Tag Archives: Nazism

Jan 30 2013

British “Intelligence” and Zionist Nazi analogies

In Douglas Murray’s latest piece for The Spectator, he asked whether Jews should leave Britain, a question prompted by a piece written by Israeli journalist Caroline Glick, which she wrote after participating in an Intelligence Squared debate about Israeli settlements.

The resolution they debated was titled: ”Israel is destroying itself with its settlement policy. If settlement expansion continues Israel will have no future.”

Glick and Danny Dayan, outgoing head of the Yesha Council, were pitted against William Sieghart and Lord Levy’s son, Daniel Levy (one of the founders of J-Street).

The resolution passed by a ratio of 5-1.

Murray wrote the following:

“As Glick notes in her bitter farewell to London, the audience was so hostile towards her argument that when she even mentioned the matter of Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini and his involvement with the Nazis during World War II she was booed down by the audience. They – having been presented to her as open-minded – turned out to be so close-minded and partial that they would not even hear a historical fact about a Palestinian figure who was an actual Nazi.”

However, there was actually some applause from the audience in response to the following Nazi reference made by an audience member. (I edited the full video, which can be seen here).

The dilemma in responding to such a grotesque inversion – the insidious and intellectually bankrupt assertion that Israeli Jews are the practitioners of a Nazi ideology, a charge for which many “sophisticated” Europeans, weary of Holocaust guilt and increasingly hostile to Israel, seem to enjoy as a bit of moral Schadenfreude - is whether to dignify it with a response.

Murray, who didn’t mention that particular question from the audience, strikes the correct tone in his broader reply when he contextualized the tenor of the Intelligence Squared debate by citing MP David Ward’s evocation of ‘Jewish atrocities’ during his putative commemoration of Holocaust Memorial Day, as well as the cartoon by Gerald Scarfe.

Murray wrote the following:

“There is absolutely no connection between, for instance, the liquidation of hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto and the treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank. There is absolutely no connection between the situation in Gaza and the herding of six million Jews into concentration camps. The wonder then is not over Scarfe or Ward’s sense of timing, but why at any point in any year they would be so keen to spread lies and to bait Jews by comparing the actions of the Jewish state with those of a genocidal doctrine of Nazism which sought to annihilate the Jews.”

While Glick’s gloomy and definitive prediction that there is no future for Jews in England seems a bit too glib, Murray’s slightly more restrained conclusion and haunting final question certainly seem sober, well-informed and depressingly apt:

“Glick’s question returns. What sort of future is there in Britain for Jews? I would submit that there is a future. But what is becoming increasingly clear is that the price of that future is that Jews will increasingly be expected to distance themselves from Israel. There is a fair amount of evidence from the Jewish community suggesting that this process is already underway. Once it is complete then those ‘good’ anti-Israel Jews will be able to proclaim victory. But the same force that they encouraged to come for their co-religionists will then just as surely come for them. And then where will they hide?”

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Jan 24 2013

‘Comment is Free’ editors finally suspend user privileges of white supremacist

On Jan. 16 we posted about a Guardian reader whose commenting privileges were not suspended despite the fact that he made racist remarks, including the promotion of Holocaust denial, beneath a Guardian story about Holocaust education in the UK.  We additionally noted how peculiar it was that his user profile remained at ‘Comment is Free’ despite the fact that it contained a link to a white supremacist site called ‘British Resistance‘.

We identified the right-wing extremist – who uses the online moniker of ‘CorshmCrusader’ – as Mark Kennedy, a Nazi sympathizer who is actually the deputy editor of ‘British Resistance’, and asked CiF Watch readers to consider contacting ‘Comment is Free’ editors to inquire why he hadn’t been banned.

Today we finally learned that ‘CorshmCrusader’s profile has indeed been removed by ‘Comment is Free’ editors.

Here’s what you see when try to open the user’s link:

profile not available

Many thanks to those of you who responded to our request, emailed CiF editors and helped us get this extremist removed from the Guardian.

Related articles

 

Nov 19 2012

Guernica, Gaza and the Guardian

 

‘Guernica’ by Picasso

The following letter was not only chosen by editors at the Guardian as worthy of publication on Nov. 18., but even was featured in the  title.

What Leslie, a supporter of Independent Jewish Voices, is saying, in a polemic deemed meritorious by the Guardian is that, “as a Jew“ who escaped Hitler’s attempt to exterminate all of the Jews on earth, he is in a privileged position to detect, and oppose, absolute evil – be it the evil of Nazism or the barbarity of the Jewish state.

The Nazis murdered six million Jews, and up to five million other “undesirables”, and launched wars which resulted in the deaths of tens of millions during WWII.

On April 26, 1937, the Nazis sent waves of bombers and fighter planes to the Spanish town of Guernica and dropped explosives, fragmentation bombs and incendiaries for 2 1/2 hours, literally razing the city to the ground.  Three days later, “they scorched the city and fired machine guns at the women and children who fled in panic.”

The IDF operation – targeting the Hamas terror infrastructure and aimed at putting a stop to incessant rockets fired at Israeli cities  - has included over 800 strikes on terrorist targets over five days.  It has resulted in 84 Palestinian deaths, half of whom are terrorists – an arguably unprecedented civilian to combatant death ratio of 1:1, especially in the context of Hamas’s practice of placing rocket launchers near civilians.  

