This leading Holocaust scholar argues that there would be dignity in death camp’s neglect

 Brett Popplewell

 The recent theft and retrieval of the infamous “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work Sets You Free”) sign that marks the gateway into Auschwitz has reignited debate over what should be done with the sombre monument to one of humanity’s darkest hours.

Last week Poland’s culture minister promised the equivalent of $137,000 for improving security at the site where more than one million people died during the Holocaust.

But Robert Jan Van Pelt, an architectural historian and a leading expert on Auschwitz, says it may be time to consider other strategies for the site, which is split into two camps, Auschwitz and Birkenau. They sprawl over nearly 500 acres.

Van Pelt, a professor at the University of Waterloo, suggests the museum consider sealing off the Birkenau death camp, where 95 per cent of the murders took place, and letting nature take over. We asked him to explain.

Why have you have posited that Birkenau should be closed up and reclaimed by nature?

There is a present problem of preservation in Auschwitz. The place that is actually well-preserved – that’s where the museum is. But the site of Birkenau, a couple kilometres away, where the murders happened, is falling apart. That camp was very hastily constructed. The buildings were built to have a lifespan of two to three years. They were built from recycled bricks. When they ran out of recycled bricks, the SS bought from the German army prefab horse stables. In 1945, when the war came to an end, these horse stables were very valuable because they were kind of instant housing for someone who needed it. So people had the idea that the best thing that they could do was to pick up all of these horse stables – and there’s like 500 of them – take them apart, put them on the train and send them to Warsaw. By 1948 all of the brick barracks in Birkenau were already falling apart. Each of the old horse stables had two stoves inside with two brick chimneys that were not taken to Warsaw.

So you had this very weird landscape – and you still have that – where you get these small, primitive brick chimneys rising three metres out of the ground. They don’t have any other bracing and if you have a storm they blow over. But of course the chimneys themselves – altogether there are hundreds of them – create a very powerful symbolic landscape because we associate Birkenau with the chimneys of the crematoria. Those crematoria aren’t there anymore, they were blown up by the Germans and one of them was blown up by the prisoners in 1944. So because there are only these ruins of the crematoria and because people expect to see chimneys in some way, that field of small chimneys that are the leftovers of the barracks creates a kind of landscape that people in some way associate with the killing and the burning of the bodies of the victims. [So, it is a complete confusion...]

By allowing nature to take over the site, do we run the risk of allowing humanity to forget what happened and set the stage for future questioning of the Holocaust?

Ninety-nine per cent of what we know we do not actually have the physical evidence to prove . . . it has become part of our inherited knowledge. [It means it's all mythology... no evidence...]

I don’t think that the Holocaust is an exceptional case in that sense. We in the future – remembering the Holocaust – will operate in the same way that we remember most things from the past. We will know about it from literature and eyewitness testimony. . . . We are very successful in remembering the past in that manner. That’s how we know that Cesar was killed on the Ides of March. To put the holocaust in some separate category and to demand that it be there – to demand that we have more material evidence – is actually us somehow giving in to the Holocaust deniers by providing some sort of special evidence. [His English is poor : he is Dutch.]

Why has the site not been closed off already?

In 1959, a proposal was made to let nature take over the camp. The museum wanted to seal the gates and let everything fall into disrepair. The idea was that this spot represented a place where humanity failed in such a monumental way that we really have no business maintaining it.

At that time the survivors opposed that proposal. They said : “You cannot lock us out of our own experience. We suffered here; we need to be able to return to the site where we suffered.”

Fifty years later, we are facing the end of the age of the survivors – the age of the witnesses – and I think when the last survivor of the Holocaust has died, when that almost silent passing happens, we as a civilization or as a species should mark this.

And (what) if no one was going to provide the funds to preserve this site? My response to that challenge is “So what? Maybe it’s not so bad if this site is erased.” But if indeed there is a moment when we can surrender this site to nature, we cannot do that before the last survivor dies.

The chairman of the international Auschwitz council says the decision should be left to those who died at Auschwitz. Do we have any insight – recorded statements from victims before they died – on what they wanted to be done with the site?

No. So when you call on the victims to some way indicate what happened at the site we can only talk about the survivors. But can survivors really represent those who died? The survivors can do that to a degree, but once they are dead I don’t think it’s our place to interpret. This is a decision that we have to take as the living. The earth belongs to the living. It is the living that have to make the tough decisions.

It is fine with me if we the living decide that this site should be preserved and . . . we are willing to spend the money to maintain the site in a proper way . . . that somehow leaves the dignity of the place intact. I’m not going to quarrel with that. But that means we as a worldwide society are actually accepting responsibility for the site – and putting resources toward that.

 27 December, The Star (Toronto)

http://www.thestar.com/printarticle/742965

Van Pelt was paid very handsome royalties to design an expert opinion in favor of Deborah Lipstad in a trial against David Irving, some years ago. He had more money and means than anybody else before him to dtudy the Auschwitz evidence. After his Report for the Court, he published a book: The Case for Auschwitz, 2002, Indiana University Press. He concluded that “extermination” of the Jews there was a “moral evidence” — since he could not find physical evidence. It is quite logical for him now to propose to erase Auschwitz, in order to suppress the search for evidence to support the conventional mythology created after the war by, first, the Communists, and then, the Zionists.

  The Latest Judicial News from Absurdistan, By the authors of the National Journal. Translated by J M Damon

The original is posted at <globalfire.tv/nj/10de/verfolgungen/kevin_kaether.htm>

 ****************

 Like a true patriot, Kevin Käther has been fighting the modern Inquisition tribunals on behalf of the German nation. In an appeal hearing on 9th June 2009, Tiergarten District Court (Berlin) initially sentenced him to a prison sentence of eight months without probation. The concerned citizen will ask: What brought about his guilty verdict and prison sentence?  

Kevin’s crime consisted of sending compact discs (CDs) of Germar Rudolf’s proscribed book Lectures On the Holocaust to three judges in Berlin and then filing an official complaint against himself for violating Germany’s notorious censorship laws. His purpose in doing this was to judicially determine, in a court trial, whether Rudolf’s factual conclusions are scientifically valid. In the cover letter that he sent with the CDs, he stated that if empirical evidence proved the contents of Rudolf’s book to be inaccurate, he would accept his punishment without objection or appeal. He wrote: 

“Under the censorship laws of the Federal Republic, distribution and dissemination of this book is proscribed as ‘Denial of Holocaust.’

