Here is more Jewish/Turkish complicity à la A.R

[Guest Fadi]

NONON... my title was main to attract... I just wonder how A.R will explain this... The ship full of Jews during WII escaping extermination was blocked by Turkey, it resulted of its drowning...

 

Times Literary Supplement (London) 1-7-94, by Bernard Wasserstein

 

"Their Own Fault; Attempts to shift the blame for the Holocaust

 

It was a rough night in the Black Sea on February 24, 1942. Ten kilometres or

so from the shore, a seventy-five-year-old, 240-ton converted yacht, carrying

767 Jewish refugees from Romania, exploded, probably after being hit by a

torpedo fired in error by a Soviet submarine. The vessel sank with the loss of

all except one of the passengers. The STRUMA had left Constanza on December

12, 1941, bound for Palestine. But on arrival at Istanbul three days later,

her engine broke down and she was unable to proceed. While engineers tried

unsuccessfully to restore the ship to seaworthiness, the Turkish and British

governments wrangled about the onward passage of the refugees. The Turks

refused to allow them to land unless they had guarantees of admission to some

other country. The British refused to grant them certificates to enter

Palestine. The failure of the two governments to agree culminated in the boat

being towed out to sea and abandoned to the waves.

 

Against the backdrop of the larger catastrophe of European Jewry, the Struma

tragedy acquired a symbolic significance that was subtly distorted by several

protagonists in order to serve their differing political ends. The British

Foreign Office, anxious to persuade the reluctant Turks to enter the war on

the side of the Allies, laid down that "no reflection must be cast on the

Turks". In his _Promise and Fulfillment_ (1949), Arthur Koestler, at that time

in his extreme Zionist phase, alleged that the Turks were never told of a

British concession whereby teenage children aboard the ship would, after all,

be allowed to enter Palestine. Koestler's object was to impugn the conduct

of the British. The truth, in this instance, was at least as discreditable to

the Turks, who were, in fast, informed of the British concession, but

adamantly refused to allow the children to travel overland across Turkey to

Palestine. No ship was available to take them, and in the end they drowned

with their families when the Struma foundered.

 

Now, with a new interpretation of this incident, and of Turkish policy on the

Jewish question in general during the Second World War, comes Stanford J Shaw,

an American historian of Turkey, hitherto best known for his skepticism

regarding the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Turks in the First World

War. To adopt and maintain that position has required both pertinacity in the

face of the contrary evidence and a certain personal courage. Professor Shaw's

home has been bombed, and he has had to deliver his lectures in the history

department of the University of California at Los Angelos under armed guard.

 

According to Shaw, Turkey, far from bearing any share of blame for the fate of

the Struma and her passengers, was the victim of British attempts to saddle

her with responsibility that justly rested elsewhere. Turkey, he claims, "was

willing to allow and even help the Struma on its way through the Straits of

Palestine" [sic], and only British pressure "compelled the ship to meet

disaster back in the Black Sea". The Turks, he maintains, "allowed Istanbul's

Jewish community to send food and other supplies to the refugees" waiting

aboard the Struma, in horribly overcrowded conditions, during its two-month

delay off Istanbul. The truth is that the Turkish authorities prohibited any

contact between ship and shore and that such provision as arrived were

smuggled aboard. According to Shaw, "The Turkish Grand National Assembly had

just passed the new law that formally granted the right of transit through

Turkey to Jewish refugees from Nazi persecution anywhere in Europe so long as

they held visas which would allow them to enter the countries to which they

were going." The reality at any rate in the case of the children aboard the

Struma was very different. Suggestio falsi on the heels of suppressio veri:

according to Shaw, the Struma, "was therefore forced to go back into the Black

Sea". What the reader of his book will not learn is that the only force used

in the episode was that applied by between one and two hundred Turkish

policemen who overpowered resistance from the debilitated refugees and

supervised the towing of the rotten, still engine-less, hulk out beyond

territorial waters. They then abandoned the passengers to near-certain death.

 

The Turkish record on the Jewish question during the Second World War was

neither outslandingly generous nor deliberately murderous. Like that of most

governments of the time, particularly neutral governments, it was narrow

minded and cynical. The Turks did admit a few hundred refugees from Nazi

Europe, mainly high-profile German-Jewish academies who, Ataturk's broad-

minded instruction, were invited after 1933 to help renovate the country's

university system. Otherwise, there is little in the Turkish record to boast

about.

 

The nadir was reached in November 1942 with the passage of the so-called

"wealth tax" or capital levy that was enforced in such a way as to

discriminate against minority (Greek, Armenian, and Jewish) merchants who had

to pay up to ten times as much as Muslims. Those who could not pay immediately

were dispatched summarily to forced labour camps. One of the senior Turkish

officials responsible for implementation of law himself later characterized

it, in a comment ignored by Shaw, as "this misbegotten offspring of German

racialism on Ottoman fanaticism". The story of the capital levy is well known

and has been described in standard works by Bernard Lewis and others. Shaw's

manner of dealing with the episode is instructive and of a piece with the

methodology of the book as a whole. He points out that the tax "was fairly

common practice in Europe at the time but was administered in such a way as to

bear most heavily on the easily accessible wealth of urban merchants many of

whom were non-Muslims"; nevertheless the tax, "was not directed primarily

against Jewish Turks". He adds: "Many of those Jewish Turks whose families

were most severely effected [sic] by the tax and its enforcement remain proud

that their payments materially assisted Turkey in resolving its financial

difficulties." That Shaw nevertheless feels a certain embarrassment is evident

in his reference to the affair as a "disaster" -- suggesting as in the case of

his treatment of the Struma sinking some sort of accident of nature or

confluence of external pressures in which the Turkish Government played no

active role.

