Fury as Dalyell attacks Blair's 'Jewish cabal' (GALLOWAY'S MATE ALERT)

Tam Dalyell, the Father of the House, sparked outrage last night by accusing the Prime Minister of "being unduly influenced by a cabal of Jewish advisers".

In an interview with Vanity Fair, the Left-wing Labour MP named Lord Levy, Tony Blair's personal envoy on the Middle East, Peter Mandelson, whose father was Jewish, and Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, who has Jewish ancestry, as three of the leading figures who had influenced Mr Blair's policies on the Middle East.

Yesterday Mr Dalyell, the MP for Linlithgow, told The Telegraph: "I am fully aware that one is treading on cut glass on this issue and no one wants to be accused of anti-Semitism but, if it is a question of launching an assault on Syria or Iran . . . then one has to be candid."

He added: "I am not going to be labelled anti-Semitic. My children worked on a kibbutz. But the time has come for candour." The Prime Minister, Mr Dalyell claimed, was also indirectly influenced by Jewish people in the Bush administration, including Richard Perle, a Pentagon adviser, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defence secretary, and Ari Fleischer, the President's press secretary.

"They very much have captured the ear of the President of the United States. I said [to Vanity Fair] I thought that Blair was very sympathetic to them. I cannot understand why," Mr Dalyell said.

Mr Dalyell's claim caused fury last night. Mr Mandelson said: "Apart from the fact that I am not actually Jewish, I wear my father's parentage with pride. As for Tam, he is as incorrigible as ever."

Lord Janner, a Labour peer and the chairman of the Holocaust Education Trust, said: "I think these comments are sad and unfounded. Tony Blair is his own man. He will follow advice if he considers it correct and not otherwise. He has been a good friend of the Jewish people and the Jewish state."

Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain of Maidenhead Synagogue and a spokesman for Britain's Reform Synagogues, said: "Tam Dalyell is not being candid but misguided. Concerning Iraq it was crystal clear that Tony Blair was not swayed by popularity or anyone else but by his own deep convictions. It is also obvious that the majority of President Bush's circle are Christian Evangelicals rather than Jews."

Ned Temko, the American-born editor of the Jewish Chronicle, said: "I just think these sort of comments are offensive and are a profound misunderstanding of the way foreign policy is made in the United States or here."

A spokesman for Lord Levy said he was not available for comment. A spokesman for the Foreign Secretary said: "If these reports are accurate, these remarks are too unworthy to be worth a comment."

I just checked out a couple of books about Eichmann (I have a very extensive library on the Nazis and Holocaust) and can't find any reference to your claims.

Eichmann - A Biography

SS Lieutenant-Colonel who was Chief of the Jewish Office of the Gestapo during World War II and implemented the 'Final Solution' which aimed at the total extermination of European Jewry, Adolf Eichmann was born in Solingen on 19 March 1906.

The declasse son of a solid middle-class Protestant family which had moved to Linz, Austria, where Eichmann spent his youth, he failed to complete his engineering studies. After working briefly as an ordinary labourer in his father's small mining enterprise and then in the sales department of an Upper Austrian electrical construction company, Eichmann became a travelling salesman for the Vacuum Oil Company between 1927 and 1933.

On 1 April 1932 he joined the Austrian Nazi Party at the suggestion of his compatriot Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Having lost his job he sought employment across the border in Bavaria in July 1933, joining the exiled Austrian legion and undergoing fourteen months' military training.

In September 1934 he found an opening in Himmler's Security Service (SD) which provided him with an outlet for his bureaucratic talents. By the beginning of 1935 he was the official responsible for 'Jewish questions' at the Berlin head office of the SD, specializing in the Zionist movement. He acquired a smattering of Hebrew and Yiddish, and briefly visited Palestine in 1937 to explore the possibilities of Jewish emigration from Nazi Germany to Palestine.

Appointed assistant to the SD leader of the SS main region, Danube, Eichmann's first big opportunity came after he was sent to Vienna by the Gestapo to prepare the ground for the Anschluss.

