Tuesday, August 15, 2017

Bibi’s “vague” response to Charlottesville: Comity with Trump trumps support for the Diaspora?



“Outraged by expressions of anti-Semitism, neo-Nazism and racism. Everyone should oppose this hatred.” Prime Minister Netanyahu’s tweet regarding Charlottesville

Sincere and heartfelt. So what's wrong with this tweet which earned the PM the ire of Times of Israel, Jpost and other Israeli forums?

Had the PM been responding to, say, a lynching of a Black or a Native American such a tweet might have described deeply felt "outrage" regarding racism, although admittedly such interference in the internal affairs of the US might be considered undiplomatic from a foreign head of state. But this was an alt-right march targeting Jews and other other minorities. The question here is, "is it appropriate" for the Israeli prime minister to criticize racism directed at Jews living in the US? If it is, then, is the PM's tweet adequate as response to those attacking Jews in the US?

AS I view the situation the answer is yes because Bibi represents Israel, the refuge created by the Diaspora for the Diaspora. He is not just leader of Jews in Israel, but of the Jewish People wherever they are found across the Diaspora. As such he is obligated to address antisemitism in the US, or wherever Jews are threatened. Because threat at a national level is precisely the what Charlottesville represents. Hitler began in one city, Munich, ten years before the Nazi Party was elected to rule the Third Reich.

Has antisemitism always existed in the US, YES. One need only look over recent decades of ADL surveys for confirmation. Is antisemitism less dangerous in the US compared to its European expression, NO. In fact, distribution and intensity of antisemitism in the US during the years of the Holocaust was little different than during, before and after Auschwitz.

And how does this bear on Bibi's comments regarding Charlottesville?

Trump was called out by his own Republican Party for his inclusive condemnation, not just of the perpetrators whose racism inspired the riots, but his obligation, as president of the United States, to condemn racism, to console its victims. (Trump today walked back his comments describing the KKK, et al< and again aimed his attack at the left).

As political leader of the Jewish People Israel's prime minister is obligated to speak out on behalf of antisemitism's victims, the Jewish Nation. To not do so may or not better position Israel in the eyes of the US president; it does not stand beside, and support Diaspora Jewry. Nor is this the first instance in which Bibi has failed to stand with the Diaspora. As the antisemites of Bannon’s alt-right minions spouting antisemitism emerged from the shadows during the US primaries, nary a word of concern or support from the prime minister lest he upset his “friend”. And Bibi’s recent violation of his promise to the Diaspora regarding access to the Wall; and more significant and far-reaching support for the Rabbinate’s long held ambition to determine Jewish identity for Israel and the Diaspora; Who is a Jew legislation! A betrayal of promises to the Diaspora to retain Hardi support for his coalition! Power over People!

Israel is Zionism's creation and exists to serve the entire Jewish Nation and not just a single religious stream holding the government hostage. Israel was intended and exists as the national homeland for Jews, ALL Jews: regardless of religious affiliation or none, whether religious or atheist, self-identified or vainly believing they can disappear through assimilation.

Today’s Israelis are not "citizens" as appear in western liberal-democracies. Today’s Israelis are custodians of the universal homeland and refuge for ALL Jews of the Diaspora. Only when the “ingathering of the exiles” sees the last Jew in Israel will all Israelis truly achieve citizenship!


Monday, August 7, 2017

America, Israel and the “Special Relationship": an Uncertain Alliance



When JPost published the editorial “Clueless Trump” last week it reminded that much that appears in Israel’s poplar media falls short in recognizing the limits of its “special relationship” with the United States. As Saddam Hussein reportedly justified Iraq’s need for WMD, “We exist in a very dangerous neighborhood,” Israel has little room to substitute wish for fact regarding the limits of this critical alliance. At least at its leadership level Israel is responding realistically to the changing global balance of power. Israeli diplomacy and trade regarding China and India are consistent with not just her emerging markets, but also global centers of power in the coming decades.

For the near-time, as regards the Palestinians: if there was little hope for accommodation before 2006 when, following elections resulting in a Hamas victory and the failed US-backed coup against victorious Hamas: what likelihood an accommodation between Israel and not just one, but two competing centers of Palestinian “authority”? As regards the extended region of Arabia, from Morocco to the Arabian Gulf; the “Arab Spring” has left states in the region unstable and under threat from within. The United States lit the fuse when Bush, following American’s commitment to Democracy, replaced Iraq’s Sunni regime, barrier to Iranian ambitions, with a majority Shiite regime placing Iraq in Iran’s orbit.

Obama’s approach to Iran remained basically unchanged from Bush, “to end the Iranian pursuit of nuclear weapons.” But where the Bush administration never tired of threatening military force, Obama was committed to dialogue. That the “dialogue” would take seven years to bear fruit and result in Iran first achieving “nuclear threshold status” suggests a policy well beyond the stated goal, consistent with Kenneth Waltz’s vision , “Nuclear Balancing Would Mean Stability,” the subheading to his article. But Waltz’s elegant theory suggests that where a single regional power possesses nuclear arms neighboring states would have been motivated to seek the bomb to counter the threat. But Israel was assumed to have a nuclear arsenal for half-century with little such counter effort. True that Saddam sought the bomb, but that was to achieve his hegemonic ambitions in the Arab world; and Syria’s short-lived nuclear adventure was more likely an Iranian effort rather than Syrian. If any Arab state confronting Israel ever felt directly threatened by her assumed nuclear arsenal, that threat was never sufficient to demand an Arab response. The “Arab response” only emerged in response to the realization that the Obama policy was not just to end Iran’s nuclear threat to the Arab world, to “cut off the head of the Iranian snake,” but instead to allow Iran to achieve breakout nuclear status.

