Category Archives: Britain

Britain, Government, History, Israel, Society

Holocaust Commemoration: The horrors that still echo

75TH COMMEMORATION

SEVENTY-FIVE years on, the sheer evil and depravity against mankind defies comprehension.

Generations may have passed, but we still share the appalling horror felt by Red Army troops as they walked into Auschwitz.

Dispassionate history books describe the site as a “concentration camp”. It would be more accurately portrayed as hell on earth: a grotesque symbol of the horrifying consequences of man’s atrocious barbarism to his fellow man.

In total, more than six million people – overwhelmingly Jews – were exterminated in Nazi gas chambers and crematorium ovens. Victims, by accident of birth, of Hitler’s depraved ideology of Aryan supremacy.

As the last frail survivors pass into history, it is imperative the world never forgets the Holocaust. Never forget how, even in our professedly civilised modern world, far removed from the slaughter of those death camps, disagreement can mutate terrifyingly quickly into hostility and dehumanisation.

That was the premise of Prince Charles’s powerful warning in a speech at a solemn event in Israel marking 75 years since Auschwitz was liberated in January 1945.

Standing alongside world leaders, the heir to the throne said: “Hatred and intolerance still lurk in the human heart, still tell lies, adopt new disguises and still seek new victims.”

Seventy-five years on, he asked, is our strife-torn society in danger of losing sight of the lessons from the atrocity? “All too often,” he said, “words are used as badges of shame to mark others as enemies.”

Prince Charles’ wise remarks as a chastisement to those who, even today, cultivate the wickedness of anti-Semitism and other disgraceful bigotry.

Listen to Jewish Labour ex-minister Dame Margaret Hodge. In the Commons she has lamented how hard-Left cranks in her party hurl execrable Jew-baiting bile.

Dozens of her family were murdered by the Nazis. Yet, on social media, she’s regularly taunted with photographs of the Auschwitz dead, swastikas and SS guards. Are these depraved morons, hiding behind their keyboards, proud of their nauseating provocations?

The internet drowns with Holocaust denial and repulsive anti-Israel propaganda. It is beyond belief the tech giants allow this foul content – a residue of the Nazi atrocities.

 

MEANWHILE, if the BBC had set out with deliberate cause to offend the Jewish community, they could hardly have achieved it more effectively. One of its senior correspondents has sparked fury by linking the Holocaust to the Palestinian crisis on prime-time TV.

This is why it is so important that influential public dignitaries such as Prince Charles counter such detestable and hate-driven disinformation.

His visit to Yad Vashem, site of the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre, was also deeply personal – his grandmother is honoured there for taking immense risks to shelter and save Jewish lives in Nazi-occupied Greece.

Tomorrow, his wife Camilla will represent Britain at a World Holocaust Day ceremony at Auschwitz. Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge will join sombre commemorations here.

All this helps ensure the evil exposed 75 years ago never slips from our memories. A Royal Family serving dutifully as the nation’s moral lodestar.

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Books, Britain, History, Immigration

Book Reviews: The Windrush Betrayal & Homecoming

WINDRUSH

FROM a ship to a scandal, from Commonwealth immigrants full of hope to elderly people shamefully traduced by the system, the name Windrush resonates through decades of history.

Both these valuable books give great voice to the families of those who travelled to Great Britain from the West Indies in search of a better life in the chilly place they had always been told was the “mother country” and which actually needed them.

Drawing on scores of first-hand accounts, Colin Grant (born in Britain of Jamaican parents) offers historical testimony at its finest, while Amelia Gentleman’s very different book is a chronicle to the dogged energy of one of Britain’s best investigative journalists whose anger at injustice spills on to the page.

We should all be familiar with those iconic pictures of serious, well-dressed black men in trilby hats, suits and ties, disembarking from the Empire Windrush at Tilbury Dock in 1948. But Colin Grant also remind us that “the popular image . . . has also reduced the story – not least because it excludes over 200 women who were also passengers.”

Significantly, he points out that it can get in the way of “the bigger picture of the impact of mass migration”, as “some 300,000 adventurers made their way to Britain” from all the West Indian islands over the next 15 years. Grant was spurred to record people “before their stories disappeared”.

His interviews reveal natural courage and style enough to face down even the vile racism encountered on the streets of Notting Hill in the 1950s and afterwards.

Soon after he began recording, “the British government gave a new twist to the story ensuring that the name ‘Windrush’ will now also forever be associated with scandal.”

Coincidentally, at the same time, prize-winning British journalist Amelia Gentleman was revealing the scandal of how the government’s “hostile environment” policy for illegal immigrants led to thousands of Windrush descendants being wrongly classified as living here illegally.

Many lost their jobs, some were deported, all were hurt and enraged by their appalling treatment at “the mother country”. One quotation encapsulates a bewilderment that can never be assuaged. “How do you pack for a one-way journey to a country you left when you were 11 and have not visited for 50 years?”