Germar Rudolf, the author of this book, was sentenced to a prison term for the commendable but criminal act of writing it. [He has now walked out of the jailhouse.]  

As a self-respecting German I have a patriotic obligation to publicize these lectures in our country… I realize that I will probably be indicted and convicted in a court of law for my action, and I accept that probability. In the ensuing criminal trial, you will be required to testify as witnesses. For this reason, you should familiarize yourselves with the factual contents of Rudolf’s book, applying old-fashioned German thoroughness.”

 The indictment came immediately. In order to either prove or disprove the veracity of Rudolf’s book in a judicial framework, Kevin submitted over four thousand pages of empirical evidence during his trial, along with Rudolf’s “Expert Report on the Alleged Gas Chambers of Auschwitz.” [Rudolf, a diploma chemist at the Max Planck Institute, had originally prepared this expert report for the Defense in the 1992 trial of Retired Gen. Otto Ernst Remer for "Denying Holocaust."] In 1993, Gen. Remer sent the Rudolf Report to more than 300 professors of Inorganic Chemistry. Not a single professor found a single mistake in his numerous analyses, and an expert witness in a Swiss court also attested to its accuracy. Regarding this report, the director of the Jewish Anne-Frank Association in Amsterdam, Hans Westra, made the following statement in 1994 on the Belgian TV program “Panorama”: 

“The scientific analysis in this expert report is perfect.”

 The Rudolf Expert Report was Kevin’s main piece of evidence, but he pointed out a number of other discrepancies in the official “Holocaust” tale that need clarification as well. For example, the newsweekly Die Zeit had reported that the “Auschwitz Holocaust” was carried out by mass shootings rather than homicidal gas chambers. In addition, Kevin called on Gita Sereny, Britain’s foremost Jewish “Holocaust” researcher and writer, as a witness.  In the London Times issue of 29 August 2001 she agreed that Auschwitz was not an extermination camp. 

Kevin also wanted the judges to indicate which of the official estimates of the number of Auschwitz deaths is correct, since they range from 66,000 to 9,000,000. Kevin then asked the Court to clarify which of the judicially valid Maidanek verdicts is correct: Berlin District Court determined that Maidanek Concentration Camp had no homicidal gas chambers, whereas Düsseldorf District Court ruled that mass gassings took place in homicidal gas chambers there. He also asked the judges to clarify through evidentiary findings whether the victims in Treblinka Camp were killed with steam or gas. The Allied Military Tribunal decreed that victims were “steamed” at Treblinka whereas Federal Republic verdicts claimed they were “gassed.” 

With over 4000 pages of evidentiary motions, Kevin hoped to make the Court establish whether he, on the strength of the documents he presented, had a legal right to publicly express the opinion that no homicidal gassings took place in Auschwitz and other wartime camps. However, all of his evidentiary motions were disallowed, and he was threatened with additional criminal charges for attempting to introduce them! 

This young German patriot, who had hoped to determine whether his historical opinions were correct or incorrect by introducing empirical evidence in a German court of law, had fallen into the black pit of judicial chaos. The German courts refused to rule on whether official documents and their own rulings, which wildly contradict one another, support Kevin’s opinions. Kevin then appealed his verdict within Tiergarten Court. In these proceedings, in which he submitted another 2500 pages of evidentiary motions, the original verdict of eight months imprisonment was upheld, as was the Court’s proscription against his submitting evidence. Kevin then appealed on points of law to the next higher court. Then, on 16 September 2009, a judicial sensation occurred: the Fourth Criminal Section (Kammergericht) of Berlin Superior Court of Justice vacated the verdict of the Tiergarten Appellate Court — and it did so in a way that allowed nothing but acquittal! The Kammergericht ruled that Kevin’s sending the book CD to three judges did not involve the public, which was indispensable for the crime of “Holocaust Denial.” Their decision reads as follows: 

“The handing out of literature to one or a few specific individuals does not fulfill the requirement of distribution unless it is definitely established that these individuals intended to further distribute the literature. 

The charge specified in the appealed verdict does not constitute such distribution. ”‘Distribution’ is not involved here because we are dealing with only three CDs of the book that were intended for specific recipients and sent to them alone. The ‘critical value’ of the minimum number of recipients needed to qualify as ‘distribution’ is clearly not present.” Thus the Kammergericht ruling forced the hand of the Court of First Instance. Because it was now clear that acquittal was certain to result from the first trial, Tiergargen District Court prepared a new indictment – this time on account of the evidence that Kevin attempted to submit. The submission and consideration of evidence to prove the innocence of defendants is of course a universally recognized human right. The European Convention of Human Rights specifically protects it. In the “Holocaust” witch trials that are currently staged in the Federal Republic of Germany, however, this basic human right is routinely trodden underfoot. It is undeniable that by refusing to accept evidentiary motions that would prove innocence in “Holocaust” trials, German courts routinely deny defendants the fundamental human right to a legal defense. Actually the situation is even worse: our courts take the denial of human rights a step further than merely refusing to allow accused persons to defend themselves. Not only are defendants forbidden to defend themselves: Even worse, they are charged with additional crimes for submitting evidentiary motions. Not even China engages in such judicial tyranny! 

On 10 December 2009 Kevin was sentenced to a prison sentence of one year and eight months for repeated “Incitement of the Masses” (specifically, reading and submitting evidentiary motion in his first trial.) This time, however, even though his “crime” was greater than in the first trial (distributing proscribed literature), the Court surprisingly substituted probation for prison time, even though the greater “crime” would logically rule this out. Did the judges suddenly develop a conscience, or did they simply abandon all attempts at logical consistency? Even with this new sentence, however, the Court still lacks any and all legal basis for sentencing Kevin. This is because he had asked the Court to declare the session in which he read his evidentiary motions “not open to the public.” Again no “public” existed, and with no public, there can be no distribution. As the Kammergericht ruled, such a public is necessary for conviction under Section 130 of the Penal Code.  

Thus this intrepid young father of a family, an honorable and patriotic German, has been effictively silenced. With the probated sentence, the Court obviously intends to hold him politically hostage so that in future he will “keep his mouth shut.” Kevin exhibited truly heroic patriotism, however.

He is a family man with a small daughter, and his conscience and sense of responsibility oblige him to refrain from further action under the present system. He has done enough, risked enough, struggled in exemplary fashion. Now he must devote himself to his family. Our unjust and inconsistent system is certain to bring about its own downfall.

