Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Some Thoughts On Yom Hashoah

THE TEXAS SCHINDLER
Yom Hashoah,

Rabbi Jack Riemer

We Jews are commanded to remember the Shoah. But what exactly is it that we are supposed to remember?

One of the Hassidic rabbis pointed out that the mitzvah on Pesach is NOT to remember the suffering that we endured in Egypt. The mitzvah is to remember THE GOING OUT from Egypt. For if we focus only on the suffering in Egypt, we will become warped and bitter and angry, and that will do us no good.

And so I would suggest that what we need to do on Yom Hashoah is not to dwell on the Hell that our people endured. For if we do that, we will lose faith in the sanity of humanity. We ought to focus instead on the sparks of goodness that appeared during that time of darkness. And so let me tell you the story of one such spark.

I read about it in a memoir by Ted Roberts, a writer on Jewish affairs, who lives in the Jewish metropolis of Huntsville, Alabama.. To the best of my knowledge, Huntsville, Alabama, is not a great center of Jewish learning, though I may be wrong. It is a center of  research into rocketry and missile science, and so there may be more Jews there than I am aware of. I know that there is at least one synagogue in Huntsville. And, as the old joke goes, if there is one synagogue there, there is probably a second one, a breakoff from the first. But this is the story that I read by Ted Roberts of Huntsville, Alabama, that I want to share with you today in honor of Yom Hashoah.

Ted Roberts says that he was once in the doctor's office in Huntsville, the place that he calls 'the buckle of the Bible Belt'. He did not have much time to browse in the magazines in the waiting room before the nurse came and called him into the doctor's office.  The doctor-let's call him Dr. O'Neil checked him out. And then, as he was dressing, the doctor noticed the Jewish Community Center T shirt that he was wearing underneath his shirt..

"Oh, you're Jewish," the doctor said. "I'm Irish."

I imagine that Mr. Roberts could probably have figured that out by himself, just from his name: O'Neil. But he sensed that the doctor wanted to say something more, and so he waited quietly, kind of curious as to what it was the doctor wanted to tell him.

"Yeah," he said. You know, a rabbi blessed my Daddy just before he died, and a Jewish boy who rose to be the president of Midwest Grain came to my Daddy's wake."

"Here it comes," said Ted Roberts to himself. "I can feel a story coming.  If I have to listen to it, I hope it is an interesting one."

It turned out that it was.

Dr. O'Neil said: "We lived in a dusty little town that you have never heard of twenty miles from Galveston. My Daddy was the head accountant---I guess you could call him the office manager---for Midwest Grain Company. It was a good job in the late 30s---you didn't make much but you could always take home food for the family.

Anyhow, in our town there was an old Jewish guy. I would often see him on the street, dressed all in black, with a great big gray beard. Instead of a Stetson, which is what everybody else in our town wore, he wore a wide-brimmed black hat. Can you imagine somebody walking around in a black suit in a hot South Texas Town, the kind of place where the river dries up in the summer? I never understood why he did that.

Well, seems like most every weekend, Daddy would go visit this fellow with the beard. Me and my brother and sister, we'd stay in the car and listen to the insect noises that filled the air. Daddy would stay in the house for about an hour. He never said what they talked about in there, but one thing I remember is that, when he came out, Daddy always carried a handful of papers.

In those years, you know, it was hard for Jews to get into the USA. They had to have a sponsor and a bona fide job waiting for them or else they were not admitted. My Daddy, we found out years later, was working with this Jewish Rabbi---I've forgotten his name---arranging for Jews from Germany or Poland or some such place to immigrate to America. Jobs were a prerequisite  and so Daddy, in his official capacity as office manager, hired seventeen Jewish boys and brought them over.  Seventeen!

In a happier time it would have been a comic scene out of a Marx Brothers movie. Seventeen office boys falling all over themselves. speaking Yiddish or fractured English. Midwest Grain must have given their Galveston Region Manager a huge corporate wink when they saw what he was doing. He had more office boys on the books than invoices, though I think that most of these guys didn't stay with the company very long. Once they got some English under their belts and learned their way around, they headed off to find a job that was more suited to their talents somewhere else. Daddy and that old Jew in the outlandish hat somehow worked it out between them. But one of those office boys stayed, and eventually he became the president of Midwest Grain.

