Poles of today should remember this fact.

Poland was more culturally alive than Germany and Austria. Mozart and Schumann, during their lifetimes, were more appreciated in Poland than in their own countries. Robert and Clara Schumann gave concerts in Vienna which were a complete flop. They then proceeded to Prague where they were enthusiastucally celebrated.

Yes, in the decades after the World War II, one did ask oneself what the parents of young Germans had done. I can’t even begin to imagine how I would have felt and reacted, had my parents been active Nazis. I knew a young German at university – David T knew him later too – who was not in the slightest anti-semitic, but refused to admit that his parents had been wrong in supporting Hitler.

I suppose it’s not only in Germany that people can be turned into mobs. The English, were exceptional in that they would have found Hitler’s screaming comical. But the Yvonne Ridley and Respect cohorts are beginning to make me wonder. She screams like Hitler.

I believe Hitler never went to Schleswig Holstein in the very North of Germany where my partly Jewish father came from and where the Angles came from. When I last went there the people actually reminded me of the English. My father told me that when Hitler’s voice was on the radio in beer cellars the students used to shout, “Waiter, Senft!” Senft being mustard and also signifying ‘rubbish.’

Israelinurse, I agree with you, but is it not possible for benevolent religions to actually have a good influence? I read an interview with the Jewish philosopher, Max Horkheimer, that the Catholics in Germany, thanks to their faith, did more than any other group to help Jews – and this was true in Italy. (I am certainly not a fan of the Vatican). But you are right in saying it should be a matter of individual consciences.

Fiyaz may have got some of his facts wrong, but his article shows that he has his heart and intelligence in the right place. But do friendly Muslims have to be battered every time they show their faces on HP? their faults dug out at all costs with unholy satisfaction? Bless his words!

Josh, this is complete nonsense.

In his trial in Jerusalem, Adolph Eichmann told how he visited (befitting the top Nazi “expert” on Jewish affairs) Palestine in 1930ties. He disembarked in Haifa and, in his words that stuck in my mind, “took a Jewish cabbie, because he couldn’t bear taking an Arab one”. Now, setting aside the idiotic attempt of Eichmann to ingratiate himself with the judges (idiotic, because, unlike some of the more moronic commentators here, the judges were intelligent enough not to equate hatred of Arabs with love of Jews). But this is a window into the Nazi mind.

The Nazis ordered humanity according to race. The Aryans were at the top, Jews at the bottom. Gypsies and Slaves not much higher above Jews – but at the same place there were Blacks, Indians, Arabs… Anybody with a swarthy skin was automatically an inferior, a sub-human. (Nazis have had genuine difficulty of accepting Japanese as allies – they endured, rather than accepted them.) The idea of Hitler actually getting the idea of the Holocaust, a central organising principle of his regime, from a conversation with the Mufti, is simply bizarre.

All this is completely ahistorical, á la Stalinist history: instead of joining the dots over known facts, you are trying to shoehorn them selectively to serve a contemporary political point. The crazy political point being that, like the Nazis, Arab hatred of Jews is unconditional, unrelated to events in the real world and unquenchable, hence one cannot ever compromise with them, hence eternal war and conquest.

Your and Philo-Semite, cookiecutter etc. essentialist concept of Arabs is eerily similar to the anti-Semite’s essentialist concept of Jews. And both are wrong.

Judy, part of the problem of understanding the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact (Hitler-Stalin; Russo-Nazi etc) is that some of it involves the perceptions of others. Kershaw for one gives this weight by saying that the motives from the Russian side for the pact was how they perceived the Munich agreement ie the Russians saw that as a means by which Britain could nudge Germany into a war in the East and hope that the two threats to its Empire would battle themselves to exhaustion etc etc. Stalin, it seems, genuinely thought that he had bought off Hitler (promise of raw materials, spheres of influence etc) so that Russia wouldn’t be invaded. (why else wouldn’t he have rearmed like crazy in the time before the actual invasion?). Whether this was actually in the minds of Chamberlain et al is up for debate, but it seems pretty clear that that was what Stalin thought was going on and so a non-aggression pact made sense to him at that very moment.

All this is completely ahistorical, á la Stalinist history: instead of joining the dots over known facts, you are trying to shoehorn them selectively to serve a contemporary political point. The crazy political point being that, like the Nazis, Arab hatred of Jews is unconditional, unrelated to events in the real world and unquenchable, hence one cannot ever compromise with them, hence eternal war and conquest.

Your and Philo-Semite, cookiecutter etc. essentialist concept of Arabs is eerily similar to the anti-Semite’s essentialist concept of Jews. And both are wrong.

Take your meds.

I repeated a claim I read once and pointing out that it is not inconsistent with Arab society. A admit I’m not an expert on Husseini and would never want to be, though I’m sure he was a very odious figure.

You can scream and knash your teeth all you want, but that none of that changes history. Essenssializing my ass! Mr “Muffin”, you’re as hysterical and intellectually dishonest now as you were last time I decided it was better to ignore you.

Also, your endless (and bizarre) dissertation on why you don’t believe a Nazi would listen to an Arab is logically irrelevant to the question of the truth of reports I’ve read that calls for exterminating the Jews were popular in the middle east back then. If that opinion, and yes I realize that I don’t have sources for the horrible things I read about the middle east, if that opinion about the past is correct, then the claim is quite possible…

I consciously made the decision NOT to collect sources on the horrors I read about the middle east, NOT to write a book.. I find the middle east too depressing. It’s an important subject, but it’s as depressing as writing about the holocaust itself, because the nature of the societies it houses is clearly exactly what you are alway in a lather of extreme hysteria to deny. As some of my ex-Muslim acquaintances from the middle east are at pains to highlight, the middle east is a cesspool of ignorance, superstition, hatred and astonishingly malign intentions.

I know that changes in societies are possible. America abandon slavery, we abandon racism, we gave women the vote, the Berlin wall came down, the reign of the Nazis ended…

But those changes didn’t come about by pretending that crimes were not happening. We didn’t end the holocaust by making friends with Hitler and saying that his intentions weren’t so bad. We didn’t end slavery by saying that both sides had something to learn…

Muffin the feel good denial that you are always frantically hysterical to create is not what the world needs and could accomplish good even if you could impose it on every man in Israel.

I should proof read some day. I still haven’t

Anyway (facepalm) “gnash” is spelled with a ‘g’

and of course the last sentence should be “…and could accomplish nothing good…”

Felix (Italy) — twi things:

(i) You do realise that Prague is not in Poland, right?

(ii) What you write about Schleswig-Holstein sounds like you believe that this part of Germany may have been less favourable to Nazi-policies. Far from it: While there still were elections in Germany, the NSDAP consistenly did better – often much better – then in the rest of the “Reich”. E.g. in 1932 the got 51% in Schleswig-Holstein, as opposed to average of 37,4%. Other years are quite similar. Also, Hitler did in fact visit SH.

I should proof read some day.

You should seek professional treatment one day. Until then, I’ll allow you to stew in your brand of juvenile hysteria that you mistake for thought.

Muffin, do you deny that there are now and have for many years been innumerable calls for the extermination of the Jews in middle eastern societies? Do you deny that such discourse is uniquely socially acceptable in these societies and essentially socially unopposed?

*two*

If you search HP’s archives you can find many examples.. including one by a popular religious leader on Arab satellite tv.

But HP is not my source .. this stuff is as common as water.

johng, as always, as clutched to the straw man that the Mufti of Jerusalem put the Holocaust idea in the mind of Hitler to evade the more pertinent issue that there were concentration camps for Jews in North Africa, staffed by Arabs, and therefore, the Holocaust was not something that happened only “by Europeans” and “in European soil” as he says. Arabs were also responsible. Thus, their lament that “Arabs paid the price of what Europeans did to the Jews” is absolutely bollocks, not to mention an exercise in Holocaust denial.

*has clutched*

Michael, your interpretation of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact is wishful thinking.

Firstly, it is not a matter of “false perception” of a poor, confused Stalin. The Soviet Politburo was singularly well informed about Western intentions, not least by its (very successful) intelligence agents. Of course, Stalin was a delusional paranoid, but this is not an excuse.

Secondly, you seem to forget the nature of the Pact. Inasmuch as Munich was shameful surrender to tyranny, at least it didn’t make UK or France directly complicit in the invasion and dismemberment of a foreign, sovereign country. The MR Pact meant precisely that: a joint, coordinated invasion and division of Poland, like a fresh, steaming carcass, between two hungry wolves. The Soviet Union was as complicit as Germany in this particular act.

Thirdly, as long as the attentions of Hitler were drawn Westwards, Stalin was perfectly happy to collaborate with him: not just providing him with oil and goods but also instructing Western communists to collaborate with the Nazis (in France) or sabotage the war effort (in UK).

And let us not mention Katyn… Or handing over of the entire Politburo of German Communist Party to Hitler as a gesture of friendship.

It was convenient to everybody (poor Poles excluded) to gloss over all that after Barbarossa. And the heroic sacrifices of Soviet soldiers and people have helped to dull the sense of outrage. But these, Michael, are the facts. And on this very day, the anniversary of the joint Nazi–Soviet invasion of Poland, we should remember them.

‘I as a Muslim, will return to Poland again and continue to learn more about its rich history.’

If you go to the North-East of the country, Fiyaz, you’ll be able to see something of Poland’s Islamic heritage – namely that of its Tatar community. It’s very small in number now, due to emigration to the states, intermarriage, and the horrors of the 1940s (Nazi and Stalinist), but its legacy can still be seen:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohoniki

Oh, and John Game – you didn’t have what it took to get your PhD from SOAS, and you don’t have what it takes to debate here. So FOAD and stick to trolling with the rest of the swuppies. It’s all your fit for.

Just in response to John Game’s efforts to whitewash the Grand Mufti:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/hitlers-holocaust-plan-for-jews-in-palestine-stopped-by-desert-rats-474080.html

‘Klaus-Michael Mallmann of the University’s Ludwigsburg research team and his assistant Martin Cüppers said they had spent three years studying German wartime archives, including those at the foreign office in Berlin which had hitherto remained sealed.

“The Allied defeat of Rommel at the end of 1942 had prevented the extension of the Holocaust to Palestine,” they said. If Rommel had beaten the Allies in the desert and invaded Egypt, a push into Palestine would have followed and the [Einsatsgruppe] would have deployed there.

The researchers, whose findings appear in a new book entitled ‘Germans, Jews, Genocide: The Holocaust as history and the present’, said the Athens unit would follow the blueprint drawn by Nazi units that hunted for Jews in eastern Europe, massacring them on the spot or shipping them off to death camps. In Palestine, they say, it would have been more of the former than the latter due to the greater distances involved.

Mr Mallmann and Mr Cüppers said the Nazis had planned to exploit Arab friendship for their plans.

“The most important collaborator with the Nazis and an absolute Arab anti-Semite was Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem,” they say in the book. He was a prime example of how Arabs and Nazis became friends out of a hatred of Jews.

Al-Husseini had met Adolf Eichmann, Adolf Hitler’s chief architect of the Holocaust, several times to settle details of the slaughter. In the academic work they draw on documents from the Reich Main Security Office showing “Einsatzgruppe Egypt” was standing by in Athens and was ready to disembark for Palestine in the summer of 1942.’

Mallman and Cuppers published their findings in ‘Halbmond und Hakenkreuz: Das dritte Reich, die Araber und Palästina’ [Crescent moon and swastika: The Third Reich, the Arabs, and Palestine] (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 2006) – but then they’re proper scholars, John; which means that they do their research and put it into print. Maybe if you did the same you wouldn’t have fluffed your doctorate.

Philo-Semite,

I’ll say this once, don’t pick fights with HP regulars.

They are NOT antisemites or Holocaust deniers, whatever you say. You might be pissed off with the world and want to take it out on these people, DON’T.

I’m quite happy with SO Muffin’s response to the garbage I was actually responding to sack cloth and ashes. As to your twisted attempt to interpret this as an attempt to white wash the Grand Mufti when I was responding to wierd conspiracy theories which take out of context quotes from scholarly research on the Holocaust to devise essentialist accounts of Muslims, and even, on some occassions to argue that it was the grand mufti of Jerusalem who initiated the holocaust (there is the familiar nudge, nudge, wink, wink approach involved as one finds in all conspiracy theories) it can only be treated with contempt. The quote you refer to is repeated ad nauseam in the wacky world of blogdom, and all that it contains is the correct allegation that the Nazies had plans to exterminate Jews in the Middle East, (with further documents on those plans), and that they hoped for collaberation. Its also noted (in the quotes which I’m sure you just lifted off the net because they’re all the same) that the Grand Mufti was a prominant anti-semite who was a collaberator with the Nazies. This is also true. What possible bearing does this have on the subject under discussion?

ehem, concentration camps in Arab lands, johng?

