“Nor will they (Israelis) speak about the situation of the Palestinian people in occupied territories, France’s responsibility for the genocide in Rwanda, Britain’s responsibility for the disaster of partitioning India, and the detention camps where members of Kenya’s freedom movement were tortured, the American responsibility for the mass slaughter of communists and leftists in Indonesia, or the genocide against natives in Canada, the US and Australia.”
— Eitay Mack, the descendant of Auschwitz concentration camp victims,
on why he wouldn’t be attending events in Jerusalem
commemorating the 75th anniversary of the camp’s liberation
Chapter 13: Holocaust
The holocaust of World War II, perpetrated by the Nazis against Jews, Gypsies (Roma), Soviets, Polish nationalists, prisoners of war, gays, the disabled, and religious fundamentalists was a horrible, horrible atrocity. Approximately 6 million Jews and a total of about 17 million people whom the Nazis considered undesirable and expendable were exterminated.
We shall never forget because we will forever be reminded.
There are at least seventy permanent holocaust museums or monuments in the United States alone. Of course the most significant is the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC.
Canada has five dedicated sites. In Toronto there is a Holocaust Museum and separate education center. There is a holocaust sculpture in Edmonton, a museum in Montreal, a monument in Ottawa, and the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.
There are holocaust monuments in at least thirty-five other countries including Brazil, Mexico, and Uruguay.
While the Nazis were committing their atrocities, on the Pacific front the Japanese were murdering an estimated 10 million Chinese, Koreans, Malaysians, Indonesians, Filipinos, and Western prisoners of war. Of this total, an estimated 6 million killed were Chinese. Two hundred thousand Chinese were believed to have been slaughtered in the Nanjing Massacre of 1938 when the Japanese invaded that Chinese capital. Most of the women and girls were raped first.
There is not one memorial or monument to the victims of this Chinese/Asian genocide in the United States or Canada.
In the 1930s, the Soviet regime starved as many as 7 million Ukrainians. It was called the Holodomor. In the 1960s, 3 million Indonesians (people from Southeast Asia) were killed by their own government and army with the ambivalence if not encouragement of the United States. The victims were Chinese nationals and communists. In the 1970s, 3 million Cambodians (Southeast Asia) were killed by the Khmer Rouge dictatorship led by a man named Pol Pot.
One won’t find any memorials in the United States or Canada to those who were killed or maimed so monstrously in the Far East. Yet there seventy museums and monuments dedicated to the Jewish holocaust and we are constantly reminded of it eighty years after the end of World War II.
Asian-Americans make up close to 6 percent of the US’s population. The Jewish population of the United States is approximately 3 percent. Americans were involved in the war on both fronts, so they saw atrocities on both fronts.
Is it cynical to suggest that the Jewish holocaust provides the cover for Israel to continue committing its own atrocities eight decades down the road?
Noa Landau wrote a story in Haaretz on January 21, 2020 with a headline that should surprise no one: “Netanyahu to Use Holocaust Forum to Boost Support for Israel against the ICC.” The ICC is the International Criminal Court. The subtext read: Prime minister “will attempt to secure backing for claim that court has no jurisdiction in Palestinian territories, as they are not a sovereign state.”
Yes, that is correct: deny them a state, terrorize them, and then say there can be no punishment because the victims don’t have a nation:
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to take advantage of a gathering of dozens of world leaders in Jerusalem for a Holocaust memorial Thursday to urge them to support Israel’s effort to prevent the International Criminal Court from investigating its alleged war crimes against Palestinians. … Netanyahu is expected to ask the leaders he will meet—chief among them US Vice President Mike Pence, as well as Russian President Vladimir Putin, French President Emmanuel Macron and others—to publish official statements that will back the Israeli claim that the court in The Hague [a city in Netherlands] has no jurisdiction in Palestinian territories.
Netanyahu of course also used this opportunity to raise his other favorite bogeyman, which is the “regional threat posed by Iran.”
