|
Rudolf Kasztner
Read
the full text of Lenni Brenner's Zionism in the Age of the
Dictators - A Reappraisal, here
Lenni
Brenner: The Iron Wall - Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky
to Shamir (1984)
THE
KASTNER TRIAL - shown at the Jewish Film Festival in
1997
Czech
film about Rabbi Weissmandel: Among Blind
Fools
The
Confession of Adolf Eichmann
Revolt
of Warsaw's Jews
|
I - 1993: ADL smears
Lenni Brenner
Abraham Foxman, the ADL's National
Director, is well and truly crazy, and for two reasons: 1)
He libeled me and 2) he thinks he can get away with
it.
The saying is that one good turn
deserves another. Since Foxman and the ADL have spread
malicious nonsense about me, I will tell the exact truth
about them, putting their dishonesty about my ideas within
the context of the ADL's unending history of rightwing
stupidity and dishonor.
In October 1993, Foxman gave a
speech at a Paris conference on xenophobia. Later he adapted
it as an article, "Holocaust Denial: The Growing Danger,"
published in an ADL magazine, Dimensions: A Journal of
Holocaust Studies, vol. 8, number 1, released in the Spring
of 1994. There we find the following remarks:
Another aspect of
Holocaust "revisionist" thinking can be found on the
radical left. A writer named Lenni Brenner maintains that
Zionists, in effect, were in league with the Nazis. He
asserts that there was a close link between elements of
the Zionist movement and the Nazi party, that Zionists
were willing to foster and exploit anti-Semitism in
Europe to bring about a Zionist state, and that they had
proposed an alliance with Nazi Germany.
Brenner's thesis, with its coupling
of Zionists with Nazis, serves as a propaganda tool to
undermine Israel: as such, it has found favor with the
American radical left, and with the press of the former
Soviet Union. The erstwhile Soviet daily Izvestia wrote of
his work: "During the World War, Brenner points out, Zionism
showed its real meaning: for the sake of its ambitions, it
sacrificed the blood of millions of Jews." Brenner has also
won approval on the other end of the spectrum, the
neo-fascist right: His books have been promoted by the
Institute for Historical Review.[1]
Has Foxman even read me on Zionism's
role during the Nazi era? His speech and article
unmistakably relied on Hitler's Apologists: The Anti-Semitic
Propaganda of Holocaust "Revisionism," prepared by Marc
Caplan of the Research and Evaluation Department of the ADL,
in 1993. Here we find the original, slightly longer, but no
more honest, version of Foxman's libel, labeled "A
Revisionist Echo on the Left." Foxman's two paragraphs on me
are virtually the same as Caplan's first two paragraphs.
Caplan added that
In 1987 this point of
view surfaced in England, when a stridently anti-Zionist
play, "Perdition," by Jim Allen, was scheduled for
production at London's prestigious Royal Court Theater.
The play generated intense public controversy and,
finally, it did not open. The writer acknowledged
Brenner's work as a source in writing his play, which
portrayed a wartime Zionist leader who allegedly
collaborated with the Nazis to save his family and other
Zionists while deserting e rest of the community. Allen
said he was seeking to mount "the most lethal attack on
Zionism ever written."[2]
I've written four books and about
100 articles. Jim Allen is a prize-winning British
playwright. I defy the ADL to point to one word in either of
our writings that supports even a particle of the Holocaust
revisionists' depravity.
In the February 18, 1985 New
Republic, Eric Breindel, now an editor of the New York Post,
reported that my first book, Zionism in the Age of the
Dictators,
has been applauded, and
made available by the Institute for Historical Review, a
pseudo-scientific flat-earth society which endeavors to
prove that the Holocaust was a
hoax.[3]
Not having seen anything on the book
by the Institute, I wrote them and received a letter from
Tom Marcellus of the IHR. They had 'promoted' the book on
two occasions. They sent me a booklist:
397. ZIONISM IN THE AGE
OF THE DICTATORS: A REAPPRAISAL by Lenni Brenner. An
astounding, bombshell expose of the active collaboration
between Nazis and Zionists, by a courageous anti-Zionist
Jew who spent years piecing together the story. Details
the close links between the "Zionist Revisionism"
movement (to which both the young Menachem Begin and
Yitzhak Shamir belonged) and the Jewish question experts
of the Nazi Party, Brenner's charge, overwhelmingly
documented: that Zionism and its leaders from the
beginning were prepared to go to any lengths to achieve
their goal of a state in Palestine -- lengths that
included fostering and exploiting anti-Semitism in
Europe, and proposing an alliance with Germany at the
zenith of that nation's power. This book has certain
surviving WWII-era Zionists quaking in their boots --
including the present Prime Minister of
Israel![4]
The IHR's letter went on:
We also promoted it in
an IHR Newsletter of a couple of years ago, but the
remaining copies of that issue and the records concerning
it were all lost in an arson that completely destroyed
our business address and inventory on 4 July
last.[5]
I replied to Marcellus in a letter,
on April 11, 1985. I quoted from it in my third book, Jews
In America Today, published in 1986:
The depravity of the
Institute is clearly expressed in a box, "The Holocaust,"
in the same booklet: "A catch-all term to identify the
alleged extermination of European Jewry which insists on
the following presumptions: 1) The Nazis executed a
deliberate plan to destroy (not resettle) European Jewry,
(2) Six million or more Jews perished as a result, and
(3) A majority of these were killed by poison gas (Zyklon
B) in gas chambers designed for the purpose of taking
human life en masse. This is the orthodox or
Establishment view. A subscriber to this view could be
called an EXTERMINATIONIST: whereas one who endeavors to
show that one or more of the above presumptions is not
factual is a REVISIONIST."
All of the above is bullshit.
I share not one iota of your mad ideology. I am your
implacable opponent. I do not believe you have any right
to exist . . . and I support any and all attempts, by any
and all, Zionist or anti-Zionist, to bust up your
institute and your meetings.[6]
I had sent a letter to the New
Republic, in response to Breindel, but Martin Peretz's
strange journal wouldn't run it. Fortunately Alex Cockburn
defended me in June 29, 1985 Nation. Breindel replied, in
the August 1, 1985 Nation. Cockburn retorted that
Breindel is fond of
saying that the Institute . . . applauds and disseminates
Brenner's work, though he denies that he is thus trying
to saddle Brenner with the Institute's views. But of
course that is what Breindel has been trying to do . . .
The Institute lists Brenner's book as it does books by
such diverse people as A.P.J. Taylor, former Israeli
Prime Minister Moshe Sharett and New Republic
contributors Ronald Radosh and Allen
Weinstein.[7]
Caplan and Foxman may have read of
this in the New Republic and The Nation. But at any rate
Caplan certainly was aware of my opinion of the IHR when he
wrote Hitler's Apologists. He had attacked me in a previous
ADL pamphlet, Jew-Hatred As History. An Analysis of the
Nation of Islam's "The Secret Relationship Between Blacks
and Jews". In that screed he had quoted -- out of context,
of course -- from Jews In America Today. So he certainly
read of the entire IHR episode, as I devoted six pages to
it.
It is in order for me to dismiss the
Institute's praise of Zionism in the Age of the Dictators by
saying that this is of no more importance the fact that
roaches like gourmet cooking just as much as you do. But
readers are entitled to know why these nutsies liked it.
Basically, they minimize the Holocaust: 'Aw right, so Hitler
didn't exactly like Jews. And he rounded them up, as
enemies, and some of them died of disease. An' besides, what
about Roosevelt rounding up the Japanese Americans on the
West Coast? An' look at Stalin's Katyn massacre, and
Churchill's horrific bombing of Dresden, and the A-bombing
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Here the Yids are, yelling about
Hitler, while the Allied leaders were monsters, just like
Hitler. Damned if it isn't true that everyone has skeletons
in their closet. Why go on dumping on po' ol' Adolf?' Given
this loony psychology, their catalogue is full of books on
Allied crimes, no less crimes for being emphasized by these
crazies. In the same way, my exposure of real Zionist
activities during the Nazi era became additional 'proof'
that Hitler was no worse than the rest of the wicked
world.
As I don't waste my time reading
such crackpots, I have no idea if they still even mention my
book. Certainly they are insane if they went on praising me,
or my book, after I told them that I hailed anyone who burns
their headquarters. As the ADL monitors their publications,
it is reasonable to think that the ADL would have mentioned
this in their attacks on me.
Caplan's paragraph re Jim Allen's
Perdition is disingenuous in its omissions. Allen is a
prize-winning British TV playwright. Perdition was based on
a chapter in Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, dealing
with the role of Rezso Kasztner, a Zionist leader in
Nazi-occupied Hungary in 1944. The play was driven out of
the Royal Court Theatre by a Zionist campaign, but their
methods alienated public opinion. David Cesarani, now an
editor of Patterns of Prejudice, published by the London
Jewish establishment's Institute of Jewish Affairs, admitted
this in the July 3, 1987 Jewish Chronicle:
Was it worth all the
fuss? Had the play gone on, it would have been seen by
around 2,000 people. It might have attracted some bad
reviews and then disappeared . . . In the event . . .
