Alexander 0102-1, Alexander Roger

Ahmed Issawi
Minority Report | February 19, 2001 The Nation
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

Wiesel Words

Is there a more contemptible poseur and windbag than Elie Wiesel? I
suppose
there may be. But not, surely, a poseur and windbag who receives (and
takes
as his due) such grotesque deference on moral questions. Look, if you
will,
at his essay on Jerusalem in the New York Times of January 24.

As a Jew living in the United States, I have long denied myself the
right to
intervene in Israel’s internal debates…. My critics have their
conception
of social and individual ethics; I have mine. But while I grant them
their
right to criticize, they sometimes deny mine to abstain.

Such magnificent condescension, to grant his critics the right. And it
is not
certain from when Wiesel dates his high-minded abstention from Israel’s
internal affairs; he was a member of Menachem Begin’s Irgun in the
1940s,
when that force employed extreme violence against Arab civilians and was
more
than ready to use it against Jews. At all events, his dubious claim
above is
only a pompous preface to discarding nonintervention in the present
because
Jerusalem is at stake, and “the fact that I do not live in Jerusalem is
secondary; Jerusalem lives within me.” (Again the modesty.) There are,
sad to
say, serpents in Wiesel’s internal Eden, and they too must be
patronized:

That Muslims might wish to maintain close ties with this city unlike any

other is understandable. Although its name does not appear in the Koran,

Jerusalem is the third holiest city in Islam. But for Jews, it remains
the
first. Not just the first; the only.

“Might wish.” “Ties.” “Understandable.” “Third holiest.” Even these
lordly
and dismissive gestures clearly cost Wiesel something. After all, he
announces that the city is “mentioned more than 600 times in the Bible,”

which (assuming for a moment that one ought to think like a religious
fundamentalist in the first place) would give a Christian Arab–these
being
at least 15 percent of the Palestinian population–quite a strong claim
on
the old place. (Incidentally, let me ask any reader how often the city
is
mentioned in the Torah.) But for Wiesel all Arabs are Muslims, and even
if
they happen to live in Jerusalem, this is nothing to the way that
Jerusalem
dwells within Wiesel. Indeed, it would evidently dwell more comfortably
within him if they did not live in it at all. Do I exaggerate? I don’t
think
so. In a propaganda tour of recent history, he asserts that in 1948,
“incited
by their leaders, 600,000 Palestinians left the country convinced that,
once
Israel was vanquished, they would be able to return home.”

This claim is a cheap lie and is known by Wiesel to be a lie. It is
furthermore an utterly discredited lie, and one that Israeli officialdom
no
longer cares to repeat. Israeli and Jewish historians have exposed it
time
and again: Every Arab broadcasting station in the region, in 1947 as
well as
1948, was monitored and recorded and transcribed by the BBC, and every
Arab
newspaper has been scoured, and not one instance of such “incitement,”
in
direct speech or reported speech, has ever come to light. The late
historian
and diplomat Erskine Childers issued an open challenge on the point as
far
back as the 1950s that was never taken up and never will be. And of
course
the lie is a Big Lie, because Expulsion-Denial lies at the root of the
entire
problem and helps poison the situation to this day. (When Israel’s
negotiators gingerly discuss the right of return, at least they don’t
claim
to be arguing about ghosts, or Dead Souls.)

In a brilliant reply to Wiesel published in Vesti, Israel’s largest
Russian-language paper, Israel Shamir compares him rather leniently not
to
Jabotinsky but to the Knight of the Doleful Countenance and his mad
quest for
purity:

Be reasonable, old man. Stay within the frame of the story and within
the
bounds of common decency. Don Quixote did not drive his jeep into Toboso
to
rape his old flame. OK, you loved her, and thought about her, but it
does
not give you the right to kill her children, bulldoze her rose garden
and
put your boots on her dining-room table.

Shamir speaks of the beautiful city that Palestinians centuries ago
“adorned
with a magnificent piece of jewelry, the Golden Dome of Haram al-Sharif,

built their houses with pointed arches and wide porches, and planted
cypresses and palm trees.” He’s wasting his time on Wiesel, who says
that
Palestine was a desert before he arrived there as one of Begin’s thugs,
and
who slanders the people he helped dispossess, first by falsely saying
that
they ran away from their beloved ancestral hometown and second by
disputing
their right even to feel nostalgia for it.

In 1982, after Gen. Ariel Sharon had treated the inhabitants of the
Sabra and
Shatila amps as target practice for his paid proxies, Wiesel favored us
with
another of his exercises in neutrality. Asked by the New York Times to
comment on the pogrom, he was one of the few American Jews approached on
the
matter to express zero remorse. “I don’t think we should even comment,”
he
said, proceeding to comment bleatingly that he felt “sadness– with
Israel,
and not against Israel.” For the victims, not even a perfunctory word.

As I write, it looks as if the same Sharon will become Israel’s prime
minister. If you recall, he occupied West Beirut in September 1982,
after the
assassination of the Maronite Prime Minister Bashir Gemayel, on the
announced
and highly believable pretext that Palestinian civilians would need
protection from Phalangist reprisal. He then sent into their undefended
camps
the most extreme faction of the Phalangist militia and backed up the
dirty
work of these notorious fascists with flares during the night, and
rear-guard
cover during the day, for thirty-six hours before having them escorted
out in
triumph and thanked for their work. In other words, the bulk of US
overseas
military aid is about to be lavished on a man who stood with hands on
hip, in
belt and boots and steel helmet and binoculars, and saw a mound of human

corpses rise, and who thought it good. For this outcome, the soil has
been
manured by the beautiful thoughts of Elie Wiesel.

From [email protected] Tue Mar 6 16:01:43 EST 2001
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Subject: Holocaust Religion and Holocaust Industry in the service of Israel :
Shraga Elam*
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Enclosed is an article which will be published in the next issue of the
Israeli-Palestinian magazine “Between The Lines”.
This article is relevant also in the context of the present discussion
on Norman Finkelstein’s book “The Holocaust Industry”.

Shraga Elam

Holocaust Religion and Holocaust Industry in the service of Israel

Shraga Elam*

There can be no argument that Judeocide (1) during World War II played
and continues to play a major role in the Arab/Israeli conflict

On the one hand, it is a commonly held Arab position that Judeocide is
merely one of many bogus Zionist postures to manipulate world public
opinion.

On the other hand, most Zionists believe that this catastrophe (in
Hebrew, ‘shoa’) demonstrates beyond doubt the necessity of a Jewish
state; and had there been one during WWII, this genocide would not have
taken place. Moreover, it is claimed that only a militarily strong
Israel which prevents such a catastrophe from recurring.

Each of the above positions is the result of the same distorted mode of
processing the past. This mode can be called religious, even though the
usual definition of religion includes a god concept — one which is
absent in this discussion. In all other ways, the necessary religious
characteristics are in place:

dogmas
commandments
rituals
shrines
prophets and priests
and, of course, economic/financial structures

One can, therefore, speak of a “Holocaust Religion” and its “Satanic”
arch enemy, “Holocaust Denial”. A third way to deal with the Judeocide,
which should be defined as secular and scientific, is often identified
with the “Holocaust Denial.”

The use of the term “Holocaust”, which means “A burnt- sacrifice or
offering, the whole of which was consumed by fire”(2), reflects the
religious character of the dominant historiography of Judeocide(3).

Using the designation “Holocaust” for the extermination of the Jews
implies accordingly the absurdity that the Nazis scarified the Jews in a
kind of a religious ritual.

The birth of the Holocaust Religion is considered to have been triggered
by the trial in Jerusalem of the Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann in 1961.
This show-trial was a spectacle meant to get the Jewish Israeli public
mainly the then youngest generation acquainted with the Judeocide.

The trial did not succeed in achieving this aim not because this
middle-ranking SS-officer, Eichman, was not adequate to represent the
whole extermination machinery. Nor was the failure due to the
impossibility of reducing the nazi monstrous system to a single
individual.

The fundamental reason for the failure must be attributed to the central
Zionist tenet: the “Negation of the Diaspora” a recurrent theme which
made it very difficult for the young Jewish-Israelis to identify
themselves with European Jewry.

Several generations of Israeli Jews were brought up to loathe Jewish
existence abroad. in fact, Jewish way of life in Europe, for example,
was viewed as sick and to be overcome through Zionism. Young
Jewish-Israelis were brain-washed, through the late 70’s, to internalize
typical Christian European prejudices against Jews and thus did not want
to identify themselves with their own grandparents or even their
parents, who had not resisted oppression in Europe.

