What kind of a person could requisition and abuse the memory of the million + women, men and children gassed to death then reduced to ash in furnaces in Auschwitz Birkenau to score the very cheapest and grubbiest of political points?
I’m not that interested in the Tory leadership race in itself. Two wealthy, over-privileged, servants of the ruling class, both educated well beyond their intelligence, battling each other over who can offer more tax breaks to their friends.
Though, until yesterday, I would have said that Jeremy Hunt would be hard pushed to make a statement as cynical, as inhuman, and as abusive of the experiences of ethnic minorities as anything Boris Johnson has managed.
Obviously I underestimated him. This is what Hunt told the Jewish News in an interview:
“When I went to Auschwitz I rather complacently said to myself, ‘thank goodness we don’t have to worry about that kind of thing happening in the UK’ and now I find myself faced with the leader of the Labour Party who has opened the door to antisemitism in a way that is truly frightening.”
What kind of a person could requisition and abuse the memory of the million + women, men and children gassed to death then reduced to ash in furnaces in Auschwitz Birkenau to score the very cheapest and grubbiest of political points?
I suppose one answer might be: a representative of a government that is allied with some of the most antisemitic, Islamophobic, homophobic and anti-refugee governments in the world; a government that created its own scandalous hostile environment, complete with “Go-Home” vans, that had such a devastating impact, especially on the Caribbean community in Britain, and continues to blight the lives of migrants.
I happen to know that Jeremy Corbyn visited Auschwitz before he became Labour leader (and has visited Theresienstadt since becoming leader).
He did so to bear witness, to learn, to absorb its lessons for humanity; lessons that he has used in his continuing, decades-long, campaigns against all racism and injustice. What a contrast.
By David Rosenberg, Jewish and East End historian, Jewish Labour Party member
What kind of a person could requisition and abuse the memory of the million + women, men and children gassed to death then reduced to ash in furnaces in Auschwitz Birkenau to score the very cheapest and grubbiest of political points?
ReplyDeleteAny politician? Case in point - Trump's "concentration camps".
Please. A concentration camp does not equal a death camp. Sobibor was a 'pure' death factory (extermination camp, holding no inmates apart from a few operatives), Auschwitz was both a concentration camp and a death factory. Other concentration camps did not actively seek to exterminate those who entered there.
ReplyDeleteThere are plenty of concentration camps around the world but no (that we know of) death factories.
The distinction is important.
No need to concentrate the deaths... when you can spread them out...
DeleteThere are plenty of 'detention centres' around the globe (including the UK) that are 'pure' concentration camps.
ReplyDeleteBut that wasn't what Hunt was referring to. He was trying to hitch a ride on the wave of fake AS, plaguing Corbyn/Labour, for point scoring.
The Democrats in Congress are the one's calling detention centers "concentration camps"... aka, Trump's camps.
DeleteDemocrats position on illegal immigration has become untenable and a massive vote loser.
DeleteEven I, not a great fan of the Nation State concept, recognise that if you want to have a country you need to have borders.
Looks like you're gonna needs a whole lot more concentration camps shortly!
ReplyDeleteNope. The whole point is to deport, rather than release into the interior. The ICE raids are for those 90% who were released into America's interior and then didn't show up for their asylum hearings. They will be put on plains, busses, and trains back to their countries of origin.
DeleteThey will be put on plains, busses, and trains back to their countries of origin.
DeleteSure but first they need to be 'processed'? Identity firmly established etc?
I think that warrants for the ICE raids will pretty well establish that.
Deletebtw...
ReplyDelete...on the roots of anti-Zionism.
ReplyDelete...somehow I doubt that "Russinland" translates to "diaspora".
DeleteLive from Rusnland...
DeletePrior to the Holocaust the vast majority of Jews were anti-Zionist (or non-Zionist). And even post-Holocaust most Jews preferred to emigrate to the US rather than the dreaded Palestine.
DeleteThat changed mainly after 1967, a war that that was sold as an 'existential struggle'. The latter was a propaganda lie: the IDF beat the Arabs without breaking much of a sweat and the war became a very successful war of conquest. But it definitively put Israel into the Jewish psyche for ever.
1967 was the turning point for most European Goyishe Zionists: the moment we saw Zionism as a neo-Colonial project.
DeleteAnd in the US it was the beginning of the US/Israel love affair and the birth of the enforcer Zionist Lobby. You've always been awkward yokels!
You mean through the expansion of territory... Sinai, the Golan, the West Bank? They gave Sinai back... and kept the rest for "defensible" nation-state reasons.
DeleteYou mean through the expansion of territory... Sinai, the Golan, the West Bank? They gave Sinai back... and kept the rest for "defensible" nation-state reasons.
DeleteLove it when Americans defend Israeli expansionism!
What do you think would have happened if Israel had been created in Massachusetts? Or Montana? ;-)
Don't laugh: Herzl considered Namibia and Patagonia, among other places.
Look at early logos of the Irgun: they depict a Greater Israel that includes Palestine (with WB), Sinai, Golan and Lebanon south of the Litani river.
DeleteManifest destiny? ;)
DeleteLiebensraum?
DeleteLebensraum?
DeleteIt's official: you're on the ADL's list of notorious anti-Semites!
;-)
So AZ has more than one root. It's appeared at different times, for different reasons. The early AZ of Diapora Jews doesn't really inform post-1967 European AZ.
