Revisionist Clarion : the blog

His Last Statement Before Verdict and Imprisonment on 25 Feb. 2009

Translated from the German by J M Damon

I am sending this at the last moment. After this I shall no longer have opportunity to address the public, so I am using this opportunity to briefly explain once more what is really at stake here. I am now being sentenced and I shall be imprisoned immediately.

Many of my supporters disapprove of what I have done. They ask me: “Why are you doing this?” {As part of the growing civil disobedience movement in Germany, Mahler had filed charges against himself for “Holocaust Denial.”} Some of my supporters point out that I would be more effective on the outside than the inside of prison. They say the government will now put me away and no benefit will come from it. I explain to them that they are considering the matter from the wrong point of view.

The most important issue is no longer the fact that the present regime has taken away our right of free speech! This state has always had the power to do that, in any number of ways, regardless of whether one is expressing an opinion. Something greater than the right to utter dissident remarks is at stake here.

If one realizes, as I do, that the “Holocaust” Religion is the principal weapon for the moral and cultural destruction of the German nation, then it is clear that what is at stake here is nothing less than the collective right of self-defense, that is, Germany’s right to survive.

Survival affects everyone!

Does the world really believe that we Germans will unresistingly allow ourselves to be destroyed as a Volk, that we will passively allow our national spirit to be extinguished without a struggle?

What kind of jurists argue that self-defense is a criminal act? As a Volk and a living collective entity we have a national and a spiritual nature. The surest way to extinguish Germany as a spiritual entity is to destroy our national soul and identity, so that we no longer know who or what we are.

Destroying our national spirit is precisely the intent of our enemy in demanding that we unquestioningly accept his alien “Holocaust” dogma and desist from pointing out that his fantastic “Holocaust” never happened.

There is no evidence of it! Once we realize that we are faced with the threat of annihilation, we no longer have doubts about who our enemy is: it is the ancient murderer of nations. Once we realize this, we no longer passively listen to the enemy’s lies and misrepresentations.

We look for a weapon and a way protect our Germany, to deprive the enemy of the power he has over us. Lo and behold, we have the only weapon we need to protect ourselves from annihilation. We have he truth. “The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth!”

A rather unusual aspect of my life history is that I entered politics from the left of the political spectrum, by way of the Red Army Faction (RAF). {Mahler’s critics never tire of stressing this political transition, although the definitions of “left” and “right” have changed drastically in the last twenty-five years. These critics would do well to consider Ralph Waldo Emerson’s aphorism “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” A wise man learns new things as he goes through life and changes his ideas accordingly.}

Briefly stated, the RAF took the path of armed struggle against “the System” as it was called in those days. The idea that motivated us to take the path of armed struggle was our belief in “Holocaust.” We actually believed what “the System” had taught us in school and what was constantly proclaimed in the enemy-controlled media.  Like others in the RAF, I believed this anti German propaganda. As the American culture bringers say, “I bought it.” I truly believed it as I sought a way to break out of the unbearable guilt complex associated with the “murder of six million Jews.” I cannot go into the details of this period of my life here — the point to be made is that I was a “true believer” in “Holocaust” when I was young.

In 2001, in the course of my career as attorney, I was asked to defend a musical patriot. This was the singer Frank Rennicke, who had been convicted and sentenced in the lower courts for “Holocaust Denial.” My response to his request was: “Of course I will defend you!” The task of defending Frank made it necessary for me to investigate all the facts, evidence and allegations connected with “Holocaust.” This is what my investigations revealed:

There is no supporting evidence for the fantastic allegations of “Holocaust!” There are only proclamations released by the victors’ tribunal at Nuremberg to the effect that such an event occurred and was sufficiently “investigated.” With his proverbial chutzpah our enemy tells us: “No other event in all history has been as thoroughly investigated as ‘Holocaust.’” [The same chutzpah leads the enemy to claim that the huge amounts of insecticide Germany used to protect the health of internees during World War II were used to murder Jews!]

If we examine the actual facts, we discover that it is all a lie. It is atrocity propaganda that is still being disseminated, 65 years after Germany’s defeat. When the servile Bundesgericht (German High Court) declares that a thousand “eyewitnesses” support the “proven event,” it is another bald-faced lie! 

Our so-called Bundesgericht (High Court) understands perfectly well that our so-called Bundesrepublik (Federal Republic) is not a sovereign state and therefore not a legitimate government. Prof. Carlo Schmid, the internationally recognized expert on international law and author of our Grundgesetz (Basic Law), stated clearly that the Federal Republic is not a valid state. In a speech he gave on the occasion of its creation in 1949, he specifically describes it as an “Organisationsform einer Modalität der Fremdherrschaft” (Organizational Form of a Modality of Foreign Rule), that is to say, a vehicle for domination by our enemies.

Prof. Schmid invented composed this diplomatic expression to avoid using the term “puppet government.” Our Basic Law was not written by a convention of elected representatives and it was not approved by plebiscite. Enemy occupiers imposed it on us and it does not meet the prerequisites for a legitimate state. Since the Federal Republic is not a legitimate state, the institutions and stipulations that our enemiues forced upon us are likewise not legitimate under international law.

It is clear that the victors or victor of World War II (the only real victor was world Jewry) took great pains to assure that the basis for Jewish domination, namely the religious cult of “Holocaust,” would be legalistically unassailable. This was their intent when they created the Federal Republic, and it is clear that the High Court long ago adopted a judicature designed to perpetuate “Holocaust.” The mission to protect “Holocaust” lies at the heart of both the Federal Republic and the Basic Law. This is the basis of Germany’s domination by its enemies.

Germany’s foreign minister Joschka Fischer explained this very clearly when he referred to “Holocaust” and sponsorship of Israel as the raison d’etre of the Federal Republic. What is happening now is nothing other than the destruction of the moral foundation of our Volk through genocidal assault on our national soul. There is nothing surprising about this. We would have to consider our enemies really stupid, especially our most powerful and dangerous enemy, if he did not take decisive measures to maintain domination over us.

Our enemies did not launch World War II against us in order to abandon their war aims after the inevitable victory of their overpowering resources of numbers and materiel. They went to great lengths to avoid giving us the possibility of exonerating ourselves ourselves from the Great Lie through authentic trials conducted by a professional and independent judiciary. Our greatest enemy is not stupid!

He took painstaking precautions, and he is all too familiar with elaborate methods to assure compliance with his peculiar brand of “justice.” No one who perceives that our enemy is still perpetrating genocide against us as part of his war aims can expect a German to obey the proscription against questioning “Holocaust..” No one can expect that a German who wants to be German will not object to this assault against our nation. This assault is nothing less than cultural genocide, and it threatens us all.

If possible, I ask you to dare to imagine what necessarily follows from this, if it is really the case. What a wretched excuse for a human being I would be if I, knowing of this threat to our nation in all its implications, would keep quiet and sink back in my easy chair and just wait for the day when the truth would come to light of its own accord! Every German has an obligation to do his duty to the Fatherland! We have a right and sacred to defend ourselves, to preserve our nation and our Volk!

In every civilized country, there is a legal obligation to come to the aid of those who are in danger. In fact, the law prescribes punishments for those who fail to render aid. Failure to assist and render aid is a serious violation of law; it constitutes a corpus delicti in itself. I would be guilty of a serious crime if I failed to render aid to my Volk – if I kept quiet and failed to come to its aid, knowing that the monstrous fraud called “Holocaust” did not really occur. In that case, I would be a truly depraved criminal!.

In the present situation, it would be pointless for me to plod along and attempt to gain a majority in this or that political party, or to found a new and independent party that would somehow make its way through our corrupt and labyrinthine parliament to repeal genocidal anti-German laws. Working alone, my only course of action is to continue doing what I have done. Relying on myself alone, I can do nothing except repeat the truth over and over again.