Average citizens would not know that more than 70 percent of the 193 member states of the United Nations, including China and Russia, recognize the State of Palestine. Among the forty-eight countries that don’t recognize Palestine are the powers that matter most in this equation, Israel and the United States of Israel.
The quote at the top of this chapter was from an opinion letter written by Eitay Mack that was published in Haaretz on January 22, 2020. The title of the opinion piece was “As Descendant of Auschwitz Victims, I’ve No Interest in the Yad Vashem [Israel’s official Holocaust museum and memorial] Laundromat”:
With US consent, Israel quickly became a central weapons supplier for a list of murderous regimes in Central and South America, Africa and Southeast Asia. For example, Israel’s important support for a 1951 charter against genocide was replaced by support for military regimes in Guatemala, and genocide was perpetrated against natives through the use of Israeli weapons. Israel’s support for a charter to eliminate all forms of racial discrimination and significant civilian projects for the independence of African nations transformed into massive military support for the apartheid regime in South Africa.
Among the massive hypocrisy machinery (claiming moral standards and then doing the opposite— see chapter 9), nothing stands out quite like Israel’s relationship with apartheid. The Daily Beast website published a story by Stephen Kinzer on July 14, 2017. In the story, “The Secret Arms Deal between Israel and Apartheid South Africa,” The subtext reads “The new book The Unspoken Alliance, about a secret deal between Israel and South Africa, has created controversy around the world but has largely been ignored by the US media”:
The book opens with what was surely the most jarring public moment in the history of this odd relationship. In 1976, Prime Minister John Vorster of South Africa, whom the British had jailed during World War II for his pro-Nazi activities, was given a red-carpet welcome in Israel, laid a wreath at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, and heard Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin praise him at a state banquet for creating a “prosperous atmosphere of cooperation” between their two countries.
Pro-Nazi?! No problem. There were deals to be made, arms to be sold, natural resources to be gained. Most of the deals, including the mutual development of nuclear weapons programs for the two countries, were done in secret.
And according to an article in the Britain’s the Guardian, Jews had developed a prominent interest in South Africa’s diamond mining and trade as far back as the 1860s. The article by Chris McGeal, “Brothers in Arms—Israel’s Secret Pact with Pretoria” (South Africa’s capital city), published on February 7, 2006, also makes reference to Vorster’s visit to Israel:
Vorster, whose army was then overrunning Angola, told his hosts that South Africa and Israel were victims of the enemies of western civilization. A few months later, the South African government’s yearbook characterized the two countries as confronting a single problem: “Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples.”
McGeal quotes from the Israeli ambassador to Pretoria, Alon Liel, who said, “At the UN we kept saying ‘we are against apartheid,’ as to Jewish people who suffered from the Holocaust, this is intolerable. But our security establishment kept cooperating.”
“We created the South African arms industry,” says Liel. “They assisted us to develop all kinds of technology because they had a lot of money. When we were developing things together we usually gave the know-how and they gave the money.”… The biggest secret of all was the nuclear one.
McGeal actually began this story telling of a woman, Vera Reitzer, who narrowly survived a concentration camp and later moved to South Africa. She joined the apartheid Nationalist party in the early 1950s:
Reitzer saw no contradiction in surviving the Holocaust only to sign up for a system that was disturbingly reminiscent in its underpinning philosophy, if not in the scale of its crimes, as the one she had outlived. She vigorously defended apartheid as a necessary bulwark against black domination and the communism that engulfed her native Yugoslavia. Reitzer let slip that she thought Africans inferior to other human beings and not entitled to be treated as equals. I asked if Hitler hadn’t said the same thing about her as a Jew. She called a halt to the conversation.
The article describes other prominent Jews involved with the government at the time. “For decades, the Zionist Federation and Jewish Board of Deputies in South Africa honored men such as Percy Yutar, who prosecuted Nelson Mandela for sabotage and conspiracy against the state in 1963 and sent him to jail for life …” The story goes on to point out that Yutar was later elected president of Johannesburg’s largest orthodox synagogue and he was described as a “credit to the community.”
