Jewish Loyalty to Israel and “Holocaust Denial” in the Minds of Non-Jews: A Short Critique of the ADL’s Global Survey on “Anti-S
June 19, 2014 at 3:45am
By Paul Grubach
Copyright 2014. All rights reserved.
I
In May of 2014, the highly influential Jewish-Zionist organization, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) published their widely publicized and acclaimed, world-wide “survey on Anti-Semitism.” Many of the world’s important news outlets published a story about it, and when this writer carried out a Google Search for “ADL Global 100: An Index of Anti-Semitism,” 385,000 results were called up.1 While there was some criticism of it in various mainstream media quarters, for the most part establishment media outlets seemed to agree that the survey’s findings were valid and a cause for concern. For a typical, mainstream view of the survey, the reader is directed to the Wall Street Journal’s article and video.2
In the Interests of fairness, we will let the ADL describe the survey and its results in their own words. An official ADL press release stated the following: “The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today [May 13, 2014] released the results of an unprecedented worldwide survey on anti-Semitic attitudes. The ADL Global 100: An Index of Anti-Semitism surveyed 53, 100 adults in 102 countries and territories in an effort to establish, for the first time, a comprehensive data-based research survey of the level and intensity of anti-Jewish sentiment across the world.”3
The ADL then described the methods used in the survey: “Respondents were asked a series of 11 questions based on age-old stereotypes about Jews, including classical stereotypes about Jewish power, loyalty, money and behavior. Those who responded affirmatively to six or more negative statements about Jews are considered to hold anti-Semitic attitudes.”4 Quite predictably, the ADL never addressed this all important question: Are these “age-old stereotypes about Jews” entirely or even partly true? For if they are entirely or even partly true, then the ADL cannot justifiably infer that those who respond affirmatively to these beliefs “hold anti-Semitic attitudes.” How can the truth ever be an “anti-Semitic prejudice?”
Due to time and length considerations, it will not be possible to deal with all 11 questions asked in the survey; a thorough analysis of all 11 “age-old stereotypes about Jews” would require a complete book. In this short essay we will only address what the ADL claims to be the “most widely accepted anti-Semitic stereotype worldwide.”5 In addition, since Smith’s Report and CODOH deal extensively with the Holocaust issue, we will address this major finding of the survey. In the ADL’s own words: “Only 54 percent of those polled globally have ever heard of the Holocaust. Two out of three people surveyed have either never heard of the Holocaust, or do not believe historical accounts to be accurate.”6
II
The first survey question was: “Jews are more loyal to Israel than to [this country/the countries they live in]. “ Overall throughout the world, 41 percent of those surveyed believe this statement to be “probably true.” In the ADL’s terms, “this is the most widely accepted stereotype in five out of seven regions surveyed.”7
Many Jews are in fact more loyal to Israel than to the country in which they live or were born and raised, and there is good evidence to substantiate this claim. So, believing this to be so does not indicate that the respondent is plagued by “anti-Jewish prejudice.” Consider the following.
In the late 1970s an important survey was conducted of committed Jews participating in Jewish leadership development programs in the United States. Those participating in the survey were described as “a broadly representative group, not of all Jews, but of that portion of American Jewry which has been socialized toward a positive Jewish commitment within the American context.”8 The survey results showed that there was broad agreement with attitudes that put Jewish-Zionist identification above all other identifications, including their identification with the United States. Seventy percent agreed or strongly agreed with the statement: “I feel more emotional when I hear Hatvikah [the Israeli national anthem] than when I hear the Star Spangled Banner [the American national anthem].” Eighty five percent agreed or strongly agreed with the statement: “Assimilation [with non-Jews] is the greatest threat to Jewish survival today.”9
And finally, here is probably the most sobering of findings. Less than 34 percent of the Jewish respondents agreed or strongly agreed with the statement: “The primary loyalty of American Jews must be the United States and their fellow Americans.” Less than 20 percent answered “not sure” to this question, while greater than 50 percent of the respondents disagreed or strongly disagreed with the statement. Thus, greater than fifty percent of the committed Jewish people in this study rejected the claim that US Jews should be more loyal to the United States than to Israel.10 In summation, the results of this important survey strongly suggests that US Jewish loyalty to Israel is–for many Jews in leadership roles in the US Jewish community–more important than loyalty to the United States.