 

The main thrust of Shaw's book purports to demonstrate that, virtually alone

in the world, Turkey took energetic steps to save "thousands of Jews from

persecution and death". At one level, his argument is based on a substratum

of half-truth: some Turkish diplomats, particularly in France, intervened

successfully to protect from the Nazis a minority among the Jews who were or

had at some stage been Turkish citizens. But this protection was only patchily

effective: thousands of Turkish-born Jews were among those deported from

France to the death camps in the east. This much has been known for many

years, and Shaw's version, presented largely in the form of lengthy

documentary transcriptions and barely edited notes, adds nothing of substance

to the historical record. His account misrepresent the Turkish attitude

towards Jews born in the former Ottoman Empire who had been automatically

denaturalized by Turkey after living abroad for more than five years. Far from

generously according these people widespread protection, as Shaw's narrative

would have us believe, the Turkish consular corps, in fact made only limited

and often grudging interventions on their behalf. As a senior Turkish Foreign

Ministry official told the British ambassador in 1944 in another comment

not quoted by Shaw, Turkey's attitude, "was perhaps severe but [the] Turkish

Government were very strict on nationality questions and considered that

people who did not think it worth while to maintain their Turkish connexion

in good times were not worth protected merely when trouble arose". A general

tendency to ignore any such negative evidence, while exaggerating the positive

leads Shaw to make palpably absurd claims. For example, according to his

figures, a total of over 90,000 Jewish refugees passed through Turkey during

the war on their way to Palestine; this sum represents some 150 per cent of

the total Jewish immigration, legal and illegal, to Palestine from all

on sources during the war.

 

How can a supposedly professional historian arrive at such distorted, at times

preposterous, conclusions? To a considerable degree, it is a matter of almost

breathtaking unprofessionalism. I had to rub my eyes, for example, when I

read: "The First Statute [sic] des Juifs, enacted by the Vichy Government on

3 October 1940, essentially revoked The edict of Nantes which had provided

French Jews with full citizenship during the course of the French Revolution."

This one sentence contains such dense concentration of appalling error that I

was inevitably reminded of one of the delights of my youth, La Foire aux

Cancres, and uproarious collection of French schoolroom howlers. In the same

vein, we learn from Shaw that on June 15, 1940 [sic], the "German army

occupied Lithuania [and] immediately started rounding up Jews." Two days

later, Shaw inserts the Wehrmacht into Latvian and Estonia -- again more than

a year ahead of Hitler's schedule. Although Shaw cites sources in many

languages, with commendable regularity, he mangles them with almost equal

frequency. At their worst, the multilingual malapropisms attain a tragic-comic

absurdity, as for example, when by repeatedly misspelling the French word

rafle (police raid or round-up) as "raffle", he manages to misunderstanding

it, thus presenting the round-up of the Jews of Paris, preparatory to their

deportation, as some sort of lottery. Occasionally one has the impression of a

book written by a home computer slightly tipsy on sweet Turkish champagne:

how else to explain the transformation of Moshe Shertok, later, as Moshe

Sharett, Israel's second prime minister, into "Moshe Cherokee (later Moshe

Shertock)"?

 

If this farrago were merely a case of faulty scholarship, one might dismiss

it as one of the sadder by-product of the life-tenure system in American

universities. One might similarly excuse the shoddy production and absence of

an index as symptoms of the gradual decline in publishing values.

Unfortunately, something more sinister is at work here. This book forms part

of larger enterprise whose real object emerges clearly if we take the trouble

to examine a little more closely the conceptual and linguistic straitjacket

within which Shaw confines his thinking

 

Note, first of all, Shaw's curious usage, "Jewish Turks", which he employs

throughout the book in place of the normal, "Turkish Jews". The distinction

between the two phrases may seem almost invisible but is, in fact, crucial to

Shaw's approach not only to this topic but to modern Turkish history in

general. The Jews in Turkey, who had lived as a tolerated, qansi-autonomous

Ladino-speaking community for more than four centuries, found themselves, in

the Turkish Republic, victims of some of the crasser aspects of the

secularizing, nationalizing policies of Ataturk. Their language, a pristine

relic of medieval Castilian, written in Hebrew characters, was condemned as an

indication of obscuranist particularism. Shaw, _plus turque qu'ataturk_ in

this as in other matters, reproves the Turkish Jews for clinging obstinately

to this foreign tongue. While he emphasizes Turkey's long record of toleration

of Jews, he makes clear his identification with the general policy of the

Turkish republic that minorities (Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Kurds) would be

tolerated only to the extent that they agreed to he virtually invisible,

abandoning most outwardly distinctive forms, traditions or loyalties, and

assimililating wholly into the Turkish nation. Hence "Jewish Turks".

