[NYTr] Zionism's Refusal to Fight Anti-Semitism
ny...@olm.blythe-systems.com
sent by Andy Pollack - Feb 6, 2007
Zionism's Refusal to Fight Anti-Semitism
At today's Zmag, Mickey Z. has a good column listing some US war crimes and
racist and fascist activities which all happened to happen in the month of
February. One of them is the German-American Bund's rally in February 1939
at New York's Madison Square Garden. [Reproduced below; posted at:
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=72&ItemID=12049 ]
He didn't mention (perhaps for space reasons) the mass mobilization against
it.
Below is an account from Lenni Brenner's "Zionism in the Age of
Dictators" about that mobilization and a similar one in Los Angeles.
These actions were significant not only as historical lessons of how to
fight fascism, but also because they're examples of how Zionists have
always REFUSED to fight fascism, and counterposed that fight to
creation of a colonial-settler state in Palestine.
Mention that the next time Dershowitz/Foxman/Nadler et al. claim Israel
is a "haven" for Jews from anti-Semitism.
P.S. The group sponsoring the rallies was the predecessor of my own,
Socialist Action. -Andy
----------------------------
http://www.marxists.de/middleast/brenner/ch18.htm
Zionism and the German-American Bund
Fascist currents in the United States had been growing throughout the
1930s. The traditional Ku-Klux-Klan was still strong in the South, and
many of the Irish in North America had become infected with Father
Coughlans clerical Fascism as Francos armies smashed into Barcelona.
Italian neighbourhoods saw organised Fascist parades, and many German
immigrant organisations were under the influence of the Nazis
German-American Bund. Anti-Semitism was growing powerful, and the
Bund determined on a show of their new strength with the announcement
of a rally in New Yorks Madison Square Garden for 20 February 1939.
Other rallies were to follow in San Francisco and Philadelphia. Would
the Jews respond?
The Jews in New York numbered at least 1,765,000 (29.56 per cent of the
population) and there were additional hundreds of thousands in the near
suburbs; yet not one Jewish organisation thought to organise a
counter-demonstration. One, the right-wing American Jewish Committee,
even sent a letter to the Gardens management supporting the Nazis
right to hold their meeting. [7] Only one group, the Trotskyists of the
Socialist Workers Party (SWP), issued a call for a
counter-demonstration. The SWP was a tiny group, with no more than a
few hundred members, but as Max Shachtman the organiser of the action
explained, it knew enough to mesh the small gear which it represents
into the huge gear which the militant workers of New York represent,
thus setting the latter into motion. [8] The public found out about
the SWPs demonstration when the city announced that the police would
defend the Nazis against attack, and the press played up the
possibility of violence.
There were two Yiddish daily newspapers then which were identified with
Zionism: Der Tog, one of whose editors, Abraham Coralnik, had been a
prime organiser of the anti-Nazi boycott; and Der Zhournal, whose
manager, Jacob Fishman, had been one of the founders of the Zionist
Organisation of America. Both papers opposed a protest against the
presence of the Nazis. Der Tog begged its readers: Jews of New York,
do not let your sorrows guide you! Avoid Madison Square Garden this
evening. Dont come near the hall! Dont give the Nazis the chance to
get the publicity they desire so much. [9] The Socialist Appeal, the
SWPs weekly paper, described the Zhournals plea as combining the same
language with an additional nauseating touch of rabbinical piety.
[10] Nor was the response of the Zionist organisations any more
militant. During the preparations for the encounter a group of young
Trotskyists went to the Lower East Side headquarters of the Hashomer
Hatzair, but they were told: Sorry we cant join you, our Zionist
policy is to take no part in politics outside Palestine. [11]
Then as now, the Hashomer claimed to be the left wing of Zionism, but
only ten months before, Hashomers magazine had defended their rigid
policy of abstentionism:
"We cant divide our position as Jews from our position as
socialists; in fact we place the stabilisation and normalisation of the
first condition as a necessary preference to our work for the second
condition ... thus we dont take part in the socialist activities in
which we could only participate as bourgeois, as an unstable, non-basic
element, not imbedded in the true proletariat and speaking from above
... This does not call for the phrase-slinging, demonstration staging,
castle building program of the usual radical organisation ... We are,
and must be, essentially non-political." [12]
Over 50,000 people turned up at Madison Square Garden. Most were Jews,
but by no means all of them. A contingent from the Universal Negro
Improvement Association, the nationalist followers of Marcus Garvey,
came from Harlem. Although the CPUSA refused to support the
demonstration through hatred for Trotskyism and their support for the
Democratic mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, whose police were protecting the
Bund, many of its multinational rank and file did attend. The area was
the scene of a furious five-hour battle as the mounted police, part of
a contingent of 1,780 armed police, repeatedly rode into the
anti-Nazis. Although the anti-Nazis were unable to break the police
lines, the victory was theirs. The 20,000 Nazis and Coughlanites in the
Garden would have been mauled, had not the police been present.
