Oklahoma OK... Kol Hakavod!

I'm a fan of Oklahoma, as readers and friends who live there will attest to. I've been there a few times and the place, generally speaking is full of G-d fearing decent folks who tend to exhibit common sense, love freedom and treat strangers with courtesy. And they also tend to elect no nonsense, honest conservatives to public office, unlike my home state.

Not only that, but I've noticed that again,generally speaking, a solid sense of justice seems to exist among most of the denizens of Okie Land,even when there's no money or benefit involved.To wit, this item.

The picture above is called "Shepherdess Bringing in Sheep" by French Impressionist Camille Pissaro, and it's worth 8 figures easy on the open market. It currently sits in the University of Oklahoma's Fred Jones Jr. Art Museum, where it was donated along with a number of other paintings.

The problem is, there's a good chance it's stolen art. It belonged originally to French department store owner Raoul Meyer, and was part of his art collection that was seized by the Nazis when they invaded France during World War II.

The Nazis loved art, and plundered the best museums and private collections in Europe. Many of the museums were able to hide some of their treasures, but private collections were looted, especially the ones owned by Jews. After all, it's not like they were in any position to complain. And since a lot of them died in the camps or were left destitute, many of them weren't in any position to try and get their valuable paintings back, so they were sold to private collectors and museums, often by officers and bureaucrats connected to the post-war occupation.

"Shepherdess Bringing in Sheep” changed hands several times after the war,and when Meyer tried to get back his lawful property, a Swiss court ruled in ruled in 1953 that he'd missed his five-year window to recover the painting. Too bad, Jew!

So after it changed hands a few more times, it ended up being donated to O.U, where Meyer's daughter tracked it down and filed a lawsuit against the University of Oklahoma in January 2014.

And here's where it gets good.Twenty-six members of the Oklahoma House of Representatives introduced a resolution today that wants O.U. and its Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art to determine to the legislature's satisfaction that none of paintings were “unlawfully appropriated during the Nazi era.”

"If it is determined from provenance research that an object in its collection was unlawfully appropriated during the Nazi era without subsequent restitution, the House of Representatives hereby directs the University of Oklahoma and the Fred Jones. Jr. Museum of Art to resolve the matter in an equitable, appropriate, and mutually agreeable manner, including restitution," the resolution states.

It's expected to pass. The idea, of course, is to shame OU into doing the right thing.

Oklahoma has a population of 3.878 million folks, of whom only 4,500 or so are Jews. So there wasn't any political benefit for the Oklahoma Legislature in doing this. They acted in response to a letter last month from the small Holocaust Remembrance and Restitution Society at the University of Oklahoma asking for them to support their efforts.

Those legislators did it because it was the right thing to do.

That, and a sense of sheer decency and fairness, which as I noted, is fairly common in Oklahoma.

Never Forget....Never Again

Look at the faces, and the photographs. Look at the faces of the Germans forced to view what almost all them knew was going on.

Look at the German officer who shot himself rather than face justice for the atrocities he had committed.

Little did he know that the odds were in his favor for getting a light sentence and living to a peaceful old age.Out of the German military and officials who directly participated in the Holocaust, almost all of them were out of jail in less than ten years,if they were even imprisoned at all.

The Holocaust was a unique experience in human history, where the armed might of a nation made the extermination of unarmed and defenseless people who posed no threat to them a war aim. Unlike other similar episodes, the idea wasn't enslavement for profit, or military victory, or driving people out of a coveted territory for nationalist reasons and simple theft and plunder. It was a war against the Jews, an organized campaign whose purpose was murder, the complete slaughter of every Jewish man, woman and child, plain and simple. Remember that the next time you hear some idiot misuse the term 'Holocaust'.

'Never Again' is more than a slogan. And here's a message to the Tribe, especially those of you who take pleasure in denigrating Israel or think it means nothing to you. It is a strong vibrant and powerful Israel that turns "Never Again' from a slogan into something with a promise of becoming reality. It ensures that this will never happen to Jews again, either to you or to Jews in far off countries like Ethiopia, Yemen, Iraq....

It has a direct effect on your own life.

Think about it.

(Thanks to Bookworm for the video)

“What Was Auschwitz?” “I Don’t Know…”

"I have never felt able to describe my emotional reactions when I first came face to face with indisputable evidence of Nazi brutality and every shred of human decency.Up to that time I had known about it only generally or through secondary sources.I am certain, however that I never at any time experienced an equal sense of shock.

I visited every nook and cranny of that camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that 'the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda.' {...}

I not only did so, but as soon as I returned to Patton's headquarters that evening I sent communications to both Washington and London urging the two governments to send instantly to Germany a random group of newspaper editors and representative groups from the national legislatures. I felt that the evidence should be immediately placed before the American and British publics in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical doubt." -Dwight D. Eisenhower, from "Crusade In Europe" , his personal memoir of WWII.

General Eisenhower realized that the historical lesson of the Holocaust was too important to be forgotten and thus perhaps repeated in a different time and place. So he not only saw to it that journalists and photographers were given access to the camps, he personally ordered that they be filmed and photographed by the Army's own personnel and eyewitness accounts documented.

He certainly can't be blamed for it, but apparently his efforts were mostly in vain.

The above video shows author Rhonda Fink-Whitman interviewing Pennsylvania public school graduates currently enrolled at four different Pennsylvania universities to see what they know about the Holocaust, WWII, and Genocide in general.

Their replies will shock and depress you,but they explain a lot.

He who controls the past controls the future.
He who controls the present controls the past.

We have always been at war with Eastasia.

(H/T, The Anchoress)

Why Europeans Will Never Forgive The Jews For Auschwitz

 In yesterday's piece on the out of control rise in anti-semitic attacks in France, I referenced this essay I wrote back in 2006 on why Jews should seriously think about leaving most of Western Europe. After quoting it briefly and saying that there's very little of it I would change today, almost 7 years later, I finished by saying that a lot of Europeans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.

