Nova Scotia professor who has faced criticism from his university and colleagues
for attending an Iranian conference that cast doubt on the Holocaust lashed out
against the school yesterday for failing to defend his academic freedom. Shiraz
Dossa, a political science professor at St. Francis Xavier University in
Antigonish, N.S., raised the ire of the university after presenting a paper at
the conference earlier this month. Prof. Dossa, who has insisted he's not a
Holocaust denier, used the forum to talk about how the Holocaust plays into the
so-called war on terror. In a statement e-mailed to other faculty members
yesterday -- his first public comments since returning from Iran -- Prof. Dossa
said the conference was relevant to his ongoing work.
The commandant himself, the prison governor, opens the door at
7 a.m., snaps almost imperceptibly to attention, and says: "Mr Irving, we are
deeply ashamed that this is happening. We do not agree with this at all...” ...I
take another call, from... Agence France Presse... I feed him some safe lines...
I stress that I am not a Holocaust denier; people who say the opposite have
clearly never read my books of the last 15 years...
British Jewish leaders have
spoken out against a ruling which sees British Holocaust denier David Irving
released early from prison in Austria. Veteran Jewish activist Lord Greville
Janner, a former Labor MP, led the chorus of disapproval after a Vienna court
has ruled that historian Irving, convicted on charges of denying the Holocaust,
should serve the rest of his three-year sentence on probation. At the end of
Irving’s appeal against his earlier conviction on Wednesday, Vienna’s highest
court ruled to convert two-thirds of Irving’s three-year sentence into
probation...
TEHRAN, Dec. 18 (MNA) -- Robert Faurisson is a revisionist scholar from
France who attended the Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision
conference in Tehran from December 11 to 12.
Following is the text of an interview with
Faurisson conducted by the Tehran Times at the daily’s offices on
December 13:
Q: What is your opinion about the Tehran
conference?
A: This conference is a big and
nice surprise. I had never thought that there could be such a thing. I
was really pessimistic. When for the first time I heard that President
Ahmadinejad said that the Holocaust was a myth, I was so surprised. I
wondered if Iran would exist anymore. I thought that the U.S. or Western
countries would try to destroy this country because the belief in the
Holocaust is the central pillar of the West and the world. To say that
it is a myth is something extremely dangerous. I, as a researcher, might
say that it is a myth, but for the head of a state it is extremely
dangerous. But he did it.
Can I say something more?
I think that the year 2006 will be counted in
history as a very important year because a country called Iran said no
to Bush and yes to revisionists. It is marvelous.
Q: Could you elaborate on what you mean by
the word myth? People use the word in a lot of different ways. Some mean
it did not happen at all and some mean that some aspects of it happened.
A: President Ahmadinejad has used
the right word. The alleged Holocaust of the Jews is a myth. That is a
belief maintained by credulity or ignorance. It does not mean that the
people who believe it are liars. They are not liars, but they are
believers.
Q: You are an expert in text and document
analysis. What kind of information did you find in the documents from
World War II that made you doubt some aspects of the Holocaust?
A: My work was the work of a
policeman, not the work of a professor. I was told there was a crime, an
enormous crime. So I said I want to see the weapon of the crime, and I
want to see the place. I went to Auschwitz, Dachau, Saxenhausen… and
places like that. And I asked a very simple question. I said show me a
gas chamber. They told me there is a fantastic weapon, and I said, OK,
show me.
In Auschwitz they said this is a gas chamber. And
I looked at it like a policeman. And I said, sorry, this cannot be a gas
chamber, for very simple reasons. Because they said that the Germans
used Zyklon B. Zyklon B is a product invented in 1920 and it is still
used today to kill lice. But Zyklon B is hydrocyanic acid, it is very
dangerous. And they say that the Germans would put 2000 Jews in this
place. Two thousand people in this place, it is already impossible.
But anyway, they would put Jews in this place, and
then in the roof there were four holes, and the Germans would go on the
roof and would dump pellets of Zyklon B (in the holes) and then the Jews
were dead. They say that a team, a group of Jews, would come in, very
gently, eating, smoking, taking the dead bodies out to the crematoria,
to burn them.
And I said, stop, impossible! Impossible because
hydrocyanic acid is something which sticks to the walls, to the roof, to
the ground, and it penetrates the same way in the bodies, it goes in the
mouth, everywhere, on the skin. So, first you cannot enter this place
even if you switch on the ventilation because it sticks very strongly.
You cannot get rid of it. And you cannot touch the body of someone who
has been killed by this gas. You cannot touch it. And remember, they
were eating and smoking. Eating means no gas mask. And smoking is
impossible because it is explosive. So as it is told, it is impossible.
I acted like a policeman.
I went to the U.S. to visit a gas chamber. To
execute one man, it is horribly complicated, horribly complicated,
because it is too dangerous. If you see a gas chamber in the U.S., to
kill one person, first you see a door in iron fit like this, sealed
perfectly, because you don’t want the gas to leak. And then, when the
man is dead, it is extremely dangerous to go inside. So you have special
fans, pushing the poison out, with a very strong vacuum. Then the gas is
sent to a kind of tank to neutralize the gas. The gas which is supposed
to be neutralized with sodium ammonia is sent up in a very high chimney.
On the day of the execution, the guards are not
allowed to go up to the towers because even this gas could be very
poisonous. And you have to wait something like one hour, and the doctor
and two people with boots, gloves, and gas masks with a special filter,
a very strong one, go inside the place and try to wash the body, and
they have to wash it thoroughly. Still the body is dangerous. You have
to wait and wait. On the day of the execution, in spite of all those
precautions, the body remains dangerous. And the day after, you still
have the smell. It is fantastic, it is everywhere. To kill one man!
And there are many details that I could give you.
I am going to give you one. You see, it is a criminal investigation, an
inquiry. The gas chamber has a central pillar, very strong. Why? Why do
we need this very strong pillar? It is because the gas might leak
outside in spite of all the precautions, so you have to create a
depression. If you create a depression the gas chamber might crumble, so
it has to be very strong. And many other details -- it’s not a luxury,
it’s necessary. It’s not American fantasy.
At the beginning, in 1917, during World War I,
many Americans thought of the electric chair, “That’s too cruel. We are
going to invent something. We are going to use gas. The people will be
there, you will put gas in, the people will go to sleep, we’ll go
inside, we’ll take the body (out), and finished!” No! The engineers had
to work five years, I think, to create one gas chamber and it was used
for the first time in 1924 in Carson City, Nevada. They executed a man,
but it was nearly a catastrophe. So you see, people think it is very
easy.
The Jews invented the story, I’m sorry, of the
Zyklon B. They could have taken perhaps other gases, but they took this
one, because when you got into the camps, you found cans of Zyklon B. It
is a stupid story. It is as if I come here, I see a knife, and I say,
“Oh, this is the proof that Faurisson is a murderer!” A can of Zyklon B
is the same thing. It was to protect health.
I could also explain to you the technicalities of
Zyklon B applied to this, to cloth. It is totally different, because
this is dead, this is living. But, too many technicalities.
It is technically impossible.
So I published this in the daily Le Monde. And I
said if you people say that it is technically possible, come, explain to
me. And I got their answer. I had to wait six weeks. Thirty-four
professors -- you know what professors are -- signed a big declaration,
and I’m going to quote exactly what they said, I’m not going to change a
word, so this is the answer of 34 professors, this was on February 21,
1979: “It must not be asked how technically such a mass murder was
possible. It was technically possible since it happened.” Professor
silliness! Which means clearly: “Faurisson, we are not able to explain”;
because if they had an explanation, they would have given it.
And I said show me a gas chamber. And I went to
Auschwitz; they said this is a gas chamber. And I said, no, no, it is
impossible. First, you have three doors, which triples the difficulty of
getting it sealed. In Auschwitz the gas chamber had a short door with
glass on the upper part of the door. The door opened inward, and the
dead bodies were there, you could not open the door. It is silliness. It
is such a silly story. It is humiliating for people to believe that. I
said this at the end of the 1970s…
I was insulted, I was kicked out of the
university, I had I don’t how many court cases. I was ruined. No more
money for myself, for my wife, for my children. I was insulted day and
night and for years and years.
And in 1995, one day, opening a magazine called
L’Express, there was a very long article written by a man called Eric
Conan. And this man is against us.
And he had written a book about the Holocaust. So
I was reading this, and suddenly, on page 68, I thought I would fall off
my chair, I read this. He said about the gas chamber in Auschwitz, the
emblematic gas chamber, which has been visited up to now by 25 to 30
million tourists. They say that at the Auschwitz Museum. He said exactly
this: “Everything in it is false.” And he said: “In the late 1970s,
Robert Faurisson exploited these falsifications all the better as the
museum administration balked at acknowledging them.” So Faurisson
exploited those falsifications, and it was easy for him because the
people at the Auschwitz museum didn’t want to answer him. So it was
easy.
Let me tell you one thing. So, Eric Conan went to
visit a lady who was a manager of the Holocaust Museum, and he said,
“How is it? It’s false. You cannot keep it like that. You have to tell
the visitors.”
Q: So he acknowledged and confirmed the
falsifications that you discovered?
A: More than that. He said
everything is false. And then he went to see this lady, and the lady
answered, “No. We are not going to explain. It would be too difficult.
So we’ll leave it as it is.”
Which means: “We have lied, we are lying, and we
are going to continue to lie.”
Q: Why are Israelis and most other Jews so
sensitive about the Holocaust, and why are countries like the United
States and some other countries which pay reparations even more
sensitive about this issue?
A: It’s because the Holocaust is
weapon number one of the state of Israel. It’s the sword and the shield
of the state of Israel and… Jewry, all together. It’s their weapon
number one. They need it. Because after the war, in 1947, the British
Empire, the French Empire, the Spanish Empire, the Portuguese Empire,
the Dutch Empire, everywhere the colonies were crumbling, disappearing.
And you had an artificial creation of a colony of Jews in Palestine.
Q: At the very time of decolonization, at
the beginning of decolonization.
A: Yes. So, it’s very strange.
And the explanation is this. It’s only because the Jews would say, “Our
sufferings were exceptional. So, for an exceptional evil, you need an
exceptional remedy.” That’s why, to answer your question, the United
States and the Jews all over the world, not only the Zionists, they need
this myth. It’s vital for them.
Q: Those who support the Holocaust claim
that they have been paying lots of money to the survivors of the
Holocaust, but on the other hand, the survivors, the Jews, claim that
this is just a registration, there is no money. How’s that?
A: You have on the one hand Jews,
on the other hand you have Jewish organizations. Organizations like the
World Jewish Congress with Mr. Edgar M. Bronfman. So Edgar Bronfman
comes and says to Switzerland, to Germany, and to Austria, you have to
pay. And they paid. And Mr. Bronfman takes the money. According to many
Jews it seems that many of them, or perhaps a few of them, do not
receive any money.
Q: In the press you are being very harshly
criticized. People are taking your words out of context. Can you clarify
your position? You are not denying every single aspect of this. You are
basically saying that the gas chambers didn’t exist, but you are not
denying that some Jews were in concentration camps and some of them died
of various causes such as illness or overwork in these concentration
camps?
A: Of course… I never said the
concentration camps did not exist. I never said that there were no
deportations. I never said that there were no Jewish hostages shot or
things like that. Of course.
I say the deportations happened, the concentration
camps existed, but there were no extermination camps.
Q: In your opinion, how many Jews were
killed?
A: We do not know. But we could
know. There is a place in Germany, in Arolsen, called the International
Tracing Service. And in 1978, when the revisionists came, they closed
their historical section they had in German. This was a place where you
had kilometers and kilometers of documents.
But, for clarification, you should hear my 60-word
sentence. It’s 60 words in French. I said I should put it in one
sentence.
“The alleged declared Nazi gas chambers and the
alleged genocide of the Jews form one and the same historical lie which
has permitted the gigantic political and financial swindle whose main
beneficiaries are the state of Israel and international Zionism and
whose main victims are the German people, but not their leaders, and the
Palestinian people in their entirety.”
Now when I say historical lie, it does not mean
that the people who are repeating it are liars. They are repeating
something that they think is right.
The
Teheran Holocaust Conference caused quite a storm in the world media. One might
ask: what’s so special about that? There are so many holocaust events and
holocaust museums and holocaust festivals, sometimes attracting presidents and
prime ministers galore, so why did the Teheran (or Tehran) conference draw so
much attention and criticism; why were the White House, Frau Merkel, the Vatican
and the EC willing to take some valuable time to condemn this small gathering in
far-away Iranian capital?
The difference is that all other gatherings were amen-sayers
accepting the official version provided by Jewish organisations as the Holy Writ
given to Moses on Mt Sinai. The official version of the Holocaust goes even
farther than Writ: you may deny Immaculate Conception and Resurrection of
Christ, you may besmirch Muhammad, but if you have any doubt that six million of
Jews were executed by Germans in gas chambers within the framework of a total
annihilation project you may find yourself in a jail in Germany, Austria,
France, Switzerland and other ‘free’ countries. The Teheran Conference is the
first one ever to deal critically with the sad events of the World War Two.
One
does not have to be a fan of Hitler to approve of the conference. What's sauce
for the goose is sauce for the gander. The Jews do not hesitate to deny their
atrocities.
The Guardian reported
that they targeted “the respected French TV correspondent, Charles Enderlin,
whose Palestinian cameraman filmed 12-year-old Mohammed al-Dura being shot and
killed, as his father tried to shield him at the start of the second intifada.
Enderlin accused Israeli troops of shooting and killing the boy. French
supporters of Israel went online to claim the report was a distortion based on
faked footage. His network, France 2, responded with legal action and, last
month, in the first of four individual cases, a French court found the organiser
of a self-styled media watchdog website guilty of libel.
"Another online target has been the TV footage of bloodshed
on a Gaza beach earlier this year. A Palestinian girl was seen screaming as she
saw the bodies of dead family members killed by what Palestinians allege was
Israeli shellfire. When [Stewart Purvis, the editor-in-chief of ITN] mentioned
the impact of these pictures at last week's conference, members of the audience
shouted "staged". One person came up to him afterwards to suggest that the
family had somehow died somewhere else and that their bodies had been moved to
the beach to be filmed. Where, for instance, was all the blood? He pointed out
that he had seen everything that the cameraman had shot and that some pictures
were too gruesome to be shown.”
More
importantly, every freedom-of-speech loving liberal should regret that even
important historians are not free to express their views on the Holocaust issue.
David Irving is in jail, and this week
Germar Rudolf was taken to a German court chained hand and foot after he was
deported from the US for publishing his book doubting the official Holocaust
dogma. Such a taboo clamours to be broken. I wrote of it at length in 2001, as
the first conference scheduled to take place in Beirut was cancelled by the
Lebanese yielding to severe pressure of the US. Then as now, the revisionists
had much hope tthat their case would finally be heard.
It did not happen. If the conference organisers believed they
could break the taboo and reach millions, they were mistaken. Though the world
media has churned out thousands of news items connected to the Conference, they
were practically identical, containing local official condemnation and the
predictable Jewish reaction. Practically none of the reports and talks given in
Tehran ever made it to the mass media. The conference participants were smeared
as ‘racist antisemites’ though there were quite a few Jews, venerable Rabbis in
their black hats and long coats, revolted by the Zionist privatisation of the
World War tragedy.
If anything, the conference proved that the holocaust dogma
is a basic tenet in the great world-embracing brainwashing machine of mass media
described by Noam Chomsky as “the manufacture of consent Stalin could only dream
of … whose discipline, and uniformity, are really impressive”. This media
syndicate is the enemy of free people everywhere, and it carries on a relentless
war against Iran and other independently-minded nations.
Just
one case: a Jewish-owned Canadian paper, The National Post
claimed that “in a move reminiscent of
the Nazis forcing Jews to wear a Star of David insignia, Iran’s parliament has
reportedly passed a law requiring Jews to wear colour-coded badges”. This was a
sheer lie: Iran is home to 30,000 Jews who are doing fine, and do not plan to
emigrate to Israel. They receive preferential treatment, and nobody forces them
to wear a badge or anything else. The Post withdrew the canard a few days
later, and apologised, but this news item was repeated ad nauseam in thousands
of papers and blogs, while the apology remained on its sixth page.
“The Holocaust is the most effective weapon in the hands of
those bent on manufacturing a “clash of civilizations.” The “lesson” of the
holocaust is good enough to justify the NATO bombing of civilian targets in
Yugoslavia, the genocidal U.S. occupation of Iraq, Israel’s massive bombing of
Beirut, a future nuclear war against Iran, etc. The Hollowcaust is the ideology
par excellence of Global Apartheid. The Hollowcaust acts like a quirky and
capricious divinity, rejecting one comparison here, accepting an equally valid
or invalid one there. It is a partisan divinity, a god that always blesses ‘us’
and curses ‘them,’ even as it simultaneously demands to be worshipped by all
humanity and in the name of all humanity.”
So far so good. Ash understands that “under such
circumstances, the denial of the holocaust is rooted in the desire to pin down
the Hollowcaust”. But then he opens the second front against the conference:
“The most charitable thing that can be said about the
organizers of this pathetic holocaust conference is that they are fools. The
message of Hollowcaust hawkers is only amplified by such idiocies as the Iranian
conference.”
And here we part ways. Iranians had a good reason for
organising the conference. The Holocaust is indeed well integrated in the
prevalent discourse as a justification of [rich and powerful] minority rights
over [oppressed] majority needs. But its success and its integration show that
the mass media machine is well integrated and concentrated in philosemitic,
mostly Jewish hands. The occupation of Palestine by Jews is painful, but it is
not more harmful than this captivity of free discourse.
These men can wield their lethal machine with the ease of a
Jedi wielding his sword. They compare Ahmadinejad to Hitler, and forbid
comparison of Israel to the Nazis, they besmirch Vladimir Putin as a KGB
assassin and do not even report that Israeli courts of law consider
assassinations legitimate, they made a spot on Monica Lewinsky’s dress more
important than the rivers of blood poured by George Bush, they turned
respectable American scholars Mearsheimer and Walt into skinheads, and now they
ferociously attack James Baker for his disengagement plan. They can bloody well
do anything. They are almost omnipotent.