The IDF is allowing Palestinian patients wounded in the fighting safe passage across the border to be treated at Israeli hospitals, and continues to send humanitarian supplies  into Gaza despite the constant rocket attacks from the territory.

I’m no emeritus professor, but to evoke Guernica in the context of the current conflict in Gaza represents an assault on truth, history and moral decency.

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Jun 22 2012

Guardian story on Alice Walker elicits support by readers for Israel – Nazi analogy

Our last post was inspired by a June 20th Guardian report on Alice Walker’s decision not to permit her book ‘The Colour Purple’ to be translated into Hebrew. Moreover, as we noted, Walker isn’t merely a proponent of BDS, but has characterized many of the state’s Jewish citizens as KKK-style racists, and Israel more broadly as morally beyond the pale.

As we noted, Walker even employed a not so subtle Israel-Nazi analogy in a prior Guardian piece defending her decision to participate in the pro-Hamas flotilla in 2011.

Sure enough, a few readers of the Guardian piece posted comments below the line which echoed Walker’s obscene Nazi narrative of the modern Jewish state.

The Israeli right has adopted Nazi ideologies of race (40 Recommends):

Nazi analogy has the tragic ring of truth (11 Recommends):

Jews in Israel learned wrong lessons (Nazi racial theories) from Holocaust (10 Recommends):

As of this post these comments have not been deleted by CiF moderators.

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Jun 13 2012

How could “liberal” Guardian give a platform to antisemitic fascists? (Essay by Lyn Julius)

The following was written by Lyn Julius, at Point of No Return. (A version of this also appeared at ‘Times of Israel‘)

Hamas suicide bombers in training

From the 1930s – well before the creation of Israel – the Muslim Brotherhood was agitating against the Jews of Egypt, Palestine and Syria. By 1945 the Muslim Brotherhood had a million armed supporters in Egypt.

The Third Reich financed and trained the Muslim Brothers of Palestine and Egypt in terrorism. The Nazi concept of the Jews as the epitome of all-controlling evil was exported to the Arab world, where it is entrenched to this day. Hitler shared his plans to kill the Jews of Europe with the main ally of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine, the Mufti of Jerusalem. The Mufti ‘s machinations led to a pro-Nazi coup in Iraq, and the murder of hundreds of Iraqi Jews in the Farhud pogrom in June 1941. Meeting in Berlin a few months later, Hitler and the Mufti agreed a plan to exterminate all the Jews of the Middle East.

From 1947 Arab governments set about making the Arab Middle EastJudenrein. They applied Nuremberg-style laws, criminalising Zionism, freezing Jewish bank accounts, instituting quotas, imposing restrictions on jobs and movement. The result was the mass exodus and spoliation of a million Jews.

Nazi-style bigotry, coupled with traditional Islamic antisemitism, remains the driving force behind the marginalisation and exclusion of minorities from the Arab world on the one hand, and the unremitting campaign to destroy Israel on the other.

The ghost of Nazi-inspired, anti-Jewish fundamentalism was never exorcised from the Arab world. The Mufti of Jerusalem should have been tried as a war criminal at Nuremberg. He was indicted, tried and convicted by Yugoslavia for crimes against humanity. But the Allies shrank from offending the Arabs. That is why today in the Arab and Muslim world, antisemitism is epidemic.

The reason why The Guardian gives a platform to genocidal fascists is less easy to fathom. The Left has always dabbled in antisemitism – the ‘socialism of fools’. Israel has been cast as the US’s little imperialist helper. No-one seems to remember that Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Iraq, Bahrain and much of the rest of the Arab world are also well within the US sphere of influence.

The so-called red-green alliance, for which The Guardian is a cheerleader, has bought into the myth that Israel is a colonial project. This brazen lie both denies the Jews’ 3,000–year-old connection to their ancestral homeland, and ignores the fact that 50 percent of Israel’s Jewish population descend from refugees indigenous to the Arab and Muslim world, predating Arab Muslim colonialism by centuries.

Then there is the misplaced belief that an extremist party like Hamas will be tamed by the responsibilities of power and needs to be engaged with. No sign of such moderation yet.

Finally, The Guardian’s decision to feature Haniyeh could simply be a hard-nosed, commercial one: controversy sells. Losing principled readers such as Charlotte of Digital Politico is evidently a price it is prepared to pay.

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Jun 6 2012

Israel boots Wagner: Harriet Sherwood chides state for uniting behind its Holocaust survivors

A guest post by Gidon Ben-Zvi, an Anglo-Israeli writer who blogs at Jerusalem State of Mind.

German Composer Richard Wagner

On Tuesday June 5th, the Guardian’s Jerusalem correspondent Harriet Sherwood reported that Tel Aviv University had denied the request of the Israel Wagner Society to have an Israeli symphony orchestra perform works by Hitler’s favorite composer Richard Wagner (Tel Aviv Wagner concert cancelled after wave of protest).

The university announced that it would not permit a scheduled Wagner concert to take place on its campus after vehement public protests.

Tel Aviv University accused Yonathan Livni – the founder of the Israel Wagner Society – of deliberately concealing the intention to perform Wagner compositions. The university also claimed that Livni did not mention the name of the organization he represented.