And that's how come the President of Midwest Grain and a Rabbi in a black suit came to my Daddy's funeral." Dr. O'Neil paused for a moment and you could tell that he was going back in his memory to that wake in South Texas, a room full of Irishmen and two Jews. And then he said---half to me, half to himself: "Damn! Those Nazis were sure mean!"

My guess, says Ted Roberts, is that he was probably repeating words that he had heard as a child as his father sat in the living room and read the newspaper. But Ted Roberts says that the words that came to his mind when he heard Dr. O'Neil talk about his father were:
"Cheez! This guy must have been a Texas Schindler!"

And then Mr. Roberts said to himself: this man may have been more of a mentsch than Oscar Schindler was. His actions may have been more praiseworthy since he was so far away from the catastrophe, and so totally disconnected from what was going on. Schindler was there-and saw up close what the Jews were going through---and so he was moved to act. This man was miles away and never saw what was happening to anyone and yet he was moved to action. Schindler knew many Jews. He had grown up with some of them; he had worked with some of them. So it is no wonder that he felt an obligation to help them if he could. But this man had probably never laid eyes upon a single Jew in his life until he met the rabbi with the black suit and the big beard. He never saw the broken lives; he never heard the widows' cries. And yet he brought over seventeen people! He must have been some guy!

Ted Roberts said to himself as he buttoned up his shirt in the doctor's office: "just goes to show you. Life can throw you a curve ball when you least expect it, but life can also send you a soft ball right over the plate some times when you least expect it.  Here I came into this office to find out what the lump on my neck was all about, and look what I got. In half an hour I got the news that the lump was nothing, and I got it cut out just the same, just in case. And I got a story that makes me feel a whole lot better about my fellow human beings.  Three blessings in one visit-that's not bad!"

Ted Roberts ends his memoir by writing that when he walked out of the doctor's office that day he was tempted to write a letter to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and tell them about this man from Texas whom he had heard about. They have a garden there---many of you have been there and seen it---they have a garden there where they plant trees in honor of those brave gentiles who saved Jewish lives. Most of those people lived in Germany or Poland or Norway or somewhere else in Europe. I bet that they probably don't have any trees there in honor of someone who lived in Galveston, Texas. But maybe they should.

I share this story with you today in honor of Yom Hashoah. And I share this story with you for our own spiritual health. For there is a real danger that remembering the Holocaust will make us suspicious of all gentiles and may make us feel that the whole world is against us. And that is not true. And that is not a healthy way to live. I share this story that I learned from this memoir by Ted Roberts with you today so that we may realize and understand that not all non-Jews are anti-Semites, and that not all non Jews are out to get us.

I share this story with you because the Hassidic Rebbe was right: the mitzvah is to remember the going out of Egypt, not to wallow in memories of the suffering that took place within Egypt.

Here was a man who lived somewhere deep in the heart of Texas. Here was a man who knew nothing about Jews or Judaism, who seldom, if ever, had even seen a Jew until he met this rabbi or whoever he was who came to him for help in rescuing Jews who were in trouble. And yet this man came through WITH SEVENTEEN AFFIDAVITS, with seventeen jobs, so that seventeen Jews could escape from Europe and come to America. And he did it, not for praise, not for publicity, not for money, and not for honor. He did it just because he knew that it was the right thing to do. He did it just because he understood that the Nazis were damn mean.

And his corporate headquarters looked the other way and let him do it. And, as a result, one of those seventeen young Jews whom he saved, stayed with the company long enough to become the president of Midwest Grain! And the two of them, the rabbi and the president of the company, came to this man's funeral. They were the only Jews who were present at that funeral. I guess the other Jews who had been rescued had long since moved away to other places and better jobs. But these two came, for they were Jews and Jews are grateful people. Jews are people who believe in hakarat hatov, in gratitude as a mitzvah. Jews are people who believe in remembering those who do good for them.