Personal representations coincided with the threat of a
mass protest outside the theatre, the combined effect of
which made it seem as if pressure was being applied . . .
This was (theatre director) Stafford Clark's autonomous
decision, but the clamour made it appear disastrously as
if he had been bullied into censoring the play . . . It
is certainly difficult to know how to respond . . .
without resorting to heavy-handed
methods.[8]
In fact Perdition was produced,
first in print, then as a reading at the Edinburgh Festival
in 1987 and then in London in May, 1988. It received massive
media attention, including favorable reviews. Stuart Hood
reflected on the print version in the July 10, 1987
Guardian:
There are certain themes
from the history of the Second World War which are
subject to taboos . . . (T)he Holocaust has come to play
an important ideological role. It has been in this sense
appropriated by the state of Israel and the Zionist
movement. It has thus become a shield against criticism
of the policies and actions of that state and of Zionism
itself . . . Allen was a bold man to write Perdition . .
. Although he develops his argument with understanding of
the terrible dilemmas of the main persons involved, his
criticism of the role of Zionist ideology, then and now,
has led to his being accused of anti-Semitism, of which
his whole political past is a denial . . . By refusing to
stage a play which honestly and compassionately examines
a terrible moment in human history, the Royal Court was
guilty of failure of nerve, of civil courage. By giving
way to powerful lobbying it has reinforced an
indefensible political taboo.[9]
There is more to this story. The
Jewish Chronicle for November 27, 1992 was forced to run an
article which announced that
The collapse of a libel
action has allowed the controversial anti-Zionist play
"Perdition" to be published in full for the first time .
. . Pluto Press, omitted several pages from the original
text because of a libel action which was brought by
Nathan Dror, a senior figure in the Israeli Labour
Federation, who headed the Jewish rescue committee in
Switzerland during the war. He brought the action . . .
for references to a letter quoted in "Perdition,"
allegedly written by Mr. Dror during the Second World
War, which claimed Jewish deaths would help justify the
foundation of a Jewish state. The action, heard in the
High Court in London, collapsed due to lack of
evidence.[10]
Dror's letter will be quoted below,
in its proper chronological place. I had quoted it in my
book, which appeared in Britain and America, in 1983. Dror
didn't sue me. But when Allen quoted the same letter, he was
sued. Because of Britain's reactionary libel laws, the
publisher was compelled to print Allen's play with a blank
space where the letter was cited because the libel case was
before the courts. I had an accompanying essay in that
printing of the play, and had the unique experience for an
American writer, of having it in effect censored, with
similar blank spaces where I also quoted the
letter.
II - Zionism and the Nazis:
The documentary record
By now two things should be clear to
open-minded readers: l) My ideas regarding Zionism's role
during the Holocaust have nothing in common with Holocaust
revisionists, who deny that the Holocaust happened, and 2)
the Zionist movement has used both libel and a spurious
libel suit in its attempt to keep the facts from the public.
But at this point readers are better informed as to what I
didn't say than what I do say re Zionism's Holocaust role.
Naturally I refer them to Zionism in the Age of the
Dictators, which is obtainable in bookstores and libraries.
But for now I will describe some of the low points of their
activities, using a small part of the documentation included
in my book.
The Nazis came to power in January,
1933. On June 21 the Zionistische Vereinigung fur
Deutschland (the Zionist Federation of Germany) sent a
memorandum to the Nazi Party. The document first saw the
light of day in 1961, when it was printed in Israel, but in
German. The Nazis were asked, very politely:
(M)ay we therefore be
permitted to present our views, which, in our opinion,
makes possible a solution in keeping with the principles
of the new German State of National Awakening and which
at the same time might signify for Jews a new ordering of
the conditions of their existence . . .
(A)n answer to the Jewish
question truly satisfying to the national state can be
brought about only with the collaboration of the Jewish
movement that aims at a social, cultural, and moral
renewal of Jewry . . . a rebirth of national life, such
as is occurring in German life through adhesion to
Christian and national values, must also take place in
the Jewish national group. For the Jew, too, origin,
religion, community of fate and group consciousness must
be of decisive significance in the shaping of his
life..
On the foundation of the new
state, which has established the principle of race, we
wish so to fit our community into the total structure so
that for us too, in the sphere assigned to us, fruitful
activity for the Fatherland is possible . . . Our
acknowledgement of Jewish nationality provides for a
clear and sincere relationship to the German people and
its national and racial realities. Precisely because we
do not wish to falsify these fundamentals, because we,
too, are against mixed marriage and for the maintaining
of the purity of the Jewish group . . . (R)ootedness in
one's own spirituality protects the Jew from becoming the
rootless critic of the national foundation of German
essence. The national distancing which the state desires
would thus be brought about easily as the result of an
organic development . . . We believe in the possibility
of an honest relationship of loyalty between a
group-conscious Jewry and the German state . . .
For its practical aims,
Zionism hopes to be able to win the collaboration even of
a government fundamentally hostile to Jews, because in
dealing with the Jewish question no sentimentalities are
involved but a real problem whose solution interests all
peoples, and at the present moment especially the German
people.
The realization of Zionism
could only be hurt by resentment of Jews abroad against
the German development. Boycott propaganda --such as is
currently being carried on against Germany in many ways
-- is in essence un-Zionist, because Zionism wants not to
do battle but to convince and to build . . . Our
observations, presented herewith, rest on the conviction
that, in solving the Jewish problem according to its own
lights, the German Government will have full
understanding for a candid and clear Jewish posture that
harmonizes with the interests of the
state.[11]
I admit to being the Shakespeare of
our times, but I didn't make that up. Indeed the Lenni
Brenner of the Elizabethean age didn't have the imagination
to concoct anything as grotesque as this memorandum. It is
found, complete, in A Holocaust Reader, edited by the late
Lucy Dawidowicz. But let's not stop here. Let's look at some
more Zionist wonderfulness.
The Nazis used the World Zionist
Organization to break the efforts of those Jews who were
trying to boycott German goods. German Jews could put money
into a Berlin bank. It was then used to buy export goods
which were sold in Palestine. When the emigres arrived
there, they would receive payment for the goods that had
been sold. German Jews were attracted to this scheme because
it was the least painful way of getting their wealth out of
the country. However, with the Nazis determining the rules,
they naturally got worse with time. By 1938 users of the
"Transfer Agreement" were losing 30% and even 50% of their
money. But this was still three times, and eventually five
times better than the losses endured by Jews whose money
went to other destinations.
Nazi
mass-murderer Adolph Eichmann who visited Zionists at
a Kibbutz in Haifa, Palestine on October 2nd
1937.
The WZO naturally wanted better
terms. Accordingly, in 1937, the Haganah, the military arm
of the Labor Zionists, who dominated the Jewish Agency, the
WZO's headquarters in Palestine, obtained Berlin's
permission to negotiate directly with the Sicherheitsdienst
(SD), the Security Service of the SS. A Haganah agent,
Feival Polkes, arrived in Germany on February 26, 1937 and
Adolf Eichmann was assigned to negotiate with him. Their
conversations were recorded in a report by Eichmann's
superior, Franz-Albert Six. It was found in SS files
captured by the Americans at the end of WWII. David
Yisraeli, a well-known Israeli scholar, reprinted it, in
German, in his PhD thesis, The Palestine Problem in German
Politics 1889-1945:
Polkes is a
national-Zionist . . . As a Haganah man he fights against
Communism and all aims of Arab-British friendship . . .
He declared himself willing to work for Germany in the
form of providing intelligence as long as this does not
oppose his own political goals. Among other things he
would support German foreign policy in the Near East. He
would try to find oil sources for the German Reich
without affecting British spheres of interest if the
German monetary regulations were eased for Jewish
emigrants to Palestine.[12]
Polkes had to cut short his visit.
But in October it was the Zionists' turn to receive
Eichmann. He arrived in Haifa on October 2, 1937. Polkes
took him to a kibbutz, but the British CID had become aware
of Eichmann's presence and expelled him to Egypt. Polkes
followed him and further discussions were held in Cairo. The
German report, photocopied in its entirety in volume five of
John Mendelsohn's Holocaust, gives us the rationale for the
Haganah's would-be collaboration:
(I)n Jewish nationalist
circles people were very pleased with the radical German
policy, since the strength of the Jewish population in
Palestine would be so far increased thereby that in the
foreseeable future the Jews could reckon upon numerical
superiority over the Arabs in
Palestine.[13]
Polkes passed on two pieces of
intelligence information to the Nazis:
(T)he Pan-Islamic World
Congress convening in Berlin is in direct contact with
two pro-Soviet Arab leaders: Emir Shekib Arslan and Emir
Adil Arslan . . . The illegal Communist broadcasting
station whose transmission to Germany is particularly
strong, is, according to Polkes' statement, assembled on
a lorry that drives along the German-Luxembourg border
when transmission is on the air.[14]
The Laborites main Zionist rivals in
the '30s were the "Zionist-Revisionist" followers of
Vladimir Jabotinsky. Their Revisionism had nothing in common
with present-day Holocaust Revisionism. They wanted to
revise the Zionist and British policy towards the
Palestinians. They wanted to crush them by force, with an
"iron wall" of weaponry. Today they are the dominant
ideological tendency in Israel's opposition Likud
bloc.