Indeed, prominent and powerful “American” Jews of the past have openly proclaimed their allegiance to the Jewish-Zionist cause did take precedence over their allegiance to the United States, the country they resided in. We give you Zionist leader Rabbi Stephen S. Wise (1874-1949), former president of the American Jewish Congress and the World Jewish Congress, in his own words: “I am not an American citizen of the Jewish faith, I am a Jew.” And further: “I am an American. I have been an American for 63/64ths of my life, but I have been a Jew for four thousand years.” He added this telling thought: “Hitler was right in one thing. He calls the Jewish people a race, and we are a race.”11
At the 1938 rally in which he made the foregoing statements, Rabbi Wise even castigated those Jews who attempted to put their Jewish faith on the same level as their citizenship to the countries in which they resided, for it is stated in the New York Herald Tribune he added: “Any Jew who speaks of ‘Americans who are Jews’ is going back to the cowardice of the German Jews who spoke of themselves as German citizens of the Jewish faith [in Germany during the pre-WWII era], Dr. Wise continued, and the German Jews were woefully and tragically punished for their error.”12
Clearly, here is a Jewish leader during the era of WWII that did prod Jews to put their Jewish-Zionist “racial identity” above that of their citizenship in the United States—and many less prominent, “rank-and-file” Jewish Zionists have done just that. The distinguished Jewish-American critic of Zionism and Israel, Dr. Alfred Lilienthal (1915-2008), in 1974 recorded a conversation between himself and two youthful American Jews who openly declared their loyalty to Israel was more important than any loyalty they had to the United States. We give you these Zionist functionaries in their own words: “`I am a Jew before I am an American…[W]e do have strong connections with Israel as well as with the U.S., and we have more connections with Israel because this is our state (Italics added).” […] We live in the U.S. We are proud, however, that Israel is our state—Israel is our homeland, and our final goal is to settle there.” […] Israel is ours. The U.S. is not our state. We are making it our home, but a home is not a state.” 13
What’s more, consider the cases of two American Jews, Jonathan Jay Pollard and Ben-ami Kadish , who held sensitive, high-level positions in the United States intelligence community, and ended up being spies for Israel, which ultimately damaged United States security.14 Here are two clear examples of American Jews who put their allegiance to Israel above their allegiance to the United States.
In January 2014, Reuters News Service reported the following: “Iranian-born immigrants to Israel are drafted to its military intelligence units in disproportionately large numbers, an official report said on Thursday, reflecting high demand for Farsi speakers to monitor the Jewish state’s arch-enemy.”15 In essence, a significant number of Jews who were born and raised in Iran ended up immigrating to Israel and then joining the Zionist fight against the country of their birth—a clear indication that for these Jews, their identification with Israel does indeed transcend their allegiance to the country in which they were born and formerly lived in, Iran.
Just recently, ordained rabbi and lifelong Jewish educator Jay Michaelson confirmed in one of the world’s most important Jewish newspapers, The Jewish Daily Forward, that some Jews definitely are more loyal to Israel than the countries they live in. We give this honest rabbi the podium: “Are Jews more loyal to Israel than to the countries they live in? Well, some Jews definitely are.”16
Still, it would be unfair and wildly inaccurate to conclude that “every single non-Israeli Jewish person in the world is more loyal to Israel than to the country in which they live and have citizenship.” Indeed, this writer knows a number of Jewish people that consider themselves only patriotic American citizens and want nothing whatsoever to do with Israel. To say that these particular Jewish people “are more loyal to Israel than to the United States” would in fact be a prejudicial statement.
The bottom line is this. If someone believes the truth—a significant number of Zionist Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the country in which they have citizenship—the ADL infers they are “infected with an anti-Semitic attitude.”17 Here, the ADL has drawn a false conclusion; for believing the true statement—Many Zionist Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the countries in which they live—is not indicative of “anti-Jewish prejudice.” It simply means that the respondent has correctly perceived a truth about certain groups of Zionist Jews. And it is here that we get a glimpse into perhaps the real underlying agenda behind the ADL’s survey—to demonize and discredit accurate beliefs about certain groups of Zionist Jews that threaten the power and status of the International Jewish-Zionist power elite. More on this in a moment.
