Hijacking of Holocaust Remembrance Day: Screening of Al Jazeera Gaza Documentary refers

Dear Sir/Madam,

Hijacking of Holocaust Remembrance Day: Screening of Al Jazeera Gaza Documentary refers

I am writing to complain and protest with regard to the hijacking of the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day event to screen an Al Jazeera documentary on Gaza: “Al Shifa The Crimes they Tried To Bury”

No matter how one may feel about the recent conflict, in particular the claims made by various parties, such an event is a time of sombre reflection and not a platform for political posturing by organisations and individuals, especially those who are not directly affected by the Holocaust.

A similar event occurred in Ireland this week, resulted in the removal of Jews who turned their backs on President Higgens, in protest at his address where he referred to the Holocaust as ‘an attempted genocide’.

The screening of the documentary in this manner, alongside the lighting of candles, at the Groote Schuur auditorium in which the context of the Holocaust was stripped of its connection to AntiSemitism, was calculated to grandstand.

“In remembering the Holocaust, we recognize threats to freedom, dignity, and humanity – including in our own time. Today – in the face of growing economic discontent and political instability, escalating white supremacist terrorism, and surging hate and religious bigotry – we must be more outspoken than ever. We must never forget – nor allow others to ever forget, distort or deny the Holocaust.” António Guterres, United Nations Secretary-General,

Repackaging the Holocaust as if it were a mere trope, to be superseded by more contemporary issues, is not only offensive, but completely inappropriate given South Africa’s role in the tragedy involving industrial scale euthanasia of Europe’s Jewish population barely 80 years ago. A role our country refuses to acknowledge.

It appears the following organisations were involved in this week’s event: Desmond & Leah Tutu Foundation, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Gift of the Givers and SAJFP.

The result must be rejected as curated propaganda and replacement theology. Our constitutional rights to dignity, religious freedom and  freedom from war are not served by obliterating history.

Here is what they don’t teach you in our local history books:

One year before the 1938 Evian Conference, Minister of the Interior under the Smuts government, D F Malan passed a piece of Anti-Semitic legislation aimed at preventing Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany entering South Africa. The last ship to arrive before the law went into effect, the SS Stuttgart was thus met by Malan’s brown-shirts in Table Bay with force. South Africa later attended the Evian Conference in France where the leaders of the world discussed the “Jewish Problem” and determined to act collectively to not allow the deportation of German Jews under Hitler to continue.

With thousands entering British Palestine, both the British and Arabs began a well-publicized campaign to stop the flood. It was the Palestinian leader Amin al-Husseini, later President of the All-Palestine government in Gaza (1948-1956) who personally met with Hitler in November of 1941, appealing to the Fuhrer himself to deal with the problem. By that time, the Farhud (Arabic for Pogrom), a violent dispossession of Jews from the Middle East & North Africa at the behest of Husseini, was well under way.

This motion was backed by Arab leaders from Saudi Arabia and Iraq in a round of shuttle-boat diplomacy the same year between Berlin and the Arab world. By January of 1942, Adolf Eichmann was presenting his plan for what became known as “The Final Solution”.

It was a ‘solution’ to precisely the topic under discussion by our own government. Thus at the Wannsee Conference, in the southwestern Berlin borough of Steglitz-Zehlendorf, Germany, and with Hitler notably absent, the Nazi Party delivered its infamous address to the German High Command. A diabolical plan to deal with the 11 million Jews then under Nazi Occupation.

Husseini would later tour the Trebben ‘concentration camp’ murder factory, as he enthusiastically supported the Nazis in their endeavor to ‘kill all the Jews’.

Holocaust denialist Whoopi Goldberg regales us once more, with her platitudes on race

HOLOCAUST DENIALIST Whoopi Goldberg has doubled down on her bizarre assertion that the event which reduced a pre-War population of 11 million Jews living in areas controlled by the Nazis to 5 million, was merely ‘white on white violence’.

After issuing an apology for similar statements made on a talk-show programme earlier this year, the Hollywood actress, re-entered the fray as if she had learn absolutely nothing from the previous experience, necessitating yet another retraction.

Goldberg’s latest remarks are deeply offensive and constitute a form of Antisemitism, in which the speaker attributes race to Jews, in order to, yes, make a point about race.

Another dimension is the manner in which the speaker also denies that race-based policies, such as that which existed under the Nazis, are even racist. In effect, decontextualising the Holocaust as nothing more than ‘white privilege’, and is thus a blatant form of denial.

In a new interview with a British newspaper, The Sunday Times shared during Hanukkah, Goldberg showed little remorse for her past rhetoric, ‘arguing again that the estimated 6 million Jews who were systematically killed in the Holocaust were not targeted based on their race’.

“The View” co-host also claimed that the Nazis targeted people of African descent in addition to Jews because they were physically different, and ‘went as far as to suggest that Jews had an easier time blending in with White people and hiding from the Nazis than Black people did at the time of the Holocaust.’