Eichmann incidently claimed at his trial that he had only met the Grand Mufti once at a reception. His deputy testified differently, and also made the ridiculous allegation that the Grand Mufti was “the initiator” of the “extermination of european jewry”. The court in jerusalem stated that they could not determine the truth of the matter on the basis of these testimonies. How often the Grand Mufti (who spent most of his time desperate to have audiences with senior nazi’s, who were almost as desperate, most of the time, to avoid him, Hitler having refused to make any commitments to him) actually met with Eichmann and what they discussed is still not known or agreed.

If the book you refer to had any additional evidence on this question one could be sure that the relevent quotes would be all over the internet. They are not.

sorry Fabien you are speaking of vichey?

‘If the book you refer to had any additional evidence on this question one could be sure that the relevent quotes would be all over the internet.’

People like you should read books, John, not march with those who burn them.

I see no one who has refuted Mallman and Cupper’s research. So unless you’ve gone into the same archives as they have, and seen the same files as they’ve read, and have proved that they’ve been misinterpreted or misrepresented, you can STFU, you wannabe-but-neverwillbe-PhD.

Oh, and it’s spelt ‘Vichy’, btw. You could have checked the spelling in something we call a ‘dictionary’.

I see nothing in their research thats relevent to this discussion. Their wider theses on the relationship between anti-semitism in the middle east and Nazi propaganda is certainly contentious for many scholars (and is somewhat weakened by the fact that neither have Arabic and are therefore forced to rely on translated material and existing scholarship, although not of course therefore refuted), but I’m not questioning their account of Nazi plans for the Middle East or their survey of Nazi attitudes and beliefs about Arabs and their expectations of collaberation (what the book, is actually about, according to most of the reviews), although there are apparently differences amongst some about the significance of the document they examined. What was relevent about you raising the book again?

I think we have to make allowance for SWPers (JohnG) and their mates (Mike Rosen), theirs is a largely static and limited view of history, born of attending too many yearly Marxism xxxx events, shouting slogans and less time spent with decent scholarly texts.

The problem being, when they discuss real events and real people their own intellectually limited view of the world is exposed.

Take for example, the Hitler loving Mufti of Jerusalem, as contended here and elsewhere that (by JohnG)

“a minority of wingnuts on the thread trying to claim that the Arabs instigated the Nazi Holocaust”

http://www.davidosler.com/2009/08/the_class_nature_of_the_irania.html#

This is, of course, a false accusation and a complete misrepresentation of the arguments, even ones that I disagree with, as CookieCutter has replied:

“Absolutely NO-ONE has said that the antisemite Husseini was RESPONSIBLE for The Holocaust or that Arabs “instigated The Holocaust”.”

But that doesn’t stop JohnG from continuing down that same vein, all thru this thread.

I think the point to make is, that the Mufti’s precise role until 2006 was disputed, by the account at Nuremberg, his biographers and apologists.

However, *after* 2006 and the research carried out by Professor Mallman and Dr. Cuppers is suggesting something else.

Again, historical research is not static but moves on and informs us as scholars continue to do research, as they are doing with Haj Amin al-Husseini.

Professor Mallman’s and Dr. Cupper’s book will be released into English sometime in the future and we can then discuss the finer points of Haj Amin al-Husseini’s collaboration with the Nazis.

Second time for dim witted SWPers, there is still more research on the Mufti to be done, the case is not closed.

Third time, history not static, research goes on, German historian’s still looking at Haj Amin al-Husseini’s precise role.

No thats right modernity, historical research proceeds and we discover new things. However to appreciate such new things its probably neccessary to be capable of reasoned disagreement.

No thats right modernity, historical research proceeds and we discover new things. However to appreciate such new things its probably neccessary to be capable of reasoned disagreement.

“However to appreciate such new things its probably neccessary to be capable of reasoned disagreement.”

But JohnG, you are *not* capable of reasoned disagreement.

This thread is an example of your erratic mentality and inability to reason.

Had you been able to reason, then you *might* have acknowledged CookCooker’s reply:

“Absolutely NO-ONE has said that the antisemite Husseini was RESPONSIBLE for The Holocaust or that Arabs “instigated The Holocaust”.”

But you couldn’t even do that.

As Muffin remarked ages ago, you, JohnG, are beyond the pale of civilized discourse, you’d best pop back to Lenin’s Tomb, where your mental clumsiness is appreciated.

‘there is still more research on the Mufti to be done, the case is not closed.’

Indeed. That seems a point more applicable to JohnGs critics than to him. But why has no-one mentioned the 10,000 Palestinian Arabs who joined the British Army’s Palestine Regiment on the eve of Alamein, and were encouraged to do so by Rashid Bey Nashashibi, the Mufti’s chief opponent?

He and his followers were just as opposed to the Zionist project as the followers of the Mufti, but believed in co-operating with the British and were not opposed to Jewish immigration on principle, as long as it was not linked to the project of a Jewish state or ‘national home’.

On what basis is he taken to be less ‘typical’ of Palestinian opinion than the Mufti, who was appointed by the British and was never AFAIK elected by any Palestinians to anything?

And what on earth is Fabian getting at with his persistent point about camps in North Africa? As all North Africa at the time was occupied by Vichy France and Fascist Italy I fail to see how the local population were responsible. The fact that local Arabs were recruited as guards is hardly the basis for a racist verdict of collective responsibility.

Here again, while Arab collaborationists are taken as typical and establishing collective guilt, for some reason those who acted differently are ignored. For example the uleima of Algeria, who called on Algerian Muslims to reject Vichy’s antijewish laws, and the Sultan of Morocco who refused to sign the same Nuremberg-style laws when Vichy officials put them in front of him – the only time during the French protectorate in Morocco that a Sultan refused to promulgate any law put forward by his French ‘advisers’.

I believe the Dey of Tunis did the same.

But they don’t fit the required racist agenda so they get written out of history. As do the dockers of Rotterdam who staged a general strike against the deportation of the Jews, which was only broken when the SS went into the streets by the docks, dragged striking dockers out of their homes and shot them dead in front of their families.

There is something intensely distasteful about this obsession with ransacking the history of WW2 to quarry ammunition to throw at this or that nation or ethnic group as more or less ‘nazi’ or ‘antinazi’ than another.

In every nation occupied or affected by nazism, there was a minority of heroes and saints; another minority of outright bastards; and the great majority who kept their heads down and went with the tide, as most people do most of the time.

It really is disgusting to see the historical record of a war whose only justification at the end of the day was that it was the only way to stop a vile regime based on ‘racial’ stereotyping, now being cynically and selectively misused to provide new justifications of the same virus, even if in a less virulent form.

But the medics tell us that the apparently innocuous swine flu virus could still mutate into a new version of the epidemic of 1918…

m

Thank-You for correcting me about Prague (I knew it really, but my mind keeps playing this game with Prague) – I’m getting older. At least Chopin and Rosa Luxemburg came from Poland.

I wrote the bit about Schleswig Holstein on purpose, waiting to see if I’d be corrected, as I only heard that Hitler didn’t go there, by word of one mouth. Yes, come to think of it they must have been pretty bad there too. My uncle was beaten up there for having married a half Jew, my father’s sister (quarter Jew) Now I remember my father telling me how a Jewish shop owner burst into tears, as he (my father) was about the only customer in Bruemsbuettelkoog who dared to go into his shop. In Hamburg my half Jewish great-uncle, a lawyer, was allowed to remain for as long as he was useful as a street sweeper. He would have gone to the camps, if the war hadn’t ended.

So bad luck for SH. Wishful thinking on my part based on my father, aunts and uncles.

It really is disgusting to see the historical record of a war whose only justification at the end of the day was that it was the only way to stop a vile regime based on ‘racial’ stereotyping, now being cynically and selectively misused to provide new justifications of the same virus, even if in a less virulent form.

Absolutely right. It is disgusting. As it was disgusting when first Soviet Union, then assorted “supporters” of Palestinians, extreme-Left groupouscules and parties (SWP) coined the equation “Israel=Nazis” and used repeatedly and nastily the awfulness of the Holocaust as an argument to bait Jews and their national project.

Those like me who were disgusted then have the moral right to be disgusted now. Those who cheered on Holocaust-baiting have zero moral right even to squeak now that similar argument is used the other way around. You’ve have sown the evil weed, now you rip.

A small correction. The SWP never accepted or promulagated the argument Israel=Nazi.

Modernity commentators can think they’re doing one thing, but its rather undermined when they link to material which constructs arguments of that type. Its also quite clear that a number of commentators here do indeed believe that the Arabs were worse Nazis then Europeans and they have explicitly said so.

Worse then this, as stated, is the persistant repetition of things which are simply not true, with apparently little real concern about whether they are true or not, so long as they support the narrative that the roots of the Israel-Palestine conflict lie in atavistic Jew hatred rooted in Islam, rather then in a national question. None of this has the slightest thing to do with historical research, and has everything to do with, as Stephen Marks put it, a less virulent version of the very virus we are discussing. Which is not to make the equation Israel=Nazi, but just a very basic matter of recognising racism when you see it.

And incidently the equation of Palestinians with the Nazis in right wing nationalist circles in Israel is considerably older then the STW movement, and earlier, and moreover cannot be understood as a reaction to Soviet anti-semitism. It is unfortunate that this tradition makes it harder to stop people playing the ‘Nazi card’ in reaction.

Ah yes, the SWP are blameless ***

They are so blameless that for *four* years they allowed an anti-Jewish racist, Gilad Atzmon to spout his filth at their premier yearly event, Marxism xxxx.

The SWP even when to the extreme of issuing a statement denying that Atzmon was a racist.

I wonder how SWP historians (if they exist) will explain away Atzmon’s statements, which seek to blame Jews for wars and revolutions?

Astute readers will know that Atzmon has long since dispensed with the subterfuge of substituting “Zionist” when he really meant “Jew”.

Aztmon is now openly pushing anti-Jewish racism, yet you won’t hear a single word from the SWP and how he managed to fool them for FOUR years, yeah, 4 years, not 1 but 4 years.

So that tells you something of where the SWP are coming from.

——
*** sarcasm

The argument was always about whether Atzmon could be won away from these views, not whether anyone agreed with them. Those who argued he could’nt turned out right, those who argued he could, turned out wrong.

No, JohnG, actually it isn’t.

The narrative of “Arabs wish to annihilate us because they are in league with Hitler” or “… because it is in their nature” or “… because it is in Islam” is fairly new. All sides to Israeli political discourse, for years, have taken for granted that
1. Yes, the Arabs, collectively, wish to destroy the State of Israel, as part and parcel of fighting over the same piece of land; and
2. Yes, this process of destruction is to include, in Ahmad Shukeiri’s words, “throwing Jews into the sea”.
The difference between moderates and hawks was that the first believed that positions can shift and it is possible to reach compromise, the latter believed that this is impossible. But I simply cannot recall any serious and ubiquitous voices expressing the sort of opinions that we have heard on this thread.

These opinions are new. And, to my mind, a major motivation for this new frame of mind is the instinctive wish (with which I instinctively sympathise, although I reject it on intellectual and political grounds) to reply to Holocaust-baiting in the same coin.

The SWP never accepted or promulagated the argument Israel=Nazi.

One of the reasons for my enduring happiness is that I don’t read SWP tracts, so I’ll take your word for it. But some evidence of SWP and its spokespeople taking issue with, say, the comparison of Gaza with the Warsaw Ghetto or with the “Zionists=Nazis” equation will be most welcome.

And incidently the equation of Palestinians with the Nazis in right wing nationalist circles in Israel is considerably older then the STW

Some Palestinians are like Nazis because like the Nazis they are antisemitic and want to kill Jews. They are unlike Nazis in that they don’t speak German all that well.

Surely, the efficacy of my comparison is indisputable.

Note I didn’t say that Palestinians ARE Nazis. I said “like”.

I’m afraid it isn’t as new as that. Its been a long running theme in nationalist Israeli propaganda since the Israeli-Arab wars began, and Arendt for example, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, refers to the desire to turn Arabs into Germans in Israeli nationalist propaganda, which she believed polluted what she thought ought to be the more universal lessons of the conclusions of a trial like that. Of course her account can be disputed but its not a new argument. In my own memory I can recall to Begin referring to Arafat’s headquarters in Beirut as “Hitlers Bunker”, and of course the strand of politics he represented (now unfortunately in government again in Israel) had a very long history of making these equations (in reverse as well: the equation of Labour Zionists with Chamberlain or Hitler himself was a staple for the far right in Israel). The specifically Islamic twist to the argument is a response to the happy circumstance that since the destruction of secular nationalism, there is now an enemy straight out of central casting. In terms of SWP pamphlets you will not find Hitler-Nazi equations, but similarly its not the case that we believe that any reference to the far right in Israel and their politics is somehow illegitimate. There are fascists in Israel. There are also real dangers of fascism. This does not however make Israel a ‘Nazi’ state.