It is precisely owing to their role as victimizers that, even now, it is
easier for Israeli soldiers to identify with the Nazis than with their
own ancestors — the victims. Example: in 1982 after the bombing of
Beirut and putting the city under siege, Israeli soldiers disgusted at
what they had just done, told an excited and adoring German journalist
who wanted to know how they were feeling: “we have just created a Warsaw
ghetto.”

Even though Eichmann’s trial did not achieve the desired effect inside
Israel, its impact abroad was enormous. Elie Wiesel, a former
concentration camp inmate, who came to Jerusalem to report on the
process, subsequently initiated a religious modality for handling the
Judeocide. This religion was to become very dominant in the ensuing
years. It came to be accepted by not only by most Jews but also many
non-Jews, especially in the industrialized countries. It was to
become one of the most important tools of the Israeli propaganda
machinery.

The relevancy of the Holocaust Religion to the Middle East conflict
cannot be overlooked. Its real breakthrough according to the Jewish
theologian Marc Ellis, who defines it rather as a theology, came through
the Israeli victory in 1967(4).

“Holocaust theology yields three themes that exist in dialectical
tension: suffering and empowerment, innocence and redemption,
specialness and normalization(5)”

After this war there was according to this analysis a kind of a
religious messianic salvation. The Judeocide and the big ‘threat’ to
Israel in 1967 are the suffering. The building of the State of Israel
and especially the victory of 1967 are the redemption.

Of course Zionism lost its innocence long before 1967. Already in the
1930’s, David Ben Gurion, the most important Zionist leader, realized
the huge potential in Judeocide as he brought these religious elements
together into a simple direct political motto for the
instrumentalization of the Jewish sufferings in Europe. He declared:
“Catastrophe is Power.” Which means the Zionist movement should find
ways to profit politically and financially from the agony. Yet the
catastrophe became a real source of political power only after Israel
became a military success in 1967. Which means, a catastrophe as such is
not necessarily a source of power. One must be powerful in order to be
able to use and abuse a disaster.

In their book “Dangerous Liasion”(6) , Andrew and Leslie Cockburn
describe how only after 1967 did Israel become attractive to the US
military establishment. Though Israel had, before that time, a burning
desire to work for Washington, the US was not enthusiastic until Israel
demonstrated its strength on the battlefield..

The journalist J.J. Goldberg(7) argues that the Jewish lobby became
strong only after 1967. AIPAC the most known lobby became influential
through the Israeli importance for the US foreign policy and not the
other way around. This claim sounds very plausible when one considers
that the American Jewish organizations were not able to convince the
Roosevelt administration to be more helpful towards European Jewry
during the Nazi era(8). Although, for example, the New York Times was
in Jewish ownership it did not darem just like the mainstream US Jewish
organizations, to oppose the anti-Jewish policy of the State
Department. The lobby to establish a Zionist state in Palestine was
anyway more effective than the one to save the Jews. This was the line
dictated by Ben Gurion and executed by his delegate Abba Hillel Silver.

The Zionist influence at that period was less strong than perceived
through the Arab lens. Still the leadership of the Jewish agency (JA),
i.e., the government-in-formation, headed by the Zionist Labor movement,
started very early to cash in on the Nazi persecutions of the Jews. This
“Holocaust Industry”(9) had been founded even before the Judeocide was
really launched.

In the mid 30’s the JA reached a deal with the Nazis, the so called
Ha’avara agreement, which helped the Zionist movement not only to
attract to Palestine very wealthy investors, but to get direct control
of some of their money. According to the this arrangement, rich Jews
could get some of their properties out of Germany if they immigrated to
Palestine and the Jewish Agency received a nice commission from these
deals. This arrangement was, among others, the result of strong Nazi
support for the Zionist project, since corresponding with the Zionist
aims the main German objective at that time was to expel the Jews from
Europe. This policy coincided with the Zionist aims(10).

The collaboration with the Nazis brought the Zionists the much needed
capital for the colonization of Palestine ($40 million, which were “60%
of capital invested in Palestine between 1933 and the war”(11). This
agreement practically saved the Zionist movement in Palestine from
bankruptcy argues the journalist Lenni Brenner.

The JA came thus to be the largest agent for German goods in the Middle
East and sabotaged Jewish efforts to declare a boycott against the
Nazis.

THIS fruitful cooperation between the Nazis and the Zionists came to an
end in 1938 following Arab insurrections. After which the British tried
to stop Jewish Immigration into Palestine. Besides the German faction,
which sought an anti-British alliance with the Arabs got stronger and
blocked the export to Palestine of goods so needed at home.

Still the pro-Zionist Nazi factions (Eichmann was a part of them) kept
their contacts with the Jewish Agency. According to the coordinator of
the Zionist activities in occupied Europe, Nathan Dror-Schwalb, his
people were working together with Eichmann in 1938 as he expelled the
Austrian Jews(12). Zionist delegates, according to Schwalb, could
operate without disturbance in Germany throughout the war and organize
their cells of the youth movement Hehalutz(13).

According to the Israeli historian S. Beit-Zvi the JA-leadership did not
hesitate to sabotage rescue efforts. This happened after it became
clear, that the British would not allow a Jewish mass immigration to
Palestine. Beit-Zvi argues that the JA-leadership was afraid that a
large number of Jews would be saved and sent to some other destinations
rather than Palestine. This development was considered a political and
economic danger (!) to the Zionist project, as it would absorb resources
needed to establish the state and would weaken the Zionist claim that
Palestine is the only possible refuge for Jews(14).

According to Beit-Zvi, Golda Meir was responsible for sabotaging the
concrete chances of rescue of the refugees which was discussed at
conference of Evian in 1938. Beit-Zvi claims that this was the real
reason why this famous conference actually failed.

In a very famous speech Ben Gurion formulated the JA rescue policy as
follow:

“If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany
by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting
them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For
we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history
of the People of Israel.”(15)

Ben-Gurion’s apologists have tried to explain away this quotation. But
an objective examination of the following activities of the JA, the
protocols of JA-leadership and the factual low priority it gave to
rescue operations, can only confirm the claim that this speech was
emblematic of this attitude and that it basically never changed even
after the scope of the catastrophe became clear(16).

In the case of the Hungarian Jews, the charge of direct collaboration of
the Labor party controlled JA leadership with the Nazis is raised by
both Jewish Antizionists and Ultra-Zionists (Likud and the radical
right). The Zionist representative, Israel Kastner is accused of making
possible the efficient deportation of half a million Jews to Auschwitz
through the cooperation of his committee with Eichmann. The defenders
of Kastner argue that he actually tried to save the Jews through
negotiating with the Nazis. Even if this claim is true, it is beyond
discussion that these negotiations were sabotaged by the JA-leadership,
the mainstream Jewish organizations in the USA and also by the Allies.

Another Israeli historian, Idith Zertal, claims that Ben Gurion was
already before WWII mainly interested in the rescue operations only for
the national purposes. The saving of persecuted Jews was to be used
primarily a means of pressure on the British Empire to abolish its
immigration restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine. But even
for these purposes, there were hardly any meaningful rescue activities
during the war. There were very few Zionist delegates to coordinate such
operations and they had hardly any financial resources to be effective.

According to Zertal the spectacular actions of the illegal immigration
after the war, like the famous trip of the “Exodus”, were mainly part of
a very effective propaganda campaign. The Jewish organization “Joint”
claimed at that time, that the total number of immigrants including the
illegal ones was smaller than British quota. This means that if the
Jewish refugees would have been transported to Palestine legally, under
normal conditions, it would have been cheaper, more comfortable and
safer for them than using the shaky illegal ships and their number would
not necessarily have been lower. But by using this legal way, the JA
would have lost the propaganda effects of the pictures of British
soldiers using excessive amount of force against Jewish survivors(17).

Though the Zionist leadership was not very active in saving Jews (to say
the least), it started already during WWII to prepare a restitution
campaign. The JA felt itself empowered to make claims on Jewish
properties without being bothered by such trivialities like whether or
not the legitimate owners or their heirs were still alive(18).

The Zionist project needed a lot of money and therefore it is not
surprising that the JA did not have too many ethical considerations when
they endeavored to save Nazi war criminals, that is, if the Nazis
could pay enough for it. Thus the SS officer responsible for the robbery
of the Hungarian Jewry, Kurt Becher, and some of his friends were saved
. The aforementioned Israel Kastner was sent in 1948 by the Israeli
finance minister to Germany to save these Nazis from trial. In return,
Becher gave orders to his Swiss trustee to transfer money to the Jewish
Agency(19).