That phrase caught the attention of a couple of long time readers who asked what I meant (and in one case, took issue with it).

Here's exactly what I meant, and my explanation may perhaps be of some interest.

Simply stated, Hitler didn't operate in a vacuum. And it wasn't just Germans, as you find when you actually take a little time to study the Holocaust, a unique event in history for a number of reasons although to observe how it's constantly tossed around freely at every conceivable occasion you'd never know it.

Unlike America, Europe was historically and officially anti-semitic. While we certainly had and have Jew hatred here, it was never government sanctioned, it was never de jure, legal. As a matter of fact, George Washington and most of the rest of the Founders were almost philo-semitic. Washington even made the point of sending a remarkable letter to the congregants of the Truro Synagogue in Rhode Island ( first and largest in America) telling them that 'the children of Abraham' would be welcome to live in America in peace as full citizens. He was telling them they need not fear the political change would result in their having to pull up stakes again.

It was different in Europe.

To give you an idea of how remarkable Washington's letter of assurance  was, in 'enlightened' Britain, Jews had only been allowed to live there as recently as 1656, when Oliver Cromwell readmitted them after they had been expelled from England in the 13th Century. Even then, Jews were not allowed to serve in Parliament or in government positions until much later, 1829. They weren't legally allowed to live in Sweden until 1715, Norway until 1850, and not allowed for many years per se in Spain, Portugal, or any of their colonies in Africa or the New World after the expulsion of 1492. In places like the German states, Poland and Russia, their status was marginal and subject to the whims of whomever was in power. So George Washington's letter was a very big deal. It defined the entire relationship between Jews and the American Republic.

A lot of Jew hatred in Europe came courtesy of the Catholic Church and Martin Luther, whose history was somewhat like Mohammed's, believe it or not. In the beginning, Luther said a a great deal about tolerance and used the Church's anti-semitism as a talking point against them, figuring that the Jews would come flocking in to become Lutherans and Protestants. But like Mohammed, when most of the Jews said no thank you, he became one of the most violent anti-semites in history.

When Hitler came to power, Jew hatred was an established mainstream thread in a lot of Europe. There was no secret as to what was going in Germany during the 1930's but frankly, the people who gave a damn were in the minority...and that was by no means limited to Germans and Germany. Few countries would give German Jews visas to emigrate, unless they had influential friends or were someone like Einstein who might be useful.

That included America, by the way. Avowed Jew Haters like Father Coughlin were major public figures, the Ivy League had strict quotas on admitting Jews, and many neighborhoods, clubs and even hotels boasted covenants that barred Jews. The State Department, then as now, had a decent quotient of anti-semites and delayed and avoided issuing visas to Jews fleeing Germany even when they were available...although there were some Americans who risked quite a lot in order to do what they could, just as there were in other countries.

Britain did its bit to expand the death toll of the Holocaust by defying international law and the terms of the Palestine Mandate by closing off Palestine to all Jewish immigration in 1938, when Jews were desperately trying to flee. Needless to say, very few of them were welcome in Britain. Later, in 1944, the British stonewalled a deal Himmler offered to the allies to exchange a million Jews bound for the concentration camps for a few trucks, some soap, and some coffee.

As Hitler gained control of Europe, a number of countries reacted in surprising ways. Some countries (Finland, Denmark, Italy, Bulgaria, the Serbs) tried to save as many Jews as they could. In countries with a high incidence of long standing Jew hatred, there were some incredibly heroic and decent people, but a lot of the locals not only turned their backs while their neighbors were dragged off to the camps, in many cases ( Norway, Austria, France, Poland,the Baltic States, the Ukraine, Romania, Croatia for example) the natives were downright enthusiastic and actually helped round the Jews up and turn them over to the Nazis, even though they had a damned good idea of what was in store for them. In Poland, for example, Cardinal Glemp was actually telling the Poles that it was the Jews fault the Nazis were in Poland and that it was a good thing that the Nazis were getting rid of them.He was never disciplined in the slightest by the Vatican.

I remember an experience related by one woman's who survived the Holocaust as a little child (can you imagine experiencing that as a child?), noted Jewish speaker and author  Rebbetzin Jungries, who was rounded up by the Hungarian Arrow Cross militia with her family to be turned over to the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz. As she and her family were being marched out of their apartment to the truck, she took her favorite doll with her, only to have it snatched away from her by one of her neighbors. When she started crying, this lovely woman told her "Shut up you dirty little Jew. You won't need this where you're going."

My point here is that many Europeans behaved with incredible cowardice and indecency. No matter what they pretended later, they pretty much knew what Hitler had in store for a bunch of innocent men, women and children whose only crime was that they were Jews, and they only thing they cared about was looking out for number one and dividing up any spoils that were left over.

The last Jews who were murdered in Europe as a result of the Holocaust were killed in Kielce, Poland, and by Poles, not Germans. They actually had the nerve to survive the camps and come back to try to reclaim their old homes.

You see, to a lot of Europeans, the Jews were, you know, a problem. A lot of them liked and approved of how the Nazis handled that problem, or at least had no particular concern about it. Afterwards, since the Nazis handled a lot of the dirty work and were able to be conveniently fingered as the sole culprits, many of these same Europeans could pretend they never heard or saw anything.

Europeans have always had a totally unjustified view of themselves as civilized, decent and humane, as opposed to, say, we loutish, brutal Americans. The Holocaust and their own cooperation with it gives the lie to that conceit. For a few years, while the memory was still fresh, there was at least a certain undercurrent of shame. The Holocaust and their enthusiastic cooperation at worst and their tacit acceptance at best made them look in the mirror and have to smell the excrement of their souls instead of being able to keep pretending it was perfume. They hated that, and harbored a deep resentment towards the Jews for for surviving as living witnesses to their worst moments and as a living  admonishment before G-d and man.