The SWP immediately followed up its New York success by calling for
another demonstration in Los Angeles on 23 February outside a Bund
meeting at the Deutsche Haus. Over 5,000 people trapped the Fascists in
their hall until the police came to their rescue. The Bunds offensive
soon came to a halt and, thoroughly humiliated, they had to cancel
their scheduled San Francisco and Philadelphia rallies.
The fact that, as late as February 1939, the SWP was alone in calling
for a demonstration against a storm-trooper meeting in New York City
testifies to a reality during the Nazi epoch: individual Zionists
certainly took part in the battle of the Garden, but the entire range
of Jewish organisations political or religious were never prepared
to fight their enemies.
Notes
1. Gisela Lebzelter, Political Anti-Semitism in England, 1918-1939, p.142.
2. Raphael Powell, Should Jews join Anti-Fascist Societies?, Young
Zionist (London, August 1934), p.6.
3. C.C.A., Should Jews join Anti-Fascist Societies?, Young Zionist
(London, September 1934), pp.12, 19.
4. William Zukerman, Blackshirts in London, Jewish Frontier (November
1936), p.41.
5. Ibid., pp.42-3.
6. Lebzelter, Political Anti-Semitism in England, p.140.
7. Review of the Year 5699 United States, American Jewish Year Book,
1939-40, p.215.
8. Max Shachtman, In This Corner, Socialist Appeal (28 February 1939), p.4.
9. The Craven Jewish Press, Socialist Appeal (24 February 1939), p.4.
10. Ibid.
11. An End to Zionist Illusions!, Socialist Appeal (7 March 1939), p.4.
12. Naomi Bernstein, We and the American Student Union, Hashomer
Hatzair (April 1938), p.16.
***
Z Magazine - Feb 6, 2007
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=72&ItemID=12049
Forgotten February
(A brief peek at America's unrestrained brutality)
by Mickey Z.
Just in case anyone needs reminding that "USA" has always stood for "United
States of Aggression," here are a forgotten few from February's Files:
February 1898
In 1897, Teddy Roosevelt stated bluntly, "I should welcome almost any war,
for I think this country needs one." His wait lasted less than a year.
February 15, 1898 was a muggy Tuesday night in Havana Harbor. Some 350 crew
and officers settled in on board the Maine. "At 9:40 p.m., the ship's
forward end abruptly lifted itself from the water," writes author Tom
Miller. "Along the pier, passersby could hear a rumbling explosion. Within
seconds, another eruption-this one deafening and massive-splintered the
bow, sending anything that wasn't battened down, and most that was, flying
more than 200 feet into the air."
The Maine was in Havana Harbor in 1898 on a purportedly friendly mission.
"At a certain point in that spring, (President) McKinley and the business
community began to see that their object, to get Spain out of Cuba, could
not be accomplished without war," writes Howard Zinn, "and that their
accompanying object, the securing of American military and economic
influence in Cuba, could not be left to the Cuban rebels, but could be
ensured only by U.S. intervention."
American newspapers, especially those run by Hearst (New York
Journal) and Pulitzer (New York World), jumped on the Maine explosion as
the ideal justification to drum up public support for a war of imperialism.
"Tabloid headlines depicting Spanish atrocities against Cubans became
commonplace, and the influential papers of both men were outdoing each
other in the sensationalized screaming for war," says historian Kenneth C.
Davis. When Hearst sent artist Frederick Remington to Cuba to supply
pictures, he reported that he could not find a war. "You furnish the
pictures," Hearst famously replied, "and I'll furnish the war."