Our
friend James Petras recently published an impressive book on
Israel’s Power in the US. But Israel’s
power is just a mere reflection of real Jewish power in the West, which is based
– not on Israeli tanks, but on Jewish think-tanks; not on Israeli nukes, but on
Jewish news. Unless the Jewish hold on discourse is broken, the West will keep
sending its sons to follow the Pied Piper of Hamelin to the streets of Baghdad
and to the hills of Lebanon.
Iranians came to conclusion that there is no chance to come
to agreement with this world-wide Jewish media syndicate. There is no way to get
to peace terms. One has to fight back, attacking the deepest sacral dogmas of
their control. If this dogma were to collapse, the Jewish hold on discourse
would be broken and the Jewish state would disappear just as the USSR did, said
President Ahmadinejad.
This comparison calls for exegesis: the USSR was ‘one state’,
a state where various peoples lived together as equals; the Jewish state is
essentially ‘two states’, a rich state of Jews controlling the poor state of
natives. Its dissolution will create ‘one state’ in Palestine; it will reverse
the trend started with the Soviet Union’s dissolution. Then Iran, and all of the
East, will be able to dwell safely without fear of American and Israeli nukes.
This is the reason
why Iran hosted the conference. Nobody – and I do mean nobody, including
British, French, American, German, Russian leaders – really cares about the
victims of a war long past, Jewish or otherwise; they pay tribute to the
Holocaust as nations pay tribute to their vanquisher. Iran has refused to pay
this tribute; when will the rest of you follow their courageous example?
Bush, the Inept Marionette
By Curt Maynard
Al-Jazeerah, December 25, 2006
Many Americans are beginning to realize the obvious, President Bush has
completely wasted any capital that he may have once had. Foreign leaders are
already aware of this, nobody takes him seriously, he is seen for what he is, a
weak, inept marionette. Recently we saw the new Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki
literally stand Bush up at an allegedly important meeting in Jordan - he
literally left Bush standing alone waiting on his own subordinate, at least from
Bush’s perspective. The Associated Press did their best to mitigate what
happened and to spin the implications, but it did a poor job at best. According
to the AP the meeting that Bush and al-Maliki were scheduled to meet at was
scrubbed, not because al-Maliki “punked” Bush by not showing up, but for some
other reason, but not before Bush was expecting al-Maliki as evidenced by the
fact that when the meeting was scrubbed, he was already
inside Raghadan Palace and had posed for photographs alone
with the king. White House counselor Dan Bartlett denied that the delay was a
snub by al-Maliki directed at Bush or was related to the leak of a memo written
by White House National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley questioning the prime
minister's capacity for controlling violence in Iraq.”
Yeah, whatever, the AP can write whatever they like, but the truth is al-Maliki
“punked,” Bush, which is modern vernacular meaning that Bush was intentionally
disrespected publicly. To my knowledge nothing like this has ever happened
before - as a rule Presidential advisors do everything they can to ensure that
the President of the United States never gets embarrassed in such a manner. In
any case, al-Maliki’s absence spelled out something quite clearly - Bush has no
influence in the Middle East any longer - zero.
The above comments weren’t made lightly, the Iranian President is well aware of
the fact that the power elite in Washington DC cannot afford to allow him to
make them look like monkeys, but nonetheless that is exactly what he has
successfully done. Another thing the Iranian leader has done that truly has
exposed the so-called modern western democracies to the embarrassment they so
desperately deserve is to hold the holocaust conference that he did a few weeks
ago, and to do so under the provision that it was held because it could not be
held in the west, which by the way is an empirical fact. Despite the fact that
President Ahmadinejad is the leader of a nation that according to our media
suppresses freedom of speech, Ahmadinejad correctly pointed out that it is the
west, not Iran, that throws its historians in prison for questioning certain
aspects of the holocaust story, not as the media would have you believe, whether
or not it occurred, but rather numbers and methods.
The fact is, not a single holocaust revisionist would state that the Nazis did
not persecute Jews during the Second World War, but most of them question the
idea that six million were killed or that any of them were gassed at Auschwitz.
By holding that conference and by emphasizing the undeniable fact that the
so-called modern democracies in the west imprison skeptics, the Iranian
President has further highlighted the fact that Bush is a “limp dick.” The media
wants you to believe that anyone that would question any aspect of the official
holocaust story is crazy and/or a “conspiracy theorist.” The fact is, the reason
some people question certain details associated with the holocaust is for
exactly the same reason that many people question the “official version” of
9-11, because there are a tremendous amount of perfectly legitimate questions
and no forthcoming answers.
The media would have you believe that only uneducated
fools, anti-Semites and racists would question their version of what happened to
Jewry during WWII, the mainstream media pumped out more than 1,000 articles
about the holocaust conference in Iran, but not a single one of them ever
mentioned that every scholar that appeared in Tehran to speak was a credentialed
academic, meaning that they had at least a graduate degree. Nope, the Mainstream
Zionist media doesn’t want you to know that. They do however want you to know
that David Duke appeared, so that they can cast aspersions on the entire
conference by dredging up the fact that Duke was associated with the KKK some
thirty years ago, but at the same time not a single one of those so-called
“objective” articles mentioned the fact that
Duke has a PhD in history
or that he appeared, not to question the holocaust, but in order to
authoritatively speak about how the mainstream western media spins and distorts
the facts, as evidenced by their very coverage of Dr. David Duke and what he
actually said. I highly encourage anyone and everyone to disregard what the
media said took place in Tehran and what the speakers said, and to see for
themselves what transpired there by
reading the words of the revisionists that were there,
and by reading what Dr David Duke actually said in regards to free speech and
its suppression in the west,
in his own words.
Was the holocaust conference a success? You bet it was, not three weeks after
its conclusion, Austria released David Irving from prison, no doubt as a result
of the embarrassment brought upon it by way of the truths spoken at the
conference. David Irving owes a large debt of gratitude to those that spoke out
on his behalf in Tehran, now let’s hope he recognizes that fact and reciprocates
without succumbing to the pressures of political correctness that often bar
those seeking fame in the modern era.
Bush has taken the world to the very edge, he has threatened the leaders of
nations with absolute destruction, as he did with Pakistan’s President Pervez
Musharraf, when he sent Zionist lackey Richard Armitage to Pakistan after 9-11
to tell the Pakistani leader that the United States would
bomb Pakistan “back to the stone age,” unless Musharraf
cooperated with the United States in its war on terror.
The fact that Pervez Musharraf even admitted this publicly as he did back in
September also is a strong indicator that Bush’s impotence is well known among
Muslim leaders. None of them believe anything he says, which has led to the
inevitable, a “broke dick” foreign policy approach by the President and his
Zionist sponsors. “Broke dick” is another term I learned while in the U.S.
cavalry, it essentially means “irreparably broken,” and better describes Bush’s
misadventures in the Mid east, than any other word that comes to mind.
It isn’t just Middle Eastern leaders that have called Bush’s bluff, the entire
world sees the fool for exactly what he is, a “limp dick” with a “broke dick”
administration. The only thing holding Bush up at this point is the Zionist
media, who have been busily engaged in making him appear as if he weren’t the
moron that he in fact is - a tough job to be sure. The Russians and the Chinese
have absolutely no respect for Bush, no matter what he does they ignore him and
move on with their own interests. Hugo Chavez the popular and democratically
elected leader of Venezuela accurately labeled Bush the devil and did so before
the entire UN assembly, in New York City no less, and stated something else that
should wake up the American people, and that is that Bush’s government
[Democratic and Republican elite alike] are the
first enemies,” of the
American people,” and that the Zionist-American elite’s empire is
on its way down.
Americans must wake up, their government is ill, it has become a pathological
liar, unable to tell the truth, because the truth will lead to its downfall.
Bush allegedly sent the US military to Iraq in order to bring “democracy” to the
Mid east, but democracy isn’t working out very well for Bush and company,
because democratically elected leaders aren’t siding with the Zionist warmongers
that inhabit Washington DC and the western media - in fact - they are doing
exactly what Bush and the Zionists least expected, they are standing up to their
bullying tactics - they are no longer afraid, which leaves Bush in the
unenviable position of having to do something about the world’s lack of fear.
Unfortunately for Bush, he has no real options, he can go nuclear which will
lead to his downfall and the collapse of the American government at best, and at
worst, death to tens of millions of people worldwide, including most likely
millions of Americans, which will also lead to his downfall and the collapse of
the American government.
No, the truth is, Bush is completely impotent, there is no guarantee that the
American people will fall for anymore lies or another
staged attack - everyone
knows Bush lied us into a war in Iraq and its subsequent disastrous occupation,
everyone now knows that Bush, despite his rhetoric, supports the amnesty of
twenty million illegal immigrants in this country, not because he gives a damn
about them, but because his Zionist puppet masters want them there for a variety
of reasons, to disenfranchise the American working man, to water down the voting
power [if any still exists] of the majority, to force down wages, and most
importantly to create disharmony and discord among the American people by way of
disingenuous accusations of racism, which will distract Americans from what Bush
does elsewhere - Machiavellian principles at their finest.
No, it’s very difficult to tell whether or not another staged terror attack like
9-11 will have the desired effect, but that isn’t to say Bush and his Zionist
masters won’t attempt one, in fact, I’d say it’s inevitable, I don’t think they
see any other way out of the mess they created, they’ll fabricate a new 9-11,
not so much to provide an excuse to nuke Tehran, which will come later, but to
impose Martial Law here in the United States - an attack can wait, but the
growing dissent among Americans cannot - that spells imminent doom for the Zio-American
entity. The question that must be plaguing their minds though is whether or not
Bush still has enough credibility to compel Law Enforcement and the National
Guard to kill American citizens in the millions. Personally I doubt it - the
imposition of Martial law will prove to be the final nail in the coffin of the
Zionist-led government in Washington. That doesn’t mean I’ll be around to see
it, the Neo-Cons will follow to the letter the policies of their ideological
predecessors and eliminate with extreme prejudice any opponents, but nonetheless
I’ll leave this world knowing that they’ll soon follow.
Why are Jews at the 'Holocaust denial' conference?
WHO, WHAT, WHY?
The Magazine answers...
Why are
Jews attending a conference on the Holocaust in Tehran at which star guests
include deniers of the genocide? Clue: they also want an end to the Israeli
state.
A handful
of Orthodox Jews have attended Iran's controversial conference questioning
the Nazi genocide of the Jews - not because they deny the Holocaust but
because they object to using it as justification for the existence of
Israel.
With their
distinctive hats, beards and side locks, these men may, to the untrained
eye, look like any other Orthodox believers in Jerusalem or New York. But
the Jews who went to Tehran are different.
Some of
them belong to Neturei Karta (Guardians of the City), a Hasidic sect of a
few thousand people which views Zionism - the movement to establish a Jewish
national home or state in what was Palestine - as a "poison" threatening
"true Jews".
WHO, WHAT, WHY?
A feature to the
BBC News Magazine - aiming to answer some of the questions behind
the headlines
A
representative, UK-based Rabbi Aharon Cohen, told the conference he prayed
"that the underlying cause of strife and bloodshed in the Middle East,
namely the state known as Israel, be totally and peacefully dissolved".
In its
place, Rabbi Cohen said, should be "a regime fully in accordance with the
aspirations of the Palestinians when Arab and Jew will be able to live
peacefully together as they did for centuries".
Neturei
Karta believes the very idea of an Israeli state goes against the Jewish
religion.
The book of
Jewish law or Talmud, they say, teaches that believers may not use human
force to create a Jewish state before the coming of the Messiah.
An opportunity for thinkers who cannot express their views freely in
Europe about the Holocaust
Manouchehr Mottaki
Iranian foreign minister, describing the conference
But how do
Neturei Karta and other Orthodox Jews such as Austria-based Rabbi Moishe
Ayre Friedman justify attending such a controversial conference?
Rabbi
Friedman told BBC Radio 4's PM programme that he was not in Tehran to debate
whether the Holocaust happened or not, but to look at its lessons.
He says the
Holocaust was being used to legitimise the suffering of other peoples and he
wanted to break what he called a taboo on discussing it.
The main
thing, he argued, was not Jewish suffering in the past but the use of the
Holocaust as a "tool of commercial, military and media power".
In what
many other Jews would consider the height of naivety, he commended Iranian
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for wanting "a secured future for innocent
Jewish people in Europe and elsewhere".
In his
speech to the conference, Neturei Karta's Rabbi Cohen said there was no
doubt about the Holocaust and it would be "a terrible affront to the memory
of those who perished to belittle the guilt of the crime in any way".
However, he
also argued that the genocide had been divine will. "The Zionists, with
their secular pompous approach behave in complete opposition to this
philosophy and dare to say 'Never Again'.
"They have
the audacity to think that they can prevent the Almighty from repeating a
Holocaust. This is heresy."
Neturei
Karta's views are regarded with abhorrence by most other Orthodox Jews,
according to Rabbi Jeremy Rosen of the Yakar centre in London.
"And I
think, frankly, even among the Hasidic world, by and large Neturei Karta are
regarded as freaks," the Orthodox rabbi told the BBC News website.
Your
comments:
I
don't understand. The western world accuses multiple countries in the Middle
East of lacking democracy and free speech, which many of them do. Yet when
Iran holds a conference, not to deny the holocaust ever happened, but to
investigate whether all we know of the Holocaust was true, we are up in
arms. What happened to the concept of free speech we were thinking is the
best thing in the world? Does that only apply on all things except when it
comes to criticizing Israel? Any criticism of the conference is sheer and
utter hypocrisy. Omar Yassin, St. Paul, MO, USA
Neturei Karta have been given tremendous undue publicity by this obscene
conference in Tehran. The truth about Neturei Karta is that they have been
virtually ex-communicated by world Jewry, and especially by the much larger
ultra-orthodox non and anti-zionist hassidic groups such as the Satmar. Rysk, Tel Aviv
These
people do not represent anyone but themselves, and they certainly do not
have the mandate to speak for religious Jews in particular. It is
unfortunate that a handful of people give the world a distorted view of the
jewish people, of Judaism and of religious Jews. Michael Spielmann, Bnei Brak, Israel
To
say the Holocaust didn't happen is like saying the earth is not round. I
understand that these rabbis believe Israel shouldn't exist. Maybe it
shouldn't - we all have the right to our opinions. HOWEVER, to attend a
conference such as this is akin to treason. Hate is by far the stupidest
thing we can do with our time, and these Iranians HATE those jews but they
both hate Israel more so lets have a conference? Further proof that we as a
species are doomed to self destruct. D Watson, Rockland County, NY
there
might be pros and cons to this. first off if there was an open dialog about
the holocaust not many people would doubt it, silence the deniers i say!!!
this thing of not discussing it totally is giving credibility to the
deniers, who are primarily racist. susan, vatican
This
is the first great story on the topic of Israel that I have come across in
my life. It is impossible for me to imagine that war will bring peace,
especially when it forces so many to live impovished lives. The fact that
Jewish religious leaders are recognizing that coexistence is possible in a
peaceful way is the only first step towards peace in the region. Building a
wall will never protect Israelis, it will only make them feel safe. But
humans are creative, determined and see challenges as obstacles to overcome.
A wall will only encourage those who are fanaticised to be more desperate
and creative in their attacks on Israel. If there is co-existence allowed;
to build a nation where Jews and Arabs can live together cooperatively then
peace will come to the banks of the Mediterranean. Sean Magee, Burnaby BC
Iran
and I guess by association Muslims want the world to respect them and their
beliefs. How on Earth can something as aborhant as a Holocaust Denial
meeting help that? No-one with an ounce of common sense and a rudimentary
knowledge of history could possibly deny that the Jews were persecuted by
the Nazis. It is true to say that Israel is not exactly a model of restraint
but regardless of modern strife, it cannot be used as an excuse to deny a
massacre that was perpetrated by the Germans in WW2.
Mark Chisholm, Dereham, UK
if
Jews and Moslems with extreme views can sit together at a ridiculous
conference, why can they not sit together to decide to be tolerant of each
others beliefs and live and let live. that this conference was called, is
the lowest political game thought in the minds of nasty people with sinister
motives. leon solomon, sun city west,az. usa
Neturei Karta have an interesting argument, however as a member of a
non-Jewish group of people who were sterilized and murdered by eugenicists
acting in collaboration with the Nazis, I find their presence at the Teheran
Conference extremely misguided as this merely gives the Iranian regime's
denial of the Holocaust credibility. Andrew Little, Gloucester
If
the Holocaust was "divine will", what does that say of the god these men
worship? Bill terKuile, Monroe, WA USA
I
don't understand. The western world accuses multiple countries in the Middle
East of lacking democracy and free speech, which many of them do. The West
uses the motive that they want to bring "democracy" to other countries as a
means for attacking them, and forming new governments (see Iraq). Yet when
Iran holds a conference, not to deny the holocaust ever happened, but to
investigate whether all we know of the Holocaust was true, we are up in
arms. What happened to the concept of free speech we were thinking is the
best thing in the world? Does that only apply on ALL THINGS EXCEPT when it
comes to criticizing Israel? Any criticism of the conference is sheer and
utter hypocrisy. Omar Yassin, St. Paul, MO, USA
In a
democracy any views should be open to debate. The majority then decides on
which of these views to progress. I'm not in anyway religious or a supporter
of any faith as I consider all churches to be a step back towards herd
behaviour. However, Rabbi Cohen's views as outlined in this article don't
really sound that outrages to me and I think the fact that he sits down with
his arch enemies to debate at such a conference portrays him as a pretty
courageous man. Alex, Athens, Greece
Every
nation has its lunatic fringe, who use their PERVERSION of religious belief
as justification for the most obscene behaviour. The Jewish nation and
people (especially the secular) treat them with the pity one reserves for
mentally unstable... All they are doing is further increasing the move to
more secularisation... thank goodness. At least something positive is
derived from their idiocy lazerbenabba, London/UK
It's
their right to deny, if they wish, the idea that the existence of Israel may
prevent another holocaust. However, their punishment for attending this
conference is to sit for three days and listen to neo-Nazis defaming the
memory of their murdered relatives. Amos Shapir, Kiryat Ono, Israel
People will continue to kill each other for whatever reason, some are more
devious and imaginative than others. The Holocaust is abhorrent but not
totally unique, should everyone who is not Jewish pay for this mistake? Who
is compensating the genocide that has occurred in Rwanda, the Native
Americans and the Albanians in Turkey to name but a few?? The formation of
Israel has caused more problems that it has solved but it is there and more
steps to working together must be taken. I see these people are working to
that goal, good luck to them. Louise, UK
If
Neturei Karta believes that the removal of Israel is the answer to the
containing blood shed in the Middle East then let him do it in a more
ideally place i.e. at home in Israel or at the U.N. Tehran is not the right
place! Iran is not interested in a pace which includes Jews and Arab living
next together! They what the total destruction of Israel and all Jews! John, Salibury, England
I am
a Muslim living in Britain and this is my home, why must some Jews insist on
having Israel as their home when it belonged to more than just one religion
for so long in peace? Mohammed Quisar Anwar, Manchester UK
I
think it should be mandatory for anyone who does not believe that the
Holocaust took place to visit Auschwitz. My partner and I visited in
November 2005 and it was an experience that left us both without words to
describe just how we felt. I returned home with intense feelings of remorse
and sorrow and I am not Jewish. Trish Fuller, UK
This
is what blindly applied dogma (religion) can do to a person's mind! Sam Butler, Anchorage
The
holocaust was a reality. The only regret i have is that the Zionist state
should have used that as a fundament corner stone to know how the palestians
are suffering. you don't suffer to let other people suffer too. If so, then
the world would be a messy place to live. john junisa kamara, Freetown Sierra Leone
I am
afraid that once again the BBC display their anti Israeli colours by giving
disproportionate column inches to a very small and rarefied group of people.