I am going to respond to “philo-semite’s” ridiculous and inaccurate precis of what I think once more and then leave him to stew in his bile:

1-I never said Jews aren’t self critical. I said there is such a tendency among some in the Jewish community (i said this in reaction to a comment from Judy but it applies ever so much more to individuals like “philo-semite”. And every nonsense comment he’s made since simply proves the point.

2-He continually refers to Karl Marx, Jesus and Saul of Tarsus as “self-critical” jews. Yes they certainly were, and if they were alive today, folks like you, who can’t take any criticism of things Jewish, would be calling them filthy anti-semites (as you call me, when I am critical of this or that Jewish person or behavior). So cut the crap, you can’t have it both ways. Yes some jews are extremely self critical, you fall into the opposite camp. I’m not sure which is worse.

3-(Also to Josh Scholar): I’m sorry you are unable to detect the difference between a land dispute (which ultimately is what the Israeli/Arab conflict is about) and the deliberate targeting of a longstanding population for extermination. I’m not excusing anything, certainly not Hebron, which was a massacre and a horrible crime. But its roots are in the dispute over land, and shouldn’t be equated with what the Nazis did or even to the longstanding and deeprooted anti-semitism in Eastern and other parts of Europe. And of course in a land dispute the hostilities work both ways: why mention Hebron but not Deir Yassin?
I’m afraid that if you don’t see the difference, we’ll just have to agree to disagree. And if you want to call me anti-semitic for noting the distinction, frankly you can get stuffed.

JohnG: Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem” can certainly be disputed. It is essentially a book populated by a large legion of her own ghosts and by an ability to look into this entire issue though the blinkers of her own convoluted and sometimes difficult past. One can feel sympathy, but one shouldn’t take her as an authority on this.

In terms of SWP pamphlets you will not find Hitler-Nazi equations

I’ll take your word for it. So, according to SWP, Hitler wasn’t Nazi. Mind boggles.

But I am still awaiting a reply to my request,

But some evidence of SWP and its spokespeople taking issue with, say, the comparison of Gaza with the Warsaw Ghetto or with the “Zionists=Nazis” equation will be most welcome.

Readers will notice that the SWP’s pet intellectual, JohnG, can’t bring himself to say:

1) It was a major mistake to invite the racist, Gilad Atzmon to Marxism xxxx for one year.

2) It was a crippling political mistake to continue to invite him to spout his racist filth for four years

3) That the SWP has learnt its lesson from these disgraceful events.

No, the SWP can’t or won’t say any of that, cos basically they don’t care and they lack the maturity to admit their own mistakes.

Thus, if they won’t admit their mistakes over Atzmon than they are hardly amenable to reasonable debate in other areas. If the SWP can’t admit they’re wrong then it is worthless to argue with them about more complex issues.

As evidenced above, SWPers are not concerned with historical accuracy, rather as ideologues they will bend, shape and squeeze facts into pigeonholes to suit their particular political priorities.

As ideologues, the SWP already know the conclusions before they’ve looked at the evidence, and they will pick, selectively digest facts as their agenda dictates, rather than let the evidence points to a conclusion.

That’s why it is worthless discussing these issues with them in a civil fashion.

m

I have been studying the relationship between Hitler and Schleswig Holstein, and glimmers of light appear here and there. I’ll have to do a lot more research ro get a clearer picture.

After a massive propoganda campaign for a plebescite in Schleswig the Nazis suffered a ‘defeat’ with consistent numbers of votes against them, despite intimidation. These are Goering’s words on the subject translated by me:
“Our failure remains the principle theme (…) spent the afternoon with the Fuehrer. Many peple there. Reasons for our failure discussed.”

A rather hefty url:

This info follows in German

http://books.google.it/books?id=vV1Tk83eRW0C&pg=PA97&lpg=PA97&dq=Besuche+Hitlers+in+Schleswig+Holstein&source=bl&ots=8jpW0QNy09&sig=03AP88tqWHOHff7NUwop_xNOrLw&hl=it&ei=rUudSqu9NtSi_QbtxJTaAg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Naturally the Nazis set out, much like Ahmynedeijad(?) to pumish the dissidents.

One observation I’ve come across more than once is that Hitler hated Luebeck. There must have been a reason for this. But I have to do more research.

So far I see evidence of Hitler’s visits to Hamburg and Kiel, but not of visits further North. I know that a great Aunt of mine spoke openly against the Nazis and refused to erect the swastika on her house. Nothing happened to her. I also read (this must be checked) that a lot of the rural populations didn’t read the newspapers and their propoganda and so saw no reason why they should support Hitler.

As I said, I have to do further research, and tho’ this thread seems to be ending and I need time. Maybe another occasion will arise.

Vildechaye, Jihad blurs your distinction between sectarian ethnic cleansing and “land dispute” to the point of meaninglessness. Is the razing of Christian neighborhoods in Nigeria more a land dispute or is it ethnic cleansing? Is the rounding up and slaughter of Hindu and Sikh villagers in Kashmir a land dispute or ethnic cleansing?

Your distinction doesn’t matter at all to the people who plan these sorts of massacres – they all spring from an Islamic triumphalist sectarianism.

And I’m not sure they come from a different ideology than, say, the bombing of Shiite pilgrims in Iraq.

As I said, labels can hide more than they reveal.

The Israeli/Arab conflict had some roots in a land dispute but unfortunately it has mutated into a common form of conflict for Muslims.

Looking at my examples of Nigeria and Kashmir may make this clearer. Islamic triumphalism deliberately manufactures land disputes where it can, because it values holding land and values denying land to other religions or sects.

Having an ideology of enmity against other sects and a policy of deliberately denying them land, makes the nature of the dispute sectarian because the only outcome that is acceptable to the Islamist is the other sect having no land or having it so far away that war is impossible. In other words the goal becomes ethnic cleansing and not property rights or human rights or human needs.

johng’s statement that

the SWP never accepted or promulgated the argument Israel-Nazi is crap

Here’s a ref from a publication called Socialist Worker in which Ronnie Kasrils, supposed hero of the ANC and a former minister promulgates repeated Nazi equations –always coming from someone else he quotes, so it’s a beyond Gordon Brownian level of plausible deniability.

Amongst the various AsAJew figleaves he uses to repeat the Israel-Nazi equation is the immortal trougher and I-need-an-£8,000-TV-in-my-slum-flat-overlooking-Regent’s-Park-expenses-claimant Sir Gerald Kaufman MP.

Ronnie Kasrils doesn’t tell us here, as he used to do rather proudly on his own web page that he was trained for his CP ANC role in Moscow at the height of the Brezhnev era when the Party line under Soviet anti-zionism had a policy of constantly equating zionism with apartheid and nazism.Kasrils, one of the most accomplished AsAJews in the world, attained the rank of a KGB colonel.
Learned his lessons well, didn’t he?

But the real prize goes to our very own “Socialist Worker” UK version which adapts the same method of “we’re not saying it, here’s this utterly authoritative AsAJew Warsaw Ghetto survivor wot says it”. And you quote Marek Edelman, Bundist (and therefore radically anti-zionist ideologue) saying it:

The Stalinist authorities, fearful that Edelman would emerge as an iconic figure for Solidarity, offered him belated Polish military honours which he refused.

In the summer of 2002, Edelman, still going strong, intervened in Israel’s show trial of the now jailed Palestinian resistance leader, Marwan Barghouti.

He wrote a letter of solidarity to the Palestinian movement, and though he criticised the suicide bombers, its tone infuriated the Israeli government and its press. Edelman had always resented Israel’s claim on the Warsaw Ghetto uprising as a symbol of Jewish liberation.

Now he said this belonged to the Palestinians. He addressed his letter to “commanders of the Palestinian military, paramilitary and partisan operations — to all the soldiers of the Palestinian fighting organisations”.

The old Jewish anti-Nazi Ghetto fighter had placed his immense moral authority at the disposal of the only side he deemed worthy of it.

And by definition, who is therefore in the role of the murderous Nazis?

But, whatever the heroic fighting experience in their own context gives to each man, we know very well that each of them is too utterly a committed parrot of a vicious party-line equation of Israel with either apartheid or Nazism. They cannot be taken other than as that. It is about as reliable (despite the presence of the speakers at the events) as would be a CPer’s view of the role of the CP in the Spanish Civil War compared with that of George Orwell.

And you can’t hide behind the “we’re not saying it–it’s this utterly authoritative AsAJew who’s saying it.” Because this counts as promulgating the equations.

Standard johng response: sidestep into some other vaguely related statement, say that I said something other than demonstrate that his statement that the SWP never accepted or promulgated the Israel=Nazi equation is wrong

My bet is he’ll stick to the “SWP doesn’t say it–this utterly respectable/reliable heroic AsAJew says it, go and argue with him”. That’s especially useful if the him is dead or otherwise unattainable. But we don’t need to do that. The fact that your rag publishes it with approval, and doesn’t point out the gross inappropriateness and inapplicability of it shows you endorse this view, and that’s why you publish it.

Casuistry, lies, same old, same old trot crap.

Last time I came across this it was Michael Rosen on HP yanking a bit of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wholly out of context to support his extreme anti-zionist views with the –”There, I’m not saying it, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks is saying it, go argue with him”.

Note to SWPers and your fellow travellers. We’ve seen through this particular bit of sleight of hand. Don’t bother trying it again.

By the way, Vildechaye, the 1947 pogrom in Aden Yemen is a perfect example how even from the beginning, extreme Arab antisemitism transformed the Israel/Arab conflict into a sectarian dispute from “a land dispute”.

Clearly the Yemenite Jews were not living on disputed land. And, in case you didn’t know, that was the beginning of a situation so horrible that almost the entire Yemenite Jewish population fled.

If the Arab/Israeli situation immediately became a sectarian dispute in Arabs lands as far away as Yemen, you’re living in a dream world to think that Palestinians weren’t and aren’t part of this phenomenon.

The quote from Ronnie Kasril’s is from the US paper socialist worker which has no connection to the British socialist worker. However neither the British SWP or the International Socialists (US), are responsible for the fact that a “supposed hero” of the anti-aparthied movement (why supposed?) has these views. Similarly the fact that one of the leaders of the warsaw ghetto uprising (a Bundist and therefore somehow reprehensible for Judy) made the statements he made is surely legitimate to report. On what moral authority do you claim to dispute his right to make such statements or for those statements to be reported? I saw him speak on an anniversy celebration of the uprising and he did not mention the Israel/Palestine conflict, or Zionism once. It is not something I got the impression, that he would be much pre-occupied with. Its obvious that he did take exception though to that struggle being yoked to repression in the occupied territories. If he used hyperbole in making such objections surely he of all people could be excused. In any case I’m quite happy for you to place me in his company, although I would have, in all honesty, no right to be personally.

SO Muffin, you are quite right I should have said Nazi-Israel associations. The obsession with equating Arabs with Germans on this thread must have confused me. I disagree with you about Arendt. Whilst she famously held a variety of changing positions I am not convinced that its impossible to learn from her. I should say that I am not one of those who claim she was an “anti-Zionist” (she wasn’t) but I am equally unconvinced by arguments that she should be ignored because she once had an affair with Heidegger (arguments about as compelling as others on this thread). The book is controversial largely because of its critique of Israeli nationalism and the way it was bought into the trial. not because of any empirical mistakes (which become interesting to some only because of the critque).

The SWP has not spent an enourmous amount of time arguing about the mistaken view that Israel can be equated with fascism, in the same way that we did not spend an enourmous amount of time arguing against the commonly held view that Aparthied was fascism (although it was equally mistaken). This is probably because we don’t share views about a ‘new anti-semitism’ which equate such views with “Holocaust baiting”. Such things occur (and where they do you will find on blogs and elsewhere those on the left opposing them) but use of the fascist analogy to express extreme moral and political disapproval is common enough in other struggles to make this an unconvincing argument. My suspician is that some find it incomprehensible that people might object passionately to the way Palestinians are treated and therefore devise wierd and wonderful theories about why they do, unable to understand that the reason they object is because people ought to object.

On reflection, when you reach the stage of trying to argue that the author of the Ghetto fights, and participant in the ghetto uprising is an “as a Jew” closet self hater, its probably fair to say something has gone terribly wrong not only with your argument, but your whole system of moral values.

On a less serious note, I would also suggest that its not immediately clear what position of moral elevation exists that allows even a self evidentially reasonable person like SO Muffin to “pity” Hannah Arendt. What licences this moral largesse?

