Why holohoax story was invented, pushed--actually serves quite a few purposes for kikes

[Apollonian]

Why the Holocaust Story Was Invented​

John Wear

Link: https://www.inconvenienthistory.com/9/3/4881

Abstract

The genocide of European Jewry by National Socialist Germany is considered by many to be the most thoroughly documented event in human history. Tens of thousands of books, magazine, and newspaper articles have been written and numerous criminal trials have been conducted to document the mass extermination of European Jewry. The crimes of Germany against Jews are considered to be so uniquely evil that the term “the Holocaust” has been invented to describe the alleged genocide of European Jewry. I have been asked the questions: “Why was the Holocaust story invented? Who benefits from this falsification of history?” This article will answer these questions.

Justification for War with Germany

World War II was by far the bloodiest and most destructive war in human history. Many people wondered whether all of the death and destruction caused by the war had been necessary.

The so-called Holocaust was used by the Allies to demonize Germany and prove that their war effort was necessary to defeat such an evil nation.

With the liberation of Ohrdruf, Buchenwald and Dachau by the American army and the liberation of Bergen-Belsen by British troops, large groups of Western observers confronted the horrors of the German camps for the first time. The gruesome scenes of huge piles of dead bodies and emaciated and diseased surviving inmates were filmed and photographed for posterity by the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Prominent newsmen and politicians were flown in to Germany to see the harrowing evidence at the camps for themselves. The horrific scenes in the German camps were used by the Allies to justify their participation in the war.[1]

Jewish historian Robert Jan van Pelt writes:[2]


“To the Allies, the discovery of the camps proved a final justification of their war effort. In 1940, Churchill had proclaimed that a Nazi victory would bring “a new Dark Age made more sinister by perverted science.” The liberation of the camps proved that Churchill had not exaggerated the danger. And even though Auschwitz had been liberated by the Russians, the English and Americans heard many stories about that camp.”

Establishment of Israel

The Holocaust story has also been used to justify the creation of the State of Israel. Simon Wiesenthal writes:[3]


“The creation of Israel was the only possible and the only correct reaction to Auschwitz. There had to be a country in the world where the Jews were the landlords instead of tolerated guests, a place of refuge in the truest meaning of the word, even for Jews who live in other countries.”

David Ben-Gurion stated at the beginning of World War II that the war should end by giving the Zionists their own state. After the war, Ben-Gurion and other Israeli leaders said that the Holocaust had proven once again that the only solution to the Jewish problem was an independent state in Israel. David Ben-Gurion again mentioned during Adolf Eichmann’s trial that the Holocaust happened because Jews did not live in their own country.[4]

Israeli historian Tom Segev explains why the Holocaust story is so important to Israel:[5]


“Israel differs from other countries in its need to justify—to the rest of the world, and to itself—its very right to exist. Most countries need no such ideological justifications. But Israel does—because most of its Arab neighbors have not recognized it and because most of the Jews of the world prefer to live in other countries. So long as these factors remain true, Zionism will be on the defensive. As a justification for the State of Israel, the Holocaust is comparable only to the divine promise contained in the Bible: It seems to be definitive proof of the Zionist argument that Jews can live in security and with full equal rights only in their own country and that they therefore must have an autonomous and sovereign state, strong enough to defend its existence.”

Tom Segev further writes:[6]


“The demonization of Nazism and its mythologizing, in general, were also necessary since the Holocaust served as the main justification for the creation and existence of the State of Israel.”

Justification of Israeli Violence

There were at least 33 massacres of Palestinian villages during Israel’s “War of Independence.” Zionist forces were larger and better equipped than their opponents, and by the end of the war over 750,000 Palestinians were ruthlessly expelled from their homes.[7] As Tom Segev writes:[8]


“Israel was born of terror, war, and revolution, and its creation required a measure of fanaticism and of cruelty.”

Entire cities and hundreds of villages in Israel were left empty and repopulated with new Jewish immigrants. The Jewish immigrants numbered 100,000 in April 1949, most of them survivors of the so-called Holocaust. The Palestinians lost everything they had and became destitute refugees, while the Jewish immigrants to Israel stole the Palestinians’ property and confiscated everything they needed.[9]

The Holocaust story has been repeatedly used to justify Israel’s aggression against its neighbors. Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin justified the demolition of an alleged Iraqi nuclear facility in June 1981 with the words:[10]


“We must protect our nation, a million and a half of whose children were murdered by the Nazis in the gas chambers.”

Before Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in June 1982, Begin told his cabinet:[11]


“You know what I have done and what we have all done to prevent war and loss of life. But such is our fate in Israel. There is no way other than to fight selflessly. Believe me, the alternative is Treblinka, and we have decided that there will be no more Treblinkas.”

A few weeks after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, Begin stated that after the Holocaust the international community had lost its right to demand that Israel answer for its actions. Begin declared in the Knesset, “No one, anywhere in the world, can preach morality to our people.” A similar statement was included in the resolution adopted by Begin’s cabinet after the massacres in Palestinian refugee camps on the outskirts of Beirut.[12]

By the late 1980s there was hardly a day when the Holocaust story was not mentioned in one of the Israeli newspapers. Such constant exposure encouraged many Israeli soldiers to plan ways to exterminate the Arabs. According to Israeli education-corps officer Ehud Praver, “too many soldiers were deducing that the Holocaust justifies every kind of disgraceful action.”[13]

German Guilt

The so-called Holocaust has also been effectively used to induce guilt in the German people. As British historian Ian Kershaw writes:[14]


“Decades would not fully erase the simple but compelling sentiment…‘I am ashamed to be German.’”

Friedrich Grimm, a renowned German authority on international law, was shown samples of new leaflets printed soon after the war in German to be distributed by the Allies throughout Germany. Describing German war crimes, the leaflets were the first step in the reeducation program designed for Germany. Grimm suggested to an Allied officer that since the war was over, it was time to stop the libel. The Allied officer replied:[15]


“Why no, we’re just getting started. We’ll continue this atrocity campaign, we’ll increase it till no one will want to hear a good word about the Germans anymore, till whatever sympathy there is for you in other countries is completely destroyed, and until the Germans themselves become so mixed up they won’t know what they’re doing!”

The Allied campaign to make Germans feel guilty concerning the so-called Holocaust has been highly successful. German guilt is so powerful that it has caused the German government to make enormous reparations and offer humble apologies to the Allies. Millions of German expellees have paid reparations to survivors of the German concentration camps even though these German expellees had their land and personal possessions stolen from them.

James Bacque writes in regard to German feelings of guilt:[16]


“Guilt pervades Germany like a religion. It is the ‘Canossa Republic,’ penitent in pain before its judges. Guilt is so powerful that it has caused the Canossa Republic repeatedly to deny any intention of reclaiming sovereignty over the eastern lands, although it is a well-established UN principle that no government has the right to waive the claims of individuals to their property. Nor may it impede their right of return to their former homeland.”

Allied Crimes Against Germans

The Holocaust story has also been used to cover up and ignore Allied crimes against Germans after World War II. German deaths after the war can be divided into three groups of people. The first group is the German prisoners of war (POW) in both Europe and the Soviet Union. The second group is the German expellees, and the third group is the Germans already residing in Germany. While no one will ever know exactly how many Germans died from 1945 to 1950, it is certain that the deaths far exceed most traditional estimates. The great majority of these deaths were caused by the lethal policies imposed by the Allies against Germany after the war.

A conservative estimate of German deaths in the Allied POW camps is 1.5 million. This includes over 517,000 POW deaths in the Soviet Union, 100,000 POW deaths in Yugoslavia, Poland and other countries, with the remaining POW deaths in U.S. and French camps. The Germans who died in these Allied POW camps suffered miserably from exposure, disease and slow starvation. This well-documented Allied atrocity is still denied by most historians today.