I have sworn a sacred oath that can be read on the Internet, our only source of uncensored information, that I will never desist from repeating this truth:  “Holocaust” is a lie, and so is the claim that it has been “proven.” There is no supporting evidence. In his undaunted defense of the Christian faith, the traditionalist Bishop Richard Williamson recently stated the same truth that I discovered long ago.

In the Rennicke case I was professionally obligated to investigate the evidence of “Holocaust” and it turned out that no such evidence exists. After reviewing several similar trials, we were able to produce a letter written by a professor of contemporary history, Prof. Gerhard Jagschitz of Vienna, whose research had also led to the conclusion that there is no evidence to support “Holocaust.” When I contacted him he said: “Yes, of course, we already know that.” Prof. Jagschitz had been commissioned by the court as an expert witness to determine whether “Holocaust” is “manifestly obvious” as an actual event of contemporary history. He spent three years researching all the available literature concerning “Holocaust” in order to determine the actual truth.

After these three years he informed the court that he could no longer defend his original assumption in support of the validity of “Holocaust.” He arrived at the emphatic conclusion that, within the guidelines of a society of laws, it is not permissible to use the “manifest self-evidence” of “Holocaust” as a basis for sentencing those found guilty of questioning it. In those days it was Prof. Jagschitz and now it is Bishop Williamson, and soon there will be many other prominent persons who arrive at this same conclusion.

Self-defense is an inalienable right.

As a German who wants to be German I am personally affected by this assault against my Volk.  The German nation is not only entitled to defend itself, it is in fact obligated to defend itself. Because of our cultural substance, we as a nation in central Europe have the duty and obligation to resist attempts to destroy us culturally, to annihilate us as a Volk and a spiritual entity. This is what is at stake!

I do not choose to wait for others to defend the German nation – I choose to do it myself! I am telling the truth as I perceive it, and the truth is that the so-called “Holocaust” never happened. That is the obvious reason why there is no evidence of it! There is nothing to support “Holocaust” except the verdicts of Moscow type show trials. These verdicts are constantly hammered into our heads by the Jewish media as “proof” that “Holocaust” was real and that there is an abundance of evidence to support it.

Those who enforces and perpetuate this blood libel is guilty of treason against the German nation. Most notorious among these traitors are the judges of the High Court, who sanctify and reinforce the decisions of the lower courts concerning the absurd “manifest obviousness” of “Holocaust.” This is worse than merely perverting justice — it is carrying out deliberate genocide against the German people. I have proven the guilt of the robed traitors in Karlsruhe numerous times and I shall continue to stress this even while in prison.

I am facing twelve years’ imprisonment. How willl it all end? I am 73 years old, and so this is a life sentence for me. My sentence proves that in Germany today, life imprisonment can be imposed for anyone who refuses do obeisance to the Great Lie. The Jews, of course, are always willing to “bargain.”

First the dissident is lightly punished, perhaps with just a fine. Or there can be a prison sentence of just a few months, which can be probated. One always has a chance of getting off easily by kowtowing to the Great Lie and giving assurances that there will be no more difficulties in future. This is precisely what the enemy wants.

Anyone who is convinced that life under the Great Lie is not worth living must be kept behind bars forever. Since I have openly expressed this sentiment countless times, knowing full well that the cudgel would fall, the enemy will most assuredly keep me in prison for the rest of my life. The enemy must demonstrate to the cowed public what is really at stake here!

Obviously we Germans are now in a situation in which we must rot away our entire lives if we do not submit to the Great Lie. Whatever happens to me – I can only say, as our Savior says in the Evangel of St. Matthew: “Whoever is not willing to take up his cross is not worthy of me!” We are not worthy to call ourselves Germans if we do not stand up for the truth, but unresistingly submit to the Great Lie! 

However, I am confident that Germany’s historic plight is about to change. The struggle over the authenticity of “Holocaust” and dominance of “Holocaust” dogma is now raging within the Catholic Church. The Church is still a great power, even though its leadership has been corrupted and undermined by the Jews. With its great wealth and hundreds of millions of faithful followers, the Church is the rock on which the ship of the Great Lie will crash and perish. 

The Jews are about to experience their Waterloo. Once “Holocaust” is openly discussed, knowledge of its true nature can no longer be suppressed. When the Bishop Williamson affair reaches the point at which a sitting pope is forced to again excommunicate him, as the head of ADL (Anti Defamation League: the fighting organization of world Jewry) demands; or if, under pressure of the Jewish media and corrupt politicians, Pope Benedict XVI abdicates the Throne of Peter, this will be an excruciating shock for the Catholic world, and the truth will break through on this account!

Christian faith is based on the Truth, the Rock of Ages. The Truth will make us free and the will to be free will grow stronger until it is irresistible, and then we will prevail.

As for me, I have done everything I could do. I have set an example. I have often said that ours is the easiest revolution that was ever carried out.

We need only for a few thousand persons to rise up and speak the truth as clearly and openly as Bishop Williamson has done and I have attempted to do, along with the others who have filed legal complaints against themselves for telling the truth and distributing Germar Rudolf’s “Lectures on the Holocaust.”

The ultimate victory of the truth is inevitable, as is the defeat of the global Zionist Empire. However, we have no way of knowing how much more time must pass, or the exact circumstances that will usher in the victory of the truth. We have to wait and see.

At present we are witnessing another collapse of the global Jewish financial system. The Jewish power base, the temple of their god Jahweh–Mammon, has been struck in the heart by the collapse of their predatory banking system. Jewish power is based on money power, which buys them control of the politicians and media. At present they are losing this money power.

Once they lose it, they also lose control of government and public opinion. Their control of public opinion has already been weakened by the rise of the uncensored Internet, which they are unable suppress. When they lose control of the media, they will be in a pitiable condition indeed!

When that happens, the Jews will be grateful that we understand and accept their historic role in world redemption. We recognize their destructive tyranny as a revelation of the path of God through the world to Himself, as the philosopher Hegel explained. We respect the Jews as the followers of Satan and we accept them in the certainty that we can redeem them as well as ourselves, by bringing the Truth into the world through our deeds. The Jews are in dire need of redemption, and they will one day be grateful to us!

Breaking the Taboo on Israel’s Spying Efforts on the United States

 By Christopher Ketcham

AlterNet. Posted March 10, 2009.

 Israel runs one of the most aggressive and damaging espionage networks targeting the U.S., yet public discussion about it is almost nil

 Scratch a counterintelligence officer in the U.S. government and they’ll tell you that Israel is not a friend to the United States.

This is because Israel runs one of the most aggressive and damaging espionage networks targeting the U.S..  The fact of Israeli penetration into the country is not a subject oft-discussed in the media or in the circles of governance, due to the extreme sensitivity of the U.S.-Israel relationship coupled with the burden of the Israel lobby, which punishes legislators who dare to criticize the Jewish state. The void where the facts should sit is filled instead with the hallucinations of conspiracy theory — the kind in which, for example, agents of the Mossad, Israel’s top intelligence agency, engineer the 9/11 attacks, while 4,000 Israelis in the Twin Towers somehow all get word to escape before the planes hit. The effect, as disturbing as it is ironic, is that the less the truth is addressed, the more noxious the falsity that spreads.

Israel’s spying on the U.S., however, is a matter of public record, and neither conspiracy nor theory is needed to present the evidence. When the FBI produces its annual report to Congress concerning “Foreign Economic Collection and Industrial Espionage,” Israel and its intelligence services often feature prominently as a threat second only to China. In 2005 the FBI noted, for example, that Israel maintains “an active program to gather proprietary information within the United States.” A key Israeli method, said the FBI report, is computer intrusion. In 1996, the Defense Intelligence Service, a branch of the Pentagon, issued a warning that “the collection of scientific intelligence in the United States [is] the third highest priority of Israeli Intelligence after information on its Arab neighbors and information on secret U.S. policies or decisions relating to Israel.” In 1979, the Central Intelligence Agency produced a scathing survey of Israeli intelligence activities that targeted the U.S. government. Like any worthy spy service, Israeli intelligence early on employed wiretaps as an effective tool, according to the CIA report. In 1954, the U.S. Ambassador in Tel Aviv discovered in his office a hidden microphone “planted by the Israelis,” and two years later telephone taps were found in the residence of the U.S. military attaché. In a telegram to Washington, the ambassador at the time cabled a warning: “Department must assume that all conversations [in] my office are known to the Israelis.” The former ambassador to Qatar, Andrew Killgore, who also served as a foreign officer in Jerusalem and Beirut, told me Israeli taps of U.S. missions and embassies in the Middle East were part of a “standard operating procedure.”