As the British weren't in Palestine
to do Jabotinsky's bidding, he and his movement looked to
Mussolini's Italy as a potential replacement for Britain as
Zionism's then necessary imperial patron against
overwhelming Palestinian numbers. While Jabotinsky insisted
that he personally didn't like Fascism, Wolfgang von Weisl,
the Revisionists' financial director, had no hesitation
about telling a Bucharest paper that "although opinions
among the Revisionists varied, in general they sympathized
with Fascism." He eagerly announced that "He personally was
a supporter of Fascism, and he rejoiced at the victory of
Fascist Italy in Abyssinia as a triumph of the White races
against the Black."[15]
Italy was quite willing to support
the Revisionists, who were obviously the Fascists of
Zionism. In 1934 Mussolini allowed the Betar, the
Revisionist youth group, to set up a squadron at the
maritime academy at Civitavecchia run by the Blackshirts.
The March 1936 issue of L'Idea Sionistica, the Revisionists'
Italian magazine, described the ceremonies at the
inauguration of the Betar squad's headquarters:
The order --
"Attention!" A triple chant ordered by the squad's
commanding officer -- "Viva L'Italia! Viva Il Re! Viva Il
Duce!" resounded, followed by the benediction which rabbi
Aldo Iattes invoked in Italian and in Hebrew for God, for
the king and for Il Duce . . . Giovinezza (the Fascist
Party's anthem) was sung with much enthusiasm by the
Betarim.[16]
Even after the outbreak of WWII, a
wing of Jabotinsky's following tried to get the patronage of
the Axis powers. According to their crackpot notions,
Britain was the main enemy of Jewry because London
controlled Palestine and wouldn't establish a Jewish state
which, they believed, was the only solution to
anti-Semitism. Accordingly they sent an agent to Lebanon,
then run by the Vichy-French regime. He delivered a
memorandum to a German diplomat. After the war it was found
in the files of the German embassy in Turkey. The Ankara
document called itself a Proposal of the National Military
Organization (Irgun Zvai Leumi) Concerning the Solution of
the Jewish Question in Europe and the Participation of the
NMO in the War on the side of Germany. It is dated 11
January 1941. At that time they still thought of themselves
as the real Irgun, Jabotinsky's underground terrorists.
Later they adapted the name Lohami Herut Yisrael, Fighters
for the Freedom of Israel. However they are universally
known as the Stern Gang, the name given to them by the
British, after their founder, Avraham Stern. Their entire
document is reprinted in Yisraeli's thesis, in German. They
told the Nazis that
The evacuation of the
Jewish masses from Europe is a precondition for solving
the Jewish question; but this can only be made possible
and complete through the settlement of those masses in
the home of the Jewish people, Palestine, and through the
establishment of a Jewish state in its historical
boundaries . . . The NMO . . . is of the opinion that . .
. The establishment of the historical Jewish state on a
national and totalitarian basis, and bound by a treaty
with the German Reich, would be in the interest of a
maintained and strengthened future German position of
power in the Near East. Proceeding from these
considerations, the NMO in Palestine, under the condition
the above-mentioned national aspirations of the Israeli
freedom movement are recognized on the side of the German
Reich, offers to actively take part in the war on
Germany's side.[17]
At the time the Sternists were a
numerically insignificant minority of the Zionist movement
and were reviled as the pro-Nazi loons that they obviously
were. This monstrous offer took on vastly greater
contemporary significance when one of their leaders, Yitzhak
Yzernitsky, later became prime minister of Israel under his
underground name, Yitzhak Shamir. As it happened, I was in
Jerusalem when Menachem Begin nominated him as his successor
and had the complete text of the traitors' memorandum
printed, in English, in an Arab-owned paper. An Israeli
daily used the occasion to confront Shamir on this episode.
The story was picked up in the 21 October 1983 London Times.
Yes, Shamir admitted,
There was a plan to turn
to Italy for help and to make contact with Germany on the
assumption that these could bring about a massive Jewish
immigration. I opposed this, but I did join Lehi after
the idea of contacts with the Axis countries was
dropped.[18]
Even if we were to take this
fairy tale as gospel, didn't Shamir confess to knowingly
joining a pro-Nazi movement? But he was lying. In 1963,
Gerold Frank wrote The Deed, a study of the 1944 Stern Gang
assassination of Lord Moyne, Churchill's High Commissioner
for the Middle East. Frank tells of an incident shortly
after Jabotinsky's death, on August 3, 1940. The Jabotinsky
loyalists, led by David Raziel, and the Sternists sent
speakers to try to convince the undecided among the Irgun to
go with them. Frank relates that
(T)he movement all
but disintegrated. In September Stern walked out and set
up his own group . . . Eliahu (Bet Zouri) and David Danon
. . . were summoned to a remote schoolhouse . . . (T)hey
were to be addressed by a representative of each faction
. . . (A) short, square-shouldered, square-faced,
muscular man awaited them. Itzhak Yizernitsky . . . spoke
tersely, summing up the reasons behind Stern's decision
to walk out . . . "Men!" His deep voice rumbled, "If you
want to smell fire and powder, come with us!" (pp. 91-3)
. . . David, for his part, could not forget Yizernitsky's
"fire and powder" remark in the days immediately
following the Raziel-Stern split.[19]
Frank had covered the trial of
the two Stern Gang youths who killed Moyne. Shamir organized
the slaying. In 1963 Frank had no reason to invent
Yizernitsky-Shamir's speech, which is a minor incident in
the book. But Shamir had the best reason in the world to
make up his 1983 fraud. The world was still naive. It wasn't
ready for an Israeli Prime Minister who would admit that he
wanted to ally himself with Hitler.
By 1994, when Shamir wrote his
memoirs, Summing Up, he had abandoned his lie about only
joining the Sternists after they had given up their treason
to the Jews. Now we are told that "In September 1940, my
life altered too, for I left the Irgun with Yair (Stern's
nom de guerre - LB) to enter the deeper underground from
which Lehi fought our outlawed war against the
British."[20] But he still can not honestly deal
with his own personal treason. He doesn't even mention their
memorandum, known to all scholars, of course, but he
rationalizes it away:
What Yair hoped
for was that the Nazis, so eager to rid themselves of
Jews, would help to bring the majority of Jews from
Europe, thru the British blockade, to Palestine, thus
making havoc of British illusions regarding post-war
control of the Middle East, facilitating Allied defeat
and, possibly, if Britain knew what was afoot, even
producing the withdrawal of the White Paper (limiting
Jewish immigration - LB). Whatever the result, he
reasoned, Jews would be brought to Palestine. He didn't
make this plan public, but Lehi termed the world war a
conflict between the forces of evil, between Gog and
Magog, and made unmistakable its position -- again it
must be remembered that all this was in 1940 and 1941 --
when it was reasonable to feel that there was little for
Jews to chose from between the Germans and the British.
All that counted for Yair was that this idea might, after
all, be a way to save Jews about whom, no one else, least
of all the British, seemed to care. Nothing came of it,
of course. By that time, though no one yet knew it, the
Nazis were already at work on a very different solution
to the Jewish problem. In the meanwhile, however, Lehi
was not only feared and disapproved of by the Yishuv (the
Jews of Palestine - LB), but also suspected of fifth
column activities by a public that went on believing --
incredibly, in the face of accumulating evidence to the
contrary -- that the British would open the gates of
Palestine to the anguished Jews and which refused to be
weaned of emotional and political dependence on
Britain.[21]
The destruction of Hungarian Jewry
is one of the most tragic chapters in the Holocaust. When
the Germans occupied Hungary, on March 19, 1944, its Jewish
community leaders knew what to expect, as the country had
been a refuge for Polish and Slovakian Jews. In postwar
years, the role of Rezso Kasztner, a leader of the Budapest
Rescue Committee, was subjected to detailed scrutiny in
Israeli courtrooms.
In 1953 the Ben-Gurion government
prosecuted an elderly pamphleteer, Malchiel Gruenwald, for
having libeled Kasztner as a collaborator for his dealings
with Eichmann in 1944. Gruenwald denounced Kasztner for
having kept silent about German lies that the Hungarian Jews
were only being resettled at Kenyermezo, in Hungary. In
return, he was allowed to organize a special train to
Switzerland, and place his family and friends on it.
Further, Gruenwald claimed, Kasztner later protected SS
Colonel Becher from hanging as a war criminal by claiming
that he saved Jewish lives.
On June 21, 1955, Judge Benjamin
Halevi found that there had been no libel of Kasztner, apart
from the fact that he hadn't been motivated by monetary
considerations. Later yet, Ben Hecht, a Zionist, and one of
the most famous American writers of his day, wrote up the
trial and its appeal in his book, Perfidy. Hecht quoted
Halevi's declaration that
The Nazis' patronage of
Kasztner, and their agreement to let him save six hundred
prominent Jews, were part of the plan to exterminate the
Jews. Kasztner was given a chance to add a few more to
that number. The bait attracted him. The opportunity of
rescuing prominent people appealed to him greatly. He
considered the rescue of the most important Jews as a
great personal success and a success for
Zionism.[22]
The Labor government remained loyal
to their party comrade and appealed the case.