Observing the tortuous seven-year-long “negotiations” between Obama and Khameini, an apparent charade in which a petulant Iran repeatedly withdrew from the talks only to return months later enticed by ever-new Obama concessions. Whatever Bush’s reasons for not pursuing Iran’s 2003 offer to quit its nuclear program, whether by chance or design the US provided Iran sufficient time to advance its nuclear program, to become a nuclear power and threat to its Arab neighbors, and to Israel.
There are today at least half-dozen Arab states, from Egypt and Jordan to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait at various stages of building nuclear reactors. And, reflecting the new reality of today’s regional “superpower” most are funded and built by Putin’s Russia.

When Obama entered office one of his central promises was to reign in global nuclear proliferation. Without going into discussing a possible American strategic motive to explain his providing for the Iranian bomb, Obama loosed a nascent nuclear arms race in this most unstable region in the world. And if there is a “silver lining” regarding that future nuclear cloud now hanging over the region it is that Israel and Arab states not yet victim to the Arab Spring, now share a common threat.


With all the benefits that a hopeful Shimon Peres saw to motivate peace in the region, it took President Obama to provide the conditions for an Israel-Arab accommodation! 

Saturday, July 15, 2017

This article was written in January, 2017. Not posted at time of writing, it should appear as first in the present series. 

Israeli Post-Zionism and its abandonment of Diaspora Jewry

“Politically, Netanyahu is right, any future prime minister will have to have the haredi parties with them. You can’t have a right-wing prime minister without the haredim.”


When I first arrived in Israel in 1960 it was “in” for teens and young adults on my Ichud (Mapai) kibbutz to refer to Zionism as passé. Surprised, maybe even a bit “offended,” still I dismissed the attitude as youthful rebelliousness. That was Israel twelve years after Ben-Gurion declared the state. Tnuva, the dairy collective for kibbutzim still flew the red flag next to the Israeli flag at their Tel Aviv facilities. Tensions over religious intrusion on the social life of secular Israelis; concerns over an anticipated not distant “kuturkampf,” consequences of  Ben-Gurion’s “compromise” exchanging  Orthodox participation in the Knesset for Yishuv unity in anticipation o the 1947 UN Partition vote.

Sixty-nine years after the First Knesset the consequences to Israeli democracy and society of inclusion of religion in government are profound. In 1947 it was rationalized, with some justification, that the two religious parties invited were “Zionist.” Certainly the National Religious Party was, and likely remains. But even the “moderate” NRP, once provided the platform of the Interior Ministry, set as priority determining Jewish identity for the state, and for the Diaspora. A series of Supreme Court decision provide background to the ministry refusing to issue even a Teudat Zehut (identity card) to an immigrant not providing evidence of an orthodox conversion in accord with the Chief Rabbinate. It was NRP, not the haredi parties, that introduced Who is a Jew legislation in the Knesset. Anti-Zionist haredi parties, later dominating the Chief Rabbinate, just made the effort to install Israeli Orthodoxy as the “official” stream of Judaism for state and Diaspora more publicly strident.

Likely the most egregious attempt by haredi politics to dictate identity for Israelis occurred in May, 2008 when the authority of Israel’s official conversion court headed by NPR’s Rabbi Haim Druckman was challenged by the Chief Rabbinate’s Supreme Rabbinical Court of Appeals for his lack of rigid compliance to halacha and Who is a Jew. The Court’s three “judges” issued a 50 page verdict which overturned the conversions of 40,000 Israelis made over a ten year period. Rabbi Druckman, a highly regarded rabbinic scholar and member of the orthodox National Religious Party was accused of performing conversions that failed to meet halachic standards!

40,000 Israelis overnight no longer “legally” Jewish, their marriages declared illegitimate, their children now bastards according to the Chief Rabbinate.

Whenever the issue of Who is a Jew is raised in Israel the Diaspora responds with outrage at the legislation’s intent to deprive them of their identity, of the legitimacy of their religious practice. In response to this particular action by the Chief Rabbinate even,

the main body of Modern Orthodox rabbis, the Rabbinical Council of America, which traditionally views the Israeli Chief Rabbinate as a definitive religious authority, issued a rare rebuke of the rabbinate’s religious court, saying in a formal statement that the court’s ruling and tone were “beyond the pale,” “create a massive desecration of God’s name” and “are a reprehensible cause of widespread conflict and animosity within the Jewish people in Israel and abroad.”

Rabbi Druckman, who had reached retirement age a year earlier and only stayed on at the request of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, once the haredi parties demanded the government compliance with the Rabbinate the prime minister did what any politician wanting to remain in power would, and fired the rabbi.

The list goes on. In January, 2016, in an effort to satisfy Diaspora demands that the Western Wall be available for prayer by all Jews, the Knesset passed legislation setting aside a small area of the Wall, the Robinson’s Arch, for “pluralistic” prayer. Its passage was followed in December, a month before enactment, by a bill introduced by Shas to block use of any part of the Wall to non-orthodox prayer.

“The legislation would criminalize anyone participating in progressive prayer services at the Western Wall, including the Robinson’s Arch area, who would be liable to prison sentences and hefty fines.” [It is recognized that the bill will be] “a disaster abroad (the Diaspora) but it’s a necessity here… You can’t have a right-wing prime minister without the haredim” said the official.”

