"AM I MY BROTHERS KEEPER?" - THE RAPE OF PALESTINE by William Ziff

"AM I MY BROTHERS KEEPER?" 

CHAPTER III

The horrible fate of the Jewish people today can no longer be ignored if Western civilization itself is to survive. Even if the world of Western humanity is so lost to common decency that it can calmly watch this terrible procession of suffering and

degradation without a twinge of conscience, it cannot escape the general disaster of which these savage persecutions are a forewarning. "The time has come," the American delegate, Myron C. Taylor, told the Evian Congress, "when governments are recognizing that the disorderly movements of peoples in great numbers makes for general unrest" and that an orderly directed migration is essential to world peace. The war of extermination against the Jews, declares Senator Wagner grimly, has been "rationalized into a crusade against the liberal and democratic ideals which are an integral part of the Jewish outlook on life. . . If Palestine fails, democracy is endangered. It is an essential responsibility of the great democratic nations to assure the preservation and success of the Jewish homeland." 2 Returning from Germany in January 1938, Ambassador Dodd solemnly warned his hearers that "mankind is in grave danger" and facing a murderous onslaught implacably bent on destroying all personal, religious and economic freedom.

It is now widely recognized that Hitler means to go down in history not in the character of a German political hero, which the forgetfulness of a few centuries will obscure, but in the tradition of Jesus, Buddha and Mohammed. The Christian and Jewish mentality are both the mortal enemy of this phase, to which he is willy-nilly being swept by the fanatic emotion of his force-crazed followers. This rapidly emerging religion (for it is no less than that) now refers to Christianity as "the Asiatic-Semitic world priesthood." Its aggressive campaign is only modified in the various countries to suit local conditions. "Jehovah whom the Jews worship,"

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asserts Der Stuermer, leading Nazi weekly, is "the greatest of all criminals." 3 "Instead of thanking God for their daily bread, German children are taught to thank Hitler," states Dr. Samuel McCrea Cavert, general secretary of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ. 4 And thunders the Nazi apostle, Dr. Engelke: "God has manifested Himself not in Jesus Christ but in Adolf Hitler."

Dr. Alfred Rosenberg, number one Nazi ideologist, whose book, The Myth of the Twentieth Century, is compulsory reading in all German schools, is the most fanatic anti-Christian alive. Christianity, he claims "is the unsuccessful attempt during the

last millennium and a half to make us mentally Jews." "No one," announces Rosenberg decisively, "has the right to find fault with those of our people who have found their Son of God [Hitler] and have thus regained their Eternal Father." 5 In the same vein General Ludendorff writes: "Christianity originates in the Jewish spirit and must be crushed if the German people are to be saved." 6 And the powerful German Action, official organ of one of Nazidom's most sacred institutions, declares: "Christianity is part of the Jew's diabolical plot against the world. It is therefore a trail blazer for Bolshevism. Bolshevism is the fruit of the Jew's Bible." 7

The ethical scruples, the regard for the individual, the principles of justice taught by the Judeo-Christian creed, are contemptuously rejected by the new anti-Semitic dogma as a poisonous system of slave morality, cunningly palmed off on the noble Aryan peoples by the Jews, in order to destroy their hardihood and further the Jewish plot against the world. According to literature distributed in ton-lots all over Europe, Masonry is a particularly vicious Jewish prop, and "the entire Jesuit order, responsible for so much Catholic mischief throughout the world, was founded by a Jew, Ignatius Loyola . . . [and is] based upon an introvert form of the Jewish Kehilla." The Jews, asserts this new scholarship, are far from the 'Chosen People' but a group of debauched culture-Bedouins who plagiarized the Scriptures themselves from earlier originals.