(In 1976, Admiral Hyman Rickover of the U.S. Navy mounted an investigation
of the Maine disaster. Rickover and his team of experts concluded that the
explosion was probably caused by "spontaneous combustion inside the ship's
coal bins," a problem common to ships of that era.)
February 1901
In the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, the U.S. fought a brutal war
of conquest in the Pacific. By 1900, more than 75,000 American
troops<three-quarters of the entire U.S. Army<were sent to the Philippines.
In the face of this overwhelming show of force, the Filipinos turned to
guerrilla warfare. The February 5, 1901 edition of the New York World shed
some light on the U.S. response to guerilla tactics: "Our soldiers here and
there resort to terrible measures with the natives. Captains and
lieutenants are sometimes judges, sheriffs and executioners. 'I don't want
any more prisoners sent into Manila' was the verbal order from the
Governor-General three months ago. It is now the custom to avenge the death
of an American soldier by burning to the ground all the houses, and killing
right and left the natives who are only suspects."
February 1939
Imagine a rally that involved plenty of marching and arms raised in a Nazi
salute to their leader. Somewhere near Nuremberg, perhaps? Guess again. The
venue was Madison Square Garden where frenzied members of the
German-American Bund cheered Fritz Kuhn as he stood before a 30-foot high
portrait of George Washington flanked by black swastikas, leading them in a
chant of "Free Amerika!" (a rallying cry which had just recently replaced
"Sieg Heil!"), while thirteen hundred New York City policemen stood guard
outside the building.
A U.S. citizen who served in the German Army during the First World War,
Kuhn's loyalty to Adolf Hitler was surpassed only by his hatred of Jews
(like Henry Ford, he went as far as blaming the Jews for Benedict Arnold's
treason). When asked if there were any good Jews, Kuhn replied, "If a
mosquito is on your arm, you don't ask is it a good or a bad mosquito. You
just brush it off." Before you dismiss Kuhn as a fringe character, consider
this: The February 20, 1939 rally described above drew 22,000 avid
followers.
February 1942
Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 giving the army the
unrestricted power to arrest<without warrants or indictments or
hearings<every Japanese-American on a 150-mile strip along the West Coast
(roughly 110,000 men, women, and children) and transport them to internment
camps in Colorado, Utah, Arkansas, and other interior states to be kept
under prison conditions. The Supreme Court upheld this order and the
Japanese-Americans remained in custody for over three years. A Los Angeles
Times writer defended the forced relocations by explaining to his readers
that "a viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched<so a
Japanese-American, born of Japanese parents, grows up to be a Japanese, not
an American."
Life in the internment camps entailed cramped living spaces with communal
meals and bathrooms. The one-room apartments measured twenty by twenty feet
and none had running water. The internees were allowed to take along
"essential personal effects" from home but were prohibited from bringing
razors, scissors, or radios. Outside the shared wards were barbed wire,
guard towers with machine guns, and searchlights.
The dislocated Japanese-Americans incurred an estimated loss of $400
million in forced property sales during the internment years, and therein
may lie a more Machiavellian motivation than sheer race hatred. "A large
engine for the Japanese-American incarcerations was agri-business," says
Michio Kaku, a noted nuclear physicist and political activist whose parents
were interned from 1942 to 1946. "Agri-businesses in California coveted
much of the land owned by Japanese-Americans."
A formal apology came to the 60,000 survivors of internment camps in 1990.
The U.S. government paid them each $20,000. While Yale Law Professor Eugene
V. Rostow later called the internment camps "our worst wartime mistake,"
Zinn pointedly asks: "Was it a 'mistake'<or was it an action to be expected
from a nation with a long history of racism and which was fighting a war,
not to end racism, but to retain the fundamentals of the American system?"
February 1945
With the Russians advancing rapidly towards Berlin, tens of thousands of
German civilians fled into Dresden, believing it to be safe from attack. As
a result, the city's population swelled from its usual 600,000 to at least
one million. Beside the stream of refugees, Dresden was also known for its
china and its Baroque and Rococo architecture. Its galleries housed works
by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Rubens, and Botticelli. On the evening of February
13, none of this would matter.