III
Certainly at the very top of the ADL’s concerns is the fact that (in the ADL’s own words) “only 54 percent of those polled globally have ever heard of the Holocaust. Two out of three people surveyed have either never heard of the Holocaust, or do not believe historical accounts to be accurate.”18 Again in the ADL’s own words, “among those who have heard of the Holocaust, 32 percent believe it is either a myth or has been greatly exaggerated.”19 What I infer from the rhetoric of the ADL’s press release is that anyone who believes that the Holocaust story is mythical and/or exaggerated, is (to borrow their phraseology) “infected with anti-Semitic attitudes.”20 Notice how the ADL employs an emotion-laden and highly charged phrase to describe beliefs that they don’t like and threaten Jewish-Zionist interests. To wit, those who reject the ADL’s Jewish-Zionist version of the Holocaust are supposedly contaminated with a mental disease, which is characterized by accepting false beliefs about the Holocaust. That is to say, they harbor an “anti-Semitic attitude.”
But what the ADL fails to make the public aware of is that even mainstream Holocaust historians have established that the Holocaust story is chock full of myths and exaggerations, and in the past the ADL itself has publicly promoted Holocaust myths and exaggerations. So, if someone believes the Holocaust is exaggerated and contains mythical aspects, this only indicates that he has accepted the truth: it does not establish that he is “infected” with “anti-Semitic attitudes.” Time and space considerations will permit me to list only a few of the well-established myths and exaggerations that are part and parcel of the Holocaust story.
1. At the postwar Nuremburg Tribunal the Allies “officially established” that the Germans exterminated four million people at Auschwitz-Birkenau. In July 1990, the Polish government’s Auschwitz State Museum, along with Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust center, conceded that the four million figure was a gross exaggeration.21 There are mainstream Holocaust historians who point out that the “four million murdered at Auschwitz” claim was a deliberate myth created for political reasons.22
2. Holocaust historians Robert Jan van Pelt and Deborah Dwork concede in their Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present that the contemporary Auschwitz “Nazi extermination camp” tourist site contains outright falsifications with a controlled ideological message, which in turn misleads visitors.23 Supporting this claim is Dr. Franciszek Piper, senior curator of the Auschwitz State Museum. In the early 1990s he admitted on film to Jewish Revisionist David Cole that the alleged “homicidal gas chamber” shown to tourists at the Auschwitz camp is a postwar reconstruction, even though tourists were told it is the “gas chambers in its original state.” Here, we are dealing with a clear deception.24
3. Professor van Pelt also conceded in his The Case for Auschwitz that the war time claims that Jews were electrocuted en masse in “electrocution chambers” at Belzec concentration camp and on “electric conveyor belts” at Auschwitz are both false myths.25
4. The annals of the Holocaust story are chock full of “Holocaust survivors” who put forth false claims in their “eyewitness testimony.” For example, one “Holocaust survivor” claimed the Germans mass murdered Jews with chlorine gas at Sobibor concentration camp, and after the people were gassed to death, their bodies fell through the “gas chamber’s floor” into train cars that took them to be cremated. This is now conceded to be another Holocaust myth.26 In a 2010 book, Holocaust historian Christopher Browning pointed out that sixteen Jewish “Holocaust Survivors” reported seeing Joseph Mengele (the doctor who allegedly selected people to be murdered in the “Auschwitz gas chambers”) on a ramp when they arrived at Auschwitz. Browning concludes this is a “vivid memory of something that actually had not occurred.”27
5. The biter critic of “Holocaust denial,” Professor Deborah Lipstadt, conceded that the story that the Nazis made soap from Jewish corpses is a war time falsehood.28 Another Holocaust era historian, Richard Breitmann, made a similar finding: the claim that the Nazis manufactured fertilizer and fats from corpses is erroneous.29
6. Without question, one of the most influential “Holocaust films” ever produced, Night and Fog–which undoubtedly is responsible for convincing millions “that the Holocaust happened,”–contains at least one falsehood that mainstream historiography owns up to. It puts forth the myth that the “Nazis made soap from dead bodies.” Wikipedia states: “While Night and Fog states that the Nazis made soap from the corpses, giving the possible impression that this was done regularly, this claim is nowadays considered as untrue, with the exception of possible isolated cases. “30
