Sins of the Fathers
A TV documentary on BBC2 investigated the guilt feelings of descendants of various Third Reich officials, including the grandson of the Commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp. The program, ‘Hitler’s Children’, was horrific and moving, but I don’t see why any of these descendants should feel guilt for what their parents and grandparents did. I do see, however, that they would have very mixed emotions as to how they relate to these parents and grandparents.
I also see that as terrible and horrific as the Holocaust was with the gas chambers, extermination camps, crematoriums, etc. the Allies of World War II came out of it little better. RAF, American and Allied airforcemen flew nightly over Germany and the occupied countries dropping bombs which killed thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands or even millions of completely innocent citizens, including little children. Some were blasted to death, others were suffocated from lack of air, some buried alive beneath rubble, many others burnt alive. The German Luftwaffe did the same to British civilians. All these things are part of the horror of War, and all are guilty.
You could argue that the Holocaust was not part of the War, but the fact remains it happened in wartime when German civilians were being killed nightly by Allied air raids. In wartime all moral standards of behavior break down and anarchy rules. The ‘enemy’ is dehumanized by political and militaristic propaganda, and in the Third Reich various minority groups such as the Jews, Communists, gipsies, gays, etc. were classed as part of the ‘enemy’. I’m not excusing what happened at all, just saying atrocities of this kind happen in all wars.
The Jews and others started being rounded up by the Nazis before War broke out, put in ghettoes, etc. but the Final Solution (the Holocaust) happened in the conditions of all-out War when all standards of civilization had broken down on all sides. I really see little difference in sending civilians, including children, into the gas chambers than bombing them and burning them from the air. Both are equally heinous crimes of genocide.
So if the descendants of the Nazi officials feel guilt for something they didn’t do, then the descendants of the Allied and Luftwaffe airmen who bombed innocent civilians should also feel this guilt. However I don’t feel any guilt for what my father may have done. He didn’t fight in the War, but I know he did many things I wouldn’t be proud of. I don’t know or particularly want to know everything my mother or grandparents did in the War – did some of them work in munitions or bomb making factories? I know my grandfather was a soldier in the First World War, but I’m damned if I’m going to feel guilty about that or the German conscripts he may have killed.
We all have to move on, and learn lessons from the past. What concerns me more than the horrors of past wars are the terrible things being committed now in our name, and being planned and prepared for. Britain is now spending billions of pounds in a time of hardship on renewing the Trident nuclear-armed submarine system. Weapons of mass destruction that would kill millions of innocent civilians, including future generations by the radioactive fallout, and cause many more to be born deformed or with cancers. These make even the Holocaust look tame by comparison. Yet all this is done in our name for political reasons. Whether it’s supposed to be preserving our way of life, defending freedom/our country, or preserving the ‘purity of the Aryan race’, it is all political and the end never justifies the means if the means are this brutal and murderous.
Ah, but nuclear weapons are just a deterrent, we are told. If so they haven’t worked very well as we’ve had constant wars ever since the Second World War ended. Also consider this. Hitler said, before the Second World War broke out, that if War did start he’d kill the Jews. Was that threat ‘just a deterrent’? If so it didn’t work either. The reverse side of this is, of course, what would have happened had War not broken out? Could the Nazis have gotten away with the Final Solution in the conditions of peacetime? We’ll never know for certain, but my bets are on an arrangement with the Zionists to ship the Jews out of the Third Reich to Palestine where the state of Israel would have been established as a Jewish homeland (on Palestinian soil).
This could hardly be done in the conditions of War when shipping large numbers of civilians out of the Third Reich by train or boat was out of the question. You cannot divorce the Holocaust from the War or what was happening at that time, with German soldiers being killed on two fronts, and German civilians being killed every night by Allied bombing. Everyone’s life was in danger.