 Ms. Sherwood’s reporting of this story is riddled with subtle distortions and logical fallacies which should be examined.

First off, Ms. Sherwood repeatedly used the term ‘boycott’ without further elucidation. The ‘boycott’ is not official and in fact the Israeli Supreme Court ruled in 2000 that it is not illegal to play Wagner in Israel. Rather, the ban is merely a custom that goes back to the founding of the Jewish state.

Next, she refers to this “unofficial boycott” of Wagner and draws an elegant parallel between it and the BDS Israel campaign which, after all, also has the word ‘boycott’ in it. Specifically, Sherwood quotes Mr. Livni, who responded to Tel Aviv University’s decision thus:

“The issue is that here is an academic institution that is threatened daily with boycotts because of Israel’s policy in the occupied territories doing exactly the same thing: imposing a boycott.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote the following:

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”

While the BDS Israel movement seeks to purge Israel, both inside and outside of the ‘Green Line’, of every last vestige of Jewish character and sovereignty, Israel’s unofficial Wagner ban serves as a crucial reminder that ideas have consequences — and that those who spread evil ideas should be held responsible for their consequences.

And this dovetails into Ms Sherwood’s next logical evasion.

The tired “divide man from his art” cliché’ is invoked in this quote, once again courtesy of Mr. Livni:

“I have no regard for the composer – he was the worst kind of anti-Semite and I despise him. But God gave him a wonderful gift with which he wrote this beautiful, sublime music.“

Simply put, none of this is about Wagner’s music. Rather, it’s about the strength and corrosive influence of his ideas. While Richard Wagner lived decades before the birth of Nazism, his influence on the National Socialist movement and especially on its leader was enormous.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that Wagner was one of “the great warriors in this world who, though not understood by the present, was nevertheless prepared to carry the fight for their ideas and ideals to their end.”

Wagner’s music was prominently featured at Nazi Party functions. And the operatic festival that he founded at Bayreuth in 1876 became a citadel of racism and reaction, and the cultural showpiece of the Third Reich and Hitler’s artistic centre.

Upon coming to power in 1933, Wagner’s works were used by the Nazi regime as part of its plan to ‘Nazify’ German culture.

In some Nazi concentration camps prescribed music was forced on the inmates by way of radio or gramophones that played over permanently installed loudspeakers.

The music, which included the works of Richard Wagner, was used along with propaganda speeches in order to re-educate the inmates. As such, the argument can be made the Wagner’s music served as soundtrack to many who lived through, and died during, the Holocaust.

Later in the article Ms Sherwood once again cites the eminently quotable Mr. Livni:

“It was hypocritical of Israelis to boycott Wagner but ride on German-built trains and drive German-made cars, and for the state to buy German submarines…”

The Reparations Agreement between Israel and West Germany  was signed in 1952 in order to:

“…address the calling for moral and material indemnity … The Federal Government are prepared, jointly with representatives of Jewry and the State of Israel … to bring about a solution of the material indemnity problem, thus easing the way to the spiritual settlement of infinite suffering.”

Although public debate in Israel was among the fiercest in the nation’s history, the aim of the reparations was undeniably to address and perhaps begin to come to terms with one of the great human tragedies ever known. While a blunt and highly controversial tool, reparations that sought to seek a smidge of redemption for an irredeemable act of cruelty were guided by a higher moral imperative.

What does this have to do with Wagner being performed in Israel?

Those who advocate for Wagner compositions being performed in the Jewish State usually rely on the ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ argument.  Whether or not one concurs, this focus on the aesthetically pleasing attributes of Wagner’s works is devoid of any appeal to redemption, forgiveness or spiritual healing.

By politicizing history in order to bludgeon Israel into illegitimacy, Ms. Sherwood does a disservice to the discipline, whose purpose is “…to reconstruct the past as accurately as the intelligence of the historian and the fullness of the historical sources permit…”

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May 28 2012

Guardian reader comment of the day: Where Greek neo-Nazis aren’t too concerned with Jews

Flag of Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn Party

Today’s ‘ Comment is Free’ piece “Open Letter: We are all Greek Jews” of May 28th, signed by Benjamin Abtan, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Elie Wiesel, Amélie Nothomb and others called on Europe to reject the Greek neo-Nazi party, Golden Dawn, which entered the Greek parliament this month.

Golden Dawn’s leader Nikos Michaloliakos

The letter warns that “the [neo-Nazi Greek Golden Dawn] party is the lineal heir of the German national-socialist party that led Europe and the world into chaos and bloodshed.”

The specter of a resurgent neo-Nazi movement in Europe would seem, at first glance, an anomaly and almost reads as fiction. However, as the open letter notes:

“Greece is not the only country threatened by this revival of Nazi ideology. In Latvia this year, the president of the republic has for the first time supported the annual former Waffen SS march.

In Austria the FPÖ, an extreme right organisation that nurtures Third Reich nostalgia, is favourite in the polls for the next parliamentary elections. In Hungary, the Hungarian Guard Movement, descendant of The Arrow Cross party – the former militia responsible for the extermination of Jews and Gypsies – terrorises Jewish populations and holds direct responsibility for provoking deadly attacks against Roma people.”

The following is a recent interview with Nikos Michaloliakosis – the leader of Greece’s Golden Dawn movement which will occupy 21 seats in the Greek parliament after winning 7% of the vote in the May 6 elections.

