- 23 Dec 2009 19:56
#13276355
Hundreds of thousands of Europeans tuned in to BBC World Service, expecting a truthful account of the course of the war. Many Jewish communities had yet to fall under Nazi occupation; they would have had a chance to escape had the truth been told. "If you give Jewish broadcasters an inch, they come clamouring for a mile." Despite the evidence from the PWE, the BBC foreign and home news boards concluded: "It seems desirable to soft- pedal the whole thing". During the war the British government actually acted against the rescue of Jews, for fear that survivors would cause problems elsewhere, especially in the Middle East. Thus, in December 1943, the British government opposed the evacuation of Jews from Rumania and France because "the Foreign Office are concerned with the difficulties of disposing of any considerable number of Jews should they be rescued from enemy occupied territory." Less than a year later, as the annihilation of European Jewry neared completion, a Foreign Office memo declared that "a disproportionate amount of the time of this office is wasted on dealing with these wailing Jews."
The BBC deliberately overlooked the Holocaust, while it was going on, as a matter of policy. BBC policy, for those who may be unaware, was and is dictated by the British Foreign Office. The BBC was instructed during World War 2 to overlook Jewish sufferings, not to report them at all, or to report them scantily at best. The attitude toward reports of Jewish suffering contrasts with the attitude toward Arab suffering, whether real or exaggerated or wholly invented. When the suffering is alleged to be Arab, then the BBC joins in, cooperates and may even invent on its own. The BBC did not exert itself to report news of the Holocaust, although there were a few skimpy notices. 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.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/the-holocaust-why-auntie-stayed-mum-1618801.html
The Holocaust: why Auntie stayed mum
The BBC knew about the Nazi death camps two years before the first reports from Belsen, says Marion Milne
MARION MILNE
Tuesday, 9 May 1995
The Holocaust was the best-kept secret of the war. Then its horrors were revealed - apparently for the first time - by BBC war reporter Richard Dimbleby's now famous broadcast of 19 April 1945. So shocked was the BBC newsroom that it refused to transmit the recording until, on threat of resignation, Dimbleby persuaded them it was one of the most important news stories of the century.
What was not admitted at the time was that the Dimbleby dispatch from Belsen was by no means the earliest news the BBC had received of the destruction of the European Jews.
New material, from a five-page directive in the Public Record Office, reveals that by 1943 the BBC had evidence which conclusively proved Hitler's plan for the "total extermination of European Jewry". Entitled "Special annexe on Extermination of the Jews: Evidence of Nazi policy and practice", it was compiled by the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), the government body that guided the BBC's overseas broadcasting.
Surprisingly, the document says nothing about making public its harrowing contents. Indeed, government policy was the reverse. "Jewish sources are always doubtful," says one handwritten note in the margin of a Foreign Office memorandum on conditions in Poland. Another Foreign Office circular suggests: "The Jews tend to exaggerate German atrocities."
Other confidential internal memorandums show an unwillingness by the BBC to broadcast on behalf of the Jews. "Any direct action to counter anti-Semitism would do more harm than good," wrote Sir Richard Maconachie, controller of the home service, on 15 April 1943. May E Jenkin, Children's Hour assistant director, stated: "If you give Jewish broadcasters an inch, they come clamouring for a mile." Despite the evidence from the PWE, the BBC foreign and home news boards concluded: "It seems desirable to soft- pedal the whole thing".
Leonard Miall of the wartime overseas service says that the BBC was "very careful to avoid giving currency to rumours that might not be true. We didn't want to jeopardise our general credibility. In the process, we did undoubtedly play down the extent of the Holocaust." In wartime, government censors made sure that the BBC would never be able to say anything contrary to official policy.
The government line, echoed by the BBC, was to win the war, then save the Jews. "We wanted to keep the Middle East quiet," says Sir Frank Roberts, a Foreign Office mandarin in charge of monitoring German activities. "It was an important part of our war effort. We had to be careful we didn't give the Arabs the impression that we had suddenly turned over into a pro-Jewish, pro-Zionist organisation."
