63 YEARS LATER AND THE HATE IS REARING ITS UGLY HEAD AGAIN

[All notes below by Tom Gross]

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel. Among other things, all places of entertainment have been shut since last night, many television stations have closed down for 24 hours and radio stations have stopped from playing pop music.

Holocaust Remembrance Day is particularly poignant this year, coming as it does a week before Israel’s 60th independence day, with fewer and fewer Holocaust survivors remaining alive and with Holocaust denial and revisionism spreading into “respectable society” in many countries.

For example, two Holocaust revisionists (one of them the convicted Holocaust denier David Irving) have been invited to address students at my old university, Oxford, this past year.

 

MORE HATE AT THE GUARDIAN

Yesterday The Guardian (which used to be a tolerant, liberal and honest paper) published a letter from dozens of well-known Jewish haters of Israel, comparing the creation of Israel with the Holocaust and suggesting that in the past Israel subjected Arabs to a “Death March” (the capital letters are theirs), and today Israel is carrying out “ethnic cleansing” of Arabs. (This is an obscene lie that will inevitably stir up anti-Semitism. The Arab population of Israel continues to increase both in real terms and proportionate to the Jewish population. There are currently over one million Arabs living in Israel and no one is persecuting them, let alone killing or evicting them.)

The Jews signing this letter include the Nobel-prize winning playwright Harold Pinter, the BBC TV stars Alexei Sayle and Stephen Fry, BBC Radio 4 broadcaster Mike Rosen, the fashion designer Bella Freud, a number of communists, and various people who have the title professor.

I believe their letter should be read in the context of other historic cases of small but vociferous groups of disturbed Jews deliberately helping anti-Semites, which we also witnessed during the Spanish Inquisition, Stalinist Russia and in Nazi Germany.

Their letter, published yesterday, quite possibly in an attempt to coincide with Holocaust Remembrance Day, was within hours picked and favorably reproduced by several anti-Semitic websites.

The European Union’s “Working Definition of Anti-Semitism” includes: Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust; and drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

 

EVEN ON THE SPORTS PAGES...

Even The Guardian’s football (soccer) blog yesterday managed to carry anti-Israeli bigotry: “If the Israeli footballers are allowed entry [into Malaysia], the government would be seen as being insensitive to the feelings of the Palestinian victims of Israeli ethnic cleansing and atrocities.”

The Guardian was referring to the Chelsea club manger Avram Grant and one of the team’s players, Tal Ben Haim, both of whom are Israeli. Chelsea are due to play a match in Malaysia as part of their Asian tour this summer.

The Guardian sports pages do not criticize the politics of a single other country in the world.

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AVRAM GRANT: I DID IT FOR THE SURVIVORS

Despite all the bitterness against him in The Guardian and other European newspapers, Avram Grant became the first ever Chelsea manager to take his side to the European champions cup final last night, by beating one of Europe’s top clubs, Liverpool. When interviewed on TV for a worldwide audience of millions after the game, Grant said he had kneeled on the ground at the end of the match because of the emotion of Holocaust Remembrance Day and that it was very difficult for him because his father had to bury his own father and sister with his own hands during the Holocaust. Grant’s father was the only surviving member of his family.

Grant, accompanied by his elderly father, flew to Poland straight after the match. He will address Holocaust survivors and their children at Auschwitz at the “March of the Living” later today.

 

AWARD-WINNING BRITISH POLITICAL WRITER SAYS ISRAEL “SMELLS OF SHIT”

Last Thursday, Johann Hari, the leading political columnist for the British daily The Independent, received the (previously) highly prestigious Orwell Prize for political writing.

The 29-year-old Hari “celebrated” by writing a vicious attack on Israel.

In his column in The Independent this week, he writes: “Whenever I try to mouth these words [of reassurance for Israel], a remembered smell fills my nostrils. It is the smell of shit.”

In his piece, Hari quotes fabricated information by the notorious anti-Zionist historian Ilan Pappe*, leaving readers to believe that Pappe’s allegations are actually true.