While this blog has often argued that Guardian readers are much more comfortable condemning right-wing antisemitism than the Islamist variety, note that the following comment, greatly downplaying even the former, garnered 113 ‘Recommends’. 

Stunning, really: a reader who questions the antisemitic bona fides of an extremist European movement which possesses a swastika-inspired emblem, enforces a  Hitlerian salute, references Mein Kampf, endorses racist ideology, and trades in Holocaust denial.

It makes you wonder what precisely it would take for some Guardian readers to see the hideous Jew hatred squarely in front of their face. 

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Apr 11 2012

Former Nazi Gunter Grass & a ‘liberal’ broadsheet called the Guardian (Analysis of coverage)

As I noted in a previous post, an 84 year old former Waffen SS Nazi named Gunter Grass published a poem falsely accusing Israel of contemplating a nuclear assault on Iran, and therefore a threat to “already fragile” world peace.

I advanced a few arguments in the piece, the most basic of which were these:

That the spectacle of a former Nazi, a German who was complicit with history’s most lethal movement, is about the last person on earth to lecture Jews on morality; that it’s shameful to characterize as “brave” his promotion of the intellectually and morally unserious charge that the Jewish state represents a threat to world peace; and that Germans, if nothing else, have a profound responsibility to guard against the resurgence of Judeophobic discourse within their society.

You’d think even the Guardian would report the story in a manner.

However, they’ve published eight pieces on the row thus far, little of which suggest genuine moral outrage at Grass, and much of which vilify Israel for its’ reaction to the poem.

Here are some highlights:

1. Gunter Grass barred from Israel over poem, April 8, by Harriet Sherwood.

What title and narrative of piece evoke: 

Israel repressing freedom of expression, unfairly barring someone from entering the state due merely to an offensive poem.

Relevant passages, representative of story’s theme

Some Israeli commentators said Grass had raised an important issue and that criticism of Israeli policies was routinely portrayed as antisemitism.

Writing on the +972 website, Larry Derfner said: “Günter Grass told the truth, he was brave in telling it, he was brave in admitting that he’d been drafted into the Waffen SS as a teenager, and by speaking out against an Israeli attack on Iran, he’s doing this country a great service at some personal cost while most Israelis and American Jews are safely following the herd behind Bibi [Netanyahu] over the cliff.”

Gideon Levy, the Haaretz columnist, wrote that Grass and other critics of Israeli policies were “not anti-Semites, they are expressing the opinions of many people”. ”Instead of accusing them, we should consider what we did that led them to express it,” he said.

By ending with two defenses of Grass, which characterize him as more deserving of moral sympathy than Israeli leaders, Sherwood is providing implicit support (or at least, legitimization) for such opinions.  The broader message is that Israel is the guilty party, not Gunter Grass. 

2. Letters: Israel, Gunter Grass and the right to artistic license, April 8

While there were two letters critical of Grass, there were also four strongly defending him and vilifying Israel: by Tim Llewellyn, John Severs, John Severs, Catherine Boswell. 

Tim Llewellyn: Zionist conspiracies, the tragically misunderstood Republic of Iran, and a compliant media that is manipulated into denigrating the great Grass.

“What is so exceptional about Günter Grass’s verse that it should provoke such political and media hysteria? He merely points out what anyone who studies the Middle East knows: that Israel is trying to bounce the United States into war with Iran by wildly exaggerating Iran’s alleged “existential” threat to Israel, regardless of the cataclysmic consequences.

Israel has nuclear weapons; Iran does not. Iran has not seriously threatened Israel: even rhetorically, the textual evidence of any real menace to Israel from Ahmadinejad is overinterpreted and exaggerated. Conversely, Israel is certainly threatening Iran.

Why do our commentators fall such easy prey to the machinations of the Israeli state and its supporters, and denigrate a great and wise writer who, after all, is only trying to give us due warning of a disaster in the making?”

Published by the Guardian: Conspiratorial narrative of a Jewish state so powerful it can goad an unwilling world super power into war with Iran; An incomprehensible lie that Iran has not threatened Israel; and the notion that commentators are manipulated by Zionists into denigrating a great and wise former Nazi.

John Severs: Three cheers, or more, to Gunter Grass!

“Three cheers, or more, to Günter Grass for exposing the hypocrisy of Israel’s stance and continuing complaints, with no evidence, about Iran developing nuclear weapon capability. Israel has significant nuclear-warhead capability, and it is constantly threatening to bomb Iran or organise land-based raids, thus creating mayhem across the Middle East. Grass might well have also mentioned the shocking Israeli blockade of Gaza and their illegal appropriation of land and water, and destruction of huge tracts of olive groves and orchards on the West Bank.

I note that, once again, a critic of Israeli policy is branded anti-Jewish. Is it no longer possible to criticise Israel as a nation without being accused of being antisemitic?

The brave Gunter Grass, who speaks truth to power, and says what must be said: Iran is the victim of Israeli aggression, a Jewish state which not only threatens world peace but destroys olive groves as well!  Plus, bonus claim: Poor former Nazis are silenced, and can’t even level hysterical warnings of a Jewish state representing the greatest threat to world peace without being called antisemitic. 

Catherine Boswell: The Mossad targeted my husband for being critical of Israel!