According to the 1979 CIA report, the Israelis, while targeting political secrets, also devote “a considerable portion of their covert operations to obtaining scientific and technical intelligence.” These operations involved, among other machinations, “attempts to penetrate certain classified defense projects in the United States.” The penetrations, according to the CIA report, were effected using “deep cover enterprises,” which the report described as “firms and organizations, some specifically created for, or adaptable to, a specific objective.” At the time, the CIA singled out government-subsidized companies such as El Al airlines and Zim, the Israeli shipping firm, as deep cover enterprises. Other deep cover operations included the penetration of a U.S. company that provided weapons-grade uranium to the Department of Defense during the 1960s; Israeli agents eventually spirited home an estimated 200 pounds of uranium as the bulwark in Israel’s secret nuclear weapons program. Moles have burrowed on Israel’s behalf throughout the U.S. intelligence services. Perhaps most infamous was the case of Jonathan Pollard, a Jewish-American employed as a civilian analyst with the U.S. Navy who purloined an estimated 800,000 code-word protected documents from inside the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and numerous other U.S. agencies. While Pollard was sentenced to life in prison, counterintelligence investigators at the FBI suspected he was linked to a mole far higher in the food chain, ensconced somewhere in the DIA, but this suspected Israeli operative, nicknamed “Mr. X,” was never found. Following the embarrassment of the Pollard affair — and its devastating effects on U.S. national security, as testified by then Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger (who allegedly stated that Pollard “should have been shot”) — the Israeli government vowed never again to pursue espionage against its ally and chief benefactor.

Fast-forward a quarter century, and the vow has proven empty. In 2004, the authoritative Jane’s Intelligence Group noted that Israel’s intelligence organizations “have been spying on the U.S. and running clandestine operations since Israel was established.” The former deputy director of counterintelligence at FBI, Harry B. Brandon, last year told Congressional Quarterly magazine that “the Israelis are interested in commercial as much as military secrets. They have a muscular technology sector themselves.” According to CQ, “One effective espionage tool is forming joint partnerships with U.S. companies to supply software and other technology products to U.S. government agencies.”

Best-selling author James Bamford now adds another twist in this history of infiltration in a book published last October, The Shadow Factory, which forms the latest installment in his trilogy of investigations into the super-secret National Security Agency. Bamford is regarded among journalists and intelligence officers as the nation’s expert on the workings of the NSA, whose inner sanctums he first exposed to the public in 1982. (So precise is his reporting that NSA officers once threw him a book party, despite the fact that he continually reveals their secrets.) The agency has come a long way in the half-century since its founding in 1952. Armed with digital technology and handed vast new funding and an almost limitless mandate in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Bamford writes, the NSA has today “become the largest, most costly, and most technologically sophisticated spy organization the world has ever known.” The NSA touches on every facet of U.S. communications, its mega-computers secretly filtering “millions of phone calls and e-mails” every hour of operation.  For those who have followed the revelations of the NSA’s “warrantless wiretapping” program in the New York Times in 2005 and the Wall Street Journal last year, what Bamford unveils in The Shadow Factory is only confirmation of the worst fears: “There is now the capacity,” he writes of the NSA’s tentacular reach into the private lives of Americans, “to make tyranny total.”

Much less has been reported about the high-tech Israeli wiretapping firms that service U.S. telecommunications companies, primarily AT&T and Verizon, whose networks serve as the chief conduits for NSA surveillance.  Even less is known about the links between those Israeli companies and the Israeli intelligence services.  But what Bamford suggests in his book accords with the history of Israeli spying in the U.S.: Through joint partnerships with U.S. telecoms, Israel may be a shadow arm of surveillance among the tentacles of the NSA.  In other words, when the NSA violates constitutional protections against unlawful search and seizure to vacuum up the contents of your telephone conversations and e-mail traffic, the Israeli intelligence services may be gathering it up too — a kind of mirror tap that is effectively a two-government-in-one violation.

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On its face, the overseas outsourcing of high-tech services would seem de rigueur in a competitive globalized marketplace.  Equipment and services from Israel’s telecom sector are among the country’s prime exports, courtesy of Israeli entrepreneurs who have helped pioneer wireless telephony, voicemail and voice recognition software, instant messaging, phone billing software, and, not least, “communications interception solutions.”  Israeli telecom interception hardware and software is appraised as some of the best in the world.

By the mid-1990s, Israeli wiretap firms would arrive in the U.S. in a big way. The key to the kingdom was the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which was Congress’ solution for wiretapping in the digital age. Gone are the days when wiretaps were conducted through on-site tinkering with copper switches. CALEA mandated that telephonic surveillance operate through computers linked directly into the routers and hubs of telecom companies — a spyware apparatus matched in real-time, all the time, to American telephones and modems. CALEA effectively made spy equipment an inextricable ligature in telephonic life. Without CALEA, the NSA in its spectacular surveillance exploits could not have succeeded.

AT&T and Verizon, which together manage as much as 90 percent of the nation’s communications traffic, contracted with Israeli firms in order to comply with CALEA. AT&T employed the services of Narus Inc., which was founded in Israel in 1997. It was Narus technology that AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein, a 22-year technician with the company, famously unveiled in a 2006 affidavit that described the operations in AT&T’s secret tapping room at its San Francisco facilities. (Klein’s affidavit formed the gravamen of a lawsuit against AT&T mounted by the Electronic Freedom Foundation, but the lawsuit died when Congress passed the telecom immunity bill last year.) According to Klein, the Narus supercomputer, the STA 6400, was “known to be used particularly by government intelligence agencies because of its ability to sift through large amounts of data looking for preprogrammed targets.” The Narus system, which was maintained by Narus technicans, also provided a real-time mirror image of all data streaming through AT&T routers, an image to be rerouted into the computers of the NSA.

According to Jim Bamford, who cites knowledgeable sources, Verizon’s eavesdropping program is run by a competing Israeli firm called Verint, a subsidiary of Comverse Technology, which was founded by a former Israeli intelligence officer in 1984.  Incorporated in New York and Tel Aviv, Comverse is effectively an arm of the Israeli government: 50 percent of its R&D costs are reimbursed by the Israeli Ministry of Industry and Trade.  The Verint technology deployed throughout Verizon’s network, known as STAR-GATE, boasts an array of Orwellian capabilities. “With STAR-GATE, service providers can access communications on virtually any type of network,” according to the company’s literature. “Designed to manage vast numbers of targets, concurrent sessions, call data records, and communications, STAR-GATE transparently accesses targeted communications without alerting subscribers or disrupting service.” As with the Narus system, the point is to be able to tap into communications unobtrusively, in real time, all the time. A Verint spinoff firm, PerSay, takes the tap to the next stage, deploying “advanced voice mining,” which singles out “a target’s voice within a large volume of intercepted calls, regardless of the conversation content or method of communication.” Verint’s interception systems have gone global since the late 1990s, and sales in 2006 reached $374 million (a doubling of its revenues over 2003). More than 5,000 organizations — mostly intelligence services and police units — in at least 100 countries today use Verint technology.

