The term ‘Holocaust’ should be used by those who have endured it, not by those who have inflicted it. Any group can become perpetrators.
The publication of Howard Jacobson’s Blood Libel article, which attacks those mentioning the killing of Palestinian children, indicates where Viner’s sympathies lie.
Don’t You Dare Contribute to the Guardian’s Financial Appeal
Channel 4 Broadcast on the Horrors in Gaza
The Guardian’s refusal to oppose Israel’s genocide in Gaza, to call for an arms ban and its support for Starmer puts it in the camp of the genocidaires.
Kath Viner cancelled American Palestinian Susan Abulhawa’s article, that Guardian US commissioned because it mentioned the word ‘holocaust’. Vinter refused to see that Holocaust can happen to anyone, anywhere and at any time. It is not confined to Jews. The Guardian’s Zionism puts it in the camp of the murderers not the murdered.
Viner approved though of Howard Jacobson’s attempt to justify the extermination of Palestinian children as a ‘blood libel’. But Palestinian children are being exterminated, along with their parents. Jacobson’s calling this a ‘blood libel’ meant that there must have been some truth to the original Christian allegation that Jews killed non-Jewish children in order to use their blood to bake matzot at Passover.
It is one of the ironies of Israel that it is determined to fulfil even the wildest fantasy of Christian anti-Semitism. Jews were alleged to poison wells in medieval Europe yet Israel has done exactly that. Jews were alleged to deliberately infect non-Jews with the plague yet Israel has deliberately introduced typhus into the water systems of Palestinians during the Nakba. It was named ‘Cast Thy Bread’.
The lesson of the Holocaust is not that Jews are perpetual victims but that any group of people, given the right set of circumstances, can be become genocidaires and and oppressors. Viner’s horror is not at what Israel is doing in Northern Gaza but at how it is described. Viner, despite her youthful support of the Palestinians, is continuing the Guardian’s historical support under CP Scott for Zionism.
The Guardian is a liberal paper and liberals, almost without exception move to the right when capitalism or imperialism is under attack. The German Democratic Party collapsed into the Nazi party. Its co-founder Hjalmar Schacht was ‘central’ in pressurising President Hindenburg to appoint the first Nazi government. He then became Hitler’s President of the Reichsbank and Minister of Economics. In Britain Lloyd-George, the last Liberal Prime Minister, wrote of Hitler:
Although the Guardian rejected a letter from over 1,000 signatories it was accepted by the Morning Star
“He is a born leader of men. A magnetic, dynamic personality with a single-minded purpose, a resolute will and a dauntless heart. … The old trust him; the young idolise him…. It is the worship of a national hero who has saved his country from utter despondency and degradation. … He is the George Washington of Germany – the man who won for his country independence from all her oppressors…. This great people will work better, sacrifice more, and, if necessary, fight with greater resolution because Hitler asks them to do so. Those who do not comprehend this central fact cannot judge the present possibilities of modern Germany.” “I Talked to Hitler,” Daily Express, November 17, 1936
Israel Burns Women and Children Alive at Al Aqsa Hospital
Last Wednesday Israeli planes bombed the tent encampments at Al Aqsa Hospital. Four people, including 20 year old Shaaban al-Dalou, on a drip at the time, were burnt alive. This was a Nazi-style massacre. It has been followed up by repeated massacres.
Indonesia Hospital Set on Fire by Israeli Troops
Israel has attacked all Gaza’s hospitals using the lie that they are Hamas bases. This is worthy of Goebbels himself. Israel has now set fire to the Indonesia Hospital. Israel even bombed Rafah’s water reservoir. No doubt there was a Hamas base there too!
Palestinians are being forced to take part in death marches just like the survivors of Auschwitz were forced on death marches. Israel is determined to follow in the footsteps of the Nazis. In Nazi Germany, just like Israel today, ethnic cleansing was followed by extermination.
