Author Topic: Anti-semitism & Jews  (Read 383688 times)

Dog Dave

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Anti-semitism & Jews
« on: October 26, 2006, 09:37:53 AM »
Those of you who know me personally know of my Ashkenazi Jewish heritage and that my parents are Holocoust survivors
now while I'm not religious by any means in fact I'm quite secular and skeptical of all organized religion, I am none the less proud of my history and ethnic origin, I am also nearly driven to projectile vomiting over the amount of anti-semitisim / anti-Americanism being expounded by Islamic fundies, but even more so by American and European white supremacist groups and ties between the two through out history.

Read on.

http://www.afrocubaweb.com/news/islamright.htm#AntiNazi%20sites

(This is the source of this info.)


Links

Anti-Nazi Planning Meetings, 12/6 & 9, Washington, DC
Al Qaeda and the Far Right
The Far Right and Bio-terrorism
Holocaust denial: far right - islamic fundamentalist cooperation

AntiNazi sites
Nazis, Jews, and Moslem in the Middle East
World News

AntiWar Movement
Afghan Genocide
Chechnya
Saudi Arabia
Tajikistan
Uzbekistan   The Far Right and Islamic Fundamentalists
by Joseph Dietrich 11/18/01
There have been a number of reports in the world press on the links between Al Qaeda and far right groups such as neo-nazis and skinheads in Europe. Solid reports of such a linkage have yet to emerge in the US, but may still come given the intensely internationalist nature of the far right. The topic of far right alliances with Islamic fundamentalists is a complex one and naturally plays into the hands of various interest groups by providing propaganda fodder.

US and European Far Right groups, particularly the Nazi organizations, had a celebratory reaction to 9-11. In recent years, these groups have been seeking alliances with Islamic fundamentalists against their traditional enemies, Israel and the US. This trend actually goes back to World War II, when German Nazis sought alliances with various Middle Eastern countries, such as Reza Shah Pahlavi's Iran, Vichy Syria, Rashid Ali's Iraq, King Farouk's Egypt, the Mufti of Jerusalem's Palestine, and Zahir Shah's Afghanistan. Some 'experts' even speculated that this type of alliance was behind the US anthrax attacks of October and November 2001. There are reports that, if true, support the existence of such an alliance, including this one from a major Italian daily:
"A recent report in the Milan-based newspaper, Corriere della Serra, suggests the alliances may be heading to a new level. It cites German intelligence services, which claim Osama Bin Ladin has begun financing far-right groups throughout Europe to help him carry out attacks during a G-8 summit meeting that will be held in Genoa this summer." in Holocaust denial finds new home, 2/22/01, Canadian Jewish News
This report, which stems from the arrest in April 2001 of al Qaeda militants in Milano and Franfurt, is echoed on the Free Republic site, with some eerie additional details:
"Italian officials say they've been warned by German intelligence services that bin Laden is secretly financing neo-Nazi skinhead groups throughout Europe to commit acts of violence during the summit, sources told The Post. The attack could also come from the sky in the form of a bizarre James Bond-style strike by remote-control airplanes packed with plastic explosives, Germany's largest newspaper reported yesterday. The planes would fly into the compound where Bush and the heads of state of major European powers will be meeting at the July 20 G-8 summit in Genoa, Italy, the Bild newspaper reported." BIN LADEN PLOTS BUSH HIT, 6/13/01, New York Post
Some antiwar activities in certain countries, such as Germany, have been supported by neoNazi groups. This stems from the ultra-cynical nazi approach to politics, as in WWII when they complained about Soviet NKVD killings in the Ukraine or the depradations of the French and the British in their colonies.
In the US, there have been a number of official pronouncements linking far right groups to the Anthrax attacks, mostly without suggesting any actual linkage between such groups and Al Qaeda. US far right groups have taken on a new dimension in recent years thanks to the dramatic growth in the prison population and the rampant racial warfare encouraged by prison authorities in what they think is a clever divide and conquer strategy. New inmates are forced to join such groups or suffer the consequences of being without protection. Once you join, it is difficult to leave, even after you are out of jail. The impetus to the far right from millions thrown in jail by dubious drug laws is incalculable: as you sow, so you shall reap.
US far right groups have met with Islamic fundamentalists, especially in the Holocaust deniers' conferences, which have helped popularize far right ideology in the Arab world, where the hatred of Israel tends to move people beyond the bounds of reason, under serious provocation to be sure.
One has to wonder to what extent senior US intelligence and military circles, not to mention certain industrial ones, have been penetrated by Nazi elements from the US, South America, Canada, the Middle East, and elsewhere, and how that may be used against them in the current war. After all, who can forget that it was the same CIA that, after developing under Allen Dulles and working with so many "ex" Nazis in the post World War II era, funded and developed the mujahedeen and later supported the Taliban through Pakistan. Dulles himself had a long prewar record of representing US firms doing business in Nazi Germany. One of his main clients was Standard Oil of New Jersey, whose largest stockholder outside the Rockerfeller interests was IG Farben, the pro-Nazi German chemical combine. Then there's the postwar CIA relationship with the Gehlen organization, the key Nazi eastern front espionage group brought over as a unit into the postwar German government where it evolved into the BND, the German equivalent of the CIA. So many relationships...which sometimes are handed down across generations as key infiltrators in police, prison, intelligence and other groups recruit their own kind.   
Links
 

Al Qaeda and the Far Right
Following the money 11/19/01 US News & World Report: "Huber said in an interview that by targeting Al Taqwa and Al Barakaat, Washington is doing the bidding of "Jew Zionists" who now "rule America." A 74-year-old Holocaust denier and convert to Islam, Huber says Swiss authorities searched his house near Bern and questioned him last week. He told U.S. News that he was introduced to bin Laden activists during Islamic conferences in London, Beirut, and Brussels, the last time in either 1997 or 1998."
Al Qaeda Reaching Out To Non-Islamic Militant Groups 11/16/01, Pacific News Service: Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda organization has already been linked to violent Islamic groups worldwide. But troubling reports from Europe link the terrorist group to a host of non-Islamic, anti-American organizations, including the continent's neo-Nazis.
ATTACK ON AFGHANISTAN ECONOMY & INVESTIGATION: Far-right has ties with Islamic extreme AL-QAEDA LINKS 11/9/01, Financial Times, UK: Mr Huber, who is based in Bern, is known in Switzerland and Germany as an Islamic fundamentalist who attempts to forge links to far-right and neo-Nazi movements. A spokesman for Germany's office for the protection of the constitution, the internal intelligence agency, said yesterday that Mr Huber "sees himself as a mediator between Islam and right-wing groups". He also belongs to the revisionist movement, which believes the Holocaust did not take place, the spokesman said. Klaus Beier, spokesman for the NPD, one of Germany's main far-right political parties, said Mr Huber has often addressed NPD events... After September 11 several far-right leaders and associations in Germany welcomed publicly the terrorist attacks... Intelligence experts say the Islamic and far-right movements often share a common hatred of the US and of Jews.
Neo-Nazis and 9/11 10/29/01, Counterpunch: details the National Alliance's William Pierce's prophecies and ravings on 9-11. Remarkably prescient.
Al Qaeda arrests in Milan, Franfurt, April 2001
This lead to information on links between Al Qaeda and European far right groups
Worldwide arrests 8/7/01 Afghan Press Agency: many details on the network, but none on the far right.
BIN LADEN PLOTS BUSH HIT 6/13/01 New York Post: details some far right links
Strikes target Bin Laden networks in Europe 4/11/01 Jane's, UK: reviews the arrest of islamic militants in Milano and Franfurt, with some organizational details, but without mentioning the links to the far right.
The Far Right and Islamic Fundamentalists
The far-right fallout 11/30 McLean's, Canada
Far-Right Recruiting Drive 11/26 Mother Jones
The Far Right and Bio-terrorism
 
   

« Last Edit: July 13, 2007, 03:57:02 AM by Crafty_Dog »

Dog Dave

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Re: Muslims, Nazis, and far right hate groups echo anti-semitisim
« Reply #1 on: October 26, 2006, 09:39:01 AM »

Abortion Clinics Hit by Second Mail Scare 11/10/01 Reuters: The Army of God
High Priority To Anti-Abortion Anthrax Mail 11/9/01 Women's eNews: interesting details here, including: - "Since Oct. 15, almost 500 anthrax threats have now been mailed to abortion rights organizations and clinics nationwide. Before that, abortion clinics had received about 80 mailed anthrax threats since 1998."

While agents continue to look abroad, they are also probing US extremist groups. 11/5/01 Christian Science Monitor: "Some even suggest that domestic extremists could be working with an international terror organization. An Al Qaeda-Aryan Nations coalition, for example, may sound unlikely, but it's not impossible, say experts, given some of their shared beliefs."

Abortion Clinics Hit by Second Mail Scare 11/10/01 Reuters: The Army of God

Anthrax attacks' 'work of neo-Nazis' 10/28 The Guardian, UK: "Neo-Nazi extremists within the US are behind the deadly wave of anthrax attacks against America, according to latest briefings from the security services and Justice Department."
The Far Right: reacting to 9-11
ADL Says U.S. -Based Anti-Semites Are Feeding Sept. 11 Rumor Mill 11/9/01 Newswire
Germans fear neo-Nazi link with Islamists 10/7/01 The Guardian, UK: "Neo-Nazi groups applauded the 11 September suicide attacks on the United States, and thanked the terrorists for 'knocking out' the 'common enemy': Americans and global capitalism. A message on the website of Horst Mahler, the former extreme-left Red Army Faction guerrilla who recently emerged as the leading ideologue of extreme-right academics, congratulated the terrorists and expressed solidarity with Islamic militants."

NEO-NAZI AMERICANS HAIL THE BUTCHERS, 10/3 New York Post
The far-right fallout 11/30/01 McLean's, Canada: "The planes that toppled the World Trade Center have helped Andrews and other self-described "racial nationalists" to advance their anti-immigrant domestic agenda. The fact that Canadian troops are serving in the war on terror in Afghanistan helps even more, he maintains. "We can bask in glory because once they lose some men over there, they'll have to come back and close the borders and look at what kind of society they want to build," says Andrews, who immigrated to Canada from Yugoslavia in 1952. "Overall, for the country's culture and preservation of the European heritage, it is a good thing."
AntiNazi sites
Anti Nazi League (UK)
adl.org - Anti Defamation League
Anti-Semitism-USA - ADL
National Alliance - ADL
Explosion of Hate: The Growing Danger of the National Alliance - ADL
Nazis Among Us
Nazi Echo - Consortium News, current global ramification of Nazis
Nazism Exposed
Pagans against Nazis
Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) with its SPLC Intelligence Project and White Pride World Wide page on the international white power music industry: "You kill all the niggers and you gas all the Jews," George Burdi sang with his band Rahowa, short for Racial Holy War. "Kill a gypsy and a commie too. You just killed a kike, don?t it feel right? Goodness gracious, Third Reich."

The Ties That Bind (SPLC): on far right international networks: "pan-Aryanism"
Texas Gang Investigators Association (TGIA)
White Supremacy TGIA, good listing of far right sites
Youth Leadership Support Network's antinazi page


 

The Far Right and US Prisons
Nazi Low Riders: A Prison Gang Emerges in California ADL

Nazi Low Riders: Law and Order Magazine

Nazi and Far Right sites
American Nationalist
www.americannaziparty.com

National Alliance - the main US NeoNazi group's web site
To the Government of Israel: 18 Demands - National Alliance - echoes demands of Palestinians, shows how the nazi National Alliance, mentioned in the Counterpunch article, Neo-Nazis and 9/11, is aligning themselves on Middle Eastern issues.
Army of God - claim attacks on abortion and family planning clinics
Jew Watch
La Falange Espa?ola
le Front National (France)
List of Nazi sites - Nazism Exposed
The Heretical Press - UK Nazis
Vanguard News Network
Nazis, Jews, and Moslem in the Middle East
Persian Outpost: Iran History
The Farhud, the Mufti inspired Krystallnacht in Iraq, 1941 EretzIsrael.org (Greater Israel)
THE ARAB/MUSLIM NAZI CONNECTION Middle East Digest, Christian Action for Israel
Nazis planned Palestine subversion: ill fated nazi mission to Palestine which did not manage to achieve any popular support, tending to contradict assertions that Palestine was pro-Nazi just because the Mufti was.
The king of Greater Afghanistan 11/30/01 Guardian, UK: "What is interesting in the German dispatch is not so much the evidence of the Afghan king's sympathy for the Nazi regime. It is the desire for a Greater Afghanistan via the incorporation of what is now Pakistan's North West Frontier province and its capital Peshawar. Zahir Shah's return is being strongly resisted by Pakistan. They know that the king never accepted the Durand Line, dividing Afghanistan and Pakistan, not even as a temporary border. They are concerned that he might encourage Pashtun nationalism."
Holocaust denial: far right - fundamentalist cooperation
 

Holocaust denial finds new home 2/22/01 Canadian Jewish News: "A gathering of Holocaust deniers in Lebanon is only the tip of the iceberg in the ongoing collaboration between neo-Nazi activists from the West and Muslim fundamentalists in the Arab world, according to an expert on Middle Eastern terror groups... Emerson, who has testified before a U.S. House of Representatives committee that held hearings on international terrorism and immigration policy, said there is "consistent use of neo-Nazi and Nazi propaganda in Islamic militant circles... Lately we see neo-Nazi cross-fertilization with radical Arab groups and even some mainstream groups"
Institute for Historical Review - Holocaust deniers' think tank: "Jewish and Zionist leaders, and their American servants, have predictably lost no time exploiting the September 11 attacks to further their own interests. Taking advantage of the current national mood of blind rage and revenge, they demand new US military action against Israel's many enemies." - from IHR statement on the September 11 attacks
Holocaust Deniers to Convene in Lebanon 2/11/01 Anti Defamation League
Islamic Fundamentalists in South America
This is one geographical area that is cited for its cooperation between Iraq and Nazis.
 


Who did it? Foreign Report presents an alternative view Jane's, UK 9/19/0: This article gives some general background on Mughniyeh, suspected in the 1992 Argentina bombing of the Israeli Embassy: "In February 1992, Israeli helicopter gunships attacked the convoy of the then head of Hizbullah, Sheikh Abas Musawi, in South Lebanon. Musawi, his wife and children were killed and the revenge attack followed a month later. According to press reports, Mughniyeh was called back into action and, in a well-planned and devastating attack, his people blew up the Israeli embassy in Argentina. The building was demolished and 92 were killed. Only last year, after a long investigation, did Argentina issue a warrant for Mughniyeh?s arrest."
World War II and the post war period
How the Vatican collaborated with fascism in Yugoslavia Flame, Ireland
New Jersey and the Nazis 1998, AfroCubaWeb, Hans Wolff


Pre World War II History

Khazaria.com A Resource for Turkic and Jewish History in Russia and Ukraine. Arthur Koestler, himself of Jewish Khazar roots, was the first to popularize the history of the Ashkenazis, the Eastern European Jewish community, which comprises 90% of Jews in the world. His book, The Thirteenth Tribe, recounts the work of historians in New York and Tel Aviv, mostly Jewish. This book is sometimes labeled anti Jewish since it does not follow the standard line that all Jews have their origins in Israel, and indeed it has become hard to find: there has been a systematic campaign to remove it from public access - it has been stolen from many libraries. See Review of The Thirteenth Tribe by Arthur Koestler. The question of the origins of various Jewish communities needs to be considered apart from 'divine' real estate implications: many communities, such as the Sephardim, the Yemenites, the Ethiopeans (Falashas), have their origins at least in part in conversions centuries back. This should be a source of pride in history, not a call to cover up evidence detrimental to certain ambitions.
Zionist Organizations
Betar: www.betar.org
Discussion Groups
Coming out of the woodwork Mother Jones: "With the nation focused on the conflict half a world away, extremist groups in the US are using the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to promote their own agendas at home. Is a nation at war particularly vulnerable to such messages of racial hatred, division, and isolationism?"
Analysis of Islamic and Christian Fundamentalisms
Mythos and Terrorism: A Response to the Events of September 11 by Barry Mills, M.D., Forensic Psychiatrist
Anti-Nazi Planning Meetings, 12/6 & 9
 

 
Friends, Here's more information on the anti-Nazi demonstration on the 15th.
PLEASE FORWARD WIDELY
Neo-Nazi's Return to DC Neighborhoods: Planning Our Communities' Response
There will be a Neo-Nazi demonstration on December 15 at the Israeli Embassy. (Please see below for details plus an article about the National Alliance).
Community Meetings: Please attend and how we can best respond with community education and visible opposition. We will demonstrate that hope is greater than hate.
Thursday, December 6, 6:30 - 9:30pm Cada Vez Conference Center, Royal Lounge, 1438 U St. NW
Sunday, December 9, 4 - 6 pm Josephine Butler Center, 2437 15th St NW, Studio Room (back entrance)
For more information call the Youth Leadership Support Network (YLSN) 202-550-7229 or email lunasol@igc.org or robin@girlswirl.net
For more, see http://www.worldyouth.org/neonazi.asp   

NEO-NAZI AMERICANS HAIL THE BUTCHERS, 10/3
 

 
By BRAD HUNTER, New York Post

October 3, 2001 -- American neo-Nazis are praising
Osama bin Laden in the wake of the horrific attacks on the
World Trade Center and Pentagon.

On Web sites and in interviews with The Post, some fringe
groups are expressing sympathy - and even support - for
the terrorists who snuffed out the lives of some 6,000
Americans.

"One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter," said
August Kreis, a spokesman for Sheriff's Posse Comitatus
and Aryan Nations, from his compound in rural
Pennsylvania.

Kreis, who spoke of "an ideological oneness" with the
terrorists, has a Web site that attacks the federal
government, Israel and Jews, and praises the "Islamic
freedom fighters."

Billy Roper, of the National Alliance, echoes Kreis'
rhetoric. In an e-mail to NA members, which he said was
pirated by the anti-racist Southern Poverty Law Center,
Roper wrote: "The enemy of our enemy is, for now at least,
our friend.

"We may not want them marrying our daughter, just as they
would not want us marrying theirs. We may not want them
in our societies, just as they would not want us in theirs. But
anyone willing to drive a plane into a building to kill Jews is
all right by me. I wish our members had half as much
testicular fortitude."

Roper said his e-mail was "stripped of context," noting
"most of the people killed in the attack were whites, the
very people the National Alliance are trying to reach out
to."

G M

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Re: Muslims, Nazis, and far right hate groups echo anti-semitisim
« Reply #2 on: October 27, 2006, 04:24:16 AM »
The Peculiar Alliance
Islamists and neo-Nazis find common ground by hating the Jews.
by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross
09/01/2005 12:00:00 AM





THERE HAVE BEEN rumblings of late about the developing alliance between Islamic radicals and neo-Nazis. In late May, Israeli president Moshe Katzav gave a speech before the German parliament in which he warned, "Let's not be surprised if terror organizations use neo-Nazis for carrying out terror attacks." And on August 5, WorldNetDaily reported, "Neo-Nazi skinheads are working with radical Islamists in a growing unholy alliance that has European law enforcement officials concerned about a new front in the war on terrorism."

Such an alliance seems unlikely on its face; after all, neo-Nazis view most Muslims as racially inferior, while Islamic extremists believe that neo-Nazis are just another flavor of infidel. However, a closer examination reveals that many white-supremacist groups have expressed solidarity with Islamic terrorists recently, and in turn some white supremacists and far-right Holocaust deniers have found newfound supporters among the Islamists.


THE MOST PROMINENT recent example of white supremacists' vocal support for Islamic terrorism came from August Kreis, the new head of Aryan Nations. In an interview with CNN earlier this year, Kreis said of al Qaeda, "You say they're terrorists, I say they're freedom fighters. And I want to instill the same jihadic feeling in our peoples' heart, in the Aryan race, that they have for their father, who they call Allah." Going a step further, Kreis told CNN that he had a message for Osama bin Laden: "The message is, the cells are out here and they are already in place. They might not be cells of Islamic people, but they are here and they are ready to fight."

The Aryan Nations website reflects Kreis's desire to instill a "jihadic feeling" in his followers. For example, it features an article purporting to show that the idea of jihad can be found not only in Islam but also in the Bible. The article concludes with a battle cry: "All the sons of Abraham, all descendants of his three wives, Sarah, Hagar and Ketourah, the parties of the Islamic and Aryan World, all need to understand their duty to enact Holy Jihad, we need to live this Jihad; total war, death to our enemy, the insidious, poisonous and rabid satanic jEw." [sic]

Aryan Nations also boasts a quote on its main page further reflecting its support for radical Muslims. Attributed to Obergruppenf?hrer Gottlob Berger, the quote states that "a link is created between Islam and National-Socialism on an open, honest basis. It will be directed in terms of blood and race from the North, and in the ideological-spiritual sphere from the East." The main page also touches on other issues of importance to Muslim radicals. It demands immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from the Middle East, and under the headline "Ariel Sharon: your typical domineering jew," the website features a picture of the Israeli prime minister with fire coming out of his mouth that ends in a mushroom cloud. Underneath, the website proclaims the photograph to be Sharon's "plan for Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, etc . . . "


BEYOND THE ARYAN NATIONS, a surprising number of other white-supremacist websites openly sympathize with Islamic terrorists. The National Alliance, the country's largest neo-Nazi organization, published a 2002 essay by its founder, the late William Pierce, which claimed that the September 11 attacks were a salutary event. Pierce wrote that through the attacks, bin Laden "forced the whole subject of U.S. policy in the Middle East into the open: the subject of American interests versus Jewish interests, of Jewish media control and its influence on governmental policy." Because bin Laden broke the "taboo" about questioning Jewish interests, Pierce claimed, "n the long run that may more than compensate for the 3,000 American lives that were lost."

Neo-Nazi James Wickstrom has a webpage that includes a number of featured articles, the headlines of which provide a good indication of where he stands on the Islamist question. These include "Military Personnel Wounded in Iraq & Afghanistan For The JEW Neo-cons," "U.S. Slaughters People At Prayer At Baghdad Mosque," "U.S. Teachers Targeted By jews If They Teach Contrary to Israeli," and "The President and his jewish handlers LIED about 9/11!"

And the neo-Nazi ADLUSA website (a site designed to oppose the Anti-Defamation League) brands the Anti-Defamation League's call for Hezbollah TV to be designated a foreign terrorist organization as part of a campaign "of smear, corruption, and harassment," and promotes the conspiracy theory that Jewish hands were behind the 7/7 and 9/11 terrorist attacks. In case this doesn't make their position perfectly clear, the ADLUSA features a direct appeal to Muslims: "Moslems, lay down your guns and join our mission to remove Jews from positions of power from which they persecute one people after another; killing Americans misled by Jews only incites endless wars."

This vocal neo-Nazi support for al Qaeda reaches back to shortly after 9/11. The Jewish newspaper Forward reported in November 2001 that the World Church of the Creator displayed a bin Laden quote on its website warning Americans that they needed to tend to their own interests and not those of the Jews.

Around the same time, the website for Florida-based Aryan Action displayed the message: "Support Taliban, Smash ZOG." (ZOG stands for Zionist Occupation Government, a term rooted in the idea that the Jews control world affairs.) In a perverse twist on President Bush's declaration that "either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists," Aryan Action's website voiced its unequivocal support for al Qaeda: "Either you're fighting with the jews against al Qaeda, or you support al Qaeda fighting against the jews."


THUS FAR, THERE has been no proof of neo-Nazi cooperation with Muslim terrorist groups in planning attacks. Despite the lack of proof of operational links, several figures with feet in both movements have actively tried to bring them closer. One such individual is Ahmed Huber, a 77-year-old Swiss convert to Islam whose study is adorned with twin pictures of Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden.

Huber told the Washington Post that his goal is to build bridges between radical Muslims and the "New Right." He said that a prevalent view on the New Right is that "what happened on the 11th of September, if it is the Muslims who did it, it is not an act of terrorism but an act of counterterrorism." Certain far-right figures, such as German National Democratic Party theorist Horst Mahler, seem amenable to Huber's ideas. Mahler has spoken of the "sense of sympathy" and "common ground" that far-right European groups share with Islamists, and has admitted to "contacts with political groups, in particular in the Arab world, also with Palestinians."

The neo-Nazis' newfound love for Islamists is by no means unrequited. Some radical Islamic groups have--perhaps in an effort to undercut one of the justifications for the state of Israel--forged intellectual ties with right-wing Holocaust deniers.

At the forefront of contemporary Holocaust denial is the California-based Institute for Historical Review (IHR), which is dedicated to the idea that the Holocaust is a historical fiction. The IHR has been so heartened by the support it's received in the Islamic world that investigative journalist Martin A. Lee noted its journal's frenetic description of a "white-hot trend: the rapid growth of Holocaust revisionism, fueled by increasing cooperation between Muslims and Western revisionists, across the Islamic world."

A number of Middle Eastern newspapers, in countries such as Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, have published articles endorsing the Holocaust deniers' thesis. Beyond that, neo-Nazi writers who lack legitimacy in the West have increasingly found a platform in the Arab world. For example, Lee further reported that an article by David Duke was featured on the front page of the Oman Times.

Nor is the Islamic promotion of neo-Nazis confined to the Middle East. Lee reports that Muslims, a New York-based weekly newspaper, has published opinion pieces by both David Duke and William Pierce.

Even some Islamic groups with more mainstream legitimacy have promoted far-right figures as featured speakers. One such speaker is William W. Baker, author of the anti-Israel screed Theft of a Nation and former president of the neo-Nazi Populist Party. (While Baker claims that he did not know at the time that the Populist Party was racist, his own words undercut these denials. The Orange County Weekly reports that, in a speech Baker delivered around the time that he headed the Populist Party, he referred to Jerry Falwell as "Jerry Jewry" and commented that he hated traveling to New York City "'cause the first people I meet when I get off the plane are pushy, belligerent American Jews.")

Baker's current avocation is promoting "religious tolerance" by emphasizing the commonalities between Christianity and Islam. In this capacity, Baker has frequently spoken at events hosted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations and various chapters of the Muslim Students' Association; he was also the featured speaker at the Assadiq Islamic Educational Foundation in Boca Raton earlier this year.


THERE ARE OBSTACLES to further development of the relationship between Islamists and neo-Nazis. In Europe, ethnic Muslims are frequent targets of neo-Nazi violence, and not all neo-Nazis share the sympathy for Palestinians expressed by the likes of William Baker. As one white supremacist website puts it, "I hate Jews but that doesn't mean I automatically love the Jews' victims." And countless Muslims recoil from Nazi ideology.

Nonetheless, this developing alliance is not without historical precedent. Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, famously supported Adolf Hitler during World War II, broadcasting radio propaganda on Germany's behalf and even forming Bosnian Muslim divisions of the Waffen SS. As with al-Husayni and Hitler, the current Islamist/neo-Nazi love affair is rooted in the notion that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend": Both groups are united in their hatred of the Jews, and of the United States.

Moving forward, this peculiar alliance presents the risk that neo-Nazis may collaborate with Islamist terrorist groups on attacks. But a second danger is that the far right's newfound legitimacy in the Arab world may allow neo-Nazi figures to claw their way out from the lunatic fringe to which they're currently relegated.


Daveed Gartenstein-Ross is a counterterrorism consultant and attorney. Kamal Ghali provided research assistance for this article.


G M

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Re: Muslims, Nazis, and far right hate groups echo anti-semitisim
« Reply #3 on: October 27, 2006, 04:28:44 AM »
http://memritv.org/Transcript.asp?P1=938

11/24/2005 Clip No. 938

American White Supremacist David Duke Addressing Damacus Demonstration in Support of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad: My Country Is Also Occupied by the Zionists

Following are excerpts from a speech by American white supremacist David Duke, aired on Syrian TV on November 24, 2005.

