Even if you had been right in your assumption that would not have meant that my charges against Holland, Hungary and other nations (see, for instance, my responses at “BBC exposes itself to…”) were in any way incorrect; but in fact, subject to a proviso I will mention shortly, you could not have been more wrong. I have always believed that Britain is a virulently anti-Semitic country (we certainly do not need any wild-eyed conspiracy theories to prove that anti-Semitism lies behind much of the hatred of Israel in Britain), and that the Holocaust could not have occurred without the almost complete collaboration of occupied Europe and the so-called “neutrals” as well as the, at best, total insouciance of the Allies. I have also suggested elsewhere that much of Britain’s shocking conduct in post-war Palestine was driven mostly by anti-Semitism.

There is however a major difference between Britain and the rest of Europe, at least insofar as the Holocaust is concerned, and that has to do with what actually occurred. You see, it’s all very well for me to pontificate about what Britain would have done had the Nazis invaded Britain, and to suggest, as I have done on a number of occasions, that the Brits would have behaved worse than the French and a little better than the Dutch. However, the reality is that Britain was not invaded in 1940 and her citizens did not round up Jews, dispatch Jews to death camps, act as guards in death camps, or otherwise murder Jews. With the exception of Denmark, there is also something that is quite unique about Britain vis-à-vis the rest of Europe and that is the deep well of real decency that exists in British society (a well of decency, at least as regards treatment of Jews, that admittedly didn’t for the most part survive the German occupation of Jersey). Thus, for example, whilst anti-Semitism, as in the rest of Britain, was certainly widespread in His Majesty’s Armed Forces during World War II, this also occurred:

“When the French Gentile Officers [in Colditz - Oflag IV-C] tried to ostracise their fellow French Jewish comrades in their barrack, British officer Airey Neave (a “home runner” and later a Conservative Minister in the Thatcher government) and many of his Commonwealth comrades, expressed their outrage and total solidarity with the Jewish officers and the row died down – though it was much exploited by the Germans in their propaganda.”

[A note: Airey Neave, the much admired barrister and politician, was murdered by the IRA in 1979]

http://tinyurl.com/mxqccn

I certainly cannot imagine that happening in Hungary, a nation where one Olympian murdered a fellow competitor, the Jewish fencer Attila Petschauer, in the most terrible circumstances merely because he was Jewish:

The Death of Attila Petschauer

“Shortly thereafter, he was deported to a labor camp in the Ukrainian town of Davidovka in 1943. During a line-up of prisoners, Petschauer was recognized by a military officer, Lieutenant Colonel Kalman Cseh, who had been an equestrian competitor for Hungary in the 1928 Olympics. The two had once been friends, but Cseh exhorted camp guards to taunt his onetime comrade and “Make things hot for the Jew”.

Petschauer’s death was brutal. Olympic champion wrestler Karoly Karpati was a fellow inmate, and witnessed Petschauer’s death. He recalled: “The guards shouted: ‘You, Olympic fencing medal winner . . . let’s see how you can climb trees.’ It was midwinter and bitter cold, but they ordered him to undress, then climb a tree. The amused guards ordered him to crow like a rooster, and sprayed him with water. Frozen from the water, he died shortly after.”

http://tinyurl.com/m3sj6h

And, instead of living alongside non-Jews as POWs, this is how many Hungarian Jews spent the war:

“In 1942, 100,000 of the 825,000 Jews living in Hungary already were conscripted for work; half were doing forced labor in Hungary, the other half, in the German Reich. Of this group, only around 7,000 survived the war.”

http://tinyurl.com/kquene

A number of photographs of those Jews who did not survive:

Hungary before the German occupation

http://tinyurl.com/nj3756

But whatever may or may not have happened in Britain had Germany successfully invaded that former nation, the fact remains that much of mainland Europe is a vast Jewish graveyard whilst virtually all British Jews who were non-combatants survived, or at least were not killed in any greater numbers than their non-Jewish neighbours by enemy action. Neither must we forget that outside of anything to do with the Holocaust there is a particularly shocking history of anti-Semitism in Europe, most especially in Central and Eastern Europe. So, to return to your original charge, it is for those simple reasons that many of us find the Jew-hatred of mainland Europe today so much more shocking than the anti-Semitism of Blighty. Yes, my finger is also pointed at Britain, but with nothing like the same degree of certitude or anger. However, if things continue the way they are, I imagine that that situation will change quite radically.

see:

http://www.theaugeanstables.com/2009/03/02/the-uses-of-antisemitism-more-from-neslon-ascher-europundit/#more-1688

Hi everybody, and most of all Mr. Robin Shepherd.

Let me add a thought-provoking aspect to all of this. As I am having correspondence with a semi-retired English journalist, who actively helped MP Denis MacShane’s book on the New Antisemitism throughout the enlightened civilized parts of the globe, [but mostly] in Europe, he gave me a very curious insight. This man was also an important former figure in the trade union movement in Britain, but this is the most I can reveal about him - am not at liberty to say more.
So according to this line of thinking, Britain - as everybody know -has one of the oldest, if not “the”, of political systems in the West - its roots going back many hundreds of years. The space for possible manipulation by the powers-that-be was/is always huge.
Far be it from me to say that I happily embrace weird and unreasonable conspiracy-theories, because this would be false. But there might be ground to reasonably suspect - as I was told by two different British people - that the Labour Unions in Britain, and England in particular, have been infiltrated and taken over. The hysteria about Israel is in fact to huge to at least theoretically reject this notion with a sleight of hand. What if the MI6 and others from the political/security etc. establishments did this precisely because they were afraid after WWII, during the so-called Cold War and even after. It makes sense to me. (Btw, this is kind of the same case with the BBC as well, which also makes sense to me up to a point.)
The motivation for the state to do this is easy to see. Until those assorted bunch of commie “troublemakers” are distracted by “Israel”, they may hardly have energy to cause tangible harm and trouble. For me at least this seems logical. As I said I heard this from serious people and I accept this view. Sorry, if you don’t then we have a difference of opinion here. Could it be that Britain at large is anti-Israel at the minimum, and possibly I run the risk to utter that it’s also largely anti-Semtic as well? So please Joshua, ALL your comfortable finger pointing to the Netherlands, Hungary and other countries can be extended, don’t you think?

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