American Pravda: Israel and the Holocaust Hoax
BY RON UNZ • UNZ REVIEW • JANUARY 8, 2024
Last month I explored the historical origins of the State of Israel and the intertwined expulsion of the Palestinian refugees from their ancient homeland. During this discussion, I emphasized the crucial role that the Jewish Holocaust had played in justifying and facilitating those momentous events of three generations ago.
- American Pravda: The Nakba and the Holocaust
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • December 11, 2023 • 14,600 Words
I read or reread more than a dozen books for my long review article, and also glancingly mentioned an additional one, which I’ve now digested as well. My main focus had been on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and The Seventh Million by Tom Segev only slightly touched on that topic. But his descriptive subtitle “The Israelis and the Holocaust” suggested a related subject of inquiry that proved quite fruitful.
Born in 1945, Segev is generally regarded as one of Israel’s leading journalists, the author of numerous widely-praised histories regarding Israel’s origins and its various wars. Although his 1991 bestseller was controversial, the back cover carried glowing praise from such top Israeli figures as Abba Eban and Amos Elon, as well as important Holocaust scholars such as Prof. George L. Mosse and leaders of the Jewish diaspora such as Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel. I found it quite enlightening, though perhaps not entirely in the way the author intended.
Even aside from its main theme, the first chapter provided some extremely useful information. Back in 2018, I’d drawn upon the shocking research found in the books of maverick leftist Lenni Brenner to publish a long article on the surprising relationship between the various Zionist factions and Nazi Germany, which spent most of the 1930s working together in a close economic partnership that laid the basis for the creation of the State of Israel.
- American Pravda: Jews and Nazis
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 6, 2018 • 6,800 Words
Although Brenner’s documentary research seemed rock-solid and had never been seriously challenged, I’d always had a few slight doubts at the back of my mind. I had wondered whether such utterly astonishing facts could really be true and yet remained totally concealed for generations by virtually all of our journalists and academics, but Segev’s brief discussion completely put those concerns to rest. Segev is a very mainstream pro-Zionist Israeli writer and he probably despised Brenner, a radical anti-Zionist Trotskyite, never mentioning the name of the latter anywhere in his nearly 600 pages of text. But Segev drew upon the same underlying archival sources to fully confirm all of Brenner’s most incendiary historical claims and even added a few additional ones, though all of this similar material was obviously presented in a very different fashion.
By the 1920s the mainstream leftist Zionist movement was heavily influenced by Marxism and led by Russian-born David Ben-Gurion, who modeled himself after Lenin, but those Zionists still eagerly formed a 1930s economic partnership with Nazi Germany based upon an obvious commonality of interests. Hitler was eager to encourage the departure of Germany’s problematical 1% Jewish minority while the Zionists were just as eager to receive them, along with the huge infusion of financial and industrial capital they could provide. During this period, important SS leaders including Adolf Eichmann were invited to Palestine as honored Zionist guests and then published their flattering accounts of the successful development activities of their Zionist partners in Joseph Goebbels’ leading Berlin Nazi newspaper. Some Zionist leaders reciprocated, traveling to Germany for very friendly meetings with their Nazi counterparts, and they reported how well the Jews of that country seemed to be doing despite Hitler’s supposedly harsh new regime.
Indeed, Segev’s figures demonstrate the enormous prosperity of German Jews, explaining why the Zionists were so eager to arrange for them to relocate to impoverished Palestine. The Nazis agreed that every such Jewish emigrant could take with him the present-day equivalent of $200,000 in foreign currency, plus another $250,000 or more in German merchandise. These were huge sums for what had been the desperately poor society of Weimar Germany, and such Jewish wealth had obviously been one of the major sources of anti-Semitic resentment in that country.
If the main Zionist groups cooperated with Nazi Germany on purely utilitarian grounds, their right-wing Zionist rivals had more ideological motives since they had modeled their movement after that of Mussolini, and always regarded themselves as fascists as did their bitter opponents. Many of these Zionists even considered Hitler’s notorious anti-Semitism as a mere political blemish rather than as an insupportable obstacle preventing their admiration. In 1933 a leading Zionist writer ranked the German dictator among the world’s “shining names,” alongside Mussolini, Ataturk, and the various other right-wing heroes of his movement, while another Zionist figure had loudly declared that “Hitler saved Germany.” Even after World War II began, one of these Zionist factions led by a future prime minister of Israel repeatedly sought to enlist in the Axis Powers, hoping to join the military alliance led by Hitler and Mussolini.
One of the interesting points made by Segev is that although a large majority of ordinary Jews around the world were intensely hostile to Hitler’s regime, the leadership of most of the different Zionist factions quietly became fierce competitors for German patronage, with those that lost out then sometimes hypocritically denouncing the Nazi affiliations of their more successful rivals. These bitter words led to the 1933 assassination of one of the top mainstream Zionist leaders in Palestine at the hands of his right-wing critics.
Although this Nazi-Zionist partnership was controversial at the time, it obviously became much more so following the Axis defeat and the concerted Allied effort to demonize the Nazis through the Nuremberg show trials and other propaganda spectaculars, so the newly established State of Israel made every effort to hide this dark secret of its recent past. When those 1930s historical facts later threatened to leak out in the mid-1950s due to the legal problems of an important Israeli political figure, the man was assassinated, and Segev suggested that Israel’s government had probably arranged the killing in order to permanently shut his mouth.
After that rather surprising first chapter, the bulk of Segev’s narrative shifts to a very different topic, namely Israel’s tangled relationship with the Holocaust, the deliberate extermination of some six million helpless Jewish civilians by Nazi Germany, mostly in the gas chambers of various World War II concentration camps. On these basic facts, the author’s views seem absolutely conventional ones, and at several points he notes the bestial cruelty of the diabolical Nazi plan to erase all Jews from the world. But although references to the Holocaust, gas chambers, or the most famous concentration camps such as Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Dachau are sprinkled across a large fraction of all these pages, Segev largely avoids discussing the details of that industrial slaughter, apparently assuming that all of his readers are thoroughly familiar with the standard narrative account produced by modern Holocaust scholarship, which began in the wake of Raul Hilberg’s seminal 1961 volume. Ironically enough, Segev notes that as of the date of his writing, Hilberg’s classic work still remained untranslated into Hebrew, probably because it had reported that all those many millions of Jews had willingly gone to their deaths, shepherded by their own community leadership and without ever showing any signs of active resistance.
However, Israeli society is unusual in that such a substantial fraction of its founding population consisted of postwar Holocaust survivors, “the seventh million” of Segev’s title, individuals who had themselves passed through the various Nazi death camps. Therefore, their gripping personal accounts seem to have provided much of the understanding of those momentous events for the Israeli public, including Segev himself, who was born just weeks before Hitler’s suicide and the collapse of his German regime.
Perhaps because Segev’s first chapter documented the close Nazi-Zionist partnership of the 1930s, which might disconcert his readers, he preceded this discussion with a Prologue that recounted the utter horrors of the Holocaust that soon followed chronologically. He focused upon the books of a particular Auschwitz survivor named Yehiel De-Nur, who had spent two years at that notorious death camp, and although the name of that writer means little in America these days, he became a celebrated postwar author in Israel.
Although all of De-Nur’s several autobiographical volumes were published under a pseudonym and his true identity remained concealed for many years, his works constituted some of the earliest Holocaust literature in Israel and were hugely influential in bringing the horrifying details of that catastrophe to Israeli popular attention, with a special literary prize established in his honor, awarded every two years by Israel’s president.
Indeed, Segev explained that he and most other Israeli teenagers of his generation first learned the extremely disturbing details of the Holocaust from De-Nur’s books, so when he managed to arrange a personal interview with the author, he did so with great trepidation. De-Nur’s writing had always emphasized the sadistic acts that were a daily part of life at Auschwitz, including the widespread sexual abuse of young Jewish boys and girls by their Nazi captors, and Segev describes the works as considerably pornographic.
According to Segev, De-Nur had been a young Yeshiva student in pre-war Poland with huge literary pretensions, desperately trying to get his writing into print when the war came along and he ended up at Auschwitz. De-Nur later claimed that Eichmann had personally condemned him to that fate so he served as a leading witness at the 1961 Eichmann trial, with his testimony ended in a fainting spell, supposedly reflecting the unspeakable personal memories that still haunted him even decades later.
As it happens, I also recently read Hannah Arendt‘s 1963 classic Eichmann in Jerusalem, and De-Nur was one of the few witnesses whom she also focused upon, treating his testimony far less gently than did Segev. According to her account, De-Nur’s bizarre, rambling monologue included a heavy focus upon astrology and all sorts of other strange things, considerably embarrassing the serious legal proceedings. When the prosecutor finally interrupted to ask a couple of basic, factual questions, De-Nur immediately collapsed in a hysterical fit, allowing the judge to salvage the situation by ordering the witness permanently removed from the stand. Arendt suggested that De-Nur’s testimony demonstrated the tremendous difficulty that emotional eyewitnesses sometimes have in distinguishing between their actual memories of events from many years earlier and the products of their own vivid imagination.
Indeed, Segev seemed to confirm Arendt’s observation, explaining that De-Nur had been so emotionally broken by his experiences at Auschwitz that he required many years of psychiatric counseling and also began a series of LSD treatment-sessions, in which he recalled visions of his days in the camp. Eventually, he produced a new Holocaust manuscript that included presumably imaginary scenes of such brutal events as an SS guard murdering the Jewish boy who had been the victim of his sexual perversions, then grilling the boy’s body on a spit and devouring the flesh piece by piece.
These bizarre pages of the Prologue apparently represent much of the Holocaust narrative as understood by most Israelis and I found it rather disconcerting that they were immediately followed by the chapter describing the mundane details of the Nazi-Zionist partnership of just a few years earlier, an extremely odd juxtaposition of such radically different situations. Thus, according to Segev’s apparent reconstruction, the friendly and respectful business arrangements between German Nazis and Zionist Jews of the late 1930s were suddenly replaced in the early 1940s by a diabolical and sadomasochistic effort by the Nazis to totally exterminate all of the world’s Jews, an extremely strange transformation that raised serious questions in my mind.
