Of the many shocks and mind-bending things that have hit me personally since the Oct. 7 military action by Hamas, none has rattled me more than learning just how ignorant and — frankly — propagandized I had been my entire life about the true nature of Israel, Zionism and the controlling grip they have over “our” government.
I was 8 when the movie that molded the American mind to the lie of the Israel myth, Exodus (1960) dominated theaters across the nation. I was in my early teens when the 1967 Six-Day War happened and 23 innocent American seamen were murdered and 171 wounded in the brutal Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, an act of betrayal for which Israel — and the American officials from the president on down who betrayed the victims — was never held accountable.
Over the past ten months, courageous American Jewish journalists and scholars have helped me understand the truth of Israel and the ethno-racist cult of Zionism, which is a deep betrayal of Judaism.
Foremost among them is Tony Greenstein, author of “Zionism During the Holocaust: The Weaponisation of Memory in the Service of State and Nation” (2022). Unsurprisingly, Greenstein had to self-publish his work. You can read about Greenstein’s book, his background growing up in an Orthodox Jewish family with a rabbi father, and link to an excellent video interview with him here.
There are many examples of Zionist duplicity, deception and outright collaboration with German Nazis contributing to the imprisonment and deaths of millions during WW II. As Greenstein’s recent article on Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland’s book The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World demonstrates, the Zionist cover-up is active and molding current public policy.
Given Freedland’s book misrepresents and twists the story of Rudolf Vrba, one of two inmates to escape the German death camp at Auschwitz in an attempt to warn the Hungarian Jews of what was really happening behind the barbed wire. Vrba was silenced, intimated, threatened and his warning muffled by Zionist Jews, enabling the murder of much of the Hungarian Jewish population in exchange for a small group of Zionists to escape with much of their wealth. one of those traitors, Rezső Kasztner, went on to become an Israeli government official, until he was taken out by Israeli security forces as his story was becoming public.
Freedland’s book is a prime example of how we have been systematically lied to and made unwitting supportive dupes of the fascist Israel government now conducting a genocide in the tradition of their Nazi allies. These lies have consequences both in Gaza and the West Bank and to our national sovereignty and soul.
‘Guardian’s’ Zionist Gatekeeper Rewrites Holocaust History
[Jonathan] Freedland’s book is part of the process of manipulating and changing the historical record to accord with a false narrative of Zionist heroism. Freedland pretends that [Rudolf] Vrba was a supporter of Israel “and rooted for it” believing that its existence “was a good thing for Jews.”
The idea that Vrba was some kind of Zionist is absurd. Freedland provides no evidence for his assertion.
By Tony Greenstein Electronic Intifada (8/22/24)
The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, by Jonathan Freedland, John Murray (paperback edition, 2023)
Jonathan Freedland is a senior journalist at British newspaper The Guardian as well as a columnist for the Jewish Chronicle. He is the latter’s figleaf liberal Zionist.
It was therefore a surprise that Freedland should choose to write about Rudolf Vrba.
On 10 April 1944, alongside Alfred Wetzler, Vrba escaped from Auschwitz with the aim of warning Hungarian Jewry of the Nazis’ plans to exterminate the last major surviving Jewish community in Europe.
Freedland’s problem, in wanting to write about this Jewish Holocaust hero, is that Vrba was not a Zionist. The Zionist movement, because of its collaboration with the Nazis (its desire to take advantage of their rise to power) has virtually no Jewish anti-Nazi resistance heroes to its credit.
Noah Lucas, a critical Zionist historian described how, “As the European holocaust erupted, [later first Israeli prime minister, David] Ben-Gurion saw it as a decisive opportunity for Zionism … Ben-Gurion above all others sensed the tremendous possibilities inherent in the dynamic of the chaos and carnage in Europe … In conditions of peace, it was clear, Zionism could not move the masses of world Jewry. The forces unleashed by Hitler in all their horror must therefore be harnessed to the advantage of Zionism … By the end of 1942 … the struggle for a Jewish state became the primary concern of the movement.”
Those few Zionists who did fight in the Resistance, like Chajka Klinger, were extremely critical of the role that the Zionist movement played.
My first criticism of The Escape Artist is its title. It gives the impression that Vrba was a circus act, another Houdini. Indeed Freedland makes just such a comparison. Freedland manages, in one short phrase, to both demean and trivialize Vrba’s bravery and heroism. Vrba was no escape artist or magician. He was someone whose survival was a combination of extreme bravery, good judgment and pure luck.
Vrba had very good reasons to hate the Zionist movement but Freedland is careful not to allow them space in his biography.
Born Walter Rosenberg, Vrba lived in Slovakia, a puppet Nazi state which had been separated off from Czechoslovakia when Hitler invaded and dismembered it in 1939. It was ruled by the Hlinka or Slovak People’s Party. The president was a Catholic priest, Father Jozef Tiso.