There’s also the undeniable fact that, when the Jews and others started to be rounded up by the Nazis before the War started, very few were accepted by the future Allies as refugees. Political asylum was not offered en masse to all the Jews and persecuted minorities in the Third Reich by the future Allies of WWII. Therefore if Germans feel guilty about the Holocaust, then so should the Allied governments which left these persecuted minorities to their fate.
It was this guilt, shared by the Allies of WWII and the Germans themselves, which led to the establishment of Israel after the Second World War. So the horrors of WWII led directly to the horrors now suffered by the Palestinians, thrown out of their homelands by Jewish settlers and their descendants, a classic case of colonialism. The Nazis talked of the ‘master race’ and needing more ‘lebensraum’ (living room), so they invaded all their neighboring countries to create a greater Third Reich (first just reclaiming the lost territories stolen from Germany by the victors of World War I).
The Israelis have also expanded from their original 1948 borders, invading and occupying land around the original state to create a Great Israel for all the Jews in the world to regard as their homeland, a physical impossibility if they all decided to emigrate to Israel. They are not the ‘master race’, of course, just the ‘chosen race’. The Palestinians are the new ‘untermenschen’ or sub-humans. Ironically, due to the backlash from Palestinian terrorists exploding bombs in Israel, that country is probably the least safe place for Jews to reside in the entire world.
What can clearly be seen from this blog is that WWI led directly to WWII and the rise of the Nazis, and WWII led to many of the problems in the volatile Middle East centered on the existence of Israel and the backlash of Islamic/Arab/Palestinian terorrism (a tactic the Jews used in Palestine against the British occupiers prior to 1948).
War leads to more war and more atrocities. WWII also led to the division of Europe for over 40 years, with the nuclear arms race between East and West which could so easily have resulted in an exchange which would make the Holocaust pale into isignificance, with hundreds of millions of completely innocent civilians slaughtered by both sides. This was only narrowly avoided in 1962 at the time of the Cuba missile crisis, a crisis, you will notice, CAUSED by nuclear weapons, and only resolved when the Soviet Union agreed to withdraw its missile installations in Cuba (bordering the USA) on the condition that the USA removed its nuclear missiles from Turkey (bordering the USSR).
Wars cause more wars, nuclear weapons have almost caused a nuclear war by their very existence, and the reasons we went to War in the first place in 1939 are conveniently forgotten. It was, supposedly, to defend the freedom and independence of Poland? Why then, at the end of the Second World War, did the Allies agree to hand Poland, Czechoslovakia and many other countries occupied by Hitler over to the dictator Stalin? They could at least have negotiated neutrality, which was granted to countries like Finland, Austria and Switzerland.
The sins of the older generations bear heavily on their descendants, but shouldn’t do. What we must all do is learn from the mistakes and crimes of the past, and vow never, ever to repeat them.
Unfortunately the arms manufacturers and the powerful, profitable interests behind the military-industrial complex have other ideas. We are all just cannon fodder in their drive for more and more profits, propping up the unstable capitalist system, grabbing dwindling oil and other resources, with no regard for the consequences for human beings or the planet. This HAS to change, and quickly, or things will just get worse till we destroy the planet and the human race with it.
So the horrors of WWII led directly to the horrors now suffered by the Palestinians, thrown out of their homelands by Jewish settlers and their descendants, a classic case of colonialism.
Why do you keep blaming the Jews for coming to Israel? They had no other place to go to? Would you rather they just stayed in concentration camps after the war?
August 8th, 2012 at 5:26 pmWhat nonsense this anonymous contributor writes. The concentration camps were dismantled after the War or turned into memorials to the victims, this happened in both West and East Germany. The Jews were no longer persecuted there, or at least no more than anywhere else.
The one exception, the ONLY place Jewish people are in daily danger of their lives, is in Israel. This is because the land was stolen from the Palestinians.
There is no room for all the Jewish people in the world to settle in Israel, that’s the first point.
The danger to the Jews in Germany and the Third Reich was BEFORE the War started and during the War, when Britain, USA and many other countries failed in their international duty to provide political asylum to persecuted minorities like the Jews, gays, Communists, gipsies, etc. in the Third Reich. Also note that only the Jews and Communists got homelands after the War, gipsies, the mentally and physically handicapped, gays got no homelands.
