[Marxism] Forces responsible for slaughter

["Mike Friedman" <mikedf@xxxxxxxx>]

Message: 8
Date: Sun, 04 Feb 2007 07:21:15 -0500
From: "Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [Marxism] Socialist Voice: Forces responsible for slaughter
        of Jews now oppress Palestinians
To: <marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
        <GreenLeft_discussion@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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The Holocaust and
Defense of the Palestinians
Forces responsible for slaughter of Jews
now oppress the Palestinian people
By Suzanne Weiss

This article is based on a talk given to a meeting of Muslim Unity of
Toronto on December 23, 2006.

Sixty years ago, a mass slaughter ? a holocaust ? was carried out against
European Jews. Today its memory is being misused to build support for
Zionism and to oppress and murder the Palestinians.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper says that Canada must not talk with Hezbollah
or Hamas, organizations that defend the Palestinians, because they "advocate
wiping Israel off the face of the Earth" ? an objective that he says is
"ultimately genocidal," that is, another holocaust. (Globe & Mail, Dec. 21,
2006) He uses this excuse to justify punishing Palestinians for electing
Hamas by cutting off aid to their government.

This is the Stephen Harper who on July 14, 2006, called Israel's slaughter
of the Lebanese a "measured response" to the abduction of two Israeli
soldiers.

The Harper government and its allies are trying to make it a crime to oppose
the Zionist state of Israel. For this supposed crime they punish Hamas and
the Palestinians with bombs, shootings, and blockade. And even here in
Canada, universities discipline students and professors that speak out
against Zionist crimes.

And how can they call replacing the Israeli state with a democratic, united
Palestine "genocide"?

The country of Czechoslovakia was dissolved in 1993 ? wiped off the face of
the map! The apartheid state of South Africa was abolished in 1994. In both
cases, this was not genocide but a peaceful settlement.

Why do Canadian officials speak so irresponsibly? They use the Holocaust as
an excuse to smother dissent. Because the German Nazis killed six million
Jews, the U.S., Canada, and Israel insist that Palestinians must pay the
price today.

Misuse of the Holocaust
We are told that because Hitler killed the Jews, the Zionist state is needed
today, supposedly to protect the Jewish people. Protect against them whom?
Against the Nazis? No, against the Palestinians.

This is the motivation for Canada's governments' public campaign about the
Nazis' Holocaust.

Canadian school children today know more about the Holocaust than they know
about crimes in our own country: crimes such as stealing the lands of the
indigenous peoples or throwing Canadians of Japanese descent into
concentration camps during the Second World War.

In Washington, the U.S. government has sponsored an imposing Holocaust
Museum. Why is there no museum to the Vietnamese, millions of whom were
killed in the U.S. war against their country?

When the Nazi campaign against the Jews was in full swing, Canada's prime
minister at that time, Mackenzie King, praised Hitler (see Irving Abella,
None is Too Many). Few voices protested Hitler's mass murders. The Catholic
Church kept silent. The U.S. and Canada excluded Jewish refugees.

For several decades after, governments said little about this horrendous
crime.

But as the Israeli army proved it could defeat in battle the neighboring
Arab states, the U.S. moved to build up the Israeli military as a weapon
against the Mideast peoples. They needed an excuse for this provocative
campaign, and they found it in the Holocaust. They insist that the Zionist
state of Israel must be protected in order to prevent another Holocaust.

To answer this argument, we must know what the Holocaust was.

What was the Holocaust?

First of all, the basic facts are indisputable. The Holocaust is one of the
best documented historical events of all time. The Nazis were methodical ?
they counted their victims and kept meticulous records. In my family's
Polish home town, of Piotrkov there were 30,000 Jews, only 100 survived. On
the train that took my mother from France to Auschwitz, of 1,000 Jews, only
a dozen survived.

Yes, this was genocide. Six million Jews were killed simply because they
were Jews, and the goal was to kill them all. Even the innocent children
were hunted down and sent to the gas chambers.

Of course it was not the first genocide. European colonialists exterminated
almost entire peoples. Study the Americas, Australia, and Africa.

But the genocide against the Jews was unique in two ways.

First, it took place not in the industrially undeveloped Third World but in
Europe. It was the first case of genocide against a white, European people.

Second, it was industrially organized. Not random killing, but managerial,
bureaucratic, assembly-line slaughter. Even pieces of the body were
recycled: the skin, the hair; and the gold fillings of the teeth.