David Duke: I come from the peace-loving people in America to the peace-loving people of Syria.

Crowd cheers.

Interpreter: If you please, no shouting.

Interpreter:I have come from the peace-loving American people to the peace-loving Syrian people.

David Duke: I come from the peace-loving people of America to your great peace-loving president of Syria.

Interpreter: I have come from the peace-loving American people to your peace-loving Syrian president.

Crowd: Our soul and our blood we will sacrifice for you, oh Bashar.

Our soul and our blood we will sacrifice for you, oh Bashar.

Our soul and our blood we will sacrifice for you, oh Bashar.

David Duke: It is only in America and around the world, it is only the Zionists who want war rather than peace.

Interpreter: All over the world... In America, and all over the world, it is only the Zionists who want war instead of peace.

David Duke: It hurts my heart to tell you that part of my country is occupied by Zionists, just as part of your country, the Golan Heights, is occupied by Zionists.

Interpreter: It saddens me and it hurts my heart to tell you that parts of my country are occupied, just as parts of your country, namely the occupied Golan, are occupied by the Zionists.

David Duke: The Zionists occupy most of the American media and now control much of American government.

Interpreter: The Zionists control most of the media outlets, and they also control the American government.

David Duke: It is not just the West Bank of Palestine, it is not just the Golan Heights that are occupied by the Zionists, but Washington DC, and New York, and London, and many other capitals in the world.

Interpreter: It is not just the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights that are occupied by the Zionists. Washington D.C., New York, London, and other cities and capitals around the world are occupied by the Zionists.

David Duke: Your fight for freedom is the same as our fight for freedom.

Interpreter: Just as the Europeans are fighting for freedom, the Arabs are fighting for freedom.

David Duke: I bring you a message from many Americans, from many people in Britain, and around the Western world. We say in unison: No war for Israel.

Interpreter: I have brought you a message from most of the Western world, from America, from Britain. The message is: No to war, no to Israel.

Duke: No war for Israel!

Crowd chants along with David Duke

David Duke: No war for Israel, no war for Israel, no war for Israel, no war for Israel!

Interpreter: No to a war for the sake of Israel... No to a war for the sake of Israel... No to a war for the sake of Israel...


G M

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Re: Muslims, Nazis, and far right hate groups echo anti-semitisim
« Reply #4 on: October 27, 2006, 04:33:24 AM »
The Day the Mufti Came to Town
By Joe Kaufman
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 13, 2006



?Death to America? can be heard loud and clear throughout the streets of Tehran. It can also be frequently heard out of the mouth of one Ikrima Sa?id Sabri, the Grand Mufti of the Al-Aqsa Mosque located in Jerusalem. Recently, Sabri had the opportunity to visit the land that he hates so much. But why would he want to, and why would we let him?



Sabri is the sixth man to hold the title of Mufti of Jerusalem, having been appointed to the position by Yasser Arafat in October of 1994. He is the considered the highest official of religious law in the area.



The first ?Grand Mufti? of Jerusalem (and third Mufti) was Haj Amin Al-Husseini. In 1921, at the time of his appointment, Amin Al-Husseini had been considered a violent extremist. Later, he would be declared a war criminal in Nuremburg for his actions with regard to the Nazis. In his memoirs, he wrote, ?Our fundamental condition for cooperating with Germany was a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from Palestine and the Arab world. I asked Hitler for an explicit undertaking to allow us to solve the Jewish problem in a manner befitting our national and racial aspirations and according to the scientific methods innovated by Germany in the handling of its Jews. The answer I got was: ?The Jews are yours.??



Like Amin Al-Husseini, Ikrima Sa?id Sabri?s hatred of Jews is prolific. About them, he has stated, ?I enter the mosque of Al-Aqsa with my head up and at the same time I am filled with rage toward the Jews. I have never greeted a Jew when I came near one. I never will. They cannot even dream that I will. The Jews do not dare to bother me, because they are the most cowardly creatures Allah has ever created...?



Sabri?s contempt is not just limited to Jews, though. He also has vitriolic feelings towards the United States. On September 12, 1997, in a sermon he delivered, Sabri stated, ?Oh Allah, destroy America, her agents and her allies! Cast them into their own traps, and cover the White House with black!? And less than a month before 9/11, on August 24, 2001, he stated, ?Allah, destroy the U.S., its helpers and its agents. Allah, destroy Britain, its helpers and its agents. Allah, prepare those who will unite the Muslims and march in the steps of Saladin. Allah, we ask you for forgiveness before death, and mercy and forgiveness after death. Allah, grant victory to Islam and the Muslims...?



With his violent posture towards America, one would imagine that Sabri would want to stay as far from our shores as humanly possible. But that is just not the case. Sabri sightings have occurred in the United States, as recently as last month.



On March 4, 2006, Muslims Intent on Learning and Activism (MILA) sponsored ?An Afternoon with Shaikh Ekrima Sabry.? The event, which was held at the Colorodo Muslim Society (a.k.a. Masjid Abu Bakr), drew a response from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Bruce DeBoskey, the Regional Director of the ADL?s Mountain States Region, in citing Sabri?s support for such things as suicide bombings, stated, ?This is a man who has a history of spewing vicious anti-American and anti-Semitic rhetoric. We would think the Colorado Muslim community would seek to distance themselves from this man's hateful rhetoric.?



However, the Colorado Muslim Society has a history of anti-Jewish sentiment. In September of 2001, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, the mosque?s spiritual leader, Ahmad Nabhan, in an interview with the Rocky Mountain News, referred to Israel as ?the first enemy.?



Colorado was not the only stop in the Sabri U.S. tour. In fact, he spent time in at least six other states ? one of which was Louisiana. On March 7, 2006, Sabri was the guest speaker at the American Legion Hall, located next door to the future home of the new Islamic Center of Baton Rouge (ICBR). A large and colorful flyer for the event is found on ICBR?s website. ICBR?s new center was a major subject in the case against KindHearts, an Islamic ?charity? recently shut down by the United States government for financing terrorism abroad.



In October of 2003, $500,000 was raised at ICBR during a KindHearts fundraiser for the new center. Yet, according to the Treasury Department, only a small part of the money went towards the building of a new Baton Rouge mosque; the vast majority of it went to Hamas. In addition, in August of 2005, ICBR acted as the Command Center for KindHearts? ?Hurricane Katrina Emergency Relief.?



The sponsor for Sabri?s Baton Rouge speech, as stated on the ICBR flyer, was the Palestinian American Congress (PAC), the American arm of the Palestinian National Authority. [The contact on the flyer for the event is PAC and ICBR dual board member, Emad Nofal.] In the past, the PAC has referred to Yasser Arafat as a ?national hero;? has celebrated the anniversary of the violent Palestinian Intifada; has condemned the Israeli executions of Hamas terrorist leaders Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz Rantisi; and has commemorated ?Al-Nakbah? (The Catastrophe), the severely offensive Arabic expression for the creation of the state of Israel. [On April 29th, at its 7th Annual Convention, the PAC will continue its hatefest with a keynote speech by newly appointed Palestinian Ambassador to the U.S., Afif Safieh, who has described the Intifada as ?our peace strategy? and has labeled Capitol Hill ?Israeli-occupied territory.?]



Grand Mufti Sabri has traveled to the U.S. previously. In July of 2003, he showed up to endorse the building of the Salah Tawfik Elementary School (STEMS), in Sunrise, Florida. In a photo that was found on the school?s site, Sabri is pictured holding the plans to the school, along with and next to Zulfiqar Ali Shah, who was, at the time, Principal of the School of Islamic Studies of Broward (which is incorporated under the same address as STEMS? location). In addition to his connection to the school, Shah is the former President (Ameer) of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), the American arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in Pakistan (Jamaat-e-Islami), and the South Asia Director for KindHearts.



For Sabri to be near a children?s school is a major problem. In an October 2000 interview with Egypt?s weekly Al-Ahram Al-Arabi, Sabri discussed his fascination with child martyrdom. He stated, ?There is no doubt that a child [martyr] suggests that the new generation will carry on the mission with determination. The younger the martyr - the greater and the more I respect him? They [mothers of martyrs] willingly sacrifice their offspring for the sake of freedom. It is a great display of the power of belief. The mother is participating in the great reward of the Jihad to liberate Al-Aqsa.?



By allowing sadistic hatemongers, such as Ikrima Sabri, into the country, the United States sends a mixed message to the world. It says that, while the nation is engaged in a far-reaching war on terror, it will tolerate those that spread the violent ideologies which ignite the enemy. This includes the terrorist support network within our borders. In the Denver event alone, over 400 people attended, standing room only.



Freedom of Speech is not a subject with infinite boundaries; it has its limits. One of those limits is screaming ?fire? in a crowded theatre. Certainly, another of those limits should be shouting ?jihad? in a crowded mosque. What a great ? but foolish ? country is America that she can allow a monster, who has cursed and declared war on her and her friends around the globe, to walk upon her shores.



G M

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Re: Muslims, Nazis, and far right hate groups echo anti-semitisim
« Reply #5 on: October 27, 2006, 04:34:15 AM »
The Times April 24, 2006


What the neo-Nazi fanatic did next: switched to Islam
By Nicola Woolcock and Dominic Kennedy

Two faces, two converts - two Muslim extremists in Britain



David Myatt, who has changed his name to Abdul Aziz ibn Myatt, is a former leader of Combat 18; he now says Islam is the best hope for "fighting the West". Photo: BBC Panorama



A NEO-NAZI whose ideas were said to be the inspiration for the man who let off a nail bomb in Central London in 1999 has converted to an extremist form of Islam.

David Myatt, a founder of the hardline British National Socialist Movement (NSM) who has been jailed for racist attacks, has changed his name to Abdul Aziz ibn Myatt. David Copeland, who is serving six life sentences after three people died in his Soho bomb attacks, was a member of the NSM.

Myatt is reportedly the author of a fascist terrorist handbook and a former leader of the violent far-right group Combat 18. But now ? in his mid-50s and sporting a red, bushy beard ? he subscribes to radical Islamist views.

In an internet essay entitled From Neo-Nazi to Muslim, Myatt asks: ?How was it that I, a Westerner with a history of over 25 years of political involvement in extreme right-wing organisations, a former leader of the political wing of the neo-Nazi group Combat 18, came to be standing outside a mosque with a sincere desire to go inside and convert to Islam? ?These were the people who I had been fighting on the streets, I had swore (sic) at and had used violence against ? indeed, one of my terms of imprisonment was a result of me leading a gang of skinheads in a fight against ?Pakis?.?

In a later interview, Myatt supports the killing of any Muslim who breaks his oath of loyalty to Islam, and the setting up of a Muslim superstate. He describes himself as having been ?staunchly opposed to non-white immigration into Britain and twice jailed for violence in pursuit of my political aims?.

He added: ?I spent several decades of my life fighting for what I regarded as my people, my race and my nation, and endured two terms of imprisonment arising out of my political activities.?

But his belief is now that: ?The pure authentic Islam of the revival, which recognises practical jihad (holy war) as a duty, is the only force that is capable of fighting and destroying the dishonour, the arrogance, the materialism of the West . . . For the West, nothing is sacred, except perhaps Zionists, Zionism, the hoax of the so-called Holocaust, and the idols which the West and its lackeys worship, or pretend to worship, such as democracy.

?They want, and demand, that we abandon the purity of authentic Islam and either bow down before them and their idols, or accept the tame, secularised, so-called Islam which they and their apostate lackeys have created.

?This may well be a long war, of decades or more ? and we Muslims have to plan accordingly. We must affirm practical jihad ? to take part in the fight to free our lands from the kuffar (unbelievers). Jihad is our duty.?

Myatt, who briefly became a monk after his second spell in prison, said that he became a Muslim while working long hours alone on a farm. He grew up in Africa, moved to Britain in 1967 and spent time living in Worcestershire. In July 2000 Searchlight, the anti-fascist magazine, described him as ?the most ideologically-driven Nazi in Britain, preaching race war and terrorism?.

Myatt was the architect of the NSM and was involved in the leadership of Combat 18. He issued a statement in response to the Soho nail bombings saying: ?Neither myself nor anyone else connected to the NSM can be held responsible for these bombs in any way. That responsibility lies with the person who constructed them, planted them and caused them to explode. Only that person, and God, know the motive behind the attacks.?

Myatt said that ?all bombs are terrible and barbaric?, whether detonated by lone bombers, Western governments in Iraq or Zionists in Palestine.

?The NSM considered the creation of a revolutionary situation in this country as necessary since it wished to build an entirely new society, based upon personal honour, and believed this could only be done by destroying the dishonourable and corrupt society of the present.

?However, the NSM neither preached, nor sought to incite, what is called ?racial hatred?. Instead, it strove to propagate the warrior values of honour, loyalty and duty, and make the British people aware of, and come to value, their ancestral warrior culture and warrior heritage.?

Myatt said recently that he had given up hope of a breakthrough by the far Right and believed that Muslims were the best hope for combating Zionism and the West. ?There will not be an uprising, a revolution, in any Western nation, by nationalists, racial nationalists, or National Socialists ? because these people lack the desire, the motivation, the ethos, to do this and because they do not have the support of even a large minority of their own folk,? he said.

?If these nationalists, or some of them, desire to aid us, to help us . . . they can do the right thing, the honourable thing, and convert, revert, to Islam ? accepting the superiority of Islam over and above each and every way of the West.?


G M

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Re: Muslims, Nazis, and far right hate groups echo anti-semitisim
« Reply #6 on: October 27, 2006, 04:35:12 AM »
Strange Allies
George Michael's "The Enemy of My Enemy" details the unlikely alliance between militant Islam and the extreme right.
by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross
08/09/2006 12:00:00 AM



FOR THE PAST FEW YEARS, there have been rumblings among terrorism analysts about an unlikely alliance between Islamic radicals and the neo-Nazi far right. This union seems counterintuitive on the surface: The far right tends to see Muslims as racially inferior, while Islamic radicals disdain most members of the far right as infidels. However, the immediate urgency of a shared enemy can sometimes take precedence over long-term differences. In his new book The Enemy of My Enemy: The Alarming Convergence of Militant Islam and the Extreme Right (University Press of Kansas 2006), University of Virginia professor George Michael argues at length that this is now the case for certain factions within the far right and radical Islamic movements.

In reality, this peculiar convergence of interests isn't new. There have been four distinct phases of cooperation between militant Islam and the extreme right, stretching back to Germany's Third Reich and World War II. During this time, much of the Muslim world sympathized with the Axis alliance, and Muslim Brotherhood members even prayed for the defeat of the Allies during their meetings.

Michael notes that the Muslim world's sympathy with the Axis alliance was "best exemplified by the cordial relationship between Hitler and the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini." Although al-Husseini's followers had already been involved in one anti-Jewish rampage by 1922, the British appointed him grand mufti that year. During the 1930s, as the Nazi government implemented a number of ordinances abridging the rights of Jewish citizens, al-Husseini lent his support to the German project and requested reciprocal assistance in his own fight against the Jews. Eventually, as World War II progressed, al-Husseini helped organize a Bosnian Muslim division of the Waffen SS, and propagandized for the Nazi cause by writing an anti-Semitic tract entitled Islam and the Jews.

The second phase of cooperation between militant Islam and the extreme right began after Hitler's defeat. As Nazi Germany crumbled, Hitler's erstwhile officers had to flee to new homes lest they face prosecution for their role in the regime's atrocities. Given the Muslim world's support for Germany, it was natural that many of Hitler's men went to the Middle East. There, out of work Nazis proved useful to their host countries by helping develop their militaries and intelligence agencies.

After Gamal Abdel Nasser became Egypt's president, for example, a number of Nazis were given prominent positions in his government. Nazi commando Otto Skorzeny trained thousands of Egyptians in guerilla and desert warfare, and even organized early Palestinian terrorist forays into Israel and the Gaza Strip in the mid-1950s. Johann von Leers, who had been a high-ranking assistant to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, produced material for Nasser attacking the United States and Israel. Von Leers even converted to Islam during this period, adopting the name Oman Amin von Leers. Corresponding with a fellow fascist, von Leers opined that "if my nation had got Islam instead of Christianity we should not have had all the traitors we had in World War II."

The third phase of cooperation came with the rise of Palestinian terrorism in the late 1960s. After witnessing such incidents as the killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, the extreme right recognized a shared hostility toward Zionism--and several times tried to collaborate with Palestinians on terrorist operations.

Some neofascists did participate in anti-Israel operations. Robert Courdroy of the Belgian SS and neo-Nazi Karl von Kyna were killed in the late 1960s while fighting for the Palestinians. Some neo-Nazi groups reportedly helped the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine carry out attacks against Jewish targets in Europe, while a neo-Nazi group called Freikorps Adolf Hitler reportedly participated in the Black September war in Jordan. Yet despite these and other incidents, no enduring bonds between the two movements were forged. As Michael writes, "At best, the ties were sparse, shallow, sporadic, and ephemeral."

THE FOURTH, CURRENT PHASE BEGAN in the 1990s. The Soviet Union's fall caused the extreme right to turn away from Communism as their prime enemy, and toward the new world order (often seen as a convergence of "international corporate finance, Jewish media, and American military power"). At the same time, the Internet's rise allowed divergent extremist groups to recognize shared interests.

The extreme right and militant Islam now possess the same enemies. They both loathe the Jews and believe that the American government is controlled by a shadowy Jewish elite. Both movements also have revolutionary aspirations, seeking to replace the existing order with "monocultural states built around racial or religious exclusivity."

While both sides began to recognize these ideological similarities in the 1990s, 9/11 hastened the convergence of interests. After the Twin Towers collapsed, many far-right leaders exulted at both the punishment inflicted on the United States and the courage displayed by the hijackers. As National Alliance organizer Billy Roper said shortly thereafter: "The enemy of our enemy is, for now at least, our friends. We may not want them marrying our daughter, just as they would not want us marrying theirs. . . . But anyone willing to drive a plane into a building to kill Jews is all right by me."

Since then, here have been intensified efforts to build bridges between radical Islam and the extreme right. Ahmed Huber, a Swiss convert to Islam who is a self-proclaimed admirer of both Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden, jubilantly declared that 9/11 would help align the two movements: "The eleventh of September has brought together [the two sides] because the new right has reacted positively. . . . They say, and I agree with them 100 percent, what happened on the eleventh of September, if it is the Muslims who did it, it is not an act of terrorism but an act of counterterrorism."

In the United States, late National Alliance founder William L. Pierce praised Osama bin Laden prior to his death. The Aryan Nations established a Ministry of Islamic Liaison, and the group's head August Kreis declared his solidarity with Osama bin Laden during an interview with CNN. Kreis even advised bin Laden that his followers were willing to fight on al Qaeda's side: "They might not be cells of Islamic people, but they are here and they are ready to fight."

MICHAEL'S BOOK IS FAR from perfect. At some points, the reader is bombarded by page after page of block quotes, with very little analysis from the author. Moreover, the book is too long, with marginal issues explored in too much detail. This is evident from the very outset, as the book's ten-page introduction includes a six-page description of pre-9/11 debates about what direction the post-Cold War world would take, including an extended analysis of the divergent views of Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington that summarizes without adding value.

Not only do these marginal issues test the reader's patience, but they also sometimes display Michael's unfamiliarity with the subjects at hand. For example, the book erroneously refers to Hezbollah as a Salafi group (page 58), and uncritically reiterates the apparently fabricated quote from Ariel Sharon that "we the Jewish people control America" (page 48).

Nonetheless, the value of The Enemy of My Enemy can be found in its in-depth study of the on-again, off-again love affair between radical Islam and the extreme right. How the latest chapter in this romance will play out remains to be seen. It may not result in joint operational work--neo-Nazi groups, in their current state of decline, may be viewed as a liability rather than an asset by Islamic militants. Moreover, although both movements despise Israel and the United States, they may prove incapable of overcoming the vast ideological divide that separates them.

But, even if a united terror front never emerges, there may be other long-term implications to the convergence between militant Islam and the extreme right. For example, the intellectual legitimacy afforded to extreme-right Holocaust deniers within the Muslim world may ultimately prove significant. This is a trend worthy of notice, and George Michael provides the best window available for glimpsing it.

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross is a senior consultant for the Gerard Group International LLC. His first book, My Year Inside Radical Islam, will be published in February 2007 by Tarcher/Penguin.



G M

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Re: Muslims, Nazis, and far right hate groups echo anti-semitisim
« Reply #7 on: October 27, 2006, 04:36:07 AM »
http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=MWM2NGQ4MzUw...YjVhYWFhYmFlNDVlOWY=

The Swastika and the Scimitar
Anti-Semitic paranoia is alive and well among Muslims.

By Jonah Goldberg


The Jews everywhere are ?the Muslim?s bitter enemies,? said a prominent Islamic leader. Throughout history, the ?irreconcilable enemy of Islam? has conspired and schemed and ?oppressed and persecuted 40 million Muslims,? he said. In Palestine, the Jews are establishing ?a base from which to extend their power over neighboring Islamic countries.? And, he proclaimed, ?This war, which was unleashed by the world Jewry,? has provided ?Muslims the best opportunity to free themselves from these instances of persecution and oppression.?

Sound like Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah? Or perhaps Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Nope. It was the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Husseini, in 1942. An ardent Nazi supporter, Husseini delivered his speech at the opening of the Islamic Institute in Berlin, one day after the Allies denounced the Nazis for ?carrying into effect Hitler?s oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe.? Husseini?s address was approved by Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, and Joseph Goebbels was in attendance. The Reich press office widely distributed the comments.

President Bush undoubtedly didn?t have any of this in mind when he dubbed our enemies in the war on terror ?Islamic fascists.? But his comments ? analytically flawed as they may be ? added some much-needed moral clarity to our current struggle. They also helped to illuminate a much-overlooked point: Islamic fundamentalism and Nazism are historically and intellectually linked. (When the Israelis caught Adolf Eichmann, an architect of the Final Solution, a leading Saudi Arabian newspaper read: ?Arrest of Eichmann, who had the honor of killing 6 million Jews.?) Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bush?s remarks seem to have struck a nerve.

The Saudi government warned ?against hurling charges of terrorism and fascism at Muslims without regard to the spotless history of Islamic civilization.? Of course, no civilization is without sin, but it takes particular chutzpah for the Saudis to preen, considering their civilization is as spotless as a leopard.

Still, the point isn?t to dredge up ancient history about Muslims and Nazis. Many Swedes got along swimmingly with the Nazis but who worries about the Swedes today? The Muslim world is another matter. Unlike the Swedes, the similarities between Nazism and Islamic fascism are not all in the past. In what may be the most important book on the Holocaust in a generation, historian Jeffrey Herf explains why.

According to the standard Holocaust narrative, the Final Solution was the product of ?hate? or racism or, often, both. Anti-Semitism became popular in the 19th century; the Nazis expanded on it, constructing a pseudo-scientific biological racism that saw the Jews as a ?cancer? on the body politic and the Holocaust as an attempt to excise the tumor. Herf does not so much debunk this version of history as cut through it.

In The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust, he concedes that hatred and racism were important, but he argues that they don?t explain Germany?s unique efforts to destroy the Jews. It?s not as if no one hated the Jews until the 1930s.

The real answer isn?t hate, but fear. Poring through miles of speeches, private comments, journal entries, party memoranda and all 24,000 pages of Goebbel?s diaries, Herf concludes that the Nazis really believed that the Jews ran the world and wanted to destroy Germany. They believed that Jews controlled not only the Bolsheviks to the east but the capitalists to the west. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was a mere pawn of his Jewish friends and advisors. The British Parliament, Goebbels wrote in one diary entry, was ?in reality a kind of Jewish stock exchange.? The ?Jewish-plutocratic enemy? was everywhere, benefiting from, and responsible for, every piece of bad news for Germany. In fact, the Nazis were sure that the Jews had declared war on Germany first, giving them no choice but to respond to the Jewish campaign to ?exterminate the Germans.? This paranoia led the Nazis to believe that rounding up millions of Jews and gassing them was an act of self-defense.

What is so frightening is how similar this is to the sounds from the Middle East today. Ahmadinejad ? dismissed by ?sophisticated? academics as a blowhard ? calls the Holocaust a myth. Indeed, there is no Jewish conspiracy theory too outlandish in the Muslim world. Huge numbers of Muslims ? even 45 percent of British Muslims ? believe that the Jews were behind 9/11. Theories that the Mossad is behind every bad headline, from the Indonesian tsunami to bad soccer performances, are common on the Arab street. According to Herf, this is only the second time the world has seen this sort of radical anti-Semitic paranoia. And, again, too many in the unspotless West are saying, ?They can?t be serious.?



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Crafty_Dog

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Re: Muslims, Nazis, and far right hate groups echo anti-semitisim
« Reply #10 on: November 01, 2006, 06:49:41 AM »
The new anti-Semitism

By Victor Davis Hanson

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Hating Jews, on racial as well as religious grounds, is as old as the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. Later in Europe, pogroms and the Holocaust were the natural devolution of that elemental venom.


Anti-Semitism, after World War II, often avoided the burning crosses and Nazi ranting. It often appeared as a more subtle animosity, fueled by envy of successful Jews in the West. "The good people, the nice people" often were the culprits, according to a character in the 1947 film "Gentleman's Agreement," which dealt with the American aristocracy's social shunning of Jews.


A recent third type of anti-Jewish odium is something different. It is a strange mixture of violent hatred by radical Islamists and the more or less indifference to it by Westerners.


Those who randomly shoot Jews for being Jews ? whether at a Jewish center in Seattle or at synagogues in Istanbul ? are for the large part Muslim zealots. Most in the West explain away the violence. They chalk it up to anger over the endless tit-for-tat in the Middle East. Yet privately they know that we do not see violent Jews shooting Muslims in the United States or Europe.


Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad promises to wipe Israel "off the map." He seems eager for the requisite nuclear weapons to finish off what an Iranian mullah has called a "one-bomb state" ? meaning Israel's destruction would only require one nuclear weapon. Iran's theocracy intends to turn the idea of a Jewish state on its head. Instead of Israel being a safe haven for Jews in their historical birthplace, the Iranians apparently find that concentration only too convenient for their own final nuclear solution.


In response, here at home the Council on Foreign Relations rewards the Iranian president with an invitation to speak to its membership. At the podium of that hallowed chamber, Ahmadinejad, who questions whether the Holocaust ever took place, basically dismissed a firsthand witness of Dachau by asking whether he really could be that old.


The state-run, and thus government-authorized, newspapers of the Middle East, slander Jews in barbaric fashion. "Mein Kampf" (translated, of course, as "Jihadi") sells briskly in the region. Hamas and Hezbollah militias on parade emulate the style of brownshirts. In response, much of the Western public snoozes. They are far more worried over whether a Danish cartoonist has caricatured Islam, or if the pope has been rude to Muslims when quoting an obscure 600-year-old Byzantine dialogue.


In the last two decades, radical Islamic terrorists have bombed and murdered thousands inside Europe and the United States. Their state supporters in the Middle East have raked in billions in petro-windfall profits from energy-hungry Western economies. For many in Europe and the United States, supporting Israel ? the Middle East's only stable democracy ? or even its allies in the West has become viewed as both dangerous and costly.


In addition, Israel is no longer weak but proud and ready to defend itself. So when its terrorist enemies like Hezbollah and Hamas brilliantly married their own fascist creed with popular leftwing multiculturalism in the West, there was an eerie union: yet another supposed third-world victim of a Western oppressor thinking it could earn a pass for its murderous agenda.


