It’s the Holocaust, stupid!

"The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz!"

Zvi Rex, Israeli psychiatrist

 

On 5 July 2024, King Charles III approved the appointment of Rt Hon Keir Starmer as UK Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury.  Rt Hon David Lammy was appointed as Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs.

On 14 July, the latter announced that the UK would “restart funding to UNRWA in order to get aid as quickly as possible to those who need it in Gaza”.  The funding had been stopped when some UNRWA ‘humanitarian workers’ were found to have taken active part in the 7 October attack and massacres.  But the new government declared that it was

“confident that UNRWA is taking action to ensure it meets the highest standards of neutrality”.

“Is taking action” is an interesting way to put it: it clearly refers to something that may bear fruit in the (undefined) future; but the funding resumed with immediate effect.

On 25 July, the UK Labour government announced that it would withdraw the objections (submitted by the previous administration) to the issuance, by the International Criminal Court, of arrest warrants against the Israeli Prime Minister and the Minister of Defence.

On 2 September, the UK government banned the export of certain weapons to Israel.  The announcement explained:

“On day one in office, the Foreign Secretary commissioned a thorough review into Israel’s compliance with International Humanitarian Law, and has travelled to Israel twice since being appointed to the role to understand the situation on the ground.”

“On day one in office” would seem to indicate a huge sense of urgency.  These three measures – all taken within 60 days of its appointment – were by far the most prominent foreign affairs decisions taken by the new government; and, in fact, arguably the most forceful decisions it took in any area.  It seems that the Jewish state and its behaviour is – for some reason – the new UK government’s top concern.

UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy visited Israel twice in his first 60 days in office, "to understand the situation on the ground". He concluded that Israel might be breaching the laws of war in Gaza, and banned the export of some weapons to the Jewish state. Here he is on a previous visit to Israel, organised in 2022 by Labour Friends of Israel. Some friend!

On the other hand, the Labour government also did something else, though perhaps not “[o]n day one in office”: it commissioned a review of the national curriculum for schools in England.  Of course, the matter of what British children are taught in British schools is not quite as burning as whatever happens in Gaza; so the curriculum review will take at least a year, not a fortnight.  It is scheduled to report sometime in autumn 2025.

Well, I suppose education reforms can wait; but some things clearly cannot.  Thus, already on 16 September this year, Prime Minister Starmer announced that, as part of the review to be completed in a year’s time, he was making “Holocaust education” a mandatory topic of study in every school in England.  Of course, the national curriculum – which is followed by the vast majority of schools in England – already includes “Holocaust education”.  And Mr. Starmer’s decision won’t be applied with immediate effect anyway – but only “when the new curriculum comes in” – i.e. after the review is completed, hopefully in autumn 2025.  So why did he announce it already – and with such fanfare?

In opposition, Sir Keir Starmer promised to mend the Labour Party's relationship with the Jewish community. Once in office, he started by making 3 anti-Israel decisions, in quick succession. No wonder that he felt he had to throw the Jews a bone. And he chose "Holocaust education".

Clearly, Rt Hon Starmer needed to balance his government’s slew of hostile measures against the Jewish state with ‘doing something good for the Jews’.  But why “Holocaust education”?  Sure, the memory of the Shoah is a very important part of contemporary Jewish identity.  But, when it comes to their expectations from the government, British Jews have many pressing concerns: “Preserve the memory of the Holocaust” was #8 on the list of ‘Ten Commandments’ included in ‘The Jewish Manifesto for the General Election 2024’ published by the Board of Deputies of British Jews.  (Interestingly, the cover of that brochure boasted a picture of Jews holding up photos of Israeli hostages abducted by Hamas!)

So why bring up the Holocaust?  Jews have been accused of being obsessed with the Shoah.  But it seems many Gentiles are fascinated by it, too; only in different ways.

Let us remember: in the ‘enlightened’ 20th century, the world attempted to murder its Jews and wipe out their memory.  I say ‘the world’ advisedly: while it was Nazi Germany that led that ‘effort,’ members of many other nations lent ‘a helping hand’.  From Ukrainian guards to Polish peasants, from Vichy government officials to Norwegian collaborators – they all played an active role in the Shoah.  Fortunately, the Nazis never conquered the isle of Britain; but even there there were those only too eager to take part in ‘freeing the world from Jewish domination’.

Of those who did not murder Jews themselves (or delivered them to be slaughtered), many were guilty by omission: the vast majority of countries refused to accept Jewish refugees fleeing unimaginable threats and persecution; the British government of the time even callously banned Jews from fleeing to the ‘Jewish Home’ they were supposed to establish.  As for the United States, it responded to European Jews’ desperate need for a safe haven by… further reducing immigration quotas – in particular (and purely coincidentally, of course!) from Germany and Poland.

Ultimately, of course, nations went to war against the Axis; soldiers spilled their blood to defeat it.  But no country fought to save the Jews – they did so to defend their own interests.  The enormity of what was being done to the Jews eventually became known to the Allies, not in the least because so many trains were crisscrossing Europe to deliver raw material to the Nazi death factories.  But, if Hitler hated Jews enough to take those trains away from the Nazi war effort and employ them as vehicles of murder – the Allies didn’t love Jews that much; otherwise, they might’ve used their clear air superiority to destroy those railways.

No wonder that, when finally the war ended and the horrors became widely known, many felt – deep in their hearts – a sense of guilt.  No, not because they felt they contributed to those horrors themselves – the perpetrators were soon declared to be just the Germans and, even among them, only a small circle of Nazis, most of whom were by then conveniently dead.  No, the reason many people secretly felt guilty was that, looking candidly into their souls, they discovered (shhhh, don’t tell anyone!) some of the same feelings that the Nazis harboured.  After all, the latter did not invent antisemitism; the Holocaust was but the culmination of many centuries of hatred, persecution and massacres.

Guilt – as any good Jew or Catholic will tell you – is a very oppressive feeling.  And so, the ovens of Majdanek had barely cooled down, when denial started.  Already by 1948, a French ‘intellectual’ and journalist was publishing a book ‘demonstrating’ that the Shoah was a false narrative.  Other ‘intellectuals’ and ‘academics’ followed suit.

The problem with Holocaust denial is, however – from the point of view of its promoters – that it’s too easily debunked.  Too many people were involved; in too many places; there were too many surviving witnesses; and, despite Nazi efforts, there was also physical evidence.  If – as the deniers claim – the gas chambers were only used to de-lice clothes, it is rather difficult to explain what happened to the people who wore those thousands of shoes left in a dusty warehouse.  The denial approach is still alive and kicking of course – massively in Muslim countries and occasionally in Europe, N. America and elsewhere.  But it struggled to attract a mass following – not in the least because its promoters tended to be obviously unsavoury characters: Islamists and neo-Nazis.

A more appealing way to deal with the guilt is Holocaust trivialisation – promoted primarily by ‘progressives’ like Jeremy Corbyn or Jackie Walkers.  The Holocaust – proclaim supporters of this particular brand of deniers – indeed happened.  But… it didn’t happen only to Jews, it affected many other categories of victims (Communists, Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, disabled people).  And ‘the Holocaust’ was really just ‘one Holocaust’ among many; perhaps not quite as horrific as the transatlantic slave trade – to cite a favourite item on that list.

Former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone (right) ‘resigned’ from the Labour Party. Former Vice-Chair of Momentum Jackie Walker (left) was expelled. Both are notorious for having made very ‘controversial’ statements involving Jews and the Holocaust.

But if the Holocaust never happened; or if it happened as just one such event among many others; then what explains the widespread belief in the contrary (i.e., that it did happen and was an extraordinary, exceptional event)?  If the deniers are really truth-tellers, then there’s a conspiracy to be found in the opposite camp.