This may again be seen in Italy's new alignment with Nazi racial principles. Fiercely,

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Mussolini refers in the Foreign Ministry organ Informazione Diplomatica to a conspiracy "proved during the past twenty years in the life of Europe, between Judaism, Bolshevism and Free Masonry." 8 These attacks on Jews and Free Masons were coincident with a tirade against the Catholic Church led by the identical section of the Fascist press which was conducting the campaign against the Jews. Membership in the Catholic Action "is incompatible with membership in the Fascist Party," thunders the anti-Semitic leader Robert Farinacci in the authoritative Regime Fascista* To receive their instruction in these theories from their source, four hundred Italian Black-shirts left for Vienna in August 1938, reports the London Daily Telegraph, for special courses of teaching in the new pagan curriculum. 10

The extent and danger of this program is well recognized by the German Church. In a defiant letter read from Church pulpits on August 28, 1938, Germany's Roman Catholic hierarchy asserted the existence of a large scale persecution designed "to eradicate Christianity in Germany" and supplant it with a new pagan doctrine. "The fate of the catacombs is meant for us," it warned bluntly, "by moves intended to mark the beginning of the end." It can hardly be doubted that modern anti-Semitic doctrine is no less rabidly anti-Christian than it is anti-Jewish. "Antisemitism of the present era," declares Osservatore Romano, official organ of the Vatican, on December 27, 1937, "is not only a fight against the national aspirations of the Jewish people, but is also an aspect of the struggle provoked by the new paganism in large sections of international political life." "Spiritually," pronounced Pope Pius XI, meeting the challenge of Nazi doctrine squarely, "we are Semites." 11 From other Christian sources comes an identical estimate. Averred the Greek Catholic Bishop of Lemberg, Dr. Jan Butchko: "The fight against Antisemitism is a fight for the defense of Christianity." 12 "And warns Dr. Hewlett Johnson, Dean of Canterbury: "The outrages and attacks on Jews are only a preliminary to an attack on Christian civilization." 13

Wherever Nazi philosophy has gained control so that it can come boldly out into the

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open with its aims, repressions of Christians as well as Jews, have followed. When the need for placating outside Christian opinion vanishes, Christianity in Germany will be crushed like an eggshell. "No Jew will be alive [there] twenty-five years from now," says Dr. John Haynes Holmes, "and if the Christian Church survives at all it will be an underground movement as it was in the days of its beginning in Rome." 14

Not since the time Mohammed's frenzied legions surged over three continents has the world been presented with as formidable a body of doctrine as this. Its followers are hardly even nominal patriots of the countries of their residence. Like that other group of renegades which takes its orders from Moscow, they no longer know loyalty to nation or State, but only to idea. The religion of blood and race has become a fixed obsession, blotting out every normal consideration. Can it be doubted that this hypnotic cult which bred traitors and renegades in Austria, which has its inspired converts throughout Europe, seeks ultimately to embrace England and America within its fold? 15 It was not for nothing that General Goering bellowed to the rubber-stamp Reichstag: "We welcome England to the Germanic community of nations !"

Can it be believed that the fanatic followers of Hitler who occupy high places in British official life are any less traitors than the Nazi renegades of Austria or those troublesome groups who seek to undermine the Netherlands, Brazil, Switzerland and other States on which the covetous Nazi eye rests? Are they not ruled by the same fixed hatreds, the identical delusions? And have they not already betrayed the vital interests of their country on the Continent, as well as in the Holy Land, in the name of the greater Aryan destiny? Who can doubt that the final object of attack is to be the Anglo-Saxon peoples and the free philosophy of life which distinguishes them. Leading the paean of hatred against the Jews, the prominent Fascist journalist Giovanni Ansaldo roars in the Gazetta del Popolo (August 14, 1938) that countries unwilling to succumb to the Anglo-Saxon world system of which "Jews are the

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agents," must organize a rigorous counter-offensive. By every innuendo, German leaders have been fully as explicit. Certainly sober British thinkers such as F. A. Voigt, brilliant Foreign Affairs Editor of the Manchester Guardian, have little doubt in their minds as to the extent and direction of the storm which is gathering. 16

The great weapon by which the Liberal world is to be beaten to its knees is Antisemitism; and always bearing the brunt of this attack are the Zionists, "the shock troops of the world Jewish conspiracy," sub-human, cunning-creatures who skulk from the shadows as the prime movers in every catastrophe, from whose contaminating touch even the savage Bedouin must be saved lest he be defiled and outraged! 17 In this mortar Western culture is being pounded. The old love for truth and justice, the sturdy character which once armored it, have all but worn away. Its once proud soul has been corrupted by gross materialism. It is full of corroding fears, but cannot act to defend itself.