“My late husband, the German poet Erich Fried, was a colleague of Grass. In 1974 Erich published a whole book of poems about the Arab-Israeli conflict entitled Höre Israel, which has been republished recently by Melzer Verlag.

Grass’s admission that he served in the Waffen SS in his teens serves as ready ammunition for the Zionists to use against him; for Erich it was the fact of being a Jew. For taking a critical stance of Israeli policies, he was dubbed an antisemite and even targeted by Mossad for a few years. It amazes me how this shameful – not to say quite illogical – equivalence can be so widely accepted.”

This letter is more proof you can engage in the most bizarre, unhinged, conspiratorial anti Zionist rhetoric and get published in the Guardian.  The notion that the Mossad was targeting her husband for engaging in criticism of Israel is so ludicrous as to be almost a parody.  

3. Gunter Grass and changing German attitudes towards Israel, April 5, by Hans Kundnani

Theme of commentary:

Grass’ poetical attack on Israel is not an isolated view in Germany, and represents increasing German anger at the Jewish state, due to its move right, and Germans’ feeling that they’re not allowed to say what they really think. (Kundnani doesn’t necessarily endorse such German and equivocates by use of words such as “rightly or wrongly” this is what Germans think.)

Key passages:

what makes the publication of the poem significant is that it expresses a sense of anger against Israel that – justified or not – many Germans seem increasingly to share. This anger is partly a response to Israel’s rightward shift during the past decade. But it seems also to be a product of developments in Germany and in particular the way that the Holocaust has receded in significance during the last decade. Increasingly, Germans seem to see themselves as victims rather than perpetrators.

A poll in January 2009 – during the Gaza war – suggested that German attitudes to Israel were in flux. Nearly half of respondents said they saw Israel as an “aggressive country” and only around a third of respondents said they felt Germany had a special responsibility towards Israel. Sixty per cent said Germany had no special responsibility (the figure was even higher among younger Germans and among those living in the former East Germany).

This anger against Israel is exacerbated by the sense some Germans have of not being able to say what they really think – as Grass suggests in the poem. This has created a pent-up resentment towards Israel that could at some point explode.

Last year, Germany voted in favour of a UN resolution demanding a halt to Israeli settlement expansion – an unusual break with Israel. Later in the year, Germany opposed the Palestinian statehood bid at the UN. But according to one poll, 84% of Germans supported Palestinian statehood and 76% believed Germany should act to recognise it – an even higher proportion in each case than in France or the UK.

An Israeli military strike on Iran could create a sudden rupture between Germany and Israel in the way that the Iraq war did between Germany and the US. My sense is that were Israel to launch a military strike on Iran, what remaining sympathy there is in Germany for Israel would evaporate almost overnight.

Again, in addition to the disturbing fact that, evidently, Germans now see themselves as victims, notice that Grass’ victimological conceit (that Germans can’t say what they truly feel about Jews and Israel without opprobrium) is, per the writer, arguably true, and shared by a large percentage of Germans.

4. Hit Gunter Grass with poetry not a travel ban, April 10, by , a blogger at the far left site (and Guardian partner blog) Liberal Conspiracy.

Major Theme: 

Banning Grass from traveling to Israel amounts to state censorship

Relevant passages:

On Sunday, the controversy surrounding Günter Grass’s poem Was Gesagt Werden Muss (What Must Be Said) escalated, with Israeli interior minister Eli Yishai confirming Grass was now considered a persona non grata in Israel, which amounts to a travel ban. This is a form of state censorship against an author, purely because of what he has written, which is wrong and an infringement on free speech.

Agree or disagree with the travel ban, such a restriction has absolutely nothing to do with censorship or free speech, which would be an apt description if, for instance, Grass’ poems were banned in Israel.  Grass is not a citizen of Israel and has no right to be allowed entry. His former role in the Nazi Waffen SS is enough moral justification for keeping him out of the country.

5. Pass notes No 3,156: Günter Grass, April 10 (no author cited)

Finally, the Guardian published a quite whimsical take on the row over the former Nazi’s poem. Here’s a sense of the light-hearted take on the topic: a brief bio of Grass, and a series of short answers to the questions surrounding the row:

Age: 84.

Appearance: Like a potato.

That’s a little unkind: OK, a potato with a pipe.

Occupation: Writer, sage, controversialist.

Most telling passage:

Do read: His early novels The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse, and Dog Years (the “Danzig trilogy”, named after his birthplace), published in the late 1950s and early 60s.

Don’t read: All his other stuff.

That’s a ridiculous thing to say. Hey, this is Pass Notes, not the LRB. Like the Israeli government, in this case, we specialise in kneejerk reactions and blanket condemnation.

Israel, home to roughly 180,000 Holocaust survivors, is characterized (in the context of their condemnation of Grass’ poem) as a country specializing in “knee-jerk reactions and blanket condemnations”!

Overall conclusion of Guardian’s coverage: Main points.

  • Exceedingly more criticism of Israel’s reaction to Grass’ poem than of the former Nazi’s atrocious vilification of Israel.
  • No commentary on the antisemitic undertones of Grass’ characterization of the Jewish state as the biggest threat to world peace.
  • A paltry amount of outrage at Grass, and the fact that he hid his Nazi past for sixty years while assuming the role of moral “conscience” of Germany.
  • Israel’s travel ban on Grass characterized as “censorship” and a threat to free speech.
  • Publishing (editorial sanctioning) of letters not only supporting Grass, but containing thinly veiled antisemitic and anti Zionist conspiracy theories.

