Why Jenin? Since it housed the suicide-bombers, it had to be deleted from the map of Palestine. If they had had barns in Jenin, the villagers would have been herded into them and set on fire. -- David Irving

April 16, 2002 (Tuesday)
London -- Eastbourne -- London

HORRIFYING pictures are spread across the front pages all major British newspapers today of the destruction inflicted by the Israeli invaders on the Palestinian village of Jenin. The stories related by Arabs to the British journalists who have penetrated the Israeli cordon are too harrowing to read right through, at least if you have children of your own. It is Deir Yassin all over again.

One wonders what madmen can have ordered such crimes, and what went through the minds of the murderers carrying out the orders -- just as Daniel Goldhagen and others have often pondered about the "ordinary men" who killed the Jews in World War II. As I told Goldhagen, when he lectured at New Orleans, the question that would occupy me, if I were a Jew, is not whose finger was pulling the triggers of the murder squads, but why?

At risk of being accused of racism, I suggest that there seems to be a bug in the Jewish brain, a historic bug that needs fixing: the inability to relate cause to effect. They recognise this, because for anybody to suggest that they bring their misfortunes upon themselves is now commonly regarded as the height of anti-Semitism; but those of us who venture to suggest it do so in the interests of the Jewish people, in the urgent desire to prevent these things ever happening again. And now this.

Mr Ariel Sharon is an indicted war criminal whose trial before a Belgian court has yet, we hope, to come (we hope, that is, in the ever-fainter belief that at such a trial he may yet be able to establish his own complete innocence). He is the same Ariel Sharon whose catastrophic invasion of southern Lebanon killed 80,000 civilians in a space of weeks. I published one awful photograph at the time, 1982, in my printed newsletter Focal Point, infuriated that the British newspapers would not.

The Jews who surround him share his blind and racist hatred of the Arabs whose land they have stolen and are, in the eyes of the United Nations and the civilised world, illegally occupying even now.

The Arabs are the new Untermensch. To my dismay several British press barons, who know which side their bread is buttered on, chortle with glee at each new Israeli adventure. (As indeed do the most hardened anti-Semites, because they see it as bringing the ultimate perdition of the Jews one step closer.)

IN the old days of the Berry family and Lord Camrose, who owned The Daily Telegraph, I used to reflect that one thing made living in all the disagreeable turbulence of Britain bearable -- the comforting knowledge that there were still 2,000,000 people who bought and read that newspaper.

Now that it is owned by Conrad Black and his creepy spouse Barbara Amiel, it has become pro-Zionist to a jaw-sagging point of laughability. This morning's most disturbing news (for me), was that almost alone in Europe, Tony Blair's Britain had voted against a United Nations human rights resolution condemning Israel for "mass killing" and "gross violations of human rights." The Telegraph tucks it away in a two-square inch paragraph on page 12. The only other European country which sided with Britain in this disgraceful vote was Germany, who built and effectively donated those monster tanks which Israel has used in its rampage (the American taxpayers provided the Apache helicopter gunships).

Support for Sharon is almost as heinous as committing this monstrous crime: in my view, his claqueurs should not escape their punishment either. Let us start a little list. To adopt a recent phrase, those who don't condemn this terrorist, and in the most unmistakeable terms, are with him: they are no less criminal.

Those nations which provide shelter and succour to these terrorists should be made the enemies of the free world. The civilised nations should apply at very least the same sanctions against them as have been hesitatingly agreed against Robert Mugabe's Marxist gang: no airline should agree to fly the representatives of these nations: they should be barred from the shores of every civilised country: their funds should be hunted down and frozen: metaphorically speaking, their shoes should be taken off and searched at every airport barrier.

They should be made the new outlaws of the world, and forced to recognise and atone for their own criminality. That includes a sizeable slice of the European politicians, and most of those officiating in Washington too, from the nice Mr Wolfowitz downwards (I have been sent a list, yesterday, of the Israeli connections of leading members of the Bush administration and it is almost as eye-opening as during the Clinton years).

THE lavishly-funded Board of Deputies of British Jews is one accomplice, of course: their articles of association identify their principal task as being to represent Israel's interests in Britain. So the Board is a foreign agent in Britain. Their director Michael Whinge has been hard at work placating the querulous British press.

The Daily Telegraph does not cease to remind its readers that the reprisal was necessary because of the actions of the suicide-bombers (whom President Bush's nice and entirely-neutral-in-this-matter spokesman Mr Ari Fleischer has renamed "homicide bombers" -- thus masking the willingness of these warriors to pay with their own lives).

And now we are faced with this morning's photographs from Jenin. Why Jenin? Since it housed the suicide-bombers, it had to be deleted from the map of Palestine (along with scores of other villages, whose names we shall never learn or at least remember). If they had had barns in Jenin, the villagers would have been herded into them and set on fire.

It all sounds eerily familiar to those who write the history of World War II: When the Czech village of Lidice was deemed to have housed the killers of Reinhard Heydrich in 1942, the SS surrounded it, rounded up all the menfolk (at least they spared the women and children) and killed them in reprisal. For that atrocity, his deputy at the time, Kurt Daluege, was later put on trial by the Czechs and, judging by the photos, put to death in the most torturous way.

If the Arab world should ever find its nerve and speak with one voice: and if it should realise how far it outnumbers the Israelis: and if it should come down with all its might and suicidal heroism on the people of Israel: and if it should lay hands on its criminal leadership: then one day historians may be contemplating similar photos of Mr Sharon meeting his deserts. But I doubt it. And in consequence twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty years from now, his people may well be asking once again: "Why us?"

Pages from David Irving's biography of Hermann Göring reveal that the German air force carried out desperate kamikaze-type suicide operations in 1945

The Israeli lobby's influence: appointments of advisors to White House and Executive Branch

Norman G Finkelstein: First the Carrot, Then the Stick: Behind the Carnage in Palestine

Islam Online: Israeli War Crimes In Nablus; Nine Family Members Buried Under The Rubble | West Bank's agony reaches into Pittsburgh family: unbiased eye-witness account

The first grim photos of Ariel Sharon's new war crime in Jenin