Harpal Brar is the leader of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), abbreviated to CPGB-ML. Brar is a supporter of the North Korean regime, and Brar travelled to Libya last year to express support for Colonel Gaddafi.
Keen to whitewash the crimes of Stalinism, Harpal Brar is prone to historical revisionism.
Wikipedia notes – accurately – of Brar:
He, along with his daughter Joti Brar, is an active member of the Stalin Society, the website of which contains articles denying Soviet wrongdoing in the Katyn Massacre,[9] The Ukrainian Famine (Holodomor),[10] and the Moscow trials[11] which they blame on the Nazis, dismiss as propaganda, or describe as fair process, respectively.
His daughter Joti is also a central committee member of CPGB-ML and also travelled on a recent Viva Palestina convoy. She is a Stop The War supporter and appears to be a member of Hackney PSC. She is a previous electoral candidate for the Socialist Labour Party, and is a contributor for the New Internationalist.
This week, she has commented on another form of historical revisionism, Holocaust denial.
Joti writes (note use of scare quotes):
I went to a meeting on Tuesday night of my local Palestine Solidarity Campaign group. We were there to talk about various motions for the upcoming PSC AGM on the subject of ‘anti-semitism’, and ‘holocaust denial’, alongside a proposed constitutional change that would take away the right of an expelled individual to appeal to the members at an AGM in the future.
[…]
The new rumours are variations on a theme whereby independently-minded activists who aren’t ‘on message’ with the leadership’s agenda are alleged to have been removed from positions of influence in PSC branches following zionist-inspired accusations of ‘anti-semitism’ and ‘holocaust denial’.
[…]
“it is the zionist hype machine that has conflated the two as interchangeable terms and created an atmosphere in which anyone is branded an ‘anti-semite’ who questions anything about Israel, including the founding myths concerning the supposedly unique suffering of jews and the alleged impossibility of jewish people living free from persecution anywhere outside Israel.
[…]
To those with a basic grasp of history, it is clear that the jewish holocaust did actually take place. To those with a basic grasp of the workings of imperialism, it is equally clear that the same racist scapegoating that led to the German extermination of European jews has been reborn in Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in particular and Arab and muslim peoples in general.
[…]
That being the case, and in a world where zionism has arrogated to itself both the right to speak for all jews and the right to speak on behalf of all jewish holocaust victims, even while perpetrating its own holocaust against the Palestinians, the rise in anti-jewish sentiment is hardly surprising, and nor is the rise in numbers of those who are questioning the truth about the holocaust. When so much of what Israel projects (the only democracy in the Middle East, a bastion of civilised values, etc etc) is revealed to be a lie, why wouldn’t people also start to wonder whether the whole Holocaust story, so central to the image that Israel projects to the world, might also be untrue?
And so ‘Holocaust denial’ has become an unfortunate by-product of what Norman Finkelstein aptly termed ‘The Holocaust Industry‘ – the zionist promotion of the myth that the jewish holocaust was somehow different from all other episodes of extermination in human history, and that this unique suffering justifies both the creation of Israel and any crimes the zionist state may commit in alleged ‘defence’ of its existence.
Moreover, it’s increasingly well understood that the early zionists were quite happy for the holocaust to go ahead if it was going to create jewish refugees who would make their way to Palestine. Hardly surprising then, that many who don’t understand imperialism’s role in the Middle East and in the foundation of Israel question the validity of the Holocaust industry’s myths about jewish suffering and are prey to conspiracy theories about an alternative narrative to the holocaust, as well as to myths about a ‘jewish power’ that controls world finance and politics and protects the Israelis from world public opinion.
[…]
So racism and ‘holocaust denial’ are clearly NOT the same thing, while Holocaust ‘minimising’ is even more troublesome to pin down. Are we to take the zionist definition that anyone who asks a question about the Nazi extermination of jews is automatically an anti-semite and therefore a racist? If someone suggests that they think perhaps five million jews were killed by the Germans and not six, is that person guilty of the abhorrent crime of ‘minimising the holocaust’ and worthy only of being hounded out of the PSC, unable to contribute anything useful to its work?