What troubles Bamford is that executives and directors at companies like Narus and Verint formerly worked at or maintain close connections with the Israeli intelligence services, including Mossad; the internal security agency Shin Bet; and the Israeli version of the NSA, Unit 8200, an arm of the Israeli Defense Forces Intelligence Corps. Unit 8200, which Bamford describes as “hypersecret,” is a key player in the eavesdropping industrial complex in Israel, its retired personnel dispersed throughout dozens of companies. According to Ha’aretz, the Israeli daily, “Many of the [eavesdropping] technologies in use around the world and developed in Israel were originally military technologies and were developed and improved by [Unit 8200] veterans.”  A former commander of Unit 8200, cited by Bamford, states that Verint technology was “directly influenced by 8200 technology….[Verint parent company] Comverse’s main product, the Logger, is based on the Unit’s technology.”   The implications for U.S. national security, writes Bamford, are “unnerving.”  “Virtually the entire American telecommunications system,” he avers, “is bugged by [Israeli-formed] companies with possible ties to Israel’s eavesdropping agency.” Congress, he says, maintains no oversight of these companies’ operations, and even their contracts with U.S. telecoms — contracts pivotal to NSA surveillance — are considered trade secrets and go undisclosed in company statements.

U.S. intelligence officers have not been quiet in their concerns about Verint (I reported on this matter in CounterPunch.org last September). “Phone calls are intercepted, recorded, and transmitted to U.S. investigators by Verint, which claims that it has to be ‘hands on’ with its equipment to maintain the system,” says former CIA counterterrorism officer Philip Giraldi. The “hands on” factor is what bothers Giraldi, specifically because of the possibility of a “trojan” embedded in Verint wiretap software. A trojan in information security hardware/software is a backdoor that can be accessed remotely by parties who normally would not have access to the secure system. Allegations of widespread trojan spying have rocked the Israeli business community in recent years.  “Top Israeli blue chip companies,” reported the AP in 2005, “are suspected of using illicit surveillance software to steal information from their rivals and enemies.”  Over 40 companies have come under scrutiny. “It is the largest cybercrime case in Israeli history,” Boaz Guttmann, a veteran cybercrimes investigator with the Israeli national police, told me. “Trojan horse espionage is part of the way of life of companies in Israel.  It’s a culture of spying.”

In a wide-ranging four-part investigation into Israel-linked espionage that aired in December 2001, Carl Cameron, a correspondent at Fox News Channel, reported the distress among U.S. intelligence officials warning about possible trojans cached in Verint technology. Sources told Cameron that “while various FBI inquiries into [Verint] have been conducted over the years,” the inquiries had “been halted before the actual equipment has ever been thoroughly tested for leaks.” Cameron also cited a 1999 internal FCC document indicating that “several government agencies expressed deep concerns that too many unauthorized non-law enforcement personnel can access the wiretap system.” Much of this access was facilitated through “remote maintenance.”

The Fox News report reverberated throughout U.S. law enforcement, particularly at the Drug Enforcement Agency, which makes extensive use of wiretaps for narcotics interdiction. Security officers at DEA, an adjunct of the Justice Department, began examining the agency’s own relationship with Comverse/Verint. In 1997, DEA had transformed its wiretap infrastructure with the $25 million procurement from Comverse/Verint of a technology called “T2S2″ — “translation and transcription support services” — with Comverse/Verint contracted to provide the hardware and software.  The company was also tasked with “support services, training, upgrades, enhancements and options throughout the life of the contract,” according to the DEA’s “contracts and acquisitions” notice. In the wake of the Fox News investigation, however, the director of security programs at DEA, Heidi Raffanello, was rattled enough to issue an internal communiqué on the matter, dated Dec. 18, 2001. Directly referencing Fox News, she worried that “Comverse remote maintenance” was “not addressed in the C&A [contracts and acquisitions] process… It remains unclear if Comverse personnel are security cleared, and if so, who are they and what type of clearances are on record…. Bottom line we should have caught it.” It is not known what resulted from DEA’s review of the issue of remote maintenance and access by Comverse/Verint.

Bamford devotes a portion of his argument to the detailing of the operations of a third Israeli wiretap company, NICE Systems, which he describes as “a major eavesdropper in the U.S.” that “keeps its government and commercial client list very secret.”  Formed in 1986 by seven veterans of Unit 8200, NICE software “captures voice, email, chat, screen activity, and essential call details,” while offering “audio compression technology that performs continuous recordings of up to thousands of analog and digital telephone lines and radio channels.” NICE Systems has on at least one occasion shown up on the radar of U.S. counterintelligence. During 2000-2001, when agents at the FBI and the CIA began investigating allegations that Israeli nationals posing as “art students” were in fact conducting espionage on U.S. soil, one of the Israeli “art students” was discovered to be an employee with NICE Systems. Among the targets of the art students were facilities and offices of the Drug Enforcement Agency nationwide. The same Israeli employee of NICE Systems, who was identified as a former operative in the Israeli intelligence services, was carrying a disk that contained a file labeled “DEA Groups.” U.S. counterintelligence officers concluded it was a highly suspicious nexus: An Israeli national and alleged spy was working for an Israeli wiretap company while carrying in his possession computer information regarding the Drug Enforcement Agency — at the same time this Israeli was conducting what the DEA described as “intelligence gathering” about DEA facilities.

***

A former senior counterintelligence official in the Bush administration told me that as early as 1999, “CIA was very concerned about [Israeli wiretapping companies]” — Verint in particular. “I know that CIA has tried to monitor what the Israelis were doing — technically watch what they were doing on the networks in terms of remote access. Other countries were concerned as well,” said the intelligence official. Jim Bamford, who notes that Verint “can automatically access the mega-terabytes of stored and real-time data secretly and remotely from anywhere,” reports that Australian lawmakers in 2004 held hearings on this remote monitoring capability. “[Y]ou can access data from overseas,” the lawmakers told a Verint representative during the hearings, “but [the legislature] seems restricted to access data within that system.”  The Australians found this astonishing.  In 2000, the Canadian intelligence service, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, conducted “a probe related to allegations that [Israeli] spies used rigged software to hack into Canada’s top secret intelligence files,” according to an article in the Toronto Star.  Several sources in the U.S. intelligence community told me the Canadians liaised with their American counterparts to try to understand the problem.  According to the Bush administration official who spoke with me, “the Dutch also had come to the CIA very concerned about what the Israelis were doing with this.”  The Dutch intelligence service, under contract with Verint, “had discovered strange things were going on — there was activity on the network, the Israelis uploading and downloading stuff out of the switches, remotely, and apparently using it for their own wiretap purposes. The CIA was very embarrassed to say, ‘We have the same problem.’ But the CIA didn’t have an answer for them.  ‘We hear you, we’re surprised, and we understand your concern.’”  Indeed, sources in the Dutch counterintelligence community in 2002 claimed there was “strong evidence that the Israeli secret service has uncontrolled access to confidential tapping data collected by the Dutch police and intelligence services,” according to the Dutch broadcast radio station Evangelische Omroep (EO). In January 2003, the respected Dutch technology and computing magazine, C’T, ran a follow-up to the EO story, headlined “Dutch Tapping Room not Kosher.” The article states: “All tapping equipment of the Dutch intelligence services and half the tapping equipment of the national police force [is] insecure and is leaking information to Israel.”

“The key to this whole thing is that Australian meeting,” Bamford told me in a recent interview. “They accused Verint of remote access and Verint said they won’t do it again — which implies they were doing it in the past. It’s a matter of a backdoor into the system, and those backdoors should not be allowed to exist. You can tell by the Australian example that it was certainly a concern of Australian lawmakers.”

Congress doesn’t seem to share the concern.  “Part of the responsibility of Congress,” says Bamford, “is not just to oversee the intelligence community but to look into the companies with which the intelligence community contracts.  They’re just very sloppy about this.”  According to the Bush administration intelligence official who spoke with me, “Frustratingly, I did not get the sense that our government was stepping up to this and grasping the bull by the horns.”  Another former high level U.S. intelligence official told me, “The fact of the vulnerability of our telecom backbone is indisputable.  How it came to pass, why nothing has been done, who has done what — these are the incendiary questions.” There is also the fundamental fact that the wiretap technologies implemented by Verint, Narus and other Israeli companies are fully in place and no alternative is on the horizon.  “There is a technical path dependence problem,” says the Bush administration official. “I have been told nobody else makes software like this for the big digital switches, so that is part of the problem.  Other issues,” he adds, “compound the problem” — referring to the sensitivity of the U.S.-Israel relationship.