Probably a minimum of 2.1 million German expellees died in what was supposed to be an “orderly and humane” transfer. The estimate of 2.1 million German expellee deaths is acknowledged to be valid by most traditional historians. Notable authorities have estimated a much higher number of German expellee deaths.[17]

An estimated 5.7 million Germans already residing in Germany died from the starvation policies implemented by the Allies after the war. James Bacque details how this 5.7 million death total is calculated:

The population of all occupied Germany in October 1946 was 65,000,000, according to the census prepared under the ACC. The returning prisoners who were added to the population in the period October 1946-September 1950 numbered 2,600,000 (rounded), according to records in the archives of the four principal Allies. Births according to the official German statistical agency, Statistisches Bundesamt, added another 4,176,430 newcomers to Germany. The expellees arriving totaled 6,000,000. Thus, the total population in 1950 before losses would have been 77,776,430, according to the Allies themselves. Deaths officially recorded in the period 1946-50 were 3,235,539, according to the UN Yearbook and the German government. Emigration was about 600,000, according to the German government. Thus, the population found should have been 73,940,891. But the census of 1950 done by the German government under Allied supervision found only 68,230,796. There was a shortage of 5,710,095 people, according to the official Allied figures (rounded to 5,700,000).[18]

The sum of 1.5 million German POWs, 2.1 million German expellees, and 5.7 million German residents equals the minimum estimate of 9.3 million Germans who died needlessly after the war. This is far more Germans than died during the Second World War. Millions of these Germans slowly starved to death while the Allies withheld available food. The majority of these postwar dead Germans were women, children, and very old men. Their deaths have never been honestly reported by the Allies, the German government, or most historians. Instead, all we ever hear about is the alleged genocide of European Jewry

Allied Guilt and Apathy

The Allies have also been declared guilty of not doing more to prevent the so-called Holocaust. Jewish historian Deborah Lipstadt writes:[19]


“A real antipathy toward Jews certainly affected the Allied response. While no one among the Allies or in the press wanted to see Jews killed, virtually no one was willing to advocate that steps be taken to try to stop the carnage. Many Allied officials in positions of power in London and Washington were tired of hearing about Jews and even more tired of being asked to do something about them even though there were steps that could have been taken.”

Elie Wiesel writes in regard to the Allies’ failure to rescue European Jewry:[20]


“It almost seems as if both diplomats and statesmen spent more time inventing reasons not to save the Jews than trying to find a way to save them.”

U.S. Presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush have all made statements that the United States will never again fail to act to stop something as evil as the genocide of European Jewry. At the dedication of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, President Bill Clinton spoke in a similar vein:[21]

“For those of us here today representing the nations of the West, we must live forever with this knowledge: Even as our fragmentary awareness of crimes grew into indisputable facts, far too little was done.”

Michael Goldberg says in regard to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:[22]


“The museum stands as a grim reminder that for all its purported ideals, America nevertheless turned its back on Jews fleeing Hitler…Hence, the museum’s recalling what happened to Jews in the past may move Americans and their national policymakers in Washington to support Israel in the present, lest in the future, the same fate lie in store for Jews again—and the same moral failure await Americans once more.”

President Barack Obama affirmed on the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Dachau:[23] “…we fervently vow that such atrocities will never happen again” and “History will not repeat itself.”

Of course, President Obama forgot to tell his audience that most of the inmates at Dachau died of natural causes. Obama also conveniently failed to mention that the single biggest atrocity that occurred at Dachau was the mass murder by American troops of 520 German guards on the day Dachau was liberated.[24]

Reparations to Jews

German guilt for the so-called Holocaust has resulted in massive reparations being paid to Holocaust survivors and the State of Israel. German reparations to Jews were discussed from the beginning of World War II. Tom Segev writes:[25]


“The idea [of reparations] seems to have been in the air from the time the war started, apparently sparked by the punitive reparations payments imposed on Germany at the end of World War I. Ben-Guiron received a memorandum on the subject as early as 1940. Berl Katznelson spoke of it publicly toward the end of that year. By December 1942, there was already a private organization in Tel Aviv called Justicia that offered to help Nazi victims draft compensation demands.”

Hatred of Germans in Israel was intense after the war. Many advocated a special law barring Israelis from all social contacts with German citizens. However, since most Israelis felt that the Germans owed them massive reparations for the so-called Holocaust, Germany and Israel began negotiating reparations on March 20, 1952. The Luxembourg Agreement was reached six months later and committed the German government to paying massive reparations to Holocaust survivors.[26]

Nahum Goldmann said in a 1976 interview that the Luxembourg Agreement “constituted an extraordinary innovation in the matter of international rights.” Goldmann also boasted that he had obtained 10 to 14 times more from the Bonn government than he had originally expected.[27]

Millions of Jews eventually received personal compensation for their pain and suffering in the so-called Holocaust. The German federal government as of 1998 had paid reparations to Israel and Third Reich victims of about $61.8 billion. In addition, Germans had paid many additional billions in private and other public funds to wartime forced laborers.[28] German reparations to Israel and Jews continue to this day.[29]

Jewish Solidarity

The Holocaust story is described by many Jewish leaders as a uniquely evil event. An example of this view was expressed by Abraham H. Foxman when he was the National Director of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith:[30]


“The Holocaust is something different. It is a singular event. It is not simply one example of genocide but a near successful attempt on the life of God’s chosen children and, thus, on God Himself. It is an event that is the antithesis of Creation as recorded in the Bible; and like its direct opposite, which is relived weekly with the Sabbath and yearly with the Torah, it must be remembered from generation to generation.”

Michael Goldberg confirms that the Holocaust story has become a religion to many Jews:[31]


“As the Holocaust has become many contemporary Jews’ master story, so, too, its perpetual observance has become their paramount Jewish practice, its veneration their religion. And as with any organized church, this Holocaust cult has its own tenets of faith, rites, and shrines."

Israelis are obsessed with the history and heritage of the Holocaust. A 1992 study of Israeli college students found that close to 80% of those asked identified with the statement, “We are all Holocaust survivors.” The so-called Holocaust has become a way for secular Jews to feel connected to their Jewish heritage.[32]

The Holocaust, which is remembered ritually through the observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day, is a major means of creating solidarity among Jews. While some Jewish communities experience conflicts among Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Jews, they set aside their differences and join together to remember the so-called Holocaust. Any truth in Judaism’s slogan of “Jews Are One” manifests itself ritually on Holocaust Remembrance Day.[33]

Conclusion

The alleged genocide of European Jewry has been used to justify the Allied war effort, to establish the State of Israel, to justify Israeli violence against its neighbors, to induce guilt in both Germans and the Allied nations, to cover up and ignore Allied crimes against Germans, to allow Jews to receive massive reparations from Germany, and to create solidarity in the Jewish community. The extreme importance of the Holocaust story in advancing Zionist/Jewish interests ensures that this falsification of history will continue in the future.


