Gary Lineker’s Crime was Comparing the Tories Refugee Policies to the Nazis – We Must Compare, Compare and Compare Again
On Wednesday March 15 at 7.30 pm I will be holding the Brighton Book Launch for Zionism During the Holocaust. This will be the first physical meeting around my book that I’ve held in Britain.
On Thursday March 16th at 5 pm British time there will be a Zoom meeting where I will be speaking with others at a PSC South Africa. Please do register.
You are invited to a Zoom webinar.
When: Mar 16, 2023 07:00 PM Johannesburg
Topic: Zionism During the Holocaust
Register in advance for this webinar:
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https://www.facebook.com/palestinesouthafrica
South Africa PSC was formed as part of an initiative for the (World Conference Against Racism) in 2000 as a secular initiative to promote the Palestinian cause in South Africa and to lead an international anti-apartheid movement against Apartheid Israel. The aims of PSC-SA include the establishment of a secular democratic state in Palestine.
When Gary Lineker spoke out against Cruella Braverman’s attack on refugees, what angered his opponents was the comparison between Cruella’s policies and those of Nazi Germany. For the ruling class and Zionists the Nazis represent a holocaust divorced from history. The holocaust began in June 1941 and Lineker referred to the 30s yet these ignoramuses tied everything into Auschwitz.
From 1933 to June 1941 the policy of Hitler was not extermination but expulsion of the Jews. The ruling class and the Mail forgets that large sections of the ruling class supported Hitler’s anti-Semitism .
In Nazi Youth in Control [Daily News 4.9.33] Lord Rothermere, the owner of the Daily Mail wrote that
‘Of all the historic changes in our time, the transformation of Germany under Hitler has been the swiftest, most complete…’
‘There has been a sudden expansion of their national spirit like that which took place in England under Queen Elizabeth. Youth has taken command. On a visit, which I am paying to Northern Germany I find-, the signs of the new Hitler spirit as manifest in the most out of-the-way villages as in the largest cities.’
Like most bourgeois apologists for Hitler Rothermere considered the reports about Nazi brutality were irrelevant.
‘They have started a clamorous campaign of denunciation against what they call ‘Nazi atrocities,’ which, as anyone who visits Germany quickly discovers for him self, consists merely of a few isolated acts of violence.’
It was merely
‘The administration of a few doses of castor oil to Communist adversaries.’
For Rothermere the concentration camps of Sachsenhausen and Dachau did not exist. Support for Hitler extended deep into the Tory Party but today anyone who points this out or the comparison between the demonisation of refugees and Hitler’s demonisation of the other, including Jews, is beyond the pale.
Lady Nugent (Emily Thornberry)
Emily Thornberry attacked Lineker saying that
Some of the language Gary Lineker has used in the last 24 hours has been really very unfortunate… I just think there is a special place in hell and for the Holocaust and I don’t think you should be making comparisons… I think he went too far but what the BBC does about it is frankly not my business…. It’ll be up to them if they want to do anything about it.
Yvette Cooper also preferred to attack Lineker than the Tories.
Asked whether she supported what Lineker had said Cooper stated:
‘No I don’t. No I don’t. That was wrong. I think he was wrong to say that.’
Asked to elaborate Cooper said
‘I just don’t think you should make comparisons with the 1930s… I just don’t think you should make those sorts of comparisons.’
Asked if he should be sacked Cooper responded that it was ‘a matter for the BBC.’
Contrary to Cooper and Lady Nugent aka Emily Thornberry we should compare, compare and compare again. When Israel uses the holocaust to justify ethnic cleansing and pogroms we should point out that the Nazis also started with ethnic cleansing and pogroms before moving on to extermination.
Hitler’s sterilisation and murder of the Disabled were modelled on similar laws in the United States, Sweden and elsewhere.
Of course Zionists hate comparisons with the Nazis but they are more than happy to make such comparisons themselves.
Former Israeli Foreign Secretary, Abba Eban when arguing against withdrawal from the Occupied Territories, referred to the 48 armistice lines as ‘the Auschwitz borders.’ Norman Podhoretz of the American Jewish Committee paper Commentary, accused Jewish critics of the Lebanese War of granting Hitler a ‘posthumous victory’ Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai threatened to give ‘Gaza a taste of the ‘shoah’. Menachem Begin portrayed ‘Arafat in Beirut as Hitler in his bunker in Berlin’ as a reason for bombing Beirut.
In Israel every enemy is a reincarnation of the Nazis. In the lead up to the Six Day War:
the newspapers continually identified Nasser with Hitler. The proposals to defuse the crisis by any means other than war were compared with the Munich agreement. [Tom Segev, The Seventh Million, pp. 390-391].