The BBC’s Olga Guerin Disproves Israeli Allegations that a Lebanese hospital is a Hezbollah Base
The reason Shaaban died? So Israeli settlers can settle the Gaza Strip. To achieve this Israel is prepared to kill as many Palestinians as it takes. On Monday senior Israeli ministers, including 10 Likud MKs, attended a conference aimed at doing just that.
200,000 people have been trapped in Jabalia refugee camp for nearly 3 weeks without food or water. This is what the Nazi Governor-General of Poland, Hans Frank, called ‘death by hunger’. Starvation was a central strategy in the Nazi genocide against the Jews. Frank was hanged at Nuremberg for his crimes. Unfortunately Netanyahu, Biden, Blinken and Starmer won’t suffer the same fate.
The First Moments of Massacre in Northern Gaza
Israel gets away with its crimes because ‘journalists’ like Viner enable it to preserve its monopoly on ‘holocaust’. The holocaust is reified, not to fight the danger of racial supremacy but to repeat it.
Israel claims to inherit the memory of the Jews who died in the holocaust. In reality it inherits the memory of those who killed them. Despite the holocaust being central to Israel’s identity, holocaust survivors in Israel live in poverty, their reparations stolen.
Israel uses the memory of the Jews who died in the holocaust as a justification for their war crimes. It imagines that the women and children it is murdering in Gaza are Nazis and that they are the Jews of the camps. What greater desecration of their memory can there be?
A Message to Israel’s Exterminators – We’ll keep exposing your lies
The victims of the Nazis didn’t fly planes and bomb the SS. It was the other way around. The victims of the Nazis didn’t have tanks and machine guns. It is part of the Israeli sickness that they are unable to see that when they call for the extermination of the Palestinians they are stepping into the shoes of the Schutzstaffel not its victims.
For the Zionists actual Holocaust survivors are irrelevant – their reparations stolen most live in poverty
In her 9 years as Editor Viner has made the Guardian into an Establishment echo chamber. What was once a (relatively) radical publication has found a comfortable niche in Starmer’s Dystopia.
Viner became Editor because of her antagonism to Janine Gibson, who brought to the Guardian the revelations of Edward Snowden about the extent of surveillance by the US and British security services of their own citizens. As Michael Wolff wrote in USA Today
Gibson’s pitch was to wholly align herself with Rusbridger and Snowden — proudly promising more of the same. Kath Viner, who had taken over for Gibson in New York … pitched decidedly against Gibson and, in a sense, against Snowden….
The story of how the Guardian was tamed was told by Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis in How the UK Security Services neutralised the country’s leading liberal newspaper. Viner was instrumental in ensuring that the Guardian became a pliant tool of the British state. Her reward was an ‘exclusive’ interview with the head of MI5.
Viner was Prepared to Acquiesce to the Secret Services Over Their Spying on Citizens
For years the Guardian had refused to co-operate with the D-Notice system, whose purpose was to spike stories about the Intelligence Agencies by putting pressure on editors. In the wake of the Snowden revelations the Guardian’s deputy editor Paul Johnson, took his place on the D-Notice Committee. Kennard and Curtis wrote about how
On 20 July 2013, GCHQ officials entered The Guardian’s offices … six weeks after the first Snowden-related article had been published.
… Guardian deputy editor Paul Johnson, along with two others, spent three hours destroying the laptops containing the Snowden documents….
Johnson claims that the destruction of the computers was “purely a symbolic act”, … Yet the episode did change something. As the D-Notice Committee minutes for November 2013 outlined: “Towards the end of July [as the computers were being destroyed], The Guardian had begun to seek and accept D-Notice advice not to publish certain highly sensitive details and since then the dialogue had been reasonable and improving.”
during the last two years of Rusbridger’s editorship, The Guardian published about 110 articles per year tagged as MI6 on its website. Since Viner took over, the average per year has halved and is decreasing year by year.
“Effective scrutiny of the security and intelligence agencies… appears to have been abandoned,” … in recent years, it “sometimes seems The Guardian is worried about upsetting the spooks.”