You’d think that, as a paper which fancies itself a liberal voice, the Guardian would be cautious in defending a former Nazi (who hid his role as a member of a Nazi unit, singled out by the Nuremberg Trials for engaging in crimes against humanity, for sixty years) who engaged in a scurrilous attack on the Jewish state - a moral inversion which juxtaposed Iranian “loudmouths” with sinister Israelis contemplating genocide.

Finally, the coverage of the incident again demonstrates that, for the Guardian, criticizing Israel provides impunity to even the most morally compromised commentators.  

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Apr 2 2012

Hijacking Holocaust Remembrance at major U.S. university to demonize Israel as Nazi state

H/T Richard Landes

This video, released by Americans for Peace and Tolerance on Campus, documents Northeastern University faculty members abusing Holocaust Remembrance events for political purposes. Northeastern professors and their invited guest lecturers are seen comparing Israelis to Nazis and denying Jewish peoplehood — on tape recordings and in internal emails. 

Some making these claims were invited by professors holding the Stotsky Professorship in Jewish Historical and Cultural Studies, established specifically to study the genocide of European Jewry.

 

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Mar 25 2012

‘Comment is Free’ reader Zionism = Nazism comment of the day

When reading the following comment advancing the Israel – Nazi analogy I was also struck by the attempt to refute Ahmadinejad’s calls to annihilate Israel – an apologia remarkably similar to what was advanced by Guardian columnist Marina Hyde in her recent polemical assault on those supporting military intervention to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Indeed, the comment was posted under Hyde’s commentary. 

Such rhetorical obfuscations about the malevolent intentions towards the Jewish state by the Islamic Republic of Iran have become an increasingly popular political leitmotif for the anti-Zionist left – aimed at undermining Israeli and Western fears of Iran’s aspirations for regional hegemony.

What’s particularly interesting about this comment is that it defends Iran, denies that the country’s leaders ever expressed desire to annihilate Israel, while simultaneously comparing Israel to an ideology so offensive that its elimination is not only acceptable, but a moral necessity. 

To this Guardian reader, the tragically misunderstood nation of Iran merely seeks the end of the only sovereign Jewish state in the world.

Finally, its impossible not to read this comment without understanding the greater context: Guardian readers are routinely exposed to commentary at ‘Comment is Free’ from contributors who implicitly, or explicitly, similarly call for an end to the Jewish state.

If you find such hideous propositions within the realm of acceptable liberal opinion, then its quite likely you’d be more predisposed to run interference for Islamist regimes like Iran which promote such aims.

The terms “useful idiocy” or “anti-imperialism of fools” doesn’t begin to do justice to the morally odious logic of such Guardian Left anti-Israel advocacy. 

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Jan 19 2012

Labour Shadow Justice Minister praises Hamas concessions @ Palestine Solidarity Campaign event

This is cross posted by Richard Millett

This map, without Israel, took pride of place behind all the speakers.

 

Last night the Palestine Solidarity Campaign revealed the horrors of what life would be like for British Jews under Labour. The Jew killing Hamas machine would become regulars to Downing Street.

But, first, a love letter.

At the PSC event about Gaza, held at Conway Hall (which is owned by the South Place Ethical Society), actorvist Leigh Outram read the following from Love Letters to Gaza (see clip 1 below). The boat mentioned is the Audacity of Hope:

What can a poem do?
Create awareness?
Light a fire?
A fire to fire the boat to sea.

There was no fire at Auschwitz
To stop the poison gas until
The fire part of the western world destroyed the evil of the Nazi state,
And Israel came into being because the will was there.

It is not now the Nazi state but Israel that blocks the seas.
It is not Auschwitz that stops the ship that carries hope and messages,
But those that might have died there.

So let this poem drive the Hope that heads for Gaza.
The victims are now the torturers.
Freedom must be for all not just the victors

Whose victory brings forgetfulness of what they suffered once now brought to others.

Maybe Ms Outram hasn’t visited Auschwitz and seen the gas chambers and the ovens or the pictures of naked Jewish women huddling together in front of a pit before being shot. Maybe she doesn’t know that one million Jewish children died in The Holocaust.

This is the true Holocaust industry, a term coined by Norman Finklestein, where the likes of Ms Outram get paid for minimalising the horrors of Auschwitz by comparing it to Gaza. But Outram set the theme for the evening.

The Love Letter read out by Tracy-Ann Woods (clip 2) described the Palestinians as “hated simply for being who they are” and that read out by Clare Quinn (clip 3) described Israel as “dying”. Ahmed Masoud, who has written for the BBC, compared Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto. Another activist (clip 4) said “no oppression or injustice has ever gone without falling. The apartheid regime ended, the collapse of Nazism…”

Meanwhile, Labour MPs Jeremy Corbyn and Andy Slaughter, the Shadow Justice Minister, sat on stage applauding and when it came to speak everyone stood in front of map of Palestine, where there was no Israel.

Of Hamas Slaughter said (clip 5):

“They recognise a Palestinian state on ’67 borders, which is to effectively recognise the state of Israel. Now I think if that is not enough for the Americans or Israelis then I think we are playing games because those concessions are considerable concessions and they are the right concessions to make.”