We're accustomed to associating hatred of Jews with the ridiculed Neanderthal Right of those in sheets and jackboots. But this new venom, at least in its Western form, is mostly a leftwing, and often an academic, enterprise. It's also far more insidious, given the left's moral pretensions and its influence in the prestigious media and universities. We see the unfortunate results in frequent anti-Israeli demonstrations on campuses that conflate Israel with Nazis, while the media have published fraudulent pictures and slanted events in southern Lebanon.


The renewed hatred of Jews in the Middle East ? and the indifference to it in the West ? is a sort of "post anti-Semitism." Islamic zealots supply the old venomous hatred, while affluent and timid Westerners provide the new necessary indifference ? if punctuated by the occasional off-the-cuff Amen in the manner of a Louis Farrakhan or Mel Gibson outburst.


The dangers of this post anti-Semitism is not just that Jews are shot in Europe and the United States ? or that a drunken celebrity or demagogue mouths off. Instead, ever so insidiously, radical Islam's hatred of Jews is becoming normalized.


The result is that the world's politicians and media are talking seriously with those who not merely want back the West Bank, but rather want an end to Israel altogether and everyone inside it.

Dog Dave

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Re: Muslims, Nazis, and far right hate groups echo anti-semitisim
« Reply #11 on: November 01, 2006, 08:43:16 AM »
Over my Dead Bar-Mitzva boy Body!

"Never Again"

Quijote

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Re: Muslims, Nazis, and far right hate groups echo anti-semitisim
« Reply #12 on: November 21, 2006, 11:43:12 AM »
Interesting historic fact: Himmler, one of the masterminds of the Holocaust, loved his muslim divisions because of their hatred for Jews. Also he considered muslims to be the best soldiers, brief overview:

http://www.srpska-mreza.com/handzar/handzar.htm
« Last Edit: November 21, 2006, 12:18:22 PM by Quijote »
"En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero
acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que viv?a un hidalgo de los de
lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, roc?n flaco y galgo corredor."

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Muslims, Nazis, and far right hate groups echo anti-semitisim
« Reply #13 on: November 24, 2006, 10:00:51 PM »
This post is not a perfect fit for this thread, but rather than start another thread here it is:

=================


November 24, 2006, 5:00 a.m.

Throw the Jew Joke Down the Well
Borat gets anti-Semitism wrong.

By Charles Krauthammer


Borat is many things: a sidesplitting triumph of slapstick and scatology, a
runaway moneymaker and budding franchise, the worst thing to happen to
Kazakhstan since the Mongol hordes, and, as columnist David Brooks astutely
points out, a supreme display of elite snobbery reveling in the humiliation
of the hoaxed hillbilly.

But it is one thing more, something Brooks alluded to in passing but which
requires at least one elaboration: an unintentionally revealing
demonstration of the unfortunate attitude of many liberal Jews toward
working-class American Christians, especially evangelicals.

You know the shtick. Borat goes around America making anti-Semitic remarks
in order to elicit a nodding anti-Semitic response. And with enough liquor
and cajoling, he succeeds. In the most notorious such scene (on Da Ali G
Show where the character was born), Borat sings "Throw the Jew Down the
Well" in an Arizona bar as the local rubes join in.

Sacha Baron Cohen, the creator of Borat, revealed his purpose for doing that
in a rare out-of-character interview he granted Rolling Stone in part to
counter charges that he was promoting anti-Semitism. On the face of it, this
would be odd, given that Cohen is himself a Sabbath-observing Jew. His
defense is that he is using Borat's anti-Semitism as a "tool" to expose it
in others. And that his Arizona bar stunt revealed, if not anti-Semitism,
then "indifference" to anti-Semitism. And that, he maintains, was the path
to the Holocaust.

Whoaaaa. Does he really believe such rubbish? Can a man that smart
(Cambridge, investment banker and now brilliant filmmaker) really believe
that indifference to anti-Semitism and the road to the Holocaust are to be
found in a country and western bar in Tucson?

Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world.

With anti-Semitism re-emerging in Europe and rampant in the Islamic world;
with Iran acquiring the ultimate weapon of genocide and proclaiming its
intention to wipe out the world's largest Jewish community (Israel); with
America and, in particular, its Christian evangelicals the only remaining
Gentile constituency anywhere willing to defend that besieged Jewish outpost
- is the American heartland really the locus of anti-Semitism? Is this the
one place to go to find it?

In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez says that the "descendents of the same ones that
crucified Christ" have "taken possession of all the wealth in the world."
Just this month, Tehran hosted an international festival of Holocaust
cartoons featuring enough hooked noses and horns to give Goebbels a
posthumous smile. Throughout the Islamic world, newspapers and television,
schoolbooks and sermons are filled with the most vile anti-Semitism.

Baron Cohen could easily have found what he seeks closer to home. He is,
after all, from Europe where synagogues are torched and cemeteries
desecrated in a revival of anti-Semitism - not "indifference" to but active
- unseen since the Holocaust. Where a Jew is singled out for torture and
death by French-African thugs. Where a leading Norwegian intellectual - et
tu, Norway? - mocks "God's Chosen People" ("We laugh at this people's
capriciousness and weep at its misdeeds") and calls for the destruction of
Israel, the "state founded ... on the ruins of an archaic national and
warlike religion."

Yet amid this gathering darkness, an alarming number of liberal Jews are
seized with the notion that the real threat lurks deep in the hearts of
American Protestants, most specifically Southern evangelicals. Some fear
that their children are going to be converted; others, that below the
surface lies a pogrom waiting to happen; still others, that the evangelicals
will take power in Washington and enact their own sharia law.

This is all quite crazy. America is the most welcoming, religiously
tolerant, philo-Semitic country in the world. No nation since Cyrus the
Great's Persia has done more for the Jews. And its reward is to be exposed
as latently anti-Semitic by an itinerant Jew looking for laughs and, he
solemnly assures us, for the path to the Holocaust?

Look. Harry Truman used to tell derisive Jewish jokes. Richard Nixon said
nasty things about Jews in government and elsewhere. Who cares? Truman and
Nixon were the two greatest friends of the Jews in the entire postwar
period: Truman secured them a refuge in the state of Israel and Nixon saved
it from extinction during the Yom Kippur War.

It is very hard to be a Jew today, particularly in Baron Cohen's Europe,
where Jew-baiting is once again becoming acceptable. But it is a sign of the
disorientation of a distressed and confused people that we should find it so
difficult to distinguish our friends from our enemies.

(c) 2006, The Washington Post Writers Group


http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MGJiYzJmY2U3MmNhMDNmNzZmNDZjZmNmOTI2ZDcxMWY=

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Muslims, Nazis, and far right hate groups echo anti-semitisim
« Reply #14 on: January 06, 2007, 07:02:45 AM »
Roger has had a conversation going with Buzwardo over the relevance of funding scientific research on the results of the research. 

In a related vein, it would appear former President (and a really bad one he was) Jimmy Carter now seems to be receiving Saudi money.   :roll: :x
=======================

In hindsight, Carter book seen as part of an awkward pattern

By Neal Sher NEW YORK, Dec.  26 (JTA) --

It was the spring of 1987 and the Office of Special Investigations, the
Justice Department's Nazi prosecution unit, which I headed at the time, was
in the midst of one of our most productive and historic periods.

On April 27, as a result of an in-depth OSI investigation and despite
resistance at the State Department, Austrian President and former U.N.
Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, who had served as an officer in the Nazi
army, was barred from setting foot ever again on U.S.  soil.

One week earlier, after eight years of bruising litigation, we deported to
the Soviet Union one Karl Linnas, who had been chief of a Nazi concentration
camp in Estonia.  To do so, we had to outmaneuver concerted attempts to
block the deportation by Patrick Buchanan, the Reagan White House's
communications director, and my boss, U.S.
Attorney General Ed Meese.

A month later, OSI announced the loss of citizenship and removal from the
United States of a former Chicago resident.  Martin Bartesch admitted to our
office and the court that he had voluntarily joined the Waffen SS and had
served in the notorious SS Death's Head Division at the Mauthausen
concentration camp where, at the hands of Bartesch and his cohorts, many
thousands of prisoners were gassed, shot, starved and worked to death.  He
also confessed to having concealed his service at the infamous camp from
U.S.  immigration officials.

In Bartesch's case, OSI researchers uncovered iron-clad documentary evidence
of his direct, hands-on role in the Nazi genocide.  Among the SS documents
captured by American forces when they liberated Mauthausen was what we
described as the Unnatural Death Book, a register of prisoners killed, along
with the identity of the SS guard responsible for the murder.

So powerful was this evidence that, in postwar trials conducted by the U.S.
military, the book served as the basis for execution or long prison
sentences for many identified SS guards.

An entry on Oct.  20, 1943, registers the shooting death of Max Oschorn, a
French Jewish prisoner.  His murderer was also recorded: SS man Martin
Bartesch.  It was a most chilling document.

Bartesch's family and "supporters," seeking special relief, launched a
campaign to discredit OSI while trying to garner political support.  Indeed,
OSI received numerous inquiries from members of Congress who had been
approached.

After we explained the facts of the case, however, the matter inevitably was
dropped; no one urged that Bartesch or his family be accorded any special
treatment.

Well, there was one exception -- Jimmy Carter.

In September 1987, after all of the gruesome details of the case had been
made public and widely reported in the media, I received a letter sent by
Bartesch's daughter to the former president.  Citing groups that had been
exposed for their anti-Semitism, it was an all-out assault against OSI as
unfair, "un-American" and interested only in "vengeance"
against innocent family members.

It's axiomatic that the families of every person prosecuted under the
criminal or immigration laws are affected and subjected to hardship.  It was
obvious, I thought to myself, that no reasonable person could genuinely
believe that the Bartesch case was worthy of special dispensation.

On the contrary, it would be a perversion of justice to accede to the
family's demands and grant Bartesch relief to which no one else would be
entitled.  Not even the staunchest and most sincere devotee to humanitarian
causes could legitimately claim that an SS murderer who deceived authorities
to obtain a visa and citizenship was somehow deserving of exceptional
treatment.

That's why I was so taken aback by the personal, handwritten note Jimmy
Carter sent to me seeking "special consideration" for this Nazi SS murderer.
There on the upper-right corner of Bartesch's daughter's letter was a note
to me in the former president's handwriting, and with his signature, urging
that "in cases such as this, special consideration can be given to the
families for humanitarian reasons."

Unlike members of Congress who inquired about the facts, Carter blindly
accepted at face value the daughter's self-serving (and disingenuous)
assertions.

As disturbing as I found Carter's plea, and although his attempted
intervention has always gnawed at me, I chalked it up at the time to a
certain naivete on the part of the former president.  But now, in light of
Carter's most recent writings and comments, I am left to wonder whether it
was I who was naive simply to dismiss his knee-jerk appeal as the
instinctive reaction of a well-meaning but misguided humanitarian.

His latest book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," and his subsequent defense
of it, leaves no doubt that Carter has a problem with Israel and its
American Jewish supporters.  His blame-Israel approach through the
distortion of easily verifiable facts; his whining about the influence of
the pro-Israel lobby; and even the whiff of plagiarism have been exposed and
are now spread upon the public record for all to see.

Kenneth Stein, who resigned his 23-year association with the Carter Center
at Emory University, described it this way: Carter's book "is not based on
unvarnished analyses; it is replete with factual errors, copied materials
not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions, and simply invented
segments."

Some believe that there's a venal element at work.  To be sure, Carter and
his publisher and editor knew that, if nothing else, the intentionally
provocative, misleading and insulting title would be good for sales.

Moreover, Carter and his center appear to care little about how they fill
their coffers.  After all, among the most generous contributors to the
Carter Center -- at least a million dollars each, according to the center's
published accountings -- are Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz,
best known for having offered $10 million to New York City after the Sept.
11 attacks, an offer that was rejected by then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani after the
prince implied that the attacks may have been justified because of U.S.
support for Israel; the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia; the Saudi Fund for
Development; and, most interestingly, the Bin Laden Group.

Make no mistake, these are not simply benevolent donors looking for a good
cause; they expect something in return.  And Carter gave them exactly what
they paid for: an unequivocal stamp of approval from a former, if failed,
U.S.  president for their decades of anti-Israel, anti-Semitic ramblings.
It's a diplomatic and public-relations dividend that likely will far exceed
their investment.

The exposure of Carter's views on Israel and the Jewish lobby has shed a
clearer light on his attempt to influence me in the Bartesch case.  We know
from his own confession that he has had lust in his heart. Unfortunately, he
has given us ample reason to wonder what else is lurking there.



Neal Sher, a New York attorney, previously served as director of the Justice
Department's Office of Special Investigations and is a former executive
director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.


Shelley Faintuch Community Relations Director Jewish federation of Winnipeg
C300-123 Doncaster St.
Winnipeg, MB Canada R3N 2B2 Ph.  204.477-7423 Fax 204.477-7405
sfaintuch@aspercampus.mb.ca

Live Generously.  It does a world of good.

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Muslims, Nazis, and far right hate groups echo anti-semitisim
« Reply #15 on: January 09, 2007, 05:46:28 PM »
Our Friday item about Wesley Clark brought this response from Hershel Ginsburg, an Israeli reader:

I read your posting on Clark's comments to the Huffington Post (or Puffington Host) and the comments of the "progressive" and "enlightened" anti-Semites cheering on Clark's anti-Semitic diatribe and was blown away.

Set aside Clark's coming out of his bigotry closet (where are all those who jumped on Senator George Allen's comments?); set aside Huffington's publishing this stuff (would she also publish some other failed politician's diatribe calling all Muslims terrorists?); what blew me away was the statement by one of the "talkbackers" saying it was time for "Jewish mothers, instead of American mothers, to mourn the loss of their sons for a while."

I will give him the benefit of the doubt. This turkey must have been busy hiding his head from the Thanksgiving hatchet to be totally ignorant of the losses in both military and civilian lives (and many times as many injured) just during these past six years of the Oslo Accords war and the Lebanese War of this past summer--about 1,200 or so. If the U.S. had suffered proportionally similar losses, the total would be over 50,000 dead and several times that in injuries. So believe me, we Israelis have mourned more than our share of dead, and will continue to do so.

For the record, I write this as the father of a reserve combat medic in the Israel Defense Forces, who served three years in regular IDF service (as a draftee, not a volunteer) and saw some of his buddies killed including a fellow medic who literally died in my son's hands as he was struggling to save his life from a sniper bullet. My son also served in Lebanon this past summer as a reservist. And indeed all my kids had the distinct "pleasure" of burying someone they knew who was a victim of Palestinian terrorism during the Oslo war.

Furthermore, Israel always has and always preferred to deal with its own security problems on its own at the risk of its own soldiers' lives but gets condemned when others just can't see what we see. The best example was the 1981 bombing of the Iraqi reactor at Osirak. It took 10 years until others, including the U.S., (although I don't know if the lefties ever "got it") recognized the necessity of bombing Saddam Hussein's French-built reactor.

During the 1991 Gulf War, when Saddam was raining missiles on Tel Aviv, Israelis wanted to retaliate, but Prime Minister Yitzchak Shamir, in a very controversial (here in Israel) move, gave in to American entreaties not to fight back and let the coalition do the work. There are many here who still think that was a grave mistake.

Now Israel is faced with a worse situation with Iran and Mad Mahmoud, who explicitly states he wants to wipe Israel off of the map and is backed by the "moderate" Hashemi Rafsanjani, who muses about Iran absorbing a 50% loss of its population as the bearable price for wiping out Israel in a nuclear exchange. On the one hand we have been waiting for the all-powerful and all-wise "international community" to work its magic and impose meaningful sanctions on Iran. To date, that is still a joke. So now we are facing a threat against our existence on the one hand, and grave warnings on the other hand from the "progressive" types not to expect the U.S. to do the job but not to do it ourselves either lest it upset the Muslim street. In the end we will have to deal with Iran ourselves and bear the consequences because ain't no one else going to do it.

And so this turkey says that its time for Jewish mothers to mourn the loss of our sons? Man, we wrote the book on it.

On a personal note, we were vacationing in Israel when Hezbollah began the war last July, and as we passed through Tel Aviv before heading for home, we phoned a few of our older cousins to see if they wanted to get together. None of them felt up to going out, because all were worried about children or grandchildren who were in the military. Israel has always seemed to us to be a country very much like America, but here we were struck by the difference: In Israel, the threat of war is constant and nearby; and having loved ones in the military is the norm rather than the exception.


Crafty_Dog

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Re: Muslims, Nazis, and far right hate groups echo anti-semitisim
« Reply #16 on: February 10, 2007, 07:03:23 AM »
Nobel prizewinner, author attacked at S.F. hotel
Matthai Chakko Kuruvila, Chronicle Staff Writer

Friday, February 9, 2007

Elie Wiesel, the renowned Holocaust author and Nobel Peace Prize winner, was attacked and dragged out of a San Francisco hotel elevator last week, possibly by a Holocaust denier who claims to have stalked Wiesel for weeks, police said Friday.
Wiesel, 78, was at the Argent Hotel on Feb. 1 for an interfaith conference when he was confronted around 6:30 p.m. in an elevator by a man insisting that he wanted to interview the author, said police spokesman Sgt. Neville Gittens.

Wiesel said he would do the interview in the lobby of the Third Street hotel, but the man insisted on going to Wiesel's room. The man then stopped the elevator at the sixth floor, dragged Wiesel out and tried to force him into a room on that floor.

"That's when (Wiesel) started yelling," Gittens said. The man fled, and Wiesel went down to the lobby and called police.

Wiesel was not injured. He decided to leave the conference on "Facing Violence: Justice, Religion and Conflict Resolution," and police escorted him to the airport.

On Tuesday, a man identifying himself Eric Hunt and claiming to be the attacker posted an account of the incident on a virulently anti-Semitic and anti-Israel Web site. The account matches the description of the attack that police later released.

"After ensuring no women would be traumatized by what I had to do (I had been trailing Wiesel for weeks), I stopped the elevator at the sixth floor," Hunt wrote. "I said I wanted to interview him. He protested, grabbed at his chest as if he was having a heart attack. He then screamed HELP! HELP! at the top of his lungs.

"I told him, 'Why, you don't want people to know the truth?' " Hunt wrote. "After pulling him about fifteen feet out of the elevator ... I decided that it was time for me to go."

Gittens said that police were aware of the Web site and that they had a suspect in mind, but would not confirm that they were looking for the person who posted the account online.

"We're not commenting on statements made on the Web site," Gittens said.

The site has articles on a number of topics, some of which repeat centuries-old slurs against Jews. It is registered to Andrew Winkler of Sydney, who also writes on the site. Phone calls and an e-mail to Winkler were not returned Friday.

Wiesel did not return calls made to his offices in New York and at Boston University, where he is a professor in the religion and philosophy departments.

Wiesel, a native of Romania, was sent by the Nazis in 1944 to Auschwitz, where his mother and three sisters were killed. His father died on a forced march to Buchenwald, another concentration camp, three months before the camp was liberated in 1945.

Wiesel has written more than 40 books based on his Holocaust experiences. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter named him to lead the effort to build the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. In 1986, Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Hunt said in his posting that he had intended to corner Wiesel and force him to admit that the Holocaust never happened.

"I had planned to bring Wiesel to my hotel room, where he would truthfully answer my questions regarding the fact that his non-fiction Holocaust memoir, 'Night,' is almost entirely fictitious," Hunt wrote on the site.

E-mail Matthai Chakko Kuruvila at mkuruvila@sfchronicle.com.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/02/09/BAGC2O21IL4.DTL

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Muslims, Nazis, and far right hate groups echo anti-semitisim
« Reply #17 on: March 15, 2007, 04:15:51 AM »
Poland honors woman who saved 2,500 Jews
Sendler, 97, was tortured by Nazis, but refused to disclose children's names
The Associated Press
Updated: 9:06 a.m. ET March 14, 2007

WARSAW, Poland - A 97-year-old woman credited with saving 2,500 Jews during the Holocaust was honored by parliament Wednesday at a ceremony during which Poland's president said she deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.

Irena Sendler, who lives in a nursing home in Warsaw, was too frail to attend the special session in which members of the Senate unanimously approved a resolution honoring her and the Polish underground Council for Assisting Jews.

The group's members, mostly Roman Catholics, risked their own lives to save Jews from the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Sendler was cited for organizing the "rescue of the most defenseless victims of the Nazi ideology — the Jewish children."

President Lech Kacyzinski said in an address to senators that Sendler is a "great hero who can be justly named for the Nobel Peace Prize."

Sendler led about 20 helpers who smuggled Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto to safety between 1940 and 1943, placing them in Polish families, convents or orphanages.

Tortured by Nazis
She wrote the children's names on slips of paper and buried them in jars in a neighbor's yard as a record that could help locate their parents after the war. The Nazis arrested her in 1943, but she refused — despite repeated torture — to reveal their names.

Anyone caught helping Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland risked being summarily shot, along with family members.

"I think she's a great lady, very courageous, and I think she's a model for the whole international community," Israeli Ambassador David Peleg said after the ceremony. "I think that her courage is a very special one."

In 1965, Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial awarded Sendler one of its first medals given to people who saved Jews, the so-called "Righteous Among the Nations."

She was given the honor in 1983, after Poland's Communist authorities finally agreed to allow her to travel abroad.

Crafty_Dog

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Whose Orders
« Reply #18 on: June 23, 2007, 05:19:57 AM »
NY Times

Whose Orders?
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By RICHARD J. EVANS
Published: June 24, 2007
In 1997, Saul Friedländer published “The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939,” the first of his projected two-volume history of “Nazi Germany and the Jews.” In the introduction to that volume, he announced his intention of “establishing a historical account of the Holocaust in which the policies of the perpetrators, the attitudes of surrounding society and the world of the victims could be addressed within an integrated framework.” Such a framework has indeed been missing from most historical accounts of this most difficult and challenging of subjects. They have focused either on the processes of decision-making and their implementation or on the world of suffering and death experienced by the victims. Friedländer’s first volume stood out from most other work in this field because it successfully combined both of these aspects. And his second volume does so as well. It now establishes itself as the standard historical work on Nazi Germany’s mass murder of Europe’s Jews.

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Jean-François Martin

THE YEARS OF EXTERMINATION
Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945.
By Saul Friedländer.

870 pp. HarperCollins Publishers. $39.95.
And yet “The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945” is no ordinary academic book. True, Friedländer seems to have read virtually every printed source and secondary work on his vast subject in English, German and French. His judgments are scrupulous and levelheaded. And he treats the historical controversies that have raged around so many of the topics he covers with untiring fair-mindedness. He writes without a trace of polemic or of facile retrospective moralizing. The book meticulously satisfies every requirement of professional historical writing.

What raises “The Years of Extermination” to the level of literature, however, is the skilled interweaving of individual testimony with the broader depiction of events. Friedländer never lets the reader forget the human and personal meanings of the historical processes he is describing. By and large, he avoids the sometimes unreliable testimony of memoirs for the greater immediacy of contemporary diaries and letters, though he also makes good use of witness statements at postwar trials. The result is an account of unparalleled vividness and power that reads like a novel.

Friedländer’s witnesses run into scores if not hundreds, and range from well-known figures like Anne Frank and Adam Czerniakow, the head of the Jewish administration of the Warsaw Ghetto, to more obscure individuals like Mihail Sebastian, a Romanian writer in his 30s, who recorded the descent of his country into its own barbarous version of genocide, and Raymond-Raoul Lambert, an Alsatian veteran of the French Army in World War I. Their haunting words chronicle the horror and disbelief of European Jewry as it slid down through discrimination and persecution to deportation and death. “If my life ends,” the Warsaw religious teacher Chaim Kaplan wrote not long before he was taken away to perish in the gas chambers of Treblinka, “what will become of my diary?” Like many others cited in this book, it survived not least by chance, having been smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto into the hands of the Polish underground resistance movement, from where it eventually found its way to New York and publication in the 1960s. The writings of diarists like Kaplan, committed to paper in conditions of terrible adversity, provide much of the human dimension of this remarkable book: they did not write in vain.

These people were the victims, Friedländer argues, not of anonymous processes generated in the machinery of Nazi and SS administration, but of one man above all: Adolf Hitler. Friedländer is critical of the recent, voluminous literature, mainly by a younger generation of German historians, that attempts to depict the extermination program as the outcome of coldly rational processes of decision-making by administrators, “experts” and officials in the German-occupied areas of Eastern Europe, who decided that the Jews would have to be killed so that the limited food supplies available in the area could go to the Germans, or to make room for German settlers or Germans left homeless by Allied bombing raids.

Such arguments do not explain the manic obsessiveness with which Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS and the man in charge of implementing the extermination program, tracked down Jews to arrest and kill, even traveling to Germany’s ally Finland to try and persuade its government to surrender that country’s tiny Jewish population, which was of no objective economic or strategic importance to Germany at all. Nor do these arguments do justice to the virulent language of hatred used by the Nazi leaders, Hitler and Goebbels in particular, when they spoke, as they did almost unceasingly, of the Jews.

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Page 2 of 2)



Friedländer devotes a good deal of space to quoting Hitler at length, showing clearly his personal obsession with the forces of international Jewry that, in his mind, lay behind the actions of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. It was the Jews, he believed, who had fomented the war launched (in reality by himself) in September 1939. As the United States committed itself ever more firmly to the Allied side in the summer and fall of 1941, Hitler delivered one tirade after another against the Jewish conspiracy he thought lay behind Roosevelt’s policy. It was at this point that he escalated his persecution of the Jews first to deportation to the East and then to mass murder and total extermination.

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THE YEARS OF EXTERMINATION
Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945.
By Saul Friedländer.

870 pp. HarperCollins Publishers. $39.95.
The German defeat by the Red Army at the Battle of Stalingrad in February 1943, blamed by Hitler yet again on the Jews, raised his anti-Semitic fury to fresh heights. The Jews, he declared, were driven by their innate racial instinct to subvert civilization everywhere. “The modern peoples have no option left,” he said in May, as the genocide was reaching its height, “but to eliminate the Jews.” Millions of entirely innocent and largely unsuspecting people across Europe paid for such violent fantasies with their lives.

The diaries and letters cited in the book show graphically how even as the prospective Jewish victims began to fear the worst, they continued to hope for the best; only a small minority found their way into hiding or resistance. As for the mass of non-Jewish citizens in Germany and other parts of Europe, indifference was the commonest reaction. Police and other state officials in most occupied countries cooperated willingly in the roundups and deportations; in some parts of Europe, notably Poland, Romania and Croatia, native anti-Semitism made its own brutal contribution to the genocide.

Friedländer’s narrative sweeps across an entire continent, encompassing every country affected by the Nazi drive for domination. In Bulgaria and Slovakia, popular outrage at the genocide forced governments initially willing to collaborate to change their stance. Leaders of the Roman Catholic Church in a number of countries played a part in articulating such feelings, and individual priests in Germany and elsewhere sometimes paid for their courageous opposition with their lives. But Friedländer makes it equally clear that many clerics, particularly senior church leaders who feared that open criticism of the genocide would bring down the wrath of the Nazis on them, remained silent and inactive, except where Jewish converts to Christianity were concerned. In some areas — particularly Croatia — nationalist clergymen egged on the murder squads with their own brand of religiously inspired anti-Semitism. Pope Pius XII, the subject of an earlier book by Friedländer, does not come out well, but what strikes the reader yet again is the exemplary evenhandedness with which Friedländer weighs the arguments on both sides in an area that has become more controversial than most in recent years.

