Holocaust Memorial Day Blunders
By Gilad Atzmon
Jewish power is a dangerous zone. It is a dialectic domain: the more powerful Jewish politics, lobbying and institutions are, the more this power is noticeable, exposed, criticized and occasionally resented. The same applies to the Holocaust and the industry attached to it. The more the Holocaust is injected into our blood vessels, the more questions that are raised regarding the primacy of Jewish suffering and the shoahs inflicted by Israel and Zio-cons (Palestine, Iraq, Libya, Syria etc.). The more they want us to remember the more we wonder why Jewish history, like the Jewish present, is such volatile territory.
The Holocaust Remembrance weekend didn’t go very well this year. On Friday, one day ahead of the holy day, the lower house of the Polish parliament passed a bill imposing a prison sentence for the use of phrases such as “Polish death camps” in reference to the Nazi camps in occupied Poland during WWII.
Israelis were totally upset. PM Netanyahu announced on Saturday, "I strongly oppose it (the bill). One cannot change history and the Holocaust cannot be denied." One may wonder why the Israelis want to charge Poland as a ‘perpetrator of the Holocaust.’ After all, Poland was occupied during the war. It was a prime sufferer of Nazi occupation and on a deeper level, where, exactly, is the “denial”?
"This is a shameful disregard of the truth," said Israel's Education and Diaspora Affairs Minister Naftali Bennett. "It is a historic fact that many Poles aided in the murder of Jews, handed them in, abused them, and even killed Jews during and after the Holocaust." This may be the case, but it has nothing to do with the Polish bill. Furthermore, the record shows that no one helped European Jews more than the Poles. According the Yad Vashem’s 'Righteous Amongst the Nations’ statistics, Poland was actually the leading nation in terms of saving Jews.
Yad Vashem sided with the Poles rather than the Israeli politicians. The Israeli Holocaust institute declared over the weekend that "There is no doubt that the term 'Polish death camps' is a historical misrepresentation."
The Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki didn’t seem to be too bothered by Bibi either. He tweeted that "Auschwitz-Birkenau is not a Polish name, and Arbeit Macht Frei is not a Polish phrase.”
But the story is not over for the Holocaust Memorial Day. The ultra Zionist Jewish Chronicle reported on Friday that all the main political party leaders released statements in advance of the Holy Day.
The JC states, “all three were general in tone, in acknowledgement of the fact that while the Nazis’ campaign of mass murder centred on European Jews, many other minorities, including gypsies, homosexuals and communists were also killed and buried in mass graves.” Apparently, “neither the Prime Minister nor the Lib Dems' Vince Cable made specific mention of Jews in their HMD statements. However opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn’s was singled out for excoriation on social media after it became apparent that the veteran left-winger had failed to mention Jews or antisemitism in his message.”
The JC seems to hold the view that the holocaust is a Jews only territory. Apparently, it should be observed universally but should apply only to Jews. Here is my daily advice to Zionist decision makers and Hasbara merchants; maybe insisting upon an international holocaust memorial day is not a very clever move as long as your Jewish State keeps millions of Palestinians behind separation walls and barbed wires in open air prisons. If you want people to express their empathy with Jewish suffering make sure you don’t perpetrate disasters yourself.
Meanwhile it has been revealed that Jeremy Corbyn actually ticked all the Jewish sensitive spots in his text publish by the Holocaust Memorial Day brochure. Zionists seem to go out of their to appease the unruly revolutionary Labour leader. Look at this sweaty regret from JC editor Stephen Pollard.
If they want to burn it, you want to read it ...
