Parallels between Minneapolis and Jerusalem are more than skin deep

In a world of depleting resources and contracting economies, states are preparing for future uprisings by a growing underclass

Jonathan Cook (H/T Harry Feldman via facebook)

It is hard to ignore the striking parallels between the recent scenes of police brutality in cities across the United States and decades of violence from Israel’s security forces against Palestinians.

A video that went viral late last month of a Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, killing a black man, George Floyd, by pressing a knee into his neck for nearly nine minutes has triggered a fortnight of mass protests across the US – and beyond.

The footage was the latest disturbing visual evidence of a US police culture that appears to treat Black Americans as an enemy – and a reminder that rogue police officers are all too rarely punished.

Floyd’s lynching by Chauvin as three other officers either looked on, or participated, has echoes of troubling scenes familiar from the occupied territories. Videos of Israeli soldiers, police and armed settlers beating, shooting and abusing Palestinian men, women and children have long been a staple of social media.

The dehumanisation that enabled Floyd’s murder has been regularly on view in the occupied Palestinian territories. In early 2018 Israeli snipers began using Palestinians, including children, nurses, journalists and the disabled, as little more than target practice during weekly protests at a perimeter fence around Gaza imprisoning them.

Widespread impunity And just as in the US, the use of violence by Israeli police and soldiers against Palestinians rarely leads to prosecutions, let alone convictions.

A few days after Floyd’s killing, an autistic Palestinian man, Iyad Hallaq – who had a mental age of six, according to his family – was shot seven times by police in Jerusalem. None of the officers has been arrested.

Faced with embarrassing international attention in the wake of Floyd’s murder, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a rare statement on the killing of a Palestinian by the security services. He called Hallaq’s murder “a tragedy” and promised an investigation.

The two killings, days apart, have underscored why the slogans “Black Lives Matter” and “Palestinian Lives Matter” sit naturally alongside each other, whether at protests or in social media posts.

There are differences between the two cases, of course. Nowadays Black Americans have citizenship, most can vote (if they can reach a polling station), laws are no longer explicitly racist, and they have access to the same courts – if not always the same justice – as the white population.

That is not the situation for most Palestinians under Israeli rule. They live under occupation by a foreign army, arbitrary military orders govern their lives, and they have very limited access to any kind of meaningful legal redress.

And there is another obvious difference. Floyd’s murder has shocked many white Americans into joining the protests. Hallaq’s murder, by contrast, has been ignored by the vast majority of Israelis, apparently accepted once again as the price of maintaining the occupation.

Treated like an enemy

Nonetheless, comparisons between the two racist policing cultures are worth highlighting. Both spring from a worldview shaped by settler-colonial societies founded on dispossession, segregation and exploitation.

Israel still largely views Palestinians as an enemy that needs to be either expelled or made to submit. Black Americans, meanwhile, live with the legacy of a racist white culture that until not so long ago justified slavery and apartheid.

Palestinians and Black Americans have long had their dignity looted; their lives too often are considered cheap.

Sadly, most Israeli Jews are in deep denial about the racist ideology that underpins their major institutions, including the security services. Tiny numbers protest in solidarity with Palestinians, and those that do are widely seen by the rest of the Israeli public as traitors.

Many white Americans, on the other hand, have been shocked to see how quickly US police forces – faced with widespread protests – have resorted to aggressive crowd-control methods of the kind only too familiar to Palestinians.

Those methods include the declaration of curfews and closed areas in major cities; the deployment of sniper squads against civilians; the use of riot teams wearing unmarked uniforms or balaclavas; arrests of, and physical assaults on, journalists who are clearly identifiable; and the indiscriminate use of tear gasand rubber-coated steel bullets to wound protesters and terrify them off the streets.

It does not end there.

President Donald Trump has described demonstrators as “terrorists”, echoing Israel’s characterisation of all Palestinian protest, and threatened to send in the US army, which would replicate even more precisely the situation faced by Palestinians.

Like Palestinians, the US black community – and now the protesters – have been recording examples of their abuse on their phones and posting the videos on social media to highlight the deceptions of police statements and media reporting of what has been taking place.

Tested on Palestinians None of these parallels should surprise us. For years US police forces, along with many others around the world, have been queueing at Israel’s door to learn from its decades of experience in crushing Palestinian resistance.

Israel has capitalised on the need among western states, in a world of depleting resources and the long-term contraction of the global economy, to prepare for future internal uprisings by a growing underclass.