Lord Weidenfeld, a Jewish refugee publisher, adds: "There was nothing ideological or mythological about this. It wasn't deeply instinctive racial hatred. It was expediency."
Conclusive proof that the BBC avoided publicising the Holocaust until the war was virtually over comes from Paul Winterton, a wartime News Chronicle Moscow correspondent and BBC contributor. Eight months before Dimbleby walked into Belsen, he accompanied the Red Army into Majdanek, the first Nazi death camp to be liberated. His account survives in the BBC sound archive. Winterton speaks of "the most horrible story I will ever have to tell you" and describes in brutal detail this appalling extermination camp.
Winterton, now in his eighties, recalls the BBC's reaction to his broadcast. "I was given a kind of reprimand. They told me they didn't want this atrocity stuff. They seemed to think it was Russian propaganda."
Eventually, Winterton's dispatch went out in August 1944, but it was heavily edited and broadcast only on the overseas service.
There was an immediate outcry from the United States, demanding a war crimes commission, and Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, the British ambassador in Moscow, telegrammed London to seek clarification. The Foreign Office did its best to bury the story. "The Russians will manage this more effectively than we," one official was minuted as saying. "It may relieve us of unpleasant responsibilities in deciding what are and what are not war crimes," another noted.
The Foreign Office had not formulated its policy on war crimes; it had to keep the Middle East happy, and could not afford a loss of morale at a critical stage in the war. Ostensibly, Winterton's contract with News Chronicle did not allow his broadcast to go out. In reality, the BBC, in line with the Foreign Office, had the perfect excuse to maintain a very British silence on the Holocaust.
The writer is assistant producer on 'What Did You Do in the War, Auntie?'. The second part will be broadcast tonight at 9.30pm on BBC1.
The BBC deliberately overlooked the Holocaust, while it was going on, as a matter of policy. BBC policy, for those who may be unaware, was and is dictated by the British Foreign Office. The BBC was instructed during World War 2 to overlook Jewish sufferings, not to report them at all, or to report them scantily at best. The attitude toward reports of Jewish suffering contrasts with the attitude toward Arab suffering, whether real or exaggerated or wholly invented. When the suffering is alleged to be Arab, then the BBC joins in, cooperates and may even invent on its own. The BBC did not exert itself to report news of the Holocaust, although there were a few skimpy notices. 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.
http://ziontruth.blogspot.com/2006/04/i ... itish.html
The BBC & the Holocaust - Was It Reported or Disregarded? - Was It British Policy? - Part One
The BBC deliberately overlooked the Holocaust, while it was going on, as a matter of policy. BBC policy, for those who may be unaware, was and is dictated by the British Foreign Office. The BBC was instructed during World War 2 to overlook Jewish sufferings, not to report them at all, or to report them scantily at best. There have been some British academic studies that mention this fact, and anyone who knows of them is welcome to discuss them with us in our Comments section
Here are excerpts from a letter by Zigelboym to the Bund's representative in New York, dated 17 December 1942. The events described took place after his previous letter dated 28 November 1942:
I held special conferences with the political editor of the London Times, with the sub-editor of the Reuters Agency, with the London correspondent of the New York Times, and with the director of the British Radio [BBC].
My conferences had the result that in the London Times there were large excerpts from our report [on the massacre of Jews {in Poland}] for three days in succession, and on Sunday -- a long editorial. The Reuters Agency distributed a large summary of the report to the press; a long cable was sent to the New York Times, my proposals in the Polish National Council were printed in the Daily Telegraph, with the newspaper taking a positive position. On the British Radio [BBC], they began to give very skimpy notices about the massacres, and this -- only in the broadcasts for Europe, and not for England.
Through the British Labour Party, I was connected with the British Foreign Ministry directly. I met three times with a person whom foreign minister Eden {Anthony Eden} had specially selected for the purpose and who is the expert on Polish affairs.
Monday afternoon, I again met Raczynski {foreign minister in the Polish Government-in-exile} who informed me about his talks with Eden. I proposed to Raczynski that he should immediately communicate all information to the governments {the British, other allied governments, and the governments in exile} in an official note and request action from them.