This from a potential Justice Minister. Except recognition of a Palestinian state is not recognition of Israel. A small swing from the Conservatives to Labour in 2015 and the Liberal Democrats could ditch the Tories. A Lib/Lab coalition would be the perfect storm for Israel and British Jews with Hamas becoming regular visitors to Number 10.

Slaughter has already met Hamas and the Labour Party offered no comment.

Corbyn (clip 6) finished off the evening calling for some potentially five million Palestinians to be allowed into Israel, effectively turning it into yet another Arab state while taking the benefits of the Israelis’ hard work builing up a successful country.

Michael Deas (clip 7), Palestinian BDS National Committee, attempted to paint Israel as being undemocratic, but he was soon followed by Kika Markham (clip 8), the widow of Corin Redgrave, who read an extract from a role she performed as Haaretz journalist Amira Hass in which Hass talks of Israel in the most despicable terms.

A country that allows Hass and Haaretz to attack it so regularly cannot be anything but democratic. There isn’t something even near the equivalent of Haaretz for the Palestinians and that speaks volumes.

Photos:

Jon McKenna, Tracy-Ann Wood, Leigh Outram, Laura Freeman watching Clare Quinn spew poison about the Jewish state.

Clip 1 – Leigh Outram (compares Auschwitz to Gaza)

 

Clip 2 – Tracy-Ann Woods (“Palestinians hated for who they are”)

 

Clip 3 – Clare Quinn (“Israel is dying”)

 

Clip 4 – Activist (likens Israel to the Nazis)

 

Clip 5 – Andy Slaughter MP (“Hamas recognises Israel”)

 

Clip 6 – Jeremy Corbyn MP (“Palestinian refugees” will go to Israel)

 

Clip 7 – Michael Deas (“Israel is not democratic”)

 

Clip 8 – Kika Markham (acts as Haaretz’s Amira Hass)

 

Jan 9 2012

What the Guardian won’t report: Egyptian soccer fans call for a new Holocaust against Jews

H/T Elder

Here’s a thought experiment: Just imagine for a second if London soccer fans chanted for a return to black slavery.  

What would the reaction from liberal intelligentsia be to such abominable racism?

How would the Guardian cover such a story?

Well, can someone please explain why the following call, by masses of Egyptian soccer fans (at an April 6th match) for another Holocaust against the Jews, hasn’t been universally condemned, or even reported, by the Guardian or anyone else in the mainstream media?

Here’s a sign at the same soccer match, posted on the “Fuck Israel” Facebook page:

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Nov 24 2011

CiF reader comment of the day: Bashing bankers, bashing Jews

Under the CiF essay, “Muslims proud to be British? There’s something to learn from the surprise“, by Mark Greer, there was this comment, by someone using the Occupy@ inspired moniker “BankerBasher, which took a full day before being deleted by CiF Moderators.

 

How kind of our friend to acknowledge that not all Jews, merely those of the Israeli variety, love terrorizing Palestinians.

Yes: Islamists, EDL, Nazis, and Zionists.

As far as “a few loonies”, nearly 3 in 4 Palestinians believe that suicide bombing against civilians is justified in certain circumstances.

But, who can be concerned with such pesky empirical data regarding the continuing problem of Palestinian extremism when the media and right wing Israeli governments can be blamed?

 

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Nov 5 2011

Philadelphia Jewish newspaper’s review of play about Anne Frank trivializes the Holocaust

I had the following essay published Thursday, Nov. 3,  in the Philadelphia edition of the online paper, The Examiner

The story of Anne Frank is one of the most morally intuitive tales of our generation: an inquisitive, sensitive, and articulate young girl killed by the Nazis because she was a Jew.

Born in the city of Frankfurt, in Weimar Germany, she lived most of her life in or near Amsterdam, in the Netherlands.

By nationality she was officially considered a German until 1941, when she lost her nationality owing to the antisemitic policies of Nazi Germany.

The Frank family moved from Germany to Amsterdam in 1933, the year the Nazis gained control over Germany but, by the beginning of 1940, they were trapped in Amsterdam by the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.

As persecutions of the Jewish population increased in July 1942, the family went into hiding in the hidden rooms of Anne’s father Otto Frank’s office building.

After two years, the group was betrayed and transported to concentration camps.

Anne Frank and her sister, Margot, were eventually transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they both died of typhus in March 1945.

She gained international fame posthumously following the publication of her diary, which documents her experiences hiding during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II.

Acknowledged for the quality of its writing, The Diary of Anne Frank is one of the most renowned and discussed books about the Holocaust, and has been the basis for several plays and films.

In “Saving Anne Frank,” a news-section feature about EgoPo Classic Theatre’s current production of The Diary of Anne Frank, at the Prince Music Theatre Cabaret in Philadelphia, Melissa Jacobs, senior editor of Inside magazine. writes the following in an essay in the current, November 3 edition of the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent:

“…there are Annes all around the world. She is the girl hiding from the Taliban, the Sudanese girl fleeing civil war, and the American girl trapped by poverty and insufficient education. Maybe the way to honor Anne Frank is to save those Annes.” [Emphasis mine]

Yes, Melissa Jacobs likened the murder of Anne Frank by a Nazi regime dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish people to low-income Americans with poor schooling.

