London Mayor Ken Livingstone Needs a History Lesson
 

The Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, the leader of one of the world's greatest cities, the capital of one of the world's great nations, accuses Israel of "ethnic cleansing" the cleansed phrase for Genocide.

The Mayor's outrageous claim and numerous other statements made about Israel, its Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who he called a war criminal, he says are not anti-Semitic but rather statements about Israeli policies and how Arabs who had lived on the now Israeli land had been driven off much like the Serbs drove off other ethnic groups in Bosnia.

Maybe these despicable comments should not come as a surprise, after all this past summer, the Mayor hosted Islamist cleric Sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradhawi to establish the International Council of Muslim Clerics. The sheikh is considered a spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, a "jihadist" organization that has resorted to acts of political violence.

With his detestable statements referring to an Evening Standard reporter, Oliver Finegold "behaving like a German war criminal" and "acting like a concentration camp guard" perhaps it's time for Mr. Livingstone to take a step back and review his distorted view of history and explain his views to the people of his city and the world.

The good Mayor should put into context what has occurred in Israel over the last century, how a nation in Diaspora was reconstructed after the black days of the Holocaust and how Great Britain's policies contributed to both the rise of Nazism and to the incendiary Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

First, back to the days of the 1930's when Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and the British government appeased Adolph Hitler who took power, raised the swastika above the German Chancellery, began to rearm the military in violation of the Treaty of Versailles and passed the racist Nuremberg Laws which essentially cast the Jews out of society as not being human.

Hitler was allowed by the British and French governments to bring the swastika to Austria and Czechoslovakia and strip those people of all rights, persecute them and send them to concentration camps if they in any way the opposed Nazi occupation.

By the time Britain decided to fight Nazi tyranny, after the invasion of Poland in 1939, it was too late. Only Hitler's strategic and tactical mistake of not annihilating British forces at Dunkirk and American strength and power saved Britain from having the swastika fly atop the House of Parliament.

After the Second World War commenced, when Jews were systematically stripped of all rights, their property ripped away from them, they were rounded up and arrested, brutalized beyond comprehension, locked into hellish ghettos and transported to mass murder factories. Britain did little about the plight of these desperate Jewish people and ultimately millions were slaughtered in a far more horrid manner than the British slay sheep.

During the course of the war, Britain allowed only 70-thousand Jews into the country when it was widely known by government and intelligence agencies that living under Nazi occupation meant arrest, being worked to death in slave labor, being gassed when too weak to work, having your body mined of gold from the teeth to enrich Nazi criminals, skin turned to lamp shades and human fat transformed to soap.

At the same time, when Jews were desperate to escape the barbarity and satanic misery that was sweeping down upon them across Europe, the British government began to renege on the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine that were the basis for creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

The McDonald White Paper, signed into law in 1939 by the British government, severely limited Jewish immigration into Palestine. Only 75-thousand Jewish immigrants were allowed to immigrate to Palestine over a five year period and any further increase needed Arab permission which was a total absurdity. Those who might have been saved from the firing squad death pits of Babi Yar or the ovens of Auschwitz were doomed by this policy.

The British government was only too willing to cooperate with Arab regimes that controlled vital oil supplies despite the fact that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini, was closely allied with Hitler.

Husseini created a Muslim SS unit for the Nazi regime that assisted in the liquidation of ninety per cent of the Jews in Bosnia and reportedly is said to have pleaded with Hitler not to allow Hungarian Jews to flee the Nazi regime, not to allow 5000 Polish children safe haven and to push extermination policies in Arab lands and North Africa.

As the war ended and the enormity and ghoulish nature of the Holocaust began to sicken the world, Jewish emigration increased into Palestine as the survivors of the camps fled lands where they were still considered outsiders by native populations.

Pogroms across Eastern Europe against the Jews who returned to their homes convinced them to flee to where a Jewish person was not a pariah and that place was the ancient land of Israel, a Jewish homeland for thousands of years prior to the Babylonian and Roman expulsions which ultimately brought the Jews to Europe.

But after the war ended, again Britain, whose obligation was to facilitate the implementation of the Balfour Declaration, which pledged "the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people, turned against the Jews.

In 1946 Britain unilaterally granted Transjordan its independence effectively partitioning what was supposed to be a Jewish Palestine into two states, allowing a Jewish state on only 22 per cent of the original mandate and creating an independent Palestine-Arab state east of the Jordan River.

The land that remained was again partitioned, this time by the United Nations. On November 29, 1947, the General Assembly voted to split western Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. The Jews were given a fraction of the land originally granted and over 75% of that land was desert.

With the remnants of European Jewry desperate to find sanctuary after the Holocaust, the Jewish population accepted the U.N. Partition Plan giving them a truncated state. The Arabs, even though granted the great proportion of land in Palestine, rejected the plan and attacked Israel from all sides.

(Final Note) The day Israel declared independence on May 14, 1948, Arab League Secretary, General Azzam Pasha declared "jihad", a holy war. He said, "This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre." Haj Amin Al Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, said, "I declare a holy war, my Moslem brothers! Murder the Jews!