The Nazi period is a seminal event in world history. It is the ultimate in capitalist barbarism. It is not surprising that it is the benchmark by which subsequent events are judged.
Zionist concerns about a high Arab birth rate in Israel mirror the Nazis’ racial obsessions. Ideologically Zionism and Nazism drink from the same poisoned well.
Relationships between Jews and Arabs are seen as a threat to the racial purity of the Jewish nation/race. More than half of the Jewish population in Israel believes intermarriage to be national treason.
In Israel like Nazi Germany opposition to miscegenation is strong. The Nuremberg Laws outlawed ‘inter-racial’ sex. In Israel opposition to such relations is a strong social taboo. 75% of Israeli Jews oppose intermarriage. A particularly egregious case involved an Arab who was gaoled for 18 months for rape. The Jewish woman believed that ‘Daniel’ was a Jewish man and thus she had been raped by deception. In Nazi Germany a common theme was that Jewish men concealed their Jewish identity in order to seduce Aryan women.
Israelis often see themselves in the role of Nazis. Before the massacre in Jenin, an Israeli officer said that:
it is justified and in fact essential to learn from every possible source…. the commander’s obligation is to … analyse and internalise the lessons of earlier battles – even, however shocking it may sound, even how the German Army fought in the Warsaw Ghetto.
When 41 Israeli Arabs were mowed down with machine guns at Kafr Kassem in 1956 one of the killers, Shalom Ofer, proudly proclaimed that ‘We acted like Germans, automatically, we didn’t think.’
There is a wider identification with the Nazis in Israeli society. ‘We are no longer Jews today,’ one Israeli wrote. ‘Today we are Nazis.’ He was trying to organise vigilante groups to attack Israeli Palestinians in mixed cities during Israel’s 2021 attack on Gaza.
The comparison of ‘assimilation’, marrying out or having relationships with non-Jews, to the Holocaust is a common Zionist theme. Avraham Greenbaum of Bar-Ilan University, expressed ‘concern that Jewry’s losses through assimilation were greater than the losses sustained in the Holocaust.’ For Zionism the Holocaust was not a human tragedy but a loss to the Jewish race.
Assimilation is frequently described as a ‘quiet’ ‘silent’ or ‘bloodless’ holocaust. Norman Lamm, President of the Yeshiva University, wrote that with a diminishing Jewish birth rate and intermarriage exceeding 40 %, ‘Who says that the holocaust is over?’ Chief Rabbi, Immanuel Jakobovitz believed that abortion in Israel was comparable to the Holocaust. Lehava’s slogan is ‘Intermarriage is a holocaust.’
Marriage between a Jew and non-Jew in Nazi Germany after 1935 was forbidden. The same is true in Israel where a Jew and non-Jew cannot marry. Hannah Arendt observed that:
Israeli citizens, religious and non-religious seem agreed upon the desirability of having a law which prohibits intermarriage… there certainly was something breathtaking in the naiveté with which the prosecution denounced the infamous Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which had prohibited intermarriage and sexual intercourse between Jews and Germans. [Eichmann in Jerusalem, p.7].
Far from comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany being anti-Semitic, the exact opposite is the case. Such comparisons constitute a powerful warning against the direction in which Israel is heading. The only question is whether they are true.
Comparing a country to Nazi Germany doesn’t mean that they are the same but that they have certain features in common.
Today there are demonstrations in Israel where the main slogan is ‘Death to the Arabs’. How is it anti-Semitic to compare this to similar demonstrations in Europe in the 1930s?
When Culture Minister Miri Regev described African refugees as ‘a cancer in the body of the nation’ this was a Nazi-like statement. Deputy Defence Minister Rabbi Eli Ben-Dahan explained that ‘[Palestinians] are beasts, they are not human.’ He also explained the racial hierarchy of souls: ‘A Jew always has a much higher soul than a gentile, even if he is a homosexual.’
Professor Amos Funkenstein, former head of the Faculty of History at Tel Aviv University, explained why comparisons with the Nazis are valid. Referring to the refusal of soldiers to serve in the Occupied Territories, Funkenstein compared them to soldiers in the German army who refused to serve in concentration or extermination camps. Funkenstein explained:
As a historian I know that every comparison is limited. On the other hand, without comparisons, no historiography is possible. Understanding a historical event is a kind of translation into the language of our time. If we would leave every phenomenon in its peculiarity, we could not make this translation. Every translation is an interpretation and every interpretation is also a comparison.
Idith Zertal described how:
‘The transference of the holocaust situation on to the Middle East reality… not only created a false sense of the imminent danger of mass destruction. It also immensely distorted the image of the holocaust, dwarfed the magnitude of the atrocities committed by the Nazis, trivializing the unique agony of the victims and the survivors, and utterly demonizing the Arabs and their leaders. [Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, p. 100].
