During the current genocide in the Gaza Strip of Palestine, Zionists are employing the same card and the same canard to deflect attention away from their war crimes. Specifically any criticism of their Zionist colonial-settler project and its attendant genocide is motivated by, in the words of President Joe Biden, an “ancient hatred”, that is anti-semitism - an irrational contempt of the Jewish people and their faith. The accusation has plagued most people who have made the mildest criticisms of the British initiated, Zionist colonial-project in Palestine known as “Israel” since the colonial entity was founded. 

Many decades ago, specifically in the 1980s, the African-American leader, Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam (NOI) was continuously harangued as an “anti-semite” by American Zionists when he referred to the actions of the Israeli government against the indigenous population of Palestine as a “gutter religion”. But as the Minister tried to explain at the time, “I never called Judaism a gutter religion. I said the practice of lying, stealing, murder, and deceit and using God's holy name to shield your dirty religion, not the practice of the scripture, but your dirty practices using God's holy name…”

A few years later in a lecture at Malcolm X College, the Minister elaborated further, “I never said Judaism was a gutter or dirty religion. I was talking about the actions of the Israeli government and now the world sees her actions as dirty against the Palestinians. She's indicted today by the human rights…organization…Amnesty International for human rights violations.” The Minister was clearly attacking the policies of the Zionist government in occupied Palestine, but this obviously and deliberately was lost on his American Zionist detractors. 

At the Malcolm X College lecture, Minister Farrakhan also gave voice to a historical paradox in the conduct of Zionists-colonialists in occupied Palestine: That is, for a people who had suffered the way Jewish people had suffered in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s to then perpetuate suffering on others was beyond his comprehension:

“For somebody that suffered as they [Jewish people] suffered under Hitler, to do to the Palestinians what they’re doing to the Palestinians is beyond me to know how you could have suffered that.”

This observation came with a word of warning to his own followers and the general African-American population. That is, if they ever come to power, then the example of Zionist-Jews is not something they should emulate:

“So Brothers and Sisters we got to remember when our day comes, we who have suffered we must never give (vent[?]) that we have suffered to others when we’re in the position of power.”

Again, for the Minister to point this out shows he acknowledges that Jewish people have been victims of European anti-Semitism and suffered immensely. Yet, at the same time, calls on his followers that although African-American history is also one of suffering, they must not end up as oppressors the way Zionists have. He, in effect, extols that one should not oppress in the name of previous suffering. Such sentiments are echoed during the current USA-German-UK backed Zionist genocide in Gaza.

I shall quote three prominent Americans who can be seen to confirm the historical paradox Minister Farrakhan had originally observed in the 1980s. Firstly, Mr. Charles Freeman, a former American Ambassador and official with a glittering and illustrious career behind him expressed the exact sentiments as Minister Farrakhan earlier this year:

“It is horrible that the descendants of people who were subjected by Europeans to genocide should themselves now be carrying out a Holocaust against Palestinians. And there are many deep roots for this, of course…But what is happening is certainly the worst atrocity of this century.

 

…The Nazis at least had a sense, enough of a sense of shame and guilt that they tried to conceal what they were doing. The Israelis are completely open about it. Mr. Netanyahu cites the biblical extermination of the Amalek. The rules of engagement that have been given to Israeli soldiers, as demonstrated in their murder of three Israeli hostages who escaped from their captivity, is basically to shoot everything that moves.” (emphasis added).

The “rules of engagement” Freeman speaks of in the current genocide in Gaza has allowed people to witness, largely through social media, what the Zionist colonial-settler project means in practice. However, among the up to 30,000 women and children killed by the Zionist forces, not even the German Nazis sunk to the level of depravity that’s enthralled Zionists, whereby they’ve cast any “sense of shame and guilt” out of the window and are openly raping prisoners (actually, Palestinian hostages); debating the virtues of raping prisoners on television and some Zionist colonial-settlers hold political demonstrations in support of the rapists.  