What a dreadful prospect humankind faces unless it can force itself to act now with purpose and resolution! Not the Jews alone, but Christianity and all its cherished institutions, must be ground to bits between the crushing millstones of Marx and Hitler's paganism. These themselves must fight another bloody conflict for mastery, since they are antithetic to each other; after which the racial philosophy must devolve into a series of devastating conflicts of mutual extermination between the various white races, and finally one last great bloody holocaust, that final struggle for supremacy between the white and colored peoples, so frankly predicted by the philosophies of Nazism from Houston Stewart Chamberlain down to Rosenberg. Within the conquering nations themselves, the tolerant, the generous and the manly will be ruthlessly extirpated, and the cowardly and mercenary will usurp their place. Does any sane person think that civilization or man himself can survive such a hideous program?

If the Nazi threat should turn out to be an overrated phenomenon, what then? Communism? Chaos? What of the Jews of East Europe, whom sheer despair is slowly driving to madness ! When the flood of Communism rolls like a great tide

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over the fall of the House of Hitler, will they resist it — or welcome it as a deliverer? That is a question whose importance to the world at large can hardly be overemphasized.

The soul of this people is now on a rack of hatred more powerful and shattering than any they have faced in their history. George Backer, Vice-Chairman of the Joint Distribution Committee, returned from Poland commenting that the Jews, "exhausted, assailed on every side, have begun to lose their faith in the power of the Word." For the first time in a thousand years of Jewish residence in Poland, we are witnessing the complete breakdown of Jewish culture.

So far the inroads of Marxism among the Jewish masses, despite anti-Semitic assertions, have not been spectacular. At the Jewish community elections in Warsaw in 1936, the labor bloc, which presented a united front and was supported by the Communists, succeeded in securing only fourteen out of forty-nine seats all told. But Jewish deputies in the Polish Sejm have warned their government that unless this vicious war of extermination against the Jew is halted, he will turn towards anything that holds out a promise of rescue from this mortal horror.

A human being is not inert like a picture in a book, which may be maltreated with impunity until it is finally cast into the garbage heap. When under-privilege has reached a certain stage in misery, it constitutes in itself a stark demand on humanity which cannot be safely ignored. Often whole civilizations, as well as States, have discovered this to their amazement — and cost. The Romans found it out in the Sparticide rebellion. The French nobles could give you details from their graves on how desperate even despised serfs may become — a story which the Russian Romanoffs could punctuate in gory particulars. The English, too, discovered it in their dealings with the American colonists, and recently in their experience with the German people, who rendered desperate by exaction's and tribute developed a Hitler, who now threatens to tear down the roof of the world.

In any system of social ethics worthy of the name, the pressure of absolute need takes precedence over all other claims, even if this were the only title to consideration that

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could be presented. Otherwise need, inspired by desperation, will inevitably attempt to force its own rights, without caring whether the world of mankind goes up in smoke as a consequence.

It seems almost impossible to believe that the Powers have learned no lesson from the situation they forced on Germany. The chancelleries of Europe can hardly afford to ignore the deadly explosion which is brewing in these pest-ridden areas, merely to satisfy the cold rapacity of a few Nazi-British officials. The bastions of European civilization are not so solid that still another of its props can be callously kicked out from under without hurt. "Economic unrest in Poland," reported Alexander Kahn of the Joint Distribution Committee, "coupled with the persecution of the three million Jews still living there, may soon set off a civil war that will involve all Europe."

Who would be the first and main sufferer in the event of such a calamity if not the vulnerable British Empire? Can this great Empire remain unaffected during any period of general unrest? If new forces appear in the world, do they not flourish at Britain's expense? The German, Russian and Chinese revolutions have already immeasurably weakened her position. Will it stand another and further assault?