“The SWP has not spent an enourmous amount of time arguing about the mistaken view that Israel can be equated with fascism,”

It seems unlikely that the SWP spent *any* time arguing on these issues, rather a line is pass down the chain of command and the little SWPers obediently parrot it.

So it was with Atzmon, Martin Smith (No.3 in the SWP) decided that Gilad Atzmon was ok, and the drones in the SWP when along with that command. For four years.

Even to this day, the SWP has still not acknowledge *why* Atzmon’s racism (change “Jew” into “Zionist”) was so acceptable at Marxism xxxx, for years and years.

Put simply, if the SWP can’t be honest about Atzmon, then how do you expect them to deal with more complex topics? They can’t and won’t.

johng has taken an awful lot of words to fudge around and try to get out of admitting that, yes, the SWP has published and therefore promulgated Israel=Nazi equations. Now here’s the nearest thing we get in all that verbiage to the admission statement:

If he used hyperbole in making such objections surely he of all people could be excused. In any case I’m quite happy for you to place me in his company, although I would have, in all honesty, no right to be personally.

So equating Israel’s militaryfight to keep the Hamasniks of Gaza from continuously shelling Israel with rockets with the action of the Nazis who without exception slaughtered every last Jew in the cruellest way possible is just a little bit of hyperbole, is it?

No johng. It isn’t hyperbole. It’s an utterly disgusting, lying equation, made in the context of the struggle of Hamas to wipe out the state of Israel and to rid what it calls “Islamic lands” of Jews. The very Hamas that uses the Protocols in its propaganda. And his experience of having been in the Warsaw Ghetto fighting doesn’t give him the entitlement, out of his own unshakeable hatred of zionism, to make such a disgusting, lying, patently disprovable equation either.

On the contrary, he should hang his head in shame at daring to make such an equation. He abuses his the potentially credibility of his experience and he destroys any claim to any moral authority he has by making such a disgusting, lying and utterly unjustifiable claim. One can instantly destroy his credibility, regardless of his experience of the ghetto fighting because it was demonstrably neither the intention, nor the practice of the IDF to systematically round up and murder each and every last Palestinian as the working out of an overall programme of total extermination.

So johng demonstrates beyond doubt that the SWP publishes Israel-Nazi equations, tries to hide behind apparently authoritative AsAJew figures to deny that it does so, tries to excuse them as “hyperbole” or allowable to the great AsAJew hero when it does so, and then tries to slither around creating a cloud of apologism for it.

What a disgusting party. What a disgusting use of propaganda. What a disgusting ideologue who lies, twists and turns to try and avoid owning up that the lies have been nailed and then tries to slither off under some sort of preposterous claim to the supposed moral authority of the discredited ideologue he’s presented to us.

Oh, and I do love “Not our SWP. That’s the SWP down the road. Don’t suppose the SWP has ever stood up Kasrils, Tutu or one of the Moscow trained ANCers to come out with this lying and pernicious crap? Pity Joe Slovo’s dead. Now there’s another great ANC hero who goes in for using his supposed credibility as the former leader of the ANC’s army to make both Israel-Nazi and Israel-Apartheid equations.

Note to SWPers. Being a witness to the experience of one type of event does not of itself entitle you to pronounce on whether another event is an exact parallel. You have to demonstrate that all the necessary conditions are met, and that none of the excluding conditions (ie commitment to total physical extermination; ruthless deliberate massacre of entire population; attack on a population that does not have any previous record of having conducted armed physical attacks on you etc etc etc) are present.

This sort of stuff may have been great for the sheep and the lesser animals of “1984″ and the type of handers-in of their brain capacity for independent thought that you recruit into the SWP. Don’t bother trying it on the alert and intelligent, thinking folk at HP. We have a habit of testing the evidence and looking up the facts, as well as checking the track records and reliability as arbiters of the authorities quoted. We don’t even take your most confident assertions along the lines of “The SWP has never….” at face value.

Bear that in mind. And don’t bother trying it again.

I am equally unconvinced by arguments that she should be ignored because she once had an affair with Heidegger

Allegedly… However, she certainly has had a deep (and often self-destructive) romantic attachment with Martin Heidegger, at a time when the guy was the tame philosopher of the Nazi Party. Much of her life is an attempt to come to terms with it, with her guilt, with her demons. There is something to be said for the principle of never having emotional attachment to one’s PhD supervisor.

But the SWP stance is more interesting – and, again, willingly, I claim ignorance.

• My understanding (and please disabuse me if I am wrong) is that SWP does not view the Israeli–Palestinian conflict as a clash of two opposing and equally legitimate nationalisms, since the standard manner such conflicts are solved is by partitioning the land between opposing nationalisms.

• My understanding (and please disabuse me if I am wrong) is that SWP, like other communist movements since young Stalin wrote his notorious paper on “the nationalities question”, does not view the Jewish nationalism as legitimate and possessing similar rights to other nationalisms, inclusive of the right for political expression and self determination.

• My understanding (and please disabuse me if I am wrong) is that SWP does view the Zionist movement as an outreach project of European imperialism, not (to repeat myself) as a legitimate national movement.

• My understanding (and please disabuse me if I am wrong) is that SWP does condemn Israel not because of specific actions of the Israeli state and/or its agents but because it is opposed to the existence of this state.

As I’ve said, I might be wrong. I’ll be delighted were you to clarify the situation. I will be genuinely happy were the answers to all the above to be a categorical, unambigeous “It is not so!”.

And, John, if you cannot distinguish between sympathy and pity, what can I say? I know that the language of contemporary scholarship is English spoken with foreign accent, but surely your level of language proficiency, as a native English speaker, should be better.

My dear Josh Scholar: MY point is that the entire Arab/Israeli issue is due to a land dispute. It is not to say that racism doesn’t come into it; of course, what begins as a land dispute can morph (and in this case, obviously has morphed) into something very different. But it still began as a land dispute. Make no mistake, i don’t wish to excuse the behavior of, say, Arab Yemenis who took it out on their local Jews. But the catalyst for the Anti-Jewish behavior stems from the land dispute. To compare this to european anti-semitism is wrong; to compare it to Nazism’s murderous anti-semitism based solely on race is absurd. And I’m not prepared to “debate” this any further.

SOM, re Molotov-Ribbentrop. Everything you say about what happened post-pact is of course 100 per cent right. But that’s not actually what I was talking about. To recap: the so-called great powers spent their time between the end of the first world war and the beginning of the second wheeling and dealing and jockeying for power, making and breaking alliances. We have Britain and France squeezing the German people dry with reparations and running massive worldwide exploitation empires. Each of these three countries had their agendas, mostly to do with securing their empires (Britain and France) and/or rearming with a view to creating a new one in the east (Germany). Murder, poverty and war are built into these agendas. Meanwhile Stalin was indeed running his evil empire and working out how to secure and/or extend it. All I was suggesting was that in the ‘game’ of power politics, he made a calculation post-Munich that he might as well see if he could get a non-agression pact out of the guy who was most likely to want the lands that lay between the two countries than go on faffing about trying to get agreements with Britain and France. Meanwhile, there was indeed every chance that Britain and France thought that ‘Hitler might go east’ and leave them alone. As it happens, they all got it wrong in their different ways and all peoples everywhere between the Atlantic all the way to the Pacific suffered beyond imagination. (I believe the figure for the Japanese occupation of China is listed by some as 50 million dead, for example.) And of course US armed forces go into that pot too…it’s all awful, terrible stuff. However, that interwar period seems to me to be full of attempts at deals that had nothing to do with ‘peace’ or co-operation and everything to do with shoring up utterly illegitimate empires or planning new ones.

On reflection, when you reach the stage of trying to argue that the author of the Ghetto fights, and participant in the ghetto uprising is an “as a Jew” closet self hater, its probably fair to say something has gone terribly wrong not only with your argument, but your whole system of moral values.

No, I did not call Marek Edelman a self hater either closet or otherwise. I called him a radically anti-zionist ideologue, which he undoubtedly is, as his words prove. His actions in the Warsaw Ghetto were heroic and he is justly admired for his heroism in them.

That does not prevent him or in any way excuse him from acting quite despicably in making such a demonstrably false and politically disgusting analogy. Particularly in the light of the lack of any initial attack of any sort on the Nazis by the Jews when they first set out to murder them, throughout the time that massive numbers of exterminatory actions were taken to ship the men, women and children to be murdered at Treblinka, and in the light of the dedicated way in which the Nazis finished the job by murdering every single Jew they could find.

And it is morally right to highlight what he’s done, to refute it and condemn him in the strongest terms for doing so. For his supposed moral authority and his experience make his digusting lies much more credible, to an innocent and/or ignorant listener than those of an SWP footsoldier who might not even have been born in WWII might be.

You show your twisted moral inversion in supporting the publication of such lies, your attempts to deny that your disgusting party ever published such lies and then your attempts to smear someone who points out what Edelman has done and how the SWP has promulgated his lies–and celebrated his “moral authority” in lying in the way he has.

And it is a disgusting and outrageous lie promoted by both him and the SWP (including yourself as one of its parrots) designed to discredit and demonize Israel–the only Jewish state in the world–by equating it with those Nazi would be committers of genocide who attempted to demonize, torture and exterminate them without exception.

Judy you are welcome to show your moral disgust for edelman. As they say its a free country. But I really don’t understand what kind of a pedestal you think you are standing on. As I said, I was lucky enough to see him speaking once. He did not mention Zionism, Israel or Palestine and I did not get the impression that he was at all motivated in appearing on platforms by a desire to have an ideological fight with Zionism. This statement which occured many years after that event appears to have been motivated by a disgust at attempts to yoke the struggle he was involved in, to the repression occuring in the occupied territories. If you can’t understand that, I guess you can’t understand that. But thats the problem isn’t it.

At Socialist Unity there’s a thread following Andy Newman’s pro-Soviet apologetics for the Hitler-Stalin pact. I even said something complimentary about an article in The Socialist Worker.

“We have Britain and France squeezing the German people dry with reparations and running massive worldwide exploitation empires.”

Utter tosh, “squeezing the German people dry with reparations” another version of the why Versailles Treaty was so terrible. It is an old historical debate, and dealt with elsewhere.

Mike Rosen, you should make an effort to engage with the historiography of this period, and avoid these false and overly simplistic statements.

more SWP history:

“Stalin’s unholy alliance with Hitler
by Chris Bambery

When German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop arrived in Moscow in August 1940 to meet his Russian counterpart, Russian dictator Joseph Stalin turned out to greet him.

As the date of Hitler’s attack on Poland approached, the Germans rushed to convince the Russian government of the benefits of a non-aggression pact between the two states – a secret agreement partitioning Poland, granting the Baltic States to Russia and offering Russia generous trade arrangements.

When the agreement was finalised Stalin invited Ribbentrop to celebrate. The Soviet dictator toasted Hitler, Ribbentrop toasted Stalin.

On 17 September, shortly before Poland surrendered to Germany, the Russian army invaded from the east.

After Poland surrendered, Stalin and Hitler issued a joint statement calling for Britain and France to accept the new order and make peace, stating, “If, however, these efforts of both governments remain unsuccessful, it will be established thereby that England and France bear the responsibility for the continuation of the war.””

Oh I’ve just seen SO Muffin’s reply. It’s worth recalling that Arendt’s affair with Heidegger occured in the 1920s. I fail to see why she had anything to be guilty about (and I can detect not a whiff of guilt in any of her writings: if you have any evidence that she was guilty about something which could not even concievably be a source of guilt I would be interested to see it. She did write a very amusing piece on the pathetic excuses Heidegger came out with about his collaberation with the Nazi’s which I have read, a piece which acts as a good critique of a much wider layer of intellectuals then just Heiddegger). Later she showed much better taste and had a fling with Walter Benjamin. I’ve always rather admired the way she cut a bit of a swathe through the most gifted philosophers of her time but, hey, thats just me. Guilt?

Oh, well “sympathy” then. Like pity, sympathy presupposes a need to make excuses. I don’t see the occassion for this kind of patronising talk thats all. Better to be precise. What EXACTLY is it about what Arendt writes that provides the need for ’sympathy’?

And you are quite right the SWP does see the Zionist movement as having been a colonial project. Which of course, in practice, it was. Zionists of the time saw themselves as being involved in such a project and spilt much ink writing to the colonial authorities to justify themselves as such. Judy’s wierd argument suggesting that the Palestinians had no right to ask questions about the establishment of a “Jewish National Home” in Palestine establishes that the ideas from this period still resonate (a statement like that is inconcievable, even as a logical proposition, outside the framework of a world in which the colonial order is taken for granted).

