Today is the first day of the resumption of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal hearings into content on the Zundelsite deemed to unjustly cause Jews hurt feelings. I don't yet know how it went. I will give you a summary tomorrow.
Meanwhile, consider this. For the past few weeks, Ernst's team has compiled quotes from various Jewish sources to confront one of the main witnesses the opposition has lined up. This gent is Frederick Schweitzer, who is going to be asked to eat his own words.
Here is a brief but telling sample from a book he authored, titled "A History of the Jews since the First Century A.D.", (MacMillen Co., 866 Third Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022, copyrighted by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith, 1971)
Read this and be enlightened by various themes covered, such as:
Jews not like Swiss:
"The trouble with disliking Jews is that, unlike say, disliking the Swiss, it leads too readily, too automatically, to a revival of the ancient pattern of hatred and discrimination and even to violence: 'dislike' is too often a figleaf for anti-Semitism, and what may be mere dislike in one person all too naturally becomes anti-Semitism in his children or pupils. Anti-Semitism runs so deep in Western Civilization as to be a habit of which we are only dimly aware, and it is still far too easy - sometimes despite the best intentions - to fall back into that hateful mental posture." (p.20)
Jews not a race:
"The history of the Jews is not the history of a "race': for Jews were not of pure stock at the beginning of their story, and in their dispersion their borrowing have been physical as well as intellectual." (p. 27, quoting historian James Parkes)
Talmud Scholar Termed "Fanciful and Imaginative":
"With the advent of Rabbi Akiba ben Joseph we come to the great age of Talmudic scholarship. His vast work of editing and commentary was highly imaginative and speculative; sometimes, however, he constructed a passage in so fanciful and esoteric a way that his colleagues protested vigorously. Akiba and his school may be singled out for that consecration to knowledge which is so distinctive of Judaism." (p. 46)
Christianity Source of Terror to Jews:
"One thing more needs to be said to understand how the religion of the Prince of Peace became an endless source of terror to Jews. The anti-Jewish diatribes of the patristic theologians were part of a war of words, in which Jews replied in kind. But with the acceptance of Christianity by the emperors, beginning with Constantine the Great and culminating with Theodosius the Great, Christianity became the sole established religion of the Empire. Weapons that were formerly only words now became the sticks and stones of imperial and ecclesiastical legislation enforced by the state. Christianity had captured the state apparatus and utilized its coercive powers to win all the arguments, to reduce Jews to pariah status, essentially without citizenship or rights." (p. 72, 73)
Crusaders and Anti-Semitism
"When the Crusaders cried out, "God exalt Christianity," it seemed often to be a mandate to abuse Judaism. When Pope Urban II, the disciple of Gregory VII, addressed the Crusaders as "the children of Israel," his words may well have carried for his excited listeners a reminder that the Jews were children of the devil, Jesus' murderers, and God's enemies. What point was there in redeeming the Holy Land, asked popular preachers of Crusading like Peter the Hermit and Walter the Penniless, if they left behind them the worst offenders of all?" (p. 86)
Jews and the Black Plague
"The popular explanation was . . . that the Jews and lepers conspired to poison the water supplies (an accusation that had appeared several times in the preceding century), and the inevitable sequel was wholesale brutalities that annihilated numerous Jewish communities, especially in Germany." (p. 90)
Jews in England
"Jews were extremely profitable to the monarchy as a source of capital and for their financial expertise. They provided the sinews of war and government, and accordingly were protected by the King. " (p.93)
Jews in France
"The French kings were much more attuned to popular prejudice and ecclesiastical policies than their English counterparts. E.g., in contrast to England, French monarchs from 1182 on often sought to bar Jews from earning a livelihood by moneylending." (94, 95)
Jews in Germany
"Medieval Germany, in a judgment made by Cecil Roth before 1933, was the classic land of Jewish martyrdom. From the first Crusade on there is a rising tide of hatred and violence." (p.97)
Jews in Spain
"It was in the fourteenth century that the violence that was so rife elsewhere in Europe began to spill over into Spain. Massacres stimulated by the black plague erupted; if less ferocious than in Germany. In the 1340s, accusations of ritual murder and Host desecration became more frequent." (p. 104, 105)
Martin Luther and the Jews
"{Martin} Luther himself was initially attracted to the Jews and, like Mohammed, expected to convert them wholesale. In fact, he castigated "popes, bishops, sophists and monks" as "coarse blockheads" who did "nothing but curse Jews and seize their wealth," as well as advising and begging "everybody to deal kindly with the Jews and allow them to compete with us earning a living." But, twenty years later, disappointed in his expectations, he turned on them with a savage fury (again much like Mohammed). "What shall we Christians do with this damned, rejected race?" he then asked. The answer: burn their synagogues, homes, and books; forbid their rabbis to teach; not allow them to travel; compel them to renounce banking and finance and earn their living "by the sweat of their noses . . ." (p. 129, 130)
Jews in Poland
"The sad point to which Jewish life had deteriorated is depicted vividly in the autobiography of Solomon Maimon (1754-1800) who recalls how the Polish nobleman Prince Radziwill, seemingly demented, had one day driven "with the whole pomp of his court to a synagogue and, without anyone to this day knowing the reason, committed the gravest havoc, smashed windows and stoves, broke all the vessels, threw on the ground the copies of the Holy Scriptures kept in the ark. . . From here the train went to a second synagogue, where the same conduct was repeated, and from there they proceeded to the Jewish cemetery, where the buildings were demolished, and the monuments cast into the fire." (p. 151)
Voltaire and the Jews