And who are more credibly accused of conspiracy than the Jews?  Of course, blaming ‘the Jews’ as such has become a little unfashionable.  But hey, there is by now a Jewish state.  From the point of view of the deniers (of all tinges and methodologies), Israel is an ideal scapegoat: on one hand, it’s mostly Jewish – so mostly suspect; but on the other hand, one can attack that ‘mostly’ by referring to them as ‘Israelis’, thus avoiding the potential pitfall of bashing ‘the Jews’ – like a certain fellow with a funny moustache!

By the mid-1950s, all references to Jews as its main victims have been ‘expunged’ from the ‘history’ of the Holocaust – as told by the Soviet Union and by many ‘progressive’ circles in the West. By mid-1970s Israel was commonly accused – in the same circles – of ‘weaponising’ the Shoah to ‘justify the crimes against the Palestinian people’.  Eventually, someone (a renegade Jew, just like in the times of inquisitorial trials) came up with the term ‘Holocaust industry’; a term invented to describe not the industrialised murder of Jews – but the Jewish ‘exaggerate’ propensity to ‘over-memorialise’ and ‘exploit’ it.

This form of denial is, it seems, much easier for people to ‘buy’ into.  A 2017 survey found that just 2% of the population strongly agreed/tended to agree with the proposition ‘The Holocaust is a myth’.  ‘The Holocaust has been exaggerated’ gained the agreement of 4%.  But no less than 10% agreed that ‘Jews exploit Holocaust victimhood for their own purposes’.  (‘No less’ is not a figure of speech: this particular question elicited a lot of ‘Neither agree nor disagree’ responses (19%), as well as ‘Don’t know/Refuse to respond’ (15%).  So, in addition to the 10% that agreed, 34% of respondents abstained – for some reason – from providing a clear answer to that question.)

But ‘merely’ accusing Jews of nefariously ‘exploiting Holocaust victimhood’ doesn’t go far enough in terms of relieving the guilt.  Because the implication is that, whether ‘exploiting’ or not, they were victims.

How about accusing the Jews themselves of somehow bringing that catastrophe upon themselves?  Of course, accusing an entire population of ‘deserving’ to be massacred is a bit problematic in ‘progressive’ circles.  And before 1948 there was no Jewish state to blame.  But, conveniently, there was a movement aiming to establish one; a movement that, for some reason, was desperate to save Jews from the claws of the Nazis – especially by bringing them to Palestine Mandate.  By 1982, the Institute of Oriental Studies (no, not SOAS; this was IOS, affiliated with the Soviet Academy of Sciences!) was awarding a PhD to a certain PLO leader called Mahmoud Abbas – upon the successful defence of his thesis “The Relationship Between Zionists and Nazis, 1933-1945”.  Few people read this piece of original research, but the theme itself is still popular among hard-leftists – see comments made by former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone in 2016.

For some, however, such theories still don’t go far enough.  After all, even if one were to believe that ‘Zionists’ collaborated with the Nazis (or, in Livingstone’s version, that ‘Hitler supported Zionism’), those Zionists would have been no worse than so many others on the European continent.  And the victims were still Jews!

No, the ultimate guilt-relieving medicine is Holocaust inversion.  If one can persuade oneself that the Jews (or the Jewish state, as the guilt-free euphemism for ‘the Jews’) perpetrate ‘a Holocaust’ themselves – then one can finally hate with no niggling unease.  One can even proffer one’s hatred as a noble endeavour, a kind of belatedly-found and cost-free anti-Nazism.  What better way of bearing the Mark of Cain, than wearing it as badge of honour?

It’s not easy, but with persistence everything is possible.  The Naqba can be narrated as ‘a Holocaust’; Gaza Strip can be equated to ‘a concentration camp’; and bombing Israel with thousands of rockets can be likened to ‘the Revolt of the Warsaw Ghetto’.

Can you name one symbol – other than the Star of David – that is so often associated with the Swastika?

The intention was clear.  Of course, one can believe – especially if one is so inclined – that Israel’s behaviour towards the Palestinians is bad, bad, bad.  But there is ‘bad’ (and there’s no penury of bad behaviour in the world) – and then there is ‘Nazi’.  Others are occasionally accused of Nazi-like behaviour; when it comes to Israel, such ‘metaphors’ abound.  There’s an overwhelming propensity to cast Jews (and only Jews) in the role of Nazis.

In fact, some people found creative ways to claim that Jews are actually worse than Nazis.  After all, unlike the original Nazis, Jews have been themselves victims of the Holocaust; so, as an Honourable Member of the House of Commons once said, they should know better, shouldn’t they??

A 1998 article (published by two ‘researchers’ holding academic positions in London and Paris) stated:

“[T]he Holocaust does not free the Jewish state or the Jews of accountability.  On the contrary, the Nazi crime compounds their moral responsibility and exposes them to greater answerability.  They are the ones who have escaped the ugliest crime in history, and now they are perpetrating reprehensible deeds against another people.”

Ah, but there was still something missing: after all, “reprehensible deeds” is rather weak – if you are to accuse somebody of perpetrating ‘a Holocaust’.  The Holocaust was more than displacement, ghettos and concentration camps; it was history’s largest and most obvious genocide.  Indeed, in most people’s minds, it is synonymous with ‘genocide’.

So, when a truly genocidal attack by Hamas triggered a harsh Israeli response; and when that response resulted (if we are to believe Hamas) in more than 40,000 Palestinian deaths; that’s when the final component fell in place.

40,000 is a large number, but hardly an unusual one.  According to a 2021 UN Development Programme report, the Saudi-led war in Yemen (prosecuted among others with British weapons) caused some 377,000 fatalities – around 150,000 from the fighting itself and the rest from lack of safe water, food and medical care.  The Saudis, by the way, did what Israel arguably should have done: they did not wait for the Houthis to attack them, but hit them first – on the assumption that an Iranian-sponsored terror group on the border is enough of a casus belli.  They also imposed a comprehensive blockade on Yemen, which according to the UN resulted in 3.5 million cases of acute malnutrition and 131,000 deaths between 2015 and 2020.

One of the indirect victims of the war in Yemen.  A 2016 UNICEF report claimed "one child dies every 10 minutes because of malnutrition, diarrhoea and respiratory-tract infections."

But all that’s irrelevant, ain’t it?  Saudi Arabia has not been accused of genocide; it hasn’t been dragged before an international court.  Its leaders aren’t going to be indicted for committing ‘the crime of extermination’.

Will Netanyahu be indicted?  Will Israel be found guilty of genocide?  It doesn't matter, folks.  The words have been spoken; the accusation is all that matters.  The image of Jews as Nazis has now been planted into the minds of those who did not harbour it already.

In short, the Saudis aren’t Jews.  There’s no specific interest – and certainly no morbid satisfaction – in accusing them of perpetrating a new Holocaust.  When Saudis kill children, it’s bad luck; when Jews do it, it’s – for some reason – fascinating...

Night is the new day, folks!  Haniyeh’s a moderate, Netanyahu the devil incarnate.  Hamas is progressive, the PLO moderate, Isreal is a racist state.  Hizb’ullah are brave and noble warriors, the J… err… Zionists are the new Nazis.  Palestinians are the new Jews, and the old ones – having failed to internalise the valuable lessons of the Shoah – are holocausting them poor bastards!  They need to be stopped!  Otherwise, what’s the point of getting all that “Holocaust Education”??  What better way to honour all those dead Jews than prevent the ones alive from doing to others what’s been done to them?  It’s time to finally apply the ‘Never again!’ injunction and all the international treaties that – as we all know – have been put in place precisely with this in mind.  The way to ensure this never happens again is to immediately restore the ceasefire that was in place before 7/10.  The way to preserve peace in the Middle East is to deny Israel weapons.  And put them nasty Isrealis in the dock, not in the Hague, but at Nuremberg – now that’s an idea!

After all, we live in a just, fair and delightful world, governed by the International Humanitarian Law.  Enjoy!!!