They deserved a line or a foot note. I would have really liked to know more
about the conference. Was it about denial or more as I suspect trying to
uncover truths about numbers and events? I am an ardent supporter of Israel
but do not believe that the stifling of debate on this issue is in their
interests. Shame the BBC has self censured itself and focused on the trivia.
Jack Kilms, Turin, Italy
Speech of Neturei Karta Rabbi in Teheran
Orthodox Jewish Attitude to the ’Holocaust’
(International Conference
“Review of the Holocaust”, Teheran 11-12 December ’06)
Speech delivered by Rabbi
Aharon Cohen of Neturei Karta
1. Honourable
friends, peers and colleagues. We are gathered here to discuss and consider from
many angles a tremendously prominent issue from among the tragic events of the
2nd World War. The issue which has become known as the ‘Holocaust’. As is known
this issue revolves around the policy and actions adopted by Nazi Germany
against the Jewish People. This is of course in the context of their much wider
murderous activities at that time. My aim is to try and give you the Orthodox
Jewish approach to this matter.
2. Firstly let
me express my gratitude to the illustrious organisers of this valuable event for
granting my colleagues and myself the opportunity to express our views on this
matter and we consider this opportunity a very great privilege.
3. I and my
colleagues are what is known as Orthodox Jews, that is Jews who endeavour to
live their lives entirely according to the age old Jewish religion and way of
life known as Judaism. We are here under the banner of the group known as
Neturei Karta which is not a separate movement or organisation but propagators
of the philosophy expressing the opposition by Orthodox Jewry to the idea known
as Zionism – the secular nationalistic movement to form a sectarian State in
Palestine. As is well known, Zionism and the Holocaust have become very much
intertwined over the years and the Zionists make a great issue of the Holocaust
in order to further their illegitimate philosophy and aims. I wish to talk
briefly about both of these topics and their connection.
4. We put
effort into attending occasions such as this because we feel that we have both a
religious and religion based humanitarian duty to spread our message as much as
possible. Consequently I pray that our discussions and conclusions at this
conference will be correct and true in every aspect.
5. I would like
firstly to recap briefly for everyone present, because of its relevance to the
subject of the Holocaust, the fact that Judaism and Zionism are totally
different and diametrically opposed concepts. Judaism is an age old G-dly way of
life going back thousands of years full of moral, ethical and religious content.
Zionism is a comparatively new – little over one hundred years – secular
nationalistic concept completely devoid of ethics and morals. Although, it must
be said that sadly there are religious groups among the Jewish People who have
been affected and infected by the Zionist nationalistic philosophy and have
‘bolted’ Zionism onto Judaism, incorrectly and falsely against the teachings of
Judaism as handed down through the generations.
6. Judaism
teaches that although the Jewish People were promised the Holy Land, now known
as Palestine, this was only subject to certain conditions, basically that we had
to maintain the highest of moral, ethical and religious standards. Our religious
teachings and literature – our Torah – are replete with warnings that if these
conditions were not fulfilled then the Jewish People would be dispersed in a
divinely decreed exile.
7. This is what
took place. The conditions were not fulfilled to the required degree and the
Jewish People were dispersed to the four corners of the globe, as history
confirms. Right up to the present day the Jewish People are in a divinely
decreed exile in which we are required to be loyal citizens of the countries in
which we find ourselves and we are prohibited under oath from trying to force
our way out of the exile by the efforts of our own hands. We are also prohibited
under oath from trying to form a State of our own in Palestine. To contravene
these prohibitions would constitute a rebellion against the wishes of the
A-lmighty and we are warned of dire consequences of making any such attempt.
8. The
philosophy of the secular movement of Zionism totally ignores and transgresses
the clear Jewish teachings outlined and because of this, Zionism was condemned
right from its inception by the great Jewish Religious authorities.
9. Furthermore,
Zionism right from its inception completely ignored the fact that there was an
indigenous population in Palestine comprising mostly Palestinians, and the
Zionists have followed a policy of depriving the Palestinians of their hope for
self determination on the land they had occupied for centuries. Depriving the
Palestinians of their homes, livelihoods and lives. So committing a shocking
contravention of religion based humanitarian justice.
10. Judaism
however, preaches compassion and consideration for the property and certainly
the lives of every fellow man.
11. It will of
course be clear from the above firstly that the Zionists do not represent the
Jewish People as a whole, and furthermore that anti-Zionism is to be applauded
and not to be confused with the ancient bigotry of anti-Semitism. Something
which we know is very well appreciated here in the Islamic Republic of Iran
where the Jewish community lives peacefully with full civil rights and has done
so for thousands of years.
12. Now one of
the pillars of justification for Zionism is the event of the Holocaust, with the
Zionists claiming that the Jews must have a State of their own in order to
prevent (as they claim) the events of the Holocaust ever being repeated. ‘Never
Again’ is their slogan. So I would like to set out the Orthodox Jewish view on
the Holocaust.
13. Firstly,
the facts. There is no doubt what so ever, that during World War 2 there
developed a terrible and catastrophic policy and action of genocide perpetrated
by Nazi Germany against the Jewish People, confirmed by innumerable eye witness
survivors and fully documented again and again. I personally was spared the
worst effects of the War because I was living in England which thankfully was
not occupied by Nazi Germany. However, I and many many others lost countless
friends and relatives who perished under the Nazi rule by intentional murder and
genocide. Three million Jews in Poland, more than half a million in Hungary,
many tens or hundreds of thousands in Russia, Slovakia, France, Belgium, Holland
and more. The figure of six million is regularly quoted. One may wish to dispute
this actual figure, but the crime was just as dreadful whether the millions (and
there were millions) of victims numbered six million, five million or four
million. The method of murder is also irrelevant, whether it was by gas chamber
(and there were eye witnesses to this), firing squads or whatever. The evil was
the same. It would be a terrible affront to the memory of those who perished to
belittle the guilt of the crime in any way.
14. However,
the Orthodox Jewish teaching and attitude is that the perpetrators of a crime,
although fully guilty and responsible for their actions, would never have
succeeded in their evil unless the A-lmighty wished it. So, to that extent the
victim or victims have of course to attempt to avoid the evil, but if this
proves impossible, then they have to accept the will of the A-lmighty. Our
teaching is that part of the decree of exile divinely imposed upon us, is that
it is not the task of the Jewish People to bring our persecutors to justice.
That is the task of the A-lmighty. Our task is to accept the will of the A-lmighty
and to strive to improve ourselves, removing from our behaviour the deeds that
may have been the cause of our suffering. That has been the Jewish attitude
during all the long history of Jewish suffering.
15. In no way
can we have the audacity to, as it were, try to prevent the will of the A-lmighty
and assume that we are capable of preventing such a thing from happening again.
That would be heresy.
16. The
Zionists, with their secular pompous approach behave in complete opposition to
this philosophy and dare to say ‘Never Again’. They have the audacity to think
that they can prevent the A-lmighty from repeating a ‘Holocaust’. This is
heresy.
17.
Furthermore, as we all know, they compound the wrong of this policy by imposing
themselves in a most cruel and harsh manner on the Palestinian People.
18. I must add
that the use by the Zionists of the Holocaust to further their aim of a
sectarian State is the height of hypocrisy when one bears in mind that the
Zionists turned each stage of Nazi oppression to their own advantage, to further
the aim of forming a State. In the thirties when the Nazi policy was to expel
the Jews from Germany, it is well documented how the Zionists cooperated by
working together – yes together - with the Nazi authorities to evacuate
‘suitable’ Jews i.e. young healthy pioneer material, from Germany to Palestine.
Then during the war when the killing was proceeding, it is again well documented
how their attitude was one of callousness, not helping when they could even
though they were able to. They needed the suffering and the deaths in order to
be able to push for their State when the war would end. Finally, after the war
they turned the whole issue of the Holocaust and the pity and sympathy it evoked
into almost an article of faith in order to ensure as much as possible the
acquisition of their State. Claiming that Zionism was there in order to prevent
another Holocaust, when in fact Zionism predated the Holocaust by decades. They
then proceeded to justify their atrocities against the Palestinians in order to
further their cause.
19. To sum up,
the Orthodox Jewish view is that yes there was a Holocaust to a terribly
significant degree whatever that was. But in no way can it be used to justify
the illegitimate and criminal cause and actions of Zionism.
20. My friends
I wish to end with the prayer that the underlying cause of strife and bloodshed
in the Middle East, namely, the State known as ‘Israel’, be totally and
peacefully dissolved. To be replaced by a regime fully in accordance with the
aspirations of the Palestinians. When Arab and Jew will be able to live
peacefully together as they did for centuries.
21. May we then
merit the time when the glory of the A-lmighty will be revealed to all and all
mankind will be at peace with each other.
http://www.nkusa.org/
French president orders probe into revisionist comments
PARIS (AFP/EJP)---
French President Jacques Chirac has ordered a probe into revisionist comments
made by the French scholar Robert Faurisson at an Iranian conference on the
Holocaust this week, his office said Friday.
Chirac has
asked Justice Minister Pascal Clement to open a preliminary investigation into
the comments made by Faurisson, a retired literature professor well-known for
his revisionist views.
In his speech
at the Tehran meeting, Faurisson repeated his theories denying the existence of
gas chambers and said that in the past twenty-two years “he had been waiting for
someone to show him one of those chambers”.
The 77-year-old
Faurisson was given a three-month suspended jail term for Holocaust denial last
October over remarks he made on Iranian television.
Iran this week
organised a conference on the Holocaust that presented Nazi Germany’s systematic
slaughter of six million Jews during World War II as a matter of historical
debate, sparking angry condemnation from around the world.
In 1991,
Faurisson was removed from his university chair on the basis of his views under
the Gayssot Act, a French statute passed in 1990 that prohibits Holocaust
denial.
He challenged
the statute as a violation of international law but the International Human
Rights Committee upheld the Gayssot Act as necessary to counter anti-Semitism.
French minister: Holocaust revisionist could face lawsuit over Iran speech
PARIS (AFP)---
A French revisionist academic who denies the existence of the Nazi Holocaust
could face legal action for speaking on the topic at a controversial Iranian
conference, French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy said Wednesday.
Robert
Faurisson might be brought to court "as a result of the comments he made" at the
"unacceptable" Tehran gathering, which wrapped up Tuesday, he said.
Iran held the
two-day conference to examine questions posed by its president, Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, who has repeatedly cast doubt on the truth of the Holocaust.
Western
countries raised an international outcry over the meeting, which also attracted
attendees such as German-born Australian Fredrick Toeben and former Klu Klux
Klan member David Duke.
France has a
statute making it illegal to deny the existence of the Holocaust.
Faurisson, a
former literary professor banned from French universities, already fell foul of
that law in February 2005 when he argued his position on an Iranian satellite
television station.
Published: 2006/12/21 22:06:51 GMT
Holocaust denier back in
Britain
British historian and Holocaust denier David
Irving has returned to the UK after being expelled from Austria.
Mr Irving was
unrepentant as he arrived back in at Heathrow airport saying he had "no need any
longer to show remorse" for his views.
Earlier this
week, he was released on probation from a three-year sentence imposed in Austria
for a speech in 1989 in which he denied the Holocaust.
He served 13
months of the sentence and has now been banned from Austria.
The
68-year-old said he would urge an academic boycott of historians from
Germany and Austria until the nations stopped jailing historians.
Mr Irving's
case sparked international debate about the limits of freedom of speech.
In his
speech in Austria 17 years ago, he denied the existence of gas chambers at
Auschwitz, though he later said he was "mistaken".
On
Wednesday, he was unexpectedly released and welcomed the decision saying he
was "fit and well".
Although
Austrian authorities have permanently banned him from Austria, he told
Agence France Presse: "I have no interest in coming back."
Intense
debate
On arriving
back in the UK, Mr Irving hit out at what he described as a "secret society
of judges" in this country who are still determined to destroy him.
"They
haven't succeeded," he said. "My enemies are deeply shocked that I'm out.
They thought I would die in prison."
He said the
case had cost him and his partner, Bente Hogh, their London home.
The
BBC's Kerry Skyring in Vienna said the presiding judge converted the
remaining two years of Mr Irving's jail term to a provisional sentence,
upholding his appeal.
Irving's
reputation as a credible historian is shot
Karen Pollock
Holocaust Educational Trust
Both the
prosecution and defence had challenged the length of the sentence. The crime
carries a prison term of up to 10 years.
The 1992
law targets "whoever denies, grossly plays down, approves or tries to excuse
the National Socialist genocide".
Mr Irving's
release on probation has dismayed Jewish groups.
Lord Janner,
vice-president of the World Jewish Congress and president of the
Commonwealth Jewish Council, said: "I am sorry that he did not serve out his
full term."
COUNTRIES WITH LAWS
AGAINST HOLOCAUST DENIAL
Austria
Belgium
Czech Republic
France
Germany
Israel
Lithuania
Poland
Romania
Slovakia
Switzerland
Asked about Mr
Irving's comments about historians being put in prison, Lord Janner said: "I
do not believe that he was put in prison because he was a historian. And
historians should be treated in the same way as anyone else."
Mr Irving
was arrested in November last year on a motorway in southern Austria. He was
visiting to give a lecture to a far-right student fraternity.
The
conviction had sparked intense debate, with supporters saying it was fully
justified but opponents arguing it undermined the right of freedom of
speech.
At the
initial trial, Mr Irving had said it was "ridiculous" he was being tried for
expressing an opinion and that he had changed his views on the Holocaust.
He says he
accepts the existence of death camps, but claims Auschwitz's role as a
"killing centre" has been exaggerated to pander to the tourist trade.
The
controversial right-wing author David Irving has been released from jail. He
sat in a Vienna prison for 13 months because he had denied the Holocaust.
Now his sentence has been reduced and he is free to return to Great Britain
on probation.
AP
David Irving has been released
from prison in Austria.
Vienna's
highest court has ruled that controversial British author David Irving
can be released from jail. The court granted the right-wing historian's
appeal against his three-year sentence and ruled that he could serve out
the remainder of his term on probation.
The
court rejected calls by the prosecution that his sentence be increased.
Instead it reduced his sentence from three to two years, with one of
those years to be served on probation. As he has already sat in jail
since his arrest in November 2005, the ruling means he can be released
from prison immediately.
During his one-day trial in February, Irving
had pleaded guilty
to the charge of denying the Holocaust, an offense punishable by up to
ten years imprisonment under Austrian law.
The
revisionist historian was arrested on charges relating to two speeches
he gave in Austria in 1989, when he contested the existence of gas
chambers in Auschwitz and said that those who had died at the
concentration camp had succumbed to diseases such as typhus rather than
execution. He escaped an arrest warrant in 1989 but was arrested when he
entered the country last year.
Irving
appeared in handcuffs to hear the verdict in the packed courtroom on
Wednesday. The prosecutor Marie-Luise Nittel argued that Irving's words
should "in no way be underestimated." She said Irving was like "an idol,
whose words provide the basis for the right-wing scene."
Irving's lawyer, Hebert Schaller, argued that his client, who is 68,
should be freed because of his age and the fact that his wife is ill.
After the hearing Schaller told Reuters, "He is free and can leave, and
he will leave."
smd/reuters/ap
Times Online December 21, 2006
Irving attacks Austria after ban
Elsa McLaren and Bojan Pancevski in Vienna
David Irving in court yesterday
British author
David Irving has been banned from returning to Austria where he was jailed for
Holocaust denial after authorities branded him a "potential safety threat".
Irving, 68, was
due to be deported from Austria today after serving a third of a three-year
sentence handed down in February.
He was jailed
for two lectures he made in Austria in 1989 which denied the existence of death
camps and the organised mass murder of Jews during Nazi rule. Under a 1992 law
denial of the Holocaust is a crime punishable with up to 10 years in prison.
Yesterday, the
Regional High Court in Vienna, in an unexpected ruling, converted his sentence
into probation, provoking outrage from the Jewish community in the country and
abroad.
Today, Irving
was banned from travelling to Austria for an indefinite time and would face
arrest and deportation if he attempted to enter the country.
Gerhard
Bruckner, Austrian immigration police spokesman, said: "Mr Irving is a convicted
offender who could pose a potential threat to the safety and order of this
country.
"That is why he
has been banned from entering the country to an indefinite time. Should he
violate this ban and attempt to enter the country illegally he will be facing
immediate arrest and deportation.
"Mr Irving can
appeal the decision in court if he chooses to."
Irving reacted
angrily to news of the ban. "Austria is a p**s-poor little country. They say
that they want to prevent me from coming back. I have no interest in coming
back," he told AFP news agency.
He added: "If
you go to Saudi Arabia and you drink beer, you get arrested. This is the same
kind of thing. It tells a little bit about the quality of the country."