Notes

[1] Van Pelt, Robert Jan, The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002, p. 165.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Wiesenthal, Simon, Justice Not Vengeance: New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1989, p. 224.
[4] Segev, Tom, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, New York: Hill and Wang, pp. 82, 185, 330.
[5] Ibid., p. 514.
[6] Ibid., p. 480.
[7] Weir, Alison, Against Our Better Judgement: The Hidden History of How the U.S. was Used to Create Israel, 2014, p. 58.
[8] Segev, Tom, op. cit. (note 4), p. 63.
[9] Ibid., pp. 161f.
[10] Ibid., p. 399.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid., pp. 407, 412.
[14] Kershaw, Ian, Hitler 1936-45: Nemesis, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000, p. 840.
[15] Tedor, Richard, Hitler’s Revolution, Chicago: 2013, p. 263; the German original can be found in Grimm, Friedrich W., Politische Justiz, die Krankheit unserer Zeit, Scheur, Bonn1953, S. 146-148; also in idem, Mit offenem Visier, Leoni: 1961, pp. 248f.
[16] Bacque, James, Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians under Allied Occupation, 1944-1950, 2nd edition, Vancouver, British Columbia: Talonbooks, 2007, pp. 175-176.
[17] Ibid., p. 124.
[18] Bacque, James, Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians under Allied Occupation, 1944-1950, 2nd edition, Vancouver, British Columbia: Talonbooks, 2007, pp. 115-116.
[19] Lipstadt, Deborah E., Beyond Belief: The American Press & the Coming of the Holocaust 1933-1945, New York: The Free Press, 1986, p. 277.
[20] Wyman, David S., The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945, New York: The New Press, 2007, p. x.
[21] Ibid., pp. 342f.
[22] Goldberg, Michael, Why Should Jews Survive?: Looking Past the Holocaust Toward a Jewish Future, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 55
[23] http://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Obama...ary-of-liberation-of-Nazis-Dachau-camp-400570.
[24] Buechner, Howard A., Dachau: The Hour of the Avenger, Metairie, LA: Thunderbird Press, Inc., 1986, pp. 5, 29, 96-97.
[25] Segev, Tom, op. cit. (note 4), p. 104.
[26] Ibid., pp. 190f., 227, 233.
[27] “West Germany’s Holocaust Payoff to Israel and World Jewry,” The Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 8, No. 2, Summer 1988, p. 245.
[28] “Germany Has Paid Out More Than $61.8 Billion in Third Reich Reparations,” The Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 17, No. 6, November/December 1998, p. 19; for a more recent figure see https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Wiedergutmachungspolitik#Summe, listing a total of 73.422 billion Euros (some 100 billion dollars) as of the end of 2015.
[29] See http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/w...any-honors-duty-to-pay-holocaust-victims.html and http://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Germany-to-pay-250-Million-to-child-Holocaust-survivors-374596.
[30] ADL on the Frontline, January 1994, p. 2.
[31] Goldberg, Michael, op. cit. (note 22), p. 41.
[32] Segev, Tom, op. cit. (note 4), pp. 513, 515f.
[33] Goldberg, Michael, op. cit. (note 22), p. 50.

 

[Apollonian]

Holocaust Discourse and the Moral High Ground​

Link: https://alethonews.com/2016/07/17/holocaust-discourse-and-the-moral-high-ground/

By Barbara McKenzie | June 13, 2016

The Jewish Holocaust occupies a unique position in modern Western society, in that questioning the facts of the Holocaust is suppressed and vilified on a global scale as no other topic of human history. Why is research into the Holocaust so problematic? Why is it that serious research by scientists, historians and other academics is rejected out of hand as immoral? Why is the suppression of research into ANY aspect of history acceptable?

At present there are 14 countries that criminalise ‘Holocaust denial’, i.e. publicly questioning, or disseminating research that questions, any aspect of the approved Holocaust narrative: Canada plus 13 European countries including Germany, Austria and France. In many of these countries legislation was passed decades after the end of WWII, in France only in 1990. As recently as 2015 a German court convicted 87 year old Ursula Haverbeck of ‘Holocaust denial’ and sentenced her to 10 months prison. Other revisionists who have served jail sentences include the German publisher Ernst Zündel and the British historian David Irving, who was arrested, sentenced and imprisoned in Austria in 2005. Academic Robert Faurisson was convicted in France of holocaust denial in 2006 and given a three month suspended sentence. In Germany convictions are rising steadily: in 2000 there were more than 2,666 violations of the Holocaust denial law STGB 130, as compared with 437 in 1987.

Even where Holocaust revision is legal, those who are involved in it or support it in any way are liable to be vilified, persecuted and generally treated as lepers. British academics like Irving and Nicholas Kollerstrom saw their careers destroyed, and every effort is made to deny revisionists any sort of platform; it goes without saying that they are subjected to vindictive trolling on social media. Some, like Faurisson and Zündel, have been physically assaulted on more than one occasion. After pro-Palestine activist Paul Eisen wrote an article ‘The Holocaust Wars’ in which he suggested there were questions to answer about the Holocaust, he experienced an extraordinary campaign of vilification and ostracism, especially from the pro-Palestine movement he had given so much to. That he was Jewish himself was no defence against the charge of antisemitism. As Eisen himself says, ‘I had metamorphosed into that lowest of animal life forms, the maggot at the bottom of the food chain – a Holocaust denier’.

Paul Eisen saw an unexpected rise in his profile during the 2015 campaign for election of the leader of the UK Labour Party. It was discovered that Jeremy Corbyn had had some links with Eisen in the past, including appearing on the same platform as him. The media, who had hardly been supportive of Corbyn’s candidature, had a field day accusing Corbyn of associating with a Holocaust denier. Jeremy Corbyn’s response to accusations of an association with Eisen was unequivocal : ‘had I known he was a Holocaust denier I would have had nothing to do with him […]. Obviously Holocaust denial is vile and wrong’. (From 2.47 mins in the following)

There are two principle assumptions relating to the Holocaust, both implicit in Corbyn’s denial of Paul Eisen:

1.It is an an indisputable fact that Adolf Hitler planned to exterminate the Jews of Europe, that he did so by gassing them with cyanide in specially constructed gas chambers, and that he was thus responsible for the deaths of 6 million Jews

2.People who question any of these premises, do so ONLY because they are neo-Nazis and white supremacists, who wish to conceal the crimes of the Nazis while at the same time sharing their ideology. They are ‘Holocaust deniers’, and all Holocaust deniers are of necessity antisemitic.

The immutability of these two premises leads to another, that anyone who questions any aspect of the Holocaust or who supports the right of others to question the Holocaust, is at best morally compromised, and probably downright evil, deserving responses ranging from suspicion, condemnation, vilification, isolation, hate mail, through to arrest and imprisonment, sometimes for many years. Those who accept unreservedly the two premises are automatically morally superior to anyone who smells a rat.

In 2012 Piers Morgan interviewed the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and asked him about his attitude to the Holocaust. I say ‘asked’, but Morgan puts his own position very clearly.

Morgan states that ‘it is an indisputable fact’ that over 6 million Jews were annihilated by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. ‘Do you dispute that 6 million Jews died or no.’ Although Ahmadinejad tries to voice his suspicions about the narrative, aroused principally because so much effort goes into suppressing research, Morgan is unmovable: the Holocaust is a fact: either you believe in it or not (subtext: and if you don’t it’s because you choose to, because you are a bad person).

The biologist Richard Dawkins sees Holocaust debate in precisely the same terms as Piers Morgan:

DawkinsHolcaustFact

So according to Richard Dawkins, too, the Holocaust’ is an immutable fact, and those who question it are intellectually on a par with people who think the earth is flat, and morally on a par with racists. Again, the Holocaust is presented as just one fact, a single package – you either believe in it or you don’t.

What is particularly interesting about Dawkins’ position is that he is one of the leaders of the New Atheist movement, ostensibly dedicated to pointing out all that’s wrong with religion. One might have thought he would be sensitive to the features of the Holocaust narrative and the protectors of its memory that are evocative of the most intolerant religions, for example Catholicism in medieval times. Criminalising Holocaust denial is like burning Bruno Giordano at the stake for claiming that the earth goes round the sun.