 

Punctuating this book are parenthetic comments that reveal the subtext and

primary purpose of the enterprise. This has nothing to do with Jews. The work

is, in fact, the latest chapter in Shaw's long-running battle with the

Armenians and, by extension, with other Christian minorities in Turkey. Hence

the repeated references to Armenian susceptibility to Nazi propaganda and

their alleged collusion with the Nazis. Sometimes his animus inspires him to

ludicrous accusations. "Many Armenians", he writes, "like Karaites [a Jewish

sect], had secured exemption from the anti-Jewish laws, though by claiming

that they were Aryans, instead of Turks, as the latter had done [sic]. Why

Armenians should have needed to secure "exemption" from the anti-Jewish laws

in the first place is not explained (there are no Armenian Jews). Why Shaw

should expect them to have claimed to be Turks (Armenian Turks?) is similarly

obscure -- save for his evident desire to tar them with the brush of claiming

fraternity with the Nazis. As for the Greeks, they "outdid the Nazis and the

British in working to prevent the escape of Jewish refugees". Venturing

further back in history, Shaw explains that Venizelots "after conquoring

Salonica during he First Balkan War, attempted to change the general pro-

Turkish attitudes, of its Jewish population to emulate into [sic] the

Greeklike racial hatred by emphasising Greek nationalism and promoting

Zionism". Not surprising, "the Greek Jews [note: not "Jewish Greeks"]

continued to moarn [sic] for the old days of Turkish rule".

 

Through the fog of illiteracy, the object of all this is plain: by

demonstrating Turkey's supposedly exceptional, humanitarian policy towards

the Jews, and by contrasting it with the alleged pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic

racialism of the Armenians and Greeks, Shaw seeks to buttress his vehemently

anti-Armenian and Hellenophobic interpretation of modern Turkish history.

 

Shaw's book is the more disturbing in that it belongs to the genre that seeks

to exclude almost everybody in any way concerned with the fate of the Jews

during the Second World War. In recent years, we have had works demonstrating

that the governments and people of Italy, Denmark, Spain, Poland, Bulgaria and

even Japan saved large numbers of Jews from the hands of the Nazis. In some of

these countries, notably Italy and Denmark, a significant proportion of the

Jewish population did indeed survive thanks to courageous efforts by local

populations and officials. Some of the other cases are more dubious and fall

into the category of exculpatory nationalist apologetics.

 

In post-Communist Poland, in particular history has been rewritten in order to

rehabilitate the record of the wartime government-in-exile in London on the

Jewish question. Again the ulterior purpose is clear. This was the last

legitimate pre-Communist government on Poland. The Polish state today formally

acknowledges a link of legitimacy with the government. At a ceremony in London

couple of years ago, the last "president" of the London Government, Count

Edward Raczynski, handed over the symbolic emblems of state to President

Welesa. The anti-Semitism commonly attributed to governments of the "second

Polish Commonwealth" remains an embarrassment to Poland's new rulers, at least

in their external relations. Hence the effort to differentiate the London

government's policy on the Jewish issue from that of is inter-war

predecessors, whose anti-Semitic credentials indeed, are difficult to deny,

since they were expressed in legislation, in speeches, and in diplomacy with

almost shameless candour.

 

David Engel is the first scholar to examine the London government's record on

the basis of all the available sources and without a political axe to grind.

In an earlier book, _In the Shadow of Auschwitz_ (1987), dealing with the

period 1939-1942, he showed the extent to which the Polish Government,

contrary to its general public position and to apologetic claims made

subsequently on its behalf, excluded Polish Jews from what it regarded as its

"universe of obligation". In _Facing the Holocaust_, Engel pursues his

investigations into the later years of the war, reaching broadly

similar conclusions.

 

Engels strains to consider Polish official attitudes in the round, giving a

full exposition of the relevant contemporary pressures and constraints. He is

scrupulous in acknowledged the limitations of some of the sources and in

avoiding the temptation to retrospective prescription. He rigorously eschews

moralizing. His readers, however, may be permitted tn draw broader conclusions

from the evidence he lays out. Taken together, his two books, models of

contemporary historical writing, constitute a revealing expose of the wartime

Polish government's miserable record on the Jewish question.

 

Engels, it should be noted, focuses specifically on the Polish government,

rather than on Polish popular attitudes. This is important in view of a

curious two-way apologetic strain that has emerged in Poland on the Jewish

issue. When popular Polish anti-Semitism is noted, refuge if often taken in

the defence that anti-Jewish feeling is fomented artificially by an

unrepresentative government -- as, for example, in 1968 -- and should not be

extrapolated to the Polish people in general. On the other hand, when

complaint is made of Polish governmental attitudes, the reaction of

politicians and officials has often been to emphasize the pressure of popular

anti-Semitic from below -- a point stressed, for example, by Raczynski, then

ambassador in London, in discussions with the Foreign Office in the late

1930s. A similar see-saw defensiveness is noticeable in the debate concerning

Polish wartime attitudes. The sad truth in that in its policies of national

chauvinism diplomatic unrealism and ethnic exclusivism, the London Government,

no less then its predecessor on represented faithfully the dominant, though

not universal, strains in contemporary Polish popular feeling -- and (it must

be added because it forms a vital part of a historical explanation) in the

teachings of Poland's is spiritual leaders, from the openly anti-Semitic

wartime primate, Cardinal Hlond, to the openly anti-Semitic current incumbent

Cardinal Glemp.