The book’s chapters are organized chronologically, each covering a period of several months. This has the disadvantage of breaking up many of the narratives, so that, for example, if one wants to follow what happened in the Netherlands, or in Romania, or even in Germany itself, one has to search through several different chapters to piece the story together. But for the reader who persists from beginning to end, this structure has the benefit of enabling one to see the connections between what was happening at any one time in different parts of the Continent, to link it to the state of play of military affairs during the war (which Friedländer usefully sketches in at various points) and to follow the slow development of Nazi policy and its implementation as it unfolded over time.

In a celebrated exchange with the German historian Martin Broszat many years ago, Friedländer argued that, faced with such events, no historian could or should remain neutral. Born in Prague into a Jewish family in 1932, Friedländer grew up in hiding in France during the war, and his personal history gives him an unusually strong identification with his subject. Broszat, who had spent much of his career compiling or overseeing expert witness reports in German war crimes prosecutions and had a vested interest in preserving the appearance of neutrality, disagreed.

The practical consequences of Friedländer’s stance are apparent: the personal testimonies of Hitler’s Jewish victims create an overwhelming impression of suffering and cast a lurid light on the policies and actions of the Nazis and their helpers. The downside of this is that the experiences of the perpetrators are presented perhaps less fully than they might have been. Their testimony is generally used to describe the conditions they created rather than (with the obvious exception of Hitler himself) to chart their personal beliefs, motives or impressions. The attitudes and behavior of the German people also remain unexplained, and are presented in a sweeping and undifferentiated way that does scant justice to the nuances and complexities that recent historical work has uncovered.

And the book’s focus on the sufferings of the Jews pushes the broader context of Nazi racial policy — which includes the mass murder of millions of Soviet prisoners of war, the systematic extermination of the Polish intelligentsia, the killing of about 200,000 mentally ill or handicapped Germans, the annihilation of a large part of Europe’s Gypsies — possibly too far into the background. For as a good deal of recent work has shown, the Third Reich’s genocidal policies toward the Jews have to be understood as part of a larger policy aimed at the ethnic reshaping of Europe. Comparisons with these other victims would have made it evident that the Jews occupied a special place in the exterminatory mentality of the Nazis; they were perceived not as a regional obstacle but as a global threat, not as inferior beings like insects but as powerful enemies, whose very existence anywhere was a terrible danger to the future of the German race.

Still, to have broadened the focus too much would have made this already very lengthy and complex book almost unmanageable. Friedländer succeeds in binding together the many different strands of his story with a sure touch. He has written a masterpiece that will endure.

Crafty_Dog

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In Poland, a Jewish revival
« Reply #19 on: July 13, 2007, 03:59:34 AM »
NY Times

By CRAIG S. SMITH
Published: July 12, 2007
KRAKOW, Poland — There is a curious thing happening in this old country, scarred by Nazi death camps, raked by pogroms and blanketed by numbing Soviet sterility: Jewish culture is beginning to flourish again.

“Jewish style” restaurants are serving up platters of pirogis, klezmer bands are playing plaintive Oriental melodies, derelict synagogues are gradually being restored. Every June, a festival of Jewish culture here draws thousands of people to sing Jewish songs and dance Jewish dances. The only thing missing, really, are Jews.

“It’s a way to pay homage to the people who lived here, who contributed so much to Polish culture,” said Janusz Makuch, founder and director of the annual festival and himself the son of a Catholic family.

Jewish communities are gradually reawakening across Eastern Europe as Jewish schools introduce a new generation to rituals and beliefs suppressed by the Nazis and then by Communism. At summer camps, thousands of Jewish teenagers from across the former Soviet bloc gather for crash courses in Jewish culture, celebrating Passover, Hanukkah and Purim — all in July.

Even in Poland, there are now two Jewish schools, synagogues in several major cities and at least four rabbis.

But with relatively few Jews, Jewish culture in Poland is being embraced and promoted by the young and the fashionable.

Before Hitler’s horror, Poland had the largest Jewish population in Europe, about 3.5 million souls. One in 10 Poles was Jewish.

More than three million Polish Jews died in the Holocaust. Postwar pogroms and a 1968 anti-Jewish purge forced out most of those who survived.

Probably about 70 percent of the world’s European Jews, or Ashkenazi, can trace their ancestry to Poland — thanks to a 14th-century king, Casimir III, the Great, who drew Jewish settlers from across Europe with his vow to protect them as “people of the king.” But there are only 10,000 self-described Jews living today in this country of 39 million.

More than the people disappeared. The food, the music, the dance, the literature, the theater, the painting, the architecture — in short, the culture — of Jewish life in Poland disappeared, too. Poland’s cultural fabric lost some of its richest hues.

“Imagine what it would mean for the culture of New York if all Spanish-speaking New Yorkers disappeared,” said Ann Kirschner, whose book, “Sala’s Gift,” recounts her mother’s survival through five years in Nazi labor camps.

Sometime in the 1970s, as a generation born under Communism came of age, people began to look back with longing to the days when Poland was less gray, less monocultural. They found inspiration in the period between the world wars, which was the Poland of the Jews.

“You cannot have genocide and then have people live as if everything is normal,” said Konstanty Gebert, founder of a Polish-Jewish monthly, Midrasz. “It’s like when you lose a limb. Poland is suffering from Jewish phantom pain.”

Interest in Jewish culture became an identifying factor for people unhappy with the status quo and looking for ways to rebel, whether against the government or their parents. “The word ‘Jew’ still cuts conversation at the dinner table,” Mr. Gebert said. “People freeze.”

The revival of Jewish culture is, in its way, a progressive counterpoint to a conservative nationalist strain in Polish politics that still espouses anti-Semitic views. Some people see it as a generation’s effort to rise above the country’s dark past in order to convincingly condemn it.

“We’re trying to give muscle to our moral right to judge history,” said Mr. Makuch, the festival organizer.

Mr. Makuch was 14 when an elderly man in his hometown, Pulawy, told him that before the war half of the town was Jewish. “It was the first time I had ever heard the word ‘Jew,’ ” Mr. Makuch recalled.

He became a self-described meshugeneh, Yiddish for “crazy person,” fascinated with all things Jewish. When he moved to Krakow to study, he spent his free time with the city’s dwindling Jewish community. There were about 300 Jews, compared with a prewar population of about 70,000. There are even fewer today.

==============

Page 2 of 2)



While few Jews have returned to the city, Jewish culture has, largely because of Mr. Makuch. In 1988, together with Krzysztof Gierat, he organized the city’s first Festival of Jewish Culture, a one-day affair in a theater that held only 100 people. In 1994, it became an annual event. There are now smaller festivals in Warsaw, Wroclaw and Tarnow.

In Poland, a Jewish Revival Thrives — Minus Jews The Krakow festival has helped revitalize the city’s old Jewish quarter, Kazimierz, which deteriorated after the end of the war.

Today, quaint carved wooden figurines of orthodox Jews and miniature brass menorahs are sold in the district’s curio shops and souvenir stands. Klezmer bands play in its restaurants, though few of the musicians are Jewish.

Along one short street, faux 1930s Jewish merchant signs hang above the storefronts in an attempt to recreate the feel of the neighborhood before the war. Many Jews are offended by the commercialization of their culture in a country almost universally associated with its near annihilation. Others argue that there is something deeper taking place in Poland as the country heals from the double wounds of Nazi and Communist domination.

“There is commercialism, but that is foam on the surface,” Mr. Gebert said. “This is one of the deepest ethical transformations that our country is undergoing. This is Poland rediscovering its Jewish soul.”

This year, the festival had almost 200 events, including concerts and lectures and workshops in everything from Hebrew calligraphy to cooking. More than 20,000 people attended, few of whom were Jewish.

At a drumming workshop in Jozef Dietl primary school, Shlomo Bar, from Israel, led an elderly woman, a young boy in a Pokémon T-shirt and shorts, a young man in dreadlocks and two dozen other, mostly non-Jewish participants in a class on Sephardic rhythms.

Outside, Witek Ngo The, born in Krakow to Vietnamese immigrants, worked as a festival volunteer, directing visitors to other workshops in nearby schools.

In one, Benzion Miller, wearing a black yarmulke, white T-shirt, black suspenders and pants, taught 40 people Hasidic songs, a wood-and-silver crucifix high on the wall behind him.

Half of the festival’s $800,000 budget comes from the national and local governments. The rest is contributed by private donors, primarily from the United States, including the Philadelphia-based Friends of the Krakow Jewish Culture Festival.

Tad Taube, a businessman whose Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture is one of the festival’s biggest donors, was born in Krakow and left shortly before the war.

Together with other donors, Mr. Taube’s foundation has spent more than $10 million to help revive Jewish culture in Poland. He attended the recent groundbreaking for a Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, another effort he has supported.

Like many people involved in the resurgence of Jewish culture in Poland, Mr. Taube said he believed that it was not only important for Poland, but for Jews around the world.

Chris Schwarz, founder and director of Krakow’s Galicia Jewish Museum, agreed, saying, “Rather than coming here just to mourn, we should come with a great sense of dignity, a great sense of pride for what our ancestors accomplished.”

For others, the celebration of Jewish culture in a city just an hour away from Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp where a million Jews died, is a triumph of history.

“The fact that you can walk around Krakow with a lanyard around your neck that reads ‘Jewish Culture Festival’ is an extraordinary thing,” Ms. Kirschner said.


« Last Edit: July 13, 2007, 04:02:15 AM by Crafty_Dog »

Crafty_Dog

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G M

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Re: Anti-semitism & Jews
« Reply #21 on: July 14, 2007, 03:49:33 PM »
Another one of those darn Jewish Bankers!  :-D

ccp

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Re: Anti-semitism & Jews
« Reply #22 on: July 14, 2007, 06:44:43 PM »
And he was only 45 when he died.

I am surprised 800K is only worth 22 million today.  I remember seeing a restaurant menu once which dated back to the late 1700s.

A recall a steak sold for 2 cents.

Anyway:

http://www.alaskacoinexchange.com/Stamps%2010/10c%20Haym%20Salomon.jpg


Crafty_Dog

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Resistance against the Nazis
« Reply #24 on: July 26, 2007, 11:44:42 AM »

G M

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Re: Anti-semitism & Jews
« Reply #25 on: July 26, 2007, 01:56:11 PM »
http://www.thememriblog.org/blog_personal/en/2269.htm

Iranian Daily: Harry Potter, Billion-Dollar Zionist Project



In an article, the Iranian daily Kayhan, which is identified with Iranian Supreme Leader 'Ali Khamenei, criticized Iran's Culture and Islamic Guidance Ministry for approving the distribution of the new book in the "Harry Potter" series.

The paper said that "Harry Potter" was a Zionist project in which billions of dollars had been invested in order to disrupt the minds of young people.

Source: Kayhan, Iran, July 26, 2007

Maxx

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Re: Anti-semitism & Jews
« Reply #26 on: July 26, 2007, 06:25:46 PM »
I don't want to sound like a dick here and I mean this with all due respect but it really gets my gas going when ppl talk about the holocaust and the jew's. Hundreds of thousands and other millions of other Types of ppl died in the camps...Gypsies, Poles and Germans that were against hitler( and many more). My GrandMother's Brother had to flee germany for writting a undergound paper talking sh1t on nazi germany,..He was warned by a friend who was a Gestapo that he was going to get a visit..He knew what was going to happen and he then  contacted a relative that lived here in the states...They sent for him and he was flown out..My grandmother on the other hand was 13 years old and was for the Nazi's..She did not know anything of death camps or any of that stuff..But back to the point..I have a friend who's grandfather was put to death in a death camp and he was from Romania..He was thrown into cars with thousands of other Romanians who were carted off not even to work..They took them right to the shooting range and they were the targets and these ppl were not Romanian jews..This is after the fact Nazi were meeting with the cathoilc church and we all know how the Catholic Church felt about gypsies though out the ages and the Jews...

http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y56/TheVorpalOne/hitler19.jpg

I tend to feel that most of the media and most jewish americans never tend to mention those other "Ethnic" groups or handicapped persons that were put to death..

Also the fact the the human "Logs" that section 742 ( I think thats what they were called) what those Japanese scientist did to captured american soldiers, Chinese civilians or the Black ppl that the experimented on..I might also add that they did most of their experiments on black ppl because the Japanese considered them lower then a dog and had no mercy when testing on them

The holocaust brought death and misery to alot of different ppl..
« Last Edit: July 26, 2007, 08:34:08 PM by Maxx »

Maxx

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Re: Anti-semitism & Jews
« Reply #27 on: July 26, 2007, 08:31:07 PM »
I also forgot to mention that I HATE Tyrants and also I Apologize for my Internet sentence structure...
« Last Edit: July 26, 2007, 08:32:50 PM by Maxx »

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Anti-semitism & Jews
« Reply #28 on: August 17, 2007, 07:22:36 AM »
http://www.aish.com/literacy/jewishhistory/Napoleon_And_The_Jews.asp

Some interesting history about Napoleon and the Jews.

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Anti-semitism & Jews
« Reply #29 on: August 23, 2007, 06:04:05 AM »
Max:

Yes of course there were other groups that were hit hard as well.  That said, the title of this thread means that the focus will tend to be on Anti-semitism.

Marc
=======================

Fearing the Nazis again
Rachel Kane is among the aging Holocaust survivors whose postwar resilience is crumbling under the weight of long-buried memories.
By Maria L. La Ganga, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
August 23, 2007


 
 Photo Gallery
Nazi memories return
For more than half a century, Rachel Kane kept the memories at bay.

There were her daughters to think of, twins born in a displaced persons camp in the aftermath of the second World War. Kane didn't want to burden them with tales of the Holocaust, of a husband shot to death by the Nazis, a baby who starved to death in the forest, an extended family wiped out in a mass execution.

She didn't explain the nightmares that woke her, screaming, in the long string of cramped apartments the family called home after resettling in Detroit and then Los Angeles.

Instead, the university-educated Hebrew teacher who spoke seven languages regaled her daughters with stories about her "beautiful life" before Hitler's armies stormed Poland, successfully locking the war years away until 1998.

That was when her second husband died. When she began to lose her battle with dementia. When she became convinced that the soldiers were coming for her, as they'd done so many years before.

Lying in her room at the Los Angeles Jewish Home for the Aging in Reseda, the elderly woman with the soft white hair and bright blue eyes "was seeing Nazis," recounted daughter Esther Kane Meyers. "She was hearing things. I came and sat with her every day. It was the most painful thing I'd ever seen. It was all happening, right there."

Watching 50 years of strength crumble under the weight of a long-buried trauma made Kane's family sad and angry. What they did not know at the time was that her experience was not uncommon among aging victims of Nazi brutality.

In recent years, a body of research has sprung from the lives of Holocaust survivors like Kane as caregivers and mental health professionals work to understand and alleviate the pain of old age and remembered trauma. But when she first began to relive her past, the territory was largely uncharted.

"There has never been a group of genocide survivors live to this age in history," said Paula David, editor of the manual "Caring for Aging Holocaust Survivors." Their experiences offer a rare window into the confluence of trauma and aging.

One clear lesson from this shrinking group, whose median age is more than 70, is that "resilience ages, too," David said, "and diminishes along with hearing and vision."

The Los Angeles Jewish Home for the Aging has the largest population of Holocaust survivors in the West, according to nursing home officials. There were 63 such patients at latest count, although that number could rise to nearly 90 when a new building opens later this summer.

Although every Holocaust survivor is different, Kane's end-of-life experiences are a good illustration of the kinds of things they can go through, said Chaya Berci, the Jewish Home's executive director of nursing.

As people age and their grasp on the present weakens, events from the distant past can seem as real as anything unfolding today. For those who lived through severe early trauma, the memories that come rushing back are often of their most harrowing experiences.

Mental health professionals debate whether the symptoms they see in some aging Holocaust survivors stem from classic trauma or other conditions, such as an incomplete mourning process, said Allen Glicksman, director of research at the Philadelphia Corp. for Aging, who has studied the experiences of Nazi victims in long-term care.

Psychologist Marla Martin met with Kane regularly over the course of nearly three years as the woman's depression and anxiety bloomed into a psychotic break fraught with paranoia and auditory hallucinations.

Even pleasant events sometimes took on dark overtones for Kane, as the voices in her head reminded her of all she had witnessed and lost.

In October 1998, Martin wrote in her case notes that Kane's "daughter Esther gave her two nice blankets, and this started a problem for her. She was feeling guilt because of the Holocaust and the voices telling her to share the blankets. How could she have two nice blankets?"

Martin has been treating Holocaust survivors at the Los Angeles Jewish Home for 15 years. By the time she started seeing Kane, she had already observed that a "sizable minority" of the strongest survivors dwelt daily on past horrors.

And a psychotic break like Kane's is "not unusual," she said. "People who have had really acute trauma can re-experience it, feel that they're there."

Kane's first husband was shot to death after Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. Pregnant and alone in an occupied city, she fled to her family's home in the small town of Byten. But the soldiers soon reached there, too, and forced Jews into a cramped ghetto.

After Kane gave birth, her father, a respected rabbi, begged her to leave. It was the only way, he told her, to avert disaster. So she took her infant daughter into the nearby forest and joined the resistance fighters.

The partisans were constantly on the run, sabotaging Nazi efforts, helping Jews escape from the ghettos, scavenging for food. Kane survived, but the baby died of starvation. Her name was Freidele, "joy" in Yiddish.

More than half a century later, as Kane's dementia worsened along with her health, Martin said, the elderly woman became increasingly focused on controlling her environment.

The shades on her window had to be just so. The leg supports on her wheelchair were never quite right. The more panicky and paranoid she felt, the tighter her clothes seemed to be.

"This was beyond the normal kind of reactions that people have adjusting to aging," Martin said. "All of the loss of control she would have had in the Holocaust and what she had lost, that was reawakened."

Kane's failing vision meant much more than not being able to read, Martin said; it robbed her of an important bridge to prewar happiness, "to her loving father, a rabbi, who shared his wall of books with her." A large-print prayer book helped.

She had trouble eating because of denture problems and depended on pureed foods. She felt that she was starving -- a common trigger for Holocaust memories -- and began to lose weight. Voices in her head reminded her of her first daughter's death by starvation.

When Kane's psychotic break began, there was no manual to help guide nursing homes and family members as they cared for aging Holocaust survivors.

Early on in Kane's breakdown, her caregivers recommended that she be transferred to a psychiatric unit at UCLA. But Meyers fought hard to keep her elderly mother in her own room -- and succeeded.

It was a critical lesson for administrators at the Jewish Home about the importance of familiar surroundings for Holocaust survivors and other dementia patients; the result is a psychiatric unit that is scheduled to open in the home's new building.

Kane's experiences point out a conundrum: Though nursing homes are often the best choice for emotionally and physically frail Holocaust survivors, institutional life -- even in the most caring facilities -- can be a constant reminder of wartime horror.

Mundane experiences -- showers, doctor visits, hunger pangs, lack of privacy -- can trigger memories of concentration camps.

"Caring for Aging Holocaust Survivors: A Practice Manual" lists nearly 40 such emotional catalysts.

The manual was published three years ago; it could have gone to press much earlier, said editor David, but "every time we talked to anyone, the list kept growing."

Lack of privacy is one reminder of life in concentration camps or in hiding, when "there was no privacy for the Jews," the manual notes, "and at any given moment the world as they knew it could be turned inside out."

Standing in line for treatment or service also can cause extreme anxiety in survivors who were forced to line up for food rations, roll calls, deportations -- even death.

As much as possible at the Los Angeles Jewish Home, Holocaust survivors are given private accommodations. Starting in 2006, residents ate restaurant-style meals in bright dining rooms, where the food comes out one course at a time and is tailored for individual health needs.

Personal hygiene is another trigger for many camp survivors, who watched as loved ones were promised showers but herded into gas chambers instead.

Caregivers can offer baths as an option, but that, too, can be an imperfect solution, because some of the Nazis' victims were placed in tubs of dry ice for hypothermia experiments.

One major point in "Caring for Aging Holocaust Survivors" is that what can cause distress in one person may be perfectly innocuous to another. It's a lesson David learned firsthand at the Baycrest Geriatric Health Care System in Toronto, where she is senior social worker and coordinates the Holocaust resource program.

"We have one gentleman who watched his entire family marched into a gas chamber. He was held back so he could pick up their corpses in a wheelbarrow and take them to the oven," she recounted. "But his family arranged for him to have a daily shower. He feels thoroughly refreshed by it."

Certain realities of nursing home life simply cannot be avoided, David said. For some, "like the impaired person who we cannot convince that they are safe and we are not the enemy," institutional life means ongoing trauma, and individual attention is the only salve.

That is why the international organization that spearheads reparations to Nazi victims worldwide allocates millions of dollars annually for home care and is pushing the German government for more funding.

In a 2005 opinion piece in the Jewish newspaper the Forward, Roman Kent, an Auschwitz survivor and senior officer with the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, called home care "one of our most pressing needs."

"We survivors are adamant about remaining in our own homes rather than entering a nursing home," Kent wrote. "To someone who endured incarceration by the Nazis, the prospect of institutionalization is frightening. It triggers memories and even induces panic."

So far, the German government has allocated only about $50 million for home care services, an amount nowhere near enough to assist the nearly 700,000 surviving Nazi victims around the world, more than 120,000 of whom live in the United States.

And some of the frailest survivors are simply better cared for in a nursing home, said Susie Forer-Dehrey, associate executive director of Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles. "For some people, including Holocaust survivors. . . with a psychotic break or Alzheimer's," she said, "it probably is the best place to be."

Today, Kane is 96 and one of the oldest surviving Nazi victims in the U.S. She has end-stage Alzheimer's disease. She no longer speaks and is severely hard of hearing. Still, her caregivers try hard to keep her comfortable, secure and free of reminders of her painful past.

Every morning she is carefully dressed and helped into her wheelchair. Caregivers at the Jewish Home roll her to meals in a second-floor dining room, where pureed food is gently spooned into her mouth. She can neither chew well nor feed herself. She naps a lot.

Exercise classes are held in the same dining room, after the breakfast dishes have been cleared and the tables pushed to the walls. Frank Sinatra croons from the stereo. Kane squeezes a soft yellow ball in her weathered hands. The instructor slowly counts to nine: "One more, Rachel. Very good."

And every Friday afternoon, there is Shabbat, the service that has shaped Kane's life for the better part of a century, giving her strength and solace in the darkest times.

Meyers wheels her mother down to the multipurpose room, where two electric candles are lighted to signal the Sabbath's official start. Wine is poured into plastic medicine cups. The challah is broken and passed around by hands sheathed in protective gloves. Prayers are intoned.

Meyers repeats the sacred words into a small black apparatus she holds in her hand like a deck of cards. It amplifies the prayer and sends it through a headset directly into her mother's ears.

Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech ha-olam. Praised are You, Lord our God, King of the universe.

maria.laganga@latimes.com
 
http://www.latimes.com/la-me-rachel23aug23,0,3005247,full.story?coll=la-home-center
« Last Edit: August 23, 2007, 06:06:09 AM by Crafty_Dog »

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Anti-semitism & Jews
« Reply #30 on: September 09, 2007, 09:30:12 AM »
Rabbi stabbed on street in Frankfurt, police say


The Associated Press
Published: September 8, 2007


FRANKFURT, Germany: A 42-year-old rabbi was stabbed in the stomach by another man on a Frankfurt street in what appeared to be a spontaneous attack, police said Saturday.
The rabbi underwent surgery after the Friday night attack and appears to be out of danger, police said.
The rabbi, whose name was not disclosed, was walking with two other people when they encountered the assailant and two women, a police statement said.
The man, whom witnesses described as possibly Arab, spoke to the rabbi — who was wearing a Jewish head-covering — in what sounded like Arabic.
The rabbi didn't understand, and the man threatened in German to kill him, then stabbed him once, the statement said. The attacker fled and the women who were with him ran in different directions.

Police said there were no indications that the man had planned his attack.
Roland Koch, the governor of the German state of Hesse, deplored the stabbing as "a perfidious deed that we can only view with horror and indignation and most strongly condemn."

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Anti-semitism & Jews
« Reply #31 on: September 15, 2007, 10:20:27 AM »
http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070915/COMMENTARY/109150003/1008
 
 
Scapegoats yet again
Victor Davis Hanson
September 15, 2007

Who recently said: "These Jews started 19 Crusades. The 19th was World War I. Why? Only to build Israel." Some holdover Nazi?

Hardly. It was former Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan of Turkey, a NATO ally. He went on to claim that the Jews — whom he refers to as "bacteria" — controlled China, India and Japan, and ran the United States.

Who alleged: "The Arabs who were involved in September 11 [2001] cooperated with the Zionists, actually. It was a cooperation. They gave them the perfect excuse to denounce all Arabs." A conspiracy nut? Actually, it was former Democratic U.S. Sen. James Abourezk of South Dakota. He denounced Israel on a Hezbollah-owned television station, adding: "I marveled at the Hezbollah resistance to Israel.... It was a marvel of organization, of courage and bravery."

And finally, who claimed at a U.N.-sponsored conference that democratic Israel was "much worse" than the former apartheid South Africa and that it "undermines the international community's reaction to global warming"? A radical environmentalist wacko? Again, no. It was Clare Short, a member of the British Parliament and Tony Blair's international development secretary.

A new virulent strain of the old anti-Semitism is spreading worldwide. This hate — of a magnitude not seen in more than 70 years — is not just espoused by Iran's loony president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or radical jihadists. The latest anti-Semitism is also now mouthed by world leaders and sophisticated politicians and academics. Their loathing often masquerades as "anti-Zionism" or "legitimate" criticism of Israel. But the venom exclusively reserved for the Jewish state betrays existential hatred.

Israel is always lambasted for entering homes in the West Bank to look for Hamas terrorists and using too much force. But last week the world snoozed when the Lebanese army bombarded and then crushed the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, which harbored Islamic terrorists.

The world has long objected to Jewish settlers buying up land in the West Bank. Yet Hezbollah, flush with Iranian money, is now purchasing large tracts in southern Lebanon for military purposes and purging them of non-Shi'ites.

Here at home, "neoconservative" has become synonymous with a supposed Jewish cabal of Washington insiders who hijacked U.S. policy to take us to war for Israel's interest. That our State Department is at the mercy of a Jewish lobby is the theme of a recent high-profile book by professors at Harvard University and the University of Chicago.

Yet when the United States bombed European and Christian Serbia to help Balkan Muslims, few critics claimed American Muslims had unduly swayed President Clinton. And charges of improper ethnic influence are rarely used to explain the billions in American aid given to nondemocratic Egypt, Jordan or the Palestinians — or the Saudi oil money that pours into U.S. universities.

The world likewise displays such a double standard. It seems to care little about the principle of so-called occupied land — whether in Cyprus or Tibet — unless Israel is the accused. Mass murdering in Cambodia, the Congo, Rwanda and Darfur has earned far fewer United Nations' resolutions of condemnation than supposed atrocities committed by Israel. A number of British academics are sponsoring a boycott of Israeli scholars but leave alone those from autocratic Iran, China and Cuba.

There are various explanations for the new anti-Semitism. For many abroad, attacking Jews and Israel is an indirect way of damning its main ally, the United States — by implying Americans are not entirely evil, just hoodwinked by those sneaky and far more evil Jews.

At home, there are obvious pragmatic considerations. Some Americans may find it makes more sense to damn a few million Israelis without oil than it does to offend Israel's adversaries in the Middle East, who number in the hundreds of millions and control nearly half the world's petroleum reserves.

Cowardice explains a lot. Libeling Israel won't earn someone a fatwa or a death sentence in the manner comparable criticism of Islam might. There are no Jewish suicide bombers in London, Madrid or Bali. This new face of anti-Semitism is so insidious because it is so well disguised, advanced by self-proclaimed diplomats and academics — and now embraced by the supposedly sophisticated left on university campuses.

