excerpt from OVERTURNING THE CULTURE OF VIOLENCE BY PENNY HESS

          What Europeans did to other Europeans under Hitler had been practiced for hundreds of years against Africans, Indigenous and Asian peoples. No white people, including Jews, protested when Africans and other colonized people were being slaughtered by the millions by European and American powers. What was inflicted on Jews by Nazi Germany was an outgrowth of centuries of genocide against other peoples. Only when the atrocities were carried out against other white people, was any outrage registered by Europeans.

Despite experiencing some of what colonized peoples have been subjected to for so long, most jews did not stand with the oppressed. Instead they stole the land of the Palestinians and created the Israeli state. Now the fiercest imperialists in the Middle East, Jews engage in the slaughter of Islamic peoples.

The mass murder of Jews in Nazi Germany is used to further attack African people. A Jewish member of the Alameda County Board of Supervisors broke into tears once when the Uhuru Movement in Oakland went before the board to protest the abuse of African children in the foster care system as genocide. Genocide only happens to Jews, she said.

Steven Spielberg once came to the nearly all-African Castlemont High School, located in East Oakland, down the street from the Oakland Uhuru House. His purpose was to force African children to watch the movie Schindler’s List.

One wonders why anyone would make a film glorifying a Nazi who saved a tiny percentage of people from death by putting them in slave labor in his factory. In any case, Spielberg and others were incensed when the Castlemont students laughed at the movie. Certainly the thought of any white people trying to tell Africans about genocide is patronizing and outright ridiculous.

Holocaust museums have opened in Washington D.C. as well as in many other U.S. cities, but the wholesale murder of Jews never took place inside the United States.
Genocide against African and indigenous people was carried out here. Jews are getting reparations by the trillions of dollars from Germany and Switzerland while reparations to African people is laughed off by white society.

Where are the Jews who are willing to use their experience in Germany as an opportunity to stand in solidarity with African and colonized people?”


-“Overturning The Culture of Violence”(2000), Penny Hess (Chairwoman of the African People’s Solidarity Committee)