Using the Dresden soccer stadium as a reference point, over 2000 British
Lancasters and American Flying Fortresses dropped loads of gasoline bombs
every 50 square yards out from this marker. The enormous flame that
resulted was eight square miles wide, shooting smoke three miles high. For
the next eighteen hours, regular bombs were dropped on top of this strange
brew. Twenty-five minutes after the bombing, winds reaching 150
miles-per-hour sucked everything into the heart of the storm. Because the
air became superheated and rushed upward, the fire lost most of its oxygen,
creating tornadoes of flame that can suck the air right out of human lungs.
Seventy percent of the Dresden dead either suffocated or died from poison
gases that turned their bodies green and red. The intense heat melted some
bodies into the pavement like bubblegum, or shrunk them into three-foot
long charred carcasses. Clean-up crews wore rubber boots to wade through
the "human soup" found in nearby caves. In other cases, the superheated air
propelled victims skyward only to come down in tiny pieces as far as
fifteen miles outside Dresden. "The flames ate everything organic,
everything that would burn," wrote journalist Phillip Knightley. "People
died by the thousands, cooked, incinerated, or suffocated. Then American
planes came the next day to machine-gun survivors as they struggled to the
banks of the Elbe."
The Allied firebombing did more than shock and awe. The bombing campaign
murdered more than 100,000 people-mostly civilians...but the exact number
may never be known due to the high number of refugees in the area.
February 1946
Edgar L. Jones, a former war correspondent in the Pacific, wrote in the
Atlantic Monthly: "What kind of war do civilians suppose we fought anyway?
We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats,
killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded,
tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled flesh
off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their
bones into letter openers."
February 1966
David Lawrence, editor of US News & World Report, wrote: "What the United
States is doing in Vietnam is the most significant example of philanthropy
extended by one people to another that we have witnessed in our times."
When challenged with stories of American atrocities in Vietnam, Lawrence
explained, "Primitive peoples with savagery in their hearts have to be
helped to understand the true basis of a civilized existence."
February 1968
An unnamed U.S. major, quoted by Associated Press on February 8, 1968, was
asked about the American assault on the Vietnamese town of Bentre. The
major explained: "It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save
it."
February 1991
High above a swamp, over 60 miles of coastal Highway 8 from Kuwait to Iraq,
a division of the Iraq's Republican Guard withdrew on February 26-27,1991.
Baghdad radio had just announced Iraq's acceptance of a cease-fire proposal
and, in compliance with UN Resolution 660, Iraqi troops were ordered to
withdraw to positions held before August 2, 1990. President George H.W.
Bush derisively called the announcement "an outrage" and "a cruel hoax."
"U.S. planes trapped the long convoys by disabling vehicles in the front,
and at the rear, and then pounded the resulting traffic jams for hours,"
says Joyce Chediac, a Lebanese-American journalist. "It was like shooting
fish in a barrel," one U.S. pilot said. "Many of those massacred fleeing
Kuwait were not Iraqi soldiers at all," says Ramsey Clark, "but
Palestinians, Sudanese, Egyptians, and other foreign workers."
Randall Richard of the Providence Journal filed this dispatch from the deck
of the U.S.S. Ranger: "Air strikes against Iraqi troops retreating from
Kuwait were being launched so feverishly from this carrier today that
pilots said they took whatever bombs happened to be closest to the flight
deck. The crews, working to the strains of the Lone Ranger theme, often
passed up the projectile of choice...because it took too long to load."
"Every vehicle was strafed or bombed, every windshield is shattered, every
tank is burned, every truck is riddled with shell fragments," Chediac
reported after visiting the scene. "No survivors are known or likely. The
cabs of trucks were bombed so much that they were pushed into the ground,
and it's impossible to see if they contain drivers or not. Windshields were
melted away, and huge tanks were reduced to shrapnel."
"At one spot," Bob Drogin reported in the Los Angeles Times, "snarling wild
dogs (had) reduced two corpses to bare ribs. Giant carrion birds pick(ed)
at another; only a bootclad foot and eyeless skull are recognizable."
Major Bob Nugent, an Army intelligence officer, said: "Even in Vietnam I
didn't see anything like this. It's pathetic."
Correction: When you're talking about America, it's not pathetic...it's
policy.
[Mickey Z. can be found on the Web at http://www.mickeyz.net.]
*
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