Shabaan Al Dalu 19, a boy on a drip, was burnt alive by Israeli planes in the tents surrounding Al Aqsa Hospital Yet Keir Starmer Phoned Netanyahu to Ask if he was alright after Hezbollah bombed his house – We are governed by war criminals
A second former Guardian journalist added:
The Guardian no longer seems to have such a challenging relationship with the intelligence services, and is perhaps seeking to mend fences since Snowden.”
In March 2015 Viner became editor. Her impact was felt amost immediately when Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party. Instead of welcoming Labour’s first radical leader the Guardian began to run stories, even before he was elected, about ‘anti-Semitism’. I organised a letter from Jewish Labour Party members 3 days later. Since then, however, the letters page has been largely closed to Jewish anti-Zionists.
During the Corbyn years hundreds of articles alleging ‘anti-Semitism’ appeared. Jonathan Freedland wrote about nothing else. Virtually every ‘journalist’ on the paper contributed their bile. Slowly but surely this had its effect.
The Guardian also began attacking Julian Assange, whose Wikileaks revelations had provided the Guardian with scoop after scoop. His reward was a Brutas-like betrayal. As John Pilger wrote:
The Guardian has exploited the work of Assange and WikiLeaks in what its previous editor called “the greatest scoop of the last 30 years”. The paper creamed off WikiLeaks’ revelations and claimed the accolades and riches that came with them.
… a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie. The book’s authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, turned on their source, abused him and disclosed the secret password Assange had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a digital file containing leaked US embassy cables.
When CNN does mention Israeli atrocities it is in terms of what effects it has had on the perpetrators – in the case of the above it was running over hundreds of Palestinians – dead or alive – Guy Zaken complained he could not eat meat any longer because of what he had seen “Everything squirts out,” – the SS also suffered traumas but most decent people concentrate on their victims not the murderers.
Luke Harding, a reporter who is very close to MI5 and MI6, wrote on 27 November 2018 that Manafort held secret talks with Assange in Ecuadorian embassy, sources say. There was no truth in this allegation concerning Trump’s former acolyte. Media Lens wrote
No shred of evidence has ever been produced for this claim, which WikiLeaks and Manafort have both vehemently denied, and the story has been widely regarded as fake from virtually the hour of its publication. Luke Harding, the lead journalist on the story, and his editors Paul Johnson and Katharine Viner, have never apologised or retracted the story; nor have they responded to the many challenges about it. … the Guardian has a disreputable record in publishing nasty, abusive and derogatory pieces about Assange.
This article still remains up. James Ball later wrote that ‘The only barrier to Julian Assange leaving Ecuador’s embassy is pride’. 16 months later Assange was dragged out of the Ecuadorian embassy. There was no mea culpa from this bogus ‘journalist’.
Viner and the Guardian’s ‘journalists’ were enthused by Starmer. This empty suit, lacking any charisma, the embodiment of the secret state, without a radical bone in his body, was what they had dreamt of. It is difficult for most people to understand how Starmer, a politician who can barely string a sentence together, who lacks any warmth or compassion, who can’t think on his feet and with all the appeal of a constipated worm, can excite anyone but the Guardian’s bought ‘journalists’ received him in raptures. Why? Because the change he promised was no threat to the system.
Starmer was elected on less than 34% of the vote. Just 1.6% more than Corbyn in 2019 and 6% lower than Corbyn in 2017. But no one at the Guardian dared point this out. Even in his own seat, Holborn & St. Pancras, despite Labour’s victory, his personal vote plummeted.
Tame ‘journalists’ like Rafael Behr provided the word salads that eased Starmer’s path to No. 10. It was change without change, which is what the Guardian has always stood for.
Starmer is the product of the war against Corbyn. The poisonous articles by Freedland and co. took their toll. We were told that ‘The roots of Labour’s antisemitism lie deep within the populist left. Political Editor Jessica Elgot, a free transfer from the Jewish Chronicle, thought that Panorama’s hatchet job, Is Labour Anti-Semitic was pure gold although it hasn’t fared well since July 2019 as key witnesses such as Ben Westerman, have been shown to be liars.
The Guardian under Viner, the youthful Palestinian supporter, had made its bed with Zionism as the British state made clear that Zionism was its adopted policy.