And that, of course, is the elephant in the room.  “Whether it’s a Democratic or Republican administration, you don’t bad-mouth Israel if you want to get ahead,” says former CIA counterterrorism officer Philip Giraldi. “Most of the people in the agency were very concerned about Israeli espionage and Israeli actions against U.S. interests. Everybody was aware of it. Everybody hated it. But they wouldn’t get promoted if they spoke out. Israel has a privileged position and that’s the way things are.  It’s crazy.  And everybody knows it’s crazy.”

  Christopher Ketcham writes for Vanity Fair, Harper’s, GQ and many other magazines. He is working on a book about the history of Israeli espionage in the United States. He can be reached at cketcham99@mindspring.com.

http://www.alternet.org/audits/130891/breaking_the_taboo_on_israel%27s_spying_efforts_on_the_united_states/?page=entire

By KAREN ANN CULLOTTA

Published: March 19, 2009

An 83-year-old man who admitted that as a Nazi concentration camp guard he took part in a two-day killing spree in which 42,000 people were killed was deported to Austria Thursday from his home in Wisconsin, immigration officials said.

The former guard, Josias Kumpf, admitted that he participated in a murderous November 1943 Nazi operation that went by the code name “Aktion Erntefest” — Operation Harvest Festival — in which roughly 42,000 Jewish men, women and children were murdered at three Nazi camps in eastern Poland in two days.

Mr. Kumpf acknowledged his role was as a guard and an assassin at the Trawniki Labor Camp, where 8,000 men, women and children were shot dead in a single day, Nov. 3, 1943, Justice Department officials said.

He was removed earlier this week from his home in Racine, Wis., by United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

Mr. Kumpf immigrated to the United States from Austria in 1956, and became a citizen in 1964. A spokesman for the Justice Department said officials began their efforts to deport him in 2003, when a federal lawsuit was filed in the Eastern District of Wisconsin to strip him of his citizenship because of his participation in war crimes. His citizenship was revoked in 2005.

“Josias Kumpf, by his own admission, stood guard with orders to shoot any surviving prisoners who attempted to escape an SS massacre that left thousands of Jews dead,” Acting Assistant Attorney General Rita M. Glavin, said in a written statement Thursday. “His court-ordered removal from the United States to Austria is another milestone in the government’s long-running effort to ensure that individuals who participated in crimes against humanity do not find sanctuary in this country.”

 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/20/us/20deported.html?hp

 “Individuals who participated in crimes against humanity ” MUST BE UNDERSTOOD AS “FOREIGN INDIVIDUALS”. As for American citizen responsible for mass murders of civilians during the war in Japan, in the Philippines, in Korea, in Vietnam (2 million killed), in Cambodia (600.000 killed by bombings decided by Nixon and Kissinger) not to mention Iraq, Afghanistan, forgetting Panama and Granada. An enormous number of US military personnel were involved in wanton massacres, by air bombing, artillery fire and simple shooting or torturing of prisonners. None of them has ever been punished. Even the little killer of My Lai made good his escape. Only when the USA will start cleaning their own house, will the become credible. Together with Israel, they are the worst criminals against mankind. That is why they strenuously avoid the International Penal Court.

David Irving postponed until September

The Literary and Debating Society of NUI Galway [Eire]  has had to postpone their much anticipated Holocaust denial Debate featuring controversial historian David Irving, until September. The debate was supposed to take place on 19^th March with Irving opposing the motion “That This House rejects the work of David Irving” and another historian of the period proposing the motion.

The reason for the postponement was the unavailability of a qualified proposition speaker for the March 19^th date. Society auditor, Dan Colley said “There are a number of talented historians who we have been in contact with who wish to challenge Irving but could not make the date that we have proposed”. He added “The Literary and Debating Society apologise for any inconvenience caused by this decision, although I hope that our members understand that it was made with the best interests of a healthy and productive debate in mind”

On 22^nd January the Lit & Deb held a debate on the motion “That this House would allow David Irving to speak at this House” which was passed 100 votes to 63. The meeting was open to the public and students and staff were allowed to vote. Dan Colley went on to say “We were given a mandate to invite David Irving to debate his views in our society by those who were interested enough to come to the debate and we intend on fulfilling that mandate in spite of opposition from a radical minority of people.”

People who were to attend the debate needed signed up at the Socs Box in Aras na Mac Leinn will be able to sign up again in September. Their information will not be kept on record for September.

 18 March 2009

http://www.sin.ie/site/view/438/

Readers and viewers should be warned that Irving has totally repudiated any Revisionist approach and is trying the join the howling pack, which however wishes to finish him off.

Holocaust Deniers On the Ropes?

Posted 1/22/2009 7:00:00 PM

 This is most encouraging:

 …an intriguing story about the coterie of neo-Nazi cranks and fraudsters who populate the so-called “Institute of Historical Review”. The Director of this “Institute”, Mark Weber, has been forced to admit that thirty years of Holocaust Denial have ended in failure.

 Holocaust denial is not new: this disgusting phenomenon can be traced back to 1974, with the output of the French pseudo-scholar Robert Faurisson. Yet thirty years on, Weber has posted an article on his site bemoaning the fact that sustained attempts by himself and other far-right sympathisers to “debunk” the Final Solution and to cast doubt on the historical record of Nazi Germany’s campaign of genocide against European Jews have got nowhere.

 Weber whines that “[it’s] been almost 30 years, and Holocaust revisionism has gotten almost no support in academic circles or society at large”, and he attributes this outcome to the malevolent influence of “Jewish-Zionist power” over academic and public opinion in North America and the West in general. The fact that Holocaust deniers have failed because they are incompetent hacks whose rantings about the Shoah are generally recognised as historically illiterate, intellectually dishonest and factually unsound seems to have escaped him.

 Deborah Lipstadt - who, along with the likes of Ken McVay, is one of the heroes of this story – warns that the news is not entirely encouraging:

 So this is good news, right?

 Well not exactly. He is now going to focus his energies on fighting Jewish-Zionist power.

 This, of course, proves what I and others have been saying for years. Holocaust denial is naught but a form of antisemitism. Weber could not spread antisemitism with Holocaust denial so he is going to try other methods.

 Methinks he will have more success with his new track. Sadly so.

See http://lipstadt.blogspot.com/  16 Jan. 2009

http://www.am770chqr.com/Blogs/TheWorldTonight/BlogEntry.aspx?BlogEntryID=10020128

by Serge Thion

In the Roman Legions the older, most experienced sol-diers were called the “old ones”. That is the exact meaning of “veterans”. After campaigning for 25 years they were demobilized and given some piece of land, in the border areas, in order to create a self-sustaining web of farms run by Army people, guarding the limes.

The little, or, let’s say, tiny fighting movement called Holocaust revisionism, really started in the 50s’. One or two generations have already disappeared. Harry Elmer Barnes, Austin App, David Hoggan in the US; Francois Duprat (murdered 1978), Paul Rassinier, Maurice Bardèche in France; Johann von Leers, Thies Christophersen, Josef Ginsburg, Otto Remer, Wilhelm Stäglich in Germany, passed away. The veterans of today are getting old, sick, lame, tired, fed up with this insane persecution (S. E. Castan, in Brazil). Some retire or claim they intend to do so (Zündel, his lawyer Doug Christie, Töben).

Others realize that, though im-paired by the coming of age, they cannot retire as the smell of blood in the next battles has become a vital drug (Faurisson, 80; Bradley Smith, Ingrid Rimland). Anyway, those who have been once in-volved in Revisionism are consid-ered as tainted and they cannot simply choose another professional life (Leuchter, now driving school buses, Lindner, many others). Some have simply slipped away into some no man’s land (Felderer, Cole, Garaudy). Others go on sol-diering in a rather secretive life: Arthur Butz, Carlo Mattogno, Ah-med Rami, Henri Roques, Jürgen Graf, Joaquin Bochaca, Gaston-Armand Amaudruz, Canadian al-lies of Zündel, Udo Walendy, Georges Theil, all of them con-stantly under endless threats. They still can write but have renounced public life. There are tolerated if they keep mute.