 Today (Sunday, Nov 22nd), Israeli human rights group B’Tselem commemorates 20 years since its founding with release of data collected by the organization from 1989-2009. This period includes many of the main events of the first Palestinian Intifada, the Oslo period and the Second Intifada, as well as the recent military operation in the Gaza Strip (Cast Lead). B’Tselem’s Executive Director, Jessica Montell, said that “a twenty-year perspective leaves one with a heavy heart, especially due to the ongoing violation of the right to life of Palestinians and Israelis resulting from the conflict. However, we can also note several human rights achievements: for instance, twenty years ago, thousands of Palestinians were systematically and routinely tortured during investigations. Thanks to the efforts of the human rights community, including B’Tselem, this torture has stopped”.

Casualties
Israeli security forces killed 7,398 Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories in the last 20 years, among them at least 1,537 minors. The year with the highest number of Palestinian casualties was 2009: 1033 persons were killed, of them 315 minors. Most of those were killed in Gaza during operation Cast Lead. 1999 saw the lowest level of Palestinian casualties (8 people killed). B’Tselem’s website provides the breakdown of casualties since September 2000, according to participation in the hostilities and other categories.
During the past twenty years, Palestinians killed 1483 Israelis, of them 139 minors. Of this number, 488 were members of the security forces, and 995 were civilians, killed in Palestinian attacks in Israel and the Occupied Territories. The year with the highest number of Israeli casualties was 2002; 420 persons were killed, of them 269 were civilians, including 47 minors, and 151 members of the security forces. 1999 was also the year with the lowest level of Israeli casualties, which numbered 4.

House demolition
Israel demolished at least 4300 homes in the Occupied Territories in the years 1989-2009, either for being built without a permit, or as punishment. This figure does not include the destruction of property during military operations. This type of demolition include 3540 houses demolished during operation Cast Lead alone, and an estimated 2700 homes demolished during previous military incursions into Gaza.

Administrative detention
In November 1989, 1,794 Palestinians were held by Israel in administrative detention, a detention without trial. Today the number of administrative detainees is 335. The lowest number of administrative detainees, 12, was registered in December 2000. The highest number of those held without trial during the second intifada was 1,007, in January 2003.

Settlements
The last two decades saw a substantial increase in the number of Israelis living over the Green Line (the 1949 armistice line). In 1989, the settlement population was 69,800 in the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem), and 118,100 in East Jerusalem. Today, over 300,000 Israelis live in the West Bank, as well as about 190,000 in East Jerusalem.

B’Tselem.org

 Friday, 16 October 2009 

Researching a book about literary hoaxes led me to investigate a sub-section of the misery-memoir genre which often left me reeling in amazement: the Holocaust hoaxers. Special privilege must be given to those increasingly few witness-writers who survived the Second World War in Europe, but they have certain duties too.

It is their right to write how and when they want (perhaps many decades later, if they are ready) and, as with Elie Wiesel, with their own definitions of truth and fiction. It was he who said that “Some stories are true that never happened.”

However, those memoirists who think that they can pretend they were there when they weren’t ought to remember that hijacking the experiences of others for selfish ends will only end in ignominy. Their motivations were, as so often in life and letters, a combination of pain, hope and greed, and they were emboldened by a marketplace in thrall to the misery memoir.

Why the huge demand for such books? Perhaps what readers seek in trauma stories is akin to what people look for in pornography: something edgy they have never seen before, followed by a spectacular resolution. And they want to identify (safely) with what they are reading; to try on someone else’s crisis for a while and see how it compares to their own. All these hoaxers had difficult childhoods but, feeling that their truth was shamefully small, they sought the grand signifier of the Holocaust to attract the compassion that they desired.

Misha Defonseca’s story began to emerge from her adopted Massachusetts in the mid-1990s and was, like many a hoaxer’s tale, one which in retrospect seems ridiculously far-fetched. It also had that great asset of the schmaltzy life-story: the love of a four-legged friend.

She told of crossing the wastes of war-torn Europe as a lonely child and not only being adopted by a pack of friendly wolves, but single-handedly murdering a burly German soldier. She gave inspirational talks about her epic journey, smiled sweetly for the camera at a local wolf sanctuary and eventually published her story in 1997.

Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years was an instant success, embodying the vain hope that belief, endurance (and fluffy animals) could mean something even in the face of Hitler’s machine. It was money that brought her down. A falling-out about royalties led her publisher to enlist the help of historians to look into what was beginning to seem like a fishy back-story. When zoologists confirmed that no such wolf-woman love could have existed, and photos appeared of her war-time childhood (smiling, well-fed and out shopping with her grandmother), “Misha” knew the game was up.

Last year she finally confessed, admitting that she was in fact a Belgian Christian whose father’s work for the Gestapo left her traumatised by the stigma of being a “traitor’s child”. She said: “It is not the actual reality – it was my reality, my way of surviving”. Binjamin Wilkomirski, who turned out not to be a Latvian-Jewish orphan but a rather comfortably-off Swiss clarinettist, is the most famous example. His spectacular lies were similarly accounted for by the repentant author. He initially claimed he had escaped to Switzerland after nearly dying in the camps, and in Fragments detailed rats feasting on corpses and Nazis crushing men to death. The book won him a host of literray prizes, but survivors noticed that his descriptions of camp life were unconvincing.

Research revealed him to be a local lad, Bruno Grosjean, fostered during the war after his mother gave him up. In her meticulous exposé in Granta, Elena Lappin concluded that as a child Bruno and his mother might have been indentured labourers, but that he had been conflating this with an imagined ghetto past for so long that he had become a “Man with Two Heads”.

His humiliation was complete when it was revealed that one of the girls he claimed to have befriended in the camps, Laura Grabowsky, was a fraud herself – an unhinged American serial-hoaxer who had written not only a fake Holocaust memoir but a phoney one about satanic ritual abuse to boot.

The most recent case is Herman Rosenblat, the twinkly-eyed American pensioner who came forward with a story so magical that it lifted the heart of every cynic in New York. As a young boy in Buchenwald, he said, he strolled daily along the perimeter fence to meet a little girl on the outside. She would toss him a shiny apple and in so doing gave him the hope – and the vitamins – to carry on.

Decades later, as he wrote in Angel at the Fence, which very nearly got published earlier this year, he randomly met a woman in New York who had also fled post-war Europe. As they talked, Herman decided that she must be the apple girl. They went on to fall in love and marry.

When his story came out, via appearances on Oprah, it was easy to debunk: anyone approaching the perimeter fence would immediately have been shot. Rosenblat had been promised a comfortable retirement on the proceeds of his late-flowering career as a memoirist, and his claim that he was only trying to spread a little hope with his story fell on deaf ears.

