Palestinian claims factually incorrect and serve only to spew hatred

VICTOR Stevens should stop trying to foment hatred by commenting on issues he knows nothing about (“When Palestinian equates to criminal,” Cape Argus, January 15). Besides getting his facts wrong, his letter has all the classic tells of an anti-Semite.

Anita Wallfisch was not spared the fate of her fellow Jews because she spoke French and, as Stevens would have us believe, was incarcerated as a French citizen and criminal rather than a Jew.

Not so, Wallfisch was an extremely talented cellist who was arrested with her sister when they tried to flee to France, and sent to Auschwitz in 1934.

In the concentration camp she heard the Germans needed a cellist for the women’s orchestra that played for the camp guards, which saved her from being sent to the gas ovens.

Later, she was transferred to Bergen-Belsen where she hung on by the skin of her teeth until the British liberated the camp.

The Nazis did treat the Jews worse than criminals.

Men, women and children were brutalised, tortured, starved, shot, dumped into mass graves, treated as cheap labour and sent to the gas ovens as part of Hitler’s master plan to exterminate the Jewish nation.

Categories of prisoners were identified by a marking system which allowed the SS guards to easily identify the Jews.

Stevens’s assertion that Palestinian and criminal are synonymous is his own perverted view.

Palestinians are not forced to live in ghettoes; they are allowed to own businesses and practise their chosen professions, unlike the Jews in Nazi Germany.

As for his other comment that the Palestinians had no part in the Holocaust, perhaps he doesn’t know that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was an admirer of Hitler and a Nazi sympathiser.

Stevens is categorising the Jews as “the other” and we all know where that leads to. Rwanda is an excellent example.

If Stevens hasn’t yet had an opportunity to visit the Holocaust Museum in Gardens, perhaps he should. Entry is free and the guides will be only too happy to show him around.

His letter does nothing to build bridges. It just exacerbates the divide in South Africa where we are plagued by racists and people who spew hate, which Stevens does in spades.

Perhaps Stevens should stick to painting because he can’t see further than the walls that surround him.

BRIAN JOSSELOWITZ Milnerton