7. In her most recent book, The Eichmann Trial, Professor Lipstadt pointed out that the late dedicated Zionist and “Nazi hunter,” Simon Wiesenthal, deliberately exaggerated the number of non-Jews killed by the Nazis in the concentration camps. Wiesenthal’s exaggeration was subsequently publicly trumpeted by American President Jimmy Carter—a tribute to the ability of a Jewish Zionist to spread a Holocaust myth.31
8. In his Assassins of Memory, French-Jewish historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet briefly discussed eyewitnesses who claimed they “saw gas chambers” where there were none. He admits that there were “imaginary gas chambers.” That is, some Holocaust survivors gave false testimony, claiming there were “homicidal mass gassings” where it is now known that they never happened. He cited the false testimony “of a Protestant theologian, Charles Hauter, who was deported to Buchenwald, never saw any gas chamber, and who went on to rave about them.”’32
9. Even dedicated opponents of “Holocaust Denial,” such as Cambridge University historian Richard J. Evans, admit that the mainstream promoters of the Holocaust story put forth myths and falsehoods. He contends that “political exploitation of the Holocaust involves distortion of the historical record […].”33 Consider his expose of how the The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum distorts reality: “Visiting the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., for example, I was struck by the its marginalization of any other victims apart from the Jews, to the extent that it presented photographs of dead bodies in camps such as Buchenwald or Dachau as dead Jewish bodies, when in fact relatively few Jewish prisoners were held there.”34 So there you have it. The viewer is led to believe that non-Jewish bodies are those of dead Jews. In effect, sympathy for Jews is gained by the exploitation of non-Jewish corpses.
10. In 1978 and 1985, the ADL published an “educational” Holocaust tabloid, entitled The Record: The Holocaust in History.35 On page 10 of the 1978 and 1985 editions, they reprinted the New York Times (August 8, 1943) mythical story about the “homicidal steam chambers” of Treblinka concentration camp, where Jews were supposedly “mass murdered and suffocated” with scalding hot steam. On the same page they reprinted the February 11, 1944 Associated Press story about the mythical “electrocution chambers” of Belzec concentration camp, where Jews were allegedly “mass murdered” by electrocution in “huge vats filled with water.” And finally, on page 12 they reprinted the May 8, 1945 New York Times story about how “four million people were mass murdered” by the Nazis at Auschwitz. Of course, mainstream Holocaust historiography now admits that the Treblinka “homicidal steam chamber” fable, the Belzec “homicidal electrocution chamber” story, and the “four-million-murdered at Auschwitz” number, are all false.36 So, in 1978 and again in 1985 the ADL promoted a now demonstrably mythical and exaggerated view of the Holocaust, but in 2014 they claim that those who believe the Holocaust is mythical and exaggerated are “infected with an anti-Semitic attitude!”
11 In short, since there are so many falsehoods, myths, and exaggerations in the Holocaust story, this gives any respondent to the ADL survey a good reason to suspect that the ADL’s version of the Holocaust is a myth or is at least greatly exaggerated. If a respondent “does not believe historical accounts [of the Holocaust] to be accurate,” this does not indicate that he is “infected with an anti-Semitic attitude.” Therefore, the important question is: why would the ADL imply that believing a truth—historical accounts of the Holocaust are not accurate or are exaggerated—indicates that the respondent is “infected with an anti-Semitic attitude?”
One plausible, possible hypothesis is as follows. The ADL may want to demonize and render taboo those beliefs that are threatening to the Jewish-Zionist version of history and deemed contrary to Jewish-Zionist interests world-wide. Think about it. The phrase—“infected with an anti-Semitic attitude”—is an emotion-laden label attached to the claim—“the Holocaust is mythical or has been greatly exaggerated”—but it does nothing to disprove the truth of the claim. Being “infected with an anti-Semitic attitude” is a linguistic artifice, the effect of which is to conjure up all the negative emotions and responses associated with the code word “anti-Semitism” in the minds of listeners, and thus induce listeners to reject out of hand the true statement that the Holocaust contains myths and exaggerations.