A number of writers have in fact analysed the parallels between the Holocaust and religion, most notably the Israeli writers Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Shraga Elam, Gilad Atzmon, and Yoshua Shalev. Their arguments have been summarised as follows: Most Jews today are either atheists or shun the religion of Judaism. Therefore, the Jewish people had to adopt belief in the ‘Holocaust’ as their new religion. They have spread this religion all over the world. ‘Holocaust’ museums are the new houses of worship and are present in most major cities. The new religion has its commandments, its decrees, its prophets, its high priests, its circle of saints, its rituals and its pilgrimages. It knows neither mercy, nor forgiveness, nor clemency but only the duty of vengeance. The Holocaust religion is coherent enough to define the new ‘antichrists’ (the Deniers) and it is powerful enough to persecute them (Holocaust denial laws).

The ‘Ten Commandments’ of this ‘Holocaust Religion’ have been enunciated as follows:

1.Remember what Amalek (the Non-Jews) has done to thee.

2.Thou shalt never compare THE HOLOCAUST with any other Genocide.

3.Thou shalt never compare the Nazi crimes with those of Israel.

4.Thou shalt never doubt the number of 6 million Jewish victims.

5.Thou shalt never doubt that the majority of them died in gas chambers.

6.Thou shalt not doubt the central role of SATAN Hitler in the extermination of the Jews.

7.Thou shalt never doubt the right of Israel to exist as the Jewish state.

8.Thou shalt not criticize the leading Jewish organizations and the Israeli government.

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

10.Thou shalt take these commandments literally and never shew mercy to them that doubt!

So what if you question this Holocaust religion? There is an almost universal assumption that if you don’t believe in the Holocaust it is not because you have an inquiring mind, it’s because you are innately evil. The belief underlying the draconian legislation relating to Holocaust denial would seem to be that the Holocaust is only questioned by neonazis, whose ‘denial’ is motivated by hate and so they should be locked up before they contaminate anyone else.

I have to confess that when I recently learned of the existence of Ursula Haverbeck and her prison sentence for ‘Holocaust denial’, in a European country in the 21st century, for carrying out, as I saw it, serious research into history, I was shocked to the core. I mentioned this to various acquaintances here in Wellington, who were equally horrified, not at the imprisonment of Ursula Haverbeck, but at the thought that I appeared to be questioning the Holocaust narrative. I was quickly made to understand that if I thought there was something worrying, something odd about this punitive response to historical research, it indicated a moral flaw in my makeup.

Soon after I had a twitter exchange with one Daniel Finkelstein, peer of the British realm, ex-editor of The Times. I came across his savage indictment of a prolific tweeter, who had defended David Irving, the notorious ‘Holocaust denier’. When I commented that the said person ‘opposes land theft (in Palestine), ethnic cleansing and child abuse – what’s not to like? Finkelstein, twitter handle ‘Dannythefink’, responded by asking me what I thought of the Holocaust. The exchange continued as follows:

Daniel Finkelstein

It comes as no surprise that Daniel Finkelstein, who is in total support of dispossession, ethnic cleansing and cruelty in Palestine, assumes morally superiority to me, since I have spoken in defense of a man who has spoken in defense of a man who does research into a field of history. And of course I have refused to commit myself to the undeniability of the Holocaust package …

One can assume that all these experts on the Holocaust, who know enough to be confident of the immutable truth of the Holocaust narrative, whether it be Piers Morgan, Dawkins, or Daniel Finkelstein, would also know another immutable truth about the Holocaust, that the Director of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss was tortured for three days and three nights, and that his testicles were smashed beyond repair,as happened to 137 out of 139 Germans ‘interrogated’ before the Nuremberg trials. One can assume that this makes no difference to their perception of the Holocaust narrative, and they will remain confident of their moral superiority to those of us who are distressed and alarmed by the knowledge that German witness statements at Nuremberg were obtained under the most brutal torture. (From Höss’s confession was derived the figure of 4 million deaths at Auschwitz; the figure was later revised down to 1 million.)

‘Holocaust denial’ is generally conflated with antisemitism, ‘Jew hate’ or racism, and so automatically deserving of vilification. However, even if revisionism is considered to be intrinsically antisemitic, protectors of the Holocaust narrative like to bolster their case by pointing to more general indicators of racism in the culprit.

To the uninitiated the best-known Holocaust revisionist is probably the British historian David Irving, who was convicted of Holocaust denial in an Austrian court and sentenced to three years in prison. Irving was interviewed by Tim Sebastian on the BBC’s Hardtalk in 2000. The programme’s style is intended to be aggressive, but when I watched the programme in 2000, knowing nothing about either Irving or Holocaust denial, I was repelled by Sebastian’s overt hostility to Irving, and I believe that any other impartial person would be too. (Sebastian underlined his antagonism by refraining from shaking Irving’s hand at the end of the interview.)

Sebastian suggests that to deny the gas chambers is hurtful and tasteless (Holocaust denial is immoral per se). But like many others he feels the need to shore up this assumption by showing that there is other evidence that David Irving is a racist, and though he has few examples to work with he is relentless on this point. Irving’s suggestion that he is no more racist than millions of other people is brushed aside with the rather strange claim from the interviewer that there is no evidence for this whatsoever (so only Holocaust deniers are racist). Furthermore, it would appear that honest but naive David Irving confessed in an interview with the Independent that he once called someone a ‘nigger’, something he immediately regretted and remained bitterly ashamed of. As someone put it in the comments below the YouTube video, David Irving is probably the most honest person on the planet.

Another protector of the Holocaust narrative is Max Blumenthal, an American Jew who has a profile as a supporter of the rights of Palestinians. Blumenthal has attracted criticism from some pro-Palestine activists, who see him as an ‘antizionist’ zionist (AZZ), or gatekeeper, due to his attacks on other activists such as Alison Weir and Gilad Atzmon, his opposition to criticism of Jewish power, his prioritising of antisemitism and Holocaust denial, and his peddling of the NATO narrative on Syria; Gilad Atzmon sees him as racist, agressive and supremacist. In 2008 Blumenthal attended a meeting by David Irving when he was touring the States, and created this video:

The video is interesting for several reason. Blumenthal has interspersed his footage with clips from old German propaganda films promoting Germans superiority – of course if you question the Holocaust you must be a Nazi and white supremacist. Like Piers Morgan he presents the question of the Holocaust in bald holistic terms, with no allowance for individual aspects, or degrees of doubt. ‘Are you a Holocaust denier’, he asks, pretty much as one might ask ‘are you a paedophile?’

And as Holocaust denial is such a heinous crime, Blumenthal is justified in first finding out the location of the meeting (given freely to him by David Irving), and then outing Irving to the Vicar of the church hosting the meeting as a ‘Holocaust denier’. The smugness, the self-satisfaction of Blumenthal are palpable; he clearly sees himself as a hero, where others might just see a manipulative sneak. In any case we are left in no doubt that Max Blumenthal, the anti-German racist, the Palestine activist who along with Israel promotes the destruction of Syria, is morally superior to the ‘Holocaust denier’ David Irving, regardless of the latter’s transparent integrity.

The claim that ‘Holocaust denial’ is innately antisemitic was blown out of the water when Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel, took into his head to declare that the Holocaust was the brainchild of the Palestinian grand mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin Husseini (so not Hitler afterall), that Hitler only wanted to expel the Jews, not exterminate them (thereby breaking Commandment 6, see above). There was anger and ridicule in Israel and amongst Jews abroad and Netanyahu was forced to climb down. Although Netanyahu was in general accused of ‘playing into the hands of Holocaust deniers’, he was actually guilty of Holocaust denial as it is defined, ie questioning an aspect of the Holocaust discourse – any German who made Netanyahu’s claim would be arrested. If one accepts the ruling that says ‘Holocaust denial’ is antisemitic, Netanyahu must be antisemitic. Which is clearly nonsense – Netanyahu’s racism does not lie in antisemitism, but in an overweening belief in Jewish exceptionalism.