Even if the Jews are to be murdered in a body, so as to do away with them and their problem together, it could only be done at the sacrifice of all existing liberty and culture. The eddies of such a monstrous proposition would not be lost until they had reduced Europe to a shambles. A population infected with such ideas is not likely to stop in its search for victims after the Jews have been butchered.

If there remains the slightest sanity or conscience in this distraught world, it must be realized that this whole affair is lifted far above the realms to which a handful of British political adventurers wish to consign it. It must be understood that it is a practical impossibility to ostracize and ruin ten million intelligent human beings (perhaps many millions more, if the Hebrew Christians are also to be included) without the most violent type of eventual repercussions on the entire world estate.

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Do the English expect that the descendants of the Maccabeans will stand by in apathy while hatred and threat converge on their children from every side? That is too much to ask of flesh.

Here, too, plenty of historical warning is written. Count Coudenhove-Kalergi wrote bluntly that "should the aims of Zionism not be realized, cruel catastrophes are imminent, dangers of which no man can tell whether they will be limited to Jews

alone." 18 The Norwegian member of the League of Nations Assembly declared in 1931 that "Palestine is the center of Jewish hopes," warning that any attempt to rob this dynamic race of its ancient homeland is to complicate the social uneasiness which characterizes the present epoch. Nearer home, Lord Robert Cecil, a member of the very cabinet which issued the Balfour Declaration, asserted: "The Zionist policy seems to me of vital importance to the world. A nation without a country of its own is an anomaly, and anomalies breed trouble . . . therefore I am a convinced Zionist." 19

Christian theology also has a very definite stake in Zionism. Christianity cannot be separated from Jewish Prophecy, which is an integral part of Scriptures. These Prophecies rest altogether on the promised restoration of the Jewish nation to their own land. "This," says the noted Christian historian, Mayers, "appears to be the uniform language, the grand object, the final result of the entire series of Prophecy, from the beginning of the inspired volume to the end." 20 It is echoed from Isaiah and Ezekiel to Jesus. The Apostle James repeats it in the words of Amos: "And I will bring again the captivity of my people, Israel, to an end, and they shall build the waste cities and inhabit them, and I will plant them upon their land, and they shall no more be pulled out of their land which I have given them, said the Lord thy God."

No matter how cruelly they use the Jews, by what sophistry can the Church justify the abandonment of the millions of Hebrew Christians? The campaign of annihilation against the Jews does not except their blood brothers in the Christian faith.

In Austria alone, where there are only two hundred thousand

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Jews, Knickerbocker estimated that eight hundred thousand non-Aryan men, women and children are hiding or fleeing from the fury of Hitler's anti-Semitic Storm Troops. If the Nuremberg laws are one day to be applied all over the earth, they may affect as many as forty or fifty million people if the condition in Austria is a fair criterion. What is to become of these Hebrew Christians? Shall not the doors of Palestine be open to them as to their brother Jews? They, too, must evacuate Europe or perish.

The Jewish National Movement is not a religious activity, but a question of National Restoration. In the days of Jesus, Hebrew Christians worshiped by the thousands in the Temple, but were none the less Jews.

Ignoring all related questions of morality and decency, it is not to the interests of mankind generally that these Jewish people be allowed to perish. Throughout Europe, in all branches of human endeavor, this ostracized race has made in the past and continues to make even under present disheartening conditions, the most brilliant contributions to human thought. 21 These same unwanted Jews have already demonstrated in Palestine - Israel that they are well capable of extending Western Civilization into Asia, where a prosperous, proud Jewish State might well become one of the outposts of Europe in a permanently unstable and dangerous part of the world. It appears quite plain that if these barren stretches can be colonized by the Jews, at once ridding Europe of a serious problem and adding to the wealth and stability of the world, not only Israel, but all mankind will be the gainer by it. It is equally evident that if the purpose of Zionism is to solve the Jewish problem, the proposed British solution is doing the very opposite by adding still another area on which it can press. The only possibility for a sane solution lies in the creation of a Jewish State within boundaries allowing for its survival as an economic unit. Any definition less than that is like     digging post holes for the purpose of filling them up again. At the very least, the Jewish Nation would require Western Palestine and Trans-Jordan. In addition it should have Sinai Peninsula, rectification of its northern borders, and a large portion of the bleak desert to the east.