Boris Johnson’s overtly racist, anti-Semitic novel in 2004, 72 Virgins, didn’t disturb Viner in the slightest. According to its reviewer
Had it have been written by any other author, Seventy-Two Virgins could be taken as being moderately offensive but Johnson’s characteristic charm and wit make it hilarious and satirical.
Clearly the references to ‘the Jewish cabal who run the American media complex’ or the ‘Jewish oligarchs’ who fiddled the figures in Russian elections were side splitting. One can only imagine what Freedland would have written if Corbyn had been the author!
Not once did the Guardian ask why there was so little evidence of actual anti-Semitism. Not once did the Guardian question the motives of the Board of Deputies and the various Zionist groups. Viner cynically and cowardly saw her role as dividing the left by conflating anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. Her concern over racism began and ended with ‘anti-Semitism’. Rivka Brown quotes one current Guardian staffer as saying
“Kath takes the Board of Deputies very seriously,” said one current Guardian staffer, “[and] read[s] the shit out of the rightwing press.”
Katherine Viner is to journalism what Donald Trump is to politics. When Palestinian American author Susan Abuhalwa said that “Israel is committing the holocaust of our time.” she spiked the article. It is Israel’s monopoly over the holocaust, thanks to people like Viner, that has enabled Israel to get away with war crimes on the scale of the Nazis. Gaza is Israel’s Auschwitz. It is a death camp.
Rivkah Brown wrote about discontent amongst Guardian staff over her double standards on Palestine. The article wassubtitled ‘Please pass on my deepest fuck you.’ It was Abuhalwa’s parting shot. If the Guardian and its ‘journalists’ (can we really call Marina Hyde & Ralph Behr, in all their shallowness, journalists?) had any integrity they would tell Viner the same.
Susan Abuhalwa and Jacobson
It is a long standing Zionist theme that only Jews suffered in the holocaust. The ‘Jewish’ State claims copyright on ‘holocaust’. It is this which has given Israel immunity for its atrocities, the tortures, the rapes and child murder.
In subscribing to this false narrative Viner, Freedland, Hyde et. al. have actively contributed to the genocide. The Western media have played a crucial role in normalising genocide in Gaza with the BBC shamelessly broadcasting Israel’s ‘defence’ at the International Court of Justice whilst omitting South Africa’s case!
The Zionists argue that only anti-Semitism was responsible for the holocaust. Nothing to do with anti-communism, eugenics or living space (lebensraum). As Sybil Milton, the child of Jewish refugees and Senior Resident Historian at the US Holocaust Museum wrote:
the validity of the eugenic interpretation does not fit into the arguments of those historians positing anti-Semitism as a central motivation in Nazi policy. The preoccupation with anti-Semitism… has limited our ability to see the connections between Nazi ideology, German social policy, and Genocide. [Sybil Milton, The Context of the Holocaust, pp. 269, 270, 276].
Those who say that ‘holocaust’ only applies to Jews provide Israel with its exceptionalism. Jews can never be safe because they are Jews and thus Israel is engaged in permanent war. Eternal anti-Semitism is the mirror image of the Nazis’ Eternal Jew. It accepts the Zionist fable that Jews can never live with others. As Hannah Arendt noted there must be something about Jews themselves which attracts this.
It also means dismissing the mass murder of the Gypsies, Disabled and other victims and ignoring German imperialism’s search for new territories and ‘living space’. As Milton explained:
‘The emphasis on antisemitism and the exclusivity of the Jewish fate has, for obvious political reasons, also been the official Israeli interpretation’ and that this had ‘profoundly influenced the historiography of the Holocaust.’ [Milton, Gypsies and the Holocaust, p. 377].
Milton defined the holocaust as ‘the mass murder of human beings because they belonged to a biologically defined group.’
Zionist exceptionalism has led to Israelis talking of ‘annihilating’ and ‘exterminating’ Palestinians whilst at the same time calling them Nazis. Israelis make no connection between their own genocidal talk and what the Nazis did in the holocaust because the holocaust has been stripped of all meaning, depoliticised and isolated from any social or economic context. Only Zionists could proclaim their desire to exterminate and yet pose as victims of racism!