Virtually the only country in Europe that has ever attempted to deal with these feelings on a national level was Germany.

Over the years, a lot of that European resentment was conveniently transferred to a more socially acceptable target, the Jewish State, the Zionists. And it continues to remain a not so covert theme in Europe's media and academia, especially as the Holocaust survivors conveniently die off and it's easier to forget what happened, or even to deny that it happened at all.

That (along with the need to appease their growing Muslim populations) is where the 'anti-Zionism', the frequent comparison of Israel with the Nazis, the notions of a ' Palestinian Holocaust', the blood libel cartoons come from. It's why a lot of the Brits and others aren't all that upset at dropping teaching about the Holocaust, especially since they can blame it on Muslim sensibilities. It's their way of subconsciously (or not so subconsciously) saying to the world and to history, "See, look. We aren't so evil. Look at what the Jews are doing! Look at how evil those ZioNazis are! Besides if they were just out of the picture, the Muslims would be satisfied, we'd have peace and quiet and we could forget all about the whole thing anyway."

That's why a lot of Europeans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.And why it carries over in hatred and resentment towards Israel today, for being so inconsiderate as to continue to insist on surviving.

How The UK Sunday Times Observed Holocaust Memorial Day...

Today, January 27th is Holocaust Memorial Day, when people throughout the world commemorate the six million  Jews who died at the hands of Hitler and his many willing assistants in all nations.

The  Times cartoon above,  showing a gargoyle like, hook nosed Benyamin Netanyahu 'cementing in a wall to peace' with the blood of those Arabs who identify as Palestinians is pretty much standard fare nowadays in the kind of country the UK has become. Or more accurately, as Caroline Glick recently pointed out, the kind of country Britain has been for some time but now feels increasingly comfortable with revealing openly.

While there are undoubtedly a number of sporadic commerativeceremonies in Britain today, the overwhelming thrust of the country's leadership and its policies are conveyed far more accurately by the cartoon above. And whether they want to admit it or not, that cartoon, and the fact that it was allowed to run today is not only overt anti-semitism, but craven cowardice. Can you imagine the Times ever running the Mohammed cartoons?

Just a day ago, Liberal MP David Ward compared Israel's policies with those of the Nazis at Auschwitz:

"Having visited Auschwitz twice - once with my family and once with local schools - I am saddened that the Jews, who suffered unbelievable levels of persecution during the Holocaust, could within a few years of liberation from the death camps be inflicting atrocities on Palestinians in the new State of Israel and continue to do so on a daily basis in the West Bank and Gaza."

While he was eventually forced to make a pro forma apology by party leaders, subsequent remarks by Ward signal that he hasn't changed his views one iota.

The sophistry that people like David Ward and many other Britons indulge in is pretty wide spread these days...that there's a difference between 'Jews' - especially Left wing Jews willing to play along with the anti-Zionist narrative - and 'Israel'.

As the above cartoon reveals, what they really object to is Jews having the nerve to actually have the right of self-determination and to insist on defending themselves, something they wouldn't dare criticize for any other group.

What they're ultimately comfortable with, whether they admit it or not, is the idea of Jews as victims,perpetually dependent on their tolerance and goodwill. The cartoon underlines that hideous  comfort in Jews as victims by  using the motif of a wall to slam Israel's security barrier, which has saved countless Israeli lives from Islamist  terrorism. Holocaust Remembrance Day, if nothing else, should be a reminder of how quickly the winds can change when it comes to the Jews, and it is a strong and powerful Israel that makes sure that passively going along with those odious breezes is not an option anymore.

The 'anti-Zionist' is almost inevitably an anti-semite, and usually you don't have to dig too deeply at all.

Since this cartoon appeared in Britain's largest newspaper,and judging by the comments a lot of people found it appropriate, it's worth taking a moment to  review a little history. Because Britain's own record on the Holocaust is frequently glossed over.

 The UK was directly complicit in the death toll of the Holocaust by defying international law and closing off Jewish immigration to Palestine on the eve of the Holocaust with the issuance of the White Paper in 1938, trapping millions of Jews in Europe without a place to flee to.Needless to say, few of them were welcome in Britain.

Britain even refused to negotiate with the Nazis to save one million Jews during the last part of WWII. In 1944, Himmler attempted to make a deal with the Allies to exchange one million Jews, including the still intact Jewish population of Hungary, about 500,000 people, for a few trucks, some soap and some coffee. The official name of the Nazi proposal was Blut fur wahren - literally, blood for goods. The Americans signaled that they might be willing to sign on to the deal but the British vetoed it, explicitly because they were more interested in placating the Arab interests in the Middle East  and did not want these Jews in Palestine.They even went to the extent of imprisoning Joel Brand, the Hungarian Jew and  member of the Hungarian Aid and Rescue Committee who was Himmler's envoy to the allies for months in Cairo, in order to effectively stonewall the proposed deal.

Brand later testified under oath in the Eichmann trial that he heard Lord Moyne, the British Minister Resident in the Middle East who was present when he was interrogated by British Intelligence say, "What can I do with these million Jews? Wherever would we put them?"

Hungary's Jews ended up in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen instead of Israel,where most of them were murdered.And while Britain was doing its best to prevent Jews from coming in to Palestine, at the same time they were allowing unlimited Arab in-migration there.Anyone interested in the full sordid story should read Lucy Dawidowicz's ` The War Against the Jews : 1933-1945: and Joan Peter's prize winning From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine.

Even after the war, the British did their very best to strangle the nascent Israel at birth. The British not only made a point of turning over as many strategic locations and arms caches within Palestine to the Arabs as they could manage, but were happy to arm and train the Arab armies that launched  a jihad  to massacre the Jews of Israel in 1948, a mere three years after Auschwitz was liberated. The most effective Arab fighting force in that war and the one that carried out the ethnic cleansing of the Old City of Jerusalem and the Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria was the Jordanian Arab legion, led by British officers under the notorious anti-semite Colonel John Glubb, AKA 'Glubb Pasha'.