Conclusion

It could be that those protecting the approved version of the Holocaust with such intolerance, aggression, and hate are absolutely right, that 6 million Jews died, in gas chambers, according to a plan drawn up by Adolf Hitler. I wouldn’t know – I haven’t done the research necessary for me to form an opinion.

However it is manifestly clear that those who question or deny the Holocaust are not united by a common neo-Nazi philosophy, of a type that on the one hand insists that Hitler was not guilty of the crimes attributed to him and on the other claims ‘Hitler was right’ to commit these crimes. Mainstream Holocaust revisionists are academics, philosophers, German patriots or Palestine activists. They do not necessarily support the far-right – many of them probably vote for left of centre parties. Some of them are notable for their immense compassion, such as Paul Eisen, who has always been a strong advocate of justice for Palestine. All of them have shown great courage and integrity, and are prepared to look for the truth and to speak it as they see it.

Regardless of the facts of the matter, criminalisation of responsible research into the Holocaust, and the vilification and isolation of those who carry it out, or even those who simply support their right to do so, is an outrageous denial of academic endeavour and historiography as a discipline. Anyone who supports such criminalisation, vilification and isolation is NOT morally superior but in fact morally and intellectually compromised. Furthermore, any honourable person with a modicum of intelligence and a modicum of courage will fight for the right of all people to carry out research into any branch of history, without treating one particular aspect as sacred and therefore exempt from scrutiny.

 

[Apollonian]

The man who’s seen more than 400 Holocaust movies — almost every one ever made — has some takeaways​

By Andrew Lapin October 1, 2021 5:12 pm
Link: https://www.jta.org/2021/10/01/cult...-made-totaling-over-400-heres-what-he-learned

Rich Brownstein is the author of "Holocaust Cinema Complete," a guide to every Holocaust movie ever made. (Rich Brownstein)

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(JTA) — At least 440 narrative films have been made about the Holocaust — and Rich Brownstein has seen just about every single one of them.
As a lecturer on Holocaust film for Yad Vashem’s international school, Brownstein has both a personal and professional interest in viewing and cataloguing so many depictions of Jewish suffering.
“Dealing with Holocaust education is akin to dealing with oncology, in that you have to set aside your personal feelings,” he says. “You can’t be drawn in.”
Now, Brownstein has published “Holocaust Cinema Complete”, a comprehensive book-length guide to the ever-expanding cinema of the Shoah. The book, which went on sale in September, contains statistics on the content of the films, essays on their methods, descriptions and capsule reviews and information for educators looking to use Holocaust films in their curriculums. Documentaries are not included, but made-for-TV movies and miniseries under three hours in length are.
Brownstein says he has seen “every film that is available to be seen” (excluding unreleased outliers such as Jerry Lewis’ “The Day The Clown Cried”). In the book, he gives his unvarnished opinions on the giants of the genre, including “Schindler’s List,” “Life is Beautiful” and “Jojo Rabbit” — and fans of those movies may not like what he has to say.
We want to hear from you! Fill out this survey to tell us which Holocaust film you think everyone should see.
Born in Portland, Oregon, Brownstein hasn’t always focused on such dour subject matter. Prior to moving to Israel in 2003, he worked as a producer for Jewish comedy legend David Zucker (“Airplane!”) and “South Park” creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker (Stone is Jewish), even appearing in an uncredited cameo in the trio’s 1998 comedy “BASEketball,” before founding his own video transcription company. He says he has no familial connection to the Holocaust, and first became interested in the subject after reading Leon Uris’ novel “QB VII.”
Brownstein spoke to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about his years watching Holocaust reenactments, what qualifies as a “Holocaust movie” in his book and how the public, and educators, should approach the genre. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
JTA: How did you become drawn to catalogue these films?
Brownstein: I started collecting movies when I was in my twenties. In Los Angeles, I had over 1,000 movies on VHS, and I knew VHS wasn’t going to exist anymore. So I started over on digital, but the whole time, I kept a database, and in the database I had created I would separate Jewish and Holocaust films from others. So I was always attuned to it.
After I moved to Israel, I had a cousin who was on a Young Judea [year abroad] course. And I asked her what she was learning and she said, “We have a Jewish film class. We just watched ‘Private Benjamin’” [a 1980 comedy starring Goldie Hawn as a grieving Jewish widow who enlists in the Army]. I said, “‘Private Benjamin’ is not a Jewish film. It has a Jewish character, but that doesn’t make it a Jewish film.” I happened to have known the educational director for the program — he and I grew up in Portland together. And so I went to him and said I would teach a class for free, on Holocaust films. And he said, “Fine, free is a very good price.”
And then, my daughter was a high school senior, and most Israeli high school kids used to go to Poland on their class trips, and she was the spokesperson for her class. Someone asked her if she would represent the State of Israel at Yad Vashem, at their international conference. I looked at the program, and one of the seminars that they had was on using the documentary “Shoah” in the classroom.
I called up the director, whom I did not know, and said, “I think this is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard, that you would consider using a 10-hour documentary in a classroom. Students would fall asleep. To have a symposium where you’re advocating to people using ‘Shoah’ pedagogically is reckless.” And he said, “You sound like you know what you’re doing, so we’ll try you out [on a class].” And his blurb is on the back of my book.
Why do you think there are so many Holocaust films?
Well, I actually don’t think there are that many Holocaust films. I think that in terms of the total number of WWII films, for example, it’s a tiny fraction. We just know about Holocaust films because 25% of all American-made Holocaust films have been nominated for an Academy Award. And from 1960 through 2015, every other year, one of the best foreign language films nominated [at the Oscars] was a Holocaust film.
So you think that they’re coming at you like snowflakes in a blizzard, but they’re not. They’re just very well targeted and very well marketed, and we have a hunger, especially in the Jewish community, for this story to be told properly.
I think that the percentage of good Holocaust films is far greater than the percentage of good non-Holocaust films. That is, I think that if I’m recommending 50 Holocaust films in my book, out of 450, that means I’m recommending 11% of Holocaust films. I couldn’t recommend 11% of non-Holocaust films.
You use a categorization system in the book. Can you break it down for us?
You can’t compare apples to oranges; you have to compare apples to apples. I created these categories — it’s a grid. The first [box] is “victim film.” So if a film took place during the Holocaust and it was principally about a Jew, then it’s a victim film, and there are like 100 of them. If a film took place principally during the Holocaust and it’s about a Gentile saving Jews, then it’s a “righteous Gentile film.” If it’s after the Holocaust and it’s primarily about a survivor, then it’s a “survivor film.” After the Holocaust and mostly about a perpetrator, a Nazi, then it’s a “perpetrator [film].”
And then I had a little bit of a problem with with this general theory because of “Sophie’s Choice” and “Inglorious Basterds,” which don’t fit into any of these categories but clearly are Holocaust films, so I added a miscellaneous or tangential category.
You consider “Harold & Maude” and “X-Men” to be Holocaust films. Is anything that references the Holocaust a Holocaust film?
No, not at all. There are many, many films that aren’t Holocaust films in my eyes that other people think are. The most famous ones are “The Book Thief” [a 2013 drama about a young girl in Nazi Germany who steals books to share with a Jewish refugee] and “The Sound of Music” [the famous 1965 musical about a wealthy family in prewar Austria, in which several characters are Nazis], neither of which I consider to be Holocaust films.
“Harold & Maude,” if you think about it, she lives in a train car. And there’s a scene where she’s in the train car with Harold, and he points to the umbrella over her hearth, and she says, “That was when I was a kid in Vienna,” and she’s tearing up. And then she says, “But that was all before.” She’s clearly a survivor, and then they reveal the tattoo. It’s not just that she happens to be a survivor and Hal Ashby threw that in there. Her entire being is shaped by her experience.
“X-Men,” too, not that it’s a great film, but you don’t have “X-Men” without Magneto suffering in the first three minutes, in Auschwitz. The mutants are a metaphor for Jews during the Holocaust, and it’s not a hidden metaphor. Magneto rips down the gates of Auschwitz! Of course it’s a Holocaust film.
JTA readers already know that your favorite Holocaust film is “The Grey Zone,” a 2001 drama about the Jews who worked as “Sonderkommando” at Auschwitz-Birkenau. What are your least favorite Holocaust films, and what distinguishes a bad Holocaust film?
It depends on how far down into the sewer you want me to go, because there are some that are spectacularly horrible.