With readymade laboratories in the occupied Palestinian territories, Israel has long been able to develop and field-test on captive Palestinians new methods of surveillance and subordination. As the largest underclass in the US, urban black communities were always likely to find themselves on the front line as US police forces adopted a more militarised approach to policing.

These changes finally struck home during the protests that erupted in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 after a black man, Michael Brown, was killed by police. Dressed in military-style fatigues and body armour, and backed by armoured personnel carriers, local police looked more like they were entering a war zone than there to “serve and protect”.

Trained in Israel It was then that human rights groups and others started to highlight the extent to which US police forces were being influenced by Israel’s methods of subjugating Palestinians. Many forces had been trained in Israel or involved in exchange programmes.

Israel’s notorious paramilitary Border Police, in particular, has become a model for other countries. It was the Border Police that shot dead Hallaq in Jerusalem shortly after Floyd was killed in Minneapolis.

The Border Police carry out the hybrid functions of a police force and an army, operating against Palestinians in the occupied territories and inside Israel, where a large Palestinian minority live with a very degraded citizenship.

The institutional premise of the Border Police is that all Palestinians, including those who are formally Israeli citizens, should be dealt with as an enemy. It is at the heart of a racist Israeli policing culture identified 17 years ago by the Or Report, the country’s only serious review of its police forces.

The Border Police increasingly look like the model US police forces are emulating in cities with large black populations.

Many dozens of Minneapolis police officers were trained by Israeli experts in “counter-terrorism” and “restraint” techniques at a conference in Chicago in 2012.

Derek Chauvin’s chokehold, using his knee to press down on Floyd’s neck, is an “immobilisation” procedure familiar to Palestinians. Troublingly, Chauvin was training two rookie officers at the time he killed Floyd, passing on the department’s institutional knowledge to the next generation of officers.

Monopoly of violence These similarities should be expected. States inevitably borrow and learn from each other on matters most important to them, such as repressing internal dissent. The job of a state is to ensure it maintains a monopoly of violence inside its territory.

It is the reason why the Israeli scholar Jeff Halper warned several years ago in his book War Against the Peoplethat Israel had been pivotal in developing what he called a “global pacification” industry. The hard walls between the military and the police have crumbled, creating what he termed “warrior cops”.

The danger, according to Halper, is that in the long run, as the police become more militarised, we are all likely to find ourselves being treated like Palestinians. Which is why a further comparison between the US strategy towards the black community and Israel’s towards Palestinians needs highlighting.

The two countries are not just sharing tactics and policing methods against protests once they break out. They have also jointly developed longer-term strategies in the hope of dismantling the ability of the black and Palestinian communities they oppress to organise effectively and forge solidarity with other groups.

Loss of historic direction

If one lesson is clear, it is that oppression can best be challenged through organised resistance by a mass movement with clear demands and a coherent vision of a better future.

In the past that depended on charismatic leaders with a fully developed and well-articulated ideology capable of inspiring and mobilising followers. It also relied on networks of solidarity between oppressed groups around the world sharing their wisdom and experience.

The Palestinians were once led by figures who commanded national support and respect, from Yasser Arafat to George Habash and Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. The struggle they led was capable of galvanising supporters around the world.

These leaders were not necessarily united. There were debates over whether Israeli settler colonialism would best be undermined through secular struggle or religious fortitude, through finding allies among the oppressor nation or defeating it using its own violent methods.

These debates and disagreements educated the wider Palestinian public, clarified the stakes for them, and provided a sense of a historic direction and purpose. And these leaders became figureheads for international solidarity and revolutionary fervour.

That has all long since disappeared. Israel pursued a relentless policy of jailing and assassinating Palestinian leaders. In Arafat’s case, he was confined by Israeli tanks to a compound in Ramallah before he was poisoned to death in highly suspicious circumstances. Ever since, Palestinian society has found itself orphaned, adrift, divided and disorganised.

International solidarity has been largely sidelined too. The publics of Arab states, already preoccupied with their own struggles, appear increasingly tired of the divided and seemingly hopeless Palestinian cause. And in a sign of our times, western solidarity today is invested chiefly in a boycott movement, which has had to wage its fight on the enemy’s battlefield of consumption and finance.

From confrontation to solace

The black community in the US has undergone parallel processes, even if it is harder to indict quite so directly the US security services for the loss decades ago of a black national leadership. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and the Black Panther movement were hounded by the US security services. They were jailed or felled by assassins, despite their very different approaches to the civil rights struggle.