*****

At what price political expediency? Israel was created by the Diaspora in response to antisemitism following the Emancipation of the Jews, particularly in the 19th century. Political antisemitism, the West’s reaction to including Jews in society, was the background to the election of National Socialism and the murder of our six million. As we look around today can we say antisemitism is no longer? Are Jews in the US confident that their security is assured by the legal machinery upon which they place their faith? FBI statistics demonstrate that Jews are targeted four times more frequently (60%) than our closest neighbor in persecution, Muslims (14%).

Regardless of how America’s new president turns out, whether he sympathizes or rejects them, Donald Trump’s populist appeal served as a magnet for radical-right fringe elements who identify as racist and antisemitic. And for Jews, barely 70 years since Auschwitz and aware even as denying the Holocaust as evolved from two-thousand years of persecution inspired by anti-Judaism and Judeophobia are understandably skittish, concerned that no country, not even their own, may turn out to be exceptional.

And what if the unthinkable actually does occur, that Jews in the United States at some point in the future are threatened as Jews for centuries, as happened in Germany? How will they view their options? Israel will, as countless times since 1948 encourage and accept all as choose to come. But how many, viewing Israel represented by Who is a Jew, may hesitate and, as German Jews who hesitated before them, how many will be lost?


This is the issue before Israeli leaders, whether to adhere to its obligations as the expression of its Zionist identity as welcoming to all Jews refuge, or to continue to play the coalition shuffle of choosing anti-Zionist haredi parties because the political cost is less than the demands of political compromise with opposition secular parties. Commitment to Zionist ideals, or to selfish and transient political rewards? 

Friday, July 14, 2017

The Battle for Identity, Israel: Zionist or anti-Zionist?

Yishai Fleisher is a well known Zionist and advocate for Israel. In today’s Jerusalem Post he provides an article with the evocative title, Two Jewish Nations, One Flag, which suggested a commonality in outlook between he and I. Yet immediately below the title he frames the issue as now within Israel but rather, “the greatest divide in the Jewish world today is between American Jewry and Israeli Jewry." As if American Jewry rather than Israel politicians was responsible for the growing divide.

Follows in my response to Yishai regarding “the divide” as seen by this Diaspora Zionist.

Likely Yishai, you and I are not far apart in our overall thinking as Zionists except that I am still in Galut, and you, from the same Galut, live in Israel. By the title of your article, I was certain that our view on the issue of “two bars and a star” also coincided but not so. I won't discuss ZIONISM as ideology, Israel as the realization of Diaspora Jews efforts to create the state of the Jews since you are likely as aware as I of those efforts. As you, I too am concerned at Herzl's warning that given the opportunity most in the Diaspora would long have voluntarily assimilated. But as he also said, and as the Holocaust taught more starkly than ever in history, even “assimilation” provides for Jewish survival. And it is this that demands that Israel remains true to the primary reason Pinsker and Herzl, two secular Jews, realized the need, and a century of Diaspora effort has created and supported the state of the Jews. Put bluntly, Yishai, whether or not Jews in the United States retain their Zionist, indeed their Jewish identity, in order to continue to serve its obligations to the Jewish people it must hold sacred the state’s definition of who is a Jew, the Law of Return and its 1970 “grandparent” amendment. As recent decisions by the present government indicate, backtracking on the Kotel agreement and, for identity purposes, promoting legislation enacting the decades-long struggle over an Halachic definition for Who is a Jew. With the recent passage of legislation ceding full state authority to the Rabbinate over conversion, the struggle over Who is a Jew appears all but over.

The point is that Israel is moving from "drift" to "accelerate" away from Zionism and its obligations and responsibilities to and for the Diaspora. And the reason is political expediency. Far easier and less expensive to provide Orthodox political parties with an anti-Zionist agenda largesse than to compromise with opposition secular Zionist parties and cede a measure of power. Not only does the arrangement result in protest among Israel’s secular majority seeing the minority benefit at their expense, but the Diaspora increasingly sees Israel increasingly distancing herself, becoming insular and unfriendly. No sooner had news of the government’s retreat from the Wall agreement; immediately following news regarding the government caving to Rabbinate authority over Who is a Jew the Rabbinate released its "Blacklist of the 160 rabbis”! Chutzpah encouraged by not just the present government capitulations, but decades previous. Except this time the Diaspora is pushing back: “Include me also on the black list” rabbis of all streams, including US Orthodox are challenging. The honor is the Diaspora denying Rabbinate authority over life outside Israel!

Israel is at a crossroads, Yishai. And it’s up to the state of the Jews to choose: religious intolerance and homeland for the intolerant; or secular Zionist and homeland to Klal Yisrael.

It's up to Israel alone to reestablish its connection to the Diaspora because it is from the state of the Jews and not from the Diaspora, that the provocation emanates! 

Monday, July 10, 2017

A Discussion between a Zionist and a Holocaust Denier

“As long as we’re playing with racism and stereotypes, where do Jews rank in the greed and power scale? Or the bad landlord scale? Or the cause of social inequality, war and exploitation of lesser people scale?” (Michael Santomauro)


In December, 2010, Marc Tracy wrote a review of Ruth Franklin’s novel Freedom which appeared in the on-line periodical, Tablet. The review inspired a lively exchange between readers, among whom was New York Holocaust Denier, Michael Santomauro. What follows is the unedited six-day exchange between the Denier and the Zionist.


What sort of TRUTH is it that crushes the freedom to seek the truth?

Folks,

The bottom line is that the Holocaust is claimed to be a historical event like the Civil War or the New Deal and therefore writing about it should be subject to the same standards of historiography.