So let us do what these two Jews did. On Yom Hashoah let us remember, not only the men and the women and the children who perished. And let us not only remember the vicious and the brutal and the savage people who murdered them. But let us also remember the people in Europe, and in America too, who reached out and tried to rescue as many Jews as they could, who often failed, but who sometimes succeeded in saving Jewish lives.  Let us remember these good people, the ones who taught their young children to say: "Damn!  These Nazis are mean!" and who taught their young children, by example, which is the only way that anyone ever teaches anything, who taught their young children by example that human beings are supposed to care for one another and to reach out and help one another whenever they can.

I hope that Ted Roberts remembered the promise that he made to himself when he walked out of the doctor's office that day, the promise that he would nominate Dr. O'Neil's father for a place in the Garden of the Righteous, the Gan Le'chasiday Umot Ha'olam, at Yad Vashem. I hope that he remembered his promise because I think it would be nice, if in the midst of those trees that grow there, the trees that have been planted in honor of people from Poland and Holland, from Norway and Belgium, from Germany and Russia and Rumania, that there was a tree that proudly bore a sign that expressed our gratitude to a good man from Galveston, Texas. For it is good to know, it is heartening to know that there was an Oscar Schindler. He did much to redeem our faith in human beings. And it is also good to know that there was a Schindler in Texas, who, even though he did not see the atrocities up close, and even though he did not know many, perhaps any, Jews, nevertheless did what he could to save Jewish lives and to redeem our faith in human beings.

May the memory of the Texas Schindler be a source of blessing to us all, and may we remember him, together with all the martyrs and all the victims whom we recall today, on Yom Hashoah. 

From Malcolm and Eleanor 

Monday, April 28, 2014

A Rotten Apple At The Core Of The State Of Tasmania.

