Extraordinary email from Tom Watson, unpleasant suggestion from Bob Russell, groundless vitriol from Chris Spivey.

This is yet another post that will earn me the usual stream of pro-Palestinian invective and hard Left dismissal as a Zionist, but it needs to be written, – as every iota of discernible Truth must be until such time as the Dark Forces can create their virtual Newspeak record. Chris Spivey has recently sent me an open list of recipients on an email purporting to come from Tom Watson MP. It is unclear as to what Watson’s view of the affair is, but the title of the email is ‘Sir Bob Russell MP – Inconvenient truth remarks’. My assumption is that Tom violently opposes the somewhat unpleasant question asked of the Education Secretary recently. If so, good for Tom.

Russell is a LibDem oddball who, calling a spade a spade here, bears the clear hallmarks of a Holocaust denier. He (along with millions of others) is part of, not a global conspiracy of any kind, but a growing body of opinion that has doubts to a varying degree about the numbers killed in Hitler’s death camps, whether the gas chambers ever existed, and the use by Israeli propagandists of the event to curry sympathy for Israel. The Nazi regime was the subject of my two Politics dissertations while I was at University in the 1960s. I have visited the Wannsee museum where the plans were made for systematic annihilation of an entire ethnico-religious group. I have read all the Wannsee papers. I have studied the records of most of the Concentration camps constructed between 1935 and 1944. On that basis I continue to be convinced that Holocaust denial is both pernicious, and utterly wrong factually. I think there are occasions when the West shrinks from the need to criticise Israel because of Holocaust sympathy, and I of course know – indeed, have personally experienced – the immense power of the Jewish lobby in the US. But those with a ‘Holohoax’ agenda bend almost every element of syntax associated with this question, and whenever they do, it never checks out.

I will give you just three examples.

An acquaintance in Athens last April snorted dismissively when I mentioned the word Holocaust. “Pah!” she observed, “Nobody even used the word until the 1990s”. That is completely untrue. James Woods and Meryl Streep starred in a TV mini-series called ‘Holocaust’ in 1978. It was the most anticipated and highest rating mini series of all time in the US. The word was first used in relation to Hitler’s genocidal scheme while it was still going on: it appeared in the London News Chronicle during November 1942.

The death-camp survivor Simon Wiesenthal became an active Nazi hunter in the 1950s, and made the word part of common parlance from then on. It is a complete myth that the term was “engineered and created by Mossad to excuse its own holocaust against the Palestinians”. But even had that ridiculous lie been true, do they think Mossad invented the term ‘Final Solution’ as well?

A frequent assertion of the Holohoax school is that the deaths of Jews were grossly exaggerated, and the gas chambers an invention. My friend Annie Walsh’s father liberated Sachsenhausen concentration camp. The German general Milch was under arrest in the nearby town. Annie’s Dad accepted the man’s Nazi fasci as a symbol of surrender – and broke it over Milch’s head, he was so disgusted by what he had seen. Pictures he took at the time are in the British military archives. His fasci was sold by Annie at auction ten years ago. The supply orders still exist for the death-gas Xylon B, and can be viewed in the Bundesrepublik archives. When Eisenhower first inspected the machinery of the death camps in late Autumn 1944, his order to the press corps and military recorders is famous: “Take all the pictures you can, because sure as hell some son of a bitch will deny this ever took place before long”. He meant the Germans. He’d be astonished if he knew that British MP’s would be denying it within forty years.

The documentary evidence of the Holocaust – how it was planned and what happened – on paper, photo and film – is so overwhelming, denying it is dafter than still thinking the Earth is flat. As it happens, it’s a myth that Hitler’s regime was the greatest mass-murdering State of all time: that honour goes to the USSR, which slaughtered 12 million dissidents under Josef Stalin between 1935 and 1950. It’s odd, is it not, that there are no Gulag Arhipelago deniers around. That’s because to do so would be beating Moscow around the head – rather than Tel Aviv. You know – the Moscow that still arms Israel’s enemies, and helps fund Peace Flotillas. Peace Flotillas that call in to ‘refuel’ at ports in the rogue Turkish Cypriot regime….controlled by Recep Erdogan, the Islamist Nazi now finally showing his true colours. You know – the pillock who had praise heaped on him by our own resident pillock David Cameron two years ago. You know, the idiot who called Gaza “a concentration camp”.

