19 February 2017

A Jewish State will always Trump the Jewish Diaspora

White House Blocked Holocaust Statement that Explicitly Mentioned Jews 



Chemi Shalev of Ha’aretz has made a powerful video about the exclusion of Jews from Donald Trump’s Holocaust Memorial Day statement.  I don’t agree with all of it, in particular his statement that the Holocaust is first and foremost about Jews.  No it’s first and foremost about Nazism i.e. German fascism.  Jews were its primary but by no means its only victims.  The Holocaust began with the Disabled, then the Polish intelligentsia and then the Jews and the Gypsies/Sinta and the Russian prisoners of war and so on.  But it is still a powerful film and it highlights the Zionist hypocrisy that they profess concern about the Holocaust but then stay silent about the anti-Semitism of Trump's Breitbart followers and Trump himself.

When Jackie Walker said that it would be nice if Holocaust  Memorial Day included other Holocausts such as what happened to the Africans in Belgium Congo and the Slave Trade it was if the heavens fell in.  Huffington Post led with Fury At Anti-Semitism Event As Momentum Vice Chair Jackie Walker Criticises Holocaust Memorial Day.  It was as if Haman and Eichmann had joined hands.  No adjective was biting enough to describe the horror felt by the Zionist movement at this criticism of what is really a politico religious icon. 
One of the chief motivators of the  false anti-Semitism campaign, Jonathan Arkush of the Board of Deputies just loves Trump
Jackie Walker however is however a minor personality on the Labour Left, important primarily for the way the British Zionist movement has singled her out as a suitable demonic figure.  Donald Trump however is the President of the United States.  You would imagine therefore that when he issued a statement on Holocaust Memorial Day, after having signed his Executive Order banning Muslims and refugees from the USA, which omitted to even mention the Jews, that the Zionists would be up in arms.  ‘Anti-Semite’ would have been the least of their descriptions.  You can imagine the hell that would have broken out if  Barak HUSSEIN Obama (the middle name was always important to Zionist Islamaphobes) had committed a similar crime.

But what is astounding is that apart from a little tut tutting, mainly in liberal Jewish papers like The Forward, there has been nothing.  Absolute silence.  Israel is still in love with the Chump and the settlers adore him.
Alan Dershowitz, lawyer to American neo-Nazis and the Jewish Defence League is happy to back Trump and Bannon
Now I've always opposed the Zionist idea that the Holocaust is only about Jews.  That to bring in any other group minimises the Holocaust.  According to Zionists such as historian Lucy Dawidowicz, 'Subsuming Jewish losses under a universal or ecumenical classification is to effectively justify anti-Semitism.' [Lucy Dawidowicz, The Holocaust and the Historian, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1981, p.17.] and according to Elie Wiesel, the Auschwitz survivor who turned his back on all other victims of genocide, to compare the sufferings of others with Jews was a “betrayal of Jewish history”.[Norman Finkelstein, p.45, Wiesel, Against Silence, v. iii, 146.]

However no one in their right mind would suggest that Jews have no place in the Holocaust.  Only the Stalinist rulers of the Soviet Union, who wished to play down the extent of collaboration in Russia and claim that all were equal victims, did that.   Clearly the Final Solution was aimed at removing Jewish people from the planet starting with a Jew free Europe.  Equally the Holocaust wasn’t only aimed at the Jews and Nazism aimed to exterminate not only the Communists and Socialists but the Disabled, Gays and the Slav peoples of Eastern Europe and Russia.
A question many liberal Jews are asking
The problem is that the Holocaust has been propagandised by the Zionist movement and depoliticised.  Stripped of its roots and causes.  It was caused by Jew hatred, pure and simple.  And why did people hate Jews?  Because they have always done so.  Simply by living in other peoples’ countries the Jews brought anti-Semitism on themselves.

The Holocaust has become a weapon in the war against the Palestinians not something to be commemorated for its own sake.   Jews in the holocaust are portrayed as two dimensional figures, with a walk-on part.  The Holocaust has become an essential part of West European post-war discourse, a prop in the cold war and a justification for imperialism in the Middle East.  Israel is at the centre of the West's intervention in the Middle East and the Holocaust is its ideological rationale - its crown of thorns.

Along comes Trump, Steve Bannon and his alt-Right, who don't particularly like 'whining Jews' and who are uncomfortable about the place of Jews in the Holocaust!  They like the Holocaust as a Jew-free ideological abstraction. 
Liberal Jews as represented by the Jewish Forward are at a loss to understand how Zionists who proclaimed their opposition to 'anti-Semitism' love Trump and Bannon 
According to Richard Spencer, who is the real ideologue of the alt-right, the “activist Jewish community” was only complaining about Trump's Holocaust Memorial Day statement because “It is all about their meta-narrative of suffering, and it shall undergird their peculiar position in American society, and theirs alone.” He deplored the fact that Hitler and the Holocaust has become the “negative moral center of the liberal universe.”