In Polish government circles . . . it was now agreed to deal with the matter as an action against the extermination of the Jewish population.
In British government circles, the information was still not believed. The British Radio had received secret instructions not to make any big propaganda about the whole issue. I spoke about this matter with the representative of the British Foreign Ministry. He denied it but the same evening, one of my friends --who belongs to the inner staff of the British Radio [BBC]-- related to me confidentially that he himself was at a staff meeting that evening at which an instruction was read out from the British Foreign Ministry, to give very cautious reports about Poland and not much.
Zigelboym wrote in his letter of 17 December 1942 to his Bund colleague in New York:
The British expert on Poland showed me his expert opinion which he had
submitted to Eden [Anthony Eden], in which he explained the killing of all Warsaw Jews as officially proven, the extermination of [the Jews in] all other cities [in Poland] -- as apparently true, but not officially proven. The issue of a declaration by the governments [in exile in London] had budged from its place.
A week after the negative directive to the British radio [BBC], an opposite directive came. And it was not a secret one, as my friend gave it to me to read. Its content was about like this: Up till today Hitler has successfully used antisemitism for his purposes. Now, the day has come when we can use his antisemitism against him. Therefore, we must widely spread news of the anti-Jewish massacres in Poland. [Zigelboym Bukh, p 359]
Then, the director of the BBC invited me to a new conference. He spoke with me about which passages in our report (from the underground Bund in Poland), as well as in the Polish government reports, that we should give maximal attention to on the radio. He proposed to me that I give an English speech of six minutes --as the direct representative of those being slaughtered. This was on the 11th of December. I gave the talk on the 13th of December (Sunday) at 10 in the morning. It made, as my English acquaintances told me, a strong impression. Excerpts from it were repeated throughout the day on all broadcasts. [pp 359-360]
Later that year, as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was proceeding without Allied help, except from a few Poles like Henryk Iwanski, Zigelboym wrote:
On May 1, I spoke on the radio [BBC] for home [for Poland]. . . [Letter of 3 May 1943; p 363]
That is, the BBC allowed him to speak on a broadcast to Poland in Polish [as far as I know, the BBC did not have Yiddish-language broadcasts, nor did it want them], not to a British audience, whereas only British public opinion could have changed British policy.
Neither the British government nor any other major Allied power did anything concrete to oppose, impede, stop, hinder, or hamper the Holocaust in Poland. Zigelboym was allowed to make appearances on the BBC starting in December 1942, but it appears that all his appearances were only granted to him by the BBC for the sake of appearances. That is, so that the BBC would be seen to be doing its duty to humanity, although nothing concrete or meaningful was being done by the British government, of which the BBC was --and is-- an agency. In 1942-1943, the British government must have felt that Zigelboym had to be placated too, since he was a person of some standing and consequence, as an official of the Polish Government-in-exile and a trade union leader with ties to British trade unions as well. So they made a few gestures towards him, but nothing concrete was done.
One thing that Zigelboym is saying is that the BBC did not report the massacres of Jews until December 1942, whereas the massacres of Jews started with the invasion of Poland in 1939 in the form of special air raids on the poor and religious Jewish neighborhoods, later continuing in other forms. Here we note a very big contrast between the way the BBC --and most other Western news/press outlets-- reported the Holocaust, and the way that the same news outlets and press agencies reported --for example-- the Israeli anti-PLO, anti-terrorist, and anti-Syrian expedition in Lebanon in 1982. In the latter case, gross comparisons were made between Israel's operation in Beirut in 1982 with the Nazi attack on the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943. Yet there were many many differences that the Western press commonly overlooked in 1982. For one thing, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943 got very little press attention compared with that given to the PLO's travails in Lebanon in 1982. Right there we have a very big difference that the sob sisters over the PLO's suffering in Lebanon did not seem to be aware of.