Goldberg suggested “these are two white groups of people. The minute you turn it into race, it goes down this alley. Let’s talk about it for what it is. It’s how people treat each other.” You can read my earlier comments and response to this statement here.

Whoopi’s comments are not simply illogical and wrong-headed, but could mislead one to conclude that black persons such as herself, cannot experience racism.

Race is the child of racism not the father. The issue here is not whether “Jews are divided on whether they are a race, religion or both” or perceive themselves to be a race (they don’t) but whether the Nazis did.

For the record, the Jews for the most part, form an historical community much like the Kurds, in which ethnicity plays a part, however there are many sub-communities, and thus one may discern Haredi, Sephardi, Ashkenazi and Mizrahi or Oriental Jews.

Local news-outlets such as IOL have failed to cover this story since it exposes and thus jars with the obvious attempt to decontextualise the Holocaust in order to provide a different narrative to the Israel/Palestine conflict, one in which the tragic genocide never occurred.

UPDATE: IOL are now carrying Whoopi’s second apology and retraction.

South Africa’s Holocaust Denial hearings

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Prof Milton Shain gives evidence

Eva Schloss is pretty much insulted by the contents of a Radio 786 broadcast made in 1998 in which all Jews,  every single last one, are targeted by racist Anti-Semitic invective which denies the injustice of the Holocaust at the same time that it appears to urge a similar solution to the “Jewish Problem”.

I attended three days of the hearings into the Radio 786 Holocaust Denial case in which experts, academics and witnesses to the tragedy presented evidence.

Eva Schloss is a beautiful woman, who was just nine when Austria was annexed, and her entire family were forced to clean pavements with tooth brushes, she still has a tattooed number on her arm from where the Nazi’s registered her when the war finally caught up after her family fled to Holland. Frau Schloss’s father, brother and step-sister Anne Frank were all murdered by the Nazis.

“I have seen the real and terrible harm caused by anti-Semitic media statements like those contained in the broadcast” she told the commission.

“After May 1940…the trouble started for the Jews. Our freedom was severely restricted by a series of anti-Jewish decrees: Jews were required to wear a yellow star; Jews were required to turn-in their bicycles; Jews were forbidden to ride trams or in cars, even their own…Jews were forbidden to go to theatres, cinemas or any other forms of entertainment; Jews were forbidden to use swimming pools, tennis courts, hockey fields or any other athletic fields…You couldn’t do this and you couldn’t do that, but life went on…”

Do we really have to examine such propositions as the advocacy of genocide — hate speech such as the denial of the Holocaust? Why should the burden of proof be placed on the victims and survivors of a crime against humanity? See: Holocaust denial is hateful, immoral and factually wrong

Think of people who were tortured and placed in solitary confinement, do we have to expose them to cross-examination on issues of credibility, every time some person claiming to be an academic, comes up with the preposterous notion that intellectually speaking, we cannot actually prove the existence of history?

Radio 786 argument seems to be along the lines of “we have the right to freedom of speech no matter what and we shouldn’t be bound by the Constitution which expressly outlaws hate speech.”

And hence the misleading media statements being issued, while the station’s own council accept the errant mischief intended by a broadcast with no attempt to solicit moderation from experts or the Jewish community itself, a spokesperson, supposedly reported in Friday’s Cape Times says in effect: We will never, ever, apologise for spreading malicious lies.

On Thursday, the leaders of South Africa’s mostly Orthodox Jewish community offered to accept an apology and walk away. Instead, South Africans were greeted with renewed claims and an attempt to defend the indefensible. Hate media was found to be a significant contributing factor in the Rwandan Genocide.

Time to revoke the license of Radio 786?

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a true post-modernist, or just crazy?

Been thinking about the problem with Mahmoud. Perhaps we should be putting up “I love Mahmoud Ahmadinejad” signs and calling for him to surrender to the infinite virtue and forgiveness of the universe. Then when he’s not looking, pack him off to the funny farm?

Not only does Mahmoud Ahmadinejad think that he is GOD, he is literally GOD. Quite obviously. I am waiting for the next sura to emanate from his very lips. The metaphysical truth – There was no Holocaust. The 20th Century is a myth. How very postmodern. I know a few people who sound like him sometimes, most of them are nuts.

Obviously if he was actually ON, speaking the TRUTH, he would be saying: There was NOTHING and there was EVERYTHING. THE HOLOCAUST MEANS NOTHING AND IT MEANS EVERYTHING at least from an existential perspective.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the all-powerful, all-knowing and all-seeing. Mahmoud the TRUTH. The unmoved mover, the causeless cause of all causes. GOD on EARTH. Surely the man is immortal? Able to prove to us his indestructible nature? I say, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can stop a bullet with his teeth?

Virtues ascribed to the Prophet Mohemmed, which can be ascribed to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – a man of good lineage, clear conscience, able to pass the various tests put to him. Let’s test him now.