In last interview, Auschwitz survivor urged Palestinians “not to give up their fight”

Hajo was born in 1924 and had to flee alone from Nazi Germany at the age of 14 because the Nazis would not allow him to attend school anymore. His parents sent him to the Netherlands in January 1939.

A year later, the Netherlands was occupied by Germany. In 1943, Hajo went into hiding but was captured by the Gestapo in March 1944 and deported to the Auschwitz death camp where the Nazis tattooed number “179679” on his arm.

After the war, Meyer returned to the Netherlands where he had a long career as a physicist. He also took up making violins in his retirement.

In a previous interview with The Electronic Intifada, Hajo said: “For as long as I can, I will continue to utter my criticism of inhuman Zionist behavior.”

On 29 July, I traveled to Meyer’s home in Heiloo in the Netherlands, to discuss the Israeli onslaught on Gaza, where the tired Hajo gave The Electronic Intifada his last interview.

I asked Hajo how he felt. “I can’t answer you positively, due to old age which prevents me from any activity in supporting the Palestinians,” he replied. “To be that old comes with such great loss of capacities, it is quite a task,” he said.

He reflected on how lucky he was to survive Auschwitz with some comrades.

 Reber Dosky, a Kurdish refugee residing in the Netherlands, made My Good Fortune in Auschwitz (2012), a short documentary about Hajo’s survival with his comrade Jos Slagter. In the documentary, Hajo plays one of the melancholic Yiddish tunes he used to test the sound of the violins he had made (watch it above — with English subtitles).

When I spoke to him, Hajo denounced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s accusations that the large demonstrations against Israel’s attacks on Gaza are an expression of an increasing hatred against Israel.

“If we want to stay really human beings, we must get up and call the Zionists what they are: Nazi criminals,” Meyer said. The hate of the Jews by the Germans “was less deeply rooted than the hate of the Palestinians by the Israeli Jews,” he observed. “The brainwashing of the Jewish Israeli populations is going on for over sixty years. They cannot see a Palestinian as a human being.”

While discussing Europe’s response to Israel’s policies, Hajo said that Europe should respond with “a much more large scale boycott of Israel” than a ban on settlement products. If we Europeans pretend to hold high the flag of humanity with what is happening in Gaza, Israel should be outcasted by us.”

I asked him if he had a message for the Palestinians, Israelis or human rights activists.

“My message for the Palestinians is that they should not give up their fight,” he replied. “If they give up, they might lose their self-esteem with the ongoing humiliations by the Israeli Nazis. Fight with human means. It is justified to show to the Israeli Zionists that you are a force to reckon with. Fight with stones, with weapons. Yes, also with weapons. If you don’t fight, you lose your self-esteem and will not be respected by the Israelis.”

“If we Western democratic societies don’t support the Palestinians in their fight, we must feel ashamed if the Palestinians are annihilated. The US and the European Union must show their teeth,” he added.

Hajo was one of more than forty survivors of the Nazi genocide who recently signed a letter condemning Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.

In May, Hajo Meyer’s letters to his family written between July 1939 and 1945 were published in Germany.

Hajo Meyer, thank you for your humanity, your dignity, your love and your consistent support to defending human rights.

 Link

Heroic Tale of Holocaust, With a Twist

The stories of the Holocaust have been documented, distorted, clarified and filtered through memory. Yet new stories keep coming, occasionally altering the grand, incomplete mosaic of Holocaust history.

One of them, dramatized in a French film released here last week, focuses on an unlikely savior of Jews during the Nazi occupation of France: the rector of a Paris mosque.

Muslims, it seems, rescued Jews from the Nazis.

“Les Hommes Libres” (“Free Men”) is a tale of courage not found in French textbooks. According to the story, Si Kaddour Benghabrit, the founder and rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris, provided refuge and certificates of Muslim identity to a small number of Jews to allow them to evade arrest and deportation.