All this just seems to me historically beyond dispute. However this does not mean that what is involved is not a dispute about national claims. The Zionist movement made a national claim to Palestine. Palestinians also made a national claim to Palestine. The justice of these claims is what the dispute was all about. Its why there was a conflict.

more SWP history:

“Stalin’s unholy alliance with Hitler
by Chris Bambery

That was the article I complimented– after pointing out the incorrect year.

Gene, indeed :)

It is a poor article, probably cribbed from Kershaw’s work, it is boilerplate stuff, you’d expect more from these supposed political geniuses, and SWPers don’t employ any proof readers?

At least Bambery didn’t make that awful Martin Smith mistake of arguing that “Hitler was elected, er, democratically, in Germany in 1933…”, as the SWP’s No. 3 did on Newsnight, 9th June 2009.**

Basically, SWPers are not overly concerned with dates or facts, so to them history is not a key subject.

Rather for them it is used for political purposes, to be dragged out at opportune occasions, etc but certainly not studied on its own merits.

—-
** He wasn’t. Hitler was appointed, not elected, as per the Weimar constitution.

dear mod., he reads something, decides it’s ‘the truth’ and tries to whack everyone over the head with it. Clearly auld Niall Fergie is the historian most favoured by mod this week. Yeah, grabbing billions from another country doesn’t distort its economy. Oh no. Whereas it remains that causing huge debts to capitalists and governments leads to massive rewal impoverishment to real people because capitalists and governments pass their debts on to workers…

dear mod., he reads something, decides it’s ‘the truth’ and tries to whack everyone over the head with it. Clearly auld Niall Fergie is the historian most favoured by mod this week. Yeah, grabbing billions from another country doesn’t distort its economy. Oh no. Whereas it remains that causing huge debts to capitalists and governments leads to massive real impoverishment to real people because capitalists and governments pass their debts on to workers…

Hitler was “appointed” in Jan. 1933 because his party had the most votes and the most seats (though not a majority). In effect, he was elected.

Mike Rosen, you wrote:

dear mod., he reads something, decides it’s ‘the truth’ and tries to whack everyone over the head with it. “

No, I was correcting your erroneous grasp of history, you were pushing a historical myth. A Far Right historical myth.

There has been a *long* debate on this subject since 1919 onwards, that’s call historiography, now you either engage with it or don’t.

Your choice.

I could recommend a few books on the topic, but I doubt you’d read them.

Yes, vild. The Nazis got just short of 44 per cent and is with all democratic countries there is some mechanism by which the party with the most votes is handed power. But what you’ve got to remember is that mod thinks he’s spotted an error because, following that election (which the Nazis won) there was indeed a mechanism of appointment, by which he became Chancellor. In Britain, mod will have noticed that the party leader of the party that wins an election is ‘asked by the Queen to form a government’. Mod will explain now why that is so staggeringly different from the process by which Hitler became Chancellor after his party won the election and why (and this is the most important part in the mod universe) this proves that Martin Smith is an idiot for saying that Hitler was elected in 1933. A quick glance at the election results of 1933 does indeed totally entitle someone to use that kind of shorthand way of describing what happened, just as journos do on the election night (or the morning after) in Britain, even though ‘we’ don’t ‘elect’ the party leader who is deemed to have ‘won’ or indeed to have been ‘elected’ our prime minister. But we say ‘we’ do.

mod, you weren’t correcting anything. I’ve read loads. You’ve made up your mind and call it ‘The Truth’ and think by using words like ‘historiography’ you’ve proved something. I don’t happen to buy the argument being made. If you can turn what I’ve said about capitalists passing debts onto workers as a right wing argument, then I’m an aubergine. You may notice the fact they’re doing the very same thing as we write, as facilitated by our ‘left wing’ government. Plus ca change.

Judy: What is your source for Ronnie Kasrils being a Colonel in the KGB?
Note: It is possible for someone like Archbishop Tutu to be simply wrong about comparing Israel with Apartheid South Africa without being a fool.

OT: No post about today, Sept 1st being the 70th anniversary of Hitler’s Invasion of Poland?

Sorry, you don’t call it ‘the truth’. You just keep saying that anyone who disagrees with your vast army of uncited sources is ‘erroneous’ or some such ie the opposite of mod’s big ‘truth’.

vildechaye, you wrote:

“Hitler was “appointed” in Jan. 1933 because his party had the most votes and the most seats (though not a majority). In effect, he was elected.”

In politics, there are terms, words, they mean something, different words have different meanings.

So NO, he was NOT elected, as an election is different from an appointment.

The Weimar constitution did not permit the election of the Chancellor.

If you want more info on the deal that made it happen, please read Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power by Ashby Turner.

And I’ve just spotted another mod classic:

“There has been a *long* debate on this subject since 1919 onwards”

Really? Wow! And none of us (least of all me) had any idea that the reparations were discussed and debated right from when they were imposed. I wish I had had you as a lecturer when I was at university…’Good morning everyone. Today I want to tell you about air. It’s what we breathe. Tomorrow we move onto water. It’s what we drink….’

RE: “you quote Marek Edelman, Bundist (and therefore radically anti-zionist ideologue).

Judy: I hope you weren’t implying by this statement that if someone is or was a “bundist” that they are by definition “therefore radical anti-zionist ideologue.

That may have been true to some extent before the war (though i’m not sure how deep the animosity ran). But my grandfather, who was a bundist politician in his galician home town in pre-war poland — and was taken by the Russians along with my father to Siberia because of it — was very supportive of Israel. He never gave up his bundist affiliations and at his funeral his coffin was covered in a red flag, but he was always pro-Israel. More telling, the Bundists in Montreal set up the Yiddishe Folks Shules (Jewish People’s and Peretz Schools) which had Keren Kayemet boxes in every classroom and were all extremely pro-Israel.

So i’m hoping you were referring to Edelman in particular and not Bundists in general.

…and mod, we talk about electing prime ministers in this country but we don’t elect them. So fucking what. Hitler’s party won that election democratically by a long way. They were by far and away the largest party. He was the undisputed leader of that party. It’s no distortion of the truth to say that Hitler was elected leader of Germany or some such. It’s just shorthand. The drift of what people mean when they say things like Hitler won the election in 1933 is not a distortion. They mean something to the effect that the Nazis were the largest single party (by a long way) in Germany in 1933. For Hitler not to have been appointed after that would have been a travesty of that particular democratic system. And that’s the key point about it in fascist history. It wasn’t a putsch or a coup. It wasn’t a matter of seizing power. It was an election that brought the Nazis to power. Hitler’s appointment was not an illegitimate fascist coup. And these facts are the tough ones for those of us who are opposed to fascism. We’re not talking Greek colonels here.

Hey mod, if you put the phrase ‘Blair elected prime minister’ into double quotes and put it into google, you get a whole string of usages of that phrase used by news outlets, historians…all sorts. But (according to mod) they’re all wrong! We don’t elect prime ministers in this country. Parties elect leaders. Party leaders of parties with the most seats are usually asked to form a government by the Queen. And, as it happens, it’s why Gordon Brown can in our system by prime minister. We, the people, don’t elect our prime ministers. But the newspapers and historians and journalists say we do. It’s shorthand. Not an error or a distortion. Likewise 1933.

Another mod classic: “In politics, there are terms, words, they mean something, different words have different meanings.”

Except when they don’t have different meanings…eg ‘Jim was voted in’ vs ‘Jim was elected’.

In those two sentences, how precisely do mod’s ‘terms’ or ‘different words’ have ‘different meanings’? Even as he tries to state the obvious, he trips over his pedagogical digit.

Vildechaye – yes, you are right. But let us return to Marek Edelman. The guy was the third in command (following Mordechai Anielewicz and Antek Zuckerman) of the Jewish Combat Organisation and the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Whatever ill-advised letter he might have written to Marwan el Bharghuti, this man is a hero of the Jewish people, one of the greatest. One needs the wooden sensitivity, bigoted stupidity, manifest ignorance and sickening self-righteousness of some posters on this thread (whose idiocy you have experienced yourself) to represent him as some sort of evil monster.

SOM, it will be explained to you by the reviled Ofsted Inspector herself that you have shown yourself to be an anti-semite. And a disgusting one at that. Be ashamed.

Mike Rosen you wrote:

“Really? Wow! And none of us (least of all me) had any idea that the reparations were discussed and debated right from when they were imposed.”

This issue has been debated since 1919 (and in the same way that Marxists have long argued over the nature of the USSR, etc), so smart people either choose to engage with the existing state of the debate and not go over old redundant arguments, or they don’t.

Generally speaking, it seems better to follow the historiography and in this case, more so, as the notion of the Versailles Treaty being particularly arduous on the Germans and the cause of their many problems has been shown to be largely false.

It is a German Far Right argument because it seeks to exculpate the Germans from any blame or causality, instead the Versailles Treaty is blamed for nearly everything, including the rise of the Nazism etc

I believe it was pushed in Britain by some military historians who often feel some kinship with Germans.

Mike Rosen, your argument was a very popular idea amongst the British aristocracy, which probably explains its persistence as a historical myth.

Indeed it was common for many British politicians in the 1930s to express some sympathy towards German nationalism as somehow seemingly constricted by the chains of the Versailles Treaty.

From a distance it has a certain plausibility, but once you start to examine the facts around the issue the myth dissipates.

The first reparation payments were in 1922, four years after the end of the Great War. Whilst it is true the German economy was in a mess, this would have been so with or without the reparation’s, as the economy had been geared towards fighting a war and the switchback to a peacetime economy would have been difficult under any circumstances.

The German rulers had calculated that if they won the war then raping other parts of Europe would allow them to set their own economy in order, but that didn’t happen.

Many of the problems in the early period were probably due to inexperience, poor governance and the consequences of losing a war, having bet your shirt on it, as much as any issue of reparation’s.

The other axis governments were in the worst situation, Hungary is one example.

The Allies, in fact, made considerable efforts to reduce reparation’s, see the Dawes plan, etc

This is not forgetting that a victorious Germany had something much worse than the Versailles Treaty planned, should it have one the Great War. Bethmann-Hollweg had plans to turn the rest of Europe into vassal states of Germany should they win.

In Britain, the arguments concerning supposedly harsh reparations were taken up by various Anglo-German friendship groups and, not unsurprisingly, the extreme right in the form of the British Union of Fascists and their allies.

I suspect also that a faintly anti-French sentiment contributed towards the longevity of this historical myth, amongst the British upper classes and as it percolated down, the notion that Britain and Germany should stand together against France often came up, remembering that France received a significant amount of reparations for the immense damage that the Great War caused the country.

I hope that partly explains some of the issues, there’s plenty more, as I said a historical myth and one best forgotten.

Two trivial points. I’m fascinated by Modernities use of the term historiography. In some small way I pat myself on the back. After the usual absurd round and round argument (on this occassion it was about the Mughal Empire) I recall seeing modernity pontificating to someone about the same: using the arguments I had just made, and which when I had made them, he had denounced. Its small-minded I know, but I thought in my own small way…

The other point is that whilst I know that SO Muffin won’t return the compliment, I have to admit to being a bit pleased that despite completely opposed standpoints on the question of Palestine and its history. its still the case that there exists some kind of decency in relationship to rationality and, I guess, that enlightenment values thing. Unlike my point about modernity this is not intended to be patronising.

Its very hard to read the kind of bilge he’s written above without laughing. But then again thats a lot better then some of the other contributions. I sometimes find myself almost becoming a Zionist in these discussions so outraged I am by the distortions of a position I disagree with but nevertheless understand. I mean the moral outrage which was proper in relation to the Marek Edelman question is not something it should be down to someone like me to express.

I’m kind of glad it was expressed by someone else.

er modernity, please name any european economy during the war which was NOT geared to fighting a war. And also (I’m genuinely interested) what are your sources for saying its been disproved that the versailles treaty imposed erronous burdens on Germany? Again, I I’d be interested to know where you get this from.

dear oh dear, mod, you have proved absolutely nothing. You do the usual tired old routine of trying to disprove an argument by smearing those who supposedly have agreed with it. So being ‘against’ reparations becomes a right wing thing because at various points in history the British aristos (supposedly) along with the German Right were against it. You mean the German and French Left thought they were great.

Then your substance: doh! EAch and every European economy was in dire straits after the War. One of the ways in which Britain and France thought they could improve their lot was through war spoils: plunder the coffers of the defeated. The fact that the German economy was a wreck doesn’t detract one smidgeon from the fact that once the reparations were imposed it became necessary for the capitalists and their surrogates in government to pass on the cost to the poorest. As they do. I think I can detect, mod, you trying to find some kind of league table of decency amongst the ‘Great Powers’ with our chaps being best. Perhaps I misrepresent you. All I can say, is that I can’t see it. These were rapacious blocs of capital wrestling for supremacy. The end of war provided one bloc (or two) with an opportunity to grab some goodies from the other lot. The fact that it impoverished and embittered millions was a price worth paying…until it turned into one of the most advanced war machines ever created.