Holocausted!

My maternal grandmother was born in Poland; but, as a young woman, her parents sent her to Romania, to take care of a sick relative.  She got married there and stayed.  I am the random outcome of that casual fact; because that’s how she survived, while her entire family (her two parents, her six siblings, her God-only-knows-how-many aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews and nieces) disappeared. 

During a recent trip to Poland, I was able to find the only physical evidence that my grandmother's family ever existed: a Town Hall record of her birth: next to the flowery calligraphy of the Polish clerk, in the correct column, is my great-grandfather’s scribbled, shaky signature: 'Jozef'.  Jozef Tratner.

They lived in Przemyśl, then a small Polish town bisected by the river San.  On 15 September 1939, the town was occupied by the Wehrmacht; between 16 and 19 September, they rounded up and shot 600 Jews.  Then the Germans withdrew across the river, so that the eastern half of the town could be occupied by the Red Army – as per the Hitler–Stalin Pact (a.k.a. the Treaty of Non-aggression between Nazi Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics).  In the Soviet half of the town, the Jews fared only marginally better: some were shot by the NKVD; thousands were deported to unknown destinations somewhere in the USSR – few were ever seen again; the remainder were killed by the Germans, after they re-occupied the eastern half of the town in 1941.

The river San flows through Przemyśl. In September 1939, it became the border between German- and Soviet-occupied Poland.

As for my grandmother’s family, I carry many of their genes, but know little of their story.  Nobody knows when they died; or where, or how they died: whether at the hands of the Germans, of the Soviets, of Polish or Ukrainian collaborators; perhaps they succumbed to starvation, thirst, cold, disease or just to depression and despair.  I know naught about their death and very little about their life.  That’s why I said that they didn’t just die – they disappeared.  The dead are memories in the souls of the living; all I have is broken branches on a family tree.

And yet, I took no part in the Holocaust Memorial Day.  As a proud Jew, this ‘Memorial Day’ offends me.

The very name ‘Holocaust’ adds insult to injury.  Contrary to popular belief, it is not an English word – it’s Greek.  The Greek translation of the Biblical term ‘burnt offering’, which refers to an animal being sacrificed and then burnt in the Temple as homage to God.  My poor relatives might have been burned, yes; but they were no animals.

Why on earth have we taken to calling our pain by a strange and grossly inappropriate Greek name?  It already has a name: it is  השואה— the Sho’ah.  It is a fitting name, because it’s in Hebrew, not Greek: the language of the prayers that my relatives may have uttered before being murdered (not sacrificed!)  The language in which I pray for their souls.  Sho'ah is a fitting name because it has nothing to do with ‘sacrifice’: it means ‘catastrophe’ or ‘calamity’; it’s what one calls a disaster of unbearable proportions.

We stupidly, bovinely accept the offensive term ‘Holocaust’, just as we once accepted ‘antisemitism’ – a term invented by a Jew-hater intent on putting a ‘scientific’, 'modern' patina on his irrational, age-old venom.

The Sho’ah ended in 1945; but there was no ‘Holocaust Memorial Day’ until 1996, when the Germans (yes, the Germans!) decided to proclaim a Day of Remembrance for the Victims of National Socialism (Gedenktag für die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus); 5 years later, it was adopted by the United Kingdom under the current name.

But, just like our pain already had a name, it already had a Memorial Day: Yom HaSho’ah, marked by Jews in Israel and in the Diaspora since 1949!

So why this new ‘Holocaust Memorial Day’?  If the peoples of the world wish to join us in our pain, why not just adopt Yom HaSho’ah as the Sho’ah Memorial Day?  Oh, don’t be naïve, my friend: the ‘Holocaust Memorial Day’ exists precisely because it is not Yom HaSho’ah: it is a Memorial Day for the Jews, just ‘cleansed’ of any Jewish character and especially (especially!) of any ‘controversial’ association with the Jewish state.  It’s a Memorial Day for the (dead) Jews, not by the (living) Jews!

Well, I resent it.  I cannot stand it.  My relatives were not “victims of National Socialism” – they were Jews murdered because they were Jews, by Jew-haters who may or may not even have known what ‘National Socialism’ is.

And I resent the ‘symbolic’ date: 27 January, a date meant to suggest ‘liberation’ or ‘salvation’ of Jews, rather than their mass extermination by Germans, with the extensive (and occasionally enthusiastic) collaboration by members of practically every European nation. 

27 January 1945 was the date on which the Red Army ‘liberated’ Auschwitz.  Liberated?  The German troops had already fled by then; most of the prisoners had been marched off – many to their death; the few emaciated, tortured human husks that still inhabited the camp had been left to their own devices – not out of belated compassion or remorse, but simply because the Nazi death industry was running out of ‘production’ capacity. 

Sorry to rain on that touching ‘liberation’ parade.  The Red Army ‘liberated’ Auschwitz not because – between September 1939 and January 1945 – it had developed a sudden interest in saving Jews; its aim was to punish those who invaded the Russian soil in 1941 – but also to create a new political reality in Eastern Europe.

But why January 1945?  Why Auschwitz?  The Soviet Army had already encountered death camps during the previous months: on 22 July 1944, for instance, the Red Army had captured Majdanek near Lublin.  Abandoned in panic by the German guards, Majdanek was captured intact – lock, stock and gas chambers.  The extent of the crimes committed was immediately clear: there were survivors, exhumations – there was even an official inquiry report published within weeks.

A crematorium in the death camp of Majdanek

By the end of July 1944, the Red Army – in full offensive and facing increasingly crumbling Wehrmacht units – had reached the outskirts of Warsaw.  In Southern Poland, the frontline passed close to the city of Rzeszow, just 150 miles east of Auschwitz.  But then – suddenly, surprisingly – the Soviet offensive stopped in its tracks; the Red Army remained relatively passive for months, before resuming its advance in January 1945.  Why?  Because on 1 August 1944, the Polish underground Home Army (Armia Krajowa) launched an insurrection against the German occupation. 

With weapons largely stolen or captured from the Germans, the Poles embarked on the symbolic act of liberating themselves – while expecting the Red Army to take advantage and advance.  As it happened, the Polish partisans  managed to take control of most of Warsaw, as well as of Rzeszow (on 2 August) and a few other parts of the country.  But Armia Krajowa was loyal to the Polish government in exile, which resided in London and was pro-Western.  Stalin had other plans for Poland.  

Opened up for research in the 1990s, the Soviet Archives include Stalin's orders halting the Red Army offensive and forbidding it from delivering any assistance to the Polish uprising.

That is the real story behind 27 January 1945: but for Stalin’s ‘overriding’ political considerations, there is little doubt that Auschwitz would have been liberated in August 1944.  Tens of thousands of Jews would have been counted among the survivors.  Unlike in the case of Majdanek, at Auschwitz the SS had time: time to dismantle crematoria and hide evidence; time to ‘liquidate’ many of the prisoners and time to march away others, into the deadly January cold.

But let’s not pick on the Soviets; there’s plenty of guilt to go around.  There’s hardly a nation in Europe and the Americas that did not contribute – directly or indirectly – to the murder of six million Jews.  Some murdered them with their own hands, others ‘just’ handed them over to the Nazis; some closed their borders, others their hearts; some sought ‘diplomatic solutions’ with mass murderers, others deemed ‘a few Jews’ a price worth paying for ‘world peace’.

Few had any interest in ‘liberating’ or saving Jews – and nobody wanted to go to war for them.