Whose fault was it? Gentleman paints a searing picture of a Home Office not fit for purpose and politicians who exist with a self-centred Westminster bubble of partisan party politics. It’s impossible to read her account of the step-by-step betrayal without feeling ashamed that it was done in your name.

But despite real admiration for this literary work, she and some readers are likely to part company on some of the broad strokes of her postscript. For example, she seems determined to see the scandal as symptomatic of widespread endemic racism rather than shocking bureaucratic bungling and negligence.

She does assert, however, that it suits the government to present what took place as “a small predicament affecting a niche-group of retirement-age Caribbean people who had no papers.”

Gentleman quotes a fellow journalist colleague: “It has yet to fully sink in that what was wrong for the Windrush generation is wrong for all immigrants.” Is it? All? Should peoples be lumped together in this way?

There were and are very real public concerns about the true extent of immigration to these shores – the latest projections suggest the population will hit 70 million by 2031 – and its effect on infrastructure.

These cannot be dismissed as “xenophobic, anti-immigrant conviction” and “a gradual withering of empathy.” Yes, the Home office was wrong, very wrong.

But what the Windrush generation should have taught us is that they shouldn’t be shoehorned into any wider debate on immigration that would arguably chip away at their very special status.

– The Windrush Betrayal by Amelia Gentleman is published by Faber, 336pp

– Homecoming by Colin Grant is published by Cape, 320pp

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Britain, Economic, Iran, Society, United States

Gulf of Oman: The stakes could not be higher

US-IRANIAN TENSIONS

THE attacks on the Japanese and Norwegian oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman have brought the simmering tensions between the United States and Iran to a new incendiary level.

Even before last week’s incident, President Trump demonstrated his hostile approach by imposing heavy sanctions on Iranian oil exports and withdrawing from the conciliatory nuclear deal negotiated by President Barack Obama in 2015.

Washington has directly blamed Tehran for the tanker explosions, backing up the claim with the release of video evidence which appears to show members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard handling what looks like an unexploded Iranian mine on the side of one of the damaged vessels.

It should be acknowledged that Iran has “categorically” denied any responsibility, arguing that the attacks were perpetrated by someone who wants to damage the country’s international reputation.

It certainly came at an awkward time for the Iranian government, which was hosting talks with the Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, whose nation is dependent on Iranian oil imports. In theory, at least, it seems irrational that Iran would damage the interests of its own fragile economy with an assault on one of the biggest customers of its oil supply. But economic rationality is not always paramount. And there are several reasons why certain figures in the Iranian regime might actually welcome an escalating crisis in the US.

Outsiders tend to regard the Tehran government as a theocratic monolith, but in reality, there is a division between the pragmatists, led by president Hassan Rouhani, and the fundamentalists who follow the head of state, supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Iran’s hawkish hardliners, who are growing in confidence, contend that a more aggressive diplomatic policy would have a number of advantages. A coalition with America would serve as a distraction from Iran’s economic woes, which have left the country plagued by public discontent. Posing as the patriot saviour in a national emergency, the hardliners could rally the people against the US, crackdown on dissent and strengthen their grip on power.

According to this narrative, ruthlessness, not diplomacy, is the best way to force Washington to back down on sanctions.

And if things do escalate, the disturbing reality is that these Iranian hardliners certainly have the capability to wage war against America. For if war does break out, the US will find defeating Iran much more costly than Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime during the two Gulf war campaigns.

Iran is three times the size of Iraq and the Revolutionary Guards which make up the special forces are well-equipped and battle-hardened. The Iranian military possesses an array of sophisticated armaments, including stocks of ballistic missiles.

But even low-tech equipment could cause severe damage to the US if it came to war in the Gulf. If only one Iranian torpedo boat from a swarm of 40 or 50 managed to break through the US defensive screen, it could still sink or cripple an American ship. And it would only need a few drones to reach a target for the results to be devastating.

Nevertheless, it is unlikely the US will back down. Given its colossal military power, it is rightly still regarded as the world’s military guardian.

In Washington, an anti-Iranian sentiment prevails, a legacy of the hostage crisis of the 1970s. America’s anti-Iranian allies such as Saudi Arabia and Bahrain will also be ramping up demands for action.

 

BRITAIN will be left in an awkward position if conflict does erupt. It is unlikely that the UK will have any direct military involvement, but diplomatically – as Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt has said – it would be unthinkable if Britain does not tacitly support the US.

If that does happen, British expats and commercial interests in the Gulf would be in a vulnerable situation. And in Britain itself, our stuttering economy – like the rest of the western world – would be severely hit by an oil crisis arising from a war.

It came as no surprise that, following the tanker attacks, oil prices in global markets became extremely volatile. After all, 30 per cent of the world’s crude oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz which borders Iran.

In this combustible situation, the stakes could not be higher. We can only hope that a mood of restraint and common sense will ultimately prevail.

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