This is the country whose  elites presume to sit in judgement over Israel's 'crimes'.

I'd say it was shameful, but how does one even convey the concept of shame to those whom have ceased to even understand what that word means?  To those incapable of feeling it?

UPDATE: The Times,of course has defended this cartoon.  “This is a typically robust cartoon by Gerald Scarfe,” said a spokesperson for The Sunday Times, adding, “The Sunday Times firmly believes that it is not anti-Semitic. It is aimed squarely at Mr Netanyahu and his policies, not at Israel, let alone at Jewish people.”

They also claim that the cartoon's appearance on Holocaust Memorial Day was 'just a coincidence' because of the recent Israeli elections. As if they have no control over what appears in their sordid  rag whatsoever.

QED on what I wrote above, exactly. 'It's not all Jews we hate..just the uppity ones with the nerve to stand up for themselves. You see that, don't you?"

One can almost hear their German counterparts of seventy years ago telling their Jewish compatriots that even they had to admit, Hitler made a lot of good points and besides, he wasn't really after them....just  the Jews in the East, the communists and the international bankers.Not the 'good Jews.'

 Drool, Britannia. When people who purport to be decent embrace indecency wholeheartedly, they deserve what happens to them.

Glorifying Evil

The Palestinian Authority had its own way of commemorating International Holocaust Remembrance Day this year.

They chose that occasion to have official Fatah-run Palestinian TV glorify the murderers of the Fogel family.

You might remember the Fogels.



They were a young family living in the Jewish community of Itamar who were at home, relaxing after the Sabbath. On March 11, 2011, two Arabs affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine(PFLP), Hakim Awad and Amjad Muhammad Fawzi Awad carried out an assault they had planned in advance, cutting through a security fence, breaking into the Fogel's home and murdering the five members of the family pictured above, including a 3-month-old baby. They butchered them without even the regard a slaughterer usually gives to an animal.

The two were captured by the Shin Bet, tried in Israeli courts and sentenced to consecutive life terms since Israel has no capital punishment. Neither ever expressed the slightest remorse.

Last week,official 'Palestinian' TV broadcast greetings to the two murderers on a show called 'For You', dedicated to Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons.

Hakim Awad's mother was an honored guest, praising the two killers as 'heroes' and referring to Hakim as her “dear son.”

Hakim's aunt also participated, also calling the two murderers “heroes,” and calling Awad “the hero, the legend” with the enthusiastic approval from show's host.

The producers of the program and its host knew in advance that the callers were relatives of the Fogel murderers and introduced them to the audience while text with the names of the callers appeared at the bottom of the screen: “Prisoner Hakim Awad’s family / Awarta – Nablus.”

Not one western leader condemned it.

Upon doing a little further research through one of my sources in a direct position to know, I found out that both Awads are on the list of those 'Palestinian' terrorists whose families receive an official monthly salary directly from the Palestinian Authority while they're in prison.

Now, it shouldn't be any great shock to anyone that the 'Palestinian Authority' and Mahmoud Abbas consider murdering Jews and Jewish children in particular to be praiseworthy and something to be rewarded financially. Nor should it surprise anyone that those whom murder Jews are held up as role models and heroes. Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah, after all, are the same folks who made child murderer Sami Kuntar an honorary 'Palestinian' citizen and gave him a hero's welcome after he was released in a prisoner swap, the same people who name public buildings and streets after murderers and teach their children about the virtues of killing Jews in their mosques and schools.

My quarrel here isn't with them because I expect nothing else. Based on what they teach their children and the sort of people they make heroes out of, they are whom and what they are, and one doesn't blame a mad dog when he bites someone - you simply deal with the situation so he doesn't bite anyone again.

But I am quite sick to death of another entirely different group of people.

As I mentioned, the program in question aired right around what is supposedly an international day of recognition and remembrance of the victims of the Holocaust.From all over the EU, various politicians issued statements about the horrors of the Holocaust and voiced their resolve that it should never happen again, some of them quite eloquently. The Norwegians, one of the most anti-Semitic nations in Europe surprised everyone by finally admitting that yes, we did help the Nazis round up our Jews and deport them, and we were pretty enthusiastic about it too. Sorry about that! It only took them until 1998, close to 60 years to get around to finally compensating those  few survivors who were still alive for property that was seized from them way back in 1942. I suppose this latest apology pretty much cleans the slate for the Norwegians are as far as they're concerned.

Our own president weighed in with his signature baritone, saying that United States would “pledge to speak truth to those who deny the Holocaust.”

“As we celebrate the strength and resilience of survivors, we pledge to stand strong against all those who would commit atrocities, against the resurgence of anti-Semitism, and against hatred in all its forms.”

Admirable sentiments, all worthy of applause.

Until it hits you.

Where's Fatah getting the money every month to pay the Awads and all the other genocidal killers in Israeli prisons? Where do the funds the PA passes on to to Hamas come from? Where did they get the cash to build a girl's school named after Dalal Mughrabi, whose claim to fame was leading a band of 'Palestinian' killers in the hijack of a bus and the murder of 13 children, some of them Americans? How do the salaries of Fatah's al-Aksa Martyr's Brigade get paid, and how are the schools, media and mosques that teach genocide as heroism and 'martyrdom' funded?

They're funded by the very same people that made such pious and stirring declarations on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, including our president, Barack Hussein Obama. The money comes from the EU, by UNRWA, by USAid, and by the IMF.

Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi has called repeatedly for genocide against Israel and a second Holocaust.In one of his sermons, he asked God "to kill the Jewish Zionists, every last one of them."