This was also the case of the important Nazi agent, Jaac van Harten,
whose money financed in 1945/46 the illegal Jewish immigration to
Palestine and acquisitions of weapons . Van Harten was crucial for the
flight of Nazis out of Europe, but the agents of the Mossad Le’Aliyah
Beth(20) who protected him, could not care less. He himself found refuge
later in Tel Aviv, where he got the protection of no less than Golda
Meir, the de-facto foreign minister at that time (1947). Till the 60’s
Van Harten kept contacts with his former Nazi boss, Friedrich Schwend,
who was then working in Peru with other famous Nazis like Josef Mengele
and Klaus Barbie. Schwend was considered to be a kind of finance
minister of the planned Fourth Reich (21).

The Zionist movement succeeded after WWII in getting restitution
illegitimately in the name of the Nazi victims. At the last stages of
the war representatives of the Jewish Agency gathered Jewish properties
and were nominated as recipient for such assets at the Paris Reparation
Conference (1945/46). The larger amount of money began to flow in the
50’s as the USA intensified its efforts to reintegrate West Germany in
its Cold War strategy. A German researcher reports about a meeting in
Switzerland between the German CHANCELLOR Konrad Adenauer and the
Israeli President Haim Weizmann. In this meeting Adenauer agreed to pay
compensations if Israel would give it consent for the rearmament of West
Germany(22).

These restitution monies were very crucial for building the Israeli
economy and military. Most probably the victory of 1967 would not have
been possible without this support.

After 1967 the influence of the Holocaust Industry and the Holocaust
Religion increased as a result of the ever growing importance of Israel
in terms of US interests. The Holocaust Religion was able to achieve a
growing control over the public opinion in Western countries. Its
influence in the 90’s reached an unexpected climax.

Steven Spielberg’s film “Schindler’s list” and the ceremonies
commemorating the Jubilee of the end of WWII functioned like a trigger
for this outburst. As an outcome of this memory-explosion the Holocaust
Industry was in position to launch in 1995 a very effective restitution
campaign against the Swiss banks, which now HAS been expanded to include
other countries. It was a mixture of a just claim, presented by the
wrong organizations for the wrong purposes, but fed through a fear of
the mythological ‘Jewish Power’ and its overestimated influence on the
US government. Of course the Jewish organizations got the support of
Clinton’s administration in this campaign, but it is not clear how far
the US would have gone on this issue against the Swiss banks. Thus the
Swiss became ‘victims’ of their own prejudices against the Jews.

>From a rather unimportant organization looking for an issue, with this
Swiss help, the World Jewish Congress and the affiliated organizations
came to be a very influential factor. The undertaking has brought till
now some $9 billion and the story is not yet over.

Israel itself tries not to be involved directly in this campaign, in
order not to get into any diplomatic complications with friendly
countries like Switzerland. Instead the World Jewish Congress (WJC),
the Jewish Claims Conference (JCC) and some other organizations are
leading the activities. Israel just hopes in one way or another to get
its share in any eventual booty. For example, after a certain
compensation for survivors was paid by Switzerland, the Israeli
government tried to cut the social security support to the Israeli
recipients commensurate with what they’d receive from Switzerland. A
step which means, that actually the money from Switzerland would have
gone to state of Israel and not to the victims.

In the meantime there is much more money in the restitution funds, but
its distribution is delayed (Israel belongs to the slowest distributors)
and the survivors have the feeling that the Jewish organizations
‘representing’ them, are just waiting for more of them to die, so that
the funds will be distributed for other purposes.

The survivors and the legitimate owners of robbed properties realized
too late that their interests are being abused by the leading Jewish
organizations (all of them with a strong Zionist influence). These
survivors are too weak and too old to fight effectively against the
mighty jet-setters of organized Jewry.

There was a series of articles in various papers in Israel, Switzerland,
Germany and USA demonstrating how the most important restitution
organization, the Jewish Claims Conference, is robbing the legitimate
heirs, as Joseph Wolff describes. Wolff, a former director of the
Israeli oil firm Paz, after learning about the cruelty of the JCC,
decided to try to help the twice victimized people. The efforts of this
influential and well connected person did not help much and till today
there is not much clarity regarding the activities of the JCC. No
outsider knows how much money it controls, how much is distributed, who
are the recipients etc.

The attacks of the US political scientist Norman Finkelstein against the
JCC in his book “The Holocaust Industry” irritate the organized Jewry
but in the short run do no more than that. This is because Finkelstein
did not invest enough energy in the complicated investigations needed
to prove his claims.

In a web-site “The Survivors vs. the Holocaust Industry”(23), several
old survivors have tried to initiate the struggle against the JCC, but
they are not very optimistic, as they do not have funds to finance the
fight against the mighty organizations.

They protest against the injustices and demand that they should be able
to decide how the money should be allocated.

The protesting survivors claim that the Jewish organizations are very
slow in distributing the monies and that they are just wait till all of
will die. They note that actually each and every month 1,000 survivors
around the world die.

The survivor Gerhard Maschkowski who is among the leaders of this
struggle writes:

“After the war ended in 1945, Holocaust survivors were treated shabbily;
most were forced to live in Displaced Persons Camps in Europe as the
world was forced to deal with stateless character of the Jewish people
until the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 [he seems to forget to
mention explicitly the role of the Jewish Agency in this postponement.
The JA used once again the sufferings of the survivors as a political
instrument – se]. Later, the “reparations and restitution” efforts
established ostensibly for the benefit of Holocaust survivors in the
United States, were inadequate and arbitrarily administered, resulting
in a legacy of frustration and humiliation for American survivors.
Today’s abandonment is occurring in the context of settlements of class
actions and disputes over Swiss bank accounts, looted Nazi gold, Nazi
use of Jewish slave laborers, and European insurers’ theft of Jews’
insurance policies. While the headlines cry with large dollar figures
purporting to represent compensation for Holocaust victims, and the box
quotes are full of lavish praise and gratitude for the settlements “as
we enter a new millennium,” the truth is, the interests of Holocaust
survivors have received the lowest priority in these negotiations. From
every perspective, the deals fall short of rendering meaningful justice
or dignity to those who were victimized. […] the agreement were struck
to provide immunity for vast numbers of European corporations that
profited from the Holocaust, in most cases, without a true accounting
for their World War II actions(24)”

This last point is demonstrated perfectly by the Interhandel affair, the
scandal of the foreign assets of the largest Nazi chemical combine IG
Farben, who among other things produced the gas for the extermination of
the Jews. These assets should have been confiscated already during WWII
and be used for the rehabilitation of war refugees, for example. This
did not happen, because Corporate America was interested in protecting
these funds and the Swiss authorities and some banks were willing to
help. This money estimated to be of a present value of at least $5
billion, was in the 60’s after a long legal fight misappropriated by the
largest Swiss bank, Union Bank of Switzerland, (today United Bank of
Switzerland – UBS) and the US government under Kennedy(25). In 1995 I
discovered in the Swiss federal archives highly classified documents
proving clearly the dubious role of the UBS and the Swiss government in
this affair(26).

The Jewish organizations leading the restitution campaigns show an
ostensive disinterest in this large amount of money stemming from the
most important Nazi combine, whose direct involvement in the crimes in
Auschwitz is well known. Recently an employee of the JCC confirmed my
suspicions and said that the organizations do not want to raise the
issue in order not to hurt the US interests involved.

It is safe to argue that neither the Holocaust Industry nor Israel have
ever really represented the interests of the Judeocide victims, although
they keep trying to create this impression that they do. This lie
serves Israel in many ways. It guarantees today the support of most of
the Jews, who feel that Israel is their redemption in the possible hour
of their need, a kind of a insurance against possible dangers. With the
Holocaust Religion, its institutions and priests it is possible to block
an all too radical critique against Israel and its crimes against the
Palestinians. Thus the Palestinians actually become indirectly victims
of the Nazis. The Holocaust Industry helps to finance the aggressions
against them and the Holocaust Religion assists in creating a negative
public opinion of them. Thus the Palestinians have to pay the price for
German crimes and Western hypocrisy.

The exposure of the Zionist abuse of Judeocide, is therefore an
important element in the efforts to reach a real and just peace in the
Middle East.

Box:
Similar to the formulations of Israeli philosopher Adi Ophir the dogmas
of this Holocaust Religion can usefully be articulated as religious
commandments :

Remember what Amalek has done to thee!