Attorney-General Chaim Cohen put the fundamental issue
before the Supreme Court:
Kasztner did nothing
more and nothing less than was done by us in rescuing the
Jews and bringing them to Palestine . . . You are allowed
--in fact it is your duty -- to risk losing the many in
order to save the few . . . It has always been our
Zionist tradition to select the few out of many in
arranging the immigration to Palestine. Are we therefore
to be called traitors?[23]
On March 3, 1957 Kasztner was gunned
down by right-wing Zionist assassins. However the Supreme
Court handed down its decision in the case on January 17,
1958. It ruled, 5 to O, that Kasztner had perjured himself
on Becher's behalf, But it concluded, 3 to 2, that he could
not be legitimately considered a collaborator. The most
forceful majority argument was presented by Judge Shlomo
Chesin:
The question is not
whether a man is allowed to kill many in order to save a
few, or vice-versa. The question is altogether in another
sphere and should be defined as follows: a man is aware
that a whole community is awaiting its doom. He is
allowed to make efforts to save a few, although part of
his efforts involve concealment of truth from the many;
or should he disclose the truth to the many though it is
his best opinion that this way everybody will perish. I
think the answer is clear. What good will the blood of
the few bring if everyone is to perish? . . . There is no
law, either national or international, which lays down
the duties of a leader in an hour of emergency toward
those who rely on leadership and are under his
instructions.[24]
Indeed the most important aspect of
the trial was its full exposure of the working philosophy of
the WZO throughout the Nazi era: the sanctification of the
betrayal of the many in the interest of a selected
immigration. Once we understand this, we can deal with
Nathan Dror's letter.
The Nazis began taking the Jews of
Slovakia in March 1942. Rabbi Michael Dov-Ber Weissmandel, a
member of the Agudat Yisrael, an ultra-Orthodox political
party, contacted Dieter Wisliceny, Eichmann's
representative, and told him that he was in touch with the
leaders of world Jewry. Would the Nazi take money for
Slovakia's Jews? Money was paid and the surviving Jews were
spared until 1944.
Weissmandel became one of the
outstanding Jewish rescue figures during the Holocaust
because he was the first to demand that the Allies bomb
Auschwitz. His post-war book, Min HaMaitzer (From the
Depths) written in Talmudic Hebrew, also tells of his
further efforts to pay off the Nazis to save Jewish lives.
Wisliceny took the matter up with Berlin and told the rabbi,
in 1943, that he could have all the Jews in western Europe
and the Balkans for $2 million in American money, then a
substantial sum. Weissmandel sent a courier to Switzerland
to try to get the money from Jewish organizations. The
courier brought back a letter from Nathan Schwalb, the
representative of the Hechalutz, a youth section of the
Labor Party. Dror is Schwalb's Zionist, i.e., Hebrew, name.
Weissmandel described the document:
There was another letter
in the envelope, written in a strange foreign language
and at first I could not decipher at all which language
it was until I realized that this was Hebrew written in
Roman letters, and written to Schwalb's friends in
Pressburg (Bratislava) . . . It is still before my eyes,
as if I had reviewed it a hundred and one times. This was
the content of the letter: "Since we have the opportunity
of this courier, we are writing to the group that they
must constantly have before them that in the end the
Allies will win. After their victory they will divide the
world again between the nations, as they did at the end
of the first world war. Then they unveiled the plan for
the first step and now, at the war's end, we must do
everything so that Eretz Yisroel will become the state of
Israel, and important steps have already been taken in
this direction. About the cries coming from your country,
we should know that all the Allied nations are spilling
much of their blood, and if we do not sacrifice any
blood, by what right shall we merit coming before the
bargaining table when they divide nations and lands at
the war's end? Therefore it is silly, even impudent, on
our part to ask these nations who are spilling their
blood to permit their money into enemy countries in order
to protect our blood -- for only with blood shall we get
the land. But in respect to you, my friends, atem taylu,
and for this purpose I am sending you money illegally
with this messenger.[25]
The letter startled rabbi
Weissmandel, to say the least. He pondered over it many
times:
After I had accustomed
myself to this strange writing, I trembled, understanding
the meaning of the first words which were "only with
blood shall we attain land." But days and weeks went by,
and I did not know the meaning of the last two words.
Until I saw from something that happened that the words
"atem taylu" were from "tiyul" (to walk which was their
special term for "rescue.") In other words: you my fellow
members, my 19 or 20 close friends, get out of Slovakia
and save your lives and with the blood of the remainder
--the blood of all the men, women, old and young and the
sucklings -- the land will belong to us. Therefore, in
order to save their lives it is a crime to allow money
into enemy territory --but to save you beloved friends,
here is money obtained illegally.[26]
He went on:
"It is understood that I
do not have these letters --for they remained there and
were destroyed with everything else that was
lost."[27]
Weissmandel assured us that the
dedicated Zionist rescue workers in Slovakia were appalled
by Schwalb-Dror's letter. But it expressed the morbid
thoughts of the rancid elements running the WZO: Instead of
Zionism being the hope of the Jews, their blood was to be
the salvation of Zionism.
Reasonable readers have seen for
themselves that the ADL libeled me. But they may say that
'every movement has its lunatic fringe. Libelers are not
reviewers. What do responsible Zionist historians have to
say about Brenner and his charges?'
Walter Laqueur, the chairman of the
International Research Council of the Center for Strategic
and International Studies at Georgetown University, devoted
six pages to attacking me in the November 2, 1987 New
Republic. (Again, I sent in a reply, but Martin Peretz has
no honor and his magazine did not run it,) Laqueur insists
that
Even if all his facts
were correct, Brenner's book would not be a serious study
of Zionism, any more than a collection of profiles in
scurrility from Benedict Arnold to Al Capone would be a
serious history of the United
States.[28]
Surely Capone wasn't the last
American rogue! At any rate, after showing me to be the
monster that I surely am, this Zionist defense attorney
makes a few concessions concerning my charges:
It is quite true that
some Zionists should not have looked for Mussolini's
support, even in the 1920s; they were grievously mistaken
to do so . . . It is true, moreover, that German Zionists
did not fully understand the meaning of Hitler when he
came to power in 1933. Some of their comments and
declarations make embarrassing reading 50 years
later.[29]
Laqueur wrote his plaidoyer for his
movement's treachery before Schwalb-Dror's suit had been
flung through the courtroom door. In the wake of that
debacle for Zionism, his comments sound more than a bit
odd:
The story of one Nathan
Schwalb . . . is absolutely crucial for the play . . .
Still, something went very wrong with this star witness
for the prosecution . . . Schwalb is alive . . . Thus, to
their dismay, Allen and Brenner found themselves suddenly
confronted with a libel action. Instead of refusing to
change a single word in their manuscript, they have
excised ten pages from Perdition. They must know that
they could not possibly make their case in a court of law
-- or indeed, in the court of public
opinion.[30]
In fact Laqueur was deliberately
deceptive in this matter. On page 144 of his 1980 book, The
Terrible Secret, the great historian himself had reported
that Schwalb-Dror refused access to his files to
scholars.
Robert Wistrich is a professor of
modern Jewish History at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He
devoted not a few words to denouncing me in his book,
Between Redemption and Perdition. He
(W)ould claim that the
falsifiers of the anti-Israeli Left who now rewrite the
history of the Holocaust as a story of Nazi-Zionist
'collaboration' are no less dangerous than the neo-Nazi
'revisionists' and possibly more effective . . . (W)orks
by Lenni Brenner, such as Zionism in the Age of the
Dictators . . . are increasingly symptomatic of the times
we live in.[31]
Nevertheless he, like Laqueur, has
to make a few admissions that some of my charges are quite
true:
In my view the entire
Jewish leadership of that generation -- including the
Zionists -- failed the test of the times and no useful
purpose is served by covering this up. Nor can it be
denied, given that the major priority of the Zionist
movement at the time was indeed building Palestine, that
the tragedy of Diaspora Jewry was inevitably given less
attention than it deserved. Equally, one can make a
reasonable case that Zionists did not fight antisemitism
before 1939 with the appropriate vigour, that some
Zionists favoured the principle of racial separateness,
and that others wanted to develop a 'special
relationship' with the Nazis for opportunistic or other
reasons.[32]
Readers must realize that not one
responsible historian grants a flyspeck of credence to even
a syllable of any Holocaust revisionist's scribblings. But
even though Foxman and Caplan insist that my writings are
"another aspect of Holocaust 'revisionist' thinking," two
star Zionist historians confessed that a raft of my
accusations are --alas! -- all too true. So much for the
Anti-Defamation League's crude attempt to defame
me.