Meanwhile, I see you’ve gone silent on your silly ‘Hitler wasn’t elected’ stuff.

Mr. Rosen has finally found a topic he’s qualified to argue about, namely whether the word “elected,” strictly applied properly describes the process that gave Adolph Hitler his first grasp on power. I’m glad he’s found this hobby. Go Micheal go, define that word!

“Meanwhile, I see you’ve gone silent on your silly ‘Hitler wasn’t elected’ stuff.”

Not really, it is child’s stuff, the meaning of words, etc and how politicos use them, or in the SWP’s case misuse them, etc

I am sure *if* Martin Smith had said that Hitler was a Martian then, Mike Rosen, you’d probably be arguing something on that too.

re historiography…perhaps mod thinks he means that some historians have been talking about a given subject for a while…and this is in itself interesting or important. However, I thought historiography was about looking at the nature and ideology of how the differing versions of that history has been told. Perhaps that’s why he went off on one about how this or that bunch of shits believed that the reparations were tough, so for anyone to agree with that proves….er…that they’re shits too! That’s not historiography. That’s just crap. Yes, it’s interesting that, say, a section of the British aristocracy was pro-German or anti-reparation and so told and still tells the story a certain way: (my Latin teacher saying to me: ‘We should have been on the side of the Germans in the last war, Rosen.’) But this tells us something about those who had those attitudes and not very much about the history that they told. That’s why mod isn’t talking about historiography. He’s talking about gossip.

SOS Muffin: No argument from me there.

It seems to me that as discredited as David Irving has become, his style of writing “history” has infected how positions are argued as well. Left and Right ideologues choose their positions first, them adopt a “damn the torpedoes” argumentative line, noting and even addressing only the facts that support the underlying thesis. When Irving did it, you end up with WWII being “Churchill’s War” (he wasn’t even in the govt. when it started, how goofy is that?). You also end up with Palestinian Nazis, Zionist Nazis, etc. and anything else your ideology predisposes you to find. But hey, what are you gonna do, this is the hand we’re dealt with today, it isn’t going to change anytime soon.

mod at 1.05. It is ‘childish’. You’re absolutely right. One problem: it was you who raised the whole matter in the first place and are so clearly wrong about it. (did you google ‘Blair elected prime minister’ for example?)

As for me supposedly slavishly agreeing with everything Martin Smith says. Er…sorry?! Who was it who disagreed with him over Atzmon? In public and private? Either you’re deliberately lying about me, or your late-night personality enhancing drugs are kicking in.

Josh, you’re in danger of agreeing with me about something. Don’t. You’ll hate yourself in the morning.

Mike Rosen,

Yes, I did raise the subject of Martin Smith’s poor history.

And if people, like you, want to defend his idiocy then go ahead, but most adults or those capable of reading a newspaper know the difference between “elected” and “appointed”, seemingly you don’t.

But carry on, I won’t stop you, your stream of conciousness sneering is always amusing, if somewhat counter-productive.

And Josh, the ‘hobby’ is mod’s not mine. It was mod who thinks that he’s on to something really important by spotting that Martin Smith said on TV that Hitler was elected democratically in 1933. All that I and vild have done is remind poor old mod that that is only a shorthand way of saying what actually happened. At least as ‘democratically’ as prime ministers are ‘elected’ by the people in the UK, say. Mod’s hobby. Not mine.

Hitler could only have been appointed because his party won the election, mod. That’s how that type of democracy works (and ours). That’s why the logical and usual consequence of a leader being elected (and his/her party winning) is to be appointed. And that’s why nearly everyone (apart from you) describes eg Tony Blair returning from Buck House as being ‘elected prime minister’ even though he wasn’t. But they’re all wrong. You’re right, mod. Howl howl howl.

Sorry Michael you are quite right. I was not suggesting that Modernity actually understood what historiography MEANT. I’m not that vain glorious.

Lol, about the earlier claim that the nature of Arab/Palestian hatred of Jews is merely one over land, reconcilable and entirely different in nature than the Nazis:

I read read this and laughed: http://www.pmw.org.il/KAJ_eng.htm

One highlight on that page, other than PA antisemitic propaganda which surpasses that of the Nazis was this

Children’s musical broadcast: Jews made ovens for burning Palestinians

A PA TV musical for children included the ultimate abuse of the Holocaust, teaching children that the Jews didn’t suffer a Holocaust, but rather made ovens to burn Palestinians:

Musical Play for Children

“From the 1921 [Arab] revolt until the strike of 1936, the nation rose as a volcano against the villain-usurpers. The evil plot was exposed, in the alliance among Satans, when the treacherous Jews, set their eyes on all Palestine…They [the Jews] are the ones who did the Holocaust… They opened the ovens for us to bake human beings. They destroyed the villages and burnt the cities. When an oven stops burning they light 100 [more] ovens.”

PA TV, May 25, 2004

“Hitler could only have been appointed because his party won the election, mod.”

er, NO,

Franz von Papen was appointed Chancellor without *his* party having an majority in the Reichstag, etc.,

Then, of course, there is the case of Schleicher who didn’t even *have* a political party.

So your point is fallacious, as well as being historically incorrect.

He gets off on words like that sometimes, jg. He uses them for a while until someone points out he’s playing his fiddle with a drumstick. Shhhh, he’s just sorting out another one of his league tables.

Also, less funny but more to the point “Findings:

PMW has found that the Palestinian Authority (PA) teaches an ideology of virulent hatred of Jews and Israel that mandates the killing of Jews solely because they are Jews. The murder of Jews is presented not only as beneficial to Muslims and Arabs, but as necessary for all humankind. These findings are based on a thorough study and analysis of eight years of official PA television and PA-controlled daily newspapers. This report documents how this hate ideology has been taught consistently for years, well before the war started in September 2000, and continues even after the death of Yassir Arafat…”

Oh mod, you twat, I made the very same point about Gordon Brown. Of course the system allows for non-democratic appointment. The point about Hitler was that it was democratic!!! He won the election. Gordon Brown didn’t. But he’s prime minister. That’s how the system works. The Hitler case of appointment was off the back of a democratic victory. Brown’s and von Pabst’s were not. That’s why no one would say Von Pabst or Brown was democratically elected leader. Come on, mod, you’re better than that. I know it’s late, but you really are a bit sharper than that. Unless I was right about the personality enhancing drugs. Oh god. Sorry. I didn’t mean to draw attention to them.

von pabst????!!!!!! er I think not.

“Hitler could only have been appointed because his party won the election, mod.” IN THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF THAT PARTICULAR ELECTION. ( in case you didn’t follow). In other circumstances, other processes are possible..

The key issue at the heart of all this, though, is that the Nazis won an election and Hitler was legitimately within that system (and it would have been the same in Britain) made the country’s leader. There was no putsch. There was no coup. It was a democratic process. One of the worst regimes in history was voted in. That’s the point. The electoral system (not that different from ours) delivered the Nazis. That’s the problem for anti-fascists. Not whether Martin Smith said ‘democratically elected’ when he should have said….(as if there’s time on Newsnight before Paxman interrupts)…’Hitler was the leader of the Nazis who won the election and so he was appointed Chancellor’. If he had said ‘appointed’ and only ‘appointed’, it would indeed sounds like the von Papen case and would seriously misrepresent the 1933 situation.

Sigh, what trivialities interest the Swuppies.

anyways, forgetting Mike Rosen’s idiocy, any one interested in the topic should read Hitler’s Thirty Days To Power by Ashby Turner, a noted professional historian of the period.

From memory, Ashby describes how the President of the Weimar had the right to appoint *anyone* he saw fit to the position of Chancellor of Germany, and how Hindenburg, a very old man at the time, was manipulated by his private secretary and Hindenburg’s son (who was rewarded later on by the Nazis).

It shows that Hitler’s appointment was no forgone conclusion, Hindenburg already had a low opinion of Hitler but was persuaded in the end. They hoped that a cabinet packed full of old conservatives would somehow restrain Hitler.

Finally, the 44% figure is considered to be erroneous by historians as it was not conducted under free and fair conditions. In the last election before Hitler’s appointment, November 1932, the Nazis got 33.1% and were viewed as on the decline.

S.O.Muffin – “you are willing to believe, to advance your argument, in any convenient lie and obfuscation of the truth, to bend facts out of shape and refuse to accept anything that clashes with your preconceived views, no matter how much the truth stares you in the face.”

Well given that such a view has no basis in fact at all, there’s not much I can do about it if you think so. A pity.

“Neither Churchill nor Roosevelt “took part in the Holocaust” and I challenge you to find anybody that said this, in these words.”

Joshua did in fact accuse them of doing so although not, I admit, in those exact words. However given the accusations flying around here I am surprise that I am the only one objecting.

“Both, however, covered themselves in eternal shame in blocking all possible avenues of escape to European Jews and in refusing to do anything practical to disrupt the Holocaust machine, even after they knew perfectly well all the facts. It might be a matter of conjecture why they did so, it is a matter of record they they did so.”

Churchill can hardly be blamed for blocking avenues of escape as he only came to power after Norway when nearly all avenues of escape were closed. However Britain and British Palestine took more German Jewish refugees before WW2 broke out than France, Belgium, Poland and Portugal combined – these being the four biggest mainland Jewish refuges. America took about twice as many as Britain. This is not nothing. Nor does it deserve condemnation. Especially while I notice silence from everyone else about all the other countries of the world.

As for disrupting the Holocaust, I agree more could have been done. But to say they knew all the facts is a bit much. They knew enough in retrospect, but they hardly had the full picture. We all operate with partial knowledge and with a mixed picture. This site is full of former Communists who knew, in my opinion, enough about Stalin to know better. That does not make them responsible for Stalin’s crimes.

Churchill and Roosevelt were doing the main thing they could do, they were defeating the German Army and ending Nazi rule. Which they did. This too is not nothing. It certainly is not collaboration with the Holocaust. You can argue about whether taking resources from what they thought was helping the war effort, and perhaps prolonging the war, was better than getting it over with as soon as possible, but this is a technical issue. It does not deserve the degree of condemnation it is getting.

Think of England – “Some commenters here have implied (or said) that the Polish aggression against the Jews (or their inaction) was a response to the Nazis; that they were in fear of the Nazis, etc., and no doubt some of that is true.”

Sorry but Polish aggression? WTF?

“HOWEVER, the record of Bulgaria’s actions toward the Jews during the war demonstrates that you cannot shift all the blame onto the Nazis. Bulgaria was a Nazi ally during the war; about 50000 of its citizens were Jews.”

Sure, Bulgaria was a German ally. Notice Poland was not. It was an occupied country under a brutal military dictatorship. Genocidal even. So you see why the two are not really comparable? Would a single Jew have died if Poland had remained independent? I doubt it. Would every single Jew have died in Bulgaria if the Germans had annexed it as they did with Poland? Certainly.

“The Nazis, bad as they were, also unleashed local forces, tapping into long standing anti-Semitism in Poland (and in France). I don’t believe the Nazis forced the Poles into greater spasms of anti-Semitism against their will; the record of the Bulgarians shows that you didn’t have to go along with them.”

Sorry but what “unleashing” of local forces? This applies to France, it applies to the Low countries and especially it applies to the Baltics. But to Poland? A lot of camps in Poland. Does anyone know of one with Polish guards? Were Poles recruited into the SS? Not that I know of but I might be wrong. Certainly the largest single ethnic group among the Righteous Gentiles are Poles.

‘I see nothing in their research thats (sic) relevent to this discussion.’

Which seeing as by his own admission he hasn’t read their work is a bit rich.

‘I think we have to make allowance for SWPers (JohnG) and their mates (Mike Rosen), theirs is a largely static and limited view of history, born of attending too many yearly Marxism xxxx events, shouting slogans and less time spent with decent scholarly texts.’

But at least Rosen can get himself published, even if it is for writing (some very good) children’s books.

Churchill can hardly be blamed for blocking avenues of escape as he only came to power after Norway when nearly all avenues of escape were closed. However Britain and British Palestine took more German Jewish refugees before WW2 broke out than France, Belgium, Poland and Portugal combined – these being the four biggest mainland Jewish refuges.

What a whitewash:
1. Britain took almost exclusively just two kinds of refugees. Either “quality emigrants” – scientists, industrialists, well-known artists etc. – or children. In the latter case it was done only subject to a guarantee that “they will not become a burden on the taxpayer”, i.e. that a willing family will take responsibility for them and for their upkeep. This was done mostly by Jewish families, but also by Quakers and some “plain” British people. They should have been recognised and celebrated more, but not the state that effectively condemned the parents and older siblings of the transport kinder to death.