In a deeper sense, though, the crime against the Jews was only too familiar.
The Nazis said that the Jews were not Europeans but members of an inferior,
subhuman race, Asiatic race. The Nazis sought to reorganize the globe along
racial lines, with the Germans and North Europeans as the elite. Such racism
is opposed to our most fundamental beliefs about the worth of human beings.

Where does this racism come from? Not from the House of Islam. Recall how
the great U.S. Islamic leader and freedom fighter, Malcolm X, said when he
visited Mecca that for the first time he saw peoples of all races
worshipping together in equality.

No, this racism is the ideology of Euro-American imperialism.

The British imperialists used racism to rationalize building an empire
around the world. Racism was used to justify enslaving the Africans and
pillaging India.

And the U.S. empire today rests on racism, in its own country through the
oppression of Blacks and immigrants but also internationally. And the racist
oppression of the Palestinian people is part of this.

Governments who subjugate races and set races, religions, and nationalities
against each other have an economic objective. Imperialist racism aims to
enable the owners of capital to make the highest profits by exploiting
oppressed peoples. In South Africa it was diamond mines. In the Middle East
it is oil.

Given the proven hostility of European and North American governments during
the Holocaust, many Jewish survivors in Europe saw Palestine as their only
possible refuge. This was a historical tragedy, for which imperialism is
ultimately responsible.

Four hundred and fifty years earlier, the Jewish victims of the Spanish
inquisition were welcomed by the Muslim societies on the Mediterranean,
where they lived and flourished into our times. But the Zionist project that
steered twentieth-century Jewish refugees from Europe toward Palestine aimed
not to enhance Muslim society but to displace it by taking the land.

Israel would not have been born except for the U.S. and Great Britain. It
lives today only because of the support of the U.S. and British who fund it
through massive government subsidies in various forms to supply the Zionist
government with the weapons of destruction.

These governments wage war on Iraq and Afghanistan for the same reasons they
support Israel. They want power; they want oil. Israel is the weapon that
they use to keep the peoples of the Middle East in check.

We must defend Iran
But the Holocaust is now being used not only against the Palestinians but
also against Iran. Bush calls Iran part of the axis of evil and wants to
overthrow its government. The U.S. is planning for a possible attack against
Iran, perhaps even with nuclear weapons, and perhaps using their proxy, the
Israeli military.

They do this because Iran, in a great revolution in 1979, kicked out the
U.S. puppet shah. Iran seized control of its oil; and won its independence.
Washington has never forgiven the Iranian people for that great act.

Of course Washington will never admit this. Among their excuses is the fact
that Iran opposes Zionism. And more recently, the fact that Iran held a
conference and set up a commission questioning the historical truth of the
Jewish Holocaust.

>From several points of view, this conference was a blow to the struggle
against imperialism. It divided the anti-imperialist movement, while
pointing toward an alliance with the openly anti-Jewish forces in the
imperialist camp. This orientation was symbolized by the presence on the
conference platform of the openly White supremacists such as U.S. politician
David Duke and apologists for Nazism. And the conference provided a platform
for the absurd charge that Holocaust survivors' testimony is a hoax. Such
slanders target the Jewish people, not Zionism, as the enemy. The Holocaust
deniers' verdict that imperialism is innocent of this historical crime feeds
illusions regarding the nature of this murderous system.

It would have been better for Iran to sponsor an international conference on
Zionism and Israel's crimes against the people of the Middle East.

By raising the Holocaust issue, Iranian president Ahmadinejad has diverted
attention from his proposed solution of the Palestinian crisis, namely to
abolish the Zionist regime and hold elections among "Jews, Christians and
Muslims so the population of Palestine can select their government and
destiny for themselves in a democratic manner." (Jerusalem Post, December
12, 2006) This is the historic goal of the Palestinian movement for a
democratic state embracing the Palestinian and Israeli peoples, a goal
widely supported by progressive people around the world.

Anti-Semitism and Zionism
The Zionist state of Israel carries out its crimes in the name of the Jewish
people, and conscripts Israeli Jews to enforce this oppression.

This state uses many of the methods of Nazism to oppress the Palestinians,
including confining them in walled ghettos. It is understandable that many
victims of Zionism feel resentment against Jews, but we cannot blame all
Jews for the crimes Israel commits in their name, any more than we blame all
Americans for Bush's crimes in Iraq or all Canadians for Stephen Harper's
crimes in Afghanistan. We must focus on our real enemy: Zionism and
imperialism.

