Lewisham, Skokie, Um al-Fahm and the fight against Israel's racists

Following the racist march through the Arab town of Umm al-Fahm yesterday we reproduce this article by Khalid Amayreh pointing to the similarities between an intimidatory march through Skokie in the US by avowed Nazis in 1977 and the march by the National Union party in Israel. And 1977 is the same year that witnessed great anti-Nazis victory which saw the police lines broken and the Nazis National Front driven back into their sewers.

To further emphasise Khalid's point about the support the racist marchers receive from across the political spectrum, as well as officially from the state in the way of police protection, the Labour Party in Israel has joined the Netanyahu government, including as it does Israel's largest racist party, Yisrael Beiteinu. Thanks to the Palestine Information Center.

Note to readers:

To my dear readers: Greeting to each and every one of you:
I am re-posting this article, which I wrote seven months ago, on the occasion of the provocative Judeo-Nazi march by Jewish extremists at the Arab town of Um el Fahm across the green line in what is known as Israel.

The march, which took place today (24 March, 2009) was protected by as many as 2500 Israeli soldiers and paramilitary policemen. As expected, the people of Um el Fahm rose up to defend their city against the Jewish disciples of Hitler who wanted to communicate the same message the “Hitler Youth” and other Nazi groups communicated to Jews at Kristallnacht, long before Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Bergen Belsen.

The marchers, mostly Jewish settlers from the West Bank, said they only wanted to exercise their freedom of speech. This is the same argument that members of the American Nazi party made in justifying their march through the small Jewish town of Skoke near Chicago in 1977.

I was studying in the United States in 1977 and I remember I took part in a protest against the Nazi provocation.

Now, it seems, the Israeli state, and security forces, as well as the vast bulk of Israeli Jews, are saying nothing and doing nothing as they watch these despicable thugs shout “death to the Arabs” and “Arabs to the Gas chambers.”

Interestingly, the march at Um el Fahm, comes only three months after the genocidal Israeli blitzkrieg against the people of the Gaza Strip which destroyed the bulk of the coastal enclave’s civilian infrastructure and killed and maimed more than 6000 people, the vast majority of them children and innocent civilians. It also coincides with the pornographic confessions being made by Israeli soldiers that they were ordered by their superiors to murder civilians in cold blood.

This is Israel of 2008-2009. It is very much like Germany in 1938-39.

Exposing Israel

When members of the National Socialist Party of America (the Nazi Party) declared their intention to march through the predominantly-Jewish Chicago suburb of Skokie in 1977, Jewish groups vociferously denounced the “attempted re-enactment of the Nazi nightmare.”

And while the American Nazis claimed the right to free speech in accordance with the First Amendment, the Jews and their supporters' claim that their right to live without intimidation and harassment overrides the Nazis’ right to freedom of speech and expression.

Eventually, after exhaustive legal actions by both sides, the Nazis were allowed to parade in Skokie.

Ironically, the American Nazi group never did march in Skokie as its leader, Frank Collin, himself the son of a Jewish Holocaust survivor, decided at the last moment that the court verdict was a big victory for freedom of speech and that this was good enough for the group.

The reason I am invoking this story, which took place 35 years ago, is because the government of Israel is finding itself today in the shoes of the American Nazi group, while the Arabs of Israel are forced to play the role of the people of Skokie.

Last week, the Israeli High Court decided to allow the followers of the infamous racist Rabbi Meir Kahana, to march through the Arab town of Um-el-Fahm in northern Israel.

The Kahana disciples argued through their lawyer that they were only exercising their freedom of speech and expression.

The truth, however, is that freedom of speech and expression is the last thing these people would value, especially when their political opponents, Arab or Jewish, are involved.

Indeed, these Judeo-Nazi thugs openly teach that basic human rights, including the right to life, don’t apply to non-Jews in general and Arabs in particular.

Kahana himself back in the mid 1970s wrote a book entitled “They Must Go” in which he urged the Israeli state to ethnically cleanse all non-Jews from Israel-Palestine.

To be sure, the racists will not be marching in Um-el-Fahm in order to assert their right to freedom of expression. It would be more than naïve to think that this is their real purpose.

The main goal behind their planned provocative parade is to assert their genocidal ideology and shout “Mawet le Arabim” (death to the Arabs) and “Arabs out of Israel.”

This is very much similar to the anti-Jewish behavior by the Nazi youth groups in Germany throughout the 1930s. We all know the rest of the story.

The Kahana group may look small in terms of sheer numbers and political representation. However, it is very clear that the group enjoys a lot of backing by powerful political parties such as the Likud, National Union, MIFDAL, Shas as well as the powerful Jewish settler lobby. Moreover, there is conspicuous flaccidity displayed by the Israeli occupation army toward this terrorist group.

Furthermore, it is also well known that the group, which had produced Baruch Goldstein, the American-Jewish physician who in 1994 murdered 29 Muslim worshipers while praying at the Ibrahimi Mosque in downtown Hebron, is backed by powerful rabbinic circles, especially from the Merkaz Harav Talmudic college in West Jerusalem which teaches the doctrine that non-Jews living under Halacha or the Jewish law must be enslaved as water carriers or wood-hewers, or expelled or exterminated.

The Israeli court decision to allow these racist thugs to march through Um-el-Fahm coincided with the screening in Israel last week of a blatantly anti-Islam film produced by a notorious Dutch Islamophobe who had called for banning Islam from the Netherlands.

On Wednesday, 3 September, the Nazi-minded Israeli parliamentarian Aryeh Eldad, who sponsored the screening of the hateful film, said he would seek to form an international parliamentary front with European colleagues against Muslims and Arabs.

This is the same Jewish lawmaker who a few years ago referred to Jews as “human beings” and to non-Jews as “non-human beings.” According to the Israeli press, when the Israeli army and border police forcibly vacated Jewish settlers from the small settler outpost of Ammona in the West Bank a few years ago, Eldad castigated the police for treating “human beings” (the settlers) the way Arabs were being treated.

I am not really presenting these facts in order to incite hatred against Jews or Judaism. I know true Judaism is not like this. I also know that probably most Jews are reasonable people who reject racism.

After all, Jews had been premier victims of the most virulent form of racism, and it is only logical that they should adopt an uncompromising stand against it.

However, it is also important to expose these hypocritical and morally duplicitous Jews who would react vociferously to racism when the victims are Jews but remain silent, or even be enthusiastically supportive, when the perpetrators happen to be Jews or Israelis.

A few years ago, when a Russian court decided to ban Shulhan Aruch, a summarized Talmudic text, Jews around the world cried out against the ugly face of Russian anti-Semitism. Eventually, the Russian court reconsidered its verdict.

However, today in Israel, we see that the entire Israeli state, including the government, the intelligentsia, the media as well as the religious establishment, is totally silent as Islam, the religion of nearly one fourth of Israel’s citizens, is openly vilified by a member of the Israeli parliament, in cooperation with a later-day European disciple of Adolph Hitler.

Moreover, one is really prompted to ask where are the voices that are being raised in Israel and among Jews worldwide against allowing the thugs of Kahana to march through Um-el-Fahm? Have you all forgotten Skokie?

We know and you know that this is not an issue of freedom of speech. This is an issue of a manifestly fascist group inciting against and trying to de-legitimize the very existence of 1.5 million Israeli citizens and another 3.5 million Palestinians living under a nefarious military occupation across the Green Line.

In short, Jews, like the rest of humanity, are expected to be morally consistent.
This means they must speak up against racism, not only when Jews are victims, but also when Jews happen to be perpetrators as well.