In another sermon on al-Jazeera he said "Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by [Adolf] Hitler. G-d willing, this time it will be the believers."

Yet President Obama's Deputy Secretary of State Nicholas Burns has had cordial meetings with Brotherhood leaders in Egypt to discuss relations with the US, and Qaradiwi himself is actually employed by our State Department as I write this as an intermediary with the Taliban. And the EU nations are even less shy about meeting with Hamas and Brotherhood officials than our State Department.

Iran has repeatedly called for genocide against 'the Zionist entity' and is currently working on a program to obtain nuclear weapons. Has any of the nations whose leaders uttered all those well meant, moving pledges of never again done anything significant to stop them?

In looking at all this, it's impossible to avoid a simple conclusion. The same nations lighting candles, attending ceremonies and making pious speeches about the Holocaust are more than happy to aid and abet the equivalent of today's Nazis when the mainstreaming of genocide in the name of Allah is involved.

For all the fuss over dead Jews, avoiding a repeat performance today with live Jews seems to have a very different priority for a lot of them.

The 'international community' is hell bent on using every subterfuge, pressure and threat to try to bully Israel into retreating to the indefensible borders Israeli statesman Abba Eban appropriately called 'the Auschwitz lines'.

They cheerfully fund the 'Palestinians', give them legitimacy and ignore their goal of murdering every Jew in Israel, just as the Fogels were murdered. They're happy to deal with the Muslim Brotherhood regardless of the Brotherhood's call to drive every Jew out of the Middle East by force. And irony of ironies,Germany,who just gifted Israel's Holocaust museum Yad Vashem with a 10 million euro grant is Iran's largest trading partner in Europe.

It's impossible not to get a certain message out of this...one that carries a certain, long standing stench about it, an echo from a not-so-distant past.

 





Odd, isn't it? In almost all western countries, Holocaust denial is decried as the idiocy it is, and it's even criminalized in most of Europe. Yet Mahmoud Abbas, who wrote his university thesis in Moscow denying the Holocaust and later published most of it in a book, al-Wajh al-Akhar: al-'Alaqat as-Sirriya bayna an-Naziya wa's-Sihyuniya that is still a standard text in the 'Palestinian' school curriculum is welcomed with open arms...and wallets. And even though Article Two of the UN charter forbids threatening genocide or aggression against a fellow member, Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is an invited guest at the UN and Iran remains a member in good standing.

For my part, I'm tired of listening to these hypocritical sentiments. I'm beyond tired...I'm sick to death of it, almost to the point of nausea. Too many of these western leaders move their mouths about their 'commitments to Israel's security' and the horrors of the Holocaust, while at the same time aiding and abetting the jihad against the Jews at worst, or ignoring it at best.

This is exactly why a strong, powerful Israel is a necessity. Because a lot of the people outside Israel who solemnly intone "Never Again" on Holocaust Remembrance Day aren't prepared to take any action whatsoever to back it up...to their shame.

Instead, they glorify evil.

A Hero When Others Stood Aside - Lyndon Baines Johnson

There's a great deal that's been written about Lyndon Baines Johnson, our 36th president whose birthday, August 27th just passed. One thing that hasn't been written about much is a uniquely heroic act he performed as a freshman congressman.

In 1938, the situation for Europe's Jews was becoming desperate, and even those who had an inkling of what was to come had few options, since the world by and large wasn't interested in granting them the visas that would save their lives and the British had already closed off legal Jewish emigration to Palestine.

Lyndon Johnson, then a freshman congressman found out about the plight of an Austrian Jewish musician named Erich Leinsdorf who was due to be sent back to Nazi-dominated Austria and likely certain death and pulled strings to get him a resident visa to stay in the US.

Johnson, a member of the Christadelphians, came from a long line of Christian Zionists.

Realizing that there were thousands of Jews trapped in Europe, Johnson put together a plot with his long time friend Jim Novy, Jack Baumel, chief engineer of the Texas Railroad Commission, and Jesse Kellam, head of the Texas National Youth Authority(NYA) to rescue the stranded Jews. They called it 'Operation Texas' and it was kept a secret for years.

What they did was to issue false passports to Jewish refugees for Latin American countries, get them visas to come into the United States and then record them as members of the NYA. This was strictly against both US law and Texas State law, and had the future president and his friends been caught, they would likely have been facing heavy fines and jail time and Johnson would have lost his seat in Congress. They didn't hesitate for a second, and Operation Texas saved hundreds of Jews who would other wise have been murdered by the Nazis.They refused to turn their backs on the Jews when it would not only have been easy, but even prudent in terms of their personal situations.

Just one month after succeeding John F Kennedy as president, lyndon Johnson attended the December 1963 dedication of the Agudas Achim Synagogue in Austin. Novy opened the ceremony by saying to Johnson, “We can’t thank him enough for all those Jews he got out of Germany during the days of Hitler.”

The First Lady later described the day, saying: “Person after person plucked at my sleeve and said, ‘I wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for him. He helped me get out.’” Lady Bird elaborated, “Jews had been woven into the warp and woof of all [Lyndon's] years.”

(Hat tip Zeb G.)

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Echoes Of Times Past - A Survivor Of The Paris Roundup of Jews Tells Her Story

When she was just eight years old, Madeleine Testyler was rounded up and forcibly taken - together with over 13,000 of Paris' Jews - to city's winter stadium to be transferred to the Nazi concentration camps. Her story is worth repeating.

On July 16, 1942, 13,152 Jews, mostly women and children, were rounded up and taken to Vélodrome d'Hiver, the indoor cycling stadium next to the Eifel Tower. Within days they were transported to the Drancy, Pithiviers, Compiègne and Beaune-la-Rolande transit camps, after which they were sent toAuschwitz. Less then 40 of them survived.

