Jonathan Rosenhead is an academic at the London School of Economics who has long been a member of the anti-Zionist asajews. He’s been a member of whatever group has been in vogue at any given time. Currently the cabal is the so-called Jewish Voice for Labour.
A week ago he gave a talk at an event entitled Corbyn, Antisemitism and Justice for Palestine where he said:
“Just before the outbreak of war the United States had organised a hole… for hundreds of thousands of Jews to escape from Germany and go to…not to the United States certainly, but to a number of Latin American countries that had agreed to have them and in those last few weeks before the war the Zionists stopped that from happening because a Jew who got out of Germany and didn’t go to Palestine was a Jew lost and as a result was hundreds of thousands of Jews who would have escaped did not.
Now that collaboration between, that there was between the Jews, sorry the Zionists and the Nazis ended when there was a British government commission which said we think we should move to create a state for the Jews…think there should be a state for the Jews and at that moment the collaboration stopped because Hitler wanted the Jews out of Germany he didn’t want them to have a state.”
So this would be Jonathan Rosenhead of @JVoiceLabour accusing “Zionists” of being responsible for the murder of “hundreds of thousands of Jews” at a meeting entitled Corbyn, Antisemitism and Justice for Palestine @LabourAgainstAS @mishtal @stephenpollard pic.twitter.com/tcayaqzJWQ
— Hurryupharry (@hurryupharry) May 1, 2018
The Jewish Chronicle promptly picked up on this after speaking to academics prominent in the field of Holocaust history:
Paul Bogdanor, a researcher who has challenged the myth of Zionist-Nazi “collaboration”, said: “Prof Rosenhead’s suggestion that ‘the Zionists’ controlled the immigration policies of the Latin American countries before World War Two, or at any other time, relies on myths of Jewish power.
“His fantasy that Zionists were willing and able to block the flight of hundreds of thousands of Jews from Europe relies on stereotypes of Jewish cruelty. Demonising fellow Jews in this way reveals nothing about history but will incite plenty of bigotry.”
Dr Rafael Medoff, director of the David S Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, in Washington DC said: “The US government never organised hundreds of thousands of German Jews to go to Latin America, or anywhere else.
“The Dominican Republic offered, in 1938, to admit 100,000 Jewish refugees, but the Roosevelt administration actively discouraged the proposal, because it feared the refugees would use it as a jumping-off point to get into the United States.
“As a result, barely 1,000 European Jews settled in the Sosua region of the Dominican Republic.
“‘The Zionists’, as Prof Rosenhead nefariously characterises them, were not some international power with the ability to stop a US initiative to rescue Jews, even if there had been one.
Rosenhead wasn’t done yet. He spoke again last night as a guest of Leeds University. When challenged about his comments last week he decided to lie about what he had said and then doubled down on the same statement:
Student:
The holocaust being caused by both the Nazis and the Zionists, and I was wondering if you could explain that theory cause I have never heard of it before.Rosenhead:
This is an example of selective and in fact inaccurate quotation. I gave that talk on Thursday and (inaudible). What I said was not that the Holocaust was caused by the Zionists but that there was a move by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the President of the United States, to get some hundreds of thousands of German Jews out of Germany in the period of ’38-’39, there was actually a big conference in Evian which he organised in 1938 pretending to take, to promise to take Jewish refugees. As part of that operation he was trying to persuade a lot of Latin American countries to take Jews. He wasn’t trying to take them to the United States the opposition was too full of Antisemitism in the United States so he tried to get them into these Latin American countries. Now the role that the Jewish leadership under David Ben Gurion at Evian was very tricky. It wasn’t actually pushing for this it was asking for conditions and so on. When Roosevelt seemed to have almost had the possibility of getting them out of Europe he was attacked by the Zionists. Now not all Zionists, there were some Zionists who did that and that was enough to destabilize it and it never happened. And what I said was that as a result of that some hundreds of thousands of Jews didn’t get out of Germany and presumably most of those had perished in the Holocaust. That is very different from what you said, I didn’t say the Zionists caused the Holocaust of course they didn’t. But they were trying to get Jews out of Germany where there was pressure, Germans for some time wanted them to go, but the Zionists wanted them to go to Palestine to become settlers. They didn’t want them to go to other parts of the world where they would not go to Palestine and would not consolidate the embryo Jewish state. That’s what I said, it’s not what you said.Student:
I mean you said the Zionists collaborated with the Nazis.Rosenhead:
I never used that word. I think you’re getting me confused with Ken Livingstone possibly (laughter from audience) If I did it certainly wasn’t the main thrust of what I said. It wasn’t about collaboration. What I was talking about was the Zionists obstructing something Roosevelt was trying to do. The Nazis were putting the pressure and people wanted to leave, the US has very strict policy that some 30000 people from whole of Germany, Jews or not, per year, and he was dealing with an secretary of state who was an antisemite and did not want the Jews to come. So there were all sorts of issues there and you can’t put it into an inaccurate summary.Student:
I’m just repeating what you said.Rosenhead:
I didn’t say it