When national, collective or personal aspirations are not met, it is far easier to blame someone or something rather than to look within for the source of the failure and frustration. More recently, someone must be blamed for getting terrorists (with oil and its profits behind them) mad at us.

That someone is — no surprise — once again Jews.



Victor Davis Hanson is a nationally syndicated columnist and a classicist and historian at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and author of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War."

 

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Anti-semitism & Jews
« Reply #32 on: September 20, 2007, 12:13:02 PM »
The Moran Liability

Real friction is developing in Congress between one of Speaker Nancy Pelosi's top lieutenants and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer. At issue are harshly critical comments made by Rep. Jim Moran of Virginia about the alleged influence of Jewish-Americans in government. Congressional Quarterly reports that Mr. Hoyer "stopped just short of calling [Mr. Moran] an anti-Semite and urged him to recant."

Mr. Moran is an ethically-challenged bully boy who represents the Washington D.C. suburbs of Arlington and Alexandria. He's notorious for not keeping his mouth under control. Last November, he bluntly told fellow Democrats who opposed Jack Murtha for majority leader -- Ms. Pelosi's preferred candidate -- that punishment would come to those who failed to toe the line: "We are entering an era where when the Speaker instructs you what to do you do it." (House Democrats ignored the threat and backed Mr. Hoyer instead.)

Mr. Moran's latest verbal belly flop involves remarks to the Jewish magazine Tikkun in which Mr. Moran called the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) "the most powerful lobby and has pushed this [Iraq] war from the beginning. I don't think they represent the mainstream of American Jewish thinking at all, but because they are so well-organized, and their members are extraordinarily powerful -- most of them are quite wealthy -- they have been able to exert power."

Mr. Hoyer wasted no time noting that such language adopted "a canard that is absolutely not true, that the Jewish community controls the press, media, government and other institutions. It has been used by those who are anti-Semitic for a very long period of time."

But this is not the first time Mr. Moran has expressed such views. Shortly after the war began, the congressman whipped up an anti-war rally by saying: "If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq, we would not be doing this. The leaders of the Jewish community are influential enough that they could change the direction of where this is going, and I think they should."

When will Democrats finally discipline Mr. Moran, easily one of their most embarrassing members? Frankly, when will the news media abandon its obsession with Senator Larry Craig's bathroom footwork and report on Mr. Moran's record? It's not hard to find him, even when he's home. Just leave Washington, D.C., cross the Potomac River and take an extreme left for a few miles until you reach Alexandria.

Political Journal WSJ

G M

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Re: Anti-semitism & Jews
« Reply #33 on: September 20, 2007, 01:02:30 PM »
It used to be that the crazy right was the core of anti-semitism in the US, today it's the allegedly mainstream left of the Daily Kos/Huffington Post/Jimmy "The Dhimmi" Carter.

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Anti-semitism & Jews
« Reply #34 on: September 22, 2007, 05:54:15 AM »
The Sword of Wood
retold by Doug Lipman
There was once a king who loved nothing better than to go out alone in the clothes of a commoner. He wanted to meet the ordinary people of his kingdom--to learn their way of life, and especially their way of thinking about the world. One night, this king found himself walking in the poorest, narrowest street of the city. This was the street of the Jews. He heard a song in the distance. The king thought, "A song sung in this place of poverty must be a lament!" But as he got closer, he could hear the true character of the song: it was a song of pride! "Bai-yum-dum, bai-yum-bai, yum-bai, bai...."

The king was drawn to the source of the song: the smallest, humblest shack on that street. He knocked on the door. "Is a stranger welcome here?"

The voice from within said, "A stranger is G-d's gift. Come in!"

In the dim light inside, the king saw a man sitting on the only piece of furniture, a wooden box. When the king came in, the man stood up and sat on the floor, offering the king the crate for a seat.

"Well, my friend," the king asked, "what do you do to earn a living?"

"Oh, I am a cobbler."

"You have a shop where you make shoes?"

"Oh, no, I could not afford a shop. I take my box of tools--you are sitting on it--to the side of the road. There I repair shoes for people as they need them."

"You cobble shoes by the side of the road? Can you make enough money that way?"

The cobbler spoke with both humility and pride. "Every day, I make just enough money to buy food for that day."

"Just enough for one day? Aren't you afraid that one day you won't make enough, and then you'll go hungry?"

"Blessed be G-d, day by day."

The next day, the king determined to put this man's philosophy to the test. He issued a proclamation that anyone wishing to cobble shoes by the side of the road must purchase a license for fifty pieces of gold.

That night, the king returned to the street of the Jews. Again he heard a song in the distance, and thought, "This time, the cobbler will be singing a different tune." But when the king neared the house he heard the cobbler sing the same song. Worse, it was even longer, with a new phrase that soared joyfully: "Ah, ha-ah-ah, ah-hah, ah-hah, ah-yai."

The king knocked on the door. "Oh, my friend, I heard about that wicked king and his proclamation. I was so worried about you. Were you able to eat today?"

"Oh, I was angry when I heard I could not make my living in the way I always have. But I knew: I am entitled to make a living and I will find a way. As I stood there saying those very words to myself, a group of people passed me by. When I asked them where they were going, they told me: into the forest to gather fire wood. Every day, they bring back wood to sell as kindling. When I asked if I could join them, they said, 'There is a whole forest out there. Come along!'

"And so I gathered fire wood. At the end of the day, I was able to sell it for just enough money to buy food for today."

The king sputtered. "Just enough for one day? What about tomorrow? What about next week?"

"Blessed be G-d, day by day."

The next day, the king again returned to his throne, and issued a new proclamation: anyone caught gathering firewood in the royal forest would be inducted into the royal guard. For good measure, he issued another: no new members of the royal guard would be paid for forty days.

That night, the king returned to the street of the Jews. Amazed, he heard the same song! But now, it had a third part that was militant and determined: "Dee, dee, dee, dee-dee, dee-dee, dah...."

The king knocked on the door. "Cobbler, what happened to you today?"

"They made me stand at attention all day in the royal guard! They issued me a sword and a scabbard. But then they told me I wouldn't be paid for forty days!"

"Oh, my friend, I bet you wish now that you had saved some money."

"Well, let me tell you what I did. At the end of the day, I looked at that metal sword blade. I thought to myself, that must be valuable! So I removed the blade from the handle, and fashioned another blade of wood. When the sword is in the scabbard, no one can tell the difference. I took the metal blade to a pawnbroker, and I pawned it for just enough money to buy food for one day."

The king was stunned. "What if there's a sword inspection tomorrow?"

"Blessed be G-d, day by day."

The next day, the cobbler was pulled out of line in the king's guard. He was presented with a prisoner in chains.

"Cobbler, this man has committed a horrible crime. You are to take him to the square. Using your sword, you are to behead him."

"Behead him? I'm an observant Jew. I couldn't take another human life."

"If you do not, we'll kill both of you."

The cobbler led this poor, trembling man into the square, where a crowd had gathered to watch the execution. The cobbler put the prisoner's head on the chopping block. He stood tall, his hand on the handle of his sword. Facing the crowd, he spoke.

"Let G-d be my witness: I am no murderer! If this man is guilty as charged, let my sword be as always. But if he is innocent, let my sword turn to wood!"

He pulled his sword. The people gasped when they saw the wooden blade. They bowed down at the great miracle that had happened there.

The king, who had been watching all of this, came over to the cobbler. He took him by both his hands, and looked him deep in the eyes. "I am the king. And I am your friend who has visited you these last nights. I want you to come live with me in the palace and be my advisor. Please teach me how to live like that--one day at a time."

Then, in front of everyone, the two of them danced and sang: "Bai-yum-dum, bai-yum-bai, yum-bai, bai...."

I first found this story in Dov Noy's Folktales of Israel, University of Chicago Press, 1963. Another, essentially similar, Jewish version from Afghanistan is in Howard Schwartz's Elijah's Violin, Harper and Row, 1983. This story is sometimes attributed to Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav, who retold and interpreted it. The basic plot is also known in Turkey and Uzbekistan, as well as in Finland, Germany, Italy, Czechoslovakia, and Greece.

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Anti-semitism & Jews
« Reply #35 on: September 22, 2007, 07:50:30 AM »
Second post of the morning:

The Chosen
Essential works about Judaism.

BY RUTH R. WISSE
Saturday, September 22, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

1. "Days of Awe" by S.Y. Agnon (Schocken, 1948).

During the 10 days between the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, and the fast of Yom Kippur, Jews submit themselves to the all-knowing and unerring judgment of God. It is sometimes a challenge to experience this soul-sifting in the modern world as most others go about their daily business. For those who desire help--or for those who simply want to gain a deeper understanding of the observances--look no further than "Days of Awe," a nonfiction work by novelist S.Y. Agnon (1888-1970), who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1966. His compendium of Jewish practices, legends and commentaries traces the rhythm of these September rituals, from the pre-holy day preparations to the aftermath of the concluding meal. The material includes simple customs (like eating an apple sweetened with honey), kabbalistic interpretations of the ram's horn blasts that are sounded in the synagogue, and prescriptions for a thorough moral accounting. Though my devotions do not approach the intensity of those of my ancestors--who, in the words of a Yiddish saying, trembled with the fish in the seas in the days of judgment--this little book puts me in awe of generations of Jews as they stood in awe of God.

2. "A Historical Atlas of the Jewish People" edited by Eli Barnavi (Schocken, 1992).

My teacher, the late Salo Baron, published 18 volumes of a "Social and Religious History of the Jews"--a project that he did not live to complete. Obviously, no single book can encompass all of Jewish experience. But when I want to find out about Jews in Palestine under the Romans, or learn how Jews fared in Muslim lands, or trace the migration of Jews to America, I turn to "A Historical Atlas of the Jewish People," an attractive volume of maps, documents, time lines and basic information. If I don't find exactly what I'm looking for, I become engrossed in something else, like an account of Jewish agriculture in South America. The book's organization is quirky, but its mixing of anthropology, history, religion and culture reflects how they are woven into the life of the Jews.

3. "Daniel Deronda" by George Eliot (1876).

One of the finest books about Jewish experience was written by an Englishwoman. George Eliot studied Judaism for years before writing this novel, her last, and her hero's gradual discovery of his Jewish origins seems to reproduce her own evolving appreciation of what Jews were about. Daniel Deronda's mother despised being Jewish, and when he was born she arranged for him to be raised as the ward of a wealthy English gentleman. But Deronda is pleased as his self-discovery unfolds, and he dreams of helping Jews find their own land "such as the English have"--in effect becoming a Zionist more than two decades before Theodor Herzl founded the Zionist movement. The novel has its painful side. Deronda's Jewish path thwarts his potential romance with the lovely Gwendolen Harleth, and well-meaning Christians who want to envelop Deronda in their embrace must learn from him the art of "separateness with communication."

4. "Tevye the Dairyman" by Sholem Aleichem (1894-1914).

No one did more than the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916) to forge the connection between Jewishness and comedy, and no character does it better than Tevye the Dairyman. In Aleichem's Tevye stories, set in Russia and collected in various forms over the years, the monologues of this first stand-up Jewish comedian treat many of the crises that Jews experienced in confronting modernity. A traditional father of many daughters (whittled down to three in the musical adaptation "Fiddler on the Roof"), Tevye must face both their challenges to his paternal authority and the dangers posed by the czarist regime. He does so with a philosophical humor that many readers attribute to Jewishness itself. "What does it say in the prayer book? We're God's chosen people; it's no wonder the whole world envies us." Whenever I teach this work, filled with specifically Jewish quotations and expressions, students of other minorities--especially those from religious families--recognize Tevye's predicaments, and they appreciate the moral balance he strives to maintain between metaphysical confidence and the disillusioning evidence presented by daily life.

5. "The Bellarosa Connection" by Saul Bellow (Penguin, 1989).

In this cautionary tale about the dangers of forgetting, the narrator, a cultured American Jewish widower, is the founder of the Mnemosyne Institute in Philadelphia. Appropriately for someone who teaches the techniques of memory, he lives in a house filled with antiques. A sudden inquiry from Jerusalem sends him in search of Harry Fonstein, a near-relative he hasn't seen in 30 years. Harry was once saved from the Nazis in Italy by the personal intervention of showman Billy Rose (mangled in Italian as "Bellarosa"), and for the remainder of this brief book the unnamed narrator recalls for us the story of the rescue and his encounters with Harry and his wife, Sorella, the woman he married after immigrating to America. Oversize yet delicate, Sorella functions as the book's oracle when she says: "The Jews could survive everything that Europe threw at them. . . . But now comes the next test--America." Wryly, and at his own expense, the memory-man describes how, by neglecting Harry and Sorella, he himself has failed that test.

Ms. Wisse, whose "Jews and Power" has just been published by Schocken, teaches Yiddish literature and comparative literature at Harvard.

WSJ

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Anti-semitism & Jews
« Reply #36 on: September 26, 2007, 06:16:35 AM »
The following was sent to me without URL.  Anyone know anything about this?
=============


China

Rabbi Marvin Tokayer   
 
In the mountainous area of northwest China, west of the Min River, near the border of Tibet, in Szechuan lives an ancient people called by the Chinese, Chiang or Chiang-Min, who numbers about 250 thousand people.
The language of the Chiang tribe had been forgotten and they had also lost their ancient script. Today they speak Chinese and two other languages, one that originates from Tibet and the other is a slang which is called Chiaring.

The area which they live is famous for its rare animals and plants including the Panda bear. The Chiang people live in villages similar to fortresses which are generally built on hilltops. In the past they were a great people who ruled the provincial territories from Kansu in the north to Liyunan in the south.

Historical maps during the Han dynasty (3rd century BCE - 3rd century CE) show that this tribe the Chiang spread to the northwest part of China. They themselves see themselves as immigrants from the west who reached this area after a journey of three years three months. The Chinese treated them as Barbarians and they related to the Chinese as idol worshipers.

Hate and enmity existed between the Chinese and this tribe for a long time. They lived independently until the middle of the 18th century when they became part of the general population to earn more freedom. The religious pressure from the Chinese, the spread of Christianity, and the influence of intermarriage caused the Chiang tribe to generally and greatly give up their special monotheistic way of life.

However it is still possible even today to learn about the past traditions of the Chiang tribe through their customs and their faith which they still keep. This tribe had been living a special Israeli way of life for 2300 years.

According to their tradition, the Chiang tribe is the descendant of Abraham and their forefather had 12 sons. Those among them who did not take Chinese wives after their victory in war still look Semitic.

The character traits of this people are integrity, love of neighbor, mutual aid, generosity, modesty, shyness, gratitude, and stubbornness. They also have a fear of heaven or respect for God.

They believe in one God whom they call Abachi meaning the father of heaven, or Mabichu, the spirit of heaven, or also Tian, heaven. As a result of Chinese influences they all call Him God of the mountains as the mountains are the central place for worship of God.

Their concept of God is that of an all powerful God who watches over the entire world, judges the world fairly, rewards the righteous, and punishes the wicked. This God gives them the opportunity to do repentance and to gain atonement for their actions. In times of trouble, they call God Yah-weh.

They also believe in spirits and demons and they are forbidden to worship them, but this is probably a Chinese influence. In the past they had written scrolls of parchment and also books but today they only have oral traditions. They themselves do not understand the prayers that they recite every week.


The Custom of Sacrifice Among the Chiang Tribe

The Chiang tribe lives a very special way of life based on the offering of animal sacrifices which seems to have been seen among the Ten Tribes of Israel. It is forbidden to worship statues or foreign gods and anyone who offers a sacrifice to another god faces the death penalty.

This worship is performed in two ways. It is public sacrifice on platforms erected on mountain tops on which they build altars of stone which may not be fashioned with tools and on which they offer special sacrifices.

They also have domestic of personal sacrifices on domestic altars built on flat surfaces on the roofs of their houses. There is an atmosphere of holy worship in all these sacrifices. They are performed by priests whose priesthood is passed down through inheritance from father to son. This was the same in ancient Israel.

These priests wear clean white clothes and perform the sacrifices in a state of purity as the priests in ancient Israel did (1 Samuel 15:27). I recall that Japanese Shinto priests also wear clean white clothes at holy events.

The priest of the Chiang tribe wears a special head turban. The priest is ordained in a special ceremony in which sacrifices are also offered. Unmarried men may not be a priest, which was the same in ancient Israel (Leviticus 21:7, 13).

The Chiang tribe does not have statues of images but they do have two symbols of holiness. A clean white sheet of paper and a piece of natural white stone. These symbolize absolute purity and perhaps the written parchment which they had in the past. Before one worships God, you must become holy and purify yourself.

It is perhaps because of the Assyrian influence of the past that they try to build their altars next to trees or branches. The altar itself is built of earth which is molded into stones which are then laid one on top of the other without being cut of fashioned by any tool of metal. It is important to remember that in the Torah, the ancient altar could not be made of cut stones (Exodus 20:25), since the sword or whatever tool to be used to cut the stone was also an instrument of war and harm.

The main part of the service is performed at night perhaps to conceal it from other Chinese or because of the special effect of the silence and the tranquility of night. This was also ancient Israeli tradition. It is interesting that the important rituals of Japanese Shinto religion are also performed at night.

Before the offering of sacrifices, one is required to wash one's self and one's clothing and to dress in clean garments. Sacrificial animals themselves must be washed and purified. There is a special place for purification and washing. The elders and priest place their hands on the head of the sacrifice which is to be slaughtered then offer their prayers.

Strangers are forbidden to approach the place of worship. The priest of the Chiang tribe perform the service solemnly. "Unclean ones" are also forbidden to approach the service (Leviticus 21:17-23). These were the same in ancient Israel.

The purpose of the sacrifice is a type of atonement and to bring God's blessings upon those offering the sacrifice. The sacrifice has the purpose of taking away sin and blood must be sprinkled on the corners of the altar to be granted atonement and to have one's prayers accepted.



Prayer Words of the Chiang Tribe

One of the prayers pronounced by the priest of the Chiang tribe in China includes the following prayer:
"Priest of God, You are the Priest of the generations who are witnesses to the fact that our sacrifice is pure and has not been changed by us, but has been performed in the same manner since ancient times. We hereby fulfill our vows. We have not eaten impure foods for three days and we have not been in impure places. We have gathered in the holy place, the bundles of grass for the sprinkling of the blood are in their places and we have brought the sacrifices and have lowered the rope on the bundles of grass for the sprinkling of the blood."

Following the prayer many of the organs of the animal are burnt with the meat in the fire and the priest receives the shoulder, the chest, the legs, and also the skin, and the meat is divided among the worshipers. At the time of the sacrifice 12 flags are placed around the altar in order to teach that they originate from a father who had 12 sons. This system of sacrifices is very similar to the sacrifices brought in ancient Israel at the time of the dispersion of the Lost Tribes.

Among the ceremonies that the Chiang tribe has include the sprinkling of blood on the doorpost to insure the safekeeping of the house, and the laws of levirate marriage which was an Israeli custom as I mentioned earlier. It is considered shameful for a woman to leave her hair uncovered and therefore, they wear white scarves. Mixed dancing of men and women does not take place. And they have a custom of closing all forests for 50 years after which they have a special ceremony to mark their opening. This is like a custom in ancient Israel.

The the Chiang tribe also has a purification of the earth as well as a ceremony with a white scroll or parchment. They show great love for parchment and take care to make sure that it remains unblemished. They also practice trances for witchcraft and to expel demons and this may be a Chinese influence.

The Chiang tribe has a new year feast, a feast of feast, and a feast of thanksgiving, but circumcision is not performed. But after the 7th day or at the eve of the 40th day of the child's life, a white rooster is slaughtered in the child's honor and he is given a name.


 

Crafty_Dog

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Ukraine
« Reply #37 on: October 06, 2007, 07:17:27 AM »
NY Times

PARIS, Oct. 5 — His subjects were mostly children and teenagers at the time, terrified witnesses to mass slaughter. Some were forced to work at the bottom rung of the Nazi killing machine — as diggers of mass graves, cooks who fed Nazi soldiers and seamstresses who mended clothes stripped from the Jews before execution.


"I cannot react to the horrors that pour out. If I react, the stories will stop."
The Rev. Patrick Desbois

They live today in rural poverty, many without running water or heat, nearing the end of their lives. So Patrick Desbois has been quietly seeking them out, roaming the back roads and forgotten fields of Ukraine, hearing their stories and searching for the unmarked common graves. He knows that they are an unparalleled source to document the murder of the 1.5 million Jews of Ukraine, shot dead and buried throughout the country.

He is neither a historian nor an archaeologist, but a French Roman Catholic priest. And his most powerful tools are his matter-of-fact style — and his clerical collar.

The Nazis killed nearly 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine after their invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. But with few exceptions, most notably the 1941 slaughter of nearly 34,000 Jews in the Babi Yar ravine in Kiev, much of that history has gone untold.

Knocking on doors, unannounced, Father Desbois, 52, seeks to unlock the memories of Ukrainian villagers the way he might take confessions one by one in church.

“At first, sometimes, people don’t believe I’m a priest,” said Father Desbois in an interview this week. “I have to use simple words and listen to these horrors — without any judgment. I cannot react to the horrors that pour out. If I react, the stories will stop.”

Over four years, Father Desbois has videotaped more than 700 interviews with witnesses and bystanders and has identified more than 600 common graves of Jews, most of them previously unknown. He also has gathered material evidence of the execution of Jews from 1941 to 1944, the “Holocaust of bullets” as it is called.

Often his subjects ask Father Desbois to stay for a meal and to pray, as if to somehow bless their acts of remembrance. He does not judge those who were assigned to carry out tasks for the Nazis, and Holocaust scholars say that is one reason he is so effective.

“If a Jewish taker-of-testimony comes, what would people think — that this is someone coming to accuse,” said Paul Shapiro, director of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. “When a priest comes, people open up. He brings to the subject a kind of legitimacy, a sense that it’s O.K. to talk about the past. There’s absolution through confession.”

Unlike in Poland and Germany, where the Holocaust remains visible through the searing symbols of the extermination camps, the horror in Ukraine was hidden away, first by the Nazis, then by the Soviets.

“There was nothing to see in Ukraine because people were shot to death with guns,” said Thomas Eymond-Laritaz, president of the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, Ukraine’s largest philanthropic organization. “That’s why Father Desbois is so important.”

The foundation helped underwrite a conference on the subject at the Sorbonne this week — the first to bring together Western and Ukrainian scholars — and has begun contributing funds to Father Desbois’s project.

Some of the results of Father Desbois’s research — including video interviews, wartime documents, photographs of newly uncovered mass graves, rusty bullets and shell casings and personal possessions of the victims — are on display for the first time at an exhibit at the Memorial of the Shoah in the Marais district of Paris.

The exhibit shows, for example, images of the 15 mass graves of several thousand Jews in a commune called Busk that Father Desbois and his team discovered and began excavating after interviewing several witnesses. Among hundreds of other items on display is a black-and-white photo from 1942 that shows a German police officer shooting naked Jewish women lying in a ravine in the Rivne region.

Traveling with a team that includes two interpreters, a photographer, a cameraman, a ballistics specialist, a mapping expert and a notetaker, Father Desbois records all the stories on video, sometimes holding the microphone himself, and asking questions in simple language and a flat tone.

In Buchach in 2005, Regina Skora told Father Desbois that as a young girl she witnessed executions.

“Did the people know they were going to be killed?” Father Desbois asked her.

“Yes.”

“How did they react?”

“They just walked, that’s all. If someone couldn’t walk, they told him to lie on the ground and shot him in the back of the neck.”
========

Page 2 of 2)

Vera Filonok said she was 16 when she watched from the porch of her mud hut in Konstantinovka in 1941 as thousands of Jews were shot, thrown into a pit and set on fire. Those who were still alive writhed “like flies and worms,” she said.
 
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
In a World War II photograph, a member of a Nazi SS paramilitary group prepared to execute a Ukrainian Jew, one of 1.5 million put to death during the war.

Witness to Genocide (memorialdelashoah.org) There are stories of how the Nazis drummed on empty buckets to avoid having to listen to the screams of their victims, how Jewish women were made sex slaves of the Nazis and then executed. One witness said that as a 6-year-old he hid and watched as his best friend was shot to death.

Other witnesses described how the Nazis were allowed only one bullet to the back per victim and that the Jews sometimes were buried alive. “One witness told of how the pit moved for three days, how it breathed,” Father Desbois recalled.

Father Desbois became haunted by the history of the Nazis in Ukraine as a child growing up on the family farm in the Bresse region of eastern France. His paternal grandfather, who was deported to a prison camp for French soldiers in Rava-Ruska, on the Ukrainian side of the Polish border, told the family nothing about the experience. But he confessed to his relentlessly curious grandson, “For us it was bad, for ‘others’ it was worse.”

There were other family links to the German occupation of France. One maternal cousin who carried letters for French resisters perished in a Nazi concentration camp. Father Desbois’s mother told him only recently that the family hid dozens of resisters on the farm.

After teaching mathematics as a French government employee in West Africa and working in Calcutta for three months with Mother Teresa, he joined the priesthood. His secular family was horrified.

He started as a parish priest, studying Judaism and learning Hebrew during a stint in Israel. He asked to work with Gypsies, ex-prisoners or Jews, and was appointed as a bridge to France’s Jewish community.

It was on a tour with a group in 2002 that, visiting Rava-Ruska, he asked the mayor where the Jews were buried. The mayor said he did not know.

“I knew that 10,000 Jews had been killed there, so it was impossible that he didn’t know,” Father Desbois recalled.

The following year, a new mayor took the priest to a forest where about 100 villagers had gathered in a semicircle, waiting to tell their stories and to help uncover the graves buried beneath their feet.

He met other mayors and parish priests who helped find more witnesses. In 2004, Father Desbois created Yahad-In Unum, an organization devoted to Christian-Jewish understanding run from a tiny office in a working-class neighborhood in northeastern Paris, backed and largely financed by a Holocaust foundation in France and the Catholic Church.

To verify witnesses’ testimony, Father Desbois relies heavily on a huge archive of Soviet-era documents housed in the Holocaust museum in Washington, as well as German trial archives. He registers an execution or a grave site only after obtaining three independent accounts from witnesses.

Only one-third of Ukrainian territory has been covered so far, and it will take several more years to finish the research. A notice at the exit of the Paris exhibit asks that any visitor with information about victims of Nazi atrocities in Ukraine leave a note or send an e-mail message.

“People talk as if these things happened yesterday, as if 60 years didn’t exist,” Father Desbois said. “Some ask, ‘Why are you coming so late? We have been waiting for you.’”


Body-by-Guinness

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Religiously Sanctioned Antisemitism, Part I
« Reply #38 on: October 18, 2007, 04:57:05 PM »
This piece contains a lot of formatting and links I'm too lazy to replicate. Link provided at the end of Part III

The First and Last Enemy

-- Jew-Hatred in Islam*

by Dr. Andrew G. Bostom (Oct. 2007)

(* Text of a speech delivered at the “Counterjihad”  conference in Brussels, Belgium, October 18, 2007

Fawaz Damra, the former Imam of the Islamic Center of Cleveland was convicted in 2004 for lying to immigration officials about his links to the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and subsequently deported. Yet Damra was touted as a promoter of  interfaith dialogue even after evidence of his participation in fundraising events for the PIJ, was produced, along with a videotape of the Imam telling a crowd of Muslim supporters in 1991 that they should aim “…a rifle at the first and last enemy of the Islamic nation, and that is the sons of monkeys and pigs, the Jews.”

