Friday, April 27, 2012

The Council Has Spoken! This Week's Watcher's Council Results



The Council has spoken, the votes have been cast, and the results are in for this week's Watcher's Council match up.

A few days ago, Jews around the world memorialized the victims of the Holocaust on a day set aside as Yom Hashoah.

This week's winner,Joshuapundit's Yom Hashoah - Reflections On The Holocaust is a look at how those people who came into contact with it tried to process it, what's been remembered, why many people would like to forget all about it and what that all means in today's context. Here's a slice:

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

As the elderly witnesses gradually die off and it becomes less common to see people with numbers tattooed on their arms and a certain look in their eyes, remembrance is at a premium.

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.

In fact, the first official act of the Muslim Council of Britain after Tony Blair put it together as a voice for the UK's Muslims was to protest Holocaust Remembrance Day being observed.

This is no accident. There are a lot of people who want what happened to the Jews of Europe forgotten and buried.

In Crusade In Europe, his post-war memoir of WWII, Allied Commander General Dwight Eisenhower over seventy 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 his commanders forced the local townspeople from the adjoining German towns to go through the camps 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 those Germans hadn't been living downwind from the smell of burning flesh for years. As if they hadn't heard the crying of children at the train stations in the dead of night, or seen their Jewish neighbors dragged away...

In our non-Council category, the winner was Raymond Ibrahim with How the Media Whitewashes Muslim Persecution of Christians submitted by Joshuapundit, an excellent look at a topic the media won't touch with a ten foot pole.

Here are this week’s full results. Only New Zeal was unable to vote this week, and only New Zeal was affected by the 2/3 vote penalty:

Council Winners



Non-Council Winners



See you next week! And don't forget to follow us on Facebook and Twitter..'cause we're cool like that!
Posted by at
Labels:

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)