Kate Winslet in “The Reader.” (Screenshot via The Weinstein Company)
Let’s talk about “The Reader” [a 2008 drama, based on a novel by Bernard Schlink, that won Kate Winslet an Oscar]. “The Reader” is a story about an East German woman after the war, who is really, really hot. But she can’t read. And so she makes this really sketchy deal with a young man, that if he reads to her, they can have sex. And then we find out, after all of this hot sex, that this really nice lady was a Nazi guard, who had, with other women Nazi guards, locked 300 Jews in a barn and burned it down. And she gets put on trial. But she can’t adequately defend herself, because she’s illiterate, and we’re supposed to feel bad for this woman who killed 300 Jews in a barn, because she’s illiterate. That’s really weird. That’s a bizarre notion.
“The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” [a 2008 British drama about a child of a Nazi guard who befriends a Jewish boy held prisoner in Auschwitz] is the same idea… It was an absolute train wreck. It was just a terrible, terrible, terrible movie.
The glorification of Nazis, I’m going to say, the humanization of barbarians is a hard no for me. I’m gonna hold the line there. And that’s my main complaint about “Schindler’s List.” Oskar Schindler was a repulsive, repugnant, horrible human being while the first five-and-a-half million Jews were killed. He didn’t care; he participated. And then all of a sudden, he grew a conscience, so he became a normal person. He didn’t become a good person. You would think somebody who was a cog, who had been participating with the Germans since 1936, that guy doesn’t get elevated.
I know this is an incredibly difficult thing to hear and say, but almost every Holocaust film that ever came out of Canada, and was directed by a Canadian, there’s not a one of them that I can recommend. Every single one of them is horrible.
Your book is structured partially as a teaching guide. In general, how do you think Holocaust films should be used in educational settings?
Holocaust film should be a supplement to lessons. If you are teaching the Holocaust using Holocaust films, then you should rethink your teaching methods, because they are not the beginning of Holocaust education. They are the end of it.
So, if you want to teach about what happened in Birkenau, you can, if your students are old enough, mature enough, you can show “The Grey Zone.” But not before you’ve spent weeks explaining what this place is, and the history of it.

Stanley Tucci and Kenneth Branagh in “Conspiracy.” (Screenshot via HBO Films)
You can teach about the Wannsee Conference, and you can show the film “Conspiracy” [a 2001 made-for-TV drama about the planning of the Final Solution] — a wonderful film, with Kenneth Branagh and Stanley Tucci. It’s one of the finest films I’ve ever seen. But if you don’t know what they’re talking about, then it’s a complete waste of time.
What would you like to see filmmakers and audiences keep in mind when it comes to making, or viewing, Holocaust films?
Well, let’s establish from the beginning that every [historical] narrative film, Holocaust or otherwise, whether we’re talking about “Lincoln” or “Argo” or “Apollo 13,” is a fictionalized account of something that happened. Every narrative film is fiction. If the intention is to represent something true, that happened, then it is raising the bar, and you need to be able to ascertain what elements of the truth are relevant and what are irrelevant.
Related: A Holocaust educator says ahistorical Holocaust movies designed for popular consumption makes his job harder
There’s a difference between watching “Inglourious Basterds” and watching “Schindler’s List.” Everybody should know, after watching “Inglourious Basterds,” that Adolf Hitler was not killed in a movie theater by Ryan the temp from “The Office.” But you don’t know when you’re watching “Schindler’s List” that Jews were not marched into a dual-purpose shower that actually did have water, but that was hermetically sealed, and that the Jews, going in, actually thought that they might be gassed. The misrepresentation of the shower scene in “Schindler’s List” is so egregious that it ruins the veracity of the film.
The second thing is within the context of all filmmaking, where does it stand? Do I need another one of these? Every story has been told, basically. We all know, within general strokes, what’s going to happen. There aren’t a lot of alternatives — people live or they die. But are they going to tell a new story in a new way?
I have to make this really clear: When I sit down to any movie, Holocaust or otherwise, I am the most optimistic person in the world. I want the movie to succeed. I believe in everything that I’m watching until they make me disbelieve it. And even then I sit there and I try to find some reason to like this movie.

 

[Apollonian]

Biden antisemitism envoy nominee faces GOP criticism at confirmation hearing​

Sens. Rubio and Johnson raise old tweet by Deborah Lipstadt calling out Republicans for bigotry; Holocaust scholar insists she speaks out against both sides of the aisle​

By Jacob Magid 8 February 2022, 8:51 pm

Link: https://www.timesofisrael.com/biden...-faces-gop-criticism-at-confirmation-hearing/


Deborah Lipstadt, nominated to be special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, with the rank of ambassador, speaks during her Senate Foreign Relations nomination hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Feb. 8, 2022. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

WASHINGTON — US President Joe Biden’s nominee for special envoy to combat and monitor antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt vowed to speak out against antisemitism, regardless of the political affiliation of its origin, as she came under attack from Republican lawmakers during her Senate confirmation hearing on Tuesday for old tweets in which she sounded off against racism in the GOP.

Lipstadt’s hearing had been delayed for months by Republicans, who were put off by her past comments and partisan affiliations. But pressure to hold the session, particularly from Jewish groups across the political spectrum, rose in recent weeks following the hostage standoff last month at a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, where a gunman held four worshipers hostage, convinced Jews were powerful enough to free an infamous terror convict being held at a US federal prison nearby.

Lipstadt, a well-known Holocaust scholar, began her opening statement by reciting a Hebrew blessing thanking God “who frees the captives.”

She asserted that the Colleyville standoff was “not an isolated incident” and that attacks targeting Jews are on the rise.

The Holocaust scholar lauded the Senate decision to elevate the position of antisemitism envoy to the rank of ambassador, demonstrating the seriousness with which the US takes the topic. Notably though, the purview of the post only allows the envoy to address antisemitism abroad and not within US borders.

Lipstadt is best known to the wider public for her appearance in a landmark British legal case in which she fought a libel suit brought by Holocaust denier David Irving. That experience was portrayed by superstar actor Rachel Weisz in the Hollywood feature film “Denial.”

Deborah Lipstadt (right), professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, with Penguin books chief executive Anthony Forbes Watson (left), arriving at London’s High Court, on Tuesday, January 11, 2000, to attend her libel case brought on by David Irving against her and Penguin books for claiming he is ‘one of the most dangerous spokespersons of Holocaust denial.’ (AP Photo/Max Nash)

She mentioned the experience among three “life-changing moments” during which she “confronted real-world antisemitism,” qualifying her for the post.

“If confirmed, I shall fight antisemitism worldwide, without fear or favor, and with that one goal emblazoned before me to make a difference,” she said.

She was then pressed by Republican Senator Marco Rubio over her old tweets.

Lipstadt acknowledged that she should not tweet “in the middle of the night” and that her posts “have sometimes not been as nuanced… as I like.”

However, she argued that when viewed “holistically,” her record shows criticism of members of her own Democratic Party. Lipstadt accused Rep. Ilhan Omar of engaging in antisemitic tropes after she suggested that pro-Israel Americans have allegiances to a foreign country in 2019. Omar has since apologized.