Others are in prison, Zündel, Germar Rudolf, Horst Mahler, and some have simply vanished from the screens (no names, here). In his article Weber mentions “Ernst Zundel and Germar Rudolf [in prison] in Germany.” He fails to remind us that both have been ar-rested by official police forces in the USA, under ridiculous and false reasons, and forcibly deliv-ered to the German totalitarian jus-tice system. The legality of those arrests and “extraordinary rendi-tions” has not yet been established. Democracies know very well how to get rid of the rules they have established. So, revisionists are not safe even in the countries which have not (not yet ?) enacted laws to ban them. See the arrest and the 50-days in prison in London of the passenger Frederick Töben, in transit, November 2008. The de-nial of the law was so blatant : the grey monster had to release its prey.

Among the “veterans”, Mark Weber is probably one of the youngest. He is in a particular situation as Director of the Insti-tute for Historical Review. He car-ries the responsibility to maintain afloat this small institution. In 30 years, the audience, the impact, the public image in front of an evolut-ive demand, have changed, deeply changed. WW II events are as re-mote as Roman gladiators for most of the younger people. They know that States do lie and they don’t quite see why they would need to commit themselves in the unveil-ing of one particular lie — about the gas chambers, whose nature anyway looks more and more mythological.

The mysteries of Sept. 11 are much more gripping and exciting. In one word, the generations who come after the one who lived through WW II are more and more disinterested. Already 10 years ago, Zündel was explicit: those who contributed to his fighting funds were dying away and were not replaced. This is a fact of life. As a consequence, the level of fi-nancing declines and the level of activities follow the same trend.

Besides, the level of activities deployed by revisionist researchers themselves has notably declined. If I look for new ground-breaking works, I find nothing really new. The only active researcher is Carlo Mattogno, in Italy, who digs into a gigantic mass of archives he was wise enough to Xerox, together with Jürgen Graf, in the big archi-val centers of Eastern Europe in the early 90’s. I am not sure this would be possible now.

Is revisionism dead? As an open quest, an intellectual com-mitment, it has probably reached its limits. But the results are there and the frenzied activities of its Zionist adversaries remain quite inconsistent. They are renewing the same type of attacks again and again, ceaselessly, with no success.

Now, all this does not preclude Weber, or anyone else, to freely evaluate the weight of revisionism in the historical culture of contem-porary societies, and the fast grow-ing, and limitless, expansion of Holocaustomaniac activities, buildings, museums, commemora-tions, spreading everywhere like a prairie fire, etc. Jews spend mil-lions of dollars, and cause public spending in the tens of millions of dollars to build inane “holocaust museums”, full of falsifications, lies and delirious interpretations. The press campaign is permanent. The political agitation is boiling everywhere. The hallucination permeates everyone everywhere all the time. Saturation is reached.

The cultural world ignores a book like My Holocaust by Tova Reich who totally demolishes the Holocaust complex and describes it as a farce organized by greedy liars and bandits. All right. The revisionists have never been able to tame the tide. As Weber says, “it was not until the late 1970s that ‘the Holocaust’ began to play a really significant social-political role.” No. This was planned, or-ganized and financed by the Zion-ist State. The first act of this new drama was written by Ben Gurion with the Eichmann trial in 1961. He explicitly said he was looking for a means to maintain the exis-tence of Israel because he was not very confident that military might alone was enough, in the long run. Israel could not afford to loose one single war and he thought the kill-ing-of-the-Jews device was a per-fect instrument to protect the Zion-ist State by making everyone else in the world guilty of not support-ing the Jews.

To make the argument short, it is enough to say that the strength of the Holocaust tale and of the smashing of revisionism is pro-vided by the State of Israel itself, its political network, its dominance of the media world, its limitless funding. What is the price of Truth? When Israel will disappear “from the pages of time”, as pre-dicted by Imam Khomeyni, the mirror will crack, and the revision-ists will be free. It’s a matter of patience. Remember that the Zion-ist entity has reached only half of the duration of the Crusaders’ Je-rusalem kingdom, a thousand years ago. “Some revisionists insist that their work is vitally important be-cause success in exposing the Holocaust as a hoax will deliver a shattering blow to Israel and Jew-ish-Zionist power. This view, however, is based on a mistaken understanding of the relationship between ‘Holocaust remembrance’ and Jewish-Zionist power.” says Weber.

That was indeed an illusion shared by some revisionists. The analysis of the political reality is beyond the purview of Holocaust revisionism and, of course, a wide range of opinions is available for all different revisionists to pick from.

We have all seen the Institute of Historical Review drift away from the serious matters of revi-sionism. Little by little it has trans-formed its content and publica-tions. There must be a practical reason: in order to survive, and pay the salaries, it has to find a public and feed this public with items that it wants, in order to be fed. It is like the polar bear on a broken piece of icepack, drifting with the currents. It is trying to find a ra-tionale to the drift. It’s the currents, stupid!

Now it was not useful to re-mind us of the suffering of the Jews. No revisionist ever denied the very harsh treatment inflicted upon them by racist Nazis. “Mil-lions lost their lives” says Weber. Good enough, but how many mil-lions? No one can give a seriously established answer.

Finally the only sentence I really object to is the last one: “Holocaust revisionism has proved to be as much a hindrance as a help.” I even object to one particu-lar word: hindrance. Does that mean that Weber, after all, regrets having missed the traditional ca-reer that was promised to him as a young laureate in history, if he had not chosen to side with the damned ones? I believe that revisionism has all along been a formidable booster to reflection, understand-ing, unveiling hidden parts of his-torical reality, an intellectual chal-lenge that can not be matched in many disciplines. A hindrance? Certainly not.

A hammer for many anvils.

Jan. 10, 2009

Smith Report nr 158, Jan. 2009

http://www.codoh.com/newsite/sr/online/sr_158.pdf

How Relevant is Holocaust Revisionism?

By Mark Weber
 

For more than 30 years, writers and publicists who call themselves revisionists have presented evidence and arguments questioning generally accepted accounts of the Holocaust. Some of these researchers have shown impressive fortitude — defying smears, abuse, physical violence, and worse.¹

In countries where “Holocaust denial” is a crime, skeptics have been fined, imprisoned or forced into exile for expressing dissident views on this issue.² These victims of what amounts to a blatant suppression of free speech include Robert Faurisson and Roger Garaudy in France, Siegfried Verbeke in Belgium, Jürgen Graf and Gaston-Armand Amaudruz in Switzerland, and Ernst Zundel and Germar Rudolf in Germany.

Revisionists have published impressive evidence, including long neglected documents and testimony, that has contributed to a more complete and accurate understanding of an emotion-laden and highly polemicized chapter of history.

I have played a role in this effort. In published writings, in lectures, and in courtroom testimony, I have devoted much time and work to critically reviewing the “official” Holocaust narrative, to countering Holocaust propaganda, and to debunking specific Holocaust claims.

But in spite of years of effort by revisionists, including some serious work that on occasion has forced “mainstream” historians to make startling concessions,³ there has been little success in convincing people that the familiar Holocaust story is defective.

This lack of success is not difficult to understand. Revisionists are up against a well-organized, decades-long campaign that is promoted in the mass media, reinforced in classrooms, and supported by politicians.⁴

Tim Cole, a history professor and prominent specialist of Holocaust studies, has written in his book Selling the Holocaust: “From a relatively slow start, we have now come to the point where Jewish culture in particular, and Western culture more generally, are saturated with the ‘Holocaust’. Indeed, the ‘Holocaust’ has saturated Western culture to such an extent that it appears not only centre stage, but also lurks in the background. This can be seen in the remarkable number of contemporary movies which include the ‘Holocaust’ as plot or sub-plot.”