Even after the magnitude of the horror became officially known, few managed to muster more than nominal compassion for the survivors.  ‘Recognising’ that most of the surviving Jews ‘could not be reintegrated’ in Europe, the British government was planning to ship them to South America.  Excerpts from a 31 July 1946 contribution to a House of Commons debate, by British Deputy Prime Minister Herbert Morisson:

[B]y assisting to reestablish political and economic stability in Europe, we should continue to contribute to the restoration of those basic conditions which will make possible the reintegration in Europe of a substantial number of displaced persons, including Jews. [...]
But, when all that is possible has been done in Europe, it is clear that new homes must be found overseas for many whose ties with their former communities have been irreparably broken.  [...]
Plans are in preparation, in cooperation with the nations concerned, for resettling large numbers of displaced persons in Brazil and other South American countries.

* * *

But those days are gone.  And why wouldn’t they?  It’s all in the past.  Auschwitz is but a museum; the hundreds of thousands of survivors are no longer wondering across Europe; most are no longer around – and nor are the perpetrators; and so the few remaining survivors – the children of Auschwitz, now old and decrepit – can safely be celebrated as “victims of National Socialism”.

‘We’ are oh-so progressive now; so liberal; so determinedly anti-fascist in a world with so few overt fascists.  We are the good guys; so let’s commemorate the ‘Holocaust’, folks!  Or better still, ‘the Holocausts’. 

So what if two thirds of Brits do not know how many Jews were killed in ‘the Holocaust’?  So what if 1 in 20 believes there hasn’t been a ‘Holocaust’ at all?  If 1 in 10 believes that “Jews exploit Holocaust victimhood for their own purposes”?  Sure, sure, we need to deal with this ignorance – education and all that jazz.

But the important, the really important and urgent thing is not to remember just the Jews – there were others who suffered.  What about the Rwandans?  The Cambodians?  The Armenians?  The Bosnians?  Most importantly, what about… what about THE PALESTINIANS??? 

In the name of 'support for the Palestinians', the 'Holocaust Memorial Day' is becoming a 'Jews-Bashing Day' (see https://cst.org.uk/news/blog/2013/01/25/holocaust-memorial-day-abuse-part-3-david-ward-mp).  On 27 January 2013, British MP David Ward declared himself "saddened that the Jews, who suffered unbelievable levels of persecution during the Holocaust, could within a few years of liberation from the death camps be inflicting atrocities on Palestinians in the new State of Israel and continue to do so on a daily basis in the West Bank and Gaza."

What about the trans-Atlantic slave trade?  What about colonialism, imperialism, racism, sexism – what about capitalist exploitation??  No, no, we cannot possibly have a Memorial Day for just one Holocaust; especially not for the Jews – who are, let’s face it – when all is said and done, white privileged persons.  No, we’re going to have a Holocausts Memorial Day, a Genocides Memorial Day; or better, a Human Suffering Memorial Day.  A day in which we remember all those who suffered – throughout history and in all places; a Super-Universal & Über-Politically Correct Day for Remembering Everything & Everybody Who Ever Suffered on Earth & Throughout the Universe!  Without Prejudice & Irrespective of Race, Nationality, Ethnicity, Sexual Orientation & Gender Self-Definition, Of All Faiths or None... (that should cover everything, I hope!)

On 27 January 2011, then Labour Party MP and now leader Jeremy Corbyn proposed that the name 'Holocaust Memorial Day' be changed to 'Genocide Memorial Day – Never Again For Anyone'.

Labour Party activist Jackie Walker (now suspended) claims that Jews are privileged in "a hierarchy of race" and that the Holocaust Memorial Day ignores "other genocides".

Did I say I was a proud Jew?  That was soooo racist of me!  What I am is a proud human being… err… I mean a progressive inhabitant of the Universe, whether human or otherwise, it doesn’t matter now does it??  I swear I'm not Earth-centric, it was just a slip of tongue!

I am so ashamed, please, please forgive my former caveman… err… caveperson mentality!  I abjure, I abjure...  I abjure my heresies: my racist tendency to mourn my relatives, rather than all relatives!  My neo-con reluctance to thank the world for our liberation; my right-wing propensity to burden the world with guilt for just one Holocaust…

I abjure my rootless cosmopolitanism, my dangerous nationalism; my bolshevism and my capitalism; my cowardice, my militarism; I confess all those sins.

I abjure Satan, Trump and Netanyahu; I affirm Noam Chomsky, I give myself to Intersectionality.

But please, I beg you: could you find it in your oh-so generous, universalist hearts to forgive me for that particular pain I’m still feeling?

It’s alright to be an anti-Semite, as long as you’re not Bonehill… err… boneheaded about it!

A few months ago, the Southwark Crown Court sentenced white supremacist Joshua Bonehill-Paine to three years and four months in prison, for inciting racial hatred against Jews.  As the verdict suggests, this was not so much about what the bonehead did, but about what he wrote.  Among other things, he called for an “anti-Jewification” march and promised that it would “be an absolute gas!”  Correctly in my opinion, the court ruled that the right of law-abiding citizens to live free of incitement trumped the lunatic’s right to freely speak his mind.

The coat-of-arms of the National British Resistance – one of
Joshua Bonehill-Paine’s organisations

Bonehill-Paine is not the only nutter in town.  More recently, a certain Gerry Downing was re-expelled from the Labour Party (he had been expelled and re-instated) after calling on Marxists to “address the Jewish Question concretely today”.

Apparently, Bonehill and Downing represent diametrically opposed ideologies: the former is an avowed right-wing fascist; the latter – a self-described socialist revolutionary.  Yet, as I have observed before, these extreme ideologies have a lot more similarities than is commonly recognised.  One of the points of agreement is the existence of a ‘Jewish Question’ in need of a radical and urgent solution.  Bonehill and Downing subscribe to the same anti-Semitic trope: that Jews control huge financial means and, through them, have a genuine stranglehold on Western political and economic life.

Despite that essential similarity, it is unlikely that Gerry will join Joshua in prison anytime soon.  To start with, from a political point of view it is very easy to deal summarily with someone like Bonehill-Paine.  He and his overtly fascist supporters are a constituency onto themselves – and one too small to matter.  It is easy to dismiss them as a small bunch of hooligans – and treat them accordingly.  When it comes to Downing, things are more complicated.  Good ol’ Gerry’s ‘revolutionary’ jargon and 'anti-Zionist' rhetoric are at times uncomfortably similar to those employed by many at the ‘court’ of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.  Simply put, placing Gerry Downing in prison for inciting racial hatred would be striking too close for comfort.  Downing’s juggling of the terms ‘Jewish’, ‘Zionist’ and ‘Israeli’ is, admittedly, very clumsy; Corbyn, KenLivingston and (especially) George Galloway are accomplished masters in that fine art.  Still, we live in a world of intellectual contorsionism, in which use of the code word ‘Zionist’ –  however clumsy and transparent – suffices, allowing naked bigotry to wrap itself in the ‘noble’ mantle of political activism.  In this atmosphere of moral relativism, one can be an anti-Semite, as long as one is clever about it; as long as one is a Downing, rather than a Bonehill.  This is why ol’ Joshua was sentenced to prison in a court of law, while Gerry was only expelled from Labour – unless, that is, his appeal will ultimately be upheld by The Party’s new powers that be.

Gerry Downing (right) talks about the ‘Jewish Question’, but also rages against ‘the Zionists’.
He was therefore considered ‘kosher’ for a BBC interview. 

As I was writing up these two examples, a third one cropped up: Vicky Kirby is an up-and-coming Labour activist from Woking in Surrey.  So up-and-coming, in fact, that she had been selected to represent the Party in last year's general elections.  Woking is rather far from Jerusalem, but the parliamentarian candidate's Twitter account showed a surprisingly keen interest in that part of the world.  One tweet called Hitler "the Zionist God", while another claimed:

“We invented Israel when saving them from Hitler, who now seems to be their teacher.”

After promising, in yet another tweet

“I will never forget and I will make sure my kids teach their children how evil Israel is!”,

Ms Kirby proceeded to lament Islamic State forces "not attacking the real oppressors, Israel".