III - The squalid history
of the ADL
Even now, after I've adduced
overwhelming evidence that the Zionist movement failed
European Jewry in its fatal hour, and that therefore the ADL
has libeled me, readers may ask a bewildered question: Why
is the ADL doing this? That is because the public is so
appalled at what the Nazis did to the Jews that it usually
doesn't think to ask what the ADL did for the Jews.
Additionally, most people identify the ADL with its
contemporary reports on anti-Semitism. It appears to be a
bone fide civil rights watchdog. But it did nothing for the
Jews in the Nazi era and it has always been an
ultra-rightist nest.
The ADL is an autonomous branch of
the B'nai B'rith (The Sons of the Covenant), an
international fraternal order, established on October 13,
1843, with the declared "mission of uniting Israelites in
the work of promoting their highest interests and those of
humanity."[33] The first challenge confronting the
group was the slavery question, which it evaded in the
interest of maintaining unity between northern and southern
Jews. The ADL itself was set up in 1913, the year that a
Jew, Leo Frank, was lynched in Georgia. Its role in fighting
anti-Semitism in the years before Hitler came to power was
pathetic. Deborah Moore's B'nai B'rith and the Challenge of
Ethnic Leadership says that
(T)he ADL's
internal-education section (was) devoted to changing the
behavior of Jews perceived to be unethical in the eyes of
Americans . . . In 1928, commenting on a lynching in
Illinois, the (B'nai B'rith) Magazine had admitted that
"when another kind of a man gets hanged, we feel those
revulsions that are natural at the sight of a
fellow-being going to his doom in the flush of life. But
when we read of a Jew being hanged, we discover ourselves
feeling resentful, not towards the hanging but towards
the erring Jew."
The Magazine had concluded that "the
sinning of the Jew is counted by men not alone against
himself but against his people
likewise."[34]
A booklet, This is B'nai B'rith,
published in 1943 by the organization, listed very few
activities for those years, with the main ADL accomplishment
being to effect
a profound change in the
treatment of Jews in vaudeville. Jewish comedians were
loath in some instances to correct their caricature of
their fellow Jews, but earnest efforts on the part of the
League in presenting the social aspects of the problem
resulted in pronounced modification of the objectionable
"humor."[35]
This is B'nai B'rith talked vaguely
about the ADL's anti-Nazi career in the years between
Hitler's taking power and the war:
In the years of
persecution and propaganda that followed in the wake of
1933, the A.D.L., through its program of research,
widespread fact dissemination, neutralization of libels
and a systematic campaign of education for democracy to
counteract the effects of un-American movements, was able
to make a major contribution to the common struggle
against anti-Semitism.[36]
The booklet couldn't say more
because the ADL and B'nai B'rith role was disgraceful. The
spontaneous reaction of American Jews to the Nazis'
ascendency to power was to boycott German goods. But there
were those who opposed a boycott. These worthies confined
themselves to charity efforts for German Jewry and its
refugees. Not least of these do-nothings was the B'nai
B'rith. The B'nai B'rith Magazine ran an editorial in its
May, 1933 issue. Be sure you are sitting down when you read
this:
Criticism is heard:
B'nai B'rith did not join the public protests against the
German-Jewish tragedy! . . . The members of this
organization have cause to be proud of their affiliation
with a Jewish body that obscured its own prestige in
order to serve its German brethren the better . . . With
the Hitler government threatening reprisals against Jews,
should B'nai B'rith have rushed forward with loud
protests? . . . Even those who were at first hot for
public protest have come to see that discretion is the
better part of valor in an hour when lives are in the
balance . . . As for B'nai B'rith, it feels that its
action in this crisis will make a worthy chapter in its
history.[37]
Samuel Untermeyer, leader of the
boycott movement, explained the stance of elements like
B'nai B'rith and the American Jewish Committee (the parent
of today's Commentary magazine, which the B'nai B'rith
always bracketed itself with, and which also opposed
boycotting Hitler). Boycott, he said, in 1933,
conjures up to them
images of force and illegality, such as have on occasions
in the past characterized struggles between labor unions
and their employers. As these timid souls are capitalists
and employers, the word and all that it implies is
hateful to their ears.[38]
The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust
article on the B'nai B'rith reports that even after the
Nazis closed down the organization in Germany, in 1937, the
president of the order "remained opposed to public protest
and boycott, and still believed that "quiet diplomacy" could
help the Jews of Germany." The Encyclopedia goes
on:
B'nai B'rith, fearful of
arousing antisemitism in the United States -- like most
American Jews at the time -- did not challenge the quota
system of the 1924 Immigration Act and did not try to
arouse public opinion against the administration's policy
of not fully utilizing even the quotas provided by that
act.[39]
Nor did the ADL do anything of any
significance in the fight against the German-American Bund
and its home-grown allies, the followers of the Catholic
clerical-fascist, Father Coughlan, or the KKK. Nathan
Belth's A Promise to Keep, published in 1979 by the ADL,
mentions a pamphlet on Coughlin, published in 1939 by a
coalition of Jewish groups, including the ADL. It then
relates that "The League and the (American Jewish) Committee
. . . had as a matter of policy and tactics been inclined to
maintain low profiles in public."[40] When the Bund
staged a rally in New York's Madison Square Garden on
February 20, 1939, the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party
called a counter-demonstration. Fifty thousand Jews and
others fought a five hour street battle with the cops, who
protected the Jew-haters. But the night belonged to the
demonstrators. The 20,000 Nazis and Coughlanites would have
been mauled if the police weren't present. The ADL did
absolutely nothing to fight the Nazis that night. Indeed it
was never prepared to fight the enemies of the
Jews.
IV - The ADL and
McCarthyism
Given the ADL's bankruptcy during
the Hitler era, it is hardly surprising that it continued on
as an integral part of the witchhunting apparatus that
emerged in America at the onset of the cold war. Arnold
Forster, the ADL's counsel, wrote about this morbid episode
in his book, Square One.
In 1956 the Fund for the Republic
issued a report on blacklisting in Hollywood and TV. It
described how the victims of the right-wing "security
clearance system" were either 'rehabilitated' or driven out
of the industry. An unnamed "public relations expert" is
quoted on the process. Forster acknowledged that he was the
expert and reprinted the relevant passages in his
book:
If a man . . . finds his
way to me . . . (and) I am convinced that he is not a
Communist, or if he has been a Communist, has had a
change of heart, I ask him whether he has talked to the
FBI. If he hasn't, I tell him the first thing he must do
is go to them and tell them everything he knows . . .
The public relations expert
concluded: 'A guy who is in trouble, even if he has a good
case for himself, will stay dead unless he finds someone
like me who can lead him through the jungle of people who
have to be satisfied. He has to persuade those people one by
one. Usually he finds his way to a lawyer and that comes a
cropper, or he finds a public relations man or press agent
who doesn't have the confidence of the 'clearance men,' and
he's only wasting his time.[41]
Forster would take the hapless actor
to right-wing journalists like Victor Reisel or Fred Woltman
for "affidavits" and then go to CBS and try to get his "boy"
a job. Square One was written after McCarthyism had been
thoroughly discredited and Forster made it look like he was
an unwilling collaborator with the witchhunters. But the
truth breaks out through the eyes of a cat, as they say. A
Communist magazine, Jewish Life, uncovered an internal ADL
memo, dated July 3, 1953, and ran it in their September,
1953 issue. It dealt with a conference that took place in
the office of the House Un-American Activities Committee, on
July 2, 1953. Herman Edelsberg, the memo's author, was
there, as were Washington representatives of the American
Jewish Committee and the Jewish War Veterans. The question
before them was how HUAC should deal with hostile Jewish
Communist witnesses. Edelsberg's report says that they made
the following proposals to Harold Velde, HUAC's
chair:
The files of the ADL and
AJC should be consulted for information about such
witnesses. Where responsible Jewish organizations had
repudiated the witness or the line he peddles, that fact
should be put in the record before the witness sounds
off. In such cases, it would be most unlikely that the
newspapers would play up the witness' charges against the
Committee . . . The Committee staff handling such
witnesses should be familiar with our analyses of the
Communists' studied tactics of exploiting charges of
persecution and discrimination. The witnesses should be
confronted with material from ADL's report, The
Troublemakers, and our two pamphlets on Communism . . .
Velde and counsel agreed then and there that in the
future, Committee investigators would be sent to the ADL
and AJC for material on prospective witnesses. (That
would be a good opportunity to make specific suggestions
on procedure.) . . . We left on the most friendly basis.
My colleagues and I were heartened by the understandings
achieved.[42]
Witchhunting began to decline after
Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin was censured by the Senate
in 1954, for trying to red-bait the US army. Forster claimed
that
(T)he senator had built
himself enough of a record to convince me he was bad
medicine. Not that the League itself, although
recognizing the evil in the man, had yet become
sufficiently resolute to attack McCarthy frontally. We
were suffering from the same fear of him and his
destructive, national movement, that affected so many
others. ADL had been treading cautiously about him while
demonstrating its opposition to his frenetic crusade. It
was not until 1956, when Ben Epstein and I released our
book, Cross-Currents, that we openly attacked McCarthy
himself.[43]
V - ADL witchhunting after
McCarthy
McCarthyism may have declined but
the ADL's hatred of the left most certainly didn't. On
February 22, 1967, the New York Times reported that the
Institute for International Labor Research, led by Norman
Thomas, the most prominent figure in the Socialist Party,
had received $1,048,940 between 1961 and 1963 from the CIA.