 

Engel documents the pattern of prevarication and suppression of news of the

fate of Polish Jewry by the Polish government-in-exile. Only when the facts

become public from other sources did the government corroborate them -- and

then reluctantly. Pleas to the government in 1942 to issue an appeal to Poles

to give succour to Jews threatened by the Nazis were rejected on the basis

that such a call would be "superfluous". When Jewish representatives asked

Polish leaders for such public declarations, a typical answer was that given

in 1942 by a Polish Minister Jan Kot, who was not regarded as personally

hostle to Jews, "Jews need to stop complaining and get to work. Where is the

Jews'public declaration that Lwow and Wilno ought to be returned to Poland?"

The latter sentence indicated the governing spirit of the Polish government's

approach to the issue. They considered it less on the humanitarian level of

seeking to protect the lives of their Jewish citizens than on a political

plane: any concession to the Jews should be met by some equivalent gesture

towards the Poles. Perhaps Kot also was alluding to the ubiquitous Polish

wartime accusation that the Jews in Eastern Poland had welcomed the arrival

of Soviet forces on September 17, 1939. Of course to the extent that the

Soviet invasion saved them from Nazi occupation -- and therefore for a while

from death -- Jews did prefer the Soviets to the Nazis. In the eyes of many

Poles however, such preference was a sign of inexpungably unpatriotic

instincts, further proof, if that were needed, that the Jews could not really

be considered as Poles at all.

 

In May 1943, the government finally abandoned its non possumus stance and

broadcast an instruction to the Polish people to assist Jews in evading death

at the hands of the Nazis. The Government's decision was taken against the

background of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and the Germans' announcement of

their discovery of the graves of the victims of the Katyn massacre. Engels

argues convincingly that the reason for the precipitate change in the Polish

government's attitude was not so much a sudden access of concern for

threatened Jews but rather the opportunistic hope of garnering propagandist

advantage and political support at a critical moment in Poland's wartime

diplomacy.

 

On April 19 the Polish government created a "Council for ...Rescue of the

Jewish Population in Poland", with three Jewish and three non-Jewish members.

This too "was intended", writes Engel, "largely to serve a public relations

purpose", It achieved nothing. A Jewish member of the council Ignacy

Schwarzbart, one of the most moderate and Polonophil of Polish-Jewish leaders,

later termed it "a fiction". At its final meeting, in June 1945, the Council

issued a bitter resolution declaring that the Polish Government has not

discharged it's its tasks in the area of financing activities aimed at

assisting and protecting the Jewish population".

 

Of course, there was very little the Poles could do to save the Jews. The Home

Army, the underground movement in Poland, offered some niggardly assistance

to the Jewish rebels in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943. A few thousand Jews were

saved by charitable Christians; A larger number were sheltered in return for

money by people who thought of themselves as Christians. An unknown but almost

certainly even larger number were abandoned or betrayed when their capacity to

such protection money ran out. Under unutterably brutal occupation, in which

the Poles themselves suffered terribly, what more could be expected of them?

Caring? The most contemptible aspect of the Polish government's record, is

disclosed by Engel, is its almost total lack of caring about the fate of three

million of its own citizens.

 

Engel does not merely expose; he also -- a mark of his quality as an historian

-- explains. He shows how "the historic perception of Jews as ineluctably

hostile to Poland, and the apparent reinforcement of that perception during

the first three years of the war" led Poland's leaders to regard Jews as "an

enemy". On the one band, the Jews in the country were seen as sympathizers

with Soviet Russia. On the other, the Jews elsewhere were seen as a diplomatic

irritant They were regarded as constantly engaged in publicly embarrassing,

anti-Polish carping. Did they not complain incessantly of rampant anti-

Semitism in the Polish army? In reality, not only the ranks but also General

Anders and other military leaders, including heads of the Home Army under

ground such as Stefan Korbonski, were far from immune from the anti-Semitic

bacillus. But the government was concerned less with the facts than with the

public relations consequences. Such controversy blackened the Poles'

reputation, provided fuel for Poland's enemies, above all the USSR, and

damaged relations with the great-power patrons on which the government-in-

exile depended for its very existence. "Towards an enemy in time of war",

Engels concludes, "a few are likely to act primarily from a sense of human or

even legal obligation".

 

Earlier this year, shortly after Raczynski's death at the age of 101, the BBC

broadcast an interview with him in which he alleged that it had been the BBC,

not the Polish government, that in 1942 and 1943 had sought to block

dissemination of the news of the massacres of Jews. It was a bravura

posthumous performance by a gracious centenarian, in full possession of his

marbles, who retained, even beyond the grave, the ability to deploy the tu

quoque argument with snake-like venom. The BBC's wartime conduct in the matter

may not have been beyond reproach. In this instance, however, it engaged in a

commendable effort of institutional self-examination and self-criticism.

By contrast, the spokesmen for the wartime Polish government prefer, as in

Raczynski's case, to question the motives and conduct of everybody except

themselves.

 

The historically troubled Polish-Jewish relationship remains a deeply

sensitive issue in Poland today. Enter any bookstore in Warsaw and you will

find an extraordinary number of books on Jewish themes. Engel's book, however

has been virtually ignored in Poland and have hardly been reviewed there. His

findings do not fit current political convenience. Yet the vital necessity for

the health of the new Polish political culture of facing the harsh realities

of Polish-Jewish relations in the recent past is recognized by a section of

the Polish intelligentsia, including some enlightened Catholic circles. All of

those who want a modern Polish history that searches honestly for truth rather

than merely reinforcing national mythology should read Engel's work.