And so to the six million number. Google it as ‘Six million holocaust deaths, true or false?’ and an endless stream of rabid nutjob sites pop up, trotting out the usual garbage – not a single piece of which can ever be verified or viewed. They all sport truly reasonable and objective site-names like ResistancetoZionism, Stormfront, Biblebelievers, Zioncrimefactory, Jewwatch, Holhohoax, Jewfraud…and on and on. So let’s try some records and facts instead.

On the site About.com, you can read a lengthy and well-documented account of how the Nazis actually exterminated 11 million Europeans – Gypsies, Romas, intellectuals, dissidents – of whom ‘only’ six million were Jewish. But if all that information to just too obvious a Zionist plot for you, then there is a far more simple way you can prove the ‘no documentary evidence’ claim made by the deniers to be utter tosh. Go the Nuremburg Trial records in Washington: read the transcripts, and examine the missing persons and demographic evidence used to arrive at the figure of somewhere between 5.1 and 6 million victims.

Warning: this will mean coming down from the belfry attic you inhabit, buying a plane ticket and then sitting for many hours doing real research. Not recommended for committed Holocaust deniers. On the other hand, being a lazy person who’d rather accuse than investigate, here’s the foreword to the collected Nuremburg record itself. It could not be clearer (my italics):

‘In order to avoid any accusation of exclusive reliance on personal testimony, which later generations might perceive to be biased, prosecutors decided to base their case primarily on thousands of documents written by the Germans themselves. These masses of documents were translated into the court’s four official languages, analyzed for their significance, and reproduced for distribution to defense attorneys and other trial participants. The prosecution presented other evidence through artifacts, diagrams, and photographs taken by Nazi photographers in concentration camps.

Nineteen investigative teams scoured German records, interviewed witnesses, and visited the sites of atrocities to build the case.

Eyewitness testimony presented at the Nuremberg trials laid the foundation for much of what we know about the Holocaust including details of the Auschwitz death machinery, atrocities committed by the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units), the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto, and the original statistical estimate of six million murdered Jews.’

OK? Fine, now onto the barmy question asked by Sir Bob Russell. Questioning Education Secretary Michael Gove about the national curriculum, Sir Bob asked: “On the assumption that the 20th century will include the Holocaust, will he give me an assurance that the life of Palestinians since 1948 will be given equal attention?”

Nudge, nudge, wink, wink – let’s hear both sides etc etc. Alright then, let’s hear both sides.

Before the State of Israel was declared in 1948 – and for some years afterwards – the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza were variously under Jordanian and Egyptian occupation. It was not a pleasant experience for them, because if we’re being frank here fellow Arabists, not that many Arabs like the Palestinians much. The Saudis, for example, positively loathe them as – put to me three years ago by one of their number – “an underclass nuisance who couldn’t organise dawn”.

Egypt had, for most of the time, occupied Palestine since 878. On 29th November 1947, the UN General Assembly partitioned the State, half for Egypt and half for the Jews. Civil war immediately broke out in the former Mandate territory, and Ben Gurion declared the State of Israel in May 1948. He saw the civil war as certain to strangle Israel at birth, and wanted to resist it. Egypt then invaded Israel without warning – and the Israeli army drove them out again. Under orders from the UN, Israel evacuated Gaza.

Since that time, neither side – Jew or Arab – has covered itself in anything even approaching glory. The Israelis have been guilty of heavy-handed tactics and hanging on to bits they’ve invaded; the Arabs have started two wars since, both without warning and one on the Jewish Holy Day Yom Kippur.