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The fact must be made clear that England has no vested interest in Palestine which entitles her to steal it from a people who need it to sustain their very life. The Arabs must be told, too, that this effort to expropriate, for their already bloated empire, a tiny province on the coast, will prove a futile and misguided dream. The vast international significance of the Holy Land demands that it be a separate State. And only through the Jews can this ever be possible.

The Jews in their present situation are not free agents and can concede nothing. Certainly the stark sequence of events must compel them to shake their present, hopelessly inadequate leadership. Fawning and international quixotism will gain them

nothing. If their objective is to be achieved, they must be ready for whatever sacrifice is necessary and must approach Whitehall 'knife in hand/ In this bitter struggle for life, they have no choice but ruthlessly to eradicate their inner enemies, the pacifists, weaklings and advocates of class struggle, who do nothing but weaken them at a time when their utmost strength is required.

Urging that this has become an emergency matter which will not wait on debates, Jewry should seek a mass repatriation of at least five million people from the ghettos of Europe, under the supervision of the Great Powers and along the lines on which

the League handled the repatriation of the Asiatic Greeks.* Such a proposition is essentially practicable, and may be carried out on an orderly, business-like basis if no insuperable obstacles are thrown in its path by the civil servants of His Britannic Majesty's Government, the present Mandatory.

The fight in that case should be carried to the Nations, and in England, to the British people themselves. The latter could profitably be told that if the coterie of Whitehall politicians speaks in their name, they have done them a great disservice; for the record these men have left says that this is an England whose word is worthless, who cannot be trusted, who robs the weak and fawns on the strong, and who has lost its soul.

The ideal situation for a Jewish Palestine would undoubtedly be a permanent alliance

# See Appendix D, p. 582.

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with the English people; but certainly if the politicians in Whitehall speak the true spirit of Britain, the Jews have no other recourse than to look elsewhere for allies.

And they may then believe with confidence that their hopes based on the fall of the British Empire will not be long in fulfillment. For when the policy of a nation no longer depends on the broad outlines of creative action and degenerates into a mere olio of petty treachery and scheming, that nation has passed its heyday — it is decadent, and on the verge of a collapse which will be as swift as it is unexpected.

Then if the Jews are smart, they will turn to anyone who has a quarrel with England, and take their chances on the result. And they will say in effect to the Powers: "No, gentlemen, unless you wish the foul dreams of the anti-Semites to come true, and the soul of torn Israel turn in despair to that destroying agency it has so far manfully resisted (Communism), you had better curb this destroying British camarilla. They and their philosophy of intrigue and hate must yield; for if the people of Jehovah are to be thus driven to national suicide because flesh and spirit can suffer no more, let the world take warning that one of its props of sanity is collapsing. It cannot gloat over the miseries of this determined, intelligent race, or be indifferent to its fate. The future of man is indivisible from morality, decency, fairness and honor. If these virtues in their broad outline no longer exist, and if the people of the Bible are to be wantonly wiped out in this Twentieth Century with no more mercy than if they were rats in a trap, then this civilization must fall. It is then proven hard and worthless, and the virtues you pose for it do not exist. By the very nature of things, men everywhere will instinctively seek a better morality, even if that attempt ends in death. Gentlemen of the Great Powers, this is not a Jewish problem alone. It is your problem too !"

Despite the drab cruelty which obscures it today, it may be deemed certain that the world conscience still exists. If the Jews take the lead with stern and unbending courage, yielding nothing that brave despair can hold, that conscience may be relied on to reassert itself. They have at least no other choice, unless they are to go

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down in some general catastrophe which may well signal the end of civilized man on this planet. Meanwhile they can only fight on, sustained by that undimmed faith which valiant men have never questioned over the ages. It rings imperishably in the sad, beautiful words of Bialik:

"Around the last dead slave, maybe tonight

The desert wind and desert beast shall fight. . . Beyond the howling desert with its sand There waits beneath the stars the Promised Land."