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Today in opposite land: Hitler was a Zionist

Hitler supported the right of Jews to self-determination in Palestine. Or at least that’s what former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone thinks.

He said as much this morning on the BBC, in defending the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish vitriol that has been spouting from his fellow party members in the past months.

According to Livingstone, Hitler was a supporter of Zionism and when elected in 1932 supported a population transfer of Jews to Palestine. Then he “went mad” and killed six million Jews.

Livingstone’s words were repulsive and he was rightly suspended from the party for “bringing disrepute.”

Where to start?

Hitler, and his henchman Adolf Eichmann, may have facilitated the removal of some Jews from Germany to Palestine, but did that make either one of them supporters of the Jewish right to self-determination?

Is Livingstone that much of an idiot to think that forced population transfer equates with support for a political ideology? Could he be that stupid? Or is he just a disingenuous jerk?

If a white supremacist hoped that all black Americans would go to Africa, and perhaps even facilitate their journey, would he be called a supporter of pan-Africanism?

As his Labour colleague, John Mann, heatedly suggested, Livingstone should really crack open a copy of Mein Kampf, which was published in 1925, well before Hitler “went mad” in Livingstone’s estimation. At this point, according to Livingstone, Hitler was still in his (never before known of) Zionist phase.

That surely comes as news to anyone who has read Mein Kampf, which very clearly outlines Hitler’s Jew hatred and plans for ridding Germany of its “Jewish problem.” Hitler, Mr. Livingstone, didn’t suddenly go mad in 1941, when the gas chambers started up. He had a well-thought out philosophy, augmented by bural militia loyal only to him, and all that started in the 1920s, well before the Holocaust. We can’t recall the section about his support for Jews returning to their homeland, Zion.

The irony is that just last week, Livingstone was on BBC Radio 4 claiming that he’d never heard anyone ever say anything anti-Semitic in the Labour Party. Apparently the man doesn’t listen to himself speak.




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