Finally, she observed

"Point abt Jews is that they OCCUPY palestine. Used to live together, now slaughter the oppressed."

Vicky Kirby won't be going to prison, like Joshua Bonehill; not has she been expelled from the Labour Party, like Gerry Downing.  True, upon discovering her charming tweets, the Labour Party dropped her MP candidacy.  But that was the Old New Labour.  She has now re-surfaced as Vice-Chair of Woking Labour Party’s executive committee.  The New New Labour Party, that is.  Corbyn's Labour Party.  In her exalted capacity as Vice Chair, lovely Ms. Kirby will also operate as Trade Union Liaison Officer, as well as Communications and Campaign Coordinator!  But worry not: despite these onerous responsibilities, I'm sure that good ol' Vicky's interests are much bigger than Woking; so she will surely find time to set the world right, by dealing first and foremost with the Jewish OCCUPATION.

Nor is anti-Semitism confined to the world of nutty revolutionaries and political activists with an axe to grind.  On the contrary, it stems from the grassroots.  A few months ago, I was taking part in a conference dinner in Germany.  Across the table sat a British delegate, a rather boisterous 50-something.  Somehow – I don’t even know how – the discussion turned to the Arab-Israeli conflict.  My interlocutor opined that ‘most British Jews are anti-Zionist’, before implying that ‘the Zionists’ wielded immense power over Britain’s financial and political establishment.  He joked (or half-joked) that I’d probably report him to those all-powerful Zionists – and get him in trouble.  I rather contemptuously answered that there were just about a quarter of a million Jews in the UK, and if indeed ‘most of them were anti-Zionists’ he was unlikely to ‘get in trouble’.  ‘A quarter of a million?’ he asked, incredulously.  ‘I thought there were a lot more…’  ‘And how many of them are politicians?’ he asked, after a moment or so.  ‘I don’t know’, I replied, ‘there’s no more than a handful of MPs who are Jewish’.  ‘A handful?’ he asked, ‘so five MPs?’  ‘I guess’, I said, eager to end the conversation, ‘I don’t know exactly’.  ‘Five MPs’, he proclaimed, in a triumphant tone.  ‘You see?  Twice the proportion in the population!  And that’s just the ones we know about…’  A few minutes and a couple of sentences later, he was threatening to throw the contents of his glass in my face, incensed at my implication that his statements amounted to anti-Semitism.  He was drinking red wine (quite a lot of it) and I was wearing my best suit – so I dropped the subject.

I was reminded of that a few weeks ago, when a British friend told me how, during a childish altercation in the schoolyard, her son had just been called a ‘Jewish c*nt’.  The offender – a 12-13 year old child – apparently thought that Jewish c*nts were decidedly worse than Gentile ones.  I’ll leave it to you, learned reader, to judge whether that was just a technical assessment – or the result of an anti-Semitic comment the child might have picked up from his parents over dinner.

In any case, it was the second such incident that my friend’s boy had been involved in.  Rather distressed, she asked me whether this time she should ‘make an issue of it’.  I opined that she should ask the Head teacher to organise a short course on Jews and anti-Semitism, so that the children could learn to recognise and reject the phenomenon.  She wrote a nice letter, proposing just that.  She even volunteered me as an unpaid lecturer on the subject.  In response, she received a very polite letter from the school, thanking her for raising her concerns and informing her that the school will not tolerate any manifestations of racism.  As for her suggestion of educating the children about anti-Semitism, the school’s management would seriously consider it…  She never heard from them again; I’m sure they continue to consider her suggestion – very seriously.

Now, that doesn't mean that the incident was swept under the carpet.  I’m sure it was dealt with – probably the boy was harshly admonished.  But dealing with this as if it were an isolated occurrence achieves nothing; this is not about scolding one 12 year old, but about educating a generation.

All the episodes described above represent overt, obvious anti-Semitic incidents.  These days, we record them, classify them, analyse them.  We publish statistics and reports about them.  Yet anti-Semitic incidents are not the biggest problem – anti-Semitism is.  We are recording the few visible symptoms, while ignoring the widespread malignant disease.  As another friend of mine – a well-assimilated British Jew – told me once “You know, a lot of people here don’t quite like Jews…”

And that’s why my problem is neither Joshua Bonehill-Paine, nor Gerry Downing.  Whether in prison or in the political rubbish bin, these overt, 'classical' anti-Semites are buffoons of no consequence; even malodorous politicians like Corbyn, Livingston and Galloway are but minor pollutants in the grand scheme of things.  No, the villain in this story is the Head Teacher in my friend’s school.  Because of his indifference, how many kids will be lost to the Dark Side?  How many will grow up to ‘not quite like Jews’?  How many of those kids will propagate further this cancer which – even in the 21^st century – eats into Europe’s moral stature, into its very soul?  He, the Educator, has the possibility and the duty to save not the European or the Israeli Jews, but the European Gentiles from an epidemic transmitted from generation to generation – over centuries.

Unfortunately, there are too many indifferent head teachers.  And that’s just the ones we know about!

John Scumbag Prescott

Those acquainted with my style know that I do not shy away from bluntness; I call the spade a spade and a shmuck – a shmuck. I frown impatiently at political correctness. Nevertheless, I am not in the habit of losing my temper and almost never resort to name-calling.  But there are acts that are so abject, so utterly disgusting, so injurious to God’s truth and justice, that they deserve nothing but the most contemptuous epithets.

Like the previous ones , the latest bout of violence in Gaza has given many a Western bully an opportunity to vent ill-concealed anti-Jewish prejudices under the ‘safe’ cover of ‘humanitarian concern’.  Needless to say, none of these insufferably sanctimonious individuals and groups made a comparable level of noise during the long siege of the Palestinian neighbourhood of Al-Yarmouk, on the outskirts of Damascus.  Which siege has caused Yarmouk’s complete destruction, has included denial of food, drinking water and medical assistance and has caused God only knows how many thousands of civilian fatalities.

Yarmouk, near Damascus, Syria: Palestinian refugees queuing for food.

The ‘pro-Palestinian’ bullies’ concern about Palestinian fatalities mysteriously surfaces only when those fatalities occur in a conflict with Israel.  Otherwise, they don’t much care – certainly not enough to haul their behinds to a demonstration.

But, frankly, I am already inured to the rantings of these rather ridiculous two-quid-a-dozen anti-Semites.  They seldom elicit more than my rather bored shrug of contempt.

Portrait of a scumbag: John Prescott

That was my initial reaction also when I first saw John Prescott’s ‘contribution’ to the 'debate', an article he penned a few days ago for the Mirror. The only reason I decided to read it was, frankly, curiosity.  ‘How huge can hypocrisy get?’ I asked myself as I started to read the article, in which Prescott claims that ‘Israel’s bombardment of Gaza is a war crime’. Yes – a war crime; so says John Prescott, Deputy Prime Minister in a government that bombed, invaded and occupied for 8 years (at the cost of hundreds of thousands of civilian lives) a country situated 4,000 kilometres away!

However, had Prescott’s shameless hypocrisy been the only item of interest, I would have dismissed the whole thing with contempt; had it all been just the usual rantings, I would have shrugged it away as the not-worth-a-second-look antics of yet another ‘has-been’ politician with too much time on his hands.  Let him froth at the mouth as much as he bloody wishes.

But that frothing mouth has done something unforgivable: it has violated the memory of the Holocaust. About midway through his otherwise boring tirades, Prescott made the following remark:

“What happened to the Jewish people at the hands of the Nazis is appalling. But you would think those atrocities would give Israelis a unique sense of perspective and empathy with the victims of a ghetto”.

Got it?? Because one third of world’s Jewry was killed by the Nazis, the descendants of those Jews (rather than the descendants of those who killed them, or of those who slammed the door in their face when they tried to escape the slaughter) have incurred some sort of moral obligation above and beyond everybody else. Because my grandmother’s entire family has been exterminated at Auschwitz – partially because John Prescott's grandmother did nothing to help them – it is ME who owes HIM something or other.

