Britain, the BBC & the Holocaust -- the Suicide of Shmul Zigelboym -- Part Two

The BBC did not exert itself to report news of the Holocaust, although there were a few skimpy notices, as Zigelboym reported to his associate, the Jewish Socialist League delegate in New York, in December 1942 [see the previous post at Emet m'Tsiyon]. On the other hand, the BBC has for many years favored Arab terrorism against Israel, giving a voice to terrorist spokesmen, while usually denying a voice to any Israeli spokesman, even the most sympathetic to the Arab side. As an example, on 6 April 2006, BBC TV from Jerusalem reported that a Hamas jihadist appointed as a cabinet member of the Palestinian Authority, for Jerusalem Affairs, was arrested by Israeli armed forces. The BBC correspondent falsely claimed that Hamas only wanted "East Jerusalem" for a future Arab state to be called "Palestine." In fact, Hamas is quite frank in its charter, stating unequivocally that Hamas wants to destroy the State of Israel in toto. They claim that all of the Land of Israel is territory belonging to Islam.

The BBC also forgets that: 1-Jews have been a majority in Jerusalem since the 1850s; 2-Muslims have been a minority in Jerusalem since at least 1800, since Jews and Christians together made up a majority; 3- Arabs drove Jews out of what became "East Jerusalem" in 1948 starting in December 1947 with the expulsion of Jews from the Shimon haTsadiq quarter [a neighborhood around the Jewish holy place, the Tomb of Simon the Just]; 4- British troops collaborated with Arabs to drive out Jews from various places in the country in the 1947-48 war, just as British troops had allowed a massacre of an estimated 600 Jews in Baghdad in the spring of 1941; 5- the religious and national-historical importance of many East Jerusalem sites to the Jews; 6- the "moderate" Arafat claimed all of Jerusalem, could the Hamas want any less?

Whereas the BBC was overtly "lukewarm" towards the Jews during the Holocaust, and in practice Britain did little to help the Jews and much to prevent Jews from finding refuge in the Land of Israel, the internationally designated Jewish National Home, the BBC today, with the approval of its guides in the Foreign Office, is a staunch supporter of Arab nationalism, endorsing atrocity tales invented by anti-Israel Arabs.

Two authors who discuss British failure [in fact, refusal] to help Jews during the Holocaust were the Poles, Jan Karski and Irenek-Osmecki. There is a very large literature on the subject of British de facto, external collaboration with the Holocaust, but I mention these two Poles while thinking of Zigelboym who was a member of the Polish National Council.

Zigelboym became more and more frustrated with BBC and other British refusal to help the Jews. One excuse that he was given was that it was British policy to help those who were fighting, and the Jews supposedly were not fighting. Then, when the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising broke out in April 1943, and the Jews were indeed fighting, Zigelboym went back to the British officials and pointed this out to them. However, the changed facts on the ground in Poland did not change British policy. In despair, Shmul Zigelboym committed suicide in May 1943. We present below the beginning of his farewell letter to the world, which was in fact addressed to the officials of the Polish National Council, Wladyslaw Raczkiewicz, president, and Wladyslaw Sikorski, prime minister.

I permit myself to address to you my last words, and through you to the Polish government and the Polish people, to the governments and peoples of all Allied countries and to the conscience of the world.
[Zigelboym- Bukh, ed. Y.S. Hertz, in Yiddish; p 364] [to be continued]

Zigelboym's last message to the world will be continued in the next post. Note above his photo with a caption from the book, The Jewish Labor Bund, edited by Y.S. Hertz (in Yiddish and English). At the bottom of this post, see photos from a memorial meeting helf for Shmul Zigelboym at which he was eulogized by the famous socialists, Camille Huysmans and Adam Ciolkosz. Click on the photos to enlarge them. Let it be understood that the international socialist
movement did little to help the Jews during the Holocaust, whether they were incapable or unwilling. And I refer more to the prominent socialists in the free countries that were fighting the Nazis, rather than to those in the Nazi-occupied lands. They were unable or unwilling to force the free world Allies to take concrete steps to stop or hinder the German massacres of Jews, such as bombing the crematoria and the railroad tracks leading to the death camps, like Auschwitz. The socialists, like others, like Roosevelt and Churchill, produced a lot of fine rhetoric.

The BBC today --in the post-9/11 world-- has been called an accessory to Islamist terrorism by none other than a Muslim writer, named Mamoun Fandy, quoted by David Bukay, an expert on Arab-Islamic terrorism.

Fandy called on Muslims to issue a fatwa against terrorism. He went on to criticize CNN and BBC, not to mention certain politicians.

"It is not helpful when London Mayor Ken Livingstone invites al-Qaradawi, just as it is not helpful when Tony Blair and George Bush invite people who are likely to become terrorists. It is regrettable that Western media channels, particularly CCN and the BBC, host radical Islamists who support terrorism and treat them as experts and analysts."
[quoted in David Bukay, Facts and Fables in the Mythology of Islamic and Palestinian Terrorism (Shaarei Tikva, Israel: Ariel Center 2006), pp 38-39]