 

Whatever one may say about apologists for the Turkish and Polish governments,

they at least have comprehensible, if misguided political motives. What are we

to make, however, of the motives of the so-called "revisionists" who deny that

that the Nazi onslaught against the Jews ever occurred? Pierro Vidal-Naquet a

distinguished French ancient historian, attempts to address that question in

_Assassins of Memory_. He scores some palpable polemical hits against the

falsifiers though he perhaps stretches a point when be calls the affaire

Faurisson "one of the strategic nodes of French cultural life in the 1980s".

As an analysis of the twisted motives and thinking of those who turn history

on its head it cannot be said that Vidal-Naquet here gets much further than

indignation. That emotion is understandable and justifiable: Vidal-Nuquet's

mother died at Auschwitz. His account not published here, of his childhood in

Vichy France, is one of the most evocative personal testimonies of Christian-

Jewish relations in that era; it has so far appeared only in an obscure French

periodical (Bulletin de la Societe de l'histoire du protestantisme francais,

136, 4). Vidal-Nuquet's American publishers would have done we+l to publish

a translation of that moving document. Instead what we are offered here is a

warmed-over and repetitive collection of essays, no doubt ephemerally

effective as prises de position in Le Monde, but hardly advancing much further

useful purpose between hard covers

 

If the Germans, the Italians, the Japanese, the Poles; the Turks, the whole

world supposedly behaved with humanity toward the Jews, who is then to be

blamed for their fate during the war? Why the Jew themselves! And who best to

be trotted out to administer the historical punishment? Again Jews themselves.

This particular obscenity has its origins in Hannah Arendt's famous attack at

the time of the Eichmann trial on the collaborationalist "Jewish Councils" in

occupied Europe. Unfortunately the counter-blasts against her argument by,

among others, Jacob Robinson, lacked her seductive literary flair and failed

to attain a wide readership. Later Menahem Begin and his acolytes in Israel

and America sought to use the notions of alleged Jewish passively and

collaborationism to whip up support from American Jews who were to be shamed

into backing up supposedly more "activist" posture in contemporary Middle East

politics.

 

Richard Bolchover's _British Jewry and the Holocaust_, falls squarely into

this polluted stream. His stated purpose is to examine the efforts of the

leaders of the wartime Jewish community in Britain to influence governmental

policy and to provide directly or indirectly aid and succour to suffering

European Jewry. Unfortunately his methodology is badly flawed. He announces

at the outset that he intends to examine only public statements and actions.

"Meetings behind closed doors, conversations and letters do not have the same

wide impact on attitudes and opions", he opines. That sentence itself reveals

a disturbing lack of understanding of political processes in the secretive

worlds at Whitehall nor Westminster, especially in wartime conditions. Of

course this approach also saved Bolchover the bother of having to spend much

time traveling on the District line to the Public Record Office at Kew, or to

other such tiresome suburban destinations Perhaps if he had read more of what

was available even in his local public library he would not have made such

elementary errors as referring more than once to a non-existent "General

Zionist Jewish Agency". If he had taken the trouble to look up Hansard or read

just a few unpublished documents, he could not have stated of Lord Samuel

and others that they denounced the murder by Jewish terrorists in 1944 of Lord

Moyne, British Minister in the Middle East while "such vehemence was rarely

heard in connection with the Jews of Europe".

 

Bolchover has not only avoided doing much research. He has also not done much

thinking. How else can one explain his astonishing assertion that the

condemnatory attitude of Samuel Wekmann and other responsible Jewish leaders

to the Moyne assassination exemplified the alleged "supremacy of British and

not Jewish interests", in their minds? In fact, a further explanation for

Bolchover's attitude is available and appears at the end of the book. The

author, it emerges, is an unabashed apologist for the Revisionist Zionist

political arm of the terrorist movement in the 1940s. He has swallowed whole

the terrorist propaganda that the murder of a British Minister at the height

of the war against Hitler in some sense advanced "Jewish interests". In his

conclusion, Bolchover denounces the "politics of fear" of the Anglo-Jewish

establishment who he alleges were, "trapped in their own values" - shockingly

myopic liberal ones in his view. By contrast, "the Revisionists" he suggests,

"did maintain a consistent well-argued and responsible attitude with regard to

the tragedy of European Jewry. Their anguished pleas cannot be dismissed as

mere rhetoric". In fact, this extreme group counted for next to nothing in

wartime Anglo-Jewry, either in numerical support or in terms of achievement

They did not succeed even in drumming up up public din of the sort emitted by

their fellow rhetoricians in New York. Bolchover's unpersuasive puff for the

Revisionist Zionists is hardly more accurate as history than Shaw's or the

neo-Nazi revisionists of the "assassins of memory".

 

Raul Hilberg, whose great work, _The Destruction of the European Jews_, is the

most authoritative book on the subject, contributes in some passages in his

writing to the tendency to regard the Jews themselves as in some degree the

authors of their fate. Hilberg's masterwork attracted criticism for a section

in which he laid stress on the supposed tradition of passivity ingrained in

the Jewish political culture in Europe. In his new book, _Perpetrators,

Victims, Bystanders_, he accords some recognition to Jewish resistance. But

his explanation of it rarity echoes his earlier theme."The rhythm of compliant

behaviour practiced over the centuries was not about to break at the sight of

a ditch." The recourse to atavism as historical explanation remains

unconvincing. Otherwise there is much in this book to commend albeit more by

way of human vignettes, illustrative of the interpretation adumbrated in his

previous work than in the shape of new historical findings. Hilberg draws

effectively on eastern European archives that have become available in recent

years although this book went to press before he was able to take full

advantage of these.