This compulsory directive is meant to cultivate and preserve for ever
and ever the memory of all the wrongdoings of Amalek against the Jews.
Amalek is the biblical collective designation for all the enemies of the
Jews, who, in the 20th century become to be mainly the Nazis and the
Arabs. It is in this sense not only a command to remember but also to
distrust and hate the non-Jews, the gentiles. This attitude is based on
the concept that the hate of the Jews, Judeophobia(27), is inherent in
all other cultures. Any questioning of the real danger for the Jews in
Europe or North America, for example, is considered blasphemy.
Organizations like the Anti Defamation League (ADL) are zealously
pursuing the supposed and the real sinners. Activities like that of ADL
together with the everlasting commemorations of Judeocide are important
elements for building the modern Jewish identity, especially for the
secular Jews. Another consequence of this commandment is that the Jews
are to be considered as the eternal victims. So even if they are the
victimizers they are still to be conceived as victims.

Thou shall never compare The Holocaust with any other Genocide!

The uniqueness of the Judeocide is a modern version of the old
judeocentric concept of “choseness”. Jewish sufferings are special,
cannot and must never be compared with other miseries.
This commandment is very important for the mythologizing of the
Judeocide and for preventing a normal historical analysis, as one of the
common and important scientific method is the comparison.

This commandment is very successful in the Western countries where the
Judeophobia has a very long tradition and is still common. The
contemporary manifestation of the prejudices against Jews is sometimes
very ingenious. It camouflages itself in an allegedly opposite
attitude, “Judeophilia”, a kind of ‘positive’ racism. The
transformation from one to the other is often seamless.

Thou shall never compare the nazi crimes with those of Israel!

Though on the whole, Isreali crimes are not yet comparable to nazi
crimes, there are certain tendencies that must be recognized before
they become full-fledged reality. Parallels therefore should not,
a-priori, be ignored. For example, the potential for technocrats,
officers etc. to commit crimes is not some specific Nazi characteristic
but is endemic to all modern system.

No causal relationships between the Judeocide and the Palestinian
tragedy are allowed

Every attempt to point out such a connection is considered to be a kind
of Holocaust-denial.

Thou shall never doubt the number of 6 million Jewish victims!

There is no real logical explanation for this figure’s being defended so
desperately. The source of this statistic, the SS officer Wilhelm
Hoettl(28), was certainly not the most reliable informant. If the
number of the slaughtered Jews were 500,000 less , would the Nazi crimes
be less dreadful?

Thou shall never doubt the right of Israel to exist as the Jewish
state!

As the Judeophobia will persist for ever, the Jews will need from now to
eternity a secure refuge. Therefore so many Jews who live in a greater
security outside Israel, still believe that this country should function
as a kind of anti-Judeocide insurance, even though the policy is paid
with Palestinian blood. Therefore is every anti-Zionist per this
definition a supporter of a potential Judeocide and is a Judeophobe.

Thou shall not criticize the leading Jewish organizations and the
Israeli government!

This commandment is reasoned by the above arguments. A career oriented
politician, journalist or artist in Western countries will usuall prefer
to remain silent on these issues in publicm as the potential punishment
is viewed as very painful.

This commandment, like some others on this list, applies mainly to
non-Jews, but radical Jewish critics risk being branded as self-haters.

Thou must never criticize Jewish organizations and the Zionist
leadership for abandoning the European Jewry in the Nazi era!

Most of the attempts to raise this issue are blocked by the argument
that it will strengthen the Judephobes, who claim that the Jews alone
bear the guilt for their fate in WWII.

Without trying to minimize the responsibility of the Nazis for their
crimes, one should take into account the behavior of a segment of the
Jewish community, most especially its leadership, inside and outside
occupied Europe. The victims have also a duty and responsibility and the
tragedy is always greater if a leadership betrays its own people. For
all practical purposes, the Zionist leadership in Palestine and in the
USA abandoned European Jewry(29), and in certain cases sabotaged rescue
attempts(30) and in some other cases even collaborated with the
Nazis(31).

Thou shall not doubt the central Role of Hitler in the
industrialization of the extermination of the Jews.

The fact that there is no proof for an Hitler’s order to build Auschwitz
is one of the most emotional historical disputes. Even logical
non-Hitler-centric descriptions are often labeled as Holocaust Denial.
This is one of the methods of preventing a political secular
explanation of the Judeocide. One of the reasons for this commandment is
that any other explanation implies that there was a real possibility of
saving the Jews and therefore the Zionist movement and the Allies are
guilty of abandoning them.

————–

*Shraga Elam is an Israeli investigative journalist based in
Zurich/Switzerland. He specializes in historical researches about the
role of Jewish organizations and Switzerland during the Nazi era.

(1) Judeocide was coined by Prof. Arno Mayer instead of “Holocaust”
because of the religious character of the latter. See Arno J. Mayer, Why
Did the Heavens Not Darken?, Pantheon, New York, 1988.
(2) Webster’s 1828 Dictionary
(3) This is basically Mayer’s argument
(4) Marc H. Ellis, Beyond Innocence & Redemption -Confronting The
Holocaust And Israeli Power Creating a Moral Future for the Jewish
People, Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1990
(5) Ellis p. 2
(6) Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of
the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship, Harper Collins l991
(7) J. J. Goldberg, JEWISH POWER – Inside the American Establishment,
Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, 1996,
(8) See e.g., David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews, America and
the Holocaust, 1941-1945; Pantheon Books, New York 1984
(9) The phrase “Holocaust Industry” was not invented but popularized by
Norman Finkelstein through his book: The Holocaust Industry Reflections
on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. Verso, New York, 2000
(10) See E.g. Francis R. Nicosia, The Third Reich and the Palestine
Question, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1985
(11) Lenni Brenner, Zionism and Rescue, in Jim Allen, Perdition, Ithaca
Press 1987, p. 74
(12) Interview of the author with Schwalb in 1993.
(13) See Nathan Dror-Schwalb’s archives and Ferdinand Kroh, David
kämpft. Vom jüdischen Widerstand gegen Hitler, Reinbek 1988.
(14) S.B. Beit-Zwi: Post-Ugandian Zionism in the Crisis of the
Holocaust. Tel Aviv 1977 (Heb.) 1991 (eng.)
(15) Out of a Ben-Gurion speech in London in 1938, Brenner in Perdition
p. 76
(16) See Tom Segev , but also the Israeli historian Yechiam Weitz who
tries to defend the JA in his book Aware but Helpless: Mapai and the
Holocaust, 1943-1945 Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi Press, Jerusalem 1994 (Heb.),
proves the opposite of his claim.
(17) Idith Zertal From Catastrophe to Power : Holocaust survivors and
the emergence of Israel, Berkeley : University of California Press,
c1998
(18) For a description of the restitution campaign see Nana Sagi,
German Reparations – A History of the Negotiations, St. Martin’s Press,
New York, 1986,
(19) See Shraga Elam, Hitlers Faelscher – wie juedische, amerikanische
und Schweizer Agented der SS beim Falschgeldwaschen halfen (Hitler’s
Forgers – how Jewish, US and Swiss Agents helped the SS to launder
forged money), Ueberreuter, Vienna, 2000.
(20) The organization for illegal immigration
(21) See Elam, Hitlers Faelscher and Ha’aretz of 28.4.2000 and
19.5.2000
(22) Rudolf Jungnickel, Kabale am Rhein -Der Kanzler und sein
Monsignore, Wartburg Verlag, Weimar 1994. p. 451 ff.
(23) http://home.att.net/~gerhardm/compensation.html
(24) http://home.att.net/~gerhardm/abandonment.txt
(25) See e.g. Joseph Borkin, The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben.
The Startling Account of the Unholy Alliance of Adolf Hitler and
Germany’s Great Chemical Combine, The Free Press, New York 1978.
(26) Shraga Elam, “Interhandel” – eine Saga ohne Ende – Wie das
Auslandsvermoegen der “I.G. Farben” ins Eigenkapital der
“Schweizerischen Bankgesellschaft” kam”, in Sebastian Speich (ed.) – Die
Schweiz am Pranger, Ueberreuter/Cash Vienna/Zurich 1997.
(27) The term Judeophobia is to be preferred to “anti-Semitism”. As
anti-Semitism is on itself a racist designation which was created by one
of the inventor the Nazi ideology, Wilhelm Marr in 1879. The Jews might
be many things but for sure no race and in so far that there is
something like a Semitic race, the Arab belong to it as well.
(28) The figures are contained in an affidavit made by Dr. Wilhelm
Hoettl and presented in the Nuremberg Trial (Document 2738-PS, Exhibit
USA-296). Hoettl quoted Eichmann as the source of the information and
saved his own life through this testimony.
(29) See e.g., David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews, America and
the Holocaust, 1941-1945; Pantheon Books, New York 1984 and Tom Segev
The Seventh Million – Israel Confronts the Holocaust, Hill & Wang 1993.
(30) See e.g., S.B. Beit-Zvi.
(31) See e.g., Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators. A
reappraisal. Croom Helm, London 1983 and Shraga Elam Hittlers Fälscher,
Ueberreuter Verlag, 2000.

