The Holocaust plus

THE HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM (HMM) in Washington DC has carried out a13 year study of the numbers of Jews killed by the Nazis. The figure of six million which has been the benchmark number since the end of the war  has been revised up by the museum to between 15-20 million people.

Hundreds of scholars have studied, not only the victims of all of the concentration camps such as Auschwitz as well as the Warsaw Ghetto; all of  whose numbers account for the commonly accepted figure. But the HMM  has researched  42,500 sites of Jewish persecution by the Nazis over the whole of occupied Europe. These include, for instance, those Soviet Jews, whose ethnicity was never taken into consideration when calculating the 20 million Soviet people killed under the Third Reich.

But even the well researched concentration camp systems have come under the HMM’s scrutiny; for there were many of these that were not researched. According to a report in the Independent newspaper: ‘Researchers conducting the bleak work of chronicling all the forced labour sites, ghettos and detention facilities run by Hitler’s regime alongside such centres of industrialised murder as Auschwitz have now catalogued more than 42,500 institutions used for persecution and death’.

            I have always believed that the six million total also included the many thousands of factories the Jews were forced to work in all over occupied Europe, with little or no care given them because such labour was cheap and plentiful. But the concentration camps, because of their cruel and industrialized method of gassing victims, became the headline for future students of the Second World War.

            The editors of this vast project are expected to have their research published in no less than seven volumes by 2225. From France to Romania Jews died in their millions according to the study. As the Independent points out:  ‘The figure has shocked academics and more than doubles an earlier finding by the same team that up to 20,000 sites were used. It casts a disturbing new light on the sheer scale of the machinery of imprisonment and oppression put in place by the Nazis throughout Europe, from Italy to Russia.’

But I doubt that the latest figures will be believed. Just as the  original six million figure has met with resistance, particularly in the Muslim world, but also on the European far Right and more recently parts of the Left because of their support for the Palestinians.  It appears that the Left  will seek benefit from the same disbelief : they will all pour ever greater scorn upon these revisions. I hope that this seven volume study will be published long before the date set by the Holocaust Museum. For their research is vital for modern Jewry; especially the Israeli’s.

Because of the Palestinian situation, the Left will readily join the Right in seeking to belittle the findings when they are printed. Only the Jews could unite both the European Left and the Right in seeking their return to the Diaspora which, for over 2,000 years, they had been forced to face the hatred of those they have been forced to live among.

If these findings become accepted by worldwide academia, then the Jews have an even greater claim upon the creation of their nation state. For 2,000 years the Jews have tried to live among us none Jews, and they have been persecuted. The Jewish state gives the Jews what we in this country, ironically, in this era of European modernism are seeking to give away – our nationhood.

THE JEWS WILL NOT go quietly into the night as far as their statehood is concerned. We in Europe, on the other hand, are all too willing to forgo our national identity in the common cause of a United States of Europe, even after a 2,000 year old history of nationhood.

A Jewish homeland is the safe-guard against persecution. It represents a retreat from anti-Semitism…an almost genetically induced prejudice against which the indigenous people in whatever nation they have sought to live within accepts. The Jews are the world’s scapegoats for whatever economic calamity befalls the nation in which they reside…especially in Europe. If only for this reason, the Jewish state of Israel deserves our support.

A Jewish state was the only recompense for what the Jews suffered under Nazism; not only in Germany, but in all the countries the Nazis occupied which had their own indigenous anti-Semitic prejudices, which the Nazis could manipulate and profit from.

All over occupied Europe the Nazis allowed age old anti-Semitic prejudices to flourish. Even in the UK we had similar prejudices against Jewry among our soon to be dissolved aristocracy. But we never entertained their persecution. But within the rest of Europe, the Jews were the ready scapegoats for whatever economic failure occurred.

No other minority has suffered such loathing throughout history as have the Jews. These revised figures shock, but do not surprise me. They recalculate the orgy of hatred that reached its historical climax in Europe between 1935-45. It was not only the Nazis that indulged in the holocaust: the further East you travel in Europe, even to this day, the Jews are seen as sub-human vermin who sacrificed Christian children in order to drink their blood.

Poland, Hungary, Russia, Lithuania, and the Balkans to name but a few; all did their bit to get the ‘wretched Jew’ off their backs. Hitler found willing accomplices among the European continent’s eastern nations regarding the Jews. Many of those peoples who suffered under Nazi occupation would have been sympathetic toward Hitler’s treatment of the Jews.

The Jews had to have a homeland. They tried for 2,000 years to integrate throughout the world; but the world rejected them. Zionism was born of a miserable history. Nothing, not even the experiences of  black slavery, could surpass the depths of cruelty inflicted on the Jews during the holocaust – the Jews deserved a homeland, and they now have one.

The ancient land of Judea, re-christened (sic) Palestine by the Emperor Hadrian after  the Jews were forced into the Diaspora, was the one and true part of the world that had belonged to the Jews, and they set about reclaiming it after the Second World War.

The modern state of Israel was created, and today it is the bugbear of the liberal West. The Jews turned a desert into flourishing agriculture – something the Palestinians never did while they occupied it.

As both a culture and a successful economy, the state of Israel surpasses its Arab neighbours in the quality of the lives provided to its citizens. In the field of technology, it has a world renowned reputation. In its brief 67 year history, the modern state of Israel has surpassed, in every field of economic development those of its neighbours. It inherited a desert and transformed it into an oasis.

BUT  NOW THE existence of Israel is under such a pressure unknown during its short history. Not even in those dark days when the state was caught unawares by the Yom-Kippur war, and Israel nearly met its end, did the Israelis feel abandoned by America. But under the presidency of Obama, the Jews of Israel would be forgiven for now feeling abandoned.

            Later this month President Obama is due to visit Israel to demand that Israel abandons its homeland development on the West Bank.  If the state of Israel has expanded, it has been because of territories won primarily through wars started by their Arab neighbours. The Six Day War in 1967 began as a result of Israeli intelligence, who had policed the intention of its Arab neighbours, including Egypt and Syria, to destroy the Jewish state. Israel acted as any nation would have, given such intelligence. The victory left Israel with land, including the Golan Heights owned by Syria and parts of the West Bank.

            Between the 6^th and 25^th of October 1973; the Arabs once more tried their luck. This time leaving the Israelis ignorant of what was in prospect as they had left the Arabs themselves in 1967. It was, as many a British general has had cause say, ‘a close run thing’. But thanks to America and Richard Nixon who supplied the Israelis with the armaments they needed; this latest attempt to annihilate the Jewish state was once more put on hold.

            The Jews have earned their statehood and will defend it. Any two-state ‘solution’ that leaves Israel weakened will not be a solution, but an invitation to further conflict. For if Israel is ever weakened enough by a two state solution, then the Palestinians will abandon any agreement entered into to put an end to the Jewish state once and for all. It is the very idea of a Jewish state in the region that so upsets the whole Arab world.

Yet Obama sides with the Muslim world; believing that if Israel were brought to book then the Islamist tide would turn. This calculation takes naivety to a level that only one who is sympathetic to the teachings of Islam could come up with. In other words, president Obama is prone, at the very least, to Muslim overtures.

The holocaust, it seems matters little to a black American president, who sees only his own black people, as his main focus. He, it has been speculated upon, is a Muslim. If this proves true, then the state of Israel had better look to its own defences rather than relying upon its long time USA ally -  at least until Obama serves his final term and leaves the political stage. After which the state of Israel can continue its appreciated alliance with America.