HITLER’S goal was to make Germany ‘Judenrein’. Today Germany has the fastest growing Jewish community in Europe. There can be no greater symbol of Hitler’s defeat than this. The murder of four French and one Danish Jew in France have shocked people but they were the actions of two individuals. Benjamin Netanyahu’s statement that Europe’s Jews should go ‘home’ to Israel has rightly been rejected. Europe is the home for its Jewish citizens. Ironically the source of most anti-Semitism in Europe today is to be located in Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.
Like many Jews, I opposed the attack on Gaza last summer. I shuddered when I heard mobs chanting ‘There’s no school in Gaza, there are no more kids left’. The desire to kill Arabs is now openly expressed in Israel.
Britain has also changed. In the 1930s Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists were supported by significant sections of the British Establishment. For example the Daily Mail wrote, in August 1938, that ‘The way stateless Jews from Germany are pouring in from every port of this country is becoming an outrage.’ At the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 over 100,000 working-class people prevented the BUF marching through the East End of London.
The Holocaust began with the extermination of disabled German children from 1939 to 1941. The very same gas trucks used in the ‘euthenasia’ program journeyed to Poland and were used to exterminate Jews in Chelmno. Up to half a million Gypsies also died in the holocaust.
Every year there is a Holocaust Memorial Day. Its message should be that racism should never go unopposed. That is why people should not ignore the EDL’s threat to march in Brighton this year. Brighton is a city of tolerance not bigotry.
Tony Greenstein
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