Finally, you cannot create a ‘homeland’ on territory stolen from another people. If you do, as happened in Palestine, you guarantee unrest, terrorism and conflict.
Palestine/Israel is a tiny area. As stated above no room for all the Jewish people who might wish to settle there. If they want a homeland Australia, Russia, Brazil, USA, China, India are large countries with plenty of space.
‘God promised the Jews Israel’. Well if you believe that, you can’t really argue with such an irrational statement. If you believe the Old Testament God also said to rape little children and virgins, to kill innocent boys and men, to kill all women who weren’t virgins, and a load of other nonsense (subjugation of women, homophobia, endorsement of slavery, etc.) written by anonymous manipulative men using religion to control the population. The whole Bible, and many other ancient religious books, badly need re-editing and censoring; much of the crap in them is not acceptable and a gross violation of human rights.
August 8th, 2012 at 7:25 pmPlease notice that I have not said anything about God promising Palestine to the Jews. But yes, many Jews were indeed stuck in the former concentration camps and displaced persons camps, and once again, the allies did not give a hoot as to where and how they were to be resettled. Their homelands in Eastern Europe were occupied by the Soviets, so there was no way any significant numbers of them would be able to return and resettle there, so the newly founded Israel became the only option.
Before hurling accusations at me, maybe you should check the facts first. Why do you feel the need to spew this acrimony about Jews and Israel every now and then in your articles? Israel exists and whatever will become of that part of the world, the large numbers of Jews already residing there and having made it their home will surely have to be taken into full consideration.Gypsies do have a something of a quasi recognised homeland where they are allowed to govern themselves in part of Romania and probably Hungary.
August 9th, 2012 at 2:13 amYour comments about gays supposedly needing a homeland is pure nonsense, yet this is what you accuse me of writing, how ironic!
I never said gays needed a homeland, I said only the Jewish people and Communists, of all the persecuted minorities of the Holocaust, got them. I wouldn’t want to live in any sort of ghetto, be it Jewish, gay, or whatever.
You say their Eastern European homelands were ‘occupied by the Soviets’ but others might say they were ‘liberated by the Red Army’. The Socialist states of post-War Europe were not perfect, but they did not compare to the Nazi period or the Holocaust.
I took great exception to the fact that Soviet Jews were the some of the few people allowed to emigrate from the Soviet Union in order to go to Israel.
I am, of course, biased as a lifelong Socialist and former Communist. I feel it was the duty of all citizens of the Socialist countries to remain there and join the ruling parties and work inside them to improve Socialism. This brought many advantages like full employment, good public services, good education and health services, subsidized rents, controlled prices for basic foodstuffs, security in old age, etc. All now lost as capitalism ravaged these countries post-1989.
However a bureaucratic ruling clique were able to infiltrate the ruling parties because so many either left the country for Israel and other places, or were too apathetic to participlate fully in Socialist democracy.
However in 1989 there was a great opportunity to reform these countries and make them truly democratic with free elections and rival parties/candidates under a Socialist Constitution. This was sadly lost, along with all the achievements of Socialism. The Socialist baby was thrown out and the corrupt politicians for the most part kept. Putin still holds high office in the Russian federation, and the corrupt Yugoslav politicians caused terrible genocidal wars when that country broke up. Tito must have been turning in his grave. It saddened me to see what happened to the most successful Socialist country in the world; the former Yugoslavia with its cooperatives and market Socialism.
What you are saying, though, is that the Jewish people alone should be given a State, stolen from someone else, because they don’t wish to live under Socialism, but nobody else in their former countries get such a choice.
This doesn’t explain, however, why so many British and American Jews, never affected by the Holocaust, also chose to emigrate to Israel.
August 9th, 2012 at 3:01 amYou have brought to my attention, however, an apparent contradiction which I need to deal with.