It was simpler than it sounds. In the early 1940s France was home to a large population of North Africans, including thousands of Sephardic Jews. The Jews spoke Arabic and shared many of the same traditions and everyday habits as the Arabs. Neither Muslims nor Jews ate pork. Both Muslim and Jewish men were circumcised. Muslim and Jewish names were often similar.

The mosque, a tiled, walled fortress the size of a city block on the Left Bank, served as a place to pray, certainly, but also as an oasis of calm where visitors were fed and clothed and could bathe, and where they could talk freely and rest in the garden.

It was possible for a Jew to pass.

“This film is an event,” said Benjamin Stora, France’s pre-eminent historian on North Africa and a consultant on the film. “Much has been written about Muslim collaboration with the Nazis. But it has not been widely known that Muslims helped Jews. There are still stories to be told, to be written.”

The film, directed by Ismaël Ferroukhi, is described as fiction inspired by real events and built around the stories of two real-life figures (along with a made-up black marketeer). The veteran French actor Michael Lonsdale plays Benghabrit, an Algerian-born religious leader and a clever political maneuverer who gave tours of the mosque to German officers and their wives even as he apparently used it to help Jews.

Mahmoud Shalaby, a Palestinian actor living in Israel, plays Salim — originally Simon — Hilali, who was Paris’s most popular Arabic-language singer, a Jew who survived the Holocaust by posing as a Muslim. (To make the assumed identity credible, Benghabrit had the name of Hilali’s grandfather engraved on a tombstone in the Muslim cemetery in the Paris suburb of Bobigny, according to French obituaries about the singer. In one tense scene in the film a German soldier intent on proving that Hilali is a Jew, takes him to the cemetery to identify it.)

The historical record remains incomplete, because documentation is sketchy. Help was provided to Jews on an ad hoc basis and was not part of any organized movement by the mosque. The number of Jews who benefited is not known. The most graphic account, never corroborated, was given by Albert Assouline, a North African Jew who escaped from a German prison camp. He claimed that more than 1,700 resistance fighters — including Jews but also a lesser number of Muslims and Christians — found refuge in the mosque’s underground caverns, and that the rector provided many Jews with certificates of Muslim identity.

In his 2006 book, “Among the Righteous,” Robert Satloff, director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, uncovered stories of Arabs who saved Jews during the Holocaust, and included a chapter on the Grand Mosque. Dalil Boubakeur, the current rector, confirmed to him that some Jews — up to 100 perhaps — were given Muslim identity papers by the mosque, without specifying a number. Mr. Boubakeur said individual Muslims brought Jews they knew to the mosque for help, and the chief imam, not Benghabrit, was the man responsible.

Mr. Boubakeur showed Mr. Satloff a copy of a typewritten 1940 Foreign Ministry document from the French Archives. It stated that the occupation authorities suspected mosque personnel of delivering false Muslim identity papers to Jews. “The imam was summoned, in a threatening manner, to put an end to all such practices,” the document said.

Mr. Satloff said in a telephone interview: “One has to separate the myth from the fact. The number of Jews protected by the mosque was probably in the dozens, not the hundreds. But it is a story that carries a powerful political message and deserves to be told.”

A 1991 television documentary “Une Résistance Oubliée: La Mosquée de Paris” (“A Forgotten Resistance: The Mosque of Paris”) by Derri Berkani , and a children’s book “The Grand Mosque of Paris: A Story of How Muslims Saved Jews During the Holocaust,” published in 2007, also explore the events.

The latest film was made in an empty palace in Morocco, with the support of the Moroccan government. The Paris mosque refused to grant permission for any filming. “We’re a place of worship,” Mr. Boubakeur said in an interview. “There are prayers five times a day. Shooting a film would have been disruptive.”

Benghabrit fell out of favor with fellow Muslims because he opposed Algerian independence and stayed loyal to France’s occupation of his native country. He died in 1954.