Later, in the July 1982 Commentary, Sidney Hook revealed
that Thomas had "telephoned Allen Dulles of the CIA and
requested a contribution" for their American Committee for
Cultural Freedom in the mid-1950s.[44] From 1957
through 1962 Irwin Suall was the National Secretary of the
SP. Today he is the "chief factfinder," i.e., the head spy,
for the ADL.
I met Suall in 1957. I was a member
of another socialist group which was merging with the SP. Of
course we had no idea about Thomas's ties with the CIA. I
left the SP in 1959 and was in California when the Times
broke the Thomas story, and I didn't see it. Therefore I
suspected nothing when I encountered Suall in the Lion's
Head Tavern in Greenwich Village in the early '70s. (I
believe the year was 1971.)
He spotted me at the bar, called out
my name, and triumphantly announced that I was "with the
National Association for Irish Justice," the support group
for the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. He told
me that he was the ADL's chief fact-finder and explained
that he knew all about the NAIJ because he had files on the
American tours of Ian Paisley, a right-wing Protestant
fanatic, who was the most vehement foe of civil rights for
Catholics. Whenever he came here he associated with our own
right-wing Protestant screwballs, some of them
anti-Semites.
We two old friends drank the night
into morning when I suggested that he let me see his Paisley
file. NAIJ could use it to show the Irish Catholic community
here where Paisley fit into right-wing politics in this
country. "I can't do that. You have enemies of Israel in
your organization." At that time I had little interest in
Israel. I knew that we had various leftists in the NAIJ, who
were anti-Zionist, but the topic of Israel never came up in
our pro-Irish movement. I explained to him that people would
think it rather odd if we asked prospective members how they
stood on Israel. That didn't matter. Enemies of Israel are
enemies of Israel and that was that.
Suall then began to rattle off
intimate details about NAIJ, including the name of a
Communist who had just started working for us. I realized he
had a spy in my organization. We knew the British, Irish and
American governments automatically put agents into our
ranks. Therefore we were discreet when we did anything
illegal under US law. But we had a policy of not starting a
witchhunt for such spies because that only tends to make
everyone into paranoids, and that can kill a movement. I
figured out who Suall's mole was. However, as I couldn't
prove my suspect was Suall's operative, and the certain
presence of more important spies wasn't affecting us, I
prudently didn't mention this singular conversation to
anyone.
In fact the ADL even boasts that it
spies on leftists. In their 1974 book, The New
Anti-Semitism, Forster and Benjamin Epstein brazenly
announced that ADL agents attended conventions closed to the
general public:
The ADL has
traditionally viewed close monitoring of extremist
activities as part of its obligation to the Jewish and
American communities. Therefore, its representatives
often attend open meetings, conventions, and conferences
of extremist groups (left wing and right wing) to keep
abreast of what the groups are
doing.[45]
The two authors rationalized ADL
infiltration of the Socialist Workers Party:
The SWP . . . take(s)
umbrage when its anti-Israel, anti-Zionist extremism is
called anti-Semitism. Its domestic political course has
been clearly anti-Jewish . . . Although its spokesmen
have been careful to avoid the use of crude anti-Semitic
phraseology, the SWP's program and activities . . . have
been totally hostile . . . whenever Jews have been under
attack from anti-Semites who happen to be black, the SWP
has consistently joined the fray against the
Jews.[46]
As we know from the Bund episode,
the SWP believes in busting up Nazi rallies. It is careful
not to utilize anti-Semitic phrases. It welcomes Jews into
its leadership. Therefore, isn't it plain that "its domestic
course has been clearly anti-Jewish"? That charge from an
organization which did next door to nothing vs. Hitler, wins
the all-time chutzpah prize.
The magnitude of ADL spying on
progressive movements became public knowledgein 1993 when
the San Francisco papers revealed that Tom Gerard, a local
cop (and ex-CIA man) illegally gave police information to
Roy Bullock, Suall'sman in SF. Further police sleuthing
revealed that they spied on a mass of groups, from Nazis
through to Armenian nationalists, the American Friends
Service Committee, the Mobilization for Peace, Jobs and
Justice, the Bay Area's broad-spectrum peace marchers, and
the ANC and the anti-apartheid movement. The two also spied
directly on these last for BOSS, South Africa's secret
police.
As things stand, Gerard has pled no
contest to a charge of illegal access to police computers.
He got three years probation, a $2,500 fine and 45 days on
the sheriff's work crew. The ADL made a 'we didn't do it,
but we won't do it again' deal with the DA. It agreed to an
injunction not to use illegal methods in its 'monitoring' of
the entire political universe. Foxman said that, rather than
go to trial, where they would certainly be found innocent,
of course, ADL settled because "continuing with an
investigation over your head for months and years leads some
to believe there is something wrong."[47] The
arrangement prevents prosecution of Bullock.
In spite of the DA's
slap-on-the-wrist deal, the documentation of Bullock's
activities provided by the police when they sought a warrant
to search the ADL offices in SF and Los Angeles, was
extensive. The ADL claims that Bullock was a free-lance
informer and that his activities for the apartheid regime
were unknown to them. But an FBI report on a January 26,
1993 interview with Bullock takes up a letter found in his
computer files, "prepared for transmission to the South
Africans." It read "during an extended conversation with two
FBI agents" in March 1990, they asked "why do you think
South African agents are coming to the West
Coast?"
"Did I know any agents," they
finally asked? . . . I replied that a meeting had been
arranged, in confidence, by the ADL which wanted information
on radical right activities in SA and their American
connections. To that end I met an agent at Rockefeller
Center cafeteria.
The FBI report says that "Bullock
commented that the TRIP.DBX letter was a very 'damning'
piece of evidence. He said he had forgotten it was in his
computer." Of course he hastened to tell the FBI that "his
statements to the FBI that the ADL had set up his
relationship with the South Africans were
untrue."[48]
It is far more likely that Bullock
was telling the truth in March 1990 and lying in January
1993. Apparently the FBI came to him on another matter in
1990 and surprised him with their questions about the South
Africans. In 1993, Bullock met the feds in his lawyers'
office. It is reasonable to presume that they had told him
what to say, and what not to say. Certainly he knew that if
he wanted ADL assistance in his troubles with the FBI
concerning the South Africans, he would have to claim that
they had nothing to do with his South African
ties.
We must also look at this situation
from the ADL's perspective. In 1993 it had the same access
to these FBI reports as anyone else. It then knew that he
had implicated them with Pretoria. Why didn't they repudiate
him then for daring to lie about them in such a grave
affair? And, for that matter, why didn't they repudiate him
for trafficking with the apartheid regime, which they
claimed to oppose? Could it be that they didn't dare do so?
If they dumped him, he would have an incentive to tell the
FBI everything he knew about their illegal activities,
regarding the South Africans, and/or any ADL involvement in
Israeli spying and other criminal activities
there.
Robert Friedman, known for his
factual reliability when writing on Jewish matters, reported
that "Suall later told the FBI that 'he didn't think dealing
with South African intelligence was different than dealing
with any other police agency,' according to a law
enforcement source."[49] At any rate, the November
17, 1993 Daily News Bulletin, an organ of the Zionist
movement's Jewish Telegraphic Agency, reported that, after
the settlement with the SFDA, "the ADL continues to work
with Bullock, according to Abraham
Foxman."[50]
Israel was South Africa's intimate
military ally, selling weaponry to the masters of apartheid
in the face of a UN arms embargo. And the ADL's own public
stance was so opposed to the African National Congress that
it stretches credulity to the breaking point for anyone to
think that they didn't know that Bullock was working with
the South Africans. When he told the FBI that the ADL put
him in contact with the South Africans, he expected them to
believe him, because the world knew that Israel, the ADL's
political holy land, was Pretoria's ally.
The ADL Bulletin for May 1986 ran an
article by Nathan Perlmutter and David Evanier, "The African
National Congress: A Closer Look," which revealed the
organization's intense hatred of the movement leading the
struggle in South Africa. The piece started off with a pious
"self-evident stipulation that apartheid is racist and
dehumanizing." But, it then went on,
(T)his is not to suggest
closing our eyes to what may emerge once apartheid is
gone . . . We must distinguish between those who will
work for a humane, democratic, pro-western South Africa
and those who are totalitarian, anti-humane,
anti-democratic, anti-Israeli and
anti-American.
The article went on to document what
everyone already knew. The Soviet Union supported the ANC.
The ANC backed the PLO as fellow colonized people. Then came
the moral to the story:
The fall of South Africa
to such a Soviet oriented and Communist influenced force
would be a severe setback to the United States, whose
defense industry relies heavily on South Africa's wealth
of strategic minerals . . . The survival of freedom in
South Africa will be possible only if the forces of
violence on the far left and of racial violence on the
far right are defeated by the democratic forces of
moderation.