"Voltaire's ill feeling for Jews runs like a vein of iron through the enormous bulk of his writings. His article on Les Juifs in his Philosophical Dictionary is a crude tirade, in the course of which he refers to them as "an ignorant and barbarous people." (p. 158)
The Jews and Finance
"It is not that the Jew invented credit - he may well have, but it cannot be established - but that, within the community and the international contacts it brought him, he had access to credit, what Christian Europe so notably lacked. Here his religious teaching . . . presented at least one grave obstacle, namely, the famous passage of Deuteronomy that is so central to Christian as well as Jewish thought. It reads: "Unto a foreigner thou mayest lend upon usury, but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury," by which one's co-religionists were taken to be one's brethren. In time an adaptation to changed circumstances - in the manner of the Hillel school - permitted the Jewish moneylender to receive interest from a fellow Jews. But what was more decisive - as we cannot overemphasize here and throughout - was the impact on Jewish economic activity of actions taken by Christian authorities. The Third (1179) and Fourth (1215) Lateran Councils of the Church, acting to implement the Deuteronomic injunction, forbade Christians to receive interest ("usury") and thereby opened the way for Jews. Such various developments explain why, between about 1000 and 1300, Jews were almost the sole bankers and financiers in many countries, especially north of the Alps. By 1250, moneylender and Jew were practically interchangeable terms . . ." (p. 170, 171)
The Shylock Stereotype
". . . the Shylock stereotype has penetrated to the marrow of our cultural bones, as anyone may see by taking a look at an unabridged dictionary. There he will find that the connotations of the word Jew are "to cheat in trade", "to Jew one out of a horse," "to Jew down the price," "to get the better of someone in the bargain," "refers to the proverbial shrewdness of Jewish traders," "a person who drives a hard bargain," "as an adjective it is taken to be offensive" etc. On the other hand, Christian has such associations as "a decent, civilized, or presentable person, characteristic of Christian people," "kindly" etc. The same kind of automatic prejudice will often come forth in attempts to explain the business success of two men, one Jewish, the other not. (p. 183)
Another Turning Point for German Jews
"The economic panic of 1873 was another significant turning point for German Jews. There, as elsewhere, the depression was blamed on Jewish financial manipulations and intrigue. "Socialist anti-Semitism" reappeared, but it was not long before the intellectual leader of the Socialist Party dismissed it as the "socialism of fools." Anti-Semitism at the other end of the social and political spectrum was, however, greatly strengthened. Wilhelm Marr's vitriolic pamphlet, The Victory of Jews over Germanism informed the comfortable classes in 1879 that the seats of power had already been wrenched away from them by "the wholly dominant Jews." (p.210)
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
The Russian Revolution of 1917 was taken by many of its anguished victims to be proof of the Protocols' validity. Trotsky, of course, was a (non-professing) Jew, and to suit their wishful thinking, Lenin was fashioned into one. When such refugees fled to western Europe, they carried the Protocols with them and it was widely read, being translated into German, French and English. It led a significant number of western Europeans to refer to World War I as "a Jew war" and "a Jew harvest," as another stage in the unfolding of the global conspiracy, and as proof positive of the Protocols' authenticity. (p. 241)
Germany not alone in Anti-Semitism
"In coming now to the twentieth century and Hitler it is necessary to state that the long history of intolerance of Jews in Germany should not be overemphasized. Most of it Germany shared with other countries of the Western world. As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, the citadels of anti-Semitism were France of the Dreyfus affair, Russia of the May laws and pogroms, and Austria-Hungary, where anti-Jewish riots and racial phobias appeared to be the chief ingredients of culture and politics so much so that they even caught the attention of Mark Twain and are the subjects of one of his essays. These three countries had the reputation, and rightly so, as the worst offenders. What made the German situation less like that of Western Europe and more like that of Russia was, as we have noted, the greater number of Jews living in Germany. . . " (p. 217)
Hitler's Nationalism
"Hitler's intense nationalism . . . was reflected in his concern for German racial 'purity.' Accordingly, the 1935 Nuremberg laws, passed there unanimously by a special session of parliament, forbade marriage between Jews and Germans, and the employment of German servants in Jewish households; coupled with them was the law barring Jews from public office and denying them most of a citizen's rights." (p. 220, 221)
Jews in Germany Today
"The Jews in Germany today can, understandably, neither forget nor forgive. It is hard, especially for the younger ones, to be happy there, even though the government protects and supports them, even though they are prosperous, even though they are respected by the public, and even though they are conscious, in many instances, of debts of gratitude to individual Germans who shielded them in the years of the holocaust. Their favored treatment often places them in the invidious position of feeling themselves to be "Germany's figleaf for Germany's shame." (p. 233)
Anti-Semitism Today
"It is sometimes argued or feared that the United States will inevitably see the outbreak of the anti-Semitic mania of massacre and expulsion that has been the fate of Jews in every instance heretofore - after a golden age in Babylonia, Islam, Spain, Germany etc. That some Jews should fatalistically search for signs of an approaching doom and remind us that cataclysm came unforeseen in past ages, like a bolt from a cloudless sky, is understandable." (p. 262)
Thought for the Day:
"How strange that there was once a time when Americans philosophized hotly, in the passionate assurance that their ideas would have practical consequences. And oddly enough, they did.
Now we just shrug and cough up the money, with the resignation of an old New Yorker facing a mugger."
(Josph Sobran in "April - The Cruelest Month")