And in a modern day “poisoning of the wells” blood libel, Hari accuses Israel of deliberately polluting West Bank groundwater supplies.

Continuing his sewage analogy, Hari’s concludes his piece: “Israel, as she gazes at her grey hairs and discreetly ignores the smell of her own stale shit pumped across Palestine, needs to ask what kind of country she wants to be in the next 60 years.”

Hari has a track record of slanderous anti-Israel opinion pieces. For example, as I have mentioned previously on this email list, he referred to the Virgin Mary (who was, of course, Jewish) as a “Palestinian refugee in Bethlehem”.

(In 2007, Hari was also named “Newspaper Journalist of the Year” by Amnesty International. He has also written for The New York Times and Le Monde.)

Hari’s “shit” piece this week is apparently considered so brilliant by other news editors that in the last two days it has been reproduced in The Canberra Times (in Australia) and The Irish Independent, as well on dozens of extreme left and extreme-right anti-Israel websites.

One would be tempted to ignore The Guardian and The Independent but they are overwhelmingly the papers of choice subscribed to by other journalists, particularly staff at the BBC and Reuters in London, and also by school teachers and university professors in the UK and elsewhere.

NATIONAL ZEITUNG

* To give you an idea of who Pappe is, he recently (on March 21) gave an interview to the German neo-Nazi newspaper, National Zeitung. (I have the url link to the interview, which appears on the National Zeitung’s and other neo-Nazi websites. I am not going to reproduce it since its lies are so insidious.)

Pappe is a pseudo-historian of Israeli origin who teaches at Britain’s Exeter University (a university that receives substantial funding from Saudi Arabia) and like David Irving and Norman Finkelstein, Pappe has built his reputation on fabricating lies and slanders about Jews and Israel.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

* Both Pappe and Finkelstein, along with Rachel Corrie’s parents, are due to speak next week at a conference billed on its posters as “The Palestinian Holocaust” at the University of California, Irvine. Hundreds of ignorant students are expected to attend this anti-Semitic hatefest which runs all next week.

GOEBBELS WOULD BE PROUD

* Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of Iran, on February 20, 2008, called Israel “this filthy bacteria.” This is one of the terms the Nazis used to describe Jews. Having denounced Israel as “apartheid,” “shit,” “Nazis,” and so on, it can only be a matter of time that some European journalists also adopt that term.

 

NOT THE FIRST TIME ISRAEL HAS BEEN CALLED “SHITTY” IN THE INDEPENDENT

Six years ago I wrote an article in which I mentioned the following:

Deborah Orr, a columnist for The Independent, writes “anti-Semitism is disliking all Jews, anywhere, and anti-Zionism is just disliking the existence of Israel and opposing those who support it. This may be an academic rather than a practical distinction, and one which has no connection with holding the honest view that in my experience Israel is shitty and little.”

In her article, in which she described Israel as “shitty” and “little” no fewer than four times, Orr was supporting remarks made by the then French Ambassador to London Daniel Bernard.

Please see www.tomgrossmedia.com/ShittyLittleCountry.html for more.

Deborah Orr remains a columnist for The Independent and has contributed to many BBC radio and television programs. She was previously editor of The Guardian’s weekend magazine. She is married to British journalist and writer Will Self.

Both Orr and Self are of Jewish origin and some other journalists, astounded by the vehemence of Self’s anti-Israel mutterings, have recently taken to calling him Will Selfhate.

 

WALKOUT AT U.N. OVER GAZA COMPARISON TO NAZI DEATH CAMPS

The ambassadors of the United States, France, Britain, Belgium and Costa Rica walked out of a Security Council debate on the Middle East last week after Libya compared the situation in Gaza to Auschwitz.

The French government has taken a much firmer line against anti-Semitism since the government of Nicolas Sarkozy assumed office last year.

French U.N. Ambassador Jean-Maurice Ripert plucked off his translation earpiece and walked out of the U.N., followed by four of his colleagues, after Libyan Deputy Ambassador Ibrahim Dabbashi made the hateful statement.