Irving said it
had been "a great shock to find myself arrested or kidnapped for what I said 17
years ago".
He said he
never denied the Holocaust during his lectures, but that he felt historians had
not researched the issue properly.
He declined to
comment further saying: "I'm in Austria at present and can't speak of that
topic. I have no idea who is listening to this phone call. They are eager to try
and put the handcuffs on me again."
Irving said he
had spent 400 days in solitary confinement.
He was due to
return to London on a flight this afternoon to Heathrow, but because of bad
weather conditions Austrian authorities have difficulties finding a flight
available.
However, Mr
Bruckner said that Irving will be escorted by police to the first available
flight to London.
December 16, 2006 Ties Cut
With Iran Institute Over Holocaust By KATRIN BENNHOLD
PARIS, Dec.
15 — Some of the world’s leading policy institutes announced Friday that
they were breaking off relations with a group within the Iranian Foreign
Ministry that organized a conference on the Holocaust in Tehran featuring
discredited academics and Holocaust deniers.
In a
statement, the leaders of the institutes said that the ministry’s Institute
for Political and International Studies, which had served in the past “as a
mainstream Iranian interface with foreign think tanks and research
institutes,” was no longer an acceptable partner.
The 34
signers of the statement included the directors of the International
Institute for Strategic Studies in London; the Aspen Institute Berlin; the
German Marshall Fund in Washington; the Geneva Center for Security Policy;
the Center for International Studies and Research in Paris; the United
States Studies Center in Sydney, Australia; and the Center for International
Relations in Warsaw.
François
Heisbourg, head of the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris, who wrote
the statement and began circulating it Wednesday night, said: “This is about
morality and about academic standards.” He added that he believed the
Iranians would be “extremely sensitive” to a condemnation of the Foreign
Ministry institute, because it “was a bit their window to the world.”
The
international institutes’ action followed statements by several world
leaders condemning the conference, which was held this week. Prime Minister
Tony Blair of Britain called it “shocking beyond belief,” and the German
chancellor, Angela Merkel, condemned “in the strongest terms” dismissals of
the Holocaust by “revisionist” historians.
The
conference had been billed as a chance for “both sides” to be heard on the
Holocaust, but none of the speeches collected in the ministry’s book or any
of the exhibitions spoke of the reality of the Nazi killing of millions of
Jews and others.
One poster
with three photographs showed dead bodies and described accounts of their
gassing as a myth. Signs pointed to smiling prisoners freed at the end of
the war with the label “truth.” New captions in Persian on other pictures of
corpses described them as victims of a typhus epidemic in Europe, not of the
Nazi death machine.
Mr.
Heisbourg was hopeful that breaking relations with the Iranian institute
could help moderate forces inside it to check their more radical colleagues.
Jacques
Chirac, the French president, on Friday ordered an investigation into
statements by a retired French professor, Robert Faurisson, at the Tehran
conference. Mr. Faurisson, who has been convicted before for denying the
Holocaust, said in a speech at the conference that the Holocaust was a myth
created to justify the occupation of Palestine, meaning the creation of
Israel.
Swedish teacher suspended over attending Holocaust meeting in Iran
dpa German Press Agency Published: Thursday December 14, 2006
Stockholm- A
Swedish computer science teacher who attended a controversial Holocaust
conference in Iran earlier this week has been suspended, news reports said
Thursday. The teacher, identified as Jan Bernhoff, had given a lecture where he
alleged that 300,000 Jews died in the Holocaust during World War II as opposed
to the number of six million commonly used by academics.
Although he did
not teach history as a subject at the adult education college where he works in
Stockholm, local politicians and the school management questioned if he could
continue as a teacher.
"I think he
will have a hard time at school since so many students and colleagues have
contacted me about his participation at the conference," principle Britt-Marie
Johansson told Swedish radio.
Johansson said
a probe would be launched and in the meantime Bernhoff would be suspended.
Minister for
Schools Jan Bjorklund, who is in charge of education issues in the cabinet, said
the teacher's participation in the Iranian conference was "unacceptable," but
that he had no constitutional right to intervene in the case.
The two-day
conference in Tehran, sponsored by the Iranian government, was widely condemned.
ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN - Tehran International Conference
"Review of the Holocaust: Global
Vision 10-12 December 2006
______________________________
What an Experience!
The ‘Holocaust’ has no reality in space and time,
only in Memory
Fredrick Töben, Tehran, 22 December 2006
Figuratively speaking, the Tehran Holocaust
conference has been something out of this world for me. Let me say why.
The fact it was planned at all is itself worthy
of celebration. Opposition came from without and from within Iran, but the IPIS
personnel overcame all the hurdles thrown their way and went ahead in staging an
event that could justifiably be called a world event.
The actual conference was conducted with the
legendary Iranian hospitality of warmth, sensitivity and inclusiveness that
characterises Iranian culture and democracy. Let me particularise this comment
by pointing out that in the western world we are used to walking into homes with
our shoes on thereby bringing in the outside dirt and dust with us. In contrast,
in Iran the home is hallowed ground, a sacred place where family and friends
socialise. Remember how the ‘coalition of the willing’ forces invading Iraq
never understood, respected nor cared about this custom, and regarded it as a
weakness. Instead, legally protected by their governments they went into homes
with boots and all – even defecating about the places they visited. The
so-called civilized western world is by comparison rather crude and wanting in
delicacies. Mind you, in the west we do have that wonderful addiction to
consumerism – I quote Dr De Maria’s 1998 quip: ‘The only freedom we have in the
west is the freedom to go shopping’.
Though absolutely predictable, the world media
reaction fascinated me somewhat because of this transparency. I could see the
manipulators, the control freaks, literally flipping out as the Tehran
‘Holocaust’ Conference began. The switch from ‘Holocaust’ to ‘Shoah’ in Jewish
papers signifies a mind on the run attempting to salvage something out of the
smoking ruins called ‘Holocaust’ and making it specifically Jewish. And yet the
non-Jewish world was right behind the Jewish push to sabotage the conference. By
the way, a literal translation of ‘sabotage’ into Farsi is – the lying, dirty,
shitty man.
Individuals who hate Revisionists because they
are Revisionists, failed to stop the conference because the Islamic Republic of
Iran’s president, Dr Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, resisted yielding to internal and
external pressure to cancel the conference. Any dealings were out of the
question and Jewish groups who wished to bribe the organisers in order to stop
it were ignored. For example there was an offer to stop attacking Islam if Iran
cancelled the conference, something scoffed at by the Iranians. This is moral
and intellectual courage objectified, and illustrates my maxim’s reality
content: “Don’t blame the Jews, blame those that bend to their pressure!” The
Iranians organising the Tehran Conference did not bend to Jewish pressure!
And what happened after the conference? How did
the world media react to what had been discussed during the full two-day
conference at the various sessions? As usual, factual information about the
speeches was not mentioned at all but was swept under the carpet. Instead, the
media started their usual sloganeering. The process of defaming individuals had
begun, and then progressed to outright personal abuse and use of foul language,
usually the refuge of the morally and intellectually bankrupt.
On the world stage Israel’s Prime Minister Olmert
visited Berlin and informed German Chancellor Merkel that Israel was indeed a
nuclear power. Finally the long known dirty open secret had publicly been
acknowledged, much to Mordechai Vanunu’s disgust who had known this secret, and
for divulging it, had his humanity robbed for 18 years.
The counter ‘Holocaust’ conference was held in
Berlin where attempts were made to focus on ‘Holocaust denial’, and Emory
University is granting Professor Deborah Lipstadt’s website $2 million to revamp
her material so that it is streamlined in other languages such as Arabic, Farsi,
Russian, and others, thereby making the ‘lessons of the Holocaust available to
future generations’. This can be seen as a direct reaction to the outcome of the
Tehran ‘Holocaust’ Conference, which saw the setting-up of a World Holocaust
Foundation that will enquire into the ‘Holocaust’. Its seat will initially be
Tehran but ultimately it is aimed to relocate it to its logical place, Berlin.
One of the spin-offs of the Tehran conference is
that the Holocaust industry is increasingly switching to the Hebrew word ‘Shoah’,
thereby attempting to rescue what is left of the narrative. It indicates that
Revisionists have had the desired effect and have done their work, and now
‘Shoah’ believers, of necessity, need to keep changing their story.
When liars are trapped, when they cannot
scapegoat anymore, they turn upon their own. This has now happened with a
vengeance as the lies of the ‘Holocaust’ industry’s mindset are exposed. I am
referring here to the people who attempt to live by the Book, the Torah True
Jews who are now in the Zionist’s sight. This has already manifested itself in
England where Rabbi Cohen faces extraordinary social and economic sanctions from
within the Jewish community that is just shy off physical violence against his
person. Austrian Chief Rabbi Friedman is also feeling the heat, so much so that
he cannot directly fly from Tehran to his home in Vienna because a government
minister has already publicly announced Friedman would be arrested upon arrival
at Vienna Airport. Even Australia’s vicious Zionists could not resist projecting
their venom on the Torah True Jews. Instead of using civilising and reasoned
language, they used expletives of disgust, thereby revealing to the world that
their emotional blustering merely reveals how morally and intellectually
bankrupt they are. No amount of huffing and puffing will enable them to regain
that much desired moral high ground, something they always seek to maintain when
propagating their ‘Holocaust’ narrative.
We have witnessed the death-throws of the
‘Holocaust-Shoah’ narrative as it stands in 2006, something that Revisionists
such as Willis Carto clearly perceived in 1969 when he published The Myth of
the Six Million. I am, of course, aware of the fact that this sentence
mentioning Willis Carto will cause some individuals to cringe. But I am merely
stating an objective fact – and I shall leave it at that.
The process of disintegration will continue
unabated, and perhaps we may recall that just as the multi-billion Enron empire
crumbled from within, so will the ‘Holocaust-Shoah’ multi-billion industry
disintegrate from within. The question of who is an authentic Jew has been posed
by the Torah True Jews at the Tehran conference. These Jews believe in the
‘Holocaust’ narrative but they reject making any reparation claim upon Germany
or anyone else, as have the Zionist Jews over these past six decades and
continue to do so.
Of interest here is the 20 December 2006
court-ordered release of David Irving from his Vienna jail, something his
lawyer, Dr Schaller, at the Tehran conference predicted would happen. Irving, of
course, is not really a ‘Holocaust’ Revisionist because he still believes in
limited gassings. Such nonsense claim causes me categorically to state: “Anyone
who believes in the homicidal gassing story is either ignorant, willingly or
unwillingly, of the physical facts, or a liar.” There is no escaping this
dialectic except, of course by refusing to delve into the material, for example,
as made available in German Rudolf’s classic Holocaust Handbook Series of 21+
volumes. Someone said to me that Irving’s problem rested on the fact that he
actually had consorted with Nazis and neo-Nazis, and that this caused him to
lose the London 2000 defamation action against Professor Deborah Lipstadt. I
corrected this perception by pointing out that this guilt-by-association –
BERÜHRUNGSÄNGSTE in German – was not the cause of his failing in his action, but
rather the fact that he lied and tried to deny that he had been associating with
Nazis and neo-Nazis. After all, the trial’s aim was to remove the so-called
derogatory terms from Irving’s character: ‘hater’, ‘Holocaust denier’, ‘antisemite’,
‘racist’, ‘neo-Nazi’, etc.
This fence-sitting attitude reflects the
different agendas that individual Revisionists have. It also reveals Irving’s
attitude towards Germans. He knows that the gassing claim still imprisons
Germans as a people. Irving’s post-release statement that ‘Mel Gibson was
right’, panders to those who oppose Jewish power as such, and does nothing to
liberate the Germans from the ‘Holocaust’ dogma, an attitude also found in Dr
David Duke’s mindset.
This anti-German sentiment is to a large measure
still present within Revisionists generally – that was my personal experience
gained throughout my stay in Tehran. This fact certainly implies that Germans
cannot rely on individual Revisionists such as Irving to help them liberate
themselves from the ‘Holocaust’ stranglehold. I personally felt this anti-German
sentiment when the World ‘Holocaust’ Foundation committee was formed. Its
secretary-general, Dr Ali Armin speaks Farsi and German only, and hence I wrote
up the committee notice in three languages, German, French and English, in that
order. Two prominent individuals objected to this. First it was objected that
German was spoken during the inaugural meeting where proceedings were translated
into English. Then it was objected that the committee notice had German as first
language. The ‘Nazi’ tag was liberally used in order to persuade me to remove
German as the first language, something I rejected outright – much to the
consternation of the fellow who objected, so much so that he fell into a
shouting frenzy. All very sad.
The fact that there is an Iranian group of
individuals who have also realized this phenomenon was anticipated by me when I
titled my August 2006 Washington AFP/ TBR Conference address: ‘Will Iran
liberate Germany from Judaism?’ The Foundation Secretary-General implied as much
in his statement that the World Foundation’s headquarters would initially be
located in Tehran but then, in time, would re-locate to Berlin. That’s a
courageous vision – and of course, Torah True Jews would be welcomed to
participate in this venture!
When I was invited to address President Dr
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the formal meeting, I mentioned that we saw democracy in
action at Tehran University where a group of Iranian students vented their
frustrations on the first day of the conference by burning pictures of their
president while he was addressing them.
Much was made of this in the western press, but little is made in
the western press of the fact that since the conference the world knows that
Zionist Jews do not speak on behalf of world Jewry because Torah True Jews
refuse to profit from participating in the ‘Holocaust’ industry. Let’s hope that
this will bring speedy relief for Ernst Zündel, Germar
Rudolf, Horst Mahler, Hans-Günter Kögel, Rigolf Hennig,
and those many more languishing in German jails simply because they refuse to
believe in the ‘Holocaust’ lies.
Anti-Zionist Orthodox Jewish Rabbis
Meet with Iranian President Ahmadinejad
Sept 21, 2006
Limiting
The Fallout From The Tehran Holocaust Conference
Written by Andrew Winkler,
The Rebel Media Group
Thursday, 14 December 2006
The Western
media are scrambling to limit the fallout from Tehran's truly historical
Holocaust conference. As per usual, we can see the multipronged approach
that is the hallmark of the Zionist moles who have infested all aspects
of political discours.
There was the usual mix of lies, libel and
innuendo, servicing the ‘true believer’ crowd. Those bluepillers don’t
need any arguments, just feeding their hate and prejudices will do for
them. Especially the likes of Dr. David Duke and Prof. Robert Faurrisson
are – as per usual – on the receiving end of this kind of attention. The
number of spiteful attacks would have been even bigger, if numerous
revisionist scholars weren’t currently enjoying the hospitality of the
Zionist occupied governments of Germany and Austria or had their
passports confiscated to prevent them from travelling to Tehran.
And then of course, there are those more enlightened writers, who are
working overtime to come up with the most fancifull explanations, why an
obviously highly intelligent man like the Iranian president would engage
into ‘Holocaust denial’. Yesterday, I reported on this fellow who was
trying to make his readers believe that the Holocaust conference was
retaliation for the controversial Muhammed cartoons that gave Mossad
provocateurs so much opportunity to misrepresent Muslims as intolerant
and violent. Another theory I read today was that the ‘Holocaust myth’
topic was just a clever bargaining chip used by Tehran in the nuclear
energy negotiations.
Both explanations are obviously nonsense. The Holocaust conference has
been in the making for over a year, so it’s far more likely that the
Muhammed cartoon and possibly even the pressure with respect to Iran’s
nuclear programme were the result of the planned conference, not the
other way round.
I should also mention the Los Angeles Times, who wrote an editorial with
the title ‘Holocaust
denial can be dangerous’. By linking
the continued existence of the Jews only state with the narrative of the
Holocaust, the editor of the LA Times inadvertently suggests that he
believes that Apartheid Israel was based on a lie and wouldn't survive
being found out.
Apparently, lies, personal insults and nonsense are all the Kosher
Nostra and the Holocaust industry have to offer against the well
researched and documented work of dozens of Holocaust revisionists. But
no matter, what they say, the chosen media's real message is this: No
educated, intelligent and sane person
could honestly believe that there were no gas
chambers; whoever says, that he thinks
the Holocaust was a hoax, is lieing. Thanks to the Iranian president
Ahmadinejad this kind of brainwashing will rather sooner than later come
to an end.
Andrew Winkler is the editor/publisher of
Sydney based dissident blog
ZioPedia.
Andrew can be contacted under
editor@ziopedia.org .
Bolton backs push to charge Iran's leader on Israel hatred
Former Ku Klux Klan
leading member David Duke talks with a reporter.
Photo: Reuters
Robert Tait, Tehran December 14, 2006
THE outgoing US ambassador to the United
Nations, John Bolton, is backing a call for Iranian President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to be charged with inciting genocide over
speeches calling for the destruction of Israel.
Mr Bolton will appear today among a panel
of diplomats and lawyers calling for Mr Ahmadinejad to be
prosecuted.
The panel has been convened by a Jewish
umbrella group in the US, the Conference of Presidents of Major
Jewish Organisations.
The call for legal action came as Mr
Ahmadinejad repeated his onslaught against Israel at an
international gathering of Holocaust deniers in Tehran.
The President, who has dismissed the murder
of six million Jews by the Nazis as a myth, told up to 70 visiting
speakers that the Israeli state would soon be wiped out. "Thanks to
people's wishes and God's will, the trend for the existence of the
Zionist regime is downwards and this is what God has promised and
what all nations want," he said. "Just as the Soviet Union was wiped
out and today does not exist, so will the Zionist regime soon be
wiped out."
He was praised by several participants for
his "bravery and democratic actions" according to a source who was
present.
The US and Britain led a chorus of Western
disgust at the conference, which the White House labelled an
"affront to the entire civilised world".
British Prime Minister Tony Blair condemned
the meeting as "shocking beyond belief". "What further evidence do
you need to have that this regime is extreme?" he said.
Mr Blair singled out the decision
to invite David Duke, a former leading Ku Klux Klan member, as proof
of Iran's extremism. Mr Duke praised the event as "a tremendous step
forward" and said Mr Ahmadinejad said "sensible things".