Today, none are around to make inspiring speeches and mobilise the wider public – either black or white Americans – to take action on the national stage.

Denied a vigorous national leadership, the organised black community at times appeared to have retreated into the safer but more confining space of the churches – at least until the latest protests. A politics of solace appeared to have replaced the politics of confrontation.

A focus on identity These changes cannot be attributed solely to the loss of national leaders. In recent decades the global political context has been transformed too. After the fall of the Soviet Union 30 years ago, the US not only became the world’s sole superpower but it crushed the physical and ideological space in which political opposition could flourish.

Class analysis and revolutionary ideologies – a politics of justice – were shunted off the streets and increasingly into the margins of academia.

Instead, western political activists were encouraged to dedicate their energies not to anti-imperialism and class struggle but to a much narrower identity politics. Political activism became a competition between social groups for attention and privilege.

As with Palestinian solidarity activism, identity politics in the US has waged its battles on the terrain of a consumption-obsessed society. Hashtags and virtue-signalling on social media have often appeared to serve as a stand-in for social protest and activism.

A moment of transition

The question posed by the current US protests is whether this timid, individualised, acquisitive kind of politics is starting to seem inadequate. The US protesters are still largely leaderless, their struggle in danger of being atomised, their demands implicit and largely shapeless – it is clearer what the protesters don’t want than what they do.

That reflects a current mood in which the challenges facing us all – from permanent economic crisis and the new threat of pandemics to impending climate catastrophe – appear too big, too momentous to make sense of. We are caught in a moment of transition, it seems, destined for a new era – good or bad – we cannot discern clearly yet.

In August, millions are expected to head to Washington in a march to echo the one led by Martin Luther King in 1963. The heavy burden of this historic moment is expected to be carried on the ageing shoulders of the Rev Al Sharpton.

That symbolism may be fitting. It is more than 50 years since western states were last gripped with revolutionary fervour. But the hunger for change that reached its climax in 1968 – for an end to imperialism, endless war and rampant inequality – was never sated.

Oppressed communities around the globe are still hungry for a fairer world. In Palestine and elsewhere, those who suffer brutality, misery, exploitation and indignity still need a champion. They look to Minneapolis and the struggle it launched for a seed of hope.

Jonathan Cook.

Wanna see two idiots?

Two very old kids (Chris Arthur and Matthew Trott) standing guard by the statue of their long departed slightly fascisty Dear Leader.

Life's minor blessings: Rep. Peter King (R) is retiring

Peter King, generally terrible arsehole and worst-in-class semblance of a human being will not be running for re-election in 2020.

A resounding electoral defeat would have been more satisfying but we'll settle for what we've been dealt here.

O.A.S.: Caught lying for Empire again (NYT admits!)

A close look at Bolivian election data suggests an initial analysis by the O.A.S. that raised questions of vote-rigging — and helped force out a president — was flawed.

The election was the most tightly contested in decades: Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first Indigenous president, was running for a fourth term, facing an opposition that saw him as authoritarian and unwilling to relinquish power.

As the preliminary vote count began, on Oct. 20, 2019, tensions ran high. When the tallying stopped — suddenly and without explanation — then resumed again a full day later, it showed Mr. Morales had just enough votes to eke out a victory.

Amid suspicions of fraud, protests broke out across the country, and the international community turned to the Organization of American States, which had been invited to observe the elections, for its assessment.

The organization’s statement, which cited “an inexplicable change” that “drastically modifies the fate of the election,” heightened doubts about the fairness of the vote and fueled a chain of events that changed the South American nation’s history. The opposition seized on the claim to escalate protests, gather international support, and push Mr. Morales from power with military support weeks later.

Now, a study by independent researchers, using data obtained by The New York Times from the Bolivian electoral authorities, has found that the Organization of American States’ statistical analysis was itself flawed.

The conclusion that Mr. Morales’s share of the vote jumped inexplicably in the final ballots relied on incorrect data and inappropriate statistical techniques, the researchers found.

Source: NYT.

Alternative History: Tearing Down Hitler's Statues

DUSM - 05/06/2021 - London

Barely a month after the Great British Resistance was finally victorious over the Nazi Wehrmacht Occupying Forces, and after 76 years of German occupation, jubilant British crowds have started tearing down statues of Hitler, Himmler and Göring in London and other major cities.

Remarked the British Prime Minister: 'History is truly being written here today!'