As I will demonstrate, Imam Damra’s blatant Jew-hatred was fully sanctioned by—indeed he was merely paraphrasing, and quoting directly from—the core religious texts of Islam. And the historical treatment of Jews in Muslim societies has been consistent with this sacralized religious bigotry. Sheer ignorance of such theology and history, combined with craven denial, allowed Damra’s words to go unchallenged for more than a decade. However the Damra affair is pathognomonic of a much larger and more dangerous phenomenon: the complete, often willful failure to examine and understand the living legacy of Islam’s foundational anti-Jewish animus.
 
Islamic Antisemitism = Islamic Jew-Hatred**
 
Although Jew-hatred is an uncompromisingly clear term, in both common and scholarly usage, the synonymous “Antisemitism,” (which should never be written with a hyphen!), predominates. Robert Wistrich has emphasized the problematic nature of the term “Antisemitism”, derived from a group of cognate “Semitic” (i.e., stemming from the Biblical Shem, one of Noah’s three sons) languages—Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Babylonian, Assyrian, and Ethiopic—and applied, inappropriately, to a pseudo-scientific racial designation by the German journalist Wilhelm Marr, in the 1870s. Regardless, for the past century, as Wistrich notes,
 
…the illogical term ‘antisemitism’…[w]hich never really meant hatred of ‘Semites’ (for example, Arabs [emphasis added in original]) at all, but rather hatred of Jews, has come to be accepted in general usage as denoting all forms of hostility towards Jews and Judaism throughout history.
 
But perhaps the strongest evidence that antisemitism was never meant to be directed at Arabs (or Muslims, or any non-Jews) comes from the perpetrators of genocidal antisemitic violence, the Nazis. During a November, 1942 press conference, a Berlin Foreign Ministry spokesman, as reported in the New York Times, took “great pains” to assure Arabs that Nazi antisemitic policies were directed at Jews, exclusively. The spokesman elaborated:
 
The difference between Germany’s attitude toward Jews and Arabs has been clearly shown in the exchange of letters between the former Prime Minister of Iraq, Rashid Ali, and the German Institute for Racial Problems. We have never said the Arabs were inferior as a race. On the contrary, we have always pointed out the glorious historic past of the Arab people.
 
Moreover, in the specific context of the Arab Muslim world during the high Middle Ages (circa 950-1250 C.E.), S.D. Goitein’ s seminal analyses of the Geniza documentary record employed the term anti-Semitism,
 
…in order to differentiate animosity against Jews from the discrimination practiced by Islam against non-Muslims in general. Our scrutiny of the Geniza material has proved the existence of ‘antisemitism’ in the time and the area considered here…
         
Goitein cites as concrete proof of his assertion that a unique strain of Islamic Jew hatred was extant at this time (i.e., up to a millennium ago)—exploding the common assumption of its absence—the fact that letters from the Cairo Geniza material,
 
…have a special word for it and, most significantly, one not found in the Bible or in Talmudic literature (nor registered in any Hebrew dictionary), but one much used and obviously coined in the Geniza period. It is sin’?th, “hatred”, a Jew-baiter being called s?n?, “a hater.”
 
Incidents of such Muslim Jew hatred documented by Goitein in the Geniza come from northern Syria (Salamiyya and al-Mar‘arra), Morocco (Fez), and Egypt (Alexandria), with references to the latter being particularly frequent.

Despite all of the following—clear historical evidence of specific Islamic antisemitism, from the Geniza record of the high Middle Ages (including the coinage of  a unique Hebrew word to characterize such Muslim Jew hatred, i.e., sin’?th), published in full by Goitein as of 1971; important studies of foundational Muslim sources detailing the sacralized rationale for Islam’s anti-Jewish bigotry, including Hartwig Hirschfeld’s mid 1880s essay series on Muhammad’s subjugation of the Jews of Medina; George Vajda’s elegant, comprehensive 1937 analysis focusing primarily on the hadith (the putative words and deeds of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, as recorded by pious transmitters); and much more recently, Haggai Ben-Shammai’s concise 1988 study of key examples of Jew hatred in the Koran and Koranic exegesis—conventional academic (and journalistic) wisdom continues to assert that Muslim Jew hatred is entirely a 20th century phenomenon, a mere by-product of the advent of the Zionist movement and the protracted Arab-Israeli conflict over the lands comprising the original 1922 Mandate for historical Palestine (i.e., modern Israel, Jordan, Judea, Samaria, and Gaza). Such thinking also contends that this strain of Jew hatred is a loose amalgam of re-cycled medieval Christian Judeophobic motifs, calumnies from the Czarist Russia “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” and standard Nazi propaganda. A prototypical assessment of this ilk was written by the journalist Lawrence Wright in his widely acclaimed investigative account of the events leading to the cataclysmic acts of jihad terrorism on September 11, 2001.
 
Until the end of World War II…Jews lived safely –although submissively—under Muslim rule for 1,200 years, enjoying full religious freedom; but in the 1930s, Nazi propaganda on Arabic-language shortwave radio, coupled with slanders by Christian missionaries in the region, infected the area with this ancient Western prejudice [antisemitism].  After the war, Cairo became a sanctuary for Nazis, who advised the military and the government.  The rise of the Islamist movement coincided with the decline of fascism, but they overlapped in Egypt, and the germ passed into a new carrier.
 
Wright’s statement was not accompanied by documentation—this was the accepted wisdom after all. And in its essence, Wright’s views are entirely consistent with those of the more elaborate prevailing scholarly analyses summarized quite accurately by Esther Webman in 1994:
 
Antisemitism did not exist in the traditional Islamic world…Antisemitism is, in fact, a relatively new phenomenon in the Arab world, gaining ground particularly since the eruption of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the mid-twentieth century. Nazi-style antisemitic books and publications have been produced openly. For example, there are at least nine different Arabic translations of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, which was translated into Arabic for the first time in the 1920s…The development of European-style antisemitism in the Arab countries is related to three major factors: first penetration during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of a variety of European ideologies and concepts into the Arab world, among them antisemitism; second, the collapse of traditional political systems and of the loyalties and practices associated with them, giving way to the emergence of nationalistic government structures less tolerant in their treatment of religious, ethnic, and ideological minorities; and third, and most crucial, the development of the conflict over the domination of Palestine, beginning with Jewish resettlement in the late nineteenth century, followed by the establishment of the State of Israel and the ensuing Arab-Israeli conflict…Themes borrowed from European Christendom were adapted by incorporating references in them.
 
But this very flawed construct ignores primary, uniquely Islamic components of Muslim Jew hatred, both past and present. Indeed, for the Muslim masses, basic Islamic education in the Koran, hadith, and sira (earliest Muslim biographies of Muhammad) may create an immutable superstructure of Jew hatred on to which non-Muslim sources of Jew hatred are easily grafted.

The uncomfortable examination of Islamic doctrines and history is required in order to understand the enduring phenomenon of Muslim Jew hatred, which dates back to the origins of Islam. We can no longer view Muslim Jew hatred as a “borrowed phenomenon,” seen exclusively, or even primarily, through the prism of Nazism and the Holocaust, the tragic legacy of Judeophobic Christian traditions, or “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” from Czarist Russia. For example, Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi wrote these words in his 700 page treatise rationalizing Muslim Jew hatred, Banu Isra’il fi al-Koran wa al-Sunna [Jews in the Koran and the Traditions], originally published in the 1970s, and then re-issued in 1986/87:
 
[The] Koran describes the Jews with their own particular degenerate characteristics, i.e. killing the prophets of Allah, corrupting His words by putting them in the wrong places, consuming the people’s wealth frivolously, refusal to distance themselves from the evil they do, and other ugly characteristics caused by their deep-rooted lasciviousness…only a minority of the Jews keep their word….[A]ll Jews are not the same. The good ones become Muslims, the bad ones do not. (Koran 3:113)
 
Tantawi was apparently rewarded for this scholarly effort by being named Grand Imam of Al-Azhar University in 1996, a position he still holds. These are the expressed, “carefully researched” views on Jews held by the nearest Muslim equivalent to a Pope—the head of the most prestigious center of Muslim learning in Sunni Islam, Sunnis representing some 85% of the world’s Muslims. And Sheikh Tantawi has not mollified such hatemongering beliefs since becoming the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar as his statements on the Jews as “enemies of Allah, descendants of apes and pigs”, the legitimacy of homicide bombing of Jews, or “dialogue” with Jews (just below), make clear.
 
…anyone who avoids meeting with the enemies in order to counter their dubious claims and stick fingers into their eyes, is a coward.  My stance stems from Allah’s book [the Koran], more than one-third of which deals with the Jews… wrote a dissertation dealing with them [the Jews], all their false claims and their punishment by Allah.  I still believe in everything written in that dissertation. [i.e., from above, in Banu Isra’il fi al-Koran wa al-Sunna]
 
Tantawi’s case illustrates the prevalence and depth of sacralized, “normative” Jew hatred in the contemporary Muslim world. Even if all non-Muslim Judeophobic themes were expunged from the Islamic world, the living legacy of anti-Jewish hatred, and violence rooted in Islam’s sacred texts—Koran, hadith, and sira—would remain intact. The assessment and understanding of Islamic antisemitism must begin with an unapologetic analysis of the anti-Jewish motifs contained in these foundational texts of Islam.
 
Jew Hatred in Islam’s Sacred Texts: From Theory to Practice**
 
The essential nature of the Koranic “revelation,” as understood by Muslims, was elaborated in 1891 by Theodore Nöldeke (whose seminal 1860 Geschichte des Qorans remains a vital tool for Koranic research):
 
To the faith of the Muslims…the Koran is the word of God, and such also is the claim which the book itself advances…
 
And to this day, for the Muslim masses, as Ibn Warraq notes,
 
…the Koran remains the infallible word of God, the immediate word of God sent down, through the intermediary of a “spirit” or “holy spirit” or Gabriel, to Muhammad in perfect, pure Arabic; and every thing contained therein is eternal and uncreated. The original text is in heaven…The angel dictated the revelation to the Prophet, who repeated it after him, and then revealed it to the world. Modern Muslims also claim that these revelations have been preserved exactly as revealed to Muhammad, without any change, addition, or loss whatsoever…the Koran remains for all Muslims, and not just “fundamentalists” the uncreated word of God Himself. It is valid for all times and places; its ideals are, according to all Muslims, absolutely true and beyond any criticism. [emphasis added]
 
Thus, the Jews’ traits as characterized in the Koran are deemed both infallible and timeless. Unfortunately, as a central anti-Jewish motif, the Koran decrees an eternal curse upon the Jews (Koran 2:61/ 3:112) for slaying the prophets and transgressing against the will of Allah. This motif is coupled to Koranic verses 5:60 and 5:78 which describe the Jews transformation into apes and swine (5:60), having been “…cursed by the tongue of David, and Jesus, Mary’s son” (5:78). The related verse, 5:64, accuses the Jews—as Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas did in a January 2007 speech, citing Koran 5:64—of being “spreaders of war and corruption”, a sort of ancient Koranic antecedent of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.


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Religiously Sanctioned Antisemitism, Part II
« Reply #39 on: October 18, 2007, 04:58:08 PM »
The centrality of the Jews’ permanent “abasement and humiliation,” and being “laden with God’s anger” in the corpus of Muslim exegetic literature on Koran 2:61 (including the hadith and Koranic commentaries), is clear. By nature deceitful and treacherous, the Jews rejected Allah’s signs and prophets, including Isa, the Muslim Jesus. Classical Koranic commentators such as Tabari (d. 923), Zamakshari (d. 1143), Baydawi (d. 1316), and Ibn Kathir (d. 1373), when discussing Koran 5:82 (“Thou wilt surely find the most hostile of men to the believers are the Jews and the idolaters; and thou wilt surely find the nearest of them in love to the believers are those who say 'We are Christians'; that, because some of them are priests and monks, and they wax not proud.”), concur on the unique animus of the Jews towards the Muslims, which is repeatedly linked to the curse of  Koran 2:61. For example, in his commentary on 5:82, Tabari writes,
 
In my opinion, [the Christians] are not like the Jews who always scheme in order to murder the emissaries and the prophets, and who oppose God in his positive and negative commandments, and who corrupt His scripture which He revealed in His books.
 
Tabari’s classical interpretations of Koran 5:82 and 2:61,  as well as his discussion of the related verse 9:29 mandating the Jews payment of the jizya (Koranic poll-tax), represent both Antisemitic and more general anti-dhimmi views that became, and remain, intrinsic to Islam to this day. Here is Tabari’s discussion of 2:61 and its relationship to verse 9:29, which emphasizes the purposely debasing nature of the Koranic poll tax:
 
…“abasement and poverty were imposed and laid down upon them”, as when someone says “the imam imposed the poll tax (jizya)on free non-Muslim subjects”, or “The man imposed land tax on his slave”, meaning thereby that he obliged him [to pay ] it, or, “The commander imposed a sortie on his troops”, meaning he made it their duty.…God commanded His believing servants not to give them [i.e., the non-Muslim people of the scripture] security—as long as they continued to disbelieve in Him and his Messenger—unless they paid the poll tax to them; God said: “Fight those who believe not in God and the Last Day and do not forbid what God and His Messenger have forbidden—such men as practice not the religion of truth [Islam], being of those who have been given the Book [Bible]—until they pay the poll tax, being humble” (Koran 9:29).. The dhimmis [non-Muslim tributary’s] posture during the collection of the jizya- “[lowering themselves] by walking on their hand, …reluctantly
 
…Ibn Zaid said about His words “and abasement and poverty were imposed upon them”, ‘These are the Jews of the Children of Israel’. I said: ‘Are they the Copts of Egypt?’ He said: “What have the Copts of Egypt to do with this? No, by God, they are not; but they are the Jews, the Children of Israel.…By “and slain the prophets unrightfully” He means that they used to kill the Messengers of God without God’s leave, denying their messages and rejecting their prophethood.
 
Indeed the Koran’s overall discussion of the Jews is marked by a litany of their sins and punishments, as if part of a divine indictment and conviction process. The Jews wronged themselves (16:118) by losing faith (7:168) and breaking their covenant (5:13). The Jews (echoing an ante-Nicaean, Marcionite polemic) are a nation that has passed away (2:134; repeated in 2:141). Twice Allah sent his instruments (the Assyrians/or Babylonians, and Romans) to punish this perverse people (17:4-5)—their dispersal over the earth is proof of Allah’s rejection (7:168). The Jews are further warned about both their arrogant claim that they remain Allah’s chosen people (62:6), and continued disobedience and “corruption” (5:32-33) Other sins, some repeated, are enumerated: abuse, even killing of prophets (4:155; 2:91), including Isa [Jesus] (3:55; 4:157), is a consistent theme. The Jews ridiculed  Muhammad as Ra’ina (the evil one, in 2:104; 4:46), and  they are also accused of lack of faith, taking words out of context, disobedience, and distortion (4:46). Precious few of them are believers (also 4:46). These “perverse” creatures also claim that Ezra is the messiah and they worship rabbis who defraud men of their possessions (9:30). Additional sins are described: the Jews are typified as an “envious” people (2:109), whose hearts are as hardened as rocks (2:74). They are further accused of confounding the truth (2:42), deliberately perverting scripture (2:75), and being liars (2:78). Ill-informed people of little faith (2:89), they pursue vague and wishful fancies (2:111). Other sins have contributed to their being stamped (see 2:61/ 3:112 above) with “wretchedness/abasement and humiliation,” including—usury (2:275), sorcery (2:102), hedonism (2:96), and idol worship (2:53). More (and repeat) sins, are described still: the Jews’ idol worship is again mentioned (4:51), then linked and followed by charges of other (often repeat) iniquities—the “tremendous calumny” against Mary (4:156), as well as usury and cheating (4:161). Most Jews are accused of being “evil-livers” /“transgressors” /“ungodly” (3:110), who, deceived by their own lies (3:24), try to turn Muslims from Islam (3:99). Jews are blind and deaf to the truth (5:71), and what they have not forgotten they have perverted—they mislead (3:69), confound the truth (3:71), twist tongues (3:79), and cheat Gentiles without remorse (3:75). Muslims are advised not to take the Jews as friends (5:51), and to beware of the inveterate hatred that Jews bear towards them (5:82). The Jews’ ultimate sin and punishment are made clear: they are the devil’s minions (4:60) cursed by Allah, their faces will be obliterated (4:47), and if they do not accept the true faith of Islam—the Jews who understand their faith become Muslims (3:113)—they will be made into apes (2:65/ 7:166), or apes and swine (5:60), and burn in the Hellfires (4:55, 5:29, 98:6, and 58:14-19).

A general guiding principle of the hadith for Muslims is khalifuhum, which means, “do not do like them.” As Georges Vajda demonstrated, however, this seemingly banal principle which covers matters ranging from daily customs and practices (such as basic grooming and dress practices to avoid), is laden with anti-Jewish animus which only intensifies when the hadith deal with more profound subjects such as eschatology.

Even sanctioned Muslim practices of onanism/masturbation, and bestiality, in particular with slaves whom the Muslims wished to avoid impregnating, became a source of friction vis a vis the Jews, who were revolted by these practices. The customs to be observed at funerals, the matters of burial plots and tombs, and more decidedly, Muhammad’s view of the fate of buried Jews, also illustrate anti-Jewish animus. For example, public lamentation over the dead became forbidden to the Jews (and Christians). The hadith further condemn certain physical gestures for being specific to Jews.

The hadith also portray the Jews’ hatred and jealousy of Muhammad: despite being convinced of the authenticity of Mohammed’s divine mission, the Jews did not become votaries of Islam due to pride in their birth and appetite for domination. (These charges became a recurrent theme in later Muslim polemics.) A related commonplace charge in the hadith is that Jews altered their sacred texts deleting Muhammad’s name and precise description. Another series of hadiths elaborate on Koran 3:93, and associated Koranic exegeses, which accuse the Jews of misrepresenting their alimentary prohibitions, most notably camel’s flesh, as in fact described in the Torah. Vajda observes, “distrust must reign” in Muslims relations with Jews—Muslims must especially beware of asking them for information of a religious kind because, “…the Jews…are rebels to the solicitations of Islam and keep their religious traditions in a way liable to lead Muslims into error.”

Striking evidence of Jewish perfidy in the hadith is illustrated by their continual, surreptitious cursing of the Muslims while ostensibly offering proper greetings. Other traditions attribute evil spells to the Jews.

Following the Muslims’ initial conquest of the Jewish farming oasis of Khaybar, one of the vanquished Jewesses reportedly served Muhammad poisoned mutton (or goat), which resulted, ultimately, in his protracted, agonizing death. Ibn Sa‘d’s biography emphasizes the conspiratorial nature of this poisoning as plotted by Jews, and insists that the offending Jewess who poisoned Muhammad was put to death. Thus the Koranic curse (verse 2:61, repeated in 3:112) upon the Jews for (primarily) rejecting, even slaying Allah’s prophets, is updated with perfect archetypal logic in this canonical hadith.

Muslim eschatology, as depicted in the hadith, highlights the Jews’ supreme hostility to Islam. Jews are described as adherents of the Dajjâl—the Muslim equivalent of the Anti-Christ—or according to another tradition, the Dajjâl is himself Jewish. At his appearance, other traditions maintain that the Dajjâl  will be accompanied by 70,000 Jews from Isfahan wrapped in their robes, and armed with polished sabers, their heads covered with a sort of veil. When the Dajjâl is defeated, his Jewish companions will be slaughtered— everything will deliver them up except for the so-called gharkad tree. According to a canonical hadith—repeated in the 1988 Hamas Charter (in section 7)—if a Jew seeks refuge under a tree or a stone, these objects will be able to speak to tell a Muslim: “There is a Jew behind me; come and kill him!” Another hadith variant, which takes place in Jerusalem, has Isa (the Muslim Jesus) leading the Arabs in a rout of the Dajjâl and his company of 70,000 armed Jews. And the notion of jihad “ransom” extends even into Islamic eschatology—on the day of resurrection the vanquished Jews will be consigned to Hellfire, and this will expiate Muslims who have sinned, sparing them from this fate.

Stubborn malevolence, however is the Jews defining worldly characteristic: rejecting Muhammad and refusing to convert to Islam out of jealousy, envy and even selfish personal interest, lead them to acts of treachery, in keeping with their inveterate nature: “...sorcery, poisoning, assassination held no scruples for them.” These archetypes sanction Muslim hatred towards the Jews, and the admonition to at best, “subject [the Jews] to Muslim domination,” as dhimmis, treated “with contempt,” under certain “humiliating arrangements.”

Hartwig Hirschfeld’s  study of the sira and their depiction of Muhammad’s interactions with the Jews of Medina concludes that “mutual disappointment” characterized their relationship, with predictably disastrous consequences for the Jews. During his attempts at proselytization, Muhammad’s misunderstanding (or sheer ignorance) of Jewish doctrine was ridiculed by rabbis and Jewish poets. Ibn Ishaq, author of the earliest Muslim biography of Muhammad, accuses them of “hostility…, envy, hatred, and malice because God ha[d] chosen his apostle from the Arabs.” Regardless, the Jews’ stubborn refusal to convert to Islam altered, decisively, the trajectory of Muhammad’s religious thinking. Following the Battle of Badr—which established the power of nascent Islam—Muhammad initiated a campaign of political assassinations of Jewish (or presumptively Jewish) poets and leaders. Ibn Ishaq recorded these telling words of one of Muhammad’s Muslim assassins, “Our attack upon God’s enemy cast terror among the Jews, and there was no Jew in Medina who did not fear for his life.”  Such fear proved to be well founded, as on the very morning after one political assassination (i.e., of Ka’b b. al ‘Ashraf), Muhammad encouraged the Muslims to slay Jews indiscriminately, according to Ibn Ishaq:
 
The apostle said, “Kill any Jew that falls into your power.” Thereupon Muhayyisa b. Mas'ud leapt upon Ibn Sunayna, a Jewish merchant with whom they had social and business relations, and killed him.
 
These murders of individual Jews were followed by the siege, expropriation, and expulsion of the Medinan Jewish tribes B. Qaynuqa and B. Nadir, and the subsequent massacre of the Jewish men of the B. Qurayza whose wives, children, and possessions were then seized as booty by the Muslims. Muhammad subsequently prepared for his campaign against Khaybar—a farming oasis and the last Jewish stronghold in Northern Arabia, where survivors (most notably, the B. Nadir) of the Muslims earlier attacks on Medinan Jewry had also sought refuge—with two further political assassinations. Bloody assaults by the Muslims which ensued shortly afterwards resulted in the complete subjugation of the Jews of Khaybar, the survivors becoming dhimmis. The theological animus which motivated Muhammad’s political subjugation of the Jews, specifically, became an indelible part of Muslim attitudes toward Jews across space and time. It also defined eternal parameters in which Jews would be permitted to live as humiliated Muslim dhimmis, the Jews of Khaybar—who, according to the hadith and sira, were eventually expelled from Arabia by Caliph Umar—being the prototype.

And a  profoundly anti-Jewish motif occurring after the events recorded in the hadith and sira,  put forth in early Muslim historiography (for example, by Tabari), is most assuredly a part of “the birth pangs” of Islam: the story of Abd Allah b. Saba, an alleged renegade Yemenite Jew, and founder of the heterodox Shi’ite sect. He is held responsible—identified as a Jew—for promoting the Shi’ite heresy and fomenting the rebellion and internal strife associated with this primary breach in Islam’s “political innocence”, culminating in the assassination of the third Rightly Guided Caliph Uthman, and the bitter, lasting legacy of Sunni-Shi’ite sectarian strife.

As noted previously, consistent with Islam’s theological Jew-hatred, S.D. Goitein’s seminal analyses of the Cairo Geniza materials from the high Middle Ages  (~ 950-1250), reveal that Jews living a millennium ago were already experiencing an indigenous Muslim Antisemitism in the Middle East and North Africa. The intensity of this Muslim Jew-hatred motivated Jews of the era to coin two unique Hebrew words: sin?th for Muslim Antisemitism, and s?n? for the Muslim haters who promulgated it. Moreover, two independent Muslim observers writing in the mid-9th century (the polymath al-Jahiz, and the Sufi theologian al-Muhasibi) suggest the most plausible sources of such anti-Jewish animus among the Muslim masses were Koran 5:82, and the sira accounts of Muhammad’s interactions with the Jews of Medina. Nearly a thousand years later in mid-19th century Egypt, E.W. Lane also attributed the Jew hatred he commonly witnessed among ordinary Muslims to their understanding of Koran 5:82. 

Although Antisemitic Islamic motifs from the Koran, hadith, and sira were much more commonly employed in daily life as a form of chronic discrimination against Jews, they have also been used to incite, more extensive persecutions, including mass violence against Jewish communities.

Rigid conformity to a motif in the hadith (and sira) based on the putative death bed wish of Muhammad himself, as recorded by Umar (the second Rightly Guided Caliph), “Two religions shall not remain together in the peninsula of the Arabs,” had tragic consequences for the Jews of Yemen. (The hadith and sira further maintain that Umar did eventually expel the Jews of Khaybar.)  Thus a pious 17th century Yemenite ruler,  Al-Mahdi wishing to fulfill the mandate of this hadith in Yemen,  as well, in 1679-1680, expelled the entire Jewish population of Yemen – men, women and children— deporting them to the inhospitable wastelands of the plain of Tihama. This expulsion was accompanied by the destruction of synagogues, desecration of Torah scrolls, and inducements for conversion to Islam. Three-quarters of the thousands of Jews  expelled perished from exposure to the intense daytime heat (and evening cold),  absence of potable water, and the subsequent spread of epidemic disease. The major Yemenite Jewish community in San’a experienced a 90 percent mortality rate from this catastrophic exile—of about 10,000 persons exiled, only about one tenth, i.e., 1,000, survived.

References to the Jews transformation into apes (Koran 2:65 and 7:166), or apes and swine (Koran 5:60)—perhaps the most striking Koranic motifs for the Jews debasement, which have always transcended any mere application to “Sabbath breakers”—have been exploited in polemical incitement against Jews, or odes celebrating their having been disgraced and slaughtered. Here again, the sacralized prototype is clear: right before subduing the Banu Qurayza and orchestrating the mass execution of the adult males from the besieged Medinan Jewish tribe, Muhammad addressed these Jews with hateful disparagement, as “You brothers of monkeys.” Some 3000 to 4000 Jews were massacred in the 1066 Granada pogrom, inspired in part by an anti-Jewish ode containing the line, “Many a pious Muslim is in awe of the vilest infidel ape,” referring to the Jewish communal leader, the vizier Joseph b. Samuel Naghrela. More Jews were killed in this one pogrom than in the Crusaders’ much more infamous ravages through the Rhineland 30 years later. Anti-Jewish riots and massacres by Muslims accompanied the 1291 death of Jewish physician-vizier Sa’d ad-Daula in Baghdad—the plundering and killing of Jews, which extended throughout Iraq (and likely into Persia)—were celebrated in a verse by the Muslim preacher Zaynu’d-Din ‘Ali b. Said, which begins with this debasing reference to the Jews as apes: “His name we praise who rules the firmament./These apish Jews are done away and shent [ruined].” Referring to the Jews as “brothers of apes”, who repeatedly blasphemed the prophet Muhammad, and whose overall conduct reflected their hatred of Muslims, the Moroccan cleric Al-Maghili (d. 1505) fomented, and then personally lead, a Muslim pogrom (in ~ 1490) against the Jews of  the southern Moroccan  oasis of Touat, plundering and killing Jews en masse, and destroying their synagogue in neighboring Tamantit. Each of these massacres was incited and/or celebrated by depictions of Jews as apes in verses by popular clerics—in the case of Touat, the “composer” of such a verse al-Maghili (d. 1505), an important Muslim theologian whose writings influenced Moroccan religious attitudes towards Jews into the 20th century—led the pogrom himself. Maghili also declared in verse, “Love of the Prophet, requires hatred of the Jews.”