To suggest that mistreatment of the Palestinian people has been entirely Israeli is convenient bollocks. And if Russell wants a ‘balanced’ historical coverage of the events then and since, here are some more ‘uncomfortable facts’ for him to consider:

* The occupying British treated the emerging Israeli State with appalling torture and gangster tactics, seeing them as ‘terrorists’.

* The Egyptian and Jordanian regimes at the time made life as unpleasant as possible for the Palestinian people.

* The sum total of people killed in all the Arab Israeli conflicts since 1948 is 65,000. Rather less than six million. Oh, sorry – you don’t believe that do you? Or you can’t afford the plane fare to Washington, one of the two.

Let’s get real here: the majority of Arabs in the region don’t ‘desire’ an independent , fully-functioning Palestinian State: they use the concept as a weapon with which to bash the Israelis. The Arab Islamist élites – where they exist, and they are growing – want the Jews liquidated from the region – either by War and/or forced displacement to a territory somewhere in Black Africa. I have to add that ordinary Arabs have been living in peace with the Jews for over 3,000 years…but let’s not go there, or we’ll be here all day.

In the basis of all this drivel, Chris Spivey four days ago published a horribly offensive post with this charming cartoon at the head of it:

Ny-eece. Not so much Holohoax, perhaps, as hollow joke. I’ve always had my doubts about Chris, but after this post I’m sorry, I shall not be able to take him seriously about anything again. Read the post and, if you really understand what The Slog is about, you’ll agree with me. The sum foundation upon which Spivey bases his conversion to denial of the Holocaust numbers is ‘Well, as it happens I got sent some information on this subject the other week. And, having now read it, I have to say that I agree. The figures and official narrative most certainly do not add up.’ He can’t identify his source, but it is ‘a respected author’. David Irving by any chance?

Couldn’t afford the fare to Washington, eh Chris? Ne’er mind: I can get you a good deal on Virgin. Some of Chris Spivey’s wild accusations against those he suspects of paedophilia are examples of what I posted about recently at The Paedofile: foulmouthed screamers who can be used and mocked by the real perpetrators who present them as The unatic Fringe. A few people didn’t like that post; lots of people won’t like this one.

The lots of people who won’t know naff-all about true Arabism, or the overlaying factors of trade, religion and quasi-caste system culture that permeate this entire region. They’re the same berks who wittered on brainlessly about an Arab Spring, who believe the Muslim Brotherhood are humanitarian freedom-fighters, that Assad bombed Turkey, that the Syrian conflict is about democracy, that Ahmadinnhejad’s departure marks a new beginning in relations with Iran, that Iran has only peaceful intentions for its bomb programme, and that the Jews have no rights at all to a homeland in the Middle East.

So I will close by getting entirely up the nasal area of those useful idiots who follow the Arab agenda on Israel to the letter along with some of the more unreasonably aggressive Israelis at the same time. It is often said that Israelis play the Jewish victim card for all it’s worth. They do – I have in forty years of dealing with them only met two I liked: and you will find a great many British Jews expressing the exact same opinions. But there genuinely is a conspiracy of silence about the other side of this coin: that some Arab leaderss play the Palestine card because they are viciously anti-Semitic, and want the Jews entirely removed from a desert they have wandered about in for nearly 4,000 years. Were they European, dare I make the parallel, they would probably have supported the Nazi attempt to liquidate Roma travelling Gypsies.

Silly? Not really: the established Ba’athist resistance opposed to the Shah of Iran during the 1940s met several times with Heinrich Himmler’s SS envoys while Erwin Rommel was in control of the desert during 1941. The purpose of this meeting? Their cooperation in the rounding up of Mideastern Jews following a Nazi victory. They too back with them a warm message of support for Adolf Hitler, expressing their admiration for his liquidation schemes.

Now there’s a thought to chew on with your roast beef. Enjoy this warm Sunday.