Is John McDonnell preparing to become Brutus to Corbyn’s Caesar?

First it was a 6 year old mural. Today it is an 8 year old meeting on Holocaust Memorial Day at which Hajo Meyer, a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz spoke. Tomorrow it will be another meeting because clearly there are scores of people researching everything Corbyn attended in the hope of a new scandal.

The outrage of the Yellow Press and the Zionists is utterly synthetic.  Where is their outrage about the Saudi atrocities in Yemen or Israel’s continuous murder of Palestinians living under occupation? That Corbyn does not call out this hypocrisy demonstrates just how weak the man has become.

Corbyn did nothing wrong 8 years ago in chairing a meeting pointing out the hypocrisy of Israel using the slogan ‘Never Again’ whilst massacring Palestinians. Corbyn should stop apologising to a bunch of racists.

It is baffling that Corbyn still does not understand the nature of the campaign against him? It is blindingly obvious that the Right are out to get him for everything he did in the past. Instead of forever hoisting the white flag Corbyn should have the political courage to stand up and defend what he once believed in.

I was at the meeting in Portcullis House when Hajo Meyer spoke, as did the representatives of other groups who suffered holocausts such as the Roma. The Guardianreports that Corbyn has said that he appeared with people “whose views I completely reject” when he hosted a Holocaust Memorial Day event in 2010, while he was a backbench MP.

This is a stupid lie. I remember very clearly the warm words Corbyn and others had for Hajo. Corbyn was right then andwrong now.  Hajo knew about Auschwitz and anti-Semitism first hand, unlike Corbyn’s malevolent detractors in the Tory press. He had every right to compare what Israel was doing in Gaza to the Nazis.

Note the word ‘compare’. Hajo didn’t say that Israel and Nazi Germany were the same he compared the actions of a state, which imprisons people in what David Cameron called a concentration camp, and then bombards them with high tech missiles and explosives, to Germany’s attacks on civilians.

There are numerous examples of Israelis comparing their own state to Nazi Germany just as there are numerous examples of Israel comparing the Palestinians to the Nazis. Two years ago Israel’s own Deputy Chief of Staff, Yair Golan compared Israel to pre-Holocaust Nazi Germany. Hebrew University lecturer Dr. Ofer Cassif described Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked as ‘Neo-Nazi scum’ and said that “I think it’s fair to compare Israel to Germany in the 1930s, and not to the years of genocide.”

The system of racial separation in Israel, the barring of Arabs from nearly a thousand Jewish villages and communities is no different to the barring of Jews from German towns and villages.  If the comparison hurts racist Zionists then so much the better.

It is the defenders of Israel who describe the creation of Israel as compensation to the Jewish people for the Holocaust. Holocaust analogies are to Israel what butter is to bread!

Israeli Labour Foreign Minister Abba Eban described the Green Line separating Israel from the Occupied Territories as the ‘Auschwitz Borders‘? Prime Minister Menachem Begin described Yassir Arafat under siege in Beirut as Hitler in his Berlin bunker. Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnaithreatened a ‘bigger Shoah’ (Holocaust) against the Palestinians of Gaza and Netanyahu stated that ‘it is 1938 and Iran is Germany.’ Arab leaders like Egypt’s Nasser were routinely talked about as the ‘Hitler on the Nile’.

There are also many right-wing Israelis who see their actions as comparable to the Nazis. One group of soldierscompared themselves to Dr Mengele, the notorious SS doctor in Auschwitz. Religious philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz, the winner of the Israel Prize, called the settlers on the West Bank ‘Judeo-Nazis.’:

Tom Segev, an Israeli historian and journalist wroteconcerning the picture of a Palestinian, the Mufti of Jerusalem at Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Israel that its purpose was to ‘‘conclude that there is much in common between the Nazis’ plan to destroy the Jews and the Arabs’ enmity to Israel.’ (The Seventh Million p.425). 

Israeli Professor of History, Edit Zertal noted there hasn’t been a war involving Israel ‘that has not been perceived, defined, and conceptualized in terms of the Holocaust.’ Israel has mobilised the Holocaust ‘in the service of Israeli politics.’ Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood.  

Just last week Hungary’s anti-Semitic Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, visited Israel and, as is the case with all official visitors to Israel, Orban stopped off to shed a few tears at Yad Vashem. Outside a group of Israelis, including Holocaust survivors, held a protest at the visit of a man who has sought to rehabilitate Hungary’s pro-Nazi war time leader, Admiral Horthy. Orban called him an ‘exceptional statesman’ and is waging a campaign in Hungary for his rehabilitation. This is the man Netanyahu calls his friend.

Veronika Cohen, one of the demonstrators and a Holocaust survivor explained ‘I don’t think that you have to be a Holocaust survivor or a Hungarian to be here to say that Orban has no business coming here,”. Yael Weiss-Reind, whose family was murdered in Hungary during the Holocaust, said that Yad Vashem was granting legitimacy to these regimes when it “accepts leaders who carry out policies and ideologies that are very similar to what we saw decades ago.”

Perhaps Veronika Cohen and Yael Weiss-Reind are also anti-Semites according to the vipers of the British press, John Mann MP and all the other anti-intellectuals who believe that any attempt to draw parallels between Israel today and Nazi Germany is ‘anti-Semitic’.

In Israel comparisons with the Nazis are run of the mill. Assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin wasdressed up by his opponents in SS uniform. Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who won the Israel prize, described the Jewish settlers on the West Bank as Judeo Nazis.Menachem Begin compared Yassir Arafat in the Beirut siege to Hitler in his final days in a Berlin bunker.

Hebrew University Professor Ofer Cassif compared Israel to Nazi Germany as did another Hebrew university academic, Daniel Blatman, a Holocaust researcher, who comparedIsrael to both South Africa and Nazi Germany.