The Palestinian liberation movement itself has never been motivated by
anti-Jewish feeling. It simply wants the right for the Palestinian people,
including the exiles, to live in peace with equal rights on their native
land.

The Arab communities of North Africa and the Middle East had no share in
guilt for the Holocaust. There is no tradition of anti-Semitism in Islamic
civilization. The prejudice against Jews grew up in Christian Europe, hand
in hand with racism, as an aspect of the growth of capitalism. And
imperialism, above all Euro-American imperialism, is still the source from
which this poison spreads.

The Jewish Holocaust's true lessons
There are two important lessons in the story of the murder of Europe's Jews.

First, that there is no limit to the savagery of imperialism. If not
opposed, it will exterminate entire peoples, like the Palestinians.

Second, to fight back against imperialism we need a broad unity of peoples
of many faiths and nationalities.

In my own background lies an example of this concept. I was born to a Jewish
family in France during the Second World War. The French government was then
rounding up the Jews, solely because of their religious and ethnic
background, and deporting them to Hitler's death camps.

My parents belonged to a Jewish resistance organization. It was united with
other immigrant groups and with French working people ? Jewish, Christian,
and Muslim together ? in the battle against the Nazis.

The resistance saved the lives of thousands of Jewish children in France,
including me. And this resistance struck heavy blows against French racism
and anti-Jewish hatred, which are felt to this day.

Today we must join in a similar broad alliance, this time to defend the
Palestinians and to oppose Zionism.

The Zionists' aggressive policies in the Middle East are against the
interests of Jewish people and Palestinians alike, all of whom have a stake
in a peaceful and united Middle East.

Palestinian liberation offers the Jewish people in the Middle East the
prospect of brotherhood and peace.

United against Zionism
Venezuela is today in the lead in building anti-Zionist unity. That country
campaigned strongly against the Israeli war in Lebanon.

Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez did not hesitate to condemn the U.S.
sponsors of Israeli aggression and to withdraw his country's ambassador from
Israel. "The hand of the Americans is spurring [Israel] on," he told the
Arab TV network Al-Jazeera, (Aug. 4, 2006). The "real threat to the world is
the imperialistic threat posed by the U.S," he said.

"We must defeat imperialism in this century, so that this elite will not
annihilate the world." This is Chavez's message to all of us.

The Venezuelan people have endorsed this policy with a 63% vote for Ch?vez
in their elections. They are repaying the very great debt that their country
owes ? that we all owe ? to all those in the Mideast who resist Zionism and
imperialism.

[In a United Nations debate January 26, 2007, Venezuela stated that Israel's
excesses have "led to a new Holocaust against the Palestinian people" and
that Iraqis also are "victims of a Holocaust." ?S.W.]

In Canada, we have built a broad alliance for Palestinian liberation called
the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid (CAIA), uniting Muslim, Christian,
and Jewish fighters against Zionism. CAIA has a Jewish sister organization
called Not In Our Name (NION).

We have launched a nation-wide joint campaign for boycott and sanctions
against the Zionist state of Israel. The first focus of action is a boycott
of the Chapters/Indigo Bookstore chain whose majority owners use their
profits to build Heseg, the foundation that recruits non-Israelis to fight
in the Israeli military. As Israeli soldiers, they participate in operating
checkpoints that restrict Palestinian freedom of movement, enforcing the
occupation of Palestinian land, and has a documented history of human rights
violations.

The CAIA initiative is a promising beginning to educate and inform the
public on the issues in the Palestinian struggle. It is an excellent way to
expose Israel's crimes in the Middle East, and to rally as we did against
South Africa's Apartheid system. Those who wish to be active in this process
should get in touch with the CAIA at www.caiaweb.org, or email
endapartheid@xxxxxxxxxxx

We should press forward these and other efforts to liberate the Palestinians
and to put an end to Zionist and imperialist wars and oppression in the
Middle East.



Michael Friedman
Ph.D. Candidate in Ecology, Evolutionary Biology and Behavior
City University of New York

Molecular Systematics Laboratory
Department of Invertebrate Zoology
American Museum of Natural History
79th Street and Central Park West
New York, NY 10024

Office: 212-313-8721


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