As far as I know, the mainstream Holocaust narrative in America has never portrayed the German concentration camps as hotbeds of rampant sadomasochistic sexual perversion. However, such themes were found in a series of popular 1970s exploitation films beginning with Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS. This leads me to wonder if many of those survivor-based accounts in Israel might fall into that same category. And indeed, according to De-Nur’s Wikipedia page, a Holocaust organization in Israel has denounced De-Nur’s books as merely pornographic fiction, not least because Nazi law absolutely prohibited any sexual relations between Aryans and Jews.
Equally bizarre and scatological stories had also been found in The Painted Bird by writer Jerzy Kosinski, which in 1976 became America’s first widely popular Holocaust memoir. But that huge bestseller was later revealed to be totally fraudulent, and the plagiarizing author eventually committed suicide. Indeed, there have been so many fake Holocaust memoirs over the years that they nearly constitute a literary genre of their own. Probably the most world’s most famous Holocaust survivor was Elie Wiesel, who parlayed the stories of his wartime suffering into becoming an enormous political celebrity, capping his career with a Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, whose announcement declared him “a messenger to mankind.” Yet journalist Alexander Cockburn has persuasively argued that Wiesel was simply a fraud, and his famous autobiographical work Night just another literary hoax.
According to Segev, one odd element of Israeli Holocaust dogma has been the widespread, almost universal conviction that the Nazis had rendered Jewish bodies into soap, with even top government leaders firmly describing that atrocity as fact. Not only was this a notorious hoax, but Segev explained that Yad Vashem, Israel’s most authoritative center of Holocaust research has fully debunked it as totally fraudulent.
Meanwhile, even some of the less gruesome stories that Segev passes along seem rather doubtful. According to a prominent Israeli attorney who later claimed to have liberated death camps as a Jewish officer during the war, a large group of men, women, and children were herded into one of the gas chambers, but because their numbers were insufficient, the penny-pinching Germans didn’t want to waste a full dose of gas on them, so they were forced to stand there naked for a day and a night awaiting additional victims, only to be rescued from death when their camp was suddenly liberated.
In reading Segev’s account of the role of the Holocaust in Israeli society and the sort of outrageous Holocaust stories that dominated the narrative in that country, I couldn’t avoid noticing a strong connection to much more recent events.
The surprisingly successful Hamas attack on October 7th was deeply embarrassing to the Israelis, and pro-Israel propagandists soon began heavily emphasizing ridiculous hoaxes such as the claims of forty beheaded babies or a baby roasted in an oven. All of these frauds were provided by extremely disreputable characters, but eagerly accepted and promoted by leading Western political elites and media outlets.
The latest wave of very doubtful claims has focused upon second-hand stories of Hamas gang-rapes and sexual mutilations. These accounts only came to light two months after the events in question and lacked any supportive forensic evidence, with many of the claims coming from the same individuals behind the beheaded babies hoax, suggesting that they are equally desperate propaganda ploys. Journalists Max Blumenthal, Aaron Mate, and others have discussed the extreme credulity of the Times and other media outlets in promoting these blatantly fraudulent stories. Many of these points are summarized in a brief video discussion:
Meanwhile, consider the very strong evidence from silence. According to news reports, small GoPro cameras were worn by the attacking Hamas militants, which recorded all their activities, and the Israelis recovered many of these from their bodies and began carefully examining hundreds of hours of this extensive video footage. They surely would have soon released a video compilation providing any incriminating evidence that they found, yet I’m not aware of a single public clip that shows any such brutal atrocities or mass killings, strongly suggesting that very little of that occurred. Indeed, the Gray Zone demonstrated that the main photograph provided of an allegedly raped and murdered Israeli woman actually turned out to be that of a female Kurdish fighter from years earlier that had been plucked off the Internet, demonstrating the apparent desperation and dishonesty of the pro-Israel propagandists promoting these stories.
These developments bring to mind a couple of paragraphs I’d published in 2018 on similar matters:
Anyone who reads serious history books knows that Jews have generally enjoyed a reputation for producing many of the world’s greatest swindlers and frauds, hardly surprising given their notorious tendency to lie and dissemble. Meanwhile, the Jewish community also seems to contain far more than its fair share of the emotionally disturbed and the mentally ill, and perhaps as a consequence has served as a launching-pad for many of the world’s religious cults and fanatic ideological movements.
Although a tendency to lie and exaggerate was hardly unique to the political partisans of Russian Jewry, the existence of a powerful international network of Jewish journalists and Jewish-influenced media outlets ensured that such concocted propaganda stories might receive enormous worldwide distribution, while the truth followed far behind, if at all.
The Gray Zone editors noted that any skeptical analysis of those outrageous Hamas atrocity stories has prompted pro-Israel advocates to fiercely denounce such critics while stubbornly refusing to provide any solid evidence.
This is obviously correct. However, I think an equally skeptical approach must also be applied to the conventional narrative of the Holocaust, which constitutes the central ideological pillar of the Jewish State, its political leadership, and its committed supporters, both Jewish and Gentile alike. Unfortunately, applying such analytical methods may be quite psychologically difficult for many Westerners because over the last couple of generations Hollywood has elevated that historical event of the 1940s into something resembling a quasi-religion. As I wrote in 2018:
All three of America’s television networks were under Jewish ownership or control, so it was hardly surprising that two years later ABC decided to repeat this process with the 1978 television miniseries Holocaust, which also achieved an audience of 100 million and generated enormous profits…
The following year, William Styron published Sophie’s Choice, a heart-rending tale involving deeply buried memories of the extermination of Christian Polish children in the Auschwitz gas chambers. Although such an occurrence was absolutely contrary to the doctrines of all Jewish Holocaust scholars, the novel became a huge national best-seller anyway, and a 1982 film of the same name soon followed, with Meryl Streep winning an Oscar for Best Actress. A decade later, Steven Spielberg’s 1993 Schindler’s List won a remarkable seven Oscars, while grossing nearly $100 million.
With Hollywood so overwhelmingly Jewish, the consequences were hardly surprising, and a huge cinematic genre soon developed. According to Finkelstein, Hollywood produced some 180 Holocaust films just during the years 1989-2004. Even the very partial subset of Holocaust films listed on Wikipedia has grown enormously long, but fortunately the Movie Database has winnowed down the catalog by providing a list of the 50 Most Moving Holocaust Films.
Many billions of dollars have surely been invested over the years on the total production costs of this ongoing business enterprise. For most ordinary people, “seeing is believing,” and how could anyone seriously doubt the reality of the Holocaust after having seen all the gas chambers and mounds of murdered Jewish corpses constructed by highly-paid Hollywood set designers? Doubting the existence of Spiderman and the Incredible Hulk would be almost as absurd.
Some 2% of Americans have a Jewish background, while perhaps 95% possess Christian roots, but the Wikipedia list of Christian films seems rather scanty and rudimentary by comparison. Very few of those films were ever widely released, and the selection is stretched to even include The Chronicles of Narnia, which contains no mention of Christianity whatsoever. One of the very few prominent exceptions on the list is Mel Gibson’s 2004 The Passion of the Christ, which he was forced to personally self-fund. And despite the enormous financial success of that movie, one of the most highly profitable domestic releases of all time, the project rendered Gibson a hugely vilified pariah in the industry over which he had once reigned as its biggest star, especially after word got around that his own father was a Holocaust Denier.
In many respects, Hollywood and the broader entertainment media today provide the unifying spiritual basis of our deeply secular society, and the overwhelming predominance of Holocaust-themed films over Christian ones has obvious implications. Meanwhile, in our globalized world, the American entertainment-media complex totally dominates Europe and the rest of the West, so that the ideas generated here effectively shape the minds of many hundreds of millions of people living elsewhere, whether or not they fully recognize that fact.
In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI sought to heal the long-standing Vatican II rift within the Catholic Church and reconcile with the breakaway Society of St. Pius X faction. But this became a major media controversy when it was discovered that Bishop Richard Williamson, one of the leading members of that latter organization, had long been a Holocaust Denier and also believed that Jews should convert to Christianity. Although the many other differences in Catholic doctrinal faith were fully negotiable, apparently refusing to accept the reality of the Holocaust was not, and Williamson remained estranged from the Catholic Church. Soon afterward he was even prosecuted for heresy by the German government.
Internet critics have suggested that over the last couple of generations, energetic Jewish activists have successfully lobbied Western nations into replacing their traditional religion of Christianity with the new religion of Holocaustianity, and the Williamson Affair certainly seems to support that conclusion.
Consider the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Funded by Jewish interests, it spent years launching vicious attacks against Christianity, sometimes in crudely pornographic fashion, and also periodically vilified Islam. Such activities were hailed by French politicians as proof of the total freedom of thought allowed in the land of Voltaire. But the moment that one of its leading cartoonists made a very mild joke related to Jews, he was immediately fired, and if the publication had ever ridiculed the Holocaust, it surely would have been immediately shut down, and its entire staff possibly thrown into prison.
Western journalists and human rights advocates have often expressed support for the boldly transgressive activities of the Jewish-funded Femen activists when they desecrate Christian churches all around the world. But such pundits would certainly be in an uproar if anyone were to act in similar fashion toward the growing international network of Holocaust Museums, most of them built at public expense.
Indeed, one of the underlying sources of bitter Western conflict with Vladimir Putin’s Russia seems to be that he has restored Christianity to a favored place in a society where the early Bolsheviks had once dynamited churches and massacred many thousands of priests. Western intellectual elites held far more positive feelings toward the USSR while its leaders retained a stridently anti-Christian attitude.
In the same very long 2018 article, I described how I’d become curious about the evidentiary basis of the Holocaust, and after careful investigation concluded that the Holocaust was largely, perhaps almost entirely a hoax.
In particular, I found strong indications that during the years immediately following World War II, most of America’s mainstream journalists and academics seem to have quietly recognized that the stories claiming that millions of Jews had been killed in gas chambers by the Nazis were merely crude wartime propaganda, not dissimilar to the First World War accusations that the Germans had raped Belgian nuns and eaten Belgian children.
One important piece of evidence was my discovery of a book written by Prof. John Beaty, who had served as a colonel in Military Intelligence during the war.
Some years ago, I came across a totally obscure 1951 book entitled Iron Curtain Over America by John Beaty, a well-regarded university professor. Beaty had spent his wartime years in Military Intelligence, being tasked with preparing the daily briefing reports distributed to all top American officials summarizing available intelligence information acquired during the previous 24 hours, which was obviously a position of considerable responsibility.
