First we had Abe Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith, speaking of the Swiss "Nazi Gold" affair, telling a reporter in the Jewish publication, Foreward, September 4, 1998: "We bludgeoned them and bludgeoned them and bludgeoned them, but at what price?"
A very telling statement the Swiss will not forget!
Next, on its heels, we had a flurry of op-ed pieces in various American papers, cautioning that the disgusting scramble for a piece of the pie of the so-called "Nazi gold loot" was dangerous - for it revived the stereotype images of the ruthless, greedy Jew, exaggerating grief and losses.
And now we get as outspoken an essay by a major American editorialist, Charles Krauthammer, himself a Jew, as we could ever hope to get! This piece was first published in the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post and then picked up by the new Canadian daily paper, the National Post, December 7, 1998.
Its title is telling: "This is honouring the Holocaust?"
As I usually do, I am breaking up this astonishingly frank, well-written piece with interspersed comments from our point of view, mostly echoing: "And who, pray, told you so?"
Krauthammer:
The pursuit of billions in Holocaust guilt money has gone from the unseemly to the disgraceful. What began as an attempt to locate actual confiscated Swiss bank accounts of individual Holocaust victims has turned into a treasure hunt for hungry tort lawyers and major Jewish organizations.
It all started with the $1.25 billion (USA) the Swiss banks paid in settlement of Holocaust claims. That has spurred personal injury lawyers, class action specialists, and major Jewish domos to seek similar bounties from banks, insurers, and manufacturers throughout Europe.
Zundelsite:
Mr. Krauthammer must have been reading some Zündel newsletters on the sly, for isn't he using Zündel's terms like "guilt money", "treasure hunt for hungry tort lawyers" etc.? For these very words and concepts, Ernst is before the Human Rights Commission, getting treated like a criminal, even as I write this!
When the extortion orgy first started almost three years ago and the Swiss were wheedling and waffling, trying to slide out from under the noose, Ernst predicted many times that if they caved in to the blackmail, a flood of similar claims would sweep the rest of the globe.
No sooner had he spoken than this was happening. Big time!
Krauthammer:
What's wrong with that? What's wrong is that there are few survivors left who will actually benefit. It is late, very late for this kind of restitution. The war ended 53 years ago. Instead, what is happening is the lawyers and community bureaucrats will reap the power and the payoff that comes from collecting in the name of those whose names are forever lost. They risk causing, to borrow a phrase from Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, "an industry to be made on the memory of victims."
Zundelsite:
Now Abe is telling us? Haven't Revisionists been warning him and his ilk -
for something like two decades? Haven't they said, over and over: "Continue on this path, and you will be creating a backlash sooner or later by those nations vilified and victimized. . ."?
An industry to be made on the memory of victims? These words melt on your tongue! Those phrases are exactly what Ernst has been using - and for which he is being vilified as a "Jew hater" and a "hate monger" by other Jewish complainants and intervenors.
Krauthammer:
Does that mean nothing should be done? No. Individual victims who had their savings or property or art stolen should be allowed to seek restitution even at this late date. Jewish organizations should help by providing lawyers. And the lawyers should help by working pro bono, or at most, on salary.
Zundelsite:
That's what Ernst Zundel has advocated for over 30 years: "Pay by all means. But only those deserving and those who have been hurt." Who would object to restitution to true and honest victims? But not to extortion by shysters!
And pro bono Jewish lawyers? Wherever might they be? There would be lots of work on behalf of those Germans who have had their savings or property or art stolen after all the shooting stopped! The post-World War II looting of Germany by the Allies was massive, and the Germans have never received a dime for the trillions of dollars in wealth and real estate annexed, confiscated and robbed from them ***after 1945***. Not to mention Germans who were used as slave laborers by Allied nations - for years!
Krauthammer:
But contingency fees? Class action suits? Fishing for aged Jews from whom they can make a killing? The lawyers crisscross Europe in search of ever richer settlements to extract from any institution - and, oh, there are many - with a tainted Second World War past.