In fact, he really had been in a sub-camp of Buchenwald and the true story of his and his devoted brothers’ survival is far more moving than the one he made up. Only nobody wants to listen to that now.

These three had at least been born in or near the theatre of war. But what would make an Australian born in 1972 fabricate a Holocaust story? The case of Helen Demidenko is the most peculiar of them all. Demidenko – real name Darville – was a right-wing student in Brisbane who in 1993 published The Hand That Signed the Paper, about the wartime experiences of the narrator’s Ukrainian father and uncle. However, they were not victims of Nazi violence but the perpetrators, having joined the Einsatzgruppen after being terrorised by Russian-Jewish “commissars”.

Florid accounts of their life as merry Jew-hating death squad members flowed enthusiastically from her pen, and when she won the Australian/ Vogel Literary Award she began appearing in Ukrainian national dress and speaking in a funny accent. Her unmasking was aided by the ire of the international Jewish community at her sideline as an anti-Israeli journalist. Interviewing David Irving was not her finest hour.

But unlike the other hoaxers, she remained unrepentant, blithely speaking of the “wog accent” she put on and her annoyance at a politically-correct culture whose prejudices she despised.

Darville’s case may not be typical of Holocaust hoaxers, but it fits exactly into the mould of the Australian literary hoax. All of them, even the harmless-sounding Ern Malley poetry hoax, whose victim was a radical Jewish poetry editor despised by the young fogies who made up Ern’s oeuvre, are characterised by a combination of racial anxiety and anti-intellectualism.

Darville is more than just a juvenile postscript to the strange canon of the Shoah-fantasists. She would never have committed her distasteful hoax had she not picked up on and wanted to subvert that dangerous concept of the “Holocaust bore”.

That idea is perpetuated by people – like Defonseca, Wilkomirski and Rosenblat – whose output contributes to the notion of an unregulated Holocaust “industry”, where victimhood is rewarded by money and fame.

Yes, the notion of absolute truth in life-writing is notoriously fraught. But when a writer stands before other survivors and gives as scripture what is stolen from the memories of real witnesses, they can expect little sympathy.

Melissa Katsoulis’s ‘Telling Tales: a history of literary hoaxes‘ is published this week by Constable. 

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/why-would-any-writer-make-up-stories-about-the-holocaust-1803275.html

Note that she studiously avoids to expose the biggest hoaxer of them all : Elie Wiesel, the king of the crooks.

US Push to Expand in Pakistan meets Resistance

By JANE PERLEZ

An aid package of $1.5 billion a year for the next five years passed by Congress last week asks Pakistan to cease supporting terrorist groups on its soil and to ensure that the military does not interfere with civilian politics. President Asif Ali Zardari, whose association with the United States has added to his unpopularity, agreed to the stipulations in the aid package.

But many here, especially in the powerful army, object to the conditions as interference in Pakistan’s internal affairs, and they are interpreting the larger American footprint in more sinister ways.

American officials say the embassy and its security presence must expand in order to monitor how the new money is spent. They also have real security concerns, which were underscored Monday when a suicide bomber, dressed in the uniform of a Pakistani security force, killed five people at a United Nations office in the heart of Islamabad, the capital.

The United States Embassy has publicized plans for a vast new building in Islamabad for about 1,000 people, with security for some diplomats provided through a Washington-based private contracting company, DynCorp.

The embassy setup, with American demands for importing more armored vehicles, is a significant expansion over the last 15 years. It comes at a time of intense discussion in Washington over whether to widen American operations and aid to Pakistan — a base for Al Qaeda — as an alternative to deeper American involvement in Afghanistan with the addition of more forces.

The fierce opposition here is revealing deep strains in the alliance. Even at its current levels, the American presence was fueling a sense of occupation among Pakistani politicians and security officials, said several Pakistani officials, who did not want to be named for fear of antagonizing the United States. The United States was now seen as behaving in Pakistan much as it did in Iraq and Afghanistan, they said.

In particular, the Pakistani military and the intelligence agencies are concerned that DynCorp is being used by Washington to develop a parallel network of security and intelligence personnel within Pakistan, officials and politicians close to the army said.

The concerns are serious enough that last month a local company hired by DynCorp to provide Pakistani men to be trained as security guards for American diplomats was raided by the Islamabad police. The owner of the company, the Inter-Risk Security Company, Capt. Syed Ali Ja Zaidi, was later arrested.

The action against Inter-Risk, apparently intended to cripple the DynCorp program, was taken on orders from the senior levels of the Pakistani government, said an official familiar with the raid, who was not authorized to speak on the record.

The entire workings of DynCorp within Pakistan are now under review by the Pakistani government, said a senior government official directly involved with the Americans, who spoke candidly on condition of anonymity.

The tensions are erupting as the United States is pressing Pakistan to take on not only those Taliban groups that have threatened the government, but also the Taliban leadership that uses Pakistan as a base to organize and conduct their insurgency against American forces in Afghanistan.

In a public statement, the American ambassador, Anne W. Patterson, suggested last week that Pakistan should eliminate the Afghan Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, a onetime ally of the Pakistanis who Washington says is now based in Baluchistan, a province on the Afghanistan border. If Pakistan did not get rid of Mullah Omar, the United States would, she suggested.

Reinforcing the ambassador, the national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, said Sunday that the United States regarded tackling Qaeda sanctuaries in Pakistan as “the next step” in the conflict in Afghanistan.

The Pakistani army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, in an unusually stern reaction last week, said that missile attacks by American drones in Baluchistan, as implied by the Americans, “would not be allowed.”

The Pakistanis also complain that they are not being sufficiently consulted over the pending White House decision on whether to send more troops to Afghanistan.

The head of Pakistan’s chief spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, or ISI, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, met with senior officials at the Central Intelligence Agencylast week in Washington, where he argued against sending more troops to Afghanistan, a Pakistani official familiar with the visit said.

The Pakistani Army, riding high after its campaign to wrench back control of the Swat Valley from the Taliban, remains nervous about Washington’s intentions and the push against the new aid is reflective of that anxiety, Pakistani officials said.

Though the Zardari government is trumpeting the new aid as a triumph, officials say the language in the legislation ignores long-held prerogatives about Pakistani sovereignty, making the $1.5 billion a tough sell.

“Now everyone has a handle they can use to rip into the Zardari government,” said a senior Pakistani official involved in the American-Pakistani dialogue but who declined to be named because he did not want to inflame the discussion.