Mr Bolton will be joined at the
launch of the legal action against Mr Ahmadinejad by a Harvard law
professor, Alan Dershowitz, and the former Israeli ambassador to the
UN, Dore Gold, together with experts from the US, Canada and Israel.
A suit will be lodged with the
International Court of Justice in The Hague, which will decide
whether to hear the action.
The panel said the Iranian
President was guilty of inciting genocide "by making numerous
threats against the US, calling for the destruction of Israel and
instigating discrimination against Christians and Jews". His words
violated a 1948 UN genocide convention, to which Iran is a
signatory, they said.
GUARDIAN, AGENCIES
David
Duke in Iran: "Has Europe gone crazy?"
Speech delivered at the Teheran International Convention on the Holocaust:
[Start]
Distinguished
friends,
Thank you Dr.
Mohammadi and all the distinguished scholars who are here at a conference that
history shall one day deem as one of the most important of the 21st century.
I and all the
conference participants must be especially thankful to the President of Iran,
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has had the knowledge, the foresight and the courage to
convene this conference to offer free speech for the world's most repressed
idea, Holocaust revisionism. We must remember that the main themes of this
conference as stated by Iran's President are the vital human right of freedom of
speech and the condemnation of the shameful imprisonment of European scholars
and academics who simply dare to state their opinions of historical events that
occurred over 60 years ago.
This conference
embraces the idea of free speech, thought, and conscience. The U.S. State
Department, under thorough control of International Zionism, in a formal
statement called this conference a quote, "disgrace." The real disgrace is that
free men are imprisoned and silenced in Europe and in other European-descended
nations around the world. The disgrace is that no leaders of our own nations
seem have the courage to defend free speech.
I also want to
thank your President for inviting me, as controversial as I am, to be here. The
Zionist-influenced media lies about me with the same enthusiasm as they lie
about him. He will be condemned for having me here, and I as a former American
elected official will be condemned by the Zionist influenced press in America
for coming here in peace and friendship to a nation that they hate: the nation
of Iran.
But, we at this
conference have decided that no longer will we let the Zionists dictate to us.
They shall not dictate to us who will be our friends, who will be our enemies,
nor will we permit them to dictate to us only their version of the past, and we
will certainly not let them dictate our future!
Let me say from
the outset that I am no disloyal American, I love my country and my people, but
I know that the Zionist extremists lead my country to catastrophe in the Mideast
and elsewhere around the world. I know that the Palestinian people, the Lebanese
people, even the American people have been sacrificed on the altar of the
Holocaust. It is the chronic media and government playing of the Holocaust that
has blinded our eyes to new holocausts and new outrages.
As a truly
patriotic American I oppose Americans being killed or maimed by the thousands in
Iraq in a war not for America, but for Israel. I am here because I love my
country and oppose those who lead America and the world to ruin on behalf of
Zionism. In Iraq too, Americans and countless Iraqis have been sacrificed on the
ideological altar of the Holocaust, for the Holocaust and its chronic recital is
used as the justification of any Israeli treachery or crime against humanity.
The
Zionist-influenced media in America and Europe is trying to mislead the U.S. and
Iran toward a war that would be catastrophic for your country, for my country
and for the world. Here too images of a Holocaust against Jews are used to
justify and promote a terrible war against Iran that would constitute a new
Holocaust, one against the Iranian people and indeed for all of us in the world.
I believe the
people of Iran want peace, and I can tell you that the average American also
wants peace. This conference is based on freedom of speech, true freedom, not
the lip service brokered in the mass media. Freedom of speech will take on the
Holocaust. But, freedom of speech also relies on a free press. Perhaps how
little we can trust the establishment press on the Holocaust is illustrated by
the lies told about your esteemed president.
This morning, I
read a story about this conference from a European newspaper that stated and I
quote, that Iran's President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for wiping Israel off
the map. This assertion has been made in literally thousands of newspaper
articles and radio and TV news reports.
But, all those
here know that such a translation of his speech is nothing but a big lie. He
never said anything of the kind. Any proper translation of his speech shows that
he never called for Israel to be quote, "wiped from the map"! But millions of
people in the West and around the world have heard this so many times they
believe it. Whatever might be the ultimate truth of the Holocaust, how can we
learn it from a press that repeats 5,000 times a lie about your President that
anyone with an Iranian-English dictionary can disprove in 5 minutes? In short,
their ability to sell this easily disproven lie shows that the media can get
away with any lie, even of the largest proportions. The only way to learn the
truth about any idea is free speech, free discussion, and free debate.
The conference
will include academics who embrace the prevalent historical conception of the
Holocaust and those who have a revisionist view. Revisionists question parts of
the official Holocaust story. In some Western nations, to diverge even slightly
from Holocaust orthodoxy will cause an historian to face not only a loss of
academic career but also imprisonment.
Right now as I
speak, three names come to mind immediately. David Irving, Ernst Zundel, and
Germar Rudolf. These three men, scholars, researchers, intellects who their
opponents dare not debate, these nonviolent, kind and gentle men sit behind dark
prison walls at this very moment for simply daring to speak their conscience,
for expressing the world's most forbidden opinion, the idea that the historical
event trademarked as the Holocaust as it is popularly presented, is not an
accurate historical portrayal, that it needs like all other events of history to
be questioned, researched freely and constantly revised. Perhaps the hypocrisy
is illustrated by devotion of Europe to freedom for the vilest kinds of
pornography. Every kind of the sickest pornography is allowed in the Western
world today, including pornography that delves into the worst forms of sadism
and masochism and the vilest degradation of women, many of whom have been drug
addicted and truly enslaved in what the world calls White slavery. Yet, these
sickest, evil forms of porn are not only legal in Europe, they are lucrative!
Yet, if you dare to research and offer a dissenting opinion about any aspect of
the event singularly called the Holocaust, it's off to prison for you, its
bankruptcy for you and your family.
In Europe you
can freely question, ridicule, and deny Jesus Christ. The same is true for the
prophet Muhammed, and nothing will happen to you, heck you might even get to
star in your own weekly TV show, but offer a single question of the smallest
part of the Holocaust and you face prison! David Irving one of the world's most
famous and well-read historians, a writer who many mainstream historians have
praised as brilliant and accurate, at this moment sits in a prison near Vienna,
Austria for simply stating his historical opinion about Auschwitz in a lecture
in Austria in 1989. German researcher/chemist Gemar Rudolf faces years of
imprisonment for simply publishing a detailed forensic analysis that challenged
the authenticity of alleged Auschwitz gas chambers. Ernst Zundel, a resident of
Canada and the U.S was ripped from his wife and home because he had politically
incorrect opinions about the events of the Second World War.
I have been
honored to know personally all three of these men. They are kind, witty,
humorous, men of family, of kindness and decency. None of these men were hateful
or advocated hate, none were violent or advocated violence, none of these men
were terrorists or supported terrorists, none of these men did anything other
than express an intellectual opinion at variance with high priests of the
Holocaust. All these men did was have the courage to express their opinions even
though they knew that by doing so everything they held dear was endangered,
their safety, their sustenance, their freedom, but they chose their conscience
and their honor, even at the risk of life, that their own heart might be stilled
forever. They still stood tall. I am not here to argue the truth or untruth of
their claims, that is for the other speakers here, but I am here to add my voice
from America from free men and women everywhere that the fact that these men are
imprisoned is a scandal and injustice. The whole world knows that imprisoning
men for their opinions is tyranny; that such is the opposite of everything that
we mean by the word freedom. As some nations of Europe jail men for their
opinions, these same nations boast about their supposed freedom and hold
themselves above many other nations they view as repressive and backward.
Some of the
brave men here today at this conference have been jailed, even physically
attacked, lost reputation, freedom, property, career, simply for speaking their
conscience. I see a number of them as I look in the audience. And none of these
men write or speak hatefully or intemperately, but how can the world even know
that, when they and their beliefs are repressed by government and media. I want
to honor one of the men here for his sacrifices over the years in his obedience
to conscience and to truth, a man who has laid in a hospital bed with his bones
crushed, his pain-racked body burned by acid, all for doing what his intellect
dictated and his conscious demanded. He is Dr. Robert Faurisson, and we here and
the world owe him a debt that we can never adequately repay. Lesser men would
have given up and lived the quiet life, but he gave his all and he still gives
us his all even now. I would like to ask you to stand up for him ladies and
gentlemen. Robert Faurrison, the best-known revisionist in the world today.
The main theme
of the Holocaust Conference is that there must be freedom of speech on this
subject as on all others. Free speech, inquiry and debate are the only way to
learn the truth on any issue. In prosecutions of Holocaust questioners,
authorities have not allowed introduction of any evidence supporting the
defendant's claims. The courts have even announced in their guilty verdicts that
"The truth is no defense," i.e. that even if the defendant can be shown to be
honest and accurate, and even if his claims can be substantiated by physical and
documentary evidence, he has broken the law by simply questioning aspects of the
official Holocaust Story.
I take no hard
position on the historical accuracy of the Holocaust, I leave that to those
whose whole lives are devoted to the study of the issue, but I take an
unshakeable position on freedom. Obviously, Jews, as well as other nationalities
suffered great losses during the Second World War. Repression, dispossession or
murder against any group is wrong. Revisionists don't deny that many Jews died
and suffered greatly in the war, they condemn any and all injustices done to
Jews in that period.
It must also be
understood that throughout history, the historical treatment of atrocities or
crimes against humanity have often been colored by political purposes.
Throughout history some crimes against humanity have been exaggerated and
emphasized to justify political agendas or even war. Other crimes against
humanity have been completely ignored or downplayed.
An example is
the contrast between the crimes of National Socialist Germany and that of Soviet
Communism. Most researchers readily acknowledge that Bolshevism imprisoned,
tortured and slaughtered many times more people in Russia and in Eastern Europe
than even the high numbers alleged in the Holocaust. Yet, the Soviet Holocaust
receives not one-hundredth of the attention of the Jewish Holocaust. Can anyone
here name even a single movie you have seen about the Bolshevik slaughter? Isn't
it sensible to think that this disparity is because of the strong Jewish
influence in Western media from the entertainment establishment of Hollywood to
the news media centered in New York and across the European world? Revisionists
suggest that an exaggeration and saturation of the Holocaust has been essential
to establishment and support of the Zionist state in Israel and that it offers a
psychological excuse for the large scale ethnic cleansing, repression, torture
and genocide against the Palestinian people. Revisionists argue that this vested
interest of much of the pro-Zionist media and pro-Zionist governments affords a
danger that the Holocaust can be distorted and politicized just as many
historical crimes against humanity have either been exaggerated or diminished in
pursuit of political agendas. Whether the revisionists scholars are right or
wrong is for you to decide, not those who want to crush free thought and free
speech.
I and every
speaker at this conference believe in freedom of speech on all historical and
contemporary issues. We believe in freedom of speech, conscience, opinion, and
expression. It is the opponents of this conference who clearly don't believe in
freedom of speech and conscience. It is they who have thrown elderly men and
women into prison for years for simply expressing their opinions. Yet, instead
of condemning these tyrants, the media even celebrates the imprisonment of human
beings who dare to question. Dr. Bruno Gollnisch, a professor of Literature at
the University of Lyon, and a member of the European Parliament was convicted of
Holocaust Denial. Speaking in Lyon, France, in October 2004, Gollnisch said: "I
do not deny the existence of deadly gas chambers. But I'm not a specialist on
this issue, and I think we have to let the historians debate it." He did not
contest the "hundreds of thousands, the millions of deaths" during the
Holocaust, but added: "As to the way those people died, a debate should take
place." For simply advocating free speech, Gollnisch was convicted of Holocaust
Denial. Has Europe gone crazy? Freedom of speech is important for two reasons.
First, freedom of speech is a vital human right. It is the cornerstone of all
other rights, because without freedom of speech no one has to the right to even
freely know and learn of the abrogation of other rights affecting human freedom
and survival. That is why the American founding fathers put freedom of speech,
press and religion as the first and highest of the Bill of Rights. Second,
freedom of speech and debate are absolutely vital for the truth to prevail. If
one side of any controversial issue can suppress the voice of opposition, we
cannot arrive at the certainty of any truth. If academics and citizens can be
blackmailed monetarily and in career; if they can be threatened with firings,
loss of income, or imprisonment for simply sincerely pursuing an historical
inquiry and publishing it, how can the truth be discovered?
How does one
even know the real revisionist opinion, if that opinion is repressed?
A perfect
example of the biased treatment of the Western press is the recent adoption of
the term "Holocaust denier" to slander anyone who may question any part of the
complex and expansive Holocaust story. The term "Holocaust denier" was created
by Simon Wiesenthal to denote any one who dares to question any part of his
version of the Holocaust. To "deny" is usually associated with an allegation of
a personal crime. For example, "John Doe denies that he committed the robbery."
It has a very negative connotation. It is not commonly used to denote people
holding a contrary historical opinion. In truth, revisionists are not deniers,
they are simply questioners who are being imprisoned and slandered for simply
questioning with research and reason this tragic period of history during the
Second World War. The Holocaust Conference in Iran is truly about respect for
intellectual freedom. Iran has organized the first international conference
dedicated to freedom of speech and inquiry on this important historical matter
that has so many ramifications on the Mideast and many other present political
realities.
I am here in
Tehran as a speaker in this conference because I am dedicated to freedom of
speech, conscience, and thought. I am honored, as are all of you, to be here at
this historic conference. I urge the fair-minded people of the world, before
they condemn this conference, the Iranian President, all the speakers and me, to
ask the question: who are the patrons of freedom and who are the real deniers,
the deniers of our precious human right of freedom of speech!
-Dr. David Duke
Former member
of the House of Representatives State of Louisiana, United States of America
Iranian leader: Israel will be ‘wiped out’
Ahmadinejad renews heated
rhetoric at meeting of Holocaust deniers
The Associated Press
Updated: 4:56 p.m. ET Dec 12, 2006
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
attends a meeting Tuesday with participants of a 'Review of the
Holocaust' conference in Tehran.
VIENNA, Austria - Iran’s
hard-line president said Tuesday that Israel will one day be “wiped out” as the
Soviet Union was, drawing applause from participants in a conference casting
doubt on the Holocaust.
President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad’s comments were likely to further fuel the outcry prompted by the
two-day gathering, which has gathered some of Europe’s and the United States’
best-known Holocaust deniers.
Anger over the
conference could further isolate Iran as the West considers sanctions in the
standoff over Tehran’s nuclear program.
Harsh rhetoric
aimed at Israel
But Ahmadinejad appeared to revel in his meeting Tuesday with conference
delegates, shaking hands with American participants and sitting near six
anti-Israel Jewish participants, dressed in black ultra-Orthodox coats and hats.
“The Zionist regime will
be wiped out soon the same way the Soviet Union was, and humanity will achieve
freedom,” Ahmadinejad said during Tuesday’s meeting in his offices, according to
the official IRNA news agency.
He called for elections
among “Jews, Christians and Muslims so the population of Palestine can select
their government and destiny for themselves in a democratic manner.”
Ahmadinejad has used
anti-Israeli rhetoric and cast doubt on the Holocaust to rally anti-Western
supporters at home and abroad, particularly in Asia and the Middle East. Several
times he has referred to the Holocaust as a “myth” used to impose the state of
Israel on the Arab world.
“The Holocaust is the
device used as the pillar of Zionist imperialism, Zionist aggression, Zionist
terror and Zionist murder,” David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader and former
state representative in Louisiana, told The Associated Press.
Iranian leader
vows ‘fact-finding commission’
Ahmadinejad announced the conference would set up a “fact-finding commission” to
determine whether the Holocaust happened or not. The commission will “help end a
60-year-old dispute,” he said.
The Tehran conference
was touted by participants and organizers as an exercise in academic freedom and
a chance to openly consider whether 6 million Jews really died in the Holocaust,
away from Western taboos and the restrictions imposed on scholars in Europe,
where some countries have made it a crime to deny the Nazi genocide during World
War II.
It gathered 67 writers
and researchers from 30 countries, most of whom argue that either the Holocaust
did not happen or that it was vastly exaggerated. Many have been jailed or fined
in France, Germany or Austria, where it is illegal to deny the Holocaust.
Participants milled
around a model of the Auschwitz concentration camp brought by one speaker,
Australian Frederick Toben, who uses the mock-up in lectures contending that the
camp was too small to kill mass numbers of Jews. More than 1 million people are
estimated to have been killed there.
Jewish group
attends conference
Rabbi Moshe David Weiss, one of six members attending from the group Jews United
Against Zionism, told delegates, “We don’t want to deny the killing of Jews in
World War II, but Zionists have given much higher figures for how many people
were killed.”
“They have used the
Holocaust as a device to justify their oppression,” he said. His group rejects
the creation of Israel on the grounds that it violates Jewish religious law.
International
condemnation
The gathering of Holocaust deniers touched off a firestorm of indignation
Tuesday across Europe, where many countries have made it a crime to publicly
disavow the Nazis’ systematic extermination of 6 million Jews.
The European Union’s top
justice official condemned the conference as “an unacceptable affront” to
victims of the World War II genocide. British Prime Minister Tony Blair
denounced it as “shocking beyond belief” and proof of Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad’s extremism.
“I think it is such a
symbol of sectarianism and hatred toward people of another religion. I find it
just unbelievable, really,” Blair said in London.
In Washington, the White
House condemned Iran for convening a conference it called “an affront to the
entire civilized world.”
The conference drew
especially sharp condemnation in Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel said
her country repudiated it “with all our strength.”
“We absolutely reject
this. Germany will never accept this and will act against it with all the means
that we have,” Merkel told reporters. She stood alongside visiting Israeli Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert, who denounced the meeting as “unacceptable” and a “danger”
to the Western world.
French Foreign Minister
Philippe Douste-Blazy was interrupted by applause from lawmakers when he told
parliament in Paris that the conference showed a resurgence of “revisionist”
theories “which are quite simply not acceptable.”
The Los Angeles-based
Simon Wiesenthal Center, answering critics who contend revisionists are simply
exercising their right to free speech, quoted an unidentified survivor as
saying: “If the Holocaust was a myth, where is my sister?”
Free speech
issues Deborah E. Lipstadt, a professor of Holocaust studies at Emory
University in Atlanta, drew a sharp distinction between the conference and this
year’s publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, which triggered protests
across the Islamic world.