In the Forward  Sam Kestenbaum quotes Spencer as speaking about the “de-Judification” of the Holocaust.  The Holocaust had become 'a sort of moral bludgeon — used against white nationalists like himself.
Breitbart welcomes the support of Dershowitz and Zionist Rabbi Shmuley Boteach
Spencer gives some examples of the problems this ‘moral bludgeon’ is causing.  People were drawing all sorts of uncomfortable conclusions from the Holocaust such as giving shelter to refugees fleeing persecution.  Spencer described the very real problems that this is causing:

“We can’t limit immigration, because Hitler. We can’t be proud of ourselves as a Europeans, because Holocaust. White people can be Christian, but not too Christian, because Auschwitz,” he wrote.
Spencer went on: “Effectively, any policy, idea, or belief that is markedly right-wing and traditional — that evokes identity, power, hierarchy, and dominance — must be regulated by the possibility that it could potentially lead back to the German Führer.” 
You can see the problems that the Holocaust is causing people like Spencer and this is why the White  House ‘deJudaified’ the Holocaust [White House Blocked Holocaust Statement That Explicitly Mentioned Jews].  It would appear that the failure to mention the Jews was no ‘oversight’.  Steve Bannon, the alt-Right ‘strategic advisor’ of Trump, who is behind this, described U.S. Jews as 'Enablers' of Jihad’.


However it is important for people to get this into perspective.  Trump is the most pro-Zionist President the United States has ever had.  He is itching for an attack on Iran.  He is full square  behind Netanyahu in not liking Muslims.  He unreservedly supports the settlements and would like to move America’s Embassy to Jerusalem (though this is proving more problematic than first thought). Hence Trump is a very popular US President – if not in America then certainly in Israel.  In the elections which were held among American citizens in Israel, the exit polls showed that Trump won by a margin of 65 points.

Of course diaspora Jewry, what the Zionists call ‘galut’ i.e. those with an ‘exile’ mentality, who think that their interests come before those of Israel are not so supportive of Trump because they know what he represents, White Supremacy, hasn’t been too kind to Jews historically.  Diaspora Jews often don't realise that the needs of the Jewish state come before the Jews. 
The Zionist Organisation of America is adept at turning a blind eye to anti-Semitism when it comes in pro-Israeli garb
This dilemma came to a head in the case of Argentina, the only post-war state to have had a neo-Nazi regime between 1976-83.  Up to 3,000 Jews were tortured to death under the military Junta, up to 12% of those who ‘disappeared’ were Jewish.  Israel however had a problem.  Argentina at that time was a part of Reagan’s anti-communist Condor alliance in South America.  The main priority was fighting the communists.  Israel naturally was a close ally in all of this.  Israel was the main arms supplier of the Argentinian Junta and equipped it in its war with Britain in 1982.

The question therefore arose for Israel as to whether or not to make the plight of the Argentinian Jewish community or its relations with the Junta its priority.  All this came to a head with the case of the Jewish newspaper editor of La Opinion, Jacobo Timerman.  Although a left-Zionist he was savagely tortured by the Junta and it was only his fame which saved him from death.  Israel was forced to intercede to help him but they also wanted to silence his criticism of the Junta and not to make a noise.  Timerman was asked by Israeli Ambassador Ram Nirgad, on his release, to sign a document saying he had been treated well.  Timerman refused and the whole affair can be read in Timmerman’s book Prisoner Without A Name, Cell Without A Number, Weidenfeld, 1980.

An important essay on the dilemmas that the Zionists faced when choosing between the Jews and the Jewish state is Yitzhak Mualem’s essay in the Jewish Political Studies Review Spring 2004) ‘Between a Jewish and an Israeli Foreign Policy: Israel-Argentina Relations and the Issue of Jewish Disappeared Persons and Detainees under the Military Junta, 1976-1983’ Mualem wrote:

While the Jewish factor has an effect on Israeli foreign policy, it is not a decisive one. It is not the only consideration, nor the main one taken into account in the policy calculations of the Israeli government. The heritage of David Ben-Gurion determined that "in our relations (with foreign countries) we should be guided by one criteria and that is whether it is good for the Jews." The Jewish consideration was quite significant in the weighing of foreign policy in the economic area. According to Ben-Gurion's national approach, the state constitutes the highest goal of Zionism and the Jewish people. He did not ignore the problems of the Jews in the diaspora, but nevertheless saw the goals of the diaspora as secondary to the goals of the state, whose mere existence serves the needs of the diaspora.

Israel's role as a Jewish state was to strengthen the Jewish nation's status and power in the domestic and international arena by mobilizing the diaspora on behalf of this cause. In the particular case under discussion, the mobilization of the diaspora was achieved on two levels: bringing Jews to Israel and the adoption of a cooperative-passive policy by the Jewish community regarding the policy of the State of Israel. MKs Yair Tsaban and Yossi Sarid [of the left-Zionist Meretz] claimed that this policy and cooperation were implemented in flagrant ignorance of the Jews of Argentina. As Yossi Sarid put it: "In Argentina, Israel sold even the Jews for the price of its immediate interests."

Of course for the Zionists this is no dilemma.  Trump is pro-Zionist even if he doesn’t particularly like Jews who he sees as effete liberals.  Which is why Mort Klein of the Zionist Organisation of America was happy to invite Bannon to the ZOA’s annual gala dinner whilst denouncing Obama as a ‘Jew hating anti-Semite’!   Unfortunately the presence of a Jewish demonstration outside the dinner consisting of unsavoury Jewish types such as Jewish Voices for Peace made him think twice about attending.  Nonetheless the Zionists are clear where their priorities lie – the Jewish State will always Trump the Diaspora Jews

Tony Greenstein 

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