The Syrian ambassador to the U.N. Bashar Ja’afari then gave a press conference defending his Libyan colleague and told reporters that Israeli and Nazi actions were similar.

Other ambassadors to the 15-member U.N. Security Council, as well as Angela Kane, the U.N. assistant secretary-general for political affairs, did not walk out.

Meanwhile the Israeli ambassador to the U.N. called former American president Jimmy Carter a “bigot” for vicious anti-Israeli comments Carter made in Egypt last week. Among the ludicrous things Carter told his Egyptian audience was that the people of Gaza were starving and had less food than anyone in sub-Saharan Africa.

 

AMAZON.COM WITHDRAWS “I LOVE HITLER” T-SHIRTS AFTER PROTESTS

The leading online Internet retailer Amazon.com has withdrawn T-shirts specifically marketed to children and women emblazoned with “I love Hitler” from its website following protests by Jewish groups.

It took several months of protests for Amazon to withdraw the T-Shirts which the World Jewish Congress had called “despicable.”

In January 2008, following a report by the Czech newsweekly Tyden, Amazon.com removed from its site other T-shirts, praising the Nazi leaders and war criminals Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler.

 

YAD VASHEM’S PHOTO ARCHIVE GOES ONLINE

Senior staff at Yad Vashem, who subscribe to this email list, ask me to make public the following:

Marking Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance and education center in Jerusalem, will today (May 1) upload its entire photo archives to www.yadvashem.org. These include 130,000 photographs and images, comprising the largest collection of its kind in the world, and form part of the ongoing efforts by Yad Vashem and other organizations to stem the worldwide growth of Holocaust denial and revisionism. Six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.

These images include photographs taken in ghettos, during deportations, in slave labor and death camps and at liberation and more. They are designed to be used by historians, educators, writers, filmmakers and the public at large.

The photographs come from a variety of sources, including official archives, private collections, museums and various historic collections.

 

YAD VASHEM LAUNCHES YOUTUBE CHANNELS

Yad Vashem has also launched two YouTube channels to coincide with Holocaust Remembrance Day, and in a further effort to combat Holocaust denial and misinformation, which is rife on the Internet.

The channels, in English and Arabic, went live today.

The English channel contains testimonies from Holocaust survivors, including archival footage, historians’ lectures on key issues related to the Holocaust, footage from visits to Yad Vashem, including those of President George W. Bush in January 2008, and Pope John Paul II in March 2000, as well as human interest stories, such as family reunions.

The Arabic channel has testimonies and archival footage about the Holocaust, with Arabic subtitles. There is an introduction on the importance of knowing about the Holocaust by Prince Hassan of Jordan, the brother of the former King Hussein.

The channels are dynamic, and new videos will be added frequently. Channels in additional languages will be launched soon.

The Yad Vashem Channels can be seen in English here and in Arabic here.

Google and YouTube both volunteered to help Yad Vashem set up the new channels.

 

LONDON UNIVERSITY REJECTS HOLOCAUST DENIER

Marking a welcome departure from the recent policies of other British universities who have invited Holocaust deniers to address students (they claim, on free speech grounds) University College London last week withdrew a researcher’s fellowship after he published an article claiming that the gas chambers of Auschwitz never existed.

The university’s move came after one of its academics, Dr. Nicholas Kollerstrom, 61, posted an article, “The Auschwitz ‘Gas Chamber’ Illusion,” on the website of the revisionist “Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust.”

Dr. Kollerstrom wrote: “The only intentional mass extermination program in the concentration camps of WW2 was targeted at Germans.”

“Let us hope the schoolchildren visitors are properly taught about the elegant swimming-pool at Auschwitz, built by the inmates, who would sunbathe there on Saturday and Sunday afternoons while watching the water-polo matches; and shown the paintings from its art class, which still exist; and told about the camp library which had some 45,000 volumes for inmates to choose from, plus a range of periodicals; and the six camp orchestras at Auschwitz/Birkenau, its theatrical performances, including a children’s opera, the weekly camp cinema, and even the special brothel established there.”