I have said in some articles that although Britain went to War because Poland was invaded by the Nazis in 1939, at the end of the War they handed over Poland, Czechoslovakia, etc. to their wartime ally, the dictator Stalin.
This sits uneasily with the idea of the Red Army liberating these countries, though I did say the Socialism established there was not perfect. It was far from perfect during the Stalin era, with purges and all the terror of a police state, which only eased gradually after Stalin’s death.
We need to examine what happened in the Second World War first to explain what happened afterwards, and then what should have happened.
An estimated 6 million Jews and others died in the Nazi Holocaust. The Soviet Union, however, lost an estimated 20 million, and overall, 60 million are estimated to have died in that tragic conflict.
Having being invaded, not once, but twice from the West since the Bolshevik Revolution, the Soviet Union at the various meetings at Potsdam, Yalta, etc. near the end of the War demanded security on its Western frontiers, and that the areas liberated from Fascism by the Red Army remain under the Soviet sphere of influence. This was agreed by the Western powers, who had their own sphere of influence dominated by American capialism.
So what actually happened was that Soviet-style Socialism was imposed on many of the areas liberated from the Nazis by the Red Army, and initially this came under the iron rule of Stalin.
Even as late as 1968, 15 years after Stalin’s death, I was in the DDR (East Germany) when they invaded Czechoslovakia with the Soviet Union and several other Warsaw Pact countries to crush Dubcek’s Prague Spring. At the time, being a hardline Communist, I supported this action. I now, of course, think it was wrong.
But we were told by our DDR hosts to look at a map of Europe. If Czechoslovakia was allowed to slip into the Western camp, then West Germany would have a corridor to march through to the Soviet Union and reclaim its lost territories not only in Poland but in the USSR itself – Kalingrad for instance. The Soviets were in real fear of another invasion from Germany, especially as West German maps at the time showed these ‘lost territories’.
Now what should have happened at these wartime conferences was a negotiated security for the Soviet Union and neutrality for the areas liberated by the Red Army. This could have taken the form of Yugoslav neutrality – a Socialist state but independent of Moscow. Finland and Austria were allowed neutrality without even a guarantee of some form of Socialism, and Finland bordered the Soviet Union itself.
So I agree it is not black and white. Jewish people in the concentration camps may well have been reluctant to return to their homes under the Stalinist regimes, but it still holds true that their fellow citizens didn’t get such a choice.
Again it was the Western powers which failed not only the Jewish people, but all the peoples of Eastern and Central Europe by not getting a guarantee of neutrality, be it under Socialism or something else.
The main thing would be that these countries would not be allowed to join NATO, and would not allow NATO troops on their soil. Perhaps some UN presence including Soviet UN troops could have reinforced this guarantee in the so-called ‘buffer states’.
All this does not in my opinion alter the fact that much was gained under even the imperfect Socialism of Eastern and Central Europe, and that much more could have been achieved both there and in the Soviet Union itself if the people had joined the ruling parties en masse.
I have spoken to people who joined the ruling parties just to gain privileges for themselves and their families, but these should have been outnumbered by those who joined, like the woman in ‘Goodbye Lenin’ the film about the former DDR, to improve Socialism.
Leaving the country is really no solution and is an abdication of duty, especially when the exodos is en masse. This happened at the end of the Second World War, and again post-1989 when at one stage so many Polish men fled to get employment in countries like the UK that at one stage Polish firestations were unmanned, and women had to do the job.
None of the above in my opinion justifies the way Israel was created without the agreement of the Palestinians, and with lack of foresight as to how such a tiny country could accommodate the world’s Jewish population should they wish to emigrate there.
August 9th, 2012 at 3:56 amWhatever happened, history cannot be altered. Israel exists, and its population has to be given consideration whenever the resolution of this long conflict will finally be at hand. They made it their home, and are not going to leave or emigrate, be it to the US or somewhere else! The reason that many US Jews choose to emigrate to Israel is probably because of the sense of belonging they feel that exists there, which is impossible for them to attain in America.