This event, which was recently retold in the French film "La Rafle (The Round Up)", and code-named "Operation Spring Breeze" by the Nazis, was not carried out by the Germans, but by the French police officers and gendarmes, who used lists of addresses given to them by the City of Paris.

Madeleine Testyler, then Madeleine Reiman was only eight years old when she was taken with her with her mother and six-year-old sister Arlette.

Before they were taken away, her mother managed to phone the ex-employer of herself and her husband, the owner of one of France's leading fur companies, and begged him for help. Madeleine's father, Abraham Reiman, had been sent to the camps along with some 4,000 other men a year earlier and Madeline's mother had begged her employer to try to intervene to get her husband out of the camps...but to no avail.

"You didn't help my husband," she told him over the phone, "at least try to help us." That telephone call would later save her and her daughters' lives.

Madeleine and her family were loaded on to trucks and taken to the stadium. "Being among the first, we found a corner for ourselves between two stands," 76-year-old Madeleine says from her home in Tel Aviv. "To my little sister and I the whole thing just seemed like a game at the time."

They later were taken to the Beaune-la-Rolande camp, a way station to Auschwitz.

There, the sisters shared a bunk with eight-year-old Lazar Sheinbuch and his four-year-old sister Rezin, their neighbors from Paris.

There is little doubt that they would have been sent to Auschwitz, but fate, in the form of their parent's former employer intervened. The owner of the fur company she had phoned on the day of their arrest had managed to use his influence to get their freedom, and the three were released. "We even got a permit to be in the street after curfew hours for the Jews in Paris, because our train was going to arrive in the city in the evening hours."

The Sheinbuch children, on the other hand, were caight up in the Shoah. "That entire family was exterminated," Madeleine said. "We slept with them on the same bunk," she said, adding that when they left the camp, her mother offered to take the neighbor's children, but their mother refused to part with them. "She said she heard that all the children would be released soon."

Shortly after their lucky escape from Beaune-la-Rolande from the mother and her daughters left Paris and moved to Vendome, which was in Vichy and not under occupation, and hid out until the end of the war.

Madeleine Testyler's subsequent story is a happy one.

After her mother's death, when she was thirteen, she decided that she was going to be independent and started working in the fur industry as an apprentice. She al;so began to paint and by the age of 20, she had achieved some success both in her professional and personal life, when she met Yosef Testyler, a young Jewish Holocaust survivor from Poland who also worked in the fur business, and the couple married.

Madeleine Testyler became a renowned painter, presenting her works in many exhibitions, including solo exhibitions in France. About 15 years ago she also began to sculpt, and has also received renown in that field in Israel, where she and her husband now live.

The Vélodrome d'Hiver stadium where the Jews were collected was demolished in 1959. And in 1995, 53 years after the round up, French President Jacques Chirac formally apologized to the Jewish community of France for his countrymen's craven behavior.

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Reflections On Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Memorial Day

Today is Yom HaShoah, the day Israel and the rest of the Jewish world officially mourn the dead of the Holocaust.

In Crusade In Europe, his post-war memoir of WWII, Allied Commander General Dwight Eisenhower over sixty years ago foresaw a time when it would be convenient in certain circles to deny that the Holocaust happened, and he felt he had a moral responsibility to document it for all time:

"I have never felt able to describe my emotional reactions when I first came face to face with indisputable evidence of Nazi brutality and every shred of human decency.Up to that time I had known about it only generally or through secondary sources.I am certain, however that I never at any time experienced an equal sense of shock.

I visited every nook and cranny of that camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that 'the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda.' {...}

I not only did so, but as soon as I returned to Patton's headquarters that evening I sent communications to both Washington and London urging the two governments to send instantly to Germany a random group of newspaper editors and representative groups from the national legislatures. I felt that the evidence should be immediately placed before the American and British publics in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical doubt."

General Eisenhower also saw to it that the camps were filmed and that a number of witnesses were given tours of the camps..and not only from overseas. Eisenhower and a number of local commanders forced the local townspeople to go through the camps from the adjoining German towns where the populace claimed ignorance. Footage still exists of American soldiers forcing Germans into the camps to look at what had been done..as if some of those Germans hadn't been living downwind from the smell of burning flesh for years.


This jolly photo was taken in the German camp of Wobbelin. It was one of those places the Americans insisted on taking the townspeople for a little tour after the Germans insisted they had no idea of what was going on.

After they were forced to take the tour, the Mayor of the town and his wife both committed suicide.

In spite of his efforts, General Eisenhower failed in his goal, through no fault of his own.

As the victims and eyewitnesses who remain die off and the living memory dims, as it becomes less common to see elderly people with numbers tattooed on their arms, the forces that want to deny that the Holocaust ever happened get stronger and more insistent.

Holocaust denial is a major industry today, and much of it is enthusiastically received ( and bankrolled) from the Islamic world, not only in the Middle East but at hundreds of mosques and madrassahs in the West, to the point where in Britain and elsewhere, educators avoid teaching about it so as not to make any waves or contradict what many Muslim youngsters are being taught at home or as part of their religious studies.

Even worse than that is the behavior of many of the politicians of the West, who are now facing the threat of a new Holocaust by some of the deniers of the old one. And just like sixty years ago, it is not merely a threat to the Jews, but to themselves. Yet they seem destined to relive the past and repeat the same tired phrases of appeasement and cowardice as the winds of history shriek with laughter at their folly.

When Israeli PM Bibi Netanyahu spoke in Israel on Yom Hashoah this year, he made no bones about it:

“The historical failure of the free world in facing the Nazi beast was in not confronting it when it could still be stopped," Netanyahu said, "today we witness the fire of the old-new hate, the hate of the Jews being spread by the regimes and organizations of radical Islam, spearheaded by Iran and its cohorts."

Iran’s leaders are hell-bent on developing nuclear weapons and publicly declare their intention to destroy Israel, “but in the face of the oft-repeated calls to erase the Jewish state from the face of the earth, we see at best mild protestations, and these too seem to be fading.”