ReplyDeletethe vast majority of Jews were anti-Zionist... The main root is in the Jewish religion itself, Neturei Karta, in the "fundamentalist" orthodoxy surrounding the 3rd Temple.... but also in the Soviet Union's dependence upon Jews at the time of the founding of Israel to run and maintain the Stalinist bureaucracy.
DeleteWhat does the Munich massacre in '72 inform?
DeleteThe Arab defeat in the '73 Yom Kippur War?
Deletefrom Wiki:
ReplyDelete1967–1985
Main article: Aliyah § Aliyah from the Soviet Union and post-Soviet states
Lev Landau, winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physics for his theory of superfluidity. In June 1965, Landau and Yevsei Liberman published a letter in the New York Times, stating that as Soviet Jews they opposed U.S. intervention on behalf of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry.[95]
A mass emigration was politically undesirable for the Soviet regime. As increasing numbers of Soviet Jews applied to emigrate to Israel in the period following the 1967 Six-Day War, many were formally refused permission to leave. A typical excuse given by the OVIR (ОВиР), the MVD department responsible for the provisioning of exit visas, was that persons who had been given access at some point in their careers to information vital to Soviet national security could not be allowed to leave the country.
After the Dymshits–Kuznetsov hijacking affair in 1970 and the crackdown that followed, strong international condemnations caused the Soviet authorities to increase the emigration quota. From 1960 to 1970, only 4,000 people left the USSR; in the following decade, the number rose to 250,000.[96]
In 1972, the USSR imposed the so-called "diploma tax" on would-be emigrants who received higher education in the USSR.[97] In some cases, the fee was as high as twenty annual salaries. This measure was possibly designed to combat the brain drain caused by the growing emigration of Soviet Jews and other members of the intelligentsia to the West. Although Jews now made up less than 1% of the population, some surveys have suggested that around one-third of the emigrating Jews had achieved some form of higher education. Furthermore, Jews holding positions requiring specialized training tended to be highly concentrated in a small set of specialties, including medicine, mathematics, biology and music.[98] Following international protests, the Kremlin soon revoked the tax, but continued to sporadically impose various limitations.
At first almost all of those who managed to get exit visas to Israel actually made aliyah, but after the mid-1970s, most of those allowed to leave for Israel actually chose other destinations, most notably the United States.
Glasnost and end of the USSR
In 1989 a record 71,000 Soviet Jews were granted exodus from the USSR, of whom only 12,117 immigrated to Israel. At first, American policy treated Soviet Jews as refugees and allowed unlimited numbers to emigrate, but this policy eventually came to an end. As a result, more Jews began moving to Israel, as it was the only country willing to take them unconditionally.
In the 1980s, the liberal government of Mikhail Gorbachev allowed unlimited Jewish emigration, and the Soviet Union itself collapsed in 1991. As a result, a mass emigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union took place. Since the 1970s, over 1.1 million Russians of Jewish origin immigrated to Israel, of whom 100,000 emigrated to third countries such as the United States and Canada soon afterward and 240,000 were not considered Jewish under Halakha, but were eligible under the Law of Return due to Jewish ancestry or marriage. Since the adoption of the Jackson–Vanik amendment, over 600,000 Soviet Jews have emigrated.
Jews also played a disproportionate role in Belarusian politics and Soviet politics more generally in the 1920s, especially through the Bolshevik Party's Yiddish-language branch, the Yevsekstsia. Because there were few Jewish Bolsheviks before 1917 (with a few prominent exceptions like Zinoviev and Kamenev), the Yevsekstia's leaders in the 1920s were largely former Bundists, who pursued as Bolsheviks their campaign for secular Jewish education and culture. Although for example only a bit over 40 percent of Minsk's population was Jewish at the time, 19 of its 25 Communist Party cell secretaries were Jewish in 1924.[81] Jewish predominance in the party cells was such that several cell meetings were held in Yiddish. In fact, Yiddish was spoken at citywide party meetings in Minsk into the late 1930s.
ReplyDeleteTo offset the growing Jewish national and religious aspirations of Zionism and to successfully categorize Soviet Jews under Stalin's definition of nationality, an alternative to the Land of Israel was established with the help of Komzet and OZET in 1928. The Jewish Autonomous Oblast with its center in Birobidzhan in the Russian Far East was to become a "Soviet Zion".[82] Despite a massive domestic and international state propaganda campaign, however, the Jewish population in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast never reached 30% (in 2003 it was only about 1.2%[83]). The experiment ground to a halt in the mid-1930s, during Stalin's first campaign of purges.
In fact the Bolshevik Party's Yiddish-language Yevsekstia was dissolved in 1930, as part of the regime's overall turn away from encouraging minority languages and cultures and towards Russification. Many Jewish leaders, especially those with Bundist backgrounds, were arrested and executed in the purges later in the 1930s,[citation needed] and Yiddish schools were shut down. The Belasusian SSR shut down its entire network of Yiddish-language schools in 1938.
What does the Munich massacre in '72 inform?
ReplyDeleteThe Arab defeat in the '73 Yom Kippur War?
Not sure what your point is here?
What did Munich say about the future of the Palestinian state?
ReplyDeleteDunno. There was never going to be Palestinian state to begin with.
Delete