Between 1989 and 2003 alone, more than 170 films with Holocaust themes were made. In many American and European schools, a focus on the wartime suffering of Europe’s Jews is obligatory. Every major American city has at least one Holocaust museum or memorial. The largest is the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, which is run by a taxpayer-funded federal government agency, and draws some two million visitors yearly.

A number of countries, including Britain, Germany and Italy, officially observe an annual Holocaust Remembrance Day. The United Nations General Assembly in 2005 approved a resolution introduced by Israel to designate January 27 as an international Holocaust remembrance day.

In the United States and western Europe, the Holocaust has become is a venerated, semi-religious mythos. Prof. Michael Goldberg, an eminent rabbi, has written of what he calls a “Holocaust cult with its own tenets of faith, rites and shrines.” In this age of secular “political correctness,” Holocaust “denial” is the modern equivalent of sacrilege.

A major reason for the lack of success in persuading people that conventional Holocaust accounts are fraudulent or exaggerated is that — as revisionists acknowledge – Jews in Europe were, in fact, singled out during the war years for especially severe treatment.

This was confirmed, for example, by German propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels in these confidential entries in his wartime diary:⁵

Feb. 14, 1942: “The Führer [Hitler] once again expresses his resolve ruthlessly to clear the Jews out of Europe. There must be no squeamish sentimentalism about it. The Jews have deserved the catastrophe that they are now experiencing. Their destruction will go hand in hand with the destruction of our enemies. We must hasten this process with cold ruthlessness.”

March 27, 1942: “The Jews are now being deported to the East from the Generalgouvernement [Poland], starting around Lublin. The procedure is a pretty barbaric one and not to be described here more definitely, and there’s not much left of the Jews. By and large, one can say that 60 percent of them will have to be liquidated, while only 40 percent can be put to work. The former Gauleiter of Vienna, who is carrying out the operation, is proceeding quite judiciously, using a method that is not all too conspicuous. The Jews are facing a judgment which, while barbaric, they fully deserve. The prophecy the Führer made about them for having brought on a new world war is beginning to come true in the most terrible manner. One must not be sentimental in these matters.”

April 29, 1942: “Short shrift is being made of the Jews in all eastern occupied territories. Tens of thousands of them are being wiped out.”

No informed person disputes that Europe’s Jews did, in fact, suffer a great catastrophe during the Second World War. Millions were forced from their homes and deported to brutal internment in crowded ghettos and camps. Jewish communities across Central and Eastern Europe, large and small, were wiped out. Millions lost their lives. When the war ended in 1945, most of the Jews of Germany, Poland, the Netherlands and others countries were gone.

Given all this, it should not be surprising that even well-founded revisionist arguments are often dismissed as heartless quibbling.

But despite a discouraging record of achievement, some revisionists insist that their work is vitally important because success in exposing the Holocaust as a hoax will deliver a shattering blow to Israel and Jewish-Zionist power. This view, however, is based on a mistaken understanding of the relationship between “Holocaust remembrance” and Jewish-Zionist power.

Even before World War II, the organized Jewish community was playing a major role in the political and cultural life of Europe and the United States, and the Zionist movement was already very influential. Although propaganda about the wartime catastrophe of Europe’s Jews was a factor in American society during the 1950s and 1960s, it was not until the late 1970s that “the Holocaust” began to play a really significant social-political role. It was not until the late 1970s and early 1980s that the term began to appear as a specific entry in standard encyclopedias and reference books, and became an obligatory subject in American textbooks and classrooms.

In short, the Holocaust assumed an important role in the social-cultural life of America and western Europe in keeping with, and as an expression of, a phenomenal increase in Jewish influence and power. The Holocaust “remembrance” campaign is not so much a source of Jewish-Zionist power as it is an expression of it. For that reason, debunking the Holocaust will not shatter that power.

Suppose The New York Times were to report tomorrow that Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust center and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum had announced that no more than one million Jews died during World War II, and that no Jews were killed in gas chambers at Auschwitz. The impact on Jewish-Zionist power would surely be minimal.

Although “Holocaust remembrance” remains well entrenched in our society, its impact seems to have diminished in recent years. In part this is because the men and women of the World War II generation are nearly all gone. But another factor has been a major shift in the world-political situation. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the Soviet empire, the end of US-Soviet “Cold War” rivalry, the Nine-Eleven terror attack in 2001, the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, and current world economic crisis, have ushered in a new era – one in which the Holocaust imagery of the 1940s is less potent because it’s less relevant.

Criticism of Israel and its policies has become much more common in recent years, even in the United States. Among thoughtful men and women, and especially in the youth, sympathy for Israel has fallen perceptibly, while skepticism about the role of the Holocaust in society has grown. Tony Judt, a prominent Jewish scholar who lives and works in New York, wrote recently:⁶

“Students today do not need to be reminded of the genocide of the Jews, the historical consequences of anti-Semitism, or the problem of evil. They know all about these – in ways our parents never did. And that is as it should be. But I have been struck lately by the frequency with which new questions are surfacing: `Why do we focus so much on the Holocaust?’ `Why is it illegal [in certain countries] to deny the Holocaust but not other genocides?’ `Is the threat of anti-Semitism not exaggerated?’ And, increasingly, `Doesn’t Israel use the Holocaust as an excuse?’ I do not recall hearing those questions in the past.”

This shift has also been noticed at the Institute for Historical Review. Over the past ten years, sales of IHR books, discs, flyers and other items about Holocaust history have steadily declined, along with inquiries about Holocaust history and requests for interviews on this subject. At the same time, and obviously reflecting broader social-cultural trends, there has been a marked rise in sales of IHR books, discs, flyers and other items about Jewish-Zionist power, the role of Jews in society, and so forth. This has been matched by an increase in the number of inquiries and requests for interviews on those issues.

Jewish-Zionist power is a palpable reality with harmful consequences for America, the Middle East, and the entire global community. In my view, and as I have repeatedly emphasized, the task of exposing and countering this power is a crucially important one.⁷ In that effort, Holocaust revisionism cannot play a central role.

One influential statesman who seems to understand this is the former prime minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohammed. In a much-discussed address delivered at an international conference in October 2003, he spoke forthrightly against Jewish-Zionist power, while making clear that he accepts the familiar “Six Million” Holocaust narrative. In the global struggle against this power, he said, “we are up against a people who think … We cannot fight them through brawn alone. We must use our brains also … The Europeans killed six million Jews out of twelve million. But today the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them.”⁸

Setting straight the historical record about the wartime fate of Europe’s Jews is a worthy endeavor. But there should be no illusions about its social-political relevance. In the real world struggle against Jewish-Zionist power, Holocaust revisionism has proved to be as much a hindrance as a help.

 Notes

1. “Jewish Militants: Fifteen Years, and More, of Terrorism in France.” The Journal of Historical Review, March-April 1996
( http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n2p-2_Faurisson.html )

2. M. Weber, “Toben’s Arrest: A New Assault Against Free Speech.” Oct. 2008
( http://www.ihr.org/other/oct08toben.html )

3. Robert Faurisson, “The Victories of Revisionism.” Dec. 2006
( http://www.fpp.co.uk/Auschwitz/Faurisson/at_Teheran_conf_2005.html, and, http://www.codoh.com/viewpoints/vprfvict.html ); R. Faurisson, “Impact and Future of Holocaust Revisionism.” The Journal of Historical Review, Jan.-Feb. 2000. ( http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v19/v19n1p-2_Faurisson.html )

4. M. Weber, “Holocaust Remembrance: What’s Behind the Campaign.” Feb. 2006.
( http://www.ihr.org/leaflets/holocaust_remembrance.shtml )

5. These Goebbels diaries quotes are from: Louis P. Lochner, ed., The Goebbels Diaries (Doubleday, 1948), pp. 86, 147-148, 195; Wilhelm Staeglich, Auschwitz: A Judge Looks at the Evidence (IHR, 1990), pp. 88-89; David Irving, Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich (London: Focal Point, 1996), pp. 387, 388, 392.