“It’s one thing to poke
fun at a faith — even Judaism. It’s a different thing to lie about history,” she
said in a telephone interview. “The question is: When does hate speech become
incitement? These people are haters — and haters can cause great damage.”
But Soeren Espersen of
the Danish People’s Party, which staunchly defended the Muhammad cartoons, said
people should have the right to speak their minds — even at a “hideous”
conference like the one in Tehran.
“We believe in freedom
of speech also for nut cases,” he said.
‘A slap in the
face’ Frantisek Banyai, the head of Prague’s Jewish community — which was
decimated during WWII from 120,000 people to just a few thousand today — decried
the meeting as “aggressive, wrong and disgusting.”
“It’s immoral. It
insults me and it insults each member of the Jewish community, because we lost
members of our families,” he said. “It’s a slap in the face of those decent
people who know the history and want to learn a lesson from it.”
EU Justice and Home
Affairs Commissioner Franco Frattini also condemned Ahmadinejad, who considers
the Holocaust a “myth” and has called for Israel to be wiped off the map, for
hosting the gathering.
“I want to state my firm
condemnation of any attempt to deny, trivialize or minimize the Shoah,” Frattini
said. “Anti-Semitism has no place in Europe; nor should it in any other part of
the world.”
Vatican warns
against indifference The Vatican called the Holocaust an “immense tragedy” and warned the
world not to react with indifference to those who challenge its existence.
“The memory of those
horrible events must remain as a warning for people’s consciences,” the Holy See
said.
Francois Nicoullaud,
France’s ambassador to Tehran from 2001 to 2005, saw the conference as another
expression of Ahmadinejad’s continuing efforts to get back to the basics of the
Islamic revolution.
“He’s trying to
scientifically justify the unjustifiable, in a sense,” he said.
For a so-called 'backwards' and 'repressive regime', Iran sure
has proved without doubt that it's more liberal than the 'most
liberal democracies on earth' when it comes to freely expressing
unpopular ideas.
Holocaust deniers and
skeptics from around the world gathered
at a government-sponsored conference here today to discuss
their theories about whether six million Jews were indeed
killed by the Nazis during World War II and whether gas
chambers existed.
In a speech opening the
two-day conference, Rasoul Mousavi, head of the Iranian
Foreign Ministry’s Institute for Political and International
Studies, which organized the event, said it was an
opportunity for scholars to discuss the subject
“away from Western taboos and the restriction imposed on
them in Europe.”
The foreign ministry had said
that 67 foreign researchers from 30 countries were scheduled
to take part. Among those speaking today are David Duke, the
American white-supremacist politician and former Ku Klux
Klan leader, and Georges Thiel, a French writer who has been
prosecuted in France over his denials of the Holocaust.
Mr. Duke’s remarks late this
afternoon are expected to assert that no gas chambers or
extermination camps were actually built during the war, on
the ground that killing Jews that way would have been much
too bothersome and expensive when the Nazis could have used
much simpler methods, according to an advance summary of his
speech published by the institute.
“Depicting Jews as the
overwhelming victims of the Holocaust gave the moral high
ground to the Allies as victors of the war, and
allowed Jews to establish a state on the occupied land of
Palestine,” Mr. Duke’s paper says, according to the
summary.
One of the first scheduled speakers, Robert
Faurisson of France, also
called the Holocaust a myth created to justify the
occupation of Palestine.
The conference is being held
at the behest of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who
likewise called the Holocaust a myth last year, and repeated
a well-known slogan from the early days of the 1979
revolution in Iran, “Israel must be wiped off the map.” He
has spoken several times since then about a need to
establish whether the Holocaust actually happened.
Most of the speakers at the
conference today praised Mr. Ahmadinejad’s comments.
Bendikt Frings, 48, a psychologist from
Germany, said he believed Mr. Ahmadinejad was “an
honest direct man,” and said he had come to the
conference to thank him for
what he had initiated.
“We are forbidden to have such a
conference in Germany,” he
said. “ All my childhood, we waited for something
like this.”
Toben Feredrick, from
Australia, said Mr. Ahmadinejad has opened an issue
“which is morally and intellectually crippling the Western
society.”
“People are imprisoned in Germany for
denying the Holocaust,” he
added.
Mr. Feredrick said he was jailed for six
months in 1999 because of his ideas, and that a court in
Germany has ordered him
arrested if he speaks out publicly again denying that the
Holocaust took place.
Other Western “revisionists”
presented what they called new facts about the Holocaust at
the conference, which also attracted attendees from some
ultra-Orthodox Jews belonging to anti-Zioinst sects that
reject the state of Israel. One participant wearing the
traditional long black coat and hat of such groups wore a
badge saying: “A Jew, not a Zionist.”
It was not entirely clear how
the lineup of speakers at the conference was set. The
Institute’s website had invited scholars and researchers to
submit papers in advance for consideration, but revealed
little about how they were evaluated. The Iranian foreign
ministry also provided little information about
participants, saying that it feared they would be prosecuted
by their home countries.
The conference included an exhibition today
of various photos, posters and other material meant to
contradict the accepted version of events, that the Nazis
murdered millions of Jews and other “undesirables” in death
camps during the war. New captions in Persian on some
familiar photos of corpses at the camps
argued that they were victims of typhus, not
the German state.
Anti-Zionist literature, including a 2004
book by the American author Michael Collins Piper, about
Zionist influence in America, was offered for sale to
visitors at the conference. So, apparently, was a video
recording of 12 Holocaust survivors telling their stories,
suggesting that the views represented at
the conference may not have been entirely
one-sided.
The conference prompted
outrage in the West. The German government summoned the
Iranian charge d’affaires in Berlin to complain. The French
Foreign Minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy, warned that the
conference would be strongly condemned if it propagated
claims denying the Holocaust.
Iran also organized an
exhibition last summer of cartoons about the Holocaust,
which outraged Jews inside Iran and out.
Iranian Jewish leaders
reacted angrily to Mr. Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust-denying
comments last year, issuing a statement saying that his
words were spreading fear among Jews in Iran.
“We consider the Holocaust as
a fact and a disgrace for humanity,” Haround Yashayai, a
leading voice among Iranian Jews, said today. “We
cannot say that such a conference cannot be held here.
We have condemned similar events in the past, and see no
reason to condemn it again.”
Who would have guessed that you'd
have to travel to Tehran to speak your mind?
The ADL must be fuming.
Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, right, greets self-styled rabbi Moishe Arye
Friedman at the conference.
The Times
December 12, 2006
Rabbi Ahron Cohen, centre,
and other members of Neturei Karta, a fringe
anti-Zionist group, were among those at the
conference in Tehran. “We certainly say there
was a Holocaust,” he said (Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty
Images)
Iran students denounce
Holocaust denial
Michael Theodoulou
Protesters burn pictures of leader
‘Nazis and racists’ gather in Tehran
::nobreak::
Dozens of
Iranian students burnt pictures of President
Ahmadinejad and chanted “Death to the dictator” as
he gave a speech at a university in Tehran
yesterday.
Never has
the hardline leader faced such open hostility at a
public event, which came as Iran opened a conference
questioning whether Nazi Germany murdered six
million Jews.
One student
activist said that the protest was against the
“shameful” Holocaust conference and the “fact that
many activists have not been allowed to attend
university”. The conference “has brought to our
country Nazis and racists from around the world”, he
added.
Mr
Ahmadinejad responded by saying: “Everyone should
know that Ahmadinejad is prepared to be burnt in the
path of true freedom, independence and justice”,
according to an Iranian students’ news agency. He
accused the protesters of being “Americanised”.
The protest
during a speech at Amir Tabir University unrelated
to the Holocaust meeting will be embarrassing for Mr
Ahmadinejad. He has portrayed Iran as a champion of
free speech in hosting the two-day Holocaust
conference, which has attracted revisionist
historians who have served jail sentences in Europe
and David Duke, an American former Ku Klux Klan
leader.
Almost 70
researchers from France to Indonesia arrived at the
plush conference centre in an affluent north Tehran
suburb. The centre’s walls were festooned with
posters claiming to debunk “myths” of the Holocaust,
disputing whether smoke ever rose from the chimneys
at Auschwitz and denouncing the film Schindler’s
List, which tells of the Nazi industrialist who
rescued more than 1,000 Jews.
But the
conference has embarrassed many ordinary Iranians
who are aware of the damage such events are
inflicting on their country’s image.
Some
Iranians point out that they have much less freedom
to debate pressing issues such as Iran’s nuclear
programme, which has brought the threat of
international sanctions. The conference, which has
provoked international condemnation, was inspired by
Mr Ahmadinejad himself, who has described the
Holocaust as a myth invented to justify the
occupation of Palestinian land. He has also declared
that Israel should be “wiped off the map”.
The
conference has dismayed Iran’s 25,000-strong Jewish
community. Moris Motamed, Iran’s sole Jewish MP,
said that denying the Holocaust was “a huge insult”.
Those at the
conference included American and European rabbis
from the fringe ultraOrthodox group Neturei Karta,
whose theology holds that there should be no Jewish
state until the Messiah arrives.
Ahron Cohen,
a British rabbi, said: “We certainly say there was a
Holocaust. But in no way can it be used as a
justification for unjust acts against the
Palestinians.” Welcoming the participants,
Manouchehr Mottaki, the Iranian Foreign Minister,
declared: “The aim of this conference is not to deny
or confirm the Holocaust. Its main aim is to create
an opportunity for thinkers who cannot express their
views freely in Europe about the Holocaust.”
Georges
Thiel, a French writer who has been convicted in
France, where Holocaust denial is illegal, said that
the Holocaust was “an enormous lie”: “Jewish people
have been persecuted, that is true, they have been
deported, but there was no machinery of murder in
any camp — no gas chambers.”
Fredrick
Toeben, an Australian who has served a prison
sentence in his native Germany for inciting racial
hatred, said: “Minds are being switched off to the
Holocaust dogma as it is being sold as a historical
fact and yet we are not able to question it. This is
mental rape.”
He brought a
model of the Treblinka extermination camp which, he
said, he would demonstrate that the gas chambers did
not exist.
PROTECTING THE TRUTH
Laws
against Holocaust denial exist in Austria, Belgium,
France, Germany, Spain and Switzerland, as well as
in Israel. All but the Israeli law were introduced
in 1990s
Israeli law
proscribes “denial, trivialisation, praise or
approval of acts committed under the Nazi regime"
The British
writer David Irving will not attend the conference
in Iran; he is serving a three-year jail sentence in
Austria for Holocaust denial. When he lost a libel
action in Britain in 2000, a judge said that Irving
was “anti-Semitic and racist”
In 1997
Private Member's Bill criminalising Holocaust denial
was considered in UK as amendment to incitement to
hatred laws but never left committee stage
Source:
Institute for Jewish Policy Research/Times archive
Rasoul
Mousavi, head of the Iranian Foreign Ministry’s
Institute for Political and International Studies,
during the opening of the Holocaust conference at the
foreign ministry in Tehran.
Abedin Taherkenareh/European
Pressphoto Agency
By NAZILA FATHI
TEHRAN, Dec. 11 — Holocaust deniers and
skeptics from around the world gathered at a government-sponsored conference
here today to discuss their theories about whether six million Jews were
indeed killed by the Nazis during World War II and whether gas chambers
existed.
In a speech opening the two-day
conference, Rasoul Mousavi, head of the Iranian Foreign Ministry’s Institute
for Political and International Studies, which organized the event, said it
was an opportunity for scholars to discuss the subject “away from Western
taboos and the restriction imposed on them in Europe.”
The foreign ministry had said
that 67 foreign researchers from 30 countries were scheduled to take part.
Among those speaking today are David Duke, the American white-supremacist
politician and former
Ku Klux Klan leader,
and Georges Thiel, a French writer who has been prosecuted in France over
his denials of the Holocaust.
Mr. Duke’s remarks late this
afternoon are expected to assert that no gas chambers or extermination camps
were actually built during the war, on the ground that killing Jews that way
would have been much too bothersome and expensive when the Nazis could have
used much simpler methods, according to an advance summary of his speech
published by the institute.
“Depicting Jews as the overwhelming
victims of the Holocaust gave the moral high ground to the Allies as victors
of the war, and allowed Jews to establish a state on the occupied land of
Palestine,” Mr. Duke’s paper says, according to the summary.
One of the first scheduled speakers,
Robert Faurisson of France, also called the Holocaust a myth created to
justify the occupation of Palestine.
The conference is being held
at the behest of Iran’s president,
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
who likewise called the Holocaust a myth last year, and repeated a
well-known slogan from the early days of the 1979 revolution in Iran,
“Israel must be wiped off the map.” He has spoken several times since then
about a need to establish whether the Holocaust actually happened.
Most of the speakers at the
conference today praised Mr. Ahmadinejad’s comments.
Bendikt Frings, 48, a psychologist
from Germany, said he believed Mr. Ahmadinejad was “an honest direct man,”
and said he had come to the conference to thank him for what he had
initiated.
“We are forbidden to have such a
conference in Germany,” he said. “ All my childhood, we waited for something
like this.”
Toben Feredrick, from Australia,
said Mr. Ahmadinejad has opened an issue “which is morally and
intellectually crippling the Western society.”
“People are imprisoned in Germany
for denying the Holocaust,” he added.
Mr. Feredrick said he was jailed for
six months in 1999 because of his ideas, and that a court in Germany has
ordered him arrested if he speaks out publicly again denying that the
Holocaust took place.
Other Western “revisionists”
presented what they called new facts about the Holocaust at the conference,
which also attracted attendees from some ultra-Orthodox Jews belonging to
anti-Zionist sects that reject the state of Israel. One participant wearing
the traditional long black coat and hat of such groups wore a badge saying:
“A Jew, not a Zionist.”
It was not entirely clear how the
lineup of speakers at the conference was set. The Institute’s website had
invited scholars and researchers to submit papers in advance for
consideration, but revealed little about how they were evaluated. The
Iranian foreign ministry also provided little information about
participants, saying that it feared they would be prosecuted by their home
countries.
The conference included an
exhibition today of various photos, posters and other material meant to
contradict the accepted version of events, that the Nazis murdered millions
of Jews and other “undesirables” in death camps during the war. New captions
in Persian on some familiar photos of corpses at the camps argued that they
were victims of typhus, not the German state.
Anti-Zionist literature, including a
2004 book by the American author Michael Collins Piper, about Zionist
influence in America, was offered for sale to visitors at the conference.
So, apparently, was a video recording of 12 Holocaust survivors telling
their stories, suggesting that the views represented at the conference may
not have been entirely one-sided.
The conference prompted outrage in
the West. The German government summoned the Iranian charge d’affaires in
Berlin to complain. The French Foreign Minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy,
warned that the conference would be strongly condemned if it propagated
claims denying the Holocaust.
Iran also organized an exhibition
last summer of cartoons about the Holocaust, which outraged Jews inside Iran
and out.
Iranian Jewish leaders reacted
angrily to Mr. Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust-denying comments last year, issuing a
statement saying that his words were spreading fear among Jews in Iran.
“We consider the Holocaust as a fact
and a disgrace for humanity,” Haround Yashayai, a leading voice among
Iranian Jews, said today. “We cannot say that such a conference cannot be
held here. We have condemned similar events in the past, and see no reason
to condemn it again.”
NATIONAL
(DECEMBER 7, 2006)
Holocaust denier to face charges
tali borowski
THE Executive
Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) is launching legal action against the
Adelaide Institute’s Dr Frederick Toben for his failure to obey a court order to
remove antisemitic material from his website.
But the ECAJ will have to wait until Dr Toben returns from Iran, where he is
pushing his revisionist views at a conference on “Holocaust history”, to serve
the 62 year old with contempt-of-court papers.
In a landmark ruling in 2002, a Federal Court of Australia judge ordered Dr
Toben to remove anti-Jewish material from his website.
Justice Catherine Branson ordered the removal of the material, claiming it was
likely to “offend, insult, humiliate and intimidate” Australian Jews, and banned
him from republishing any similar material anywhere on the internet or by any
other means.
The judgement stated that should Dr Toben continue to publish the material, he
would be found guilty of contempt of court, an offence that could result in a
jail sentence.
ECAJ president Grahame Leonard told the AJN the new material was “more of the
same” Holocaust-denial propaganda.
Dr Toben is currently in the Iranian capital at a conference on “Review of the
Holocaust: global vision”, which is being presented by Iran’s Institute for
Political and International Studies. According to the conference’s website, the
event is marketed to those interested in clarifying the “hidden and open
corners” of the Holocaust.
Dr Toben, who served seven months in a German prison in 1999 for inciting
racism, has been quoted in the Iranian Tehran Times, which supports the
anti-Israel regime of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that Hitler’s extermination of
six-million Jews and the existence of gas chambers had not been proven.
The ECAJ’s national Report on antisemitism in Australia, which was tabled at
last week’s annual conference by its author, Jeremy Jones, reported increases in
web-based antisemitism, including on popular video site YouTube.
Iran vows no
'preconceived ideas' at Holocaust meet
by Farhad Pouladi
Tue Dec 5, 6:56 AM ET
Iran has said that more than 60
researchers from 30 countries will attend a controversial conference on the
Holocaust next week to examine the event without any "preconceived ideas".
Deputy Foreign Minister Manouchehr
Mohammadi said Tuesday the staging of the conference on December 11-12 was a
response to the lack of answers to questions posed over the Holocaust by Iranian
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Ahmadinejad, who has also called for
Israel to be wiped off the map, has repeatedly raised questions about the scale
of the Holocaust and even described the mass slaughter of six million Jews in
World War II as a "myth".
"Ahmadinejad asked did the Holocaust
happen or not. And if it happened why are scholars prevented from doing research
on this and why are revisionists thrown into prison?" Mohammadi told reporters.
"And if it happened, why should the
Palestinians pay for this?"
The conference will, he said, "without
any preconceived ideas, provide the atmosphere for scholars and researchers from
both sides to give their papers in the utmost freedom".
Mohammadi declined to give the names of
the 67 international "scholars" he said would be attending over fears their home
countries would ban them from travelling to Tehran.
He stressed that Iran's "study" of the
Holocaust "does not mean we deny the crimes of Hitler".