The expanding American security presence has become another club. DynCorp has attracted particular scrutiny after the Pakistani news media reported that Blackwater, the contractor that has generated controversy because of its aggressive tactics in Iraq, was also in Pakistan.

Recently, there have been a series of complaints by Islamabad residents who said they had been “roughed up” by hefty, plainclothes American men bearing weapons, presumably from DynCorp, one of the senior Pakistani officials involved with the Americans said.

Pakistan’s Foreign Office had sent two formal diplomatic complaints in the past few weeks to the American Embassy about such episodes, the official said.

The embassy had received complaints, and confirmed two instances, an embassy official said, but the embassy denied receiving any formal protests from the Foreign Office. It also declined to comment about the presence of Blackwater, now known as Xe Services, in Pakistan.

American officials have said that Blackwater employees worked at a remote base in Shamsi, in Baluchistan, where they loaded missiles and bombs onto drones used to strike Taliban and Qaeda militants.

The operation of the drones at Shamsi had been shifted by the Americans to Afghanistan this year, a senior Pakistani military official said.

Several Blackwater employees also worked in the North-West Frontier Province supervising the construction of a training center for Pakistan’s Frontier Corps, a Pakistani official from the region said.

There was considerable unease about the American diplomatic presence in Peshawar, the capital of the North-West Frontier Province, one of the senior government officials said. [...]  On a television talk show, Senator Tariq Aziz, a member of the opposition party, called the legislation “the charter for new colonization.”

“People think this government has sold us to the Americans again for their own selfish interests,” said Jahangir Tareen, a former cabinet minister and a member of Parliament, in an interview. “Some people think the United States is out to get Pakistan, to defang Pakistan, to destroy the army as it exists so it can’t fight India and to break down the ISI’s ability to influence events in India and Afghanistan. Everyone is saying about the Americans, ‘Told you so.’ ”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/world/asia/06islamabad.html?_r=1&hp

By HARVARD UNDERGRADUATES FOR HISTORICAL HONESTY

To the editors of the Harvard Crimson 

The Jewish people have a “tragic history that cannot be denied. Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, [UNTRUE] and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. […] Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death [UNTRUE]  by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed [UNTRUE]—more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, it is ignorant, and it is hateful.” These powerful and courageous words were spoken by [MISLED]  President Barack Obama on June 4th, in his landmark address to the Muslim world from Cairo, Egypt. Yesterday, here in Cambridge, the Harvard Crimson chose to grant a platform to those “hateful” voices so strongly condemned by our President. 

On the bottom of page A7 of its September 8th, 2009 issue, The Crimson ran an ad questioning the truth of the Holocaust. In it, Bradley Smith, the founder of an organization which calls itself the “Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust,”  [CODOH] asked readers if they could “provide, with proof, the name of one person killed in a gas chamber at Auschwitz.” [GOOD QESTION, INDEED]  

As Harvard students, many of us members of The Crimson’s various departments, and all of us with an abiding respect for the paper’s staff and its institutions, we were shocked and pained by this immoral subversion of our own publication of record. Some of us are the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors [AND STORY TELLERS] and were deeply hurt by the implication that those stories passed on to us of our past—of lives lost and families destroyed—were all lies concocted by a vast Jewish conspiracy. Like President Obama, we can view such “baseless” sentiments with nothing but revulsion. [IT'S NEVER TOO LATE TO LEARN] That the Harvard Crimson would choose to fund its activities with money garnered from the promotion of such hateful, willful ignorance shames its good name. 

Doubtless this was a late night oversight made under the pressure of impending deadlines. But it was a grave error nonetheless, and one that demands correction. As Americans, we must practice what we preach—what was [UN]true in Cairo is [UN]true in Cambridge. We—as fellow staff, students and human beings – ask that you please set the record straight for the Crimson’s readership and issue an appropriate apology for the hurt inadvertently caused to so many. 

HARVARD UNDERGRADUATES FOR HISTORICAL HONESTY (= Jewish Zionist Genocidal Group) Cambridge, Mass, September 9, 2009

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=528843

August 13, 2009

SYDNEY, Australia (JTA) — A German-born Holocaust denier living in Australia was jailed for three months, drawing to a close a 13-year legal battle. Dr. Fredrick Toben, director of the Adelaide Institute in South Australia, an allegedly anti-Semitic and Holocaust-denying organization, lost his appeal Thursday in Federal Court to overturn his conviction for contempt of court.

Toben, 64, was found guilty earlier this year on 24 counts of contempt of a 2002 court order to remove anti-Semitic material on his Web site that included claims that gas chambers did not exist at Auschwitz and that the Holocaust was “a lie.”

In their verdict, the three judges said the issue was not the Holocaust [what a bunch of liars !] but whether Toben had complied with court orders.

“Obedience to the court is not optional,” the judges wrote. “In our opinion, the sentence of three months cannot, on any stretch of the imagination, be considered excessive or unwarranted.”

The long-running case began in 1996 when Jeremy Jones, a former president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, accused Toben of breaching the Racial Vilification Act.

Jones told JTA: “Fredrick Toben has, for many years, showed contempt for basic decency and contempt for history. He is now in jail for his contempt of Australian law.” Jones said Toben would not be hailed as a martyr. “There is no evidence that he has gained any support at all due to the court cases he has lost – to the contrary, outside the government of Iran, he has failed dismally at attracting support of any type.” [Wrong again, poor guy !]

On Thursday, Toben’s Web site included a notice that read: “It is the contention of this site that the Holocaust does not exist in reality … We have no malice towards Jews, and we wish them well in their struggle to escape their own enslavement.”

Robert Goot, current ECAJ president, said in a statement he would “not hesitate” to return the matter to the court if Toben breached the law again.

Toben has twice previously served jail time: In 1999 he spent several months in a German jail for inciting racism; [another invention: he was arrested because he confronted the German prosecutor on the Holocaust] in 2008 he spent two months in jail in London as German authorities tried unsuccessfully to extradite him under a European Arrest Warrant for publishing his revisionist material. [The should add that Toben is judicially persecuted but the so-called Jewish community representatives since more than  10 years...]

JTA [Jewish Transworld Authority ?]

http://jta.org/news/article/2009/08/13/1007218/toben-jailed-in-australia

The Electronic Intifada, 8 June 2009

In Errol Morris’s 2004 film The Fog of War, former US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara recalls General Curtis LeMay, the architect of the fire-bombings of Japan during World War II, saying that “if we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” LeMay was merely articulating an unacknowledged truism of international relations: power bestows, among other things, the right to label. So it is that mass slaughter perpetrated by the big powers, from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, is normalized through labels such as “counterinsurgency,” “pacification” and “war on terror,” while similar acts carried out by states out of favor result in the severest of charges. It is this politics of naming that is the subject of Mahmood Mamdani’s explosive new book, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror.