Those forces of moderation were --
didn't you know? -- the apartheid regime itself: "The US
State Department", i.e., Reagan, said that "more positive
changes have taken place in South Africa in the last five
years than in the previous 300."[51]
For propagandistic reasons, Israel
had to make it look like it was against apartheid and
supported responsible opposition to it. So it openly
patronized Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, head of the Inkatha
Freedom Party and its death squads. When he toured here in
1992, Israel got the Conference of Presidents of Major
American Jewish Organizations to host him at their New York
office. They knew that, according to the June 12, 1992 DNB,
"many observers . . . say the violence among blacks reflects
collusion between the South African security forces and
Inkatha aimed at disabling the ANC." Yet, according to
Kenneth Jacobson, the ADL's director of international
affairs, there was "nothing for us to feel guilty about.
He's a man with a point of view, and that should be heard."
The Mr. Nice Guy of South African politics declared himself
a free-market freedom-fightin' kind of fella and "not a
friend of Gadhafi or Yasir Arafat. All these are friends of
the ANC."[52]
The ADL thought so highly of their
1986 anti-ANC tirade that they sent it to every member of
the US Congress! And even after Bullock was exposed as
specifically reporting to the South Africans on an LA
meeting for Chris Hani of the ANC, Foxman fanatically
defended their venomous hatred of South Africa's liberators.
The Northern California Jewish Bulletin for May 7, 1993
described how
Foxman, seeming like a
general dressing down his troops, marched into the Jewish
Bulletin office . . . where he lambasted critics of the
ADL, speaking angrily of a conspiracy and at times fuming
as he turned several shades of red . . . "People are very
upset about the (files on the) ANC," he agrees. "At the
time we exposed the ANC, they were Communist. They were
violent, they were anti-Semitic, they were pro-PLO and
they were anti-Israel. You're going to tell me I don't
have the legitimacy to find out who they were consorting
with."[53]
Time hasn't been kind to Foxman. The
ANC runs its country and is a model of ethnic and religious
tolerance. It never was anti-Semitic and today there are
seven Jewish ANCers in the Pretoria parliament. Foxman was
-- and is -- exactly what the Jewish Bulletin's journalist
described: a steam-coming-out-of-his-ears right-wing
ranter.
VI - The ADL and the
affirmative action question
As many readers well know, whole
Canadian forests have been chopped down in recent years to
provide newsprint for articles on Black anti-Semitism. Such
pieces frequently begin with a nostalgic look back at the
good ol' 'Black-Jewish alliance' of the early '60s when the
ADL was part of the great -- dare I say it? -- multicultural
coalitions that marched behind Martin Luther
King.
Such articles usually then turn into
tales of Black ingratitude. In life the Jewish establishment
was only part of such an alliance until the Black movement
began to call for affirmative action quotas, and the
left-wing of the movement began to support the Palestinians
as fellow oppressed. From then on the ADL has been a fanatic
opponent of Black liberation. Jonathan Kaufman's Broken
Alliance tells of how Jack Greenberg, long-time head of the
NAACP Legal Defense Fund, came to see the ADL:
As legal cases involving
affirmative action began to appear in the courts in the
early 1970s, the Legal Defense Fund began filing lawsuits
. . . One of the first cases involved a challenge to the
New York prison system, which had never promoted a black
correction officer above the entry level . . . The Legal
Defense Fund sued successfully . . . When the case was
appealed, Greenberg was stunned to discover that the
Anti-Defamation League had filed a brief opposing the
affirmative action plan . . . He did not know officials
at the ADL well. But he . . . called several of them up .
. . (Eventually) Greenberg felt some officials of the
ADL, the most vociferous opponents of affirmative action,
had become "haters."[54]
In its most notorious
anti-affirmative action campaign, the ADL was one of a
gaggle of rightwing Jewish groups, plus several gentile
"unmeltable ethnic" outfits, the Fraternal Order of Police,
the Chamber of Commerce and other free-market
freedom-fightin' guys, who submitted amici curiae briefs on
Allen Bakke's behalf when he sued the University of
California at Davis for setting aside 16 seats in its
medical school for minorities. In 1978 the Supreme Court
ruled that the school's plan discriminated against
whites.
In the August 1985 issue of
Commentary, Harvard sociology professor Nathan Glazer gave
us the "pragmatic considerations" behind the Jewish
establishment's undying hatred of quotas:
Jews were already
"over-represented" in the institutions that were becoming
battlefields . . . If it were to be generally conceded
that each ethnic/racial group should be represented
proportionately . . . what would happen to the
over-represented?[55]
There is no doubt that Glazer, who
is intimate with the Jewish establishment, was referring to
the ADL, amongst the others, when he wrote the above. And in
fact the ADL does give a distinctly 'Jewish' spin to its
opposition to quotas. The December, 1978 ADL Bulletin quotes
Nathan Perlmutter, Foxman's predecessor as National
Director, on quotas:
The message of the 1960s civil
rights movement, he explains, was to be color blind, to
judge a person on his individual merits. "Now, guided and
abetted by government agencies, there is massive backsliding
to quotas, to evaluating a person on such extraneous factors
as race. The simple incontrovertible fact is that quotas in
favor of one group, by definition, means quotas against
another group. That's the very essence of the Nuremberg
Laws."[56]
According to the November, 1979 ADL
Bulletin, the ADL "submitted a 'friend of the court' brief"
in a case, Fullilove v. Kreps,
concerned with the
constitutionality of the Federal Public Works Employment
Act of 1977, which provides that no grant for public
works shall be made unless the applicant assures . . .
that at least 10 percent of each grant sum be expended
for "minority" business enterprises . . . (The) ADL . . .
opposes this quota and questions the legality of laws
which establish governmentally-designated and protected
groups. "Stamping the imprimatur of the Federal
government upon a particular racial or ethnic definition,
and granting and withholding benefits to individuals
accordingly," our brief points out, "calls to mind
notorious examples of attempts by other governments to
define racial and ethnic groups, such as the Nuremberg
laws in the Third Reich defining a
'Jew'."[57]
People get sent to mental
institutions for a lot less than this. The notion that a
law, doubtlessly supported by a majority of congressional
Democrats, designed to bring a small measure of economic
justice to Blacks, Spanish-speakers, Orientals, Indians,
Eskimos and Aleuts, was really no better than Nazi
anti-Jewish legislation, takes my breath away. The idea that
affirmative action quotas in favor of minorities, might be
used, some day in the future, as a pretext to discriminate
against Jews, is a notion that hasn't occurred to anyone
outside the Jewish establishment There were Jews among the
congressional majorities that voted in every affirmative
action law. Surely no such scheme was thought to be
sanctioned by them. Were the gentiles in those congresses,
black or white, even remotely contemplating discrimination
against Jews? Of course not! The Nazi laws were measures
taken against a minority hated by the German government.
American affirmative action laws are policies projected by a
government with a white majority in favor of minorities,
Jews are affected only insofar as they are overwhelmingly
white. And, of course, affirmative action has actually
benefited Jews. Glazer points out that
(F)emales were one of
the groups designated as beneficiaries of affirmative
action. Thus . . . one could argue that Jewish women were
as much helped by affirmative action as Jewish men were
hurt, or helped even more than Jewish men were
hurt.[58]
Arguments utilizing previous
discrimination against Jews to oppose present proposals to
redress past discrimination against America's ethnic
minorities, and women, are ideological self-deceptions, at
best, and sophistries at worst. They are designed to put a
pseudo-progressive gloss on efforts to preserve the economic
status quo. And, as affirmative action in favor of women
stands or falls with similar policies towards Blacks and
other minorities, such specious reasoning is a razor against
the interest of the majority of Jews, who, as with all other
groups, are majority female.
VII - Yo! Abe! Make me rich
and famous, not just famous
Since one of the most important
things we learn from the past is that most people don't
learn from the past, I must automatically presume that at
least some of my readers will still say, even after this
obviously factual recounting of the ADL's record, that,
whatever its past sins, it performs a valuable service in
exposing some anti-Semites. But its reactionary politics
constantly leads it to libel and lunacy, so much so that I
must confess that I celebrated when I discovered Foxman's
attack on me. It meant that I certified as part of the
intellectual elite.
Surely the most hilarious of the
ADL's cockeyed accusations were uttered by Forster and
Epstein in their book:
Film cartoons - like the
the X-rated Fritz the Cat which . . . had a tasteless
synagogue sequence . . . contributed to the atmosphere of
anti-Jewish denigration, along with anti-Jewish
stereotyping found in such full-length 1972 feature films
as Woody Allen's Everything You've Always Wanted to Know
About Sex, Such Good Friends, and Made for Each Other in
addition, of course, to Portnoy . . . Capping and
capitalizing on the vogue for sick "ethnic" humor and
dehumanization was . . . The National Lampoon . . .