As a zealous anti-Communist, he regarded much of America’s Jewish population as deeply implicated in subversive activity, therefore constituting a serious threat to traditional American freedoms. In particular, the growing Jewish stranglehold over publishing and the media was making it increasingly difficult for discordant views to reach the American people, with this regime of censorship constituting the “Iron Curtain” described in his title. He blamed Jewish interests for the totally unnecessary war with Hitler’s Germany, which had long sought good relations with America, but instead had suffered total destruction for its strong opposition to Europe’s Jewish-backed Communist menace.
Beaty also sharply denounced American support for the new state of Israel, which was potentially costing us the goodwill of so many millions of Muslims and Arabs. And as a very minor aside, he also criticized the Israelis for continuing to claim that Hitler had killed six million Jews, a highly implausible accusation that had no apparent basis in reality and seemed to be just a fraud concocted by Jews and Communists, aimed at poisoning our relations with postwar Germany and extracting money for the Jewish State from the long-suffering German people.
Furthermore, he was scathing toward the Nuremberg Trials, which he described as a “major indelible blot” upon America and “a travesty of justice.” According to him, the proceedings were dominated by vengeful German Jews, many of whom engaged in falsification of testimony or even had criminal backgrounds. As a result, this “foul fiasco” merely taught Germans that “our government had no sense of justice.” Sen. Robert Taft, the Republican leader of the immediate postwar era took a very similar position, which later won him the praise of John F. Kennedy in Profiles in Courage. The fact that the chief Soviet prosecutor at Nuremberg had played the same role during the notorious Stalinist show trials of the late 1930s, during which numerous Old Bolsheviks confessed to all sorts of absurd and ridiculous things, hardly enhanced the credibility of the proceedings to many outside observers.
Then as now, a book taking such controversial positions stood little chance of finding a mainstream New York publisher, but it was soon released by a small Dallas firm, and then became enormously successful, going through some seventeen printings over the next few years. According to Scott McConnell, founding editor of The American Conservative, Beaty’s book became the second most popular conservative text of the 1950s, ranking only behind Russell Kirk’s iconic classic, The Conservative Mind.
Moreover, although Jewish groups including the ADL harshly condemned the book, especially in their private lobbying, those efforts provoked a backlash, and numerous top American generals, both serving and retired, wholeheartedly endorsed Beaty’s work, denouncing the ADL efforts at censorship and urging all Americans to read the volume. Although Beaty’s quite explicit Holocaust Denial might shock tender modern sensibilities, at the time it seems to have caused barely a ripple of concern and was almost totally ignored even by the vocal Jewish critics of the work.
Given his crucial wartime role, there probably would have been few Americans better informed of our Intelligence information than Prof. Beaty, and his huge 1951 bestseller casually dismissed the Jewish Holocaust stories as nonsense. His book was strongly endorsed by many of our leading generals, and although the ADL and other Jewish groups ferociously attacked him on every other point, none of them ever challenged his statements on the Holocaust.
I went on to explore the striking absence of any significant mention of the Holocaust during those years:
Beaty’s very brief 1951 discussion has been the earliest instance of explicit Holocaust Denial I have managed to locate, but the immediate postwar years seem absolutely rife with what might be described as “implicit Holocaust Denial,” especially within the highest political circles.
Over the years, Holocaust scholars and activists have very rightfully emphasized the absolutely unprecedented nature of the historical events they have studied. They describe how some six million innocent Jewish civilians were deliberately exterminated, mostly in gas chambers, by one of Europe’s most highly cultured nations, and emphasize that monstrous project was often accorded greater priority than Germany’s own wartime military needs during the country’s desperate struggle for survival. Furthermore, the Germans also undertook enormous efforts to totally eliminate all possible traces of their horrifying deed, with huge resources expended to cremate all those millions of bodies and scatter the ashes. This same disappearance technique was even sometimes applied to the contents of their mass graves, which were dug up long after initial burial, so that the rotting corpses could then be totally incinerated and all evidence eliminated. And although Germans are notorious for their extreme bureaucratic precision, this immense wartime project was apparently implemented without benefit of a single written document, or at least no such document has ever been located.
Lipstadt entitled her first book “Beyond Belief,” and I think that all of us can agree that the historical event she and so many others in academia and Hollywood have made the centerpiece of their lives and careers is certainly one of the most extremely remarkable occurrences in all of human history. Indeed, perhaps only a Martian Invasion would have been more worthy of historical study, but Orson Welles’s famous War of the Worlds radio-play which terrified so many millions of Americans in 1938 turned out to be a hoax rather than real.
The six million Jews who died in the Holocaust certainly constituted a very substantial fraction of all the wartime casualties in the European Theater, outnumbering by a factor of 100 all the British who died during the Blitz, and being dozens of times more numerous than all the Americans who fell there in battle. Furthermore, the sheer monstrosity of the crime against innocent civilians would surely have provided the best possible justification for the Allied war effort. Yet for many, many years after the war, a very strange sort of amnesia seems to have gripped most of the leading political protagonists in that regard.
On that matter, I quoted a very interesting passage by Prof. Robert Faurisson, who became one of France’s leading Holocaust Deniers in the 1970s:
Three of the best known works on the Second World War are General Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe (New York: Doubleday [Country Life Press], 1948), Winston Churchill’s The Second World War (London: Cassell, 6 vols., 1948-1954), and the Mémoires de guerre of General de Gaulle (Paris: Plon, 3 vols., 1954-1959). In these three works not the least mention of Nazi gas chambers is to be found.
Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe is a book of 559 pages; the six volumes of Churchill’s Second World War total 4,448 pages; and de Gaulle’s three-volume Mémoires de guerre is 2,054 pages. In this mass of writing, which altogether totals 7,061 pages (not including the introductory parts), published from 1948 to 1959, one will find no mention either of Nazi “gas chambers,” a “genocide” of the Jews, or of “six million” Jewish victims of the war.
Consider the full implications of these facts.
As Faurisson emphasized, during the years 1948-1959, Eisenhower, Churchill, and de Gaulle published their memoirs and histories, which totaled more than 7,000 pages. These individuals were the greatest victorious heroes of World War II and the massive works they had published were intended to permanently establish their places in history, not merely for the next few years, but for many decades and even centuries to come.
Mainstream Holocaust scholars have reasonably argued that the event they study was probably the greatest crime ever committed in the history of the world, the rapid extermination of six million innocent victims by one of the world’s most highly-educated countries using diabolically advanced scientific means.
Those three leaders had led the global campaign to defeat the country responsible for the Holocaust, which had only occurred about a decade earlier.
Yet no one reading those 7,000 pages of text would have ever suspected that any Holocaust had even occurred. How can that possibly be explained under the standard historical narrative?
My own contrary explanation is a very simple one. All three of those top leaders knew perfectly well that the Holocaust was merely a hoax, a ridiculous concoction of wartime propaganda. They were sure that within another five or ten years, twenty at the most, the Holocaust hoax would have been completely debunked and universally recognized as absurd, just as had happened with the atrocity-hoaxes of the First World War. So they believed that if they mentioned it in their books, they would be endlessly ridiculed by future generations, and they wanted to avoid that embarrassing fate.
I’ve never looked into it, but I assume that all the prominent Allied leaders who published their histories and memoirs after WWI were very careful to avoid including any claims that the Germans had raped Belgian nuns or eaten Belgian children.
The “rediscovery” of the Holocaust in Western historiography only occurred at the beginning of the 1960s, and some of those very ironic circumstances seem to point towards the same controversial conclusion. As I wrote in my 2018 article:
The late scholar Raul Hilberg is universally acknowledged as the founder of modern Holocaust studies, which began with the 1961 publication of his massive volume The Destruction of the European Jews. In his very interesting 2007 Hilberg obituary, historian Norman Finkelstein emphasizes that prior to Hilberg’s work, there had been virtually no writing on the Holocaust, and discussion of the topic was considered almost “taboo.” For a recent event of such apparent enormity to have been so completely wiped away from public discussion and the consciousness of historians and political scientists can be explained in several different ways. But once I began to investigate the circumstances behind Hilberg’s ground-breaking work, I encountered all sorts of strange ironies.
According to Wikipedia, Hilberg’s family of Austrian Jews coincidentally arrived in the United States on the exact day in 1939 that war broke out, and in his early teens he was soon horrified to read all the news reports of the ongoing extermination of his fellow Jews in the continent his family had left behind, even telephoning Jewish leaders asking why they were doing so little to save their kinsmen from annihilation. He subsequently served in the U.S. military in Europe, then majored in Political Science at Brooklyn College after the end of the conflict. The inspiration for his future scholarly focus seems to have come when he was shocked by a remark made by one of his lecturers, Hans Rosenberg:
The most wicked atrocities perpetrated on a civilian population in modern times occurred during the Napoleonic occupation of Spain.
When Hilberg asked how Rosenberg, himself a German-Jewish refugee, could have so totally ignored the murder of 6 million Jews, a monstrous crime committed just a couple of years earlier, Rosenberg sought to deflect the question, saying that “it was a complicated matter” and “history doesn’t teach down into the present age.” Since Rosenberg was a student of Meinecke, whom Lipstadt has bitterly denounced as an implicit Holocaust Denier, one wonders whether Rosenberg may have shared the beliefs of his mentor but was reluctant to admit that fact to his overwhelmingly Jewish students in emotionally-charged postwar Brooklyn.
Later, Hilberg conducted his doctoral research at Columbia under Franz Neumann, another German-Jewish refugee scholar. But when Hilberg indicated he wanted his research to focus on the extermination of Europe’s Jews, Neumann strongly discouraged that topic, warning Hilberg that doing so would be professionally imprudent and might become “his academic funeral.” When he attempted to publish his research in book form, it received numerous negative reviews, with Israel’s Yad Vashem fearing it would encounter “hostile criticism,” and over a six year period, it was rejected by several major publishing houses along with Princeton University, based on the advice of the influential Jewish intellectual Hannah Arendt. One naturally wonders whether all these established scholars may have quietly known something that a naive young doctoral candidate such as Hilberg did not. His book only appeared in print because a Jewish immigrant whose business had suffered under the Nazis funded the entire publication.