Like the Middle East, parts of Africa have been engulfed in conflict for much of the post-colonial period. While the media coverage in both cases is perfunctory, in the case of Africa it is also sporadic. To the extent that there is coverage, the emphasis is on the dramatic or the grotesque. When the subject is not war, it is usually famine, disease or poverty — or sometimes all three — and invariably the coverage lacks context. The wars are between “tribes” led by “warlords” that take place in “failed states” ruled by “corrupt dictators.” Driven by primal motives, they rarely involve discernible issues. The gallery of rogues gives way only to a tableau of victims, inevitably in need of White saviors. A headline like “Can Bono save Africa?” is as illustrative of Western attitudes towards the continent as the comments of Richard Littlejohn, Britain’s highest-paid columnist, who wrote at the peak of the Rwandan genocide, “Does anyone really give a monkey’s about what happens in Rwanda? If the Mbongo tribe wants to wipe out the Mbingo tribe then as far as I am concerned that is entirely a matter for them.”

Darfur is the conspicuous exception to this trend, though Rwanda did enter Western vocabulary after the 1994 genocide. This, Mamdani argues, is primarily due to the efforts of one organization — the Save Darfur Coalition (SDC) — whose advocacy has been central to turning this into the biggest mass movement in the United States since the anti-Vietnam mobilization, bigger than the anti-apartheid movement. While the mobilization did have the salutary effect of raising awareness about an issue otherwise unknown to the majority of US citizens, its privileging of acting over knowing renders this less meaningful. Indeed, the campaign’s shunning of complexity, its substituting of moral certainty for knowledge, and its preference for military solutions, precludes the very end that it purports to strive for. Invoking what it claims are lessons of the Nazi Holocaust and the Rwanda genocide, it combines slogans such as “never again” with the battle cries of a new “good war,” “boots on the ground” and “out of Iraq and into Darfur,” to call for military intervention in Sudan. Mamdani contends that SDC is not a peace movement, it is a war movement. If the signature activity of the anti-Vietnam war movement was the teach-in, for the SDC it is the advertising campaign; the expert has been replaced by the celebrity.

The SDC was established in July 2004 through the combined efforts of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and the American Jewish World Service. It has since been joined by a broad spectrum of political and [mostly Jewish] religious organizations, a gaggle of celebrities and [mostly Jewish] prominent intellectuals. It has spawned student chapters all across the country that range from the high school to university levels. Led by an advertising executive, it is the only organization capable of bringing together such unlikely partners as the Reverend Al Sharpton and author Elie Wiesel, actor George Clooney and former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton. However, the apparent diversity of its affiliates obscures the fact that its agenda is driven mostly by Zionists and the Christian Right. However, Mamdani pays scant attention to the composition of the SDC even though he devotes a whole chapter to its politics and methods. As The Jerusalem Post reported ahead of the SDC’s rally in Washington on 30 April 2006, it is “[l]ittle known … that the coalition, which has presented itself as ‘an alliance of over 130 diverse faith-based, humanitarian and human rights organizations’ was actually begun exclusively as an initiative of the American Jewish community.” It noted that even in 2006 that coalition was “heavily weighted” with a “diverse collection of local and national Jewish groups.” Many have used Darfur as a strategic distraction from Israeli crimes against the Palestinians, as Ned Goldstein has argued in his investigation of the Zionist interests behind the SDC (most recently at the United Nations Durban II conference against racism).  The salient feature of the propaganda is to paint the conflict as war between “Arabs” and “Africans” and to label the violence “genocide.”

The genocide debate hinges on two factors: numbers and identity. For mass violence to qualify as genocide the killing has to be on a large enough scale, and the intent to eliminate a discrete ethnic or racial group has to be established. Mamdani argues that in order to sustain its claim of genocide, the SDC has inflated casualty figures and racialized the conflict. The mortality figure of 400,000 has become a staple of SDC propaganda even though it has been repeatedly discredited. In 2007, the British Advertising Standards Authority chided the SDC (and the Aegis Trust) for breaching “standards of truthfulness” in its use of the figure for its UK advertising campaign. The number had already been challenged when a panel convened by the US Government Accountability Office in collaboration with the National Academy of Sciences concluded that of the six estimates they studied, the figures presented by the SDC were the least reliable. The most reliable estimate was the study carried out by the World Heath Organization-affiliated Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) that had recorded 131,000 excess deaths at the peak of the conflict of which only 30 percent were due to violence. The violence had dropped sharply after January 2005; this, Mamdani avers, was due mainly to the intervention of African Union peacekeepers. By 2008, the total deaths for the whole year had dropped to 1,500. These numbers are far lower than what constitutes an emergency according to the UN, let alone genocide. [Poor genocide, now totally forgotten]

The conflict began as a civil war in 1987-89, driven less by race or ethnic rivalries than by a struggle for land and resources — it pitted the mostly nomadic landless Arabs against the mostly sedentary Fur peasants. Compounded by Khartoum’s botched attempt at land reform during the 1990s, turning it into a party to the civil war, the simmering conflict erupted into a full-scale insurgency in 2003. This eventually led to the government’s brutal counterinsurgency campaign where it turned to nomadic tribes from Darfur and Chad to serve as proxies.

Mamdani identifies three causes as having contributed to the conflict. First, is the history of colonial rule wherein the British went about a project of retribalizing Darfur through a system of native administration that created tribal homelands and introduced a principle of discrimination that privileged “natives” over “settlers.” This led to the dispossession of nomadic tribes, especially the camel nomads of the north. The tribal identities were further solidified through a census that required each registrant to choose a “race;” a written history that presented Arabs as “settlers” from the Middle East; and laws that gave preferential treatment to whoever was deemed a “native.” This narrative also allowed the British colonizers to present themselves as merely following the precedent of an earlier Arab colonization.

Drought and desertification was the second contributing factor. The Sahara’s southern rim expanded by 100 kilometers, forcing nomadic tribes further south and eventually to encroach on the lands of the sedentary Fur tribes.