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The Independent – London
2-12-1

Finkelstein, Son Of Holocaust Survivors –
‘The Man Who Said Too Much’

By Fergal Keane

Norman Finkelstein has angered Jews by claiming that the
Holocaust has become an industry. How can the son of camp
survivors say such a thing?

I doubt that I have ever interviewed a man who is more
exact
about directions. In a lengthy e-mail, he suggests no less
than
three different means of getting to his home in Coney
Island
subway, New York taxi or mini-cab service and thoughtfully
attaches the cost and duration of each. Norman Finkelstein,

academic at a small New York university and author of a
book
that earned the hostility of the Jewish establishment,
leading one
prominent figure to describe him as “poison … a
disgusting,
self-hating Jew, he’s something you find under a rock”. And
by
the way, he is the son of Holocaust survivors.

My concept of the typical American academic’s home was
formed entirely by Hollywood and I expected Mr Finkelstein
to
greet me on the porch of a wood-framed house, the smell of
freshly brewed coffee wafting in the hallway as we
negotiated our
way around a jumble of books and papers to his
wood-panelled
study.

Well, that’s not Coney Island, and it certainly isn’t
Norman
Finkelstein. There are books aplenty but they are neatly
stacked in
a book case in the hall. It is a narrow hall. The rooms are
small,
spotlessly clean and adorned with furniture that has been
sitting
around a long time. There is an air of monastic asceticism
about
the place.

Norman Finkelstein has the sharp, vigorously alive
appearance of
a man who takes care of his body. He jogs for several miles

every morning and I get the impression he has few if any
mortal
vices. But with Norman Finkelstein, you take care not to
intrude
much into the detail of his personal life. It is not that
he would
refuse to answer the questions, but that they seem so
irrelevant to
the central cause of his life: the Holocaust.

Since the publication of his book The Holocaust Industry,
Norman
Finkelstein has become an object of special loathing for
many
fellow Jews. His claims that Jewish leaders have exploited
the
Holocaust for financial gain and extorted money from the
German
and Swiss governments caused outrage. As if that were not
controversy enough, he also claimed that many of those who
say
they are Holocaust survivors are fakes and that interest in
the
Final Solution only arose after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war
when it
was needed as a political weapon.

He is a self-proclaimed supporter of the Palestinian cause
and
has been beaten up by Israel soldiers while taking part in
a
demonstration.

He certainly has a gift for the incendiary sentence and the

explosive simile (eg the suffering of the Holocaust has
been
reduced to the moral stature of a Monte Carlo casino). He
abhors
the current trend in Holocaust museums and exhibitions,
films like
Schindler’s List and the monuments and memorial services.
And
when he speaks about his book and the reactions, his voice
bristles with indignation. But did he not worry that by
labelling
Jewish leaders as “hoaxers and hucksters” he was
perpetuating
the anti-Semitic stereotype of the greedy grasping Jew?

“I worry that these individuals are lending credibility to
that ugly
stereotype, and I think those of us who are concerned about
the
spread of anti-Semitism have a responsibility to expose
these
individuals, to repudiate these individuals and to work so
that
these individuals are no longer part of public life, or are

allowed to
represent themselves as they do as representing American or

world Jewry.

“Abba Eban [the legendary Israeli foreign minister] makes
the
joke ‘there’s no business like Shoa business’. That is
shameful
and it ought to be rebuked, repudiated, exposed.”

But would he worry if the stand he’s taken gave comfort to
Holocaust deniers?

“Holocaust deniers and the holocaust industry have a
symbiotic
relationship. The Holocaust industry needs the deniers so
that it
can continue to claim the world is awash with Holocaust
deniers
so we need more museums, more conferences, more books, to
justify their quote-unquote ‘Holocaust education’. The
holocaust
deniers, they love the Holocaust industry, because the
Holocaust
industry supplies them with all the ammunition for their
arguments. It’s the Holocaust industry which continues to
wildly
inflate the number of survivors. As my late mother used to
say, ‘if
everybody who claims to be a Holocaust survivor actually is
one,
who did Hitler kill,’ and that’s exactly what the Holocaust

industry
is doing. It’s become the main exponent of Holocaust denial
in the
world today.”

There has been criticism aplenty from sources outside the
leadership of mainstream Jewish organisations. Journalists
who
have reviewed the book have accused him of manipulating
facts.
One accused him of being closer to the territory of the
Holocaust
deniers than the survivors; others like Rabbi Julia
Neuberger
have said the book fails because it is a rant and not a
reasoned
critique like Professor Peter Novick’s The Holocaust and
Collective Memory. Interestingly, Finkelstein’s book was
given
much greater publicity and provoked a far wider debate here
in
Britain than in the United States. The British, and
especially
British
Jews, he says, were far more willing to argue the issue.

Finkelstein bats down the criticisms and places himself in
distinguished intellectual company. Edmund Burke ranted and
so
did Tom Paine, so did Rousseau and so did Marx.

Throughout the “Taking A Stand” interview series, I have
always
been more interested in motivation than justification. With
public
figures and experienced interviewees, the arguments they
spend
every day of their lives defending are so familiar to them
that they
shift into auto-response mode. If you don’t take them off
that
safe
ground, little new is learned. With Norman Finkelstein,
every
question is carefully answered. But when he leaves the
public
debate on the Holocaust and talks about his parents there
is a
distinct change in his tone of voice. It is softer and very

often tinged
with sadness.

The flat we are sitting in was inherited from his father, a

survivor of
the Auschwitz death march. His mother survived the Majdanek

camp. Neither his mother or father received compensation
sums
for their death-camp experiences. (His father did receive a

German pension until his death.) On the walls, there are
pictures
of his parents. They are a handsome couple and it is hard
to
connect them with the half-ghosts they must have been at
the end
of the war. There are others on the wall close relatives
who did
not survive the camps. I ask him what it was like to grow
up
in the
shadow of the Holocaust.

“The earliest recollection I have, I can see it in my
mind’s eye,
was I came home from school to where we lived in a little
apartment in Borough Park in Brooklyn, an orthodox Jewish
neighbourhood, and I walked into the living room and my
mother
had her eyes fixed on the TV screen. She was watching the
Eichmann trial. I was about nine years old and then my
mother
started to read through books on the Warsaw ghetto. I
remember
trying to make this mental leap between the people in this
place
called the Warsaw ghetto starving and on the verge of
extermination and so forth, and trying to connect them with
my
parents… and there was no way for me to make, much as I
tried,
the imaginative leap. I just couldn’t.”

His parents would discuss the Holocaust as a moral or
political
issue, but they would never speak of their personal
experiences.
He does remember that when anything went wrong with the
electricity supplies in the house his father would seize
pliers and
thrust it into a socket.

Norman and his brothers would shout at him to stop but
their
mother would say: “Don’t worry, he was an electrician in
Auschwitz.” Little glimpses now and again.

Like the trip to Germany in 1979. His mother had been
called to
give evidence against some camp guards and Norman travelled

with her. “It was for me a terrible experience. When we
went, the
assumption was that these guards would be incarcerated and
would be treated as criminals of considerable dimensions…
my
mother saw them walking freely around the courthouse and
she
was totally shocked and she said: ‘Why aren’t they in
cages, those
animals, why aren’t they in cages?'”

His mother hated all Germans and all Poles, believed them
all to
be anti-Semitic. Norman does not share this view and will
be
travelling to Germany soon on a lecture tour.

Earlier in the interview, I asked him if he was never
tempted to
ask his parents about their personal experiences of the
camps.
His reply surprised me. “To tell you the truth, I was
terrified of
asking him. I was afraid that the floodgates would open and
I
wouldn’t be able ever again to detach myself from him. I
would
feel so duty-bound to somebody who had suffered so much,
that I
would never be able to say no to anything. As it was I
think
it’s fair
to say I was a faithful son… I felt that if I found out
more, I could
never separate myself from my parents.”