geoffff


This is troubling.
Tasmania is Australia’s smallest and poorest state and in many ways its most problematic. It has always been a focus of the Australian culture wars given its history as the place of the harshest of the penal colonies and of a particularly brutal war with the indigenous people that ended with their almost complete extinction.
Whether the extinction was complete is one no-man’s land in these wars. There are some descendants of these people but they tend to have fair skin and blue eyes. Some people find that bracing. Does it mean they are not who they say they are and therefore they may be ridiculed for identifying as such? That because they had a choice not to identify as they have chosen then the public choice they made is somehow not valid? That in fact they may feel they had no choice could be at the heart of this? That even the choice they have made, to the extent they had any choice was motivated by something ulterior? That others can claim to define who a people are and that they can override or ignore what the people and their survivors have to say about it themselves whether they be the Tasmanians or the mainland peoples?
I don’t think so. Bolt and his admirers are dead set wrong about that and its a pity no one seems to have taken the trouble to point out why. I think he was owed that. He is after all among the closest friends of Israel and the Jews in the Australian media and he has no trouble at all getting that. Friends like that are not falling from the trees like macadamia nuts. It is not as if there are any to burn.
There is about to be another front in this culture war. Whether what happened in Tasmania was “genocide”. You might ask what else you would call it but apparently the issue is how much of the dying off, for want of a more neutral and less offensive term, was due to killings in what I guess could be called a civil war that saw atrocities on both sides and how much was due to stupid, paternalistic but well intentioned policies that had the unfortunate but unintended consequence of polishing off all but a fragment of the surviving population.
An unintended consequence. We’ve all had those.
There has just been a book published by an historian presenting a debut work that its publishers and others are claiming is the last word on everything to do with what happened to the Tasmanian people. Somehow I don’t think so.
Tasmania is among the most fascinating places on the planet. With about half a million people it is sparsely populated with only a few major towns including the capital Hobart with about 200 000 people. It also lush, mountainous and rich with rivers, lakes, forests, coastlines drenched with fish and seafood and a heartland with precious things there for the digging including gold.
Did I mention the fruit trees? Tasmania is known as The Apple Isle.
Tasmania is startlingly beautiful. It has a hinterland so vast that it harbours legends of sightings of theTasmanian Tiger , not a cat but a carnivorous marsupial that was plentiful when the settlers came but despite the high hopes of some including Ted Turner is very likely extinct at least since the 1960′s. There is strong political sentiment that the place not be plundered and destroyed and of course a fringe party pressing crackpot populist issues as the winds take it has been able to spark into life on the back of the raw emotion of the cause.
At about 90 000 sq kms, it is three times the size of the Land of Israel and by that I mean the whole of the land between the river and the sea. I once accepted an offer from a native born Tasmanian, and by that I mean a settler if the word ever had a meaning, for a straight swap. He was testing my Zionism resolve, as he saw it, I suppose or prodding to see what reaction he might get. Naturally I had to claim to speak on behalf of all the citizens of Israel and all the world’s Jews to close the deal and I was attacked from the Left for being presumptuous or egotistical or something for having done so.
You can understand my dilemma. But I’m nobody’s fool. I knew this native born Tasmanian settler had been resident in Sydney for decades and therefore was certain to welsh on the deal. Therefore I saw nothing controversial in calling his bluff.
You are probably wondering by now where all this is heading.
Friday was Anzac Day which is a pretty big deal down under and will get bigger as we move through the anniversaries of events of a century ago. Next year, the centennial of the Anzac landing itself will be bigger still, 2016 will be just as big and 2017 and 2018 with the anniversaries of the campaigns in France and Belgium, and of Palestine, will be biggest of all as the country recalls or learns just what that generation went through and what it achieved and lost. What we lost.
There are some people who are saying this is a bad thing. One of them is Peter Underwood, the Governor of Tasmania who in his Anzac Day speech to the crowd at the ceremony at the Cenotaph in Hobart said among a bunch of other dopey stuff:
“In this year of peace, Australia should establish a centre for the study of peace, conflict and war,” he said.
Mr Underwood told the service, “if that can’t be done, how about diverting some of the millions of dollars that will be spent on the Anzac Festival to provide proper support for the University of Sydney’s Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies.”
For the benefit of US readers and others, Australian governors are not elected and do not have any political power. Their role is ceremonial. They are ostensibly appointed by the Queen but in reality by the government of the day. By convention they are never former politicians but eminent and respected persons especially academics, judges and senior military officers. Underwood is a former Chief Justice of Tasmania.
As usual, Andrew Bolt was first on the scene. What would we do without him? Who would do the heavy lifting then?
“How about diverting some of the millions of dollars that will be spent on the Anzac festival to provide proper support for the University of Sydney’s Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies?”
Underwood is no doubt voicing his Quaker beliefs. But those beliefs conflict with his duty as Governor — and are indistinguishable from those of a dangerously naive boor.
First, Underwood is the Queen’s representative. No one elected him and his role is to unify. To instead preach politics on Anzac Day is impertinent and a breach of duty.
Second, Underwood was guest of honour at a ceremony attended by people paying their respects to the dead and to those who served their country in war. His attack on the ceremony, the soldiers and their cause was unfeeling, disrespectful and another abuse of his position.
Third, I saw no one on Anzac Day celebrating some “mythical tall, lean, bronzed and laconic Anzac” or “glorifying war”.
