Birobidjan - a campaign update

Earlier this year, we blogged on the efforts of Michele Renouf, one of Britain's best-known Holocaust deniers, to promote her campaign to have Jews relocate en masse to Birobidjan, a Jewish autonomous region established in the eastern Soviet Union by Stalin in 1934. On that occasion, she was speaking to a meeting at the House of Lords, where her proposal was greeted with applause.

Now she has taken her campaign overseas: to Iran, where, in her words, she was "invited to give an impromptu address to President Ahmadinejad and a thousand international guests at the Presidential Headquarters in Teheran on 3rd June 2010." Renouf was in Iran to address the 4th International Conference on Imam Khomeini and Foreign Policy (scroll down for a photo of Renouf), organised by the Institute for Political and International Studies.

Renouf used the opportunity of her "impromtu address" to propose Birobidjan as a home for Israeli Jews as well as European ones, thereby solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at a stroke:

Indeed after 1928 European Jews had no need to pirate Palestine, and to this day a Jewish Autonomous Region called Birobidjan exists peacefully and available on Russia’s south-east border with China, having never displaced an indigenous people for its creation. Today some Jews try to claim that it was an act of anti-semitism when Stalin gave this region of 30,000 sq. km  (the size of Switzerland) to Jews. The truth is that Stalin was providing every ethnic group comprising the Soviet Union with its own autonomous region, and nothing “anti-semitic” has ever endangered Birobidjan. Furthermore in 1945 when European Jews were crying “We have no homeland, we need and deserve Palestine” – again they lied, for in 1945 there was no political impediment to prevent European Jewry heading for the welcome arms of their vast and long-established Jewish Autonomous Region in Birobidjan.

The same is true today, yet in our mainstream media we hear not a word of Birobidjan. Only rarely does the Jewish Telegraphic Agency mention Birobidjan, and when it does it refers to it disingenuously as a “district”. Which district in the world is the size of Switzerland? The fact is that since the dissolution of the Soviet Union its ethnically autonomous regions have been entitled to republic status, yet the JTA lets us know that due to so-called “sensitivity” to Israel, Birobidjan has declined, due to fear of raising gentile public awareness of its existence, to acknowledge this first Jewish homeland, and all but state and republic.

My hope is that our President Ahmadinejad, who speaks the whole truth bravely, will promote awareness of the first Jewish homeland and that there is no need for European Jews to go back to Germany, Poland or Austria when they have their own state whose first language is Yiddish. Please view my first homeland option website at www.birobidjan.co.uk for, in the spirit of Imam Khomeini, there you will find a campaign for moral and morale rearmament. The Palestinians whose Nakba constitutes the greatest tragedy of the 20th century – those brave voters who democratically elected the long heroic Hamas - deserve the return of every inch of their tormented land, and not any part in the specious “one-state two-state” farce.  The immediate vacation of European Jews from all of Palestine and compensation to the indigenous Arab people is more than overdue to those who, for more than a century, continue to fight for Reason at the front line of historical truth and international justice for all of us.

Ahmadinejad's response to Renouf's plea is not known. But if the Iranian President does, at some point in the future, propose deporting Israeli Jews to Birobidjan, you will know where he heard it first.