Yet another strange element, thoroughly documented but rather difficult to square with the traditional Holocaust narrative is that large numbers of part-Jewish Germans served loyally in Hitler’s armies, with some of them holding very high military ranks:
Consider the interesting case of Field Marshal Erhard Milch, Hermann Goering’s very powerful number-two in the German Luftwaffe. His father was certainly a Jew, and according to researchers Robert Wistrich and Louis Snyder, there is archival evidence that his mother was Jewish as well. Now it is certainly not impossible that a Third Reich supposedly dedicated with grim fanaticism to the extermination of each and every Jew might have spent the entire war with a full- or half-Jew near the absolute top of its military hierarchy, but surely that puzzling anomaly would warrant careful explanation, and Milch’s apparent Jewish background was certainly known during the Nuremberg Trials…
Indeed, the fascinating and widely-praised 2002 book Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers by Bryan Mark Rigg notes that aside from Milch, Hitler’s military contained over a dozen half-Jewish generals and admirals and another dozen quarter-Jews of that same high rank, plus a total of roughly 150,000 additional half- or quarter-Jewish soldiers, with a large fraction of these being officers. All of these individuals would have had some fully-Jewish parents or grand-parents, which seems decidedly odd behavior for a regime supposedly so focused on the total eradication of the Jewish race.
I discussed all of these issues and many others as well in my very long 2018 article, as well as a related piece published the following year:
- American Pravda: Holocaust Denial
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 27, 2018 • 17,600 Words - American Pravda: Secrets of Military Intelligence
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 10, 2019 • 12,500 Words
For those who prefer to absorb some of this same information in a different format, I was interviewed last year by Iranian broadcast television on a number of the highly-controversial topics excluded from the Western media, and two of the half-hour segments focused on the Holocaust. Channel Four of the Iran Broadcasting Corporation is one of the country’s largest, having a potential audience of ten million, and after the segments were put online, I had them video-captured and uploaded to a Rumble channel:
Analyzing the Holocaust, Part I • 25m
Video Link
Analyzing the Holocaust, Part II • 32m
Video Link
Although totally ignored by our dishonest Western media, over the last two generations principled Holocaust investigators have uncovered and accumulated an enormous volume of persuasive evidence, demonstrating the utter and complete falsehood of the traditional historical narrative on a very wide range of different grounds.
One of the earliest major works was originally published in 1976 by Prof. Arthur R. Butz of Northwestern and after having been updated several times since then, his volume still constitutes one of the most comprehensive introductions to the subject. The book bears the very appropriate title of “The Hoax of the Twentieth Century” and although it was purged by Amazon several years ago, it is still easily available here and elsewhere.
- The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry
Arthur R. Butz • 1976/2015 • 225,000 Words • PDF • ePub Format⬇
As I discussed in my 2018 article, the most important recent addition to this extensive collection of material was probably published about a decade ago by a respected science historian.
Most recently, Dr. Nicholas Kollerstrom, who had spent eleven years as a historian of science on the staff of University College, London, suffered this same fate in 2008. His scientific interests in the Holocaust provoked a media firestorm of vilification, and he was fired with a single day’s notice, becoming the first member of his research institution ever expelled for ideological reasons. He had previously provided the Isaac Newton entry for a massive biographical encyclopedia of astronomers, and America’s most prestigious science journal demanded that the entire publication be pulped, destroying the work of over 100 writers, because it had been fatally tainted by having such a villainous contributor. He recounted this unfortunate personal history as an introduction to his 2014 book Breaking the Spell, which I highly recommend.
Kollerstrom’s text effectively summarizes much of the more recent Holocaust Denial evidence, including the official Auschwitz death books returned by Gorbachev after the end of the Cold War, which indicate that Jewish fatalities were some 99% lower than the widely-believed total. Furthermore, Jewish deaths actually showed a sharp decline once plentiful supplies of Zyklon B arrived, exactly contrary to what might have been expected under the conventional account. He also discusses the interesting new evidence contained in the British wartime decrypts of all German communications between the various concentration camps and the Berlin headquarters.
Dr. Kollerstrom’s excellent book was purged from Amazon, but is freely available on the the Internet or can be easily downloaded in various formats, and I would highly recommend it to those interested in the topic.
- Breaking the Spell
The Holocaust: Myth & Reality
Nicholas Kollerstrom • 2014/2023 • 110,000 Words • PDF • ePub Format⬇
Much of his important material was presented in an interesting two hour interview on Red Ice Radio, eventually purged from Youtube but still available elsewhere on the Internet.
A couple of decades earlier, German chemist Germar Rudolf had been similarly purged and later imprisoned for his skeptical investigation of the scientific evidence for the Holocaust. Rudolf eventually created the most comprehensive published collection of Holocaust Denial literature, one that includes the works of Butz and Kollerstrom as well as dozens of other books by various scholars, nearly all of them freely available for downloading;
- Holocaust Handbooks • 51 Volumes
For those who prefer to receive their information in video format, that same website has a considerable collection of such video documentaries and I would particularly recommend the following three very long ones, all produced around 15 years ago by a San Francisco resident. Although they lack the lavish production values of a big budget Hollywood film and the quality of the narration is only so-so, I think the volume of factual material presented in these videos is extremely comprehensive and persuasive, just as I had remembered from originally watching them four or five years ago.
One-Third of the Holocaust • 4h15m
Video Link
Buchanwald, a Dumb, Dumb Portrayal of Evil • 2h21m
Video Link
The Auschwitz Hoax – Why the Gas Chambers are a Myth • 50m
Video Link
I think that anyone who has carefully investigated the subject would soon conclude that there is an overwhelming volume of strong factual evidence against the reality of the Holocaust, which appears to be almost entirely fictional, just as fraudulent as the recent claims of forty beheaded babies. But that Holocaust myth has nonetheless remained in place and steadily grown for more than three generations, having seemingly become a lie too enormous to ever be challenged.
One likely reason for such impunity has been the successful transformation of the historical Holocaust into the quasi-religion of Holocaustianity, which in many respects reigns as the dominant faith of much of today’s deeply secular West. I have noted that although Pope Benedict XVI and his successor had been willing to accept deviations from the canonical doctrines of their Catholic Church on numerous questions, no skepticism towards the Holocaust could possibly be tolerated. Many otherwise courageous individuals are very reluctant to challenge such a religious faith, especially one in which they themselves have been immersed from their early childhood, perhaps without even recognizing that process.
However, belief in such pernicious falsehoods may sometimes prompt acts of the most dreadful nature, just as the recent Israeli atrocity-hoaxes have been used to enable the horrific ongoing massacre in Gaza.
According to Segev’s book, the widespread postwar belief among the Jews of Palestine that the Germans had exterminated six million of their people provoked a group of Zionist militants to plot the extermination of six million German civilians in retaliation, spending months infiltrating the water supply facilities of Occupied Germany and securing large quantities of the deadly poison that they planned to introduce. Fortunately, their project failed and although Segev seems convinced that the plot was real and came close to success, I am personally more skeptical. But the mere possibility that the most enormous mass-murder in all of human history might have been prompted in retaliation for an imaginary Holocaust crime is a sobering one.
Soon afterward, the Zionists leveraged the same Holocaust story to provide themselves the political cover they required for their brutal war of aggression and expulsion towards the native inhabitants of Palestine, seizing nearly 80% of the land and forcing 80% of the longstanding Arab population to flee as pitiful refugees.
During the many decades that followed, that same get-out-of-jail-free Holocaust card has been endlessly played, invoked by Israel’s leaders and its fierce advocates to justify every naked violation of international law and every grisly war crime, culminating now in the destruction of defenseless Gaza. Over the last three months, more than 22,000 bodies of dead civilians have been identified by the Gaza Health Ministry, and with so many thousands more still missing, their bodies buried in the rubble of 100,000 destroyed buildings, the true death-toll is probably well above 30,000.
Without doubt, this is the greatest televised slaughter of helpless civilians in the history of the world, and some of Israel’s top leaders have used explicitly genocidal language to describe their plans for the millions of Palestinians. Meanwhile, the rest of the world watches, either unwilling or unable to halt the killing. After more than three months of this unending massacre, the government of South Africa has now filed an 84-page legal brief condemning Israel for this ongoing “genocide.”
In our own country, popular progressive slogans advocating for a single unified secular democratic state of Palestine have been demonized as calling for “Jewish genocide.” When several elite college presidents refused to suppress criticism of Israeli policy on their campuses, they were browbeaten by Congressional interrogators and billionaire Jewish donors, with two of them already forced to resign.
The Israel Lobby appears to possess near total control of our political system, government, and media organs, and most observers see no prospect of change, agreeing that it would take an unprecedented ideological earthquake to dislodge such control. But surely the collapse of the Holocaust narrative would constitute exactly that sort of unprecedented ideological earthquake, perhaps causing the total disintegration of the entire Zionist project built upon it. For most pro-Israel partisans, the reality of the Holocaust is the fundamental cornerstone of their understanding of the world, and calling it into question would threaten the complete annihilation of their entire system of beliefs.
Those who wish to end what they regard as the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians must recognize that one of their best and only chances to achieve that goal may involve their courageous willingness to challenge a purported genocide from eight decades ago, a genocide that never took place, but has subsequently been used to justify an enormous catalog of war crimes and massacres.
I can only repeat the closing paragraphs of my original 2018 article on Holocaust Denial:
Despite this situation, the powerful media focus in support of the Holocaust over the last few decades has elevated it to a central position in Western culture. I wouldn’t be surprised if it currently occupies a larger place in the minds of most ordinary folk than does the Second World War that encompassed it, and therefore possesses greater apparent reality.
However, some forms of shared beliefs may be a mile wide but an inch deep, and the casual assumptions of individuals who have never actually investigated a given subject may rapidly change. Also, the popular strength of doctrines that have long been maintained in place by severe social and economic sanctions, often backed by criminal penalties, may possibly be much weaker than anyone realizes.
Until thirty years ago, Communist rule over the USSR and its Warsaw Pact allies seemed absolutely permanent and unshakable, but the roots of that belief had totally rotted away, leaving behind nothing more than a hollow facade. Then one day, a gust of wind came along, and the entire gigantic structure collapsed. I wouldn’t be surprised if our current Holocaust narrative eventually suffers that same fate, perhaps with unfortunate consequences for those too closely associated with having maintained it.
And the Holocaust is merely one of many enormous falsehoods regarding the central shaping events of the twentieth century that I had discussed in several pieces last year:
- Why Everything You Know About World War II Is Wrong
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 12, 2023 • 12,600 Words - More Falsehoods of World War II
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 19, 2023 • 7,500 Words - Hitler, Churchill, the Holocaust, and the War in Ukraine
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 17, 2023 • 9,700 Words
Related Reading:
Pro-Palestine activists set global day of action to stop Israel’s Gaza genocide
Press TV – January 8, 2024
Activists in a number of countries worldwide have signed up to a global day of action that will see marches take place on January 13 demanding an end to Israel’s genocidal campaign in the besieged Gaza Strip.
