Exchange: Tony Greenstein – More Errors Than Paragraphs, Cont. Previous: Oliver Kamm -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ah, such invective, so few little facts, not least from our aristocratic banker Kamm. As for thick, well I’m sure he’s an expert in such things. As for Mikey’s “guest post” (is he that special that he has to be a guest?): Yes, in some quarters I’m no doubt a “notorious radical left-wing anti-Zionist demagogue.” If such quarters include the racist warmongers of Harry’s Place then that is an added compliment. i. Brenner’s research is his own, not from Stalinist sources. If he quotes Klaus Polkehn it’s because the latter’s article, which if I remember correctly appeared in History Today around 1980, regarding the trip to Palestine of the head of the Jewish Office of the SS, Count Mildenstein, was courtesy of the Labour Zionist Haganah. of course mere facts like that don’t get a look in at Mikey’s when ad hominem attacks and lies are so much more interesting. ii. I’m aware of when the Kastner trial started, who was accusing who etc. But as in many libel trials, e.g. Irving v Penguin, the accuser becomes the accused and so it was in the Kastner trial. The Attorney General took over the case personally and asked whether all Zionists are guilty of collaboration because it was Zionist policy to select the few, the Zionist elite, out of the many. iii. The Supreme Court overturned the lower court decision, by 3-2, BUT upheld the facts found by the lower court and also the finding that Kastner had collaborated by seeking to exonerate Nazi SS war criminals, something Mikey finds perfectly OK and acceptable – not just Becher, but Krumey and Wisliceny and also I understand another 4. iv. Dobkin may have testified that Kastner had no authority to testify on behalf of the Jewish Agency, but that does mean it is true. Fact is that the Israeli State, fully aware of what Kastner did, had at no time prosecuted him for this act. On the contrary Mapai, Israeli Labour Party, put him high on the list for the next Knesset elections before the trial. v. Kastner wasn’t at Nuremberg other than to help get SS war criminals avoid the gallows. The Americans complained about this Zionist official whose only interest seemed to be in exonerating such criminals. And why if it was all kosher did Kastner not admit from the start what he was doing? And if he was at Nuremberg as an aide to the Americans, presumably he was there as a representative of the Jewish Agency? In what other capacity would he have been there? vi. No the allegations in Perdition were not made by Vrba. Nor did I say they were. But Perdition covers the same ground and therefore presumably, by the same guilt by association techniques loved by HP, he is also an anti-Semite! Vrba blamed Kastner for far more than not publicing Auschwitz but for covering up, suppressing the news, doing a deal in exchange for help in rounding up and pacifying the Jews of Hungary. vii. Vrba was indeed a non-person in Israel, where he briefly settled before making his way, via the London Medical Research Council to a professorship in Canada. His book I Escaped from Auschwitz was not translated into Hebrew, the Auschwitz Protocols, which he and Wetzler had provided the material for, concerning the whereabouts of Auschwitz and its layout etc., were not translated at Yad Vashem into English or Hebrew and were virtually hidden away from all but the most persistent and knowledgeable of academics. Likewise Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem was also not translated for years into Hebrew. When Arendt wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem she was subject to bitter attack by an Israeli Professor at Oxford. Vrba leapt to her defence against this forerunner of Harry’s Place propaganda. viii. The full story of the attack on Vrba by the Zionists’ official historians of Yad Vashem, Bauer et al. is told in the remarkable little book by Ruth Linn, herself a Professor at Haifa University, Escaping Auschwitz – A Culture of Forgetting, which I reviewed earlier this year for Tribune. ix. In fact Bauer and co. after many attacks on Vrba, whose name was wholly unknown in Israel to all except a few experts in the area, e.g. the fact that he was the 2nd and 3rd Jewish escapee with Alfred Wetzler is not to be found in the normal school syllabus on the Holocaust, realised that their attacks had rebounded. But Bauer called Vrba many other things besides the comment Mikey quotes. x. It is asserted that I have nothing to say about Zionists who fought the Nazis. Not true. I am not a biological determinist. Zionists, given the right set of circumstances, will of course fight like others. But I’m not going to take the hasbarah of Israeli propagandists at their word. No-one doubts the bravery of Mordechai Anielwicz, commander of ZOB in the Warsaw Ghetto. But Anielwicz himself said that the Zionist activities of the Zionist youth groups in Poland was an utter waste of time and a distraction, things like running kibbutzim to replace Polish labour deported to the slave factories of France (which Skif, the Bundist paper, vigorously condemned as collaboration incidentally). But what I do say is that when Zionists fought, they did not do so as Zionists, be it in the allied armies or as Partisans, but as individuals organised in groups, despite the politics of those groups. Hashomer Hatzair and left PZ in the Warsaw Ghetto had effectively abandoned Zionism and had one though and one alone – retribution against the Nazi beasts. Likewise incidentally the Revisionist fighters who, in Warsaw almost alone of anywhere, also fought (and more effectively given their heavier weaponry) than ZOB. xi. Vrba doesn’t label anyone who negotiated with the Nazis as a collaborator. Show me the quote. He certainly doesn’t accuse Rabbi Weissmandel, who certainly does accuse the Zionists of collaboration e.g. Holocaust Victims Accuse or Min Hamitzair. What Vrba says, and on this I agree with him though Lenni Brenner doesn’t agree, is that his belief