Lipstadt also said Tuesday that her criticisms never descended to personal attacks.

Republican Senator Ron Johnson did not accept her assertion, however, and insisted that Lipstadt’s public criticism of him had crossed a line and disqualified her for the position of antisemitism envoy.

Last March, Lipstadt tweeted an article about a statement Johnson made in which he said he would have been more concerned by the January 6 insurrection had the rioters been “Black Lives Matter and Antifa protesters” as opposed to Trump supporters. Lipstadt wrote, “This is white supremacy/nationalism. Pure and simple.”

This is white supremacy/nationalism. Pure and simple. GOP Senator Johnson slammed as 'white nationalist sympathizer' after race remarks https://t.co/9vaBQsqK7J
— Deborah E. Lipstadt (@deborahlipstadt) March 14, 2021

Johnson said Lipstadt lobbed “malicious poison” at him and should have gotten to know him and his partnership with a Black pastor in Wisconsin before accusing him of being a white supremacist.

Lipstadt has apologized for the post and Johnson said Tuesday that he accepts the apology, but concluded his questioning by declaring that he could not support her nomination before walking out of the hearing.

Before adjourning the Senate confirmation hearing, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Menendez made a point of defending Lipstadt.

“If we cannot call out comments for what they are, if we don’t understand that words have power to them — sometimes very negative, powerful consequences — then we can never challenge whether it be antisemitism or racism or other elements,” Menendez said.

Menendez then asked Lipstadt whether, if confirmed, she’ll continue calling out antisemitism regardless of where it sprouts.

“Absolutely,” she responded. “Because after I’ve stopped this position, I’ll still have to live with myself.”

Asked by Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen if she considers criticism of Israel to be antisemitic, Lipstadt said that she does not.

“I don’t think any rational-minded person would think that criticism of Israeli policies is antisemitic,” she said.

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., questions Deborah E. Lipstadt, nominated to be special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, with the rank of ambassador, about comments she made online, during her Senate Foreign Relations nomination hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Feb. 8, 2022. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

However, Lipstadt acknowledged that in some instances, criticism of Israel does “cross the line” into antisemitism.

She pointed to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism as a “helpful tool.” The classification provides a number of examples for when Israel criticism does cross that line, such as when Israel’s policies are compared to those of the Nazis.

The definition has become more controversial in recent years though, with progressive, pro-Israel groups arguing that it is being used to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel.

Lipstadt urged practicing caution with the matter, saying “a lot depends on the context” and that “it’s important to be nuanced” because “if you call everything antisemitism, when you have a real active antisemitism, people aren’t paying attention.”

Asked by Rubio about the recent Amnesty International report accusing Israel of practicing apartheid, Lipstadt said she found the determination to to “ahistorical and unhistorical.”

Despite the pushback from some Republicans, Lipstadt is expected to be voted out of committee in the coming days, given the Democratic majority. She is then expected to be confirmed through a full vote in the Senate as well.

The antisemitism monitor is responsible for reporting on antisemitism overseas and pressing governments to adopt measures to mitigate antisemitism.

Lipstadt, 74, is the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, where she was the founding director of the Institute for Jewish Studies.

A picture made available by the Italian online news portal Open, showing people gathered around a swastika-covered casket outside the St. Lucia church, in Rome, on Monday, January 10, 2022. (Open Via AP)

She is the author of “Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust 1933-1945”; “History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier”; “The Eichmann Trial” and “Holocaust: An American Understanding” and “Antisemitism: Here and Now.”

She has also served in several roles at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, including twice as a presidential appointee to the museum’s council, and was asked by former US president George W. Bush to represent the US at the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the White House noted in its biography of Lipstadt.

The historian received a BA from City College in New York and an MA and PhD from Brandeis University. She is also fluent in Hebrew.

In 2020, during the election, she broke a longstanding taboo on comparing present-day American politicians to the Nazis and endorsed an ad by the Jewish Democratic Council of America likening the Trump administration to 1930s Germany. Lipstadt said Holocaust analogies were still off-limits, but she could see parallels to the rise of the Nazis.

Lipstadt will be the first nominee who will need to be confirmed by the Senate since the post was first created in 2004. Last year, Congress moved to elevate the position to ambassador level, with more funding and easier access to the secretary of state and the president. If confirmed, Lipstadt will be the fifth individual in the post.

A diverse array of Jewish organizations were quick to laud the nomination, from Americans for Peace Now, to the Jewish Federations of North America and the Orthodox Union. Israel’s Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan also welcomed her nomination.

 

[Apollonian]

NFL Player Sparks Outrage After Making Disturbing Hitler Comments​

STATION GOSSIP 05:42

Link: http://www.stationgossip.com/2022/02/nfl-player-sparks-outrage-after-making.html

A Washington Commanders star beat a hasty retreat after causing outrage by saying he’d like to have dinner with Adolf Hitler. Defensive ta...​

Durham: Perkins Coie Allies Connected to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Campaign Spied on Trump’s Internet Traffic While Trump Was PresidentHorror! Macron Police Hurl Tear Gas at Customers Inside Paris Cafe — Chase Hundreds of Freedom Protesters Down the Street (VIDEO)
A Washington Commanders star beat a hasty retreat after causing outrage by saying he’d like to have dinner with Adolf Hitler.
Defensive tackle Jonathan Allen apologized Wednesday for the comment.
“Early I tweeted something that probably hurt people and I apologize about what I said,” he tweeted. “I didn’t express properly what I was trying to say and I realize it was dumb.”

The controversy began innocently enough when Allen, a Pro Bowl selection, asked his Twitter followers to ask him anything they wanted, according to The Washington Post.
He was asked to name three people with whom he would like to have dinner.
Allen picked his grandfather, Michael Jackson and Hitler. The tweet has since been deleted.
“He’s a military genius and I love military tactics,” Allen wrote when asked to explain his choice. “But honestly I would want to pick his brain as to why he did what he did. I’m also assuming that the people I’ve chosen have to answer all my questions honestly.”
The comment outraged many.

As the choice drew more negative comments, Allen said he was not giving Hitler “props.”

“Not props, I probably should have used a different term but I was asked and I was giving my reason as to why I think it would be interesting to have a convo with him. He’s easily one if not the most evil persons to have ever lived but this was a hypothetical question,” he wrote.
A Twitter user claiming he was Jewish then chided Allen, saying the comment was hurtful.

“I’m sorry i offended you that definitely was not my [intention], I was just answering a question,” he replied.

 

[Apollonian]

Citing Colleyville, 96 Jewish federations and JCRCs urge Senate confirmation of Deborah Lipstadt as antisemitism monitor​

By Ron Kampeas February 1, 2022 3:16 am

Link: https://www.jta.org/2022/02/01/poli...n-of-deborah-lipstadt-as-antisemitism-monitor

Deborah Lipstadt walks a red carpet for "Denial" during the 11th Rome Film Festival at Auditorium Parco Della Musica in Rome, Oct. 17, 2016. (Elisabetta A. Villa/WireImage via Getty Images) Advertisement



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WASHINGTON (JTA) — Close to 100 local Jewish federations and Jewish community relations councils are urging the Senate to confirm Deborah Lipstadt as antisemitism monitor, citing the attack on a Colleyville, Texas synagogue last month.
“This latest, horrific attack makes clear that the Senate must expeditiously confirm this position so that America’s diplomatic corps has an able leader to combat the global threat of antisemitism,” the organizations said in a letter sent Monday that was initiated by the Jewish Federations of North America, an umbrella group.
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The letter was addressed to Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho, its senior Republican. But the real target was Risch, who has been holding up Lipstadt’s confirmation because of her past sharp criticisms of Republicans. Jewish groups have multiple times called on the Senate to press forward with Lipstadt’s confirmation hearings.
The position of antisemitism monitor tracks antisemitism overseas and consults with governments about how to stem it. The man who held a rabbi and three congregants hostage on Jan. 15 for 15 hours was a British Muslim who appeared to buy into antisemitic tropes about Jewish control.
“We may not know everything that led to this attack, but the congregants held hostage that day report a series of antisemitic tropes from the gunman,” the letter said. “It is undeniable that a rising tide of antisemitic speech and physical attacks have targeted the Jewish community across the world, creating the dangerous preconditions to attacks on Jewish individuals and institutions abroad and at home.”