Meet the Boojahideen (Boogaloo Bois)

DONALD TRUMP IS right. The anti-racism protests that have convulsed cities across the United States are also being used as cover, to quote the president, for “acts of domestic terror.”

In late May, for example, three Nevada men were “arrested on terrorism-related charges in what authorities say was a conspiracy to spark violence during recent protests in Las Vegas,” reported the Associated Press. Federal prosecutors say the men had molotov cocktails in glass bottles and were headed downtown, according to a copy of the criminal complaint obtained by AP.

“People have a right to peacefully protest,” said Nicholas Trutanich, the U.S. attorney in Nevada. “These men are agitators and instigators. Their point was to hijack the protests into violence.”

But here’s the thing: None of these three men were members of antifa, the left-wing, anti-fascist protest movement that has been blamed both by the president and his attorney-general Bill Barr for recent violence. They were all self-identified members of the so-called boogaloo movement, aka “boogaloo bois” aka “boojahideen” — perhaps the most dangerous group that, until the past week or so, most Americans had never heard of.

The complaint filed in Nevada last month described “boogaloo” as “a term used by extremists to signify coming civil war and/or fall of civilization.” According to Cynthia Miller-Idris, an expert on domestic extremist groups at American University, members of the boogaloo movement “are all united by the idea that they are fighting against government ‘tyranny’ and want to launch a violent insurrection against the government and bring about a second civil war.”

Their weird name comes from — I kid you not! — the much-mocked 1984 movie “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo,” a sequel to, and near-copy of, the original “Breakin’.” starring Ice T. “Boogaloo boys style the forthcoming war as a repeat of the American civil war,” explained the Economist in May. “The Hawaiian shirts that dot the crowds are a reference to ‘the big luau’, another name for the ‘boogaloo’, which celebrates pig (police) roasts.”

Name and dress sense aside, though, there’s nothing silly or funny about them. The Anti-Defamation League, while documenting how white supremacists have “adopted the boogaloo concept,” also referred to the boogaloo movement’s “casual acceptance of future mass violence” as “disturbing.”

Remember: These are heavily armed men, many of them with military training, looking for new and greater opportunities for violent protest. Miller-Idris told me that the boogaloo bois have mobilized “over the past six months in three separate waves of protests” — against attempts by state legislatures to reform gun laws; against the coronavirus lockdowns and shelter-in-place orders; and now as part of the demonstrations and marches against police brutality and racism, in the wake of the George Floyd killing.

Worryingly, their movement is growing online at breakneck speed. As Reuters reported last week, citing a study from the Tech Transparency Project, “tens of thousands of people joined boogaloo-related Facebook groups over a 30-day period in March and April as stay-at-home orders took effect across the United States. … Project researchers found discussions about tactical strategies, weapons and creating explosives in some boogaloo Facebook groups.”

In March, Timothy Wilson, a 36-year-old Missouri man with neo-Nazi ties, was shot and killed by the FBI after plotting to bomb a hospital in the Kansas City area on the first day of the lockdown. Wilson had told an undercover FBI agent that he had wanted “to create enough chaos to kick start a revolution” and referred to his planned attack as “operation boogaloo.”

In April, Aaron Swenson, a 36-year-old Arkansas man, was arrested after he threatened to kill a police officer on a Facebook Live video. “I feel like hunting the hunters,” he wrote on Facebook, where he also made “boogaloo” references, according to the police.

THE BOOGALOO BOIS don’t operate in a vacuum. Their goals, methods, and personnel overlap with a number of far-right, anti-government groups that also pose a significant threat to law, order, and race relations, from the Proud Boys, to the Oath Keepers, to the Three Percenters, to the Sovereign Citizens. Don’t forget the Ku Klux Klan either: The Virginia man arrested for driving his truck into a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters over the weekend is head of a local KKK chapter.

Some of us have been trying to sound the alarm for several years now. In 2015, a survey of law enforcement agencies found the vast majority of respondents ranked “the threat of violence from anti-government extremists higher than the threat from radicalized Muslims.” In February, prior to both the coronavirus lockdowns and the George Floyd protests, Trump’s handpicked FBI director Christopher Wray told Congress that the bureau had raised its assessment of the threat posed by racially motivated violent extremists in the U.S. to a “national threat priority,” and revealed how extremists motivated by racial or religious hatred made up a “huge chunk” of the FBI’s domestic terrorism investigations.