August 9th, 2012 at 5:42 pmWho are you really to blame the Jews who came to Israel in the 1940′s! There was probably no way that they could return to their former countries of residence. Why do you have the arrogance to assume that the ones from Eastern Europe chose not to return to their homes simply because they were reluctant to live under communism? It was simply unsafe for many of them to return, just like it is still very unsafe for the Bosnian Muslims to return to their former homes in what has become the Republica Serpska part of Bosnia! The entire Jewish communities were desimated by the Nazis all across Eastern Europe, particularly in the Western Ukraine, where they just shot all the Jews almost as soon as they got there, instead of sending them to the concentration camps. There were really no homes for them to return to, since many of their former
non-Jewish neighbors just took them over.There were a couple documentaries dealing with that subject that I watched. One of them dealt with what happened to the Jews of Poland, and how many of them faced exactly this kind of situation. They were interviewing one woman who said that all throughout the war she was longing to and wainting to return to her hometown, but upon returning found that it was taken over by a Polish man who told her to “return from where she came from”. So it was not a matter of choice for the majority of Eastern European Jews to emigrate to Israel, but a matter of necessity. You cannot just lay hurl this acrimony and disdain at them and their descendants, since you never really have been in their shoes!Was there another alternative for them that you can think of or propose?
Ideally the allies should have negotiated with Stalin to provide some sort of safe haven or homeland for them in the Eastern European countries where they were previously residing, instead of them having to come into the new war zone that was Palestine at the time.
Thank you for clarifying the situation. I may well have seen that documentary where people had taken over homes where Jewish people once lived. Indeed this has happened in many countries, including where my father came from. Cyprus, where there were ethnic troubles and movement of populations.
You are right, the clock cannot be turned back, and we now have to accept Israel but also give the Palestinians an independent state. Ideally I’d prefer a united secular state where the two peoples could live together peacefully, but that is not going to happen.
I’m sure many Jewish people must have returned to their former homes, or at least, to their former towns and if their homes had been taken, given new ones. I haven’t, however, researched this. But lots of people were displaced in the War or bombed out and the Socialist and other governments provided them with new homes if their old ones were no longer available.
I agree with you that instead of basically ‘dumping the Jewish problem’ in the middle of a hostile war zone, a better solution would have been either the above one of welcoming them back or creating homelands elsewhere if that’s what they really wanted, though to me this still sounds like the ghettoes they were first herded into by the Nazis. However the Zionists were determined the Jewish homeland should be in the Biblical land of Israel, which was then Palestine.
All this is, of course, water under the bridge, and just as in my original article I said the descendants can’t be responsible for the sins of their fathers (and mothers) nor can the present populations of Palestine and Israel be responsible for what happened in previous generations. They now have to find a way to live together in that area of the world, and it seems the two-state solution is really the only viable one.
However Israel has to accept that its bounderies are fixed, and it must rescind its promise to guarantee to accept every Jew anywhere in the world who wishes to emigrate there. All countries have to control both immigration and emigration. Israel should put up the ‘full up’ notice, which means they would only accept people closely related perhaps, or those in real danger of persecution elsewhere in the world. But this obligation is shared by other countries, to offer asylum to those in danger or actually suffering persecution.
August 10th, 2012 at 2:36 amAgain, don’t just assume anything! You don’t know!Why do you constantly insist on whitewashing this invonvenient aspect of history and still clinging to the view that it is “the Jews” that are always the “problem”? There is no Jewish problem, just Jewish people, many of whom are just as native to Europe as the rest of the European population. This kind of sick mentality is the reason why the conflict still persists!Jews were basically the only people who were denied any help or resettlement assistance by either East or West European post-war governments.These Jews, like the ones of Poland, had the basic right to have their homes back, just like the Palestininans of today are demanding.