Freedland describes how as a 17-year-old in February 1942 Vrba received a summons to report for deportation. Slovakia was the first country to deport its Jews. From March to October 1942 some 57,000 out of 88,000 Jews in the country were deported.
“I must be going mad”
In March 1942 Vrba fled to Hungary and he made contact with the socialist underground in Budapest. What Freedland doesn’t mention is that after staying with the underground, Vrba visited Hungary’s Zionists. In Vrba’s autobiography he describes what happened:
That afternoon I went to OMZsA House, headquarters of the Zionist organization in Budapest. There I told my story in detail to a stern-faced man in his middle thirties.
He pondered a while before he said: “You are in Budapest illegally. Is that what you are trying to say?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t you know you’re breaking the law?”
I nodded, wondering how a man with such a thick skull could hold down what seemed like a responsible position.
“And you expect to get work here without documents?”
“With false documents.”
Had I torn up the Talmud and jumped on it, I do not think I could have shocked him more. His mouth opened once or twice and then he roared: “Don’t you realize it’s my duty to hand you over to the police?”
Now it was my turn to gape. A Zionist handing over a Jew to fascist police. I thought I must be going mad.
“Get out of here! Get out as fast as a bad wind!”
I left utterly bewildered. It was nearly three years before I realized just what OMZsA House and the men inside it represented.
When his contacts in the Underground warned him that the Zionist official might report him to the police, Vrba decided to leave Budapest for Slovakia. Naturally not a word of this appeared in Freedland’s book.
Freedland had access to the personal papers of Vrba from his first wife Gerta Vrbova and his second wife, Robin, as well as other relatives. There is therefore a lot of useful and interesting information that he acquired on the personal life of Vrba but the use to which he put this is questionable, in particular the judgments he made about Vrba’s relationship with Vrbova.
Credulousness
Freedland never interviewed nor met Vrba. He only talked to a bitter ex-wife, Gerta Vrbova, who blamed her ex-husband for the marital breakdown. So what did Freedland think he was doing making an assertion that “their lovemaking lacked the tenderness, the gentleness, she craved. Instead she felt it carried a trace of violence.”
This is more than just prurience. It is an attempt to sow the seeds of doubt as to Vrba’s character. Jane Bennett, Vrba’s stepdaughter, had memories of a “lovely, modest man.” Freedland comments that “It was Rudi’s side of the acrimonious family story they heard.” Well yes, but the same is true of Freedland!
Because the hardback preceded the paperback by a year, Bennett was able to come forward with another side to the story. According to her, Rudi experienced “distress that, when he sent gifts to his two daughters, his presents would be returned, unopened.” It would seem that Gerta, who had taken Freedland into her confidence, had a vengeful side to her. Not something she would admit to the credulous Freedland.
This biography is not a disinterested account of Vrba’s life. From the start, Freedland had a hidden political agenda, prime among which was whitewashing the record of the Zionist movement during the Holocaust. Vrba was prime amongst the critics of the Zionist movement in Hungary for enabling the extermination of Hungarian Jewry.
Zionism has always found its friends among the anti-Semites. Its founder, Theodor Herzl, wrote in his diaries that “the anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s friendship with Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban is but one example.
When Vrba and Wetzler escaped from Auschwitz and reached the Jewish Council offices in Zilina, Slovakia they immediately set down their accounts of what was happening in Auschwitz, the only functioning Nazi extermination camp by then. The report they compiled, the Vrba-Wetzler Report (the VWR, also known as the Auschwitz Protocols) revealed for the first time that Auschwitz was not, as was widely believed, a concentration and labor camp but an extermination camp.
Vrba and Wetzler were desperate to reveal the deadly preparations being made in Auschwitz to receive the 800,000 strong Hungarian Jewish community.
Warning about the Holocaust
The VWR, which was completed on 26 April, was handed to the leader of Hungarian Zionism, Rezső Kasztner by 29 April 1944. Instead of distributing it and using it to inform Hungarian Jews of what would happen if they boarded the deportation trains, Kasztner suppressed it, then used it as part of his negotiations with key Holocaust perpetrator Adolf Eichmann to secure a train out of Hungary for the Zionist and Jewish elite.
In June 1944, 1,684 rich Jews left Hungary, first for the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and then for Switzerland. They comprised Kasztner’s extended family along with Jewish and Zionist leaders. Meanwhile, from 15 May to 8 July (when Admiral Miklós Horthy, the ruler of Hungary, called a halt to the deportations) some 437,000 Hungarian Jews had been deported to Auschwitz, the vast majority of whom were led straight to the gas chambers.