In doing research for the film, Mr. Ferroukhi and even Mr. Stora learned new stories. At one screening a woman asked him why the film did not mention the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern European origin who had been saved by the mosque. Mr. Stora said he explained that the mosque didn’t intervene on behalf of Ashkenazi Jews, who did not speak Arabic or know Arab culture.

“She told me: ‘That’s not true. My mother was protected and saved by a certificate from the mosque,’ ” Mr. Stora said.

On Wednesday, the day of the film’s release here, hundreds of students from three racially and ethnically mixed Paris-area high schools were invited to a special screening and question-and-answer session with Mr. Ferroukhi and some of his actors.

Some asked banal questions. Where did you find the old cars? (From an antique car rental agency.) Others reacted with curiosity and disbelief, wanting to know how much of the film was based on fact, and how it could have been possible that Jews mingled easily with Muslims. Some were stunned to hear that the Nazis persecuted only the Jews, and left the Muslims alone.

Reviews here were mixed on the film, which is to be released in the Netherlands, Switzerland and Belgium. (American rights have been sold as well.) The daily Le Figaro said it “reconstitutes an atmosphere and a period marvelously.” The weekly L’Express called it “ideal for a school outing, less for an evening at the movies.”

Mr. Ferroukhi does not care. He said he was lobbying the Culture and Education Ministries to get the film shown in schools. “It pays homage to the people of our history who have been invisible,” he said. “It shows another reality, that Muslims and Jews existed in peace. We have to remember that — with pride.”

source

How Europeans butchered innocents throughout history

Interesting article from The Guardian:

Europe was massively enriched by the genocides in the Americas; the American nations were founded on them. This is a history we cannot accept.

In his book American Holocaust, the US scholarDavid Stannard documents the greatest acts of genocide the world has ever experienced. In 1492, some 100 million native people lived in the Americas. By the end of the 19th century almost all of them had been exterminated. Many died as a result of disease, but the mass extinction was also engineered.

When the Spanish arrived in the Americas, they described a world which could scarcely have been more different to their own. Europe was ravaged by war, oppression, slavery, fanaticism, disease and starvation. The populations they encountered were healthy, well-nourished and mostly (with exceptions like the Aztecs and Incas) peaceable, democratic and egalitarian. Throughout the Americas the earliest explorers, including Columbus, remarked on the natives' extraordinary hospitality. The conquistadores marvelled at the amazing roads, canals, buildings and art they found, which in some cases outstripped anything they had seen at home. None of this stopped them destroying everything and everyone they encountered.

The butchery began with Columbus. He slaughtered the native people of Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic) by unimaginably brutal means. His soldiers tore babies from their mothers and dashed their heads against rocks. They fed their dogs on living children. On one occasion they hung 13 Indians in honour of Christ and the 12 disciples, on a gibbet just low enough for their toes to touch the ground, then disembowelled them and burnt them alive. Columbus ordered all the native people to deliver a certain amount of gold every three months; anyone who failed had his hands cut off. By 1535 the native population of Hispaniola had fallen from eight million to zero: partly as a result of disease, partly due to murder, overwork and starvation.

The conquistadores spread this civilising mission across central and south America. When they failed to reveal where their mythical treasures were hidden, the indigenous people were flogged, hanged, drowned, dismembered, ripped apart by dogs, buried alive or burnt. The soldiers cut off women's breasts, sent people back to their villages with their severed hands and noses hung round their necks and hunted them with dogs for sport. But most were killed by enslavement and disease. The Spanish discovered that it was cheaper to work the native Americans to death and replace them than to keep them alive: the life expectancy in their mines and plantations was three to four months. Within a century of their arrival, about 95% of the population of South and Central America were dead.

In California during the 18th century the Spanish systematised this extermination. A Franciscan missionary called Junípero Serra set up a series of "missions": in reality concentration camps using slave labour. The native people were herded in under force of arms and made to work in the fields on one fifth of the calories fed to African American slaves in the 19th century. They died from overwork, starvation and disease at astonishing rates, and were continually replaced, wiping out the indigenous populations. Junípero Serra, the Eichmann of California, was beatified by the Vatican in 1988. He now requires one more miracle to be pronounced a saint.