In the eyes of people endowed with normal moral compass, a raped woman is entitled to understanding and sympathy; in light of her traumatic experience, she might even be expected to over-react if threatened. But on Prescott’s twisted, upside-down planet, she would actually be required to behave better than anyone else: it is from the victims – not the criminals and the indifferent bystanders – that he requires better behaviour. Rather than being entitled to some allowances, in Prescottland victims qualify for heavier loads and harsher censure.

In the insensitive mind of this louse, the memory of the Holocaust is but another cudgel with which to bludgeon Jews, in a kind of psychological pogrom.

And that is why I say, with all my soul: John Prescott – you are not just a disgusting hypocrite who points at the spec in his neighbour’s eye, while being himself responsible for nearly a million Iraqi deaths; you are actually an abominable scumbag.

Six years and six days

In military parlance, each large combat operation has its own D-Day.  But modern historiography knows just one such date: June 6, 1944.

One can describe the Allies’ landing on Normandy’s beaches in the language of superlatives: the largest amphibian operation in history decisively contributed to ending the bloodiest war in history.  And ending it in victory for the Good.

70 years later, we’ve come to take that conclusion for granted.  But did it have to end that way?  In an ‘alternate history’ novel called ‘Fatherland’, Robert Harris describes a victorious Nazi regime ruling over Europe in the 1960s, with USA as its still standing, but remote opponent.  Thankfully, ‘alternate history’ ultimately means ‘fiction’.  But in truth, that fiction was not far from becoming reality.  Hitler did manage to either occupy or subdue the entire Europe – save for the British Isles.  Britain remained unconquered, a defiant fortress behind its great seawater moat.  It was down first and foremost to the fierce determination of its people and to the strength of its leaders, but arguably also to US assistance and to Hitler’s choice of aerial bombardments over immediate invasion.  The successful defence of Britain – that last remaining bastion of European freedom – was what enabled D-Day and, eventually, V-Day.  But that was not ‘an inevitable conclusion’; rather, it was ‘victory snatched from the jaws of defeat’.  Had Great Britain fallen, reality would have closely resembled Harris’s ‘alternate history’ – and who knows for how many decades?

Even with Britain standing proud and USA adding its full might in 1941, World War II lasted six long years and (staggeringly, incomprehensibly!) claimed the lives of 70 million people, 50 million of them civilians.

I say ‘six years’, because historians generally view Wehrmacht’s invasion of Poland, which began on September 1st, 1939, as the ‘official’ start of World War II.  But the aggression that led to the war – in seemingly inexorable fashion –actually started much earlier.

Hitler became Kanzler (Chancellor, the official title of German Prime Ministers) in January 1933, as the leader of the largest party.  No, it was not a coup; it was a round of parliamentary elections that brought Hitler to power.  Had it happened in 2013, rather than 1933, ‘The Guardian’ would still refer to him as ‘the democratically-elected leader of Germany’ and would urge open and respectful dialogue with the ‘moderate National Socialists’.

Hitler’s ascent to power marked the start of a relentless series of aggressive moves.  Almost immediately, he started to re-build the German army, with little regard for the limits imposed by the post-World War I peace treaties.  In March 1936, he ordered Wehrmacht units to enter Rhineland (a demilitarised area), thus openly violating the peace agreements.  Later that same year, Hitler intervened in the Spanish civil war, sending in German troops and armament.  Next, he annexed Austria, after first undermining and then bullying its government into submission.  That occurred in March 1938 and Hitler lost no time in moving onto the next target: Czechoslovakia.  He started by stoking ethnic strife between the Czech majority and the German minority; to ‘protect’ the latter, he demanded the territory called Sudetenland; and, when that was ceded, proceeded to occupy the whole of Czechoslovakia.

That sequence of aggressions could not have been more ominous.  Yet the rest of the world – however worried – allowed Hitler to have his way; it was only in September 1939, when Nazi Germany attacked Poland (and proceeded to occupy it in just one month) that Great Britain and France finally declared war.  And even then, they initially abstained from large-scale military operations, still desperately clinging to the hope of a last-minute ‘accommodation’.

Given the repeated violations and acts of aggression (as well as Hitler’s ideology and domestic policies), that timid response is hard to understand and forgive.  Nowadays, historians generally agree that, despite having invested heavily in re-building the German army, in 1936-1938 Hitler was still vulnerable.  Even the Czechoslovak army – smaller, but well-equipped and entrenched in strong Sudetenland fortifications – could have presented a challenge for the Wehrmacht, especially if the latter would have had to fight also on the British-French and Polish fronts.

In the beginning, Hitler’s moves were still tentative: while re-militarising Rhineland, he was informed that French troops were being placed on war footing; a hesitant Führer decided to continue, but was apparently ready to order a retreat, had the French army actually crossed the border.  But it did not; and the dictator learned that he could get away with it, that he was feared.

Prime Minister Chamberlain flies to Germany to 'negotiate' with the Führer, hat in hand...

It was, however, the Czechoslovak affair that made the world war unavoidable.  Bent on appeasing Hitler at all costs, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew several times to Germany, in order to ‘negotiate’ a solution to the ‘Sudeten problem’.  He gradually acceded to Hitler’s every demand; finally, at Munich, in violation of his country’s solemn commitments to Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain practically ‘served’ it to Hitler on a silver platter, in return for mere promises.  In retrospect, not only did this embolden Hitler and pulled the rug from under his opponents’ feet; it bolstered Germany’s still feeble economy and strengthened its army.

... and comes back with a piece of paper, promising 'peace in our time'.

Although few remember it, the pre-war Czechoslovakia was a rich, relatively well-developed  country, with a strong military industry (as an example, the famous ‘Bren’ machine gun, used by the British army throughout the war, had been designed in the Czech city of Brno and ultimately manufactured in Enfield).

According to Katriel Ben-Arie, Hitler’s Czech plunder amounted to

“3.5 billion Reichsmarks’ worth of gold, foreign currency and stockpiled raw material and finished goods [which] saved Hitler’s Reich from speedy economic collapse”

Niall Ferguson opines:

“Hitler gained immediately from Munich. With Czechoslovakia emasculated, Germany’s eastern frontier was significantly less vulnerable.  In occupying the Sudetenland, the Germans acquired at a stroke 1.5 million rifles, 750 aircraft, 600 tanks, and 2,000 field guns, all of which were to prove useful in the years to come.  Indeed, more than one in ten of the tanks used by the Germans in their western offensive of 1940 were Czech-built…  To put it another way: it would prove much harder to fight Germany in 1939 than it would have proved to fight Germany in 1938.”

Yet on his return to England, Neville Chamberlain saw himself as ‘the saviour of peace’ – and was hailed as such.  Speaking outside 10 Downing St., he boasted:

"My good friends, for the second time in our history a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time."

The British press and war-wary public generally agreed.  The Manchester Guardian (the precursor of the current broadsheet – some things never change) triumphantly announced that “Europe has been saved”, albeit at the expense of a distant, unimportant country.

Churchill’s voice must have sounded like that of a crazed prophet of doom:

"England has been offered a choice between war and shame. She has chosen shame, and will get war."

Chamberlain: 'the greatest peace man since the world began', or the man whose actions invited the greatest war since the world began?

There is, of course, no doubt that Chamberlain and ‘the peace camp’ meant well – as did Churchill.  This was not an argument between peaceniks and warmongers, but between self-delusion and realism.  One does not stop a bully by appeasement – that only emboldens him; unpleasant as it may be, the only way to deal with a bully is to stand up to him.