 

Since 1989, vast archives of the Nazi occupation throughout Europe including

Jewish records seized by the Nazis and transported after the war to Moscow

have been opened to historians in Russia the Baltic states, Belarus and

Ukraine. Just as the opening of the ULTRA and MAGIC papers has compelled

historians to rethink the standard account of armed operations at almost

every juncture in the war, so these new sources may well require a similar

rewriting of the history of the mass murder of European Jewry. Is it too much

to hope that this will give rise to a genuine reassessment rather than the

spurious, politically motivated revisionisms that have hitherto distorted much

public understanding of the most terrible mystery of our time? "

 

Bernard Wasserstein is Professor of History at Brandeiss University.

 

[ April 11, 2002, 07:50 AM: Message edited by: Domino ]

[A.R.]

So, Whats your point? Look at whats happening now.

The link I posted below about the Turks and Jews praising each other at the Gala in 1992 explains everything from there very own leaders mouths. Better luck next time. Is Shaw a Jew? I`am willing to bet he is. Better luck next time trying to cover up for the Jews. Today Jews and Turks are the best of friends. Turks and Jews crushed the Genocide resolution in the US. Israel denies the Armenian Genocide! Shaw himself is best friends with Turks and Jews. Shaw is revisionist scum. Here is a quote below from the article above.

 

According to Shaw, Turkey, far from bearing any share of blame for the fate of

the Struma and her passengers, was the victim of British attempts to saddle

her with responsibility that justly rested elsewhere.

 

[ March 26, 2002, 07:43 PM: Message edited by: A.R. ]

[khodja]

A.R.

 

Where were your formative school years passed? I think it would expliain a lot of things to us here in the forum. But you have to be truthful. We KNOW that you post from Orlando and not D.C. as you state.

[A.R.]

More Jew Lies from Jewarag. I post from Orlando?

Is that all you got? Plus the name of my Armenian Church is Sourp Khatch and it is in Bethesda, Maryland which is 15 minutes from Washington DC. I love to crush your Lies Jewarag.

 

[ March 26, 2002, 09:15 PM: Message edited by: A.R. ]

[gamavor]

They know everything aren't they, A.R.?

 

Regards!

[A.R.]

Yes Gamavor, Jewarag can`t attack what I post because its the truth so he attacks me. Regards Brother Gamavor!!!!!!!

[khodja]

You virtually shut down the Armenian Cafe and NOW you are working at shutting down the Hye Forum. So you expose the Turkish-Jewish axis,which we all know about already. Then what? Will it help our cause one iota, or will it be counter-productive. Do you want our Jewish friends in Congress and academia to abandon us? You do the Turkish government agents proud. They dance in Ankara when Armenians like you (I think that you are part Arab) gain a prominent voice.

[A.R.]

Look Jewarag you are a Liar and a fraud. Your loyalty is to Jews not Armenians that is why you Spazz out when I post Articles exposing the Jews and there Anti Armenian Cause. Why did those Jewish "friends" destroy the Armenian Genocide resolution in congress? Sounds more like an enemy than a friend. Sukkkker!!

[A.R.]

So you expose the Turkish-Jewish axis,which we all know about already

 

AR

Really? You must think you are a clever Jew. So don`t talk about the Turkish/ Jewish axis cause we

already know about it? So what!! You might know about it but other Armenians might not. I`am not here for you, am here for the Armenians that read this forum and don`t post on it. Yes Armenians know about the Turkish/Jewish alliance but most don`t know how deep that alliance runs counter to the Armenian Cause. That Turkish/Jewish alliance works hand in hand to cover up the Armenian Genocide. That alliance with the help of Jews around the world helps to promote Turkey intrests.

So you lose again, Sukkker!

[khodja]

Listen you, I am not a Jew but an Armenian. 1/8 Assyrian doesn't mean much of anything. Do you really think that Armenians are THAT stupid that they don't know what is transpiring? You are not accomplishing anything positive with your stupid posts. Some of them just prove that there are Jews out there like Charney, Auron and Morgenthau. When the Arab-Israeli conflict is resolved, the Israelis will be more honest about the Genocide. The sooner Sharon goes the better. He is the one who instigated the present unrest. I saw with my own eyes the residence he established in the center of the Moslem Arab sector of Old Jerusalem.

Why would any prominent Israeli Jew want to live in the middle of that squalor but to agitate the Palestinians?

[khodja]

Again, you twist what I say and take it out of context. I called the Mangassarian crew in Glendale and a right-wing Armenian cleric nazis, but in the same sentence praised other prominent Armenians, namely Rafi Manoukian, Mark Geragos and Armenian clerics working with him. As for Jewish and Mongol blood in the Armenians, this is documented in the history books and confirmed by recent genetic studies emanating from the ROA. We also have Assyrian and French blood mixed in with the blood of the Nairi.

[Guest Fadi]

My point ?

 

My point is that the "Shaw" that you hate so much, the Shaw that you consider of being a genocide revisionist has been also accused of being a revisionist of the Holocaust... Thats my point.

[A.R.]

Listen you, I am not a Jew but an Armenian. 1/8 Assyrian doesn't mean much of anything

 

AR

No, you are a Jew and I have saved posts from you on my forum that prove your loyalty is to Jews not Armenians.