that deportations from Slovakia stopped in 1942 because of the payment of a £50,000 ransom negotiated with Wisliceny and the idea of the Europa Plan that for a $2m dollar ransom the Final Solution could be ended were utterly futile pipe dreams. The idea that the Nazis were susceptible to this bribery was absurd, not least because there was an economic and political incentive to murder the Jews of occupied Europe. But these subtleties the war mongers of HP will never understand. xii. Yes, Bauer is on record that Kastner is a hero (& elsewhere that he was a collaborator). Vrba has always been crystal clear, as he wrote in the Daily Herald of February 1961:           I accuse certain Jewish leaders of one of the most ghastly deeds of the war. This small group of quislings           knew what was happening to their brethren in Hitler’s gas chambers and bought their own lives with the           price of silence. Among them was Dr Kastner. I was able to give Hungarian Zionist leaders three weeks           notice that Eichmann planned to send a million of their Jews to his gas chambers. Kasztner went to           Eichmann and told him, I know of your plans; spare some Jews of my choice and I shall keep quiet?           Eichmann not only agreed, but dressed Kasztner up in SS uniform and took him to Belsen to trace some           of his friends. Both Bauer and Israel Gutman, both of the Israeli propaganda institute, Yad Vashem, accept that the Auschwitz Protocols were not disseminated by those who received them, 2 weeks before the deportations in Hungary began, in order to save the negotiations for the Jewish and Zionist elite. That is where the sympathies of Mikey and his war monger friends on HH place lie, with the Jewish bourgeoisie and their Zionist friends. Ours is with the Jewish working class who were sacrificed in Hungary and elsewhere. And incidentally, Yad Vashem also refused to print Raul Hilberg’s monumental Destruction of European Jewry because again it didn’t fit into the ideological purposes of Yad Vashem. xiii. As for the centuries longing of Jews to “return” to Palestine, strange they chose the imperial era to do it, under the protecton of British bayonets. Even stranger that the first Zionist Congress had to be transferred in 1897 from Munich to Basle. Presumably this longing had temporarily waned? xiv. Likewise the Zionist nonsense about the “internationally recognised right of Jews to their own homeland” etc. The anti-Semites certainly recognised the “right” of Jews to “return” since they didn’t recognise rights of Jews where they were. But who cares? As Herzl said in his Diaries, the anti-Semites will be our friends and allies (pp. 83-4 from memory). The fact is that those who saw the Jews as a separate nation apart from those who lived there were either anti-Semites or Zionists and in the case of HH I suspect both. xv. Yes Lapid compared the actions of settlers to the Nazis harassment of Jews. Mikey, being an apologist for the settlers and settlements of course chooses to query whether it refers to all or some settlers. The fact is that the pogroms and harassment, the stone throwing and the encouragement these scum have from the army and police can be found in the actions of anti-Semitic regimes in Europe. This is something that Mikey, Kamm and all the other trash of Harry’s Place are more than happy to applaud. xvi. In fact there is a direct ideological link between Nazi Germany and Israel. Whether it is the actions of the Judeo-Nazi settlers (Israel Shahak and Leibowitz’s words – not mine!) in the occupied territories, the Rabbis consulting the Black Book of who is and is not a Jew (including Nazi sources of who is a Jew) or the welcome given by Zionist groups to the Nuremberg Laws, whose very preamble paid tribute to this Zionist welcome is a matter of record. As for Perdition, it is a play and as such should be allowed poetic licence. But I welcome the Zionists’ continued attempts to ban this play by the excellent socialist and Trostkyist playwright, the late Jim Allen (not a Stalinist you fools). The more you scum ban, the more people want to know!!! Posted by: Tony Greenstein at January 25, 2007 06:18 PM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Although the thickos on this list wouldn’t have spotted it, I did in fact confuse Klaus Polkehn, who wrote of the “Secret Contacts between the Zionists and Nazis 1933-41,” with Jacob Boas who wrote the January 1980 article in History Today on a Nazi’s travels to Palestine. Re: Yehuda Bauer. As Ruth Linn, no anti-Zionist she, writes in Escaping Auschwitz – A Culture of Silence, p. 123:           When they [the Slovakian Judenrat/Jewish Council/Working Group] were told to ask the Jews of           Bratislava to report for deportation to Sered, they obeyed. When their community list was taken the [local           Slovak] police, they complained to the SS but did not spread the word to the community to hide... The           month of September [1944] the last period of the Working Group activity, casts a dark shadow over all of           them and on Gizi as their leader. They could have no illusions by then, but they acted just like many of the           Jewish Councils in Poland. [Bauer, Gizi Fleischmann, 262.] As Linn notes, Vrba’s voice was first given academic legitimacy not by the Israelis but rather by the Germans (p. 112) and in his reply to Vrba’s 1996 article in Vierteljahrshefte fuer Zeitgeschichte, Bauer accepts that the Hungarian Jews who were deported to Auschwitz were ignorant of their fate. Yet the “prominents” in the elite train did know. And in his Rethinking the Holocaust Bauer also accepts that Vrba’s Auschwitz Protocols were an important factor in stopping the deportations (p. 238). Gutman and Bauer also have no doubt that Kastner and the Hungarian Zionists had the Protocols, i.e. knew about Auschwitz over 2 weeks before the deportations began. The conclusion is obvious. Posted by: Tony Greenstein at January 25, 2007 11:03 PM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Next: “Mikey”