While the Spanish were mostly driven by the lust for gold, the British who colonised North America wanted land. In New England they surrounded the villages of the native Americans and murdered them as they slept. As genocide spread westwards, it was endorsed at the highest levels. George Washington ordered the total destruction of the homes and land of the Iroquois. Thomas Jefferson declared that his nation's wars with the Indians should be pursued until each tribe "is exterminated or is driven beyond the Mississippi". During the Sand Creek massacre of 1864, troops in Colorado slaughtered unarmed people gathered under a flag of peace, killing children and babies, mutilating all the corpses and keeping their victims' genitals to use as tobacco pouches or to wear on their hats. Theodore Roosevelt called this event "as rightful and beneficial a deed as ever took place on the frontier".

The butchery hasn't yet ended: last month the Guardian reported that ­Brazilian ranchers in the western Amazon, having slaughtered all the rest, tried to kill the last surviving member of a forest tribe. Yet the greatest acts of genocide in history scarcely ruffle our collective conscience. Perhaps this is what would have happened had the Nazis won the second world war: the Holocaust would have been denied, excused or minimised in the same way, even as it continued. The people of the nations responsible – Spain, Britain, the US and others – will tolerate no comparisons, but the final solutions pursued in the Americas were far more successful. Those who commissioned or endorsed them remain national or religious heroes. Those who seek to prompt our memories are ignored or condemned.

This is why the right hates Avatar. In the neocon Weekly Standard, John Podhoretz complains that the film resembles a "revisionist western" in which "the Indians became the good guys and the Americans the bad guys". He says it asks the audience "to root for the defeat of American soldiers at the hands of an insurgency". Insurgency is an interesting word for an attempt to resist invasion: insurgent, like savage, is what you call someone who has something you want. L'Osservatore Romano, the official newspaper of the Vatican, condemned the film as "just an anti-imperialistic, anti-militaristic parable".

But at least the right knows what it is attacking. In the New York Times the liberal critic Adam Cohen praises Avatar for championing the need to see clearly. It reveals, he says, "a well-known principle of totalitarianism and genocide – that it is easiest to oppress those we cannot see". But in a marvellous unconscious irony, he bypasses the crashingly obvious metaphor and talks instead about the light it casts on Nazi and Soviet atrocities. We have all become skilled in the art of not seeing.

I agree with its rightwing critics that Avatar is crass, mawkish and cliched. But it speaks of a truth more important – and more dangerous – than those contained in a thousand arthouse movies.

Palestinian Holocaust Museums

In a small anonymous home in the West Bank, a Palestinian academic has set up a project which is almost unheard of in the Occupied Territories.

Hassan Musa is the curator of a museum exhibition dedicated to the Jewish Holocaust in Europe.

The cracked white walls of this makeshift museum in the village of Ni'lin are covered from floor to ceiling with images of people forced out of their homes, tortured, imprisoned, starved and murdered.

In addition to the pictures depicting the Nazi brutality against Jews in Europe, there are also images of the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) following the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and the violence in Palestine since.

On one wall, there is a picture of a scared Jewish boy holding up his hands as Nazi soldiers look on; the caption reads: "Make your final account with Hitler and the Nazi Germans, not with the Palestinians."

On an adjacent wall there are photos of dead children, demolished homes and women screaming during the Israeli war on Gaza in January.

Musa, who is also a member of Ni'lin's Popular Committee Against the Wall, says pictures of the atrocities committed against both peoples were strategically placed side-by-side to not only reflect the suffering of both and help Israelis and Palestinians better understand each other, but also to demonstrate how victims of one conflict can become the harbinger of another.

"The Palestinians have no connection to the Holocaust in Europe, but unfortunately we are paying the price of a misdeed we did not commit," he said.