Dr Kollerstrom, of St John’s Wood, north-west London, said “I don’t understand why they are calling me a neo-Nazi. I have some very good Jewish friends and I have always belonged to the Green Party, CND and Respect.” [All three are mainstream leftwing movements in the UK.]

 

HAMAS: JEWS PLANNED HOLOCAUST TO KILL HANDICAPPED JEWS

Jewish leaders planned the Holocaust to kill “disabled and handicapped” Jews to avoid having to care for them, according to a new Hamas TV educational program.

The program, broadcast last week on Palestinian TV, and addressed at children, said that the murder of Jews in the Holocaust was a Zionist plot with two goals:

1. To eliminate “disabled and handicapped” Jews by sending them to death camps, so they would not be a burden on the future state of Israel.
2. At the same time, the Holocaust served to make “the Jews seem persecuted” so they could “benefit from international sympathy.”

Amin Dabur, head of the Palestinian “Center for Strategic Research” explained that “the Israeli Holocaust – the whole thing was a joke, and part of the perfect show that Ben Gurion put on.” The “young energetic and able” were sent to Israel, while the handicapped were sent to Poland “so there would be a Holocaust.”

“The alleged numbers of Jews [killed in the Holocaust] were merely for propaganda,” he told Palestinian viewers.

Click here to see a video of his remarks.

 

IAF CHIEF: HITLER WASN’T BELIEVED; WE CAN’T MAKE THAT MISTAKE WITH AHMADINEJAD

The Commander of the Israel Air Force, Major General Eliezer Shkedi, said in a television interview this week that “in Nazi Germany, people didn’t believe that Hitler meant what he was saying. I suggest that we refrain from repeating that line of reasoning and prepare ourselves for anything.”

Ha’aretz writes: “Shkedi is expected to conclude his term as the IAF commander and retire from the Israel Defense Forces soon, after 33 years of service. A large portion of his service was dedicated to the preparation for a possible mission that was never discussed in public: an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, should international economic sanctions prove to be fruitless.”

According to Israeli intelligence forecasts, Iran may go nuclear by next year.

 

CONCENTRATION CAMP DOCTOR HEADS LIST OF TOP 10 WANTED NAZIS

The Associated Press writes (in an article published yesterday):

BADEN-BADEN, Germany – Karl Lotter, a prisoner who worked in the hospital at Mauthausen concentration camp, had no trouble remembering the first time he watched SS doctor Aribert Heim kill a man.

It was 1941, and an 18-year-old Jew had been sent to the clinic with a foot inflammation. Heim asked him about himself and why he was so fit. The young man said he had been a soccer player and swimmer.

Then, instead of treating the prisoner’s foot, Heim cut him open, castrated him, took apart one kidney and removed the second, Lotter said. The victim’s head was removed and the flesh boiled off so that Heim could keep it on display.

“He needed the head because of its perfect teeth,” Lotter, a non-Jewish political prisoner, recalled in testimony eight years later that was included in an Austrian warrant for Heim’s arrest uncovered by The Associated Press. “Of all the camp doctors in Mauthausen, Dr. Heim was the most horrible.”

The Austrian medic would inject petrol and an array of different poisons straight into the hearts of his so-called patients to see which killed them fastest. He once removed the tattooed flesh of a prisoner and turned it into soft furnishings for his commandant's flat.

But Heim managed to avoid prosecution, his American-held file in Germany mysteriously omitting his time at Mauthausen [in Austria], and today he is the most-wanted suspected Nazi war criminal on a list of hundreds who the Simon Wiesenthal Center estimates are still free.

Heim would be 93 today and “we have good reason to believe he is still alive,” said Efraim Zuroff, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s top Nazi hunter. He spoke in a telephone interview from Jerusalem ahead of the center’s plans to release a most-wanted list Wednesday, and to open a media campaign in South America this summer highlighting the $485,000 reward for Heim’s arrest posted by the center along with Germany and Austria...

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Efraim Zuroff is a long-time subscriber of this email list, as is Aryeh Rubin, who has helped him. For more, see the website, Operation Last Chance.