Finally, the civil war in neighboring Chad where opposition groups armed by Cold War rivals — the US, France and Israel on one side, and Libya and the Soviet Union on the other — had frequently taken refuge in Darfur, leading to a proliferation of weapons and militias. Mamdani explains that the Western powers were involved in the conflict long before the Sudanese government was; and Omar al-Bashir’s Islamist regime wasn’t even in power at the time.

The Arab-versus-African narrative obscures the fact that since at least the British colonial era, Arabs have been Darfur’s most deprived constituency. “If Darfur was marginal in Sudan,” writes Mamdani, “the Arabs of Darfur were marginal in Darfur.” Contrary to the British historiography — whose assumptions have since been reproduced in 20th century nationalist writings — most Arabs arrived in Sudan as refugees fleeing persecution in Mamluk Egypt. Moreover, the diffusion of Arab culture was more a consequence of commerce than of conquest. Mamdani demonstrates that “Arab” is not a racial, ethnic, or cultural identity. It is an assumed political identity that is more a reflection of preference and power than of genealogy. For example, former slaves once freed would become Fur in Darfur, and Arab in Funj, the Sultanate in riverine Sudan where Arabs dominated. To be an Arab in Darfur therefore signifies nothing so much as weakness. The conflict in Darfur today is as much between Arabs (the Abbala camel nomads against the Baggara cattle nomads) as it is against the relatively privileged Fur and Massalit, and the less privileged Zaghawa. The SDC however emphasizes the north-south axis of the conflict that pits Arab against Fur and ignores the south-south axis which pits Arab against Arab.

The Darfuri rebels likewise defy easy classification. When the insurgency began in 2003, there were two major groups — the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) — they have now split into 26. JEM, which is the largest rebel organization, has an Islamist orientation and draws its inspiration from Hassan al-Turabi, the influential Sudanese Islamist and onetime ally of Omar al-Bashir. In contrast, the SLA is secular-Africanist with ties to the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in the south (led by the late John Garang). Before the split between the Islamists in Khartoum, the government had employed Darfuri Islamists led by future JEM founder Khalil Ibrahim for its counterinsurgency in the south. (Ibrahim opposed the power-sharing agreement that ended the war in the south.) However, according to Sudan scholar Alex de Waal, both organizations learned “to characterize their plight in the simplified terms that had proved so effective in winning foreign sympathy for the south: they were the ‘African’ victims of an ‘Arab’ regime.” The government’s response to the insurgency was at first a half-hearted attempt at reconciliation, followed by the arming of a proxy force comprising nomadic militias, many of them from Chad, who have come to be known as the Janjawid. The consequences were devastating, with large-scale bloodletting and the displacement of 2.5 million people.

Khartoum’s use of proxies to quell an insurgency and the resulting death and displacement parallel US policies in Iraq, where ethnic-sectarian militias have been deployed against the mostly-Sunni insurgency. Yet, unlike Iraq, where in excess of a million have died according to the latest Opinion Research Business poll, and five million displaced, the violence in Darfur has been labeled a genocide. Darfur has also spawned domestic mobilization in the US on a scale for which there is no parallel in the case of Iraq. Mamdani argues that this is due to the fact that Iraq requires Americans to act as citizens, with all the responsibility and complicated political choices it entails, whereas Darfur only requires them to act as humans where they choose to take responsibility out of a sense of philanthropy. He notes that “In Darfur, Americans can feel themselves to be what they know they are not in Iraq: powerful saviors.” As the Nigerian writer Uzodinma Iweala observed, “It seems that these days, wracked by guilt at the humanitarian crisis it has created in the Middle East, the West has turned to Africa for redemption.” In adopting the language of good and evil, Mamdani observes, the SDC has acted as “the great depoliticizer” in precluding political reconciliation in favor of a moral (read military) solution.

In Saviors and Survivors, Mamdani emphasizes regional over international solutions. Western modes of conflict resolution in Africa resemble nothing so much as the International Monetary Fund’s Structural Adjustment Programs: “Those who made decisions did not have to live with their consequences, nor pay for them.” The Western emphasis on the humanitarian crisis in lieu of a political solution merely prolongs the conflict. By contrast, the AU’s approach is both humanitarian and political. The African Union’s (AU) intervention in Darfur had been largely successful in reducing the violence, yet its operation was undermined by Western powers that failed to deliver the support they had pledged when the AU brokered the N’DJamena ceasefire agreement in April 2004. It was also vilified in SDC propaganda. Mamdani asserts that much of the foot-dragging was to discredit the AU so that the notion of an African solution for an African problem could be discredited. The aim was to “blue hat” the AU forces and bring them under Western command. In a Washington Post op-ed pointedly titled “Stop Trying To ‘Save’ Africa,” Iweala asked, “How is it that a former mid-level US diplomat receives more attention for his cowboy antics in Sudan than do the numerous African Union countries that have sent food and troops and spent countless hours trying to negotiate a settlement among all parties in that crisis?”

The recent International Criminal Court case has further entrenched the Khartoum government in its defiant stance. Criminal prosecutions during an ongoing conflict merely exacerbate matters, Mamdani argues. More so when the adjudicating body has a demonstrable record of bias. The model for justice must be the post-Apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission rather than Nuremberg — survivors’ justice rather than victors’ justice. The well-being of surviving multitudes must not be subordinated to the imperative of punishing individual perpetrators. Mamdani offers a trenchant critique of what he calls the “New Humanitarian Order,” which has supplanted traditional colonialism and turned human rights into the new pretext for intervention. The “international community,” which Mamdani argues is nothing more than a “post-Cold War nom de guerre for the Western powers,” has created “a bifurcated system whereby state sovereignty obtains in large parts of the world but is suspended in more and more countries in Africa and the Middle East,” reducing citizens to wards in “an open-ended international rescue operation.”

The Obama Administration already appears to be making a break with its predecessor’s approach and has ordered a review of its Sudan policy. Scott Gration, the new envoy, has already visited Khartoum and Darfur, as has John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In the case of the Bush Administration, the SDC was able to mobilize Congress against the State Department that was seeking a political resolution modeled on the power-sharing agreement that ended the longstanding conflict in the south. It remains to be seen how much the Obama Administration is able to resist the formidable lobbying power of the [Jewish] SDC. While Mamdani maintains that the aim of the SDC is to induce the US government to intervene militarily in Sudan, it appears that the real interest of its core organizations is to perpetuate the conflict so as to continue using the image of the Arab as the perpetrator to distract from the regional reality of the Arab as the victim.

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad is the co-founder of PULSE. He can be reached at m.idrees A T gmail D O T com.