When Franklin says of Primo Levi’s Auschwitz memoir that it ”underwent a process of fictionalization” she should have said that he decided to pack his rather mundane experience in the German concentration camp with a bunch of fantastic lies.

The same can be said about Elie Wiesel, who she says of his book ”Night” that its ”poetic austerity comes at the expense of literal truth”.

Not a single memoir of the Holocaust or as a matter of fact not a single historical study of the Holocaust by establishment historians can withstand the cross examinations of Revisionist historians.

If you doubt this remember what Wiesel said “some things that never happened are true and some things that happened are not true ”.

And one more thing:

I wish to express my outrage that the Holocaust, unlike any other historical event, is not subject to critical revisionist investigation. Furthermore, I deplore the fact that many so-called democratic states have laws that criminalize public doubting of the Holocaust. It is my position that the veracity of Holocaust assertions should be determined in the marketplace of scholarly discourse and not in our legislatures bodies and courthouses.

Let’s get rid of Holocaust denial laws in Israel and 16 other nations. That have been instituted in Israel in 1986 and for the other 16 nations since 1990. Decades after the event. Why?

What sort of Truth is it that crushes the freedom to seek the truth?


In defending the pursuit of historical veracity through what he describes as an unbiased inquiry into the Holocaust, Michael Santomauro fails to distinguish between Holocaust inquiry and Holocaust denial. The first is an effort to marshal available facts in service of creating as “objectively” as possible, a past event. The second is to select from the available facts and, where absent, to extrapolate “facts” in order to present a predetermined ideological outcome.
Holocaust Denial takes many forms, represents various purposes. Some use it as a form of schadenfreude, the joy of creating and seeing others suffer. Some use it as a defense of their religion from the obvious part that millennia of Christian anti-Judaism played as foundation and inspiration to the crime. But such representations are not “history,” are not valid historical enquiry. Their purpose is not to describe factually, but to promote or defend a political or social position. And this is polemic, not history.
There are many volumes relating the prehistory of the Holocaust, the event itself and its significance for the future with which I am in sharp disagreement. But I do not for that reason deny their authors the right to the study and presentation of their views. Nor are laws criminalizing Holocaust Denial or any other form of incitement against a minority directed at independent scholarship, even when the agenda is ideologically revisionist.
You reason well, Mike. But you confuse your facts with the Facts.


Dear David Turner,

The Holocaust narrative reads like a conspiracy not Holocaust Revisionism!

Preeminent Holocaust expert Raul Hilberg summarized his thesis in 1983 before an audience of nearly 2,700 at Avery Fischer Hall in New York City: the entire German policy for the physical destruction of the Jews was to be explained by mind reading! No document attesting to this criminal policy could be found, because no such document existed. For several years, the entire German bureaucratic machinery operated through a kind of telepathy. As Hilberg put it:
“But what began in 1941 was a process of destruction not planned in advance, not organized centrally by any agency. There was no blueprint and there was no budget for destructive measures. They [these measures] were taken step by step, one step at a time. Thus came about not so much a plan being carried out, but an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus — mind reading by a far-flung bureaucracy.”

Let us note again those final words: “an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus — mind reading by a far-flung bureaucracy.”

In his 1985 “revised and definitive” edition of his book, in it, the University of Vermont professor did not use the expression “consensus” or “mind reading.” And yet he wrote:

“In the final analysis, the destruction of the Jews was not so much a product of laws and commands as it was a matter of spirit, of shared comprehension, of consonance and synchronization.”

I refuse to believe that which is not believable. I refuse to believe in the incredible. I refuse to believe in what Hilberg himself calls “an incredible meeting of minds.” I refuse to believe in mind reading or telepathy, just as I refuse to believe in the intervention of the Holy Ghost or in spontaneous generation. I take exception to any historical thesis, any system of historical explanation, based on such hare-brained notions.



Well, Mike, whether or not there was a plan or blueprint, whether or not the bureaucrats from Himmler on down got the message via telepathy, the evidence of Buchenwald and Auschwitz remains; the roll of Jews previously resident of Germany and France and Holland and Romania and Poland who vanished during the course of the Holocaust is also evidence of the event. Your position is based on ideology, not fact. It’s a form of “wishful thinking,” perhaps not that the Jews whose fate you dismiss as fancy were indeed victims of the West’s “final,” if incomplete solution to their Jewish Problem, but perhaps the adolescent joy of discovery of a flaw, the missing blueprint, that can be exploited to demonstrate to self and other your own superior insight.

In point of fact, Hitler wrote multiple times of his desire to murder the Jews, to erase the entire people (of course he used terms like parasite, vermin and bacillus) from the planet at least as far back as writing Mein Kampf in his jail cell. Interviewed in that cell by Josef Hell he said, “Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews. As soon as I have the power to do so, I will have gallows built in rows – at the Marienplatz in Munich, for example – as many as traffic allows. Then the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately, and they will remain hanging until they stink; they will hang there as long as the principles of hygiene permit. As soon as they have been untied, the next batch will be strung up, and so on down the line, until the last Jew in Munich has been exterminated. Other cities will follow suit, precisely in this fashion, until all Germany has been completely cleansed of Jews.” Of course this was 1922, before he was elected chancellor, before such primitive and time-consuming instruments of murder as the gallows was replaced by the efficient dispatch of life and remains through the application of Hitler’s idol Henry Ford’s assembly line at Auschwitz.

The evidence, the material evidence remains there, Mike.