The demonstrations will be held a day before the 100th day of Israel’s hostilities.
Four percent of the population in Gaza have been either killed, injured or gone missing since early October.
UK-based advocacy groups organizing the initiative say the marches seek to mobilize people to demand a permanent ceasefire.
Events are planned in dozens of cities across countries including the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Japan, Indonesia, South Korea, Australia, Brazil, Jordan, and Turkey, among others.
The Palestinian Forum, one of several British groups organizing the move, said the growing number of cities joining the global action “reflects a shared commitment to ending the violence in Gaza.”
“Together, we stand united in the #GazaGlobalAction campaign, sending a resounding message that the world demands change, justice, and a future free from violence.”
The Palestinian Forum said the “grim reality” in Gaza “underscores the urgent need for international attention, humanitarian aid, and a concerted effort towards achieving a just and lasting resolution to the conflict.”
Calls to join the global day of action have been shared widely on social media using the hashtags #CeasefireNow #EndTheSiege and #FreePalestine.
Ismail Patel, the chair of the pro-Palestine Friends of Al-Aqsa group, has said the demonstrations principally seek to “empower the international community to challenge Israel’s allies.”
“The global day of action hopes to highlight the worldwide condemnation of Israel’s relentless bombing and siege of Gaza, which is claiming around 300 lives daily, the ongoing ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, the discrimination against Palestinians within Israel, the dehumanizing of Palestinians by Israeli leaders, and Israel’s provocative attacks targeting Syria and Lebanon,” Patel said.
The groups that have organized the pro-Palestine day of action spearheaded protests against the US war on Iraq on February 15, 2003. Those demonstrations were held in more than 600 cities worldwide and drew in millions of people.
Since October 7, 2023, Washington has already vetoed two UN Security Council resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
In a last-ditch effort in December, South Africa filed a case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, accusing the regime of genocide in Gaza. The hearing is scheduled for January 11 and 12.
Israel has been bombing hospitals, schools, supply vehicles and even UN-run facilities in Gaza since October 7. The regime has also killed more than 23,000 people, most of them women and children.
Haifa missile strike by Iraqi resistance shows how fragile Israeli regime is
By Wesam Bahrani | Press TV | January 8, 2024
In yet another significant act of solidarity with the people of Gaza, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq on Sunday struck “a vital target in occupied Haifa” with an advanced long-range cruise missile, grabbing headlines and taking the embattled regime in Tel Aviv by another surprise.
In a statement, the Iraqi resistance emphasized that the operation was carried out because of “our ongoing support for people in Gaza,” who have been reeling under the Israeli aggression since Oct. 7.
The statement added that the operation was “in response to the massacres committed by the usurping entity against Palestinian civilians, including children, women, and the elderly.”
The Iraqi resistance, which has in recent months launched a string of attacks on US military bases in Iraq and Syria, said it will continue to hit enemy strongholds, warning that “more is yet to come”.
The concluding part of the statement was the most attention-grabbing.
Such is the stringent Israeli media censorship of the occupying regime’s war on the besieged Gaza Strip; it is difficult to speculate what vital infrastructure has been hit.
The Iraqi resistance struck Haifa with a long-range cruise missile, named al-Arqab, from Iraqi territory. The distance from Baghdad to Haifa is almost 1,000 kilometers.
According to sources, the launch of the missile took place closer to the Western Iraqi deserts. That is still roughly 600 kilometers away, or perhaps more, depending on the launch site.
It essentially means that Haifa, which is located in the northern part of the occupied territories, can expect attacks again from the Iraqi soil, the timing of which will be decided by the resistance.
More importantly, the long-range cruise missile traveled the same distance that can put Tel Aviv and all other Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories within the range of Iraqi fire.
On Monday, Iraq’s Harakat al-Nujaba resistance movement claimed responsibility for the strike, warning that Israel should await more crippling attacks in retaliation for its bloody war on Gaza.
“The Axis of Resistance is determined to disrupt US scenarios in the region and thwart the occupying Israeli regime’s schemes in Gaza,” Hussein al-Moussawi, spokesman for the group, said.
Should we be surprised that the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), under which the Islamic Resistance in Iraq operates, possesses such world-class military technology?
The short answer is no.
The Iraqi government itself armed the PMU with the most capable military equipment from Baghdad’s weapons depots because it plays the most fundamental role of all the Iraqi armed forces.
The attack on Haifa points to the start of a new chapter by the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, in what is expected to be an even stronger show of support for the Palestinian resistance in Gaza and its people.
In this latest phase, we must expect an escalation in attacks on crucial Israeli infrastructure inside the occupied Palestinian territories, facilitated by the utilization of sophisticated long-range cruise missiles.
The Islamic Resistance in Iraq has made no secret of its iron-clad support and solidarity with the oppressed people of Gaza amid the Israeli regime’s indiscriminate bombings and inhumane siege.
It had also made no secret of its military operations against the Zionist regime and its Western backers, which has been completely evident in the past few weeks.
Shortly after the Israeli regime launched its war on Gaza on October 7, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq carried out a number of operations against Israeli interests and its main backer, the United States.
In late December, the Iraqi Resistance struck a vital target in the Eli-ad settlement, in the southern Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights with drones.
Before targeting Eli-ad, the resistance also pounded the regime’s main offshore (occupied) Karish gas field in the eastern Mediterranean Sea with a direct hit, inflicting heavy damage.
That came after the Iraqi resistance struck a target in occupied Umm al-Rashrash (Eilat) with appropriate weapons and released images of the operation for the public.
The regime evacuated the settlers of Eilat, transforming the area into a military garrison. It made the site an ideal target for Iraq as well as Yemen, another Arab country that has upped the ante recently.
Yemen, Iraq and Lebanon’s Hezbollah resistance movement have carried out a series of operations against Israeli interests with a barrage of long-range drones and missiles.
At times, the goal has simply been to fire a barrage of missiles and drones to preoccupy the Israeli Iron Dome and Patriot Missiles. These calculated efforts have proven successful.
They effectively ease the pressure on the Palestinian resistance while at the same time drain out Israeli military resources, which have in recent months become extremely depleted.
The regime has killed more than 22,000 Palestinians since Oct. 7, the majority of whom have been women and children. Thousands more are missing, presumably dead under the rubble.
Among the countries and movements taking the lead in militarily pressuring the U.S. and its apartheid regime to end its inhumane attacks on Gaza, Iraqis have played a courageous role.
In Iraq, the resistance has targeted illegal American military bases on its territory as well as in Syria more than 110 times since the Israeli war against Gaza began three months ago.
Rockets, mortar shells, drones, and short and long-range ballistic missiles have all been used in these operations, leading to scores of casualties among US troops and collateral damage.
Now, the question that everyone is asking is: Why has the Iraqi resistance opened a new chapter?
Lately, the illegal US military occupation on Iraqi soil made a costly mistake by attacking sites belonging to the PMU, which means Washington and Tel Aviv have to pay the price.
Recent US attacks against affiliates of the PMU, including Kataib Hezbollah, and the recent deadly strike on the headquarters of Harakat al-Nujaba, which led to the assassination of one of its leaders in Baghdad, Haj Mishtaq, means the time is ripe for the resistance to expand its operations.
For context: In the eyes of the Iraqi resistance, there is no difference between the US military occupation of Iraqi soil and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. The liberation of the Palestinian territories begins with the expulsion of American troops from Iraq and the rest of the region.
While the Israeli regime commits horrendous crimes against humanity in Gaza, America is shielding, arming, funding and facilitating this madness of death and destruction campaign in the coastal strip.
Taking a closer look at the events unfolding in Gaza, it is, in essence, an American war on Gaza.
This direct complicity means that Washington has to pay the same price as the Israeli regime is paying for its massacres of civilians in Gaza. They are two sides of the same coin.
Whilst illegal US bases in Iraq and Syria are closer to the line of fire for the resistance, the indiscriminate Israeli attacks against women and children in Gaza have seen the PMU increasingly target the Israeli regime, the latest being Haifa.
What the Al-Aqsa Storm (or Al-Aqsa Flood) operation provided was an opportunity for the Iraqi resistance to strike at Israeli interests for the first time in history.
As pressure grows on the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Mohammad Shia’ al-Sudani to expel the illegal US forces, it has also opened a new window for the PMU to end the American occupation and avenge Washington’s assassination of its deputy leader Abu Mehdi al-Muhandis.
For the moment, the main goal of the resistance is to expand its scope of attacks against the Israeli regime in order to mount pressure on the apartheid occupation as well as the US.
And, as the Iraqi resistance warned after the Haifa attack, “more is yet to come”.
Wesam Bahrani is an Iraqi journalist and commentator.
Singling out Smotrich and Ben-Gvir adds to Israel’s impunity
MEMO | January 6, 2024
Earlier this week, the US State Department released a statement rejecting the forced transfer and resettlement of Palestinians from Gaza, attributing the rhetoric from the Israeli side to Israeli Ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. “We have been told repeatedly and consistently by the Government of Israel, including by the Prime Minister, that such statements do not reflect the policy of the Israeli government,” US State Department’s Spokesperson Matthew Miller declared.
Maybe the US State Department is unaware of the reports that explicitly name Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as making the suggestion during a closed-door meeting for Likud MKs. Or that the former Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon called forced transfer and the international community’s possible complicit participation “a moral imperative”. Going further back, the leaked document by Israel’s Ministry of Intelligence also lists the forced transfer of Palestinians as the preferable option for Israel.
If Israel does not go ahead with the plan, it only means that the international community is not willing to go so far as visibly aiding Israel’s colonisation after public opinion has shifted so much towards Palestine, and rightfully so. Before 7 October, the Nakba could only be imagined or read about in terms of statistics on ethnic cleansing and its related destruction. Zionism has now illustrated to the world what genocide looks like, and governments are paying slight heed, if only to prevent themselves from getting further embroiled in the repercussions of Israel’s fabricated security narrative.
