Facing international condemnation, Israel\\'s supporters go to the principal weapon in their arsenal – use of media to divert attention. Is it coincidental that Public Broadcasting (PBS) rebroadcasted the program America and the Holocaust immediately after formation of the ultra- right wing Israel government  and the January 3 visit of Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, to the al-Haram al-Sharif or does this confirm its reason for producing the spurious and ahistorical documentary? Knowing that Ben Gvir’s tactics would anger western leaders, did PBS purposely repeat a program indicating that those it deemed guilty of not saving lives should refrain from questioning those who may be loosely related to those who died?  

The Word War II genocide has been allowed a special name, Holocaust, as if mass murder of one ethnic group deserves to be specifically designated from the mass murder of other ethnic groups. This rhetorical feature is similar to the contrived term antisemitism, which succeeds in giving special attention to hatred of one ethnic group when compared to hatred of other ethnic groups. Both features aim at continually persuading successive generations, those detached from the World War II genocide and from centuries old discriminations, that the Zionists have a distinctive message, are the rescuers of the Jewish people, and any interference in their rescue mission is blasphemy.

The lack of any rebuttal to the PBS program, America and the Holocaust, bewilders and weakens those who struggle for peace and justice. If there are there no historians, patriotic Americans, journalists, educators, civic officials, ministers, and those aware of the genocide perpetrated on the Palestinian people willing to correct inaccuracies and challenge the media control and command of political and civic thought, how can society stop the locomotive that carries a cargo of decades of oppression from reaching its ultimate destination? The oppression is enhanced by the failure to realize and question the nefarious manner in which the Zionists operate — inserting distortions of American history into a publicly funded program, telling present day Americans that their long gone ancestors of the ”greatest generation” faulted by not fully assisting a selected part of the hundreds of millions around the world who needed help in escaping Japanese and Nazi oppression, referencing a decades old tragedy that involved a long past generation in which nothing can now be done, and never discussing contemporary genocides with contemporary audiences. The latter discussion involves those acquainted with present tragedies and can lead to something being done. Unlike other commentaries on Zionist malfeasance, which feed those already aware, serious reactions to the PBS program would have solicited support from a massive number of Americans and organizations enraged at the duplicity of America and the Holocaust. It might have been a game changer and remains for today, tomorrow and forever, entering the classroom curricula, influencing students and mainstream America into believing that Americans had betrayed the World War II Jews and owe Zionists their support.

The second rendition, occurring only several weeks after its premiere, prompts more examination of the PBS program. Failure to challenge the objectivity of the “documentary” is not the only lapse. Also identified are failures to recognize that the 6-hour program provided Nazi Germany with an excuse for its treatment of the German Jews during the 1930s (not later) and that PBS exhibited a trace of white nationalism.

The violence against the European Jewish community occurred in two stages — until the start of World War II, which occurred at the end of the 1930s decade, the Nazis instituted a denial of civil rights and perpetrated some violence against German Jews. In the next stage, after Germany’s conquest of Poland and France and its invasion of the Soviet Union, oppression of Jews in conquered territories reached another plateau – intended extermination. Separating these two periods of oppression is essential in examining them; if World War II had been prevented, the genocide of the East European Jews would not have occurred but the oppression of the German Jews would still have happened and possibly intensified. The intensification would not have lasted long; with seaports available and embassies open, most of the remaining (thirty percent) German Jews would have been able to leave.

In the first stage of the Nazi oppression of the Jews, the PBS program relates denial of civil rights to America’s Black and Oriental populations and violence against them to denial of civil rights to Germany’s Jewish population and violence against it. Although this reference is not clear, the program indicates the Nazis borrowed their racist concepts from America and America was rife with anti-Semites who prevented Jews from entering its shores. Let’s clarify; Jews suffered minor discrimination in the United States – earlier immigrants, mostly German, resided equally with other Americans and achieved satisfying roles in all facets of American life. The later waves of Jewish immigrants rapidly advanced in education, politics, and economic endeavors, far exceeding the progress made by contemporary immigrants of other ethnicities. Assuredly, there were a few anti-Jewish folk around, some in the government, willing to make trouble for Jews, but they were insignificant compared to those inciting violence against Catholics, Irish, Italians, Blacks, Mexicans, Amish, Chinese, Native Americans and anyone who did not look like them or spoke like them.    