Far cry from today, when ninety-year-old Nazi prison guards are still being hunted down and prosecuted for their involvement in a war that ended seventy-five years ago. On the German DW website on March 5, 2020, the headline read “US to Deport Nazi Concentration Camp Guard.” This man had “served as a prison guard in a Nazi concentration camp system near Hamburg. He had been living in the United States for more than 60 years”:
Since 1979, the US Justice Department has won 109 similar cases involving former supporters of the Nazi regime. The last such deportation occurred in August 2018, when 95-year-old former SS guard Jakiw Palij was expelled after living in New York since 1949.
Revenge? Publicity? Are the same Jewish interests who are pushing this effort, and spending U.S. tax dollars and Justice Department resources for offenses that occurred well outside the United States, also pursuing former guards and soldiers from that war’s Japanese regime, or those involved in more recent conflicts and genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, or elsewhere?
Actually no. In fact, Israel is selling arms for genocide, happily doing so if the particular victims happen to be Muslim.
In a September 6, 2017 article in Haaretz by John Brown, “As Violence Intensifies, Israel Continues to Arm Myanmar’s Military Junta” (junta—a military group that takes over by force), the journalist wrote:
The violence directed at Myanmar’s Rohingya [Muslim] minority by the country’s regime has intensified. United Nations data show that about 60,000 members of the minority group have recently fled Myanmar’s Rahine state, driven out by the increasing violence and the burning of their villages, information that has been confirmed by satellite images. But none of this has led to a change in the policy of the Israeli Defense Ministry, which is refusing to halt weapons sales to the regime in Myanmar, the southeast Asian country formerly known as Burma.
The United States and the European Union had issued an embargo (no sales) on arms sales to Myanmar. Israel continued the sale of arms despite investigations by the UN, Israel’s own High Court of Justice and questions from the Knesset (Israel’s legislature). Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman said Israel “subordinated” (followed along) with whatever the US and the rest of the enlightened western world was doing by maintaining the same policy. However, John Brown made a point that:
Lieberman statement was incorrect. … It’s unclear whether the cause was ignorance, and Lieberman is not fully informed about Israel’s arms exports, even though he must approve them, or an attempt at whitewashing.
Whitewashing in this case simply means to prevent people from learning the truth:
In terms of history, as well, Lieberman’s claim is incorrect. Israel supported war crimes in Argentina, for example, even when the country was under a US embargo, and it armed the Serbian forces committing massacres in Bosnia despite a United Nations embargo.
In other words, he lied. Take the money, damn the blood.
In Haaretz on November 12, 2019, Charles Dunst reiterated findings in the story “Israel’s Shameful Role in Myanmar’s Genocidal Campaign against the Rohinga”:
In 2016, the Myanmar military intensified its decades-long persecution of the Rohingya, setting fire to their villages, throwing their babies into fires, raping their women, and decapitating their boys. Over a million Rohingya fled; thousands were killed. As the head of the UN’s fact-finding mission for Myanmar told US officials in late October: “It is an ongoing genocide that is taking place at the moment.”
“Never again” is the Jewish slogan of Holocaust remembrance; in reality it means “Never again to us”:
After a late 2017 High Court challenge, Israel claimed to have stopped selling advanced weaponry to Myanmar’s military. But public relations dust-ups—Myanmar’s Israeli envoy [ambassador or representative] later said Israel was still selling his country weapons; Burmese officials were in June 2019 spotted at a Tel Aviv [Israel] weapons expo—have undermined Israel’s position and credibility.
There’s that term again; public relations. Also known as, so often the case with Israel, out and out lies. It was late 2019 before Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs finally denounced the Myanmar atrocities.
The public relations effort also involves downplaying or ignoring the aforementioned genocides committed elsewhere in the world. It would seem the Holocaust doesn’t want to share the spotlight. The US media sees no reason to go down this road, and so it rarely does.
