Was Hitler or Netanyahu Behind The Defacing of Yad Vashem?
By Michael Robeson
05 July, 2012
Countercurrents.org
Why couldn't Neo-Nazis or Arabs have been the ones to deface Israel 's official Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, last month? It would have been so much easier to condemn the usual suspects for spewing their undying animus against Jews, especially during a time in which Israelis were treated to the first " Miss Holocaust Survivor" Beauty Pageant, an event that was attended by two of Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu's Cabinet members. Instead, in an attack described by Yad Vashem's Chairman Avner Shalev as a “callous expression of burning hatred” the culprits turned out to be several Israeli Jews and their hatred was directed instead, in Shalev's words “against Zionists and Zionism.”
The graffiti included some eyebrow raisers like “If Hitler hadn't existed, the Zionists would have invented him.” And, “You (Zionists) declared war on Hitler in the name of the Jewish people. You brought about the Shoah!” And perhaps most scandalously, “ The Zionists wanted the Holocaust!” Accompanying these statements was a crude sketch of the iconic entrance to Auschwitz with a Star of David leading to the gate. Hardly the script for a Spielberg film.
An attack on Yad Vashem, the Holy of Holies only after Auschwitz , would normally be 24/7'd in Israel with politicians, like Bibi Netanyahu, assuring their voters that this kind of atrocity would never occur again, and with Abraham Foxman issuing his usual warnings about the global rise of anti-Semitism. But the Israeli press has downplayed the attack and the New York Times has given it scant attention, and for good reason. The perpetrators themselves destroy the usual image of anti-Semites; and their shocking graffiti statements greatly complicate the issue of how "hate crimes" and “hate speech” are currently defined. No Arab or Neo-Nazi could have succeeded, like this, in putting a couple of specifically kosher wrenches in the works of wielding “anti-Semitism” as a weapon.
First, Chairman Avner Shalev himself was forced to make a distinction between an attack on Zionists and Zionism and one on Jews and Judaism. This distinction is one rarely heard from reputable people in the American media who would wish to avoid being labeled anti-Semites. Second, the content of those graffiti statements, blaming Zionists equally with Hitler for the destruction of European Jewry, offers a potentially explosive glimpse of an alternative history of WWII and the creation of the Israeli state, damning both to Zionist and Western leaders whose reliance on the “Good War” and the “Holocaust” narratives, provide a fundamental basis for their increasingly doubtful political legitimacy.
The Israeli Jews and who were arrested and accused of the “hate crime” are allegedly members of Neturei Karta, a group that refers to itself as True Torah Jews. Neturei Karta is an Orthodox Jewish sect, comprised of several factions that take some highly unorthodox views on Jewish and Israeli issues. The factions differ in their beliefs, but all of them are utterly opposed to Zionism and believe that its Jewish state is a sin against God, even an abomination. Members of Neturei Karta are hardly representative of the kind of Jews that Elie Weisel was thinking of when he wrote: "Whatever he chooses to do, the Jew becomes a spokesman for all Jews, dead and yet to be born." But then Weisel is hardly representative of what Neturei Karta members believe to be a True Torah Jew. As one of Neturei Karta's leaders, Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss put it: "The Zionists use the Holocaust issue to their benefit….Zionism is not Jewish, but a political agenda.” To be clear, Rabbi Weiss, by making an unfashionable distinction between politics and religion, was not referring to the Beauty Pageant.
Attacks, which would normally be considered acts of anti-Semitism, by Jews against fellow Jews are not rare. In the past years in America alone, over a dozen cases of allegedly anti-Semitic actions against Jewish property were, upon investigation, discovered to have been performed by Jews themselves. This includes cases of Jews claiming to have been victims of hate crimes attacks that turned out to have been self-inflicted. None of these cases received the media attention given to that of Tawana Brawley. The media's usual reaction to these cases is to label such individuals as disturbed or troubled while in the Jewish media the term “self hating” is occasionally used. Neturei Karta upends these usual equations because not only are they Jews, but they consider themselves more Jewish than those who regularly wield the equations as weapons of self protection and tools of self empowerment. One of Neturei's Israeli Rabbis, in fact, was beaten during a 2009 visit to Auschwitz . But not by vicious anti-Semitic Poles; rather, he was beaten by a group of visiting Jews; and he refused to press charges.
The vandalism at Yad Vashem comes at a time when the U.S. government is being lobbied by some Jewish groups to classify all anti-Israeli protests on college campuses as “anti-Semitic” and to prosecute the demonstrators under “hate crime” laws. Should Neturei Karta members decide to vandalize a college Hillel or Chabad office, would Prosecutors be lobbied to go after them with the same diligence taken against an Arab student group? And under the already strict hate speech law, would, say, a Neturei Karta vandalism of the U.S. Holocaust museum be prosecuted as severely as one by David Duke or Louis Farakkahn? Not likely.
Cultural identifiers and political beliefs play an unspoken and often contradictory role in deciding how much "hate" is in the mind of perpetrator; and that hatred is often not absent in the mind of the beholder. If Jewish groups are to be given protection against criticism of their cultural identity - Israel , should not patriotic Evangelical Christians be given protection against anti-war and anti-U.S. government demonstrations? After all, they believe that America is a Christian nation; its wars against Arab countries obviously give them their cultural and religious identity as Americans. Should not this minority group, therefore, be protected from "anti-Christian" hate crimes? It would serve much to improve American political discourse if discussion were permitted about the "Christian" nature of those wars, which Evangelicals so emotionally support. But that should not allow us to think the same about any “Jewish” nature in support of those wars.