When his father was dying from Alzheimer’s in a public
hospital in
Brooklyn, Norman Finkelstein would visit him three times a
day to
make sure he had food. With one nurse to 30 patients,
Norman’s
mother would tell her son he had to go to the hospital.
“Your
father, after Auschwitz, he can’t die a death like that.”
Whenever
he writes, he says, he feels that his parents are looking
over his
shoulder, nodding or shaking their heads. They are in that
room
in Coney Island alright, with a faithful son and the
impossible
weight of the Holocaust bearing down on all of them. <end>

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http://www.nationalpost.com/commentary/story.html?f=/stories/20010214/473886

.html

National Post | February 14, 2001

Spreading the blame to IBM is dangerous

John O’Sullivan
United Press International

To the lengthening list of those who helped the Nazis to implement the
Holocaust, we are now told to add the name of the U.S. pioneer of
information technology — International Business Machines, or IBM for
short. A lawsuit was launched against the company in Brooklyn on Monday
on
behalf of Holocaust survivors. And a sensational new book, IBM and the
Holocaust, by the former journalist Edwin Black, alleges IBM’s
punch-card
technology enabled the Nazis to transform the otherwise haphazard
business
of mass murder into an efficient bureaucracy of genocide. Hitler even
gave
a medal to IBM founder Thomas Watson.

Since IBM stopped operating in Germany in 1940 and lost all control of
its
German subsidiary in 1941 — the year before the Holocaust began — a
long
chain of reasoning is needed to establish IBM’s guilt. That guilt rests
on
such arguments as IBM technology facilitated a more efficient pre-war
census which in turn enabled the Nazis, in Mr. Black’s words, “to
achieve
scale, velocity and efficiency” in classifying people racially and
rounding
them up.

There are, however, weak links in this chain. As the distinguished
historian Raul Hilberg pointed out to the Washington Post, for instance,

the Nazis were good bureaucrats with such primitive methods as pen and
paper. If IBM had for some reason denied them punch cards, they could
either have pirated the technology or nationalized the German company.
And
as the SS and the Wehrmacht showed on the eastern front, simply
machine-gunning people into
mass graves achieved scale, velocity and efficiency, too. Without punch
cards, the Holocaust would have lacked punch cards.

Even if Mr. Black’s speculations were correct, however, that still would

not condemn IBM. To prove complicity in the Holocaust, you must show
more
than that a company traded with the Nazis between 1933 and 1940. That
standard would convict virtually every government and international
company
of the day. What must be demonstrated is that IBM knowingly and
willingly
provided the Nazis with the tools of genocide. If that can be done, IBM
deserves censure. Otherwise, accusations of complicity become little
more
than a way of spreading the blame for the Holocaust away from the Nazis
and
on to — well, on to IBM, the entire German people (for having an
“exterminationist” culture), the Swiss, Pope Pius XII, the Allied
leaders
(for failing to bomb the death camps), the United States (for not
admitting
more German-Jewish refugees before 1939) and anyone else who did not
heroically assist the Jews from Nazi persecution.

There were, of course, individuals, groups and governments who
collaborated
with the Nazis when their full wickedness was clear. We rightly condemn
them for what they actually did. To spread the blame more widely,
however,
on to those who failed either to foresee Nazi crimes or to resist them
with
the utmost heroism is objectionable on several grounds.

First, it blames people for actions taken before 1940 on the basis of
what
we know happened from 1941 to 1945. Yet how could they be expected to
foresee a genocide that even most German Jews thought incredible?
Insofar
as people were nervous of a genocidal regime at the time, moreover, they

were nervous of Soviet Russia. Before September, 1939, Hitler’s victims
were numbered in thousands, whereas Stalin had already murdered millions
in
the forced Ukrainian famine and the Great Terror. That was why East
European governments were reasonably reluctant to ally themselves with
Russia against Germany. They wanted neither the frying pan nor the fire.

That turned out to be a political miscalculation — Hitler was the more
immediate threat, and in the end they got both Hitler and Stalin — but
it
was an understandable one.

Second, there is something morally unpleasant about people who live in
the
safety and prosperity of today demanding heroic resistance from those
who
lived daily with fear and hunger in the war years. We all like to think
we
would have been “righteous gentiles,” sheltering Hitler’s victims; in
fact
we might not have been brave or selfless enough. For that reason, one of

the political heroes of anti-Nazism, British Foreign Secretary Anthony
Eden, always refused to comment on how the French behaved under German
rule. We were never occupied, he said; we cannot know what we might have

done to survive.

Finally, the more we spread the blame, the more we lighten the
responsibility of Hitler and the Nazis. Instead of the perpetrators of a

uniquely terrible crime, they become merely the most active and
energetic
agents of an Evil that many others served timidly and nervously. But the

Nazis chose mass murder; some collaborators joined them willingly and
share
their guilt; others were dragooned into collaboration through fear or at

gunpoint. These distinctions are crucially important and must not be
fudged.

Thomas Watson, incidentally, returned the medal to Hitler in 1940 in
protest at German policies.

Or not incidentally. <end>

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The Book They Dare Not Review
An Inconvenient
Holocaust Story
by John
Lombardi
May
9, 1994
©1994 by New
York Magazine

At GQs Christmas party the year before last,
editor-for-life Art Cooper glanced up from his Moet glass
to behold a very unhappy face: a junior-junior
editor who’d just spent weeks checking a 10,000-word
story by John Sack. The former Esquire magazine
star had written a stunning piece on Jews who’d
“turned the tables” on Germans after World War
II, contributing to the deaths of 60,000 to 80,000 of
them in prisons and concentration camps. The
young GQ woman had located a Columbia University
professor who’d independently authenticated
Sack’s startling research (Antony Polonsky, the
respected Brandeis University scholar, soon did
the same for Basic Books, which would publish
Sack’s full-length account). But now the junior
editor had just learned that GQ was killing the story.
“Why?” Sack recalls her asking Cooper. After
he’d spluttered for a few moments about “the libel laws
in Britain,” where GQ is also distributed, she
interrupted him: “Bullshit, Art. It’s a Jewish thing, isn’t
it?” (Cooper says the encounter never happened
and calls the imputation absurd.)

In fact, several senior members of Conde-Nast’s
in-house law firm (Conde-Nast owns GQ) had
trooped into Cooper’s office a few days
earlier, and after they’d trooped out, the normally ebullient
Cooper had telephoned Sack. “This is not a
happy call,” he’d said. Sack, who’d once been voted
“most religious” in his New Rochelle reform
temple’s Torah class, was mystified: GQ had paid him
$15,000 plus expenses to travel to Poland and
Germany in pursuit of the story; the magazine was set
to ship proofs to the printer; a cover had been
dummied with a top line that read a death camp run by
a jew, and Cooper had even called Sack’s story
“the most important …in GQ’s history.” Yet suddenly
British libel laws were being invoked as a
reason to cancel everything?

Sack began shopping his story–which focused on
Solomon Morel, a Jewish camp commandant at
Schwientochlowitz in Poland–to likely buyers:
Harper’s Magazine, where Sack had been a
contributor, rejected the manuscript as
“overheated”; The New Yorker refused to even read it; Rolling
Stone declined, commenting, “I’m sure you’ll
understand”; even Esquire, under then-editor Terry
McDonell (who’d sent Sack to cover the Gulf
War), passed, calling the story “too bloody” (!). Only
Jonathan Larsen, the editor of The Village
Voice, would publish the piece, which he did last March.
After researchers had spent a week vetting it,
Larsen joked, “This may be the most accurate story in
the history of American journalism.”

So why the great reluctance? Solomon Morel, the
protagonist of the Voice excerpt, was finally being
sought by the Polish government for what
amounted to crimes against humanity, and Sack’s
hyperactively written book, though sympathetic
to Morel, constituted a virtual indictment. After
recounting how Morel had lost his family to
Polish collaborators during the war, he described Morel
torturing German civilians at Schwientochlowitz
(where he’d been placed in 1945 by postwar Poland’s
Jewish-dominated Office of State Security),
inviting drunken party guests to beat the Germans with
clubs:

“You! Lie on top of them crosswise! No!”
he cried, clubbing the man. “I said crosswise!
You!” he continued, and he kept piling up
Germans, three this way, three that, till he had a
human cube as high as a hand could reach.
“All right!” Solomon said, and his guests started
swinging their clubs, whacking away at the
cube as if they were hunters and it were a pod
of Canadian seals…In the high tiers, the
Germans cried “Bitte! Please!”… the Germans in
the center tiers moaned, but the Germans
in the low tiers were mute, for the weight of the
two dozen people on top had pushed their
viscera out and [they] were dying.

The Voice piece affected the media in two ways:
Alarms went off that Sack had produced a tract that
would prove useful to those whom Leon
Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, would later
characterize as “the enemies of truth,” i.e.,
traditional anti-Semites and right-wing crazies interested in
denying the Holocaust and showing that Jews
were as “bad as Nazis”; and excitement grew at Basic
Books, which signed Sack up, and 60 Minutes,
which dispatched its own researchers to verify Sack’s
reporting.