2. A high proportion of emigrants to British Palestine did it by breaching the White Paper border controls, in spite of the might of the British state. It is rather rich praising the British State for this.

3. It was possible to save Jews, in substantial numbers, also after the beginning of the war and after Churchill was the PM. Try googling for “Struma” or for “Joel Brandt”. It was also possible to disrupt the Nazi extermination machine – Jewish organisations were literally begging for the railway lines from Hungary to Auschwitz, as well as the Birkenau gas chambers, to be bombed. Both Roosevelt and Churchill refused. It was also possible to broadcast a warning that anybody taking part in the extermination of Jews will be punished by the Allies with the utmost severity – this might have stopped at least some. And no, it wasn’t done.

This whole history is full of paradoxes. They might be strange but nothing can be done, these were the facts.
• The only significant member of the Alliance who admitted all Jewish refugees was the Soviet Union. And then they sent the Polish Jewish refugees to Siberia, where about 50% of them perished (until they were freed after Barbarossa). Given that survival rate in Poland was <1%, this saved very large numbers of Jews.
• The one body that covered itself in eternal glory was the… Italian Army (as distinct from the fascist regime) that deliberately and as a matter of policy saved thousands and thousands of Jews in the Balkans and South of France.
• While, once railway lines from Italy to Austria via Bolzano were cut by Alllies bombers, the Swiss allowed (in late Spring 1945) trains with Italian Jews to be transported via Zürich to extermination camps.

Strange history, difficult to comprehend to this day. But it must be comprehended with honesty.

I wake up this morning to find that mod has of course moved the goalposts. a) it matters not to this argument whether Hindenburg had this or that rights of appointment. Hitler won the election. b) to say that he didn’t win it fairly is a whole other issue. As we know, there are questions over major elections in our own time (hanging chads etc) but that isn’t what we were talking about.

Yes, this may all sound ‘trivial’, but what’s at stake is what happens when fascists start winning elections. By Jan 1933, it was too late to do anything constitutional to stop the Nazis. When you look at the make-up of the other parties in the Reichstag, there was no way that they could or would unite against Hitler and his party. He had won. He was the winner. Look at the results. The next party was miles behind him.

mod. trees. wood. from. can’t see etc etc

re ‘decline’ of the Nazis between 1932 and 1933. However, in between, they had the Reichstag fire going for them. Big events (falklands invasion etc) can assist parties overnight.

Neither Churchill nor Roosevelt “took part in the Holocaust” and I challenge you to find anybody that said this, in these words.

Joshua did in fact accuse them of doing so although not, I admit, in those exact words.

I think you meant someone else, it wasn’t me.

‘Big events (falklands invasion etc) can assist parties overnight.’

Ah yes, the old Thatcher=Hitler trope we know and love. Incidentally, there were a few months between the Falklands War and the 1983 election, and I’m sure one of the things that made the Tories win big was Labour’s lurch to the far left, and its publication of a manifesto memorably described by Gerald Kaufman as the ‘longest suicide note in history’(*). But then the world must look slightly different to a swuppie.

(*) This being one of the last sensible comments he made.

“PA antisemitic propaganda which surpasses that of the Nazis”

You sure about that Josh Scholar? Your suggesting that the anti-semitic propaganda of the Palestinian Authorities “surpasses” that of the Nazi’s? Again, one is in the realm of ‘lets make the Arabs the Germans’ except here its ‘worse then the Germans’.

Oh and sack cloth and ashes I have’nt read the book no. Unfortunately I can’t read German. You have not read it either. But you claimed it was relevent on the basis of a review you had read. I too read the review. And couldn’t see what was relevent about it on that basis. I await its translation with some interest but am aware that there is something a bit dubious about a claims being made on behalf of a book one of whose theses is a very large one about the nature of ideology in the Arab world, given that the authors can’t read Arabic. Reading off ideologies in the Middle East on the basis of Nazi statements about them would not be terribly convincing. But perhaps the reviews misrepresent the book.

sackcloth and ashes,

I agree, but it is a bit silly for SWPers (JohnG) and their follow travellers (Mike Rosen) to try to blur the distinction between “elected” and “appointed”.

Anyone competent in current affairs or politics know they are distinctly different, as in “the Union membership elected the official” or “the official was appointed by the NEC”. Two very different material processes.

These distinctions are key to understanding life, and the fact that SWPers/their mates want to argue about it, tells us something about their reasoning processes, or lack of.

They are best ignored.

I know, I know I should ignore his historical illiteracy, but I can’t allow Mike Rosen to rewrite history, Rosen writes:

“re ‘decline’ of the Nazis between 1932 and 1933. However, in between, they had the Reichstag fire going for them. “

The Reichstag fire occurred *after* Hitler was appointed and had the full resources of the State at his command, so plainly they are different circumstances both materially and historically.

The point made by Ashby Turner was that, *if* Hitler had not been appointed by Hindenburg then the Nazi Party probably would have split apart as they were broke, financially speaking and had considerable internal dissent, prior to the 30th January 1933.

After his appointment as Chancellor, businessmen were rushing to meet the Nazis and put money in their coffers. The appointment gave life, funding and new membership to the Nazi Party, which is why the events around it are important, historically speaking.

S.O. Muffin writes:

‘Britain took almost exclusively just two kinds of refugees [from Nazism]. Either “quality emigrants” – scientists, industrialists, well-known artists etc. – or children.’

My father was neither of these; just a 30-year-old civil engineer. And he wasn’t admitted to the UK (in May 1939) on account of his professional expertise; he was required to qualify all over again.

There must have been many others like him.

‘Oh and sack cloth and ashes I have’nt read the book no.’

Surprise surprise.

‘Unfortunately I can’t read German.’

Past experience on this site shows that you can’t read English, either.

‘But you claimed it was relevent (sic) …’

Who taught this prick to spell?

‘on the basis of a review you had read.’

Actually a newspaper article, in a paper not normally known for being anti-Palestinian. But never mind.

I too read the review. And couldn’t see what was relevent (sic) about it on that basis.’

Here’s a little reminder:

‘Al-Husseini had met Adolf Eichmann, Adolf Hitler’s chief architect of the Holocaust, several times to settle details of the slaughter. In the academic work they draw on documents from the Reich Main Security Office showing “Einsatzgruppe Egypt” was standing by in Athens and was ready to disembark for Palestine in the summer of 1942.’

So basically your contention that the Grand Mufti just happened to be a slightly unpleasant Jew-hater doesn’t wash.

‘I await its translation with some interest’

Bollocks.

‘but am aware that there is something a bit dubious about a claims being made on behalf of a book one of whose theses is a very large one about the nature of ideology in the Arab world, given that the authors can’t read Arabic.’

The authors did their research in the old Reich archives. The Nazis spoke German, not Arabic. Their meetings with foreign officials would have had interpreters present, and the records transcribed. Your waffling about ‘ideology in the Arab’ world is therefore an irrelevant digression, which is typical of your gross ignorance about matters you profess to be an expert on.

No wonder you failed your doctorate. You would have been murdered if you’d ever reached a viva.

Cookie cutter
“It is a fact that Al-Husseini was the leaders of the Palestinians and also a pan-Arab Nationilist leader almost on par with a Nasser.”

How can he be the leader of a people you claim dont or didnt exist? (the Palestinians)
Who elected him? He was a British appointee.
And since you claim he was an important figure he was Mufti of Jerusalem how can you claim Jerusalem isnt important to Muslims?
He was clearly so integral to the Holocaust that the zionists let him live out his life in next door Lebanon while travelling half way across the globe to nab Eichmann

Husseini collaborated with the Germans on the simple basis of “the enemy of my enemy” – leaving aside what it has done to the Palestinians Israel has collaborated and supported in its own politicak intersests numerous genocidal anti-Muslim forces from the Serbs to the Lebanes Phalange to the BJP regime in India

You also ignore zionist and jewsih collaboration with the Nazis which was far more substantial.

Your revisionism is hilarious

Actually if you had bothered to read more widely sackcloth you would have found that they do in fact have a theses about ideology in the Arab world. I’m surprised you have not familiarised yourself with this. Thankfully the monograph for the book has been published in English. The material about meetings with Eichmann is drawn from secondary sources (including ironically enough Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, another monograph first published in 1946, and one published in 1986). The bulk of the article concerns a) Nazi plans for an extermination program in mandate palestine and Nazi expectations about collaberation, and, on the other hand, an account (again based on secondary sources) of the grand mufti’s political career and activities in mandate Palestine, much of which is, until today, a subject of dispute amongst historians. The latter point is important as the account of this period is based entirely on secondary sources. Its also worth noting that I nowhere suggested that the mufti was merely a ’slightly unpleasent anti-semite’.

What is new is the plan the middle east and the careers and politics of the SS officers involved.

Anyway here is the monograph:

http://www1.yadvashem.org/about_HOLocaust/studies/vol35/Mallmann-Cuppers2.pdf

Oh and I of course have nowhere professed to be an “expert” on these matters. In some ways this assumption is a bit of a compliment.

“Muslim”: In trying to make your case you are spewing out falsehoods. I challenge you to substantiate any of them (and no, not from the sort of wingnut websites your sort get their information from):

Israel has collaborated and supported in its own politicak intersests numerous genocidal anti-Muslim forces from the Serbs

Falsehood

to the Lebanes Phalange

As did the Syrians (who originally invaded Lebanon in support of the Phalange).

to the BJP regime in India

Israel has had good relations with India’s governments, both Congress and BJP. Neither were as genocidal as Pakistani-based Jihadi terrorists.

You also ignore zionist and jewsih collaboration with the Nazis which was far more substantial.

This is the total falsehood that the lowest of the low (like you) propagate, the most filthy form of Holocaust baiting: accusing the victims in colluding in their own murder. Substantiate it or crawl back under your stone.

You are a disgrace to humanity. And representing yourself as “Muslim”, you are a disgrace to your faith.

From that Pdf, page 19 onwards:

“Amin el-Husseini: Nazi Collaborator and Radical Jew-Hater

[Editor's note: That's the Mufti's words]

Yes modernity thats all from the article, all drawn from secondary sources, and none of it new.

One point SOMuffin. Its unclear to me on what basis you describe the forces of Hindutva as not as genocidal as Jihadists (although its clearly ridiculous to suggest that Israel having relations with India is in some sense complicity with the crimes of Hindutva):
(I’ve just drawn the following link at random).
http://www.wrmea.com/archives/may03/0305074b.html

disgracefully a newspaper affiliated to the FT group was to give Modi (the orchestrater of the anti-Muslim pogroms in Gujarat) an award, just recently:

http://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/2009/08/31/and-the-financial-times-award-goes-to-a-human-rights-violator-please-sign-the-protest-letter/

http://www.wrmea.com/archives/may03/0305074b.html

One small point. Whilst its true that its ridiculous to lay massacres and communal violence sponsered by the BJP on Israel, because like almost every government in the world, the Israeli one has relations with India, its also dangerous to get into a game about how Jihadists are more murderous then proponents of Hindutva. Recently an attempt was made by a newspaper part of the FT group to make Modi, a central figure in the communal pogroms in Gujarat, south asian man of the year. After vigerous petitioning by a range of human rights groups both in India and abroad this has been withdrawn. What is true though, is that the Zionist right and figures involved in Hindutva increasingly make similar types of propaganda about Muslims. No doubt responses to the denial of Modi his coveted ‘man of the year’ award will witness the strange lock-step between those on the right wing of Zionism and those on the right of Hindutva (apparently it now transpires that Vajpayee, himself a Hindutva man, had wanted Modi to resign after these massacres), possibly on this very thread.

And yes modernity those are his own words, and he was a vicious anti-semite who collaberated with the Nazies. All this is well known. What is disputable though is whether interpretations of the Palestinian response to Zionist migration, and both the politics and the violence associated with it, should be understood as simply flowing from an inherent anti-semitism or should be seen as a national dispute. In terms of this argument, nothing new is bought to the table aside from assertions.

JohnG: I explicitly said “India’s governments, both Congress and BJP”, there is no doubt in my mind that at the wilder reaches (which are discomfortingly wide) of BJP there are many nasty individuals. But why should Israel be castigated for maintaining good diplomatic and commercial relations with a country like India, that maintains good diplomatic and commercial relations with most other countries?

What is disputable though is whether interpretations of the Palestinian response to Zionist migration, and both the politics and the violence associated with it, should be understood as simply flowing from an inherent anti-semitism or should be seen as a national dispute.

Well, JohnG, I agree with what you are trying to say.