Yehuda Bauer, the principal Zionist holocaust historian long argued that only the Jews suffered a holocaust. This meant Bauer explaining the extermination of the Roma because of their ‘asocial conduct’. In a debate with Bauer, Milton’s response was withering:
Defining an entire ethnic group as anti-social and criminal is a classic example of racism. I do not know why Mr. Bauer does not understand this. [Milton, Correspondence: Gypsies and the Holocaust, p. 517].
Instead of understanding the racial, imperial and eugenic origin of Nazi ideas, Nazi anti-Semitism was ascribed to a demonic obsession with Jews. It is this which Viner has signed up to.
Zionism, havingdone nothing to rescue Europe’s Jews during the holocaust and having obstructed the rescue efforts of others, exploited the holocaust after the war. Imperialism has used the murder of Europe’s largely anti-Zionist Jewish population as its moral alibi.
Most journalists, the Guardian’s included, know nothing about the Holocaust or the Nazis rise to power. This is also true of most Zionists. The Holocaust is simply something to exploit politically.
Viner’s reservation of the holocaust for Jews alone omits capitalism and the role that IBM for example played in the holocaust. Those who reserve Holocaust for Jews wish to preserve it in aspic, divorced from the society which created it. The West played a major part in helping prepare the way for the holocaust. Roosevelt spoke about the:
understandable complaints which the Germans bore towards the Jews in Germany, namely that while they represented a small part of the population, over 50% of the lawyers, doctors, school teachers, college professors, etc. in Germany were Jews..
Had Viner been alive in the 1930s she would have been the first to echo Roosevelt, a liberal hero, in his opposition to relaxing the immigration barriers. It is far easier to see the holocaust in terms of irrational Jew hatred than the racism of Western society.
The Zionist explanation that the holocaust was due to irrational Jew hate is ahistorical. Hitler praised America’s record in eugenics in the development of his own thinking. In Mein Kampf he wrote:
At present there exists one state which manifests at least some modest attempts that show a better appreciation of how things ought to be done in this matter. It is not, however in our model German Republic, but in the U.S.A., that efforts are made to conform, at least partially to the counsels of commonsense. By refusing immigrants to enter there if they are in a bad state of health, and by excluding certain races from the right to become naturalised citizens, they have begun to introduce principles similar to those on which we wish to ground the People’s State. (p.247)
It is Israel’s sense of victimhood which is driving Gaza’s holocaust. This is the typical settler colonial belief that they are the victims of those whose necks they place their boots upon but in Israel’s case it is magnified by the holocaust that Zionism did nothing to prevent.
Yehuda Elkana, a child survivor of Auschwitz and Rector of the Central European University wrote in Ha’aretz in March 1988 about:
a profound existential “Angst” fed by a particular interpretation of the lessons of the holocaust … that we are the eternal victim. In this ancient belief… I see the tragic and paradoxical victory of Hitler. Two nations, metaphorically speaking, emerged from the ashes of Auschwitz: a minority who assert, “this must never happen again,” and a frightened and haunted majority who assert, “this must never happen to us again.”
I don’t doubt that Viner has fooled herself into thinking that there is a straight line between being co-editor of the Tears of Rachel Corrie, the young American activist who Israel murdered and her role today. No doubt a salary of over half a million pounds a year provides the lubricant for her conscience, even whilst the Guardian begs its readers for donations. There is a Yiddish word for that – Chutzpah!
Gideon Levy on one of the most brutal cruel tyrannies on earth
Gideon Levy wrote in Ha’aretz, that Gaza is permitted because of Auschwitz. If true then it’s not only permissible but it is mandatory to compare Gaza to Auschwitz and the holocaust. But rather than debate these things out Viner act as a gatekeeper to ideas with which she feels uncomfortable. I don’t know what skills a Guardian editor should possess but clarity of thought is clearly not one of them.