The one piece of “evidence” you, and others of your thinking hang on is that we have not yet uncovered the “blueprint.” As if Germany would have admitted in writing that it was murdering the Jews! And who needed a roadmap or order; the Holocaust was quite content to progress “intuitively,” the blueprint already laid out by the fuehrer decades earlier. Are the battle plans for a war written in advance? The carnage proceeds at its own pace, advantages recognized and exploited or not. There is never a definitive “blueprint,” just the intention expressed by leadership to march. Why should the War Against the Jews be judged differently?

Speaking before SS officers a Poznan, Poland in 1943, Himmler stated that for which no blueprint existed: “…we have never conversed about it amongst ourselves, never spoken about it… I am talking about the “Jewish evacuation”: the extermination of the Jewish people. It is one of those things that is easily said. “The Jewish people is being exterminated,” every Party member will tell you, “perfectly clear, it’s part of our plans, we’re eliminating the Jews, exterminating them, ha!, a small matter.”



Dear David Turner,

At the end of the Second World War, the Allies confiscated a tremendous quantity of German documents dealing with Germany’s wartime Jewish policy, which was sometimes referred to as the “final solution.” But not a single German document has ever been found that orders or even refers to an extermination program. To the contrary, the documents clearly show that the German ‘final solution’ policy was one of emigration and deportation, not extermination.

Moreover, there is no documentary evidence that Adolf Hitler ever gave an order to exterminate the Jews, or that he knew of any extermination program. Instead, the record shows that the German leader wanted the Jews to leave Europe, by emigration if possible and by deportation if necessary.

Contrary to the popular propaganda image, the wartime German authorities were concerned about the high death rate in the concentration camps due to disease, and took measures to prevent deaths among the inmates. From a directive dated December 28, 1942, from the head of the SS camp administration office to all the German concentration camps, including Auschwitz. It sharply criticized the high death rate of inmates due to disease, and ordered that “camp physicians must use all means at their disposal to significantly reduce the death rate in the various camps.” Furthermore, it ordered: “The camp doctors must supervise more often than in the past the nutrition of the prisoners and, in cooperation with the administration, submit improvement recommendations to the camp commandants …” Finally, the directive stressed, “The Reichsführer SS [Himmler] has ordered that the death rate absolutely must be reduced.”

At one time, it was seriously claimed that the Germans exterminated Jews with electricity and steam, and that they manufactured soap from Jewish corpses. At Nuremberg, the United States charged that the Germans killed Jews at Treblinka, not in gas chambers, as is now claimed, but by steaming them to death.

These bizarre stories have also been quietly abandoned in recent years.

In April 1990, Israeli historians conceded that the Germans did not manufacture bars of soap from the bodies of murdered Jews — contrary to what had been alleged for years in countless periodicals and supposedly authoritative history texts. If this story is not true, one might reasonably ask, how then did it ever get started? Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer had a ready answer. He charged that the Nazis invented it. In fact, this particular fable was first widely circulated in 1942 by the World Jewish Congress, and especially by its president, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise.

Peace.



I have already suggested, Michael, that I do not read your comments as from the more typical Holocaust Denial lunatic fringe. Indeed, you sound reasonable and well-educated… in the documents that serve your pursuit. Nor do I attack your right to pursue your studies as they affirm your beliefs. Nor do I reject most of the facts you marshal in defense of your thesis. The facts are generally correct, if not viewed within the actual process of the Holocaust. While there were beastly atrocities occurring in most ghettos, several were administered by officers whose approach seems out of sync with an outcome such as extermination. In fact the record of these more “humane” commandants was more concerned for preserving their wards as filling a labor shortage serving German war aims. Not exactly a humanitarian gesture. Von Braun likewise made efforts to keep his Jewish slaves alive as long as possible in pursuit of developing the super weapons that, had the war lasted a bit longer, might have ended the war differently. And then there might not be a Jew around today to respond to Deniers and Revisionists.

As far as the legend of Jews turned into soap goes, again your facts are OK, but context is, again, everything. Rabbi Weiss was an ocean away, subject to rumor no less than any person a continent away. The rumor of people into soap was actually born during the First World War when, if memory serves, the British and French used the lie as a propaganda instrument against the Germans. Considering the barbarism of the Holocaust, it is no stretch to suspect that the Germans were cleaning the stench of burned Jews with soap manufactured from their ashes.

Have you read my earlier quotes by Hitler in 1922, and Himmler in 1943? Himmler openly referred to the “secret” operation to “exterminate” the Jews: “The Jewish people is being exterminated, every Party member will tell you ‘perfectly clear,’ it’s part of our plans, we’re eliminating the Jews, EXTERMINATING THEM, ha!, a small matter.”



Dear David Turner,

Link for the speech in question:

Excerpt from intro:

Reading Himmler’s speech in its entirety, rather than the usual out-of-context quotations, results in a new level of understanding. Brief, out-of-context quotations have been used to support the orthodox Holocaust story since the end of the Second World War. For example, Lucy Dawidowicz cited the Himmler speech in her book, The War Against the Jews 1933-1945. She reproduced however only 197 of the more than 24,000 words and these with a translation which directly supports her thesis. Dawidowicz is not alone in the misleading use of the Posen speech. Gerald Reitlinger, in his volume, The Final Solution also quotes from the Posen speech. Reitlinger reproduces 205 of the 24,000 words.

Carlos Porter has also provided interesting insights in his translation of the various controversial terms used by Himmler: ausrotten, ausmerzen, umbringen and totschlagen. Besides his translation of these German terms, Porter shows that all of these terms are used multiple times during the speech and that each is used at least once in a figurative sense. The less suspicious phrases in which these terms are used are never quoted in the traditional literature.