But the new governments of E. E. countries were anti-Jewish and there was even a massacre in Poland shortly after the war.So this aspect of the conflict also has to be given full consideration. If some descendants of E. E. Jews want to return to their ancestral homelands like Poland, they should be granted this right.
You British have created this problem! You assumed that the Jews of Europe wanted a homeland in Palestine without asking them first, but not only that, you actually gave some questionable characters the right to speak for all of them.It was your degenerate aristocracy that crafted the Balfour Declaration and the people who were behind this, were doing this because basically due to being anti-Jewish racists. Like all people of Europe Jews just wanted to keep living in the countries where they were born, and did not have any desire to move to Palestine en masse and establish a state there.
You can hate Israel and Israelis all you want, but that will never provide you with an escape from the responsibility for haveing created this conflict, and pay you will!
I also want to tell you something that you are referring to as the the “abdication of responsibility” by many people from Eastern Europe who you blame for coming to the UK and stealing “poor little Englishmen’s jobs”.
August 10th, 2012 at 8:38 pmThe economies of these countries were completely ruined by the liberal economic policies that were pursued by the US and UK governments. Wasn’t it your own Margaret Thatcher who said that there are only 15 million people who are needed in Russia to service the oil rigs? Where the hell did she want the rest of these poor Russians to go? These people are coming over because there are absolutely no jobs that would provide them with the steady income in their own countries, so once again you have no business berating them for doing exactly what as you say your ancestors did.
Well I can only say I agree with almost 100% of what you are saying. I thought that’s what I was saying all along. People of all religions should be able to live in the countries where they were born and brought up, if they wish. So of course this applies to the homeless Jewish people after the War as well.
The only massacre I’m aware of in Poland was the Stalinist execution of many Polish officers, a heinous crime. I’m not aware it was an anti-Jewish thing.
As to the East Europeans, I said myself that it was US dominated capitalism which caused the problems in these countries in the post-Socialist era as they sought to exploit the people in these countries. What I was arguing for was trade unions and trade union rates for jobs in these East/Central European countries, and also in the UK.
So it appears we are in almost complete agreement. The British, in fact, are responsible for many of the current conflicts and unrest in the world due to our colonial past. Cyprus, Afghanistan, Palestine, Israel, Falklands/Malvinas, Gibraltar, Ireland, Pakistan, India, Iraq, on the African continent – all places where we’ve meddled in the past, drawn arbitrary borders on maps, exploited and murdered the local populations, etc. It was also the British who invented concentration camps I believe.
August 10th, 2012 at 9:34 pmWell, not quite! You are saying that somehow Jews in the DP and remaining functioning concentration camps were somehow in a better position than their former fellow citizens in EE countries, because somehow the latter were given a choice to not live under Stalinist regimes. What nonsense! Are you suggesting that any E Europeans would prefer trading their places with the Europe’s Jews just so that they would be given an escape route and not having to live under communism? Yes, I do believe that Jews had the right to request a homeland just like all other people of Europe. By the way supposedly defending and standing up for the Palestine’s Arab population did not in any way justify the bestial and subhuman fashion in which you British treated the Jewish refugees who desperately tried to reach Palestine in the late 1940′s. They were treated like animals, and probably large numbers of them had relatives who were already living in Palestine at the time. The majority of Jews in late 1940′s were indeed stuck in either displaced persons camps or concentration camps like Buchenwald, Bergen Belsen, and probably even Auschwitz that were still open even at that time.The massacre that I metioned did take place, except that it was after and not during WWII, so basically in peacetime, whereas the Katyn massacre took place in wartime and was directed mainly at the members of the Polish military, whereas the one I was talking about was directed at the civilian Jewish population. According to another documentary that I watched there were even some Polish clergy who defended the massacre by saying that all the Jews were communists.So how can you even imply that somehow the Jews of Europe were in some sort of privileged position and better off than the rest of the European post-war population? You must really hate them a lot, I do mean a lot! There is no moral equivalent between the Jewish post-war refugees who were fleeing to Palestine from Europe out of sheer desperation and a lack of a better alternative and the other colonialists that the history has known. Lastly,for you to be putting Jews together in a category with the handicapped and gays just shows that you are either completely ignorant or don’t have a clue what you are talking about. It is like mixing apples and oranges, as simple as that!