Freedland obscures the reasons why Kasztner did not distribute the VWR and omits his role in not only keeping the truth of Auschwitz from its victims but in actually misinforming them.
In Israel some years later, Kasztner was accused by a fellow Hungarian Jew, Malchiel Gruenwald, of collaborating with the Nazis. Because by then he had become a senior government official, Kasztner was forced by the state to sue for libel. However the trial of Gruenwald rapidly became effectively a trial of Kasztner.
Kasztner’s undoing came when he denied giving testimony at Nuremberg in favor of Kurt Becher, Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler’s personal emissary in Hungary. Gruenwald’s attorney Shmuel Tamir then produced Kasztner’s affidavit in support of Becher. Later it transpired that Kasztner had given favorable testimony to a host of other Nazi war criminals including two of Eichmann’s closest butchers, Dieter Wisliceny and Hermann Krumey.
Standing up for Nazis
Freedland’s explanation for Kasztner testifying in favor of mass murderers was that “perhaps Kasztner’s motivation was less compassion for Nazis in need than a blackmailed man’s fear of exposure.”
This “explanation” is a novel one. Nazi war criminals on trial for their lives in Nuremberg were unlikely to be in a position to blackmail anyone. Kasztner’s efforts were not only on his behalf but that of the Jewish Agency and the World Jewish Congress.
Freedland’s suggestion that Kasztner’s appeal was upheld by the high court (by which time he was dead, assassinated by agents of Shin Bet in 1957) because “they accepted that Kasztner had in good faith believed that he was engaged in an effort to save the many, rather than the few” is the precise opposite of what happened. The high court found no such thing. …
“…Vrba’s memoirs were published in the diaspora. They were not, however, published in Israel, despite it being the nation that “stops once a year” to remember a Zionist version of the Holocaust: a sanitized Holocaust which justifies the very racism that European Jews experienced during the Nazi era.”
'Deeply Complicit': US Has Sent Israel Over 50,000 Tons Of Weaponry In 11 Months
On average, the Biden administration has sent Israel "a weapons shipment every 12 hours" since October, noted the IMEU Policy Project.
By Jake Johnson Common Dreams (8/27/24)
The Israeli government announced Monday that it has received over 50,000 tons of military equipment—including armored vehicles and munitions—from the United States during its assault on the Gaza Strip, where most of the population is now displaced and at growing risk of starvation.
The IMEU Policy Project, an affiliate of the Institute for Middle East Understanding, noted that according to the Israeli government's figures, the Biden administration has on average sent the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) "a weapons shipment every 12 hours, for nearly 11 months"—arms "that are used to kill Palestinian civilians."
The Israeli Defense Ministry said in a statement that the U.S. "equipment procured and transported includes armored vehicles, munitions, ammunition, personal protection gear, and medical equipment, which are crucial for sustaining the IDF's operational capabilities during the ongoing war."
Josh Ruebner, policy director at the IMEU Policy Project, wrote that the new shipment numbers underscore that "the U.S. is deeply complicit in Israel's genocide."
"Weapons to Israel violate U.S. laws and policies that are supposed to prevent atrocities," Ruebner added.
In the face of what Amnesty International has called "damning evidence of war crimes," the Biden administration has continued to approve weapons transfers to Israel, including a recent $20 billion sale of F-15 fighter jets and tens of thousands of mortar shells.
"More extraordinary than the price tag of these arms deals is that the White House made them
public," Stephen Semler, co-founder of the Security Policy Reform Institute, wrote Monday. "Prior to last week's announcements, it had disclosed just two arms sales to Israel. By March, the Biden administration had already greenlit more than 100 separate weapons deals for Israel."
According to a new Amnesty report, Israeli forces on May 26 used "two U.S.-made GBU-39 guided bombs" in a pair of deadly airstrikes on a makeshift camp for displaced people in Rafah. The strikes killed at least 36 people, including six children.
Common Dreams work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
You Don't Get To Vote On Any Of Your Government's Most Consequential Actions
By Caitlin Johnstone Caitlin’s Newsletter (8/28/24)
…The functioning of a globe-spanning empire is seen as too important to be left in the hands of the voting public — so it isn’t. Nothing that is critical to the empire’s operation is ever on the ballot. They only let voters control a few superficial details about their society which make no difference to the powerful, while placing tremendous significance on elections and their outcomes so that voters really feel like they are making a difference.
Noam Chomsky was correct when he said “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.” Until you really understand that quote and how far it goes, you can’t understand anything about mainstream western politics and political discourse.
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Amazing how much has been airbrushed about Zionists. Thanks for sharing this, Mark.
As Featured on Abby Martin’s Empire Files
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Produced by ROGER WATERS ~ WALLED OFF (2024)
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