In conclusion, the ADL’s insistence that non-Jews are “infected with an anti-Semitic attitude” when they assert that many Jewish Zionists are more loyal to Israel than to the country in which they reside and that the Holocaust is mythical and exaggerated, may be an attempt on the part of this Jewish nationalist group to stamp out with a fallacious propaganda technique beliefs that threaten world-wide Jewish-Zionist power. More simply stated, by labeling people who hold beliefs that the ADL does not like as “anti-Semites” is a method by which this Zionist pressure group can wage intellectual terror.
Footnotes
.
10. Ibid, p.112.
11. New York Herald Tribune, 13 June 1938, p. 12.
12. Ibid.
13. Alfred M. Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection II: What Price Peace? (North American, 1982), pp.745-746.
14. See the entries for “Jonathan Pollard” and “Ben-ami Kadish” in Wikipedia.
15. Dan Williams, “Israeli military lifts veil on its Iran listeners,” Reuters, 9 January 2014. Online: http://news.yahoo.com/israeli-military-lifts-veil-iran-listeners-133858420.html
16. Jay Michaelson, “I am 1 Billionth ‘Anti-Semite’: ADL ‘Study’ a Tangled Hodgepodge—Anyone Could Fail,” The Jewish Daily Forward, 20 May 2014. Online: http://forward.com/articles/198475/i-am--billionth-anti-semite/
17. ADL Press Release.
18. ADL Global 100: An Index o f Anti-Semitism, p.11.
19. ADL Press Release.
20. Ibid.
21. Nuremberg document 008-USSR; IMT "blue series," Vol. 39, pp. 24-25. Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, eds., Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp (Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 61-62; Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (The Free Press, 1993), p.188, footnote.
22. Yehuda Bauer, “Auschwitz: The Dangers of Distortion,” Jerusalem Post International Edition, week ending 30 September 2009; Peter Steinfels, “Auschwitz Revisionism: An Israeli Scholar’s Case,” New York Times, 12 November 1989.
23. Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present (WW. Norton & Company, 1996), pp. 360, 361, 363, 364, 367, passim.
24. See the video “David Cole in Auschwitz—David Cole Interviews Dr. Franciszek Piper, Director, Auschwitz State Museum.” Online:http://holocausthandbooks.com/index.php?page_id=1004&play=100#watch
25. Robert Jan van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial (Indiana University Press, 2002), pp. 145, 159.
26. See Carlo Mattogno, Belzec in Propaganda, Testimonies, Archeological Research, and History (Theses & Dissertations Press, 2004), p.10. Online:http://www.vho.org/GB/Books/b/index.html
27. Christopher R. Browning, Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp (W.W. Norton & Co., 2010), pp.235-236.
28. See Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews: Student Edition (Holmes & Meier, 1985), pp. 314-315. Lipstadt, p. 188.
29. Richard Breitman, The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution (Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), p. 6.
30. See the entry for “Night and Fog” in Wikipedia. Online:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_and_Fog_(1955_film)
31. Deborah E. Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial (Schocken Books, 2011), pp. 8-10.
32. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust (Columbia University Press, 1992), pp.14, 181fn44.
33. Richard J. Evans, Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial (Basic Books, 2001), p.262.
34. Ibid, p.261.
35. The Record: The Holocaust in History: 1931-1945.
36. See Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews: Student Edition (Holmes & Meier, 1985), pp. 314-315; Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe 1939-1945 (Jason Aronson Inc., 1987), p. 140-141.
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The Holocaust story serves as the Zionist Miracle Weapon that morally justifies the conquest and occupation of Palestinian land. It is an endless source of billions of dollars in reparations for Jews, and is a weapon that in the United States is used to prohibit adult behavior by congressmen, academics, and journalists alike (they all agree: you cannot "discuss" the Holocaust Question). I founded Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust to try to defuse this Miracle Weapon. If you find my work useful, please take a moment to Contribute:
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