Among the marching soldiers I saw in Melbourne were female officers, an African-Australian, a Sikh and a bearded Jew. The clapping crowds were honouring sacrifice and service for the nation.
Fourth, to ridicule the idea of our soldiers “enthusiastically and unflinchingly carrying the torch of freedom” is to ridicule what was often the truth.
What else but freedom were our soldiers fighting for in World War II? I’d say much the same of our interventions in East Timor, Korea and Vietnam.
Indeed, in Iraq, we helped depose a genocidal dictator. In Afghanistan, we repelled a fascist terrorist movement and guarded a democracy.
Fifth, Underwood suggests we should celebrate Anzac Day less and peace more, as if one comes at the cost of the other.
I dare say almost every man and woman listening to him would just as fervently prefer peace, but also know our peace is protected by people prepared to fight for it.
And how dare Underwood urge that “millions of dollars“ be given instead to the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, which is so far Left that its academics recently included Australia’s Communist Party boss.
Andrew Bolt: Herald Sun
At his blog he adds
What a disgraceful suggestion.
The reason?
Here are just some. This misleadingly named Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies promotes an essentially racist boycott of Israeli Jews to punish Israel from defending itself against movements that wish it destroyed. It has held talks with the leader of Hamas, which maintains a terrorist wing. It is so far to the Left that until recently its staff included the then head of Australia’s Communist Party and now a member of its central committee.
Incredibly the Centre which Underwood recommends includes on its academic staff Johan Galtung, whose bizarre anti-Jewish rants include claims that “the Jews control U.S. media, and divert for the sake of Israel”, “six Jewish companies control 96% of the [US] media”, “seventy percent of the professors at the 20 most important American universities are Jewish” and Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik had ties to the “Freemasons” organization “which has Jewish origins” and Mossad might have given Breivik his orders, so “it will be interesting to read the [Norwegian] police report on Israel, during the trial”.
Galtung has even claimed “terrible Auschwitz,” had two sides. “[It was] not unproblematic that Jews had key niches in a society humiliated by defeat at Versailles”. “In no way, absolutely no way, does this justify the atrocities. But it created anti-Semitism that could have been predicted.” Oh, and Mao’s China, responsible for the murder and man-made starvation of between 40 million and 70 million people, was in fact ”endlessly liberating when seen from many other perspectives that liberal theory has never understood”.
The Centre’s president, Ken McNab, claims America’s war on terrorism is largely a hoax: “…a largely artificial, politically inspired, illegally conducted, ineffectual and counter-productive campaign”. And so is ours: “ASIO Director General David Irvine warned that ‘the threat of terrorism remains real and persistent’. Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?” The war in Iraq was just a fight for capitalism: “Violence and war became more openly than ever before the tools with which to defend and extend American capitalism.” In fact, war is just a tool to make capitalists money” “Quite apart from its vanguard role for capitalism, war itself is highly profitable for capitalists.” (Really? So Socialists, Fascists, dictators and religious extremists don’t start wars?) We should subcontract part of our foreign policy to the Australian members of any tribe we confront: ”Including the Iraqi peoples in Australia [on reaching peace in Iraq] intends to give them a voice and to allow them to take ownership of the process.”
Perhaps worst of all, the Centre, through its Sydney Peace Foundation, has given its annualSydney Peace Prize to John Pilger, a man who once urged us to support Sunni militants, al Qaeda and other terrorist groups in Iraq who fought our soldiers in Iraq – soldiers Underwood was meant to be honouring on Anzac Day:
Here’s a taster of the inspiration for peace and justice that Pilger provides, from an interview he gave to the Australian Green Left Weekly in 2004:
‘Do you think the anti-war movement should be supporting Iraq’s anti-occupation resistance?
‘Yes, I do. We cannot afford to be choosy. While we abhor and condemn the continuing loss of innocent life in Iraq, we have no choice now but to support the resistance, for if the resistance fails, the “Bush gang” will attack another country. If they succeed, a grievous blow will be suffered by the Bush gang.’
Evidently the Sydney Peace Foundation resolved that it wasn’t going to be choosy either.
That is the Centre that Underwood wants us to give “millions of dollars”.
Peter Underwood is not fit to be Governor of Tasmania.
Hear. Hear. It is the sanctimonious condescending preachiness that perhaps offends me most about the pacifists. The hypocrisy. It is difficult to say. There is so much about about them that is offensive. Perhaps I should launch a Section 18C prosecution.
Which brings me to the point about Tasmania and Israel. Underwood is the head of state of a polity of settlers whose arrival in the nineteenth century lead to the destruction of the indigenous people by the next century. Yet he does not even pause before calling for public money to be diverted from learning and meditating on what Australians had to do just a hundred years ago, to of all things, an academic discipline that it right on the cusp of the arcs of the extreme left and the extreme right when it comes to Israel and the Jews. Right at the point where the Communists and the Nazis shake hands.
Peace and Conflict Studies. The discipline of Stuart Rees and Jake Lynch and whose intellectual godfather is Norwegian academic Johan Gultang who has said that the Jews brought the Holocaust on themselves, to understand the world today you should read the Protocols of the Elders of Zionand who uses as sources material published by US Nazi groups.
It is easy to imagine the glee of the neo Nazi antisemites. Gultang is no longer an extreme leftist in their eyes. He is a prominent Norwegian sociologist.
Peace and Conflict Studies is a discipline known for its intolerance of internal dissent and which is committed to the elimination of the indigenous people of Israel as free and independent people entirely from the Middle East as comprehensively as the indigenous people of Tasmania were a century ago. It is astonishing how frequently Israel and the Jews come up in the teachings, public lecturing and political campaigns of Galtung and his acolytes in these strange little monocultural departments sprinkled in public universities across the West.
No wonder Underwood wants us to forget about the Anzacs. This is what comes of a short memory. The same horrible things keep happening over and over again.
cross posted
Israel Thrives