 

[Apollonian]

Deborah Lipstadt confirmed as US special envoy on anti-Semitism​

The Holocaust historian and Emory University professor's nomination was brought to the floor of the Senate by Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.), who asked for unanimous consent.

By Dmitriy Shapiro

Link: https://www.jns.org/deborah-lipstadt-confirmed-as-us-special-envoy-on-anti-semitism/

U.S. Capitol Dome with American flag. Credit: Andrea Izzotti/Shutterstock.

(March 31, 2022 / JNS) Deborah Lipstadt, U.S. President Joe Biden’s nominee to the position of Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, was officially confirmed to the position by the U.S. Senate on Wednesday night.

Lipstadt’s nomination was brought to the floor of the Senate by Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.), who asked for unanimous consent on her nomination.

“Right now, as we speak, the scourge of anti-Semitism is rising again in this country and around the world,” he said on the Senate floor, after speaking about how his two Jewish grandparents came to the United States to escape anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe in the early 1900s. “If we mean the words never again, then at long last, Madam President, let’s confirm Deborah Lipstadt to fight anti-Semitism on behalf of the United States.”

Unlike in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where opposition from Republicans delayed Lipstadt’s confirmation hearing for more than six months, no Republican objected to the nomination, which would have then required a floor vote to be scheduled.

Lipstadt, 75, a top Holocaust historian and the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University, was finally approved by the committee on Tuesday in a 13-9 vote, with Sens. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) joining the Democrats to vote in favor of her nomination.

The committee vote had been twice rescheduled—the first time because of an objection from Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and then due to low committee attendance.

‘The task before us is great’

Jewish organizations had pushed for the swift approval of her nomination, and her confirmation was applauded on Thursday.

“Having been involved with the creation of the post, working with the late Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio) and the late Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.), I can attest that her expertise is needed now more than ever—with anti-Semitism and Jew-hatred at seemingly all-time highs,” William Daroff, CEO of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, said in a release. “We are still haunted as a community because of the attack on the synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, at the beginning of the year. And this week in Israel, terrorists claiming allegiance to the Islamic State have killed 11 innocent people in three different cities. We offer our full support at this critical time on behalf of American Jewry and look forward to working with Ambassador Lipstadt in the ongoing fight against anti-Semitism.”

Agudath Israel, which represents many of the country’s most observant Jews, who often are the victims of anti-Semitism because of their traditional clothing, endorsed the choice of Lipstadt early on and joined other Jewish groups to get her confirmed.

“Dr. Lipstadt is a unique blend of scholar-activist,” said Rabbi Abba Cohen, Agudath Israel’s vice president of government affairs and Washington director, in a news release. “She is a prominent historian and thinker on the Holocaust and anti-Semitism, and that puts her in a position of being able to turn her knowledge and understanding of these issues into informed and creative thinking about how best to fight this scourge, which is plaguing countries around the world.

“The fight against anti-Semitism is never-ending,” he said, “and particularly critical at a time when we are witnessing open and increasing verbal and physical attacks against Jews in foreign countries.”

Ronald S. Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, sent his heartfelt congratulations to Lipstadt, whose nomination he said was long overdue.

“When President Biden first nominated Dr. Lipstadt to this critically important position, I said that he and Secretary of State [Antony] Blinken could not have found anyone better qualified to confront today’s challenges. I am tremendously relieved that we will now have her powerful voice and moral leadership in the global fight against virulent and surging Jew-hatred—for make no mistake about it, that is what anti-Semitism is,” he said.

In a joint statement, B’nai B’rith International President Seth Riklin and CEO Daniel Mariaschin identified Holocaust revisionism and anti-Israel hatred as major threats, noting that Lipstadt was “eminently qualified” for the role.

“As anti-Semitism has spiked around the world in many forms, including Holocaust revisionism and vociferous anti-Israel hatred, Lipstadt’s work as special envoy will be vitally important,” they wrote. “Anti-Semitism must be confronted wherever it occurs, whether it be on the far-right, the far-left, among radical extremist groups or on the Internet.”

Hadassah, the women’s Zionist organization, noted that Lipstadt will be the first woman to hold the position as an ambassador. She will be the second woman to serve in the position after Hannah Rosenthal served as a special envoy, and as the head of the Office to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism in the Obama administration, for three years—from Nov. 23, 2009, until Oct. 5, 2012.

In 2019, the role was upgraded to the rank of ambassador after the passing of the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism Act of 2019, which was introduced by a bipartisan group of senators and signed into law by former President Donald Trump.

“As an explicitly Zionist organization and stakeholder in the land of Israel, Hadassah knows firsthand the role anti-Semitism plays in threatening the safety and security of Israel and the Jewish people,” Hadassah stated in a news release. “The task before us is great, but Ambassador Lipstadt is the right person to help us build a more peaceful and tolerant world.”

 

[Apollonian]

Here's the BBC persecution "interview" of David Irving after the holohoax trial

 

[Apollonian]

See, Judaism is actually a mental dis-order, just a massive delusion, as I've noted--Judaism is "Oral Law Trad.," by definition, meaning it's "midrash" (interpretation) of Torah (first five books of Bible) for purpose of Jews' "good," rulership, dominance, esp. over gentiles. So u see, Judaism is SUBJECTIVISM (Torah means what Jews WANT it to mean, for their self-interested purposes).

 

[Apollonian]

Israeli Politician: We Should 'Take Advantage of the Holocaust' to Ethnically Cleanse and Occupy Gaza​ Chris Menahan InformationLiberation Jan. 02, 2024

Link: https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=64212

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Israel should "take advantage of the Holocaust [Jews] went through" to bomb Gaza to smithereens, ethnically cleanse the Palestinians and build Israeli settlements on their land, so says Israeli politician Moshe Feiglin. "We should overturn all the laws and take advantage of the Holocaust we went though and throw out all the laws so that we can achieve a crushing and painful victory, which means three things: occupation, displacement and settlement," Feiglin said in Hebrew during an interview last week. Israeli analyst and Unit 8200 veteran Eliyahu Yossian said in another recent interview that Palestinian babies and first graders are Israel's enemies and insisted Jews must not adopt "Western values" which say otherwise. Israel has killed over 10,000 children in less than three months in their relentless bombing campaign performed with US-supplied weapons. As I reported last month, Israel's war on Gaza is killing children at 100x the rate of Russia's war on Ukraine. When US Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Israel on Oct 12 and met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to underline the US's support for Israel's war, he cited the Holocaust and his own Jewishness to justify US backing for Israel's war. "I come before you, not only as the United States Secretary of State, but also as a Jew," Blinken told Netanyahu. "My grandfather, Maurice Blinken fled pogroms in Russia. My stepfather, Samuel Pisar, survived concentration camps: Auschwitz, Dachau, Majdanek. So, Prime Minister, I understand, on a personal level, the harrowing echoes that Hamas's massacres carry for Israeli Jews, indeed, for Jews everywhere." Metula Council head David Azoulai said last month that Israel should ethnically cleanse Gaza and make it "resemble the Auschwitz concentration camp." Any opposition to this explicit ethnic cleansing campaign is being labeled "anti-Semitic" by the controlled media.