On one of those occasions, on August 4, 2016, Ilya Somin wrote about China in the Washington Post under the headline and subtext “Remembering the biggest mass murder in the history of the world—Mao Zedong’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ was the biggest episode of mass murder in the history of the world. But it rarely gets the recognition it deserves.” Somin first raises the question “Who was the biggest mass murderer in the history of the world?” He brings up Hitler and then Stalin, who through famine and murder combined, killed more people than Hitler did:
But both Hitler and Stalin were outdone by Mao Zedong. From 1958 to 1962, his Great Leap Forward policy led to the deaths of up to 45 million people—easily making it the biggest episode of mass murder ever recorded.
Somin refers to an article published earlier that year by Jewish historian Frank Dikotter, It upgrades the number of those tortured, murdered, or starved to death from 30 million to 45 million and it summarizes the ways in which it was done.
The basic facts of the Great Leap Forward have long been known to scholars. Ever heard of it?
In contrast to the numerous books, movies, museums, and remembrance days dedicated to the Holocaust, we make little effort to recall the Great Leap Forward, or to make sure that society has learned its lessons. When we vow “never again,” we don’t often recall that it should apply to this type of atrocity [communist authoritarianism], as well as those motivated by racism or anti-Semitism.
The New York Times pointed out in 2010 that secret Chinese documents exposed between 2005 and 2009 revealed the true scope of the horrific and brutal mass murder. Eight times as many people killed compared to the Holocaust, but not a single memorial to honor the victims. The New York Times’ story foreshadowed Dikotter’s article in 2016. So at this publication rate, expect another mention of the Great Leap Forward in about 2022.
Meanwhile, for the last decade, legislators in the US Congress have been debating the recognition of the Armenian Genocide committed by the Turks. It’s been a tough battle. How’s it possible anyone would refuse to recognize genocide?
Some point to foreign relations with Turkey and that commemorating the genocide would be bad policy. Others might suggest that it’s the Holocaust-sympathy powers that are uncomfortable with sharing the space. There are others.
Nicholas D. Kristof wrote an editorial in the New York Times on February 6, 2010 entitled “The World Capital of Killing”:
It’s easy to wonder how world leaders, journalists, religious figures and ordinary citizens looked the other way while six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. And it’s even easier to assume that we’d do better. But so far the brutal war here in eastern Congo has not only lasted longer than the Holocaust but also appears to have claimed more lives. A peer-reviewed study put the Congo war’s death toll at 5.4 million as of April 2007 and rising at 45,000 a month. That would leave the total today, after a dozen years, at 6.9 million.
Kristof goes on to tell the story of a young woman, Jeanne Mukuninwa, who was gang raped more than once after watching her family get tortured and killed. Her internal organs were devastated after she was raped with sticks.
Do you remember hearing about this? Have you seen the memorial in New York? Of course not, because there isn’t one. There was money and natural resources at stake and the victims were African:
Unless we see some leadership here, the fighting in Congo—fueled by profits from mineral exports—will continue indefinitely. So if we don’t act now, when will we? When the toll reaches 10 million deaths? When Jeanne is kidnapped and raped for a third time?
World leaders are continuously being reminded of Holocaust political correctness. Nations continue being harassed and threatened legally to provide reparations to Jews for World War II. For National Public Radio (NPR) on February 7, 2019, Amy Held wrote about France’s settlement under the headline “Holocaust Survivors and Victims’ Families Receive Millions in Reparations from France” That money comes “in acknowledgement of the government’s role in deporting them to Nazi death camps via French trains”:
Forty-nine people who made it out of the Holocaust alive are receiving around $400,000 each, according to former Ambassador Stuart Eizenstat, the State Department’s expert adviser on Holocaust-era issues, who helped negotiate the agreement. He said 32 spouses of deportees who died will get up to $100,000, depending on how long their spouse lived. Heirs and estates of deportees or their spouses are also getting paid. The money is the second and last round of payments from the $60 million France provided following a 2014 agreement in exchange for recipients relinquishing the right to sue.
So yes, among other takeaways from this story, the US State Department is utilizing resources to arrange deals between other countries and Holocaust survivors:
“It’s about justice and recognition and feeling acknowledgement,” Greg Schneider, executive vice president of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany told NPR.
