Twenty Five Lies of Benjamin Freedman

From http://www.bluwiki.org/go/The_Benjamin_Freedman_Speech

The Benjamin Freedman Speech
From BluWiki

Twenty Five Lies of Benjamin Freedman

Daryl Bradford Smith makes a big deal out of this speech on his Web site. Here are twenty-five lies told by Freedman -- and repeated by Daryl Bradford Smith:


(1) "In other words, Christian boys are going to be yanked out of their homes, away from their families, and sent abroad to fight in Palestine against the Christian and Moslem Arabs who merely want to return to their homes."

In the forty-six years since this speech was delivered, not one U.S. soldier has fought in Israel or the Palestinian territories.

(2) "[T]he United States will trigger World War III."
Hasn't happened yet.

(3) "[T]he Arab nations called a meeting in Lebanon and there they decided to resurrect, or reactivate, the government of Palestine, which has been dormant more or less, since the 1948 armed insurrection by the Zionists."

There was never a Palestinian government to resurrect. Nominal political control over the Palestinian people had been exercised by Amin Al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, but this was during the period that Palestine was still a British colony. That mandate expired on May 15, 1948, and the same day, Israel declared its statehood. The Palestinians, by contrast, when the war was over, were occupied by either Egypt (in the Gaza strip) or Jordan (in the West Bank and East Jerusalem). Neither power offerered the Palestinians autonomy, much less statehoof. King Abdullah of Jordan never even entertained the idea. Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt made moves toward an "All-Palestine Government," but didn't act against Israel militarily until 1967 -- six years after Freedman gave this speech.

(4) "Within two years Germany had won that war [World War I]: not alone won it nominally, but won it actually."
Freedman claims that before August 1, 1916, Germany had won the World War I. This is simply not true.

Germany was fighting a two-front war during World War I. Plus it had soldiers deployed in the Middle East to assist the Ottoman Turks, who were losing badly and would continue to lose until all their territory was gone. During the period that Freedman is discussing, Germany was fighting the combined forces of France and the British Empire (Canadian, Indian, South African, and ANZAC troops were there also) at the Battle of the Somme.

The battle went from July 1, 1916, to November 18, 1916, and was declared a stalemate. Losses for both sides were about equal, which means Germany actually lost more troops because it was fighting alone on its own side. At the same time, beginning before the Battle of the Somme and ending afterwards, the Germans lost to the French at Verdun, though they sustained fewer casualties. The losses for Germany were so severe that she changed her position on the Western front from offensive to defensive, which remained the case until surrender in November 1918.
Germany did rather better on the Eastern Front, driving into Poland and ultimately leading to the tsar's overthrow in March 1917. But Germany was still fighting Russia in the summer of 1916, as well as in the Middle East with the Turks.

(5) "At that time, the French army had mutinied. They lost 600,000 of the flower of French youth in the defense of Verdun on the Somme. The Russian army was defecting. They were picking up their toys and going home, they didn't want to play war anymore, they didn't like the Czar. And the Italian army had collapsed."

Neither the French troops nor the Russian troops had mutinied at the time Freedman says they did. French losses at Verdun were around 150,000 -- not 600,000, as Freedman claims. If the Italian army had collapses, that would be a surprise to the Italian soldiers at the Battle or Gorizia, where the Italians defeated Austria-Hungary in eleven days.

(6) "[T]he Zionists in London went to the British war cabinet and they said: 'Look here. You can yet win this war. You don't have to give up. You don't have to accept the negotiated peace offered to you now by Germany. You can win this war if the United States will come in as your ally.'"

There's a staggering amount of disinformation in here. First, there was no German peace offer, and if there were, it would have been coming from a position of weakness to better fight on their Eastern Front.

(7) "They [Zionists] told England: 'We will guarantee to bring the United States into the war as your ally, to fight with you on your side, if you will promise us Palestine after you win the war.'"
This is very interesting given the actual state of affairs in the Middle East at that time. England and France had already divided up the Ottoman holdings in the Middle East. In fact, they had done so the previous year -- with the Sykes-Picot Agreement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes-Picot_Agreement). It hadn't promised Palestine to anyone -- it had left it an issue to be decided in the future.

(8) "However, they [the British] made that promise, in October of 1916"
I have no idea where Freedman gets this date, given that the Sykes-Picot Agreement had been signed in May 1916, and it contravened the only other possible offer on the table at the time, which was the promise by Henry McMahon, British High Commissioner in Egypt, to Sharif Hussein of Mecca (father of Abdullah I of Jordan) that Arab nationalism would be realized with the defeat of the Turks. However, none of McMahon's correspondence ever promises him Palestine.

(9) "Well, shortly after that, Mr. Wilson declared war on Germany."
Actually it was six months later, on April 6, 1917, and it was Congress that declared war, the President not being allowed by the Constitution of the United States to do so. The U.S. declared war on Austria-Hungary in December, with less than a year left in the war. Notably, the U.S. never declared war on the Ottomans? Why not? Because they were finished by then. Given that it was the Ottomans who controlled Palestine up to this point, how could U.S. entry have secured this if it came so late?
The answer is that it couldn't.