 

Do you really think that Armenians are THAT stupid that they don't know what is transpiring?

 

AR

Tell us what is transpiring O clever Jew? Yes Armenians know that there is a Turkish/Jewish axis but most Armenians don`t know how Jews murdered Armenians during the Armenian genocide.

Most Armenians don`t know that ATATURK was a Turkish Jew. Most Armenians don`t know that it was the Jews who destroyed the Armenian genocide resolution in the US, but the Truth is coming out and Armenians are waking up, that is why you are in big time damage controll.

 

You are not accomplishing anything positive with your stupid posts.

 

AR

Really? So posting Truthfull posts about Jews and Turks from Armenian and Jewish sources is stupied to you? So anything that exposes the Jews is stupied to you? Deal with it monkey there is much more to come.

 

Some of them just prove that there are Jews out there like Charney, Auron and Morgenthau.

 

AR

Go to my forum and read what Israel Shamir a Jewish author has to say about Israel. He calls Israel a Nazi State. I post truthfull articles.

 

When the Arab-Israeli conflict is resolved, the Israelis will be more honest about the Genocide

 

AR

LOL!! Thats a good one

 

The sooner Sharon goes the better. He is the one who instigated the present unrest. I saw with my own eyes the residence he established in the center of the Moslem Arab sector of Old Jerusalem.

 

AR

Sharon is a Nazi war criminal and a Butcher!

 

Why would any prominent Israeli Jew want to live in the middle of that squalor but to agitate the Palestinians?

 

AR

Why do the Jews live on Palestinian land? The Gaza and west bank is Occupied Palsestinian land. It is the Jews who don`t want peace. Even The Armenian Orthodox Catholicos of the House of Cilicia called the Israelis "criminals."

 

The Daily Star (Lebanon)

March 12 2002

 

Armenian Orthodox prelate flays Israeli `criminality'

 

The Armenian Orthodox Catholicos of the House of Cilicia called

Monday for a serious effort to put an end to Israel's `criminal

practices' against the Palestinians.

In a statement made on his return to Beirut from Damascus, where he

participated in an annual religious gathering, Aram I Keshishian also

called for dialogue and negotiations between all parties concerned in

the Middle East conflict.

`(This is) the only way to achieve a just, comprehensive and

permanent peace,' he said, stressing the need for the Palestinians to

gain their `full and legitimate rights, by the establishment of an

independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.'

Keshishian questioned why the international community ­ especially

the UN and the United States ­ `overlooked the Israeli aggressive

policy in the Middle East that has dissipated all hopes for achieving

peace.'

Addoum seeks information on murder of ex-LF man in Brazil

State Prosecutor Adnan Addoum is due to send on Tuesday a formal

letter to the Brazilian authorities, via the Lebanese Embassy in Sao

Paolo, seeking any available information on the murders of two

Lebanese there last Thursday.

Michael Nassar, 39, a former member of the Lebanese Forces, and his

wife, Marie Noel Mimassi, 31, were gunned down by masked men while

waiting to repair a flat tire at a gasoline station.

Addoum will also send a similar letter to Interpol for any possible

information on the killing.

Meanwhile, Addoum received charges filed by Gina Hobeika against her

husband Elie's unknown assassins, together with the widows of two of

his companions.

He is expected to decide on the next legal measure to be taken in the

case on Tuesday.

 

[ March 27, 2002, 12:14 AM: Message edited by: A.R. ]

[khodja]

I propose that we both find a reasonable Armenian third-party, who we can both trust, to determine our ethnicity. I would not trust you with my identity or that my family. I remember what happened in the Parliament chambers and to Poghosyan. We will have an independent evaluation as to whether I am an Armenian or a Jew and whether you are an Armenian or a Palestinian. I will provide to this independent person biographical records about my great-grandfathers so he/she can determine if the are the "filth" you say they are. What do you think, Abdul?

[A.R.]

No time to play Jew games but Armenians can go to my forum where I posted some of your posts. You call Armenians Nazis and you say Armenians have Mongol and Jewish Blood. You have Jewish and Mongol blood but Armenians don`t, thank God. Jewish and Mongol blood? BWAHHHHHHBWAHHHHHHHHHH

[A.R.]

My point is that the "Shaw" that you hate so much, the Shaw that you consider of being a genocide revisionist has been also accused of being a revisionist of the Holocaust... Thats my point.

 

AR

Really? Shaw a revisionist of the Jewish "Holocaust?" Who you think you kidding?

Your point is mute!

 

http://www.sefarad.org/publication/lm/044/5.html

[Guest Fadi]

Do you know what revisionist mean ? It dosnt mean denial but revision, it is not necessary denial... Shaw has been accused of revisionism, not because he denied the Holocaust, but rather, denied the wrong doings of Turkey in a tragedy that happened to the Jews during the Holocaust. So for this, him with his pseudo-Works revising that tragedy makes him a revisionist of the Holocaust, when this action by Turkey was foolish, when they knew that these orphans and children were in danger on the sea and the authorities didn't wanted to allow them enter, if there was no garantee that they will leave just after.

[anoush.]

Fact of the matter is that Stanford Shaw is a jew. We have proof of that. So how does that figure with your contention that he denies the holohoax????

 

BTW, there was only ONE Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide.

[A.R.]