To make the forced displacement of Palestinians sound like it was just the concoction of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir lends additional impunity to Israel. Israel was built upon the ethnic cleansing and forced transfer of the Palestinian people. Conceptualising the forced transfer of Gaza’s Palestinian population is a continuation of the Nakba, not an innovative idea conjured up by two far-right-wing politicians. The Times of Israel is perpetuating the narrative of forced transfer being the idea of just two politicians, both of them in the public eye for their ongoing incitement. But the Israeli settler-colonial state is an incitement in itself.
Meanwhile, in a brief interlude, an unnamed Israeli official spoke of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) for its delivery of humanitarian aid as doing its work “for the first time in its history”. There is no forgetting, however, that Israel wants to destroy UNRWA and, during the Donald Trump administration, embarked upon doing so, emboldened by the so-called “deal of the century” and the US-Israeli insistence to alter the definition of who can be classified as a Palestinian refugee.
The bottom line here, however, is that Israel’s expectation that the international community clears up the mess after its atrocities knows no limit. Had Israel not bombed Gaza and rendered 85 per cent of the population forcibly displaced, the current humanitarian catastrophe could have been avoided. As things stand, and with Gaza almost completely destroyed, Israel and the international community can maintain the humanitarian paradigm for Palestinians because basic needs will always be perceived as more important than a political process where Palestinians are concerned. Colonisation required complicity, and there is no proposal Israeli officials come up with that can be separated from the narrative of Israel’s settler-colonial existence.
Israeli army uses drones to terrorize civilians at Gaza hospital
Palestine Informtion Center – January 7, 2024
GAZA – The health ministry in Gaza has accused the Israeli occupation army of using its armed drones to terrorize the patients and medical staff at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah City in central Gaza.
“Israeli drones are opening fire at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital’s sections and courtyards, targeting everyone who moves,” the health ministry said in a statement on Sunday evening.
The ministry also accused the Israeli army of seeking to put Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital out of service through intensively opening fire at it from drones.
The ministry pointed out that the ongoing shooting attack on the hospital forced a number of patients and wounded civilians to leave it and expose themselves to gunfire from the drones.
The ministry warned that thousands of wounded and sick people in central Gaza would be sentenced to death if the hospital stopped providing its services.
Since October 7, 2023, the Israeli army’s military aggression against Gaza and its deliberate attacks on medical facilities have made the majority of the hospitals and health centers “nonfunctional.” The Israeli army has also destroyed 121 ambulances since then.
Day 93: Israeli Assault Claims Two More Journalists
Al-Manar | January 7, 2024
Gaza Strip is witnessing a sharp escalation in violence, with Israeli military operations in last night’s onslaught in Al-Faluga and Khan Yunis leaving at least 20 Palestinians martyred, a toll that tragically includes civilians seeking refuge and victims from an attack on a United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) school in the Mughazi refugee camp.
In the southern Gaza Strip, at least two journalists, Hamza Wael al-Dahdouh, son of al-Jazeera Gaza bureau chief Wael Al-Dahdouh, and Mustafa Thuraya, were killed in an Israeli airstrike that targeted and blew up their vehicle in Khan Younis on Sunday.
The journalists, including Hamza, were en route to the Moraj area northeast of Rafah, designated a “humanitarian zone” by the Israeli army but reportedly subject to recent bombings. Their intention was to report on the situation and aftermath of bombings in the area, where many displaced Gazans sought refuge from bombardment in other regions of the territory.
Bureau chief for Al-Jazeera Arabic in Gaza, Wael Dahdouh, stands over the body of his son Hamza
Wael al-Dahdouh, Hamza’s father and Al-Jazeera’s bureau chief in Gaza, was recently wounded in an Israeli strike. His wife and two children had been killed by a separate Israeli strike in the initial weeks of the aggression.
The media office of the Hamas resistance movement strongly condemned the “heinous crime” committed by the “Israeli occupation army against journalists.” The Zionist entity aims to “intimidate journalists in a failed attempt to obscure the truth and prevent media coverage,” the office added.
The media office called “on all press unions, human rights and legal bodies to condemn this crime and denounce its repeated commission by the occupation.” It also called for pressuring “the occupation to stop the genocidal war against our defenseless people in the Gaza Strip.”
20 Palestinians lost their lives during the night as the Israeli occupation forces launched airstrikes on Al-Faluga in the Jabalia refugee camp, situated in the northern Gaza Strip. Among the targeted locations was a building belonging to the Abu Alba family in Al-Faluja. Concurrently, air strikes pounded Tal Al-Zaatar in the northern Gaza Strip, further exacerbating the already dire situation.
Adding to the toll, 16 Palestinians were martyred in the bombing of the central Gaza Strip since evening.
Deir al-Balah witnessed 11 casualties due to Zionist attacks, while in Khan Yunis, located in the southern part of the Gaza Strip, the death toll rose to 17. Artillery shelling intensified in the neighborhoods of the city’s center, west, and north.
Rafah also bore the brunt of the occupation’s aggression, with several areas being targeted. The toll rose to 7 as a result of an Israeli bombing that specifically aimed at a building housing displaced people. Disturbingly, reports emerged of injuries resulting from an air strike on a house belonging to the Al-Ajez family in the Al-Zuhur neighborhood, situated in the northern part of Rafah.
According to reports from the official Palestinian news agency WAFA, the Israeli military targeted a residence in Khan Yunis, where a significant number of displaced individuals sought refuge. Tragically, this resulted in the loss of at least 12 civilian lives and injuries to 50 others.
Furthermore, Israeli warplanes struck a school operated by the United Nations Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) in the Mughazi refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, leading to the death of at least four individuals, including a woman.
The report indicates that the Israeli military employed drones and engaged in intensive firing at homes and streets in the Mughazi camp. Simultaneously, Israeli warplanes launched a fire attack near Sekka Street west of the camp, accompanied by heavy artillery fire from the army.
Eyewitnesses reported a fire breaking out east of the neighboring Nuseirat camp due to sustained Israeli airstrikes.
The Israeli aggression extended to Tel al-Zaatar and the city of Deir al-Balah, where fierce airstrikes resulted in additional casualties, according to the report.
The grim statistics underscore the severity of the ongoing Israeli aggression on Gaza, with the death toll reaching at least 22,700 Palestinians, the majority of whom are women and children. Additionally, 7,000 individuals are reportedly missing under the rubble, presumed to be casualties of the conflict. The international community faces an urgent call to address the escalating humanitarian crisis and seek a sustainable solution to the longstanding conflict in the region.
Display of Resistance
Palestinian forces thwarted the advances of the Zionist enemy, effectively dealing heavy blows and preventing any consolidation of occupation across various regions of the Gaza Strip.
Despite the passage of two and a half months since the commencement of the ground operation, the relentless efforts of the Palestinian resistance have led to successive defeats for the occupying forces, compelling their withdrawal from the majority of areas in the northern Gaza Strip—an accomplishment of significant magnitude for the steadfast resistance fighters.
A notable triumph unfolded today as the Al-Qassam Brigades orchestrated the complete destruction of a Zionist personnel carrier situated in Al-Maghazi camp in the central Gaza Strip, employing the formidable “Al-Yassin 105” shell. Scenes depicting the obliteration of the personnel carrier were released by Al-Qassam, symbolizing a powerful stance against the occupiers.
The resilience of Al-Qassam forces further manifested as they obliterated enemy forces that had penetrated Al-Maghazi camp, utilizing a barrage of heavy-caliber mortar shells. Simultaneously, the Al-Quds Brigades announced the successful missile salvoes targeting strategic locations, including “Nahal Oz,” “Sufa,” and “Hulit.”
In another commendable operation, the Brigades revealed their precision and efficacy by targeting an occupation army force entrenched in a house in Tal al-Hawa, Gaza, with an OG-7V anti-personnel missile. This precise strike resulted in casualties within the force, and the Mujahideen successfully seized the soldiers’ equipment.
China’s COSCO halts shipping to Israeli ports: Israeli media
The Cradle | January 7, 2024
Chinese state-owned shipping company COSCO, the fourth largest in the world, has halted sailing to Israeli ports, Israeli media outlet Globes reported on 7 January, in the wake of attacks and attempted seizures of vessels heading to Israel via the Red Sea by Yemeni armed forces.
The Israeli report indicated that the Chinese firm did not disclose a reason for the policy change. COSCO’s offices in Israel have refused to comment on the development.
The Globes report attributed the decision to the close ties between China and Iran, which sells 90 percent of its crude oil exports to Beijing. Iran is a supporter of the Yemeni government and opposes Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza.
In a similar development, the Hong Kong-based OOCL halted all cargo deliveries to Israel last month, citing “operational problems.”
In the same month, other major shipping firms, including the Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) and CMA CGM, announced their decision to halt shipments to Israel one day after the Yemeni Armed Forces attacked two Israel-bound vessels.
Yemeni forces have been attacking Israeli-bound vessels in the Red Sea in response to Israel’s war on Gaza, which the Sanaa government views as genocide.
Washington and its allies in turn formed the Prosperity Guardian naval coalition and issued an ultimatum to Yemen’s Ansarallah-led government to stop their Red Sea operations or suffer the “consequences.”
Yemen’s actions have forced numerous leading shipping companies to instead travel around the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa to reach Europe, extending the shipping times by two weeks and increasing costs.
On 31 December, US naval forces sank three Yemeni boats in the Red Sea, killing ten Yemeni naval soldiers.
From the onset of the Gaza conflict on 7 October, Yemeni military forces have targeted a minimum of 15 merchant vessels either bound for Israeli harbors or owned by entities associated with Israel.
So You’re a Professor? Here’s What You Can Do to Oppose Genocide
By Steve Salaita | January 7, 2024
College instructors, particularly those in Europe and North America, are generally limited when it comes to meaningful intervention in imperialist horrors afflicting the Global South. Nevertheless, it is usually their governments either orchestrating or abetting the horror. They ought to do something, then, even if it seems pyrrhic or inadequate.
People around the world are now witnessing a particularly gruesome event as the Zionist entity, armed by its U.S. sponsor and enjoying the support of capitalist institutions across the globe, commits one atrocity after the other in the Gaza Strip (along with the West Bank and at times further afield). The atrocities, anyone with a modicum of integrity agrees, add up to genocide. The depth of grief and suffering Palestinians now experience is indescribable, immeasurable.