60 Minutes came up with eight eyewitnesses,
independent of Sack, who reported that Morel had
indeed “[trampled] on us with his boots and
kick[ed] us in the head” until “many” died; “beat people
over the head [with stools] until skulls were
so badly smashed that people were left dying,” and
submerged prisoners in freezing water. In all,
at least 1,500 Germans and Poles perished in Morel’s
custody after the war, according to the German
Federal Archives.

The incidence of such crimes was later verified
by Professors Istvan Deak of Columbia University’s
Institute on East Central Europe and Arno Mayer
of Princeton University’s history department. “The
great majority of political police officers
were certainly Jews,” says Deak, “and many among them
were out for revenge–but this must be put in
the context of Poland after the war. Stalin may have
chosen Jews deliberately, so they would cause
resentment and could be blamed later.” Confirms
Mayer: “I don’t play the numbers game, but it’s
more than likely that that was the case.”

The evidence was incontrovertible but
unwelcome. At the same time that Steven Spielberg’s film
Schindler’s List, which romanticized the
motives of a German businessman who’d saved 1,100 Jews
from the death camps, began gathering media
momentum, An Eye for an Eye was published by the
highly regarded Basic last November, and then
reported on by 60 Minutes. Abe Foxman of the
Anti-Defamation League immediately blasted the
report as untrue, arguing that Morel, “while born a
Jew,” would have been better described “as a
Communist of Jewish origin”; Elan Steinberg of the
World Jewish Congress appeared on 60 Minutes,
warning viewers that “you cannot rely on
eyewitnesses [because] you’re insulting the
memory of 6 million martyrs.”

Wieseltier, too, was incensed: “I’m not
embarrassed to say that as part of my job of policing the
culture, I felt that the sooner we stopped this
book the better.” He felt he lacked “the scholarly
equipment” to properly attack the book himself;
however, so he gave it to Daniel Goldhagen of
Harvard’s Center for European Studies.
Goldhagen wrote a devastating piece that impugned Sack’s
research and interpretation–like Foxman he
questioned the “Jewishness” and number of Jews
implicated in the crimes: “Whenever a Jew was
involved in some brutality, no matter how irrelevant to
the deed…Sack leaps to identify him as…a Jew”;
“Sack’s…claim that 75 percent of those in the
Office of State Security in Silesia were Jews
[is] sheer invention,” etc. Goldhagen’s rhetoric is
rote–Sack’s arguments were not “sober or
learned”; “in no sense does [his book’s] empirical basis
justify its packaging”; it creates “a sometimes
subtle and sometimes not so subtle indictment of Jews in
general,” and thus feeds ancient ant-Semitic
prejudices. In a subsequent exchange of letters, Wieseltier
allowed Goldhagen to sidestep Sack’s
rebuttals–that the 75 percent figure represented the number of
Jews in leadership positions in Silesia; that
the Jews had identified themselves as Jews; and that he’d
never made any reference to “Jews dominating
Poland” at all. Nevertheless, Wieseltier says now, “It’s
one of the stupidest books I’ve ever read, and
I frankly resolved to do as much damage as I could.”

One of Wieseltier’s and Goldhagen’s main
objections was Sack’s prose. It was far too “spontaneous,”
cracking jokes and “recreating” dialogue–all
high-journalese methods completely inappropriate for
serious historical documentation. As a matter
of fact, Sack’s style, forged in the sixties when he was
one of the preeminent “New journalists” at
Esquire, had failed to flatten itself in accordance with
nineties “stenographic” tastes. The latter
objection had already been raised by book editors who’d seen
An Eye for an Eye before Basic bought it. Bob
Loomis at Random House, for example, said the
approach should have been “reserved and clear”
but was “too hyped and overwritten”; Kent Carroll at
Carroll & Graf didn’t like “the novelistic
style” and felt that the “anecdotes and stories don’t really give
a sense of what…happened” (!); Lee Goerner of
Atheneum worked the other side of the street:, “[It]
is rather an interesting story. But for these
tired eyes, not told with very telling effect.” Terry
McDonell, then of Esquire, however, laid the
fish on the plate. “Don’t believe it,” he told Sack.
“They’re scared, and I’m scared, too.”

The New Republic’s
POV seemed to be the subtext for Bettyann Kevles’s
Los Angeles Times review and for Daniel Wick’s San
Francisco Chronicle piece, but most U.S.
publications, rather astonishingly, simply ignored Sack altogether.
Although the New York Times has been meticulous in
covering Holocaust-related subjects, and though An Eye for
an Eye was rushed to managing editor Joseph Lelyveld
and assistant managing editor Warren Hoge, columnist Abe
Rosenthal, Times Book Review editor Becky Sinkler,
and Warsaw bureau chief lane Perlez, no mention of the book
has ever appeared in the paper; fifteen phone calls
to Sinkler and her deputy Marvin Siegel went unanswered; and
Rosenthal, when reached, asked for a synopsis, then
laughed and said, “I’ve never heard of this author or his book,
okay?”

Nina King of the Washington Post’s “Book World”
likewise recalled running “a brief descriptive
mention” but no review of the Sack book, and
speculated that “it must have gotten lost with all those
other Holocaust books, but I assure you we
wouldn’t have been influenced by The New Republic”;
arts editor Ray Sokolov of the Wall Street
Journal acknowledged that no review has run or is planned,
but would say only that “it’s not our policy to
discuss these matters”; Chris Porterfield, Time’s cultural
editor when An Eye for an Eye was published,
felt that it might have “run afoul of our end-of-year
scheduling, when we do best-of lists and
children’s books”; a Newsweek editor, who asked not to be
named, said the magazine has “300 books a week
to deal with,” and though aware that Newsweek had
run a “Periscope” item on Sack’s magazine flap,
had “no idea there was a book”; AP and Reuters
reporters, who’d interviewed Sack and promised
news stories on Morel, said “the daily crush” of fresh
news–Hillary’s stone-walling on Whitewater,
Tonya’s ice-skate guilty plea–and the “tiredness” of the
subject had doomed their coverage…

Every excuse was perfect.

===================================================
You can find the author at

http://www.johnsack.com

RLA

From [email protected] Tue Mar 6 16:01:44 EST 2001
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Joel Rosenberg wrote:

> [email protected] (Joseph Hertzlinger) writes:
>
> > On Mon, 29 Jan 2001 00:18:44 GMT, American Patriot
> > <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> > >–
> > >”We don’t believe free speech extends to Nazis or fascists or racists.”
> > >
> > >- Leonard Zakim of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, as quoted in the
> > >Jewish Advocate (May 19, 1994)
> >
> > I have no reason to believe he speaks for the Jewish community.
>
> I think he speaks for many in the Jewish community, and it’s
> understandable that he does, given the behavior of Nazis and fascists
> and racists. It’s still, however, not the law in the US; the
> Constitution protects those scum, as perhaps it should.

It protects you too Joel. The Jewish student group at Binghamton University
in New York recently protested the planned visit of Hanan Ashrawi on the
grounds that it would cause trouble in the community. They lost, but they
tried
to stifle her speech.
RLA

From [email protected] Tue Mar 6 16:01:46 EST 2001
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And all good Zionists and their sympathizers agree with you, no doubt.
There is no substantiation for your assertions, is there?
I thought not.
RLA

meshehu wrote:

> In article <[email protected]>, [email protected]
> (Paul B.) wrote:
>
> > “Israel’s drive for a kind of Ottomanization of the region has been
> > noted by others, among them, Boaz Evron, who describes Sharon’s
> > plan as “a revival of the Ottoman Empire’s ‘millet’ system,”. . .
> > In Lebanon, Evron continues, the plan is to set Maronites, Sunnite
> > and Shiite Muslims and Druze against one another. Israel will help
> > each group to maintain itself in the “perpetual civil wars” that
> > will result”
> >
> > – Noam Chomsky, _The Fateful Triangle_
>
> Ahh, geez. Chomsky is a discreditable source of information if ever there
> was one. He’s the furthest thing from objective there ever was and “The
> Fateful Triangle” is a perfect example of his “selective fact finding”. He
> -only- cites publications that support his agenda and ignores any that
> don’t.

From [email protected] Tue Mar 6 16:01:46 EST 2001
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Finkelstein’s Holocaust Book Sells 50,000 Copies In 2 Weeks In Germany

By Tony Paterson, in Berlin
http://www.telegraph.co.uk

London Daily telegraph | February 18, 2001

A book accusing American Jews of using the Nazi Holocaust to blackmail
Europe into making huge “exploitative” compensation payments has sold
more
than 50,000 copies in Germany following its publication here two weeks
ago.