Many of those who accept the orthodox version of the Holocaust story refuse to accept Porter’s translation of Ausrottung, and the other terms which are typically translated to mean extermination. Porter’s translation shows that there can be a benign interpretation of these words, especially when taken within the context of the entire speech.

In 1993, Robert Wolfe, supervisory archivist for captured German records at the National Archives admitted that a more precise translation of Ausrottung would be extirpation or tearing up by the roots. Wolfe also pointed out that in Himmler’s handwritten notes for the speech, that Himmler used the term, Judenevakuierung, or evacuation of the Jews, not killing.



Mike, as I said earlier, I recognize that, for whatever reason, you are a serious student of the mass murder of my people on the European sub-continent. Your observations are useful as a caution to myself regarding accepting one or another translation from a foreign language. I am certainly aware of the problem in discussing Christian scripture, although while the standard of precision we might prefer can never be achieved word for word, still intent can be approximated from context. In the case of Matthew, for example, “his blood on our heads, and those of our children (from memory, not from text)” may or not have translated exactly from the original Greek or Aramaic (we can only rely on multiple rewrites over the first fifteen hundred years even for the present texts, and you know how meaning changes the original from the whisper-circle experiments). But whether or not the words are accurate, the meaning in context is suggestive. And that, regarding the gospels and other “original” texts, has resulted in what one scholar estimates is the murder of one of every two Jews born in the past thousand years.

As regards the Himmler speech, I have read it in entirety and although some words may have multiple possible meanings, the context and intent none-the-less refers to the systematic elimination of all Jews whom his soldiers were able to get their hands on. Was this originally the plan, as his words imply or a progressive elimination of options leading to their disappearance? Does it matter? The fact is that between 1941 and 1945 roughly six million Jews ceased to exist.

You and I can quibble back and forth over ideas, something I find not without value. But we are not likely ever to agree. And the reason is that the Holocaust for you is a topic of interest, an intellectual challenge. For me the Holocaust is a stark reminder of how tenuous my existence is in Diaspora that has murdered Jews for two millennia.

The Holocaust was only the most recent attempt to solve the West’s Jewish Problem.



Dear David Turner,

Thank you for your input. In his 1988 book, Jewish Professor Arno Mayer calls for “excavations at the killing sites and in their immediate environs” to determine more about the gas chambers. In fact, such forensic studies have been made. The first was conducted in 1988 by American execution equipment consultant, Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. [note added July 10, 2017: a known Holocaust denier, Leuchter’s “evidence” was part of David Irving’s failed defense in the libel case, Irving V Lipstadt, 2000] He carried out an on-site forensic examination of the alleged gas chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek to determine if they could have been used to kill people as claimed. After a careful study of the alleged killing facilities, Leuchter concluded that the sites were not used, and could not have been used, as homicidal gas chambers. Furthermore, an analysis of samples taken by Leuchter from the walls and floors of the alleged gas chambers showed either no or minuscule traces of cyanide compound, from the active ingredient of Zyklon B, the pesticide allegedly used to murder Jews at Auschwitz.

A confidential forensic examination (and subsequent report) commissioned by the Auschwitz State Museum and conducted by Institute of Forensic Research in Krakow has confirmed Leuchter’s finding that minimal or no traces of cyanide compound can be found in the sites alleged to have been gas chambers.

The significance of this is evident when the results of the forensic examination of the alleged homicidal gas chambers are compared with the results of the examination of the Auschwitz disinfestation facilities, where Zyklon B was used to delouse mattresses and clothing. Whereas no or only trace amounts of cyanide were found in the alleged homicidal gas chambers, massive traces of cyanide were found in the walls and floor in the camp’s disinfestation gas chambers.



An aside to another responder:

David Turner says:

Thank you, Leucippe. What appears above is a debate between two persons with opposite expressions (I cannot speak for Mr. Santomauro’s motives) of an issue important, perhaps central to Jewish identity and future survival. I hope it helped clarify both sides of the issue for others not that familiar with the challenge to the reality of the Holocaust, the denial by some that the event ever occurred; or if it did, was greatly exaggerated, manipulated by the Jews for some purpose or other. Shades of the Protocols!

This is not the place to challenge Holocaust Denial; it takes many forms and reflects a range of motives from an effort to defend Christianity as inspiration and precedent, to the obvious provocation of the open antisemite. Neither is to be taken seriously as both, whether through subtlety born of self-deception, or willful polemic, fall well outside universally accepted norms of historical discussion. My debate with Santomauro above, his references to a missing “smoking gun,” the absence of a document by Hitler “ordering” or providing a “blueprint” for the Holocaust, while ignoring the existing record of writings, speeches and interviews precisely stating Hitler’s intentions, for example his 1922 jail cell interview, “Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews!”; or Himmler’s 1943 Poznan speech to his SS officers, “every Party member will tell you, we’re eliminating the Jews, exterminating them. Ha, a small matter!”

As regards the Himmler speech Mr. Santomauro tried blurring it’s obvious meaning through the subterfuge of mistranslation. Of course the speech was a translation, and of course individual words can be translated slightly differently. But the meaning comes through not by the weight of its individual words, but by its context. And by context Himmler’s meaning is as clear in 1943 as was Hitler’s in 1922.



Sorry Mike, raising the Zyklon B issue demeans, not promotes your efforts. The means of murder are, at best, a side issue. In fact later studies demonstrated that the results you refer to were, to be generous, in error. But again, this is a bogus issue. You fail to convince based on arguing from texts, and fail also by this detour.