That group’s website states:
Since our first agreement with West Germany in 1952, more than $70 billion has been paid to more than 800,000 Holocaust victims.
In seventy-five years will the Palestinians be compensated for the untimely death of tens of thousands of their family members since 1948 or for their land that has been stolen?
Here’s a stand-alone: “Vatican Defends Status of WWII Pope” from the New York Times on December 24, 2009 by Rachel Donadio:
In an effort to calm growing tensions with Jewish groups, the Vatican said Wednesday that Pope Benedict XVI’s decision moving the wartime pope Pius XII closer to sainthood was not a “hostile act” against those who believe Pius did not do enough to stop the Holocaust. The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, issued a statement saying that the beatification process evaluated the “Christian life” of Pius, who reigned from 1939 to 1958, and not “the historical impact of all his operative decisions.”
Even more remarkable is the power the Jewish lobby has over individual US states. Banning criticism of Israel (see chapter 1) in a majority of jurisdictions is simply the most alarming. There are more subtle efforts directly tied to the Holocaust. The original lobbying and legal activities that led to the aforementioned French train settlement began via pressure in the United States.
On May 19, 2011, the Associated Press issued a story “Maryland Governor Signs Bill that Would Require French Rail Company to Disclose WWII Roles”:
Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley is signing a first-of-its-kind bill that would require the French rail company SNCF to disclose its role in transporting Holocaust victims to concentration camps, if the company seeks a procurement contract to provide train service in the state… It will require any company pursuing a procurement contract to provide MARC [Maryland Area Regional Commuter] rail service to disclose any activity it undertook in transporting people to Nazi death camps during World War II.
Who came up with this one? It would appear to be part public relations, part legalized blackmail, part opening-up-an-opportunity-to-file-lawsuits seven decades after the fact. Proponents of the bill claimed the rail company failed to be transparent with its WWII record keeping.
When the courts lapsed, Jewish senator Charles (Chuck) Schumer, the Democratic Party’s leader on that side of the legislature, introduced a bill supporting the cause in 2008. Ultimately; mission accomplished. It was a sustained legal and public relations effort involving multiple countries and jurisdictions over the course of a decade.
Similar examples can be found in a Washington Post article on January 21, 2008 by Craig Whitlock and Shannon Smiley called “Heirs of Jewish Art Collectors Pursue Works Sold in Nazi Era,” or in the Post’s story of November 25, 2007 by the same two writers called “Holocaust Survivors, Heirs Fight on for Compensation.” The subtext: “Though Germany Long Ago Satisfied Most Claims, Many Remain.”
Then there’s the case of the Persepolis tablets, priceless 2,500-year-old clay artifacts that tell the early story of the Persian Empire and one of the greatest cultures in history. The Iranians loaned the tablets to a Chicago museum for ongoing study almost a hundred years ago.
A Jewish fashion designer and his lawyer led a group wanting the tablets sold and the proceeds distributed to the victims of a 1997 Hamas bombing in Israel that killed five people. They claimed Iran was responsible, or complicit, and won $71 million in federal court. Iran hadn’t paid.
The Washington Post article by Peter Slevin covering the case on July 18, 2006 was called “Iran, U.S. Allied in Protecting Artifacts.”
Yes, it brought about an unexpected partnership, lawyers from feuding governments working together against an outrageous lawsuit:
“There’s absolutely no justification for this. It’s a bizarre, almost surreal kind of thing, said Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, which has studied the unbaked clay tablets on loan from Iran since the 1930s. “The Iranians are understandably furious about this. You’d have to imagine how we would feel if we loaned the Liberty Bell to Russia and a Russian court put it up for auction.”
Nothing is sacred. Connect the dots and collect the money:
“Would Egypt loan the treasures of King Tut if they thought they could be seized by anyone who had a beef with the government of Egypt?” he asked.
Twelve years after this report, the US Supreme Court voted 8-0 in favor of Iran.
