One would have thought that
the most obvious of lessons from the Holocaust was that if the Western
countries had opened up their doors to the Jews of Europe, then millions could
have been saved.  But that of course
would not fit with the present racist politics of immigration control, to say
nothing of anti-Muslim racism, which pervades Europe and the United States.  If the lesson of not turning away refugees
from our shores were to apply, then we would be queuing up to grant permission
for Syria’s refugees to enter this country.

David Cameron however cannot
find it within himself to even allow 3,000 refugee children to enter
Britain.  They are just a ‘bunch of
migrants’ a ‘swarm’ and little more than a pestilence.  Allowing them in will only encourage
others.  Yet nothing that is said today
wasn’t said in the 1930’s and 1940’s.  The
idea that if we let one Jew in then we will have to allow more in was the
prevalent orthodoxy.  In the United States
under baleful influence of Breckenridge Long, an Assistant Secretary at the State
Department, even the miserable quotas for Jewish refugees that did exist were
not fulfilled.  It took until 1944 until
Henry Morgenthau, the US Treasury Secretary, ousted him.  Breckenridge Long was however a strong
supporter of the Zionist movement.

And the Tory
press that is today so vehemently anti-immigration when it comes to Syrian and
other asylum seekers, was equally hostile to Jews in the 1930’s and during the
mass immigration of refugee Jews from the 
pogroms in Czarist Russia.  As Tony
Kushner of Southampton University observed, “The
Daily Mail has been an anti-alien newspaper since the 1900s. There’s great
continuity.”  Its owner Lord
Rothermere was a  Hitler supporter.  On 20 August 1938 an article fulminated that “The way stateless Jews from Germany are
pouring in from every port of this country is becoming an outrage… (it
is) a problem to which the Daily Mail has repeatedly pointed.’’  The Daily
Hate Mail is very prone to outrage.

The Sunday Express was
also outraged about the perils of Jewish immigration:  “There is
a big influx of foreign Jews into Britain. They are overrunning the country. They
are trying to enter the medical profession in great numbers. Worst of all many of
them are holding themselves out to the public as psychoanalysts.”

The newspaper went on to explain that psychoanalysts,
of whom there were a number of Jews ‘often obtain an ascendancy over the patient
of which bad use can be made if the psychoanalyst is a base man.”

The British establishment,
from Churchill down, excelled themselves. 
A certain R. Dew, a Foreign Office official was of the opinion that ‘a
disproportionate amount of time in this office is wasted in dealing with these
wailing Jews’.  Another official, A.W.G.
Randall, head of the Foreign Office Refugee Department, worried in December
1943, after which some 5 million Jews had been killed, that ‘once we open the
door to adult male Jews to be taken out of enemy territory, a quite
unmanageable flood may result.’  And
another official believed that ‘(Hitler may facilitate it!)’

See ‘Britain and the
Jews of Europe, 1939-1945’- London and Oxford: Institute of Jewish Affairs and
Clarendon Press, 1979.

Churchill was of the
opinion, as he wrote after the war, that: ‘There
were known to be twenty thousand organised Nazis in England at this time’. A
sentiment which the liberal Manchester Guardian supported.    It has now been updated to a belief that
amongst the Syrian and other refugees, there may be hiding ISIS moles.

We can however thank Donald
Trump for his honesty in wishing to ban all Muslims from the shores of the
United States.  President Obama is
pursuing exactly the same policy, not by legislation but by administrative
decree.  Muslims are now finding that
their ability to travel to the United States has been revoked at a moment
notice.  Revealed: 20 British Muslimfamilies ‘stopped’ from entering US amid fears ‘Trump ban is already in place’

That is why I have always
been opposed to Holocaust Memorial Day. 
It isn’t a means of renewing our anti-racism but a means of glorifying present
day racism.  The holocaust has become a
means of defending not only the Israeli state and its racist barbarities but
western civilisation as a whole.  It is
the way that racism in Europe, not least in Germany, cleanses its conscience at
the expense of the Palestinians.