October 1972. A major item was a mock comic book entitled
"The Ventures of Zimmerman," a put-down on folksinger Bob
Dylan, drawn with Jewish features, blue Yarmulke, and
portrayed as a scheming, avaricious, money-hungry
"superman" type who poses as a simple idealistic
folksinger . . . The mock cover . . . bore a "seal"
reading "Approved by the Elders of Zion" . . . Are the
editors of Lampoon anti-Semitic? Probably not. But they
have made a signal contribution to the perpetuation of
those destructive stereotypes - like the Stuermer
cartoons so intimately associated with the annihilation
of European Jewry.[59]
For my immediate purpose of
defending myself, a Jew, against a libelous accusation of
being a Holocaust denier, I call your attention to the fact
that at least two of the people accused of contributing to
the atmosphere of anti-Jewish denigration were Jews, Woody
Allen and Philip Roth, two of the greatest comic talents of
our age. But frankly I must say that comparing a Lampoon
spoof to the Hitler regime's most virulent Jew-hating rag is
easily the maddest thing I've ever seen in any ADL
production.
You didn't know that Spike Lee is an
anti-Semite? Well then, you just are not as smart as one
Abraham Foxman. Here is the Forward for August 10,
1990:
Filmmaker Spike Lee's
portrayal of two Jewish jazz club owners in the new film
"Mo' Better Blues" is being called anti-Semitic by . . .
the Anti-Defamation League . . . The two-dimensional
depiction of the two brothers, named Moe and Josh
Flatbush, who appear in brief scenes throughout the
movie, was sharply criticized by Abraham Foxman . . .
"Spike Lee's characterization of Moe and Josh Flatbush as
greedy an unscrupulous club owners dredges up an age-old
and dangerous form of anti-Semitic
stereotyping."[60]
Spike Lee isn't the kind of person
to take that kind of crap from anyone, and he replied to the
charge in a New York Times op-ed:
I'm not a racist; I'm
not a bigot; I am not an anti-Semite. What I try to do
with all my characters is offer what I feel are honest
portraits of individuals with both faults and endearing
characteristics . . . I challenge anyone to tell me why I
can't portray two club owners who happen to be Jewish and
who exploit the Black jazz musicians who work for them.
All Jewish club owners are not like this, that's true,
but these two are . . . I'm an artist and I stand behind
all my work, including my characters, Moe and Josh
Flatbush. As of now, this matter is closed for
me.[61]
I have presented more than enough
evidence for any serious reader to grasp the base character
of both the ADL and the Zionist movement. Therefore it is
time for me to close as well. I will do so with a quote,
from a Zionist writer's article in The New Republic, a
pro-Zionist publication:
(W)hile ever growing
numbers of Jews believe anti-Semitism in America is
rising to crisis proportions, by nearly every available
measure it is actually on the decline . . . In private,
some Jewish agency staffers insist the alarmist tone set
by a few national Jewish agencies, mainly for
fund-raising purposes, is a key cause of Jewish anxiety.
Fingers point most often at the ADL and the Los
Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, both of which
specialize in mass mailings warning of impending doom and
urging donations. "People don't give if you tell them
everything's o.k.," says a cynical staffer at one of the
smaller agencies. People give generously to the
Wiesenthal Center and the ADL.[62]
J. J. Goldberg concludes by saying
that "maybe it's time for the leadership to start leading,
and tell their public the truth." But of course they won't.
Therefore I ask my readers to help me expose these incurable
frauds. Now that you have read this critique of the ADL,
pass it along to the general public, Jew and gentile alike.
And let me thank you, in advance, for your time and trouble
in this regard.
This article was first published in
a pamphlet by the same title in the USA in 1993 , is
reproduced with the kind permission of Lenni Brenner.
© Lenni Brenner,
2002
NOTES
1 Abraham Foxman, "Holocaust Denial:
The Growing Danger," Dimensions, vol. 8, 1994, p.
14.
2 Marc Caplan, Hitler's Apologists:
The Anti-Semitic Propaganda of Holocaust "Revisionism," p.
51.
3 Eric Breindel, "The Price of
Rescue," New Republic, February 18, 1985, pp.
39-41.
4 Fall/Winter 1984 Books and Tapes
of Revisionist History.
5 Letter from Institute for
Historical Review, March 8,1985.
6 Letter to Institute for Historical
Review, April 11, 1985.
7 Alex Cockburn, "Cockburn Replies,"
Nation, August 31, 1985, p. 130.
8 David Cesarani, "Back To
Perdition," Jewish Chronicle (London), July 3, 1987, p.
26.
9 Stuart Hood, "Questions of Guilt
and Taboo," Guardian (London), July 10, 1987.
10 Julian Kossoff, "Full Version of
'Perdition' to be published," Jewish Chronicle (London),
November 27, 1992, p. 8.
11 Lucy Dawidowicz (ed.), A
Holocaust Reader, pp. 150-155.
12 David Yisraeli, The Palestine
Problem in German Politics 1889-1945 (Hebrew) Bar-Ilan
University, Appendix (German): "Geheime Kommandosache
Bericht," pp. 301-302.
13 Heinz Hohne, The Order of the
Death's Head, p. 337.
14 Klaus Polkehn, "The Secret
Contacts: Zionism and Nazi Germany 1933-41," Journal of
Palestine Studies, Spring 1976, p. 75.
15 "Dr. von Weisl Believes in
Fascism," World Jewry (London), June 12, 1936, p.
12.
16 "Supplemento al no. 8 di L'Idea
Sionista," March 1936, p. 2.
17 "Grundzuege des Vorschlages der
Nationalen Militaerischen Organisation in Palastina (Irgun
Zwei Leumi) betreffend der Loesung der juedischen Frage
Europas und der aktiven Teilnahme der NMO am Kriege an der
Seite Deutschlands," Yisraeli, pp., 315-317.
18 Christopher Walker, "Shamir
Defends Terrorist Past," The Times (London), October 21,
1983, p. 24.
19 Gerold Frank, The Deed, pp.
91-93, 124, 139.
20 Yitzhak Shamir, Summing Up, p.
31.
21 Ibid., p. 34.
22 Ben Hecht, Perfidy, p.
180.
23 Ibid., pp. 194-195,
268.
24 Ibid., pp. 270-271.
25 Michael Dov-Ber Weissmandel, Min
HaMaitzer, p. 92.
26 Ibid., p. 93.
27 Ibid., p. 93.
28 Walter Laqueur, "The Anti-Zionism
of Fools," New Republic, November 2, 1987, p. 34.
29 Ibid., p. 34.
30 Ibid., p. 37.
31 Robert Wistrich, Between
Redemption and Perdition, p. 22.
32 Ibid., p. 244.
33 Bernard Postal (ed.), This is
B'nai B'rith, p. 7.
34 Deborah Moore, B'nai B'rith and
the Challenge of Ethnic Leadership, p. 181.
35 This is B'nai B'rith, p.
61.
36 Ibid., p. 20.
37 "B'nai B'rith and the
German-Jewish Tragedy," B'nai B'rith Magazine, May, 1938, p.
227.
38 Edwin Black, The Transfer
Agreement, p. 277.
39 "B'nai B'rith," Encyclopedia of
the Holocaust, vol. 1, p. 223.
40 Nathan Belth, A Promise to Keep,
p. 141.
41 Arnold Forster, Square One, pp.
164-166.
42 'Memorandum of the ADL," Jewish
Life, September 1953, p. 8.
43 Forster, p. 160
44 Sidney Hook, "My Running Debate
with Einstein," Commentary, July 1982, p. 47.
45 Benjamin Epstein and Arnold
Forster, The New Anti-Semitism, p. 336.
46 Ibid., pp. 137-138.
47 Debra Cohen, "ADL Settles
California Case Over Collecting Information," Jewish
Telegraphic Agency Daily News Bulletin, November 17,
1993.
48 Joel Moss and Kathleen Puckett,
(FBI) FD-302 of Roy Edward Bullock, pp. 19-21.
49 Robert Friedman, Village Voice,
July 27, 1993.
50 Cohen
51 Nathan Perlmutter and David
Evanier, "The African National Congress: A Closer Look," ADL
Bulletin, May 1986.
52 Larry Yudelson, "South African
Black Leader Seeks Closer Ties with Jewish Community,"
JTADNB, June 12, 1992, p. 3.
53 Garth Wolkoff, "ADL Chief Lashes
Out at Critics, Press, D.A.," Northern California Jewish
Bulletin, May 7, 1992, pp. 1, 26.
54 Jonathan Kaufman, Broken
Alliance, pp. 111-112.
55 Nathan Glazer, "On Jewish
Forebodings," Commentary, August 1985, pp. 32-34.
56 "National Director: Nathan
Perlmutter," ADL Bulletin, December 1978, pp.
7-8.
57 Jeffrey Sinensky, "The Supreme
Court and Racial Quotas," ADL Bulletin, November 1979, p.
8.
58 Glazer
59 Epstein and Forster, pp.
113-114
60 "Spike Lee Stumbles on
Stereotypes," Forward, August 10, 1990, p. 8.
61 Spike Lee, "I am Not an
Anti-Semite," New York Times, August 22, 1990.
62 J.J. Goldberg, "Scaring The
Jews," New Republic, May 17, 1993, pp. 22-23.
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