The ongoing campaign against European countries, companies and families comes with an irony conveniently overlooked: These are Jewish World War II victims suing in courts all over Europe to get their property or furniture or paintings back eighty years after the fact, as Israel steals land right out from under the Palestinians on a routine basis.
Here’s a headline, the likes of which seem to appear on a monthly basis in the West Bank: “Israeli Court Clears the Way to Evict Palestinian Family from East Jerusalem Home.” The story was written by Nir Hasson in Haaretz on July 1, 2020:
An Israeli court rejected an appeal by a Palestinian family, allowing authorities to go ahead with plans to evict them from a building in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan in which they have lived since the 1950s. The Jerusalem District Court ruled Tuesday that all 18 members of the Sumreen family have until August 16 to leave the premises and levied a charge of 20,000 shekels [about $5,800] they must pay to the KKL-Jewish National Fund, which has been deemed to be the property’s legal custodian.
The judges used the Abandon Assets Law from 1950 to say that the patriarch of the family had moved to an “enemy country,” therefore abandoning the property, making the Jewish custodian the new owner. The custodian exercised the legal effort without the family’s knowledge.
The same writer handled a story almost exactly a year earlier entitled “Israel Evicts Palestinian Family from East Jerusalem Home, Handing It to Settlers.” Both stories involved three-decade court battles. The Jews involved sued over and over and over again until they finally won.
It could be worse; they could actually bulldoze Palestinian homes or take them by force or harassment, like the Nazis did to Jews and others in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s.
Oh wait, yes, Israel does that too.
In the Palestine Chronicle on August 2, 2017, taken from international news agencies, in just one example of the hundreds of incidents over the years, the headline read; “Bulldozed: UK Mom Tastes Palestinian Suffering”:
Waking up to bulldozers pulverizing her home into rubble, British mother Jessica Barhum got a glimpse of what Israel has been doing with Palestinians for decades. “You can’t believe a country like this would make a law against its own citizens,” tearful Barhum told Agence France-Presse (AFP).” The 32-year-old mother and her Israeli husband woke up in shock at 5:00 a.m. to two Israeli bulldozers tearing down their two-bedroom house in the village of Ein Rafa, west of occupied East Jerusalem.
According to the story, her husband had built the house eight years earlier on land owned by his family. Eighteen months before the demolition, Israel told him to get a permit for the building, a permit that’s almost impossible to get. When the bulldozers showed up, the couple was given five minutes to vacate:
For decades, Israel has been adopting a series of oppressive measures to force Palestinians out of the holy city, including systematic demolition of their homes. Israeli authorities do not issue building permissions for Palestinians who are also banned from renovating their house unless with an Israeli permit, which they rarely get.In 1968, Israel enacted a law allowing “illegal” houses to be razed even if permits are pending in the bureaucratic pipeline. The law is disproportionately used against the Palestinians and Israeli Arabs rather than Jewish Israelis, according to AFP.
That goes without saying in an apartheid state.
Taxpayers in the United States pay to support this apartheid and its genocidal tendencies, all while being constantly reminded of the “victimhood” of the perpetrators. “Never again” doesn’t apply in Israel.
Jewish writer Peter Beinart summarizes it nicely in his book “The Crisis of Zionism”. Roger Cohen critiqued the book in a column for the New York Times called “The Dilemmas of Israeli Power” on February 13, 2012:
“We are being asked to perpetuate a narrative of victimhood that evades the central Jewish question of our age: the question of how to ethically yield Jewish power,” he writes. “That power, for 45 years now, has been exercised over millions of Palestinians who enjoy none of the rights of citizenship and all the humiliations of an occupied people.”
It’s tragically ironic and it must end.
At some point, maybe we’ll get to the point of understanding reached by Jewish hockey player Evan Kaufmann, who played for the German national team. He had lost ancestors in the Holocaust. He told the New York Times for an article profiling him on February 18, 2012, “I’m not going to hold it against a whole country for what happened long ago. You’re never going to move forward if you keep doing that.”