There's an important difference today, however and Netanyahu is fully aware of it . This time, the Jews have a country and an army of their own. While the West may indulge itself in Holocaust denial again to its own ultimate peril, the Jews of Israel realize that not only do they not have the luxury of disbelief but that more importantly, they need not suffer for others indulging in it.

And that's the real message of Yom HaShoah, as well as the reason for Israel's existence....because this is a day of renewal as well as sadness, just as the nation of Israel has grown like a brilliant flame out of the ashes of a thousand Jewish communities of Europe liquidated in the Shoah.

Am Yisroel Chai.

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Welcome To The Babi Yar Hotel

There's a place in the Ukraine that was originally on the outskirts of Kiev, but has become a suburb of the city as it has expanded. To the Kiev city council,it was an ideal site for a tourist hotel to service the expected trade for the 2012 European soccer championship.

It's called Babi Yar.

Sixty eight years ago, it was the scene of something uniquely horrible in a time of horrors. The Nazis, with the cheerful assistance of Ukrainian 'Blue' police rounded up 33,741 Jewish men, women and children who lived in Kiev, made them strip naked and then forced them into a ravine and machine gunned them to death in one mass grave.



While the killing was going on, some of the Jews' Ukrainian neighbors looked on, enjoyed the show and ate a picnic lunch.

Babi Yar was part of the War Against the Jews in the Ukraine.It was the culmination of an effort that murdered over 700,000 Ukrainian Jews at the hands of the Germans and their Romanian and Ukrainian allies. The ravine itself became a favorite killing ground of the Nazis and their collaborators, and the site for the murder of Gypsies and Russian POWs as well as Jews, although it was overwhelmingly Jews whose corpses populated the ravine.

Babi Yar was never the site of any kind of memorial, although dissident Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote a haunting poem in 1961 decrying the massacre and the attitude of the locals to what happened to the Jews there.

The Soviets finally put a memorial there in 1976, but it referred to 'the murder of innocent Soviet citizens by the fascist occupiers', and there was no mention of the fact that the victims were mostly Jews or about the extensive collaboration by the locals. The Soviets weren't interested in memorializing victims or regurgitating old memories. They had their own ghosts in the Ukraine they wanted forgotten, several million people they deliberately starved to death with an artificially created famine.

The first prominent Ukrainian to address Babi Yar honestly was the first president of independent Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk, who made a fiery speech at a memorial gathering in October 1991. He actually admitted that Ukrainians shared some responsibility for carrying out the massacre, something that evoked a decidedly mixed response among his countrymen.

Babi Yar popped back into the news again when the Kiev City Council voted to build a tourist hotel on the site of the old killing ground. The original plans actually called for the place to be called the Hotel Babi Yar, believe it or not.

I'm sure the hotel theme restaurants and gift shops would be unique.

Fortunately, there is a happy ending to this sordid story. After the plans leaked out, widespread outrage from around the world caused the city's mayor, Leonid Chernovetsky to veto the plan. I don't doubt that took considerable courage on his part.

After all, this is a country where mass murderer and anti-Semite Bohdan Chmielicki is still regarded as a national hero, memorialized with a statue in the middle of Kiev.

Why write about this? Well, time passes for all things, and that is how it should be. But there are things we need to remember, simply to make sure they don't occur again.

There have been some very recent and public attempts to pave over history or deny it ever happened in the first place. Seeing that, I think that remembering is a more pressing need for human society just now than another spiffy new hotel. Not so much just to memorialize the dead, as to help save the living.

Selah.

The Real Holocaust Denial

Today is Yom HaShoah, the day Israel and the rest of the Jewish world officially mourn the dead of the Holocaust.

It's also the day after Iran's President, serial Holocaust denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad addressed a UN conference on racism and human rights as an honored and invited guest.

True to form, he came up with a speech that demonized Israel as a racist and illegitimate regime and denied the Holocaust, claiming the West used the question of the Holocaust ( and one native Farsi speaker I know who heard it live translated it as the 'questionable Holocaust') as a "pretext" to steal Muslim land.*

Ahmadinejad has referred to Israel as a cancerous tumor, called for it to be wiped off the map repeatedly and has said that Israel is fated to `disappear' soon ...and that the `countdown' towards the end of the Zionist regime will be over soon, Allah willing. He's repeatedly denied the Holocaust actually took place and hosted conferences on Iran on that very subject. And believe it or not, I don't blame him one bit.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is merely doing what he's always done, repeating the stock line of most of the Arab and Muslim world, where Mein Kampf and its dream of a Jew free world is still a bestseller.

No, Ahmadinejad can't be faulted for doing the same old material. The 20 odd Western UN delegates who theatrically walked out on him ? That's another matter.

A number of Western leaders seem bent on doing collective impressions of Claude Rains' famous Vichy French captain at Rick's Place in `Casablanca'..they're shocked, simply shocked.I can't imagine why they would be.

Promoting a second Holocaust to make up for the one they claim never happened has been Iran's position since 1979. It was, after all, Iran's `moderate' ex-president Rafsanjani who said that the problem of Israel could be solved by one nuclear bomb.

These same Western leaders voicing shock and dismay at the spectacle of Ahmadinejad ranting about destroying Israel can't pretend they aren't aware of all this. And they're also fully aware that Iran's denial of the first Holocaust is part of its arming of people like Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad and its pursuit of nuclear weapons to perpetrate a second one.

This is the regime whom people like Barack Obama and Robert Gates want to `negotiate' with, thinking it's going to stop with Israel and the Jews.

In a very real sense, the `Holocaust denial' of the West's leaders is much worse than Ahmadinejad's. Because they have even less excuse for it than they did in 1938. They know that not only did it happen, but that it's entirely plausible.And like the last time, they are doing absolutely nothing to stop it, aside from things like the theatrics we witnessed yesterday at the UN.