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Religiously Sanctioned Antisemitism, Part III
« Reply #40 on: October 18, 2007, 04:58:45 PM »
Currently the invocation of Koranic references to the Jews as apes and pigs pervades Muslim (especially Arab Muslim) religious and political discourse in print, audio, video, and internet venues. Young children are targeted with these messages, and even encouraged to repeat them by approving adults during additional media coverage. Menachem Milson recently warned that repeated invocation of these motifs cannot be “dismissed as mere vulgar invective”, or “primitive magical thinking”. Rather, these recurring expressions need to be understood as a form of dehumanization serving as a pretext for the destruction of Jews. Given the murderous historical legacy of Muslim societies that invoked these Koranic motifs (i.e., in Granada, Baghdad, and Touat, Morocco) his concern is not alarmist. 
 
The Islamization of European Antisemitism**
 
On Thursday, September 7, 2006, an All-Party Parliamentary Enquiry into Antisemitism issued its finding that anti-Jewish violence had become endemic in Britain, both on the streets and university campuses. A major surge of attacks had accompanied—and followed—the summer 2006 conflict between Hezbollah and Israel, and the report held a “minority of Islamic extremists” responsible for “inciting hatred toward Jews.” As a press report noted, The Parliamentary Enquiry’s results are consistent with data recently published in The Journal of Conflict Resolution by Yale University biostatistician Dr. Edward H. Kaplan, and Dr. Charles A. Small of the Yale Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism.

Drs. Kaplan and Small examined the views of 5004 Europeans, roughly 500 individuals sampled from each of 10 European Union countries (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom). The authors’ main publicized results confirmed their (rather commonsensical) a priori hypothesis: anti-Israel sentiments strongly and independently predicted the likelihood that an individual was Antisemitic in a graded manner, i.e., the more anti-Israel (on a scale of zero to 4), the more a person was likely to be Antisemitic. But perhaps an even more striking finding in light of the burgeoning Jew hatred now evident in Europe’s Muslim communities, received much less attention: in a controlled comparison to European Christians (as the “referent” group), European Muslims were nearly eightfold (i.e., 800%) more likely to be overtly Antisemitic. [emphasis added]. Furthermore, in light of the Pew Global Attitudes Project data on Muslim attitudes toward Jews in Islamic countries, the Yale study likely underestimated the extent of Antisemitism amongst Europe’s Muslim communities, had more poorly educated, less acclimated European Muslims been sampled. Pew’s earlier international survey indicated,
 
In the Muslim world, attitudes toward Jews remain starkly negative, including virtually unanimous unfavorable ratings of 98% in Jordan and 97% in Egypt. Muslims living in Western countries have a more moderate view of Jews - still more negative than positive, but not nearly by the lopsided margins that prevail in Muslim countries.
 
The clear excess virulence of the Antisemitism in Europe’s Muslim versus Christian populations, combined with the evidence that globally, Muslims in Islamic countries exhibit even more fanatical Jew hatred than their European co-religionists, defies the “conventional wisdom” regarding the ultimate origins of Muslim Jew hatred in Western Europe, and beyond. This very flawed construct—that  Muslim Jew hatred is merely a loose amalgam of re-cycled medieval Christian Judeophobic motifs, calumnies from the Czarist Russian “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, and standard Nazi propaganda—continually ignores both empirical contemporary observations, and primary, uniquely Islamic components of Jew hatred, both past and present. When the late 23 year-old Parisian Jew Ilan Halimi was being tortured to death in February 2006, his Muslim torturers, as Nidra Poller wrote in the Wall Street Journal “…phoned the family on several occasions and made them listen to the recitation of verses from the Koran, while Ilan's tortured screams could be heard in the background.” In the heart of Western Europe, Ilan Halimi’s torturers/murderers did not invoke any non-Islamic sources of anti-Jewish hate, only the Koran.
 
Islam Über Alles—The Convergence of Jihad, Islamic Jew-Hatred, and Nazism**
 
Thirty-fours years ago (1973/74) Bat Ye’or published a remarkably foresighted analysis of the Islamic Antisemitism resurgent in her native Egypt, and being packaged for dissemination throughout the Muslim world. The primary, core Antisemitic motifs were Islamic, derived from Islam’s foundational texts, on to which European, especially Nazi elements were grafted.
 
The pejorative characteristics of Jews as they are described in Muslim religious texts are applied to modern Jews.  Anti-Judaism and anti-Zionism are equivalent—due to the inferior status of Jews in Islam, and because divine will dooms Jews to wandering and misery, the Jewish state appears to Muslims as an unbearable affront and a sin against Allah. Therefore it must be destroyed by Jihad. Here the Pan-Arab and anti-Western theses that consider Israel as an advanced instrument of the West in the Islamic world, come to reinforce religious anti-Judaism. The religious and political fuse in a purely Islamic context onto which are grafted foreign elements. If, on the doctrinal level, Nazi influence is secondary to the Islamic base, the technique with which the Antisemitic material has been reworked, and the political purposes being pursued, present striking similarities with Hitler’s Germany.
 
That anti-Jewish opinions have been widely spread in Arab nationalist circles since the 1930s is not in doubt. But their confirmation at [Al] Azhar [University] by the most important authorities of Islam enabled them to be definitively imposed, with the cachet of infallible authenticity, upon illiterate masses that were strongly attached to religious traditions.
 
Nazi academic and propagandist of extermination Johannes von Leers’ writings and personal career trajectory—as a favored contributor in Goebbel’s propaganda ministry, to his eventual adoption of Islam (as Omar Amin von Leers) while working as an anti-Western, and Antisemitic/anti-Zionist propagandist under Nasser’s regime from the mid-1950s, until his death in 1965—epitomizes this convergence of jihad, Islamic Antisemitism, and racist, Nazi Antisemitism, as described by Bat Ye’or.  Already in essays published in 1938 and 1942, the first dating back almost two decades before his formal conversion to Islam while in Egypt, von Leers produced  analyses focused primarily on Muhammad’s interactions with the Jews of Medina. These essays reveal his pious reverence for Islam and its prophet, and a thorough understanding of the sacralized Islamic sources for this narrative, i.e., the Koran, hadith, and sira. von Leers provided this reverent summary characterization of Muhammad’s activities in Mecca, and later Medina, which is entirely consistent with standard Muslim apologetics, in 1942:.
 
[Mecca] For years Muhammad sought in Mecca to succeed with his preaching that there was only one God, the sole, all-merciful king of Judgment Day.  He opposed to the Christian Trinity the unity of God, rejected the Christian doctrine of original sin and salvation, and instead gave every believer as a guiding principle the complete fulfillment of the commands of the righteous, given by a compassionate and just God, before whom every individual person had to account for his acts.
 
[Medina] September 622 he left Mecca for Medina, where he took up residence. Here he encountered the Jewish problem for the first time.  He believed in the victorious power of good in the world, he was firmly convinced that the religion of the one and only God, with its easy, practical, reasonable, basic laws for human life was nothing other than the original religion.  He wanted to take mankind out of the current turmoil and lead it toward the original, clear vision of God.  But since he had to deal with people who had been influenced by both Christianity and Judaism, he said that it was the religion in which Abraham (Ibrahim) had already believed, and which Christ and Moses had proclaimed, only each time it had been distorted by human beings.  He said that this had been revealed anew to him by God.  He wanted to make the path easy to follow for both Christians and Jews; thus at first he allowed his followers to pray facing toward Jerusalem.  He repeatedly emphasized that he only wanted to purify the existing religions, to establish the restored, newly revealed faith.  At the same time he was a skilled statesman.   When the Arab tribes were unified, the Jews became a minority in Medina.  Muhammad provided them with a kind of protectorate agreement: they were to retain their administration and their forms of worship, help the faithful defend the city, not ally themselves with Muhammad's opponents, and contribute to the faithful’s wars. The Jews could have been satisfied with this.  But they began a general hate campaign against Islam, which proclaimed a pure conception of God…
 
Citing (or referring to) the relevant foundational text sources (i.e., Koran 13:36; 8:55-58; 59:1-15; the sira and canonical hadith descriptions of the fate of individual Jews such as Abu Afak and Ka’b ibn Ashraf, and the Jewish tribes Banu Qaynuqa, Banu Nadir, Banu Qurayzah, as well as the Jews of the Khaybar oasis), von Leers chronicles Muhammad’s successful campaigns which vanquished these Jews, killing and dispersing them, “…or at most allow[ing] them to remain in certain places if they paid a poll tax.” Von Leers further describes the accounts (from the hadith, and more elaborately, the sira) of Muhammad’s poisoning by a Khaybar Jewess, and also notes the canonical hadith which records Caliph Umar’s rationale for his putative expulsion from northern Arabia of those remaining Jews who survived Muhammad’s earlier campaigns.
 
On his deathbed Mohammed is supposed to have said:  “There must not be two religions in Arabia.” One of his successors, the caliph Omar, resolutely drove the Jews out of Arabia.
 
And von Leers even invokes the apocalyptic canonical hadith which 46 years later became the keystone of Hamas’ 1988 charter sanctioning a jihad genocide against the Jewish State of Israel.
 
Ibn Huraira even communicates to us the following assertion of the great man of God: “Judgment Day will come only when the Moslems have inflicted an annihilating defeat on the Jews, when every stone and every tree behind which a Jew has hidden says to believers: ‘Behind me stands a Jew, smite him.’”
 
Von Leers’ 1942 essay concludes by simultaneously extolling the “model” of oppression the Jews experienced under Islamic suzerainty, and the nobility of Muhammad, Islam, and the contemporary Muslims of the World War II era, foreshadowing his own conversion to Islam just over a decade later:
 
They [the Jews] were subjected to a very restrictive and oppressive special regulation that completely crippled Jewish activities.  All reporters of the time when the Islamic lands still completely obeyed their own laws agree that the Jews were particularly despised…
 
Mohammed's opposition to the Jews undoubtedly had an effect—oriental Jewry was completely paralyzed by Islam.  Its back was broken.  Oriental Jewry has played almost no role in Judaism's massive rise to power over the last two centuries.  Scorned, the Jews vegetated in the dirty alleys of the mellah, and were subject to a special regulation that did not allow them to profiteer, as they did in Europe, or even to receive stolen goods, but instead kept them fearful and under pressure.  Had the rest of the world adopted a similar method, today we would have no Jewish question—and here we must absolutely note that there were also Islamic rulers, among them especially the Spanish caliphs of the House of Muawiyah, who did not adhere to Islam's traditional hostility to Jews—to their own disadvantage.  However, as a religion Islam has performed the immortal service of preventing the Jews from carrying out their threatened conquest of Arabia and of defeating the dreadful doctrine of Jehovah through a pure faith that opened the way to higher culture for many peoples and gave them an education and humane training, so that still today a Moslem who takes his religion seriously is one of the most worthy phenomena in this world in turmoil.
 
And even earlier, in a 1938 essay, von Leers further sympathized with, “the leading role of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in the Arabians’ battles against the Jewish invasion in Palestine.” He observes that to the pious Muslim, “…the Jew is an enemy, not simply an ‘unbeliever’ who might perhaps be converted or, despite the fact that he does not belong to Islam, might still be a person of some estimation.  Rather, the Jew is the predestined opponent of the Muslim, one who desired to bring down the work of the Prophet.”  Thus, von Leers continues, “how shocked and angry the Muslims of today are…when the Jews are once again introduced into Palestine by a European nation against all historical common sense, and set up as a ruling class!” He then proclaims, “For the pious Muslim, this is nothing other than a manifestation of the enthroning of Satan!”  von Leers concludes by warning that,
 
The British political policy here is not paying sufficient attention to the true realities of spiritual history.  They would do better to free themselves from the Jew-friendly teachings of liberalism and to listen closely to the cry of the anger of Islam…
 
Until his death in 1965 von Leers remained unrepentant about the annihilationist policies towards the Jews he helped advance serving Hitler’s Reich. Indeed he was convinced of the righteousness of the Nazi war against the Jews, and as a pious Muslim convert, von Leers viewed the Middle East as the succeeding battleground to seal the fate of world Jewry. His public evolution over the course of three decades illustrates starkly the shared centrality to these totalitarianisms—both modern and ancient—of the Jews as “first and last enemy” motif.  Finally, an October 1957 US intelligence report on von Leers’ writings and activities for Egypt and the Arab League confirmed his complete adoption of the triumphalist Muslim worldview, desirous of nothing less than the destruction of Judeo-Christian civilization by jihad:
 
He [Dr. Omar Amin von Leers] is becoming more and more a religious zealot, even to the extent of advocating an expansion of Islam in Europe in order to bring about stronger unity through a common religion. This expansion he believes can come not only from contact with the Arabs in the Near East and Africa but with Islamic elements in the USSR. The results he envisions as the formation of a political bloc against which neither East nor West could prevail.
 
Fifty years later ignorance, denial, and delusion have engendered the sorry state of public understanding of this most ominous conversion of hatreds, by all its potential victims, not only Jews. This lack of understanding is little advanced by the current spate of analyses which seek “Nazi roots” of the cataclysmic September 11, 2001 acts of jihad terrorism, and see Nazism as having “introduced” antisemitism to an otherwise “tolerant”, even philosemitic Islamic world beginning in the 1930s. Awkwardly forced, and ahistorical, these analyses realign the Nazi cart in front of the Islamic steed which has driven both jihad and Islamic antisemitism, since the 7th century advent of the Muslim creed, particularly during the last decade of Muhammad’s life.

Even if all vestiges of Nazi militarism and racist antisemitism were to disappear miraculously overnight from the Islamic world, the living legacy of jihad war against non-Muslim infidels, and anti-Jewish hatred and violence, rooted in Islam’s sacred texts—Koran, hadith, and sira—would persist. The assessment and understanding of the uniquely Muslim institution of jihad, and Islamic antisemitism, begins with an unapologetic exposure of both the injunctions sanctioning jihad war, and the anti-Jewish motifs contained in these foundational texts of Islam. Yet while the West has engaged in self-critical mea culpa, acknowledging its own imperialistic past, shameful role in the slave trade, and antisemitic persecution, and has taken steps to make amends where possible, the Islamic nations remain in perpetual denial. Until Muslims acknowledge the ugly realities of jihad imperialism, and anti-Jewish persecution in their history, the past will continue to poison the present, and there will be no hope of combating resurgent jihadism, and Islam’s unreformed theological hatred of Jews in modern times, from Morocco to Indonesia, and within Muslim communities living in Western, and other non-Muslim  societies across the globe.
 
**All adapted from Andrew G. Bostom’s forthcoming, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, 2007, on Prometheus Books.

http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/11679/sec_id/11679
 

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Anti-semitism & Jews
« Reply #41 on: November 08, 2007, 08:54:07 AM »
Saving Civilization From Itself
Churchill understood that the Jews are the bedrock of Western tradition.

BY ARTHUR HERMAN
Thursday, November 8, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST

"Why should we Anglo-Saxons apologize for being superior?" Winston Churchill once growled in exasperation. "We are superior." Certainly Churchill's views of what he and other late Victorians called the "lesser races," such as blacks and East Indians, are very different from ours today. One might easily assume that a self-described reactionary like Churchill, holding such views, shared the anti-Semitism prevalent among Europe's ruling elites before the Holocaust.

But he did not, as Martin Gilbert vividly shows in "Churchill and the Jews." By chronicling Churchill's warm dealings with English and European Jews throughout his long career, and his heartfelt support of Zionism, Mr. Gilbert conveys Churchill's deep admiration for the Jewish people and captures his crucial role in creating the state of Israel. Churchill offers the powerful example of a Western statesman who--unlike other statesmen in his own time and ours--understood the malignant nature of anti-Semitism and did what he could to oppose its toxic effects.

His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, had been a close friend and ally to many wealthy British Jews, almost notoriously so, given the rancid snobbery of his circles. The son rarely failed to follow his father's inclinations, in this matter as in others. Jews like the Rothschilds and the banker Sir Ernest Cassel helped to advance Winston Churchill's early career (including watching over his finances after his father's death), and he repaid their support in part by publicly condemning the kind of anti-Semitism that was all too common in England's upper classes. But his actions were not merely an expression of personal thanks.





A student of history, Churchill came to feel that Judaism was the bedrock of traditional Western moral and political principles--and Churchill was of a generation that preferred to talk about principles instead of "values." For Europeans to turn against the Jew, he argued, was for them to strike at their own roots and reject an essential part of their civilization--"that corporate strength, that personal and special driving power" that Jews had brought for hundreds of years to Europe's arts, sciences and institutions.
To deny Jews a national homeland was therefore an act of ingratitude. Churchill became a keen backer of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which broached the idea of creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine. As a friend to Zionist leader Chaim Weizman, and as colonial secretary after World War I, Churchill made establishing such a homeland a matter of urgency. "The hope of your race for so many centuries will be gradually realized here," Churchill told a Jewish audience in Jerusalem during his visit in March 1921, "not only for your own good, but for the good of all the world."

By "all the world" Churchill most pointedly meant to include Palestine's Arabs. As Mr. Gilbert recounts, Churchill was dismayed and disgusted by Arab resistance to Jewish immigration and settlement in Palestine. "The Jews have a far more difficult task than you," he told Arab representatives, since "you only have to enjoy your own possessions," while the Jewish emigrants from Europe and elsewhere would have to carve a society out of a barren wilderness.

Yet Churchill was convinced that Arab civilization would benefit from contact with an entrepreneurial and morally centered people. "Speaking entirely as a non-Jew," he wrote, "I look on the Jews as the natural importers of western leaven so necessary for countries in the Near East." At the same time, Churchill tried to ensure that Palestinian Arabs got their own national homeland. It was Churchill who, as colonial secretary, decided to separate Transjordan (modern-day Jordan) from the rest of Palestine, assuming that Transjordan would become the site of the Arabs' future state and that other parts of Palestine (including the West Bank of the Jordan River) would be open to Jewish settlement.

Churchill was to be disappointed by the results of his Middle Eastern efforts, as Arabs hunted down and murdered Jewish settlers by the hundreds in the 1920s and 1930s--just at the time when Adolf Hitler was building his own regime around the persecution of the Jews in Germany. As early as 1930 Churchill realized that the Nazis' anti-Jewish policies carried the stench of an ancient evil. "Tell your boss from me," he said to a Hitler acquaintance in the late summer of 1932, as the Nazi Party was on the verge of power, "that anti-Semitism may be a good starter but it is a bad finisher."

In December 1942, Churchill--now prime minister--learned from a Roman Catholic member of the Polish resistance, a man named Jan Karsky, that thousands of Jews were being rounded up and sent by cattle cars to what turned out to be the death camp at Belzec, in eastern Poland. Churchill used the Karsky report to compel the Allies, including the Russians, to condemn "a bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination" in Germany--although he understood that the best way to halt the slaughter would be the speedy destruction of Hitler's empire. The chief of Britain's air staff, Sir Charles Portal, warned that any air raids "avowedly conducted on account of the Jews would be an asset to enemy propaganda," and Churchill reluctantly bowed to his advice. Nonetheless, in 1943 he wanted a film that documented the atrocities committed against the Jews to be shown to every American serviceman before the invasion of Europe.





After the war, Churchill felt that the most fitting response to the Holocaust would be to punish those guilty of the most horrific crimes against the Jews and to fulfill the promise of a Jewish homeland that he and Britain had made almost 30 years earlier. When Ernest Bevin, Britain's Labour Party foreign minister, hesitated to recognize Israel nine months after its founding, for fear of inflaming Arab opinion, Churchill swung back hard: "Whether the Right Honorable Gentleman likes it or not, the coming into being of a Jewish State in Palestine is an event in world history to be viewed in the perspective, not of a generation or a century, but in the perspective of a thousand, two thousand, or even three thousand years." Israel was just recompense, Churchill felt, not only for what the Jews of Europe had lost but for what they had given to civilization over the centuries.
This view, of course, no longer prevails. Today the existence of Israel is apparently something to be regretted, even deplored, not only in Arab capitals but in European ones and on American university campuses. Paradoxically, such feelings intensified after 9/11, an event that should have made us all aware of who the friends of Western civilization really are--and who its enemies. Martin Gilbert's book reminds us that anti-Semitism is the dark turn of the modern mind against itself, and a form of cultural patricide.

Mr. Herman's "Gandhi & Churchill" will be published by Bantam in April. You can buy "Churchill and the Jews" from the OpinionJournal bookstore.

WSJ

Crafty_Dog

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Jews on first?
« Reply #42 on: November 15, 2007, 07:37:18 PM »
Jews on first?

http://www.veoh.com/videoDetails.html?v=e107067WHhNhRh4

and one more:

From: "Marc Denny" <craftydog@dogbrothers.com>
To: "Marc Denny" <craftydog@dogbrothers.com>
Subject: Fw: Great Jewish Parrot Joke
Date: Thursday, November 15, 2007 7:34 PM



Sent: Thursday, November 15, 2007 7:06 PM
Subject: Fw: Great Jewish Parrot Joke


The Jewish Parrot


Meyer, a lonely widower, was walking home along Delancy Street one day
wishing something wonderful would happen in his life, when he passed a
pet store and heard a squawking voice shouting out in Yiddish,
"Quawwwwk...vus machts du?"

Meyer rubbed his eyes and ears. Couldn't believe it.
Perfect Yiddish.

The proprietor urged him, "Come in here, fella, and check out this parrot..."

Meyer did. An African Grey cocked his little head and said: "Vus?
Kenst sprechen Yiddish?"

In a matter of moments, Meyer had placed five hundred dollars on the
counter and carried the parrot in his cage away with him. All night he
talked with the parrot. In Yiddish. He told the parrot about his
father's adventures coming to America. About how beautiful his late
wife, Sarah, was when she was a young bride. About his family. About
his years of working in the garment district. About Florida.

The parrot listened and commented.

They shared some walnuts.

The parrot told him of living in the pet store, how lonely he would
get on the weekends. They both went to sleep.

Next morning, Meyer began to put on his Tfillin, all the while saying
his prayers. The parrot demanded to know what he was doing and when
Meyer explained, the parrot wanted to do the same. Meyer went out and
had a miniature set of tfillin hand made for the parrot.

The parrot wanted to learn to daven and learned every prayer. He even
wanted to learn to read Hebrew.

So Meyer spent weeks and months, sitting and teaching the parrot,
teaching him Torah. In time, Meyer came to love and count on the
parrot as a friend and fellow Jew.

One morning, on Rosh Hashanah, Meyer rose and got dressed and was
about to leave when the parrot demanded to go with him. Meyer
explained that Shul was not a place for a bird, but the parrot made a
terrific argument, so Meyer relented and carried the bird to Shul on
his shoulder.

Needless to say, they made quite a spectacle, and Meyer was questioned
by everyone, including the Rabbi and the Cantor. They refused to allow
a bird into the building on the High Holy Days, but Meyer persuaded
them to let him in this one time, swearing that the parrot could
daven. Wagers were made with Meyer.


Thousands of dollars were bet that the parrot could NOT daven, could
not speak Yiddish or Hebrew, etc.

All eyes were on the African Grey during services. The parrot perched
on Meyer's shoulder as one prayer and song passed - Meyer heard not a
peep from the bird. He began to become annoyed, slapping at his
shoulder and mumbling under his breath, "Daven!"

Nothing.

"Daven...parrot, you can daven, so daven...come on, everyone is looking at you!"

Nothing.

After Rosh Hashanah services were concluded, Meyer found that he owed
his Shul buddies and the Rabbi over four thousand dollars..


He marched home, so upset he said nothing to the parrot.

Finally several blocks from the Temple the Parrot began to sing an old
Yiddish song, as happy as a lark.


Meyer stopped and looked at him.

"Why? After I had tfillin made for you and taught you the morning
prayers, and taught you to read Hebrew and the Torah. And after you
begged me to bring you to Shul on Rosh Hashana, why? WHY?!? Why did
you do this to me?"

"Meyer, don't be a schmuck," the parrot replied. "Think of the odds
we'll get on Yom Kippur!"

« Last Edit: November 15, 2007, 07:55:12 PM by Crafty_Dog »

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Anti-semitism & Jews
« Reply #43 on: December 13, 2007, 07:37:04 PM »
RESPECT to the Muslim who stepped forward!!!

NEW YORK -- Ten subway riders, including two with prior bias crime busts, were charged with assaulting a group of four Jews wishing each other "Happy Hannukah" aboard a Q train in Brooklyn last week.

Authorities say the victims, two men and two women, were on a southbound Q train at Canal Street in Lower Manhattan when they were approached by the gang of 10 at around 11:15 p.m. Friday.

They were allegedly beaten up by the group in an attack now being investigated as a bias crime, because one is accused of shouting, "Hanukkah is when the Jews killed Jesus."

Two of the victims, Maria Parsheva and Walter Adler spoke to Eyewitness News reporter NJ Burkett.



"At first, I got hit, but I wasn't bleeding," Adler said. "It was one of those sucker punch, shock punches. But by the second time, there were like people stomping me."

But it was what the attackers said that will stay with Adler longer than the bruises.

"'You killed him, you killed Jesus, you killed him on Hanukkah, you dirty Jew, you [expletive] Jew,' Adler said the attackers said.

Adler said the incident was sparked by him wishing his friends a Happy Hannukah to his friends.

"And almost immediately, you see the look in this guy's face, like I've called his mother something," Adler said. "And I see the way this guy looks, and I see the way that this guy wants to fight me, and I look, and I see another guy right in front of me, another guy. And I see the crowd moving in."

"Attacking someone because they yell 'Happy Hanukkah' is obviously reason to believe this is an anti-Semitic," Parsheva said.

When Hassan Askari, another passenger on the train, tried to help, he was beaten up too.

"I don't understand," Askari said. "They just said 'Happy Hannukah.' That was it. There was nothing else."

Although hate crimes charges have not yet been brought, it is being investigated as a bias incident.

Police say the victims were treated for bruising and swelling to the head and face, but none required hospital treatment.

The 10 suspects, ages 19 and 20, were arrested at the DeKalb Avenue station in Brooklyn. They were charged with assault and unlawful assembly.

"No one else helped up, except Hassan," Parsheva said. "No one else on the train."

"A Muslim-American saved us, when our own people were on the train and didn't do anything," Adler said. "Someone who in the media often gets painted as the enemy of Israel and the Jews, this is a...Sunni Muslim, this is someone that jumped in, he knew we were Jews, to help us."

During the investigation, one of four victims revealed the comment made by one of the attackers, prompting the hate crimes task force investigation.

Two of the 10 suspects charged have prior hate crimes arrests.

Authorities say 19-year-old Joseph Jirovec was one of six charged in a June 2006 attack on four black youths in Brooklyn's mostly white Gerritsen Beach neighborhood.

Jirovec, the son of a firefighter serving in Iraq as an Army staff sergeant, claimed at the time that the motivation for the attack was his membership in a violent street gang, and not bias.

He said his street name was "Bloody Fitted" and that he held the rank of two-star general in the Bloods street gang.

Another of those arrested, 19-year-old Zachary Rogalski of Brooklyn, was charged in a May 2005 attack on several black youths in Marine Park, Brooklyn.

He was part of a group of nine white youths who beat up a group of three blacks looking for a $70 cigarette lighter they lost during a previous fight, according to police.
(Copyright ©2007 WABC-TV/DT. All Rights Reserved.)