Moreover, Freedman completely ignores the importance of the Zimmermann Telegram, a communique sent by the German Foreign Minister, Arthur Zimmermann, to Mexico, urging it to form an alliance against the U.S. This was the smoking gun that led the U.S. into the war. Interventionism was the result of the fear of the Germans (who, remember, were not winning the war -- the telegram dates from January 1917) that the U.S. would enter to stake territory for its Allies. There was, after all, already an Allied Expeditionary Force of American soldiers fighting in Europe.

(10) "After we got into the war, the Zionists went to Great Britain and they said: “Well, we performed our part of the agreement. Let's have something in writing that shows that you are going to keep your bargain and give us Palestine after you win the war.” Because they didn't know whether the war would last another year or another ten years. So they started to work out a receipt. The receipt took the form of a letter, and it was worded in very cryptic language so that the world at large wouldn't know what it was all about. And that was called the Balfour Declaration."

So according to Freedman's chronology, in October 1916, the British promise the Zionists Palestine, it takes them six months to get us into the war, but the Balfour Declaration still wasn't issued until seven months after we declared war on Germany. This doesn't add up.

(11) "Now, when the war was ended, and the Germans went to Paris, to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, there were 117 Jews there, as a delegation representing the Jews, headed by Bernard Baruch. I was there: I ought to know."

Well, Bernard Baruch was certainly at the Paris Peace Conference, but where this figure of 116 other Jews as a separate delegation (Baruch was with the American delegation; after all, he was head of the War Industries Board). As for Freedman being there, I have yet to see a single independent source that verifies he was there. Not one.

(12) "The Jews at that peace conference, when they were cutting up Germany and parceling out Europe to all these nations that claimed a right to a certain part of European territory, the Jews said, 'How about Palestine for us?'"

Well, first of all, the land that was cut out of Germany was land that was, with very few exceptions, populated by non-German people, e.g., Poland. Austria ceded Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, these being Slavic nations whereas Austria was and is a Germanic nation.
But the real kicker is that the "Jewish delegation" demanded Palestine at this point. While it is true that an important agreement on Palestine was made at this point, it was not made between Bernard Baruch and the British government, as Freedman would have us believe. Rather, the agreement was made between Chaim Weizmann and the leader of the Arab delegation. Weizmann was of course a Zionist but a British citizen -- not one of these virtually nonexistent German Zionists that we're told about.
Freedman doesn't tell us about the Arab delegation, but it was led by Sharif Hussein's other son, Faisal, who would become the first King of Iraq. You can read the agreement here: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/faisaltext.html
So Britain didn't hand Palestine over to the Zionists. Ultimately, it was Faisal that did.

(13) "And they produced, for the first time to the knowledge of the Germans, this Balfour Declaration. So the Germans, for the first time realized, 'Oh, that was the game! That's why the United States came into the war.' And the Germans for the first time realized that they were defeated, they suffered this terrific reparation that was slapped onto them, because the Zionists wanted Palestine and they were determined to get it at any cost."
Given that the New York Times published news of the Balfour Declaration a mere twelve days after the declaration was issued, it was a known agreement by the time of the Paris Peace Conference. (There were two more stories in the Times alone before the Peace Conference began.) In other words, Freedman was lying.
Notably, it is on the basis of this lie that Freedman then argues that the Germans were justified in their hatred of Jews. He ignores all evidence of German anti-Semitism between 1871 and 1919.

(14) "When Germany realized that the Jews were responsible for her defeat, they naturally resented it. But not a hair on the head of any Jew was harmed. Not a single hair. Professor Tansill, of Georgetown University, who had access to all the secret papers of the State Department, wrote in his book, and quoted from a State Department document written by Hugo Schoenfelt, a Jew who Cordell Hull sent to Europe in 1933 to investigate the so-called camps of political prisoners. And he wrote back that he found them in very fine condition."
In 1933, the only people in concentration camps were political prisoners and not Jews. More on this below.

(15) "They were in excellent shape; everybody treated well. And they were filled with Communists. Well, a lot of them were Jews, because the Jews happened to be maybe 98 per cent of the Communists in Europe at that time."

That's an exaggeration obviously, but even more so for 1933 in Germany. The KPD (Communist Party) in Germany was led by Ernst Thaelmann, a Gentile. He was arrested and put in Dachau in 1933 and kept in solitary confinement until Hitler had him shot in 1944. But Jews in Germany tended not to vote for the KPD, despite its quite excellent returns in the elections between 1929 and 1932 (it always polled in the top three parties). Most Jews in Germany voted instead for the SPD, the Social-Democratic Party of Germany. This was not a communist party.