Yes Anoush, Stanford Shaw is a Jew and he is a Revisionist of The Armenian Genocide. Stanford Shaw is not a Revisionist of The Jewish "holocaust" Domino likes to make up lies to cover up for the Jews. Here is proof below that Shaw is a Jew.

 

Turkey and the Jews

The Turkish Times

September 1, 1994

ISTANBUL. Jewish communities still extant in Muslim countries tend to be weak and without a future, mere shells of the vital populations that existed half a century ago. Anyone with energy or ambition long ago fled Iran, Yemen, Syria, Egypt, or Tunisia; those who remain barely eke out a living. They have no role to speak of in the business or intellectual life of their countries; politically they count only as potential victims or as hostages to be bartered away. In The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times (1991), Norman Stillman accurately described them as "a small, vestigial, and moribund remnant."

How different in Turkey! Here Jews, as in the West, play a disproportionate role in the life of the country. During a visit not long ago to Istanbul (the city where nearly all the Turkish Jews live), I had an opportunity to meet two of the country's tycoons, both Jewish. Jefi I. Kamhi is the flamboyant, jet-setting chairman of Profilo, a company which produces almost everything you can think of (prefabricated construction units, white goods, parts and accessories); in addition, it imports and exports, distributes consumer durables, and invests.

Üzeyir Garih, CEO of Alarco, is a more restrained figure; his company contracts projects, engineers them, and specializes in building big-ticket items such as pipelines, gas storage terminals, refineries, textile factories and office complexes. Both men are active in business associations, are counted among their country's leading philanthropists, and have strong ties to the highest political circles.

Thanks to their knowledge of European languages and foreign contacts, Jewish businessmen have played an important role in the expansion of Turkish companies into international markets. They also have a prominent role in fashion, advertising, and banking; for example, Jews dominate Istanbul's Tahtakale money market and effectively set the dollar exchange rate for Turkey's currency. These Jews are not small, vestigial, or moribund.

And it's not just the businessmen. I didn't get to see Sami Kohen this trip, but he's been for many the foreign affairs columnist for Turkey's largest circulation daily newspaper Milliyet, where he writes a sophisticated analysis of his country's geopoliticals, as well as frequently contributing to such American papers as the The Christian Science Monitor and The New York Times. Other Jews teach at the universities and work for the government, where they serve as diplomats and hold other positions of responsibility. In short, unlike the dying Jewish communities in other parts of the Muslim Middle East, the one in Turkey is vibrant and influential.

Interestingly, other Jews -- those of Israel and the United States -- also have a role in Turkey. In extensive talks with officials in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Prime Minister's Office, I found a consistent interest in strengthening ties with Israel, and near delight with September's Israel-PLO agreement because it hastens this process. These analysts see Israel in a variety of ways: as a trading partner, a fellow democracy to help stabilize the region, an ally which can help deal with the Iranian and Syrian regimes, and a means of access to Washington. The first-ever visit by Turkey's Foreign Minister Hikmet Çetin to Israel last November consolidated these ties and raised high hopes for the future.

Which brings us to American Jews. One Turkish analyst pointed out to me that many of the leading American scholars of Turkey are Jewish (including Bernard Lewis, Stanford Shaw, and Avigdor Levy). A Foreign Ministry official who noted that Turkey's strongest advocates in the United States are Jewish, mentioning specifically Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, concluded with the comment, "We love American Jews." Turkey's government despairs of a Turkish lobby ever emerging in the United States which will be capable of standing up to the Greeks and Armenians; in the meantime, it counts on Jews to make the argument for Turkey in Washington. More effectively than anyone else, these individuals point out Turkey's importance as an ally in an especially turbulent part of the world (for example, vis-à-vis Iraq); its positive influence in the Middle East as an enduring democracy; and its importance as a model of secularism for the Muslim world as a whole.

Of course, Turkey also has its share of fundamentalist Muslims, fascists and other forms of anti-Semite. Like their counterparts elsewhere, these spread conspiracy theories about Jews and fulminate against Israel. But in Turkey, unlike Iran and the Arab countries, these people don't make policy, nor do conspiracy theories dominate political thinking. Perhaps most important, Turks don't engage in violence against Jews. (It was foreigners, not Turks, who carried out the one major act of violence against Turkey's Jews, the 1986 bombing of Neve Shalom Synagogue.)

There's every reason to think the good news will continue in the years ahead -- that Jews of Turkey will flourish; that Ankara's relations with Israel will expand; and that American Jews will play a valuable role explaining Turkey in the United States. With regard to Jews, as is the case in so many other ways, Turkey has successfully removed itself from the paranoia and repression of the Middle East and made itself a part of the West.

All material on this site ©1980-2001 Daniel Pipes.

Site built and maintained by Grayson Levy.

http://www.danielpipes.org/articles/19940901.shtml

[Guest Fadi]

Everyone on this board know Shaw is an American Jew, they even affirm it in ataa.org, so your info is not new.

 

Now I NEVER said he denied the Holocaust, what I said was that he REVISED the Holocaust, by denying some ellements of the tragic even. This is revising, someone do not need to deny a genocide to be a revisionist, revisionist mean revising.

[anoush.]

Of course you have NOTHING to say. Your false contention left you speechless. You really wanted to hope we didn't know the guy was a joo.

[Guest Fadi]

I'm sure you would find Jewish conspiracy theories everywhere... so don't worry, I didn't hopped anything... to say the truth the word hope used with you would be an oxymoron.