The Holocaust Industry by Norman Finkelstein, a Jew whose parents were
Holocaust survivors, prompted a furious debate following its publication
in
English last summer when critics in America and Britain dismissed it as
“disgusting”. A German version of the book has caused far greater
outrage.

Finkelstein believes that American Jews with the backing of Israel have
set
up a “Holocaust industry” to exploit Germany financially. Germany’s
Jewish
leaders have called for the book to be banned while the German far-Right
and
neo-Nazi publications have welcomed the work as “proof” of a world-wide
Jewish conspiracy against Germany.

Finkelstein’s promotional tour of Germany has attracted large audiences.
A
launch of his book at Berlin’s Urania theatre was attended by more than
1,000 people. The weekly magazine Der Spiegel said: “Germany is in the
grip
of Holocaust madness. Finkelstein is being taken seriously. What he says

corresponds with what many who do not know the facts think.”

In an interview, Finkelstein declared that “the Holocaust is a political

weapon. Germans have legitimate reasons to defend themselves against
this
abuse”. Finkelstein, who describes himself as a Jewish atheist and
Left-wing
anti-Zionist who supports the Palestinian cause, has been ostracised by
the
American Jewish community for his views.

Publication of his book coincided with an opinion poll that showed that
65
per cent of Germans totally or partially agreed with Finkelstein’s
assertion
that “Jewish organisations make exaggerated compensation demands on
Germany
to enrich themselves”. <end>

From [email protected] Tue Mar 6 16:02:29 EST 2001
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Ahmed Issawi

Minority Report | February 19, 2001 The Nation
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

Wiesel Words

Is there a more contemptible poseur and windbag than Elie Wiesel? I
suppose
there may be. But not, surely, a poseur and windbag who receives (and
takes
as his due) such grotesque deference on moral questions. Look, if you
will,
at his essay on Jerusalem in the New York Times of January 24.

As a Jew living in the United States, I have long denied myself the
right to
intervene in Israel’s internal debates…. My critics have their
conception
of social and individual ethics; I have mine. But while I grant them
their
right to criticize, they sometimes deny mine to abstain.

Such magnificent condescension, to grant his critics the right. And it
is not
certain from when Wiesel dates his high-minded abstention from Israel’s
internal affairs; he was a member of Menachem Begin’s Irgun in the
1940s,
when that force employed extreme violence against Arab civilians and was
more
than ready to use it against Jews. At all events, his dubious claim
above is
only a pompous preface to discarding nonintervention in the present
because
Jerusalem is at stake, and “the fact that I do not live in Jerusalem is
secondary; Jerusalem lives within me.” (Again the modesty.) There are,
sad to
say, serpents in Wiesel’s internal Eden, and they too must be
patronized:

That Muslims might wish to maintain close ties with this city unlike any

other is understandable. Although its name does not appear in the Koran,

Jerusalem is the third holiest city in Islam. But for Jews, it remains
the
first. Not just the first; the only.

“Might wish.” “Ties.” “Understandable.” “Third holiest.” Even these
lordly
and dismissive gestures clearly cost Wiesel something. After all, he
announces that the city is “mentioned more than 600 times in the Bible,”

which (assuming for a moment that one ought to think like a religious
fundamentalist in the first place) would give a Christian Arab–these
being
at least 15 percent of the Palestinian population–quite a strong claim
on
the old place. (Incidentally, let me ask any reader how often the city
is
mentioned in the Torah.) But for Wiesel all Arabs are Muslims, and even
if
they happen to live in Jerusalem, this is nothing to the way that
Jerusalem
dwells within Wiesel. Indeed, it would evidently dwell more comfortably
within him if they did not live in it at all. Do I exaggerate? I don’t
think
so. In a propaganda tour of recent history, he asserts that in 1948,
“incited
by their leaders, 600,000 Palestinians left the country convinced that,
once
Israel was vanquished, they would be able to return home.”

This claim is a cheap lie and is known by Wiesel to be a lie. It is
furthermore an utterly discredited lie, and one that Israeli officialdom
no
longer cares to repeat. Israeli and Jewish historians have exposed it
time
and again: Every Arab broadcasting station in the region, in 1947 as
well as
1948, was monitored and recorded and transcribed by the BBC, and every
Arab
newspaper has been scoured, and not one instance of such “incitement,”
in
direct speech or reported speech, has ever come to light. The late
historian
and diplomat Erskine Childers issued an open challenge on the point as
far
back as the 1950s that was never taken up and never will be. And of
course
the lie is a Big Lie, because Expulsion-Denial lies at the root of the
entire
problem and helps poison the situation to this day. (When Israel’s
negotiators gingerly discuss the right of return, at least they don’t
claim
to be arguing about ghosts, or Dead Souls.)

In a brilliant reply to Wiesel published in Vesti, Israel’s largest
Russian-language paper, Israel Shamir compares him rather leniently not
to
Jabotinsky but to the Knight of the Doleful Countenance and his mad
quest for
purity:

Be reasonable, old man. Stay within the frame of the story and within
the
bounds of common decency. Don Quixote did not drive his jeep into Toboso
to
rape his old flame. OK, you loved her, and thought about her, but it
does
not give you the right to kill her children, bulldoze her rose garden
and
put your boots on her dining-room table.

Shamir speaks of the beautiful city that Palestinians centuries ago
“adorned
with a magnificent piece of jewelry, the Golden Dome of Haram al-Sharif,

built their houses with pointed arches and wide porches, and planted
cypresses and palm trees.” He’s wasting his time on Wiesel, who says
that
Palestine was a desert before he arrived there as one of Begin’s thugs,
and
who slanders the people he helped dispossess, first by falsely saying
that
they ran away from their beloved ancestral hometown and second by
disputing
their right even to feel nostalgia for it.

In 1982, after Gen. Ariel Sharon had treated the inhabitants of the
Sabra and
Shatila amps as target practice for his paid proxies, Wiesel favored us
with
another of his exercises in neutrality. Asked by the New York Times to
comment on the pogrom, he was one of the few American Jews approached on
the
matter to express zero remorse. “I don’t think we should even comment,”
he
said, proceeding to comment bleatingly that he felt “sadness– with
Israel,
and not against Israel.” For the victims, not even a perfunctory word.

As I write, it looks as if the same Sharon will become Israel’s prime
minister. If you recall, he occupied West Beirut in September 1982,
after the
assassination of the Maronite Prime Minister Bashir Gemayel, on the
announced
and highly believable pretext that Palestinian civilians would need
protection from Phalangist reprisal. He then sent into their undefended
camps
the most extreme faction of the Phalangist militia and backed up the
dirty
work of these notorious fascists with flares during the night, and
rear-guard
cover during the day, for thirty-six hours before having them escorted
out in
triumph and thanked for their work. In other words, the bulk of US
overseas
military aid is about to be lavished on a man who stood with hands on
hip, in
belt and boots and steel helmet and binoculars, and saw a mound of human

corpses rise, and who thought it good. For this outcome, the soil has
been
manured by the beautiful thoughts of Elie Wiesel.

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Albert Reingewirtz wrote:

> In article <95fms[email protected]>, <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/instree/1949e.htm
> > Convention (IV) relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time
> > of War, Geneva, 12 August 1949
> > […]
> >
> > ARTICLE 49
> >
> > Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of
> > protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the
> > Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are
> > prohibited, regardless of their motive.
>
> So? When are all the Americans leaving the USA?

You live here Albert. Set the example.
RLA

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You, of course, are lying.
RLA

Poul wrote:

> In article <[email protected]>,
> [email protected] wrote:
> > http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/instree/1949e.htm
> > Convention (IV) relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time
> > of War, Geneva, 12 August 1949
> > […]
> > ARTICLE 49
> > […]
> > Nevertheless, the Occupying Power may undertake total or partial
> > evacuation of a given area if the security of the population or
> > imperative military reasons so demand. Such evacuations may not
> involve
> > the displacement of protected persons outside the bounds of the
> occupied
> > territory except when for material reasons it is impossible to avoid
> > such displacement. Persons thus evacuated shall be transferred back to
> > their homes as soon as hostilities in the area in question have
> ceased.
>
> Good. When Palestinians will cease hostilities, we’ll take them back.
> Marvelous.
>
> —
> Hope this helps.
> Regards,Poul A. Costinsky [email protected]
> -No amount of learning can cure stupidity, and
> formal education positively fortifies it.
>
> Sent via Deja.com
> http://www.deja.com/