Yet Trump, of course, isn’t interested in terrorists of the far-right variety — no matter how many Americans they kill or maim. He refused to apply the label of “domestic terrorism” to the white supremacists who murdered Jews at synagogues in Pennsylvania and California. He refused to apply it to a supporter of his who sent pipe bombs to a number of high-profile Democratic politicians and donors. After a Coast Guard lieutenant was arrested on suspicion of plotting to commit an act of white nationalist terrorism, Trump simply said it was a “shame” and a “very sad thing.” After the massacre of 51 Muslims at two mosques in New Zealand, Trump denied white nationalist terrorists were a growing problem and dismissed them as “a small group of people.”

But antifa, on the other hand? “The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization,” declaimed the president on Twitter on May 31 — despite the glaring lack of evidence connecting antifa elements to any of the recent violence or looting.

You know who has been linked to it? The armed guys in the Hawaiian shirts. And not just the trio with molotov cocktails in Nevada. In South Carolina, a 22-year-old man, who the local sheriff’s department accused of being a supporter of boogaloo, was charged “with inciting a riot and aggravated breach of peace.” In Denver, police seized assault rifles and gas masks from a 20-year-old protester who “identifies with the ‘boogaloo’ movement.” In Georgia, “self-identified” boogaloo supporters “armed with rifles and handguns” were spotted among protesters in downtown Athens. In a memo, the Athens police chief called the boogaloo movement an “extremist organization” that aims in part “to instigate race wars across America.”

Let’s be clear: Far-right extremists are hijacking nationwide protests against racism to push for … a race war! While the boogaloo “might have elements that are closer to libertarians … 90 percent of the boogaloo material is racist,” Mia Bloom, an expert on online extremism at Georgia State University, told me. According to Bloom, therefore, “we can expect a lot more violence in the lead up to the 2020 election.” Miller-Idris of American University agrees. “I think we should be very concerned about the violent potential of these groups,” she told me. “There have always been fringe seditionist and anti-government militia groups but this phenomenon represents a more rapid growth in both online and offline space than we have seen before.”

The president and his attorney general, then, have stumbled on an undeniable truth: There is a domestic terror threat in the United States. We need to recognize it in order to protect against it. But here’s what Trump and Barr won’t say: That terror threat comes not from anti-fascists in black masks, but from actual fascists in Hawaiian shirts.

Mehdi Hasan @TI.

The Holocaust Industry

Why is the Nazi holocaust more important than the Slave Trade and the Death of 10 million Africans in the Belgian Congo?

If you Google ‘books on genocide in Belgian Congo’ you come up with just one book. Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa. If you type in ‘Nazi holocaust’ then you have an endless selection.

There are literally thousands of books, from every conceivable angle, on aspects of the Holocaust. Most are worthless but nonetheless no respectable library is without a shelf (at least).

How is it that the Jewish Holocaust (because there are few books on the other victims – the Disabled, Gypsies, Russian POWs, Political Prisoners, Jehova Witnesses) has received such attention yet the genocide of Black Africans has not?

In these days of Black Lives Matter there is one, obvious, answer. White lives matter more. Yet this is not the whole answer, indeed it is not even half an answer. The Irish Famine is also not top of the book lists. Admittedly the British killed ‘only’ one million but the accepted figure of Jewish dead in the Holocaust is 6 million. The estimated number of dead in the Belgian Congo is 10 million. The estimated death from the Slave Trade is about 14 million.

Of course the industrial extermination of the Jews of Europe was, by any stretch of the imagination, horrific. But was death by gas or shooting worse than castration, chopping off of limbs, burning and skinning alive. It took minutes to expire from bullets or cyanide gas, whereas the tortures of the Belgian colonial sadists are unimaginable.

One thing is for certain. It isn’t about the special place of Jews before the anti-Semites get their heartbeats racing. Indeed for a long time after the Holocaust there were very few books about the Holocaust written, albeit they were the best. Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of European Jewry, Gerald Reitlinger’s The Final Solution and Gerald Fleming’s Hitler and the Final Solution. Today there are more good histories such as Richard Evan’s trilogy on the Third Reich and Christopher Browning’s The Origins of the Final Solution.

In post-war America the Holocaust was played down to the point of non-existence. During the McCarthy era emphasising the Holocaust was likely to incur accusations of being a Communist. At the funeral for the executed Rosenbergs the Song of the Warsaw Ghetto was sung.