6. Tony Judt, “The ‘Problem of Evil’ in Postwar Europe,” The New York Review of Books, Feb. 14, 2008, pp. 33-35.
( http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21031 )

7. M. Weber, “In the Struggle for Truth and Justice.” August 2008.
( http://www.ihr.org/other/aug08weber.html ); M. Weber, “The Israel Lobby: How Important Is It.” Nov 2007.
( http://www.ihr.org/other/0711_webereugene.html ) See also: M. Weber, “A Straight Look at the Jewish Lobby.” Dec. 2007 ( http://www.ihr.org/leaflets/jewishlobby.shtml )

8. J. Aglionby, “Fight Jews, Mahathir tells summit,” The Guardian (Britain) , Oct. 17, 2003.
( http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/oct/17/malaysia ) Quoted in: M. Weber, “In the Struggle for Peace and Justice: Countering Jewish-Zionist Power.” August 2008.

January 7, 2009

 http://www.ihr.org/weber_revisionism_jan09.html

Revisionist: It’s Time To Quit Shoah Fight 

By Nathaniel Popper

One of the primary leaders in the fight to question and delegitimize the Holocaust has proclaimed that fight to be a lost cause, sparking a furious debate among his cohorts. Mark Weber, a telegenic Californian, has served for 15 years as director of the Institute for Historical Review, which was founded in the late 1970s as a center for people dedicated to doubting and criticizing mainstream histories of the Holocaust. This month, however, Weber released an essay on the institute’s Web site, questioning whether this work has ever had any relevance. Weber argued that Holocaust revisionists are unlikely to have any success in convincing large numbers of people.

“It’s been almost 30 years, and Holocaust revisionism has gotten almost no support in academic circles or society at large,” Weber told the Forward. “It’s gotten some support in Iran, or places like that, but as far as I know, there is no history department supporting writing by these folks.” The argument in Weber’s essay, “How Relevant Is Holocaust Revisionism?” might appear, at first glance, to be good news for the Jewish organizations that have fought against Holocaust revisionists. But in his essay, Weber calls for his movement to shift to a new mission, one more purely directed to fighting against “Jewish-Zionist power.”

Michael Shermer, a columnist for Scientific American who wrote a book about Holocaust revisionists, said that “for Weber, the Holocaust is just a minor skirmish. The real war to be won is about the Zionists.” Though Weber, like most Holocaust revisionists, is not a fan of the Jewish community, his essay has not even gained him popularity among his fellow travelers. Bradley Smith, a former employee of Weber’s institute who is a prominent online publisher of Holocaust revisionist material, told the Forward that he is putting together a whole issue of his newsletter with arguments against Weber. “It’s hard for me to think of Mark Weber as betraying me, because we’re friends. And yet, there are those who feel he has betrayed the institute and that he has betrayed the revisionist movement such as it is,” Smith said in a phone interview from Mexico. Smith said that a number of prominent revisionists will be calling for Weber’s resignation from the institute.

The world of Holocaust revisionists — inhabited by people who are, by nature, disputatious and unconcerned with social norms — is not one in which divisions and fights have been foreign. Weber took over the Institute for Historical Review after a prolonged and expensive legal fight with its founder, Willis Carto, who had built the institute into what both antagonists and protagonists acknowledge was the premier forum for Holocaust doubters and deniers. Since taking over, Weber has continued to publish writing on the Holocaust and on World War II. But he came to the institute after working with the white supremacist National Alliance party, and he has pushed to broaden the institute’s mandate. The Web site that Weber has built features such articles as “The Jewish Role in the Bolshevik Revolution” and “Israel at 60: A Grim Balance Sheet.”

In his new essay, published January 9, Weber does try to position himself as a more moderate voice in the debate about the Holocaust. He acknowledges Jewish suffering, and notes that Joseph Goebbel’s diaries speak about a concerted campaign to eliminate the Jews — a heretical view for many Holocaust doubters. “Much of the predictable hostility toward my piece has come from people who are basically cultists — or fanatics on this issue,” Weber told the Forward. “They view it with an almost religious fervor.” Already, this has appeared to cause some questioning on revisionist Web sites. One commenter, writing under the handle Carto’s Cutlass Supreme, responded to Weber’s use of Goebbel’s diary by asking: “What would people say about that here? Do we know the diary couldn’t have been tampered with?”

Weber’s discussion of Jewish suffering, though, is a lead-in to the historian’s broader point, which is that the Holocaust doubters have not been effective agents in the broader battle against Jewish power. Michael Santomauro, who runs an e-mail list dedicated to questioning Jews and the Holocaust, said that Weber’s shift is a strategic mistake. “I think it is an unfortunate path he is taking, because the Holocaust is an effective weapon,” he told the Forward. “When the Holocaust is used as a weapon, it explains a lot of the lopsided foreign policy.” But for Santomauro and many of his online friends, much of the problem with Weber is not his ideology, but his work output. Most prominent revisionists are prolific writers who will publish anywhere in order to have their views distributed. Under Weber, the institute has ceased publication of its journal and stopped hosting international conferences. “He hasn’t done any work,” Smith said.

Aryeh Tuchman, director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Library and Research Center, said that Weber’s slowed production hurt the doubters and deniers of the Holocaust long before his new essay. “There is not a central Holocaust denial organization or body anymore,” Tuchman said. “There’s no one who can serve to motivate them anymore.” The Iranian government, under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, tried to take up this mantle when it hosted a conference with Holocaust doubters last year. But even Weber said that the conference didn’t do revisionists any favors. “If the point of the conference was to be scholarly, the thing was a failure,” Weber said. “The thing only strengthened and confirmed the views people already had about Iran, Ahmadinejad and Israel.”

http://www.forward.com/articles/14953/

Forward, 15 Jan. 2009. This journal, formerly called Vorwärts (same meaning) was for a long time published in Yiddish.

Men convicted of race hate crimes

Two men have been convicted of publishing “obnoxious and abhorrent” racist material.

Simon Sheppard, 51, of Brook Street, Selby, and Stephen Whittle, 41, of Avenham Lane, Preston, have been found guilty of a number of offences.

A trial at Leeds Crown Court heard they printed leaflets and controlled websites featuring racist material. The pair, who are currently in the hands of US immigration authorities, will be sentenced in March.

Sheppard and Whittle were originally convicted of race-hate offences at a trial in July last year. At an earlier hearing, Sheppard was found guilty of 11 offences and Whittle was found guilty of five offences. The jury was unable to agree a verdict on a further seven charges against Sheppard and it was decided he would face a retrial on six of these charges.

The retrial began on 8 December and concluded on Thursday. It was held in the absence of Sheppard as he and Whittle fled to America before the jury returned verdicts in the first trial. The court heard the investigation into Sheppard began when a complaint about a leaflet called “Tales of the Holohoax” was reported to the police in 2004 after it was pushed through the door of a Synagogue in Blackpool. It was traced back to a post office box in Hull registered to Sheppard.

Pen name

Reviewing lawyer Mari Reid, of the CPS’s Counter Terrorism Division, said:

“People are entitled to hold racist and extreme opinions which others may find unpleasant and obnoxious. What they are not entitled to do is to publish or distribute those opinions to the public in a threatening, abusive or insulting manner either intending to stir up racial hatred or in circumstances where it is likely racial hatred will be stirred up. The vast majority of the material in this case concerned Jewish people, but there was also material relating to black, Asian and non-white people generally, all described in derogatory terms using offensive language. As well as printed leaflets, there was evidence of Simon Sheppard controlling websites which featured racist material, some of it written by Whittle, under the pen name of Luke O’Farrell.”

The pair were charged with publishing racially inflammatory material, distributing racially inflammatory material and possessing racially inflammatory material with a view to distribution. Mrs Reid said: “Both juries saw some thoroughly unpleasant material which contained views which most people would find obnoxious and abhorrent.”

8 Jan. 2009

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/engla