Source Drudge

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Anti-semitism & Jews
« Reply #44 on: January 12, 2008, 07:34:55 AM »
Bush Says U.S. Should Have Bombed WWII Death Camp During Holocaust Memorial Tour
Friday , January 11, 2008
Associated Press
JERUSALEM —
President George W. Bush, on an emotional tour of Israel's Holocaust memorial, stopped in front of an aerial photo of Auschwitz on Friday and told his secretary of state that the U.S. should have bombed the death camp to stop the extermination of Jews there, the memorial's chairman said.
It was a rare acknowledgment from a U.S. leader on an issue that has stirred deep controversy for decades.
The Allies had detailed reports about Auschwitz during the war from Polish partisans and escaped prisoners. But they chose not to bomb the camp, the rail lines leading to it, or any of the other Nazi death camps, preferring instead to focus all resources on the broader military effort.
Between 1.1 million and 1.5 million people were murdered at the infamous camp in Poland.
Bush twice had tears in his eyes during an hour-long tour of the museum, said Yad Vashem's chairman, Avner Shalev, who guided Bush through the exhibits.
Upon viewing an aerial shot of Auschwitz, taken during the war by U.S. forces, Bush called the ruling not to bomb it "complex." He then called over Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to discuss President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's decision, clearly pondering the options before rendering an opinion of his own, Shalev told the Associated Press.
"We should have bombed it," Bush said, according to Shalev.
Tom Segev, a leading Israeli scholar of the Holocaust, said the Bush comment, which appeared spontaneous, marked the first time an American president had made this acknowledgment.
"It is clear now that the U.S. knew a lot about it," he said. "It's possible that bombing at least the railway to the camps may have saved the lives of the Jews of Hungary. They were the very last ones who were sent to Auschwitz at a time when everybody knew what was going on."
Bush, making the most extensive Mideast trip of his presidency, was accompanied on his tour of the museum by a small party that included Rice, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Israeli President Shimon Peres.
At the compound, overlooking a forest on Jerusalem's outskirts, Bush visited a memorial to the 1.5 million Jewish children killed in the Holocaust, featuring six candles reflected 1.5 million times in a hall of mirrors.
At the site's Hall of Remembrance, he heard a cantor chant a Jewish prayer for the dead. There, Bush, wearing a yarmulke, placed a red-white-and-blue wreath on a stone slab that covers ashes of Holocaust victims taken from six extermination camps. He also lit a torch memorializing the victims.
"I was most impressed that people in the face of horror and evil would not forsake their God. In the face of unspeakable crimes against humanity, brave souls — young and old — stood strong for what they believe," Bush said.
"I wish as many people as possible would come to this place. It is a sobering reminder that evil exists, and a call that when evil exists we must resist it," he said.
The memorial was closed to the public and under heavy guard Friday, with armed soldiers standing on top of some of the site's monuments and a police helicopter and surveillance blimp hovering in the air overhead.
It was Bush's second visit to the Holocaust memorial, a regular stop on the visits of foreign dignitaries. His first was in 1998, as governor of Texas. The last sitting U.S. president to visit was Bill Clinton in 1994.
In the memorial's visitors' book, the president wrote simply, "God bless Israel, George Bush."
Shalev then presented Bush with illustrations of the Bible drawn by the Jewish artist Carol Deutsch, who perished in the Holocaust.
Deutsch created the works while in hiding from the Nazis in Belgium. He was informed upon, and died in 1944 in the Buchenwald camp. After the war, his daughter Ingrid discovered that the Nazis had confiscated their furniture and valuables but had left behind a single item: a meticulously crafted wooden box adorned with a Star of David and a seven-branched menorah, containing a collection of 99 of the artist's illustrations of biblical scenes.
The originals are on display at Yad Vashem. The memorial recently decided to produce a special series of 500 replicas, the first of which was presented to Bush.
Debbie Deutsch-Berman, a Yad Vashem employee whose grandfather was Deutsch's brother, said she was proud that Bush would be given her relative's artwork.
"These are not just his paintings, they are his legacy, and the fact that they survived shows that as much as our enemies tried to destroy the ideas that these paintings embody, they failed," she said.

Crafty_Dog

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Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust
« Reply #45 on: April 01, 2008, 09:32:52 AM »
The relative lack of Jewish resistance in Europe is a common myth. However inadequate, it was far more than anyone else in Europe was doing. And a lot of other important factors keep getting conveniently overlooked.

A very important discussion of that is posted here by noted writer and political scientist Dave Kopel.
http://www.davekopel.com/2A/Foreign/...-holocaust.htm
I would suggest reading the whole thing and its references.

The key quote would be "Jews resisted Hitler more so than any other group behind Nazi lines"

However, a few more quotes seem in order.
"Contrary to myth of Jewish passivity, many Jews did fight back during the Holocaust. They shut down the extermination camp at Sobibor, rose up in the Warsaw Ghetto, and fought in the woods and swamps all over Eastern Europe. Indeed, Jews resisted at a higher rate than did any other population under Nazi rule."

"Jewish resistance was extensive, and succeeded in saving many lives. The record also explains that a key impediment to even more effective resistance was the lack of firearms, as well as Jewish unfamiliarity with arms during the pre-war years. The article dispels the myth of Jewish passivity during the Holocaust"

About who else was helping, in no small way, to murder Jews:
"In the woods and swamps of Eastern Europe, the Jewish partisans were often attacked by local civilians, or by non-Jewish partisan groups, including remnants of the Russian or Polish armies."
Locals collaborating with Nazis were a major factor too.

Also note that a very large fraction of combat capable Jews were already serving in various armies and/or units. Note the interesting statistic for one partisan formation:
"On the day the Bielski unit was disbanded, it comprised 1,140 Jews, including 149 armed combatants."
Given that there was a most remarkable 95% survival rate in this unit, that says a great deal about available human resources.

Looks like it's the Europeans, and not the Jews (Poles in this case) who were the real passive bunch
"In 1942-43, Jews constituted half of all the partisans in Poland."
Being a Jewish partisan apparently carried about 80% death rate, on average.

"There were armed revolts in over forty different ghettos, mostly in Eastern Poland."

More on who was really passive. And why we don't hear much about it.
"In other parts of Europe, Jews likewise joined the resistance at much higher rates than the rest of the population. Unlike in Eastern Europe, though, Jews were generally able to participate as individuals in the national resistance, rather than having to fight in separate units."


At risk of reinforcing stereotypes of France and French. Nothing passive here.
"For example, in France, Jews amounted to than one percent of French population, but comprised about 15-20 percent of the French Resistance."

Similar situation in Greece.
"In Greece too, Jews were disproportionately involved in the resistance. In Thessaly, a Jewish partisan unit in the mountains was led by the septuagenarian Rabbi Moshe Pesah, who carried his own rifle. The Athenian Jew Jacques Costis led the team which demolished the Gorgopotoma Bridge, thereby breaking the link between the mainland and Peloponnesian Peninsula, and interfering with the delivery of supplies to Rommel’s Afrika Korps."

"Approximately 10,000 of the 80,000 Jews in Minsk escaped to the wood to fight as partisans.Half of them survived the war."

Crafty_Dog

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Wallenberg
« Reply #46 on: April 28, 2008, 09:33:26 AM »
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080427/ap_on_re_eu/the_wallenberg_mystery

Scholars run down more clues to a Holocaust mystery
By ARTHUR MAX and RANDY HERSCHAFT, Associated Press Writers Sun Apr 27, 3:51 PM ET

STOCKHOLM, Sweden - Budapest, November 1944: Another German train has loaded its cargo of Jews bound for Auschwitz. A young Swedish diplomat pushes past the SS guard and scrambles onto the roof of a cattle car.

Ignoring shots fired over his head, he reaches through the open door to outstretched hands, passing out dozens of bogus "passports" that extended Sweden's protection to the bearers. He orders everyone with a document off the train and into his caravan of vehicles. The guards look on, dumbfounded.
Raoul Wallenberg was a minor official of a neutral country, with an unimposing appearance and gentle manner. Recruited and financed by the U.S., he was sent into Hungary to save Jews. He bullied, bluffed and bribed powerful Nazis to prevent the deportation of 20,000 Hungarian Jews to concentration camps, and averted the massacre of 70,000 more people in Budapest's ghetto by threatening to have the Nazi commander hanged as a war criminal.

Then, on Jan. 17, 1945, days after the Soviets moved into Budapest, the 32-year-old Wallenberg and his Hungarian driver, Vilmos Langfelder, drove off under a Russian security escort, and vanished forever.

And because he was a rare flicker of humanity in the man-made hell of the Holocaust, the world has celebrated him ever since. Streets have been named after him and his face has been on postage stamps. And researchers have wrestled with two enduring mysteries: Why was Wallenberg arrested, and did he really die in Soviet custody in 1947?

Researchers have sifted through hundreds of purported sightings of Wallenberg into the 1980s, right down to plotting his movements from cell to cell while in custody. And fresh documents are to become public which might cast light on another puzzle: Whether Wallenberg was connected, directly or indirectly, to a super-secret wartime U.S. intelligence agency known as "the Pond," operating as World War II was drawing to a close and the Soviets were growing increasingly suspicious of Western intentions in eastern Europe.

Speculation that Wallenberg was engaged in espionage has been rife since the Central Intelligence Agency acknowledged in the 1990s that he had been recruited for his rescue mission by an agent of the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, which later became the CIA.

About the Pond, little is known. But later this year the CIA is to release a stash of Pond-related papers accidentally discovered in a Virginia barn in 2001. These are the papers of John Grombach, who headed the Pond from its creation in 1942. CIA officials say they should be turned over to the National Archives in College Park, Md.

In February, the Swedish government posted an online database of 1,000 documents and testimonies related to Wallenberg's disappearance. In a few months, independent investigators plan to launch a Web site with their nearly 20-year research into Russian archives and prison records. Russia is building a Museum of Tolerance that will feature once-classified documents on Wallenberg. And the CIA last year relaxed its guidelines to reveal details of its sources and intelligence-gathering methods in the case.

Despite dozens of books and hundreds of documents on Wallenberg, much remains hidden. The Kremlin has failed to find or deliver dozens of files, Sweden has declined to open all its books, and The Associated Press has learned as many as 100,000 pages of declassified OSS documents await processing at the National Archives.

The Russians say Wallenberg died in prison in 1947, but never produced a proper death certificate or his remains.

But independent research suggests he may have lived many years — perhaps until the late 1980s. If true, he likely was held in isolation, stripped of his identity, known only by a number or a false name and moving like a phantom among Soviet prisons, labor camps and psychiatric institutions.

In 1991, the Russian government assigned Vyacheslav Nikonov, deputy head of the KGB intelligence service, to spend months searching classified archives about Wallenberg.

"I think I found all the existing documents," Nikonov e-mailed The Associated Press last month. The Soviets believed Wallenberg had been a spy, he said, but unlike many political detainees he never had a trial.

Nikonov's conclusion: "Shot in 1947."

Later in 1991, Russia and Sweden launched a joint investigation that lasted 10 years but failed to reach a joint conclusion.

The 2001 Swedish report said: "There is no fully reliable proof of what happened to Raoul Wallenberg," and listed 17 unanswered questions.

The Russian report bluntly said, "Wallenberg died, or most likely was killed, on July 17, 1947." It named Viktor Abakumov, the head of the "Smersh" counterintelligence agency, as responsible for the execution and cover-up. It said the Russians consider the Wallenberg case "resolved."

Unsatisfied, independent consultants and academics have kept digging, analyzing, reassessing old information and pressing for the Kremlin to release missing files.

___

Wallenberg arrived in Budapest in July 1944. With the knowledge of his government, his task as first secretary to the Swedish diplomatic legation was a cover for his true mission as secret emissary of the U.S. War Refugee Board, created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a belated attempt to stem the annihilation of Europe's Jews.

In the previous two months, 440,000 Hungarian Jews had been shipped to Auschwitz for extermination. They were among the last of six million Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust.

Of the 230,000 who remained in the Hungarian capital in mid-1944, 100,000 survived the war.

After the Red Army arrived in January, Wallenberg went to see the Russian military commander to discuss postwar reconstruction and restitution of Jewish property. Two days later he returned under Russian escort to collect some personal effects, then was never seen in public again.

And what did his country — or his influential cousins — do about it?

Looking back a half century later, the Swedish government acknowledged that its own passive response to the detention of one of its diplomats was astounding, and that it had missed several chances to win his freedom.

"The worst mistakes were done in the first two years," said Hans Magnusson, the Swedish co-chairman of the 10-year investigation with the Russians. Sweden felt intimidated by the mighty Soviets and unwilling to challenge them, he said.

In the mid-1950s, the Swedes pursued the case more aggressively, prompting a memorandum from Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in 1957 that Wallenberg had died of heart failure in detention 10 years earlier — at age 34.

As more testimony came in that Wallenberg was still alive, Stockholm periodically raised the issue with Moscow — but without results, said Magnusson, interviewed in the Netherlands where he is now ambassador.

Sweden could have pushed harder, he said, "but I doubt it would have achieved more."

"It is inconceivable," says Wallenberg's half-sister, Nina Lagergren. "Here is a man sent out by the Swedish government to risk his life. He saved thousands of people — and he was left to rot."

___

Some time around 1994, Susan Mesinai, who had by then been researching the Wallenberg case for five years, visited Lucette Colvin Kelsey, Wallenberg's cousin, at her home in Connecticut. After lunch, Kelsey caught up with Mesinai as she got into the car and told her: "Raoul was working for the highest levels of government."

"So I said to her, 'How high? Do you mean the president?' And she nodded her head," Mesinai said, disclosing to AP a conversation she had kept confidential for 14 years.

Kelsey's father, Col. William Colvin, had been the U.S. military attache in the Swedish capital around the time of World War I. Wallenberg spent vacations in the 1930s with the Colvin family while he earned a degree in architecture at the University of Michigan. Kelsey, who was a year younger than her cousin, died in 1996.

Rather than clarify anything, Kelsey's cryptic remark only deepened the fog.

Wallenberg's rescue mission inevitably placed him in a vortex of intrigue and espionage involving the Hungarian resistance, the Jewish underground, communists working for the Soviets, and British, U.S. and Swedish intelligence operations. He also had regular contact with Adolf Eichmann and other Nazis running the deportation of Jews.

Whether or not he himself was passing on intelligence, Russia had plenty of reason to suspect him of spying, either for the Allies or Germany — or both.

"Wallenberg had ties to all the major actors in Hungary," says Susanne Berger, a German researcher who collaborated with the Swedish-Russian research project.

The Stockholm chief of the War Refugee Board, Iver C. Olsen, was also a key member of the 35-man OSS station in the Swedish capital, and it was he who recruited Wallenberg, who in turn kept the U.S. connection secret by sending his communications through Swedish diplomatic channels.

Olsen's OSS personnel file — unpublished until the AP viewed it at the National Archives — revealed that the American was cited for using his position at the War Refugee Board "in gathering important information for the OSS and for the State Department."

In 1955 Olsen denied to the CIA that Wallenberg ever spied for the OSS, and Mesinai and Berger offer a different likelihood: that the Swede was a source for the Pond, which was a rival to the OSS known only to Roosevelt and a few insiders in the War and State Departments.

A small clandestine intelligence-gathering operation, the Pond relied on contacts in private corporations and hand-picked embassy personnel. It worked closely with the Dutch electronics company N.V. Philips, "which had access to 'enemy' territory as well as a far-flung corporation intelligence apparatus in its own right," said former CIA analyst Mark Stout who wrote a brief unofficial history of the Pond.

So far, no evidence has emerged that Wallenberg worked for the Pond, and Stout said in an interview he had not seen Wallenberg mentioned in any papers he has reviewed.

But their circles of contacts intersected at several points, including members of the Hungarian resistance and possibly the Philips connection.

"The Pond was centered around President Roosevelt's office and rumors of a special mission, intelligence or otherwise, for Raoul Wallenberg have persisted through the years," said Berger, who suspects the Soviets knew about the agency.

It may have been just one more reason for Stalin to order his arrest, she said. Regardless of whether Wallenberg was involved, "the Pond's activities clearly would have served to enhance Soviet paranoia about Allied activities and aims in Hungary."

Hungarian historian Laszlo Ritter, of the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, said the Philips company also was providing cover for Britain's MI6 intelligence service. One of its crucial agents in the Balkans was Lolle Smit, who was knighted after the war by both Britain and his native Holland.

One month before Wallenberg arrived, Smit fled Budapest for Romania, from where he continued to control his network, Ritter said, but he left his family behind.

Smit's daughter, Berber Smit, worked with Wallenberg in his rescue efforts — and "had a romance with him," according to her son, Alan Hogg.

Ritter said Hungarian war files show no direct tie between Wallenberg and Smit, or between the diplomat and British intelligence. At the same time, MI6 used the Swedish legation at least twice to smuggle out information, and helped give false papers to Jews and the anti-fascist resistance, he said.

When the OSS wanted to dispatch a radio to the Hungarian underground leader Geza Soos, it sent the transmitter with a Swedish intelligence officer and told him Wallenberg would know how to contact Soos.

Wallenberg's very name may have been enough to arouse Russian distrust. Throughout the war, his cousins Marcus and Jacob Wallenberg, the czars of a banking and industrial empire, had done business in Germany, producing the ball bearings that kept its army on the move.

The Wallenbergs also were involved in discreet, unsuccessful peace efforts between the Allies and Germany, which Stalin feared would leave him excluded — a foretaste of global realignment that would lead to the Cold War.

___

In December 1993, investigator Marvin Makinen of the University of Chicago interviewed Varvara Larina, a retired orderly at Moscow's Vladimir Prison since 1946. She remembered a foreigner who was kept in solitary confinement on the third floor of Korpus 2, a building used both as a hospital and isolation ward.

Though it was decades earlier, the prisoner stood out in Larina's memory. He spoke Russian with an accent and "complained about everything," she said. He repeatedly griped that the soup was cold by the time Larina delivered it. Prison authorities ordered her to serve him first.

"This is very unusual," Makinen said in an interview. Normally, such complaints would condemn an inmate to a punishment cell. "The fact that he wasn't means he was a very special prisoner."

When shown a gallery of photographs, Larina immediately picked out Wallenberg's — one never published before, Makinen said.

She recalled he was in the opposite cell when another prisoner, Kirill Osmak, died in May 1960.

That was enough for Makinen and Chicago colleague Ari Kaplan to roughly pinpoint the cell of Larina's foreigner. Creating a database of cell occupancy from the prison's registration cards, they found two units opposite Osmak's that were reported empty for 243 and 717 days respectively.

Normally, cells were left vacant for a week at most, Makinen said. The researchers concluded that those two cells likely held special prisoners, namelessly concealed in the gulag.

Mesinai and others reviewed hundreds of accounts over the decades of people who claimed to have seen or heard of someone who could have been Wallenberg. They established a pattern of sightings, even though many individual reports were considered unreliable, uncorroborated, deliberate hoaxes or cases of mistaken identity with other Swedish prisoners.

Some stories, like Larina's, ring particularly true.

One compelling account came in 1961. Swedish physician Nanna Svartz asked an eminent Russian scientist about Wallenberg during a medical congress in Moscow. Lowering his voice, the Russian told her that Wallenberg was at a psychiatric hospital and "not in very good shape."

The Russian, Alexandr Myasnikov, later claimed he had been misunderstood, but Svartz stood firm. His remark, she later reported, "came spontaneously. He went pale as soon as he said it, and appeared to understand that he had said too much."

A few years later the Soviets sent out feelers for a possible spy swap. Envoys indicated Moscow was ready to "compensate" Sweden if it freed Stig Wennerstromm, a Swedish air force officer who had spied for the Kremlin for 15 years.

Though Wallenberg's name was never mentioned, he was considered the only prize worth exchanging for such a high-value spy. The intermediary was Wolfgang Vogel, an East German lawyer who engineered many Cold War prisoner exchanges. But years of halfhearted negotiation ended in no deal.

___

Nina Lagergren keeps a small wooden box in the cellar of her comfortable Stockholm home. The Russians gave it to her in 1989 when she visited Moscow. It contains her half-brother's diplomatic passport, a stack of currency, a Swedish license for the pistol he bought but never used, and two telephone diaries. Among the entries are Eichmann and Berber Smit, the daughter of the Dutch spy.

They also gave the family a copy of Wallenberg's "death certificate," handwritten and unstamped.

"They anticipated that I would get very moved and understand there was no more hope," Lagergren said.

Instead it reinforced her belief that Wallenberg had lived beyond 1947 and perhaps was even then alive. "This proved we could go on," she said. Today he would be 95, and she concedes he must be dead.

If indeed Wallenberg's death in 1947 was a lie, the question remains: Why was he never freed?

The 2001 Swedish report speculated that the longer he was held, the harder it was for the Soviets to release him. Still, "it would have been exceptional to order the execution of a diplomat from a neutral country. It might have appeared simpler to keep him in isolation," the report said.

The search continues.

Berger, the independent researcher, has submitted a new, detailed request to Moscow to release files on prisoners who shared cells with the missing diplomat and on other foreigners in the gulag; Mesinai hopes to study psychiatric facilities where Wallenberg may have been confined; Ritter, the Hungarian researcher, is tracing the British spy network of Lolle Smit; and historians are awaiting the release of the Pond papers.

Whatever any of this reveals, a 1979 State Department memo puts these questions into perspective: "Whether or not Wallenberg was involved in espionage during World War II is a moot point at this stage in history. His obvious humanitarian acts certainly outweigh any conceivable 'spy' mission he may have been on."

___

Associated Press investigative researcher Randy Herschaft reported from Washington, D.C.

___

On the Net:

Wallenberg Association: http://tinyurl.com/55p7y5

Swedish government Web site:

http://www.sweden.gov.se/content/1/c6/04/11/37/37b7322e.pdf

International Wallenberg Foundation: http://www.raoulwallenberg.net/?en/wallenberg/

U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum:

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?langen&ModuleId10005211

National Archives: http:http://www.archives.gov/iwg (point of contact for CIA, OSS, Pond docs)

CIA Docs: http://www.foia.cia.gov (type in wallenberg in search field)

CIA "Pond" article: http://tinyurl.com/3ar3rx

Crafty_Dog

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MLK and the Jews
« Reply #47 on: April 30, 2008, 07:26:45 PM »
King and the Jews
By CLARENCE B. JONES
April 30, 2008

Earlier this month, at a Los Angeles event for the national African-American fraternity Kappa Alpha Psi, the keynote speaker launched into an anti-Semitic tirade – directed at the fraternity's guest of honor. The shocking episode shows just how far we've strayed from the original vision of the civil rights movement – and how far we have yet to travel to realize that vision.

The guest of honor, Daphna Ziman, an Israeli-American woman, had just received the Tom Bradley Award for generous philanthropy and public service. But instead of praise, the Rev. Eric Lee berated her. "The Jews," he claimed, "have made money on us in the music business and we are the entertainers, and they are economically enslaving us." (Mr. Lee would later apologize to Ms. Ziman.)

It was bad enough that the event took place on April 4, the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. Even more galling, Mr. Lee is the president-CEO of the L.A. branch of the Southern Christian Leadership Foundation – the very civil-rights organization co-founded by the slain civil-rights leader.

Martin would have been repelled by Mr. Lee's remarks. I was his lawyer and one of his closest advisers, and I can say with absolute certainty that Martin abhorred anti-Semitism in all its forms, including anti-Zionism. "There isn't anyone in this country more likely to understand our struggle than Jews," Martin told me. "Whatever progress we've made so far as a people, their support has been essential."

Martin was disheartened that so many blacks could be swayed by Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam and other black separatists, rejecting his message of nonviolence, and grumbling about "Jew landlords" and "Jew interlopers" – even "Jew slave traders." The resentment and anger displayed toward people who offered so much support for civil rights was then nascent. But it has only festered and grown over four decades. Today, black-Jewish relations have arguably grown worse, not better.

For that, Martin would place fault principally on the shoulders of black leaders such as Louis Farrakhan, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson – either for making anti-Semitic statements, inciting anti-Semitism (including violence), or failing to condemn overt anti-Semitism within the black community.

When American cities were burning in the summers before he died, Martin listened to any number of young blacks holding matches blame Jewish landlords or Jewish store-owners in the inner city – no matter that Jews were a minority of landlords and store owners. He asked them, Who else might have bought the buildings that we lived in and rented us apartments? Who else was willing to come in and open stores and sell us the things we needed? Where were these Negroes with money who'd abandoned their communities? And if blacks had bought those businesses and buildings, would they have charged less for rent and bread?

As Martin wrote in 1967, "Negroes nurture a persistent myth that the Jews of America attained social mobility and status solely because they had money. It is unwise to ignore the error for many reasons. In a negative sense it encourages anti-Semitism and overestimates money as a value. In a positive sense, the full truth reveals a useful lesson.

"Jews progressed because they possessed a tradition of education combined with social and political action. The Jewish family enthroned education and sacrificed to get it. The result was far more than abstract learning. Uniting social action with educational competence, Jews became enormously effective in political life."

To Martin, who believed the pursuit of excellence would trump adversity, Jewish success should, and could, be used as a blueprint and inspiration for blacks' own success rather than as an incitement to bitterness.

Any blacks who subscribe to the views represented in Mr. Lee's speech would do well to heed the words and deeds of the man whose name and legacy they claim to represent.

Mr. Jones was Martin Luther King's personal attorney and close adviser. He is the co-author, with Joel Engel, of "What Would Martin Say" (Harper, 2008), from which this was adapted.

rachelg

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Architectural plans of Auschwitz death camp found in Berlin
« Reply #48 on: November 08, 2008, 10:50:10 AM »
Architectural plans of Auschwitz death camp found in Berlin
Nov. 8, 2008
JPost.com Staff , THE JERUSALEM POST

The German paper Bild revealed never-before-seen architectural plans of the Auschwitz extermination camp on Saturday.

The floor plans, cross-sections and maps on yellowing paper, mostly on a scale of 1:100, were allegedly found during the evacuation of an abandoned Berlin apartment. They were drawn up between 1941 and 1943, when the Holocaust was at its peak.

The 28 documents include detailed blueprints of prisoner barracks, gas chambers marked clearly Gaskammer in a gothic-inspired font and even a cross-section of the gate into which entered the rails of trains carrying Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, disabled persons and other people the National Socialists sent to die in the most horrifyingly efficient genocide in history.

One of the maps carries the handwritten signature of Gestapo commander Heinrich Himmler.

The plans were not construction plans but were drawn after Auschwitz-Birkenau was built (on the foundations of an existing military base of the Austro-Hungarian empire.)

On 20 January 1942 Nazi officials met in the resort of Wannsee east of Berlin where they devised the Final Solution, and this has traditionally been taken by historians as the beginning of the Nazis' extermination campaign.

One of the drawings, predating the Wannsee Conference by eight months, sheds new light on the chronological extent of the German genocidal machine.

Dr. Hans-Dieter Kreikamp, Chief Director of the Bundesarchivs, the federal archives in Berlin, said the find was of "extraordinary importance."

"The plans are authentic certificates of a systematically planned genocide of European Jews," he was quoted by Bild as saying.

What the documents tellingly reveal, however, in their unequivocally marked sections, is that any persons involved in the operation of Auschwitz knew full well that it was intended for the systematic extermination of human beings, and were not simple "labor camps."

French right-wing politician Jean-Marie Le Pen claimed no people were gassed in Auschwitz as recently as April this year.

As the plans show a "Laundry and shower room" leading into a "Dressing room" and then to the "Gas chamber," there could be no doubt what the purpose of the large room marked Gaskammer was.

The documents rebut the last Holocaust deniers, Bild states in its report.


-- I don't think this will actually stop any holocaust deniers

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Re: Anti-semitism & Jews
« Reply #49 on: November 08, 2008, 10:57:25 AM »
You could put a holocaust denier in a time machine and take him to the death camps firsthand and that would have no effect. Same for the 9/11 truthers.