Nor was the Israeli state any different. In the late 1940s and early 1950s the Holocaust was barely mentioned in Israel. In a 220 page Israeli history textbook published in 1948, just one page was devoted to the Holocaust compared to 10 pages on the Napoleonic wars. [Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, p. 94]

Why the change and when did it start to come about? Both Peter Novick [the Holocaust in American Life] and Norman Finkelstein [the Holocaust Industry] agree that the change began after Israel’s victory in the 6 Day War in 1967. By defeating Egypt’s President Nasser and slaying the dragon of Arab nationalism, Israel had proved its utility to US imperialism. It represented a dagger at the heart of the Arab East.

In Israel itself attitudes began to change with the show trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. Eichmann was, of course, guilty of all that he was accused of and deserved to hang but that wasn’t the point of the trial. It wasn’t to reveal information so much as to begin the process of using the Holocaust as a source of Israel’s legitimation. Israel claimed the Holocaust as its inheritance, as well as a source of financial reparations.

Previously Holocaust victims had been seen as a source of shame in Israel. Unlike the brave Israelis, who slaughtered Arabs without mercy, yea even the suckling on a mother’s breast, the Jews who went to the gas chambers were seen as cowards.

Hayyim Nahman Bialik, the national Zionist poet, spoke of the ‘disgraceful shame and cowardice’ of the Jewish victims of the 1903 Kishinev pogrom. Yitzhak Greenbaum, of the Jewish Agency Executive Committee, spoke of ‘unparalleled feelings of burning shame.’ ‘Sheep to the slaughter’ in the words of Eichmann’s prosecutor Gideon Hausner.

The first Holocaust survivors to arrive in Palestine were called sapon (soap) after the myth that the bodies of victims were made into soap.

Hanzi Brand wrote of how, when she settled on Kibbutz Gvata Haim, the other members ‘talked about their war to avoid hearing about hers. They were ashamed of the Holocaust.’ [Tom Segev, The 7th Million, p. 471]

Peter Novick spoke of the prevailing view in the Yishuv that holocaust survivors represented the ‘survival of the worst.’ In Ben Gurion’s view they were

‘hard, evil and selfish people and their experiences destroyed what good qualities they had left.’

Ben Gurion went on to add that they were

‘A mob and human dust, without language, without education, without roots and without being absorbed in tradition and the nation’s vision.’

David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister had already demonstrated during the war his indifference to the genocide of Europe’s Jews. His only concern was that the extermination of Europe’s Jews would render the establishment of a Jewish state irrelevant and reduc the number of immigrants to Israel.

Ben Gurion’s official biographer, Shabtai Teveth quoted Ben Gurion as saying that

‘where there was a conflict of interest between saving individual Jews and the good of the Zionist enterprise, we shall say that the enterprise comes first.’ (The Burning Ground, p. 855)

It is therefore clear that the obsession, because it is an obsession, with the Jewish holocaust and the almost complete ignoring of, for example, the British genocide in Bengal which killed an estimated 32 million people, has nothing to do with genuine horror.

We can see that quite clearly with Holocaust Memorial Day which excludes all genocide before the Nazi Holocaust. So there is no mention of the Armenian Holocaust, the Slave Trade or what happened in the Belgian Congo. Why? What possible logic is there for time limiting which Holocausts are deserving of attention?

The only conclusion is that the Nazi holocaust of the Jews serves a major ideological and propaganda purpose in terms of legitimising western imperialism and capitalism. The Nazi Holocaust makes western capitalism seem anti-racist whereas in fact the way it is used is to reinforce its racism and imperialism. There simply is no other explanation.

If you go to the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust’s web page on the Holocaust it tells you that ‘The Holocaust (The Shoah in Hebrew) was the attempt by the Nazis and their collaborators to murder all the Jews in Europe.’ The page on the Holocaust deals exclusively with the Jews. It says nothing about the Euthenasia campaign between 1939-1941 when about 100,000 mentally and physically handicapped Germans were murdered, mainly by carbon monoxide poisoning.

As Henry Friedlander’s excellent The Origins of Nazi Genocide argues, the Holocaust began in 1939 not 1941/2. The very same gas trucks used to murder the disabled, and German Jewish disabled were singled out in particular, made their way to Chelmno, near Lodz in Poland and there they established the first extermination camp in December 1941.

This prioritisation of the Jewish holocaust is not only racist but it’s also bad history. It treats the Holocaust, in the words of Tom Segev, as a ‘bizarre cult of memory, death and kitsch’ in which false memory is used to bolster the Zionist narrative of eternal anti-Semitism.

Moar words by Tony Greenstein.