Secondly, Dr. Jill Stein, the United States Green Party leader, herself Jewish but not Zionist, has also noted the historical paradox during the current genocide in Gaza:

“I was just saying as a Jew myself, growing up after the Holocaust, this was like all about what we were learning that genocide must never happen again, not to anyone, and to see this is like, what else do you call this when people are being targeted…when there are assassins basically with guns waiting for people to come out and go looking for food and killing them, doing the same to hospital staff…when 80% of all buildings have been levelled, when 2 million people basically are denied food and water. We are on a death watch right now for all two million people who are surviving under just astonishing conditions. This is a game of fish in a barrel…

 

… It's a difficult conversation, but I think it's really important to make the facts clear and they are as clear as day. They are rolling out on our computer screens and our iPhones every day that innocent people are being slaughtered right now, yeah there's a lot of history to this conflict, there always is in any genocidal situation, there's always a history of conflict, a history of tit for tat, and so on, but the bulk of that goes back to before the founding of the state of Israel because Israel was founded on enormous ethnic cleansing and violence that began really from well before the state of Israel was declared. There was a very purposeful move of, you know, that was propelling Jewish refugees who were desperate and traumatized and illustrate really why being genocided yourself does not then justify your committing genocide.

 

There's no doubt about the horrors that were inflicted on Jews starting long before the Holocaust, my family you know came here fleeing pogroms in Russia and Poland.” (emphasis added).

As Dr. Stein claims, the founding of the state of “Israel” was based on “enormous ethnic cleansing and violence”. This Zionist colonial-settler project was initiated by the British occupation of Palestine between 1920 and 1948. As Professor Rashid Khalidi has argued, the military crushing of the indigenous Palestinian population was initiated and taught to the Zionist-Jewish colonisers by the British imperialist. As such, most of the ethnic cleansing and violence Dr. Stein speaks of was committed out by the Zionist colonial-settlers was committed under the watch of the British rulers.  

Finally, Joe Rogan, the world renowned podcaster and martial artist echoed the paradox while hosting an alleged comedian and anti-Arab, anti-Muslim bigot, Kurt Metzger, 

“But the whole thing is like they're [Zionist colonial forces] always saying they're only targeting Hamas and everybody else is a casualty. Well, if those guys are just unarmed civilians and they're walking alone, that's what they appear to be...and you just blast them from the sky with robots….this is insane, and no one knows what to think now, because if you can't talk about that, if you can't say that's real, then you're saying that genocide is okay as long as we're doing it…if you're saying that from a perspective of someone who literally went through the Holocaust, or your people your tribe went through the…Holocaust, and now you're willing to do it…it's so nuts, it's so hard to imagine that someone where a culture like a country was like officially founded in what 47, 48, 48 okay, officially founded, so that's so recent and you and you guys are willing to do what was done to you that led you to believe that you needed to start your own country.” (emphasis added).

Mr. Rogan should be commended for echoing Minister Farrakhan, but mistaken about why the Zionist state came into being in 1948. Contemporary “Israel” has it its roots in the British Empire’s Balfour Declaration that was published in 1917, and not the Holocaust. With little thought given to the indigenous Palestinian Arab population which was well over 90%, the British imperialist solely and eventually created the colonial, social and military conditions for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine that Dr. Stein spoke of. The Zionists who established the state in 1948 were overwhelmingly European colonial-setters who had arrived in Palestine in the previous decades. When the British Empire issued the Declaration, the Jewish population of Palestine was less than 10%. It should not be lost on Mr. Rogan and others, that although the Holocaust was later used to justify the creation of the Zionist-colonial entity, Imperial Britain was determined to create the colonial project in Palestine regardless. 

All three Freeman, Stein and Rogan today acknowledge the same historical paradox Minister Farrakhan spoke of in the 1980s. They all acknowledge, like the Minister, that Jewish people have been victims of anti-Semitism and suffered immensely. And like the Minister they are aghast that an entity, which claims to exist in the name of the Jewish people, should oppress and is currently committing genocide on Palestinians. Yet no one should be surprised, because at the end of the day, “Israel” is a British initiated colonial-settler project and most colonial projects in the era of Western imperialism are genocidal. As one of the initiators and champions of Zionist colonialism, the pro-genocide, white supremacist, imperialist, Winston Churchill, was to claim about Palestine in 1937:

“I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time…I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia…I do not think the Red Indians had any right to say, ‘The American Continent belongs to us and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in here’. They had not the right, nor had they the power.”

Churchill clearly used this analogy to express his contempt and condemnation of the indigenous Palestinians in the hope of insisting they were to eventually share the fate of the ‘Red Indians’ of America and the ‘black people’ of Australia. 

In conclusion and in the barbaric light of today’s genocide in Gaza, can all of Minister Louis Farrakhan’s detractors from back in the 1980s and 1990s, admit they lacked the Minister’s perception and that he was right about the Zionist colonial-settler project i.e “Israel”, which today stands exposed, in the eyes of most of the world outside of the United States, Germany and, of course Britain, as a genocidal, colonial monstrosity?