It is also noteworthy that the BBC and the British Foreign Ministry, which had the superb resources of British intelligence at their disposal, did not want to believe the reports of massacres of Jews supplied by Zigelboym and the Polish underground courier, Jan Karski, among others. Somehow the Foreign Office and Anthony Eden in particular did not know or did not want to know or did not want to acknowledge that they knew about the ongoing Holocaust. This was the same Anthony Eden who favored pan-Arab nationalism by promoting formation of the Arab League . The attitude toward reports of Jewish suffering contrasts with the attitude toward Arab suffering, whether real or exaggerated or wholly invented. When the suffering is alleged to be Arab, then the BBC joins in, cooperates and may even invent on its own. Consider the BBC attitude to the Jenin massacre hoax. BBC TV anchormen openly relished the story of the Jenin massacre, impatiently asking BBC correspondents on the ground in Jenin whether the bodies had yet been found. In fact, the bodies were never found because the Jenin massacre was a hoax, invented and spread by Arafat and his cronies, such as Sa'eb Erikat.
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.
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.
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]
In Despair over BBC & Official British Disregarding of Holocaust, Zigelboym Commits Suicide -- Part Three
It is believed that Shmuel Mordecai Zigelboym committed suicide on the night between May 11 and May 12, 1942, in London. He was in despair over the reluctance of the Allied governments, of which the leading ones were Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union, to do anything concrete to stop the mass murder proceedings being conducted by the German Nazis. Allied reluctance to help the Jews was confirmed several times later in the war.
Here is the last, the farewell letter of Shmul Zigelboym to the world:
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.
The latest reports from Poland make clear that the Germans are now killing with their horrible cruelty, the few Jews remaining in Poland. The last act of a tragedy which has no equal in history is now taking place behind the walls of the Ghetto.
The responsibility for the crime of murdering the whole Jewish population in Poland falls in the first place on the murderers themselves, but indirectly the responsibility also burdens all mankind. It burdens the peoples and governments of the Allied states, which have till now not made any efforts towards concrete action for stopping the crime. By passively watching the murder of defenseless millions of tormented children, women, and men, these countries have become partners of the criminals.
I cannot remain silent. I cannot live while the remnants of the Jewish people of Poland, whose representative I am, are being destroyed. My friends in the Warsaw Ghetto died with weapons in their hands in the recent heroic struggle [= the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising]. I was not fated to die as they did, together with them. But I belong to them and to their mass graves.
By my death I want to express the strongest protest possible against the passivity with which the world looks on and allows the extermination of the Jewish people.
I know how little a human life is worth in our times, but because I have been able to do nothing during my life, I may help by my death in breaking the indifference of those who have the capability of saving, now, perhaps at the last moment, the still-remaining Polish Jews.
My life belongs to the Jewish people in Poland, and therefore I give it away to them. My wish is that the few who will remain of the couple of millon Polish Jews will survive to see, together with the Polish population, the deliverance which can be realized in Poland in a world of freedom and in the justice of socialism. I believe that such a Poland will arise and that such a world will come.
I am sure that the President and Prime Minister [of Poland] will deliver my words to all those to whom they are addressed and that the Polish government will soon begin the appropriate promised actions in the diplomatic area for those who are still alive. I say my "Be Well" to everyone, to all who are dear to me and whom I loved.
[Zigelboym- Bukh, ed. Y.S. Hertz, in Yiddish; p 364-5]
So the British helped the Arab nationalists against the French and against the Jews. They also helped the German Nazis kill more Jews by making it extremely difficult for Jews to enter the Jewish National Home, thus violating the mandate given to them by the League of Nations to foster development of the Jewish National Home. Note that Nuri as-Sa`id gave a copy of his plan for an Arab League to the British before the plan was fulfilled.
The insistent support that British diplomacy gave to Arab nationalism and pan-Arab unity notwithstanding, the typical "politically correct" hack historians in the West, in the Arab world, and some in Israel too, claim that Israel and Zionism always enjoyed unlimited, unconditional support from Western imperialism. In fact, Britain, France, and the United States showed more support for Arab nationalism than for Zionism and indeed opposed Zionism in practice.
It is also curious that the UK supported pan-Arab unity insistently, whereas not all Arab rulers were eager for it, for their own reasons. Certainly, Britain prodded the Arab states to form the Arab League, and this was needed to overcome Arab leaders' reluctance.
- By wat0n
- By QatzelOk