"Since we are not accused of and not
responsible for the Holocaust, we are an impartial judge," he said.
He brushed off any idea that staging the
conference would prompt anti-Semitism and racism, pointing to the existence of
Iran's own 25,000-strong Jewish community.
"Anti-Semitism is a Western phenomenon,
we never had it, we are strongly against any racist moves since we consider all
human beings and divine religions as equals."
"The Jews have been living in Iran for
centuries... and even after Iran became an Islamic nation, they have been living
here in harmony, so it proves that we are an impartial referee," he added.
Tehran has already sparked controversy
by opening an international exhibitition of cartoons on the Holocaust, in
response to the publication in Western papers of caricatures of the Prophet
Mohammed.
"But when it comes to research we
believe that this subject (the Holocaust) can be investigated and it should not
be considered a red line," Mohammadi added.
"In Iran one can investigate and
research Islamic issues and even deny them and no one will stop you you," he
said.
The controversy surrounding Iran's
stance over the Holocaust was on the agenda of the outgoing UN Secretary General
Kofi Annan when he discussed it with Ahmadinejad in Tehran earlier this year.
Annan, during his September visit to
Tehran, said the right to freedom of speech had to be exercised with
"sensitivity" and that the Holocaust was an "undeniable historical fact".
Mohammadi also said that Iran views the
Holocaust conference as a prelude to organizing other conferences on killings in
other parts of the world.
"We are going to have a conference in
February about Latin America and in that gathering one of the topics is the
genocide that was inflicted on the indigenous Americans," he said.
· Gathering will consider whether
deaths took place · Event 'will not be a forum for anti-semites'
Robert Tait in
Tehran Wednesday December 6, 2006
Guardian
Iran announced yesterday details of a conference
questioning whether the Holocaust really happened, prompted by an international
outcry a year ago when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad described the slaughter of
six million Jews by the Nazis as "myth" fabricated to justify Israel.
The foreign ministry said "intellectuals and
researchers" from 30 countries - including Britain - would attend Studying the
Holocaust: An international view, in Tehran on Monday and Tuesday.
The idea for the gathering was dismissed earlier this
year as "shocking, ridiculous and stupid" by Tony Blair. Iran responded by
inviting him to attend.
A Foreign Office spokesman said it had no record of who
was going. "I think the government's views on Iran's comments regarding the
Holocaust are well known but it is not up to us who travels to Iran."
Participants will consider documentary, pictorial,
physical and demographic evidence in what Iranian officials depict as an
academic investigation to establish the Holocaust's authenticity and whether the
reported number of victims was exaggerated. Organisers say it will include
submissions for and against. It will also focus on the plight of the
Palestinians.
The conference will have six panel discussions and an
open forum. It will discuss the capacity of Nazi death camps and the impact of
the second world war on other national and ethnic groups. Iranian officials say
Jewish suffering is played up at the expense of other victims. Manouchehr
Mohammadi, the foreign ministry's research and education officer, said the
conference was intended as a platform for open discussion of the Holocaust,
which Iran claims is denied in the west.
"Our aim is to scientifically study the Holocaust and
listen to both sides before reaching a conclusion," Mr Mohammadi said. "This
issue has a crucial role regarding the west's policies towards the countries of
the Middle East, especially the Palestinians. Iran isn't against or for. We
weren't involved in this event so we can be a neutral judge. It is important for
us to know the answer so that we can process our stances to issues in this
region. If we conclude that the Holocaust happened, we will admit it but we are
still going to ask why Palestinians have to pay." He said it would not be a
forum for anti-semites or neo-Nazis, and rabbis would attend. "Our policy
doesn't mean we want to defend the crimes of Hitler."
Mr Ahmadinejad has called for Israel to be "wiped off
the map" and has said its inhabitants should go to Europe or Alaska.
Michael Rosen, of the Community Security Trust, which
works to safeguard Jews in Britain, said he was aware of the event but that it
was not clear who was planning to attend from the UK. Karen Pollock, of the
Holocaust Educational Trust, said: "To hold a state-sponsored conference
questioning the truth of the Holocaust is not only deeply disturbing but a huge
insult to Holocaust survivors and the families of Holocaust victims."
New York, NY, December 7, 2006 … The
Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today urged European leaders to condemn an upcoming
conference in Iran titled, "Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision," in which
the Iranian government will feature dozens of speakers questioning the
historical fact of the Holocaust.
"We believe this type of Holocaust
denial has no place in the family of nations, and that it is essential for
European and world leaders to condemn this conference and everything it stands
for at its core, which is anti-Semitism," said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National
Director and a Holocaust survivor.
"Holocaust denial is an anti-Semitic
conspiracy theory that posits that Jews, for their own selfish purposes, created
a monstrous tale of their own destruction and deliberately inflicted the hoax on
the entire world," added Mr. Foxman. "It presumes that Jews control the
international media and all other forms of information, for how else could such
a 'fantasy' flourish the way it has."
The conference, scheduled to take
place next week in Tehran, follows on the heels of a
cartoon contest sponsored
by the Iranian government, in which cartoonists from around the world were given
awards for drawings that mocked the Holocaust and attacked Israel and Jews.
While Tehran has refused to release a
list of participants, Bradley Smith, a U.S.-based Holocaust denier, has boasted
to supporters that at least ten notorious Holocaust deniers from around the
world will present papers, including Robert Faurisson of France, Jurgen Graf of
Switzerland, Michele Renouf of the U.K. and Ahmed Rami of Sweden. Mark Weber of
the Institute for Historical Review, a major purveyor of Holocaust denial
materials based in California, has said that while he will not be attending, his
organization is providing a video presentation to be shown to delegates.
In a letter to European leaders, ADL
urged their governments and the European Union to publicly denounce the
conference.
"This conference seeks to question the
record of the Holocaust and is a disgrace to the memories of the six million
Jews and others who died at the hands of the Nazis," said the League's letter,
whose recipients include Prime Minister Tony Blair of the United Kingdom, Prime
Minister Romano Prodi of Italy, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, President
Jacques Chirac of France and Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen of Finland, who also
serves as President of the European Union.
ADL praised U.N. Secretary General Kofi
Annan for his strong statement, issued today, condemning the Iranian Holocaust
conference and "any effort to question or deny the Holocaust." Mr. Annan said
that, "…any attempt to cast doubt on the reality of this unique and undeniable
horror must be firmly resisted by all people of goodwill and of whatever faith."
Israeli Muslim to take on Holocaust denial at
Iran conference
The Associated Press
Friday,
November 17, 2006
JERUSALEM
An Israeli Arab who opened a
Holocaust museum in his home last year is planning to attend an upcoming
conference in Iran on whether or not the Holocaust actually happened —
and he intends to tell the Iranians it cannot be denied.
Khaled Kasab Mahameed, a Muslim
lawyer from Nazareth, said he had been invited to the conference, slated
to begin December 11 in Iran's capital, Tehran. It was initiated by
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, who has called the Holocaust a
"myth," and is supposed to encourage research into whether or not
millions of Jews were murdered by the Nazi regime during World War II.
Ahmedinejad, who has also called
for Israel to be "wiped off the map" and has been accused by the West of
pursuing nuclear weapons, has suggested that the Israelis invented the
Holocaust in order to dispossess the Palestinians.
Mahameed said he planned to
openly contradict Ahmedinejad's statements at the conference.
"Instead of trying to understand
the Holocaust and learn something from it, they choose to deny it,"
Mahameed said. "I'm going to tell them that there is no argument about
the facts, and that they must try to understand how the Holocaust has
shaped the positions of the Jews, of Europe, of America. I will tell
them they must internalize its meaning and not say it didn't happen."
Mahameed opened a modest museum
in his home last year, holding lectures, running a web site and
displaying photographs he obtained from Yad Vashem, Israel's official
Holocaust museum. He also penned a book in Arabic, "The Palestinians and
the Sovereignty of the Holocaust."
"The dimensions of the Holocaust
were never internalized by the Arab discourse on Israel, and many people
don't believe it happened," Mahameed said. Teaching Arabs about the
Holocaust, he believes, can help them understand Israelis better and aid
progress towards a resolution of the Mideast conflict.
Rabbi Friedman cautions against strategic abuse of
Holocaust
Iran-Israel, Politics,
12/9/2006
Austrian rabbi and chief of the Orthodox
Anti-Zionist society of Austria, Moshe Aryeh Friedman, yesterday cautioned
against strategic abuse of the historic event of Holocaust.
Speaking to IRNA yesterday before
departing for Tehran, Iran, to attend Holocaust symposium, Rabbi Friedman said,
"As one who has conducted research on the issue for years, I regrettably notice
how Judaism and fame of our ancestors are abused through distortion of the
historical event." Rabbi Friedman stressed that impartial scholars and the
journalists, who conducted objective research on Holocaust and its
politicization by Zionism, have been named as criminal and sentenced to several
years of prison.
The Jewish figure noted, "We should
focus on the reality that the behind-the-curtain individuals and financial
providers as well as perpetrators of some of the World War II crimes had been
Zionists themselves." Now another Holocaust has taken place, this time involving
Palestinians and Arabs -- something unprecedented in history, he added.
The Austrian Rabbi also thanked Iran as
the best venue for the conference on the Holocaust because it used to remain
neutral during the World War II and was not involved in the event.
Friedman described Iran as a model
country in dealing with and tolerating religious minorities.
"We have been witnessing that religious
minorities either now or in the past have been holding a very proper and good
position in Iran," said the rabbi.
The international symposium of "Study of
Holocaust, Global Perspective" is to be held in Tehran from December 11-12,
sponsored by Foreign Ministry's Institute for Political and International
Studies (IPIS).
The Education and Research Department at
Foreign Ministry has said the conference would provide a channel for scientific
and free debate on the issue by related scholars and experts.
Holocaust conference 'unacceptable'
From correspondents in Berlin 08dec06
THE German Government today summoned the Iranian charge d'affairs in Berlin to
express its opposition to a planned conference on the Holocaust in Tehran next
week.
A foreign ministry spokesman, Jens Ploetner, said that
Germany had made clear that as the country responsible for the Nazis' crimes it
found any statements questioning Israel's right to exist or the fact of the
Holocaust to be "shocking" and "unacceptable".
"We condemn any attempt, in the past or in the future,
to give a forum to those who relativise or question the Holocaust," he said.
Germany "bears a unique responsibility toward the
victims of the Nazis, in particular the victims of the Holocaust," he added.
Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mohammadi
said this week the staging of the conference on December 11-12 was a response to
the lack of answers to questions posed over the Holocaust by President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad.
He declined to give the names of the 67 international
"scholars" he said would be attending over fears their home countries would ban
them from travelling to Tehran.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said this week that he
would deplore any conference that sought to cast doubt on the reality of the
Holocaust.
GENEVA (EJP)--- The Democratic
Union of the Centre, the right-wing party that won a majority in the last Swiss
elections, has proposed to the abolishment of Switzerland’s anti-racist law,
arguing it impedes freedom of speech.
The Federation of the Swiss Jewish communities has expressed concern after the
declaration by Ueli Maurer, the Democratic Union’s leader and previously
Switzerland’s justice minister, and members of his party, known as UDC.
The law was adopted on Jan. 1, 1995, and forbids any discrimination against a
person or group on the basis of race, ethnicity or religion. It also mandates
punishment for denying or attempting to justify a genocide or crime against
humanity, especially the Holocaust.
The UDC holds that the law is too abstract and that Swiss do not understand what
they can and cannot say in public. Maurer said his party was fighting for
freedom of speech in Switzerland, and that everyone should have the right to
express what they thought, even if it was not right.
Moreover, the UDC charges that the law has encouraged a passive form of racism.
They say the penal law is not the best way to combat to revisionism, and that
more faith should be placed in people’s ability to discern between right and
wrong.
Still, others argue the law is not harsh enough.
Tobias Hirschi, a member of the extreme-right party PSN, was recently acquitted
by a Solothurn court after being charged for carrying a banner with the slogan
“Who directs the workers?” next to a Star of David in a May 2005 demonstration.
Hirschi was accused of tapping into the Nazi ideology that led to the Holocaust,
but the judge ruled that although the banner was anti-Semitic, there was no link
to the Nazis. As such, it did not violate the anti-racism law.
The debate on the law began after Swiss Minister of Justice Christophe Blocher,
a former UDC leader, declared during a visit to Turkey that everyone has the
right to an opinion and the right to express it, and that the law should be
abolished.
It was enacted in another case in 2005 after a July visit by Turkish politician
Dogu Perinçek to Lausanne. Perinçek denied a genocide of Armenians by Turkey
took place in 1915. The Swiss government, which has officially recognized the
genocide, charged him with negating it.
Jerome
Brentar, 84, ran travel agency,
gained fame as Demjanjuk supporter
Jerome Brentar, who helped numerous
Eastern European immigrants get established in Cleveland but gained wider
fame for helping fight government allegations that John Demjanjuk served as
a Nazi guard during World War II, died Friday.
The 84-year-old retired travel agent
was pronounced dead at Euclid General Hospital after being found on the
floor at his Cleveland home. Cuyahoga County Coroner Elizabeth Balraj said
Brentar's death was the result of a head injury. She will rule after an
investigation.
Brentar generated controversy as a
Demjanjuk supporter, spending 17 years interviewing Nazi guards and camp
survivors to help clear the Seven Hills auto worker from a death sentence in
Israel in the 1990s.
More recently, the two men made
headlines when Brentar sued the Demjanjuk family for $2 million, seeking
reimbursement for the money he spent on Demjanjuk's defense.
Brentar, who had screened thousands
of refugees looking for help from the United Nations International Refugee
Organization in the late 1940s, also testified in depositions on behalf of
other men accused of working with Nazis.
Joseph McGinness, a lawyer who
defended such clients, said, "Jerry was probably one of the kindest people
you'd ever want to meet, and he had a big heart. He was a person who was
constantly in pursuit of truth and justice."
Others saw Brentar as an
anti-Semitic Nazi-sympathizing activist.
"His views are in sync with modern
Holocaust revisionists, and, as a former OSI prosecutor, I found those views
totally repugnant," said Jonathan Drimmer, formerly with the Office of
Special Investigation.
Brentar, a Cleveland native and son
of Croatian immigrants, founded Europa Travel, which became one of the
largest chartered booking agencies in Cleveland.
For decades, he opened his home to
newly arrived immigrants, who stayed with his family until he helped them
land jobs and find homes. He sponsored local performances of Croatian
musical groups to expose Clevelanders to other cultures.
Brentar flirted with politics in the
1990s, when he ran unsuccessfully for U.S. Congress: District 19 in 1994 and
District 11 in 1998.
In the late 1980s, he served on
then-Vice President George Bush's nationalities coalition, but was dropped
from the committee when his controversial views became known to Bush's
advisers.
Plain Dealer reporter John Caniglia
contributed to this story.
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:
abaranick@plaind.com, 216-999-4828
Jerome A. Brentar
1922 - 2006
Survivors: Wife, Dora; daughters,
Carolyn "Suzi" Music of Kirtland, Mary Ann Drazina of Novato, Calif., and
Dora Bourgault of Chester Township; son, John of Belmont, Calif.; five
grandchildren; and three brothers.
Services: 10 a.m. Thursday, St. Paul
Croatian Church, 1369 East 40th St., Cleveland.
Robert
Stinnett closes his excellent
summary article on
Pearl Harbor historiography with these words: "Though the Freedom of
Information Act freed the foreknowledge documents from the secretive vaults
to the sunlight of the National Archives in 1995, a cottage industry
continues to cover up America’s foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor." Cottage
industry, indeed! This cottage industry is the entire professional guild of
salaried historians.
Pearl Harbor’s
Establishment historiography remains as secure in its tenured cocoon as it
was when I began college in 1959. American history textbooks are as free
from the truth about Roosevelt’s deliberate provocation of Japan, and his
advance knowledge of Pearl Harbor, as they were in 1943. Mr. Stinnett does
not have a Ph.D., nor is he employed as a history instructor. He was
therefore in a position to tell the truth. This was equally true of
journalist George Morgenstern, whose 1947 book on Pearl Harbor was the first
to put the story together in one detailed volume. The historical guild paid
no attention to Morgenstern. We shall see if it pays attention to Stinnett.
I strongly doubt that the reception will be either favorable or widespread.
A week ago, I
sent a letter to a group of my subscribers. It provided background on the
issues raised by Mr. Stinnett. I made this point, in the context of how
intellectual guilds operate. They adopt a three-phase position on a
controversial new idea.
The story isn’t
true.
The story is
true, but so what?
We always knew
it was true.
I then illustrated
this with the historiography of Pearl Harbor. Here is what I wrote.
* * * * * * * *
Consider the
conservatives’ account of Roosevelt’s advance warning of the Japanese attack in
late 1941. When George Morgenstern wrote
Pearl Harbor: The Story of a Secret War,
only right-wing Devin-Adair would publish it (1947). The book was ridiculed by
academic historians as being a pack of unsubstantiated opinions written by a
mere journalist – and a Chicago Tribune journalist at that. When the
premier liberal historian, Charles A. Beard, said much the same thing the next
year in
President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War
(Yale University Press), he was dismissed by his colleagues as senile, and he
permanently lost his reputation. When the premier American diplomatic historian,
Charles C. Tansill, said it again in 1952 in his
Back Door to War (Regnery),
he, too, was shoved down the liberals’ memory hole.
Today, the
revisionist account of Pearl Harbor is more widely accepted, and is gaining
ground fast. Another journalist, Robert B. Stinnett, recently found the "smoking
gun" – an 8-page 1940 memo by a lieutenant commander in the navy on how to get
Japan to attack us, a memo that Roosevelt adopted, point by point. His book is
titled,
Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor
(Free Press, 1999). Stinnett served under a young George Bush during World War
II. His book is the capstone to his career.
The liberals are
now moving to stage 2: "The story is true, but so what?" Stinnett’s book argues
that Roosevelt basically did the right thing in luring the Japanese to attack
Pearl Harbor. This attack overcame America’s anti-interventionists, who had 88%
of the people behind them in 1940. Pearl Harbor got us into the War in Europe.
It didn’t, of
course. Hitler’s suicidal declaration of war on the United States on the
following Thursday is what got us into the European war.