Do professors and other campus workers have any ability to mitigate the grief and suffering? Not really. But we’re not entirely powerless, either. Higher education is an important sector for information and activism and an industry where participants like to contemplate the role of both exceptional and ordinary people in making a better world. Like anybody else, teachers and researchers can be most effective in their own communities, which are not inoculated from the genocide. Zionist groups have organized hundreds of defamation campaigns against Palestinian students and faculty, often resulting in employment termination and other serious forms of recrimination. These campaigns don’t exist in a vacuum. Targeting Palestinians and anti-Zionists is an extension of the genocide, or at least one of its attendant tactics. And then, of course, many of the campuses are somehow invested in the Zionist entity—financially, politically, or logistically. It does no good to say that “we” aren’t affected by what happens “there.”
The following is a list of suggestions for Western academics, with the understanding that not all professors are equal and each campus is different in terms of its cultural and economic composition. In turn, I have tried to be comprehensive, offering comments that I hope will be useful to everyone from contingent faculty whose employment is precarious to senior scholars with big platforms at elite institutions. (The latter are much more likely to be facilitating the genocide, either obliquely or explicitly, but nevertheless.)
One thing is clear: the world is now experiencing a moral crisis whose enormity will reshape political attitudes and alliances for generations to come. Pretending that life, no matter how sheltered or comfortable, can simply continue as normal is its own kind of moral crisis.
Try one or more of the following if you can:
Defend Palestinian Students: Be it from forces on or off campus, or be it individuals you know or don’t know personally, it is reprehensible that students should suffer doxing and harassment, whether it is orchestrated by skeezy has-beens like Michael Rapaport or hysterical faculty on their own campus. Speak on behalf of your students. It can be done publicly through the usual channels or in private communication with chairs, deans, and other administrators. Or keep it simpler: reach out to the students and offer yourself as a resource.
Defend Palestinian Colleagues: The same idea holds, but with a quick addendum. Being a Palestinian in Western academe can be deeply alienating, in no small part because shitting on Palestinians is a reliable method of upward mobility. I’m sure some of your Palestinian colleagues will appreciate any gesture that might make them feel slightly less alone.
Boycott: Up to this point, academic boycott of Israeli universities has been controversial, even in supposedly progressive quarters of the industry. The facts, however, are clear. Israel has destroyed every institution of higher learning in the Gaza Strip. It has murdered dozens of faculty and administrators, including university presidents, and an untold number of students. There is no academic freedom in Palestine. There is no academe at all in Gaza. Reluctance to boycott is no longer acceptable. It is the baseline of political decency. Anybody who continues to oppose or dissemble about academic boycott should be regarded as untrustworthy on everything else.
Divest: Start or join a local campaign to force your university to divest any holdings from the Zionist entity. Divestment can include study abroad programs in Israel, which inherently discriminate against Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students. In the past decade, students have successfully passed divestment resolutions at numerous universities, but management simply ignores them. Faculty voices will help these efforts.
Invite People from Gaza: Surely the rank-and-file in academe are tired of the same few dozen big-name professors and celebrity activists saying the same three or four things in the lucrative lecture economy. Decisionmakers on campus invite speakers for prestige, for the brand, or else to network or be in the presence of fame. The habit needs to die and there’s no better time than now. Instead of summoning the usual Endowed Chair of Gobbledygook at Wealthy Private University to deliver radical affectations at a cost of multiple thousands, reach out to scholars and journalists from Gaza (and for God’s sake give them a proper honorarium). They will assuredly be more insightful than warmed-over relics of the pre-millennial theory craze. Likewise: recruit graduate students from Palestine. You can also look into bringing Palestinians as visiting writers/scholars or as researchers/consultants in any effort to document the genocide. Start with people who are currently outside of Gaza; when conditions are better, reach out to those still inside the territory. Gaza is filled with individuals of remarkable talent. You will be better off for having sought it.
Organize or Attend a Demonstration: You don’t need to be a seasoned organizer to raise hell about the abomination that is the Zionist entity.
Direct Action: Why should students always be the ones to shut down administrative offices or gum up the machinery of genocide? Professors can participate, as well. I’m not saying you need to do it. I just want you to bear in mind that nobody, no matter how urbane or well-published, is too good to get fired or sit in jail for a few hours in solidarity with a people whose heroism is known and admired around the world.
Teach Palestine: Hundreds of Palestinian poets, novelists, and essayists write in English or are available in translation. Consider including them on your syllabus. So what if your courses don’t focus on Palestine or the surrounding region? If you’re a modernist, then assign Fadwa Tuqan or Mahmoud Darwish. If you’re in gender studies, look up Fatima Bernawi or Rasmea Odeh. If you teach novels, try Susan Abulhawa, Susan Muaddi Darraj, Sahar Mustafah… on goes the list. If you’re an Americanist, there are numerous options. Same for Latin Americanists. A critical theorist? No problem: there’s Elias Sanbar and Bassel Al-Araj and Ghassan Kanafani. And if you’re, say, a medievalist? That’s no problem, either.
Stop Pandering to Customs of Civility: You don’t need to condemn “Hamas.” You don’t need to “affirm Israel’s right to exist.” You don’t need to bang on about “democratic values.” You don’t need to be “nuanced.” You need to defend the people suffering a genocide. Not a single one of them is asking for anything else. (“Who is my audience?” keep asking yourself. If the answer is anything other than “the dispossessed,” then recalibrate your ethics and try again.)
Shun the Genocidaires: Those rationalizing or cheering on the genocide are personae non grata from here on out. No co-authoring articles with them. No sitting together on conference panels. No buddy-buddy bullshit on the networking circuit. Sure, sometimes circumstance will force you onto the same committee or whatever, but, if the association is voluntary, then decline the opportunity and find colleagues who don’t celebrate mass murder.
Speak: [speak]
Or better still: Listen.
Reporters without shame: Top ‘media rights’ organization ignores rampant killings of Gaza journalists
By Eva Bartlett | RT | January 7, 2024
At the end of 2023, Reporters Without Borders (Reporters sans Frontieres, RSF), the international organization ostensibly advocating for freedom of information, released its annual report. The paper massively downplays the widespread and deliberate targeting of Palestinian journalists in the Israel-Gaza war.
The report’s announcement, titled, “Round-up: 45 journalists killed in the line of duty worldwide – a drop despite the tragedy in Gaza,” excludes most of the Palestinian journalists killed by Israel in 2023, particularly in the past few months. It claims 16 fewer journalists were killed worldwide in 2023 than in 2022. This doesn’t reflect reality.
The report claims that (as of December 1, 2023), only 13 Palestinian journalists were killed while actively reporting, noting separately that 56 journalists were killed in Gaza, “if we include journalists killed in circumstances unproven to be related to their duties.”
Other sources put the overall number of Palestinian journalists killed in the enclave much higher. The UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported on December 1 that 73 journalists and media workers had been killed, citing to the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate (PJS).
While The Committee to Protect Journalists’ (CPJ) December 20, 2023 numbers are lower (at least 61 Palestinian journalists killed since October 7), CPJ at least didn’t disregard dozens of slain Palestinian journalists like RSF did.
In fact, in contrast to RSF’s cheerful “things are much better for journalists than previous years” tone, CPJ emphasized that in the first 10 weeks of Israel’s war on Gaza, “more journalists have been killed than have ever been killed in a single country over an entire year.” It voiced its concern about, “an apparent pattern of targeting of journalists and their families by the Israeli military.”
It isn’t clear how RSF discerns which circumstances were “unproven to be related” to the duties of slain Gazan journalists, nor who is “actively reporting” when Gaza is under relentless Israeli bombardment and suffers frequent internet cuts. In fact, given the nonstop Israeli bombing (and sniping) throughout the strip, it would be nearly impossible to discern whether journalists were reporting (including from their homes) at the time of their death.
However, in the methodology section near the end of its more detailed report, RSF notes it “logs a journalist’s death in its press freedom barometer when they are killed in the exercise of their duties or in connection with their status as a journalist.”
Many Palestinian journalists in Gaza have received death threats from officers in the Israeli army precisely due to their status as journalists. And many of those threatened have subsequently been killed, along with family members, when Israeli airstrikes targeted their homes or places of shelter.
We also have the precedent in prior wars (in 2009, 2012, 2014, and 2021) of Israel bombing Gazan media buildings (including one I was in in 2009) with varying severity, damaging and finally destroying two major media buildings in 2021. This is clearly intended to stop the flow of reports from Gaza under Israeli bombs, and so is the killing of journalists.
On December 15, the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate criticized the RSF report, going as far as accusing RSF of complicity with Israel’s war crimes against Palestinian journalists through whitewashing.
This is the same PJS whose statistics the UN’s OCHA cites, statistics which PJS says are “accurate and based on professional and legal documentation that follows the highest standards in documenting crimes against journalists.” This documentation includes journalists who Israeli airstrikes targeted in their homes, killed precisely because they are journalists.
In response, RSF claimed it, “did not yet have sufficient evidence or indications,” to state that any more than 14 journalists in the Gaza Strip (as of December 23, the date of its response) “had been killed in the course of their work or because of it.”
RSF called the PJS accusations “inane,” complaining that they “damage our organisation’s image,” and chastised the PSJ to not “impugn our motives,” or “quarrel” over numbers. “Quarreling over numbers” is a pretty cavalier objection from an organization espousing concern over journalists being targeted.
At least three journalists were shot dead, at least three killed by an Israeli airstrike on media outlets in central Gaza City, and many more were killed by Israeli airstrikes on “safe” areas – areas south of Wadi Gaza, which Israel had commanded civilians to flee to for their “safety.” In spite of this command, Israeli bombings continued all over the strip, including all the way south to Rafah.
Still many more – in Gaza City, as well as to the north and to the south of it – were killed at home with their families, including one journalist in Khan Younis, killed along with 11 members of his family when an Israeli airstrike targeted his home on November 2. On November 23, a journalist was killed in an Israeli airstrike on his home in Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, along with 20 family members.
The Cradle reported that, “The Israeli army sent a letter to legacy news outlets, Reuters and AFP.” The letter said, “The [Israeli Army] is targeting all Hamas military activity throughout Gaza. Under these circumstances, we cannot guarantee your employees’ safety.”
One Israeli bombing of a journalist’s home on November 7 killed him and 42 family members. Like many of his slain colleagues, he was a journalist for Palestinian Authority-run Wafa news. Many of the other murdered journalists worked for: Palestinian Authority-run Palestine TV, independent news agencies, local TV and radio programs, and larger outlets like al Jazeera. Others worked with Hamas-affiliated media and radio. Still others were freelancers.