Ahmadinejad at least has an explanation, if not an excuse. He obviously thinks of himself as a G-d fearing and pious man who finds his pretext for Jew hatred in the Qu'ran and the Hadith, where it clearly states that Allah's Messenger Mohammed told his followers that on the Day of Judgement the very rocks and trees will call out to pious Muslims to kill the Jews hiding behind them (Sahih Muslim, Book 041, Number 6985). A lot of people who live in Iran and in the other Muslim countries who's delegates cheered his speech yesterday agree with him.

That's because Ahmadinejad's views are shared by much of the Muslim world - that the Holocaust was a myth, that the sinister Jews used it to `steal' Arab land, and that even if a few Jews did become lampshades and chimney smoke,why should the Muslims suffer for it?

Here's why, the dirty little secret that the Muslim world will never acknowledge. The Arab world is directly complicit in the Holocaust. And what's more, they know it, even if they refuse to admit it.

After World War I, the former Ottoman province that became the Palestine Mandate was given by the League of Nations to British authority for the express purpose of creating a Jewish nation. In the area west of the Jordan River, the only real populated communities were places like Jerusalem and Safed, where the majority of the inhabitants were Jews. Britain's first act was to take 80% of this land, everything east of the Jordan River, give it to the Arabs as Trans-Jordan and forbid any Jews from living or settling there.

The Zionist movement was promised by Britain that the rest of Palestine - everything else west of the Jordan River-would be the Jewish homeland. This promise was never kept. The British, during their tenure in Palestine put all kinds of arbitrary barriers on Jews migrating to Palestine, while allowing unlimited immigration to what was left of Palestine to Arabs from Syria, Egypt, and the Hejaz.

Of course, even 80% of Palestine was not enough for the Arabs to accept Jews living next to them in peace and equality. Incited by their leaders, the Arabs rioted and created such unrest from the 1930's onward that the British halted all Jewish immigration to the Holy Land on the eve of the Holocaust with the issuance of the White Paper in 1938, trapping millions of Jews in Europe without a place to flee to. If not for that, the death toll in the Holocaust would have been nowhere near what it was.

If the Arabs `gave' the Jews three times as much land as Israel consists of today,it would not be enough to compensate for their part in the slaughter of the Jews of Europe or their attempt to murder the survivors. And they've compounded this sin - and I use the word advisedly - by ethnically cleansing almost a million Jews from the Arab world since 1948,and trying to complete the task of genocide up to our present day.

And then as now, they had the willing help of the West, who had no such `religious' excuse.

All during WWII, when a third of the Jewish population of Palestine was in uniform fighting for the allies, the British allowed unlimited migration from the Arab world into Israel. In 1944, Himmler attempted to make a deal with the Allies to exchange the Jewish population of Hungary, about 500,000 people, for a few trucks. The Americans signed on to the deal but the British vetoed it, explicitly because they were afraid of Arab unrest and did not want these Jews in Palestine.

Hungary's Jews went to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen instead of Israel. A picture of how almost all of them ended up is at the head of this piece.

During WWII, the Arabs largely sided with the Axis against the allies. The `Palestinian' leader, the British appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem spent most of the war in Europe recruiting Muslims from Bosnia and the Caucasus to fight in SS divisions for Hitler and the Nazis. In the French provinces of Syria and Lebanon, Arab troops fought with Vichy against the allies and Iraq was taken over by a pro-Nazi Arab regime. And in Egypt, numerous veterans of the British 8th Army who fought and defeated the Nazis at El-Alamein have related how the Egyptians had Cairo all decked out in Nazi flags to welcome the German `liberators' when the British marched back into the city.

In spite of this, the British were happy to arm and train the Arab armies that attempted to massacre the Jews of Israel in 1948, three years after Auschwitz was liberated. The most effective Arab fighting force in that war, the Jordanian Arab legion, was led by British officers under the notorious Jew hater Colonel John Glubb (`Glubb Pasha'). Nor were the British alone, though they were the most blatant. The UN did nothing to stop their Arab member states from their attempted genocide and even the United States had an arms embargo on the infant Jewish state. Anyone interested in the full sordid story should read Lucy Dawidowicz's ` The War Against the Jews : 1933-1945: and Joan Peter's prize winning From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine.

In his book, `Crusade in Europe' written in 1946, General Eisenhower wrote about what he called `horror camps' and his reaction on seeing his first one. He made a point of recording those feelings, of seeing that the press toured the camps and took pictures, because somehow he foresaw even then a time when people would deny that the Holocaust occurred.Footage still exists of American soldiers forcing Germans into the camps to look at what had been done..as if some of those Germans hadn't been living downwind from the smell of burning flesh. General Eisenhower wanted to make sure that `plausible denial' would no longer be an excuse.

Based on how the West is reacting to another Holocaust in the making, he failed, through no fault of his own.Listening to Gordon Brown and Barack Obama, you can hear the same tired phrases of appeasement and cowardice as the winds of history whistle and chuckle.

The difference of course is that this time, the Jews have a country and an army of their own. While the West may indulge itself in Holocaust denial again to its own ultimate peril, the Jews of Israel realize they do not have that luxury and need not suffer for it.

And that's the real message of Yom HaShoah, as well as the reason for Israel's existence. Never again, indeed.

*UPDATE: Another note on the speech - oddly enough, Ahamadinejad's original text as released to the media read that "following World War II, they resorted to military aggression to make an entire nation homeless on the pretext of Jewish sufferings and the ambiguous and dubious question of Holocaust."

Ahmadinejad appears to have dropped the terms "ambiguous and dubious," referring instead in Farsi to "the abuse of the question of the Holocaust" as a substitute, perhaps thinking that would make it more palatable.I still go with the translation of my Farsi speaker as given above.