The term anti-semite was coined by anti-Jewish bigot Wilhelm Marr in 1879. According to Yahoo encyclopedia:
German Anti–semite Marr started his political career in the 1848 socialist protest movement in his native Hamburg, later joining an anarchist atheistic group in Switzerland as an exile. His 1862 anti–semitic pamphlet Der Judenspiegel (“Jews Mirror”) was followed by the influential “The Victory of Judaism over Germandom, Considered from a Non – Religious point of View, ” reaching its 12th edition in 1879. The religious issue was replaced by racism, the words “Jew” and “Judaism” by “Semite” and “Semitism” which, with the prefix “anti, ” were to gain general currency. Having first brought racist ideas to a wide audience, Marr introduced in 1879 the word “anti–semite” into the political vocabulary by founding the League of Anti–semites, which organized lectures and published a short – lived monthly. The “league” failed as an organization, but it was historically important for it was the first effort of creating a popular political movement based on anti–semitism.”
Much can be written on the racism and internal contradictions of Zionism and the fact that it is only the other side of the coin of racism and anti-semitism. I will just try to point out a few conveniently forgotten facts. It is worthwhile and interesting to note that Hitler’s “Mein Kempf” states that Zionists suppot his theory of Jews as a distinct nation and he described Zionism as a “great movement.” Why? Because both Zionists and Nazis believed that Jews can’t be Germans. They both believed that Jews cannot function normally in other societies as equal citizens. Zionists in fact were never interested in welfare of Jews generally but only in political goals of colonial Jewish presence in Palestine. This is why they collaborated with the Nazi’s and thwarted some efforts to rescue Jews. A good discussion of these things are found in these books: Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (Lenni Brenner), The Tranfer Agreement (Edwin Black), The Holocaust Victims Accuse ( Neturei Karta), PERFIDY by Ben Hecht, Ben-Gurion and the Holocaust (Shabbtai Teveth), Ben-Gurions Scandals (Noam Giladi)..
The Zionists cooperated with the Nazis in the mid-thirties to facilitate Jewish immigration to Palestine (Details of this agreement were given by: Edwin Black, “The Transfer Agreement: The Untold Story of the Secret Pact Between the Third Reich & Jewish Palestine”, New York: Macmillan Publishing Co. London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1984.).
Zionism and fascism have a lot in common. Revisionist Zionist youth, Betar wore black shirts, or brown shirts (Menachem Begin’s preference) and used the fascist salute. The fascists wanted the Jews out of Europe — and so did the Zionists. The Zionist Federation of Germany sent a message of support to the Nazi Party in June 1933. The World Zionist Organization (WZO) defeated a resolution calling for action against Hitler in 1933; the vote was 240 to 43. The WZO’s Anglo-Palestine Bank broke an international boycott of the Nazi regime, facilitating the purchase of Nazi goods and their import into Palestine. Joseph Goebbels praised Zionism in a major report he issued in 1934. Adolph Eichmann was invited to Palestine as a guest of the Haganah.
The Zionist movement was willing to sacrifice anything and anyone for the colonization of Palestine. As late as 1943, while the Jews of Europe were being exterminated in their millions, Rabbi Stephen Wise, leader of the American Jewish Congress opposed any change in United States immigration laws to enable Jews to find refuge from Nazism. Dr. Rudolph Kastner of the Jewish Agency Rescue Committee in Budapest signed a secret pact with Adolph Eichmann to “settle the Jewish question” in Hungary. The pact consisted of sending 600 prominent Hungarian Jews to Palestine, in exchange for the Jewish Agency’s silence during the extermination of 800,000 Hungarian Jews. On January 11, 1941 Yitzhak Shamir, who became Israeli Prime Minister in the 1980s, proposed a formal military pact between the Irgun and the Nazi Third Reich. Zionism’s betrayal of the victims of the Holocaust is well documented in Norman Finkelstein’s works including his seminal “The Holocaust Industry.”
When, after Kristallnacht, the British, in the hope of easing the pressure for increased immigration into Palestine, proposed that thousands of children be admitted directly into Britain, Ben-Gurion was absolutely against the plan, telling a meeting of Labour Zionist leaders on 7 Dec. 1938:
‘If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the People of Israel.’ (Brenner cites as reference no 23. Yoav Gelber, ‘ Zionist Policy and the Fate of European Jewry (1939-42)’ Yad VAshem Studies, vol. XII, p. 199)
In “The Holocaust Victims Accuse”, Rabbi Moshe Shonfeld (Neturei Karta, USA, New York, 1977) quotes the Zionist leader Yitzhak Greenbaum, who, after the war, stated: “When they asked me, couldn’t you give money out of the United Jewish Appeal funds for the rescue of Jews in Europe, I said, ‘NO!’ and I say again ‘NO!’ . . . one should resist this wave which pushes the Zionist activities to secondary importance.”
In his book “Ben Gurion’s Scandals” Naeim Giladi (an Iraqi Jew and ex Zionist) discusses the crimes committed by Zionists in their frenzy to import Jews from Iraq to Israel in the 1950s. He lives in New York now after he left Israel and he wrote to ‘The Link’ about his book saying “About 125,000 Jews left Iraq for Israel in the late 1940s and into 1952, most because they had been lied to and put into a panic by what I came to learn were Zionist bombs. But my mother and father were among the 6,000 who did not go to Israel..”
Literature abounds to document how zionism and anti-semitism, are faces of the same coin. Original Sins (Benjamin Beit-Hallami), Beyond Innocence and Redemption, Confronting the Holocaust and Israeli Power (Dr. Marc H. Ellis), Unholy Alliance (Marc H. Ellis), Ending Auschwitz (Marc H. Ellis), Selected essays in the compendium “Walking the Red Line” (ed. By Deena Hurwitz with an introduction by Rabbi Marshall T. Meyer. Of special interest is the essay “Living Comfortably with Taboos” by Rabbi Gary Nitzan-Ginzberg, who asserts that many aspects of Zionism in theory and as practiced can be categorized as Nazi-like, and certainly racist.
Zionists certainly hijacked the true suffering of the Jewish people for power and money. Good documentation of this is found in The Seventh Million by Tom Segev and the Holocaust Industry by Norman Finkelstein.
“Ah, those who plan iniquity and design evil on their beds; When morning dawns, they do it, For they have the power, They covet fields, and seize them; houses, and take them away, they defraud men of their homes, and people of their land. Assuredly, thus said the Lord; I am planning such a misfortune against this clan that you will not be able to free your necks from it. You will not be able to walk erect: it will be such a time of disaster. ” – MICAH 2: 1-4
I am grateful to Dr. Bill Friend and other colleagues for resources.
(Dr. Mazin B. Qumsiyeh is Chair of the Media Committee, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition)