If the program’s purpose was to demonstrate that U.S. attitudes toward its Black and Oriental citizens were similar to that of Nazi Germany to its Jewish citizens and, therefore, the U.S. should take heed and modify its policies toward its own citizens, then the program could be considered a documentary and contained a valid purpose. The program’s thrust proceeded in the reverse, excoriating the American government for not totally assisting White Europeans to escape severe discrimination. Did PBS expect that a government that had engaged in genocide of the Native Americans, enslaved African people, refused for generations to give its Black and Oriental citizens equal eights, had used immigration as cheap labor to man its factories and mines, and, after the cheap labor was no longer warranted, refused to help distressed peoples throughout the world, would give all to help Europeans? Could Americans accept its government alleviating a foreign government from responsibility to its persecuted citizens while the American government forfeited its responsibility to persecuted people within its own country?

Instead of a charge of abandonment, the program had reason to give slight praise to the Roosevelt administration. Famines, during which millions of people died in China, India, and Ukraine occurred during 1927-1943, and few people knew or paid attention to them. Unlike the U.S. government responses to other oppressions, which occurred in the Soviet Union throughout the 1930s, Ukraine in the early 1930s, Spain in the late 1930s, and China, due to Japanese aggression during the 1930s, in which the U.S. government did little to assist any of these persecuted peoples to escape their tormentors, the Roosevelt administration provided unusual assistance to the persecuted Jews in Nazi Germany. Although Jews were only a few percent of the European population, during the latter years of the Great Depression, when economic difficulties created a barrier to immigration and a mass of the European population sought asylum from Fascist and Communist oppression, the U.S. opened its doors to 150,000 plus Jews. This number was 60 percent of the immigration to the United States during that time, not two or three percent, but 60 percent, several magnitudes more than any other ethnicity that entered America’s shores and several magnitudes more than assistance to contemporary persecuted people.

PBS told a story but not the story for an American audience. The story is the more meaningful history of America’s shameful treatment of its minorities from the day the Puritans landed until today. The PBS program added little to that history and emerged as a retelling of the Holocaust. In the retelling, the producers lent credence to apologists and exhibited racism.

The program allowed Nazi sympathizers to point out that the most democratic nation in the world committed severe and similar excesses with its minorities and other democratic nations treated their colonized people in a pitiful manner. They could now say, “Why point the finger at the center of Europe? Look in a North American mirror,” which is exactly what Israel’s supporters say when Israel is accused of committing another crime against the Palestinian people. US State Department Spokesperson Ned Price responded to the UN Human Rights Council’s Commission of Inquiry (COI) into the situation in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza by saying that "the COI in its current form is a continuation of a longstanding pattern of unfairly singling out Israel.”

Accusing U.S. officials of not sufficiently assisting white Jewish European refugees while not recognizing they should first resolve persecutions of their own citizens, and not realizing that the U.S. never assisted darker skinned refugees, and, even today, has ignored the refugees from Myanmar, Middle East, and Africa, smacks of white nationalism. Kristallnacht, in which tens of Jews are reported to have been killed and much property destroyed, deserves attention, but does it deserve inordinate more attention than the Nanking massacre, which the University of California Shoah Foundation reports at https://sfi.usc.edu/collections/nanjing-massacre?

On December 13, 1937, the Japanese army captured what was then China’s capital city, Nanjing, and killed as many as 300,000 civilians and numerous unarmed Chinese soldiers over the course of two months. After the Japanese overran the city, they hunted down and killed suspected Chinese soldiers, massacred families living outside the Safety Zone, and raped tens of thousands of women. The Japanese army also looted the city and burned down many buildings.