On November 5, PJS reported that at least 20 of the journalists killed (since October 7) “were intentionally targeted by strikes on their homes or during their work covering Israel’s attacks.” This tally is already greater than RSF’s reported total of 13 journalists killed at work or because of their work, even though the RSF report covers a period of almost a month more.
Israel threatens journalists, kills family members
Many Gaza journalists report being threatened by the Israeli army. CPJ noted it is “deeply alarmed by the pattern of journalists in Gaza reporting receiving threats, and subsequently, their family members being killed.”
One such incident followed a threat to Al-Jazeera Arabic reporter Anas Al-Sharif. CPJ noted he had received multiple phone calls from officers in the Israeli army instructing him to cease coverage and leave northern Gaza. Additionally, he received voice notes on WhatsApp disclosing his location. His 90-year-old father was killed on December 11 by an Israeli airstrike on their home in the Jabalia refugee camp.
On November 13, CPJ noted, “eight family members of photojournalist Yasser Qudih were killed when their house in southern Gaza was struck by four missiles. Qudih survived the attack.”
On October 25, an Israel airstrike on the Nuseirat refugee camp in the center of Gaza killed the wife, son, daughter, and grandson of Al-Jazeera’s bureau chief for Gaza, Wael Al Dahdouh.
The popular young independent journalist, Motaz Azaiza, reported receiving multiple threats from anonymous numbers urging him to cease his coverage, CPJ reported, noting that another Al-Jazeera correspondent, Youmna El-Sayed, said her husband received a threatening phone call from a man who identified himself as a member of the IDF and told the family “to leave or die.”
RSF bias: Not only in Palestine
Whereas RSF only reluctantly, as an afterthought, mentioned Palestinian journalists killed in “circumstances unproven to be related to their duties,” in a 2021 report on Syria, it stated, “at least 300 professional and non-professional journalists have been killed while covering artillery bombardments and airstrikes or murdered by the various parties to the conflict,” since 2011, going on to say, “this figure could in reality be even higher.”
It cited a report by the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) claiming the number could be up to 700. While endorsing these numbers, the RSF also gave a caveat, albeit a much meeker one than the one about Gaza journalists: “Confirming such estimates is not currently possible because of the difficulty of accessing information.”
Aside from reporting numbers it could not confirm, RSF cited a body in no way impartial or credible. As an investigative article noted, the SNHR is “based in Qatar… funded by foreign governments and staffed by top opposition leaders,” and “has openly clamored for Western military intervention.”
In 2017, Stephen Lendman wrote of RSF’s attempt to shut down a panel sponsored by the Swiss Press Club in which British journalist Vanessa Beeley would be participating. “An organization that defends freedom of information is asking me to censor a press conference,” the club’s executive director Guy Mettan said at the time. He refused to cancel the event.
RSF’s 2023 roundup also didn’t include two Russian journalists killed this year, one by a Ukrainian cluster bomb strike and the other by a Ukrainian drone attack (targeting journalists).
Sputnik pursued the matter and reported that RSF, “refused to give any comments to Sputnik ” citing “editorial policy.”
Journalist Christelle Neant likewise noted RSF’s glaring omission of the Russian journalists. She wrote about the body’s funding from various governments, and more notably from regime change agencies: the Open Society foundation, The Ford Foundation, and the National Endowment for Democracy, funded by the US Congress.
RSF’s notorious funders explain why it cherry picks or inflates its reports. The borderless organization has lines it won’t cross. It reports a grain of truth but otherwise whitewashes the crimes of Israel and Washington.
Eva Bartlett is a Canadian independent journalist. She has spent years on the ground covering conflict zones in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Palestine (where she lived for nearly four years).
While Gaza Burns, Media Zionists Still Portray Israel as Victim
By Niall McCrae | 21st Century Wire | January 7, 2024
In words often wrongly attributed to Voltaire, Kevin Alfred Strom asserted that ‘to learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticise’.
Since the Hamas attack on 7th October, this has been made very clear. Influential Zionist activists, who exert phenomenal influence on western politics, governments, and media, have ensured that only the one version of events, the Israeli version, is socially acceptable. This political reality was demonstrated in grave detail in Al Jazeera’s multi-part investigative documentary, The Lobby -Britain and The Lobby – USA. Of course, a different truth is known by any objective observer, especially millions of Palestinian people, and also by the millions who march worldwide against the brutal military bombardment and massacre of civilians in Gaza. But the BBC and The Daily Mail still refuse to broadcast or publish the widespread and justified disgust at the actions of the Israeli government.
Disturbingly, the British mainstream media have been actively shilling for the Israeli government, as their Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insists on continuing the annihilation of Gaza. A prime asset of the campaign to cast Israelis as the oppressed, and the Palestinians as the oppressor is British media pundit Douglas Murray. Writing in the Spectator, Why I’m considering a life of crime, Murray denounced posters at Heathrow Airport inviting travellers from the ‘Israel/Palestinian territories’ who have ‘witnessed or been a victim of terrorism, war crimes or crimes against humanity’ to report to it police, in potential pursuance of a case by the International Criminal Court. This call for international justice deeply offends Murray, who asserts that ‘there is no country called Palestine’. Why not, Douglas? My old atlas from the 1930s clearly shows a land of this name, on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea and bordering on Trans-Jordan.
Curiously, Murray is not sure what status to give the remaining Palestinian area. As he explains, ‘there is the disputed territory of the West Bank and there is Gaza, which was handed over to the Palestinians in 2005 and which promptly became a ‘terror state’. Hold on, Douglas, don’t you deny such statehood? It seems that Murray wants Gaza to have responsibility without any sovereign recognition or power, and the inverse for Israel.
But their journalists and commentators are not only concerned with what’s happening in a narrow strip of land invaded by Israeli troops. They portray all Jews living in Britain as victims of hate, because supporters of the Palestinian cause are railing against the murderous exploits of a state that claims to represent Jewish people worldwide. Meanwhile our police and judiciary appear bent on protecting a foreign jurisdiction two thousand miles away; for example, arresting UK protestors with placards likening the Knesset to the Third Reich.
INFOGRAPHIC: Latest number in Israel’s ongoing genocide of the native Palestinian population in Gaza (Source: EuroMed)
The lead opinion piece in the Daily Express (4th January 2024), by the chairman of Glasgow Friends of Israel, shows the way that the wind is blowing. According to Sammy Stein, anti-Zionism is nothing but rebranded anti-Semitism. Although Stein acknowledges the right to criticise Israel and its leaders (as do many Israelis), he smears the regular large pro-Palestinian rallies in Glasgow as “anti-Semitic,” based on his experience in running a market stall in the city centre adorned with Israeli flags. He believes that flying a national flag (of a country that is clearly committing crimes against humanity) is somehow defending the rights of Jews. Within reasonable limits, criticism of his stall is an expected and justifiable act of free speech, a fundamental right in a free society.
Stein confines the concept of anti-Semitism to dislike of Jews, despite the broader meaning of Semitic peoples (including the Semitic Palestinian people, the targets of Israeli bombs and bullets). He claims that this ‘is a term established specifically for the hatred of the Jewish people and not, as some believe, hatred against people who can be described as Semites, such as Muslims’. The expanding scope of anti-Semitism, as determined by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), is now sufficiently wide enough to quell any opprobrium towards Israel, while there is no equivalent protection for the native Palestinian people and their diaspora. Shamefully, nearly all major Western political parties have signed up to this blatantly one-sided censorship.
Despite the efforts of these Western institutions to impose an arbitrary definition of what constitutes a ‘hate crime,’ the fact remains that Jews are not the same as the state of Israel, and both of which is not the same as the ideology known as Zionism. But the distinction between Zionists and the Israeli leadership is becoming blurred. As the Palestinians and their supporters chant of ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’, treated by many Western authorities as a potentially hateful message, Netanyahu’s administration seems to be aiming for that very same outcome – capturing the whole land for Israel and evicting the Palestinians from their homeland. Stein notes that ‘today, Zionism refers to support for the continued existence of Israel, in the face of regular calls for its dissolution’. The Israelis have a right to self-determination, Stein believes, but not the Palestinian inmates trapped in the world’s largest concentration camp.
Stein also reminds us that ‘Jesus was a Jew,’ who, ironically, was persecuted by the Jews, leading to his crucifixion under the aegis of Roman authority at the time. But for Stein and Zionists, the land of historic Palestine belongs to the Jews because some Jews have continuously inhabited the area for thousands of years, after having first established their presence thousands of years ago. Also, they believe that this homeland was supposedly promised to them as a fulfilment of God’s covenant with Abraham. This is a simplistic and convenient reading of history. There is no straightforward link between Judah of the Bible and present-day Zionists. Regardless, should Israel really be allowed to run an exclusionary ethno-nationalist and inhumane Apartheid state (as Western societies simultaneously promote multiculturalism, diversity, equity and inclusion)?
Stein regards anti-Zionism as ‘unique in demanding the dismantling of an existing state after over seventy years of independence.’ Palestinians would splutter over such hypocrisy. For Stein, anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are now the same thing, being slightly different ‘ways of saying that Jews have no right to exist collectively as Jews with the same rights as other humans’. Perhaps Stein should spend a few days on the Gaza strip to learn whose hate is most powerful – that of desperate, bombed-out Palestinians or that of the American-backed Israeli branch of the military-industrial complex.
***
Niall McCrae is a researcher and educator, and author of ‘The Moon and Madness’ (Imprint Academic, 2011), and ‘Moralitis: a Cultural Virus’ (Bruges Group, 2018).
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From the Archives
Genetic baloney in thick slices
MAYBE COULD BE INC.
By Jon Rappoport | No More Fake News | July 8, 2021
Gene research companies tend to come and go. They start out banging and popping like fireworks in the sky, and then they fade out—selling themselves to larger outfits who’ve hired better liars…
Once upon a time, it sounded easy. Start with a disease, find the gene responsible for the disease, and correct the problem.
Then, researchers wondered, was disease the result of one gene or a group of genes acting together?
Either way, the proof would be in devising cures for diseases using gene therapy. “Not yet, but soon…”
And regardless, the major need was: money. Lots and lots of money.
This need required good PR people. “We have to pump up the idea that we’re on the edge of tremendous breakthroughs. We’re always on that edge…”
This hype also needed to obscure the fact that there wasn’t (and isn’t) ANY gene cure for ANY disease. … continue
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