Where previously I reserved judgment on your motives, perhaps a misguided history buff who joyfully “discovered” what he felt a flaw in historical process, you now emerge from the closet fully regaled. What is it about provoking Jews that motivates you? Is it the effort at getting a rise from us, or just the reaching out of the lonely among others, striving for identity and affirmation?



Dear David Turner,  
As I stated before:

“I refuse to believe that which is not believable. I refuse to believe in the incredible. I refuse to believe in what Hilberg himself calls “an incredible meeting of minds.” I refuse to believe in mind reading or telepathy, just as I refuse to believe in the intervention of the Holy Ghost or in spontaneous generation. I take exception to any historical thesis, any system of historical explanation, based on such hare-brained notions.”

Peace.



So why is the Holocaust the object of your disbelief? Why are we Jews so important in your life?




Dear David Turner,

Thank you for asking the question.

Most of us are mentally trapped to think Jewish. Actually, it is safe to say that virtually every mainstream publication or or other type of media organ is “nothing more than a screen to present chosen views.” The great battle over the last century has been a battle for the mind of the Western peoples, i.e., non-Jewish Euros. The chosen won it by acquiring control over essentially the complete mainstream news, information, education and entertainment media of every type, and using that control to infuse and disseminate their message, agenda and worldview, their way of thinking, or rather the way they want us to think. Since at least the 1960s this campaign has been effectively complete. Since then they have shaped and controlled the minds of all but a seeming few of us in varying degree with almost no opposition or competition from any alternative worldview. So now most of us are mentally trapped in the box the chosen have made for us, which we have lived in all our lives. Only a few have managed to avoid it or escape it, or to even sometimes see outside of it, and so actually “think outside of the (Jewish) box.”

The Holocaust is often treated with reverence, and as a central event of world history. For many Jews, says Rabbi Michael Goldberg, a Jewish author and religious leader, the “veneration” of the Holocaust has become a new religion. “And as with any organized church,” he adds, “this Holocaust cult has its own tenets of faith, rites, and shrines.”

Two well-known Jewish writers, Seymour Lipset and Earl Raab, pointed out in their 1995 book, Jews and the New American Scene:

“During the last three decades Jews [in the United States] have made up 50 percent of the top two hundred intellectuals… 20 percent of professors at the leading universities … 40 percent of partners in the leading law firms in New York and Washington … 59 percent of the directors, writers and producers.

This intimidating power is not a new phenomenon but has long been an important factor in American life. In 1972, during a private White House meeting, President Richard Nixon and the Rev. Billy Graham spoke frankly about the Jewish grip on the media. “This stranglehold has got to be broken or the country’s going down the drain,” said Graham, the nation’s best-known Christian evangelist. “You believe that?,” Nixon responded. “Yes, sir,” said Graham. “Oh, boy,” replied Nixon. “So do I. I can’t ever say that, but I believe it.”

In 1978, Jewish American scholar Alfred M. Lilienthal wrote in his detailed study, The Zionist Connection:

“How has the Zionist will been imposed on the American people?… It is the Jewish connection, the tribal solidarity among themselves and the amazing pull on non-Jews, that has molded this unprecedented power … The Jewish connection covers all areas and reaches every level. Most Americans may not even sense this gigantic effort, but there is scarcely a Jew who is not touched by its tentacles.”

To sum up: Jews wield immense power and influence in the United States. The “Jewish lobby” is a decisive factor in US support for Israel. Jewish-Zionist interests are not identical to American interests. In fact, they often conflict.

As long as the “very powerful” Jewish lobby remains entrenched, there will be no end to the Jewish-Zionist domination of the US political system and the American media, the Zionist oppression of Palestinians, the Israeli threat to peace, and the bloody conflict between Jews and non-Jews in the Middle East.



Well, Mike, you’ve redeemed yourself in my mind. For a moment I thought you were quitting with that Zyklon B addendum. I appreciate you coming completely out of the closet, putting aside the non-issue of freedom of speech, since your repeated appearance in this vehicle of the (for real) Jewish media certainly provides even you a forum to air your decidedly from the start anti-Jewish point of view. You quote freely from Jewish sources to “prove” your point but, if you don’t mind my saying, you cherry pick and distort by your selections. Wiesel, who admitted the nightmare too unimaginable to present as anything than in a fictive form certainly was not saying, as you would have it, that the Holocaust was a creation of imagination. Likewise that since no specific order or blueprint has yet been discovered, that the process by which the Holocaust unfolded was as if by telepathy. Again, the closest document I, for one, am aware of was the Himmler Poznan speech, which you choose to nit-pick the translation to suit your purposes but, I suggest, any unbiased reader in the German or English translation, would have little difficulty understanding as a full admission that Germany from Hitler on down was fully aware of the program as full and systematic eradication of Jewish existence, if possible.

The one piece of evidence for a “Jewish Conspiracy” that you do point at, relating to Jewish achievement in the United States again, to the eyes of a dispassionate non-Jew might evoke envy but, since the majority of graduates from the universities are non-Jews, and the institutions themselves, and particularly the “ivy leagues” are or were originally Christian in origin; well, I agree, in the 200 years since our “emancipation” Jews have proportionately contributed more artists, scientists, professors, and overall Nobel laureates than the general public, in all lands of the Diaspora. In fact, it has been assumed that had Germany not destroyed their Jews they would have won the war.




Dear David Turner,

Remember the New York magazine cover story: “The Jewish Brain: Are Jew’s smarter?”


Oct. 19, 2005

Re: Are Jews Smarter?