Is this what honoring the Holocaust has come to? A shakedown of Swiss banks, Austrian industry, German auto makers - the list grows daily - that recalls the worst of racial hustling and class action opportunism in the United States? Soon no doubt to be added to the list: Ford and GM. What did they know and what did they do when their plants were taken over by the Nazis? This is an important question. But it is work for scholars, not shysters.
Zundelsite:
That Krauthammer fellow could really grow on you! "Racial hustling"? That's a new and precious one not even Ernst has thought of when he talked about the shakedown industry that the Holocaust has become. "Class action opportunism"? Tell that to the group of shysters who are battling Ernst Zundel in a Toronto courtroom in their own version of legalistic terrorism and intimidation even as I type this!
These people aren't honoring the Holocaust. They are bringing shame and disgrace to a country whose Supreme Court ruled on August 27, 1992 that members of minorities, including Germans such as Mr. Zundel, have the perfect right to make their voices heard and make their viewpoint known - as the court put it, even if they were wrong or the majority did not like what the minority might have to say!
Krauthammer:
The Holocaust commands the preservation of memory. It is not an instrument for the generation of money. The dead are honored by learning the truth and never letting the world forget it, not by entering into negotiations with corporate leaders who represent a generation entirely innocent of these crimes.
Looting, moreover, was the least of the crimes of the Holocaust. Nor is it unique. The Holocaust itself, the deliberate mechanized racial murder of six million souls, is a singular crime. Wartime looting is not.
Zundelsite:
Boy, one has to read this twice to savor it! How often has Ernst said that once you remove the propaganda tales, exaggerations and lies about gas chambers, you are left with individual war crimes - by individual war criminals - with which one can deal!
As for the rest? Mr. Krauthammer, give yourself a chance to be updated on the latest - which is that the ". . . deliberate mechanized racial murder of six million souls" is hogwash. The Zundelsite and other Revisionist websites are there for the asking and reading, as many have discovered and many more are going to find out.
Krauthammer:
Even Israel's acceptance of German reparations was problematic. But at least one could make an argument from necessity: A people collectively made destitute and desperate by German depredations were entitled to German reparations. But today?
Zundelsite:
When Ernst talks like that, it's the slammer for him. Krauthammer would get five years in Germany for what he has put down on paper!
And, furthermore, the Palestinians, a people collectively made destitute and desperate by Israeli depredations, will be entitled to Jewish reparations. That day may come much sooner than you think.
And let it be known here and now: The Zundelsite will be in the forefront to demand that the Palestinians will be compensated based on the very generous postwar German model.
Krauthammer:
Today, the only thing certain to come out of this grotesque scramble for money is the revival of Shylockian stereotypes. This is unfortunate, not just because in truth there is no people more given to philanthropy than the Jews. But also because this generation of Europeans has grown up more free of anti-Semitic poison than any in European history.
Zundelsite:
We happily second that statement. Why ask for trouble when things are going swimmingly? Why push a patient people to the limit?
And "revival of Shylockian stereotypes"? Guess who is causing that?
Krauthammer:
It is one thing to risk reviving dormant anti-Jewish feeling in defence, say, of a vital, living cause like Israel, heir to the civilization destroyed by the Nazis. But for this? For blood money from the Holocaust?
Should we find out and proclaim the truth about Holocaust looting? Of course. And truth about the forced labor. And truth about the industrialists who abetted the Nazi machine. And truth about the peoples of Europe who were silent - or worse. But money? It should be beneath the dignity of the Jewish people to accept it, let alone seek it.
Zundelsite:
It should be, but it isn't - and if the blame be laid at anybody's doorsteps, it may as well start with those who are desperately scrambling to prevent Ernst Zundel from speaking. Who blew the whistle on the Big H Racket first? Who is constrained from exposing that racket - this even as we speak?
Go watch the action - NOW! Go to 151 Bloor Street West, Toronto, Canada where all this week, and next, the shysters are desperately trying to plug up the holes in the dike that are spilling the truth into transcripts.
Ingrid
Thought for the Day:
"There is, for example, a whole generation of Soviet officials who put perfectly sane dissidents into psychiatric prisons and presided over that hell called the gulag. Those officials are not just running around the world. Some of them are still running Russia."
(Charles Krauthammer in "A Strange Morality", Time, Dec. 14, 1998)