Gideon Levy takes his life in his hands every day. As do the journalists who operate in Gaza, given that Israel has murdered over 140 of them. The only risk that Guardian journalists take is being knocked over in the rush for a seat in a restaurant.
When Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant declared that the Palestinians were ‘human animals’ he was repeating the exact phrase that Himmler used at Poznan on 4 October 1943 when justifying the extermination of Jews. Two days later on 6 October 1943, Himmler explained why Jewish children also had to die:
‘I did not assume to have the right to exterminate the men… and have the avengers personified in the children to become adults for our children and grandchildren.’
Israel’s justification for killing Palestinian children is the justification that Himmler used for killing Jewish children. Yet this does not disturb mainstream journalists whereas comparing Gaza with the Holocaust does. What explanation can there be other than racism?
On March 7 Rabbi Eliyahu Mali of the Shirat Moshe pre-military Yeshiva in Jaffa explained that
“Today’s terrorists are the children of the prior [military] operation that left them alive. The women are essentially the ones who are producing the terrorists,” he said, adding that when someone comes to kill you, you should be quick to kill them. “It’s not only the 14- or 16-year-old boy, the 20- or 30-year-old man who takes up a weapon against you but also the future generation. There’s really no difference,”
Even a Guardian editor should be able to understand the comparison. Those whose justification for genocide in Gaza was the Nazi holocaust have turned Gaza into a death camp and they have done it in the name of the holocaust. Cowardice has become the principal virtue of the Guardian’s ‘journalists’ and its editor.
Michael Rosen’s Letter to the Guardian about Jacobson was rejected by its Letters Editor, Rory Foster
Although Viner spiked Susan Abuhalwa’s article she was proud to carry Howard Jacobson’s ‘blood libel’ justification for Israel’s genocide. The full measure of Jacobson’s senile viciousness was demonstrated in his interview with Isaac Chotiner in the New Yorker.
However Viner and her senior editors are not just monkeys smiling upon Gaza’s holocaust. Their hypocrisy extends even wider. It has nothing to do with Jews despite the name. I refer to Nick Cohen, who was previously a long-standing Observer journalist.
The Guardian was quick to leap on the bandwagon of the #metoo movement. Yet at the same time Viner, Freedland and co. covered up Cohen’s sexual attacks on women in the Guardian newsroom. The big question is why he was paid off instead of being sacked? According to the New York Times ‘In his farewell, editors praised his “brilliant” and “incisive” coverage.’ Which is not how I remember this boring Islamaphobe and war monger.
In October 2021, freelance journalist Lucy Siegle accused him of having groped her in the office when she had been a newly-recruited admin assistant. Siegle told The Independent that, in some ways, the Guardian’s handling of her complaint – which she first raised in 2018 – had been more injurious to her than her encounter with Cohen.
The NYT reported that Cohen was paid a financial settlement for quitting and agreed to confidentiality.
In 2018, Ms Siegle had reported Mr. Cohen to The Guardian for groping her in the newsroom, but nothing had happened. …
“It just amplified this sense that #MeToo is nothing but a convenient hashtag for the British media. The silence on its own industry is just really conspicuous.”
Not long after Siegle lodged her complaint with the Guardian, records show that. Cohen began working with a freelance copy editor, a single mother with autism. She became another of Cohen’s victims. Cohen offered to send her an explicit photograph which the woman declined.
In the following days, Cohen turned cold. In messages, she apologized if she had misread the situation. Eventually, she told him continuing to work together “would be at a cost too high for my own mental health.”
Given that Viner is the Guardian’s Global Editor-in-Chief as well as its first woman editor, the real question is why she hasn’t resigned?
See also Caitlin Johnson’s excellent When The Holocaust Returned It Came Denouncing Anti-Semitism And Wearing A Star Of David and Rivka Brown’s How the Guardian’s Editor-in-Chief Caved to Pro-Israel Pressure
Tony Greenstein
See the Letter Containing 1080 Names Protesting at Howard Jacobson’s Justification of the Extermination of Palestinian Children click here