In Britain we can see
this in the way fascist organisations like the English Defence League and the British
National Party openly proclaim their support for Israel and their hostility to
the Palestinians.  We even had the
obscenity of leading Zionist activists such as Jonathan Hoffman and Harvey
Garfield, demonstrating alongside the English Defence League at the demonstrations
outside Israel’s ‘beauty’ products shop, Ahava, in London.  Likewise the tie up between Zionist activists
and the Jewish Nazi Jewish Defence League. 
In Birmingham the EDL attacked a Birmingham PSC stall flaunting the Israeli
flag in one hand and giving Hitler salutes with the other!

Indeed across Europe far-right
and fascist organisations are, almost uniformily, pro-Israel.  People like the anti-Semitic Polish
politician, Michal Kaminski combined hostility to Poland Jews with avid support
for Israel.  In this they receive fulsome
support from leading Zionists such as the Editor of the Jewish Chronicle,
Stephen Pollard who wrote that ‘”Far from being an anti-Semite, Mr Kaminski is about as
pro-Israeli an MEP as exists.”  Which of course is true.  You can be pro-Israeli and virulently anti-Semitic!  See Pollard – Upset by Corbyn’s‘anti-Semitism’ but a devotee of the anti-Semitic Michael Kaminski.   

Tony Greenstein

‘We are all Jews’ — the Holocaust as imperial export

This
is taken from Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss.

As
International Holocaust Remembrance Day dawned, I was in the Philippines on a
month-long teaching and speaking tour. In the Philippines, remembering the
Holocaust feels different. The experience of devastation and suffering is
ongoing here. When Filipinos look back to their history of suffering, they see
their future.

For
Filipinos, the future is different than the future Jews around the world
experience. Rather than empowerment, with the unbridled and increasing aid
Israel receives from the United States, the Philippines remains dependent and
vulnerable to American imperial power. It’s unlikely that the current or any
future president of the Philippines will be invited to address Congress as
Prime Minister Netanyahu did some months ago. Prime Minister Netanyahu was
critical of the proposed US deal with Iran. If a Filipino president addressed
Congress, and was honest, what would he or she have to say?

So
when President Obama declared at the Israeli
embassy in Washington D.C, that “We are all Jews,” Filipinos might wonder
how that applies to them. If it did apply, the Philippines would soon have a
memorial museum in proximity to the Mall in Washington. Such a museum would
commemorate their martyrs to the Spanish, the Japanese and, yes, to the
Americans. What would that museum be named?

To
internationalize Holocaust remembrance, it must cease being Jewish in time and
place. Or become truly Jewish in light of Israel and the Palestinians. With the
organized, systematic and permanent oppression of the Palestinian people by
Israel, with the enablement of Jews in America and the United States
government, the Holocaust has ceased to be a prophetic warning for the future.
The Holocaust has become an imperial export that continues the cycle of
violence and atrocity in different parts of the world, often in its name.

Later
that day, I lectured on a Jewish theology of liberation and paid tribute to
those Jews who mined the meaning of the Holocaust for Jews and others.
Holocaust thinkers probed deeply the disconnection between God and the Jewish
people and human endeavor and ethics, as a challenge to Jews and humanity. Yet
the trajectory of Holocaust thought is Israel, unmindful of the horrific
suffering Israel is causing the Palestinian people. Such thought then censors
dissent on the consequences of the use of the Holocaust as a blunt instrument
against the Palestinian people.

With
the suffering of the Palestinians in mind, I moved quickly to the second
“after” of Jewish life. After the Holocaust, yes, but also after what Jews in
Israel and beyond have done and are doing to the Palestinian people. If indeed
“We are all Jews,” then Jews, too, must contemplate how the memory of the
Holocaust functions to the detriment of others. It must be a critical force
against the misuse of Jewish power

My
Filipino audience resonated with the Holocaust’s dual after’s precisely because
the onslaught here continues. But it isn’t only the Philippines where both
after’s apply. The truly international importance of Holocaust remembrance
awaits a further exploration as the fiftieth anniversary of Israel’s permanent
occupation of Palestine looms. When that exploration is named internationally,
the horror of Holocaust will remain. It may even be disentangled from those who
trumpet the Holocaust as an imperial and colonial power over others.

It is little wonder
that Goebbels wrote in his Diaries (12.12.42.) that ‘At bottom, however, I believe both the English and the Americans are
happy that we are exterminating the Jewish riff-raff.’ (Henry Feingold, the
Politics of Rescue, p. 169)