The second wrench in the works is the political content of those graffiti statements - The accusation that wartime Zionist leaders were responsible for the massacre of their own people. Most readers would consider such an idea preposterous and whoever believes it to be a lunatic. But considering that Israeli leaders like Bibi Netanyahu have relentlessly accused Iran of threatening the "existential destruction" of Israel with nuclear weapons, even while heads of Israeli Intelligence agencies contend that Iranian leaders have not even decided yet whether or not to build them, the question of who is a lunatic becomes moot. Especially when Israeli leaders know that they have over 300 nuclear weapons at their disposal, and have already threatened to use them.
The official website of Neturei Karta's pulls no punches, offering a wide range of material that gives substance to their attack on Yad Vashem. Dozens of articles and downloadable books, mostly by Jewish authors including one by the Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht, provide documented and convincing support for Neturei Karta's claims. In 1933, certain Zionist leaders in America publicly and loudly declared war on Hitler and demanded an international boycott of his new regime. Within months, certain Zionist leaders in then Palestine established contacts with the Nazi regime to, among other things, create financial programs to assist mainly wealthier German Jews to emigrate to Palestine . Zionist leaders there maintained working relationships with the Nazis and with the Italian Fascists involving agricultural and military training for young Zionists right up until the beginning of the war. Other relations continued even after war began, including efforts by the Stern gang, one of whose leaders was future Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Shamir, to offer their assistance to the Nazi war effort. One is struck by, among other things, the element of "good cop/bad cop" in these relations with the masses of European Jews caught in the middle.
The history told by the authors at the Neturei Karta website also documents Zionist leader's focus on the priority, not of saving European Jews, but of building the Zionist state by using only the best "human material." Understood in this way, Zionist policy included eugenic selection in its effort to build a Jewish state by transforming European Jewry from a people of the Shtetl to citizens of the State. Scandalous as this may be, one should recall that colonialism and the modernist movement are both illuminated by Enlightenment beliefs. They both propose to improve humanity by ridding it of backward, supernatural beliefs and ritualistic behaviors. Zionism, in this sense, was operating in no less a modernist way against those outside of their state building needs than were French Revolutionaries toward Catholics, Christian conquistadors toward Native tribes and the white races in general toward the darker races. The past 500 years of Western progress have been an almost endless saga of genocides and destruction of traditional cultures, that is of common people who fail to adapt to modernism's increasingly politicised materialist philosophies.
After reading the books and seeing the documentation of Neturei Karta, the only argument that remains in support of Zionist leader's good intentions is that their neglect of the non- politicized masses of European Jewry was merely benign. That argument runs smack up against a book titled "Holocaust Victims Accuse." It tells of Yitzhak Greenbaum, chairman of the ‘Rescue Committee' of the Jewish Association in Palestine . During the war, he was confronted in an interview about the lack of initiative in his Committee's work. Greenbaum explained his policy in this way: “And when I was asked, ‘But could you donate from the resources of the United Jewish Appeal for the rescue of Jews in Europe ,' I said no. And I say again no.…In my opinion one should resist this wave which relegates the Zionist activities (building the Israeli state) to secondary importance.”
Anyone who wishes to maintain that his and, by extension, his fellow Zionist leader's feelings toward European Jews were nevertheless sympathetic, Greenbaum amplified his statement by later stating very clearly - "One cow in Palestine is worth more than all the Jews in Europe." This from the man heading the Zionist's Rescue Committee and responsible for doing everything possible to prevent his fellow Jews from being slaughtered. Eichmann himself could not have put it better.
Who are the real haters? Who are the real anti-Jews? Or, perhaps, a deeper question - Who are the real anti-humans? The politically unenlightened defacers of Yad Vashem, some of whom attended the 2006 Holocaust Revision conference in Iran and one of whom was a political advisor to Yasser Arafat? Or those modernist Zionist leaders themselves who after the war promoted the construction of Yad Vashem, used it for moral advantage in their theft and murderous occupation of Palestinian land, use it for political advantage in their frequent military excursions against neighboring lands and then regularly accuse the West of not having done enough to save the Jews from Hitler?
But what does Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have to do with this?
Almost exactly two months prior to the defacing of Yad Vashem, Netanyahu made a speech comparing the “Nazi Holocaust” to the dangers posed by a “nuclear-armed Iran .” When criticized by some of the media for exaggerating the threat, he defended himself, stating: "I will continue saying the truth to the world but first of all to my own people, who I know are strong enough to hear the truth,"
Members of Neturei Karta would hardly dispute that they are among his “own people.” They surely think of themselves as being strong, strong enough to take controversial positions on issues that, taken by the goyim, could get them ostracized or put in prison. They know at least one of their members has endured a beating at Auschwitz , more than some “holocaust survivors,” such as many of those in the Beauty Pageant, could honestly claim. So, if they are strong, and stronger than most of us - who could barely endure the cocktail party shame for not having seen the most recent acclaimed film, then maybe they consider themselves, more than most people honestly can, strong enough “to hear the truth”? And then, perhaps, to act upon it?
It is doubtful that Netanyahu will be subpoenaed during the upcoming trial and accused of being legally responsible for inspiring the actions of the defendants, the way that Muslim clerics are hauled into American courts and prosecuted for inspiring acts of terrorism (or, to save time and expense, simply droned by Presidential order). But I have the sneaking suspicion that if Neturei Karta members actually are responsible, then some of them might just be smirking every time they see the face of their “abominable” nation's leader on TV. Especially when he says, as he did, on CNN little more than a year ago:
“The ayatollahs want…to make another Holocaust…. But that's just for starters….They're actually true to their word….This fanatic ideology armed with nuclear weapons is the single greatest threat to the peace of the world.”
Being True Torah Jews, how could they not get certain ideas in their heads that the rest of us would consider lunacy? So used are we to accepting our own.
Mike Robeson is a middleaged ex-pat living in Italy. Reader comments are welcome at [email protected]
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