Scholar Manfred Gerstenfeld, in a book titled “The abuse of Holocaust Memory”, characterized such political parallels as “the trivialization of the Holocaust” and wrote, about such intellectually unserious analogies:

“Holocaust trivialization is a tool for some ideologically or politically motivated activists to metaphorically compare phenomena they oppose with the industrial scale extermination of the Jews in World War II by Germans and their allies. Examples of such comparisons include environmental problems, abortion, the slaughter of animals, the use of tobacco, and human rights abuses. None of these, in their basic characteristics, resemble the man-made genocide of the 1940s.”

The Diary of Anne Frank is not a lesson in the need for liberal social policy.

Frank’s story, quite simply, is a testament to the urgency of combatting antisemitism in all of its manifestations. 

Anne Frank was not “every girl”.  

She was a young girl murdered because her mere existence as a Jew was seen by the Nazis as a threat to the world – an annihilationist ideological antisemitism which, as a brief survey of the politics of the Middle East makes clear, did not disappear after the horrors of the Holocaust were revealed to the world. 

You’d think that a Jewish community paper such as The Exponent would understand this painfully obvious moral truth.

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Oct 28 2011

Channeling the Nuremberg Laws with the Guardian’s Deborah Orr

A guest post by AKUS

Twitter has become a treasure trove of information that reveals a great deal about the sub-conscious of those hastily tweeting messages that, in more sober moments, they might revise. As a communications medium the tweets can remind one of the outbursts a permanently drunk Mel Gibson he would have preferred to hide. The twitter equivalent of  “in vino veritas” appears to be: “In tweets, the twouth”. This should be emblazoned at the top of smartphones to warn the unwary that the unedited tweets emerging directly from their nastiest depths will be faithfully recorded and available on the internet.

There has been a well-deserved uproar over the despicable article by Deborah Orr in the Guardian, and her mealy-mouthed apology  in her attempt to rescue what was left of any reputation she might have had.

Thinking of how Nir Rosen lost his job when his tweets about the sexual assault on CBS reporter Lara Logan in Cairo revealed at the very least a warped sense of humor,  I took a look at Orr’s twitter account to see what else she may have to say on the topics of Israeli, Zionism, and Jews.

Deborah Orr describes herself as a “sarcastist” by which she presumably means she has a somewhat cynical view of the world and a great sense of humor.

Much was made of her reference to the “chosen”, a prime antisemitic trope, but I think that there is another interesting sub-text at play in her writing. Her tweets reveal that, sarcastic or not, she has picked up many of the memes that informed the Nazis with their racial theories. She applies the Nuremberg calculus to her musings about degrees of “Jewishness”, and, in a bizarre twist, to her own family.

Wikipedia has a concise version of the racial arithmetic used by the Nazis in formulating the infamous Nuremberg laws:

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

The Nuremberg Laws classified people with four German grandparents as “German or kindred blood”, while people were classified as Jews if they descended from three or four Jewish grandparents. A person with one or two Jewish grandparents was a Mischling, a crossbreed, of “mixed blood”. These laws deprived Jews of German citizenship and prohibited marriage between Jews and other Germans.[2]

Now take a look at the following tweets from Ms Orr, in a few exchanges at https://twitter.com/#%21/DeborahJaneOrr with two Jewish interlocutors, “yidtech” and “roeberg”  (you can see the full exchanges at her twitter page if you wish). Note how she refers to Jews as a “race”, which by now most supposedly educated and intelligent people should understand Jews are not, and her fascination with the determination of the fractional Jewish makeup of her husband and children.

The next day, caught up in the furor over her article, her mental defenses are going up, though she still apparently fails to grasp just how badly her article was received – hence her inadequate apology in the Guardian, hardly better than the original article:

Finally, after having initially executed the most extraordinary example of what Landes brilliantly referred to as “a magnificent exegetical pirouette” or moral inversion possible by asserting that Hamas’ insistence on releasing 1,027 of their terrorists in exchange for one kidnapped Israeli soldier was an example of Israeli racism, she backed away. Trying to ease her way back to the safety of condemning terrorism (and perhaps others of Hamas’ less than attractive beliefs and activities) she tweeted:

(Unfortunately, even if some of her best Palestinian friends think Hamas is a ghastly organization, the polls taken to evaluate Palestinian attitudes to Hamas reveal exactly the opposite – that many think it is really quite a fine organization. So do several well-known British citizens – Baroness Tonge, Lauren Booth and  Ben White, to name just three of many).

I do not mean to imply, of course, that Deborah Orr is a Nazi, by any means – but her tweets reveal how deeply prevalent the kind of thinking that imbued Nazi anti-Semitism can still be found among some representatives of Britain’s chattering classes.

Coincidentally or not, Deborah Orr is leaving  CiF for the less widely circulated pages of the Guardian’s Saturday edition. I suppose we will never know if her interesting ideas about Israeli racism and the chosenness of the Jewish people were a last hurrah or the cause of her departure. 

Perhaps on Saturday she will stick to less dangerous topics, such as gardening or cooking. In a way, I will miss her – it is always interesting to have on hand someone like Orr who provides insights into the murky depths below the veneer of “liberalism” that the Guardian tries to maintain over the original ethos it has so perverted.

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