A documentary documents, presents known historical facts as completely as possible and permits the viewer to absorb the facts and render opinions. The PBS documentary did not present a documentary; it presented a one-sided view, discarded relevant facts, mixed opinions with fact, and behaved as favoring an agenda. The later program chapters were primarily agenda.

The second stage of the tragedy that fell upon the Eastern European Jewish people, complete annihilation, had similar roots to those that engulfed the German Jews. The approach to mollify it was more difficult and its appearance was initially less evident. PBS crudely discarded the latter conjecture and presented only information to support a thesis - complete reports proving the existence of extermination camps were available in 1941 and the U.S. government refused to act upon them. This is not the entire history.

Looking back in hindsight at decisions made decades earlier assume that what was stated and turned out to be true should have been instantly accepted by others. PBS blames the Roosevelt administration and insinuates that anti-Semites in the State department prevented recognition of the genocide until December 1942. A documentary would have shown that many governments and institutions responded in a similar manner, including the Zionists in the British Mandate, who were closely tracking the events. The March 17, 1942 issue of Davar, a Hebrew-language daily newspaper published in the British Mandate and reported in Post-Ugandan Zionism On Trial, S. B. Beit Zvi, P. 40, certifies the previous statement.

JEWISH BLOOD - - “UP FOR GRABS”

Even in a period in which the sword has been unsheathed and blood is being spilled like water, we must have mercy on every drop of blood and refrain from straining nerves unnecessarily. None of us will want to be consoled or to console others to the effect that the Nazi murderers did not harm or trample or run roughshod over Jews. They did so and they are doing so. However, the various irresponsible informants are continuing to kill Jews with their own hands. They scoop up every rumor, search high and low for every piece of bad news, for every lethal number--and submit itto the papers and the readers in blood-curdling form and content, and they actually “kill.”

Undoubtedly there are those who will say: we here are too complacent, our hearts are closed and insensitive to what is transpiring there in the dark and ravaged Jewish world--and it is not to be regretted if a certain report makes us less complacent. But do the disseminators of the reports about tens of thousands of Jews and about a quarter of a million Jews killed and slaughtered, not realize that many people are not inclined to become overly excited about the facts and figures in these reports because their exaggerated character renders them untrustworthy?

We still remember the reports cabled from this country around the world during the days of the Arab Riots. How much exaggeration and inaccuracy marked these reports from our little land. All the more so from a huge country and [a situationof] great chaos. Take it easy, informants and journalists, in pouring Jewish blood into your copy!

Post-Ugandan Zionism On Trial later states:

On Monday, November 23, 1942, the press carried a communique issued by the Jewish Agency for Palestine which generated a shock among the public and for the first time placed the destruction of European Jewry on the agenda of the Yishuv. The following is the full text of the statement:

The Jewish Agency Executive in Jerusalem has received from authoritative and reliable sources detailed reports about acts of murder and slaughter perpetrated against the Jews of Poland and the Jews of Central and Western Europe who have been deported to Poland. 

Although the Zionists in the British Mandate also refused to validate the mass slaughter of the Jews and did not recognize it until the same time as the U.S. government, PBS refrains from inserting the valuable knowledge in the program. One difference can be noted; the U.S. administration did not deny the reports; it claimed it could not act until fully verifying the reports. The Zionists told their associates that the reports exaggerated the atrocities. 

An honest PBS tosses the program, America and the Holocaust, into the wastebasket and prepares a documentary, America and its Genocides, which documents the violence committed by Americans against other peoples, beginning from the landing of the Pilgrims until the present times. In addition, PBS can produce a documentary that examines Zionism’s history, its role in the World War II genocide and in the predicted ontological genocide of the Palestinian people. This program permits the public to evaluate more accurately Zionism’s credibility, worth, and truthfulness. In order to simplify PBS\\' task in preparing the documentary, research that contains elements for the documentary will be available in a forthcoming Alternative Insight article. From the article, PBS, in cooperation with Alternative Insight Productions, will, hopefully, present Zionism and Genocides, a documented history of Zionist roles in the World War II genocide and in the decades of violence that occurred afterwards.

TO BE CONTINUED

alternative insight
january 23, 2023

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