Jews Downunder



   

Friday, April 18, 2014

Antisemitism And The Australian Left

geoffff

Those looking for the smoking gun of Australian Leftist antisemitism and how far and deep it has come so quickly need only take a glance at New Matilda. Look at this recent article by Stuart Rees following on from antisemitic enabler, Bob Carr's outburst about the Jews. Needless to say my retort was not published.



The Israel Lobby's Goal Is Silence

By Stuart Rees

As Bob Carr's diaries reveal, the Israeli lobby has consistently tried to silence critics of the state and shut down discussion of the human rights situation in Palestine, writes Stuart Rees
In the much discussed memoirs from his time as Foreign Minister, Bob Carr revealed the "extraordinary influence" that the Israeli lobby has on Australian foreign policy. His work details how former Prime Minister Julia Gillard would not criticise Israeli West Bank settlements for fear of the anger such criticism would provoke. "So we can’t even ‘express concern’ without complaint," wrote Carr.
For decades, the narrative about Palestinians being savage and uncivilised has been controlled by Israel — but under the influence of the world wide, non-violent, Boycott, Divestment Sanctions (BDS) movement to assert Palestinians’ rights to self-determination, that control is being challenged.
A week ago, a public forum in Sydney’s Footbridge Theatre was subtitled "All you wanted to know (about BDS) and were afraid to ask". Palestinian playwright Samah Sabawi identified Israeli academics’ deafening silence when Palestinian universities were bombed or closed, or when such academics learned of other human rights abuses against Palestinians: murders, the theft of lands and destruction of homes. She asked, "Would an invitation to Australian academics to protest these abuses and to join the BDS movement also be met by silence?"

Do read it all You will find just about every antisemitic trope going in just a few hundred words. Including
  • That there is an extraordinarily powerful "Lobby" doing the bidding of Australian Jews 
  • Its job is not to put a case to politicians and the media but to silence "critics" of Israel
  • Its influence extends way beyond mere political pressure 
  • Australian bureaucrats, academics, journalists and politicians are pressured to not criticise Israel  
  • Rees's fellow antisemite, Jake Lynch, is being pursued in the Federal Court at the behest of the "Lobby" (In fact Australian Jewish communal leaders opposed this action)
  • Major newspapers do not report on the court action against Lynch because of fear or intimidation 
  • Jews deploy enormous wealth to achieve these ends 
  • Rees gets "hate mail" every week and that this appears to be organised
  • Jews bash and intimidate foreign pro BDS demonstrators in Israel  

And so on.
You might think that at least New Matilda and its commenters are not yet pushing Holocaust Denial. You would be wrong.

Look at this The emphasis is mine.




Syd Walker
Posted Thursday, March 27, 2014 - 17:08

...
I'm also someone who usually identifies with the "Left" on most issues and I've been a passionate conservation for many years. I dislike bigotry, the Murdoch media and Andrew Bolt. 
However, I find most of the current debate shrill, formulaic and partisan. When the Human Rights Commission was estabhed in the 1980s, I remember feeling excited that it would help push the case for human rights in Australia. I was aware of the International Declaration of Human Rights and pleased to have a Govt body set to defend it. i was especially keen on Article 19 of the UDHR which gives a robust guarantee for free speech.
28 years later I am disappointed. I'm unaware of a single instane when the HRC has actually promoted free speech in Australia. On the contrary, it has acted to limit free speech. The 1990s amendment that introduced 18C was lobbied for by the Zionist movement. A few years ago, Jeremy Jones of the Australia Israel Jewish Affairs Council was actually given a HRC award for his efforts
...
The Scully and Tobin cases followed enactment of 18C. , their human rights were shredded by the HRC in the courts. Both ended up bankcrupted. The Tobin case was particularly egregious. As far as I'm aware, it was the first time a court in Australia arrogated to itself the right to specify historical truth, in some detail. 
Now we have a boorish, unchallenged and multi-partisan vilification of "Holocaust Deniers" - while these peoples' free speech is almost completey denied (they're NEVER given a fairing airing in the mass media - not as long as I've been watching this issue).
...
Is there anyone viewing this forum who'd like to explain why they believe the opinions expressed by Paul Eisen in the article below should be routinely vilified and subject to criminal prosecution?
http://pauleisen.blogspot.com.au/2012/12/how-i-became-holocaust-denier-by-paul.html