An illustrative example can be made with the situation in the Soviet Union, where far more leaders of the Communist Party there were Jews. Even conceding that this is the case, the vast majority of Jews in Russia between March 1917 and November 1917, when the Bolsheviks seized power, were not in communist parties. They tended to be either in Zionist parties or in the Jewish Bund or the PSR (social democrats). These latter two parties were the only parties in the USSR condemn the Bolshevik coup in the Congress of Deputies that had been established after the tsar had been overthrown.

Germany had even fewer Jews and, given the explanation already given that their living standard was better in Germany and that they fled there from Russia in 1905, it is not unreasonable to conclude that fewer Jews were communists in Germany than in Russia, particularly in 1933.

(16) "Well, I don't want to go by what they were called. We're now using English words, and what they were called in Germany is not very material. . . but they were Communists, because in 1917, the Communists took over Germany for a few days."
As already demonstrated, the KPD existed in Germany, as did the SPD, and their platforms were so different, in fact, that the KPD refused to join SPD-led governments.

(17) "Nevertheless, the Jews of the world declared a boycott against Germany, and it was so effective that you couldn't find one thing in any store anywhere in the world with the words 'made in Germany' on it."
The Untermeyer boycott was so incredibly ineffective that Germany had experienced complete economic recovery by 1937.

(18) "The Jews -- I call them Jews to you, because they are known as Jews. I don't call them Jews. I refer to them as so-called Jews, because I know what they are. If Jesus was a Jew, there isn't a Jew in the world today, and if those people are Jews, certainly our Lord and Savior was not one of them, and I can prove that."

The largest Christian organization in the world is the Roman Catholic Church. In his 1965 encyclical Nostra Aetate, Pope Paul VI wrote, "The Church keeps ever in mind the words of the Apostle about his kinsmen: "theirs is the sonship and the glory and the covenants and the law and the worship and the promises; theirs are the fathers and from them is the Christ according to the flesh" (Rom. 9:4-5), the Son of the Virgin Mary. She also recalls that the Apostles, the Church's main-stay and pillars, as well as most of the early disciples who proclaimed Christ's Gospel to the world, sprang from the Jewish people."

I think the Pope probably can speak on greater authority on these matters than Freedman.
(19) "The eastern European Jews, who form 92 per cent of the world's population of those people who call themselves Jews, were originally Khazars."

While there is no doubt that the Khazarian Empire adopted Judaism as its official religion and that this empire stretched into parts of Eastern Europe, there was still a settlement of Jews along the Rhine Valley that pre-dated the Khazars. They did not emigrate to Poland and points east of there until the 16th century, long after the Khazars were gone. These Jews spoke Yiddish, which is based on German, whereas the Khazars spoke a Turkish language.
Furthermore, genetic tests conducted in the last two years indicate that the vast majority of Jews derive from only four women, and that the priestly tribe of Jews, the kohenim, share a Middle Eastern common ancestor.

(20) "When, on the Day of Atonement, you walk into a synagogue, the very first prayer that you recite, you stand -- and it's the only prayer for which you stand -- and you repeat three times a short prayer. The Kol Nidre. In that prayer, you enter into an agreement with God Almighty that any oath, vow, or pledge that you may make during the next twelve months -- any oath, vow or pledge that you may take during the next twelve months shall be null and void."
The Kol Nidrey nullifies only vows made to God. This is one of the oldest libels against Judaism and has been disproven repeatedly.

(21) "And further than that, the Talmud teaches: 'Don't forget -- whenever you take an oath, vow, and pledge -- remember the Kol Nidre prayer that you recited on the Day of Atonement, and that exempts you from fulfilling that.'"

The Talmud says no such thing and I challenge any person to prove otherwise.
(22) "There was no English word because Judea had passed out of existence. There was no Judea. People had long ago forgotten that. So in the first translation he used the word, in referring to Jesus, as 'gyu', 'jew'. At the time, there was no printing press."
Freedman's linguistic analysis of the word "Jew" is so terrible it would make a real linguist laugh in hysterics. Suffice it to say that, yes, there was no letter J in the Roman alphabet, but they did not pronounce their word for Jew (Iudean) with the /j/ phoneme at the beginning.

(23) "Just like 'anti-Semitic'. The Arab is a Semite. And the Christians talk about people who don't like Jews as anti-Semites, and they call all the Arabs anti-Semites. The only Semites in the world are the Arabs. There isn't one Jew who's a Semite. They're all Turkothean Mongoloids. The Eastern european Jews."
Well, Jews are Semites, but that's beside the point. The word coined by Wilhelm Marr nearly a century before Freedman's speech was Antisemitismus and it was coined to apply to Jews only -- not to Arabs.

(24) "They've never been persecuted for their religion. And I wish I had two rows of Rabbis here to challenge me. Never once, in all of history, have they been persecuted for their religion."
Jews were consistently persecuted only on religious grounds until the 19th century. Before then, the charge was "Christ-killer." That is a religious basis.

(25) "But Benjamin Franklin observed, and by hearsay understood, what was happening in Europe."
Freedman is referring to a hoax of an anti-Semitic quote attributed to Ben Franklin that was actually created by William Dudley Pelley in 1933.
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