Implicit in equating Warsaw and Gaza is a lie of the most cowardly and evil kind. Promoting the falsehood, in addition to being an attack on Jews - and an assault on English Jews in particular, for it is their environment that is being contaminated - it is a gross disservice to the people of Gaza whose suffering is of no consequence to the authors of this event. To elevate sworn would-be destroyers of Israel to the level of the heroism of the Jews of Warsaw is a vile distortion wothy of the German propaganda machine of the thirties.

It is an absolute outrage to compare the needless innocent suffering, heroism and ultimate murder of the Jews of Warsaw and all the ghettos of Europe, to the Gaza hardships directly resulting from the free democratic choice of Gazans to be governed by a terrorist organization.

The Hamas charter, published fully five years before the Gaza elections, states clearly and categorically its intention to destroy Israel. The people of Gaza voted specifically for this. The true similarity is that the same free choice was exercised by the people of Germany in 1933 six years after the written publication of the Nazis’ aims in Mein Kampf.

Would the scholars of Goldsmith’s College hold the allies responsible for the post war hardships of the German people? Quite possibly.

Some more facts.

Following the UN decision to create two states in Palestine one each for Jews and Arabs living in Palestine, the Jews agreed, the Arabs said “No” and made war. They lost and many fled to Egypt-controlled Gaza. Their children and grandchildren are living in the home of their birth, just as the one million Jewish refugees from Arab lands and their children and grandchildren are living to day in Israel. The Arabs call themselves refugees. The Jews call themselves Israelis.

Gaza was occupied by Egypt for twenty years without complaint from anyone, including Goldsmith’s College.

In 1967 in response to Egypt’s naval blockade of Israel in the Straits of Tiran, and its advancing massed army in the Sinai desert, Israel repulsed Eqypt. Many attacks on Israel including air strikes were launched from Gaza. Israel was forced to capture the Gaza strip and administer it. Later, in the Carter-brokered agreement of 1977, Egypt refused to take it back. ( They did take back the Siani together with Israel-developed oil fields.)

Gaza was occupied by Israel to prevent its use for further attacks on Israel. Its agriculture was developed by Israeli settlers and world class facilities and greenhouses with huge production capacity. In 2005 these were given to the people of Gaza in a total withdrawal by Israel. It was looted and completely trashed. Some Gazans are now hungry.

But their hunger is different from the hunger of the kidnapped victims in the Warsaw Ghetto. The Jews had been living Poland as peaceful and productive citizens for six hundred years , since the reign of King Cazimir.

Polish Jews did not launch any war on Germany or threaten it daily with destruction. They were not taught in UN-financed schools to hate Germans. They were not given greenhouses and medical treatment. They were systematically killed. Over 100,000 were murdered there, not in defense of Germany, but in cold-blooded murder of men, women and children because they were not Christian. The ghetto in Warsaw was one stage in the process of the destruction of European Jewry.

Not in the most deranged, drug-induced, psychotic mind could any human being draw a parallel with the people of Gaza and their troubles.

The gross distortion of truth implicit in this title is purely for the sadistic gratification of the authors - notwithstanding the Stockholm Syndrome of one speaker. It is not intended in any way to empathize with or ameliorate the suffering in Gaza. The authors are using that suffering for their own purpose, and thus are betraying the people of Gaza.

The title of this talk is nothing less than a repackaging of the ancient blood libel against the Jews. It first appeared in England in 1292, and has surfaced over the centuries in every country in Europe. The libel is now resurrected in its birthplace in the twenty-first century - at an establishment of higher learning. Shame on the scholars of Goldsmith’s. Utter shame.

M. Wallach

http://www.engageonline.org.uk/blog/article.php?id=2216

http://www.zionismontheweb.org/zionism_commentary/Goldsmiths_Gaza_and_the_Warsaw_Ghetto.htm

What precisely did she “survive”? The sea journey across the Atlantic from France?

Here again we have the spectacle of allowing a Holocaust survivor use her experiences in order to attack Israel. Will they allow a Holocaust survivor to speak in support of Israel?

At the Warsaw Ghetto Jews didn’t’ have Kassam rocket to fire into Germany or even into the Polish areas of the city. Nor were there convoys of fuel and food shipped there. Besides the Jewish community there didn’t take hostages, didn’t blow themselves up in order to kill civilians.

Finally the Jews there would have been all too happy to comply with whatever demands made on them if only they had been allowed to live. They certainly would walked to any country that would have given them refuge. Unfortunately England wasn’t one of those countries.

What is it about these Israel haters who are ready to ignore real atrocities and real suffering and focus instead on supposed potential atrocities that never seem to materialize?

Why don’t they pay attention to Darfur, the Congo, and other places of horror instead of telling themselves horror stories that are fictitious! Doesn’t Suzanne Weiss understand the difference between the actual and the potential?

In any case, here is some information about Suzanne Weiss the Holocaust survivor who will be speaking at the London event.

There is an article posted on a website under her name. Here is in part what she says about herself:

“Holocaust survivor responds to Zionism” By Suzanne Weiss

“I was born in France to a Jewish family during the mass slaughter of Europe’s Jews by Hitler and the Nazis. My family fell victim, but I survived. As a child, I came to the United States, where I found racism against Blacks and immigrants, persecution of dissidents, McCarthyism, and the hideous electrocutions of the Rosenbergs.

I also learned that the United States, Canada, and Britain were complicit in the holocaust.”

http://www.nion.ca/public-forum-weiss.htm

Not much specificity here, but the equation of the “persecution of dissidents, McCarthyism, and the hideous electrocutions of the Rosenbergs,” to the Holocaust is nauseatingly simple minded.

There is more. In another article on the same website she says:

“The Three Faces of Anti-Jewish Prejudice” by Suzanne Weiss

“In 1919, Lenin, the great leader of the Russian Revolution, gave a brief talk on anti-Semitism that was recorded for use among the Russian peasantry.”

“Anti-Semitism means spreading enmity towards the Jews,” he said. It is a “remnant of ancient feudal times, when the priests burned heretics at the stake, when the peasants live in slavery, and when the people were crushed and inarticulate.” In our epoch, “we often see the capitalists fomenting hatred against the Jews in order to blind the workers, to divert their attention from the real enemy of the working people, capitalism.”
(Collected Works, vol. 29, page 252)

That sums up both how Jewish prejudice and hatred was born and the form it takes in modern capitalism. But as we shall see, the rise of Zionism has given this scourge a new twist.”

It’s clear that Ms. Weiss is a Leninist. It’s also cleat that she ignores any antisemitism that emanated from the Soviet Union.

Nor does she mention Arab or Muslim antisemitism. Like most “anti-imperialists” she blames the Jews for any hostility present in the Arab world. Jewish nationalism is bad. Arab nationalism is good because it is anti-imperialist.

“Following the Second World War, the imperialists sponsored the formation of the state of Israel in order to obtain a stronghold against the rise of Arab nationalism and to strengthen their grip on Mideast oil.”

http://www.nion.ca/read-more-weiss.htm

Ms. Weiss historical fantasies should be confronted.