Posted Thursday, March 27, 2014 - 17:37

...
The net result of 18C on the thorny topic of judically-enforced historical 'truth' has been a handful of show trials (eg Scully and Tobin), while more-carefully worded querying of 1930s/40s history has not, so far, been persecuted.
But there has been a more important effect. That has been to give the mass media a rationalization for why they report and discuss "The Holocaust" with such egregious bias.
Roughly a decade ago, I emailed Phillip Adams to ask why, after an hour-long, utterly one-sided interview he gave to one of David Irving's most prominent critics on Late Night Live, in which Irving was repeatedly vilified, he didn't invite Irving to reply. Adams responded that he didn't think irving would dare accept. I emailed Irving to ask him directly if he was willing to be interviewed on Australian radio. He said he most certainly was - but doubted the offer would come to anything. He was right. When I emailed Adams again to say Irving accepted, he ignored my correspondence.
When I re-read Adams' emails, he did at one time mention there might be 'legal issues'. I presume he had in mind the Tobin case. As long as 18C is on the statute books, it facilitates wholly one-sided coverage of this important history in mass media, schools, academia and public discuourse in general. Someone like Adams or his prodcuer can avoid accusations of bias by claiming they are compliant with the law.
...


Marga
Posted Friday, March 28, 2014 - 14:38

Syd Walker:
I did not read the full Paul Eisen article but the pertinent points.
I would classify him not as a denier - as he himself does - but a skeptic.

And this guy:


Kevin Charles H...
Posted Friday, April 11, 2014 - 18:03

I question the numbers murdered in the Shoah.

Does that make me a H denier?

And so on.

My reply


geoffff
Posted Saturday, April 12, 2014 - 10:50 new

Sure it does. Why would you even bother given that this is the most examined and closely recorded event  in human history? Why is it so important  to you to deny that? Why are the "numbers" so important to you especially given you must know you haven't a clue what you are talking about? What exactly is your point?
There is is not a shadow of doubt about it. The Left has become the natural home of the bigots. A glance at this thread proves that beyond any question.
Congratulations modern Australian Left with all your pretensions and elitist self importance courtesy of a public education system that you made not the slightest contribution to build. 
...
Syd Walker is this charmer  Have a look at his most recent contribution to the public conversation. Some years ago he was even banned from Margo Kingston's now defunct Webdiary. Why? You guessed it. For Holocaust Denial.

This Is What Happens To "Palestinians" Who Try ...

geoffff

Read this. Just in case you were under the delusion that there is any hope of peace with these people.


Palestinian university students’ trip to Auschwitz causes uproar

(Courtesy of Mohammed Dajani/ Handout Image ) - Mohammed Dajani, a Palestinian university professor, took 27 of his Palestinian students to Auschwitz last month on a project to learn more about the Holocaust and to study empathy.
JERUSALEM — Professor Mohammed S. Dajani took 27 Palestinian college students to visit the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland a few weeks ago as part of a project designed to teach empathy and tolerance. Upon his return, his university disowned the trip, his fellow Palestinians branded him a traitor and friends advised a quick vacation abroad.
Dajani said he expected criticism. “I believe a trip like this, for an organized group of Palestinian youth going to visit Auschwitz, is not only rare, but a first,” he said. “I thought there would be some complaints, then it would be forgotten.”

Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Censored!

geoffff

The Conversation, fed by filthy great slabs of Australian taxpayers money, doesn't have the guts to hear what I have to say.

Apparently I'm immoderate and anonymous. Is there any doubt who I am? That I might have a genuine concern to protect my family? 

 Yet they publish the views of professional antisemitic activists and other cowards such as Antony Loewenstein without so much as a look in the rear view mirror. They ain't heard half of it yet.

They "welcome debate and dissent".

Bullshit they do. Only if you are a Jew basher.