Snippets of news today from several different sources:
* England:
According to the London Times, December 1, 1999,
"A huge bill submitted by lawyers in the class-action suit brought by victims of Nazism against Swiss banks has raised the hackles of Holocaust victims, who accuse the attorneys of cashing in on their grief."
A group of nine lawyers would like to be paid $13.5 million for their work in negotiating last year's $1.25 billion settlement with the Swiss banks. Most of these lawyers are not willing, however, to reveal their time charts. One who did asked to be paid $2,369 for 8.6 hours' work in reading Tom Bower's book Nazi Gold - ". . . and still misspelt Mr Bower's name. (...)
"To make matters worse, some of the lawyers are claiming what is known as a "lodestar" multiplier to increase their fees almost threefold because of the complexity of the case, boosting their fees to $700 an hour.
* Japan:
Nintendo is in trouble. According to an Associated Press article that was sent to me, (no date given) Nintendo has agreed it will
". . . stop making a Pokemon card that bears a mirror image of a swastika - a symbol with a benign meaning in Japan - after getting complaints from the Anti-Defamation League."
In Japan, the swastika means "good fortune" and can also represent a Buddhist temple. On street maps, the symbol locates a temple just as a cross stands for a church on an American map.
However, Kenneth Jacobson, a spokesman for the ADL, is on record saying that the decision by Nintendo
". . . showed sensitivity to the feelings of Jews and others to whom the swastika is a very offensive symbol. We recognize there was no intention to be offensive, but goods flow too easily from one place to another in the world."
* USA:
From the ostensibly "freedom-of-speech" newsgroups, always so obligatorily hostile to revisionism, come some mighty interesting quotes. Says one participant:
"Perhaps it's time for the online community's politically correct veneer to wear thin where people try to restrict our freedom online. And perhaps it's time for the growing online Jewish community to make themselves heard. . . making it quite clear that neither the Simon Wiesenthal Center, nor anyone else, have the power or the authority to decide for anyone online what may or may not be said or sold."
A second:
"While, overall, I agree with the activities of the SWC and admire it's founder for his work in hunting down the perpetrators of the Holocaust, the SWC has lately become a "hate" machine of it's own. They use the law and public opinion like a blunt instrument to suppress anything they don't like - civil and human rights be damned.
"Overall, Israel has the worst record of human rights of any American "satellite" country that has ever existed. Formerly, I thought that honor belonged to the Diem regime in S. Vietnam. But, Israel practices state sponsored genocide and, particularly, discrimination, which the US people would not rightfully stand for in a country such as Panama . . . mainland China or Korea."
And a third, commenting on EBay selling "Nazi memorabilia":
Censors do not have good intentions. As I noted over two years ago (http://www.mrlizard.com/tcrime.htm), the sole 'intention' of the SWC is to keep itself alive and receiving donations now that every remaining Nazi war criminal is either dead or drooling on their shoes. (...)
"And, by the same token, many items the SWC would approve of are illegal in places like Iraq and Iran and Libya. But if EBay were to ban the sales of Israeli military memorabilia, the SWC would be on them like white on rice, as they say in the South.
"Hypocrisy should not be praised. That even you (meaning another member of the group) treat the SWC with kid gloves is disturbing. They're a bunch of book-burners, and deserve the same contempt as the Christian Coalition, Enough Is Enough, or Morality in Media.
* Israel:
Jerusalem (as reported by Tom Gross in the Electronic Telegraph ISSUE 1647 Sunday 28 November 1999):
"HOLOCAUST survivors were outraged last week after a group of Israeli students ended a tour of Poland's death camps with a strip show. The students, from a kibbutz high school, invited male and female strippers to their hotel rooms in Warsaw only hours after visiting Treblinka, where 900,000 Jews were murdered. Memories of the Nazis are so strong in Israel that the incident has caused deep offence. On a previous occasion, Israelis were shocked after a group of army officers went to a casino after visiting Auschwitz. (...)
"Efraim Zuroff, the director of the Jerusalem office of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, told The Telegraph:
"Teaching in the classroom is not enough. The Holocaust is the worst tragedy in human history. I would urge not just Jews and Israelis, but everyone to visit a place like Auschwitz to understand this."
But Mr Zuroff added a note of caution. "Although the trips are meticulously planned, this is an age where kids are undisciplined.
"After seven days of dealing with the most harrowing experiences, they are looking for some way to relieve the tension, although obviously something went very wrong in this particular case. We need to make sure that they are provided with ways of dealing with the emotional aftermath."
* Germany:
Manfred Roeder, 70, was given a two year sentence without parole for referring to the Holocaust as "humbug" during an August 1998 election rally in the eastern German city of Stralsund. In Germany it is illegal to deny the Holocaust. In court, Roeder said a tape of his speech had been "manipulated and falsified."
The judge agreed with three witnesses who said the tape was genuine. (Source: Associated Press, December 2, 1999)
Ingrid
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Thought for the Day:
"To meet this holocaust survivor cacophony head-on, we should start calling ourselves at every possible opportunity 'Dresden Survivors' or - better still - 'Morgenthau Plan Survivors'."
(A faithful ZGram reader)