So if you agree with me that you British were definitely the force behind the creation of this conflict and many others, how come it is always only Israel and Israelis that you continuously accuse of colonialism, and see them as worse colonialists than the white South Africans and Zimbabweans of British descent? How come it is okay for white Zimbabweans to own all the best land in that country at the expense of the native African population and for the same thing to still be the case in South Africa even though apartheid has been dismantled, but nevertheless the whites still own all the good land? Britain stands firmly on the side of the descendants of white colonialists in Zimbabwe, while at the same time sanctimoniously berating the Jewish settlers in the West Bank.
August 11th, 2012 at 3:17 amI see little point in continuing this debate on an old posting about a TV program months ago. For the record, I’m against colonialism by anyone, have never defended the British, I would actually prefer to be able to register as an EU citizen, I don’t hate the Jews but don’t like the situation where Jews and Palestinians, Greeks and Turks, Protestants and Cathlolics in Israel/Palestine, Cyprus, Ireland, etc. are at each others throats.
I’m not aware of any massacre of Jews after the War in Stalinist Poland because they were thought to be communists. If this happened I would have thought it was more likely to be in the War.
August 11th, 2012 at 3:43 amNevertheless, it is the supposed “Jewish” colonialism and Jewish Nazi genocide survivors that you constantly hurl abuse at, and not anyone else, so cut the crap! If you are so intent on attacking them and their descendants, maybe you shoud suggest what should they should have done differently, if you are such an expert on the good old Communist regimes of post-war Eastern Europe.
BTW the massacre you talked about indeed took place after the war, and is referred to as the Jedwabne massacre. Read up on it first, before arrongantly stating how you “would have thought” that it happened in the war.
Also, you cannot point any fingers a the EE immigrants to the UK and stealing the jobs, since you are an immigrant yourself. Maybe you should also go back to your home country and assume responsibility, just like you advocating the immigrants should have done.
August 31st, 2012 at 5:13 pmI was born in London, my English mother was also born in London as was her English mother, her English father in Reading. My estranged father was Greek-Cypriot. I had little to do with him or his culture, my parents separated when I was 6. I never even visited Cyprus till in my 30s, and never learnt Greek, being brought up by my mother and maternal grandparents.
I repeat that Jewish people are probably in more danger in Israel than most other places in the world due to Palestinian terrorism. Staying in their country of birth, under a Socialist regime or not, would have been an alternative. However now Israel is established with generations born there, it must be accepted alongside a Palestinian independent state.
On the Jedwabne massacre:
From Wikipedia:
The Jedwabne pogrom (pronounced [jɛdˈvabnɛ]) of July 1941 during German occupation of Poland, was a massacre (pogrom) of at least 340 Polish Jews[1] of all ages. These are the official findings of the Institute of National Remembrance, “confirmed by the number of victims in the two graves, according to the estimate of the archeological and anthropological team participating in the exhumation,”[2] wrote prosecutor Radosław J. Ignatiew, who headed an investigation in 2000-2003 ordered by the Polish government.
A treason and murder trial was launched by Poland’s communist regime in 1949, which was later condemned as a miscarriage of justice.[3] After a fresh investigation concluded in 2003, the Polish Institute of National Remembrance stated the crime was committed by Polish inhabitants of the town,[4] with the complicity of Nazi German Ordnungspolizei. The involvement of German paramilitary forces of the SS and Gestapo remains the subject of debate, especially the role of Nazi German Einsatzgruppe Zichenau-Schroettersburg.[5][6][7][8] According to some later commentators, many people were shocked by the findings, which contrast with the rescue of Jews by Poles during the Holocaust.[9][10][11]
August 31st, 2012 at 8:28 pm