Dear Ms. Senior:

Why is it okay for white Jews (Ashkenazim) to sub-divide themselves from the Sephardic lower IQ? (Forty-five percent of Israel’s population has the Sephardic IQ of 88.)

And it is not okay for other White ethnics to be able to do the same when reporting IQ scores? For example, at the very minimum, it would show Northern and Western Europeans to be comparable if not slightly higher than the Jewish-white IQ, when you eliminate the Eastern European IQ. In some categories the European-White IQ is way higher, such as in spatial reasoning, even for all White ethnics including the Eastern European. This is rarely reported in the mass media. I wonder why? It reminds me of a joke from the Jewish comedian David Steinberg, who is married to an Italian-Catholic: “Whenever I go to family gatherings, the Jewish side breaks things, and the Italian side fixes them!”

In folk psychology and folk sociology, when it comes to E. Q., even my Jewish supremacist acquaintances and friends will think they have been culturally short changed, thinking of themselves as an unhappy lot.

In aesthetics Jews “seem” to have an inferiority complex when it comes to physical aptitude, which I have argued with my Jewish friends, is absolutely uncalled for! For instance, in “folk talk,” my Jewish girlfriends believe what is often said (even by Bobby Fischer) about Jewish men in the “below the belt” department, that they have been short-changed from all that inbreeding.

And what about Jewish women? Again, referring to David Steinberg’s promulgation of the joke: “What moves more Jell-O or Jewish women in bed”. The rate of Jewish men running away to marry “shiksa’s” for the under 35 age category is as high as 35-50%, depending on which data you want to embrace.

Are we to make a correlation from any of this?

The point being, it is hard to define what is a “Jewish brain” in the secular world. You mention the high percentage of Jewish Nobel Prize winners since its inception in 1901, yet about two-thirds of the Jewish winners come from inter-faith/inter-ethnic backgrounds. For centuries before 1901, the portion of Jewish contributions to the high sciences is almost void.

To refer to chess master Bobby Fischer (another one of those 1/2 Jews), is slanderous to Jews. Your readers should be aware that he hates Jews with a fervent passion, and blames virtually any bad that is happening in the world on organized Jewry.

You wrote: “Of course, there’s another side to this shining coin. Jewish cleverness has also been an enduring feature of anti-Semitic paranoia.”

The implication here for your readers misunderstanding is that anti-Semitism is the result of Jewish intellect. Historically it has been as a result of resource competition, belief in a moral and intellectual superiority and a fierce policy of non assimilation with the host countries which initially offered you admittance with friendliness. Anti-Semitism is not in any way a mental illness.

Western Civilization is a European-white accomplishment and Judaism has always been an appendage. Not the other way around.

We are a better world today because Western Civilization took the road to Athens over the road to Jerusalem.

If we had a proper scientific study involving IQ tests that are not skewed to fit one group in particular (by, for example, including musical intelligence tests that are currently excluded because some people “don’t believe in” musical intelligence) then all this Jewish intellectual narcissism would disappear up its own arsehole. Which is precisely why we will never see such a thing, for it would be truly “anti-Semitic”.

As long as we’re playing with racism and stereotypes, where do Jews rank in the greed and power scale? Or the bad landlord scale? Or the cause of social inequality, war and exploitation of lesser people scale?

One last thing, it’s too much of a reach to think that Charlemagne “lured” Jews there to lend money. Give me a break!
Peace.



Apparently you sent me this latest in response to my observation regarding the contribution of Jews to Western society over the past century or so. I did not mean to offend or threaten; in fact mine was only an observation in response to your earlier comments. But again your facts appear, as earlier, strongly colored by your ideology. I am not aware that the skew towards Jewish recipients of the Nobel were progeny of mixed marriages. And what if they were, that still would not explain why the far superior Aryan genes contributing to their talents would not be even more powerfully expressed in marriages between two Aryans?

You ask, “Why is it okay for white Jews (Ashkenazim) to sub-divide themselves from the Sephardic lower IQ? (Forty-five percent of Israel’s population has the Sephardic IQ of 88.)”

While I agree that among the ultraorthodox in Israel there is a tendency for the two groups to maintain separate communities, this is a cultural artifact reflecting their unique histories, not the superiority or bigotry you assert. And as to that reference to “the Sephardic IQ of 88,” once again, Mike, either you, or your source, is confabulating. And don’t take this wrong, I don’t mean to provoke yet another response regarding Aryan intellectual superiority, but Israelis are a world leader in technological innovation from health care to computers. And I suspect that does not result from a population where “Forty-five percent of Israel’s population has the Sephardic IQ of 88.´Unless, of course, you mean that the other 55% of Israelis are so intelligent as to… But I suspect that is not your conclusion.

And finally, Mike, you truly achieved a new low in referring to Jewish women. “What moves more Jell-O or Jewish women in bed”. Of course, as always, you are quoting a Jew, this time a comedian. And, as usual, out of context (we Jews are known to use ourselves as the butt of our jokes). But even here your biases confuse your conclusions. If Jewish women are such active partners, why would “[the] rate of Jewish men running away to marry “shiksa’s” for the under 35 age category [be] as high as 35-50%”? Again, I question your statistics. But your conclusions…


Mike, this all began as you protesting that somehow the “Jewish press” controls the freedom of you and others to explore and express your beliefs. That Tablet, a Jewish journal, has provided you a forum to express yourself from your historical opinions on such anti-Jewish issues as Holocaust Denial, Aryan superiority, and defamation of Jewish womanhood is clear evidence that paranoia, while sometimes justified, fails this particular test.