Holocaust is rooted in Torah and Medina

Edwin Black presented three talks based on his bestselling books, two during Shabbat and one after, inaugurating the Young Israel of Woodmere’s Holocaust Memorial Lecture series there.

Black traced the roots of the Holocaust to the rivalry between Yitzchak and Yishmael, sons of Avraham, and to Mohammed’s conquest of Medina, a city with a significant Jewish population, in 627 CE.

Presenting from his book, “The Farhud: Roots of the Arab-Nazi Alliance in the Holocaust,” Black recounted that when the Jews did not accede to Mohammed’s demand that they convert to his new religion of Islam, he decapitated 600, their heads rolling into a trench. As Moslem conquest spread through Africa, the Middle East and Eurasia, Jews under Muslim control were sometimes “exalted and treated as special people” but were often persecuted, assaulted and killed — either way, Jews were always treated as dhimmis (second class citizens), Black said during his motzei Shabbat lecture.

The notion of Jews and Moslems living in harmony until the advent of modern Zionism is false, he said.

A rise in Jewish nationalism in the form of Zionism paralleled the heightening of nationalist sentiment sweeping Europe in the late 19th century. As the Ottoman Empire was nearing its collapse in World War I, Palestine, under Ottoman control, was an “unimportant backwater in the Moslem world.”

There were no Arab countries, just tribes, until 1920 when the precursor of British Petroleum, working with the League of Nations, created them, so carefully selected leaders of those nations would sign oil agreements, Black said.

As declarations by the United States, France and Germany — similar to the Balfour Declaration — designated a Jewish Homeland in Palestine, “Moslems were unwilling to coexist with Jewish neighbors as equals,” he said.

Haj Amin Al Husseini, leader of the Moslem community in Palestine, who talked peace with the British while exhorting the Arabs to kill Jews, was made Grand Mufti of Jerusalem by the British.

Husseini engineered the 1929 riots in Jerusalem and the massacre of the Jewish community of Hebron, in both cases with British authorities coming late to the defense of the Jews, Black said. There was “constant violence against the Jews in Palestine and those Arabs who wanted to make peace with the Jews were shouted down and shot down.”

When Moslems approached German consulates to join the Nazi Party and were rebuffed by racist Germany since the Arabs are Semites, they formed their own Hitler youth, translated Mein Kampf into Arabic, and closely followed the broadcasts of Radio Berlin in Iraq, Black said.

Hitler joined with the Arabs in 1939, and a mass pogrom against the Jews of Baghdad took place during Shavuot, 1941, incited by Husseini and the Nazi-Iraqis, Black continued. In this pogrom, known as The Farhud, Jewish homes were marked by a red hamsa (hand) and for two days Baghdad’s Jews were systematically tortured and slaughtered, their property destroyed.

This was the beginning of the end for the 2,700-year-old Jewish community in Iraq, 140,000 Jews ultimately dwindling to fewer than 10 by 2008.

Arabs formed three divisions in the Waffen SS, trained in all types of warfare and deployed across the continent under the direct supervision of Heimlich Himler, Black said. They prayed five times a day under the supervision of the Mufti who was on the German payroll. When the war ended in Europe in 1945, it continued in the Middle East, he said.

Black said there is “no hope for genuine peace between the Arabs and Jews in our time, but peaceful coexistence is possible,” pointing to treaties with Egypt and Jordan that remain in force.

Edwin Black is an award-winning bestselling international investigative author of books and newspaper and magazine articles. He is the son of Jewish Polish Holocaust survivors. His mother escaped from a train and his father from a shooting squad. Black was born in Chicago and currently lives in Washington, DC.

Funding terror in Israel

In a talk following musaf Shabbat morning, Black discussed his most recent book, “Financing the Flames: How Tax-Exempt and Public Money Fuel a Culture of Confrontation and Terror in Israel.” Black explained that American taxpayers support non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that are working to destabilize the Israel Defense Forces, fund confrontation, and finance terrorism in Israel.

He accused the New Israel Fund (NIF) and George Soros’s Open Society Foundations of funding individuals and organizations that are involved in staged riots by Arabs who push their children at Israeli soldiers, hit the soldiers with sticks, and agitate and harass the IDF until the soldiers react; the rioters then film the confrontation and post the distorted one-sided footage on the Internet. These NGOs twist the defensive techniques of the IDF and attempt to prosecute the IDF and its officers as war criminals, Black said.

He noted that the NIF does support numerous positive organizations such as those attempting to protect battered women, but in other cases, millions of taxpayer dollars are funneled into anti-Israel activities including salaries for terrorists in Israeli prisons. These terrorist salaries escalate with the violence — the more murders and destruction committed, the more they are paid by the Palestinian Authority using United State and European Union foreign aid.

“It’s up to everybody to take this discovery to make a change,” he said. “Your wallet is being pilfered to support a highly politicized organization involved in social engineering to wipe away the Jewish identity of the Jewish State. They should help battered women but stop battering the IDF.”

IBM’s Holocaust

Following mincha, Black discussed IBM’s role in facilitating the systematic exploitation and murder of the Jews of Europe in the Holocaust. He held up copies of receipts, punch cards and company correspondence — all documentation gleaned in the research for his book, “IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation.”

He ticked off the use of IBM’s technology in categorizing the Jews to enable the Nazis to find, isolate and use them for forced labor, confiscating their belongings and, ultimately, murdering them.

The numbers tattooed on the victims’ arms were “IBM Numbers” based on the numbers IBM assigned to prisoners, Black said.

The company had customer sites in concentration camps and its communications during the war years were sent via diplomatic pouch, he said.

IBM’s Hollerith punch card system was copyrighted and designed to meet the Nazis’ specifications and was leased to the Nazis to enable a tidy profit for IBM. It was not anti-Semitism that fueled IBM founder Thomas Watson’s assistance of the Nazis but the desire for profit, said Black.

As for lawsuits against IBM, Black said that IBM pressured lawyers to drop their cases and that IBM has stonewalled anyone seeking further information.

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The Young Israel of Woodmere’s Holocaust Memorial Lecture Series will focus on lesser known aspects of the Holocaust, said Associate Rabbi Shalom Axelrod, who described last weekend’s inaugural event as “very successful.”

“It’s for people with a fairly decent knowledge of the Holocaust,” he said. “They came away with facts and gained knowledge they didn’t have.”

Dates for future sessions have not yet been set, Rabbi Axelrod said.