Two race hate criminals who, in a bid to win political asylum in the USA, fled the country after being convicted, have both won the first round of a legal battle to clear
their names.
Simon Sheppard, 52, and Stephen Whittle, 43, were the first Britons to be convicted of inciting racial hatred online.
They were found guilty last year, but fled to the US before they could be sentenced and attempted to use America’s free speech laws to stay there.
They claimed they were being persecuted by the UK Government for material published on the website heretical.com, London’s Criminal Appeal Court heard today.

However, they were eventually extradited back to Britain and jailed. Sheppard was sentenced to four years and ten months behind bars, while Whittle received two years and four months in July this year at Leeds Crown Court.
Whittle, of Avenham Lane, Preston, and Sheppard, of Brook Street, Selby, had both been convicted of a number of counts of publishing racially inflammatory material in July 2008.
Sheppard was also convicted in his absence of further counts of distributing and possessing racist material in January this year.
Today at the Appeal Court, top judge, Lord Justice Richards, gave the pair permission to appeal their convictions, after hearing argument from both their legal teams.
It was the Crown’s case at trial that the pair worked together, Whittle composing articles and Sheppard editing them and posting them online.
Many of their articles targeted Jewish people, and a pamphlet entitled “Tales of the Holohoax” was also produced.
“The pamphlet suggested Jews had a history of inventing stories and portrayed the Jews in a way that made it likely that racial hatred would be stirred up against them,” said Lord Justice Richards.
However, ruling that both men’s convictions were “arguably” unsafe, the judge concluded: “We are persuaded that there is sufficient merit in the points raised to merit consideration by the full court.”
No date was set for the full hearing of the appeals.
Last updated: 2:07pm, July 15 2009
The Jewish Chronicle, July 15, 2009

http://www.thejc.com/articles/web-racists-appeal-unsafe-sentence

Steve Pollack

In the beginning, you’re not quite sure what to make of Tova Reich’s “My Holocaust.” Where is she going with all this lampooning of Holocaust survivors, trips to Auschwitz and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum?

It’s not until you’ve gotten more than halfway through the book that you realize Reich’s mockery is not limited to Holocaust survivors: with this book she’s likely to offend Catholics, Poles, Germans, Buddhists, Israelis, Palestinians, Mormons, New Age-hippie-meditation types, second-generation Holocaust survivors and especially all those big-shot donors who paid to have their names put on plaques at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Now, back to Reich’s Holocaust survivors and one in particular: Maurice Messer.

Messer, who’s as endearing a character as you’ll find anywhere, is the wheeler-dealer chairman of the Holocaust museum who likes to boast of his connections to the White House and his days as a partisan resistance fighter. Of course, only his children and fellow survivors know Maurice never actually fought the Nazis during the war, but exposing him as a fraud would be bad for the Jews so they just think of it as a harmless inside joke.

Maurice, his hapless son, Norman, and his chief of staff, the Rabbi Dr. Monty Pincus, spend all of their time and energy soliciting large donations for the museum from wealthy Jews. As Reich makes clear, their ‘product’ is the Holocaust and Maurice is the ultimate pitch man. At the museum one day, Maurice finds spiritual solace at the Founders’ Wall:

This wall was his supreme creation. It was the monument to his greatest achievements, inscribed like a Rosetta stone with the chronicle of his triumphs, which only he could truly decipher. For a long time he gazed at the names on the wall, the roster of his precious donors of one million dollars or more, and was suffused with emotion as he recalled the details of each and every deal — how to reach this one on his private island he had retched nonstop over the side of a boat in the Bermuda Triangle, how at the second meeting in the San Francisco penthouse to extract the gift of a lifetime in the estate planning of that one, the prospect had appeared wearing a surgical mask because, as his feygele assistant nonchalantly explained, Maurice had a habit of standing too close and spitting too wildly from excitement in the climatic moments of a fund-raising pitch, and so on and so forth down the roll of his princely benefactors.

Alas, Maurice’s success on the donor circuit inspires jealousy among other victims’ groups. And here’s where trouble begins.

First, one of Maurice’s VIP donor trips to Auschwitz get interrupted by a rabble of New Age hippies who seek to include other ‘victims’ in the Holocaust genre. There’s the African-American holocaust, the Palestinian holocaust, the women’s holocaust, the American Indian holocaust, the Christian holocaust, the Muslim holocaust, the Gay and Lesbian holocaust, the Tibetan holocaust and any and all other holocausts, known or unknown.

Back in the States, the hippies go even further by occupying Maurice’s beloved museum and demanding inclusion of the ‘other’ holocausts. It’s a spectacle that draws crowds from all over to watch the tragedy unfold on 14th Street. Maurice is among the hostages stuck inside but Norman and Monty won’t let the police storm the museum because, as one of the occupiers explains, it would look bad to have “federal storm troopers come breaking into the United State Holocaust Memorial Museum of all places … and turn [it] into another Waco Holocaust.”

Nu, so what’s the point of all this?

Reich’s satire demonstrates the absurdity of the competition for victim status that appears to be vogue among liberal elites. As Cynthia Ozick points out in her praise of the book:

[I]t accuses the prevailing tone of American society, a cultish-ness cultivated from the top down—the cult of rivalrous victimization, celebrated among the humanities in all American universities, from women’s studies to black studies to postcolonial studies, from literature departments to history departments to Middle Eastern departments, all those braggart elitist realms where grievance and suffering are crowned with laurel.

Reich also succeeds in chastising the collective Jewish community for the intense fund-raising, the countless memorials and the accompanying donor-ego aggrandizement surrounding the memory of the Holocaust.

This is no simple task. When you venture into criticism of anything Holocaust-related, you risk backlash from the Jewish community. You can be seen as someone who wants to minimize the Holocaust in history. And with that being a common tactic among the Holocaust deniers, it qualifies you for an associate membership in their group. Even if you reject the deniers’ point of view, the deniers can still embrace your ideas and for many in the Jewish community that’s just as bad because you provided fodder for the enemy.

So that’s the risk Reich took. Undoubtedly, she’s already received letters from people who think Holocaust survivors are too sensitive a subject for satire. But, those readers miss Reich’s larger message about ‘victim-ness’ in American society. Of course the Holocaust is a sensitive subject but that’s precisely why something had to be said about the tainting of its legacy.

Thankfully, Reich has said it.

“My Holocaust” is published by HarperCollins (326 pages, $24.95).

Jewish Literary Review, 22 may 2007

http://www.jewishliteraryreview.com/post/Review-of-Tova-Reich-My-Holocaust.aspx