Misrepresenting the Evian Conference of 1938

The Australian Jewish News spins the 1938 Evian Conference:

"A Melbourne rabbi is hopeful the 75th anniversary of the Evian Conference on Jewish refugees will prompt the federal government to formally acknowledge Australia's lack of action at the time. Exactly three-quarters of a century ago this month, representatives of the Western allies met at Evian-les-Bains in France on the initiative of US president Franklin D. Roosevelt, in an attempt to develop a policy for absorbing Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria. But the Evian Conference turned out to be an abysmal failure, with almost no country making any significant commitment to increase their intake of Hitler's hapless victims... When Britain's notorious White Paper on Palestine emerged in May 1939, virtually closing the gates of the Jewish homeland, the fate of European Jewry was sealed. In July 1938, as country after country remained non-committal to the plight of the Jews, an Australian representative at the conference, Thomas White... stated: 'It will no doubt be appreciated also that as we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one by encouraging any scheme of large-scale foreign migration.' Australia partly relented and later accepted some 15,000 Jewish refugees." (75 years since the world shut us out, 19/7/13)

Note here how Palestine, then still a country with an overwhelming Arab majority which had just waged a bitter 4-year campaign of armed resistance against the British/Zionist policy of flooding its homeland with East European Jews, is brazenly referred to, in true Zionist style, as "the Jewish homeland".

Note how Britain is claimed to have "closed the gates" of Palestine with its 1939 White Paper when in fact it merely reduced Jewish immigration to 75,000 over the following 5 years in a belated attempt to satisfy the legitimate Arab demand for an end to the kind of mass Jewish immigration designed to convert the Arab majority into a minority in its own homeland.

And note how there is no mention whatever of the key role of the Zionist movement in scuppering the conference because it had no interest in German Jews going anywhere but Palestine. (For the details, just click on the Evian label below and read my 21/11/11 post Laying Siege to German Jews.)

A rare dissenting letter in The Australian Jewish News of July 26 by Professor Bill Rubinstein of Caulfield South, Victoria, refuses to toe the AJN line on this issue:

"Your article and editorial regarding the 75th anniversary of the Evian Conference is seriously misleading. Rather than closing the doors to Jewish refugees, after the Anschluss with Austria (March 1938) and Kristallnacht (November 1938), most of the world allowed in more Jews than before; Evian was irrelevant to this process. Britain let in up to 75,000 Jewish refugees, mainly in 1938-39, the most famous of whom was Sigmund Freud... The United States admitted more than 100,000 Jews as immigrants between 1938 and the end of 1941. Australia's reluctant decision to admit 15,000 refugees from the Reich (when this country's total population was only 6.5 million) was the first time Australia had admitted any refugees. About 72% of Germany's Jews actually left Germany before the Nazis (not the democracies) closed the door. However, more than 95% of the Jews who perished in the Holocaust were not in Germany, but in other parts of Nazi-occupied Europe, especially Poland, the USSR, Hungary, and the Netherlands. Before the war, these Jews were not refugees, not under Nazi rule, and were irrelevant to the Evian Conference, which exclusively concerned Germany. Any Jew in the USSR who expressed a wish to leave Stalin's utopia would have been shot or sent to a gulag. Polish Jewry was divided into 3 main factions: the Zionists, the Bund, and Agudas Israel (the strictly Orthodox party), the latter two being fierce opponents of Zionism. The Bund advised its followers to stay where they were and to fight anti-Semitism through an alliance with the Polish working class. Obviously, they could not have known what the fate would be of Jews trapped under Nazi rule, and neither could the Western democracies."