In the main room, a large banner sends a direct message to Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, a message: "Why should we Palestinians continue to pay for the Holocaust?"

Musa believes this question is the impetus behind the exhibit, hoping it will challenge the international community on what is happening between Israelis and Palestinians.

"The world is shamefully silent about what is happening in Palestine as a way of expressing their sorrow for the death of six million Jews, but in the meantime, they are supporting the state of occupation," he said.

Ni'lin has become synonymous with violent weekly clashes between Israeli soldiers and activists protesting against the construction of the 'Separation Wall'.

The current path of the Wall will annex 10,000 acres of Ni'lin land to Israel, leaving its residents with 30,000 acres; this is a fraction of the 228,000 acres that constituted the village in 1948.

Since then, Ni'lin residents have lost more than 85 per cent of their land to confiscation and illegal settlement building.

People in the village also accused the Israeli military of killing four Ni'lin residents since protests against land confiscation began in May 2008.

Among those was Musa's 10-year-old nephew, Ahmad, who died on July 29, 2008 from a bullet wound to the head; a number of residents and activists have also been injured in the protests.

In March, Tristan Anderson, a 38-year-old American activist acting as an observer with the International Solidarity Movement, was shot in the head with a high-velocity tear gas canister, leaving him in critical condition.

It is these events that make the location of the museum all the more significant, Musa says.

In a place where Palestinians struggle to fend off occupation, Musa now offers them an opportunity to empathise with and further understand their occupier.

Israeli, Palestinian and international visitors continue to trickle into the museum, though they are fewer in number than the crowds that gather for the protests.

Remaining optimistic, Musa hopes this endeavour will encourage Israelis to pressure their government to halt the occupation.

"Our message to the Jewish people all over the world is that having been victims of such a brutal genocide, we expect you to be messengers of all the principles of justice, mercy and humanity," he told Al Jazeera.

According to Musa, reaction from Palestinians, especially those in the village, has been positive; the exhibits are, in many instances, the first images they have ever seen of the Holocaust.

Musa says some Palestinian visitors leave the exhibit feeling sorrow for the Jewish people, but also with the same question posed in the messages plastered across the walls: "Why are they punishing us?"

"I lost my nephew and I know how painful it is for me," Musa says, "that's why I don't want anyone else living on this land to lose their loved ones."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Islam Online are creating their own Palestine Holocaust Museum in Second Life. Check it out here.

Tale of two Holocaust: Spot the difference

THE GRANDCHILDREN OF HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS FROM WORLD WAR II ARE DOING TO THE PALESTINIANS EXACTLY WHAT WAS DONE TO THEM BY NAZI GERMANY…

BUILDING WALLS & FENCES TO KEEP PEOPLE IN PRISONS

CHECK POINTS NOT TO ALLOW PEOPLE BASIC FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT

ARRESTS & HARASSMENTS

DESTROYING HOMES & LIVELIHOODS

GIFTS (WITH LOVE) FROM THE CHILDREN OF PEACE-LOVING & CIVILIZED COUNTRIES

THE CLASSIC PROPAGANDA MACHINE - YOU WILL FIND THE PICTURE IN BLACK & WHITE IN ALL AMERICAN AND SOME OTHER WESTERN COUNTRIES, HISTORY BOOKS, ENCYCLOPAEDIAS, LIBRARIES, MUSEUMS… THAT DEPICTS A YOUNG JEWISH BOY WITH HIS HANDS UP WHILE NAZI TROOPS POINT THEIR GUNS AT HIM AND HIS FAMILY IN ORDER TO EXPEL THEM FROM THEIR HOMES… IT'S SUPPOSED TO MAKE YOU SYMPATHIZE WITH THE VICTIMS & TO SUPPORT THEIR CAUSE FOR JUSTICE & A HOMELAND.

THE ISRAELIS PRACTICE THE SAME TACTICS

…FORWARD if you feel that there is no difference between human beings…

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