But let’s take it one step further. So, we agree that this is a national dispute: I take this as a dispute between two national movements. Right? Now, what you are saying (and I agree) that often-atrocious behaviour of side A toward side B can be understood (which is different from excusing) because of the climate and ferocity typical of national conflict. Will you equally agree that often-atrocious behaviour of side B toward side B can be understood (which is different from excusing) on similar grounds? Will you agree that the solution to this national conflict should be the same as the solution to every other national conflict: territorial compromise and an opportunity for both sides to take political responsibility for their destiny, living side-by-side and in peace with their neighbours? And if not, why not?

That’s the beauty of arguing with SWPers (and their mates, like Mike Rosen), they can barely read the documents that they proffer and so miss evidence which contradicts their own assertions.

But before I show that I’d like to point out that SWPers often crudely mischaracterised debates and erect strawmen only to demolish them and so it is with this statement:

“What is disputable though is whether interpretations of the Palestinian response to Zionist migration, and both the politics and the violence associated with it, should be understood as simply flowing from an inherent anti-semitism or should be seen as a national dispute.”

Notice the juxtaposing of antisemitism *or* as a national dispute.

It seemingly doesn’t occur to the SWP that it could be both?

Both a national dispute and to some degree antisemitism. Therefore, they crudely counterpoise the two, rather than appreciate it could be a bit of both?

That anti-Jewish racism stoked up by the Arab ruling classes have contributed to many unnecessary clashes, impeded negotiations and blocked peace. Those are not the only things that have done that, but conspicuous anti-Jewish racism has not helped anyone in the Middle East.

I will try to state this as bluntly as I can, because I know from dealing with SWPers that they don’t listen, are poor readers and have worse comprehension:

Is anti-Jewish racism at the *root* of the conflict in the Middle East? No, certainly not.

Again, certainly not, but it does contribute to the conflict and stirs up unnecessary hatreds.

But let us returned to JohnG’s PDF, extracted from page 15 onwards:

” In 1928, the cleric Hassan al-Banna had established the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. It formed the core cell of modern Islamic fundamentalism. In 1936, the Brotherhood was but a small organization with some 800 members. Yet its ranks soon swelled, and two years later it boasted a total of 200,000.40

The driving factor behind this upsurge was mobilization for the Arab uprising in Palestine, as passages of the Koran hostile to Jews were interwoven with antisemitic formulations of struggle from the Third Reich, and the hatred of the Jews was transformed into jihad, “holy war.”41 The consequence was boycott campaigns and violent demonstrations under the slogan, “Jews out of Egypt and Palestine!”42 In October 1938, a conference of Islamic parliamentarians “for the defense of Palestine” was held in Cairo; antisemitic tractates were distributed, including the Arabic versions of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.43

In contrast, the Syrian National Socialist Party, founded in Damascus by Antun Saadeh in 1932, was decidedly secular and totalitarian, as were the Phalanges Libanaises, founded in 1936, and based on the principle of the “strong leader.” They postulated a folk-ethnic superiority and, in their external forms, borrowed from the paradigm of the NSDAP, as manifest in their swastika flag and fascist salute with a raised hand.44

In Trans-Jordan, under the Hashemite Emir Abdullah, the most moderate country in the region,45 there were also traces of antisemitism. The British representative in Amman noted in February 1941:

“There has been a certain amount of pro-Nazi talk.”46

In Saudi Arabia, in 1939, King Ibn Saud offered the use of Saudi Arabia as a way station for German weaponry shipments to Palestine and openly expressed his sympathies for Nazi deology:

“All Arabs and Muslims throughout the world have great respect for Germany, enhanced by the struggle Germany is waging against Judaism, the arch enemy of the Arab nation.”47 ”

Remember that by 1948 five Arab armies tried to snuff out the new State of Israel.

1948, nine years after those original words were spoken by King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia, so it seems highly unlikely that such intense anti-Jewish racism would have dissipated in that time.

Rather the leaders probably held those same views and tried to act on them, by attempting to physically destroy the new State of Israel and implement the mass murder of Jews.

Given the wealth of evidence it would be remiss and illogical to dismiss the extent of those feelings amongst the Arab ruling classes, as one aspect of their motivations. Not the only one, but contributing to their intellectual makeup.

Agreed. I was simply referring to the comment (probably made in anger), that the Jihadists are worse then the Hindutva people. Thankfully whilst they still exist at the level of the local state, at national level anyway, they have been driven out of government. India was in the situation that Israel is today: the far right in government. There are real affinities between the two. But the symmetry is broken at government level (for the moment anyway).

Modernity you do make me laugh.

I most certainly in my haste to gild the lily stated quite clearly and wrongly that Reichstag happened before 1933 election. Quite wrong. However, that was me trying to suggest how and why the Nazi vote stood up. Which wasn’t what we were talking about.

As for your or Ashby’s argument about what-ifs, they are completely fatuous because Hitler won the election overwhelmingly. Hindenburg couldn’t reasonably (under that constitution) have gone to anyone else. That’s why, in terms of the sequence of history, the fact that he was appointed has very little to do with where the Nazis were at in Germany in Jan 1933. They were the biggest, most popular and most successful party in Germany at that moment. In the system of democracy that was operating there (and not all that dissimilar from our own in the UK now) that’s how parties get given the job of government. They win the most number of seats – albeit not a majority – and so long as the other lot don’t all quickly gang together (of which there was no chance whatsoever) the appointer (queen/president/head of state) has little or not choice but to go to the leader of that winning party.

What ws the point that Martin Smith was trying to make? Hitler won that election. Did he win the election? Yes. And that should give us (even you, mod) pause for thought. While you sit working yourself up into a little hissy fit of indignation about ‘appoint’ and ‘elect’ (in the circumstances of an overwhelming democratic victory) we are witnessing a fascist party winning elections in Britain. HP very correctly points out what the true nature of the BNP is. However, they win votes. So, mod, (after the hissy fit has died down) what is there to do? What can be done? What can we learn from the fact, that Hitler won an election? And quite legitimately became the Chancellor. (no putsch, no coup, no what-ifs). Or do we just sit and pore over texts that speculate about what might have been if Hitler had been cheated of the victory that was his?

As for the meetings with the big industrialists etc, perhaps you’ve forgotten that this was written up in the Daily Worker at the time and been talked about my marxists ever since including Stalinist East Germans in their famous film ‘The German Story’ (circa 1960).

Can you imagine having a domestic with modernity?

Johng you certainly did not read the page of antisemitic propaganda I linked to or you would be ashamed to say that.

But despite the fact that the bile on that page seems to me to be if possible, even more hateful than Nazi propaganda I’ve read, I will happily accept the judgment that beyond a certain point such judgments are meaningless. Once you’re calling for genocide, it doesn’t matter how openly or how hysterically you call for it.

I will be happy to dial back my assessment of PA antisemitic propaganda to being just as bad as the Nazi’s antisemitic propaganda.

No I would not be ashamed about anything that I said. YOU are the one who should be ashamed.

On a thread about Auschwitz. We’ve already heard someone calling one of the leaders of the warsaw ghetto uprising “disgusting” because he dared to be angry with Israels treatment of the Palestinians, and now we have this crap. Be ashamed. Its simply disgraceful. At least play your turning Arabs into Germans at appropriate times: when justifying aerial bombardments or something. Not on a thread about the holocaust.

…and a thread in which HP’s resident correcter and nitpicker thinks he’s saying something significant or important when he points out over and over again that Hitler wasn’t ‘elected’ democratically as Chancellor, he was ‘appointed’, and in so doing effaces the fact that Hitler and the Nazis overwhelmingly won that famous election and so of course (under that constitution) was appointed. In fact, the more I think of it, Hitler had much more constitutional legitimacy in Jan 1933 than Gordon Brown has today!

I get the impression that Modernity sometimes deliberately winds people up with the nitpicking bit. Its why I was imagining a domestic. You know that feeling. “BUT THATS NOT THE POINT!!” etc, etc. At least according to a principle of charity I hope he is deliberately winding people up.

RE: Now, what you are saying (and I agree) that often-atrocious behaviour of side A toward side B can be understood (which is different from excusing) because of the climate and ferocity typical of national conflict. Will you equally agree that often-atrocious behaviour of side B toward side B can be understood (which is different from excusing) on similar grounds?

Josh I don’t understand. What you write now is exactly what I wrote and you took issue with (national conflict, understanding but not excusing, etc.). Anyway, I’m glad you had a change of opinion.

Modernity: You’re clearly picking nits on the German election. You may as well say the American people don’t select the president, a bunch of unelected members of an “electoral college” do so. Hitler had the most seats in the january 1933 election: In canada he’d be heading a minority government, of course, the gov. gen. would formally “appoint” him. Also to whomever wrote it, hitler did not gain 44% in that election. He gained 44% in a second election after the Reichstag fire, after which he banned all parties but his own.

vildechaye,

I am not nitpicking, I am using basic language skills, the ability to differentiate between the meanings of two different words:

1) Elected.
2) Appointed.

It is a simple process.

In North America, you’d probably call it Politics 101, being able to tell when someone was elected (by an electorate) or when they are appointed by a higher body.

It is essential to know the difference. It is very useful when analysing political situations knowing the difference between those two words.

Vildechaye see mbunderstanding

I don’t think we agree.

No I would not be ashamed about anything that I said. YOU are the one who should be ashamed.

Once again, Johng if you don’t find this propaganda every bit has horrible as anything the Nazis produced (and I would say in some ways its worse) then you’re fucking antisemite yourself.
Enjoy: http://www.pmw.org.il/KAJ_eng.htm

the mbunderstanding was a cheap shot, the main point is that your characterization of the Israeli/Arab situation as being essentially different from other expressions of sectarian hatred because it is supposedly “a land dispute” hides every real dynamic of the situation and proffers up an defunct one. It misrepresents the situation by misleadingly offering hope in solutions that are doomed to fail because it is not at this point, a dispute over land.

See my link in the previous comment. Perhaps you will achieve illumination.

Oh for gods sake Josh just shut up. Do you have no sense of basic decency at all?

Oh for gods sake Josh just shut up. Do you have no sense of basic decency at all? Have you ever seen Nazi propaganda?

I can see it all now. “At least the Nazi’s did’nt do suicide bombing” will be the next line. Why don’t you get in touch with David Irving?

I’m sure he’d find you as a useful a useful idiot as the Nazi’s once found the grand mufti of Jerusalem.

Vildechaye: I can understand why you don’t understand. You’ve mis-attributed by contribution for that of the delightful, clever, profound Josh, the Sage of the Bay. Easy to spot this: either by scrolling upwards or by noting that only somebody as scatterminded as I could have written “often-atrocious behaviour of side B toward side B”, meaning of course “often-atrocious behaviour of side B toward side A”.

Another tell-tale sign is “behaviour”, rather than “behavior”.

Modernity: I am sorry. you are correct. you are not nitpicking. Rather, you are an idiot. Answer this: Is the Canadian prime minister elected? Yes or no. Is the U.S. president elected? Yes or no. If you answer yes to both those questions, then your position makes no sense, especially given that the Prime Mininster of Canada was ELECTED with the most seats but not a majority (as was the case with Hitler) and was appointed by Gov. Gen. Michaelle Jean. Of course, she would have APPOINTED him even if he won a majority. So, by your moronic definition, there has never been an elected leader of Canada (or Britain, or any parliamentary democracy). Nice work. In yiddish we have an expression for guys like you: Farshtoppte Kop. You’re the poster boy.

Well vildechaye,

If you want to insult me, fine carry on.

But I wonder why you want to discuss current affairs and politics when you can’t grasp these simple concepts, elected vs. appointed.

Still, it is your choice.

If you are very nice to JohnG or Mike Rosen they might send you a free membership to the SWP :)

John, in other words you either didn’t read that page or are pretending it isn’t totally horrifying.

The sort of lying your doing might work for you in front of a crowd of people who can’t read it for themselves or won’t bother and who trust you. But here you are at the end of thread with half a dozen people in it, none of whom trust you and all of whom can follow a link. Why do you bother lying?

Modernity: I make the same argument every time and you never address it. Instead, you seem to think that it’s the difference between elected and appointed that baffles others. So one last time, answer this: Was Stephen Harper elected or appointed?

As for the SWP, my feelings on those guys and the two posting here have been made quite clear in other posts. That being said, on the issue being discussed in this blog other than your stupid “elected vs. appointed” nonsense, I have to concede that I tend to agree with them. And that’s the first time in here I’ve ever written that.

I’m not quite sure how the debate over whether Hitler was elected or appointed turned into a personal slugfest, but it’s all too typical of what happens in our comments and elsewhere on the web.

vildechaye you wrote: “I make the same argument every time and you never address it”

They are not relevant.

It does not matter what happens in Canada, the US or with Tony Blair. They are all irrelevant