From August 1938 he was in charge of the "Office for Jewish Emigration" in Vienna set up by the SS as the sole Nazi agency authorized to issue exit permits for Jews from Austria, then Czechoslovakia and later the old German Reich. Eichmann's acquired expertise in "forced emigration"--in less than eighteen months approximately 150,000 Jews left Austria--and extortion was to prove an ideal training-ground for his later efficiency in "forced evacuation," i.e., the registering, assembly and deportation of Jews to extermination centres in the East. By March 1939 he was already handling forced deportations to Poland and, in October of the same year, he was appointed special adviser on the "evacuation" of Jews and Poles.

In December 1939 Eichmann was transferred to Amt IV (Gestapo) of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) where he took over Referat IV B4 dealing with Jewish affairs and evacuation. For the next six years Eichmann's office was the headquarters for the implementation of the 'Final Solution'; though it was not until the summer of 1941 that his 'resettlement' department began the task of creating death camps, developing gassing techniques and organizing the system of convoys that were to take European Jewry to their deaths.

It was in 1941 that Eichmann first visited Auschwitz and in November of the same year he was promoted to SS Lieutenant-Colonel. He had already begun to organize the mass deportation of Jews from Germany and Bohemia, in accordance with Hitler's order to make the Reich free of Jews as rapidly as possible.

The Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942 consolidated Eichmann's position as the "Jewish specialist" of the RSHA and Heydrich now formally entrusted him with implementing the "Final Solution." In this task Eichmann proved to be a model of bureaucratic industriousness and icy determination even though he had never been a fanatical anti-semite and always claimed that "personally" he had nothing against Jews. His zeal expressed itself in his constant complaints about obstacles in the fulfilment of death-camp quotas, his impatience with the existence of loopholes such as the free zone in Vichy France or the unco- operativeness of the Italians and other German allies in expediting their Jews.

When even Himmler became more "moderate" towards the end of the war, Eichmann ignored his 'no gassing' order, as long as he was covered by immediate superiors like Heinrich Muller and his old friend, Kaltenbrunner. Only in Budapest after March 1944 did the desk-murderer become a public personality, working in the open and playing a leading role in the massacre of Hungarian Jewry. In August 1944 the 'Grand Inquisitor' of European Jewry could report to Himmler that approximately four million Jews had died in the death camps and that another two million had been killed by mobile extermination units. Though arrested at the end of the war, Eichmann's name was not yet widely known and he was able to escape from an American internment camp in 1946 and flee to Argentina. He was eventually tracked down by Israeli secret agents on 2 May 1960, living under an assumed name in a suburb of Buenos Aires. Nine days later he was secretly abducted to Israel, to be publicly tried in Jerusalem. The trial, which aroused enormous international interest and some controversy, took place between 2 April and 14 August 1961. On 2 December 1961 Eichmann was sentenced to death for crimes against the Jewish people and crimes against humanity. On 31 May 1962 he was executed in Ramleh prison.

Source: Wistrich, Robert S. Who's Who in Nazi Germany, Routledge, 1997. USHMM photo.

"It was also revealed he had a jewish ancestor either on his maternal or paternal side (I don't remember which) a fact also known to his SS superiors."

Half of the gentile German population probably had a Jewish ancestor. Jews had been emancipated at the turn of the 19th century and had been marrying out at a rate of around 50% ever since. The fact is that the Nazis were brought up in total ignorance of any such relative and were raised as Christians and not Jews. I don't imagine anyone argues that Fascism or anti-Semitism is genetic. Rather it's cultural and it's from the background in which they were raised where they gained their prejudices.

And as for the girlfriend, I suppose it's possible. I just heard today of a Tutsi whose best friend, a person who he was closest to in the world, ended up murdering his mother.

And don't believe that stuff about Eichmann not hating Jews, that was just the cover he used for the defence at his trial. The Nazis didn't work in a vacuum, but were building on the anti-Semitism that was an integral part of the society in Germany and later in Austria (where it was probably even worse). The Germans knew for the most part what was going on, although the details of the camps might have been sketchy, and heartily approved. As William Shirer, the great American journalist, who was present in Germany at that time and later wrote what is still the seminal work on the Nazis, "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich", said, whatever Germans disliked about the Nazis, the one thing they almost unanimously approved of and that was the treatment of the Jews.

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