It will be a long
time before liberal historians get to stage 3: "We always knew it was true."
They will not admit how they smeared the reputations of first-rate historians
who told the truth early, and then for the next fifty years used their power
over graduate schools and professional academic journals to screen out the
truth. The issue was power, and liberals respect it and use it.
* * * * * * * * *
*
What happened to
Beard sent a warning to any aspiring young grad student who might have been
tempted to follow in Beard’s revisionist path. Beard was at the end of a long
and distinguished career. He was the only scholar ever to be elected as
president of both the American Historical Association and the American Political
Science Association. But his academic achievements gained him no mercy when he
broke ranks on Pearl Harbor. James J. Martin, the premier revisionist historian
after Harry Elmer Barnes died in 1968, in 1981 provided an account of what
happened.
Beard not only infuriated
the influential supporters of Roosevelt by his insistence that the
continuous deception by the President in making his steady moves toward war
while endlessly talking about his peacefulness (few were allowed to forget
his pre-election promise in 1940 never to send Americans off to a war
outside U.S. borders) was in essentials, as Leighton described it,
"completely to undermine constitutional government and set the stage for a
Caesar" (Beard’s famed peroration on pp. 582-584 of his Epilogue to
President Roosevelt is required reading in this context.) He had opened up
another sore while writing his book with a famed article in the Saturday
Evening Post for October 4, 1947, "Who’s to Write the History of the
War?," in which he revealed that the Rockefeller Foundation, working with
its alter ego, the Council on Foreign Relations, had provided $139,000 for
the latter to spend in underwriting an official-line history of how the war
had come about, in an effort to defeat at the start the same kind of
"debunking" historical campaign which had immediately followed the end of
World War I. Beard complained of inaccessibility of various documents, which
he was sure would be fully available to anyone doing an Establishment
version of the wartime past, convinced that these would be sat on as
‘classified’ for a generation or more. . . .
So it was
understandable that the following February, two months before the
publication of President Roosevelt, when the National Institute of
Arts and Letters awarded Beard their gold medal for the best historical work
published in the preceding decade, that his erstwhile liberal admirers would
reach the end of their tolerance. The highlight of their protest was the
resignation in rage from the Institute by one of its most influential
members, Lewis Mumford, accompanied by abuse of Beard so extreme that it led
to a memorable chiding to Mumford from Harry Elmer Barnes in a 11/2 column
letter to the editors of the Chicago Tribune, published 11 February
1948. But the attack on Beard had barely begun.
With the publication of
President Roosevelt two months later, in April, the denunciation of
Beard became a veritable industry, and the most eminent of the Roosevelt
academic defenders were recruited to contribute to the character
assassination. Probably the most outrageous was that of Harvard’s Samuel
Eliot Morison, Roosevelt’s handpicked choice to write a history of
American naval operations in World War II, and even elevated to the rank
of Admiral in recognition of his labors. But the outline of the total
campaign aimed at Beard is substantial, extensively documented in the
later editions of Barnes’s booklet The Struggle Against the
Historical Blackout (especially 6th thru. 9th).
Beard died in
1949. His book on Roosevelt was allowed – a mild word, given the circumstances –
to go out of print almost immediately, and it was never reprinted. Maybe the Web
will resurrect it. I hope so.
The final
product of the Council on Foreign Relations’ investment of $139,000 in 1946 – a
lot of money in 1946 – was the standard Establishment history of the coming of
the war, written by William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason,
The Challenge to Isolation: The World Crisis of 1937-1940
and American Foreign Policy (1952). It was
still the standard account two decades later. Its perspective remains dominant
on campus today. Langer was a professor of history at Harvard. So was Gleason –
medieval history – until he moved to Washington after Pearl Harbor, to join the
Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor of the CIA. He later became
the official historian of the State Department. Establishment enough for you?
(The other standard book was Herbert Feis’s
Road to Pearl Harbor
(1950). He had served as the State Department’s Advisor for International
Economic Affairs.) Yes, the victors always write the history books, but when the
historians are actually policy-setting participants in the war, the words "court
history" take on new meaning.
I read
Admiral Kimmel’s Story (Regnery, 1955) in 1958. That same year, I read
anti-Roosevelt journalist John T. Flynn’s
The Roosevelt Myth
(Devin-Adair, 1948). At age 16, I became a World War II revisionist.
In 1963, I had a
conversation with Thomas Thalken, who later became the librarian of the Herbert
Hoover Presidential Library. We were then both employed by a short-lived think
tank, the Center for American Studies. He was its librarian. I was a summer
intern, fresh out of college. He had earned a master’s degree in history under
Tansill a decade earlier. He told me that Tansill had advised him not to earn a
Ph.D. in history. Tansill had said that anyone who taught the truth about
America’s entry into World War II would see his career end before it even began.
Thalken took his advice.
This is why there
are no tenured World War II revisionists who write in this still-taboo and
well-policed field. The guild screened them out, beginning in the early 1950’s.
Beard and Tansill by 1960 were remembered only for their non-WWII revisionist
writings. Barnes was forgotten. Martin – in my view, the most accomplished
American revisionist historian – never became known on campus. Anthony Kubek
spent his career on the academic fringes. What the guild did to Barnes, Beard,
Tansill at the end of their careers, and to Martin at the beginning of his,
posted a warning sign: Dead End.
I went on to
earn a Ph.D. in American history, but I never did teach in my field. Neither did
Bruce Bartlett, who wrote
The Pearl Harbor Cover-Up
(Arlington House, 1978). (Our paths crossed briefly in 1976: we were both on
Congressman Ron Paul’s Washington staff.) Bartlett did not earn a Ph.D. Instead,
as a supply-sider on Jack Kemp’s Congressional staff, he wrote his way into
economic policy-making.
This is typical of
the handful of WWII revisionists in the post-Tansill era. Most of them never
made it onto a campus, and of the few who did, they did not teach WWII
revisionism. The WWII revisionist books of 1947-55 were out of print by 1960.
They remain out of print.
In 1966, an
aged Barnes wrote a brief introduction to an article that appeared in a
small-circulation journal published by libertarian pioneer Robert Lefevre,
Rampart Journal.
At the end of his introduction, Barnes wrote: "We should be able to look
foreword to something more honest and dependable in the quarter of a century
between now and the fiftieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor." Nice dream; no
fulfillment. World War II revisionism remains a fringe movement of
non-certified, non-subsidized historians.
Conclusion
In 1958, the only
book critical of Franklin Roosevelt’s domestic policies and his foreign policies
was Flynn’s book. In 1958, it was out of print. In the Year of Our Lord, 2000,
it remains the only book critical of Roosevelt’s domestic and foreign policies.
We haven’t come a
long way, baby.
Things are
beginning to change for the better. The Web has begun to chip away at every
academic guild’s monopoly. What is taught in college classrooms no longer has
the same authority that it possessed in 1960. But until the subsidizing of
higher education by the state ends, and until the state-licensed accreditation
oligopoly ends or is overcome by new, "price-competitive
technologies," it will remain an uphill battle
for Pearl Harbor revisionists in academia.
December
12, 2000
Gary
North is the author of a ten-volume series, An Economic Commentary on the
Bible. The latest volume is Sacrifice and Dominion: An Economic
Commentary on Acts. The series can be downloaded
free of charge at
www.freebooks.com.
One should never judge a book by its cover, but in the case of former President
Jimmy Carter’s latest work, “Palestine Peace Not Apartheid”, we should make an
exception. All one really needs to know about this biased account is found in
the title.
It is truly shocking, at a time of Islamic extremism running rampant, of suicide
bombs polluting cities in Europe, Asia and the Middle East, of Iran publicly
stating its desire to wipe Israel off the map and building nuclear weapons to
achieve that end, of the missile and rocket attacks by Hezbollah and Hamas on
Israel, that Jimmy Carter can to a large degree only see Israel as the party
responsible for conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
In some ways, Carter’s book reminds me of the outlandish paper on “The Israel
Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” by professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt,
though he doesn’t go to their extremes. Like them, his examination of almost
every issue concerning the conflict results in blaming Israel for most or all of
what has gone wrong.
Listen to his conclusions: “Israel’s continued control and colonization of
Palestinian land have been the primary obstacles to a comprehensive peace
agreement in the Holy Land.” And, “The bottom line is this: Peace will come to
Israel and the Middle East only when the Israeli government is willing to comply
with international law, with the road map for peace…”.
In order to reach such a simplistic and distorted view of the region, Carter has
to ignore or downplay the continuing examples of Palestinian rejection of Israel
and terrorism, which have been part of the equation from the beginning and which
are strong as ever today. He has to minimize or condemn all the instances of
Israel’s peace offers and withdrawals, most particularly former Israeli Prime
Minister Ehud Barak’s initiative at Camp David in 2000, Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005 and current Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert’s campaign pledge to withdraw from the West Bank. And he has to frame
every example of Palestinian distress as simply the product of Israeli
repression instead of Palestinian extremism, e.g., the economic condition of the
Palestinians, which has much to do with the continued terrorism against Israel.
Much as in the paper of Mearsheimer and Walt, one doesn’t have to be a
pro-Israel advocate to recognize that the issues in the long conflict are a lot
more complicated than Carter would portray. It’s particularly revealing, that at
a time when even many Arab leaders are recognizing the destructive and dangerous
policies of the Palestinians, Carter can hardly bring himself to speak to such
matters.
It is not the goals that Carter seeks that are so troubling -- he calls for a
two-state solution, with Palestinians and Israelis living securely in two
states, which, of course, is the policy of Israel -- but his obsession with
blaming Israel for these goals not being achieved.
The problem with this approach is two-fold. He unjustly encourages
Israel-bashers around the world. The legitimizing factor of being able to quote
a former President of the United States and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize
cannot be overestimated.
Secondly, this gives comfort to the extremists on the Palestinian side who are
reinforced in their extremism by this kind of “analysis.” In the end, it is the
Palestinians themselves who are hurt by such a biased approach because they
become even further entrenched in their illusions about weakening Israel and the
need not to change.
As disturbing as Carter’s simplistic approach is, however, even more disturbing
is his picking up on the Mearsheimer -Walt theme of Jewish control of American
policy, though in much more abbreviated form and not being the focus of his
work. Referring to U.S. policy and the “condoning” of Israel’s actions, Carter
says: “There are constant and vehement political and media debates in Israel
concerning its policies in the West Bank but because of powerful political,
economic, and religious forces in the U.S., Israeli government decisions are
rarely questioned or condemned, voices from Jerusalem dominate our media, and
most American citizens are unaware of circumstances in the occupied
territories.” In other words, the old canard and conspiracy theory of Jewish
control of the media, Congress, and the U.S. government is rearing its ugly head
in the person of a former President.
It is sad that Mr. Carter would attempt to use his influence in this way. It is
dangerous because he will be used by elements that want to undermine support for
Israel in this country.
Ultimately, we have faith in the good sense, fairness and understanding of the
American people. They know that life in the Middle East is much more complicated
and will require seeing all sides of the issue, something President Carter
doesn’t seem to be interested in doing.
Abraham H. Foxman
is National Director of the Anti-Defamation League and the author of Never
Again? The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism.
White Britons, alarmed at
immigration, are fleeing the capital and even the country in record numbers in a
“white flight” that mirrors South Africa’s exodus.
And this week a controversial
new book which seeks to explain their flight, encouraged young British-born
families to leave in the face of unchecked immigration .
A report by Britain’s chief
immigration think-tank, Migrationwatch, said more than 100000 British-born
Londoners have left the UK capital this year as immigrants stream into the city.
Meanwhile, another report by
private analysts predicts that the white exodus is set to accelerate further,
and that London’s immigrant population will jump from 40% to 60% i n just 12
years.
Sir Andrew Green, chairman of
Migrationwatch, said the departing whites were being replaced by other ethnic
minorities in their neighbourhoods, leading to a “very unfortunate”
apartheid-style segregation of the capital.
The report said it was a
potential disaster for integration and race relations in Britain. “The effect is
a rapid increase in the ethnic minority composition of some boroughs, resulting
from an outflow of the white population and an inflow of African and Asian
international migrants.”
While white South Africans
fled Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban for either suburban security complexes
or foreign shores in the mid-1990s, experts said whites in London and cities
like Birmingham and Bradford were fleeing to rural “market towns” — and,
increasingly, abroad.
In his seemingly xenophobic
book, Time to Emigrate? George Walden, who was education minister under Margaret
Thatcher, had no doubt about the cause. I mmigration had created “unacceptable”
terrorist and crime risks, and had doomed British culture .
Walden told the Sunday Times:
“I’m not saying all our national problems are due to immigration . . . but this
is the greatest gamble this country has ever taken and it is totally unplanned.
“Already, we’re seeing the
failure of the policy of multiculturalism, which — as Trevor Phillips, our race
relations tsar has pointed out — has come down to separate development; in other
words, apartheid. We have a dangerous mixture of people who do have colonial
resentments; who have fundamentalist beliefs; and who have absolutely no desire
to integrate.”
In his book he predicts
London, in a decade, will be “a three-ring circus without the laughs” —
including largely white inner and outer rings bristling with security, and a
“multicultural ring” exclusively made up of “ethnic immigrants”.
“The rougher parts of the
multicultural ring will be ghettoes of crime, poverty and racialism in reverse.”
Holocaust Jew accused of war crimes
By Allan Hall
Age Correspondent
Berlin July 11, 2005
An old Jewish man who took
his own cold-blooded revenge against Germans for the Holocaust will
not be extradited back to Poland from Israel to answer charges of
genocide.
The case of Solomon Morel,
86, is the only one in Holocaust history where a Jew stands accused
of war crimes against Germans.
It has perplexed legal minds
in both countries. Poland says genocide is genocide whether a Jew or
a Nazi committed it, while many Israelis see rough justice in the
1500 German deaths for which Mr Morel is alleged to be responsible.
Now the Israeli Government
has said that Mr Morel will not be sent back to stand trial in
Poland under any circumstances.
Mr Morel, who came from the
little Polish town of Grabowo, claims he was an Auschwitz survivor
whose family was murdered by the Nazis during World War II. A book,
An Eye for an Eye, which documents his strange life, claims
his family was indeed liquidated, but by Poles who collaborated with
the Nazis. It also says that he was never imprisoned by the Germans.
By 1943 he was employed
peeling potatoes for a Jewish partisan brigade before escaping to
the Soviet Union, where he trained in the gruesome interrogation
methods of the NKVD, Stalin's political police, before returning to
Poland in 1945. He was then put in charge by the communists of a
camp containing thousands of German prisoners including SS men,
soldiers and civilians.
John Sack, the
Jewish-American author of An Eye for an Eye, claims Mr
Morel, as commandant of Swietochlowice Camp, morphed into the kind
of monster that would have been welcomed by the Gestapo.
"His favourite method of
killing prisoners was hacking the skull of his victims with a wooden
leg of a chair," according to the book. "It is quite possible that
in Swietochlowice several thousand persons were murdered by Morel
and his men."
They would beat them and
throw the bodies out of the window." Camp survivor
Sack's book, and a score of
Polish books and newspaper articles, said he beat, shot, starved,
tortured and killed with gusto in the camp.
"I knew Morel in the camp.
He was a very brutal man," survivor Dorota Boriczek said. "He was
young then. He would come in at night. We could hear the cries of
the men then. They would beat them and throw the bodies out of the
window."
In 1989, a Polish reporter
found Mr Morel living in a part of Katowice assigned for former
uniformed functionaries of communist terror.
In the early 1990s, the Main
Commission for the Investigations of Crimes Against the Polish
Nation started an official investigation of Mr Morel's activities in
the Swietochlowice Camp after witness articles appeared in the
press.
In 1994, Mr Morel sought
political asylum in Sweden. This was refused. He then successfully
sought sanctuary in Israel.
Poland tried to extradite
him seven years ago on torture charges. Israel refused. So
prosecutors began preparing a genocide case, for which there is no
statute of limitations.
Last week, they received a
blank refusal from Israel saying "there was no basis whatsoever" to
extradite Mr Morel.
A Polish prosecutor said
testimony from former inmates documented Mr Morel's torture of at
least 13 prisoners.
"There should be one measure
for judging war criminals, irrespective whether they are German,
Israeli, or any other nationality," the prosecutor said.
![Siegfried Verbeke --- That Father Stalin would be innocent of the planned starvation of up to eight million Ukrainian peasants, may still be proclaimed and commercially published by the likes of the Flemish communist Ludo Martens. That the Hutu’s have decapitated their Tutsi bro’s by the hundred thousands can also be denied in the official media circuit.That Hitler-Germany first gassed and then cremated a total of six million Jews is a statement that may not be refuted, denied, questioned, approved nor minimalized according to Belgian legislation of 1995. Although the Free University of Brussels claims to withstand “every form of dogmatic thinking” in its statutes, this is a mere fait divers [diversion], since hardly any academics protested the limits imposed on free speech and on academic freedom vis-à-vis the alleged “judeocide”. After a decennium of bullying, house searches, the Flemish revisionist publisher Siegfried Verbeke (pictured; founder of Free Historical Research, or VHO, which was previously shut down by the corrupt Jewish politician André Gantman) was convicted in the end and sentenced to one year and a half of probation and a rather large fine. The investigation that took seven years could hardly convince any serious jurist, but the judge must have felt the breath of the judeo-liberal ruling class down his neck. If this were not harsh enough, Siegfried Verbeke was arrested again on Saturday 27th of November 2004 in his Flemish town of residence, Kortrijk on the same charges. Given the recently established "European Arrest Warrant" Belgium will pass this martyr of free speech on to the Germans, who was very eager to prosecute him to even further lengths. The 63-year old revisionist scholar will then probably spend his last days in a German jail. In the best case scenario, he will sit in the same prison block as Ernst Zündel once he is extradited.](Siegfried.jpg)
The
Teheran Holocaust Conference caused quite a storm in the world media. One might
ask: what’s so special about that? There are so many holocaust events and
holocaust museums and holocaust festivals, sometimes attracting presidents and
prime ministers galore, so why did the Teheran (or Tehran) conference draw so
much attention and criticism; why were the White House, Frau Merkel, the Vatican
and the EC willing to take some valuable time to condemn this small gathering in
far-away Iranian capital?