Chamberlain and those who acclaimed him wanted peace; but peace was not on offer; war was to start just a few months later.  Standing up to Hitler in 1936-1938 may have cost lives; but it would have saved countless others.  As it happened, the ‘peace camp’s’ good intentions merely paved the road to a 6-years-long hell which devoured 70 million lives.  Including the 4,414 Allied soldiers who died on June 6, 1944, on the beaches of Normandy.



Just short of 23 years after D-Day (on June 5, 1967), in a different part of the world, another military operation was starting: waves of Israeli planes were taking off, their mission to bomb Egyptian military airfields and destroy that country’s airforce.  The war that had just started was to last not six years, but six days; it was a different war, in almost every way.

Nasser with King Hussein of Jordan and Egyptian Chief of Staff General Amer. Scapegoated for the defeat, Amer will eventually 'commit suicide' in rather mysterious circumstances...

But, like World War II, the main hostilities had been preceded by a dictator’s ever-bolder aggressive moves.  An ex-officer who acceded to power through a military coup, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser had invested heavily in building up the army, despite his country’s poverty.  He had also forged military alliances with Syria and Jordan – the former was also politically united with Egypt, while the latter’s armed forces were placed under Egyptian command.  This was accompanied by extremely aggressive rhetoric and by various border skirmishes with Israel.  Finally, in May, Nasser ordered his army to enter Sinai and take positions at the border with Israel.  Three days later, he ordered the UN peace-keeping force to leave Sinai – an order that the international organisation meekly obeyed.  Finally, on May 22, Nasser declared a naval blockade, closing the Straits of Tiran (an international waterway controlling access to the Red Sea) to Israeli ships and trade.  All three steps – massing troops in Sinai, expelling the peace-keepers and of course the naval blockade – were clear violations of the armistice agreements.

Nasser’s immediate intentions will remain a matter of debate among historians and political activists – with some seeing just an ill-judged exercise in brinkmanship and a botched attempt to extract political and military advantages; there is no real doubt, however, that in the longer term he was intent on wiping Israel off the map, if at all possible.

Israel found herself in a quandary: while Nasser’s moves constituted acts of aggression and in principle triggered the right to self-defence, the ‘international public opinion’ (and parts of the national one) were against war and called for ‘restraint’, ‘moderation’ and ‘international dialogue’.

Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol and young Yitzhak Rabin

At first, Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol assented: he sent secret appeasement messages to Nasser and agreed to let the ‘international community’ solve the crisis.  But attempts to organise an international escort to challenge the Egyptian blockade soon came to nothing; while paying lip service to ‘international law’, neither the UN nor USA, Britain or France were ready to enforce it.  With the Egyptian forces massed at her Southern border, Israel had to mobilise its army, largely made up of reservists.  This brought the economy to an abrupt halt; the ‘restraint’ was making Israel weaker, while emboldening Nasser, whose threats were becoming ever bolder.

On June 1st, an Israeli national unity government was sworn in.  On June 4th, the new government ordered the Israel Defence Forces to take out the Egyptian airforce.

The Six Days War claimed the lives of more than 700 Israelis.  Fortunately, we will never know how many lives it saved.




War is a terrible, horrible, hideous thing.  What sane person likes or wants war?  Yet bullies cannot be ‘appeased’, they need to be confronted.  The only thing worse than a war is a longer and bloodier war.  And the only thing worse than fighting a long and bloody war is losing it.

Bullies and bad character

In a recent article, I opined that – contrary to ‘popular belief’ – criticism of Israel is NOT legitimate, because criticising countries or peoples is the epitome of bigotry. Dictatorial regimes and even democratic governments can indeed be subjected to legitimate criticism; but Israel is the only country that gets criticised as such.

In the same article, I classified Israel’s critics into three categories: ‘the haters’ – who ‘simply’ detest the country and want her to disappear; the ‘justiciaries’ – who persecute her in the name of principles of ‘justice’ invented ad-hoc and not applied to much worse offenders; and ‘the lovers’ – those who behave like abusive parents, constantly bashing Israel for not living up to the impossible standards required by their suffocating ‘love’.

I promised to deal with each category, so here I am ready to make a start.

Frank McDonald thinks that Gaza and Warsaw Ghetto are similar.

Let me start with a certain Frank McDonald.  As environmental editor with Irish Times, Mr. McDonald is no expert in either Middle East politics or the history of the Holocaust. Even his ‘non-expert knowledge’ can only be described as patchy, biased and dated: he visited Israel and the West Bank twice, both times in the 1980s; and he also drew ‘knowledge’ from a highly partisan book written by… another hater. As for the Holocaust, he admits that he ‘looked up’ things about it, in search for parallels. But haters never allow lack of basic knowledge to get in the way of shamelessness: he recently saw fit to compare the Gaza Strip with Warsaw Ghetto and Israel with the Nazis.

Civilians in Gaza, filmed by the Iranian television. Starvation?

The ‘factual basis’ of McDonald’s imbecile assessment is that at the beginning of the Gaza blockade, an Israeli governmental body had apparently calculated the minimum subsistence (‘red line’) food levels for the civilian population in blockaded Strip; in his view, this is similar to the Nazi starving of Jews in Warsaw Ghetto.

The Israeli document McDonald refers to is an expert’s presentation entitled “Food Needs in Gaza – Red Lines”. It purportedly listed minimum calorie intake for subsistence, according to age and gender.

First, let’s elucidate, once and for all, why would an Israeli governmental body commission such a document. Mr. McDonald’s theory (expressed in another of his defamatory Twitter posts) is that Israelis simply behaved ‘like Nazis’.  But that’s his visceral hatred ‘talking’. In reality, Israel was required to do so – under currently accepted rules of conflict. Having declared a blockade against a territory controlled by a terrorist organisation (one that publicly called to ‘exterminate’ Jews and attempted to do so by deliberately bombarding Israeli towns), Israel became bound by the rules governing such blockade. Such rules are listed, for instance, in the San Remo Manual on International Law Applicable to Armed Conflicts at Sea (1994), published on the Red Cross website. Article 103 stipulates:

If the civilian population of the blockaded territory is inadequately provided with food and other objects essential for its survival, the blockading party must provide for free passage of such foodstuffs and other essential supplies, subject to:

(a) the right to prescribe the technical arrangements, including search, under which such passage is permitted; and

(b) the condition that the distribution of such supplies shall be made under the local supervision of a Protecting Power or a humanitarian organization which offers guarantees of impartiality, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross.”

I.e., provided certain conditions are fulfilled, the blockading power is required to allow the passage of supplies essential for the survival of the civilian population. Of course, those ‘certain conditions’ were never fulfilled, because Hamas never cooperated; so in theory Israel would have been justified in refusing any supplies. Needless to say, however, Israel had no intention of causing starvation among the civilian population; so – even while her own civilians were under constant bombardment coming from Gaza – she allowed passage of essential supplies into Strip. Which, given the nature of a terrorist organisation whose ‘fighters’ cannot be readily distinguished from the non-involved civilian population, meant that she also fed the enemy combatants who were launching the rockets. But how does one ascertain that essential supplies are being delivered, while on the other hand not allowing the enemy to live in luxury? By asking experts to calculate what is essential – and by making sure that what is delivered does not fall below that (in reality, the numbers show that Israel constantly delivered considerably more than the experts’ ‘red line’).

So while Frank McDonald clutches onto that document as ‘evidence’ of Israeli Nazi-like behaviour, it proves precisely the opposite. While the Nazis’ purpose was to starve the Jews, Israel’s was to ensure that the Gazan civilian population survived – even in the midst of an armed conflict. Which is why all the cohorts of haters, despite their keen desire to find ‘Israeli crimes’, cannot point to even one person who died of starvation in Gaza.  It's not that people do not starve to death in today's world.  Unfortunately they do  – in droves.  In poverty and disease-stricken areas of Africa, Asia and Latin America, more than 20,000 people die of hunger every day.  It's just that haters did not find a way to blame their plight on the Jews (yet!).  Hence, they'd rather focus on denouncing Israel's incredible cruelty: while Israelis supply the Gazans with flour, meat and cooking oil, they deny them ginger and coriander!

What all this also demonstrates is the haters fundamental ill-will.  McDonald seizes what looked to him as a ‘similarity’ – however conjectural – and based on that sole ‘fact’ concludes that the two situations (Gaza Strip and the Warsaw Ghetto) were comparable. Based on such ‘logic’, one can compare, for instance, the US-led Operation Desert Storm with the Nazi Blitzkrieg. After all, both were based on fast encircling manoeuvres by airforce-supported armoured divisions…

On the way to ‘demonstrating’ his predetermined conclusion (that Jews behave like Nazis) McDonald ‘misses’ a few tiny ‘details’. For instance, that the fundamental purpose of the Warsaw Ghetto was to ‘exterminate’ Poland’s Jewish population. Towards that purpose, they were not just deliberately starved, while also subjected to forced labour; they were gradually transported to death camps, where they were murdered en-masse. The Nazi racial ideology-based ‘extermination’ was perpetrated against a population that never attacked or posed any danger to Germany. While the Gaza Strip is merely subjected to a blockade – a legitimate tactic in armed conflicts – following its falling under the control of a terrorist organisation which attacked Israel. Indeed, McDonald admits that much; it just does not occur to him that these differences are infinitely more important than his one conjectural ‘similarity’. He ‘simply’ declares that cheese and chalk are the same – because both are white.

Israeli car (yellow licence plate) and West Bank Palestinian car (note the 'P' for 'Palestine'), parked side-by-side in a Jerusalem parking lot.

Like fire, hatred finds things to feed on – just about anything it encounters. For instance, on one of his two visits to Israel, 34 years ago (!) McDonald came across a racist Israeli taxi driver, who urged his party to use his own taxi, rather than a Palestinian one. I rather suspect that there were a few racist taxi drivers in London 34 years ago; but to McDonald – that was conducive of his ‘discovery’ of yet another aspect of Israelis’ Nazi-like behaviour: the Palestinian taxi had different licence plates, unlike the Israeli ones. This, McDonald immediately concluded, was entirely similar to “in the Nazi concentration camps, Jews had yellow Star of David symbols and numbers tattooed on their arms”. Needless to say, all cars registered by Israeli citizens – whether Jews or Arabs – have identical licence plates.  But, since Israel has never annexed the West Bank, Palestinians inhabiting that territory are not Israeli citizens. Indeed, in 1980 they were Jordanian citizens. Their cars had foreign licence plates, different from the Israeli licence plates; just like a Northern Irish cars crossing into Frank McDonald’s native Republic of Ireland. So, yet another conjecture that ill-will turned into ‘evidence’.

A car from Northern Ireland (yellow licence plate) and one from the Republic of Ireland, parked side-by-side at a public event.

But at this point, one needs to ask: why is McDonald so keen to find ‘similarities’ between Jews and Nazis?

To answer that question, one needs to delve a bit into Mr. McDonald’s own ethics. Which we feel we are justified in doing, given that in criticising Israel he claims moral high ground.

One night in 2010, Frank McDonald’s comfort was impinged upon: a neighbourhood hotel operated a night club and the resulting noise bothered Frank. He walked to the club and argued his case with a female employee. Nothing wrong with that; in fact, McDonald could even have complained to the police. But he didn’t; instead, when the female employee did not accede to his demands… he hit her. This holder of ‘moral high ground’ and self-appointed judge of Israeli misbehaviour resorted to physical violence against a woman, merely because he perceived her as somehow responsible for disturbing his rest. And what would Mr. McDonald do against people who bombed his home and endangered his family’s life and limb? I guess we’ll have to leave that to reader’s own imagination!

How is this related to comparing Jews to Nazis? Well, as his behaviour shows, Mr. McDonald is a bully. And bullies try to intimidate people, by hurting them in the ‘best’ way they can. Mr. McDonald knows (or, more likely, instinctively feels – the way bullies do) that comparisons to the Nazis are particularly hurtful to Jews; and that’s precisely why he uses them. McDonald does not compare anyone else to the Nazis – not even Assad’s regime. He never drew a comparison between – for instance – Warsaw Ghetto and the city of Homs. (While the two are not similar in my opinion, the latter has been subjected so far to three years of siege, during which nothing was allowed in and no one has been allowed to get out alive. But Assad is not Jewish and hence he would be much less susceptible to bullying by calling him a Nazi).

McDonald is not the only Israel-hater hurling his ‘criticism’ from a very low ‘moral high ground’. In fact, if one digs deep enough, one will probably find this to be the rule, not the exception.

After admitting plagiarism and misconduct, Johann Hari had to attend a course in journalistic ethics. We do not know the outcome.

A well-known ‘critic’ of Israel, journalist Johann Hari is the one who, from the pages of The Independent, associated Israel with “the smell of shit” – just one of many ways in which Hari chose to lambast Israelis for their ‘immoral’ behaviour. Given his harsh judgements and acute sense of smell when it comes to Jews, one would have expected Hari’s own ethics to smell of frankincense and rosewater.  Hardly, however: in 2011, it was discovered that he engaged in a bit of plagiarism, ‘borrowing’ bits of other people’s work without their permission – and planting them in his own ‘interviews’. Forced to admit that offence, Hari denied, however, another charge: that he invented an atrocity which never happened, in order to win a journalistic prize. In an attempt to quickly end the controversy, he returned the prize itself – though not the £2,000 that came with it! To complete the picture, let’s also mention that he was busily editing Wikipedia under a pseudonym, lavishing praise on himself and defaming other journalists he perceived as ‘rivals’…

Reverend Paul Flowers: a tale of religion, business, politics and... cocaine. Some 'ministry'!

In 2012, the Co-op business-politics conglomerate blacklisted four Israeli companies for ‘helping the occupation’ (by selling dates and cherry tomatoes grown on the ‘wrong side’ of the 1949 armistice line). Apparently, this contravened Co-op’s ‘ethical policies’, one of which bans trade not with all ‘settlements’, but specifically with ‘Israeli settlements in the West Bank’ and (as a fig leaf) ‘Moroccan settlements in Western Sahara’ (no Moroccan company has ever been blacklisted, of course). Despite Co-op’s pretence of ‘democracy’ in terms of decision-making, that particular decision was adopted at Board level and imposed top-down. Persistent rumours indicate that one of the main ‘drivers’ of that decision was Rev. Paul Flowers, the chairman of Co-op Bank and de-facto deputy chair of the conglomerate. Under Rev. Flowers’s diligent leadership, the bank lost £700 million in 6 short months – and that’s before a £1.5 billion hole was found in its finances! But that’s just bad management. More enlightening in terms of his personal morals (as opposed to his professional capability) are the revelations about his trading in drugs – in particular cocaine. Following these revelations and the subsequent arrest, Rev. Flowers has also come under scrutiny elsewhere: he is currently under investigation for alleged submission of false expenses claims as Trustee (as in ‘trusted’? how ironic!) of a charity dealing with drug abuse. The matter has meanwhile been referred to the Charity Commission. As a Methodist minister, Flowers was also influential in the Church, having repeatedly candidated for the Presidency of the Methodist Conference and served on several of its committees. It is as yet unknown to which extent – if any – that influence contributed to the anti-Israel boycott resolutions adopted by the UK Methodist Conference in 2010.

Violence, plagiarism, drugs… it would seem that Israel-haters’ unforgivingly ‘ethical’, holier-than-thou attitude towards the Jewish State is conducted from some very murky ‘moral high ground’. One should not be surprised: the bullies’ constant need to oppress and persecute often hides a profound self-dislike; their anger is frequently just an attempt to drown out that tiny inner voice telling them they are really bad people…